Serguei Oushakine

During his stay at IWM, Serguei Oushakine plans to work on two book-length projects. One of them is a book on the material production of personal living space in the late Soviet Union. Relying on historical documents and trade publications, he traces how the 1957 campaign for “mass housing” pioneered by Nikita Khrushchev faced an unexpected dilemma: a lack of daily items (furniture, dishes, etc.) necessary for new individual apartments. In short, the book explores the gradual emergence of the material world of late socialism. The second project is based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork that the author has been conducting in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and Minsk (Belarus); the book proposes to look at post-socialist development in these countries through the lens of postcolonial theory. In particular, the book focuses on the retrospective articulation of the colonial past that is taking place in these two “postcolonies of communism.”