CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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.