Annual Report 2011 - NTNU

APRIL—JUNE 2011 NTNU GLOBAL PAGE 3
The Conquerors’ Maps: Soviet Literary, Scientific and Cultural Actors’
Mental Mapping of East Central Europe, 1944-1953
Lars Peder Haga
Department of History and Classical Studies
Lars Peder Haga defended his thesis on
14th April. Haga’s PhD project was
affiliated with the globalization focus
area Intercultural Dynamics. Professor
György Péteri at the Department of
History and Classical Studies supervised
the thesis.
Summary of the thesis
After the Second World War, the Soviet
Union had gained recognition as a
global political player, and acquired an
East Central European periphery of
communist-dominated countries. After
a while, these countries became known
as the ”Soviet Bloc”. This simplification
has made it too easy for posterity to
ignore that in 1944-45, no common
terminology existed to describe these
countries, and they were not commonly
thought of or discussed as a single, unified
group of countries or region. After
the completion of the military conquest,
the intellectual conquest still remained
to be done.
This intellectual conquest, or mental
mapping is the object of inquiry in the
thesis. The term mental mapping is
taken from Larry Wolff, whose work on
18th century writings on East Central
Europe, together with among others the
work by Edward Said and Maria Todorova
on Western perceptions of the
Orient and the Balkans, have inspired
the methodology applied in the thesis.
As its starting points, the analysis take
four operations of mental mapping:
Association – intellectually combining a
group of diverse countries and naming
them as a single region; Comparison –
comparing the newly
conceptualised region
with other regions and
countries, almost always
ordering them in a hierarchical
manner; Peopling
– describing the inhabitants
of the region, and
ascribing certain traits to
them; Addressing – proscribing
to the people(s)
of the region how they
should order and organize
their society.
The empirical cases have
been found in a play and
a novel by the two
prominent Soviet writers,
Konstantin Simonov and Oles’ Honchar;
In the publications and archives of two
research institutes under The Soviet Academy
of Sciences, The Institute of World Economics
and World Politics and The Institute of
Economy; And in archival materials of the
Soviet Cultural exchange organization
VOKS, The All-Union Society for Cultural
Ties Abroad. Periodically, the thesis deals
with the period from the end of the war
until Stalin’s death – what may appropriately
be named the pioneering phase of
Soviet mental mapping of East Central
Europe.
At the centre of the analysis is how the
justification of Soviet political, economical
and cultural hegemony over East Central
Europe was an integral part of the processes
of mental mapping. A particular
problem in this respect was that the degrees
of industrialization and urbanization,
as well as levels of education and
prosperity in these countries were measurably
higher than in the Soviet Union.
In addition came a less tangible idea of
their belonging to a culturally more developed
West. This frustrated the construction
of an unambiguously hierarchical
relationship, where the Soviet Union
was positioned as a natural superior and
leader. The various strategies employed
to handle this problem are central to the
conclusions.
The findings in the thesis expand upon
and explain important aspects of the Soviet
imperial project in East Central
Europe, in particular the connections
between cultural and scholarly production,
identity politics and political domination.
It clearly shows how the Soviet
Union’s ambition to be established as an
alternative global leader, on par with or
even superior to the ”West”, was frustrated
by both quantifiable and nonquantifiable
indicators of development.