The project RENAISSANCE USSR investigates a largely unexplored chapter in the global history of historiography: the study of the Italian Renaissance in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1980s. While the Italian Renaissance is widely regarded as a foundational moment in the emergence of modern European identity, celebrated for its values of humanism, scientific inquiry, and individualism, its historiography has long been dominated by Western narratives. From Jacob Burckhardt’s landmark The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1861) onwards, the field has grown significantly in Europe and North America. Yet Renaissance scholarship developed in parallel, albeit in relative isolation, in the Soviet Union, where the Italian Renaissance was appropriated within a distinct ideological and cultural framework.
The main problem addressed by the project is the neglect of Soviet contributions to Renaissance studies in mainstream academic discourse. Soviet scholars, despite limited access to funding, primary sources, and international mobility, produced a rich body of work on Italian humanism, Renaissance political thought, and philosophy. However, this scholarship remained largely invisible to the global academic community due to the language barrier, Cold War-era geopolitical divides, and differing ideological frameworks. As a result, modern accounts of the Renaissance often exclude twentieth-century Eastern European perspectives, undermining efforts to understand the Renaissance as a truly global heritage.
This issue is important to society because it reveals how historical narratives are shaped by political and cultural power structures. In an increasingly interconnected world, there is a growing imperative to reassess Eurocentric frameworks and incorporate marginalized voices into global intellectual history. By illuminating the Soviet reception and reinterpretation of the Italian Renaissance, the project contributes to a more pluralistic and inclusive historiography. It also offers insights into how knowledge circulates across ideological and political boundaries and how cultural memory is constructed in different contexts.
The main objective of the project was to examine the Italian Renaissance Studies in the Soviet Union, taken as an independent and considerably isolated scholarly tradition, but placed in the broader context of intellectual history and development of Renaissance historiography in the twentieth century. The project sought to comprehend (1) why and how Italian Renaissance intellectual history was extensively studied in the Soviet Union, (2) what was the contribution of the Soviet scholars to the field on the international level and how they reshaped understanding of Renaissance humanism, and (3) how these scholars, whose financial opportunities and academic mobility were significantly limited, participated in the international academic networks.
