CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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.

NOTE: This is a partial recording of a complete panel. The beginning of the panel was not recorded. - Panelists share their experiences volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees in border regions of Poland and Ukraine. This panel features Kari Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna, Head of Operations for Operation SafeDrop of the Make a Difference Foundation and practicing attorney in Washington, D.C.), Anna Tumarkin (University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+), and Dianna Murphy (University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute).

Russians today often remember the “Wild 1990s” as a time of chaos, impoverishment and disorientation. Through the lens of the privileged Writers’ Town, which had been built under Stalin and once been home to Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and Kornei Chukovskii among others, we can see how marketization and the collapse of socialist support systems led to both degradation and gentrification of the dacha community. In this talk, Dr. Kelly Smith will analyze the way in which partial commodification of property and freedom from state monopolies led to what residents perceived as the “ruin” of Peredelkino. About the Speaker: Kelly E. Smith is Professor of Teaching at the School of Foreign Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley and is the author of two books on memory and Russian politics–Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (1996) and Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (2002). Most recently, she published Moscow 1956: A Silenced Spring, a social and political history of a turning point year in Russia. Currently, Dr. Smith is engaged in a new research project on Peredelkino, the “Writers’ Village” created by Stalin.

Dr. Ilya Kliger outlines an approach to the study of “sociotopes” in narrative fiction and beyond. Defining sociotopes as specific configurations of sociality, presupposing and projecting diverse scenarios and normative principles of affiliation and detachment, Professor Kliger takes as his case study the emblematic and consequential moment in the history of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Russia: Belinsky's scandalous “reconciliation with actuality” (primirenie s deistvitel’nost’iu). About the Speaker: Ilya Kliger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He is currently working on a book project on the poetics and politics of Russian Realism.

Dr. Tatyana Gershkovich contests the familiar opposition of Tolstoy the moralist and Nabokov the aesthete. She argues that their divergent stylistic and philosophical trajectories were in fact parallel flights from the same fear: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private, and impossible to share through art. Yet unlike modernist and postmodernist authors for whom such doubt ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that an artwork, when made in the right way, can serve to assuage our skeptical fears. About the Speaker: Tatyana Gershkovich is the William S. Dietrich Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern UP, 2022).