Internationalist Activism under the Hammer and Sickle: The Czechoslovak Industrial Commune "Interhelpo" in Soviet Kyrgyzstan
Lecture by David Leupold (ZMO)
The lecture sheds light on the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in shaping urbanization "from below" in the early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, 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 light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this research draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia.
David Leupold is a postdoctoral research fellow in the research group “Representations of the Past“ at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). Since 2010, he dedicates his research explicitly to questions surrounding spacial perception, historical narratives, and collective violence. Currently he is working on a research project entitled ‘Relicts of (Another) Future?’ – The Afterlife of the Socialist City in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. In May 2020, he published his first monograph Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian,Turkish and Kurdish Memory (Routledge).
The event will be held via Zoom. Please register at registration@zmo.de
This event is part of the lecture series:
Lecture Series in the academic year 2019/20
Central Eurasian Studies and Translocality. A Debate Unfolding
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Virtual event