Event Description
The legacies of October Revolution have predominantly been associated with the massive proletarianisation, industrialisation and collectivisation that occurred under Stalin, while the image of post-revolutionary society based on already existing peasant communes and pre-modern forms of life have been marginalised by the official Soviet historiography. This event explores the discovery of the planet in the early Soviet science and fiction, where the planetary vision refers to a sense of connectivity between diverse communities, forms of life and environmental structures. This vision confronted aggressive industrialism without rejecting the project of socialist modernisation. To explore the early Soviet planetary visions, the event will mainly focus on Alexander Bogdanov’s corpus of texts on environmental systems (1908-1920) and Andrei Platonov’s essays and fiction on the previously unexamined project of "Repairing the Earth" (1920). It will discuss the extent to which such a vision is arguably close to our own current debates on climate emergency and planetary crisis by considering Platonov's understanding of the earth as an agent and a chain connection in the production and reproduction of social life.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email Eileen Huhn at [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
