In 1977, an unusual series of articles titled "Psychology: Conscious and Unconscious" appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta, sparking a rare intellectual exchange between Soviet psychologists and American scholar Nancy Rawlins. This dialogue, which revolved around the definition of the unconscious, was remarkable given the Soviet Union’s earlier suppression of psychoanalysis in the 1930s. Despite their ideological differences, participants agreed on the possibility of fruitful collaboration across political boundaries. This research investigates how the concept of the unconscious was shaped on both sides of the Iron Curtain and how Cold War ideologies influenced these interpretations. Drawing from historiography on Russian psychoanalysis and cultural exchanges during the Cold War, this study situates the unconscious as a "boundary object"—a concept shared by different social worlds that facilitates communication and cooperation across ideological divides. In this context, the unconscious became a cultural and intellectual tool for navigating Cold War tensions, enabling Soviet and Western scholars to engage in productive discourse despite their differing perspectives. By examining Soviet and Western scholarly works, archival sources, and the proceedings of the 1979 Tbilisi symposium on the unconscious, the paper highlights how the unconscious functioned as a global connector. This concept, reinterpreted and adapted within various national and ideological frameworks, underscores the dynamic intellectual exchanges between the socialist and capitalist worlds, challenging the rigid separations often associated with the Cold War era. In doing so, the paper contributes to the global history of ideas, demonstrating how scientific concepts can transcend political barriers and foster international dialogue.

My talk will be based on my ongoing second book project which explores the enduring legacies of Soviet urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus, three decades after the USSR's collapse. It interrogates the question: "What is left of the socialist city?" by tracing the material and mnemonic remnants of these urban landscapes and revealing how Soviet city planning sometimes sparked radical ideas that transcended state socialism’s confines. The book focuses on four case studies: the internationalist efforts of Esperanto-speaking Czechoslovakians in the Central Asian steppe, Armenian Futurists' attempts to blend Soviet architecture with Persianate heritage, the vision of a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher to create the USSR's first ecopolis, and the development of a polycentric urban model in Soviet Armenia. By examining these urban experiments, the research reveals how cities like Bishkek and Yerevan have become contested spaces where the socialist past and ethnonationalist present coexist in tension. Through a historical and ethnographic investigation of sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book identifies four competing visions of urbanity: bottom-up, rooted, polycentric, and ecocentric. These are explored across the Soviet era and into the present day, showing how Soviet-era materiality is being re-appropriated by new generations. Expanding the global archive through a transdisciplinary approach that blends urban sociology and critical memory studies with the history of the former Soviet South, it offers a polyphonic account of Soviet urbanity's life and afterlife, engaging with different key themes of the Eighth ENIUGH Congress, tieing in with questions of multivocality in a concerted effort to rethink the vision of the socialist city from the Soviet South.

The current paper adopts a comparative historical perspective (the time frame end of the 19th - beginning of the 21st centuries) and investigates the historical practices of Russia to use the (il)legal transborder trafficking for political goals. In particular, it looks upon the Russian borders with Finland, and the Baltic states. It considers such instances, as regulating the korobeinki trade and the smuggling in the territory of the Great Duchy of Finland and the Baltic states in the 19th – beginning of the 20 centuries to augment failing Russification; to support and to organize smuggling to Finland and to the Baltics in the early Soviet years as a disguise for espionage; the Soviet attempts to administer illegal trafficking at the end of the 1920s – beginning of the 1930s and the reasons for closing it. It investigates the “unintended consequences” of creating a “politicized contraband” corridors, and looks for an explanations of why eventually it turned out to be ineffective. The paper dwells upon the administered semi-legal trafficking of “transparent” borders of the 1990s and ends up with the discussion of the most recent Russian state’s incidents of using an illegal migration as as political tool. The paper is based on the archival sources, official documents, and the press. The assumption of the current work is that the present-day Russian policy of border controls, as well as the peculiarities of its actively (ab)used transborder traffic, has visible parallels with the matrix dating back to the Russian imperial, and then Soviet border management policies.