CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. An interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems documents a complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements. Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Black Earth, White Bread reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. About the Speaker: Susanne Wengle is Nancy R. Dreux associate professor of Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame, with a Ph.D. from the from University of California Berkeley.

Dissenting opinions are an unusual type of judicial behavior, especially in autocracies. Except for in very rare circumstances, separate opinions do not lead to changes in law or policy, but judges spend their time and resources to author them. In authoritarian regimes, dissents are even less expected: why would judges publicly voice their disagreement with the majority given the higher personal risks of expressing such discontent? Using original data on 629 judgments and 8,857 judicial votes, Yulia Khalikova explains dissenting behavior at the RCC.

Signe Baumane (Latvian-born animator, artist, and film maker) discusses her animated films, particularly 'Rocks in my Pockets' (2014), a film about five Latvian women throughout the twentieth century, which focuses on topics of depression, suicide, marriage, and gender roles in Soviet-occupied and post-Soviet Latvia. Baumane also offers a glance at her work-in-progress animated feature film 'My Love Affair With Marriage,' a fresh look on gender and romantic love, to be released in 2022. [Audio from 'My Love Affair With Marriage' has been removed from this podcast episode, as the film is currently unreleased.]

The introduction of an expansive housing reform in Moscow in 2017–the destruction and replacement of Khrushchev-era five story buildings–reflected a new form of consultative policy processes that demand state-society interaction. Similar policy interactions in democratic systems have led to increase in social capital and pro-social norms. In authoritarian contexts, they are a mechanism to win social support. The findings presented by Dr. Regina Smyth (Indiana University)have important implications for new state initiatives to extend the housing program across the Federation and push urbanization as the central mechanism to win societal support.

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.