CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

When you enter to field to collect data for your dissertation or thesis, what are some basic safety precautions you need to consider? What does it mean to receive informed consent from individuals in a Tajikistani village? This short talk will delve into these and other related topics for you to consider as you prepare to enter the field. Christopher Whitsel has been involved with education in Central Asia since 1999, including teaching English in Uzbekistan, conducting fieldwork in Tajikistan, and most recently working at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. He has published several articles addressing education and inequality of access, including trends in inequality in the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods, gender differences, as other social inequalities in education. More specifically, his work highlights barriers that families face in sending their children to school and the ways that community differences constrain their decisions. In addition to his academic endeavors, Dr. Whitsel has worked with international organizations like UNICEF-Tajikistan and the Open Society Foundation on projects about education, as well as social aspects of poverty in Tajikistan.

China’s on-going policies of transforming Uyghurs have been increasing more rapidly than ever before. In this talk, Mr. Aksu discusses the main policies that the Chinese government is enforcing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; how did state policies influence the Uyghur people, and how different are these policies from previous ones. He explores these transforming policies by providing both quantitative and qualitative examples in terms of labor transfer, language change, and the “Re-education” Camps.

Patronage is often described as the ‘glue’ that binds Central Asian patronal presidents and elites, creating strong material incentives to uphold the political status quo. With one hand, the president rewards loyal elites, giving them access to ‘the fruits of office’ and other valued resources; with the other, the president punishes wayward elites, taking away whatever benefits they have accumulated and closing off access to future ones. Yet, material conceptions of patronage-based rule are incomplete without consideration of norms–the rules and expectations governing ‘who gets what, how’ and how much. As a routinized practice, patronage entails a ‘mutual promise-keeping’: just as elites agree to comport themselves according to expectations, the president promises to do the same, enforcing patronage norms as needed. Presidential legitimacy depends in large part on how well he is able to satisfy the demands of those closest to him (patronage norm #1: differential access) while also meeting his obligations to the broader set of elites whose support he depends upon to stay in power (patronage norm #2: fair play). To do otherwise not only risks alienating a broad swath of elites, but is also likely to make the president appear weak and ineffective, a ruler who is controlled by his inner circle rather than in control of it. The cases of President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan under President Karimov illustrate the argument.

The siege of Leningrad was one of the most tragic episodes of World War II. Blockaded for almost three years, the city suffered staggering losses; perhaps as many as one million civilians died, primarily of starvation. During the war, the Soviet state covered up the extent of the losses and propagated the story of Leningrad as a “hero city.” In the presentation, I seek to explain how and why this heroic story outlasted the state that promoted it. Drawing on a variety of commemorative projects and memoirs, I show the ways in which personal memories underpinned the “official” narrative of Leningrad as a “hero city” and how the official narrative in turn offered a resource for survivors attempting to cope with and make sense of painful memories. The case of Leningrad illustrates how difficult it can be to separate the political and personal impacts of war. Recognizing the personal importance, if not internalization, of shared, ostensibly official narratives helps to explain why in contemporary Russia it has been so difficult to decouple ideology, politics, and memory.

The lecture focuses on the structure of the legal profession, the lack of professional filters, and the priority of organizational, but not professional, rules and ethics norms. The problems of a non-organized legal market and the possibility to practice law in Russian courts with neither a professional license nor a formal legal education are presented together with the current project of legal market reformation launched by the Ministry of Justice.

In the nearly two decades between the first transatlantic satellite television broadcast demonstration in 1962 and the rise of direct broadcast satellite service after 1980, the US and USSR developed two rival, intergovernmental satellite communications networks, the US-led INTELSAT and the Soviet-led Intersputnik. Yet this apparently typical story of Cold War competition and division conceals a much messier reality of interconnection, mutual influence, and shared anxieties that helped shape the future of both satellite communications and international cooperation in space from the early 1970s onward. Drawing on US and Soviet diplomatic and technical archives, interviews, and marketing and training materials, this talk explores what the history of communications satellite infrastructure can tell us about the Cold War and of the US-Soviet “space race.”

This lecture examines Michał Witkowski’s 2005 critically acclaimed novel Lubiewo (Lovetown). Witkowski’s novel builds an ethnography of a lost era, permeated with nostalgia for socialist Poland and for the seemingly plentiful queer sexual encounters in parks and Soviet barracks. In my reading of the novel, I demonstrate how Witkowski interrogates mainstream Polish narratives of moving from oppression to freedom, occupation to autonomy, stagnation to development, as well as narratives of progress tied to capitalism and globalization. Lubiewo challenges these tropes through a mapping of sexual and nostalgic pleasures derived from Polish encounters with Russian imperialism, specifically taking pleasure in the “bad” socialist past, and in a decidedly queer Slavic brotherhood.

Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests, in part, on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment carried out after the 2016 State Duma elections, we find that voters withdraw their support from United Russia candidates who are reputed to have used electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Providing them information about fraud significantly reduces their propensity to support the ruling party. These findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest—as several scholars have argued—but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect elections to be free and fair, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.

This talk argues that the primary driver of turnout under autocracy is civic duty, just as in democracies. Using survey data from Russia, Professor Reuter presents evidence that the duty to vote is strongly felt among many voters, as well as linked with respect for the state and patriotism. Opposition voters, however, are more likely to feel alienated from the state and be less patriotic, giving authoritarian incumbents an inherit mobilization advantage.

Since Yuri Lotman and Vladimir Toporov introduced the concept of the “Petersburg Text” in Russian literature, the idea of “reading” urban space through the lenses of a particular literary corpus has become popular among Russian literary scholars. But St. Petersburg also occupied a special place in the imagination of Russian Jews. As the capital of the Russian Empire, the city had the harshest restriction on Jewish residence, and yet it became a major center of multilingual Jewish culture. In my presentation Professor Krutikov attempts to apply the concept of “Petersburg Text” to the multilingual corpus of Jewish writings about St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Professor Krutikov argues that by exploring the intertextual dynamics of the image of St. Petersburg in the prose and poetry in Russian (by Osip Mandelstam and Lev Lunts), Hebrew (Yehuda Leyb Gordon and Haim Lenski), and Yiddish (by Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch) we can gain new insights into the more general problem of modern multilingual Jewish literature.