CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Debra Javeline (Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame) will present on her book, After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed (Oxford University Press, 2023). Free and open to the public. About the lecture: Starting on September 1, 2004, and ending 53 hours later, Russia experienced its most appalling act of terrorism in history, the seizure of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Approximately 1,200 children, parents, and teachers were taken hostage, and over 330 —nearly one of every hundred Beslan residents— were killed, hundreds more seriously wounded, and all severely traumatized. After Violence is the first book to analyze the aftermath of such large-scale violence with evidence from almost all direct victims. It explores the motivations behind individual responses to violence. When does violence fuel greater acceptance of retaliatory violence, and when does violence fuel nonviolent participation in politics? The mass hostage taking was widely predicted to provoke a spiral of retaliatory ethnic violence in the North Caucasus, where the act of terror was embedded in a larger context of ongoing conflict between Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens. Politicians, journalists, victims, and other local residents asserted that vengeance would come. Instead, the hostage taking triggered unprecedented peaceful political activism on a scale seen nowhere else in Russia. Beslan activists challenged authorities, endured official harassment, and won a historic victory against the Russian state in the European Court of Human Rights. After Violence provides insights into this unexpected but preferable outcome. Using systematic surveys of 1,098 victims (82%) and 2,043 nearby residents, in-depth focus groups, journalistic accounts, investigative reports, NGO reports, and prior scholarly research, After Violence offers novel findings about the influence of anger, prejudice, alienation, efficacy, and other variables on post-violence behavior. About the speaker: Debra Javeline is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Russian and East European Studies Program, and Environmental Change Initiative. Her research interests include mass political behavior, survey research, Russian politics, sustainability, environmental politics, and climate change. She focuses on the decisions of ordinary citizens, whether in response to violence or climate impacts, and she is currently exploring coastal homeowner motivations to take action to reduce their risk from rising seas, hurricanes, and other hazards.

Historian Adrienne Edgar (Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara) will present on her recent book, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022). Free and open to the public. About the lecture: In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single “Soviet people.” Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized beginning in the 1960s, and in this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply “Soviet.” Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the “official” nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity; that they were unable to speak “their own” native language; and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Edgar’s conclusions are based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers. About the speaker: Adrienne Edgar is professor of modern Russian and Central Asian history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Oberlin College, an M.A. in international affairs and Middle East studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in history from U.C. Berkeley. Adrienne has received research grants and fellowships from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has held post-doctoral and visiting scholar appointments at Harvard University, McGill University, the Alexander von Humboldt University (Berlin), and the University of Heidelberg. Adrienne’s first book, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. She co-edited, with Benjamin Frommer, the volume Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). She has published a number of articles on ethnicity, gender, and intermarriage in the Soviet Union and Central Asia in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Kritika, Ab Imperio, and Central Asian Survey; one of these won the annual article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Adrienne’s second monograph, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022) was co-winner of the 2023 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Ethnicity and Nationalism Studies.

Lecture with Grigory Vaypan. Grigory traces the root causes of Russia’s war against Ukraine to the failure of the post-Soviet transitional justice project in the early 1990s. When the Soviet totalitarian regime collapsed, very little was done to confront its past crimes. Impunity for Soviet-era atrocities set the ground for persecution and abuse of power to reproduce themselves in contemporary Russia’s domestic and foreign policies. The story of Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group and co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, reflects that trajectory, from the moment it emerged as a grassroots movement for memory and accountability in 1987 until its forced dissolution by the Russian government in 2022. About the speaker: Dr. Grigory Vaypan is a Russian human rights lawyer and scholar. He is a Senior Lawyer at Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group and laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Currently, he is also a Democracy Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. He is a former Galina Starovoitova Fellow on Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. Grigory holds his first law degree from Moscow State University, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in International Law from Saint Petersburg State University. At Memorial, Grigory carries out litigation, legal research and legal advocacy on transitional justice in Russia. His work, including the high-profile “children of the Gulag” case, has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and other leading international media. Grigory has more than a decade of strategic litigation experience before the Constitutional Court of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights. He is the recipient of the 2022 Moscow Helsinki Group Human Rights Award for defending human rights in court. Most recently, Grigory has been involved in the legal defense of Russian citizens prosecuted for protesting against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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.