Soviet Paradoxes: A Day of Investigation
By Veronica Marcinschi
This review is based on the original news piece of Bard College Berlin, which can be found here.

On Friday, April 24, 2026, faculty, invited scholars, students and guests from the Berlin Metropolitan School gathered at Bard College Berlin (BCB) for the conference “National Internationalism? Nation, Race, and Class in the Soviet Sphere.” Organized by Prof. Dr. Ewa Atanassow, Professor of Politics, Dr. Berit Ebert, Director of Public Programs, and Dr. Denis Skopin from the Smolny Beyond Borders project based at BCB, the conference considered the contradictions and complexities of the kinds of Communism that emerged from the Russian Revolution of 1917.
With interdisciplinary contributions from scholars of political science, sociology, art history, and literature, “the conference,” as Ewa Atanassow noted, “discussed the vision of internationalism and postcoloniality theorized and practiced in the Soviet sphere, and compared it with Yugoslavia’s alternative approach to state socialism.” “The larger goal [of the conference],” she added, “was to consider what the communist experience can teach us about the nature and historical evolution of political modernity, and about the fundamental dilemmas of modern society. One such dilemma facing every modern polity is how to reconcile the core modern value of equality with cultural and sociological diversity. Communism promised to resolve this dilemma, yet was in a sense dissolved by it.”
In theory, and in ideological claim, Communism was internationalist in ambition and outlook. In practice, Soviet Communism both intentionally and inadvertently fostered national and ethnic differences and divisions. The ethnic conflicts which emerged in its aftermath reflected this history as much as they signaled a condition of collapse. Furthermore, the Soviet Empire, though professing decolonial commitments, was in many ways a continuation of Tsarism. Speakers considered a range of contexts: Bulgaria, Chechnya, Poland, Tatarstan, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia. They also addressed the treatment of minority ethnicities in the Soviet Union: the persecution of Jewish populations and the nature, purpose, and effects of the policy of supporting students from Soviet-allied or nonaligned African countries to study at Russian universities from the late 1950s.

In terms of chronology, the contributions ranged from an early phase of revolutionary optimism (which attracted adherents from around the world) to the insularity and repression of the 1930s, to post-1945 Cold War competition. Joshua Yaffa, Writer-in-Residence at BCB, spoke about the life story of the African American activist and Comintern member Lovett Fort-Whiteman (1889–1939). Fort-Whiteman’s activism in the Soviet Union unfolded in the context of Moscow’s recruitment initiatives aimed at African Americans—attracted by the promise of liberation in the Bolshevist idea of racism as an outgrowth of capitalist exploitation—to spread communist ideology in the years of early Bolshevism. In the period of top-down hierarchical centralization under Stalin, a much less open and inwardly focused Soviet state policy led to “suspicion against foreigners.” Lovett Fort-Whiteman, as Joshua Yaffa noted, is the only known African American to have died in the Gulag.
Margaret Litvin, Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, spoke about the internationalist impulse in the USSR in its early and Cold War periods, and examined the student dormitory as a “microcosm of internationalism” and, more saliently, a “synecdoche of Soviet foreign policy.” Drawing on archival and literary evidence, including “dorm novels” by Albanian, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Syrian, and Ukrainian writers, Margaret Litvin traced a dominant form of racism, which she termed “racist inclusion,” that exoticized, reified, and infantilized ethnic and national minorities under a state strategy of assimilation. In the long term, she remarked, this “embrace” of minorities and difference only fostered racist violence instead of precluding it, while “real friendships,” she argued, “emerged despite rather than because of the Soviet friendship agenda.”
Further problematizing the scope of Soviet internationalist policies, Denis Skopin explained the simultaneous mistrust and exploitation of Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism on the part of the Soviet state by presenting the case study of Soviet writer, ideologist and propagandist Vladimir Aboltin’s amateur photographic series of Ghana from 1963. The photographs reveal at once the Soviet political project of reorientation toward Africa and its disregard of African realities through an explicitly exoticizing and stereotypical aesthetic gaze.

A particular highlight of the conference was the contribution of Una Blagojević, alumna of BCB and currently an Affiliated Researcher at the University of Vienna. Una Blagojević presented the paper “‘Is nationalism our destiny?’ Yugoslav Marxist Humanism, Self-Government, and the National Question,” inviting a comparison of Soviet Communism with the Marxist humanist vision of the Yugoslavian “Praxis” intellectuals. In counterpoint to the Stalinist ideological stance, the Praxis group promoted the idea of the withering away of the state, but not of the nation. On the other hand, Una observed, from the perspective of its Soviet counterparts, Yugoslavian politics were criticized for their emphasis on nationalism, exemplifying a so-called “Marxist humanism with a nationalist face.”
The conference also examined the ramifications of Soviet policies on manifestations of national identity in Soviet republics. Ostap Sereda, currently leading the Invisible University for Ukraine program, gave a paper related to his current research, “Rethinking Soviet Ukraine in American Academia. Was there a ‘revisionist turn’ in Ukrainian studies during the ‘Cold War’?” Beginning with the question of “Why did the nation-state prove resilient to Marxist ideology and finally survive the communist rule?”, Sereda investigated the national issue in Soviet Ukraine, and identified a process of reconceptualization of the nation-class relationship in studies on Ukraine in American academia between the 1950s and 1980s.
At the conclusion of the conference, participants gathered at Metis Books and Café in Prenzlauer Berg to hear a conversation between Berit Ebert and the German novelist and journalist Khuê Phạm, who was born in West Berlin to parents from South Vietnam. Khuê Phạm spoke about the diasporic influences and Cold War inheritance that had shaped her investigation of the consequences of war and political division. With family remaining in Vietnam and another branch of her family in California, Khuê Phạm encountered the silence and trauma that results from displacement through violence. Growing up in Berlin in the 1990s, she also observed the peculiarities of the German case of state division and unification. Noting the increase in incidences of racist violence that occurred at that time and the present-day rise of the AfD, she warned against regression and counseled awareness that “society is not always as we would like it to be.” With Alice Bota and Özlem Topçu, Khuê Phạm is the author of the book Wir neuen Deutschen: Wer wir sind, was wir wollen [Us New Germans: Who we are, what we want] (2012). Her novel Wo auch immer ihr seid [Wherever you are] (2021) is available in English translation as Ghosts and Brothers (2024).
The conference on National Internationalism was organized by Bard College Berlin, Smolny Beyond Borders, and the European Democracy Institute, with the support of Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.
About the Author
Veronica Marcinschi is originally from Moldova, and graduated from Bard College Berlin in 2015 with a BA in Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought. She is currently working as Admissions Counselor at the College.
Citation: Veronica Marcinschi, Soviet Paradoxes: A Day of Investigation, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 26.05.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/65696
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 26, 2026). Soviet Paradoxes: A Day of Investigation. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 14, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/169u5


