CREECA Lecture Series Podcast: Recent Episodes
Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public.
As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.
(Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016). He has completed a book-length study of the Pugachev rebellion which is about to come out in Russian.
(Inostrannaia literatura), this lecture demonstrates how Soviet critics developed formulaic reading practices that served remarkably similar functions to Tsarist-era engagement with American racial issues and western colonialism. Both regimes used American racism as a mirror to reflect their own moral superiority and projected paternalistic leadership over distant oppressed peoples, from Imperial Russia’s relationship with Ethiopia in the nineteenth century to the Soviet Union’s post-war interest in a rapidly decolonizing Africa.The talk reveals how literary criticism functioned as ideological instruction in the Soviet Union, with critics constructing a carefully curated canon of acceptable Black literature that taught readers how to “properly understand” Black American life, reinforcing the state’s anti-racist credentials while serving Cold War propaganda goals. By attending to these continuities rather than taking revolutionary rhetoric at face value, the lecture offers new insights into Soviet cultural politics and the enduring patterns of Russian soft-power projection that remain relevant to understanding contemporary Russian foreign policy.About the Speaker: Jesse Kruschke is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the Soviet reception of twentieth-century American literature, with particular attention to how literary journals published, translated, and framed the work of leftist Black
traces the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse, based on multilingual research conducted across the former Soviet Union. Future projects include a history of perestroika from below and a history of enumeration in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
In 1991, as the USSR broke apart and its population became open to the reforming discourse of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program of perestroika, Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev set the tone for subsequent writing on Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, concluding that he was “a personality so mediocre and a politician so ordinary” that he “quickly disappeared from the political scene and also in the literal and metaphorical sense.” But not for long. When it became clear by the end of the decade that market capitalism and democracy had not improved people’s lives, nostalgia for the Brezhnev era rightly raised the question of whether he had been given his just due and unfairly blamed for the shortcomings of the Soviet system. This reversal of fortune also makes clear that no Soviet leader has been as neglected or as misunderstood as Brezhnev and therefore no Soviet party boss is in such need of a fresh historical reassessment. Divided into two parts, my presentation will first make a case for Brezhnev, emphasizing his vision of guaranteeing stability, assuring peace, and letting people live well. Earlier I coined the term “Soviet man of peace,” to characterize Brezhnev. I emphasize this point here, arguing that his dream of wanting to be remembered as an asset for world peace made him a leader who changed the world. In part 2 of my presentation, I zoom in on the Leonid Brezhnev that, as his biographer, I might never know and propose what these unresolved questions might mean.Donald J. Raleigh is the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of Russian History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has authored, translated, and edited numerous books on modern Russian history including Revolution on the Volga (1986), Experiencing Russia’s Civil War (2002), Russia’s Sputnik Generation (2006) and Soviet Baby Boomers (2012). He currently is writing a biography of Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, research for which has taken him to archives in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the UK, and the US.This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History and University Lectures.
Environment, and many other platforms. In 2023, she received Mary Zirin Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. In addition to writing, Darya also works with images through drawing, painting, collage, and film essays. You can learn more about her work here: https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/This lecture is made possible in partnership with Wisconsin RISE-EARTH Initiative.
Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself.Sergei Antonov is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. He was born in Moscow and came to the US in 1992. Antonov earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and his J.D. from NYU Law. His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Harvard, 2016), won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize. His second book, Russia’s Rogue Masters: Elite Criminal Trials in the Age of Reform, 1866-1884, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026.This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History.
Scientific Atheism as an Ideological Discipline in Soviet Ukraine by Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
About the Lecture: In this presentation, Karnes will talk about Maija Tabaka, who was the first Soviet citizen to be awarded the DAAD fellowship. Tabaka unwittingly opened doors to over a decade of artistic exchanges between Riga and West Berlin. She also provided an enduring model for arranging such collaborations, with offices of the Latvian KGB partnering with Latvian emigres to broker relationships, awards, and creative possibilities. Mining archives in Berlin and Riga, this talk traces the origins of such exchanges in the 1970s, their evolution in the time of perestroika, and their end in an ill-fated endeavor to support the dream of the Latvian musician Hardijs Lediņš to record with Laurie Anderson in a newly reunited Berlin.About the Speaker: Kevin C. Karnes is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music and Divisional Dean of Arts at Emory University and Visiting Professor of Musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. His most recent book is Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (2021). His latest research considers techno music and club culture as both product and reflection of transnational exchange across reimagined European borders at the turn of the 1990s.
About the Lecture: In this book presentation, Finkel uncovers the deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Following the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. The Russian Empire, USSR and Putin’s Russia had long used violence to successfully crush Ukrainian efforts to chart a separate path. Today’s violence is just a more extreme version of Russia’s past efforts. But unlike in the past, the people of Ukraine have overcome their deep internal divisions, and this rise of civic Ukrainian nationalism explains the successful resistance to the invasion.About the Speaker: Eugene Finkel (UW PhD in Political Science) is the Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins SAIS. Finkel’s most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), and co-author of Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and other journals. Finkel also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.
About the Lecture: Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, analysts and observers around the world were shocked and surprised that Ukraine did not fall in a matter of days or weeks. Instead people across the country resisted with both military and civilian means, halting the Russian advance. Surveys indicate that over 80% of the Ukrainian population contributed to the war effort in some way (e.g. Onuch et al 2022, 2023), suggesting that Ukrainian civilians have made a crucial, if hard-to-quantify, contribution to Ukraine’s continued resistance. However, scholarship on civilian wartime engagement more broadly tends to focus on decisions to join the military or to flee following the onset of conflict – meaning that our understanding of how and why civilians mobilise in non-combatant roles is limited. Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in Ukraine, this talk discusses the diverse roles Ukrainian civilians are playing in the war effort and what motivates this engagement, particularly in parts of Ukraine most acutely impacted by the war. The discussion will also contextualize this engagement in Ukraine’s longer history of civilian mobilization, based upon Emma’s doctoral research into mass mobilization in Ukraine prior to 2022.About the Speaker: Emma Mateo is a postdoctoral fellow at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. She studies political behaviour in times of crisis, such as mass protest and war, with a regional focus on eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Belarus. Her current monograph project explores civilian responses to conflict, focusing on the case of Ukrainian mobilisation during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Drawing upon fieldwork in Ukraine and systematic analysis of local and social media data, the project investigates the actions and motivations of ordinary Ukrainians in different local contexts who engaged in the war effort as civilians. Emma also researches subnational mobilisation during mass protest, mapping and analysing local protests Belarus and Ukraine for her doctoral research. Emma’s interest in the intersection of protest, civil society, media and technology has led her to make innovative use of social media data, such as Telegram Messenger. Her work has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs and Social Media + Society, and featured at major conferences and expert workshops in the US, Canada, UK, and EU. She has previously worked at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Harriman Institute, and Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology. Emma holds a PhD in Sociology (2022) and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies (2018) from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Modern Languages (Russian, French and Ukrainian) from the University of Cambridge.
[About the Lecture:] The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia’s governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution, Anne O’Donnell reimagines the Bolsheviks’ unprecedented effort to eradicate private property and to create a new political economy—socialism—to replace it.O’Donnell’s account captures the story of property in reverse, showing how the bonds connecting people to their things were broken and how new ways of knowing things, valuing them, and possessing them coalesced amid the political ferment and economic disarray of the Revolution. O’Donnell reminds us that Russia’s postrevolutionary confiscation of property, like many other episodes of mass dispossession in the twentieth century, largely escaped traditional forms of record keeping. She repairs this omission, drawing on sources that chronicle the lived experience of upheaval—popular petitions, apartment inspections, internal audits of revolutionary institutions, and records of the political police—to reconstruct an archive of dispossession. The result is an unusually intimate history of the Bolsheviks’ attempts to conquer people and things.The Bolsheviks’ reimagining of property not only changed peoples’ lives and destinies, it formed the foundation of a new type of state—one that eschewed the defense of private property rights in favor of an enduring but enigmatic new domain: socialist state property.[About the Speaker:] Anne O’Donnell is Associate Professor of History at New York University. Her first book, Taking Stock: Power and Possession in Revolutionary Russia, charts the rise of illiberal Soviet statecraft through the conquest of the urban material environment. It is a history of market-making in reverse: of how people have lost their worlds of things; how they have taken things from one another; how they scrambled conventional indicators of value, and how these searingly intimate, yet widely shared experiences coalesced into a staging ground for socialist revolution. Her next project will be a study of the study of poverty in the post-war Soviet Union.
About the Lecture: During the 70 years of its existence, the Soviet Union claimed to be a communist state based on the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and, at the later stages, Vladimir Lenin. This made philosophy a mandatory course in every Soviet university and led to the creation of a peculiar version of the history of philosophy. Leading Soviet specialists, such as Valentin Asmus and Igor Narskii, interpreted the history of philosophy as a dialectical struggle of oppositions, such as materialism and idealism, religion and science, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Consequently, they divided philosophers of the past into two camps: allies, whose theories preceded dialectical materialism, and foes, who belonged to the idealistic camp. This talk will highlight the principal patterns of the Soviet approach to the history of philosophy and illustrate them through the case study of Igor Narskii’s interpretation of David Hume’s theory.About the Speaker: Viacheslav Zahorodniuk was an assistant professor at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He defended his PhD thesis, “The evolution of the ‘idea’ concept in the British philosophy of the 17-18th centuries,” devoted to Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s epistemology. Zahorodniuk was a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at the University, working on a project on Hume’s theory of knowledge. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Research in Humanities, working on the project “Early Childhood in the Early Modern: Locke’s Accounts on Children Perception.” His interests also include Soviet studies, and an article, “Painted Red: The Soviet interpretations of Hume’s epistemology,” is forthcoming in Hume Studies.
About the lecture: The legacy of past human activities strongly shapes current landscapes and ecosystems, with today’s actions set to leave similar long-term impacts. Predicting future landscape changes, however, requires a thorough understanding of past ones, yet most land and habitat change studies are limited to recent decades—starting only in the 1980s with the availability of 30-m satellite data or in the 2000s with commercial high-resolution satellites. This presentation will introduce an alternative approach, using high-resolution imagery from the 1960s U.S. Corona spy satellites series to trace landscape changes over the past half-century. Focusing on the diverse Caucasus region, with its wide variation in elevation, climate, ecosystems, and historical land-use patterns, this presentation will highlight methods to create detailed land cover maps capturing landscapes before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These historical maps provide a unique perspective on land changes, as well as habitat changes for wild species. This presentation will underscore the value of 1960s spy satellite data for understanding long-term land cover and habitat changes of large ungulate species, offering new insights into historical land use and its implications for wildlife and conservation.About the speaker: Afag (pronounced ah-fah) is a remote sensing and conservation expert with extensive field experience in the Caucasus region. Currently an Honorary Fellow at the SILVIS Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (https://silvis.forest.wisc.edu/people/), she holds a PhD in Forestry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Postgraduate Diploma in Wildlife Conservation from the University of Oxford. Afag’s research employs high-resolution satellite data to map historical land cover in the Caucasus eco-region, investigating long-term landscape changes and their impacts on wild habitats. Her past work has contributed to projects in wild mammal species’ reintroduction, habitat management, and human-wildlife conflict mitigation, and she has shared her findings in various publications (link to google scholar – https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sqSt3H4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao). In addition, employed as a data scientist at Spatial Informatics Group (SIG), she is currently involved in environmental projects in developing countries. Fluent in three languages and conversant in two others, Afag brings a global perspective to her work.
About the Lecture: The legal repression of opposition protests in pre-war Russia is characterized by the deployment of a bifurcated repressive system. This system relies, on the one hand, on “administrative” offenses and, on the other hand, on the criminal justice system to punish protesters. Following the demonstrators from the streets to the police bus, the police precincts and the court, this talk analyzes the case of relatively low-stakes prosecutions for protest-related “administrative” offences and the defensive legal mobilization that they prompted. This use of law and rights claims and sustained organization of legal aid and information support for prosecuted individuals in cases, where a guilty verdict is all but certain, speaks to the broader question of authoritarian legality and constant oscillation of defense actors and defendants themselves between belief and disbelief in law.About the Speaker: Renata Mustafina is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Renata is a law and society scholar with research interests in authoritarian legality, legal mobilization, and defense lawyering in repressive settings, as well as in critical approaches to human rights. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Against Impossible Odds: Defensive Legal Mobilization in Russian Protest-Related Prosecutions,” ethnographically studies the legal aftermath of opposition protests in pre-war Russia (2012-2017). Renata holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po, an M.A. in Sociology from École Normale Supérieure, and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Moscow State University
About the Lecture: Georgia’s 26,000 rivers connect citizens to nature, to their childhood, to their unique regions, each of which has its “mother-river.” The sounds of rushing water as well as the sights and scents of riverside gatherings provoke powerful memories and remain central to Georgian identity. Rivers also form the republic’s economic backbone. This presentation will focus on late Soviet Georgia, when hydroelectricity and gravel taken from riverside quarries joined irrigation and fishing as key contributors to Georgia’s development. Decisions on how to use rivers—at the republic and everyday level—governed the type of state and the spaces where Georgians worked and lived. These decisions, often haphazard and sometimes reversed, manifest a far more complicated dynamic than a simple dichotomy between modernization and conservation. They also implicated a wide range of actors beyond government and expert circles. Rivers themselves, finally, were far from passive actors in these decisions and contests. This presentation, based on oral histories, ethnography and archival sources, will blend human and non-human histories as well as deconstruct late Soviet Georgian state and society through riverine interactions.About the Speaker: Jeff Sahadeo is a professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois. He is the author of Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 (Indiana University Press, 2007) and Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Cornell University Press, 2019). He has published in Slavic Review, Journal of Modern History, Central Asian Survey and other major outlets. His first article from his current project on rivers in tsarist and Soviet Georgia, “The Mtkvari River’s Many Faces: Symbolism, Space and Agency in Late Imperial Tiflis,” is available open access at https://doi.org/10.22215/cjers.v17i1.4436
About the Lecture: The idea of Estonia as a Nordic country gained traction in the late 19th century alongside the rise of Estonian nationalism. As Germany and increasingly also Russia came to be perceived as historical adversaries of the Estonian nation, Sweden’s arguably benevolent influence on Estonia’s history in the 17th century ‘good old Swedish times’ provided the Estonian national movement with an alternative model not just for their understanding of Estonia’s history but also for its political future. The presentation that is based on Mart Kuldkepp’s recent book Nordic Estonia will highlight the continuous efforts of early Estonian nationalists to position the country within the Nordic cultural sphere both before the achievement of Estonia’s independence, and after, with the leaders of the interwar-era independent Estonian state consistently seeking alignment with Sweden and other Nordic nations. Not least in terms of security policy, the recognition of this identity by other Nordic countries was seen critical in shaping Estonia’s geopolitical relationships. Yet it is only in the recent decades that it has found somewhat broader resonance and acceptance abroad. Today, when all the Nordic and Baltic states are members of NATO and most of them also of the EU, the ‘Nordic’ label is perhaps less important as a form of self-identification than it used to be. Yet it remains an exceptionally strong regional brand, and in the minds of most Estonians, their Nordic identity strongly contrasts with other, usually externally imposed labels, such as ‘Baltic’ or ‘post-Soviet’.About the Speaker: Mart Kuldkepp is Professor of Estonian and Nordic History at University College London in the UK. He defended his PhD at University of Tartu in Estonia in 2014 and joined UCL in 2015, where he has worked as lecturer, associate professor and professor. A few months ago, his book Nordic Estonia: The Birth of a Nation State was published in Estonia, tracing the political and intellectual history of the idea of Estonia’s Nordic identity in the first decades of the 20th century. He is currently a visiting professor at Yale University.
Solidarity Networking and Ukrainian Mental Maps: Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive ProjectAbout the Lecture: I am an East European intellectual and political historian by training, and a student of map prejudices by practice. For a digitally activist Ukraine, the February 24th Archive is a polyphonic treasure trove of solidarity and resistance to Russia's war of aggression. My archive bridges six main multilingual groups: (1) professionally trained field experts in Ukrainian Studies; (2) interested nonspecialists in and beyond academe; (3) leading journalists; (4) OSINT amateurs and mapmakers, who catalogue war crimes and build cases with evidence for criminal prosecution; (5) diplomats and policymakers; and (6) most crucially, a voting citizenry that crosses ideological lines, hoping to raise literacy against malignant disinformation. While we commonly think about how social media divides and polarizes in 2024, I will introduce strategies on how I have worked against over the past three years against currents of unseen algorithms on digital platforms. I take inspiration for my ongoing Twitter/X war archive from scholarly work in the history of social and radical cartography, and ongoing Ukrainian war documenting projects. My goal for the February 24th Archive is to respect Ukrainian privacy and ethical issues toward a future Nuremberg tribunal moment, while basing a rolling public war digital record in a daily working Global Commons which is too often flooded with disinformation.About the Speaker: Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018); just translated into Russian (Academic Studies Press, 2024); Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013); and Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to Chicago's international history of cartography series, and he has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer exchange program. From 2019 to 2022, he hosted 89 author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, an ongoing 24-hour community-driven, public-facing digital project focused on building global solidarity for Ukrainians, with 1000s of threads and averaging 30 million people in 75 countries per month across the world. Professor Seegel was awarded the Vega Medal of 2024 by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) for his scientific contributions to human geography. He received the gold medal from King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden on 22 April, celebrated annually as Earth Day.
About the Lecture: This conversation will be devoted to Elena Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country (2023), “a haunting book of rare courage,” as Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent, called it. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time—perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war.I Love Russia earned several distinctions, including a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME, and the Pushkin House Book Prize (London, U.K.).About the Speaker: Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist; in 2024-2025, she is a Fellow at The Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard University. She was born in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1987, and she spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper, until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine after the start of the Russian invasion. She is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and is the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Free Media Award, and the Paul Khlebnikov Prize.This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.This talk was co-sponsored by the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Center for Journalism Ethics.
About the lecture: In December 1989, in officially recognizing the authenticity of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s secret protocol, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies evinced the hope that the globally divided historical consciousness of the Cold War would be replaced with a new conception of the past, reflecting “a whole and mutually interdependent world and increasing mutual understanding.” While there was cause for hope in the immediate post-Soviet years that such a “flat earth” of shared accounts of history—the foundation for a world of shared political values—would emerge, subsequent decades led to renewed, often weaponized fragmentation of historical vision across political borders, and especially at the border separating Europe from the Russian Federation. However, in distinction from the Cold War opposition of ideologically differentiated accounts of history, current standoffs relate to the application of the most basic terms—empire, nation, fascist, genocide, socialist, liberal—which are applied on both sides of borders and conflict zones, yet with opposed significance. Rather than a confrontation of historical ideologies, this is a standoff of historical ontologies. In this presentation of his recently published book "Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders", Platt will examine the etiology of this ontological conflict, as it emerges from the experience of a population that has been located since the end of the Cold War in the interstitial zone at the borders of Europe: Russian-speaking Latvians. Their world, riven by contradiction, offers a vantage, as through a keyhole, toward globally shared conditions of historical and political incoherence and conflict at the start of the twenty-first century.About the speaker: Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work focuses on Russian and East European culture, history, poetry, and fiction. He is author or editor of a number of scholarly books, among them "Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths" (Cornell, 2011), "Global Russian Cultures" (Wisconsin, 2019), and, most recently, "Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders" (Cornell/NIUP, 2024). His translations of Russian and Latvian poetry have appeared in "World Literature Today:, "Jacket2", "Fence", and other journals. He is the founder and organizer of the poetry translation symposium Your Language My Ear. His current project is entitled “Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds.”
About the Lecture: The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to open classified U.S. files, and then to match those American primary sources with newly opened (and often now closed) archives in the former Soviet Union and countries of the Warsaw Pact. This presentation will draw on materials from the Archive to shed light on major events of recent history, such as the last “superpower summits” (between Gorbachev and Reagan, and later Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush), the miraculous revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, Yeltsin’s turn to authoritarianism in Russia in the 1990s together with the “market bolshevism” (Peter Reddaway’s phrase) of economic reform, what Gorbachev and Yeltsin heard from Americans and Europeans about NATO expansion, nuclear follies from Semipalatinsk to Pervomaysk, and the existential threats to humanity (nuclear and climate) that make the U.S. and Russia “doomed to cooperate” (in Sig Hecker’s phrase).About the Speakers:Tom Blanton is the director since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association’s James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors. The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.” His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive’s online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive’s more than 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya is director of Russia programs (since 2001) at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University. She is the author, with Thomas Blanton, of the book The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), and editor of the book by the late Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Missiles of November (Stanford: Stanford University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012). Dr. Savranskaya won the Link-Kuehl Prize in 2011 from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, recognizing the best documentary publication over the previous two years, for her book (with Thomas Blanton and Vladislav Zubok) “Masterpieces of History”: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe 1989 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2010). She is author and co-author of several publications on Gorbachev’s foreign policy and nuclear learning and the end of the Cold War, and numerous electronic briefing books on these subjects. She serves as an adjunct professor teaching U.S.-Russian relations at the American University School of International Service in Washington D.C. (since 2001).
About the lecture: This talk will offer an overview of Professor Shevelenko’s current book-length project and will focus on a few case studies. The book examines artistic and intellectual tendencies that shaped the thinking about the “age of extremes” (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s appellation for the twentieth century) during the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. This research analyzes the quest for narrative forms and techniques and, more broadly, representational strategies that the authors chose in order to capture the experience of society and individuals confronting the failure of political modernization and the disruption of social structures.About the speaker: Irina Shevelenko is Professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of CREECA. Her research interests include Russian modernist literature and art, late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, Russian poetry, and nationalism studies. She is the author and editor of several books in English and Russian, including Reframing Russian Modernism (edited volume, 2018) and Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (2024).
A Colonial Muslim History of China and the WorldThe Tarikh-i Ḥamidi of Mullah Musa Sayrami (1836–1917) is celebrated as a monument of Uyghur literature and the preeminent Muslim history of nineteenth-century Xinjiang (East Turkestan). Yet it is more than a chronicle — it is a history of the world as seen from the heart of Eurasia and an argument about the nature of politics and faith. Sayrami’s work is also multilayered, polyvocal text, and one that bears recontextualization and rereading through different analytical approaches. This talk explores the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi in terms of its interaction with other Muslim and Chinese sources and as a colonial, transcultural text that advances insightful observations of Chinese power and new ideas about its workings.About the Speaker: Eric Schluessel is associate professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. His first monograph, Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia, won the 2021 Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Schluessel has also authored a textbook for reading the Chaghatay language and translated the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi, the quintessential Uyghur chronicle of the nineteenth century. His research has been funded by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and at the Institute for Advanced Study. Schluessel continues to research the social and economic history of China and Central Asia.
From Moldova to Tajikistan, from Belarus to Uzbekistan: The Formulation and Flow of National Identity from the Late Czarist Times to TodayRiordan will explore the formulation of identity over the past 150 years in Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus and Uzbekistan. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground work and research across all four countries, Riordan will discuss his findings on the trajectory of national identity and how it continues to shape the political discussion in each country today.About the Speaker: John P. Riordan is a career Foreign Service Officer in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He currently serves as the Deputy Mission Director at USAID/Moldova. Prior to Moldova, he was on assignment as a Development Advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida (2017-2020). Riordan was the USAID Country Director in Uzbekistan (2014-2017), where he served for multiple, extended periods of time as acting Deputy Chief of Mission. He was also USAID’s Country Director in Belarus (2009-2013). In both Belarus and Uzbekistan, Riordan pioneered the leveraging of Baltic partner expertise and regional knowledge in order to advance shared objectives. He was recognized in 2017 with a Diploma of Commendation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia for his decade contribution to fostering a close relationship between Latvia and the United States and in jointly providing support for Belarus and Central Asian countries.Riordan was the USAID Development Adviser to the command group at Combined Joint Task Force 101 and 82 in Bagram, Afghanistan (2008-2009). Riordan served two assignments in Iraq (2006 and 2008, respectively) as the Deputy Director of USAID’s Governance and Provincial Reconstruction Team Office during the U.S. Government “surge,” and then helped to launch the Joint Interagency Task Force at Multi-National Forces-Iraq. He also served at the Agency’s mission in Romania (2005-2006). Riordan was honored to be the first Foreign Service Officer selected for an academic year in the Advanced Military Studies Program at the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas (2007- 2008). While there, Riordan produced a monograph, Red D.I.M.E., which drew on original research on the Basmachi Resistance Movement against the fledgling Bolshevik forces of the Soviet Union in the Ferghana Valley region of Central Asia in order to apply historical and political lessons to irregular warfare in complex, adaptive environments.Before joining USAID, Riordan lived and worked in the Ferghana Valley region of Central Asia. He lectured at Ferghana State University and was the first American to conduct research in the Ferghana City archives as a Fulbright scholar in Uzbekistan. He also collected oral histories of Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Tajik World War II veterans in order to better understand the formation of Soviet identity in Central Asia (2002-2003). He was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ferghana Valley region of Kyrgyzstan (1998-2000), and worked as the Office Director of the State Department funded Freedom Support Act/Future Leader Exchange Program (FSA/FLEX) in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (2000-2001).Riordan earned a master’s in military arts and sciences from the School of Advanced Military Studies at the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., and a master’s in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was awarded a Foreign Language Area Scholarship while at Wisconsin for the study of the Uzbek language and spent three summers on scholarship at Indiana University studying Russian, Uzbek, and Turkmen. He completed his undergraduate degree in Political Science at Marquette University, where he was selected for an internship on Capitol Hill via Marquette’s Les Aspin Center for Government.
The lecture will provide insight into the particular (and sometimes peculiar) challenges Central Asian states faced in their energy systems during the first 30 years of independence as they struggled to provide reliable energy at home and secure resource markets abroad. It will then turn to examine what the global transition away from fossil fuels portends for Central Asia’s future.About the Speaker: Theresa Sabonis-Helf is a Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University. She is based in the Georgetown School of Foreign Service Master’s Degree program, and serves as the Inaugural Chair of the Science, Technology and International Affairs concentration. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College in Washington DC for 18 years. She has lived and worked in seven countries of the Former USSR, has assisted two nations with the development of their first National Security Strategies, has written a textbook on Caucasus regional energy issues, and has co-edited two volumes on Central Asia’s political and economic transition. She has also published and lectured extensively on energy security, climate change policies, critical infrastructure resilience and security, post-Soviet energy and environmental issues, energy transition, and the politics of electricity. She is a frequent advisor to NATO and to the US government. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Emory University, and an MPA in International Affairs from Princeton University.
Ostap Kin presented and read from his book, “Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond” on Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the Lecture: On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews in Babyn Yar. By the time the Soviet army recaptured Kyiv, the total number of people exterminated at the ravine had reached some 100,000 to 150,000. The name Babyn Yar has become synonymous with one of the most horrific massacres of World War II. "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" features poems by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, written in response to the tragedy at Babyn Yar. The poems in the anthology create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust, as well as other people who lost their lives at the Babyn Yar site.About the Lecturer: Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute) and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Academic Studies Press). He is the translator, with John Hennessy, of Yuri Andrukhovych’s Set Change (forthcoming from NYRB/Poets), Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI) and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography (Lost Horse Press). He translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse Press). He’s pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University.
Anna Nemzer and Ilia Venyavkin presented on their work with the Russian Independent Media Archive Project on Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the Lecture: In this joint presentation, journalist Anna Nemzer and historian Ilia Venyavkin will discuss the work of the Russian Independent Media Archive — an initiative of PEN America and Bard College aimed at preserving the work of independent journalists from Russia since 2000, guarding this historical record against erasure as media outlets not aligned with the regime of President Vladimir Putin are shuttered and their reporters and editors are cast into exile. A direct link to RIMA is available at https://rima.media/enAbout the Lecturers:Anna Nemzer is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker studying the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She is a presenter on TV Dozhd (aka TV-Rain – formerly the only independent TV channel in Russia, now working in exile), a scholar at Bard College in, and a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) dedicated to the preservation of all Russian independent media as the most important evidence of the era.Ilia Veniavkin is an historian and journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook, Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He is a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a scholar at Bard College, and is writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.
Pavel Golubev gave a lecture on, “Queer(ing) Art of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Emigration, 1890s—1940s” on Thursday, March 7, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the Lecture:The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia invites you to a lecture about the queer imagery in the art of Russia, and its colonies from the late Imperial period to the early Soviet era.The talk will explore the evolution of the homosexual narrative in Russian art through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. It details how artists navigated the complex interplay of societal norms, personal identification, and creative expression and how the shifts in political and cultural landscapes influenced the representation and perception of themes and subjects in art referring to same-sex love, desire, and sexual identity from the late 19th century to the 1930s.The focus of the lecture stands on key artistic movements and notable figures whose work challenged conventional norms during a time of significant sociopolitical upheaval, such as Konstantin Somov, Leon Bakst, Alexander Nikolaev (also known as Usto Mumin), Pavel Tchelitchew, and many others.This event will intrigue anyone interested in the intersection of art history, gender studies, and Russian/Soviet sociocultural history, providing a perspective into a largely unexplored subject in recent years.About the Lecturer: Pavel Golubev is a visiting research scholar in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Moscow State University and subsequently defended his thesis there. Pavel Golubev is responsible for the multivolume edition of the diaries of Russian symbolist artist Konstantin Somov, a monograph about him, and a retrospective show at the Odesa Fine Art Museum in 2019. In Odesa, Golubev headed the exhibitions there before leaving Ukraine for the United States in 2022.
Epp Annus gave a lecture on, “Do you suffer from urbanitis? Gender, cybernetics, and environmental concerns in the 1970s Estonian SSR” on Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the Lecture: On the cover of Aimée Beekman’s novel Valikuvõimalus (The Possibility of Choice, 1978) stands the figure of a naked woman with a calculator in place of her womb. Beekman’s novel is a difficult fit for the well-digested Russocentric Soviet gender crisis discourse: the main character Regina is an owner of a comfortable house, she proposes to a man of her choice and then conceives three children out of wedlock, all with different men. The novel is remarkable for its proliferative ambiguity: Regina’s character is presented both as admirable in her determination and agency, but also as a symptom of a society in crisis. Extramarital relations and broken relationships had become the norm, as people – ‘poisoned with noise’ and addicted to constant stimulation – moved along on the ‘conveyer belt’ of easy pleasures. People in the cities were figured as suffering from urbanitis, a malady of urban life that made people impatient and fidgety and inclined to fill their days with meaningless quotidian trivialities. In the novel’s view, at the outset of the information age, humanity was suffering a deep and multifaceted global crisis: growing commodification, unrestrained urbanization, and polluted air and water were all producing a sense of shared insecurity and uncertainty, impacting the most intimate spheres of everyday life. This talk situates Beekman’s novel within the media discussions in the 1970s Estonian SSR concerning gender, cybernetics, and the global environmental crisis.About the Lecturer: Epp Annus is Associate Professor with the Institute of Humanities at Tallinn University, Estonia. She also lectures in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018), and Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule, ed. Epp Annus (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on a manuscript Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990 (under contract with Cambridge UP). She is the author of two novels.
Tamara Trojanowska gave a lecture on “Cryptotheology, Psychobiography: Transgression in Polish 20th-Century Theatre” on Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the Lecture: Tamara Trojanowska will present on her current research, which focuses on the intersections of 20th and 21st-century drama and theatre with history and religious thought, highlighting identity, subversion, and transgression issues. Her latest research project, co-edited with Joanna Niżyńska and Przemysław Czapliński and entitled A History of Polish Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on 20th and 21st Centuries, includes her extensive analysis of the transgressive practices in Polish drama and theatre (“Delectatio furiosa, or the modes of cultural transgression”) among over sixty essays by colleagues from all over the world. She has also contributed a chapter on this subject to Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (eds. Magda Romanska and Cathleen Cioffi, 2020), with her investigations of the dramatic and the sacred resulting in a new selection of and an extensive introduction to the plays of Roman Brandstaetter (Dzień gniewu. Dramaty, 2016).About the Lecturer: A graduate of the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto (Ph.D.) and of Theatre Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (MA), Tamara Trojanowska has also formerly held an Oxford University scholarship and an internship at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. She has taught at universities in Poland, Canada, and the United States, returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 1998. Since then, she has directed the Polish Language and Literature Program at the Slavic Department, strengthening its profile and presence in North America, the University College Drama Program (2008-2012), and the Center for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (2017-2021). She now serves as Vice-Dean Faculty and Academic Life in the Faculty of Arts and Science.
Natalia Kovyliaeva (Ph.D Candidate, University of Tartu) gave a lecture on "Between Horror and Hope: Feminist Anti-War Resistance and Opportunities for Mobilization in and Outside of Putin’s Russia" on Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the lecture: Since the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Russian feminist grassroots immediately reacted to this event and joined forces to protest against the war. On February 25th, a group of feminist activists published a manifesto, which outlined the anti-military and anti-Putin agenda of the Russian feminist grassroots movement and called for the international feminist movements to join the anti-war protest actions worldwide. As for today, they were able to attract supporters not only in Russia but received much international attention and support worldwide. Relying on the concepts of invisibility and opportunity structures, the upcoming discussion focuses on how the perceived notions of (in)visibility shaped the resistance opportunities for FAR's activists both in and outside Russia, including the transnational level of opportunities. The study relies on the extensively rich online data from the FAR channels on Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook and supporting materials such as newspaper interviews, Youtube interviews, documentary movies, and personal reflections of activists from the semi-structured online interviews. In general, the talk will demonstrate how marginalized and vulnerable groups may find a way to resist the dictatorial regime to spread their anti-war messages and gain a voice within a very hostile environment, build a transnational (online) network of feminist anti-war cells inside and outside of Russia, form new identities and agendas within the feminist grassroots movements and impact political agendas of other anti-war initiatives and organizations sharing similar goals and claims.About the speaker: Natalia Kovyliaeva is a Ph.D. candidate, Junior Fellow Researcher in Political Science at Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu (Estonia). Her current dissertation project, titled "Gaining Voice: Feminist Grassroots Mobilizations in Putin's Russia," explores the emergence and development of the feminist grassroots movements and their tactics and strategies in Russia starting from the early 2000s. Natalia holds an MA in Political Science from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and an MA in International Relations from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). Natalia has volunteered and interned for organisations such as the Sakharov Centre, EU-Russia Civil Society Forum, German-Russian Exchange, and Transparency International - Russia.
Ann Komaromi (Professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto) presented on her book, “Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society,” on Thursday, November 9, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the lecture: Komaromi will talk about the research associated with her book Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (2022). She will describe the process of pursuing archival research of underground (samizdat, or self-published) journals in a variety of collections at established institutions and in independent organizations. Komaromi will also discuss the interdisciplinary method of the study, spanning historical investigation and literary analysis, and reflect on the development of a critical perspective on samizdat, as developed in and through the materials surveyed. Samizdat facilitated the formation of imagined communities of readers through extra-Gutenberg communications. While the goals and styles of expression differed from democratic dissidents to the Jewish national movement, and from Leningrad poets to the fans of rock music, some common values and strategies characterized these varied groups, creating a positive basis for grassroots renewal of society and culture in the Soviet Union.About the speaker: Ann Komaromi is professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. Her research has focused particularly on late Soviet culture, samizdat (underground publishing) and dissidence in the USSR. Her articles theorize the formation of alternative publics and epistemologies in samizdat, while attending to specific texts and groups. Komaromi is interested in the return of modernism and avant-garde in nonconformist and oppositional literary and art movements in the late twentieth century and beyond. Current projects include studies of dissident memoirs and archives and a history of Jewish activism in Leningrad.
Erik R. Scott (Associate Professor of History, University of Kansas) gave a lecture on "Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World" on Thursday, November 2, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the lecture: Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world’s attention during the Cold War. Their stories were given sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. In contrast to other migrants, defectors were pursued by the states they left even as they were eagerly sought by the United States and its allies. Taking part in a risky game that played out across the globe, defectors sought to transcend the limitations of the Cold War world. Recently published by Oxford University Press, Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World, is the first history of defection on a global scale. The book charts a global struggle over defectors that unfolded among rival intelligence agencies operating in the shadows of an occupied Europe, in the forbidden border zones of the USSR, in the disputed straits of the South China Sea, on a hijacked plane 10,000 feet in the air, and around the walls of Soviet embassies. Surprisingly, the competition for defectors paved the way for collusion between the superpowers, who found common cause in regulating the spaces through which defectors moved. Disputes over defectors mapped out the contours of modern state sovereignty, and defection’s ideological framework hardened borders by reinforcing the view that asylum should only be granted to migrants with clear political claims. Although defection all but disappeared after the Cold War, this innovative work shows how it shaped the governance of global borders and helped forge an international refugee system whose legacy and limitations remain with us to this day.About the speaker: Erik R. Scott is Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (OUP, 2016) and editor of The Russian Review.
Matthew Kendall (Assistant Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago) will give a lecture on “Revolutions per Minute: Sonic Inscription, Soviet Writing, and Mikhail Romm’s Oral Stories” on Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.About the lecture: In 1921, the poet Aleksandr Blok bemoaned the sonic aftermath of the Revolution from his deathbed, writing that “for a long time, no new sounds have been heard…it would be blasphemous, even deceitful, to consider how a space now silent once sounded.” But few writers heeded Blok’s warning. On the contrary, many were thrilled to inscribe their voices onto gramophone discs, and several explored or even mimicked the novel sensations that came with the 20th century’s technologies for reproducing sound in their literary texts. This talk examines a complicated relationship that emerged between sound recording and the Soviet literary establishment, which altered conceptions of authorship, attention, archive, and representation among both readers and practitioners. The prime example of this phenomenon for the lecture is Mikhail Romm’s Oral Stories, an audio memoir that Romm (who was primarily known as a film director) recorded with a magnetic tape recorder. Through a reading of Oral Stories and a discussion of Romm’s concerns with memory and historical preservation near the end of his career, Kendall shows how Soviet ideas of literary production and reception grew in dialogue with the growing relevance of sound recording in everyday life.About the speaker: Matthew Kendall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research broadly explores the various intersections, relationships, and rivalries that formed between literary writing, popular filmmaking, and mechanical recording technologies in the 20th century, and he has published on topics including Soviet 3D cinema, Russian digital games, and the history of Soviet sound recording in Russian Review, Russian Literature, and Slavic Review. His book project, Revolutions per Minute, is a cultural history of Soviet sound recording that explores this recording technique’s impact on literary and cinematic production in the first half of the Soviet century.This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.
Debra Javeline (Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame) will present on her book, After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed (Oxford University Press, 2023). Free and open to the public.About the lecture: Starting on September 1, 2004, and ending 53 hours later, Russia experienced its most appalling act of terrorism in history, the seizure of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Approximately 1,200 children, parents, and teachers were taken hostage, and over 330 —nearly one of every hundred Beslan residents— were killed, hundreds more seriously wounded, and all severely traumatized. After Violence is the first book to analyze the aftermath of such large-scale violence with evidence from almost all direct victims. It explores the motivations behind individual responses to violence. When does violence fuel greater acceptance of retaliatory violence, and when does violence fuel nonviolent participation in politics? The mass hostage taking was widely predicted to provoke a spiral of retaliatory ethnic violence in the North Caucasus, where the act of terror was embedded in a larger context of ongoing conflict between Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens. Politicians, journalists, victims, and other local residents asserted that vengeance would come. Instead, the hostage taking triggered unprecedented peaceful political activism on a scale seen nowhere else in Russia. Beslan activists challenged authorities, endured official harassment, and won a historic victory against the Russian state in the European Court of Human Rights. After Violence provides insights into this unexpected but preferable outcome. Using systematic surveys of 1,098 victims (82%) and 2,043 nearby residents, in-depth focus groups, journalistic accounts, investigative reports, NGO reports, and prior scholarly research, After Violence offers novel findings about the influence of anger, prejudice, alienation, efficacy, and other variables on post-violence behavior.About the speaker: Debra Javeline is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Russian and East European Studies Program, and Environmental Change Initiative. Her research interests include mass political behavior, survey research, Russian politics, sustainability, environmental politics, and climate change. She focuses on the decisions of ordinary citizens, whether in response to violence or climate impacts, and she is currently exploring coastal homeowner motivations to take action to reduce their risk from rising seas, hurricanes, and other hazards.
Historian Adrienne Edgar (Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara) will present on her recent book, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022). Free and open to the public.About the lecture: In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single “Soviet people.” Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized beginning in the 1960s, and in this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply “Soviet.” Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the “official” nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity; that they were unable to speak “their own” native language; and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Edgar’s conclusions are based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.About the speaker: Adrienne Edgar is professor of modern Russian and Central Asian history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Oberlin College, an M.A. in international affairs and Middle East studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in history from U.C. Berkeley. Adrienne has received research grants and fellowships from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has held post-doctoral and visiting scholar appointments at Harvard University, McGill University, the Alexander von Humboldt University (Berlin), and the University of Heidelberg. Adrienne’s first book, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. She co-edited, with Benjamin Frommer, the volume Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). She has published a number of articles on ethnicity, gender, and intermarriage in the Soviet Union and Central Asia in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Kritika, Ab Imperio, and Central Asian Survey; one of these won the annual article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Adrienne’s second monograph, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022) was co-winner of the 2023 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Ethnicity and Nationalism Studies.
Lecture with Grigory Vaypan.Grigory traces the root causes of Russia’s war against Ukraine to the failure of the post-Soviet transitional justice project in the early 1990s. When the Soviet totalitarian regime collapsed, very little was done to confront its past crimes. Impunity for Soviet-era atrocities set the ground for persecution and abuse of power to reproduce themselves in contemporary Russia’s domestic and foreign policies. The story of Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group and co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, reflects that trajectory, from the moment it emerged as a grassroots movement for memory and accountability in 1987 until its forced dissolution by the Russian government in 2022.About the speaker: Dr. Grigory Vaypan is a Russian human rights lawyer and scholar. He is a Senior Lawyer at Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group and laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Currently, he is also a Democracy Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. He is a former Galina Starovoitova Fellow on Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. Grigory holds his first law degree from Moscow State University, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in International Law from Saint Petersburg State University.At Memorial, Grigory carries out litigation, legal research and legal advocacy on transitional justice in Russia. His work, including the high-profile “children of the Gulag” case, has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and other leading international media. Grigory has more than a decade of strategic litigation experience before the Constitutional Court of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights. He is the recipient of the 2022 Moscow Helsinki Group Human Rights Award for defending human rights in court. Most recently, Grigory has been involved in the legal defense of Russian citizens prosecuted for protesting against Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Lecture with Professor Kenneth J. Yin.
First migrating from northwest China to Russian Central Asia after the suppression of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) under the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, the Dungan people boast a rich oral tradition, which served as an important breeding ground for the development of Dungan written literature in the Soviet period. This presentation discusses the findings of an in-depth structural and comparative analysis of Dungan folk narratives conducted in the second half of the twentieth century by a team of leading Soviet scholars comprising Russian sinologist Boris Riftin, Dungan writer and literary scholar Makhmud Khasanov, and Dungan historian Il′ias Iusupov. Primarily based on Dungan oral narratives recorded between 1951 and 1974 in the Soviet Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the study indicates that Dungan folk narratives are deeply rooted in Chinese storytelling traditions but also exhibit substantial Middle Eastern, East Asian, and Central Asian influence. Detailed findings of this study and the full texts of seventy-eight folk stories are available for the first time in an annotated English version by Kenneth J. Yin, under the title 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘬𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘓𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 (2021), volume 16 in the Peter Lang International Folkloristics series.
About the speaker: Kenneth J. Yin teaches modern languages, literatures, and linguistics at the City University of New York. His scholarly work centers on the Dungan literature and culture of Central Asia, as well as the Tungus literatures and cultures of North Asia—namely Siberia and the Russian Far East—with a focus on Udege, Nanai, and Evenk. A graduate of Cornell University and Georgetown University, he has received fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the City University of New York. His book publications include 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘬𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘓𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 (Peter Lang, 2021) and 𝘔𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵: 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘌𝘵𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘭𝘪 𝘋𝘻𝘩𝘰𝘯 (Peter Lang, 2023).
This presentation will focus on the migration of Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Russians and some other ethnic groups from Xinjiang province of China to Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1950-60s. Discussion of the migration based on analysis of the Soviet archival materials as well as oral histories of migrants will be put into the context of the Great Game paradigm, that is a struggle of great powers for domination in Central Asia. Besides the historical background of the migration, we will examine the main factors of the migration. repatriation of Soviet citizens from Xinjiang and Manchuria and settling them in the ‘virgin lands’ of Kazakhstan. Main stages of the mass migration, its ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, adaptation of migrants to Soviet environment and their involvement in the Sino-Soviet ideological war in the 1970-1980s, emergence of the ‘Chinese’ segments among the ethnic communities of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics will be other issues to be discussed.
About the speaker: Graduate of the Department of Oriental studies (China studies) of the Tashkent State University in 1984. Accomplished aspirantura (PhD) program at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies (present Institute of Oriental manuscripts, St. Petersburg) and earned his PhD degree from that Institute in 1990. Gained his D.Sc. degree (habilitation) from the Institute of Oriental Studies in Almaty, Kazakhstan. His main academic interests include History of Turkic peoples of China, with a special focus on Uyghurs. His latest publications include monographs “Uyghurs of Kazakhstan”, “Dungans of Kazakhstan” (both: 2016), “Oral History of Migration of 1950-1970s from China to Kazakhstan” (ed., 2022) and “Links Across Time: Taranchis During the Uprising of 1916 in Semirech’e and the “Atu” Massacre of 1918”, in The Central Asian Revolt of 1916. A collapsing Empire in the age of war and revolution (Manchester, 2020: 227-255), “Uyghur Historiography”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press, 2021), “Nation, religion and social heat: heritaging Uyghur mäshräp in Kazakhstan”, in Central Asian Survey (2021: 9-33; co-authored with R. Harris). Held positions of visiting scholar at the University of Washington (Seattle), the US Library of Congress, Indiana University (Bloomington IN), University of Oxford (UK), and Maison des sciences de l’Homme (Paris). He served as President of European Society of Central Asian Studies (ESCAS) in 2020-2022), and was elected President of Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) in 2022. Editorial Board member of ‘Central Asian Survey’ (UK) and other journals.
The talk focuses on the socio-economic consequences of the war and the factors contributing to the resilience of the Ukrainian people. Russia’s war against Ukraine has been ongoing for many years, and despite the challenges, the Ukrainian people have shown remarkable resilience in the face of adversity. The talk will highlight the factors that have contributed to the resilience. These include a strong sense of national identity, a deep-rooted commitment to democracy, and a successful decentralization reform. - About the Speaker: Tymofii Brik is Rector at the Kyiv School of Economics and national coordinator of the European Social Survey. He is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics (2022-24) and the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology and the Roberta Buffett Institute (2022-23). Brik received his PhD at Carlos III of Madrid, MSc at Utrecht University, and an MSc at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University. In 2018 and 2019-2020, Brik was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and New York University respectively. Beyond academia, he is a member of PONARS and VoxUkraine, board member at CEDOS, advisory board member at Gradus Research, and Executive team member at SITADHub . He also co-founded a social restaurant Urban Space 500 in Kyiv. His paper “When church competition matters?” won the N.Panina award in 2018 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine.
The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the long eighteenth century. Though the Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, Ivanov’s recent book argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observers called a religious revolution. Embedded with lively portrayals of historical actors and vivid descriptions of political details, A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1836 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020; Paperback Edition, 2023) is the first large-scale effort to fully identify exactly how Western thought influenced the Russian Church. These new ideas played a foundational role in the emergence of the country as a modernizing empire and the rise of the Church hierarchy as a forward-looking agency of institutional and societal transformation. Ivanov addresses this important debate in the scholarship on European history, firmly placing Orthodoxy within the much wider European and global continuum of religious change. - Andrey Ivanov is an Associate Professor of History at UW-Platteville.
What happens when women’s political quotas are implemented in non-democracies? Valeria Umanets focuses on understanding the political and social meaning and manipulation of gender in the Soviet Union, which held informal women’s political quotas for almost 75 years. Specifically, this talk focuses on the political engagement of women in the Soviet legislative bodies and local councils and their consequences today. Valeria Umanets argues that the effects of women’s quotas should be considered through the lens of how authoritarian states see and control representation and uncertainty. - About the Speaker: Valeria Umanets is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include women’s representation and political participation, political parties, post-Communist states, and Russian politics.
The great puzzle of Russia-West relations throughout the three post-Cold War decades has been the apparent reluctance of the Kremlin to reap significant and evident benefits from collaboration with the United States and its allies. At many junctures, Moscow consistently chose confrontation over reassurance of its western counterparts and other key players. The costs of such behavior would almost invariably turn out to be high and unnecessary. Despite learning these lessons, Moscow continued to appear uninterested in reassurance. That puzzle is echoed in formal academic literature on the sources of war which is regarded as a very risky and costly undertaking. This talk will use existing theories of signaling and several high-profile cases in US-Russia relations to hypothesize about Russia’s consistent reluctance to pick the low-hanging fruit of reassurance and cooperation. - About the Speaker: Mikhail Troitskiy is a Professor of Practice at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research on conflicts, security, and politics in Eurasia, Russian foreign policy and U.S.-Russia relations, arms control, and international negotiation was published with Problems of Postcommunism, Survival, Global Policy, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russian Politics and Law, Horizons, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Palgrave-Macmillan, McGill-Queen’s University Press / CIGI, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Nomos Verlag, and SIPRI. He is a member of PONARS Eurasia and PIN Negotiation networks of scholars.
Finland was the first country in Europe to allow for suffrage for both men and women and the first in the world where women were elected to national legislative office. Using turn of the 20th century Finland as an example, Professor Tripp will demonstrate how war and the end of empire are linked to the expansion of women's citizenship. (The lecture was co-sponsored by UW-Madison Center for European Studies, CREECA, and UW-Madison GNS+.) - About the speaker: Aili Mari Tripp is Vilas Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has focused on gender/women and politics, women’s movements in Africa, transnational feminism, women in postconflict and authoritarian contexts globally.
The literature of the war against Ukraine testified to the profound changes that took place in the nature of Ukrainian artistic expression: from the loss of the very ability to speak, through the development of a new poetics of the voice and body, through literalism as the restoration of the connection between the word and reality and the rejection of metaphor in favor of metonymy – to the formation of a new idea of literature. Understood as a sphere of imagination and at the same time as a mechanism of representation, Ukrainian literature has been re-thinking its attitudes around reality and also its use for constructing of the ‘common places’ of anthropological and emotional experience. - Olena Haleta is a professor of literary theory and comparative literature at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and professor of cultural anthropology at Ukrainian Catholic University (Ukraine). She is an author, co-author, and co-editor of eight books on the literary history of modern Ukraine.
Russia's war against Ukraine has brought about a radical restructuring of the Russian political economy, placing transformative ideology and outright coercion firmly at the heart of power. Despite this, the war and its consequences have produced remarkably little resistance. This discussion delves beyond the dynamics of coercion and ideology, to investigate how the war has interacted with Russians' "vernacular knowledge" about power and powerlessness. This knowledge has thus far remained resilient to the cognitive challenges posed by the war, underpinning a social resilience that both enables the state's internal and external aggression, and limits it. - Sam Greene is professor in Russian politics at King’s College London. His most recent book, co-authored with Graeme Robertson, is Putin v the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale University Press 2019). Alongside his work at King’s, Sam is an Associate Fellow of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a Trustee of Pushkin House, and Editor-in-Chief of Russian Politics & Law.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a ‘civil war’ in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. Jesse Driscoll explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance (Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decisionmakers misunderstood the attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and also failed to anticipate that their intervention would transform Ukraine into a more cohesively ‘Ukrainian’ polity. - About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015) and Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021)
How can the Russian economy, moving from one crisis to another one, avoid significant hikes in unemployment? How does human capital evolve when workers’ wages peak so early and then decline so steeply? How does a country so rich in human capital exhibit such low productivity? Vladimir Gimpelson suggests some explanations and proposes how examining them can help in understanding past, present and future of the Russian economic performance. - Vladimir Gimpelson is Professor of Practice in Russian Studies in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, UW-Madison.
Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine reverberates beyond Ukraine in a major way. The international order and law are blatantly violated. Energy corridors have been affected and food supply chains have been disrupted around the world. The very notion of the international community and its ability to react to aggression is being tested. Volodymyr Dubovyk discusses how Russia's war in Ukraine puts the future of the EU as a foreign policy actor and of NATO as a major security player at stake. - Volodymyr Dubovyk is an Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Director, Center for International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). Currently he is a Visiting Professor at Tufts University.
Humans have harnessed and selectively bred livestock in Kazakhstan for over 5,000 years. This lecture discusses the history and current practices of pastoralism in Kazakhstan, exploring the contemporary interaction shared among people, animals, and ecosystems and the advantages of incorporating ancient lifeways among those who herd livestock in Kazakhstan today. Other topics include the necessity to “re-wild” environments and to expand the decision-making capacity of smallholders, as climate change causes radical reassessments of everyday planning and actions. - Russell Zanca is a Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern Illinois University.
Emerged from several courses taught by UW-Madison faculty this semester focusing on Ukraine, the panel addresses questions submitted by the students in these courses relating to the histories and cultures in the region, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. - SPEAKERS: Oksana Stoychuk (German, Nordic, and Slavic+), Sara Karpukhin (German, Nordic, and Slavic+), and Yoshiko M. Herrera (Political Science)
The story of Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. What can we learn about the values of this international organization from Russia’s participation in it? Was Russia’s membership “worth it”? Any attempted answer must produce more questions: from which perspective – Russia’s, the Council’s, other Member States’ – should the effects of Russian membership be evaluated? How did the Council of Europe change Russia (if Russia was, indeed, changed) and how did Russia change the Council of Europe? This lecture examines the beginning of this story to identify the details in Russia’s drive for membership that may have planted seeds for its later expulsion. - About the Speaker: Jeffrey Kahn is the University Distinguished Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University.
with Ted Gerber (UW-Madison Professor of Sociology) - After Russia recovered from the economic woes of the 1990s, its government sought to maintain and expand its influence over former Soviet republics of Central Asia by opening the doors to large numbers of labor migrants from them. However, many accounts of the experiences of Central Asian labor migrants in Russia during the 2010s emphasize their exploitation and mistreatment at the hands of officials, police, employers, and the general population. Indeed, cruel, demeaning, and racist treatment of Central Asian immigrants testifies to the type of imperial mentality on the part of Russia’s state and society criticized by the movement to “de-colonize” research about Russia. However, research the speaker conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2016 and 2017, including focus groups and a survey in Bishkek of Kyrgyzstani migrants who had recently returned from Russia, suggests that they had a range of experiences, positive as well as negative. If anything, these experiences were linked to more positive than negative assessments of Russia’s institutions and foreign policy, which appears to reinforce, rather than undermine, Russia’s imperial objectives in its geopolitical conflict with the United States. Apart from calling for caution in analyses of how Russia’s imperial legacy is perceived outside of Europe, the findings suggest that migration scholars should devote more attention to studying “geopolitical remittances”–that is, how experiences in a host society can advance or impede its efforts to project soft power abroad.
Dr. Fijalkowski explores the relationship between law and visual culture by looking at photographs of individuals (a dissident, a judge, and a prosecutor who were involved in high-profile trials during the Stalinist period. An image can hide and expose questions of legitimation and authority pertaining to Stalinist rule and how we view defendants, judges, prosecutors, and justice. Visualising law requires extra-legal sources and analysis to reveal the nuances of a question that has been well researched but in which there is still much to discover about key players and events, as well as a better recognition of legal biographies that make for a richer history about law under Communism.
About the Speaker: Dr Agata Fijalkowski (Leeds Beckett University) is in the process of completing Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial, for GlassHouse Books (Routledge). The monograph considers photographs of trials from the period 1944-1957 in Albania, East Germany, and Poland.
NOTE: This is a partial recording of a complete panel. The beginning of the panel was not recorded.
Panelists share their experiences volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees in border regions of Poland and Ukraine. This panel features Kari Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna, Head of Operations for Operation SafeDrop of the Make a Difference Foundation and practicing attorney in Washington, D.C.), Anna Tumarkin (University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+), and Dianna Murphy (University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute).
Russians today often remember the “Wild 1990s” as a time of chaos, impoverishment and disorientation. Through the lens of the privileged Writers’ Town, which had been built under Stalin and once been home to Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and Kornei Chukovskii among others, we can see how marketization and the collapse of socialist support systems led to both degradation and gentrification of the dacha community. In this talk, Dr. Kelly Smith will analyze the way in which partial commodification of property and freedom from state monopolies led to what residents perceived as the “ruin” of Peredelkino.
About the Speaker: Kelly E. Smith is Professor of Teaching at the School of Foreign Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley and is the author of two books on memory and Russian politics–Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (1996) and Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (2002). Most recently, she published Moscow 1956: A Silenced Spring, a social and political history of a turning point year in Russia. Currently, Dr. Smith is engaged in a new research project on Peredelkino, the “Writers’ Village” created by Stalin.
Dr. Ilya Kliger outlines an approach to the study of “sociotopes” in narrative fiction and beyond. Defining sociotopes as specific configurations of sociality, presupposing and projecting diverse scenarios and normative principles of affiliation and detachment, Professor Kliger takes as his case study the emblematic and consequential moment in the history of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Russia: Belinsky's scandalous “reconciliation with actuality” (primirenie s deistvitel’nost’iu). About the Speaker: Ilya Kliger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He is currently working on a book project on the poetics and politics of Russian Realism.
Dr. Tatyana Gershkovich contests the familiar opposition of Tolstoy the moralist and Nabokov the aesthete. She argues that their divergent stylistic and philosophical trajectories were in fact parallel flights from the same fear: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private, and impossible to share through art.
Yet unlike modernist and postmodernist authors for whom such doubt ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that an artwork, when made in the right way, can serve to assuage our skeptical fears.
About the Speaker: Tatyana Gershkovich is the William S. Dietrich Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern UP, 2022).
Bukovina, a former borderland of the Habsburg empire now divided between Ukraine and Romania, was a place of mutual observation, competition, and conflict between the different states and governments that laid claim to the territory. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the province experienced repeated regime changes – many of which occurred seemingly overnight. This talk explores how the shared challenges of governing Bukovina facilitated mutual influences between regimes that otherwise viewed each other as ideological opposites. About the Speaker: Cristina Florea is an Assistant Professor in Modern European history at Cornell University, researching and teaching the histories of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, imperial entanglements and competition, and the interplay of nationalisms and empires in the region.
Dr. Lucey considers how Russia’s writers and artists popularized images of madams and procuresses as manipulative and greedy figures who tricked and abused the women in their charge. Portrayed as far more heinous than the men who frequented brothels, the madam looms in literature and fine art as a trafficker in human flesh who goes against God and nature in the pursuit of profit. Yet, as historians of imperial Russia have shown, the experience of brothel madams working under the state system of administrative supervision (nadzor) was far more complex than reflected in visual and print culture. Learn how the image of the madam evolved in nineteenth-century Russia and why such figures evoked heated debate about the rights of women and the regulation of commercial sex. About the Speaker: Colleen Lucey, PhD, is assistant professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russian literature and visual culture. She is the author of Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2021).
Iryna Januszek is one of the many Ukrainians who found a life in Poland in the post-Soviet era, but Ukraine has never been far from her thoughts. Members of family remained there and participated in the movements to build a new society. She also shares those aspirations which brought Ukrainians to fight for freedom and association with Europe. Now the war has brought millions of Ukrainians to Poland as refugees, and she has been working to help them adjust to life there. She has many insights into how these closely-related but different people are interacting in this crisis. About the Speaker: After obtaining her degree in German and English philology in 2000, Iryna moved to western Poland and was hired as a language teacher. She now owns her own language school, Success Factory. She is now founding a nonprofit to assist young refugees.
How did African American visitors and residents of Soviet Central Asia imagine their Central Asian counterparts? Through an exploration of their writings, we can see how African Americans envisioned a shared historical and racial bond between themselves and Central Asians. About the Speaker: Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Pennsylvania and a Penn Presidential Ph.D. Fellow. Her work examines how the presence of people of color shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and post-Soviet space. She is a regular commentator on Russian, Ukrainian and American affairs in national media outlets.
7.21.22 Henry Misa provides an almost two-thousand-year-long context for the modern climate crisis in Central Eurasia. He gives an overview of climatic and environmental change in Central Eurasia stretching from around 400 to the 1960s, and discusses the ongoing debates within the historiography of climate and society in Central Eurasia with a focus on the medieval period. Amanda Wooden brings together mining histories, political ecology, and modern environmental perceptions in Kyrgyzstan. The history of mining in Kyrgyzstan connects extractivist colonization, post-Soviet neoliberalism, and contemporary national climate change politics. During the aftermath of the Soviet Union disbanding, the Canadian mining company Cameco developed the largest productive gold field in Kyrgyzstan, Kumtor, the only open pit mine in the world removing glacial ice to access ore. Wooden outlines conceptualizations of these mountains and glaciers over time, including today’s renewed socio-nature ideas competing with modernistic views of these lively geological bodies.
Amanda E. Wooden is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Henry Misa is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University, Department of History, specializing in premodern Central Asian history.
Dr. Kassenova shares the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment, and the story of the public anti-nuclear movement that led to the closure of the nuclear testing site. She also explains why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure.
Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention
By focusing predominantly on discourse production and language management, language policy research de-emphasizes the material sources of inequality. The lecture argues that language management, often restricted by ritualistic and symbolic gestures, cannot rectify historically formed relations of power and calls for critical examination of both sociolinguistic and socio-economic consequences of language reforms. About the Speaker: Juldyz Smagulova is Associate Professor and Dean of College of Humanities and Education, KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). Her research interests include language ideology, language education, and language policy. She co-edited the Language Change in Central Asia (2016) and co-authored the bilingual Kazakh-Russian Dictionary of Sociolinguistics (2020). She has articles published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, World Englishes and the International Journal of Bilingualism.
This lecture presents research findings on the reasons for Chechen population growth in times of harshness. The investigation begins with an observation of a quite contradictory nature: Chechens would not postpone creating families in times of war (1994-1996 and 1999-2009). Being based on demographic statistics, which imply longitudinal studies, the analysis goes back as far as 200-250 years ago, when the first estimates of Chechen population size were made. This lecture analyzes available statistical data of the censuses conducted in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, examined with the periods of harshness experienced by the Chechen nation. The analysis of these interviews revealed a strong link between reproductive motivation and two other variables, namely ethnic identity and population loss due to times of harshness.
About the Speaker: Marat Iliyasov is a graduate of Vilnius University, where he obtained his MA in Diplomacy and International Relations. His second MA comes from Ilia State University, and he holds a PhD from the School of International Relations of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His current work comes to the crossroad of several disciplines, among which are: International Relations, Ethnography, and Political Demography. Dr. Iliyasov is an author of several publications that analyze migrants’ identity evolution, the demographic trends in the conflict and post-conflict societies, self-legitimation of authoritarian governments, and politics of memory in autocracies.
Hannah Chapman presents a theory of how non-democratic regimes use seemingly democratic forms of communication and participation to bolster regime legitimacy and mitigate information dilemmas. She argues that autocrats develop and maintain participatory technologies—elite-mass communication strategies that promote increased interaction between the public and individuals in power—as a tool of legitimation and information management in authoritarian regimes. About the Speaker: Dr. Hannah Chapman is the Karen and Adeed Dawisha Assistant Professor of Political Science at Miami University and a faculty associate at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. Her research examines political participation, information management, and public opinion in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Panel Discussion with Kathryn Ciancia, Lukasz Wodzynski, Krzysztof Borowski, and Brian Porter-Szucs : December 13, 2021, marked the 40th Anniversary of the Declaration of the Martial Law, the Communist Government’s violent attempt to quell a civic mass movement that gave millions of Poles hope for a better future. It marked the end of the “carnival of Solidarity,” ushering in a new era of brutality and repression. Despite the ultimate defeat of communism in East-Central Europe, the shadow of Martial Law still looms large in Poland’s cultural memory. This panel discussion seeks to address Martial Law’s troubled cultural and historical legacies, particularly in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Polish-Belarussian border crisis, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In March 1968, Polish youth rebelled against the communist regime, demanding free speech and academic freedom. In response, the government publicly accused Polish Jews of staging the demonstrations as part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to weaken communism and forced thousands of Jews to leave the country. The talk exposes the conspiracies the communist regime held and promoted, which had turned Polish Jews into “security risks,” and points to connections between contemporary memory politics in Eastern Europe and the anti-Jewish drive of 1960s Poland. About the Speaker: Anat Plocker teaches at the School of General Studies at Stockton University, specializing in Modern European History. She gained her PhD from Stanford University and had been a fellow at Yale University and the University of Haifa. Plocker’s first book, The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland, was published with Indiana University Press in 2022.
There is very little academic literature on polygyny among Central Asians in general and among the Kyrgyz in particular. This talk, based on Michele Commercio’s forthcoming book, will explore the normalization of polygyny among the Kyrgyz in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, which criminalizes such unions, from a historical perspective. By this, she means implicit tolerance of unconcealed polygynous marriages at the mass and elite levels of Kyrgyz society within a state that is obligated but neglects to penalize men with multiple wives. During the talk, Commercio will explain how communist institutions gradually limited the rate of unconcealed polygynous marriages among the Kyrgyz, and how the breakdown of those institutions combined with enduring hegemonic constructions of gender gradually contributed to the re-emergence of unconcealed polygynous marriages among the Kyrgyz.
About the Speaker: Professor Commercio specializes in Central Asian comparative politics. Her research interests include issues related to regime transition, ethnic politics, gender, and Islam in post-Soviet states. Her current research focuses on obstacles women desiring a career in Kyrgyz politics confront as well as obstacles women in Kyrgyz politics confront.
While James Joyce’s place in the modernist pantheon has long been firmly entrenched, its resonances continue to be uncovered. In the Russian context, the Irish writer has occupied many roles since his work was first translated in the mid-1920s. This talk will trace the development not of a monolithic Joyce, but rather of five separate Russian Joyces — the versions of the author imagined by his Russian readers.
About the Speaker: José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. He specializes in prose of the long twentieth century, with an emphasis on experimental works. His first book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature, examines Russian writers’ reception of Joyce’s fiction.
The world has been shocked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why did this happen? What is the true historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine? How are people reacting in Russia? What are the implications for the United States, NATO, and international security? What will be the impact of sanctions and other financial penalties that the United States and its allies have imposed on Russia? A panel of University of Wisconsin faculty members addressed these and other questions.
Panelists include Mark Copelovitch (UW-Madison, Political Science), Yoshiko Herrera (UW-Madison, Political Science), Andrey Ivanov (UW-Platteville, History), Kirill Ospovat (UW-Madison, GNS+), and Jessica Weeks (UW-Madison, Political Science). Moderated by Ted Gerber (UW-Madison, CREECA Director).
Military assertiveness in the “near abroad” and elsewhere has characterized Russia’s foreign policy at least since 2008. It has also played well with the Russian public. Is this aggressiveness due only or mostly to Putin’s ambitions or do popular attitudes in Russia support it as well? About the Speaker: Michael Alexeev is Professor of Economics at Indiana University in Bloomington. His research and teaching interests lie mostly in the fields of institutional economics, law and economics, and economics of transition from a Soviet-type economy to a market economy.
From 1878 to the early 1920s, millions of Ottoman Muslims became citizens of other European states. This talk explores the many ways Muslims responded, from resistance to negotiation, illuminating how Muslim citizens shaped the states and societies in which they lived. Emily Greble addresses questions about why Muslims have been erased from so much of European history and what we can learn about secularism, religious freedom, and European legal norms by analyzing Muslim lives and perspectives. About the Speaker: Emily Greble teaches History and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. A historian of the Balkans, she is the author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (2021) and Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (2011.
Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. An interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems documents a complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements. Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Black Earth, White Bread reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917.
About the Speaker: Susanne Wengle is Nancy R. Dreux associate professor of Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame, with a Ph.D. from the from University of California Berkeley.
Dissenting opinions are an unusual type of judicial behavior, especially in autocracies. Except for in very rare circumstances, separate opinions do not lead to changes in law or policy, but judges spend their time and resources to author them. In authoritarian regimes, dissents are even less expected: why would judges publicly voice their disagreement with the majority given the higher personal risks of expressing such discontent? Using original data on 629 judgments and 8,857 judicial votes, Yulia Khalikova explains dissenting behavior at the RCC.
Signe Baumane (Latvian-born animator, artist, and film maker) discusses her animated films, particularly 'Rocks in my Pockets' (2014), a film about five Latvian women throughout the twentieth century, which focuses on topics of depression, suicide, marriage, and gender roles in Soviet-occupied and post-Soviet Latvia. Baumane also offers a glance at her work-in-progress animated feature film 'My Love Affair With Marriage,' a fresh look on gender and romantic love, to be released in 2022. [Audio from 'My Love Affair With Marriage' has been removed from this podcast episode, as the film is currently unreleased.]
The introduction of an expansive housing reform in Moscow in 2017–the destruction and replacement of Khrushchev-era five story buildings–reflected a new form of consultative policy processes that demand state-society interaction. Similar policy interactions in democratic systems have led to increase in social capital and pro-social norms. In authoritarian contexts, they are a mechanism to win social support. The findings presented by Dr. Regina Smyth (Indiana University)have important implications for new state initiatives to extend the housing program across the Federation and push urbanization as the central mechanism to win societal support.
Dmitriy Vorobyev analyzes a unique dataset on personal characteristics of Russian regional governors serving between 2006 and 2019. Many of these governors have professional or educational military backgrounds. He combines the data with a panel of detailed regional budgets over the same period to identify any relationships between governors’ backgrounds and their spending preferences, and finds that governors with military backgrounds tend to distribute regional budgets very differently from those with civilian backgrounds, exhibiting stronger preferences towards pro-social expenditures and weaker preferences towards spending on the economy and infrastructure. This lecture will discuss several potential explanations for these findings.
"Ethnic and Religious Identities in Russian Penal Institutions: A Case Study of Uzbek Transnational Prisoners" discusses how the arrival of a large number of transnational Muslim prisoners shapes the traditional hierarchies and power relations in Russian penal institutions. He will argue that the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian penal institutions into a legally plural environment where it is possible to glean the patterns of the coexistence and clash between various formal rules and informal sub-cultures: (a) colony regime, that is official regulations and everyday management practices at the institutional level, (b) traditional prison sub-culture, so-called the thieves’ law, (c) Muslim sub-culture based on Sharia law, and (d) sub-cultures based on ethnic solidarity norms. In doing so, this article challenges the widely held view among Russian criminologists and Western historians that penal institutions in Russia have traditionally been ethnically – (racially) and religiously- blind. The presentation will be based on Professor Urinboyev's extended ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, Russia, and Fergana, Uzbekistan, conducted between January 2014 and September 2020.
Video material has been removed from the recording to respect the privacy of those serving sentences in Russian prisons.
In December of this year, ten years will have passed since the death of the Czech writer, dissident, and statesman Václav Havel. This roundtable discusses Havelian concepts including “truth” (pravda), “power” (moc), “civil society” (občanská společnost), “appeal” (apel/výzva), “indifference” (lhostejnost), “focus/center” (ohnisko), “theater” (divadlo), “prison” (vězení), and “responsibility” (odpovědnost). Roundtable participants are noted scholars of Havel from North America and Europe: Aspen Brinton, Virginia Commonwealth University; David S. Danaher, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Barbara Day, independent scholar based in Prague; Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College; Delia Popescu, Le Moyne College; Jiří Přibáň, Cardiff University; Kieran Williams, Drake University.
In 1887, a Jewish eye doctor named L.L. Zamenhof launched his international auxiliary language “Esperanto” from the western borderlands of a tsarist empire in crisis. Brigid O’Keeffe traces the history of Esperanto as a utopian vision rooted in late imperial Russian culture through to its rise as a vibrant global movement that inspired women and men around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Esperanto and Esperantists have long been dismissed to the margins and footnotes of history, O’Keeffe proposes that revolutionary Russia’s Esperantists were exemplars of their era. Their triumphs, frustrations, and tragedies illuminate how and why the Soviet Union ultimately rejected an international language for the global proletariat and chose instead to elevate Russian – “the language of Lenin” – as the language of socialist internationalism.
Dr. Molly Blasing presents material from her recent book, Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021). She considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day, using examples of photo-poetic writing by Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, and other 20th and 21st century poets. Listen to learn about how the camera transformed the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities available for poetic writing in Russian.
As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. Stefan Link reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order.
The war conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014 and it is still far from its resolution. One of the most debated questions during all those years was the following: Who joined anti-Kyiv armed groups during the first years of the Donbass war, and why? Some experts claimed that Russian soldiers and paid volunteers constituted the majority of irregular anti-Kyiv forces. Others that observe the civil war find that it was Donbass locals who joined armed groups in the first place. In this presentation, based on interviews with combatants and observations collected in 2016-2017 in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Donetsk and Luhansk, Natalia Savelyeva will discuss mobilization trajectories of anti-Kyiv combatants, different factors which impacted their decision to join the fight, and the role of ideology in the Donbass war.
Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, this talk investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process – how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within – promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.
Darren Thies will share perspectives and advice on the career of a diplomat, learning foreign languages (particularly Persian dialects), current U.S. policies in Central Asia, and the human geography of the region. Darren can offer insights and answer questions on the cultures of Central Asia, traveling in the region, perceptions of Americans, how language is used in practice, and how the region has developed over the past decade. Darren’s linguistic expertise centers around the three main Persian dialects (Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki), and can offer specific advice to learners of these languages.
What does intersectionality as praxis look like in Kyrgyzstan? Grassroots feminist, LGBTQ and transfeminist groups in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan are creating a unique space for themselves through various community art projects. The 2019 Feminnale Art Exhibit was one such meticulously curated space that provided possibilities for “subaltern voices to speak” (Spivak 1988) on the everyday experiences of women in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the region. By centering the “everyday” experiences of women, this feminist art project challenged the monolithic and homogenized categories of “woman” imposed by both the West and Russia on (post)socialist Central Asia, opening up further insights on race, gender, and sexuality in the socialist past and (post)socialist future.
The Kazakh famine of the 1930s was one of the great crimes of the Stalinist regime. More than 1.5 million people perished, and the disaster transformed a territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, the size of western Europe. But until recently, the crisis was little known in the West. In her talk, which draws from her recently published book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sarah Cameron will discuss the causes of Kazakh disaster and its consequences for Kazakh society. Along the way, she will also explore the reasons for why the story of the Kazakh famine has been neglected, as well as how this particular episode should reframe our understanding of violence and nation-building under Stalin.
This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and related peoples as inferior and expendable. However, the justifications have their origins in the Global War on Terror and its characterization of ‘terrorists’ as less than human and irrational. Like the ‘savages’ of European colonialism, China’s imagination of Uyghurs as ‘terrorists’ provides a rationalization for carry out destructive harm to a people that is framed as benevolent and in the best interests of those are the victims of that harm.
Artemy Kalinovsky’s Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) investigates the Soviet effort to make the promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the book places the Soviet development of central Asia in a global context. In this talk, Kalinovsky will review the book’s findings and the questions they raised, and discuss his experience with archives, memoirs, and oral history.
The presentation discusses the stylistic, pragmatic, phraseological, lexical-semantic problems of literary translation from Uzbek into English and introduces the online poetic dictionary as a solution to overcome them. Gulnoza Odilova is an Uzbek scholar of Translation Studies. She did her PhD in 2011 and DSc in 2021. She works as an Associate Professor at Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature. She has published more than 200 articles, 2 monographs, 2 textbooks, 1 encyclopedia, and patented a mobile app “Dictionary of gastronomic terms”. As a translator, she has translated Erkin Vohidov’s poems into English and poems of Shakespeare, Byron, Tomas Moore, Robert Burns and Edgar Allan Poe into Uzbek. In 2019 her project “www.poetiklugat.uz” achieved the recognition of the President of Uzbekistan and she was awarded the national medal “Shuhrat” (Glory) for her contribution to the science and literature of Uzbekistan. She is the chairperson of the Gastronomy Tourism Association of Uzbekistan and the coordinator of several projects such as “Gastromahalla”, “Delicious Uzbekistan” and “restoservice.uz”.
“Eurasian Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis: Between Fact and Fear” with Caress Schenk, Associate Professor of Political Science, Nazarbayev University.
Description: Amid the economic and health crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, underlying questions of state-society relations loom large in Eurasia: why do people follow or not follow regulations that the government deems healthy for them? Do people trust the scientific underpinnings of state modernization projects? How do states increase public buy-in or compliance with their policies?
This talk will outline the origins of the project and preliminary findings from a study that Schenk conducted, analyzing the linkages between state and society as they together navigate a world of uncertainty and crisis. To empirically study questions related to fear-based and scientific-based decision making during times of crisis and uncertainty, Schenk’s project uses a three-pronged approach. First is an investigation of public attitudes towards health behaviors, including the choice to be vaccinated against COVID-19, using interviews, surveys, and social media analysis. Second, she investigates expert opinion and the construction of official data using interviews, media analysis, and various analyses of available empirical data. Third, Schenk analyzes the policies and policymaker perspectives in addressing COVID-19, using data from the CoronaNet Project, interviews, analysis of policymakers’ rhetoric, and the messaging of public awareness campaigns. This project uses these approaches to probe linkages between political rhetoric, policy, and people’s attitudes and behaviors.
Bio: Caress Schenk is an Associate Professor of political science at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan) with teaching and research expertise in the politics of immigration and national identity in Eurasia. Her new book, published with the University of Toronto Press, is called Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia. Current and previous research has been funded by the American Councils for International Education, Nazarbayev University and the Fulbright Scholar Program and has been published in Demokratizatisya, Europe-Asia Studies, and Nationalities Papers, and in edited volumes published by Edinburgh University Press and Oxford University Press. Dr. Schenk is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia).
"Technological Solutions for Complex Problems: Emerging Electronic Surveillance Regimes in Eurasian Cities" with Erica Marat, Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University
Description: ‘Smart city’ is the new buzzword in cities across Eurasia. Most large urban areas in the post-Soviet space have embraced smart city technologies, and those that have not are in the process of finding smart technology solutions to criminal and disorderly behavior. This use of technologies serves the larger ideal of a society in which even minor crimes are meticulously documented, a habit dating back to the Soviet tradition of criminological research. On the example of Kyiv, Almaty and Bishkek, this presentation will discuss how the pursuit of smart cities in Eurasia strives to attain modernity without the burden of deeper political change. It will review how smart city initiatives rapidly emerging across the region on two dimensions: first, local initiatives to modernize law enforcement and, second, global pressures to innovate fueled both by transnational state-controlled firms promoting their own security products. The spread of surveillance technologies in Eurasia shows how cities and countries aspire to follow global trends for smart city technologies.
Bio: Dr. Erica Marat is an Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs of the National Defense University. Dr. Marat’s research focuses on violence, mobilization and security institutions in Eurasia, India, and Mexico. Her book The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press 2018) explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail.
"Calling the Future: What Names in Russian and East European Science Fiction Reveal" with Sibelan Forrester, Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College.
Description: In Eastern Europe and Russia/the USSR, science fiction has often offered ways to make implicit assertions about the future. In Socialist Realism, representations of the future were constrained by Marxist theory. Science fiction enabled authors to craft more creative plots and adventures; a story could assume “socialism in space” without specifying how that happened. Naming was one narrative technique Soviet science fiction writers used to shape notions of the future. Names with ethnic and national associations, for example, were used to suggest that this future would be international. This talk will present a number of examples from Czech, Polish, and Russian science fiction, bringing in not only nationality but also race and gender, to address questions of how the names could be, or have been, effectively translated into English.
Bio: Sibelan Forrester is the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. She has translated fiction, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, including science fiction from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Olga Larionova, and Davor Slamnig. Her current research includes a study of how the Russian “technical intelligentsia” interacted with science fiction as both authors and readers.
"China and the Uyghurs: Cultural Genocide in the Name of Counterterrorism" with Sean Roberts, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
Description: This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and related peoples as inferior and expendable. However, the justifications have their origins in the Global War on Terror and its characterization of ‘terrorists’ as less than human and irrational. Like the ‘savages’ of European colonialism, China’s imagination of Uyghurs as ‘terrorists’ provides a rationalization for carry out destructive harm to a people that is framed as benevolent and in the best interests of those are the victims of that harm.
Bio: Sean Roberts is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Dr. Roberts is an anthropologist who has studied the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia for thirty years, writing his dissertation on the Uyghurs of the China-Kazakhstan borderlands while a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. He has published numerous articles in academic journals, edited volumes, and in policy-oriented publications about the Uyghurs, and he is the author of the recently published book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020).
“Queer Budapest: Sex, Society and the Illiberal State, Past and Present” with Anita Kurimay, Associate Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College
Description: The presentation discusses the strange and enduring alliance between queer life and a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes throughout the first half of the 20th century, which had been silenced by subsequent political regimes. It details how the legacy of deliberate silencing and erasure of non-normative sexualities from historical records helps to explain more recent emergence of anti-LGBTQ politics in Hungary.
Bio: Anita Kurimay is Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College (USA). Her main research interests include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender history, conservativism and the politics of the far right, the history of human rights, and the history of sport. Her book Queer Budapest, 1873 -1961 (Chicago University Press, 2020) examines the history of Hungarian politics of non-normative sexualities from the late 19th century to the present. She has published articles on Hungarian gay and lesbian history in Sexualities and Eastern European Politics and Societies (EEPS).
“Putinism and its Discontents” with Brian Taylor, Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University.
Description: What is Putinism? Taylor argues that Putinism is both a mentality and a system of rule. In this talk, Taylor describes these two aspects of Putinism and examines the current challenges facing Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Bio: Brian Taylor is a Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Taylor is the author of three books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia” with Kathryn Graber, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Lecture co-sponsored by Indiana University.
Description: Focusing on language and media in eastern Siberia, Mixed Messages (Cornell University Press, 2020) engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. The book demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts, and by whom? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? In this book talk, Kathryn Graber will address these questions through her ethnography of the Russian Federation’s Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia.
Bio: Kathryn E. Graber is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, she researches minority language politics, multilingualism, mass media, materiality, and intellectual property in Russia and Mongolia. She is the author of Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell (Brill, 2019). Graber’s award-winning writing on Buryatia has appeared in journals such as Slavic Review, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language & Communication, and Inner Asia, as well as in Russian collections. Since 2014 she has been researching how value is negotiated in the Mongolian cashmere industry, based on fieldwork at sites along the commodity chain. Her research has been funded by agencies including the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education/Fulbright-Hays, and the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Graber is also an award-winning teacher, teaching courses at IUB that bridge anthropology and area studies. She holds an A.B. in Anthropology and Linguistics (University of Chicago), M.A. in Russian and East European Studies (University of Michigan), and M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology (University of Michigan). She previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at IUB.
"The Gendered Ambiguity of the Postcommunist Transitions" with Janet Elise Johnson, Professor of Political Science and Gender/Women’s Studies at Brooklyn College; Katalin Fábián, Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College; and Mara Lazda, Professor of History at Bronx Community College.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Kristen Ghodsee’s 2017 New York Times op-ed and subsequent popular book, "Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism"(2018), now translated into 12 other languages, is the latest foray into a central and longstanding debate as to whether the transition in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia was bad for women. Drawing upon four decades of gender scholarship of this region with more than 200 million women, we build on and move beyond this unanswerable question to examine why and how assessments have been and remain contradictory. Extending critical theory’s concept of intersectionality and interweaving the legacies of colonialism and informality, we ground our analysis and assessment in the concept of ambiguity. Ambiguity helps us make sense of the varied perspectives of women in this region–as shaped by class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability–and the varied and complicated processes of democratization, economic reforms, and redefining borders and alliances. This presentation comes out of our collaboration on "The Routledge Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia" (forthcoming July 2021), which reflects on and advances the interdisciplinary, transnational, and multidimensional study of this part of the world. Over the last three decades, gender has become an integral, if derided, component of the study of the region across the social sciences. This study is also an important element of the decentering of the West in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, especially with its nuanced and innovative theorizing on the intersections of class, ethnicity, and race outside of western frameworks.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTIONS: Janet Elise Johnson is a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA. Her books include The Gender of Informal Politics (Palgrave 2018), Gender Violence in Russia (Indiana University Press 2009), and Living Gender after Communism (Indiana University Press 2007). In the last few years, she has published articles in Slavic Review, Human Rights Review, Journal of Social Policy Studies, Politics & Gender, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Social Policy, and Aspasia as well as online in The New Yorker, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, and The Boston Review.
Katalin Fábián is a Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, Easton, PA USA. Her books include Contemporary Women’s Movements in Hungary: Globalization, Democracy, and Gender Equality (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Domestic Violence in the Postcommunist States: Local Activism, National Policies, and Global Forces (Indiana University Press, 2010), Democratization through Social Activism: Gender and Environmental Issues in Post-Communist Societies (Tritonic Romania, 2015), and Rebellious Parents: Parents’ Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia (Indiana University Press, 2017).
Mara Lazda is Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College, City University of New York, USA. Her regional focus is on Latvia, with broader research interests on the intersections between gender, nationalism, and transnationalism in historical and contemporary contexts. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Baltic Studies, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Nationalities Papers. She has served as the President of the Association of Baltic Studies (2014-2016), a coordinator of the Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe workshop at New York University, and an editor for Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History.
“Promoting US Policy in Eurasia—A Practitioner’s View” with Caroline Savage, career Foreign Service Officer and non-resident fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Foreign Service Officer and REECAS alumna Caroline Savage will talk about her extensive career in international affairs. Savage will discuss various topics relating to her academic and professional career, including her work in public diplomacy as a Foreign Service Officer, how she has utilized her foreign language and area studies training in her professional life, and her experience facilitating inter-agency coordination. Conversation moderated by CREECA Director Ted Gerber.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Caroline Savage is a career Foreign Service Officer who served most recently as Director of the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Press Center. As non-resident fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, her focus is diverse diplomacy leadership in foreign affairs, a project she began during her tenure as Virginia and Dean Rusk Fellow at ISD from 2018-2019. Prior to Georgetown, she served as Public Affairs Officer at U.S. Embassies Azerbaijan and Mozambique. In Washington assignments, she was Director for Russia and Central Asia on the National Security Council and Political-Military Officer in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Russian Affairs. She also served previously in Belarus and Luxembourg. A native of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, she graduated from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, then received master’s degrees in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her languages are French, Russian, Portuguese, and Azerbaijani.
"Since 1989 – Poland’s Democratic Experience" with Donald Pienkos, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: In 1989, Poland, thanks primarily to the efforts of the Solidarity movement, emerged from 44 years of Soviet domination to establish a new system of representative democratic government. Given its people’s extremely difficult situation at that time, coupled with Poland’s failed experience with democratic governance in the years after its national rebirth in 1918, few observers were hopeful about the chances for democratic governance after 1989. Why they were proven wrong, how Polish democracy has developed over the past three decades, and what we can learn from Poland’s experience – both from its successes and its challenges – are covered in this talk.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Donald Pienkos is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has published extensively on Poland’s politics and was a founder of UW-Milwaukee’s programs in Russian and East European Studies and Polish Studies. In the 1990s he worked for Poland’s admission into NATO. A past president and national director in a number of academic bodies and organizations focused on Poland, including the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America and the Polish American Congress, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of Service from the President of Poland in 2010. He holds his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin (1971).
"Guns to Butter: Economic Perceptions and Policy Preferences in Russia" with Maria Snegovaya, Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and a postdoctoral scholar at the PPE program at Virginia Tech.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Scholars on “rally ’round the flag” often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of the literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). Snegovaya conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign policy preferences among respondents exposed to negative economic priors in Russia. In line with the earlier findings on this topic, this analysis shows that participants who encounter negative economic primes report significantly less support for assertive foreign policy narratives. In this lecture, Snegovaya will demonstrate how continuing economic strain may limit the Kremlin’s ability to divert public attention from internal problems through the use of assertive rhetoric.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Maria Snegovaya (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and a postdoctoral scholar at the PPE program at Virginia Tech. She is a comparative politics, international relations, and statistical methods specialist. The key focus of her research is democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe, as well as Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Her research results and analysis have appeared in policy and peer-reviewed journals, including West European Politics, Journal of Democracy, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Her research has been referenced in publications such as the New York Times, the Economist, and Foreign Policy. She is frequently invited to give talks at U.S. universities and think tanks.
"On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World" with Kathyrn Ciancia, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION:As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted a minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once modern and Polish. By tracing how these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of civilization—in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized—within the borders of their nation-state, Kathryn Ciancia offers a new story of Polish nationalism that is both locally grounded and global in scope.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Kathryn Ciancia is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has taught since 2013. She holds a BA from Oxford University, an MA from University College-London, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World, has just been published by Oxford University Press. She is now at work on a new book about the role of Poland’s global consular network in policing the boundaries of citizenship between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Cold War.
“Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: Revisiting the International Military Tribunal on its 75th Anniversary” with Francine Hirsch, University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Please note that this CREECA Lecture was given as part of the Area Studies Lecture Series presented by the 2018-2021 U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies grant recipients for Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
"Toxic Crimes Project: Legal Activism Against Environmental Destruction in the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine" with Dr. Freek van der Vet, Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: War often destroys the environment – either directly when armies poison foliage as a military strategy or indirectly, when toxins leak from bombed industrial sites. In the “Toxic Crimes Project,” we examine how rights advocates—lawyers, experts, and activists—protect the environment from wartime environmental destruction, how they promote the idea that the environment has legally enforceable rights, and how they expand international legal mechanisms (at the ICC and ILC) to protect the environment during war. In this lecture, Van der Vet presents case studies from the project. Based on several pilot-interviews with lawyers and NGO activists, the lecture examines legal activism against environmental destruction during the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine is one of Europe’s most heavily industrialized areas. Before the conflict broke out, the region already coped with heavy pollution from its industry and coal sector. Some of these heavy industry sites have been unstable or fraught with safety issues. Many of these industrial sites in the Donbas region are located in the immediate vicinity of the front line of the conflict. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has damaged many of these sites, for instance the Zasyadko coal mine and the Lysychyansk oil refinery, polluting the air and contaminating water supplies, and, as a result, damaging human health and ecosystems for years to come.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Dr. Freek van der Vet is a University Researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki Finland. Van der Vet’s research interests include international litigation at human rights courts, legal mobilization under authoritarianism, and environmental destruction during war. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of “Toxic Crimes Project: Legal Activism against Wartime Environmental Destruction” (funded by Kone Foundation and Academy of Finland); a research group investigating how lawyers and experts seek accountability for wartime environmental destruction. In his previous projects, he worked on legal mobilization against disinformation and trolling in Russia, the legal defense of treason suspects and NGOs in Russia, and litigation at the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of victims from the Chechen conflicts. He is a member and co-founder of ActInCourts (Activists in International Courts; funded by SSHRC, Canada), a network of scholars and human rights practitioners working on regional human rights courts. His academic work has appeared in Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Europe-Asia Studies, The International Journal of Human Rights, Social & Legal Studies, Human Rights Review, Review of Central and East European Law, among others. He completed visiting fellowships at the University of British Columbia (Canada) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).
This podcast is a recording of the CESSI Virtual Alumni Panel which took place on October 24. Featured Alumni were Kiiyha Gray, Katka Showers-Curtis, Stu McLaughlin, and Matt Brown. The first part of the panel is a brief introduction to CESSI while the second part is a Q&A with our panelists.
"Perestroika's Dark Side: Nationalism, Racism and Crisis on Moscow Streets at the End of the Soviet Union" with Jeff Sahadeo, Professor at Carleton University.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Migration from the Soviet South (Caucasus and Central Asia) to the capital, Moscow, dramatically increased in the 1980s. Newcomers sought to take advantage of top-quality education, professional opportunities and to trade as economic conditions in their homelands grew more challenging. Street traders from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, whose fruit and flowers fetched much higher prices than they might at home, came to symbolize a changing Soviet Union for Moscow’s residents. Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to bring openness (glasnost) and economic restructuring (perestroika) to the USSR brought initial enthusiasm to Soviet citizens, who hoped for increased social mobility and economic opportunity. As reforms faltered, however, as prices rose and shortages appeared in the planned economy, the goods and services provided by these Soviet southerners became at once more important and more resented by Moscow’s Slavic majority. Nationalist and racist ideas, percolating under the surface alongside increased south-north movement, burst into the open in the late 1980s and changed life plans of many of these southern migrants. Based on oral histories of the time, this presentation reveals connections between mobility, nationalism and racism in Moscow and across the USSR. By 1990, when hope for progress ebbed, the Soviet maxim of the Friendship of the Peoples evaporated and migrants no longer considered Moscow “their” capital.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Jeff Sahadeo is a Professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Department of Political Science. His presentation is drawn from his recent book, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Cornell University Press, 2019). Professor Sahadeo is also the author of Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 and the co-editor of Everyday Life in Central Asia, Past and Present. His current research examines the intersection between nature and society through a study of rivers in tsarist and Soviet Georgia
"A Small State on the Global Scene: Bulgaria’s ‘Developing World’ in the 1970s" with Theodora Dragostinova, Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: In the 1970s, officials and intellectuals in communist Bulgaria launched an ambitious program of international cultural outreach. Paris, Vienna, London, Munich, and New York City all hosted spectacular exhibitions of Bulgarian ancient treasures and medieval icons, but Bulgarian cultural ambassadors also sponsored concerts, film showings, and book readings in regional centers and rural areas throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Focusing on Bulgarian cultural events in India, Mexico, and Nigeria, this talk highlights the role of culture in a small state’s foreign policy choices. By interrogating the unique notions of development that emerged out of these encounters, it explores the role of cultural diplomacy in the relationship between the Second and the Third Worlds during the later years of the Cold War.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Theodora Dragostinova is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University. Her work focuses on nationalism, migration, global history, and Cold War culture. She is the author of Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks in Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Cornell UP, 2011) and the co-editor of Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (CEU Press, 2016). Her newest book, The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in 2021.
"Putin's Constitutional Amendments - 2020" with Ekaterina Mishina, Independent Legal Scholar.
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: At his 2020 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed substantial amendments to the Russian constitution. The proposed referendum would allow Putin to serve as the President until 2036, give the Russian Constitutional Court the power to nullify international tribunals' decisions, and make gay marriage unconstitutional. In July, the referendum was passed by a– contested– national popular vote. This talk will address the 2020 amendments to the Russian Constitution, the procedure of approval, and explain how these changes affect all branches of power and further strengthen the President's role.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Ekaterina Mishina is an independent legal scholar. She received a B.A. and M.A. in Jurisprudence from the Faculty of Law of Moscow State University, graduating in with the highest honours in 1987. Dr. Mishina holds a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence from the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992). Selected positions held: Principal Advisor to the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of the RF (1995 – 1997) Deputy Director, Legal Advisor ( “Legal Culture” project of the Russian Foundation of Legal Reforms (1997 -1999), head of the Legal Department of “MOSTELECOM” JSC (1999-2002), advisor to the Chairman of the Foundation for Development of Parliamentarism in Russia ( 2002-2005), Deputy Director of the Institute of Legal Studies, the National Research University –Higher School of Economics (2005 – 2011). Associate Professor, Department of Constitutional law, Faculty of Law of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (2005 – 2014). Visiting Professor at the Law School (2012-2013) and the Department of Political Science (2014 – 2016) of the University of Michigan.
Image credits: Putin’s 2020 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly [“File:2020 Putin Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly (12).jpg” by kremlin.ru is licensed under CC BY 4.0]
“The Fall of Europe’s Last Dictator” with Yuliya Brel of the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research at the University of Delaware
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Belarusian citizens elected their first president in 1994. Within the next 26 years, A. Lukashenko ran for the presidency five more times. With the exception of the first presidential election, the outcomes of all other consecutive elections were invariably disputed by the opposition and deemed undemocratic and rigged by the European community and the USA. Since 2006, presidential elections have been routinely followed by opposition rallies and protests as well as subsequent crackdowns on the protests and mass arrests of the protesters by the riot police. Every time, after the suppression of the protests, the situation would normalize, and Lukashenko would continue ruling the country without much threat to his personal power. However, the situation that arose in Belarus right before and after the latest presidential election of August 9, 2020, turned out to be completely unique. The scale and duration of mass protests against the rigged election (Lukashenko announced himself the winner with over 80% of votes for the sixth time) have been unprecedented. At the same time, the scale of repressions on the part of the state, and the brutality, cruelty, and downright sadism of the riot police have been unprecedented, too. This presentation analyzes how and why the first democratically elected Belarusian president became a dictator. It also offers a tentative explanation of changes that took place in Belarusian society and led to the current confrontation between Lukashenko and the people of Belarus. The presentation concludes with possible implications of the confrontation for the future of Belarus.
SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Yuliya Brel is an assistant policy scientist at the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research at the University of Delaware. She holds Master’s and PhD degrees in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware, and a Master’s degree in linguistics from Minsk State Linguistic University in Belarus. Her research interests concentrate on the problems of transition from authoritarianism to democracy in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and the former Soviet republics, and on why some of them fail to democratize. She also studies, modern dictatorships, democratic governance, and the role of civil society in the process of transition to democracy and its subsequent consolidation. Additionally, her research focuses on the modern nation-building in post-communist states and on whether the strength/weakness of national consciousness, alongside other factors, played a role in the divergent outcomes of the process of democratization in CEE countries. Finally, she inquires into social policy, for example, language policy and how it may affect minority language speaking communities, or utilities and housing sector policy and the reasons for its ill success in some authoritarian states.
“Moral Future: Halal Businesses in Central Asia” with Aisalkyn Botoeva of the George Washington University
LECTURE DESCRIPTION: How do people in Central Asia understand the Islamic Economy and enact its principles in their day-to-day lives? In her 18-month research in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, she explored a wide range of sites within the burgeoning Islamic Business sector, from high-visibility financial firms to small and medium-sized businesses, and all the way down to bazaars and street stalls. In this talk, she focuses on one of the key arguments of her work – that the halal business is a space of ethical inquiry, exploration, experimentation, and debate for those who decide to adopt this form of business practice. When it comes to food, for example, there is a strong belief that the consumption of halal food can lead to physical and psychological cleansing and spiritual nourishment. Along with discussions of how people understand halal, she also presents contentious cases such as the one involving kymys [fermented mare’s milk], and whether it is halal (permissible)or haram (forbidden). Moreover, ideals of what constitutes halal have spilled over to various areas of business activities that go beyond entrepreneurs’ concern with the technical aspect of food production. Some of the key debates involve questions around bribes and corruption. Entrepreneurs voice their aspirations to earn their money through adal ish (here literally halal work, but in Kyrgyz generally means work based on good intentions) and ak söz (literally white words, but connotes words of wisdom and propriety). Exploring emic ethical vocabulary and repertoires among those involved in the halal business sheds light on broader processes through which halal economy is embedded in local cultures of doing business as well as being a pious Muslim. The talk aims to give a snapshot from an ethnographic study that aims to contribute to more “top-down” accounts of Islam and the economy in the region.
SPEAKER BIO: Aisalkyn Botoeva currently serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian & Eurasian Studies (IERES) of the George Washington University. She is a sociologist with broader research interests in socio-economic development, economic decision-making, and resilience in the face of uncertainty. Her past and current research experience is in topics of industrial revival in resource-poor contexts of Central Asia, entrepreneurship in the post-Soviet region, as well as the varying strategies and economic repertoires of action that entrepreneurs employ in this context. In addition to research, she taught a wide range of courses from Social Research Methods, to Globalization & Social Conflict, Leadership & Global Development both in Kyrgyzstan and the U.S. Her individual research has been funded by the Aga-Khan Foundation, Open Society Foundations as well as Hazeltine Fellowship of the Business, Organizations and Entrepreneurship Program at Brown University. The results of her individual and collaborative projects have been published in Politics & Society, Theory & Society, Families, Relationships and Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs, and Central Asian Survey among other journals.
“When is home? Exploring Kazakhstani Koreans’ notions of place and homeland” with Dr. Elise Ahn, International Projects Office, UW-Madison
July 23, 2020
ABSTRACT: The collective memories of Central Asian Koreans have not been fully explored, particularly in connection to notions of “homeland” and identity. This lecture explores the linkages between participants’ family histories regarding the Korean deportation, notions of historic homeland, and participant identities regarding their “Korean-ness” through ethnographic interviews.
The interview questions were based on a study looking at the lived experiences of other diasporic communities in Kazakhstan (Li Wei, 2016; Smagulova, 2016). The broader study explores questions related to issues of social mobility, socio-economic access, and identity construction among ethnolinguistic minorities in Kazakhstan.
LECTURER BIO: Elise S. Ahn is the Director of the International Projects Office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an adjunct lecturer at Edgewood College, where she teaches research methods and the internationalization of higher education in their Doctor of Education program. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) in 2011 in Education Policy Studies with a concentration on Global Studies in Education and a methodological specialization in Program Evaluation.
Before coming to UW–Madison, Elise worked at KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan) as an assistant professor and director of a master’s degree program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Her research interests focus on the intersection of space, structures, and scale in examining the effects of internationalization in education and language policy production processes.
She is also interested in issues related to language, education, and equity/access with a focus on urban contexts. She co-edited Language Change in Central Asia (with Juldyz Smagulova), which was published in 2016 and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue of World Englishes examining English in Central Asia.
CESSI Alumni Research Panel with Nick Seay and Laura Tourtellotte
“Reaping the Benefits of the Harvest: Towards an Applied Approach of your Central Asian Language Skills”
Speaker: Nick Seay
Nick Seay shares some of his research experiences, specifically as they relate to working with the Tajik language. He then shifts the conversation to talk more concretely about ways in which language learners can target the study and use of Central Asian languages towards research and/or professional goals. Part of this talk includes Nick’s reflections after talking with several leading scholars in the field of Central Asian studies.
“Deserving Daughters, Martyred Mothers: The Role of Reproductive Politics and ‘Good Women’ within Gendered Social Programs in Kazakhstan”
Speaker: Laura Tourtellotte
Laura Tourtellotte presents some results from her dissertation fieldwork and explores how these findings relate to the necessity of equity and context-informed interventions in social service provisioning within the contemporary reality of a global pandemic.
Dr. Madina Djuraeva talks about her 8-year long research on multilingualism among Central Asian young adults. She shares her fieldwork experience in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where she collected narrative data from over 60 student participants. Dr. Djuraeva also shares a number of her key research findings around the themes of morality, belonging, and education.
Madina Djuraeva defended her Ph.D. in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Lecturer of Elementary Uzbek and she has previously taught both Tajik and Uzbek languages through CESSI. Originally from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, Madina grew up in a multilingual environment of the city, which eventually contributed to her choice of profession. Her doctoral research examines lived experiences of being and becoming multilingual at the nexus of language, education, policy, and identity in the contexts of post-Soviet Central Asia and transnational migration. She has published on the issues of (non)nativeness, language policy, and morality in multilingual Central Asian communities
“An Uzbek Patron and the Limits of Eurasian Power” - Morgan Liu (The Ohio State University)
Can the rich and powerful (“elites”) make society a better place? How can they transform structural problems and are there limits to what elites can accomplish for the common good? I present a case from Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan where an Uzbek grand patron claimed to act for the communal good by building urban institutions serving people of all ethnicities. As a result, Uzbeks, who have experienced discrimination in Kyrgyzstan, actually flourished in this city under politically adverse circumstances for the first two decades of post-Soviet independence, until the violence of 2010 brought this Uzbek patron’s endeavors to a crashing and burning halt. We conclude with the global implications about what elites can and cannot do for the public good.
After the fall of communism, regardless of debates on the nature of systemic change, most agreed on the importance of non-violence. In this paper, I argue that the year 1989 represented a revolution in the very idea of revolution—self-limiting, non-violent, and yet far reaching in impact. However, Cold War triumphalist narratives and Western liberal mis-readings have together misrepresented the lessons and legacies of 1989, generating a “recipe-based” approach to regime change. Yet today multipolar great power politics, the soft power decline of the United States and liberal democracy more generally, an international legal regime that dis-incentivizes unpopular authoritarians to step away from power, and the moral hazard associated with the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, have made non-violent or “1989-type” revolutions far less likely.
While recent findings suggest that violence during civil war can generate pro-social behavior, why do we often see polarization between groups based on ethnic, religious, or sectarian differences after conflict? What conditions explain why we see this in some cases, but not others? These questions matter, given that polarization complicates peacebuilding, affects post-war party politics, and may lead to a return to conflict.
Presenting evidence from Bosnia, Price argues that how violence is targeted during civil war is essential to explaining the observed variation. Collective violence increases the salience of group identity while selective violence is unlikely to provoke these responses. Where these changes are widespread, they aggregate into cleavages, the social divisions which define political competition, and these results may persist well past the initial conflict.
Election forensics is a growing field of statistical techniques that can be used to detect suspicious patterns in election data. Researchers are increasingly turning to such methods to detect and evaluate potential manipulation in elections, both internationally and in the US. This lecture will present a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the election forensic approach, and then demonstrate how election forensic methods can be used to study variation in electoral manipulation at the subnational level in Russia and Ukraine. In particular, it will show how the type of election manipulation that parties employ in a territory depends both on their access to patronage resources and the degree to which they face political risks in that region.
Wodzyński examines the cultural expression of adventure in post-communist east central Europe through Tomasz Różycki's modern classic, the epic poem in prose Twelve Stations (2004). The work, with its elements of satire and questing, is a prime example of the use of the adventure romance form to intervene in the realm of collective and cultural memory.
Savelyeva explores the transformation of political culture in Russia from 2011-2019, describing a shift in attitudes toward protest, changes in the motivations and strategies of the opposition, and the burgeoning role of local activism in these movements.
Brel considers the post-communist development of the Republic of Belarus and suggests an answer to the question of why the country failed to democratize. Employing modernization theory, the presentation analyzes the connection between economic development and democracy, and between civil society and democracy. It also explores the idea that the absence of a strong national consciousness might have contributed to the country’s inability to democratize.
In this talk, Brooks will present an abbreviated statement of fact and personal experience dealing with the Supreme Commercial (Arbitrazh) Court of Russia from 1991 to 2016. He will tell the first-hand story of working with the Court as it reformed and adopted principles intrinsic to an independent, objective, and fair court system, and practices consistent with the rule of law, individual rights, transparency and deterring corruption. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of governmental and political pressures which rolled back much commercial court reform.
The interconnected terrorist and criminal milieus are believed to be a critical destabilizing factor in today’s global security environment, yet the trafficking/terrorism nexus remains highly politicized and loosely applied concept. What is the nature of trafficking/terrorism connections and how do they vary across states? Does the trafficking/terrorism nexus amplify the threat of terrorist violence? Focusing on Central Asia, this presentation offers surprising answers to these and other questions. It challenges the assumption that the intersection of terrorist and criminal activity is a prevalent, or even a common, occurrence.
Popular understanding of modern authoritarianism lacks a satisfying explanation for the genuine popularity of autocrats, as many clearly enjoy enthusiastic support even in times of economic stagnation or decline. In their recently published book, Robertson and his co-author argue that part of the solution lies in unpacking the role of emotions in building support for rulers. Drawing on a unique panel survey conducted shortly before and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, they discover that the resulting “rally” around the authoritarian flag involves much more than simply support for the leader or a simple increase in nationalism. Rather, they witness a broad shift in respondents’ emotional orientation. Driven by the shared, mediated experience of the Crimean “moment”, this shift improves people’s evaluation of their social, political and economic surroundings in the present, the future – and even the past.
In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang employs a postcolonial frame to highlight how the depiction of Roma in post-Yugoslav film render them postcolonial “objects,” knowable by way of difference constructed through racial hierarchies, stereotypes, and culture.
In this lecture, Dr. Austin Charron discusses findings from his PhD dissertation concerning socio-spatial identities among residents of Crimea who were internally displaced to mainland Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Building on previous research into Crimean identities from before the annexation, Charron’s work examines evolving discourses of regional and national belonging among Crimea’s ethnic Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians now living in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Lviv, and considers the question of whether these groups may constitute a diaspora.
Timothy Nunan is a Lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) and a Freigeist Fellow at the Center for Global History at the Free University of Berlin. He is the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge UP, 2016).
In this lecture he discusses how the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on the slogan of “Neither East Nor West”–neither alignment with the Soviet Union nor the United States. The end of the 1980s saw, however, a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow that would form the basis for relations between the countries to the present day. Drawing on archival resources and memoirs from the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Afghanistan, this talk explores how CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Iranian elites such as Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamene’i abandoned pretensions of leading the global anti-imperialist movement and sought to use relations with the other to navigate world politics between the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War.
In this lecture, Dr. Nikita Zakharov explores the political economy of media harassment in Russia by using a unique monthly dataset on the incidents of harassment of the media in Russian cities between 2004 and 2017 to establish political cycles driven by local elections. This research analyzed frequency of harassment incidents during the two months before a local election – a period that coincides with the official period of the electoral campaign. The lecture will also discuss how the effect differs with respect to the level of local election.
This talk examines Soviet nationalities policy in Central Asia through the lens of a prosopographical overview of ethnic Kazakhs within the Kazakhstan’s pre-war nomenklatura, using biographical data to provide a statistical picture of Kazakhstan’s Party elite. Analyzing those Kazakhs who served as members of the republic’s Party Bureau between 1920 and 1937—examining when and where they were born, where they went to school, and when and how they joined the Party—offers insight into the broader process of elite formation in the early Soviet period, revealing clear patterns in terms of who became a Bolshevik and what types of people achieved political success in the first two decades of Soviet rule. It also illustrates the enduring resonance of the Russian colonial presence in Kazakhstan in determining the course of revolutionary change in the republic, and indeed its political landscape across the following decades.
This talk introduces key themes from Scott Levi’s recent book on the Khanate of Khoqand, a surprisingly dynamic state that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century in eastern Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley. The lecture addresses the ways that political, economic, technological and environmental developments influenced life in Central Asia and contributed to the rise, and fall, of Khoqand. It also identifies a number of ways that Central Asians influenced the policies of their much larger imperial neighbors on the Eurasian periphery – especially Tsarist Russia and Qing China.
The past three decades are marked by substantial improvements in many Reproductive Health indicators across the countries of Central Asia. Increases in aggregate levels of knowledge, access, and practice of family planning are particularly impressive and represent substantial improvements in the health and well being of women. However, are these benefits shared equally across all women? Employing qualitative and quantitative data Cynthia traces the impact of cultural norms and structural factors on limiting the ability of rural, less educated, unmarried, and childless men and women to reap the benefits of reproductive health improvements.
When you enter to field to collect data for your dissertation or thesis, what are some basic safety precautions you need to consider? What does it mean to receive informed consent from individuals in a Tajikistani village? This short talk will delve into these and other related topics for you to consider as you prepare to enter the field.
Christopher Whitsel has been involved with education in Central Asia since 1999, including teaching English in Uzbekistan, conducting fieldwork in Tajikistan, and most recently working at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. He has published several articles addressing education and inequality of access, including trends in inequality in the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods, gender differences, as other social inequalities in education. More specifically, his work highlights barriers that families face in sending their children to school and the ways that community differences constrain their decisions. In addition to his academic endeavors, Dr. Whitsel has worked with international organizations like UNICEF-Tajikistan and the Open Society Foundation on projects about education, as well as social aspects of poverty in Tajikistan.
China’s on-going policies of transforming Uyghurs have been increasing more rapidly than ever before. In this talk, Mr. Aksu discusses the main policies that the Chinese government is enforcing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; how did state policies influence the Uyghur people, and how different are these policies from previous ones. He explores these transforming policies by providing both quantitative and qualitative examples in terms of labor transfer, language change, and the “Re-education” Camps.
Patronage is often described as the ‘glue’ that binds Central Asian patronal presidents and elites, creating strong material incentives to uphold the political status quo. With one hand, the president rewards loyal elites, giving them access to ‘the fruits of office’ and other valued resources; with the other, the president punishes wayward elites, taking away whatever benefits they have accumulated and closing off access to future ones. Yet, material conceptions of patronage-based rule are incomplete without consideration of norms–the rules and expectations governing ‘who gets what, how’ and how much. As a routinized practice, patronage entails a ‘mutual promise-keeping’: just as elites agree to comport themselves according to expectations, the president promises to do the same, enforcing patronage norms as needed. Presidential legitimacy depends in large part on how well he is able to satisfy the demands of those closest to him (patronage norm #1: differential access) while also meeting his obligations to the broader set of elites whose support he depends upon to stay in power (patronage norm #2: fair play). To do otherwise not only risks alienating a broad swath of elites, but is also likely to make the president appear weak and ineffective, a ruler who is controlled by his inner circle rather than in control of it. The cases of President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan under President Karimov illustrate the argument.
The siege of Leningrad was one of the most tragic episodes of World War II. Blockaded for almost three years, the city suffered staggering losses; perhaps as many as one million civilians died, primarily of starvation. During the war, the Soviet state covered up the extent of the losses and propagated the story of Leningrad as a “hero city.” In the presentation, I seek to explain how and why this heroic story outlasted the state that promoted it. Drawing on a variety of commemorative projects and memoirs, I show the ways in which personal memories underpinned the “official” narrative of Leningrad as a “hero city” and how the official narrative in turn offered a resource for survivors attempting to cope with and make sense of painful memories. The case of Leningrad illustrates how difficult it can be to separate the political and personal impacts of war. Recognizing the personal importance, if not internalization, of shared, ostensibly official narratives helps to explain why in contemporary Russia it has been so difficult to decouple ideology, politics, and memory.
The lecture focuses on the structure of the legal profession, the lack of professional filters, and the priority of organizational, but not professional, rules and ethics norms. The problems of a non-organized legal market and the possibility to practice law in Russian courts with neither a professional license nor a formal legal education are presented together with the current project of legal market reformation launched by the Ministry of Justice.
In the nearly two decades between the first transatlantic satellite television broadcast demonstration in 1962 and the rise of direct broadcast satellite service after 1980, the US and USSR developed two rival, intergovernmental satellite communications networks, the US-led INTELSAT and the Soviet-led Intersputnik. Yet this apparently typical story of Cold War competition and division conceals a much messier reality of interconnection, mutual influence, and shared anxieties that helped shape the future of both satellite communications and international cooperation in space from the early 1970s onward. Drawing on US and Soviet diplomatic and technical archives, interviews, and marketing and training materials, this talk explores what the history of communications satellite infrastructure can tell us about the Cold War and of the US-Soviet “space race.”
This lecture examines Michał Witkowski’s 2005 critically acclaimed novel Lubiewo (Lovetown). Witkowski’s novel builds an ethnography of a lost era, permeated with nostalgia for socialist Poland and for the seemingly plentiful queer sexual encounters in parks and Soviet barracks. In my reading of the novel, I demonstrate how Witkowski interrogates mainstream Polish narratives of moving from oppression to freedom, occupation to autonomy, stagnation to development, as well as narratives of progress tied to capitalism and globalization. Lubiewo challenges these tropes through a mapping of sexual and nostalgic pleasures derived from Polish encounters with Russian imperialism, specifically taking pleasure in the “bad” socialist past, and in a decidedly queer Slavic brotherhood.
Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests, in part, on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment carried out after the 2016 State Duma elections, we find that voters withdraw their support from United Russia candidates who are reputed to have used electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Providing them information about fraud significantly reduces their propensity to support the ruling party. These findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest—as several scholars have argued—but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect elections to be free and fair, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.
This talk argues that the primary driver of turnout under autocracy is civic duty, just as in democracies. Using survey data from Russia, Professor Reuter presents evidence that the duty to vote is strongly felt among many voters, as well as linked with respect for the state and patriotism. Opposition voters, however, are more likely to feel alienated from the state and be less patriotic, giving authoritarian incumbents an inherit mobilization advantage.
Since Yuri Lotman and Vladimir Toporov introduced the concept of the “Petersburg Text” in Russian literature, the idea of “reading” urban space through the lenses of a particular literary corpus has become popular among Russian literary scholars. But St. Petersburg also occupied a special place in the imagination of Russian Jews. As the capital of the Russian Empire, the city had the harshest restriction on Jewish residence, and yet it became a major center of multilingual Jewish culture. In my presentation Professor Krutikov attempts to apply the concept of “Petersburg Text” to the multilingual corpus of Jewish writings about St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Professor Krutikov argues that by exploring the intertextual dynamics of the image of St. Petersburg in the prose and poetry in Russian (by Osip Mandelstam and Lev Lunts), Hebrew (Yehuda Leyb Gordon and Haim Lenski), and Yiddish (by Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch) we can gain new insights into the more general problem of modern multilingual Jewish literature.
Anna Müller discusses her new monograph, If the Walls Could Speak, an intimate account of the lives of female political prisoners in Stalinist Poland. Müller portrays the individuality, the humanity, and ultimately the resistance of a dedicated group of women who were incarcerated for their attempts to save Poland. Using archival documents and extensive interviews she opens up the world of grueling interrogation, torture, show trials, and the boredom of everyday existence as political prisoners tried to breath new meaning into their lives. In Müller’s account, prison was both the centerpiece of Stalinist Poland and the central experience in the biographies of the women she represents, many of whom never fully recovered from their incarceration. This is an untold story that evokes the particularities of the Stalinist past and the gruesome toll it took on some of Poland’s most committed patriots. Anna Müller opens up this period with all of its dedication and fear, desperation and paranoia, while also returning dignity to a category of women who paid the ultimate price for patriotic devotion.
A UW-Madison graduate student panel featuring:
Victoria Sluka (Anthropology) Kramer Gillin (Geography) Piotr Puchalski (History) Zach Rewinski (Slavic) Degi Uvsh (Political Science)
Graduate students from various departments across campus discuss their recent field research, give updates on their research to date, and provide suggestions for any graduate students planning field research in the future.
Being lied to by politicians should feel perennially familiar to all of us, as dishonest politicians and political subterfuge are not new phenomena. Nonetheless, current forms of political dishonesty feel particularly distressing because the words produced by leaders are sometimes believed by followers only because they are spoken from positions of power and frequently repeated. Power and repetition do not make truth, so what are we to do? Drawing from the writings of various Central European thinkers who understand why “speaking truth to power” can be extremely complicated in such contexts, I will argue that Central European experiences of dissenting against political dishonesty can help inform our current existential and political responses to dishonesty. Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Czesław Miłosz, and Franz Kafka, among others, show us that to confront powerful authorities, we must act in nuanced and sometimes paradoxical ways: perhaps it is subversive to act “as if” there might still be transcendent truths that can be reciprocally recognized in diverse human communities; perhaps we can act “as if” the shared rationality of human experience and meaning is actually accessible in contexts of deep alienation; or maybe we can act “as if” history is still ours to shape through embracing a future-oriented historicity capable of shoring us up against the ruins of the past (to evoke T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland). In practice, these ideas might lead to new forms of “solidarity of the shaken” (to evoke Patočka), new samizdat, or new forms of civil society—to name only a few phenomena already showing signs of appearing and reappearing. Such conceptual ideas from Central European thought are rich and varied, open to new embodiment, and still capable of helping us to confront the untruthful pathways of our thoughts, speech, and actions.
The Russian Supreme Court recently declared the Jehovah’s Witnesses to be an “extremist” organization. The April 2017 decision has placed the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the same legal footing as terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. Witness publications can no longer be imported or printed domestically, and the organization’s administrative center outside of St. Petersburg has been shut down and its assets liquidated. The court ruling has also had immediate implications for the more than 170,000 members of this Christian minority community in Russia. With their faith now officially classified as extremist, individual Witnesses have faced increasing harassment as they continue to conduct evangelism among their neighbors. The international organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, has appealed the decision to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, the fate of Witnesses in Russia remains uncertain. This talk reconstructs the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses on Russian soil and what led to this court decision. In doing so, Baran considers the implications of the Witnesses’ ban for the state of religious freedom in Russia today.
From the lecture titled "How Jehovah's Witnesses Became "Extremists": The Strange State of Religious Freedom in Russia."
World War I ended on the western front on November 11, 1918. That same day in Warsaw Joseph Pilsudski proclaimed Poland’s independence. This talk focuses on the short and long term significance of these two intertwined events. In addition, Pienkos discusses the roles of President Wilson and a Polish national army raised from immigrants to the United States--the first and only of its kind since.
Natalia Sats (1903-1993) is the mother of professional theatre for children and youth, that is, theatre by adults for young people. Starting as a 15-year-old in charge of the Children’s Theatre in Moscow shortly after the 1917 Revolution, Sats founded several theatres for young people and remained a major force in the field until her death in 1993. In many ways the life of Sats mirrors Soviet life, through the trials and tribulations of the Revolution, Stalin’s purges, the Thaw, Glasnost and Perestroika, and on through the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. This talk focuses on the circumstances of Natalia Sats’s arrest and exile and her artistic endeavors in camps and in exile in Almaty, painting a picture of a female artist in men’s world who may very well have been the only female artist to live through the entire Soviet period.
When the Russian Constitution was adopted in 1993, many observers were critical of what they saw to be its super-presidential nature. This was a misreading of the actual document, and it also failed to take into account the potential difference between what the document says and how particular individuals interact with it. Some are highly constrained by it and others less so, but this is often less a function of the document itself than of the personality of the person involved and other contingent factors. This is clearly reflected in the different presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin was a weak president whose sparse political resources meant that the Constitution acted as a restraint upon how he could act and contributed to a performance that disappointed many. In contrast, Putin’s greater store of political resources (and luck!) enabled him to be a much more active and effective president. Nevertheless he clearly faces current challenges, some of which are reminiscent of his predecessor. This paper will survey the performance of both presidents and project how Putin might seek to meet those challenges over the coming five years.
One of the most important developments in the study of Russian history in the last decade or so is the “religious turn,” which, among other things, has pushed the study of Russian Orthodoxy beyond the conventions of church, theology, and doctrine toward the study of lived religion. Yet, many of the same scholars who study Orthodoxy as everyday practice have unknowingly become entangled in the very categories they seek to move beyond—that is, church, theology, and doctrine. This talk by Patrick Michelson explores these entanglements and their implications for the ways in which we understand this complex, contingent, and multivalent thing called Russian Orthodoxy.
From the talk "Orthodox Impossible: Russian History and the Limits of Studying Religion."
Commercial entities operating across international borders face a number of legal and cultural hurdles. American companies negotiating with partners in Russia or Ukraine not only need to navigate the laws of those countries, but they are also obliged to follow US commercial law, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Major on-the-ground differences in accepted business practices and commercial transactions represent potential pitfalls for clients working under a dual legal framework. Likewise, businesses in East Europe seek out commercial litigators familiar with US law to protect their interests here. In this talk, Chester discusses the complexities of representing US clients abroad and foreign clients in the US, the practicalities of protecting clients’ legitimate interests amid systemic corruption, and how the FCPA is being enforced in the current political environment.
From the talk "Beyond Policy: The Practical Realities of Russia-Ukraine-US Commercial Transactions and Litigation."
Ideal modern nation states have clearly defined borders and a sedentary population. People without a defined domicile who regularly cross national borders easily put such an order into jeopardy. This talk explores the problem of transhumance in the Soviet South Caucasus in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. Relying on documents of the Transcaucasian state and party institutions, it provides insights into Soviet policies attempting to assert control over this “fluid” part of the population, placing it into the frame of the national state and on track towards a new, socialist economy.
From the lecture, "When Nationalism Meets Soviet Modernization: The 'Liquidation' of the Nomads in the South Caucasus, 1921-1936."
The object of study here is Ukraine, a highly corrupted former Soviet republic. Specifically, Osipian researches the market of writing and defending doctoral dissertations, also known as the dissertations market. He identifies providers of the service, as well as types of services they offer and the prices they charge. Such “dissertations for order” services are accompanied by other services that provide the necessary requirements for a doctorate. University faculty play three distinct roles in this business, including that of customers, ghost-writers, and gatekeepers. Osipian's analysis suggests that fighting the corrupt practice of ghost-writing dissertations with legal means is unlikely to bring any drastic changes, for as long as there is demand for such services, there will be supply.
From the lecture, "Let Me Write a Dissertation for You: Faculty Misconduct, Corruption, and Doctoral Degree Fraud in Ukraine."
When you enter the field to collect data for your dissertation or thesis, what are some basic safety precautions you need to consider? What does it mean to receive informed consent from individuals in a Tajikistani village? This short talk will delve into these and other related topics for graduate students to consider as they prepare to enter the field.
The criminal justice system in Kazakhstan is full of contradictions: Soviet-era accusatorial bias in pre-trial detention and sentencing goes hand in hand with the pro-defendant bias in closing criminal cases. This paradoxical co-existence of seemingly contradictory biases fits well within the informal power map of the criminal justice system. The major reform—reducing prison population to decrease recidivism and minimize international shaming (coupled with more recent drives for closing cases on the basis of reconciliation, the total registration of crimes, and a zero tolerance approach to combating crime)—has been achieved only through changes in the incentive structure of the criminal justice system. The post-Soviet innovation of closing criminal cases of public prosecution based on reconciliation with the victim has proliferated in Kazakhstan because this matched both the incentives of the criminal justice system key actors and the demands of private actors who are involved in criminal proceedings. In contrast, other types of public participation, such as jury trials which implement the right to a fair trial, give teeth to adversarial proceedings, and cultivate judicial independence—requirements of the Constitution of Kazakhstan—have rarely been used because they disrupt existing power relationships within the law-enforcement system.
Friedman’s talk focuses on China’s foreign policy interests in the post-Mao era, with particular attention to future forecasts for China and Central Asia. Will China continue to dominate economically? What are some sources of resistance to this from wider Asia? And what is Russia's response to competing Chinese influence in Central Asia?
"Gluttony discourse" plays an important role in literature. Research on this topic shows food discourse narratives can be used as a tool to describe individuality, spirituality, mood, and the social status of the protagonist. Eating processes, cooking scenes, descriptions of food, and what and how the protagonist eats can all provide source readers with clues to the writer’s intent, as these scenes usually carry pragmatic national associations. However, in translation the difference between cooking habits, kitchen details, and features specific to dishes in the source and target cultures can result in misunderstandings. This issue assumes a serious dimension in translation studies. In this lecture, Dr. Odilova analyses different novels from Uzbek literature with narrative descriptions of food and eating habits. Odilova suggests some solutions to problems of intercultural communication and crossing cultural barriers in translation of fiction from Uzbek into English in the hopes of better defining a more in-depth description of the Uzbek national worldview.
On April 12, 2017, President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed a new program called, in English, “The Third Modernization”, but it is in reality a program for the spiritual revival of Kazakhstan. It is the 3rd stage in the national revival, the first stage being political and the second stage economic. This 3rd stage includes points on national history, sacred geography, switching to the Latin alphabet, and the selection of 100 textbooks to be translated into Kazakh for use in universities in Kazakhstan. Schamiloglu's talk gives an overview of this program, which is now deeply embedded in Kazakhstan’s civic discourse.
The literature on Soviet politics teaches us that the lack of established, democratic procedures for leadership transitions exposed the USSR to succession crises. One might expect, then, that the authoritarian regimes dominating post-communist Central Asia would be prone to disruptive leadership transitions, and yet that has not been the case. In fact, if one leaves aside the tumultuous early years of Tajikistan’s independence, it is only in Kyrgyzstan—which boasts the region’s most competitive political environment—that one finds deeply disruptive succession crises, the latest of which is on full display this year. After a review of the transitions of power in Central Asia (including Azerbaijan) over the last quarter-century, Huskey uses, inter alia, the works of Barbara Geddes on personalism and Henry Hale on patronalism to seek to explain the political transitions paradox.
Russia’s interests in Central Asia are similar to those of China and the United States. Today, all three powers are mostly concerned with security in the region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian troops were withdrawn from Central Asia, with the exception of those in Tajikistan and small forces on the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan borders with China. Both Russia and China were threatened by the spillover of Islamic militancy, terrorism, and arms and drug trafficking from the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security bloc jointly led by China and Russia, now includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, and Pakistan, and is currently engaged in military, security, economic and technological cooperative efforts in Central Asia. In this talk, Maltsev discusses the current state of affairs and the development of international political cooperation in Central Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
On the morning of April 26, 1986, the world witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In his lecture, Serhii Plokhii draws on new sources to lay bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of Communist party rule, the regime’s control of scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else. Today, the risk of another Chernobyl, claims Plokhii, looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world.
In its third year of power, Poland’s far right Law and Justice party enjoys greater public support than ever before. Where other far right parties have alienated large numbers of citizens, has Law and Justice found a way to make “fascism” acceptable again? With policies including family benefits, enforced labor laws, higher wages for the working poor, a government takeover of the courts, state promotion of racism, and fanatic nationalism, Law and Justice harks back to classical notions of “national socialism,” with the modern twist of allowing an opposition to exist (though with restrictions limiting its capacities). Can it work? What are the conditions for its success? Why is the party so difficult to challenge? Can it be replicated by Trump or in western Europe? The far right no longer just threatens to take power. In Poland and Hungary it already has, even while it faces critics even further to the right. Its model, moreover, is applicable elsewhere, including the United States. Poland helps us understand the sources of the far right’s new strength, and provides hints as to its potential weaknesses.
Conflict between states or actors belonging to different identity groups is often accompanied by sharply divergent historical narratives about responsibility for past wrongs. Indeed, shared understanding of past events is often a constituitive element of a social identity, and these diverging narratives of the past can prevent cooperation in the present. In formal models of cooperation such as the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, many strategies that facilitate cooperation depend upon shared beliefs about who is responsible for prior defections. Absent such agreement, these strategies are likely to perpetuate conflict rather than overcome it. In contrast, we examine alternative “blame-free” strategies that can sustain cooperation in the absence of shared beliefs about guilt for past transgressions. We present the results from a computer tournament of several strategies and show how if there are divergent perceptions, “temporary mutual punishment” is the the strategy that tends to prevail, if cooperation is possible at all. We consider this model of cooperation with a case study of the current context of U.S.-Russian relations since the Crimea crisis.
Murav’s new project, Archive of Violence: Neighbors, Creatures, and the Witness Literature of the Russian Civil War, explores the strangeness of neighborly relations, enacted both in violence and reconciliation. The talk examines both kinds of relations in one of the most important witness texts of the time, Itsik Kipnis’s 1926 Yiddish novel Months and Days (Khadoshim un teg).
A panel of UW-Madison experts discusses the nature and impact of Russian influence in U.S. elections. Faculty members from the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA) and the Elections Research Center will speak about Russian hacking efforts leading up to the 2016 presidential election, as well as what we can expect going into the 2018 midterm elections.
Timeline of podcast: 0:00: Introduction. Moderator: Ted Gerber, Director, Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia & Professor of Sociology 3:16: Opening Remarks by Barry Burden, Director, Elections Research Center & Professor of Political Science 6:52: Opening Remarks by Scott Gehlbach, Professor of Political Science 13:49: Opening Remarks by Young Mie Kim, Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication & Political Science 21:53: Opening Remarks by Megan Metzger, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Wisconsin Russia Project 27:55: Dialogue among panelists
The law against ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ (homosexuality) has operated in Russia since 2013. It legitimized homophobia, causing a wave of increased homophobia resulting in hate crimes (bashing, abuse, homicide) against people identified as lesbians, gay men or transgender. My research sought to identify the sources of data for further statistical generalization. As a result, I collected texts of court decisions on criminal law sentences of violence against members of the LGBT community. The generated data shows existing dynamics of hate crime against LGBT in Russia characterized by a dramatic growth in such crimes after the adoption of the ‘propaganda’ law. Further, narratives produced by judges demonstrate their views on different sexualities, perpetrator emotions, and other related themes. The texts of the legal sentences are powerful enunciations of juridico-political discourse supported by institutions of criminal law. Thus, many new venues of analysis exist that could be pursued to further scrutinize relations of power in Russia.
The canon of political theory rarely deals with Eastern European political thought, either as a regional category or in relation to particular thinkers. The East-West duality describes and prescribes a hermeneutic relationship that delineates a form of (subaltern) engagement with the East European other. Popescu discusses the implications of this hermeneutic relationship for how the region is conceived, including its much contested variants, like the Balkans, and how it is reflected on the study of political thought coming from the region. To illustrate the argument, she briefly invokes the example of Vaclav Havel's writings and their reception. Popescu uses this case study as a springboard to propose a reconsideration of both the study of political theory (and its canon) and, more specifically, of the East-West duality as an analytical category.
The effectiveness of property rights -- and the rule of law more broadly -- is often depicted as depending primarily on rulers' "supply" of legal institutions, overlooking the crucial importance of private sector "demand" for law. In this talk, based on his recent book Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and Demand for Law, Gans-Morse unpacks the demand for law in Russia, building on an original enterprise survey as well as extensive interviews with lawyers, firms, and private security agencies. By tracing the evolution of firms' reliance on violence, corruption, and law over the two decades following the Soviet Union's collapse, the book clarifies why firms in various contexts may turn to law for property rights protection, even if legal institutions remain ineffective or corrupt.
This study contributes to the debate about the legacies of the Soviet era in contemporary Russian politics. Critical of treating legacies as causal factors, Sharafutdinova advances a socio-cognitive approach that brings together political leadership, legitimacy concerns and factors that constrain/enable the choices of legitimating narratives that resonate with the masses. She argues that Vladimir Putin has indeed relied on the revival of the central dimensions of the Soviet collective identity evoking a sense of exceptionalism and using conflict as a means of consolidating the Russian domestic public.
Tymofiy Mylovanov is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a PhD from UW-Madison. He is involved with projects such as the Ukraine Decentralization Initiative. In this lecture, he talks about his work with Ukrainian economic organizations and their influence on the Ukrainian government.
International migrants navigate their way in a legal space in the countries of destination, and must comply with various laws and regulations to obtain work authorization, residence registration, and maintain authorized documentary status. Law power affects people in the home countries as well. The presentation builds upon ethnographic research in Tajikistan, and discusses recent changes in Russian migration laws, introduction of re-entry bans, and the meaning of the new travel restrictions for Tajik migrants who maintained physical, social, and symbolic connections with Russia over time.
Collaborating with Maria Petrova and Aleksey Makarin, Ruben Enikolopov tests empirically whether the spread of social media affects participation in political protests. Using the example of political protests in Russia in December 2011 they show that increased penetration of social media led to higher probability of the protests. Additional results suggest that social media has affected protest activity by reducing the costs of coordination, rather than by spreading information critical of the government.
This presentation summarizes Gregg's recent research on Imperial Russian commercial law, finance, and industrial productivity. By the early twentieth century, the Imperial Russian economy still lagged behind Western European levels of development but was growing rapidly. Gregg's larger project seeks to understand how the Imperial government's industrial policies, for example restricting the creation of large corporations, affected the development of the Russian industrial sector. Her results are obtained from two large databases describing individual firms in the Russian Empire: one describes all industrial firms in 1894, 1900, and 1908, and another describes every corporation on an annual basis from 1900 to 1914. With this new data, some classic, stubborn questions can now be answered. For example, results demonstrate that Russia's concession system of incorporation held back industrial development and that, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter, Russian corporations behaved reasonably competitively.
This talk examines the reasons why the First World War's eastern front became the "unknown war," as Winston Churchill called it, by tracing the impact it had on German, Russian, and Polish history. Only by transcending many of the narrow boundaries of national scholarship can the shared importance of the war for the region as a whole be understood.
Wisconsin Russia Project postdoctoral fellow Alexandra Lukina speaks about Russia’s recent demographic trends, focusing on birth and death rates, international migration, and forecasts of Russia’s age-sex structure. A thorough look into the statistics enables the study of fertility rate dynamics and the effects of some pro-family programs. Dynamics of mortality rates and life expectancy at birth are briefly analyzed as well. The talk also examines different aspects of international migration processes, such as migration control measures, migrant transfers (remittances), and “brain drain”. Various population forecasts, including the Federal State Statistics Service forecasts and Lukina's own forecast, are analyzed and compared. Some reasons for Russia’s population decline are discussed.
The exile after the coup in 1948 and the fate of Czechs abroad, who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, enslaved by the Communists, are an integral part of our modern history. However, this phenomenon is still neglected and the general public has only fragmentary information about it. Researchers are still unable to agree on the intensities of individual waves of emigration between 1948-1989. The most likely figure would be probably 250,000 people in total. The estimate of Czechoslovak State Security at the end of 1948 states 8614 refugees. Their first steps in the free world brought these people into the so-called displaced persons camps in Western occupation zones of Germany and Austria or in Italy. The first periodicals were published, the first seeds of political activity were born and later developed by numerous exile groups and entities. Almost seven dozens of newspapers, magazines and newsletters, and nearly one hundred ninety Czechs institutions, including political organizations, parties, academic clubs or think-tanks, operated in the free world after 1948. Despite the promising start and international support, the so called Council of Free Czechoslovakia, meant as the umbrella body for the entire exile, writhed in crisis, fell apart and reunited again, its members were wasting time with endless quarrels and were continuously losing the confidence of the exile public and their donors from the U.S. government. As time passed, the atmosphere in the exile changed, new topics, challenges and leaders raised. Dr. Nekola will discuss all aspects of the Czechoslovak Cold War exile (with a particular focus on the USA) in his contribution. If you would like to reach Dr. Nekola with comments or questions, feel free to reach out to him at marnekola@gmail.com.
Marina Zaloznaya speaks about her new book, published with Cambridge University Press Studies in Law and Society Series in April 2017. Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoing political transition. Instead, it develops a more nuanced approach that appreciates the complexity of corruption economies in non-Western societies, embraces the local meanings and functions of corruption, and recognizes the stability of new post-transitional regimes in Eastern Europe and beyond. This book offers a critical look at the social costs of transparency, develops a blueprint for a 'sociology of corruption', and offers concrete and feasible policy recommendations. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social justice activists.
October 15, 2017 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the “hero of two continents” and a person called “the purest son of liberty” by his friend, Thomas Jefferson. Just who was Kosciuszko and what did he do in his life that deserves to be remembered, written about, and appreciated today – both in his native Poland and in his adopted country, the United States? In his remarks Dr. Pienkos will address these two questions and invite comments from his audience and a conversation about Kosciuszko and what he represents today.
What is the value of a statistical life (VSL) in a dictatorship? We structurally estimate the trade-off between monetary costs and fatality risk in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. Using regional variation in the level of political victims during the Great Terror, we estimate this VSL to be approximately $43,000, 6% of the VSL estimate of US in 1940 and 29% of the modern VSL estimate in India. These findings are the first explicit attempt to measure VSL in a dictatorship and are a novel contribution to the debate on autocracies versus democracies.