Other Voices in Soviet History: Collected for a Devil’s Advocate

Other Voices in Soviet History identifies Soviet historian Lynne Viola’s critical methodological and thematic interventions in the study of Soviet history and builds on them through a selection of new research trajectories inspired by her thinking. The collection’s essays are oriented around three overlapping themes: listening to subaltern voices, challenging a rigid victim-perpetrator binary, and contesting dominant narratives. By looking beyond central archives, official collections, and traditional sources, the contributors convey peripheral and subaltern voices and uncover how state narratives overlaid, existed alongside, or ignored altogether voices from the many crevices of empire. Other Voices in Soviet History decentres Soviet history by examining how colonial mindsets, war, agency, identity, the proximity of various borders, and transnational interactions shaped political, social, and cultural dynamics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.