Ekaterina Boltunova and Galina Egorova at the International Workshop "State Descriptions Revisited: Historical Forms of Territorial Representations, 18th - 21st Centuries"

On January 21, 2022, Ekaterina Boltunova, Head of the Laboratory, and Galina Egorova, Research Fellow of the Laboratory, presented a paper "Russia’s “Golden Ring”: Imperial Basis for Late Soviet Tourist Route" at the International Workshop "State Descriptions Revisited: Historical Forms of Territorial Representations, 18th - 21st Centuries", organized by Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies.

Abstract:

In the 1960s, a well-known tourist route “Golden Ring” appeared in the Soviet Union. It linked to one another several cities of Central Russia that remained preserved after World War II (Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Suzdal', Rostov, Pereslavl', etc). The route, which is still popular nowadays, turned out to give ground for repositioning the territory and created a special narrative for describing this part of the USSR. The paper demonstrates that the choice of cities was not situational or determined entirely by Soviet perceptions as the idea of the tourist route strongly referred to the narrative that emerged in late 19th – early 20th century i.e. under imperial rule.