'Scientist's Code': Ekaterina Kalemeneva on Modernist Projects in the Arctic, Khrushchev-Era Houses and Similarity between Historians and Gold Diggers
Before the start of the academic year, we keep introducing you to the professors of HSE University-St Petersburg. Ekaterina Kalemeneva supervises the Department of History and teaches Bachelor's and Master's students. In her research, she focuses on historical urban studies, Soviet urban development and the Thaw era. We talked to the Candidate of Historical Sciences about the projects of modernist cities in the Arctic and the changes entailed by the construction of the Khrushchev-Era houses.
Research you are proud of
Pride in your work is ephemeral in some sense. While working on research, you always consider it the most important but at the same time doubt every line. When the text is published, it is a little estranged from you. If there was pride during the process, it would quickly disappear as soon as you switch to the next research.
Nevertheless, there is one story which I take pride in. A couple of years ago, I hunted up a story about modernist architectural projects in the Arctic cities. Before me, it was hardly known to researchers of the Soviet Arctic, and it lives its own life which I am extremely happy about.
Everything started with the journal 'Problems of the North' from 1964. Among the articles about oceanography, studies of ice and the Arctic climate, I came across the article by architects. They offered a project of a northern modernist city under a glass dome with houses connected with passages. Later, I started looking for similar projects in other issues about the North or Soviet architecture and realised that in that decade, they appeared quite often.
Then, I started working with archival materials of LenZNIIEP and managed to determine the circle of experts who worked on these projects. I found some of them and recorded interviews with them. These conversations showed me all the difficulties of the situation with modernist projects of Northern cities. It is easy to reduce their story to 'paper' architecture: archives show that sometimes, locals rebuked architects and said that it was more important for the city to build a school than to implement an ultramodern plan. One can do otherwise and romanticise this story a lot. Lots of these project creators, to whom I managed to talk, were very inspired, and all of them stated that the ideas were not implemented by sheer coincidence. But it is also wrong for a researcher to be a megaphone for their voices. The problem was not only the refusal of the Soviet government to finance the construction of such cities.
The more sources you use, the more obvious it becomes that there is something more difficult behind the story of these projects. It was interesting for me to speculate about what the appearance of such projects could tell us about the 1960s in general, about various scenarios of Arctic exploration, and about the opportunities which were available at that time but gradually disappeared. These projects recorded a strong desire for change, and it was important for me not to give a verdict but to understand what encouraged their appearance and how we can study wider processes with their help.
Research which changed your conception of science
It happened to me for the first time in the second year of my specialist's degree. To work on a term paper, I ordered in the library an author's summary of a dissertation but it turned out to be disappointing. There was no breakthrough in it, and the language was difficult. To take my mind off things, I decided to walk between the library shelves.
I accidentally came across the book 'The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France' which was not related to the topic of my thesis and simply intrigued me by its title, and I literally fell into it. In that research, Marc Bloch studied medieval folk beliefs that kings could heal scrofula by touch. Studying this plot, he looked at where such ideas came from, and what they could say about the authority and its nature. In particular, Marc Bloch shows that the appearance of these beliefs proves not the strength but weakness of the monarchy: it had to search for a supernatural explanation of its authority. Only later, I found out that this research was the classics of historical anthropology but the first impression has stayed with me ever since. Before this book, I had no idea that one could write about history so lively and interestingly, that such research existed at all.
Talking about the works much more related to my academic interests, I should name several types of research devoted to the social history of the late Soviet standard housing. Back in the day, I was deeply impressed by articles and books by Susan Reid and Stephen Harris, they made me look at Khrushchev-era houses from a completely different angle. it turned out that the foresides of standard houses hide not only history of daily life but a real social revolution. Khrushchev-era houses changed the city’s aesthetics, the status of architects, a sense of community in new micro districts and many other things. We discuss many of these topics with students now in the course on Soviet urbanism, and I would like this story to open for plenty of people.
Researcher you want to look up to
When I first started to teach and engage in science seriously, I suddenly noticed how strongly I was influenced by completely different academic models which I came across while studying or working in various research teams. However, in the formation of any researcher, a special role is always given to the thesis supervisor. So, I was greatly influenced by Julia Lajus who was my thesis supervisor during my master's and PhD degrees. She gave me a lot of creative freedom but at the same time could push for action and inspire. I am especially grateful to her for organisational generosity. Prof Lajus can skilfully gather interesting academic teams around her, create research projects and organise significant conferences. Perhaps, thanks to this experience in particular, the researchers, who invest a lot of resources in forming an academic environment around them, make me feel great respect. I also want to create such an environment for other people where they would like to develop.
Sources of inspiration
A huge inspiration can come from the material itself. You find a hole like Alice and realise that you can dive in headfirst. It lights a certain spark in you and makes you get off the ground. However, the material alone will get you only so far. Enthusiasm flattens quickly if you do not fuel it.
Sometimes, you need to put the material aside to come back to it later with a fresh perspective. I once had a story about the way a material can cause academic depression and later become a whiff of fresh air. Besides, while working on my dissertation, I went to Yakutia for a month and worked with the archives of the construction of Mirny—the first diamond town in the USSR. It was important for me to puzzle out why modernist projects, developed for Soviet diamond towns and approved by the State Committee for Construction of the RSFSR, had never been implemented. But the longer were searches, the more disappointed I got in the materials: there were lots of them but they did not help to answer my initial question. Back then, I got so upset that many of the found stories were not included in the final text of my dissertation. But in some years, I came back to my notes and realised that I could use them for research on what it meant to build and populate a socialist town in the middle of the taiga in the 1950s. As a result, this year, I published an article in the journal 'Urban History' about the fate of Mirny and the way how its construction helped to develop a new model of a Soviet Arctic city.
I get a lot of inspiration from summer—not only from entertainment but also an opportunity to work in the archive calmly. During an academic year, it is hard to combine teaching and other university affairs as the archives also work only on weekdays. Besides, I can work with the articles’ texts more attentively: rewrite and complement them in a calm atmosphere. So it turns out that the summer months are the busiest time for working on your research.
The main thing for a scientist
For a scientist, an important thing is basic curiosity. It is impossible to get off the ground without it. Curiosity also helps in finding materials, working with them and immersing yourself in the context. Any good researcher is a naturally curious person who decided to dedicate their whole life to studying the new. They don't stop asking questions because they know that one carefully considered explanation is not enough.
However, it is easy to burn out only on curiosity, so a scientist needs diligence. This quality is a little boring but it is hard to make a truly good research without it. In science, you cannot give up if you can't find material straight away. Take the work in the archives—it is similar in many ways to the work of gold diggers: if you are lucky, you will find what you look for straight away; but the search can be very long and unsuccessful sometimes. This is why any researcher has to have patience.
Finally, of course, an important thing for a scientist is their love for what they do. Science is built on communication, on presenting and explaining your ideas to people, and one cannot do it without love.