This seminar invites participants to explore and compare conceptions of time — breaks, ruptures, leaps, decelerations, stagnations, and nostalgias — developed in socialist literature, film, architecture, science, and art from around the world. In the years following the October Revolution in 1917, a future-oriented outlook dominated politics and social life. This outlook carried over into numerous revolutionary and decolonial movements, from the Middle East and China to Africa and Latin America. At the same time, after a period of revolutionary fervor, many societies experienced dramatic shifts in attitudes toward time and history. In the Soviet Union, for instance, the so-called “era of stagnation” (late 1960s-80s) generated a sense of time as an eternal present characterized by eclectic notions of repetition, emptiness, impermanence, circularity, ritual, and death. The aim of this seminar is to reconstruct the multitude of temporal regimes around the socialist world that existed during the Soviet period (1917-1991). How did these regimes synchronize with, decouple, overthrow, or overtake Moscow’s? To what degree was Moscow even in synch with itself? And to what extent did new labor-saving technologies and global financial systems influence the experience of time in the socialist world? We propose to study these questions in the hope of understanding how different social groups in various socialist countries experienced and made sense of history and time. Finally, we seek to understand how these multiple temporalities are currently being reappropriated by culture and ideology in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the Global South.