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his class explores the art, culture, and history of the Soviet and post-Soviet peripheries, meaning the non-Russian republics of the USSR, including, among others, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), and the diverse countries of Central Asia including Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). We will focus on notable examples from different art forms, including literature (fiction and poetry), music (popular, traditional, and classical), film, and the visual arts, as we investigate questions about identity, power, cultural politics, and coloniality and decoloniality from the early twentieth century up to the present. Representative creators include Oksana Zabuzhko (The Museum of Abandoned Secrets), Dato Turashvili (Flight from the USSR), Chinghiz Aitmatov (The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years), Rashid Nugmanov (The Needle), Sergei Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates), Kira Muratova (The Piano Tuner), Valentyn Sylvestrov, Viktor Tsoi, the Ganelin Trio, and Sainkho Namchylak. We will consider how different Soviet and post-Soviet thinkers from representative traditions wrestled with local definitions of “Sovietness” as well as with varied interpretations of the “post-Soviet.” The discourse of socialist realism and its bureaucratic and aesthetic negotiations will be a central topic, but so too will divergences from Moscow-centered artistic and philosophical demands