CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The law against ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ (homosexuality) has operated in Russia since 2013. It legitimized homophobia, causing a wave of increased homophobia resulting in hate crimes (bashing, abuse, homicide) against people identified as lesbians, gay men or transgender. My research sought to identify the sources of data for further statistical generalization. As a result, I collected texts of court decisions on criminal law sentences of violence against members of the LGBT community. The generated data shows existing dynamics of hate crime against LGBT in Russia characterized by a dramatic growth in such crimes after the adoption of the ‘propaganda’ law. Further, narratives produced by judges demonstrate their views on different sexualities, perpetrator emotions, and other related themes. The texts of the legal sentences are powerful enunciations of juridico-political discourse supported by institutions of criminal law. Thus, many new venues of analysis exist that could be pursued to further scrutinize relations of power in Russia.

The canon of political theory rarely deals with Eastern European political thought, either as a regional category or in relation to particular thinkers. The East-West duality describes and prescribes a hermeneutic relationship that delineates a form of (subaltern) engagement with the East European other. Popescu discusses the implications of this hermeneutic relationship for how the region is conceived, including its much contested variants, like the Balkans, and how it is reflected on the study of political thought coming from the region. To illustrate the argument, she briefly invokes the example of Vaclav Havel's writings and their reception. Popescu uses this case study as a springboard to propose a reconsideration of both the study of political theory (and its canon) and, more specifically, of the East-West duality as an analytical category.

The effectiveness of property rights -- and the rule of law more broadly -- is often depicted as depending primarily on rulers' "supply" of legal institutions, overlooking the crucial importance of private sector "demand" for law. In this talk, based on his recent book Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and Demand for Law, Gans-Morse unpacks the demand for law in Russia, building on an original enterprise survey as well as extensive interviews with lawyers, firms, and private security agencies. By tracing the evolution of firms' reliance on violence, corruption, and law over the two decades following the Soviet Union's collapse, the book clarifies why firms in various contexts may turn to law for property rights protection, even if legal institutions remain ineffective or corrupt.

This study contributes to the debate about the legacies of the Soviet era in contemporary Russian politics. Critical of treating legacies as causal factors, Sharafutdinova advances a socio-cognitive approach that brings together political leadership, legitimacy concerns and factors that constrain/enable the choices of legitimating narratives that resonate with the masses. She argues that Vladimir Putin has indeed relied on the revival of the central dimensions of the Soviet collective identity evoking a sense of exceptionalism and using conflict as a means of consolidating the Russian domestic public.

Tymofiy Mylovanov is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a PhD from UW-Madison. He is involved with projects such as the Ukraine Decentralization Initiative. In this lecture, he talks about his work with Ukrainian economic organizations and their influence on the Ukrainian government.

International migrants navigate their way in a legal space in the countries of destination, and must comply with various laws and regulations to obtain work authorization, residence registration, and maintain authorized documentary status. Law power affects people in the home countries as well. The presentation builds upon ethnographic research in Tajikistan, and discusses recent changes in Russian migration laws, introduction of re-entry bans, and the meaning of the new travel restrictions for Tajik migrants who maintained physical, social, and symbolic connections with Russia over time.

Collaborating with Maria Petrova and Aleksey Makarin, Ruben Enikolopov tests empirically whether the spread of social media affects participation in political protests. Using the example of political protests in Russia in December 2011 they show that increased penetration of social media led to higher probability of the protests. Additional results suggest that social media has affected protest activity by reducing the costs of coordination, rather than by spreading information critical of the government.

This presentation summarizes Gregg's recent research on Imperial Russian commercial law, finance, and industrial productivity. By the early twentieth century, the Imperial Russian economy still lagged behind Western European levels of development but was growing rapidly. Gregg's larger project seeks to understand how the Imperial government's industrial policies, for example restricting the creation of large corporations, affected the development of the Russian industrial sector. Her results are obtained from two large databases describing individual firms in the Russian Empire: one describes all industrial firms in 1894, 1900, and 1908, and another describes every corporation on an annual basis from 1900 to 1914. With this new data, some classic, stubborn questions can now be answered. For example, results demonstrate that Russia's concession system of incorporation held back industrial development and that, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter, Russian corporations behaved reasonably competitively.

This talk examines the reasons why the First World War's eastern front became the "unknown war," as Winston Churchill called it, by tracing the impact it had on German, Russian, and Polish history. Only by transcending many of the narrow boundaries of national scholarship can the shared importance of the war for the region as a whole be understood.

Wisconsin Russia Project postdoctoral fellow Alexandra Lukina speaks about Russia’s recent demographic trends, focusing on birth and death rates, international migration, and forecasts of Russia’s age-sex structure. A thorough look into the statistics enables the study of fertility rate dynamics and the effects of some pro-family programs. Dynamics of mortality rates and life expectancy at birth are briefly analyzed as well. The talk also examines different aspects of international migration processes, such as migration control measures, migrant transfers (remittances), and “brain drain”. Various population forecasts, including the Federal State Statistics Service forecasts and Lukina's own forecast, are analyzed and compared. Some reasons for Russia’s population decline are discussed.