"Heritage Modernism: Museums and Craft Revival in Early Soviet Tashkent"

• Mollie Arbuthnot

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This link provides access to the full article, first published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 26, no. 1 (Winter 2025): 5–34. Many thanks to the editors for generously permitting it to be shared here.

Comprehensively researched and showing assured scholarship and erudite analysis, Mollie Arbuthnot’s article examines the collecting strategies and cultural policies of two Tashkent museums between 1918 and 1930—the Central Art Museum and the Main Central Asian Museum. Arbuthnot traces the evolution of museological policy from an early anti-bourgeois, imperial vision, through the Soviet policy of korenizatsiia (indigenisation), and onward to a model less tied to an explicitly ethnic paradigm.

The article tackles a central conundrum: how Soviet cultural policy could champion a distinctly Soviet, utopian modernity while simultaneously also promoting an ostensibly pre-modern indigenous heritage; one key aspect of this was how craft — most often associated with manual labour — could be valorised as anti-imperial. Yet, as Arbuthnot convincingly demonstrates, this tension was never fully resolved. She writes: "Eurocentric assumptions and imperial legacies ... persisted within these museums, but their specialists also asserted the value of Central Asian cultures in the face of Russo-European chauvinism and opposed the neglect, extraction, or destruction of heritage objects and traditions" (p. 16). Following an analysis of Tashkent museological policy — its multiple spheres of influence, collecting practices, and heritage priorities — Arbuthnot turns to the Art Educational Workshops and their role in craft revival. These operated in ways that reflected and responded to curatorial agendas, thus transcending the pedagogical context and participating in the dynamic ideological contexts of post-revolutionary Central Asia.

Nuanced, well-argued, and supported with evidence throughout, this article makes a significant contribution to decolonial art history, museum studies, and cultural studies. Arbuthnot’s is a powerful new voice in the growing field of Central Asian studies; here, she advocates compellingly for the value of museological, material, and visual-culture histories in deepening our understanding of Uzbek, Turkestan, and Soviet histories, as well as Russian and Soviet imperialisms.

SHERA 2025 Prize Committee: Cosmin Minea (Masaryk University, Czechia), Louise Hardiman (Independent Scholar, UK) and Tomasz Grusiecki (Queen’s University, Canada)

"Malewicz's Mimetic Resistance: The Censor's Strike as a Spur to Suprematism"

Modernism/modernity 30, no. 3, September 2023

Kamila Kociałkowska

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The jury members, who included Amy Bryzgel (Northeastern University), Alison Hilton (Georgetown University), and Olenka Pevny (University of Cambridge), praised the contribution as follows: Challenging pervasive assumptions about official restrictions on Russian culture, this article makes a significant contribution to modernist art history and the crucial role of Suprematism. “Malewicz's Mimetic Resistance: The Censor's Strike as a Spur to Suprematism” focuses on how censorship was interiorized and parodied by the artist, offering a close analysis of the formal qualities and socio-political context surrounding the 1919 publication of Malewicz’s manifesto “On New Systems in Art” in relation to his Suprematist paintings (the author uses the historic spelling of the artist's name, as it appeared on his birth certificate, throughout). Dr. Kocialkowska argues that the numerous misprints in this text were intentional and essential to Malewicz's revolutionary rejection of official censorship. As an impetus for abstraction, the appearance of blacked-out pages in literary works and documents brought an element of practical, bureaucratic reality to Malewicz's quest for the infinite through form. Mimetic mocking of rules may have come naturally to the Kyiv-born, ethnically Polish artist working in Moscow. This timely article offers new and valuable perspectives on the evolution and lasting significance of abstraction.

"'A Slightly Exotic Country': Poland’s Contentious Debut at the 11th Milan Triennale, 1957"

Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture and Design from 1945, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Katarzyna Jezowska

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Dr. Jezowska’s essay makes an important contribution to decentering the narrative of modernism in Western and Central Europe. Her analysis of Polish design sent to the 11th Milan Triennale in 1957 explores the post-Stalinist Polish state’s strategic use of vernacular design to position Poland as contributing its own distinctive modernity to debates on modern design. The responses of the Western design world in binary terms of progressive/backwards reveal the pressure international exhibitions could exert in privileging ideas of modernity and progress.

"On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art"

Speculum, July 2023

Justin Willson

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The article is a tour de force, drawing on an impressive command of multiple languages, theological traditions, texts, and images in order to reconstruct a “period vocabulary for discussing formal structures which cut across East and West.” It is an exceptionally lucid, as well as richly nuanced, exploration of how the Eastern and Western churches understood the nature of the Trinity, and how and why their ability to express that nature in diagrams sheds new light on icons. To present such abstruse theological parsing of different contested truths with such clarity not only speaks to Dr. Willson’s scholarship, it also demonstrates the profundity of his discovery: that theological diagrams provide a powerful tool with which to better understand the dialogue between icons, texts and diagrams.

“Transforming the Architecture of Food: From the Soviet to the Post-Soviet Apartment”

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80, no. 4, 2021

Kateryna Malaia

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This important study explores the lived uses of the Soviet and Post-Soviet kitchen within the context of official documentation and the ideological background that produced it.

“Mansardization: Attic Space, Urban Development and the Politics of Preservation in St. Petersburg”

Slavonic and East European Review 100, no. 1, January 2022

Abigail Karas

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Dr. Karas’s article is a fully developed, masterfully examined, and beautifully written study of the history of the mansard in St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Its originality lies both in its methodological scope—the interweaving of different registers of sources, of approaches to analysis (from close readings of literature and memoirs to social historical data)—and in its historical range, which turns to the contemporary social and aesthetic spheres. The author takes us through the complex and often contradictory resonances and uses of the mansard, and the consequences for urban planning, political engagement, and lived experience.

“Close Others: Poles in the Visual Imaginary of Early Modern Amsterdam”

Slavonic and East European Review 98, no. 4, October 2020

Tomasz Grusiecki

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The committee report praises his well-researched and well-written essay that encompasses an impressive range of mediums. It addresses wider scholarly issues such as identity and transnational relationships; cultural relationships between the Poles and the Dutch; and the image of the “cultural other.” The essay covers a wide range of material and relevant theoretical issues within clearly defined and limited parameters. They concluded that it is an exemplary work of scholarship.

“Historicist Architecture and Stalinist Futurity”

Slavic Review 79, no. 3, Fall 2020

Antony Kalashnikov

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The essay adopts a nuanced understanding of “temporality” and “the future” in Stalinist architecture using a wealth of material (both primary and secondary) to support it. Kalashnikov innovatively combines research on material sciences and durability in Stalinist architecture to expand his argument, that historicity and enduring materials were used “to ensure posterity’s grateful and perpetual remembrance of the heroic Stalinist era.” This is an impressive display of erudition and research, particularly in relation to the debates of the period and the issue of the “durability” of materials, which enriches our understanding of the activities, motives, and intentions that stimulated architects in the Soviet Union during the period 1930s-1950s. The final section mentions parallels in thinking between Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, America, and Britain, and Kalashnikov’s research throws vital new light on the architectural practice of the period.

“The Athonite Patronage of Stephen III of Moldavia, 1457-1504”

Speculum 94, no.1, 2019

Alice Isabella Sullivan

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The committee felt this highly original study deserves the Prize for its new and significant contribution to our understanding of not only how sacred landscapes developed within the northeastern Greek territories in the nearly fifty-year period of Stephen III’s rule, but also how princely patronage from Europe’s eastern borderlands had a direct and profound impact on the broader reification of Byzantine culture after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus on the study of Byzantine ideology in these lands (historical Wallachia, Moldavia) in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, Sullivan turns a conventional center-periphery argument on its head. An impressive linguistic and material array of primary sources that includes liturgical artifacts, vestments, manuscripts, buildings, inscriptions, and monetary records in Church Slavonic, Greek and Romanian underpins Sullivan’s deft elucidation of the connection between cross-cultural exchange and contemporary patronage. The committee would like to recognize and praise the intellectual work that a study of this type requires, the clarity of its presentation, and the demonstration of how the study of “borderland” territories is essential to how we interpret and theorize cross-cultural exchange.

“Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature”

Representations 142, no. 1, 2018

Aglaya K. Glebova

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“Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature”…is highly innovative in its approach to the interpretation of a famously problematic episode in the career of Aleksandr Rodchenko: the work produced during his visit to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, one of the first Soviet forced labor camps, in the early 1930s. As Glebova argues, Rodchenko’s “in-the-moment” White Sea Canal photographs, especially the colorized ones, revolutionized visual thinking and also reveal the conflicting impulses inherent in the execution of the first five-year plan. Through a close reading of the artist’s photographs of nature and of a range of texts by, among others, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Sergei Tretiakov, and Leon Trotsky, Glebova reframes Rodchenko’s apparent rejection of avant-garde aesthetics to introduce the critical potential of his work—and of the theme of landscape more generally—in relation to what she describes as the “official censure of formalism and ‘contemplation’” in this period. At the same time, she situates Rodchenko’s visceral disdain for nature—an attitude in line with the Soviet subjugation of the vision of nature that had been epitomized by bourgeois eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape paintings—in relation to the immediate will of “the people” and “the state.” Her incisive and original argument follows from an evocation of a paradox that yokes totalitarian policy to aesthetics and ultimately yields a new understanding of Rodchenko’s 1930s practice as ideologically incorrect and un-Soviet.

“From Tractors to Territory: Socialist Urbanization through Standardization”

Journal of Urban History 44, no.1, 2017

Christina E. Crawford

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Rigorously researched and theoretically astute, Christina Crawford’s essay “From Tractors to Territory: Socialist Urbanization through Standardization” examin[es] the design and construction of both the Kharkiv Tractor Factory (1930-31) and the neighboring planned city for its workers, Crawford details the importation of a Fordist model of industrial standardization into a Soviet context and demonstrates how the concept of priviazka, taken from contemporaneous architectural discourse, was productively applied to other spheres in order to facilitate rapid growth in manufacturing and distribution. Her essay illuminates the importance of adaptability within the ostensibly standardized design practices that fueled the breakneck tempo of industrialization and urbanization during Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. Innovative and authoritative, Crawford’s scholarship offers a methodological model for considering the relationship of architectural design and economic development during the process of early Soviet industrialization.