Vortrag von Oxana Gourinovitch (Zürich): Subdued State. The dissonant spatial legacy of the Soviet German uranium mining corporation Wismut

Zweite Veranstaltung des Berlin-Brandenburger Colloquiums für Umweltgeschichte (BBC) im Sommersemester 2025, das zu vier Terminen von Mai bis Juli einlädt. 

Veranstalter: Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam

Montag, 23. Juni 2025 | 18-20 Uhr

Zum Vortrag

Oxana Gourinovitch (Zürich): Subdued State. The dissonant spatial legacy of the Soviet German uranium mining corporation Wismut

Since 1991, the territories of the German federal states of Saxony and Thuringia have been the subject of one of the largest remediation projects in the world, and the most expensive one ever undertaken by the European Union, with its first phase, estimated to cost over 7 billion euros, being scheduled for completion in 2027. The massive undertaking addresses the toxic legacy of Wismut corporation, a concern around the Soviet-German shareholder company Wismut that mined uranium for Soviet military needs on the territory of the German Democratic Republic during the entire period of the GDRs existence.

Wismut became one of the largest uranium producers in the world and turned the East German regions into the main providers for the Soviet nuclear project. Forty-four years of its operation critically reshaped both the under- and aboveground environments of Saxony and Thuringia and radically transfigured the spatial and social fabric of the regions. While the remediation project led by Wismut GmbH has prompted extensive research into the environmental damage inflicted by Wismut’s activities, its built environments remain largely overlooked not only by the Wismut-led public discourse, but also by scholarship. The talk addresses the asymmetries in the dealing with Wismut’s heritage and brings the dissonant and neglected spatial legacy of Wismut’s operation into focus.

Kurzbiographie:

Oxana Gourinovitch, PhD TU Berlin, is an architectural historian, architect, and curator focusing on built environments of the state socialist world. She has been teaching and researching at the TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen, and was the CCA/WRI fellow at the Center for Contemporary Architecture in Montreal. Her PhD was awarded the Tiburtius Prize of the Berlin Universities and published as a book Raising the Curtain: Operatic Modernism and the Soviet Nations by Spector Books in 2024. Currently Gourinovitch is the Egon Eiermann Postdoc Fellow at the ETH Zürich.