CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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.

In this talk Darya Tsymbalyuk presents her recent book Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press, 2025). The book focuses on the impact of the Russian invasion on the more-than-human worlds of Ukraine, discussing how witnessing and experiencing environmental destruction profoundly changed our perceptions of familiar places and spaces such as forests, agricultural fields, and shelterbelts. Combining autoethnography with cultural and media analysis, and environmental data, Tsymbalyuk asks: what does it mean to inhabit a world under attack, what does it mean to live on contaminated land? Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya’s work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. Darya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press 2025). Among her many shorter scholarly publications is a double special issue on the environmental humanities of Ukraine co-edited with Tanya Richardson and forthcoming with East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Her other scholarly texts have been published by Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of International Relations and Development, Narrative Culture, REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, to name a few. Her public-facing writing appeared in BBC Future Planet, openDemocracy, The Funambulist, KAJET, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & 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.

Eugene Finkel, a leading scholar in international affairs and author of 'Intent to Destroy', unpacks the deep historical roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. He explores how Russian nationalism has long sought to dominate Ukraine, underpinning centuries of conflict. Finkel highlights Ukraine's transformation as it overcomes internal divisions, fostering a robust civic nationalism that fuels resistance today. He contrasts this with past narratives of violence and oppression, revealing how history shapes the current struggle for identity and sovereignty.

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.