Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Erin Hutchinson. Moderated by Yana Skorobogatov.
During the Gorbachev era, “writer-activists” became key figures in the emerging world of Soviet politics. This talk will analyze the activism of Soviet writers around environmental and language issues during this crucial period in Soviet history. In 1985, Russian Village Prose writers’ public advocacy for environmental issues became the harbinger of Gorbachev’s new policy of glasnost’. Intellectuals in the non-Russian republics, emboldened by activism of Russian writers and galvanized by the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, began to champion their own environmental causes. Events in the republics began to spiral out of control, however, when intellectuals also began advocating for cultural issues like the status of non-Russian languages. The national Writers’ Unions, founded in the Stalin era to channel national sentiment towards the Soviet state, became hotbeds of nationalist political organizing. This talk argues that writers’ Gorbachev-era activism hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union by delegitimizing Communist Party rule and presenting the nation as a morally superior alternative to the crumbling USSR.
