CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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)

How can the Russian economy, moving from one crisis to another one, avoid significant hikes in unemployment? How does human capital evolve when workers’ wages peak so early and then decline so steeply? How does a country so rich in human capital exhibit such low productivity? Vladimir Gimpelson suggests some explanations and proposes how examining them can help in understanding past, present and future of the Russian economic performance. - Vladimir Gimpelson is Professor of Practice in Russian Studies in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, UW-Madison.

Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine reverberates beyond Ukraine in a major way. The international order and law are blatantly violated. Energy corridors have been affected and food supply chains have been disrupted around the world. The very notion of the international community and its ability to react to aggression is being tested. Volodymyr Dubovyk discusses how Russia's war in Ukraine puts the future of the EU as a foreign policy actor and of NATO as a major security player at stake. - Volodymyr Dubovyk is an Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Director, Center for International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). Currently he is a Visiting Professor at Tufts University.

Humans have harnessed and selectively bred livestock in Kazakhstan for over 5,000 years. This lecture discusses the history and current practices of pastoralism in Kazakhstan, exploring the contemporary interaction shared among people, animals, and ecosystems and the advantages of incorporating ancient lifeways among those who herd livestock in Kazakhstan today. Other topics include the necessity to “re-wild” environments and to expand the decision-making capacity of smallholders, as climate change causes radical reassessments of everyday planning and actions. - Russell Zanca is a Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern Illinois University.

Emerged from several courses taught by UW-Madison faculty this semester focusing on Ukraine, the panel addresses questions submitted by the students in these courses relating to the histories and cultures in the region, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. - SPEAKERS: Oksana Stoychuk (German, Nordic, and Slavic+), Sara Karpukhin (German, Nordic, and Slavic+), and Yoshiko M. Herrera (Political Science)

The story of Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. What can we learn about the values of this international organization from Russia’s participation in it? Was Russia’s membership “worth it”? Any attempted answer must produce more questions: from which perspective – Russia’s, the Council’s, other Member States’ – should the effects of Russian membership be evaluated? How did the Council of Europe change Russia (if Russia was, indeed, changed) and how did Russia change the Council of Europe? This lecture examines the beginning of this story to identify the details in Russia’s drive for membership that may have planted seeds for its later expulsion. - About the Speaker: Jeffrey Kahn is the University Distinguished Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University.

with Ted Gerber (UW-Madison Professor of Sociology) - After Russia recovered from the economic woes of the 1990s, its government sought to maintain and expand its influence over former Soviet republics of Central Asia by opening the doors to large numbers of labor migrants from them. However, many accounts of the experiences of Central Asian labor migrants in Russia during the 2010s emphasize their exploitation and mistreatment at the hands of officials, police, employers, and the general population. Indeed, cruel, demeaning, and racist treatment of Central Asian immigrants testifies to the type of imperial mentality on the part of Russia’s state and society criticized by the movement to “de-colonize” research about Russia. However, research the speaker conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2016 and 2017, including focus groups and a survey in Bishkek of Kyrgyzstani migrants who had recently returned from Russia, suggests that they had a range of experiences, positive as well as negative. If anything, these experiences were linked to more positive than negative assessments of Russia’s institutions and foreign policy, which appears to reinforce, rather than undermine, Russia’s imperial objectives in its geopolitical conflict with the United States. Apart from calling for caution in analyses of how Russia’s imperial legacy is perceived outside of Europe, the findings suggest that migration scholars should devote more attention to studying “geopolitical remittances”–that is, how experiences in a host society can advance or impede its efforts to project soft power abroad.

Dr. Fijalkowski explores the relationship between law and visual culture by looking at photographs of individuals (a dissident, a judge, and a prosecutor who were involved in high-profile trials during the Stalinist period. An image can hide and expose questions of legitimation and authority pertaining to Stalinist rule and how we view defendants, judges, prosecutors, and justice. Visualising law requires extra-legal sources and analysis to reveal the nuances of a question that has been well researched but in which there is still much to discover about key players and events, as well as a better recognition of legal biographies that make for a richer history about law under Communism. - About the Speaker: Dr Agata Fijalkowski (Leeds Beckett University) is in the process of completing Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial, for GlassHouse Books (Routledge). The monograph considers photographs of trials from the period 1944-1957 in Albania, East Germany, and Poland.