A tale of pineapples and palm trees: how the Soviet atomic city of Shevchenko became the Kazakh oil town of Aqtau (1980s-2010s)

Shevchenko/Aktau in Kazakhstan

A tale of pineapples and palm trees: how the Soviet atomic city of Shevchenko became the Kazakh oil town of Aqtau (1980s-2010s)

Monday, 7 November 2022 - 5:00pm to 6:45pm
Venue: 
Nissan Lecture Theatre
Speaker(s): 
Dr Stefan Guth (Heidelberg University)
Convenor: 
Dr Zbig Wojnowski (St Antony's)
Series: 
Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Monday Seminar

The seminar series this autumn focuses on the history of the USSR’s non-Russian republics and successor states. It explores political reforms, socio-economic transformations, and cultural upheavals which shaped Soviet borderlands between the 1950s and the 1990s. As the collapse of the USSR remains under-studied and politicised, the series bridges the 1991 chronological divide to recover diverse experiences of systemic transformation, state collapse, and nation building which still affect international relations and mental geographies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.