CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Lecture with Professor Kenneth J. Yin. First migrating from northwest China to Russian Central Asia after the suppression of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) under the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, the Dungan people boast a rich oral tradition, which served as an important breeding ground for the development of Dungan written literature in the Soviet period. This presentation discusses the findings of an in-depth structural and comparative analysis of Dungan folk narratives conducted in the second half of the twentieth century by a team of leading Soviet scholars comprising Russian sinologist Boris Riftin, Dungan writer and literary scholar Makhmud Khasanov, and Dungan historian Il′ias Iusupov. Primarily based on Dungan oral narratives recorded between 1951 and 1974 in the Soviet Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the study indicates that Dungan folk narratives are deeply rooted in Chinese storytelling traditions but also exhibit substantial Middle Eastern, East Asian, and Central Asian influence. Detailed findings of this study and the full texts of seventy-eight folk stories are available for the first time in an annotated English version by Kenneth J. Yin, under the title 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘬𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘓𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 (2021), volume 16 in the Peter Lang International Folkloristics series. About the speaker: Kenneth J. Yin teaches modern languages, literatures, and linguistics at the City University of New York. His scholarly work centers on the Dungan literature and culture of Central Asia, as well as the Tungus literatures and cultures of North Asia—namely Siberia and the Russian Far East—with a focus on Udege, Nanai, and Evenk. A graduate of Cornell University and Georgetown University, he has received fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the City University of New York. His book publications include 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘬𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘓𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 (Peter Lang, 2021) and 𝘔𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵: 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘌𝘵𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘭𝘪 𝘋𝘻𝘩𝘰𝘯 (Peter Lang, 2023).

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 talk focuses on the socio-economic consequences of the war and the factors contributing to the resilience of the Ukrainian people. Russia’s war against Ukraine has been ongoing for many years, and despite the challenges, the Ukrainian people have shown remarkable resilience in the face of adversity. The talk will highlight the factors that have contributed to the resilience. These include a strong sense of national identity, a deep-rooted commitment to democracy, and a successful decentralization reform. - About the Speaker: Tymofii Brik is Rector at the Kyiv School of Economics and national coordinator of the European Social Survey. He is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics (2022-24) and the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology and the Roberta Buffett Institute (2022-23). Brik received his PhD at Carlos III of Madrid, MSc at Utrecht University, and an MSc at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University. In 2018 and 2019-2020, Brik was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and New York University respectively. Beyond academia, he is a member of PONARS and VoxUkraine, board member at CEDOS, advisory board member at Gradus Research, and Executive team member at SITADHub . He also co-founded a social restaurant Urban Space 500 in Kyiv. His paper “When church competition matters?” won the N.Panina award in 2018 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine.

The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the long eighteenth century. Though the Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, Ivanov’s recent book argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observers called a religious revolution. Embedded with lively portrayals of historical actors and vivid descriptions of political details, A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1836 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020; Paperback Edition, 2023) is the first large-scale effort to fully identify exactly how Western thought influenced the Russian Church. These new ideas played a foundational role in the emergence of the country as a modernizing empire and the rise of the Church hierarchy as a forward-looking agency of institutional and societal transformation. Ivanov addresses this important debate in the scholarship on European history, firmly placing Orthodoxy within the much wider European and global continuum of religious change. - Andrey Ivanov is an Associate Professor of History at UW-Platteville.

What happens when women’s political quotas are implemented in non-democracies? Valeria Umanets focuses on understanding the political and social meaning and manipulation of gender in the Soviet Union, which held informal women’s political quotas for almost 75 years. Specifically, this talk focuses on the political engagement of women in the Soviet legislative bodies and local councils and their consequences today. Valeria Umanets argues that the effects of women’s quotas should be considered through the lens of how authoritarian states see and control representation and uncertainty. - About the Speaker: Valeria Umanets is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include women’s representation and political participation, political parties, post-Communist states, and Russian politics.

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. - 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.

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+.) - 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.

The literature of the war against Ukraine testified to the profound changes that took place in the nature of Ukrainian artistic expression: from the loss of the very ability to speak, through the development of a new poetics of the voice and body, through literalism as the restoration of the connection between the word and reality and the rejection of metaphor in favor of metonymy – to the formation of a new idea of literature. Understood as a sphere of imagination and at the same time as a mechanism of representation, Ukrainian literature has been re-thinking its attitudes around reality and also its use for constructing of the ‘common places’ of anthropological and emotional experience. - Olena Haleta is a professor of literary theory and comparative literature at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and professor of cultural anthropology at Ukrainian Catholic University (Ukraine). She is an author, co-author, and co-editor of eight books on the literary history of modern Ukraine.

Russia's war against Ukraine has brought about a radical restructuring of the Russian political economy, placing transformative ideology and outright coercion firmly at the heart of power. Despite this, the war and its consequences have produced remarkably little resistance. This discussion delves beyond the dynamics of coercion and ideology, to investigate how the war has interacted with Russians' "vernacular knowledge" about power and powerlessness. This knowledge has thus far remained resilient to the cognitive challenges posed by the war, underpinning a social resilience that both enables the state's internal and external aggression, and limits it. - Sam Greene is professor in Russian politics at King’s College London. His most recent book, co-authored with Graeme Robertson, is Putin v the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale University Press 2019). Alongside his work at King’s, Sam is an Associate Fellow of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a Trustee of Pushkin House, and Editor-in-Chief of Russian Politics & Law.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a ‘civil war’ in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. Jesse Driscoll explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance (Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decisionmakers misunderstood the attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and also failed to anticipate that their intervention would transform Ukraine into a more cohesively ‘Ukrainian’ polity. - About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015) and Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021)