Abstract

How did socialist realism represent petroculture? This talk explores the so-called “Severe Style” painting of the late 1950s and 1960s in Azerbaijan, during one of Baku’s major oil booms, when the city was a key site of Soviet extractivism. These works emerged alongside–and often pictured–the construction of Neft Daşları, one of the first offshore drilling platforms in the world, built in the Caspian Sea. What role did extractivism play in shaping Soviet aesthetics? And what place did labor, and its mobility, occupy in the postwar oilscapes of socialist realism?

General Information

• The complete program of the lecture series can be found here.
• All lectures will be recorded and made available on the website of the Mediothek of Osteuropa-Institut and on the institute's YouTube channel.

About the Lecture Series

This lecture series features both researchers from the Institute for East European Studies (OEI) and international scholars with a focus on Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. The series explores the interplay between voluntary and involuntary human mobility across state borders and the political regimes, social orders, and cultural landscapes of Eurasia. Topics such as diversity, labor, migration, development, and the impact of refugees on their host societies are discussed from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

These interactions occur as the existing political, economic, and cultural world order is being reshaped by the deepening Russian-Chinese partnership, Russia’s attempts to secure its zones of influence, economic nationalism, and the weakening influence of the “West.” Therefore, the series also includes lectures that connect this regional focus to the emerging logic of geopolitics and geoeconomics, and the construction of alternative institutions influencing both mobility and order.