CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The story of Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. What can we learn about the values of this international organization from Russia’s participation in it? Was Russia’s membership “worth it”? Any attempted answer must produce more questions: from which perspective – Russia’s, the Council’s, other Member States’ – should the effects of Russian membership be evaluated? How did the Council of Europe change Russia (if Russia was, indeed, changed) and how did Russia change the Council of Europe? This lecture examines the beginning of this story to identify the details in Russia’s drive for membership that may have planted seeds for its later expulsion. - About the Speaker: Jeffrey Kahn is the University Distinguished Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University.

with Ted Gerber (UW-Madison Professor of Sociology) - After Russia recovered from the economic woes of the 1990s, its government sought to maintain and expand its influence over former Soviet republics of Central Asia by opening the doors to large numbers of labor migrants from them. However, many accounts of the experiences of Central Asian labor migrants in Russia during the 2010s emphasize their exploitation and mistreatment at the hands of officials, police, employers, and the general population. Indeed, cruel, demeaning, and racist treatment of Central Asian immigrants testifies to the type of imperial mentality on the part of Russia’s state and society criticized by the movement to “de-colonize” research about Russia. However, research the speaker conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2016 and 2017, including focus groups and a survey in Bishkek of Kyrgyzstani migrants who had recently returned from Russia, suggests that they had a range of experiences, positive as well as negative. If anything, these experiences were linked to more positive than negative assessments of Russia’s institutions and foreign policy, which appears to reinforce, rather than undermine, Russia’s imperial objectives in its geopolitical conflict with the United States. Apart from calling for caution in analyses of how Russia’s imperial legacy is perceived outside of Europe, the findings suggest that migration scholars should devote more attention to studying “geopolitical remittances”–that is, how experiences in a host society can advance or impede its efforts to project soft power abroad.

Dr. Fijalkowski explores the relationship between law and visual culture by looking at photographs of individuals (a dissident, a judge, and a prosecutor who were involved in high-profile trials during the Stalinist period. An image can hide and expose questions of legitimation and authority pertaining to Stalinist rule and how we view defendants, judges, prosecutors, and justice. Visualising law requires extra-legal sources and analysis to reveal the nuances of a question that has been well researched but in which there is still much to discover about key players and events, as well as a better recognition of legal biographies that make for a richer history about law under Communism. - About the Speaker: Dr Agata Fijalkowski (Leeds Beckett University) is in the process of completing Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial, for GlassHouse Books (Routledge). The monograph considers photographs of trials from the period 1944-1957 in Albania, East Germany, and Poland.

NOTE: This is a partial recording of a complete panel. The beginning of the panel was not recorded. - Panelists share their experiences volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees in border regions of Poland and Ukraine. This panel features Kari Anderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna, Head of Operations for Operation SafeDrop of the Make a Difference Foundation and practicing attorney in Washington, D.C.), Anna Tumarkin (University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+), and Dianna Murphy (University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute).

Russians today often remember the “Wild 1990s” as a time of chaos, impoverishment and disorientation. Through the lens of the privileged Writers’ Town, which had been built under Stalin and once been home to Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and Kornei Chukovskii among others, we can see how marketization and the collapse of socialist support systems led to both degradation and gentrification of the dacha community. In this talk, Dr. Kelly Smith will analyze the way in which partial commodification of property and freedom from state monopolies led to what residents perceived as the “ruin” of Peredelkino. About the Speaker: Kelly E. Smith is Professor of Teaching at the School of Foreign Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley and is the author of two books on memory and Russian politics–Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (1996) and Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (2002). Most recently, she published Moscow 1956: A Silenced Spring, a social and political history of a turning point year in Russia. Currently, Dr. Smith is engaged in a new research project on Peredelkino, the “Writers’ Village” created by Stalin.

Dr. Ilya Kliger outlines an approach to the study of “sociotopes” in narrative fiction and beyond. Defining sociotopes as specific configurations of sociality, presupposing and projecting diverse scenarios and normative principles of affiliation and detachment, Professor Kliger takes as his case study the emblematic and consequential moment in the history of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in Russia: Belinsky's scandalous “reconciliation with actuality” (primirenie s deistvitel’nost’iu). About the Speaker: Ilya Kliger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He is currently working on a book project on the poetics and politics of Russian Realism.

Dr. Tatyana Gershkovich contests the familiar opposition of Tolstoy the moralist and Nabokov the aesthete. She argues that their divergent stylistic and philosophical trajectories were in fact parallel flights from the same fear: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private, and impossible to share through art. Yet unlike modernist and postmodernist authors for whom such doubt ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that an artwork, when made in the right way, can serve to assuage our skeptical fears. About the Speaker: Tatyana Gershkovich is the William S. Dietrich Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern UP, 2022).

Bukovina, a former borderland of the Habsburg empire now divided between Ukraine and Romania, was a place of mutual observation, competition, and conflict between the different states and governments that laid claim to the territory. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the province experienced repeated regime changes – many of which occurred seemingly overnight. This talk explores how the shared challenges of governing Bukovina facilitated mutual influences between regimes that otherwise viewed each other as ideological opposites. About the Speaker: Cristina Florea is an Assistant Professor in Modern European history at Cornell University, researching and teaching the histories of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, imperial entanglements and competition, and the interplay of nationalisms and empires in the region.

Dr. Lucey considers how Russia’s writers and artists popularized images of madams and procuresses as manipulative and greedy figures who tricked and abused the women in their charge. Portrayed as far more heinous than the men who frequented brothels, the madam looms in literature and fine art as a trafficker in human flesh who goes against God and nature in the pursuit of profit. Yet, as historians of imperial Russia have shown, the experience of brothel madams working under the state system of administrative supervision (nadzor) was far more complex than reflected in visual and print culture. Learn how the image of the madam evolved in nineteenth-century Russia and why such figures evoked heated debate about the rights of women and the regulation of commercial sex. About the Speaker: Colleen Lucey, PhD, is assistant professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russian literature and visual culture. She is the author of Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Iryna Januszek is one of the many Ukrainians who found a life in Poland in the post-Soviet era, but Ukraine has never been far from her thoughts. Members of family remained there and participated in the movements to build a new society. She also shares those aspirations which brought Ukrainians to fight for freedom and association with Europe. Now the war has brought millions of Ukrainians to Poland as refugees, and she has been working to help them adjust to life there. She has many insights into how these closely-related but different people are interacting in this crisis. About the Speaker: After obtaining her degree in German and English philology in 2000, Iryna moved to western Poland and was hired as a language teacher. She now owns her own language school, Success Factory. She is now founding a nonprofit to assist young refugees.