The CUPOLA Project 2024-2028

"Culture’s politics under authoritarian rule: Soviet civilizationism and the case of the humanities during the Stalin era" (CUPOLA) is a four-year long research project funded by the Kone Foundation.
Our research approach

When a Ukrainian-born Soviet musicologist Mikhail Druskin memorialized his life under Stalinism during the Perestroika, he wrote: “How to explain to someone who has not experienced this, how painful intellectual hunger is. The ration, meagerly supplied by the authorities, only whets one’s appetite.” The “CUPOLA” project studies the professional motivations, logic and strategies of intellectuals to define and rule their own intellectual existence as an aspect of “culture’s politicality” amid Stalin-era authoritarianism (1928–1953). Certainly, science had no full autonomy in the Soviet Union and it hardly operates in a cultural vacuum elsewhere either; but how much room was there in Stalinist society for autonomism – the belief in conducting research as a critical and free scientific practice? This, after all, is an essential motivation for anyone to practice science. How to capture the aforementioned intellectual hunger in the Soviet Union? 

Second, CUPOLA critically reconsiders the cultural and political construction of late-Stalin-era civilizationism. Russian “civilizational nationalism,” we hypothesize, became a state-political discourse for the first time when the late Stalinism presupposed that the Soviet Union constituted a system of unique cultural values to be disseminated, developed, and protected from external threats.

We approach state-civilizationism as a transnational intellectual current which also has an extensive cultural history in Russia. Tackling nationalist-colonialist tendencies in ‘Russian Culture,’ we need to know its genealogy to comprehend and, where appropriate, oppose it; this necessitates identifying key architects of this cultural construction. The leading goal of our CUPOLA project goes, however, beyond Russia borders. We seek to show that not only should cultural ideas, be taken seriously, since they ‘may be instrumentalised’ by politics, but that political ideas, can also be instrumentalised by cultural authors for purposes of cultural autonomy. 

Key concepts, methods and questions

CUPOLA critically reconsiders the cultural and political construction of late-Stalin-era civilizationism. Russian “civilizational nationalism,we hypothesize, became a state-political discourse for the first time when the late Stalinism presupposed that the Soviet Union constituted a system of unique cultural values to be disseminated, developed, and protected from external threats. This was, however, a transnational intellectual and political current with a complex cultural genealogy. CUPOLA examines how civilizationism as a politico-cultural phenomenon preceded state-led politics and, crucially, involved negotiation between culture and politics. We approach the question of culture’s politicality from a novel methodological perspective – “culture’s politics” (CP), by which we mean a struggle for power to define and rule one’s own cultural existence. 

Our main aim is two-fold. First, through historical case studies  - philosophy and musicology - and with the methodological tool CP, we develop a conceptualization of how/why culture works in politics and how/why politics work in culture. We ask

  • What does it mean to be political in culture? 
  • How should we conceptualize the politicality of culture in multidisciplinary research?  

Second, we analyse the historical formation of Russian civilizationism as a cultural and political phenomenon. For these aims, we frame cultural and civilizational arguments as an essential political strategy of Stalin’s statecraft and, vice versa, political arguments as humanists’ pivotal professional strategy. We ask:

  • What kind of cultural and civilizational arguments can we identify in Stalin’s statecraft? 
  • What kind of civilizational and cultural arguments appear in Soviet philosophical and musicological scholarship? 

The project members combine cultural studies, transnational history, gender studies, musicology, philosophy and political theory into an interdisciplinary prism to Soviet culture and conceptualization of Soviet civilizationism and politicality of culture. In this setting, CUPOLA 

  • reconsiders the relationship between culture and politics 
  • specifies how “politicality” and being “political” can be understood in culture
  • traces the history of Russian/Soviet civilizationism as a cultural-cum-political discourse amid Stalin-era authoritarianism
  • analyses the scientific and cultural contents of humanities (philosophy and musicology in particular) 
Case studies

CUPOLA produces consequential historical knowledge of late-Stalin-era humanities from critical methodological perspectives. Our main case studies are musicology and philosophy. We ask:

  • To what extent did scholars in the authoritarian context of Stalinism succeed in their struggle to define and rule their own cultural existence? 
  • What strategies were used and what are the key similarities and differences in the two dissimilar cases of philosophy and musicology? 
  • How and why have intellectuals instrumentalized political ideas?  
  • What resulted from the negotiation between “culture’s politics” and state’s “cultural politics”

Musicology

Musicology is an apt “multidisciplinary” representative of Soviet humanities and artistic culture, as it recurrently turned to other Soviet disciplines for a scientific anchor, while maintaining seamless connections with the practice of music. Musicology also mirrors various general ideological and political tendencies in interwar Soviet Union. Whereas Soviet musicology remains largely unexplored outside Eastern Europe, the major Russian accounts lack post-colonial and transcultural perspectives and reproduce a national discourse of the supposed unique path of ‘Russian’ scholarship. Further, still reflecting Cold War settings, post-Soviet scholarship often reduces artists/musicologists to supporters of dominating cultural-political discourses, powerless victims, autonomists, or those rewarded for acting politically Instead, our narrative intersects with a different set of cultural-political experiences and motivations that, together, helped shape the professional strategies and hermeneutics of musicologists from various cultural, gender and ethnic backgrounds in leading Soviet institutions. Framing culture as a form of political agency, CUPOLA's hypothesis is that musicologists used political tropes and strategies to advance their professional autonomy. This is methodologically essential when exploring intellectuals as political agents. 

Philosophy

Since philosophy was at the center of political attention in the early Soviet Union, it forms an apt point of comparison to the relatively independent musicology. CUPOLA team will focus on the analysis of political strategies of individual philosophers who in the 1930s turned to the relatively free field of the history of philosophy to avoid criticism. Ironically, the history of philosophy soon became a locus of specific state-political interest and even gained the Stalin prize in 1942. The official Soviet philosophical discussions of the 1940s led to the emergence of a “nationalist” turn in the historiography of Russian philosophy. This turn, linked with the name of Andrei Zhdanov (the so-called “zhdanovshchina”) entailed emphasizing the role of the “revolutionary democrats” (Herzen, Belinsky, Chenyshevsky) in Soviet Marxism and culture. Curiously, the nationalist turn seems to have occurred earlier in musicology than in philosophy – in the early 1930s when the new generation of “proletarian” musicologists took power over the field for some time.

We are interested in what happened to the legacy of such repressed notable 1920s philosophers as Gustav Shpet? What kind of intellectual and career strategies did his students Nikolai Zhinkin, Nikolai Volkov, Aleksandr Ahmanov and Aleksei Tsires employe in the 1930s and 1940s? Further, philosophical questions essentially formed the fields of aesthetics and literature. We also focus on the theories of Valentin Asmus and Mikhail Lifshits, among others, to study the prevalence of civilizational arguments in philosophical texts.