In the late 1980s, the USSR experienced a sharp status inversion from a superpower and major donor of global humanitarian aid to one of its primary recipients. As radioactive fallout from Chernobyl contaminated the land and skies of the country’s western borderlands and a deadly earthquake unfolded in Armenia, millions of the country’s citizens grappled with the wide-ranging consequences of disaster. Humanitarian crisis was accompanied by a radical upending of the status quo. Under the conditions of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, information on humanitarian crisis reached enormous audiences both at home and abroad, Soviet citizens rapidly mobilised their own networks of relief, and international NGOs entered the USSR for the first time since the advent of Soviet power. These moments of crisis and their aftermaths turned the country into a laboratory of humanitarian action, wherein new forms of intervention were implemented in response to displacement, disaster, and the collapse of welfare states, and humanitarianism became intertwined with new forms of political and economic governance. This transformation not only deeply affected the dissolving Soviet Union, but it also had a profound impact upon the international humanitarian sector more broadly.

Soviet Red Cross

This talk examines this process by focusing on the Soviet Red Cross and its relief efforts in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and the Armenian earthquake. Drawing upon archival materials from Geneva, Minsk, Moscow, and Kyiv, it will explore how local branches of the Soviet Red Cross challenged the Soviet government’s monopoly on diplomacy and foreign exchange and forged their own partnerships with the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and national Red Cross/Red Crescent societies around the world. More broadly, it will explore how Soviet Red Cross representatives navigated their new complicated position as recipients of aid, experts in disaster response, and intermediaries between the Soviet government and the IFRC.

About the speaker

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union who is based at the University of Manchester. Her research broadly explores histories of health, humanitarianism, gender, and sexuality throughout the twentieth century. She is currently writing a book about the Soviet Red Cross in the second half of the twentieth century entitled Red Humanitarians: The Red Cross Movement in the Soviet Union, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. From May 2026, she will lead an ERC-funded project entitled ‘Laboratories of Humanitarianism: Aid, Intervention, and the End of the Soviet Union, 1985-2000’.