REPRESENTATION INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE LATE SOVIET BOOSTERISM: URALS AND WESTERN SIBERIA

The article, based on the corpus of Soviet geographical poetry dedicated to the Urals and Western Siberia, examines the infrastructure set up to represent industrial projects. The adopted approach to studying geographical images of the Soviet industrial expansion of the 1950–1970s relies on the ideas of the “infrastructural turn” in the social sciences and uses as a research tool the methodology of “distant reading”. The author argues that the goals of the late Soviet representational project cannot be reduced to direct propaganda or mobilization. It was formed as a local version of modern boosterism — an expansionist ideology characteristic of the situation of forced creation of new territorialities and aimed at the formation of patriotic identities in new settlement centers. The Late Soviet geographical poetry was the product of this Soviet representational infrastructure, and the quintessence of its ideology, functioning within the framework of consolidating rhetoric, and giving rise to the figure of the poet, who was identified with poems dedicated to a certain infrastructure project. The Soviet boosterism implied placing the representations of industrial projects in a situational administrative-social context, while simultaneously producing indirect infrastructural effects that were crucial for the formation of urban “normality”, subjectivity and identity. The article outlines the main stages of the formation of the Soviet representational infrastructure, standard forms of its functioning in the late Soviet period; it describes historical geography of this network in the Urals and Western Siberia, which assumed different forms of dealing with the projects for representation of which it was created.