Ostap Kin presented and read from his book, “Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond” on Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews in Babyn Yar. By the time the Soviet army recaptured Kyiv, the total number of people exterminated at the ravine had reached some 100,000 to 150,000. The name Babyn Yar has become synonymous with one of the most horrific massacres of World War II. "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" features poems by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, written in response to the tragedy at Babyn Yar. The poems in the anthology create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust, as well as other people who lost their lives at the Babyn Yar site. About the Lecturer: Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute) and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Academic Studies Press). He is the translator, with John Hennessy, of Yuri Andrukhovych’s Set Change (forthcoming from NYRB/Poets), Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI) and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography (Lost Horse Press). He translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse Press). He’s pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University.

Anna Nemzer and Ilia Venyavkin presented on their work with the Russian Independent Media Archive Project on Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: In this joint presentation, journalist Anna Nemzer and historian Ilia Venyavkin will discuss the work of the Russian Independent Media Archive — an initiative of PEN America and Bard College aimed at preserving the work of independent journalists from Russia since 2000, guarding this historical record against erasure as media outlets not aligned with the regime of President Vladimir Putin are shuttered and their reporters and editors are cast into exile. A direct link to RIMA is available at https://rima.media/en About the Lecturers: Anna Nemzer is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker studying the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She is a presenter on TV Dozhd (aka TV-Rain – formerly the only independent TV channel in Russia, now working in exile), a scholar at Bard College in, and a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) dedicated to the preservation of all Russian independent media as the most important evidence of the era. Ilia Veniavkin is an historian and journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook, Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He is a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a scholar at Bard College, and is writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.

Pavel Golubev gave a lecture on, “Queer(ing) Art of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Emigration, 1890s—1940s” on Thursday, March 7, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia invites you to a lecture about the queer imagery in the art of Russia, and its colonies from the late Imperial period to the early Soviet era. The talk will explore the evolution of the homosexual narrative in Russian art through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. It details how artists navigated the complex interplay of societal norms, personal identification, and creative expression and how the shifts in political and cultural landscapes influenced the representation and perception of themes and subjects in art referring to same-sex love, desire, and sexual identity from the late 19th century to the 1930s. The focus of the lecture stands on key artistic movements and notable figures whose work challenged conventional norms during a time of significant sociopolitical upheaval, such as Konstantin Somov, Leon Bakst, Alexander Nikolaev (also known as Usto Mumin), Pavel Tchelitchew, and many others. This event will intrigue anyone interested in the intersection of art history, gender studies, and Russian/Soviet sociocultural history, providing a perspective into a largely unexplored subject in recent years. About the Lecturer: Pavel Golubev is a visiting research scholar in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Moscow State University and subsequently defended his thesis there. Pavel Golubev is responsible for the multivolume edition of the diaries of Russian symbolist artist Konstantin Somov, a monograph about him, and a retrospective show at the Odesa Fine Art Museum in 2019. In Odesa, Golubev headed the exhibitions there before leaving Ukraine for the United States in 2022.

Epp Annus gave a lecture on, “Do you suffer from urbanitis? Gender, cybernetics, and environmental concerns in the 1970s Estonian SSR” on Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: On the cover of Aimée Beekman’s novel Valikuvõimalus (The Possibility of Choice, 1978) stands the figure of a naked woman with a calculator in place of her womb. Beekman’s novel is a difficult fit for the well-digested Russocentric Soviet gender crisis discourse: the main character Regina is an owner of a comfortable house, she proposes to a man of her choice and then conceives three children out of wedlock, all with different men. The novel is remarkable for its proliferative ambiguity: Regina’s character is presented both as admirable in her determination and agency, but also as a symptom of a society in crisis. Extramarital relations and broken relationships had become the norm, as people – ‘poisoned with noise’ and addicted to constant stimulation – moved along on the ‘conveyer belt’ of easy pleasures. People in the cities were figured as suffering from urbanitis, a malady of urban life that made people impatient and fidgety and inclined to fill their days with meaningless quotidian trivialities. In the novel’s view, at the outset of the information age, humanity was suffering a deep and multifaceted global crisis: growing commodification, unrestrained urbanization, and polluted air and water were all producing a sense of shared insecurity and uncertainty, impacting the most intimate spheres of everyday life. This talk situates Beekman’s novel within the media discussions in the 1970s Estonian SSR concerning gender, cybernetics, and the global environmental crisis. About the Lecturer: Epp Annus is Associate Professor with the Institute of Humanities at Tallinn University, Estonia. She also lectures in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018), and Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule, ed. Epp Annus (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on a manuscript Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990 (under contract with Cambridge UP). She is the author of two novels.

Tamara Trojanowska gave a lecture on “Cryptotheology, Psychobiography: Transgression in Polish 20th-Century Theatre” on Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: Tamara Trojanowska will present on her current research, which focuses on the intersections of 20th and 21st-century drama and theatre with history and religious thought, highlighting identity, subversion, and transgression issues. Her latest research project, co-edited with Joanna Niżyńska and Przemysław Czapliński and entitled A History of Polish Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on 20th and 21st Centuries, includes her extensive analysis of the transgressive practices in Polish drama and theatre (“Delectatio furiosa, or the modes of cultural transgression”) among over sixty essays by colleagues from all over the world. She has also contributed a chapter on this subject to Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (eds. Magda Romanska and Cathleen Cioffi, 2020), with her investigations of the dramatic and the sacred resulting in a new selection of and an extensive introduction to the plays of Roman Brandstaetter (Dzień gniewu. Dramaty, 2016). About the Lecturer: A graduate of the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto (Ph.D.) and of Theatre Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (MA), Tamara Trojanowska has also formerly held an Oxford University scholarship and an internship at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. She has taught at universities in Poland, Canada, and the United States, returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 1998. Since then, she has directed the Polish Language and Literature Program at the Slavic Department, strengthening its profile and presence in North America, the University College Drama Program (2008-2012), and the Center for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (2017-2021). She now serves as Vice-Dean Faculty and Academic Life in the Faculty of Arts and Science.

Natalia Kovyliaeva (Ph.D Candidate, University of Tartu) gave a lecture on "Between Horror and Hope: Feminist Anti-War Resistance and Opportunities for Mobilization in and Outside of Putin’s Russia" on Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the lecture: Since the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Russian feminist grassroots immediately reacted to this event and joined forces to protest against the war. On February 25th, a group of feminist activists published a manifesto, which outlined the anti-military and anti-Putin agenda of the Russian feminist grassroots movement and called for the international feminist movements to join the anti-war protest actions worldwide. As for today, they were able to attract supporters not only in Russia but received much international attention and support worldwide. Relying on the concepts of invisibility and opportunity structures, the upcoming discussion focuses on how the perceived notions of (in)visibility shaped the resistance opportunities for FAR's activists both in and outside Russia, including the transnational level of opportunities. The study relies on the extensively rich online data from the FAR channels on Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook and supporting materials such as newspaper interviews, Youtube interviews, documentary movies, and personal reflections of activists from the semi-structured online interviews. In general, the talk will demonstrate how marginalized and vulnerable groups may find a way to resist the dictatorial regime to spread their anti-war messages and gain a voice within a very hostile environment, build a transnational (online) network of feminist anti-war cells inside and outside of Russia, form new identities and agendas within the feminist grassroots movements and impact political agendas of other anti-war initiatives and organizations sharing similar goals and claims. About the speaker: Natalia Kovyliaeva is a Ph.D. candidate, Junior Fellow Researcher in Political Science at Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu (Estonia). Her current dissertation project, titled "Gaining Voice: Feminist Grassroots Mobilizations in Putin's Russia," explores the emergence and development of the feminist grassroots movements and their tactics and strategies in Russia starting from the early 2000s. Natalia holds an MA in Political Science from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and an MA in International Relations from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). Natalia has volunteered and interned for organisations such as the Sakharov Centre, EU-Russia Civil Society Forum, German-Russian Exchange, and Transparency International - Russia.

Ann Komaromi (Professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto) presented on her book, “Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society,” on Thursday, November 9, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the lecture: Komaromi will talk about the research associated with her book Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (2022). She will describe the process of pursuing archival research of underground (samizdat, or self-published) journals in a variety of collections at established institutions and in independent organizations. Komaromi will also discuss the interdisciplinary method of the study, spanning historical investigation and literary analysis, and reflect on the development of a critical perspective on samizdat, as developed in and through the materials surveyed. Samizdat facilitated the formation of imagined communities of readers through extra-Gutenberg communications. While the goals and styles of expression differed from democratic dissidents to the Jewish national movement, and from Leningrad poets to the fans of rock music, some common values and strategies characterized these varied groups, creating a positive basis for grassroots renewal of society and culture in the Soviet Union. About the speaker: Ann Komaromi is professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. Her research has focused particularly on late Soviet culture, samizdat (underground publishing) and dissidence in the USSR. Her articles theorize the formation of alternative publics and epistemologies in samizdat, while attending to specific texts and groups. Komaromi is interested in the return of modernism and avant-garde in nonconformist and oppositional literary and art movements in the late twentieth century and beyond. Current projects include studies of dissident memoirs and archives and a history of Jewish activism in Leningrad.

Erik R. Scott (Associate Professor of History, University of Kansas) gave a lecture on "Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World" on Thursday, November 2, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the lecture: Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world’s attention during the Cold War. Their stories were given sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. In contrast to other migrants, defectors were pursued by the states they left even as they were eagerly sought by the United States and its allies. Taking part in a risky game that played out across the globe, defectors sought to transcend the limitations of the Cold War world. Recently published by Oxford University Press, Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World, is the first history of defection on a global scale. The book charts a global struggle over defectors that unfolded among rival intelligence agencies operating in the shadows of an occupied Europe, in the forbidden border zones of the USSR, in the disputed straits of the South China Sea, on a hijacked plane 10,000 feet in the air, and around the walls of Soviet embassies. Surprisingly, the competition for defectors paved the way for collusion between the superpowers, who found common cause in regulating the spaces through which defectors moved. Disputes over defectors mapped out the contours of modern state sovereignty, and defection’s ideological framework hardened borders by reinforcing the view that asylum should only be granted to migrants with clear political claims. Although defection all but disappeared after the Cold War, this innovative work shows how it shaped the governance of global borders and helped forge an international refugee system whose legacy and limitations remain with us to this day. About the speaker: Erik R. Scott is Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (OUP, 2016) and editor of The Russian Review.

Matthew Kendall (Assistant Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago) will give a lecture on “Revolutions per Minute: Sonic Inscription, Soviet Writing, and Mikhail Romm’s Oral Stories” on Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the lecture: In 1921, the poet Aleksandr Blok bemoaned the sonic aftermath of the Revolution from his deathbed, writing that “for a long time, no new sounds have been heard…it would be blasphemous, even deceitful, to consider how a space now silent once sounded.” But few writers heeded Blok’s warning. On the contrary, many were thrilled to inscribe their voices onto gramophone discs, and several explored or even mimicked the novel sensations that came with the 20th century’s technologies for reproducing sound in their literary texts. This talk examines a complicated relationship that emerged between sound recording and the Soviet literary establishment, which altered conceptions of authorship, attention, archive, and representation among both readers and practitioners. The prime example of this phenomenon for the lecture is Mikhail Romm’s Oral Stories, an audio memoir that Romm (who was primarily known as a film director) recorded with a magnetic tape recorder. Through a reading of Oral Stories and a discussion of Romm’s concerns with memory and historical preservation near the end of his career, Kendall shows how Soviet ideas of literary production and reception grew in dialogue with the growing relevance of sound recording in everyday life. About the speaker: Matthew Kendall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research broadly explores the various intersections, relationships, and rivalries that formed between literary writing, popular filmmaking, and mechanical recording technologies in the 20th century, and he has published on topics including Soviet 3D cinema, Russian digital games, and the history of Soviet sound recording in Russian Review, Russian Literature, and Slavic Review. His book project, Revolutions per Minute, is a cultural history of Soviet sound recording that explores this recording technique’s impact on literary and cinematic production in the first half of the Soviet century. This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.

Debra Javeline (Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame) will present on her book, After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed (Oxford University Press, 2023). Free and open to the public. About the lecture: Starting on September 1, 2004, and ending 53 hours later, Russia experienced its most appalling act of terrorism in history, the seizure of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Approximately 1,200 children, parents, and teachers were taken hostage, and over 330 —nearly one of every hundred Beslan residents— were killed, hundreds more seriously wounded, and all severely traumatized. After Violence is the first book to analyze the aftermath of such large-scale violence with evidence from almost all direct victims. It explores the motivations behind individual responses to violence. When does violence fuel greater acceptance of retaliatory violence, and when does violence fuel nonviolent participation in politics? The mass hostage taking was widely predicted to provoke a spiral of retaliatory ethnic violence in the North Caucasus, where the act of terror was embedded in a larger context of ongoing conflict between Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens. Politicians, journalists, victims, and other local residents asserted that vengeance would come. Instead, the hostage taking triggered unprecedented peaceful political activism on a scale seen nowhere else in Russia. Beslan activists challenged authorities, endured official harassment, and won a historic victory against the Russian state in the European Court of Human Rights. After Violence provides insights into this unexpected but preferable outcome. Using systematic surveys of 1,098 victims (82%) and 2,043 nearby residents, in-depth focus groups, journalistic accounts, investigative reports, NGO reports, and prior scholarly research, After Violence offers novel findings about the influence of anger, prejudice, alienation, efficacy, and other variables on post-violence behavior. About the speaker: Debra Javeline is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Russian and East European Studies Program, and Environmental Change Initiative. Her research interests include mass political behavior, survey research, Russian politics, sustainability, environmental politics, and climate change. She focuses on the decisions of ordinary citizens, whether in response to violence or climate impacts, and she is currently exploring coastal homeowner motivations to take action to reduce their risk from rising seas, hurricanes, and other hazards.

Historian Adrienne Edgar (Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara) will present on her recent book, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022). Free and open to the public. About the lecture: In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single “Soviet people.” Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized beginning in the 1960s, and in this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply “Soviet.” Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the “official” nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity; that they were unable to speak “their own” native language; and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Edgar’s conclusions are based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers. About the speaker: Adrienne Edgar is professor of modern Russian and Central Asian history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Oberlin College, an M.A. in international affairs and Middle East studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in history from U.C. Berkeley. Adrienne has received research grants and fellowships from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has held post-doctoral and visiting scholar appointments at Harvard University, McGill University, the Alexander von Humboldt University (Berlin), and the University of Heidelberg. Adrienne’s first book, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. She co-edited, with Benjamin Frommer, the volume Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). She has published a number of articles on ethnicity, gender, and intermarriage in the Soviet Union and Central Asia in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Kritika, Ab Imperio, and Central Asian Survey; one of these won the annual article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Adrienne’s second monograph, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022) was co-winner of the 2023 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Ethnicity and Nationalism Studies.