The Promises of Infrastructure I: Imagining Isolation and Integration

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Wherever they are undertaken, infrastructural projects make great promises: mobility, connectivity, modernity, development. Above all, infrastructure promises integration, and so it has historically taken on such potency and urgency in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Roads, railways, pipelines, and other aspects of the built environment provide ways of overcoming the isolation and fragmentation that are otherwise imagined to plague a vast, diverse, and unwieldy territory. From Eastern Europe to the Bering Strait, these papers examine construction projects designed to better integrate Soviet power across borders: to bridge international waters, to establish Russian presence in the Arctic, to increase economic interdependence in the Soviet bloc with the Soyuz pipeline, or to embed Soviet aesthetics in Yakutia through architecture. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic methods, the authors describe the continuing resonance of past promises. They consider broken promises, roads not traveled, railways not built, cities not completed, agreements that were abandoned, and centralized plans that were somehow circumvented or subverted. Collectively, the papers in this panel argue that unfulfilled plans can be analytically fruitful places to view imagined futures of various sorts—national, political, environmental, geopolitical. This panel is one of two on the promises of infrastructure in Russia, with a focus on Siberia.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology/Cultural Studies

Chair

• Russell Scott Valentino, Indiana U Bloomington

Papers

• The Power of Imagination: The Long History of Not (Yet?) Crossing the Bering Strait by Train - Peter Schweitzer, U of Vienna (Austria)

• Uprooted Town on Solid Foundations? Mobility, Temporariness, Fluidity in Soviet Urban Thinking on the Example of the Arctic Port Town Igarka - Kinga Nędza-Sikoniowska, Jagiellonian University

• The 'Showpiece' of CMEA Integration: Reconsidering the Soyuz Pipeline - Michael Benjamin De Groot, Indiana U Bloomington

• Contrasting the Soviet City: Sakha Architecture and the National Project - Sigrid Schiesser, U of Vienna (Austria)

Discussant

• Kathryn Graber, Indiana U Bloomington