During the last few years, maritime history has gained from methodological innovations in historical research, learned from other disciplines, and spread into the areas of Eastern, Southeastern, and Eurasian History. The Max Weber Stiftung Georgia Branch Office, which is, among others, devoted to the transnational and international history of the Black Sea Region, aims to take up these discussions and further develop them.
While these maritime spaces and their navigation under the Russian or Ottoman Empire have already become the subject of comparatively extensive trans-imperial or global historical research, the maritime history of the Soviet Union and its socialist Allies has only been explored inadequately. The workshop aims to fill this gap by comprehensively, comparatively, and globally examining the maritime history of socialist states during the Cold War and its immediate prehistory.
In particular, the global oceans and seas played a significant role in shaping – and conducting - the Cold War as spaces for transport, economic and political relations, and communication. Different fleets used the maritime space for transporting goods and contraband, knowledge, and spies. Merchant ships stayed for several weeks in ports of the ideological enemy; these spaces served as a window into the other system and simultaneously became heterotopia in a Foucauldian sense. The Soviet Navy became a severe global player after the Second World War. Soviet warships patrolled oceans, guarded the coasts, and were prepared for military operations far from the motherland.
Meanwhile, new sea routes and the organization of maritime space through international conventions shaped orders that exist today. By analyzing practices and experiences on boundless seas, the workshop will question understandings and concepts of confrontation and division and contribute to methodological and conceptual discussions especially in Cold War history.
Contributions are invited from history and social sciences covering Soviet encounters with and ideas on the “Seven Seas” since the late 1930s.
Topics might be (not exclusively):
- Socialist navies (merchant marine, military navy, fishing fleet)
- Global Sea routes and infrastructures
- Ideas of the Socialist Maritime
- Gender and Nationalities in Maritime Socialist History
- Socialist Seafarers and maritime labor
- Socialist contributions to Maritime institutions and international organizations
- Ports as contact zones in the Cold War
- Maritime Military Encounters in the Cold War
- Making of and dissolving of Soviet Fleets