Interview with David Leupold, Relicts of (Another) Future? project

Andrea Talabér: Before we discuss your project, Relicts of (Another) Future? – The Afterlife of the Socialist City in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus, could you tell our readers about your academic background?

David Leupold: It is fair to say that I come from a quite interdisciplinary background. During my undergraduate years I studied Modern History of the Middle East at Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg, devoting my time to learning Turkish, Farsi, Kurdish and Ottoman Palaeography. However, already my first academic research project – deciphering a 19^th century Persian travelogue and the Ottoman-Qajar modernization narratives embedded in it – elicited in me a profound interest in social theory, so I pursued my graduate studies in Social Sciences in a dual degree programme at the Middle Eastern Technical University Ankara and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, respectively. Back then, it was the time of relative liberalization in which space opened up for critical debates in Turkey on the Kurdish question (“Kürt açılımı”) of the present and the Armenian question (“Ermeni açılımı”) of the past.

Inspired by this “wind of change”, I sought to bring these two questions together in my doctoral research. Supervised by Silvia von Steinsdorff, a scholar of the political systems of Eastern Europe, Klaus Eder, a structural sociologist with expertise in the field of memory studies, and Ronald G. Suny, one of the most prominent historians of the Soviet Union, I explored bridging memories and legacies of collective violence stretching from the Armenian Genocide of the past to the Kurdish-Turkish conflict of the present. The results of this research were published in my first book, Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish Memory, which was honoured by the US-based Central Eurasian Studies Society with its 2021 annual book prize. For over a decade now, I have been exploring the politics of history (Geschichtspolitik) and its contestation – so called “memory wars” – in the shatter zone of different “(post-)empires”: the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Qajar Empire, the Romanov Empire. With the current project, I seek to bring in a new facet: the futures encapsulated in the past.

AT: Relicts of (Another) Future? explores Soviet urbanity in the post-Soviet city, examining the various layers of the socialist future-scape versus ethno-national past-scape. What is the aim of your project?

DL: The urban memory landscapes of present-day Armenia and Kyrgyzstan – which are at the heart of this research – are surfeit with antagonistic tendencies. For instance, up until the year 2003, at the very heart of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek the statue of no lesser than Lenin himself towered over the central Ala-Too Square. And even when it was ultimately replaced by an equestrian statue of the Kyrgyz folk hero Manas the Lenin statue did not simply disappear but was rebuilt in its full size only a few meters away at the rear of the museum building – in close vicinity to a smaller statue of Marx and Engels. We get a similar picture in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, where the Soviet Armenian General Marshal Hovhannes Baghramyan and Soviet Armenian architect Aleksandr Tamanyan share one and the same urban monumental landscape with Armenian liberation fighters and ultra-nationalists like Andranik Zoravar or Garegin Njdeh. 

However, in my own research I am less interested in the afterlife of the monumental. Turning away from the icons of the Soviet canon, I instead want to look at what is actually “left” of the socialist city – both as memory and materiality. I intentionally use “left” here in a dual sense: both as what “remains of” and what “lies politically to the left of” the Soviet city. Reconstructing the discourse of Soviet urbanity in all its complexity and multifaceted nature, I argue that the Soviet South, as a socio-political and socio-cultural environment, gave rise to a myriad of distinctly different and, at times, strongly conflicting visions of the future city. We can think here, for instance, of the quasi anarcho-communist momentum that informed the activities of a Czechoslovak industrial cooperative in early Soviet Bishkek or the “green communism” that animated the vision of a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher to turn the science city of Pushchino into the USSR’s first Ekopolis. Early Soviet Yerevan appears here like a particularly embattled urban site where the Stalin-favoured image of a “Western” neoclassicist city clashed with an opposing – and by now largely repressed – vision advanced by Constructivist architects and Futurist writers, which imagined “de-imperial” Yerevan, instead, as the urban epicentre of a nascent “New East” (Nor Arevelk’). 

In this effort, my research seeks to retrace alternative urban visions and their spatial materializations within a vast Southern Soviet geography bordering at its Western expanses with Anatolia and in the East with Xinjiang. I aim to bring here the geographical “blank spaces” back into the focus of the Soviet urbanization discourse: the region of the former Soviet South stretching from the mountains of the South Caucasus to the steppes of Central Asia, which too often continues to be peripheralized or exoticized in the wider academic debate.

AT: You focus on Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus, more precisely on Yerevan in Armenia and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. What can these two cities tell us about the socialist vision of the future through the built environment? Why focus on these two particular cities?

DL: The title of my envisioned book – The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities – is obviously an allusion to Jane Jacobs’ scathing critique of architectural modernism: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Of course, the borrowing here is rather polemical in nature as Jacobs certainly did not have much sympathy for socialist urbanity, to say the least. In fact, her rather reactionary vision of the “future” city – poignantly satirized by Marshall Berman as a quest for the New York “before the blacks got there” – stands indeed in clear opposition to the future-oriented visions explored in my own book.

Admittedly, given that Jacobs’ work focused on “Great American Cities” one might have expected a book with a similar title to focus on cities like Tashkent, the de facto capital of Soviet Central Asia, or Tbilisi, whose historical and socio-cultural significance in the Caucasus was rivalled only by a once cosmopolitan Baku. Yet, in my book I make the conscious attempt to avoid the “great” and, hitherto, exceptional in favour of foregrounding life in “modest” and unexceptional Southern Soviet cities. These two cities, which in some sense owe their very existence as country capitals to the Soviet experiment – might tell us far more, I argue, about Soviet urbanity en large. Their histories tie in much more with urban realities in Dushanbe, Shymkent, Makhachkala, Kyzylorda – and other mid- and large-scale cities that certainly deserve to be included in a wider future quest to think about the Soviet city from its geographical South.

AT: Socialist internationalism also played a role in the shaping of these socialist cities. For example, the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” actively shaped urbanisation in Bishkek. What was this cooperative and what did they do in Bishkek?

DL: “Interhelpo”, which translates from Ido, a constructed language derived from Esperanto, as “mutual help”, was founded in 1923 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners centered around the mountaineer and Bolshevik fighter Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina. Mareček, born into a family of carpenters in Moravia, became politically radicalized in the working-class milieu of the 16th district (Ottakring) in Vienna. It is on the eve of the revolution, during one of his journeys to Bessarabia, that he encounters commune life for the first time: a Russian emigrant by the name of “Nikolsky” takes him to a commune of “Tolstoyans” – nowadays we would maybe call them Hippies – in Voronovytsa in present-day Ukraine. Soon after, however, he leaves disenchanted, having found there little more than “vegetarianism and the idea of not resisting evil” (vegetariánství a ideu nebránit se zlu).

Yet, the vision of founding a commune deeply captivated him. Years later, after returning from Central Asia to Czechoslovakia, he revives the idea. In 1925, a first train of internationalists from Czechoslovakia arrives in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Until its liquidation during the Second World War, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of local members including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other.

AT: What is the present-day legacy of “Interhelpo”? Both in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and in Kyrgyzstan?    

DL: Today, almost a hundred years later, there are few reminders of the cooperative’s history. In 2007, the public broadcaster Czech Television featured a documentary on the history of the otherwise largely forgotten cooperative: “Interhelpo – The History of an Illusion” (Interhelpo: Historie jedné iluze). However, in a distinctly revisionist and pessimistic narrative, internationalism is reduced to being a fatal mirage that misled the hard-working yet naïve Czechoslovak “utopians” into the wasteland of Central Asia. Standing “left” of state socialism, it seems that the history of a self-governed industrial commune of internationalists has fallen out of the frame of today’s socio-historical memory. Though they too faced repression under Stalinism, their unwavering political conviction as committed communists and internationalists renders them ill-suited to be seamlessly molded into the post-socialist historical narratives of an independent Czechia and Slovakia. 

In Kyrgyzstan, only Nazdar, a small Czechoslovakian association, is making concerted efforts to preserve the historical heritage with limited financial means. The association’s office resembles a small private museum: a small room filled to the brim with history books, archive photos and souvenirs from Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. “There is not a single museum dedicated to the cooperative in Bishkek,” complains a local journalist, adding that the extant archive material was “literally thrown in the garbage can after the privatization of the Frunze factory”. A similar picture was revealed to me during my visits to Kyrgyzstan. When I set out to visit the historic building of the leather factory – located on 38 Fučík Street – I was met by the receptionist of a private company who told me that the company was facing bankruptcy. When I revisited the site last year the building was gone. With the demolition, yet another material artefact bearing witness to the history of internationalism in Bishkek disappeared. Yet there are some noteworthy individual initiatives: the Slovak journalist Lukáš Onderčanin has just published a book – “Utopia in Lenin’s Garden”(Utópia v Leninovej záhrade) – on the history of Interhelpo while in Kyrgyzstan Bishkek Walks has for some years been offering alternative city tours to the former site of the cooperative.

AT: How is the socialist vision of the future, which never actually arrived, inhabited today, three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union?

DL: This greatly depends. On the one hand, we have trends towards disavowing the past, while on the other hand, we also observe initiatives to re-claim these pasts. In the first case, Derrida speaks here of “exorcising” the “Specters of Marx”. For what we can see in the context of Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, however, I propose rather to call it “exiling”. For places such as the site of the internationalist cooperative Interhelpo are not subject to any clear-cut policy of politically motivated demolition, as is the case with “decommunization” campaigns in other post-socialist states. They are merely forgotten, exiled to the outskirts of today’s city – and the fringes of public memory. Stripped of their potential to inspire any new futures, they are simply abandoned to ruination – and on a discursive level – gradual oblivion. 

However, in some cases, such sites can be rediscovered. Such is the case with the Soviet-era planetarium in Bishkek, which became the site of a fierce legal struggle between private investors who had acquired the property and intended to demolish it and an amorphous activist group composed of a law graduate, an architect, an economist, a philologist and a software engineer – all in their early 20s, born almost a decade after the end of the Soviet Union – who sought to save the building and, possibly, restore it. After a long journey through the lower courts, the case ultimately ended up before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not only deny the claims of the petitioners. It effectively told them they are too young to claim it. I argue that the decision here must be understood in light of a larger discursive project to contain the subversive potential of socialist materiality by making it effectively “unclaimable”. 

Here the material remains of state socialism are indeed treated as a specter, as something that must be kept at bay, that must not be allowed to return to affect the present. By stigmatizing Soviet materiality as part of an “outlawed past”, post-Soviet memory regimes seek to prevent young activists not only from engaging with the materiality itself. At the same time, they also seek to prevent them from engaging with the ideas congealed in this materiality — if only in the form of a largely unfulfilled ideality — such as the right to public space or the prospect of an alternative collective identity not grounded in mutually exclusive ethno-national particularisms.

AT: You carried out ethnographic fieldwork in both Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. Did you find anything surprising during your research?

DL: As someone born in West Germany at the end of the Cold War, the relationship that many interlocutors maintained with the recent socialist past surprised me. In the country where I grew up, the material relics of state socialism served at worst as a chamber of horrors from a totalitarian past and at best as obscure curiosities of a bygone world – lumped together under the catch-all term of “Ostalgie”. Although many of my interlocutors were born up to a decade after the end of the Soviet experiment, and thus lacked any direct personal experience, it struck me to see how many expressed a distinct sense of wistfulness paired with candid curiosity for the socialist past. And more interestingly, it appeared to be less a longing for the past then a yearning for a future horizon that had come undone. While one may initially be tempted to understand this as the symptom of an acute “post-Soviet nostalgia”, I ultimately came to realize that the region’s own historical trajectory, starkly differing from that of other post-socialist societies in Central and Northern Europe, played a crucial role in the formation of such a public memory.

While late-Soviet Kyrgyz citizens would embark from their capital on domestic flights across the republic on jet-powered Yak-40s and Soviet Armenian citizens dreamt of a high-speed Maglev train connecting the city via the satellite town of Abovyan to the shores of Lake Sevan, today’s residents find themselves increasingly in despair, inhabiting war-ridden and land-locked countries whose ailing economies rely heavily on diaspora investments and remittances of migrant workers. While for countries such as the Baltic states and much of Eastern Europe the dissolution of the USSR marked the beginning of decades of economic prosperity and greater freedom, for many in the “Soviet South” –– the advent of the market economy has become associated largely with economic hardship, political instability and a lack of viable future horizons. If we want to take the frequently raised demand to give a voice to those who actually inhabit the region seriously, we must better accommodate these perspectives that diverge from the – what one may call “Eurocentric” – master-narrative on the history of socialism and post-socialism. 

AT: Where can people learn more about your project?

DL: Based on the research I have been conducting for the last three years as principal investigator of a DFG-funded individual research project at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin, I am currently finalizing my second monograph The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives – which is expected to come out by the beginning of next year. Related to my work in Kyrgyzstan, I have already published a series of articles, accessible online such as Building the Internationalist City from Below: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek (ILWCH, Fall 2021, Cambridge University Press), Skyrise, Smog and Seismic Menace. In the El Dorado of Bishkek’s Elite Housing (Europe-Asia Studies 75:7, 2023, Taylor & Francis), and Back to the Cosmic Future? The Bishkek Planetarium and the (Un-)Claimability of the Socialist Past (Journal of World History 73:2, 2024, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Related to my work in Armenia, I shared some first insights during a lecture series in the United States last year. The public lectures held at the University of Michigan and the University of California have been recorded and are accessible online.

Thanks a lot for the interview, Andrea.