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.

Black Like Us: African-American Travelers in Soviet Central Asia - Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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.  
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Russell Zanca is a Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern Illinois University.

Pastoralism in Kazakhstan as Cultural Heritage or Sustainable Culture? - Russell Zanca

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+.)  
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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.

War, Revolution, and the Expansion of Women's Political Citizenship in Finland with Aili Tripp

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.  
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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.

Shifting Rationality: How Identity Decay Led Russia to Invade Ukraine with Mikhail Troitskiy

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 Great Game and Migration of the 1950-60s from China to Kazakhstan with Dr. Ablet Kamalov

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.

The Story Of Memorial And The Country's Failed Transition To The Rule Of Law

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.

Intermarriage And The Friendship Of Peoples

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.

After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre And The Peace That Followed

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.

Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World

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.

Do you suffer from urbanitis? Gender, cybernetics, and environmental concerns in 1970s Estonian SSR

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.

Queer(ing) Art of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Emigration, 1890s—1940s

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/en

About 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.

Russian Independent Media Archive Project

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.

Power, Light and Yet Another Transition

From Moldova to Tajikistan, from Belarus to Uzbekistan: The Formulation and Flow of National Identity from the Late Czarist Times to Today

Riordan 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 Formulation and Flow of National Identity from the Late Czarist Times to Today

A Colonial Muslim History of China and the World

The 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.

A Colonial Muslim History of China and the World

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).

Writing the Twentieth Century in Post-Stalin Russia

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).

Secrets of State

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.”

Russian-Speaking Latvians at the Borders of Global History

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.**

“Reporting from a Lost Country,” a conversation with Elena Kostyuchenko

Solidarity Networking and Ukrainian Mental Maps: 
Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project

About 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.

Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project

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.

Estonia’s Nordic Identity: History and the Present

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

Rivers and Society in Late Soviet Georgia: Nation, the Environment and the Everyday

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.

Mapping Land Use and Habitat Changes in the Caucasus Through Spy Satellite Data

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.

Writing the Soviet History of Philosophy in the 1960s–1980s

[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.

Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution

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.

“If not us, then who?”: Understanding Ukrainian Civilians’ Engagement in the War Effort Since February 2022

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.

Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-hundred-year Quest to Dominate Ukraine

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.

Laurie Anderson, Emigre Culture, the KGB, and the Dream of Connecting: (Soviet) Latvian Artists in (West) Berlin, 1977-1992

Scientific Atheism as an Ideological Discipline in Soviet Ukraine

Lecture by Sergei Antonov (Yale University). 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.

Elite Women on Trial in Post-Reform Russia, 1866-1884

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.

Shadow of the Hegemon: Eastern Europe, Havel, and their Interpreters — Delia Popescu (2.22.18)

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.

CREECA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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