CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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).

Bukovina, a former borderland of the Habsburg empire now divided between Ukraine and Romania, was a place of mutual observation, competition, and conflict between the different states and governments that laid claim to the territory. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the province experienced repeated regime changes – many of which occurred seemingly overnight. This talk explores how the shared challenges of governing Bukovina facilitated mutual influences between regimes that otherwise viewed each other as ideological opposites. About the Speaker: Cristina Florea is an Assistant Professor in Modern European history at Cornell University, researching and teaching the histories of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, imperial entanglements and competition, and the interplay of nationalisms and empires in the region.

Dr. Lucey considers how Russia’s writers and artists popularized images of madams and procuresses as manipulative and greedy figures who tricked and abused the women in their charge. Portrayed as far more heinous than the men who frequented brothels, the madam looms in literature and fine art as a trafficker in human flesh who goes against God and nature in the pursuit of profit. Yet, as historians of imperial Russia have shown, the experience of brothel madams working under the state system of administrative supervision (nadzor) was far more complex than reflected in visual and print culture. Learn how the image of the madam evolved in nineteenth-century Russia and why such figures evoked heated debate about the rights of women and the regulation of commercial sex. About the Speaker: Colleen Lucey, PhD, is assistant professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russian literature and visual culture. She is the author of Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Iryna Januszek is one of the many Ukrainians who found a life in Poland in the post-Soviet era, but Ukraine has never been far from her thoughts. Members of family remained there and participated in the movements to build a new society. She also shares those aspirations which brought Ukrainians to fight for freedom and association with Europe. Now the war has brought millions of Ukrainians to Poland as refugees, and she has been working to help them adjust to life there. She has many insights into how these closely-related but different people are interacting in this crisis. About the Speaker: After obtaining her degree in German and English philology in 2000, Iryna moved to western Poland and was hired as a language teacher. She now owns her own language school, Success Factory. She is now founding a nonprofit to assist young refugees.

How did African American visitors and residents of Soviet Central Asia imagine their Central Asian counterparts? Through an exploration of their writings, we can see how African Americans envisioned a shared historical and racial bond between themselves and Central Asians. About the Speaker: Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Pennsylvania and a Penn Presidential Ph.D. Fellow. Her work examines how the presence of people of color shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and post-Soviet space. She is a regular commentator on Russian, Ukrainian and American affairs in national media outlets.

7.21.22 Henry Misa provides an almost two-thousand-year-long context for the modern climate crisis in Central Eurasia. He gives an overview of climatic and environmental change in Central Eurasia stretching from around 400 to the 1960s, and discusses the ongoing debates within the historiography of climate and society in Central Eurasia with a focus on the medieval period. Amanda Wooden brings together mining histories, political ecology, and modern environmental perceptions in Kyrgyzstan. The history of mining in Kyrgyzstan connects extractivist colonization, post-Soviet neoliberalism, and contemporary national climate change politics. During the aftermath of the Soviet Union disbanding, the Canadian mining company Cameco developed the largest productive gold field in Kyrgyzstan, Kumtor, the only open pit mine in the world removing glacial ice to access ore. Wooden outlines conceptualizations of these mountains and glaciers over time, including today’s renewed socio-nature ideas competing with modernistic views of these lively geological bodies. Amanda E. Wooden is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Henry Misa is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University, Department of History, specializing in premodern Central Asian history.

Dr. Kassenova shares the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment, and the story of the public anti-nuclear movement that led to the closure of the nuclear testing site. She also explains why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure. Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention