CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

In 1887, a Jewish eye doctor named L.L. Zamenhof launched his international auxiliary language “Esperanto” from the western borderlands of a tsarist empire in crisis. Brigid O’Keeffe traces the history of Esperanto as a utopian vision rooted in late imperial Russian culture through to its rise as a vibrant global movement that inspired women and men around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Esperanto and Esperantists have long been dismissed to the margins and footnotes of history, O’Keeffe proposes that revolutionary Russia’s Esperantists were exemplars of their era. Their triumphs, frustrations, and tragedies illuminate how and why the Soviet Union ultimately rejected an international language for the global proletariat and chose instead to elevate Russian – “the language of Lenin” – as the language of socialist internationalism.

Dr. Molly Blasing presents material from her recent book, Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021). She considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day, using examples of photo-poetic writing by Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, and other 20th and 21st century poets. Listen to learn about how the camera transformed the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities available for poetic writing in Russian.

As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. Stefan Link reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order.

The war conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014 and it is still far from its resolution. One of the most debated questions during all those years was the following: Who joined anti-Kyiv armed groups during the first years of the Donbass war, and why? Some experts claimed that Russian soldiers and paid volunteers constituted the majority of irregular anti-Kyiv forces. Others that observe the civil war find that it was Donbass locals who joined armed groups in the first place. In this presentation, based on interviews with combatants and observations collected in 2016-2017 in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Donetsk and Luhansk, Natalia Savelyeva will discuss mobilization trajectories of anti-Kyiv combatants, different factors which impacted their decision to join the fight, and the role of ideology in the Donbass war.

Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, this talk investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process – how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within – promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.

Darren Thies will share perspectives and advice on the career of a diplomat, learning foreign languages (particularly Persian dialects), current U.S. policies in Central Asia, and the human geography of the region. Darren can offer insights and answer questions on the cultures of Central Asia, traveling in the region, perceptions of Americans, how language is used in practice, and how the region has developed over the past decade. Darren’s linguistic expertise centers around the three main Persian dialects (Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki), and can offer specific advice to learners of these languages.

What does intersectionality as praxis look like in Kyrgyzstan? Grassroots feminist, LGBTQ and transfeminist groups in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan are creating a unique space for themselves through various community art projects. The 2019 Feminnale Art Exhibit was one such meticulously curated space that provided possibilities for “subaltern voices to speak” (Spivak 1988) on the everyday experiences of women in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the region. By centering the “everyday” experiences of women, this feminist art project challenged the monolithic and homogenized categories of “woman” imposed by both the West and Russia on (post)socialist Central Asia, opening up further insights on race, gender, and sexuality in the socialist past and (post)socialist future.

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.