Russian-Soviet Viticulture in Global Historical Perspective (1860-1941)

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The research project takes a synthesizing perspective on winegrowing, wine consumption and cellar techniques in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union from the end of the Crimean War up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. It pursues an entangled history with its local, regional and global aspects and consequences.At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was among the top ten wine producing countries in the world. Contemporaries were not only particularly pleased with the high quality of Crimean sparkling wines but also with the full-bodied dessert wines. International experts were convinced that grape culture had become a power in Russia during the last decades of the 19th century and that the Russian confidently expect to make grape culture one of their leading products. In an international comparing perspective the project shows how Imperial and Soviet wine makers coped with devastating ecologic, economic, and political crises such as pests and phylloxera, World War I that went along with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, Revolution, Civil War and the collectivization.Specific climatic conditions are a prerequisite to grow wine. The wine producing regions were basically located at the southern peripheries of the Russian Empire, ranging from Bessarabia via the littoral of the Black Sea including Taurida and Don provinces to the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. The commodity wine, however, was imported and exported via different ports and border cities. Accordingly, not only divergent transregional and transnational interdependencies arose from these different conditions but also varying imaginations of the global, as well as individual belongings and affiliations.This project will examine wine not only as a globally circulating object of knowledge but also as a consumer product with its overarching economic and scientific ties, transfers and sometimes failed interactions. Moreover, it will also examine any deliberate distinctions and disintegrative aspects of Imperial Russian and Soviet history what may have led to the fact that most global histories have widely disregarded the empire up to now. The project focuses on three different aspects: first, the international wine blight, which existentially threatened many producers in France, as well as in Germany and Russia, second, the ways of acquisition and transfer of knowledge via different national and international educational institutions, public spheres and forums and finally, the adulteration of wine and trade mark counterfeiting and the actions taken by various agencies to forestall this global economic disaster on behalf of both producers and consumers.