CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The world has been shocked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why did this happen? What is the true historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine? How are people reacting in Russia? What are the implications for the United States, NATO, and international security? What will be the impact of sanctions and other financial penalties that the United States and its allies have imposed on Russia? A panel of University of Wisconsin faculty members addressed these and other questions. Panelists include Mark Copelovitch (UW-Madison, Political Science), Yoshiko Herrera (UW-Madison, Political Science), Andrey Ivanov (UW-Platteville, History), Kirill Ospovat (UW-Madison, GNS+), and Jessica Weeks (UW-Madison, Political Science). Moderated by Ted Gerber (UW-Madison, CREECA Director).

Military assertiveness in the “near abroad” and elsewhere has characterized Russia’s foreign policy at least since 2008. It has also played well with the Russian public. Is this aggressiveness due only or mostly to Putin’s ambitions or do popular attitudes in Russia support it as well? About the Speaker: Michael Alexeev is Professor of Economics at Indiana University in Bloomington. His research and teaching interests lie mostly in the fields of institutional economics, law and economics, and economics of transition from a Soviet-type economy to a market economy.

From 1878 to the early 1920s, millions of Ottoman Muslims became citizens of other European states. This talk explores the many ways Muslims responded, from resistance to negotiation, illuminating how Muslim citizens shaped the states and societies in which they lived. Emily Greble addresses questions about why Muslims have been erased from so much of European history and what we can learn about secularism, religious freedom, and European legal norms by analyzing Muslim lives and perspectives. About the Speaker: Emily Greble teaches History and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. A historian of the Balkans, she is the author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (2021) and Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (2011.

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.