The Epoch of Socialist Reconstruction: Ideas, Myths, and Programs for Social Reform international conference was held September 8th-10th at the Ural Federal University Named after the First President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin under the project titled Early Soviet Society as a Social Project: Ideas, Mechanisms of Realization, Results of Development.
The cognitive potential of the theory of social planning for the interpretation of events in the Soviet history and, most of all, the processes of formation and development of the early Soviet society was discussed at the conference.
Researchers from 15 regions of the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, and the USA participated in the conference. The most intense discussion was stirred by the presentations by: Lomonosov MSU Professor, RAS member correspondent Leonid Borodkin “Motivations for labor in the Soviet Russia in the 20s and 30s”; Doctor of Historical Sciences Galina Ershova “Cultural revolution as a mechanism for societal transformation”; and a Polish researcher Ya. Sadovskiy “Stalinism as a result of the death of utopia”.
The Faculty of History from the South Ural State University Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities was represented at the conference by the faculty Dean, Professor of the Department of Russian and Foreign History, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Igor Sibiryakov. In the section “Socialist City Project. The City as an Object and Space for Social Development” he gave a scientific presentation titled “The Sevastopol experiment: experience in constructing a new Soviet cultural-historical city space”, and answered many questions by the conference participants. Within his presentation, Professor Sibiryakov gave the first summaries of a longstanding scientific project being completed at the SUSU Department of Russian and Foreign History – “The image of Sevastopol in the cultural memory of the Soviet society”, supported by the Russian Fund for Basic Research.