Abstract: Conventional accounts of the Soviet politics of time foreground the "utopian" campaigning of the revolutionary, Bolshevik years, and their substitution by a strategy focused on "stability" under Stalin. This antinomy is then transposed to the late Soviet period: Khrushchev's Thaw figuring as a period of utopian revival and the Brezhnev years as one of neo-Stalinist stabilization. Altogether, this yields an elegant, if reductive, metanarrative of Soviet history. By contrast, this article profiles more recent work on Soviet chronopolitics, which is sensitive to contests between multiple copresent imaginaries of time. I argue that such scholarship spearheads the ongoing trend of breaking Soviet history out of an imminent, self-contained frame, spatially and chronologically. These contributions are especially apparent in the way scholarship on the politics of time advances the "Soviet modernity" debate and decenters the 1989/1991 historical divide.
A 2026 study studied this question.