On December 6th, 2021, the Jordan Center hosted Sasha de Vogel for her talk “No Final Victories: How Reneging Affects Concessions to Low-Capacity Protest Campaigns in Moscow, Russia” as part of the Jordan Center’s joint research workshop with the Higher School of Economics.

On November 29th, 2021, the Jordan Center and the Columbia University Harriman Institute hosted experts for a panel on “The State of US-Russia Relations One Year into the Biden Administration.” Speakers included Timothy Colton (Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard University), Alexander Gabuev (Senior Fellow and Chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at Carnegie Moscow Center), Rose Gottemoeller (Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Center for International Security and Cooperation, Former Deputy Secretary-General of NATO) Robert Legvold (Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and previous Harriman Institute Director), and Maria Snegovaya (Postdoctoral Fellow of Political Science at Virginia Tech University and visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University). This talk was moderated by  Jordan Center Director Joshua Tucker and Harriman Institute Director Alexander Cooley. Note: This event took place before the larger escalation of negotiations related to the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border that intensified in late 2021 and early 2022.

On November 8, 2021, the Jordan Center hosted Professor Israel Marques for his talk “Privacy Versus Security in Trying Times: Evidence from Russian Public Opinion.” Marques is an assistant professor in the School of Politics and Governance at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia, and a research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, an international laboratory at the HSE University. This talk was the first event in the Jordan Center’s new joint lecture series with HSE University. This new series will meet at least twice a semester, switching off monthly between speakers based at HSE in Moscow, and speakers based at NYU and other US institutions. You can watch the recording on YouTube. 

On November 4th, 2021, the Jordan Center hosted Professor David Herman for a talk “Tolstoy’s Orphans.” Professor Herman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is titled ​​Poverty of the Imagination: 19th-Century Russian Literature about the Poor, and he is currently working on The Tragic Tolstoy: The Writings after 1876.

On a trip to Moscow to meet with Vasily Grossman’s granddaughter, Robert Chandler recalled seeing a room with Grossman’s things. There, the translator was shocked to see the same line of little sculpted animals that had featured in “Everything Flows.” It seems, then, that the figure of the young boy was inspired by Grossman’s own life, elements of which the author deliberately wove into his prose. 

On October 1, 2021, the Jordan Center hosted Professor Francine Hirsch, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a talk about her book titled Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after the Second World War.