Montag, 19. Januar 2026, 16.50-18.20, Raum N.316 | Monday, 19 Jan 2026, 4.50-6.20 pm, room N.316
Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh
Vortrag auf Englisch
Link zur Online-Teilnahme
The Soviet nationalities policies is one of the most intensively studied subjects in the historiography of the Soviet Union. Scholars have shown how the Soviet state elaborated a vision of governing difference grounded not in religion but in ethno-territorial categories, institutionalized during the 1920s through a federative architecture of national republics. This project aimed, above all, to reorder the former territories of the Russian Empire while tightening Moscow’s political authority. Yet we still know remarkably little about how Soviet ideas of ethno-territorial self-determination travelled beyond Soviet borders. This lecture argues that Soviet approaches to managing diversity acquired unexpected resonances across parts of the global South, becoming an object of engagement for a wide range of state and non-state actors. It focuses on the post-Ottoman Middle East and British-ruled South Asia – two arenas in which anti-colonial politics and rival imaginaries of sovereignty took especially sharp form during the interwar years. Drawing on sources in Arabic, Urdu, Russian, and other languages, the lecture places Soviet nationalities policy in dialogue with select case studies from the interwar histories of both regions. In doing so, it seeks to generate new questions not only about Soviet nationalities policy itself, but also about the political and intellectual trajectories of South Asia and the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century.
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