MIT Anthropology Colloquium
The Making of a Post-Soviet Public:
Exhibiting Gifts to Soviet Leaders at the Kremlin Museum, Moscow, 2006
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge, Department of Anthropology)
and
Olga Sosnina (Kremlin Museum)
Monday, November 26
4:15-5:30
MIT, Room 16-220
How is the anthropology of socialism to be
situated in post-socialist context? In Autumn
2006, we curated the Kremlin Museums exhibition
of public gifts to Soviet leaders. This
exhibition is part of our ongoing research
project on Soviet-era gift giving practices. This
paper explores the exhibition not as a
presentation of research results, but as itself
an ethnography of post-socialism in its complex
discursive and affective relation to socialism.
We discuss such materials as visitors comment
books and Russian and foreign media coverage of
the exhibition in relation to our ethnographic
self-observations of making and running the
exhibition. The paper charts how a conceptual
gesture that we (anthropologists and curators)
made, in creating a material and visual
presentation of the anthropological concept of
Soviet state gift economy, lives in and
indeed participates in the making of complex modalities of post-socialism.
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