For more information about the upcoming events in the greater Boston area, subscribe to the following newsletters:
- Russia Matters
- Davis Center for Russia and Eurasian Studies
- Ballets Russes Arts Initiative
- Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia
Tuesday, January 28, 2020 | 4:30-5:45pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S250
Joshua Yaffa, Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, presents his first book, Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia (Tim Duggan Books, January 2020), in conversation with Professor Timothy Colton.
Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence
Monday, February 3, 2020 | 2:00-3:15pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S050
Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence (University of Toronto Press, 2020) provides an overview of the relationship between two dynamic regions, highlighting the ways in which Russia and Central Asia have influenced and been influenced by Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. This readable synthesis, covering early coexistence in the seventeenth century to the present day, seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about how the modern world developed.
Shoshana Keller focuses on the five major “Stans”: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Cultural and social history are interwoven with the military narrative to provide a sense of the people, their religion, and their practices — all of which were severely tested under Stalin.
Speaker: Shoshana Keller, Professor of History, Hamilton College
Becoming Ukraine: New Research on Ukraine’s Contemporary Identity and Transformation
Monday, February 10, 2020 | 12:15-2:00pm
34 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Tymofii Brik (Kyiv School of Economics) and Viktoriya Sereda (Ukrainian Catholic University/ HURI) present two recent books on Ukraine’s contemporary identity: Ukraine in Transformation: From Soviet Republic to European Society (Palgrave) and Regionalism without Regions: Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity (CEU Press).
Speaker(s):
Tymofii Brik, Assistant Professor of Policy Research, Kyiv School of Economics
Viktoriya Sereda, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ukrainian Catholic University; HURI MAPA Project Research Fellow
Chaired by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of HURI’s Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program (TCUP)
The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan
Tuesday, February 11, 2020 | 4:30-5:45pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S354
Professor Cameron’s talk, which draws from her recent book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this crisis, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population, and the disaster transformed a territory the size of western Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of sources in Russian and in Kazakh, her talk brings this largely unknown story to light, revealing its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. It finds that through the most violent means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan and forged a new Kazakh national identity. But the nature of this transformation was uneven. Neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. More broadly, she shows how the case of the Kazakh famine overturns several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin.
Demand-side Theory of Information Attacks, and the Case of the 2016 U.S. Election
Friday, February 14, 2020 | 12:00-1:15pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S153
This workshop brings together graduate students, postdocs, and area faculty to discuss new work related to politics and economics in the post-communist (and communist) countries of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia. Visit the Workshop’s home page for more information.
Speaker: Alla Baranovsky, Ph.D. Candidate in Government, Harvard University; Graduate Student Assoicate, Davis Center
Stalin and Soviet Foreign Policy on the USSR’s Southern Borders, 1945-1947
Tuesday, February 18, 2020 | 12:15-1:45pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S354
This seminar will cover Soviet policy toward Turkey, Iran, and western China in the early years of the Cold War. In addition to being a prominent historian in Azerbaijan, Jamil Hasanli formerly served two terms in the Azerbaijani parliament and ran unsuccessfully as an opposition candidate for the Azerbaijani presidency.
Religious Elites and Democratic Backsliding in Turkey and Russia
Friday, February 28, 2020 | 12:00-1:15pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S153
This workshop brings together graduate students, postdocs, and area faculty to discuss new work related to politics and economics in the post-communist (and communist) countries of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia. Visit the Workshop’s home page for more information.
Speaker: Daniel Schulte, Ph.D Candidate, Brown University
The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe
Friday, February 28, 2020 | 2:00-4:00pm
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, Adolphus Busch Hall, 27 Kirkland Street at Cabot Way, Cambridge, MA
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet empire, the West faces a new era of East-West tensions. Any vision of a modern Russia integrated into the world economy and aligned in peaceful partnership with a reunited Europe has abruptly vanished. Two opposing narratives vie to explain the strategic future of Europe, one geopolitical and one economic, and both center on the same resource: natural gas. In The Bridge, Thane Gustafson, an expert on Russian oil and gas, argues, that the political rivalries, that capture the lion’s share of media attention, must be viewed alongside multiple business interests and differences in economic ideologies.
Speaker: Thane Gustafson, Professor of Government, Georgetown University
Discussant: Rawi Abdelal, Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, Harvard Business School; Faculty Associate, CES, Harvard University; Faculty Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Chair: Aurélie Bros, Senior Fellow, Energy Project, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies; Lecturer on Government, Harvard University
Tuesday, March 31, 2020 | 4:30-5:45pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S354
Vladimir Putin has long been known for his macho displays, and Donald Trump for his misogynist pronouncements. In both the U.S. and Russia, machismo and misogyny play fundamental roles in politics; the former is used to legitimize particular politicians as strong leaders, and the latter to undermine opponents as weak. In their lecture, while drawing parallels to Russia, Professors Robert Boatright and Valerie Sperling will focus on their new book about masculinity and misogyny in the U.S. political context, exploring how Donald Trump’s misogyny in the 2016 presidential race changed the way Congressional campaigns were waged in 2016 and 2018, and how the Trump factor is likely to affect the 2020 elections.
Speaker(s):
Robert G. Boatright, Professor and Chair, Political Science Department, Clark University
Moderated by Rochelle Ruthchild, Resident Scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University; Center Associate, Davis Center
Postcolonial Approaches to Central and Eastern European Theater and Performance
Friday, April 10, 2020 | 4:30-5:45pm
CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S354
This talk addresses the potential implications — political, social, aesthetic — of contextualizing Central and East Euopean theater and performance through the prism of postcolonial critique. Theater and opera were essential to nation-building because they provided a platform for the evolution of a national discourse while enacting and solidifying a sense of shared national identity. For this very reason, they also became politically contested sites.
Speaker: Magda Romanska, Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Dramaturgy, Emerson College; Center Associate, Davis Center