CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Dmitriy Vorobyev analyzes a unique dataset on personal characteristics of Russian regional governors serving between 2006 and 2019. Many of these governors have professional or educational military backgrounds. He combines the data with a panel of detailed regional budgets over the same period to identify any relationships between governors’ backgrounds and their spending preferences, and finds that governors with military backgrounds tend to distribute regional budgets very differently from those with civilian backgrounds, exhibiting stronger preferences towards pro-social expenditures and weaker preferences towards spending on the economy and infrastructure. This lecture will discuss several potential explanations for these findings.

"Ethnic and Religious Identities in Russian Penal Institutions: A Case Study of Uzbek Transnational Prisoners" discusses how the arrival of a large number of transnational Muslim prisoners shapes the traditional hierarchies and power relations in Russian penal institutions. He will argue that the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian penal institutions into a legally plural environment where it is possible to glean the patterns of the coexistence and clash between various formal rules and informal sub-cultures: (a) colony regime, that is official regulations and everyday management practices at the institutional level, (b) traditional prison sub-culture, so-called the thieves’ law, (c) Muslim sub-culture based on Sharia law, and (d) sub-cultures based on ethnic solidarity norms. In doing so, this article challenges the widely held view among Russian criminologists and Western historians that penal institutions in Russia have traditionally been ethnically – (racially) and religiously- blind. The presentation will be based on Professor Urinboyev's extended ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, Russia, and Fergana, Uzbekistan, conducted between January 2014 and September 2020. Video material has been removed from the recording to respect the privacy of those serving sentences in Russian prisons.

In December of this year, ten years will have passed since the death of the Czech writer, dissident, and statesman Václav Havel. This roundtable discusses Havelian concepts including “truth” (pravda), “power” (moc), “civil society” (občanská společnost), “appeal” (apel/výzva), “indifference” (lhostejnost), “focus/center” (ohnisko), “theater” (divadlo), “prison” (vězení), and “responsibility” (odpovědnost). Roundtable participants are noted scholars of Havel from North America and Europe: Aspen Brinton, Virginia Commonwealth University; David S. Danaher, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Barbara Day, independent scholar based in Prague; Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College; Delia Popescu, Le Moyne College; Jiří Přibáň, Cardiff University; Kieran Williams, Drake University.

In 1887, a Jewish eye doctor named L.L. Zamenhof launched his international auxiliary language “Esperanto” from the western borderlands of a tsarist empire in crisis. Brigid O’Keeffe traces the history of Esperanto as a utopian vision rooted in late imperial Russian culture through to its rise as a vibrant global movement that inspired women and men around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Esperanto and Esperantists have long been dismissed to the margins and footnotes of history, O’Keeffe proposes that revolutionary Russia’s Esperantists were exemplars of their era. Their triumphs, frustrations, and tragedies illuminate how and why the Soviet Union ultimately rejected an international language for the global proletariat and chose instead to elevate Russian – “the language of Lenin” – as the language of socialist internationalism.

Dr. Molly Blasing presents material from her recent book, Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021). She considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day, using examples of photo-poetic writing by Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, and other 20th and 21st century poets. Listen to learn about how the camera transformed the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities available for poetic writing in Russian.

As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. Stefan Link reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order.

The war conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014 and it is still far from its resolution. One of the most debated questions during all those years was the following: Who joined anti-Kyiv armed groups during the first years of the Donbass war, and why? Some experts claimed that Russian soldiers and paid volunteers constituted the majority of irregular anti-Kyiv forces. Others that observe the civil war find that it was Donbass locals who joined armed groups in the first place. In this presentation, based on interviews with combatants and observations collected in 2016-2017 in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Donetsk and Luhansk, Natalia Savelyeva will discuss mobilization trajectories of anti-Kyiv combatants, different factors which impacted their decision to join the fight, and the role of ideology in the Donbass war.

Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, this talk investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process – how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within – promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.

Darren Thies will share perspectives and advice on the career of a diplomat, learning foreign languages (particularly Persian dialects), current U.S. policies in Central Asia, and the human geography of the region. Darren can offer insights and answer questions on the cultures of Central Asia, traveling in the region, perceptions of Americans, how language is used in practice, and how the region has developed over the past decade. Darren’s linguistic expertise centers around the three main Persian dialects (Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki), and can offer specific advice to learners of these languages.

What does intersectionality as praxis look like in Kyrgyzstan? Grassroots feminist, LGBTQ and transfeminist groups in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan are creating a unique space for themselves through various community art projects. The 2019 Feminnale Art Exhibit was one such meticulously curated space that provided possibilities for “subaltern voices to speak” (Spivak 1988) on the everyday experiences of women in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the region. By centering the “everyday” experiences of women, this feminist art project challenged the monolithic and homogenized categories of “woman” imposed by both the West and Russia on (post)socialist Central Asia, opening up further insights on race, gender, and sexuality in the socialist past and (post)socialist future.