Africans and the Soviet Rights Archipelago

IF 0.8 2区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY
Thom Loyd
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The history of Soviet “rights defenders” is seemingly well known. Emerging in the 1960s in response to fears of a creeping re-Stalinization, the rights movement was part of the broader dissident milieu that coalesced in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Drawing on new documents from the Ukrainian KGB, this article broadens the canon of what we consider “Soviet rights talk” by focusing on a group completely ignored in the existing history of Soviet rights defenders: African students. As the article demonstrates, Soviet citizens were not the only people to draw on a discursive repertoire of civil and universal rights to articulate their demands against the Soviet state. By closely examining the letters and petitions activists produced, it becomes clear that African students’ language of rights grew alongside and, in many respects, pre-empted the Soviet rights movement. The article concludes by considering why, despite sharing the same discursive and physical spaces, neither African nor Soviet rights defenders succeeded in building bridges between their respective islands of protest. Examining this failure to build meaningful solidarities demonstrates the value of pursuing the social history of internationalism; it is only in the banality of the everyday that the capacity for Soviet internationalism to create unanticipated frictions and conflicts reveals itself.

非洲人与苏维埃权利群岛
苏联 "维权人士 "的历史似乎众所周知。维权运动兴起于 20 世纪 60 年代,以应对人们对悄然发生的再斯大林化的担忧,是赫鲁晓夫和勃列日涅夫时代凝聚起来的更广泛的持不同政见者群体的一部分。本文利用乌克兰克格勃的新文件,通过关注一个在现有苏联维权人士历史中完全被忽视的群体,拓宽了我们所认为的 "苏联维权谈话 "的范围:非洲学生。正如文章所展示的,苏联公民并不是唯一利用公民权利和普遍权利的话语体系来表达他们对苏联国家的诉求的人。通过仔细研究积极分子所写的信件和请愿书,我们可以清楚地看到,非洲学生的权利语言是与苏联的权利运动同时发展起来的,而且在许多方面先于苏联的权利运动。文章最后指出,尽管非洲和苏联的维权人士拥有相同的话语空间和物理空间,但他们都未能在各自的抗议岛屿之间架起桥梁。研究这种未能建立有意义的团结关系的情况,表明了研究国际主义社会历史的价值;只有在平淡无奇的日常生活中,苏维埃国际主义制造意想不到的摩擦和冲突的能力才会显露出来。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.10
自引率
0.00%
发文量
68
期刊介绍: International Review of Social History, is one of the leading journals in its field. Truly global in its scope, it focuses on research in social and labour history from a comparative and transnational perspective, both in the modern and in the early modern period, and across periods. The journal combines quality, depth and originality of its articles with an open eye for theoretical innovation and new insights and methods from within its field and from contiguous disciplines. Besides research articles, it features surveys of new themes and subject fields, a suggestions and debates section, review essays and book reviews. It is esteemed for its annotated bibliography of social history titles, and also publishes an annual supplement of specially commissioned essays on a current theme.
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