Regions at the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industrial Exhibition, 1923: Geography, Ethnology, and Art

This paper examines regional expositions at the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industrial Exhibition, which took place in Moscow in 1923. The study aims to reconstruct the geographical, historical, ethnological, and art contexts of these expositions. The objective of the study includes identifying the ambitions of the Bolshevik leaders to publicly demonstrate their national discourse at the exhibition. The focus of the study is on republican pavilions and local departments of the "Village" section of the exhibition. It is shown that one of the goals of the exhibition was to convince the public in the advantages of unification of the "Sovietised" national republics and autonomous regions into the USSR. The other goal was to articulate, along with "global", "local" context of the show: to display identity and peculiarity of a particular region. The paper argues that the exhibition became a tool for promoting modernisation (both agricultural and social) for the whole territory of the USSR, including its geographically distant parts.