The project explores relationships between modern technologies, their emergence and use, and social and cultural change in Ukraine under Soviet rule (1922-1991). During this period, all production facilities were nationalized, technologies and their development were subject to centralized planning, and the Soviet state defined pathways for the distribution of goods. This system, radically distinct from market economies, both provided the foundations for specific Soviet designs of technological systems and encompassed, and potentially obscured, a much more complex reality, involving conflicting visions of technological development held by various lobby groups and arising from divergent points of view. The ideological frontier between “East” and “West” did not prevent the frequent transfer of Western technological innovations and solutions nor their implementation; the result was an often striking uniformity in global technological developments. In the meantime, under the radar of official ideology, citizens of the Soviet Union, including the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, practiced their own culture of the use, modification, and repair of technologies, which both helped to fill the gaps in supply of state-produced goods and, at times, gave rise to discontent and resistance.

This project aims to provide a unique account of the Soviet minority experiment as designed and implemented during the 1920s-early 1930s within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet Ukraine served as a trendsetting laboratory for Soviet minorities policy Union-wide. Unlike most studies on the Soviet nationality policy, this project makes Soviet ethnic minorities its primary focus, scrutinising the Soviet minority experiment at various levels of power, from top to bottom. At the top level, it looks at the state strategies to organise the society along the ethnic lines; at the middle local level it studies how local party officials and minority specialist translated the state-imposed vision of ethnic proliferation to the local conditions. Lastly, at the bottom level it looks at the way education and cultural workers adapted and carried out those programmes on the ground, and investigates how people digested the new ethnic regime and adapted (if at all) their everyday life to the new expectations. The primary material gathered by the project, combined with its theoretical framing and comprehensive perspective, will form a significant and original contribution to the historiography of the Soviet and Eastern European interwar-period studies.

Among the new states established in Central Europe on the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, Czechoslovakia was both the most democratic and the most precarious. Forged from disparate territories with a diverse population, Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary republic that came under pressure from various authoritarian currents on both the right and the left. Political groups ranging from communists through Sudeten German nationalists and Nazis, Slovak autonomists, and Hungarian irredentists to Czech fascists seriously opposed either the state’s very existence or its liberal-democratic constitution.

This project aims to investigate how the Czechoslovak authorities addressed political threats within the population, what impact their actions had on those accused of disloyalty, and how the attempt to protect the “democratic-republican” system figured in societal debates on state security, nationhood, citizenship, and democracy. In doing so, it will provide a new political history of the First Czechoslovak Republic from the margins of the democratic system.

The Study Group for Minority History (SGMH) is a forum devoted to the study of minority groups in the national and regional histories of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe from the Napoleonic Wars to the contemporary past. Its key aim is to assist scholars, currently working in this area of inquiry by fostering international networks to help promote and share their research. It also seeks to encourage collaborative forms of scholarship across different aspects of minority history such as the evolution of identity, diaspora-formation, inter-communal engagements, the development of cultural institutions, relations with states and state actors and the impact of regional conflicts. In addition, the SGMH aims to encourage the use of new methodologies, interdisciplinary scholarly approaches and theoretical frameworks in the study of minority groups.

Podcast-Series 'Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change'

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the Study Group for Minority History. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck), Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia) and Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth University).

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.