CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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.