Introduction by Francine Hirsch, Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History at UW-Madison. About the lecture: The denouement of the Great War produced an arc of overlapping crises that stretched from Anatolia to India, which energized a number of anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements in the region. The Russian Revolution, itself a product of the war, offered a radical hope of remaking the world order on completely new lines. The collapse of both the Russian and the Ottoman empires had thrown open imperial borders and made mobility across them possible as never before. In this situation, Tashkent became a crossroads of (often self-proclaimed) revolutionaries from the former Ottoman Empire, Iran, and India. They were overwhelmingly Muslim but engaged in radical politics in which Islam played only a marginal role. The new Soviet regime espoused anticolonial rhetoric from the very outset and sought to harness anticolonial sentiment. In this short-lived conjuncture, Muslim activists encountered each other and the world’s first socialist regime. This talk will provide an account of this episode and explore the many ways in which new solidarities were born but also in which different groups often spoke past each other. About the speaker: Adeeb Khalid is Jane & Raphael Bernstein Professor of History and Asian Studies at Carleton College. His work focuses on modern Central Asia, broadly defined, and which he situates in wide geographical and conceptual frames. His last book was Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book that explores transregional connections made in Tashkent during the era of the Russian Revolution.

This lecture was co-sponsored by European Studies, the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, and the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Introduction by Professor Irina Shevelenko (GNS+), CREECA Director. About the Lecture: The talk is based on approximately 800 pages of unpublished correspondence between the Jewish philosopher and musician Evsei Davidovich Shor and the Protestant writer and publisher Rudolf Roessler. After leaving his native Russia in 1922 as the assistant to Vasily Kandinsky, Schor established himself as a student at the University of Freiburg, where he studied with Husserl and Heidegger and began to translate Russian philosophy into German (essays by Viacheslav Ivanov and Nikolai Berdiaev, both of whom he knew personally). In 1932 he moved to Berlin, where he encountered Roessler, at the time the publisher of the leading German theater journal, a position he would soon lose with the advent of the Nazis. The two men and their wives established an intense friendship that developed against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover. Both Shor and Roessler would emigrate, the former in 1933 (for a year in Italy, then in Palestine/Israel), the latter in 1934 (to Switzerland). In Luzern, Roessler founded the anti-Nazi publishing house Vita Nova. The correspondence between Shor and Roessler focuses on the early years of the publishing house’s activities. Wachtel pays special attention to the history of their most audacious publication, "Die Gefährdung des Christentums durch Rassenwahn und Judenverfolgung" (Racism and the Persecution of Jews as a Danger for Christianity, 1935). About the speaker: Michael Wachtel, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, has been teaching Russian and European literature at Princeton University since 1990. His scholarship focuses on Russian poetry and poetics as well as German-Russian cultural relations. His most recent book is Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life (Columbia University Press, 2025). Among his current projects is an annotated edition of the complete correspondence of Evsei Schor and Rudolf Roessler.

This lecture was co-sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History and Department of Communication Arts Film Colloquium. Introduction by Professor Jeff Smith, Department of Communication Arts, UW-Madison. About the Lecture: When Soviet films were shown in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, reviewers often complained about their slow tempo and propagandistic appeals but praised their acting and cinematography. Although since 1930 the Soviet film industry relied primarily on domestic film stock, and photography suffered as a result, the feature films that made it to the U.S. were of relatively high technical quality. One of the practices Soviet cinematographers developed to achieve crisper images was “white film”: filming white elements against white backgrounds using sunlight. This approach resulted in a strikingly bright look that distinguished Soviet films from those made in Hollywood, which was then developing a fashion for high-contrast cinematography that eventually resulted in film noir. About the Speaker: Maria Belodubrovskaya is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of "Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin" (2017) and has published works on Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet cinema, and various issues in film aesthetics.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison Department of German, Nordic, Slavic+. About the Lecture: This talk will address the Pugachev Rebellion (1773-1775) in the Russian Empire, the most massive popular uprising in eighteenth-century Europe which brought together Cossacks, Russian serfs, and Bashkir nomads (to name just the major groups) in a common uprising against the Russian Empire and its colonization of the steppe. Arguing against the common theory of “naïve monarchism”, the talk will aim to uncover the idioms of democratic empowerment and universal rights which so far have been hiding from scholars in the plain sight of the rebellion’s massive published archive. These idioms could take two forms: a secular, juridical form, which combined official concepts of law with those of the unwritten common law in order to affirm democratic self-governance; and the form of a heretical political theology which questioned feudal social hierarchies, established forms of property over land, and the official absolutist vision of authority. About the speaker: Kirill Ospovat is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of two books on eighteenth-century Russian culture and literature: "Pridvornaia slovesnost’: institut literatury i konstruktsii absolutizma v Rossii serediny XVIII vekaPridvornaia slovesnost’: institut literatury i konstruktsii absolutizma v Rossii serediny XVIII veka" [Courtly Letters: Russian Literature and Visions of Absolutism in the Mid-Eighteenth Century] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020), and "Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia" (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016). He has completed a book-length study of the Pugachev rebellion which is about to come out in Russian.

About the Lecture: This talk examines Soviet engagement with Black American literature by tracing unexpected continuities between Imperial Russian and Soviet approaches to race and cultural diplomacy. Through close analysis of literary criticism published in Soviet journals from the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly reviews of works by Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois in "International Literature" (Internatsional’naia literatura) and "Foreign Literature" (Inostrannaia literatura), this lecture demonstrates how Soviet critics developed formulaic reading practices that served remarkably similar functions to Tsarist-era engagement with American racial issues and western colonialism. Both regimes used American racism as a mirror to reflect their own moral superiority and projected paternalistic leadership over distant oppressed peoples, from Imperial Russia’s relationship with Ethiopia in the nineteenth century to the Soviet Union’s post-war interest in a rapidly decolonizing Africa. The talk reveals how literary criticism functioned as ideological instruction in the Soviet Union, with critics constructing a carefully curated canon of acceptable Black literature that taught readers how to “properly understand” Black American life, reinforcing the state’s anti-racist credentials while serving Cold War propaganda goals. By attending to these continuities rather than taking revolutionary rhetoric at face value, the lecture offers new insights into Soviet cultural politics and the enduring patterns of Russian soft-power projection that remain relevant to understanding contemporary Russian foreign policy. About the Speaker: Jesse Kruschke is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the Soviet reception of twentieth-century American literature, with particular attention to how literary journals published, translated, and framed the work of leftist Black

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History. About the Lecture: After the October Revolution, Bolshevik leaders inherited a vast geographic expanse that was home to some 200 different ethnicities—some 130 million people who needed to be integrated into the new Soviet order. To reverse prior oppression, Bolsheviks organized their polity as an ethno-territorial federation and promoted minorities in politics, the economy, and culture. Alongside this embrace of diversity, however, a larger challenge remained. How could leaders forge cultural unity among an extraordinarily diverse citizenry? This talk investigates the dual promotion of unity and diversity in the Soviet Union through the lens of citizenship and identity, demonstrating that political and cultural elites promoted a civic identity built on active participation in public life that citizens embraced across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum. At the same time, the official rhetoric of equality, inclusion, and multiethnic representation coexisted with systemic inequalities that shaped lived experience and ultimately undermined the Soviet state. Drawing on a range of multilingual materials collected from across the former Soviet Union, this talk offers fresh perspectives on both the forging of Soviet unity and its long-term unmaking. The talk opens by describing new ways of conceiving civic identity after the revolution and the evolution of this identity under Stalin and his successors—in short, the making of the Soviet people—before detailing the fracturing of this civic identity in the 1980s. Combining the voices of both elites and ordinary citizens from across the country, the talk considers how ideas of equality and experiences of inequality profoundly shaped the rise and fall of Soviet citizenship. About the Speaker: Anna Whittington is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she focuses on citizenship and inequality across Soviet Eurasia. Her in-progress book manuscript, "Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People," traces the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse, based on multilingual research conducted across the former Soviet Union. Future projects include a history of perestroika from below and a history of enumeration in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

About the Lecture: The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has reinvigorated debates about the causes of war. The question of why Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war in 2022 does not seem to be answered by many usual explanations, e.g. material interests or threats to international security. Herrera argues that Russia’s imperial ambitions and sense of Russian national identity heavily shaped Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the full-scale invasion. Hence, one of the challenges for International Relations theory is the need to update and improve our understanding of the role of identity in conflict and political violence. In this talk, Herrera maps out a theoretical framework for identity and conflict, and then discusses relevant aspects of identity in both Ukraine and Russia, with an emphasis on how identities might have contributed to the war and been changed as a consequence. About the Speaker: Yoshiko M. Herrera is Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on Russian and Eurasian politics, identity, and political economy. Herrera teaches courses on comparative politics, social identities and diversity, and a new course on the Russian war on Ukraine. She is also a former director of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia at UW-Madison. She is the author of two books and an influential co-edited volume on Measuring Identity. Her most recent co-authored article is “Don’t Look Back in Anger: Cooperation Despite Conflicting Historical Narratives” published in the "American Political Science Review."

In 1991, as the USSR broke apart and its population became open to the reforming discourse of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program of perestroika, Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev set the tone for subsequent writing on Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, concluding that he was “a personality so mediocre and a politician so ordinary” that he “quickly disappeared from the political scene and also in the literal and metaphorical sense.” But not for long. When it became clear by the end of the decade that market capitalism and democracy had not improved people’s lives, nostalgia for the Brezhnev era rightly raised the question of whether he had been given his just due and unfairly blamed for the shortcomings of the Soviet system. This reversal of fortune also makes clear that no Soviet leader has been as neglected or as misunderstood as Brezhnev and therefore no Soviet party boss is in such need of a fresh historical reassessment. Divided into two parts, my presentation will first make a case for Brezhnev, emphasizing his vision of guaranteeing stability, assuring peace, and letting people live well. Earlier I coined the term “Soviet man of peace,” to characterize Brezhnev. I emphasize this point here, arguing that his dream of wanting to be remembered as an asset for world peace made him a leader who changed the world. In part 2 of my presentation, I zoom in on the Leonid Brezhnev that, as his biographer, I might never know and propose what these unresolved questions might mean. Donald J. Raleigh is the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of Russian History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has authored, translated, and edited numerous books on modern Russian history including Revolution on the Volga (1986), Experiencing Russia’s Civil War (2002), Russia’s Sputnik Generation (2006) and Soviet Baby Boomers (2012). He currently is writing a biography of Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, research for which has taken him to archives in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the UK, and the US. This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History and University Lectures.

In this talk Darya Tsymbalyuk presents her recent book Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press, 2025). The book focuses on the impact of the Russian invasion on the more-than-human worlds of Ukraine, discussing how witnessing and experiencing environmental destruction profoundly changed our perceptions of familiar places and spaces such as forests, agricultural fields, and shelterbelts. Combining autoethnography with cultural and media analysis, and environmental data, Tsymbalyuk asks: what does it mean to inhabit a world under attack, what does it mean to live on contaminated land? Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya’s work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. Darya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press 2025). Among her many shorter scholarly publications is a double special issue on the environmental humanities of Ukraine co-edited with Tanya Richardson and forthcoming with East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Her other scholarly texts have been published by Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of International Relations and Development, Narrative Culture, REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, to name a few. Her public-facing writing appeared in BBC Future Planet, openDemocracy, The Funambulist, KAJET, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, and many other platforms. In 2023, she received Mary Zirin Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. In addition to writing, Darya also works with images through drawing, painting, collage, and film essays. You can learn more about her work here: https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/ This lecture is made possible in partnership with Wisconsin RISE-EARTH Initiative.

Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself. Sergei Antonov is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. He was born in Moscow and came to the US in 1992. Antonov earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and his J.D. from NYU Law. His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Harvard, 2016), won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize. His second book, Russia’s Rogue Masters: Elite Criminal Trials in the Age of Reform, 1866-1884, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026. This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History.

Scientific Atheism as an Ideological Discipline in Soviet Ukraine by Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison