The Soviet 60s represent a very contradictory thesaurus of narratives. On the one hand, this was a period of the famous Thaw and of political expectations about the Soviet utopia’s breakthrough. On the other hand, the 60s prove to be a decade of harsh disillusions ending up with the Prague Spring of 1968 and entailing the recession of democratic revival and cultural development.
The historical events that effected Tülay German’s life are still echoing in many common experiences. Compulsory immigration decisions due to political ideas, ideological faith in individual and collective engagement, and the erasure of collective memory in time.
The magazine Souffles made an important contribution to modern Moroccan culture in the 60s. The impact of its literary, artistic, and cultural production were of the greatest importance.
Our parent’s generation succeeded in finding the nerve of local modernity. All these people, they were on the border of the discovery. That international context was suddenly transformed into something new with local nuances and without any marginality. Later this was lost and now it is going to be trampled down.
Reflecting on the Soviet 60s nowadays, we are dealing with such an enormous amount of information, images, personages and narratives as well as their interpretations that (both during the Soviet and post-Soviet times) there have been only few subtle reconsiderations connected with changes in the political and cultural paradigm.
Based on interviews, Nadire Mater’s book “Sokak Güzeldir: 68’de Ne Oldu?” [Street is Beautiful: What Happened in 68?] (Metis, 2009) attempts to give a realistic account of the year 1968 in Turkey, and deals not only with Turkey’s 68, but also with that of the world.
For the Iranian visual artist of the decade the main preoccupation was always two pronged: How to be modern in an age that demanded non-conformity, rebelliousness, and breaking away from tradition, and how to preserve a distinct identity as the only way to lessen the pressure of measuring up to an ideal of Western art whose site of origin was always elsewhere.
A few years ago a syndicated TV project The Great Ukrainians was aired at one of the national channels. The idea of the project was very simple: the whole nation, which was represented by a TV-audience, elected its most important historical figures.
Modern scientific socialism has already been acquiring this knowledge of the need to scientifically found all social movements and transformations, which has always been its powerful weapon.
During the entire 19th century, Russia’s relations with Turkey, often on the battlefield, were vital for the former. This was a time when the Russians sought to redefine their identity using Western concepts, to present themselves as a modernizing nation in the Western sense, as a country that was a part of Europe.
