CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Anna Müller discusses her new monograph, If the Walls Could Speak, an intimate account of the lives of female political prisoners in Stalinist Poland. Müller portrays the individuality, the humanity, and ultimately the resistance of a dedicated group of women who were incarcerated for their attempts to save Poland. Using archival documents and extensive interviews she opens up the world of grueling interrogation, torture, show trials, and the boredom of everyday existence as political prisoners tried to breath new meaning into their lives. In Müller’s account, prison was both the centerpiece of Stalinist Poland and the central experience in the biographies of the women she represents, many of whom never fully recovered from their incarceration. This is an untold story that evokes the particularities of the Stalinist past and the gruesome toll it took on some of Poland’s most committed patriots. Anna Müller opens up this period with all of its dedication and fear, desperation and paranoia, while also returning dignity to a category of women who paid the ultimate price for patriotic devotion.

A UW-Madison graduate student panel featuring: Victoria Sluka (Anthropology) Kramer Gillin (Geography) Piotr Puchalski (History) Zach Rewinski (Slavic) Degi Uvsh (Political Science) Graduate students from various departments across campus discuss their recent field research, give updates on their research to date, and provide suggestions for any graduate students planning field research in the future.

Being lied to by politicians should feel perennially familiar to all of us, as dishonest politicians and political subterfuge are not new phenomena. Nonetheless, current forms of political dishonesty feel particularly distressing because the words produced by leaders are sometimes believed by followers only because they are spoken from positions of power and frequently repeated. Power and repetition do not make truth, so what are we to do? Drawing from the writings of various Central European thinkers who understand why “speaking truth to power” can be extremely complicated in such contexts, I will argue that Central European experiences of dissenting against political dishonesty can help inform our current existential and political responses to dishonesty. Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Czesław Miłosz, and Franz Kafka, among others, show us that to confront powerful authorities, we must act in nuanced and sometimes paradoxical ways: perhaps it is subversive to act “as if” there might still be transcendent truths that can be reciprocally recognized in diverse human communities; perhaps we can act “as if” the shared rationality of human experience and meaning is actually accessible in contexts of deep alienation; or maybe we can act “as if” history is still ours to shape through embracing a future-oriented historicity capable of shoring us up against the ruins of the past (to evoke T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland). In practice, these ideas might lead to new forms of “solidarity of the shaken” (to evoke Patočka), new samizdat, or new forms of civil society—to name only a few phenomena already showing signs of appearing and reappearing. Such conceptual ideas from Central European thought are rich and varied, open to new embodiment, and still capable of helping us to confront the untruthful pathways of our thoughts, speech, and actions.

The Russian Supreme Court recently declared the Jehovah’s Witnesses to be an “extremist” organization. The April 2017 decision has placed the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the same legal footing as terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. Witness publications can no longer be imported or printed domestically, and the organization’s administrative center outside of St. Petersburg has been shut down and its assets liquidated. The court ruling has also had immediate implications for the more than 170,000 members of this Christian minority community in Russia. With their faith now officially classified as extremist, individual Witnesses have faced increasing harassment as they continue to conduct evangelism among their neighbors. The international organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, has appealed the decision to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, the fate of Witnesses in Russia remains uncertain. This talk reconstructs the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses on Russian soil and what led to this court decision. In doing so, Baran considers the implications of the Witnesses’ ban for the state of religious freedom in Russia today. From the lecture titled "How Jehovah's Witnesses Became "Extremists": The Strange State of Religious Freedom in Russia."

World War I ended on the western front on November 11, 1918. That same day in Warsaw Joseph Pilsudski proclaimed Poland’s independence. This talk focuses on the short and long term significance of these two intertwined events. In addition, Pienkos discusses the roles of President Wilson and a Polish national army raised from immigrants to the United States--the first and only of its kind since.

Natalia Sats (1903-1993) is the mother of professional theatre for children and youth, that is, theatre by adults for young people. Starting as a 15-year-old in charge of the Children’s Theatre in Moscow shortly after the 1917 Revolution, Sats founded several theatres for young people and remained a major force in the field until her death in 1993. In many ways the life of Sats mirrors Soviet life, through the trials and tribulations of the Revolution, Stalin’s purges, the Thaw, Glasnost and Perestroika, and on through the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. This talk focuses on the circumstances of Natalia Sats’s arrest and exile and her artistic endeavors in camps and in exile in Almaty, painting a picture of a female artist in men’s world who may very well have been the only female artist to live through the entire Soviet period.

When the Russian Constitution was adopted in 1993, many observers were critical of what they saw to be its super-presidential nature. This was a misreading of the actual document, and it also failed to take into account the potential difference between what the document says and how particular individuals interact with it. Some are highly constrained by it and others less so, but this is often less a function of the document itself than of the personality of the person involved and other contingent factors. This is clearly reflected in the different presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin was a weak president whose sparse political resources meant that the Constitution acted as a restraint upon how he could act and contributed to a performance that disappointed many. In contrast, Putin’s greater store of political resources (and luck!) enabled him to be a much more active and effective president. Nevertheless he clearly faces current challenges, some of which are reminiscent of his predecessor. This paper will survey the performance of both presidents and project how Putin might seek to meet those challenges over the coming five years.

One of the most important developments in the study of Russian history in the last decade or so is the “religious turn,” which, among other things, has pushed the study of Russian Orthodoxy beyond the conventions of church, theology, and doctrine toward the study of lived religion. Yet, many of the same scholars who study Orthodoxy as everyday practice have unknowingly become entangled in the very categories they seek to move beyond—that is, church, theology, and doctrine. This talk by Patrick Michelson explores these entanglements and their implications for the ways in which we understand this complex, contingent, and multivalent thing called Russian Orthodoxy. From the talk "Orthodox Impossible: Russian History and the Limits of Studying Religion."

Commercial entities operating across international borders face a number of legal and cultural hurdles. American companies negotiating with partners in Russia or Ukraine not only need to navigate the laws of those countries, but they are also obliged to follow US commercial law, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Major on-the-ground differences in accepted business practices and commercial transactions represent potential pitfalls for clients working under a dual legal framework. Likewise, businesses in East Europe seek out commercial litigators familiar with US law to protect their interests here. In this talk, Chester discusses the complexities of representing US clients abroad and foreign clients in the US, the practicalities of protecting clients’ legitimate interests amid systemic corruption, and how the FCPA is being enforced in the current political environment. From the talk "Beyond Policy: The Practical Realities of Russia-Ukraine-US Commercial Transactions and Litigation."

Ideal modern nation states have clearly defined borders and a sedentary population. People without a defined domicile who regularly cross national borders easily put such an order into jeopardy. This talk explores the problem of transhumance in the Soviet South Caucasus in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. Relying on documents of the Transcaucasian state and party institutions, it provides insights into Soviet policies attempting to assert control over this “fluid” part of the population, placing it into the frame of the national state and on track towards a new, socialist economy. From the lecture, "When Nationalism Meets Soviet Modernization: The 'Liquidation' of the Nomads in the South Caucasus, 1921-1936."