Organised by Katja Doose (Lyon 2), Grégory Dufaud (UPHF), & Anna Safronova (ZMO)
While being less spectacular than terror and repression, the Soviet state’s efforts to protect the population from uncertainty and dangers were also instrumental for reshaping the relationship between state and society. Constructing an unforeseen event or danger as a social problem, taking protective measures and determining the conditions to compensate victims and anticipating the future – this is how we characterise the ‘politics of uncertainty and danger’. This workshop aims to clarify the paradox whereby the regime was attacked by the Soviets on the basis of its inability to protect them, despite its having reaffirmed its protective nature by implementing security measures.
Thursday, 16 April 2026
09:15–09:30 | Welcome
Welcome by the organisers
Introduction to the workshop format
Panel 1 – Pollution, Expertise, and Technological Responses
09:30–12:30
Nicholas Seay (The Ohio State University)
Striking with a Sword: Pesticides, Pests, and Ecology in Soviet Tajikistan
Anna Helena Liiv (University of Tartu)
Industrial Disaster and Microbial Life:
The Politics of Bioremediation in Late Socialist Estonia
Marc Elie (CERCEC, CNRS)
Toxic Storm Warning: Forecasting, Prevention, and the Naturalization of Pollution in Soviet Meteorology, 1970s–1990s
12:30–14:00 | Lunch
Panel 2 – Civil Defence, Care, and Social Order
14:00–16:00
Grégory Dufaud (Université polytechnique Hauts-de-France)
Defending the Fatherland, Mobilising the Population:
The Establishment of Civil Defence in Soviet Latvia in the Early 1960s
Siobhán Hearne (University of Manchester)
The Soviet Red Cross and the Civil Defence Movement in the Post-Stalin USSR
16:00–16:15 | Coffee break
Panel 3 – Nuclear Threats, Disasters, and Public Mobilisation
16:15–18:15
Dmitrii Sidorov (California State University)
Atomic Urbanisms: Soviet Cold War “Defensive Dispersal”
Dylan Hebert (University of Oxford)
Rebuilding Socialism: The 1966 Tashkent Earthquake and the Cold War Politics of Disaster
19:30 | Conference Dinner
Friday, 17 April 2026
Panel 4 – Governing health and risk in late socialism
09:15–12:15
Ekaterina Suverina (University of Konstanz)
Performative Biopolitics: HIV Surveillance and African Students in the Late Soviet Union
Roman Gilmintinov (European University Sankt Petersburg)
“We Are Talking about the Very Existence of the City as a Social Unit”: Public Health and the Limits of Economic Reason in Environmental Investments, 1970s–1980s
Viola Lászlófi (Central European University)
Mapping Health Risks from Below? Socialist Everyday Life and Empirical Sociology in 1970s–80s Hungary
12:15–13:00 | Concluding Discussion
Synthesis and perspectives for publication
13:00 | End of workshop
(Download the programme here)
