Abstract

My paper examines railway infrastructure in Armenia as a key instrument through which imperial and Soviet authorities reshaped space, mobility, and power relations. Focusing on the Armenian railway system during the late Soviet period (1950s–1980s), particularly the construction of the Yerevan–Hrazdan–Ijevan line, my study explores how railway development functioned simultaneously as a strategic infrastructure of state power and as a material environment through which societies imagined political and economic futures.

Railways have historically played a central role in integrating the South Caucasus into wider imperial and regional networks linking the Black Sea, the Caspian basin, and Central Eurasia. Soviet planners presented railway expansion as a mechanism of modernization that would accelerate industrial development, secure strategic borderlands, and strengthen economic integration across the region. In this sense, infrastructure operated not only as a technical system but also as a political project aimed at reorganizing spatial relations between imperial centers and peripheral territories.

Drawing on archival sources and anthropological methodology, my research analyzes how Soviet railway projects articulated what Reinhart Koselleck describes as a particular “horizon of expectation,” in which infrastructure symbolized progress, connectivity, and socialist transformation. At the same time, these projects were deeply embedded in earlier imperial spatial orders, as railway corridors initially constructed under the Russian Empire were repurposed to serve Soviet geopolitical and military objectives in a strategically volatile borderland.

The research further explores the legacies of these infrastructures in the post-Soviet period. Many railway lines built during the late Soviet decades now exist in states of stagnation or partial abandonment, transforming infrastructures once associated with socialist modernization into material reminders of unrealized futures. By examining railways as both instruments of territorial integration and as mnemonic landscapes of imperial power, my study contributes to the broader debate on infrastructure, spatial transformation, and the politics of power in the South Caucasus region.