Join us for another installment in our series of conversations hosted by Jordan Center Distinguished Journalist in Residence Dr. Yevgenia Albats. Throughout the year, Dr. Albats will be joined by leading experts – journalists, researchers, foreign service officers, and more – in one-on-one, public conversations regarding the most pressing issues in our understanding of Russia […]
How is the Gulag represented in the former Soviet Union? Many books have been published both by former prisoners who describe the day-to-day of Soviet concentration camps, and by numerous historians who attempt to analyze the subject. Paradoxically, though, very few films have examined the history and visual reality of the camps, due in part to […]
Join us for another 19v seminar! "It is often the case that husbands kill their wives’s lovers; sons, their fathers, frequently conspiring with their mothers and friends after they had caught them in flagrante with another woman; a brother-in-law kills his sister’s husband upon her request and together they dispose of the body. One sister stabs another […]
In 1961, construction of the industrial town of Darkhan started in the northern Mongolian steppes. The project was carried out through the joint effort of six socialist countries, among them Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Bulgaria, Poland and the Soviet Union. Apartments in residential areas of Darkhan were furnished with Romanian furniture, Polish record players and […]
Tomila Lankina will present her book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book argues that the Bolsheviks failed to obliterate the social structure of Tzarist Russia. The author will argue in the talk that these divisions continue to have implications for understanding popular support for […]
How do societies explain what happened during war, what they did and what was done to them? In the Soviet Union after World War II theater played a central role in constructing a narrative of war appropriate to general audiences, officials, and most artists. The Theater of the Carpathian Military District in recently-conquered Lviv, Ukraine, […]
In this talk, Mieka Erley will present selected episodes from her recent book, On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality. As a whole, the book takes an ecocritical approach to the place of soil in Russian and Soviet culture, considering key moments in the evolving mythology of soil across a century of modernization, colonization, and ecological change. […]
The late 1940s are generally considered a time of notorious Soviet isolationism and anti-western hysteria, fomenting by Kremlin. Likewise, the Truman administration’s anxieties about containing communism touched off a series of laws designed to limit contact with the Soviet Union and verify Americans’ loyalties. Yet, throughout this tumultuous time, American and Soviet women were in […]
What remained of the Persianate literary tradition, after the vernacularizing projects of Soviet, Middle Eastern, and South Asian nation-builders? What remained of its rhetorical resources, after they had been deployed in service of nationalist and internationalist programs of political representation for more than a half century, when secular nationalism and communist internationalism alike faltered in […]
Labor once enjoyed a pride of place in Soviet society. Even in Anglo-American Soviet historiography, labor history had a heyday in the 1980s and 90s. And in the sense of an economic category, of people selling their labor for a wage, the working class still constitutes a majority of the post-Soviet population As a source […]
