Chapter 5 describes the planning, design, and construction of the Sanmenxia Hydropower Project in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Building on David Pietz’s analysis of the Soviet influence on the general plan for the Yellow River, this chapter examines the negotiations that took place between Soviet experts, their Chinese counterparts, and local stakeholders during the process of designing the Sanmenxia Dam. While the Communist Party proclaimed in 1957 that the primary purpose of the project was flood control, it is clear from the sources examined in this chapter that the generation of hydroelectricity was the principal element of the dam’s design.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.

Chapter 3 focuses on the poetry of the Iranian Aḥmad Shāmlū and his pioneering imagination of what would eventually come to be called the Third World in his second collection of poetry, The Manifesto, from 1951. Shāmlū’s committed poetry goes beyond Nīmā’s prosodic innovations to reach past the borders of Iran in a bid to build solidarity with, for instance, a Korean soldier fighting against the United Kingdom and United States in the Korean War. The Manifesto, therefore, represents Shāmlū’s attempt to forge a Third World literary network within the Global South that predates later moves in this direction following the Bandung Conference in 1955. However, Shāmlū’s idealism was cut short in 1953 only weeks after the Korean War ended when these same imperial powers staged their coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 15–19. The 1953 coup represents a momentous turning point not just for local politics in the Middle East but also for cultural production. Shāmlū tempered his political engagement following the coup, and the Iranian Left suffered a general malaise from which it never recovered.

The Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s political positions underwent a monumental shift after he witnessed Mossadegh’s ouster first-hand while on the run from the Iraqi police in Iran. Chapter 4 traces the effects this political shift had on Sayyāb’s view of his own poetry and the worlds he imagined within it. Sayyāb was a card-carrying Communist prior to the coup against Mossadegh, but afterwards he began to support a nationalist politics informed by Western Liberalism. The changes his poetry underwent thus offer an indispensable point of comparison with Shāmlū’s committed project. After experiencing the events of 1953 in Iran, Sayyāb returned to a volatile period in Iraq’s history as a bloody 1958 revolution overthrew the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and instituted a radical military dictatorship in its stead. During the ensuing years, Sayyāb published several modernist poems, which have been hailed by critics as crucial contributions to the development of modernist forms and themes in Arabic. In this chapter, I explore Sayyāb’s development of modernist themes alongside his retention of premodern Arabic prosodic form in his 1954 long poem “Weapons and Children.”

In this chapter I extend insights about the channels of professional continuity discerned in Chapter 4 to focus on the institutions that socialized the next generation of Soviet citizens. I first present Russia-wide data on resilience in education as related to the estates and follow this data analysis with a qualitative account of imperial schooling. Statistical analysis is strongly suggestive of the interconnected human-capital and estate drivers of spatial variations in educational attainment and institutions during the communist period and in the present. To unpack the causal mechanisms behind the statistical patterns, I adapted concepts of institutional drift and conversion to Russia’s post-revolutionary context. Insights from comparative historical analysis into institutional path-dependencies help dissect how the eclectic tapestry of schools catering to Samara’s educated society found its phoenix-like reincarnation in Soviet pedagogy, even when punctuated with closures and reforms. An exercise in historical forensics concerning the Samara Jewish School allows me to dissect some ways in which lower-status pedagogic old-timers capitalized on their new status as Soviet school headmasters. Finally, similar to patterns observed in Samara City, I dissect heterogeneity in demand for and supply of schooling within rural areas.

Russian literature and culture are topics to which Stoppard has repeatedly returned, from his ongoing critical engagement with revolutionary movements (from Herzen to Lenin and beyond) to his adaptations of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

After 1949, the Communist government invested in industrial development, much of it in cities far from the coast, which were now linked to the urban system by rapidly expanding rail and road networks. Industrial development caused rural-to-urban migration, and so the government introduced policies to keep people in the countryside, which meant that there were few really large cities in the Maoist period. Influenced by the USSR, Chinese planners built micro-districts combining work with housing and municipal services. Most were managed by danwei (work units), such as large state-owned companies, where Communist Party cadres organized many aspects of urban life. Urban space was now highly politicized, and this allowed the government to mobilize the people during political campaigns. Communist Party cadres became a new urban elite, and there were divisions between those who worked for large state-owned enterprises, and had access to urban amenities through their danwei, and those who worked in smaller factories or workshops. Meanwhile, people’s class status became important in their daily lives. Those who were from bourgeois backgrounds were targeted in political campaigns, and during the Cultural Revolution many suffered humiliating struggle sessions at the hands of Red Guards.

States commit via succession when new states have emerged and the prior state had already ratified to the treaty. Though often categorized into the same commitment as ratification, succession is a deliberate recommitment to human rights standards. Succession is a unique and rare form of treaty commitment only available to new states that have separated from other states. Succession states experience unique regime change often characterized by democratization. I argue that new states use succession as a means to seek legitimacy from the United Nations and other states. The increased attention paid to succession states also means accountability for compliance. As a result, states committing via succession have the motivation and accountability contributing to compliance. I examine the historic case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia and track human rights patterns following succession in the succession states versus ratification states. I find higher rates of human rights changes following succession, which aligns with these states experiencing regime transition and democratization. The finding supports my call to separate out commitment types from ratification.

The great budgetary transformation of central Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union demonstrates the critical importance of economic context, political culture, history, and institutions in the recreation of public financial management systems. Since the collapse of the USSR, countries in this region have served as fiscal laboratories that experiment with budgetary reforms. This includes countries like Hungary and Poland that joined the European Union.

Kazakhstan is a relatively new country that has been a nation-state since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country has been transitioning to a market economy, with property rights being established and private entrepreneurship being encouraged. The transition has led to some firms making inroads into international markets. For this study, we chose five companies – Air Astana, Sberbank Kazakhstan, Kamaz Kazakhstan, Sportmaster, and Tsesna. Of these, Sberbank and Kamaz originated in Soviet times; Sport Master evolved in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union; and Air Astana and Tsesna are relatively new domestic firms that have tried to develop specific competitive advantages. Some of the capabilities that these companies initially developed were in product innovation, branding, distribution, and human resources. A more general competency that all these companies developed, first in their home market but then in foreign markets, is the ability to survive and succeed in institutional conditions that are still evolving and changing. While new institutions were still developing and building credibility, networks and political connections were still important and played a role in most of these markets.