CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The Kazakh famine of the 1930s was one of the great crimes of the Stalinist regime. More than 1.5 million people perished, and the disaster transformed a territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, the size of western Europe. But until recently, the crisis was little known in the West. In her talk, which draws from her recently published book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sarah Cameron will discuss the causes of Kazakh disaster and its consequences for Kazakh society. Along the way, she will also explore the reasons for why the story of the Kazakh famine has been neglected, as well as how this particular episode should reframe our understanding of violence and nation-building under Stalin.

This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and related peoples as inferior and expendable. However, the justifications have their origins in the Global War on Terror and its characterization of ‘terrorists’ as less than human and irrational. Like the ‘savages’ of European colonialism, China’s imagination of Uyghurs as ‘terrorists’ provides a rationalization for carry out destructive harm to a people that is framed as benevolent and in the best interests of those are the victims of that harm.

Artemy Kalinovsky’s Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) investigates the Soviet effort to make the promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the book places the Soviet development of central Asia in a global context. In this talk, Kalinovsky will review the book’s findings and the questions they raised, and discuss his experience with archives, memoirs, and oral history.

The presentation discusses the stylistic, pragmatic, phraseological, lexical-semantic problems of literary translation from Uzbek into English and introduces the online poetic dictionary as a solution to overcome them. Gulnoza Odilova is an Uzbek scholar of Translation Studies. She did her PhD in 2011 and DSc in 2021. She works as an Associate Professor at Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature. She has published more than 200 articles, 2 monographs, 2 textbooks, 1 encyclopedia, and patented a mobile app “Dictionary of gastronomic terms”. As a translator, she has translated Erkin Vohidov’s poems into English and poems of Shakespeare, Byron, Tomas Moore, Robert Burns and Edgar Allan Poe into Uzbek. In 2019 her project “www.poetiklugat.uz” achieved the recognition of the President of Uzbekistan and she was awarded the national medal “Shuhrat” (Glory) for her contribution to the science and literature of Uzbekistan. She is the chairperson of the Gastronomy Tourism Association of Uzbekistan and the coordinator of several projects such as “Gastromahalla”, “Delicious Uzbekistan” and “restoservice.uz”.

“Eurasian Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis: Between Fact and Fear” with Caress Schenk, Associate Professor of Political Science, Nazarbayev University. Description: Amid the economic and health crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, underlying questions of state-society relations loom large in Eurasia: why do people follow or not follow regulations that the government deems healthy for them? Do people trust the scientific underpinnings of state modernization projects? How do states increase public buy-in or compliance with their policies? This talk will outline the origins of the project and preliminary findings from a study that Schenk conducted, analyzing the linkages between state and society as they together navigate a world of uncertainty and crisis. To empirically study questions related to fear-based and scientific-based decision making during times of crisis and uncertainty, Schenk’s project uses a three-pronged approach. First is an investigation of public attitudes towards health behaviors, including the choice to be vaccinated against COVID-19, using interviews, surveys, and social media analysis. Second, she investigates expert opinion and the construction of official data using interviews, media analysis, and various analyses of available empirical data. Third, Schenk analyzes the policies and policymaker perspectives in addressing COVID-19, using data from the CoronaNet Project, interviews, analysis of policymakers’ rhetoric, and the messaging of public awareness campaigns. This project uses these approaches to probe linkages between political rhetoric, policy, and people’s attitudes and behaviors. Bio: Caress Schenk is an Associate Professor of political science at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan) with teaching and research expertise in the politics of immigration and national identity in Eurasia. Her new book, published with the University of Toronto Press, is called Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia. Current and previous research has been funded by the American Councils for International Education, Nazarbayev University and the Fulbright Scholar Program and has been published in Demokratizatisya, Europe-Asia Studies, and Nationalities Papers, and in edited volumes published by Edinburgh University Press and Oxford University Press. Dr. Schenk is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia).

"Technological Solutions for Complex Problems: Emerging Electronic Surveillance Regimes in Eurasian Cities" with Erica Marat, Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University Description: ‘Smart city’ is the new buzzword in cities across Eurasia. Most large urban areas in the post-Soviet space have embraced smart city technologies, and those that have not are in the process of finding smart technology solutions to criminal and disorderly behavior. This use of technologies serves the larger ideal of a society in which even minor crimes are meticulously documented, a habit dating back to the Soviet tradition of criminological research. On the example of Kyiv, Almaty and Bishkek, this presentation will discuss how the pursuit of smart cities in Eurasia strives to attain modernity without the burden of deeper political change. It will review how smart city initiatives rapidly emerging across the region on two dimensions: first, local initiatives to modernize law enforcement and, second, global pressures to innovate fueled both by transnational state-controlled firms promoting their own security products. The spread of surveillance technologies in Eurasia shows how cities and countries aspire to follow global trends for smart city technologies. Bio: Dr. Erica Marat is an Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs of the National Defense University. Dr. Marat’s research focuses on violence, mobilization and security institutions in Eurasia, India, and Mexico. Her book The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press 2018) explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail.

"Calling the Future: What Names in Russian and East European Science Fiction Reveal" with Sibelan Forrester, Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. Description: In Eastern Europe and Russia/the USSR, science fiction has often offered ways to make implicit assertions about the future. In Socialist Realism, representations of the future were constrained by Marxist theory. Science fiction enabled authors to craft more creative plots and adventures; a story could assume “socialism in space” without specifying how that happened. Naming was one narrative technique Soviet science fiction writers used to shape notions of the future. Names with ethnic and national associations, for example, were used to suggest that this future would be international. This talk will present a number of examples from Czech, Polish, and Russian science fiction, bringing in not only nationality but also race and gender, to address questions of how the names could be, or have been, effectively translated into English.  Bio: Sibelan Forrester is the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. She has translated fiction, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, including science fiction from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Olga Larionova, and Davor Slamnig. Her current research includes a study of how the Russian “technical intelligentsia” interacted with science fiction as both authors and readers.

"China and the Uyghurs: Cultural Genocide in the Name of Counterterrorism" with Sean Roberts, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Description: This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and related peoples as inferior and expendable. However, the justifications have their origins in the Global War on Terror and its characterization of ‘terrorists’ as less than human and irrational. Like the ‘savages’ of European colonialism, China’s imagination of Uyghurs as ‘terrorists’ provides a rationalization for carry out destructive harm to a people that is framed as benevolent and in the best interests of those are the victims of that harm. Bio: Sean Roberts is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Dr. Roberts is an anthropologist who has studied the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia for thirty years, writing his dissertation on the Uyghurs of the China-Kazakhstan borderlands while a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. He has published numerous articles in academic journals, edited volumes, and in policy-oriented publications about the Uyghurs, and he is the author of the recently published book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020).

“Queer Budapest: Sex, Society and the Illiberal State, Past and Present” with Anita Kurimay, Associate Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College Description: The presentation discusses the strange and enduring alliance between queer life and a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes throughout the first half of the 20th century, which had been silenced by subsequent political regimes. It details how the legacy of deliberate silencing and erasure of non-normative sexualities from historical records helps to explain more recent emergence of anti-LGBTQ politics in Hungary. Bio: Anita Kurimay is Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College (USA). Her main research interests include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender history, conservativism and the politics of the far right, the history of human rights, and the history of sport. Her book Queer Budapest, 1873 -1961 (Chicago University Press, 2020) examines the history of Hungarian politics of non-normative sexualities from the late 19th century to the present. She has published articles on Hungarian gay and lesbian history in Sexualities and Eastern European Politics and Societies (EEPS).

“Putinism and its Discontents” with Brian Taylor, Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Description: What is Putinism? Taylor argues that Putinism is both a mentality and a system of rule. In this talk, Taylor describes these two aspects of Putinism and examines the current challenges facing Vladimir Putin and Russia. Bio: Brian Taylor is a Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Taylor is the author of three books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.