Programme :
Presentations by Streams
Keynote
Professor Gwendolyn Sasse (ZOiS - Centre for East European and International Studies, Berlin) Quo vadis Area Studies amidst Russia‘s War against Ukraine?
The New Soviet Person from Late Stalinism to Perestroika
Bolsheviks’ ambition to create a New Soviet Person during the first two decades of Soviet rule has received ample scholarly attention. We know much less, however, about the place of the New Soviet Person in Soviet ideology after World War II. This panel seeks to remedy that and explore the meanings of the New Soviet Person from late Stalinism to Perestroika. Yulia Chernyavskaya will focus on the postwar efforts to make people into conscious communist builders by providing them with accessible scientific information. Alissa Klots will analyze the drive to engage retirees in raising the new generation of the Soviet youth under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Irina Roldugina will consider medical discussions of male homosexuality in the 1970s. Finally, Courtney Doucette will examine the place of the New Soviet Person in Perestroika ideology.
East-Central Europe after 1968
Changing Perceptions in EU-EEU Relations: A Driver for Changing Foreign and Defence Policy
The Russian war against Ukraine is affecting the relations of the European Union (EU) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Whereas, before 2/24, EU member states followed different approaches in their relations with EEU member states - especially with its dominant member Russia - the Russian aggression resulted in unprecedented consensus in EU’s Russia policy. However, fissures in the common European position re-emerged soon. The EEU member states positions are also changing and differ considerably. While Belorussia strongly supports Russia, Kazakhstan is distancing itself from Russia and government and opposition in Armenia disagree over the country’s future course.
Since the social constructivist turn in International Relations (IR), the relevance of norms, ideas and identities in foreign policy have been highlighted. Especially EU foreign and security policy has been analysed in view of role concepts (Kirste/Maull), civilian power (Orbie) and normative power (Manners). In these research approaches the self-perceptions of the EU as well as third parties’ perception of the EU and the EU’s perception of other international actors, which are all rooted in cultural foundations and historical legacies, play an important role.
From this theoretical perspective, the panel aims at analysing the external and the self-perception of EU and EEU member states with regard to their mutual relations. Are these perceptions changing since February 2022? Based on this analysis the main research question is, how far differing self-perceptions as an international actor or different perceptions of the partner/opponent cause contestation over foreign and defence policy (on the internal level) or in external relations between the EU and the EEU (on the international level).
The panel invites papers from different disciplines analysing the EU’s and the EEU’s as well as their respective member states’ self-perception as internal actors and the external perception of the partners/opponents in the relations between the EU and the EEU. In addition to such descriptive analyses, the panel also invites papers analysing the relevance of perceptions of the EEU’s and the EU’s external relations since 2/24 or in the past.
Conservativism, religion, and war in Putin's Russia
Energy politics and policy
Ukrainian domestic politics
Eastern European Processes of Remembering Through Film: Documenting the Past, Archiving the Future
Popular discourses describe Eastern Europe as a region with fluid geographic boundaries and caught in a grey zone between dictatorship(s) and liberalism(s), between past and present, as a region constantly emerging or in transition, characterised by change and instability rather than economic stability and political continuity. Many temporal terms (belatedness, backwardness, nonsynchrony) and a host of proper names (East Central Europe, Central Europe, Newly Independent States, the Other Europe, the borderlands, and the Bloodlands) have been mobilised to capture the condition of this region.
In this panel, we want to explore how Eastern European cinematic productions engage productively with such widely-held views of the region and identify the aesthetic means and institutional strategies used in an effort to go beyond such binary, oppositional thinking in order to produce a more nuanced understanding of Eastern European cultural and political changes and transformations. How does film production from the region contribute to providing updated, new ways of thinking about this region especially, in view of the possibilities of including Eastern European experiences of the past into existing European memory frameworks? How do locally/ nationally / regionally significant memory events and institutions reflect on or challenge established European or global memory practices?
The papers in this panel zoom in on this set of questions by focusing on (documentary, essayistic and experimental) practices of appropriating archival materials as a way to connect history, memory and film and to reconstruct and make intelligible the Eastern European past for both local and global audiences. While this practice is not new, the specific case studies that this panel brings together rework the audio-visual archive of key events and institutions such as the Second World War and the Holocaust, Chornobyl utopia/dystopia, as well as communist secret police and its legacies in order to challenge, reinterpret existing patterns of collective and historical thinking about the region both locally and globally. At the same time, these cultural productions and memory practices can be seen as an attempt to inscribe the region’s memory work into wider (European) cultural and archival practices of productively engaging with the past.
Printing and Printmaking in Ukraine: Art Traditions and National Identities
Between Aesthetics and Politics: Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Russian Culture.
The panel will discuss several important trends in Russian literature and culture of the 2000s-2020s related to the emergence of the ethical turn in literary texts and in performances. It will analyse how the impact of social media on Russian writers and performers in the last thirty years has enabled them to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals who are eager to reach new transnational audiences. As Odile Heynders writes, “Today’s public intellectual operates in a media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate to a broad public”. (Odile Heynders. Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 3.) One of the main communicative strategies of Russian postmodernist authors and performers is related to the deconstruction of myths pertaining to communist ideology, history, and Russian classical canon. The panel will develop Mark Lipovetsky’s view of Russian contemporary culture as a space of deconstruction and restructuring “along different counter-mythological principles”. (M. Lipovetsky. “The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism”, Russian culture, 2012, 1-36; https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture/19)
Representing Poles and Jews in Theatre, Literature and Language
From communism to post-communism: Romanian paradoxes
This panel brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss the range of paradoxes of Romania's communist and post-communist history from a transregional and global perspective. The panel explores topics related to the domestic politics of the communist regime, positioning towards various international crises, and the consequences of the transition that led to the emergence of nostalgia and the explosion of populism.
In her paper, Mara Margineanu analyzes the nutrition regulations between the 1960s and 1980s in Romania, with a focus on the state's effort to convey knowledge into organizational structures and actions, and articulate social hierarchies and normalizing everyday taxonomies. Mioara Anton proposes a particular topic focused on the Chilean crisis and the way in which the humanitarian crisis was used by Ceausescu to increase his image capital both at the international level and within the communist bloc.
Using archival research and oral interviews, Luciana Jinga shows that after 1989, Romanians felt deeply humiliated when the westerners simply ignored Romania`s tradition as the initiator for humanitarian aid. In an interesting twist of the post-socialist memory, even the massive humanitarian aid received by Romania in the 1970s’ was left out. Daniel ?andru will explain how the presence of populism in Romanian society, on different dimensions, has affected, over time, the development and consolidation of the democratic political system.
Agencies of/for Democracy
Christian Churches and identity-building in contemporary Belarus
Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania
Class, Gender and Protest
Music and Memory
Translation and Translingualism
Church, religion and state before 1914
Creative use of Language
The New Soviet Person from Late Stalinism to Perestroika
Bolsheviks’ ambition to create a New Soviet Person during the first two decades of Soviet rule has received ample scholarly attention. We know much less, however, about the place of the New Soviet Person in Soviet ideology after World War II. This panel seeks to remedy that and explore the meanings of the New Soviet Person from late Stalinism to Perestroika. Yulia Chernyavskaya will focus on the postwar efforts to make people into conscious communist builders by providing them with accessible scientific information. Alissa Klots will analyze the drive to engage retirees in raising the new generation of the Soviet youth under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Irina Roldugina will consider medical discussions of male homosexuality in the 1970s. Finally, Courtney Doucette will examine the place of the New Soviet Person in Perestroika ideology.
East-Central Europe after 1968
Changing Perceptions in EU-EEU Relations: A Driver for Changing Foreign and Defence Policy
The Russian war against Ukraine is affecting the relations of the European Union (EU) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Whereas, before 2/24, EU member states followed different approaches in their relations with EEU member states - especially with its dominant member Russia - the Russian aggression resulted in unprecedented consensus in EU’s Russia policy. However, fissures in the common European position re-emerged soon. The EEU member states positions are also changing and differ considerably. While Belorussia strongly supports Russia, Kazakhstan is distancing itself from Russia and government and opposition in Armenia disagree over the country’s future course.
Since the social constructivist turn in International Relations (IR), the relevance of norms, ideas and identities in foreign policy have been highlighted. Especially EU foreign and security policy has been analysed in view of role concepts (Kirste/Maull), civilian power (Orbie) and normative power (Manners). In these research approaches the self-perceptions of the EU as well as third parties’ perception of the EU and the EU’s perception of other international actors, which are all rooted in cultural foundations and historical legacies, play an important role.
From this theoretical perspective, the panel aims at analysing the external and the self-perception of EU and EEU member states with regard to their mutual relations. Are these perceptions changing since February 2022? Based on this analysis the main research question is, how far differing self-perceptions as an international actor or different perceptions of the partner/opponent cause contestation over foreign and defence policy (on the internal level) or in external relations between the EU and the EEU (on the international level).
The panel invites papers from different disciplines analysing the EU’s and the EEU’s as well as their respective member states’ self-perception as internal actors and the external perception of the partners/opponents in the relations between the EU and the EEU. In addition to such descriptive analyses, the panel also invites papers analysing the relevance of perceptions of the EEU’s and the EU’s external relations since 2/24 or in the past.
Conservativism, religion, and war in Putin's Russia
Energy politics and policy
Ukrainian domestic politics
Eastern European Processes of Remembering Through Film: Documenting the Past, Archiving the Future
Popular discourses describe Eastern Europe as a region with fluid geographic boundaries and caught in a grey zone between dictatorship(s) and liberalism(s), between past and present, as a region constantly emerging or in transition, characterised by change and instability rather than economic stability and political continuity. Many temporal terms (belatedness, backwardness, nonsynchrony) and a host of proper names (East Central Europe, Central Europe, Newly Independent States, the Other Europe, the borderlands, and the Bloodlands) have been mobilised to capture the condition of this region.
In this panel, we want to explore how Eastern European cinematic productions engage productively with such widely-held views of the region and identify the aesthetic means and institutional strategies used in an effort to go beyond such binary, oppositional thinking in order to produce a more nuanced understanding of Eastern European cultural and political changes and transformations. How does film production from the region contribute to providing updated, new ways of thinking about this region especially, in view of the possibilities of including Eastern European experiences of the past into existing European memory frameworks? How do locally/ nationally / regionally significant memory events and institutions reflect on or challenge established European or global memory practices?
The papers in this panel zoom in on this set of questions by focusing on (documentary, essayistic and experimental) practices of appropriating archival materials as a way to connect history, memory and film and to reconstruct and make intelligible the Eastern European past for both local and global audiences. While this practice is not new, the specific case studies that this panel brings together rework the audio-visual archive of key events and institutions such as the Second World War and the Holocaust, Chornobyl utopia/dystopia, as well as communist secret police and its legacies in order to challenge, reinterpret existing patterns of collective and historical thinking about the region both locally and globally. At the same time, these cultural productions and memory practices can be seen as an attempt to inscribe the region’s memory work into wider (European) cultural and archival practices of productively engaging with the past.
Printing and Printmaking in Ukraine: Art Traditions and National Identities
Between Aesthetics and Politics: Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Russian Culture.
The panel will discuss several important trends in Russian literature and culture of the 2000s-2020s related to the emergence of the ethical turn in literary texts and in performances. It will analyse how the impact of social media on Russian writers and performers in the last thirty years has enabled them to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals who are eager to reach new transnational audiences. As Odile Heynders writes, “Today’s public intellectual operates in a media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate to a broad public”. (Odile Heynders. Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 3.) One of the main communicative strategies of Russian postmodernist authors and performers is related to the deconstruction of myths pertaining to communist ideology, history, and Russian classical canon. The panel will develop Mark Lipovetsky’s view of Russian contemporary culture as a space of deconstruction and restructuring “along different counter-mythological principles”. (M. Lipovetsky. “The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism”, Russian culture, 2012, 1-36; https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture/19)
Agencies of/for Democracy
Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania
Class, Gender and Protest
Music and Memory
Translation and Translingualism
Church, religion and state before 1914
Representing Poles and Jews in Theatre, Literature and Language
From communism to post-communism: Romanian paradoxes
This panel brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss the range of paradoxes of Romania's communist and post-communist history from a transregional and global perspective. The panel explores topics related to the domestic politics of the communist regime, positioning towards various international crises, and the consequences of the transition that led to the emergence of nostalgia and the explosion of populism.
In her paper, Mara Margineanu analyzes the nutrition regulations between the 1960s and 1980s in Romania, with a focus on the state's effort to convey knowledge into organizational structures and actions, and articulate social hierarchies and normalizing everyday taxonomies. Mioara Anton proposes a particular topic focused on the Chilean crisis and the way in which the humanitarian crisis was used by Ceausescu to increase his image capital both at the international level and within the communist bloc.
Using archival research and oral interviews, Luciana Jinga shows that after 1989, Romanians felt deeply humiliated when the westerners simply ignored Romania`s tradition as the initiator for humanitarian aid. In an interesting twist of the post-socialist memory, even the massive humanitarian aid received by Romania in the 1970s’ was left out. Daniel ?andru will explain how the presence of populism in Romanian society, on different dimensions, has affected, over time, the development and consolidation of the democratic political system.
Christian Churches and identity-building in contemporary Belarus
The New Soviet Person from Late Stalinism to Perestroika
Bolsheviks’ ambition to create a New Soviet Person during the first two decades of Soviet rule has received ample scholarly attention. We know much less, however, about the place of the New Soviet Person in Soviet ideology after World War II. This panel seeks to remedy that and explore the meanings of the New Soviet Person from late Stalinism to Perestroika. Yulia Chernyavskaya will focus on the postwar efforts to make people into conscious communist builders by providing them with accessible scientific information. Alissa Klots will analyze the drive to engage retirees in raising the new generation of the Soviet youth under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Irina Roldugina will consider medical discussions of male homosexuality in the 1970s. Finally, Courtney Doucette will examine the place of the New Soviet Person in Perestroika ideology.
East-Central Europe after 1968
Changing Perceptions in EU-EEU Relations: A Driver for Changing Foreign and Defence Policy
The Russian war against Ukraine is affecting the relations of the European Union (EU) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Whereas, before 2/24, EU member states followed different approaches in their relations with EEU member states - especially with its dominant member Russia - the Russian aggression resulted in unprecedented consensus in EU’s Russia policy. However, fissures in the common European position re-emerged soon. The EEU member states positions are also changing and differ considerably. While Belorussia strongly supports Russia, Kazakhstan is distancing itself from Russia and government and opposition in Armenia disagree over the country’s future course.
Since the social constructivist turn in International Relations (IR), the relevance of norms, ideas and identities in foreign policy have been highlighted. Especially EU foreign and security policy has been analysed in view of role concepts (Kirste/Maull), civilian power (Orbie) and normative power (Manners). In these research approaches the self-perceptions of the EU as well as third parties’ perception of the EU and the EU’s perception of other international actors, which are all rooted in cultural foundations and historical legacies, play an important role.
From this theoretical perspective, the panel aims at analysing the external and the self-perception of EU and EEU member states with regard to their mutual relations. Are these perceptions changing since February 2022? Based on this analysis the main research question is, how far differing self-perceptions as an international actor or different perceptions of the partner/opponent cause contestation over foreign and defence policy (on the internal level) or in external relations between the EU and the EEU (on the international level).
The panel invites papers from different disciplines analysing the EU’s and the EEU’s as well as their respective member states’ self-perception as internal actors and the external perception of the partners/opponents in the relations between the EU and the EEU. In addition to such descriptive analyses, the panel also invites papers analysing the relevance of perceptions of the EEU’s and the EU’s external relations since 2/24 or in the past.
Conservativism, religion, and war in Putin's Russia
Energy politics and policy
Ukrainian domestic politics
Eastern European Processes of Remembering Through Film: Documenting the Past, Archiving the Future
Popular discourses describe Eastern Europe as a region with fluid geographic boundaries and caught in a grey zone between dictatorship(s) and liberalism(s), between past and present, as a region constantly emerging or in transition, characterised by change and instability rather than economic stability and political continuity. Many temporal terms (belatedness, backwardness, nonsynchrony) and a host of proper names (East Central Europe, Central Europe, Newly Independent States, the Other Europe, the borderlands, and the Bloodlands) have been mobilised to capture the condition of this region.
In this panel, we want to explore how Eastern European cinematic productions engage productively with such widely-held views of the region and identify the aesthetic means and institutional strategies used in an effort to go beyond such binary, oppositional thinking in order to produce a more nuanced understanding of Eastern European cultural and political changes and transformations. How does film production from the region contribute to providing updated, new ways of thinking about this region especially, in view of the possibilities of including Eastern European experiences of the past into existing European memory frameworks? How do locally/ nationally / regionally significant memory events and institutions reflect on or challenge established European or global memory practices?
The papers in this panel zoom in on this set of questions by focusing on (documentary, essayistic and experimental) practices of appropriating archival materials as a way to connect history, memory and film and to reconstruct and make intelligible the Eastern European past for both local and global audiences. While this practice is not new, the specific case studies that this panel brings together rework the audio-visual archive of key events and institutions such as the Second World War and the Holocaust, Chornobyl utopia/dystopia, as well as communist secret police and its legacies in order to challenge, reinterpret existing patterns of collective and historical thinking about the region both locally and globally. At the same time, these cultural productions and memory practices can be seen as an attempt to inscribe the region’s memory work into wider (European) cultural and archival practices of productively engaging with the past.
Printing and Printmaking in Ukraine: Art Traditions and National Identities
Between Aesthetics and Politics: Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Russian Culture.
The panel will discuss several important trends in Russian literature and culture of the 2000s-2020s related to the emergence of the ethical turn in literary texts and in performances. It will analyse how the impact of social media on Russian writers and performers in the last thirty years has enabled them to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals who are eager to reach new transnational audiences. As Odile Heynders writes, “Today’s public intellectual operates in a media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate to a broad public”. (Odile Heynders. Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 3.) One of the main communicative strategies of Russian postmodernist authors and performers is related to the deconstruction of myths pertaining to communist ideology, history, and Russian classical canon. The panel will develop Mark Lipovetsky’s view of Russian contemporary culture as a space of deconstruction and restructuring “along different counter-mythological principles”. (M. Lipovetsky. “The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism”, Russian culture, 2012, 1-36; https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture/19)
Agencies of/for Democracy
Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania
Music and Memory
Translation and Translingualism
Creative use of Language
Representing Poles and Jews in Theatre, Literature and Language
From communism to post-communism: Romanian paradoxes
This panel brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss the range of paradoxes of Romania's communist and post-communist history from a transregional and global perspective. The panel explores topics related to the domestic politics of the communist regime, positioning towards various international crises, and the consequences of the transition that led to the emergence of nostalgia and the explosion of populism.
In her paper, Mara Margineanu analyzes the nutrition regulations between the 1960s and 1980s in Romania, with a focus on the state's effort to convey knowledge into organizational structures and actions, and articulate social hierarchies and normalizing everyday taxonomies. Mioara Anton proposes a particular topic focused on the Chilean crisis and the way in which the humanitarian crisis was used by Ceausescu to increase his image capital both at the international level and within the communist bloc.
Using archival research and oral interviews, Luciana Jinga shows that after 1989, Romanians felt deeply humiliated when the westerners simply ignored Romania`s tradition as the initiator for humanitarian aid. In an interesting twist of the post-socialist memory, even the massive humanitarian aid received by Romania in the 1970s’ was left out. Daniel ?andru will explain how the presence of populism in Romanian society, on different dimensions, has affected, over time, the development and consolidation of the democratic political system.
Christian Churches and identity-building in contemporary Belarus
The New Soviet Person from Late Stalinism to Perestroika
Bolsheviks’ ambition to create a New Soviet Person during the first two decades of Soviet rule has received ample scholarly attention. We know much less, however, about the place of the New Soviet Person in Soviet ideology after World War II. This panel seeks to remedy that and explore the meanings of the New Soviet Person from late Stalinism to Perestroika. Yulia Chernyavskaya will focus on the postwar efforts to make people into conscious communist builders by providing them with accessible scientific information. Alissa Klots will analyze the drive to engage retirees in raising the new generation of the Soviet youth under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Irina Roldugina will consider medical discussions of male homosexuality in the 1970s. Finally, Courtney Doucette will examine the place of the New Soviet Person in Perestroika ideology.
East-Central Europe after 1968
Conservativism, religion, and war in Putin's Russia
Ukrainian domestic politics
Printing and Printmaking in Ukraine: Art Traditions and National Identities
Between Aesthetics and Politics: Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Russian Culture.
The panel will discuss several important trends in Russian literature and culture of the 2000s-2020s related to the emergence of the ethical turn in literary texts and in performances. It will analyse how the impact of social media on Russian writers and performers in the last thirty years has enabled them to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals who are eager to reach new transnational audiences. As Odile Heynders writes, “Today’s public intellectual operates in a media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate to a broad public”. (Odile Heynders. Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 3.) One of the main communicative strategies of Russian postmodernist authors and performers is related to the deconstruction of myths pertaining to communist ideology, history, and Russian classical canon. The panel will develop Mark Lipovetsky’s view of Russian contemporary culture as a space of deconstruction and restructuring “along different counter-mythological principles”. (M. Lipovetsky. “The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism”, Russian culture, 2012, 1-36; https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture/19)
Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania
Creative use of Language
From communism to post-communism: Romanian paradoxes
This panel brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss the range of paradoxes of Romania's communist and post-communist history from a transregional and global perspective. The panel explores topics related to the domestic politics of the communist regime, positioning towards various international crises, and the consequences of the transition that led to the emergence of nostalgia and the explosion of populism.
In her paper, Mara Margineanu analyzes the nutrition regulations between the 1960s and 1980s in Romania, with a focus on the state's effort to convey knowledge into organizational structures and actions, and articulate social hierarchies and normalizing everyday taxonomies. Mioara Anton proposes a particular topic focused on the Chilean crisis and the way in which the humanitarian crisis was used by Ceausescu to increase his image capital both at the international level and within the communist bloc.
Using archival research and oral interviews, Luciana Jinga shows that after 1989, Romanians felt deeply humiliated when the westerners simply ignored Romania`s tradition as the initiator for humanitarian aid. In an interesting twist of the post-socialist memory, even the massive humanitarian aid received by Romania in the 1970s’ was left out. Daniel ?andru will explain how the presence of populism in Romanian society, on different dimensions, has affected, over time, the development and consolidation of the democratic political system.
Pluralism, Resilience and Societal Survival: Ukraine under Zelensky
Departure during the War: Migration from Russia in 2022
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in, among other much graver consequences, hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country. It is impossible to give the social portrait of a “typical emigrant” as various migration strategies differ radically. It is more viable to envision them as a complex continuum which includes political activists fleeing from repressions as well as young men escaping from the mobilization.
For us as researchers in social sciences who oppose this criminal war and share the experience of emigration with our interviewees, this project is more than an academic endeavour. We see it as a civil action as its results may be used to counter Russian propaganda.
The panel will feature the studies conducted by several research groups which form a complex understanding of the migration from Russia during the war.
1. The Independent research group “After 24” was formed in March 2022 by scholars who moved to Armenia and Georgia and focus on this region. They finished the quantitative stage of research with 900 filled questionnaires and started the qualitative one with over 50 interviews conducted at the time of this application. The main research questions include the identity of different migrant groups, adaptation and integration strategies, and political views and emotions.
2. Researchers from three universities conduct a survey that covers migrants based in 60+ countries (1680 completed questionnaires in March and 2900 - in September). This project relies on a variety of data that allow for a systematic comparison of migrants’ trajectories, their impact on the host state's security, domestic political landscapes, as well as their ties with Russia.
3. Alevtina Borodulina, social anthropologist and exhibit curator, and Eva Rapoport, cultural anthropologist and photographer, started working on the research of the “shock wave of Russian emigration” while volunteering for the Istanbul branch of “The Ark” (Kovcheg), a project helping Russian emigrants. They focus on people who left Russia during the very first weeks of the war. They also created a digital art project “Imagine/unimaginable” based on the interviews they conducted.
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: Gendered and centre-periphery dynamics
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Papers united by this panel examine change and continuity in visible and invisible hierarchies along the gender and centre-periphery gradient in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. They capture how diverse communities, ranging from public policy bureaucrats to academics and artists, sustain, reproduce, and transform these hierarchies throughout space and time. Each paper focuses on women’s lived experiences to unveil the intricate ways through which gender intersects with other Soviet and post-Soviet hierarchies and often empowers Russia's coloniality. This feminist lense allows to dientangle hegemonic narratives of Soviet and post-Soviet modernities and reflect on the power structures that reproduce opressive hirarchies on different levels of these modernities.
Under Pressure? Nationality, Ideology and Borders in Soviet Political History and Russian Politics
The Baltic in world politics from the Early Modern to the present
This panel will explore the engagement of the Baltic sea region with the global world in its political, economic and legal dimensions.
Ukrainian Literature and Culture
Russian Poets in Dialogue
Production of strategic narratives and audience perception
Climate Adaptation and Knowledge in the Russian Arctic
Research project by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Climate change in Russia’s Arctic: Perceptions, response, implications, investigates Russian perceptions and interpretations of climate change in the Arctic and responses in terms of policy and adaptive measures. Our key concept is knowledge. We examine it from the state, social and scientific points of view asking: What are the main sources of knowledge on climate change and its impacts found in the Russian societal debate and policy development, and how are companies active in the Russian Arctic using this knowledge? Our research on societal knowledge suggests that both anthropogenic and cyclical perceptions as the origins of climate change persist, and that benefits from climate change are still expected while climate science is perceived as the most important source of knowledge by educated Russian interviewees. While there is an official climate adaptation policy, economic adaptation to international climate politics has come to the forefront, raising questions of the need for structural change in the Russian economy. The discontinuation of work in the Arctic Council as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can have serious impact on climate science: lack of access to Russian climate data and reduced inputs from international climate science in Russia. Big Russian companies operating in the Arctic find themselves in a precarious situation mainly because of the war, but they still have to consider direct threats to their operations from thawing permafrost. They also realize that any future role in international markets will be affected by their adoption of ESG standards.
Russian foreign policy – concepts and ideas
“East of the West, West of the East”: Narrating Identity and Difference in Modern and Contemporary Polish Prose
Investigating "National Form" in Early Soviet Culture, 1917-1953
In recent years, increasing numbers of scholars have begun to recognise the centrality of the nationalities question to the Soviet project. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 as a multinational state where, in a bid to marry revolutionary socialism with the notion of national self-determination, non-Russian nationalities were granted their own national territories and structures of government. In the cultural sphere, this Soviet multinationalism manifested itself in the mantra that cultural production should be “national in form, socialist in content”, combining expressions of national identity with the dominant ideology of Marxism-Leninism. But what did this “national form” look like in practice? How was it translated into the political and cultural realities of the many non-Russian Soviet republics? And what factors influenced the different manifestations of national form from one republic to another?
This panel seeks to explore the nuances of national form in Soviet cultural production up to 1953. Containing papers looking at areas as diverse as Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, it aims to assess the application of “national in form, socialist in content” across different national contexts, looking both for shared features and local particularities. In this way, the panel hopes to advance discussions of national form in early Soviet culture, moving away from suggestions of an undifferentiated all-Union cultural policy and recognising the varied and multifaceted ways in which national art was produced in the non-Russian republics of the USSR.
New Perspectives on Dostoevsky
Colonial Efforts and the Habsburg Monarchy: Hungarian Perspectives from the Balkans (1867-1918)
The papers of the panel focus on ideas about colonialism in Hungary and colonial activities undertaken by Hungarians between 1867 and 1918. Postcolonial theory has been widely applied to analyze the colonial past of the Habsburg Monarchy, but most studies scrutinized only developments in Austria and the Austrian half of the Monarchy. Hungary’s role in the Habsburg Monarchy is often treated in a negative way, as Hungary significantly contributed to the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire due to the nationalizing policies of the Hungarian elite. Yet, Hungary was considered by many, even in official parlance, as an empire itself within the political framework of Austria-Hungary. The panel addresses the different manifestations and efforts at colonization in Hungary starting from political ideas about colonization, economic expansionism, the civilizing mission in the Balkans, infrastructure promoting colonization such as educational institutions, associations, trade companies, and railway lines, and finally imperial bureaucracy as a specific tool of colonial domination. The goal of the panel is therefore to analyze Hungary’s (up to now ignored) colonial past and situate it in a wider (East-)European context. It also demonstrates that colonialism can have different manifestations ranging from unfulfilled political ideas via educational institutions to infrastructural investments, even in a relatively backward Central-European country.
Future Spaces: Tourism, Heritage and Architecture
Transformations of LGBTQ Politics and Cultures in the Post-socialist Baltic States
While the Baltic states have flourishing queer subcultures, the legal equality of LGBTQ people in the region remains meagre and unstable. The contemporary situation is often attributed to the legacy of the Soviet era as well as the hegemony of conservative gender politics in post-socialism. With the tension between social and legal reality rising, there is a growing need for research which would analyze both the history of homophobia and of queerness, and its contemporary post-Soviet manifestations.
The papers in this panel focus on the transition period from the last years of glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way it affected the attitudes, (self-)perceptions, behaviors, cultural norms, and political strategies of LGBTQ people in the aftermath of socialism in the Baltics. So far the historical research into the Soviet Union has demonstrated that medicalization and criminalization of homosexuality as well as nearly total silence about transgender people was an inseparable part of socialist modernity (Alexander 2020; Healey 2018; Essig 1999). Through close work with archival materials and cultural objects, scholars have challenged the assumption of “silence” about same-sex desire and gender transition in the Soviet Union and aimed to historicize contemporary trans- and homophobia. Combining archival sources with oral history researchers have provided invaluable insights into the biopolitical control and regulation of sexuality and gender, and the effect it had on the subject formation of queer individuals throughout the Soviet period. The historiography of the state-socialist contexts has shown a variety of tools of modern disciplining of same-sex sexuality and eroticism, especially through pathologising discourses and censorship. The historiography of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialism yet remains mostly limited to Soviet Russia and the Central European countries, with little research done on the (former) Western borderlands of the Soviet Union.
The papers in this panel offer a glimpse into the topic of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialist Lithuania and Estonia, countering the false impression of absence of queer subjectivities, behaviors and discourses in Soviet Baltic societies. It highlights the dynamics of queerness, understood both as an identity and as a socio-cultural category, in arts and cinema, LGBTQ activism, and the narratives of the self.
The historiography of the state-socialist contexts has shown a variety of tools of modern disciplining of same-sex sexuality and eroticism, especially through pathologising discourses and censorship. The historiography of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialism yet remains mostly limited to Soviet Russia and the Central European countries, with little research done on the (former) Western borderlands of the Soviet Union. The collection of papers in this panel offers a glimpse into the topic of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialist Lithuania and Estonia, countering the false impression of absence of queer subjectivities, behaviors and discourses in Soviet Baltic societies. It highlights the dynamics of queerness, understood both as an identity and as a socio-cultural category, in arts and cinema, LGBTQ activism, and the narratives of the self.
Economic development in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe
Language as Ever-Changing Phenomenon
Pluralism, Resilience and Societal Survival: Ukraine under Zelensky
Departure during the War: Migration from Russia in 2022
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in, among other much graver consequences, hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country. It is impossible to give the social portrait of a “typical emigrant” as various migration strategies differ radically. It is more viable to envision them as a complex continuum which includes political activists fleeing from repressions as well as young men escaping from the mobilization.
For us as researchers in social sciences who oppose this criminal war and share the experience of emigration with our interviewees, this project is more than an academic endeavour. We see it as a civil action as its results may be used to counter Russian propaganda.
The panel will feature the studies conducted by several research groups which form a complex understanding of the migration from Russia during the war.
1. The Independent research group “After 24” was formed in March 2022 by scholars who moved to Armenia and Georgia and focus on this region. They finished the quantitative stage of research with 900 filled questionnaires and started the qualitative one with over 50 interviews conducted at the time of this application. The main research questions include the identity of different migrant groups, adaptation and integration strategies, and political views and emotions.
2. Researchers from three universities conduct a survey that covers migrants based in 60+ countries (1680 completed questionnaires in March and 2900 - in September). This project relies on a variety of data that allow for a systematic comparison of migrants’ trajectories, their impact on the host state's security, domestic political landscapes, as well as their ties with Russia.
3. Alevtina Borodulina, social anthropologist and exhibit curator, and Eva Rapoport, cultural anthropologist and photographer, started working on the research of the “shock wave of Russian emigration” while volunteering for the Istanbul branch of “The Ark” (Kovcheg), a project helping Russian emigrants. They focus on people who left Russia during the very first weeks of the war. They also created a digital art project “Imagine/unimaginable” based on the interviews they conducted.
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: Gendered and centre-periphery dynamics
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Papers united by this panel examine change and continuity in visible and invisible hierarchies along the gender and centre-periphery gradient in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. They capture how diverse communities, ranging from public policy bureaucrats to academics and artists, sustain, reproduce, and transform these hierarchies throughout space and time. Each paper focuses on women’s lived experiences to unveil the intricate ways through which gender intersects with other Soviet and post-Soviet hierarchies and often empowers Russia's coloniality. This feminist lense allows to dientangle hegemonic narratives of Soviet and post-Soviet modernities and reflect on the power structures that reproduce opressive hirarchies on different levels of these modernities.
Ukrainian Literature and Culture
Russian Poets in Dialogue
Production of strategic narratives and audience perception
Climate Adaptation and Knowledge in the Russian Arctic
Research project by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Climate change in Russia’s Arctic: Perceptions, response, implications, investigates Russian perceptions and interpretations of climate change in the Arctic and responses in terms of policy and adaptive measures. Our key concept is knowledge. We examine it from the state, social and scientific points of view asking: What are the main sources of knowledge on climate change and its impacts found in the Russian societal debate and policy development, and how are companies active in the Russian Arctic using this knowledge? Our research on societal knowledge suggests that both anthropogenic and cyclical perceptions as the origins of climate change persist, and that benefits from climate change are still expected while climate science is perceived as the most important source of knowledge by educated Russian interviewees. While there is an official climate adaptation policy, economic adaptation to international climate politics has come to the forefront, raising questions of the need for structural change in the Russian economy. The discontinuation of work in the Arctic Council as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can have serious impact on climate science: lack of access to Russian climate data and reduced inputs from international climate science in Russia. Big Russian companies operating in the Arctic find themselves in a precarious situation mainly because of the war, but they still have to consider direct threats to their operations from thawing permafrost. They also realize that any future role in international markets will be affected by their adoption of ESG standards.
Russian foreign policy – concepts and ideas
“East of the West, West of the East”: Narrating Identity and Difference in Modern and Contemporary Polish Prose
Investigating "National Form" in Early Soviet Culture, 1917-1953
In recent years, increasing numbers of scholars have begun to recognise the centrality of the nationalities question to the Soviet project. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 as a multinational state where, in a bid to marry revolutionary socialism with the notion of national self-determination, non-Russian nationalities were granted their own national territories and structures of government. In the cultural sphere, this Soviet multinationalism manifested itself in the mantra that cultural production should be “national in form, socialist in content”, combining expressions of national identity with the dominant ideology of Marxism-Leninism. But what did this “national form” look like in practice? How was it translated into the political and cultural realities of the many non-Russian Soviet republics? And what factors influenced the different manifestations of national form from one republic to another?
This panel seeks to explore the nuances of national form in Soviet cultural production up to 1953. Containing papers looking at areas as diverse as Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, it aims to assess the application of “national in form, socialist in content” across different national contexts, looking both for shared features and local particularities. In this way, the panel hopes to advance discussions of national form in early Soviet culture, moving away from suggestions of an undifferentiated all-Union cultural policy and recognising the varied and multifaceted ways in which national art was produced in the non-Russian republics of the USSR.
New Perspectives on Dostoevsky
Colonial Efforts and the Habsburg Monarchy: Hungarian Perspectives from the Balkans (1867-1918)
The papers of the panel focus on ideas about colonialism in Hungary and colonial activities undertaken by Hungarians between 1867 and 1918. Postcolonial theory has been widely applied to analyze the colonial past of the Habsburg Monarchy, but most studies scrutinized only developments in Austria and the Austrian half of the Monarchy. Hungary’s role in the Habsburg Monarchy is often treated in a negative way, as Hungary significantly contributed to the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire due to the nationalizing policies of the Hungarian elite. Yet, Hungary was considered by many, even in official parlance, as an empire itself within the political framework of Austria-Hungary. The panel addresses the different manifestations and efforts at colonization in Hungary starting from political ideas about colonization, economic expansionism, the civilizing mission in the Balkans, infrastructure promoting colonization such as educational institutions, associations, trade companies, and railway lines, and finally imperial bureaucracy as a specific tool of colonial domination. The goal of the panel is therefore to analyze Hungary’s (up to now ignored) colonial past and situate it in a wider (East-)European context. It also demonstrates that colonialism can have different manifestations ranging from unfulfilled political ideas via educational institutions to infrastructural investments, even in a relatively backward Central-European country.
Future Spaces: Tourism, Heritage and Architecture
Economic development in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe
Under Pressure? Nationality, Ideology and Borders in Soviet Political History and Russian Politics
The Baltic in world politics from the Early Modern to the present
This panel will explore the engagement of the Baltic sea region with the global world in its political, economic and legal dimensions.
Transformations of LGBTQ Politics and Cultures in the Post-socialist Baltic States
While the Baltic states have flourishing queer subcultures, the legal equality of LGBTQ people in the region remains meagre and unstable. The contemporary situation is often attributed to the legacy of the Soviet era as well as the hegemony of conservative gender politics in post-socialism. With the tension between social and legal reality rising, there is a growing need for research which would analyze both the history of homophobia and of queerness, and its contemporary post-Soviet manifestations.
The papers in this panel focus on the transition period from the last years of glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way it affected the attitudes, (self-)perceptions, behaviors, cultural norms, and political strategies of LGBTQ people in the aftermath of socialism in the Baltics. So far the historical research into the Soviet Union has demonstrated that medicalization and criminalization of homosexuality as well as nearly total silence about transgender people was an inseparable part of socialist modernity (Alexander 2020; Healey 2018; Essig 1999). Through close work with archival materials and cultural objects, scholars have challenged the assumption of “silence” about same-sex desire and gender transition in the Soviet Union and aimed to historicize contemporary trans- and homophobia. Combining archival sources with oral history researchers have provided invaluable insights into the biopolitical control and regulation of sexuality and gender, and the effect it had on the subject formation of queer individuals throughout the Soviet period. The historiography of the state-socialist contexts has shown a variety of tools of modern disciplining of same-sex sexuality and eroticism, especially through pathologising discourses and censorship. The historiography of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialism yet remains mostly limited to Soviet Russia and the Central European countries, with little research done on the (former) Western borderlands of the Soviet Union.
The papers in this panel offer a glimpse into the topic of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialist Lithuania and Estonia, countering the false impression of absence of queer subjectivities, behaviors and discourses in Soviet Baltic societies. It highlights the dynamics of queerness, understood both as an identity and as a socio-cultural category, in arts and cinema, LGBTQ activism, and the narratives of the self.
The historiography of the state-socialist contexts has shown a variety of tools of modern disciplining of same-sex sexuality and eroticism, especially through pathologising discourses and censorship. The historiography of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialism yet remains mostly limited to Soviet Russia and the Central European countries, with little research done on the (former) Western borderlands of the Soviet Union. The collection of papers in this panel offers a glimpse into the topic of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialist Lithuania and Estonia, countering the false impression of absence of queer subjectivities, behaviors and discourses in Soviet Baltic societies. It highlights the dynamics of queerness, understood both as an identity and as a socio-cultural category, in arts and cinema, LGBTQ activism, and the narratives of the self.
Language as Ever-Changing Phenomenon
Pluralism, Resilience and Societal Survival: Ukraine under Zelensky
Departure during the War: Migration from Russia in 2022
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in, among other much graver consequences, hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country. It is impossible to give the social portrait of a “typical emigrant” as various migration strategies differ radically. It is more viable to envision them as a complex continuum which includes political activists fleeing from repressions as well as young men escaping from the mobilization.
For us as researchers in social sciences who oppose this criminal war and share the experience of emigration with our interviewees, this project is more than an academic endeavour. We see it as a civil action as its results may be used to counter Russian propaganda.
The panel will feature the studies conducted by several research groups which form a complex understanding of the migration from Russia during the war.
1. The Independent research group “After 24” was formed in March 2022 by scholars who moved to Armenia and Georgia and focus on this region. They finished the quantitative stage of research with 900 filled questionnaires and started the qualitative one with over 50 interviews conducted at the time of this application. The main research questions include the identity of different migrant groups, adaptation and integration strategies, and political views and emotions.
2. Researchers from three universities conduct a survey that covers migrants based in 60+ countries (1680 completed questionnaires in March and 2900 - in September). This project relies on a variety of data that allow for a systematic comparison of migrants’ trajectories, their impact on the host state's security, domestic political landscapes, as well as their ties with Russia.
3. Alevtina Borodulina, social anthropologist and exhibit curator, and Eva Rapoport, cultural anthropologist and photographer, started working on the research of the “shock wave of Russian emigration” while volunteering for the Istanbul branch of “The Ark” (Kovcheg), a project helping Russian emigrants. They focus on people who left Russia during the very first weeks of the war. They also created a digital art project “Imagine/unimaginable” based on the interviews they conducted.
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: Gendered and centre-periphery dynamics
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Papers united by this panel examine change and continuity in visible and invisible hierarchies along the gender and centre-periphery gradient in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. They capture how diverse communities, ranging from public policy bureaucrats to academics and artists, sustain, reproduce, and transform these hierarchies throughout space and time. Each paper focuses on women’s lived experiences to unveil the intricate ways through which gender intersects with other Soviet and post-Soviet hierarchies and often empowers Russia's coloniality. This feminist lense allows to dientangle hegemonic narratives of Soviet and post-Soviet modernities and reflect on the power structures that reproduce opressive hirarchies on different levels of these modernities.
Ukrainian Literature and Culture
Russian Poets in Dialogue
Production of strategic narratives and audience perception
Climate Adaptation and Knowledge in the Russian Arctic
Research project by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Climate change in Russia’s Arctic: Perceptions, response, implications, investigates Russian perceptions and interpretations of climate change in the Arctic and responses in terms of policy and adaptive measures. Our key concept is knowledge. We examine it from the state, social and scientific points of view asking: What are the main sources of knowledge on climate change and its impacts found in the Russian societal debate and policy development, and how are companies active in the Russian Arctic using this knowledge? Our research on societal knowledge suggests that both anthropogenic and cyclical perceptions as the origins of climate change persist, and that benefits from climate change are still expected while climate science is perceived as the most important source of knowledge by educated Russian interviewees. While there is an official climate adaptation policy, economic adaptation to international climate politics has come to the forefront, raising questions of the need for structural change in the Russian economy. The discontinuation of work in the Arctic Council as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can have serious impact on climate science: lack of access to Russian climate data and reduced inputs from international climate science in Russia. Big Russian companies operating in the Arctic find themselves in a precarious situation mainly because of the war, but they still have to consider direct threats to their operations from thawing permafrost. They also realize that any future role in international markets will be affected by their adoption of ESG standards.
Russian foreign policy – concepts and ideas
“East of the West, West of the East”: Narrating Identity and Difference in Modern and Contemporary Polish Prose
Investigating "National Form" in Early Soviet Culture, 1917-1953
In recent years, increasing numbers of scholars have begun to recognise the centrality of the nationalities question to the Soviet project. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 as a multinational state where, in a bid to marry revolutionary socialism with the notion of national self-determination, non-Russian nationalities were granted their own national territories and structures of government. In the cultural sphere, this Soviet multinationalism manifested itself in the mantra that cultural production should be “national in form, socialist in content”, combining expressions of national identity with the dominant ideology of Marxism-Leninism. But what did this “national form” look like in practice? How was it translated into the political and cultural realities of the many non-Russian Soviet republics? And what factors influenced the different manifestations of national form from one republic to another?
This panel seeks to explore the nuances of national form in Soviet cultural production up to 1953. Containing papers looking at areas as diverse as Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, it aims to assess the application of “national in form, socialist in content” across different national contexts, looking both for shared features and local particularities. In this way, the panel hopes to advance discussions of national form in early Soviet culture, moving away from suggestions of an undifferentiated all-Union cultural policy and recognising the varied and multifaceted ways in which national art was produced in the non-Russian republics of the USSR.
New Perspectives on Dostoevsky
Colonial Efforts and the Habsburg Monarchy: Hungarian Perspectives from the Balkans (1867-1918)
The papers of the panel focus on ideas about colonialism in Hungary and colonial activities undertaken by Hungarians between 1867 and 1918. Postcolonial theory has been widely applied to analyze the colonial past of the Habsburg Monarchy, but most studies scrutinized only developments in Austria and the Austrian half of the Monarchy. Hungary’s role in the Habsburg Monarchy is often treated in a negative way, as Hungary significantly contributed to the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire due to the nationalizing policies of the Hungarian elite. Yet, Hungary was considered by many, even in official parlance, as an empire itself within the political framework of Austria-Hungary. The panel addresses the different manifestations and efforts at colonization in Hungary starting from political ideas about colonization, economic expansionism, the civilizing mission in the Balkans, infrastructure promoting colonization such as educational institutions, associations, trade companies, and railway lines, and finally imperial bureaucracy as a specific tool of colonial domination. The goal of the panel is therefore to analyze Hungary’s (up to now ignored) colonial past and situate it in a wider (East-)European context. It also demonstrates that colonialism can have different manifestations ranging from unfulfilled political ideas via educational institutions to infrastructural investments, even in a relatively backward Central-European country.
Future Spaces: Tourism, Heritage and Architecture
Economic development in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe
Under Pressure? Nationality, Ideology and Borders in Soviet Political History and Russian Politics
The Baltic in world politics from the Early Modern to the present
This panel will explore the engagement of the Baltic sea region with the global world in its political, economic and legal dimensions.
Transformations of LGBTQ Politics and Cultures in the Post-socialist Baltic States
While the Baltic states have flourishing queer subcultures, the legal equality of LGBTQ people in the region remains meagre and unstable. The contemporary situation is often attributed to the legacy of the Soviet era as well as the hegemony of conservative gender politics in post-socialism. With the tension between social and legal reality rising, there is a growing need for research which would analyze both the history of homophobia and of queerness, and its contemporary post-Soviet manifestations.
The papers in this panel focus on the transition period from the last years of glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way it affected the attitudes, (self-)perceptions, behaviors, cultural norms, and political strategies of LGBTQ people in the aftermath of socialism in the Baltics. So far the historical research into the Soviet Union has demonstrated that medicalization and criminalization of homosexuality as well as nearly total silence about transgender people was an inseparable part of socialist modernity (Alexander 2020; Healey 2018; Essig 1999). Through close work with archival materials and cultural objects, scholars have challenged the assumption of “silence” about same-sex desire and gender transition in the Soviet Union and aimed to historicize contemporary trans- and homophobia. Combining archival sources with oral history researchers have provided invaluable insights into the biopolitical control and regulation of sexuality and gender, and the effect it had on the subject formation of queer individuals throughout the Soviet period. The historiography of the state-socialist contexts has shown a variety of tools of modern disciplining of same-sex sexuality and eroticism, especially through pathologising discourses and censorship. The historiography of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialism yet remains mostly limited to Soviet Russia and the Central European countries, with little research done on the (former) Western borderlands of the Soviet Union.
The papers in this panel offer a glimpse into the topic of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialist Lithuania and Estonia, countering the false impression of absence of queer subjectivities, behaviors and discourses in Soviet Baltic societies. It highlights the dynamics of queerness, understood both as an identity and as a socio-cultural category, in arts and cinema, LGBTQ activism, and the narratives of the self.
The historiography of the state-socialist contexts has shown a variety of tools of modern disciplining of same-sex sexuality and eroticism, especially through pathologising discourses and censorship. The historiography of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialism yet remains mostly limited to Soviet Russia and the Central European countries, with little research done on the (former) Western borderlands of the Soviet Union. The collection of papers in this panel offers a glimpse into the topic of non-heteronormative sexuality in (post-)socialist Lithuania and Estonia, countering the false impression of absence of queer subjectivities, behaviors and discourses in Soviet Baltic societies. It highlights the dynamics of queerness, understood both as an identity and as a socio-cultural category, in arts and cinema, LGBTQ activism, and the narratives of the self.
Language as Ever-Changing Phenomenon
Ukrainian Literature and Culture
Russian Poets in Dialogue
Production of strategic narratives and audience perception
Climate Adaptation and Knowledge in the Russian Arctic
Research project by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Climate change in Russia’s Arctic: Perceptions, response, implications, investigates Russian perceptions and interpretations of climate change in the Arctic and responses in terms of policy and adaptive measures. Our key concept is knowledge. We examine it from the state, social and scientific points of view asking: What are the main sources of knowledge on climate change and its impacts found in the Russian societal debate and policy development, and how are companies active in the Russian Arctic using this knowledge? Our research on societal knowledge suggests that both anthropogenic and cyclical perceptions as the origins of climate change persist, and that benefits from climate change are still expected while climate science is perceived as the most important source of knowledge by educated Russian interviewees. While there is an official climate adaptation policy, economic adaptation to international climate politics has come to the forefront, raising questions of the need for structural change in the Russian economy. The discontinuation of work in the Arctic Council as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can have serious impact on climate science: lack of access to Russian climate data and reduced inputs from international climate science in Russia. Big Russian companies operating in the Arctic find themselves in a precarious situation mainly because of the war, but they still have to consider direct threats to their operations from thawing permafrost. They also realize that any future role in international markets will be affected by their adoption of ESG standards.
Investigating "National Form" in Early Soviet Culture, 1917-1953
In recent years, increasing numbers of scholars have begun to recognise the centrality of the nationalities question to the Soviet project. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 as a multinational state where, in a bid to marry revolutionary socialism with the notion of national self-determination, non-Russian nationalities were granted their own national territories and structures of government. In the cultural sphere, this Soviet multinationalism manifested itself in the mantra that cultural production should be “national in form, socialist in content”, combining expressions of national identity with the dominant ideology of Marxism-Leninism. But what did this “national form” look like in practice? How was it translated into the political and cultural realities of the many non-Russian Soviet republics? And what factors influenced the different manifestations of national form from one republic to another?
This panel seeks to explore the nuances of national form in Soviet cultural production up to 1953. Containing papers looking at areas as diverse as Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, it aims to assess the application of “national in form, socialist in content” across different national contexts, looking both for shared features and local particularities. In this way, the panel hopes to advance discussions of national form in early Soviet culture, moving away from suggestions of an undifferentiated all-Union cultural policy and recognising the varied and multifaceted ways in which national art was produced in the non-Russian republics of the USSR.
New Perspectives on Dostoevsky
Economic development in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe
The Baltic in world politics from the Early Modern to the present
This panel will explore the engagement of the Baltic sea region with the global world in its political, economic and legal dimensions.
New Perspectives on Dostoevsky
Russia's war on Ukraine (1)
Developing new forms of collaborations in East-Central Europe
Cold War dinamics, exchanges and mobilities within the Socialist World and beyond
Our panel aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of culture in the context of the Cold War (as part of Cultural Cold War studies), its political role in democratic and non-democratic configurations, and the potential of the cultural exchanges to foster cultural change and transform political culture. Its goal is to also contribute to the development of a new perspective regarding cultural collaborations within the State-Socialist World, and beyond it, throughout the 1950s-1980s; that is a perspective which is less biased by the concept of the “Socialist bloc” as a monolithic political construct or by the traditional, uncritical approaches on the relationship between the East and the West, the East and the South, etc.
Participants: Irina Nastasa-Matei; Caterina Preda; Irina Carabas; Alina Popescu; Alexey Kotelvas
Literary responses to the Russian Revolution, c. 1905-1930s
This panel features three papers that discuss, from different perspectives, how Russian and Western writers responded to the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century. Chronologically the papers span the revolutionary divide. Topics include George Bernard Shaw's views of the Bolshevik revolution as expressed in his drama, the emigre writer Mark Aldanov, and literary representations of political violence after 1905.
DIY Queers. Self-Made Gender and Sexual Identities in Interwar Poland
A growing number of queer stories have recently emerged from historiographical oblivion in Eastern Europe. These stories have frequently challenged hegemonic categories of analysis and dominant narratives about the region’s past. Thanks to them, historians of interwar Poland, among other times and places, no longer need to prove that queers existed there too. Now, we want to know who they were and how they conceived of themselves. Did they identify as lesbians or homosexuals, or did they maybe have some other notion of self?
All three papers gathered in this panel follow personal stories of queer people from interwar Poland and uncover the unique ways in which they identified and expressed their gender or sexual dissent. It might seem that the interwar period in Poland was anything but a favourable time for ambiguous, queer concepts of self. At a time when the national was paradigmatic, medical experts pathologized non-heteronormativity and lawyers delimited sexuality through legal norms, circumstances did not seem propitious for queers to manifest their existence. Yet, they did. And they did it creatively – by adapting existing identity categories, reconstructing and modifying them. Their personal writings and the accounts of their contemporaries attest to their great ingenuity.
A female skier from the Tatras assembled her unique expression of queerness from the elements of culture and rigid gender roles of Poland’s highlanders. Around the same time, four Jewish homosexuals from Warsaw took opposite sides in a conflict raging within their community. Two of them embraced Jewishness and adapted it to their queerness, while two others rejected national categories as limiting. Another group of men grabbed their pens and wrote to the press about their own concepts of homosexuality – sometimes, queerly twinned with that of nationality.
In telling these stories, we pay particular attention to the voices of their protagonists and their ways of self-identifying. For their striking originality, we label them ‘DIY.’ It seems fitting, as one dictionary defines ‘DIY’ as ‘the method of building, modifying, or repairing things by oneself without the direct aid of professionals or certified experts.’
“Sensory Afterlives of the War Violence in (Former) Yugoslavia. Artistic Responses”
The panel discusses different works of visual arts that reflect the mass violence in the former Yugoslavia from a more sensory perspective, pointing to the strange intertwinement between intimacy and distance of violent acts to which the bodies were exposed. We get to know multi-modal means of engagement with the atrocities during the II World War or Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s: film, photography, drawings, voice recordings, and autobiographical notes. They include video artwork Snajperist (The Sniper, 2007) made by Bosnian artist Adela Jušic, the film Imprinted (2020, Croatia, Germany, Serbia) from Linda Paganelli and Snežana Stankovic, and the exhibition in the museum Lipa Remembers located in the municipality of Rijeka in Croatia. They all illuminate how the violence endures beyond the generation that experienced it directly and how this intergenerational transmission is in the first line sensory. These artworks and the exhibition use a visual language that goes beyond the national categories and makes us belong to the very private community of more than a viewer.
Agents of Internationalism in Central and Eastern Europe during Late Socialism
This panel focuses on people and institutions in late-socialist Central and Eastern Europe who fostered international linkages and economic ties. Taking the perspectives of these agents of internationalism seriously, it asks what, if anything, they understood to be socialist about the forms of international cooperation they brokered. Focusing on arms dealers, aid workers, and Native American sovereignty activists, the papers ultimately ask what the myriad international connections forged across Central and Eastern Europe during late socialism meant for the societies that instigated them.
The European Union – politics, policy, and law
Revising the Russian Canon
Revisiting Room 101: Understanding State Violence in Early Soviet Literature
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a horrifying invasion of Ukraine. The consequences of that invasion for the academic community of Slavists and Eurasianists are of secondary importance to the human cost. However, as in all moments of crisis and caesura, Russia’s war has demanded fundamental reappraisal of how we define Slavic Studies, including a necessary re-evaluation of how contemporary approaches to the field have been shaped and dominated by the Russian state: a dominance enforced by both physical and symbolic violence. Many contemporary scholars struggle to find words to describe Russia’s current politics. However, some of the lexis reclaimed for today’s events explicitly recalls the Soviet past of totalitarian state violence: arbitrary and destructive, exerted over many decades, its legacies unresolved. But whereas Anglophone scholars of the former Eastern bloc have long struggled to accommodate the nuance and indeterminacy of the Soviet and Imperial Russian past, they now face a resurgent temptation to read Russian behaviour as a direct product of those eras. Russian literature has not been spared accusations of complicity, if not culpability, in Putin’s brutal tactics. In a controversial article published in the Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022), the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko suggested that Russian literature, even the classics, is modelled around a template that normalizes and enables evil, thus shaping the cultural formation of a nation intrinsically murderous and rapacious.
Thus, it could not be more timely to revisit how state violence was simultaneously constructed and depicted in the literature of the nascent Soviet regime. The four cross-disciplinary papers in this panel track back a century to the decades following the ‘Russian’ Revolution, a period marked by extraordinary human suffering justified by the widely accepted perception of individuals as mere ‘wood-chips’ to be consumed on the bonfire of insurrection. Drawing upon literary studies as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history, all four papers excavate the significance and symbolism of state violence within a selection of fictional works from Russia and Ukraine, all by writers struggling to process the extraordinarily violent historical transition through which they were living. In the process the panellists interrogate the very meaning of violence itself, its cultural encoding, and its consequences.
Public Attitudes and Collective Mobilisation
Alternative scenarios for a future Russia across 1917
Crime Fiction and Prison Culture
From Bamlag to Ukraine: Intersections of Class, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Context of Punishment, 1930S - 2023.
The purpose of the panel is to examine the role of penal systems of the different countries of the former Soviet Union have used their prison systems in national building. The panelists will discuss the ways that penal institutions at various time from the 1930s to the present day have been the sites of insider/outsider identity construction, the public understanding of their role, and instruments of state power and nation building. The panel will explore these themes in relation to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway in East Siberia in the 1930s ( which recently entered the news as an example of a project that the “new” punishment of “forced labour as an alternative to deprivation of liberty” will be used to complete); the way in which language policy in Estonia’s prisons (claimed to be the most progressive among those of the former Soviet states) is used to define the borders of national belonging in that country; public attitudes towards, and affects on, current penal reform in the Russian Federation; and the use of prisons in times of war to achieve states’ domestic and international goals.
Economic development in Russia
Language Pedagogy and Linguistics
Russia's war on Ukraine (1)
Developing new forms of collaborations in East-Central Europe
Cold War dinamics, exchanges and mobilities within the Socialist World and beyond
Our panel aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of culture in the context of the Cold War (as part of Cultural Cold War studies), its political role in democratic and non-democratic configurations, and the potential of the cultural exchanges to foster cultural change and transform political culture. Its goal is to also contribute to the development of a new perspective regarding cultural collaborations within the State-Socialist World, and beyond it, throughout the 1950s-1980s; that is a perspective which is less biased by the concept of the “Socialist bloc” as a monolithic political construct or by the traditional, uncritical approaches on the relationship between the East and the West, the East and the South, etc.
Participants: Irina Nastasa-Matei; Caterina Preda; Irina Carabas; Alina Popescu; Alexey Kotelvas
The European Union – politics, policy, and law
Revising the Russian Canon
Revisiting Room 101: Understanding State Violence in Early Soviet Literature
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a horrifying invasion of Ukraine. The consequences of that invasion for the academic community of Slavists and Eurasianists are of secondary importance to the human cost. However, as in all moments of crisis and caesura, Russia’s war has demanded fundamental reappraisal of how we define Slavic Studies, including a necessary re-evaluation of how contemporary approaches to the field have been shaped and dominated by the Russian state: a dominance enforced by both physical and symbolic violence. Many contemporary scholars struggle to find words to describe Russia’s current politics. However, some of the lexis reclaimed for today’s events explicitly recalls the Soviet past of totalitarian state violence: arbitrary and destructive, exerted over many decades, its legacies unresolved. But whereas Anglophone scholars of the former Eastern bloc have long struggled to accommodate the nuance and indeterminacy of the Soviet and Imperial Russian past, they now face a resurgent temptation to read Russian behaviour as a direct product of those eras. Russian literature has not been spared accusations of complicity, if not culpability, in Putin’s brutal tactics. In a controversial article published in the Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022), the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko suggested that Russian literature, even the classics, is modelled around a template that normalizes and enables evil, thus shaping the cultural formation of a nation intrinsically murderous and rapacious.
Thus, it could not be more timely to revisit how state violence was simultaneously constructed and depicted in the literature of the nascent Soviet regime. The four cross-disciplinary papers in this panel track back a century to the decades following the ‘Russian’ Revolution, a period marked by extraordinary human suffering justified by the widely accepted perception of individuals as mere ‘wood-chips’ to be consumed on the bonfire of insurrection. Drawing upon literary studies as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history, all four papers excavate the significance and symbolism of state violence within a selection of fictional works from Russia and Ukraine, all by writers struggling to process the extraordinarily violent historical transition through which they were living. In the process the panellists interrogate the very meaning of violence itself, its cultural encoding, and its consequences.
Public Attitudes and Collective Mobilisation
Crime Fiction and Prison Culture
From Bamlag to Ukraine: Intersections of Class, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Context of Punishment, 1930S - 2023.
The purpose of the panel is to examine the role of penal systems of the different countries of the former Soviet Union have used their prison systems in national building. The panelists will discuss the ways that penal institutions at various time from the 1930s to the present day have been the sites of insider/outsider identity construction, the public understanding of their role, and instruments of state power and nation building. The panel will explore these themes in relation to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway in East Siberia in the 1930s ( which recently entered the news as an example of a project that the “new” punishment of “forced labour as an alternative to deprivation of liberty” will be used to complete); the way in which language policy in Estonia’s prisons (claimed to be the most progressive among those of the former Soviet states) is used to define the borders of national belonging in that country; public attitudes towards, and affects on, current penal reform in the Russian Federation; and the use of prisons in times of war to achieve states’ domestic and international goals.
Literary responses to the Russian Revolution, c. 1905-1930s
This panel features three papers that discuss, from different perspectives, how Russian and Western writers responded to the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century. Chronologically the papers span the revolutionary divide. Topics include George Bernard Shaw's views of the Bolshevik revolution as expressed in his drama, the emigre writer Mark Aldanov, and literary representations of political violence after 1905.
DIY Queers. Self-Made Gender and Sexual Identities in Interwar Poland
A growing number of queer stories have recently emerged from historiographical oblivion in Eastern Europe. These stories have frequently challenged hegemonic categories of analysis and dominant narratives about the region’s past. Thanks to them, historians of interwar Poland, among other times and places, no longer need to prove that queers existed there too. Now, we want to know who they were and how they conceived of themselves. Did they identify as lesbians or homosexuals, or did they maybe have some other notion of self?
All three papers gathered in this panel follow personal stories of queer people from interwar Poland and uncover the unique ways in which they identified and expressed their gender or sexual dissent. It might seem that the interwar period in Poland was anything but a favourable time for ambiguous, queer concepts of self. At a time when the national was paradigmatic, medical experts pathologized non-heteronormativity and lawyers delimited sexuality through legal norms, circumstances did not seem propitious for queers to manifest their existence. Yet, they did. And they did it creatively – by adapting existing identity categories, reconstructing and modifying them. Their personal writings and the accounts of their contemporaries attest to their great ingenuity.
A female skier from the Tatras assembled her unique expression of queerness from the elements of culture and rigid gender roles of Poland’s highlanders. Around the same time, four Jewish homosexuals from Warsaw took opposite sides in a conflict raging within their community. Two of them embraced Jewishness and adapted it to their queerness, while two others rejected national categories as limiting. Another group of men grabbed their pens and wrote to the press about their own concepts of homosexuality – sometimes, queerly twinned with that of nationality.
In telling these stories, we pay particular attention to the voices of their protagonists and their ways of self-identifying. For their striking originality, we label them ‘DIY.’ It seems fitting, as one dictionary defines ‘DIY’ as ‘the method of building, modifying, or repairing things by oneself without the direct aid of professionals or certified experts.’
“Sensory Afterlives of the War Violence in (Former) Yugoslavia. Artistic Responses”
The panel discusses different works of visual arts that reflect the mass violence in the former Yugoslavia from a more sensory perspective, pointing to the strange intertwinement between intimacy and distance of violent acts to which the bodies were exposed. We get to know multi-modal means of engagement with the atrocities during the II World War or Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s: film, photography, drawings, voice recordings, and autobiographical notes. They include video artwork Snajperist (The Sniper, 2007) made by Bosnian artist Adela Jušic, the film Imprinted (2020, Croatia, Germany, Serbia) from Linda Paganelli and Snežana Stankovic, and the exhibition in the museum Lipa Remembers located in the municipality of Rijeka in Croatia. They all illuminate how the violence endures beyond the generation that experienced it directly and how this intergenerational transmission is in the first line sensory. These artworks and the exhibition use a visual language that goes beyond the national categories and makes us belong to the very private community of more than a viewer.
Agents of Internationalism in Central and Eastern Europe during Late Socialism
This panel focuses on people and institutions in late-socialist Central and Eastern Europe who fostered international linkages and economic ties. Taking the perspectives of these agents of internationalism seriously, it asks what, if anything, they understood to be socialist about the forms of international cooperation they brokered. Focusing on arms dealers, aid workers, and Native American sovereignty activists, the papers ultimately ask what the myriad international connections forged across Central and Eastern Europe during late socialism meant for the societies that instigated them.
Alternative scenarios for a future Russia across 1917
Russia's war on Ukraine (1)
Developing new forms of collaborations in East-Central Europe
Cold War dinamics, exchanges and mobilities within the Socialist World and beyond
Our panel aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of culture in the context of the Cold War (as part of Cultural Cold War studies), its political role in democratic and non-democratic configurations, and the potential of the cultural exchanges to foster cultural change and transform political culture. Its goal is to also contribute to the development of a new perspective regarding cultural collaborations within the State-Socialist World, and beyond it, throughout the 1950s-1980s; that is a perspective which is less biased by the concept of the “Socialist bloc” as a monolithic political construct or by the traditional, uncritical approaches on the relationship between the East and the West, the East and the South, etc.
Participants: Irina Nastasa-Matei; Caterina Preda; Irina Carabas; Alina Popescu; Alexey Kotelvas
The European Union – politics, policy, and law
Revising the Russian Canon
Revisiting Room 101: Understanding State Violence in Early Soviet Literature
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a horrifying invasion of Ukraine. The consequences of that invasion for the academic community of Slavists and Eurasianists are of secondary importance to the human cost. However, as in all moments of crisis and caesura, Russia’s war has demanded fundamental reappraisal of how we define Slavic Studies, including a necessary re-evaluation of how contemporary approaches to the field have been shaped and dominated by the Russian state: a dominance enforced by both physical and symbolic violence. Many contemporary scholars struggle to find words to describe Russia’s current politics. However, some of the lexis reclaimed for today’s events explicitly recalls the Soviet past of totalitarian state violence: arbitrary and destructive, exerted over many decades, its legacies unresolved. But whereas Anglophone scholars of the former Eastern bloc have long struggled to accommodate the nuance and indeterminacy of the Soviet and Imperial Russian past, they now face a resurgent temptation to read Russian behaviour as a direct product of those eras. Russian literature has not been spared accusations of complicity, if not culpability, in Putin’s brutal tactics. In a controversial article published in the Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022), the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko suggested that Russian literature, even the classics, is modelled around a template that normalizes and enables evil, thus shaping the cultural formation of a nation intrinsically murderous and rapacious.
Thus, it could not be more timely to revisit how state violence was simultaneously constructed and depicted in the literature of the nascent Soviet regime. The four cross-disciplinary papers in this panel track back a century to the decades following the ‘Russian’ Revolution, a period marked by extraordinary human suffering justified by the widely accepted perception of individuals as mere ‘wood-chips’ to be consumed on the bonfire of insurrection. Drawing upon literary studies as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history, all four papers excavate the significance and symbolism of state violence within a selection of fictional works from Russia and Ukraine, all by writers struggling to process the extraordinarily violent historical transition through which they were living. In the process the panellists interrogate the very meaning of violence itself, its cultural encoding, and its consequences.
Public Attitudes and Collective Mobilisation
Crime Fiction and Prison Culture
From Bamlag to Ukraine: Intersections of Class, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Context of Punishment, 1930S - 2023.
The purpose of the panel is to examine the role of penal systems of the different countries of the former Soviet Union have used their prison systems in national building. The panelists will discuss the ways that penal institutions at various time from the 1930s to the present day have been the sites of insider/outsider identity construction, the public understanding of their role, and instruments of state power and nation building. The panel will explore these themes in relation to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway in East Siberia in the 1930s ( which recently entered the news as an example of a project that the “new” punishment of “forced labour as an alternative to deprivation of liberty” will be used to complete); the way in which language policy in Estonia’s prisons (claimed to be the most progressive among those of the former Soviet states) is used to define the borders of national belonging in that country; public attitudes towards, and affects on, current penal reform in the Russian Federation; and the use of prisons in times of war to achieve states’ domestic and international goals.
Economic development in Russia
Literary responses to the Russian Revolution, c. 1905-1930s
This panel features three papers that discuss, from different perspectives, how Russian and Western writers responded to the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century. Chronologically the papers span the revolutionary divide. Topics include George Bernard Shaw's views of the Bolshevik revolution as expressed in his drama, the emigre writer Mark Aldanov, and literary representations of political violence after 1905.
DIY Queers. Self-Made Gender and Sexual Identities in Interwar Poland
A growing number of queer stories have recently emerged from historiographical oblivion in Eastern Europe. These stories have frequently challenged hegemonic categories of analysis and dominant narratives about the region’s past. Thanks to them, historians of interwar Poland, among other times and places, no longer need to prove that queers existed there too. Now, we want to know who they were and how they conceived of themselves. Did they identify as lesbians or homosexuals, or did they maybe have some other notion of self?
All three papers gathered in this panel follow personal stories of queer people from interwar Poland and uncover the unique ways in which they identified and expressed their gender or sexual dissent. It might seem that the interwar period in Poland was anything but a favourable time for ambiguous, queer concepts of self. At a time when the national was paradigmatic, medical experts pathologized non-heteronormativity and lawyers delimited sexuality through legal norms, circumstances did not seem propitious for queers to manifest their existence. Yet, they did. And they did it creatively – by adapting existing identity categories, reconstructing and modifying them. Their personal writings and the accounts of their contemporaries attest to their great ingenuity.
A female skier from the Tatras assembled her unique expression of queerness from the elements of culture and rigid gender roles of Poland’s highlanders. Around the same time, four Jewish homosexuals from Warsaw took opposite sides in a conflict raging within their community. Two of them embraced Jewishness and adapted it to their queerness, while two others rejected national categories as limiting. Another group of men grabbed their pens and wrote to the press about their own concepts of homosexuality – sometimes, queerly twinned with that of nationality.
In telling these stories, we pay particular attention to the voices of their protagonists and their ways of self-identifying. For their striking originality, we label them ‘DIY.’ It seems fitting, as one dictionary defines ‘DIY’ as ‘the method of building, modifying, or repairing things by oneself without the direct aid of professionals or certified experts.’
“Sensory Afterlives of the War Violence in (Former) Yugoslavia. Artistic Responses”
The panel discusses different works of visual arts that reflect the mass violence in the former Yugoslavia from a more sensory perspective, pointing to the strange intertwinement between intimacy and distance of violent acts to which the bodies were exposed. We get to know multi-modal means of engagement with the atrocities during the II World War or Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s: film, photography, drawings, voice recordings, and autobiographical notes. They include video artwork Snajperist (The Sniper, 2007) made by Bosnian artist Adela Jušic, the film Imprinted (2020, Croatia, Germany, Serbia) from Linda Paganelli and Snežana Stankovic, and the exhibition in the museum Lipa Remembers located in the municipality of Rijeka in Croatia. They all illuminate how the violence endures beyond the generation that experienced it directly and how this intergenerational transmission is in the first line sensory. These artworks and the exhibition use a visual language that goes beyond the national categories and makes us belong to the very private community of more than a viewer.
Agents of Internationalism in Central and Eastern Europe during Late Socialism
This panel focuses on people and institutions in late-socialist Central and Eastern Europe who fostered international linkages and economic ties. Taking the perspectives of these agents of internationalism seriously, it asks what, if anything, they understood to be socialist about the forms of international cooperation they brokered. Focusing on arms dealers, aid workers, and Native American sovereignty activists, the papers ultimately ask what the myriad international connections forged across Central and Eastern Europe during late socialism meant for the societies that instigated them.
Alternative scenarios for a future Russia across 1917
Language Pedagogy and Linguistics
Developing new forms of collaborations in East-Central Europe
Cold War dinamics, exchanges and mobilities within the Socialist World and beyond
Our panel aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of culture in the context of the Cold War (as part of Cultural Cold War studies), its political role in democratic and non-democratic configurations, and the potential of the cultural exchanges to foster cultural change and transform political culture. Its goal is to also contribute to the development of a new perspective regarding cultural collaborations within the State-Socialist World, and beyond it, throughout the 1950s-1980s; that is a perspective which is less biased by the concept of the “Socialist bloc” as a monolithic political construct or by the traditional, uncritical approaches on the relationship between the East and the West, the East and the South, etc.
Participants: Irina Nastasa-Matei; Caterina Preda; Irina Carabas; Alina Popescu; Alexey Kotelvas
The European Union – politics, policy, and law
Revising the Russian Canon
Revisiting Room 101: Understanding State Violence in Early Soviet Literature
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a horrifying invasion of Ukraine. The consequences of that invasion for the academic community of Slavists and Eurasianists are of secondary importance to the human cost. However, as in all moments of crisis and caesura, Russia’s war has demanded fundamental reappraisal of how we define Slavic Studies, including a necessary re-evaluation of how contemporary approaches to the field have been shaped and dominated by the Russian state: a dominance enforced by both physical and symbolic violence. Many contemporary scholars struggle to find words to describe Russia’s current politics. However, some of the lexis reclaimed for today’s events explicitly recalls the Soviet past of totalitarian state violence: arbitrary and destructive, exerted over many decades, its legacies unresolved. But whereas Anglophone scholars of the former Eastern bloc have long struggled to accommodate the nuance and indeterminacy of the Soviet and Imperial Russian past, they now face a resurgent temptation to read Russian behaviour as a direct product of those eras. Russian literature has not been spared accusations of complicity, if not culpability, in Putin’s brutal tactics. In a controversial article published in the Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022), the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko suggested that Russian literature, even the classics, is modelled around a template that normalizes and enables evil, thus shaping the cultural formation of a nation intrinsically murderous and rapacious.
Thus, it could not be more timely to revisit how state violence was simultaneously constructed and depicted in the literature of the nascent Soviet regime. The four cross-disciplinary papers in this panel track back a century to the decades following the ‘Russian’ Revolution, a period marked by extraordinary human suffering justified by the widely accepted perception of individuals as mere ‘wood-chips’ to be consumed on the bonfire of insurrection. Drawing upon literary studies as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history, all four papers excavate the significance and symbolism of state violence within a selection of fictional works from Russia and Ukraine, all by writers struggling to process the extraordinarily violent historical transition through which they were living. In the process the panellists interrogate the very meaning of violence itself, its cultural encoding, and its consequences.
From Bamlag to Ukraine: Intersections of Class, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Context of Punishment, 1930S - 2023.
The purpose of the panel is to examine the role of penal systems of the different countries of the former Soviet Union have used their prison systems in national building. The panelists will discuss the ways that penal institutions at various time from the 1930s to the present day have been the sites of insider/outsider identity construction, the public understanding of their role, and instruments of state power and nation building. The panel will explore these themes in relation to the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway in East Siberia in the 1930s ( which recently entered the news as an example of a project that the “new” punishment of “forced labour as an alternative to deprivation of liberty” will be used to complete); the way in which language policy in Estonia’s prisons (claimed to be the most progressive among those of the former Soviet states) is used to define the borders of national belonging in that country; public attitudes towards, and affects on, current penal reform in the Russian Federation; and the use of prisons in times of war to achieve states’ domestic and international goals.
Media and narratives during Russia's war on Ukraine
Education and research – politics and policy
Russia(ns) in the world
Everyday Life behind the Iron Curtain
Faith and Family in the USSR: Religious Transmission Across Borders and Generations
After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks aimed at eradicating religion from the public space, in the belief that faith would wither away with the passing of the last believers. To a large extent they succeeded in suppressing outward manifestations of faith through terror and to instill atheism into new generations of Soviet citizens. Yet they could not wholly control the private sphere, and families remained an important site of transmission and reproduction of religious beliefs and practices. While the most devout families preserved their creed even in the face of repression, others saw religion as a mere tradition and perpetuated only some of its practices, such as baptism. Religious families thus stood apart from the Soviet secular model of family life, and this factor played an increasing role in the late Soviet period.
Families were also sites of intergenerational solidarity, fostering alternative loyalties, which resisted attempts to break traditional ties and integrate individuals into the Soviet collective. When Soviet believers stepped into resistance to anti-religious policies, families were an important unit to organize their struggle, and wives and mothers of political prisoners were particularly active in publicizing their husbands’ and sons’ plight. Finally, in some religious communities, such as the German Mennonites, family ties spread across the Soviet border, and could connect believers with their brethren in the West. In the late Soviet period, such reconnections, whether through mail or tourism, provided believers in the USSR with a window onto another world, where religion was free to thrive.
Media and Propaganda in Historical Research
Practices of Solidarity inside Socialist Society I.
In the recent years socialist internationalism and attendant practices of solidarity have gained more attention among scholars. This panel, however, will shift the perspective and explore the practices of solidarity inside the socialist societies after the Second World War. It will investigate the ways in which solidarity was integrated into societal infrastructure, local institutions, or enterprises, what solidarity meant or was understood by the people who experienced and practiced it in their local environment. The panel, divided into two parts, brings together examples from Cuba, East Germany, and Yugoslavia, and shows how practices of domestic solidarity emerged and were supported both from above and below as well as formally and informally.
Reconciliation in Post-Yugoslav Space: Digital Peacebuilding
As traditional reconciliation mechanisms such as transitional justice failed to rebuild peace and good neighborly relations in former Yugoslavia after the wars in the nineties, the region burdened with unresolved border issues and frozen conflicts faces yet another security challenge in the face of geopolitical changes caused by the war in Ukraine. While political actors are saying that reconciliation has never been so important, there are no new official initiatives coming from any of the sides. At the same time, new, organic reconciliation practices emerge from below the surface and spread their influence through art, culture and economic practices. They are at the same time emotional and algorithmic as their impact is exacerbated by social media.
The Life and Afterlife of Soviet Planning: Industrial Urbanism, Built Environments, and Geographic Politics
Since the 1990s, the so-called ‘monotowns’ have emerged as emblematic symbols of post-Soviet industrial collapse. With their economies revolving around a single industry or complex of enterprises, these settlements entered a phase of rapid decline following transition to a market economy plagued by infrastructural decay, unemployment, and depopulation. While monotowns present the most extreme example of the failure of Soviet urbanism, very few cities in the post-Soviet space fit the narrow definition of ‘monotown,’ whose turbulent fate has dominated press headlines and policy debates. Instead, one can observe a continuum of urban forms, which were shaped by the Soviet-era industrialization drive: from the hubs of new, mid-sized manufacturing centers created to speed up urbanization of frontiers, to secluded, ‘closed’ military cities and smaller, satellite towns or industrial neighborhoods established on the outskirts of existing urban centers to expand productive capacity. The disproportionate attention to the ‘monotowns’ has often overlooked the diversity of forms of Soviet urbanism and the uneven trajectories of their post-socialist development. This panel seeks to rethink the past and present of Soviet urban space by exploring the everyday lives and experiences of inhabitants as well as public representations of modernist architectural projects and industries in the USSR and beyond. The analysis of Soviet urbanism has tended to oscillate between ‘semiotic’ approaches that focus on ‘decoding’ the urban landscape and ideologies behind specific architectural forms, and dismissive or stereotypical images of dystopian, homogenous housing blocks that suppress creativity and individual autonomy. This panel aims to move beyond dominant representations by foregrounding accounts that focus on imagining Soviet and post-Soviet urban forms as spaces of creative encounter between different, often conflicting logics of planning and governance, socially and ethnically heterogenous groups, and experimental terrains for production of new forms of sociality.
The panel aims to address a broad range of questions, including, but not limited to:
- What are the differences and similarities in the trajectories of post-Soviet planned cities or neighborhoods? How are these dynamics affected by geographical and national context, proximity to regional metropolitan centers, and/or the nature of key industries?
- What are the peculiarities of myth and identity-making in Soviet-era planned cities?
- How do local residents and tourists engage with industrial heritage and ‘the ruins’ of shutdown factories or depopulated apartment blocks?
- How do people resist the economic and symbolic devaluation of their hometowns? And what visions of future development do they seek to articulate?
War in Ukraine: Displacement, Mobilities and Identities
Strategy, conflict, and security
Authoritarian Regimes and Social Values
Spatial Politics: Approaches to Knowledge and Planning
New perspectives on the 19th century Russia
The Aesthetics of Return in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Literatures of the Russian Arctic area I
During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.
Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.
One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.
Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.
Russian Orthodoxy: Representations and Influences
Language Strategies and Use of Terminology
Polish Literature and Culture
Russian Orthodoxy: Representations and Influences
Media and narratives during Russia's war on Ukraine
Education and research – politics and policy
Russia(ns) in the world
Everyday Life behind the Iron Curtain
Media and Propaganda in Historical Research
Reconciliation in Post-Yugoslav Space: Digital Peacebuilding
As traditional reconciliation mechanisms such as transitional justice failed to rebuild peace and good neighborly relations in former Yugoslavia after the wars in the nineties, the region burdened with unresolved border issues and frozen conflicts faces yet another security challenge in the face of geopolitical changes caused by the war in Ukraine. While political actors are saying that reconciliation has never been so important, there are no new official initiatives coming from any of the sides. At the same time, new, organic reconciliation practices emerge from below the surface and spread their influence through art, culture and economic practices. They are at the same time emotional and algorithmic as their impact is exacerbated by social media.
The Life and Afterlife of Soviet Planning: Industrial Urbanism, Built Environments, and Geographic Politics
Since the 1990s, the so-called ‘monotowns’ have emerged as emblematic symbols of post-Soviet industrial collapse. With their economies revolving around a single industry or complex of enterprises, these settlements entered a phase of rapid decline following transition to a market economy plagued by infrastructural decay, unemployment, and depopulation. While monotowns present the most extreme example of the failure of Soviet urbanism, very few cities in the post-Soviet space fit the narrow definition of ‘monotown,’ whose turbulent fate has dominated press headlines and policy debates. Instead, one can observe a continuum of urban forms, which were shaped by the Soviet-era industrialization drive: from the hubs of new, mid-sized manufacturing centers created to speed up urbanization of frontiers, to secluded, ‘closed’ military cities and smaller, satellite towns or industrial neighborhoods established on the outskirts of existing urban centers to expand productive capacity. The disproportionate attention to the ‘monotowns’ has often overlooked the diversity of forms of Soviet urbanism and the uneven trajectories of their post-socialist development. This panel seeks to rethink the past and present of Soviet urban space by exploring the everyday lives and experiences of inhabitants as well as public representations of modernist architectural projects and industries in the USSR and beyond. The analysis of Soviet urbanism has tended to oscillate between ‘semiotic’ approaches that focus on ‘decoding’ the urban landscape and ideologies behind specific architectural forms, and dismissive or stereotypical images of dystopian, homogenous housing blocks that suppress creativity and individual autonomy. This panel aims to move beyond dominant representations by foregrounding accounts that focus on imagining Soviet and post-Soviet urban forms as spaces of creative encounter between different, often conflicting logics of planning and governance, socially and ethnically heterogenous groups, and experimental terrains for production of new forms of sociality.
The panel aims to address a broad range of questions, including, but not limited to:
- What are the differences and similarities in the trajectories of post-Soviet planned cities or neighborhoods? How are these dynamics affected by geographical and national context, proximity to regional metropolitan centers, and/or the nature of key industries?
- What are the peculiarities of myth and identity-making in Soviet-era planned cities?
- How do local residents and tourists engage with industrial heritage and ‘the ruins’ of shutdown factories or depopulated apartment blocks?
- How do people resist the economic and symbolic devaluation of their hometowns? And what visions of future development do they seek to articulate?
War in Ukraine: Displacement, Mobilities and Identities
Strategy, conflict, and security
Spatial Politics: Approaches to Knowledge and Planning
New perspectives on the 19th century Russia
The Aesthetics of Return in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Language Strategies and Use of Terminology
Polish Literature and Culture
Faith and Family in the USSR: Religious Transmission Across Borders and Generations
After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks aimed at eradicating religion from the public space, in the belief that faith would wither away with the passing of the last believers. To a large extent they succeeded in suppressing outward manifestations of faith through terror and to instill atheism into new generations of Soviet citizens. Yet they could not wholly control the private sphere, and families remained an important site of transmission and reproduction of religious beliefs and practices. While the most devout families preserved their creed even in the face of repression, others saw religion as a mere tradition and perpetuated only some of its practices, such as baptism. Religious families thus stood apart from the Soviet secular model of family life, and this factor played an increasing role in the late Soviet period.
Families were also sites of intergenerational solidarity, fostering alternative loyalties, which resisted attempts to break traditional ties and integrate individuals into the Soviet collective. When Soviet believers stepped into resistance to anti-religious policies, families were an important unit to organize their struggle, and wives and mothers of political prisoners were particularly active in publicizing their husbands’ and sons’ plight. Finally, in some religious communities, such as the German Mennonites, family ties spread across the Soviet border, and could connect believers with their brethren in the West. In the late Soviet period, such reconnections, whether through mail or tourism, provided believers in the USSR with a window onto another world, where religion was free to thrive.
Practices of Solidarity inside Socialist Society I.
In the recent years socialist internationalism and attendant practices of solidarity have gained more attention among scholars. This panel, however, will shift the perspective and explore the practices of solidarity inside the socialist societies after the Second World War. It will investigate the ways in which solidarity was integrated into societal infrastructure, local institutions, or enterprises, what solidarity meant or was understood by the people who experienced and practiced it in their local environment. The panel, divided into two parts, brings together examples from Cuba, East Germany, and Yugoslavia, and shows how practices of domestic solidarity emerged and were supported both from above and below as well as formally and informally.
Authoritarian Regimes and Social Values
Literatures of the Russian Arctic area I
During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.
Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.
One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.
Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.
Media and narratives during Russia's war on Ukraine
Education and research – politics and policy
Russia(ns) in the world
Everyday Life behind the Iron Curtain
Media and Propaganda in Historical Research
Reconciliation in Post-Yugoslav Space: Digital Peacebuilding
As traditional reconciliation mechanisms such as transitional justice failed to rebuild peace and good neighborly relations in former Yugoslavia after the wars in the nineties, the region burdened with unresolved border issues and frozen conflicts faces yet another security challenge in the face of geopolitical changes caused by the war in Ukraine. While political actors are saying that reconciliation has never been so important, there are no new official initiatives coming from any of the sides. At the same time, new, organic reconciliation practices emerge from below the surface and spread their influence through art, culture and economic practices. They are at the same time emotional and algorithmic as their impact is exacerbated by social media.
The Life and Afterlife of Soviet Planning: Industrial Urbanism, Built Environments, and Geographic Politics
Since the 1990s, the so-called ‘monotowns’ have emerged as emblematic symbols of post-Soviet industrial collapse. With their economies revolving around a single industry or complex of enterprises, these settlements entered a phase of rapid decline following transition to a market economy plagued by infrastructural decay, unemployment, and depopulation. While monotowns present the most extreme example of the failure of Soviet urbanism, very few cities in the post-Soviet space fit the narrow definition of ‘monotown,’ whose turbulent fate has dominated press headlines and policy debates. Instead, one can observe a continuum of urban forms, which were shaped by the Soviet-era industrialization drive: from the hubs of new, mid-sized manufacturing centers created to speed up urbanization of frontiers, to secluded, ‘closed’ military cities and smaller, satellite towns or industrial neighborhoods established on the outskirts of existing urban centers to expand productive capacity. The disproportionate attention to the ‘monotowns’ has often overlooked the diversity of forms of Soviet urbanism and the uneven trajectories of their post-socialist development. This panel seeks to rethink the past and present of Soviet urban space by exploring the everyday lives and experiences of inhabitants as well as public representations of modernist architectural projects and industries in the USSR and beyond. The analysis of Soviet urbanism has tended to oscillate between ‘semiotic’ approaches that focus on ‘decoding’ the urban landscape and ideologies behind specific architectural forms, and dismissive or stereotypical images of dystopian, homogenous housing blocks that suppress creativity and individual autonomy. This panel aims to move beyond dominant representations by foregrounding accounts that focus on imagining Soviet and post-Soviet urban forms as spaces of creative encounter between different, often conflicting logics of planning and governance, socially and ethnically heterogenous groups, and experimental terrains for production of new forms of sociality.
The panel aims to address a broad range of questions, including, but not limited to:
- What are the differences and similarities in the trajectories of post-Soviet planned cities or neighborhoods? How are these dynamics affected by geographical and national context, proximity to regional metropolitan centers, and/or the nature of key industries?
- What are the peculiarities of myth and identity-making in Soviet-era planned cities?
- How do local residents and tourists engage with industrial heritage and ‘the ruins’ of shutdown factories or depopulated apartment blocks?
- How do people resist the economic and symbolic devaluation of their hometowns? And what visions of future development do they seek to articulate?
War in Ukraine: Displacement, Mobilities and Identities
Strategy, conflict, and security
Spatial Politics: Approaches to Knowledge and Planning
New perspectives on the 19th century Russia
The Aesthetics of Return in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Language Strategies and Use of Terminology
Polish Literature and Culture
Faith and Family in the USSR: Religious Transmission Across Borders and Generations
After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks aimed at eradicating religion from the public space, in the belief that faith would wither away with the passing of the last believers. To a large extent they succeeded in suppressing outward manifestations of faith through terror and to instill atheism into new generations of Soviet citizens. Yet they could not wholly control the private sphere, and families remained an important site of transmission and reproduction of religious beliefs and practices. While the most devout families preserved their creed even in the face of repression, others saw religion as a mere tradition and perpetuated only some of its practices, such as baptism. Religious families thus stood apart from the Soviet secular model of family life, and this factor played an increasing role in the late Soviet period.
Families were also sites of intergenerational solidarity, fostering alternative loyalties, which resisted attempts to break traditional ties and integrate individuals into the Soviet collective. When Soviet believers stepped into resistance to anti-religious policies, families were an important unit to organize their struggle, and wives and mothers of political prisoners were particularly active in publicizing their husbands’ and sons’ plight. Finally, in some religious communities, such as the German Mennonites, family ties spread across the Soviet border, and could connect believers with their brethren in the West. In the late Soviet period, such reconnections, whether through mail or tourism, provided believers in the USSR with a window onto another world, where religion was free to thrive.
Practices of Solidarity inside Socialist Society I.
In the recent years socialist internationalism and attendant practices of solidarity have gained more attention among scholars. This panel, however, will shift the perspective and explore the practices of solidarity inside the socialist societies after the Second World War. It will investigate the ways in which solidarity was integrated into societal infrastructure, local institutions, or enterprises, what solidarity meant or was understood by the people who experienced and practiced it in their local environment. The panel, divided into two parts, brings together examples from Cuba, East Germany, and Yugoslavia, and shows how practices of domestic solidarity emerged and were supported both from above and below as well as formally and informally.
Authoritarian Regimes and Social Values
Literatures of the Russian Arctic area I
During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.
Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.
One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.
Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.
Media and narratives during Russia's war on Ukraine
Education and research – politics and policy
Russia(ns) in the world
Everyday Life behind the Iron Curtain
Media and Propaganda in Historical Research
The Life and Afterlife of Soviet Planning: Industrial Urbanism, Built Environments, and Geographic Politics
Since the 1990s, the so-called ‘monotowns’ have emerged as emblematic symbols of post-Soviet industrial collapse. With their economies revolving around a single industry or complex of enterprises, these settlements entered a phase of rapid decline following transition to a market economy plagued by infrastructural decay, unemployment, and depopulation. While monotowns present the most extreme example of the failure of Soviet urbanism, very few cities in the post-Soviet space fit the narrow definition of ‘monotown,’ whose turbulent fate has dominated press headlines and policy debates. Instead, one can observe a continuum of urban forms, which were shaped by the Soviet-era industrialization drive: from the hubs of new, mid-sized manufacturing centers created to speed up urbanization of frontiers, to secluded, ‘closed’ military cities and smaller, satellite towns or industrial neighborhoods established on the outskirts of existing urban centers to expand productive capacity. The disproportionate attention to the ‘monotowns’ has often overlooked the diversity of forms of Soviet urbanism and the uneven trajectories of their post-socialist development. This panel seeks to rethink the past and present of Soviet urban space by exploring the everyday lives and experiences of inhabitants as well as public representations of modernist architectural projects and industries in the USSR and beyond. The analysis of Soviet urbanism has tended to oscillate between ‘semiotic’ approaches that focus on ‘decoding’ the urban landscape and ideologies behind specific architectural forms, and dismissive or stereotypical images of dystopian, homogenous housing blocks that suppress creativity and individual autonomy. This panel aims to move beyond dominant representations by foregrounding accounts that focus on imagining Soviet and post-Soviet urban forms as spaces of creative encounter between different, often conflicting logics of planning and governance, socially and ethnically heterogenous groups, and experimental terrains for production of new forms of sociality.
The panel aims to address a broad range of questions, including, but not limited to:
- What are the differences and similarities in the trajectories of post-Soviet planned cities or neighborhoods? How are these dynamics affected by geographical and national context, proximity to regional metropolitan centers, and/or the nature of key industries?
- What are the peculiarities of myth and identity-making in Soviet-era planned cities?
- How do local residents and tourists engage with industrial heritage and ‘the ruins’ of shutdown factories or depopulated apartment blocks?
- How do people resist the economic and symbolic devaluation of their hometowns? And what visions of future development do they seek to articulate?
War in Ukraine: Displacement, Mobilities and Identities
Strategy, conflict, and security
New perspectives on the 19th century Russia
The Aesthetics of Return in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Polish Literature and Culture
Russia(ns) in the world
Authoritarian Regimes and Social Values
Ideology and the Putin System: Before and after 2022
Russian politics is often analysed in terms of rational actor theory, structuralism, institutionalism or democratisation theory. When it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shocked so many, a large part of the explanation can be found in the domain of culture, identity and ideology. Yet, the hybridity of ideological options in Russia, and the refusal of the Kremlin to codify a state ideology into clear doctrinal form, leaves analysts with serious challenges in arriving at consensus on what ‘ism’, if any, is most appropriate to describe the Putin system. We examine the development of ideology along several dimensions. In the first paper, Mark Bassin tracks the evolution great geopolitical vision of the Kremlin, “Greater Eurasia”, which has emerged from academic and intellectual discussions that Vladimir Putin has cultivated at the Valdai Forum. In the second paper, David Lewis examines the influence of the Schmittian concept of Grossraum in Russia, which has driven successive spatial projects, culminating in the war on Ukraine. In the third paper, Matthew Blackburn and Natalia Yudina analyse the reconfiguration of “patriotic forces” (systemic opposition, alternative media, patriotic NGOs, thinktanks and paramilitaries) over 2014-2022. The paper examines the extent to which reconfigured ‘patriotic forces’ operate as a loyal opposition, the distinctiveness of their ideological agendas as well as how the war in Ukraine has affected them. The final paper from Luke March assessed the role of nationalism in Russian foreign policy, balancing the clear incorporation of nationalist rhetoric into Kremlin discourse against continued lack of harmony with radical nationalists inside the country.
Her Side of The Story: Women Dissident Practices in the Soviet Union and Beyond
This panel will focus on the women’s experience of dissidence and resistance in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries, which are still largely overlooked in the scholarship. Not attempting to undermine or reverse the general understanding of dissent, the panel seeks to diversify its meaning but looking for and looking into specifically women’s practices, which developed outside the main known centres of the dissident movement. Additionally, it seeks to answer the question about the reasons for women's "invisibility" in the narratives of dissent.
Unlikely Political Connection?: Asia and Central Europe
Against a backdrop of communism and nationalism, the panel examines and compares the dissent, political and ideological "witch-hunt", the desire to live in democracy, bravery connected with human modesty and civic responsibility. Topics have been drawn from geographically distant countries - the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, Thailand and Taiwan but there is a strong comparative potential in them. In the case of communist Czechoslovakia, the panel examines Charter 77, Václav Havel, the dissent world and ideas, and the significant help of the Jan Hus Foundation (UK). In the case of the current Czech Republic - already 30 years after the fall of communism - the panel reflects on the development of relations with China and Taiwan. The contribution on Thailand introduces the tragic fate of the young left-oriented student Chit Phumisak in the intersection of nationalism and communism, and compares the positions, chances and choices of Chit Phumisak and Václav Havel, and their legacies.
Contextualising Tolstoy: politic, literary, and religious subtexts of "War and Peace" and "Resurrection".
Tolstoy's novels are complex statements that can be read through a variety of contexts. The papers in this panel examine Tolstoy's famous texts from three not-so-obvious perspectives. 1. How did Tolstoy's critique of political nihilism manifest itself in “War and Peace” and his other texts of the time, how did Tolstoy take part in the broad discussion of this phenomenon in the 1860s, and what did Tolstoy actually understand by the term “political nihilism”, analysing it from the perspective of his own political theory? 2. How can we interpret Tolstoy's reader’s reactions to Anthony Trollope's novel “The Bertrams” (1859) and understand his strange feeling of writer’s competition? What makes Tolstoy speak of Trollope's “murderous skill”, let him feel envy and despair while reading far not the best and not the best-known novel of the English author? In this case we can speak about the special reader’s position from which Tolstoy can see the similarity of writing techniques and identify himself with the characters in "The Bertrams. 3. The third paper in this section concentrates on Tolstoy's connections with the American religious movement Mind Cure and looks at his correspondence with spiritualist Christian preachers Lucy Mallory and Alice Bunker Stockham. Reading Mind Cure texts changed Tolstoy's ideas about Christianity and determined the religious credo of the novel “Resurrection” (1899). The genesis of late Tolstoy's favourite conceptions, such as the “loving communion of men”, the idea of an “inner” god living within every man, and the concept of a “good contagion”, can be traced from Tolstoy’s readings and correspondences with the Mind Cure activists.
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev re-examines the question of social control against the backdrop of institutional rivalries and bureaucratic spaces in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. Presenting four chapters of our forthcoming volume, this panel looks at how Soviet leaders defined and redefined socialist legality in the face of rising crime rates, while the procuracy, lower courts, Supreme Court, and other state institutions struggled to resolve important social issues like alimony, housing disputes, and juvenile delinquency. It explores the issue of popular agency and state institutions in the enforcement and negotiation of Soviet norms and how citizens asserted their own legal rights. We hope cast a new light on how the Stalinist and post-Stalinist state tried to discipline and control its citizens, and how people accommodated and occasionally resisted these attempts.
Practices of Solidarity inside Socialist Society II.
General Winter and the Snow Maiden: Cold in Russian Culture and History
This panel brings together four speakers whose papers will address different facets of Russia’s historical engagement with the cold as a cultural experience throughout the empire. Taken together, these four papers seek to explore the role of cold and climate in the culture of Russia and its empire. We will develop four main themes in our discussion. First, cold as an enemy; second, cold as an opportunity that may hold riches either natural or theoretical; third, cold as an adventure; and fourth, cold as metaphor for the very nature of the Russian state itself.
Russia's war on Ukraine (2)
War and Society: Embodied Experiences, Narrated Identities
Repression and dissent under socialism
Domestic Matriarchy vs. Public Patriarchy. Ascribing and Questioning Gender Roles in Central Europe after 1989
The end of the socialism and the soviet era in Central Europe led to liberalization in economic terms, but not in in the choice of life models. Major progressive developments have taken place in the sphere of modernization i.e. infrastructure and economics. However, in the sphere of modernity, the development was opposite: interferences between church and politics, homophobia, misogyny and aggression against minorities led to a paradoxical social situation, which Przemyslaw Czaplinski describes with the concept of belated modernity (Czaplinski 2018).
The panel scrutinizes the gender-specific aspects of this phenomenon that public narratives have been trying to shape positively: The emphasis has been put on the advantages of a classic role model that reduces the female sphere of power to the private whereas public discourses (politics, economy, culture) were to a large extent taken over by men. Slawomira Walczewska (1999) coined and problematized the term domestic matriarchy (i.e. the unnoticeable female way to exercise power over the whole family at home). Walczewska argues that this conception is misleading since women de facto disappeared from public life and the ascribed domestic influence was only a comforting narration for the loss of significance.
This questionable power division is however a universal phenomenon and becomes obvious especially when states regain independence: We observe pro-natalist and profamily policies in post socialist countries that rely to a large extent on traditional role models. In Hungary, a “care fare” (Fodor 2022) regime ascribes women a “natural responsibility” for care work, in Poland restrictive family policies and conservative sex education approaches in school foster traditional role models. In Ukraine, ambivalent cohesion of traditional gender roles occurred first through increased migration and now through war.
Our goal is to make aware of problems for society resulting from a binary role model but also to shed light on counter movements and strategies of female self-empowerment.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together both early career and established researchers from different disciplines (history, sociology, literature and cultural studies), focusing on the countries of Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, as well as Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Authoritarianism and disinformation
New Directions in Polish Censorship
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: regional and translocal divides
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Starting with the Thaw and up to 1985 semi- and unofficial local grassroots structures and diverse voices, including those from the Soviet republics and the autonomous national republics of RSFSR, played a prominent role in inaugurating a parallel public sphere. They even took part in preparing perestroika and became one of its pillars. Paradoxically, one of the outcomes of the process of “democratisation” during Gorbachev’s and later Yeltsin’s times for Russia was the new centralisation of power and the re-emergence of imperial ideas. This process intensified during Putin’s 2000s and 2010s. Many of these local and translocal groups now have fewer rights than they had during Brezhnev's stagnation and behind the Iron Curtain.
The papers in this panel, with their topics as diverse as the ideas of development of Russia’s Far East from the late 1980s, the fate of the Institute of Experimental Aesthetics in Kazan, and trajectories of amateur photography groups from mid-1970s up to the present, are united by our wish to reflect on the concepts of periphery and centre.
Literatures of the Russian Arctic area II
During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.
Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.
One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.
Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.
Resisting Russia’s War on Ukraine by Cultural Means
Multilingual Societies and Language Policies
Ideology and the Putin System: Before and after 2022
Russian politics is often analysed in terms of rational actor theory, structuralism, institutionalism or democratisation theory. When it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shocked so many, a large part of the explanation can be found in the domain of culture, identity and ideology. Yet, the hybridity of ideological options in Russia, and the refusal of the Kremlin to codify a state ideology into clear doctrinal form, leaves analysts with serious challenges in arriving at consensus on what ‘ism’, if any, is most appropriate to describe the Putin system. We examine the development of ideology along several dimensions. In the first paper, Mark Bassin tracks the evolution great geopolitical vision of the Kremlin, “Greater Eurasia”, which has emerged from academic and intellectual discussions that Vladimir Putin has cultivated at the Valdai Forum. In the second paper, David Lewis examines the influence of the Schmittian concept of Grossraum in Russia, which has driven successive spatial projects, culminating in the war on Ukraine. In the third paper, Matthew Blackburn and Natalia Yudina analyse the reconfiguration of “patriotic forces” (systemic opposition, alternative media, patriotic NGOs, thinktanks and paramilitaries) over 2014-2022. The paper examines the extent to which reconfigured ‘patriotic forces’ operate as a loyal opposition, the distinctiveness of their ideological agendas as well as how the war in Ukraine has affected them. The final paper from Luke March assessed the role of nationalism in Russian foreign policy, balancing the clear incorporation of nationalist rhetoric into Kremlin discourse against continued lack of harmony with radical nationalists inside the country.
Her Side of The Story: Women Dissident Practices in the Soviet Union and Beyond
This panel will focus on the women’s experience of dissidence and resistance in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries, which are still largely overlooked in the scholarship. Not attempting to undermine or reverse the general understanding of dissent, the panel seeks to diversify its meaning but looking for and looking into specifically women’s practices, which developed outside the main known centres of the dissident movement. Additionally, it seeks to answer the question about the reasons for women's "invisibility" in the narratives of dissent.
Unlikely Political Connection?: Asia and Central Europe
Against a backdrop of communism and nationalism, the panel examines and compares the dissent, political and ideological "witch-hunt", the desire to live in democracy, bravery connected with human modesty and civic responsibility. Topics have been drawn from geographically distant countries - the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, Thailand and Taiwan but there is a strong comparative potential in them. In the case of communist Czechoslovakia, the panel examines Charter 77, Václav Havel, the dissent world and ideas, and the significant help of the Jan Hus Foundation (UK). In the case of the current Czech Republic - already 30 years after the fall of communism - the panel reflects on the development of relations with China and Taiwan. The contribution on Thailand introduces the tragic fate of the young left-oriented student Chit Phumisak in the intersection of nationalism and communism, and compares the positions, chances and choices of Chit Phumisak and Václav Havel, and their legacies.
Russia's war on Ukraine (2)
War and Society: Embodied Experiences, Narrated Identities
Repression and dissent under socialism
Domestic Matriarchy vs. Public Patriarchy. Ascribing and Questioning Gender Roles in Central Europe after 1989
The end of the socialism and the soviet era in Central Europe led to liberalization in economic terms, but not in in the choice of life models. Major progressive developments have taken place in the sphere of modernization i.e. infrastructure and economics. However, in the sphere of modernity, the development was opposite: interferences between church and politics, homophobia, misogyny and aggression against minorities led to a paradoxical social situation, which Przemyslaw Czaplinski describes with the concept of belated modernity (Czaplinski 2018).
The panel scrutinizes the gender-specific aspects of this phenomenon that public narratives have been trying to shape positively: The emphasis has been put on the advantages of a classic role model that reduces the female sphere of power to the private whereas public discourses (politics, economy, culture) were to a large extent taken over by men. Slawomira Walczewska (1999) coined and problematized the term domestic matriarchy (i.e. the unnoticeable female way to exercise power over the whole family at home). Walczewska argues that this conception is misleading since women de facto disappeared from public life and the ascribed domestic influence was only a comforting narration for the loss of significance.
This questionable power division is however a universal phenomenon and becomes obvious especially when states regain independence: We observe pro-natalist and profamily policies in post socialist countries that rely to a large extent on traditional role models. In Hungary, a “care fare” (Fodor 2022) regime ascribes women a “natural responsibility” for care work, in Poland restrictive family policies and conservative sex education approaches in school foster traditional role models. In Ukraine, ambivalent cohesion of traditional gender roles occurred first through increased migration and now through war.
Our goal is to make aware of problems for society resulting from a binary role model but also to shed light on counter movements and strategies of female self-empowerment.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together both early career and established researchers from different disciplines (history, sociology, literature and cultural studies), focusing on the countries of Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, as well as Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Authoritarianism and disinformation
New Directions in Polish Censorship
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: regional and translocal divides
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Starting with the Thaw and up to 1985 semi- and unofficial local grassroots structures and diverse voices, including those from the Soviet republics and the autonomous national republics of RSFSR, played a prominent role in inaugurating a parallel public sphere. They even took part in preparing perestroika and became one of its pillars. Paradoxically, one of the outcomes of the process of “democratisation” during Gorbachev’s and later Yeltsin’s times for Russia was the new centralisation of power and the re-emergence of imperial ideas. This process intensified during Putin’s 2000s and 2010s. Many of these local and translocal groups now have fewer rights than they had during Brezhnev's stagnation and behind the Iron Curtain.
The papers in this panel, with their topics as diverse as the ideas of development of Russia’s Far East from the late 1980s, the fate of the Institute of Experimental Aesthetics in Kazan, and trajectories of amateur photography groups from mid-1970s up to the present, are united by our wish to reflect on the concepts of periphery and centre.
Resisting Russia’s War on Ukraine by Cultural Means
Multilingual Societies and Language Policies
Contextualising Tolstoy: politic, literary, and religious subtexts of "War and Peace" and "Resurrection".
Tolstoy's novels are complex statements that can be read through a variety of contexts. The papers in this panel examine Tolstoy's famous texts from three not-so-obvious perspectives. 1. How did Tolstoy's critique of political nihilism manifest itself in “War and Peace” and his other texts of the time, how did Tolstoy take part in the broad discussion of this phenomenon in the 1860s, and what did Tolstoy actually understand by the term “political nihilism”, analysing it from the perspective of his own political theory? 2. How can we interpret Tolstoy's reader’s reactions to Anthony Trollope's novel “The Bertrams” (1859) and understand his strange feeling of writer’s competition? What makes Tolstoy speak of Trollope's “murderous skill”, let him feel envy and despair while reading far not the best and not the best-known novel of the English author? In this case we can speak about the special reader’s position from which Tolstoy can see the similarity of writing techniques and identify himself with the characters in "The Bertrams. 3. The third paper in this section concentrates on Tolstoy's connections with the American religious movement Mind Cure and looks at his correspondence with spiritualist Christian preachers Lucy Mallory and Alice Bunker Stockham. Reading Mind Cure texts changed Tolstoy's ideas about Christianity and determined the religious credo of the novel “Resurrection” (1899). The genesis of late Tolstoy's favourite conceptions, such as the “loving communion of men”, the idea of an “inner” god living within every man, and the concept of a “good contagion”, can be traced from Tolstoy’s readings and correspondences with the Mind Cure activists.
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev re-examines the question of social control against the backdrop of institutional rivalries and bureaucratic spaces in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. Presenting four chapters of our forthcoming volume, this panel looks at how Soviet leaders defined and redefined socialist legality in the face of rising crime rates, while the procuracy, lower courts, Supreme Court, and other state institutions struggled to resolve important social issues like alimony, housing disputes, and juvenile delinquency. It explores the issue of popular agency and state institutions in the enforcement and negotiation of Soviet norms and how citizens asserted their own legal rights. We hope cast a new light on how the Stalinist and post-Stalinist state tried to discipline and control its citizens, and how people accommodated and occasionally resisted these attempts.
Practices of Solidarity inside Socialist Society II.
General Winter and the Snow Maiden: Cold in Russian Culture and History
This panel brings together four speakers whose papers will address different facets of Russia’s historical engagement with the cold as a cultural experience throughout the empire. Taken together, these four papers seek to explore the role of cold and climate in the culture of Russia and its empire. We will develop four main themes in our discussion. First, cold as an enemy; second, cold as an opportunity that may hold riches either natural or theoretical; third, cold as an adventure; and fourth, cold as metaphor for the very nature of the Russian state itself.
Literatures of the Russian Arctic area II
During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.
Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.
One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.
Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.
Ideology and the Putin System: Before and after 2022
Russian politics is often analysed in terms of rational actor theory, structuralism, institutionalism or democratisation theory. When it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shocked so many, a large part of the explanation can be found in the domain of culture, identity and ideology. Yet, the hybridity of ideological options in Russia, and the refusal of the Kremlin to codify a state ideology into clear doctrinal form, leaves analysts with serious challenges in arriving at consensus on what ‘ism’, if any, is most appropriate to describe the Putin system. We examine the development of ideology along several dimensions. In the first paper, Mark Bassin tracks the evolution great geopolitical vision of the Kremlin, “Greater Eurasia”, which has emerged from academic and intellectual discussions that Vladimir Putin has cultivated at the Valdai Forum. In the second paper, David Lewis examines the influence of the Schmittian concept of Grossraum in Russia, which has driven successive spatial projects, culminating in the war on Ukraine. In the third paper, Matthew Blackburn and Natalia Yudina analyse the reconfiguration of “patriotic forces” (systemic opposition, alternative media, patriotic NGOs, thinktanks and paramilitaries) over 2014-2022. The paper examines the extent to which reconfigured ‘patriotic forces’ operate as a loyal opposition, the distinctiveness of their ideological agendas as well as how the war in Ukraine has affected them. The final paper from Luke March assessed the role of nationalism in Russian foreign policy, balancing the clear incorporation of nationalist rhetoric into Kremlin discourse against continued lack of harmony with radical nationalists inside the country.
Her Side of The Story: Women Dissident Practices in the Soviet Union and Beyond
This panel will focus on the women’s experience of dissidence and resistance in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries, which are still largely overlooked in the scholarship. Not attempting to undermine or reverse the general understanding of dissent, the panel seeks to diversify its meaning but looking for and looking into specifically women’s practices, which developed outside the main known centres of the dissident movement. Additionally, it seeks to answer the question about the reasons for women's "invisibility" in the narratives of dissent.
Unlikely Political Connection?: Asia and Central Europe
Against a backdrop of communism and nationalism, the panel examines and compares the dissent, political and ideological "witch-hunt", the desire to live in democracy, bravery connected with human modesty and civic responsibility. Topics have been drawn from geographically distant countries - the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, Thailand and Taiwan but there is a strong comparative potential in them. In the case of communist Czechoslovakia, the panel examines Charter 77, Václav Havel, the dissent world and ideas, and the significant help of the Jan Hus Foundation (UK). In the case of the current Czech Republic - already 30 years after the fall of communism - the panel reflects on the development of relations with China and Taiwan. The contribution on Thailand introduces the tragic fate of the young left-oriented student Chit Phumisak in the intersection of nationalism and communism, and compares the positions, chances and choices of Chit Phumisak and Václav Havel, and their legacies.
Russia's war on Ukraine (2)
War and Society: Embodied Experiences, Narrated Identities
Repression and dissent under socialism
Domestic Matriarchy vs. Public Patriarchy. Ascribing and Questioning Gender Roles in Central Europe after 1989
The end of the socialism and the soviet era in Central Europe led to liberalization in economic terms, but not in in the choice of life models. Major progressive developments have taken place in the sphere of modernization i.e. infrastructure and economics. However, in the sphere of modernity, the development was opposite: interferences between church and politics, homophobia, misogyny and aggression against minorities led to a paradoxical social situation, which Przemyslaw Czaplinski describes with the concept of belated modernity (Czaplinski 2018).
The panel scrutinizes the gender-specific aspects of this phenomenon that public narratives have been trying to shape positively: The emphasis has been put on the advantages of a classic role model that reduces the female sphere of power to the private whereas public discourses (politics, economy, culture) were to a large extent taken over by men. Slawomira Walczewska (1999) coined and problematized the term domestic matriarchy (i.e. the unnoticeable female way to exercise power over the whole family at home). Walczewska argues that this conception is misleading since women de facto disappeared from public life and the ascribed domestic influence was only a comforting narration for the loss of significance.
This questionable power division is however a universal phenomenon and becomes obvious especially when states regain independence: We observe pro-natalist and profamily policies in post socialist countries that rely to a large extent on traditional role models. In Hungary, a “care fare” (Fodor 2022) regime ascribes women a “natural responsibility” for care work, in Poland restrictive family policies and conservative sex education approaches in school foster traditional role models. In Ukraine, ambivalent cohesion of traditional gender roles occurred first through increased migration and now through war.
Our goal is to make aware of problems for society resulting from a binary role model but also to shed light on counter movements and strategies of female self-empowerment.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together both early career and established researchers from different disciplines (history, sociology, literature and cultural studies), focusing on the countries of Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, as well as Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Authoritarianism and disinformation
New Directions in Polish Censorship
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: regional and translocal divides
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Starting with the Thaw and up to 1985 semi- and unofficial local grassroots structures and diverse voices, including those from the Soviet republics and the autonomous national republics of RSFSR, played a prominent role in inaugurating a parallel public sphere. They even took part in preparing perestroika and became one of its pillars. Paradoxically, one of the outcomes of the process of “democratisation” during Gorbachev’s and later Yeltsin’s times for Russia was the new centralisation of power and the re-emergence of imperial ideas. This process intensified during Putin’s 2000s and 2010s. Many of these local and translocal groups now have fewer rights than they had during Brezhnev's stagnation and behind the Iron Curtain.
The papers in this panel, with their topics as diverse as the ideas of development of Russia’s Far East from the late 1980s, the fate of the Institute of Experimental Aesthetics in Kazan, and trajectories of amateur photography groups from mid-1970s up to the present, are united by our wish to reflect on the concepts of periphery and centre.
Resisting Russia’s War on Ukraine by Cultural Means
Multilingual Societies and Language Policies
Contextualising Tolstoy: politic, literary, and religious subtexts of "War and Peace" and "Resurrection".
Tolstoy's novels are complex statements that can be read through a variety of contexts. The papers in this panel examine Tolstoy's famous texts from three not-so-obvious perspectives. 1. How did Tolstoy's critique of political nihilism manifest itself in “War and Peace” and his other texts of the time, how did Tolstoy take part in the broad discussion of this phenomenon in the 1860s, and what did Tolstoy actually understand by the term “political nihilism”, analysing it from the perspective of his own political theory? 2. How can we interpret Tolstoy's reader’s reactions to Anthony Trollope's novel “The Bertrams” (1859) and understand his strange feeling of writer’s competition? What makes Tolstoy speak of Trollope's “murderous skill”, let him feel envy and despair while reading far not the best and not the best-known novel of the English author? In this case we can speak about the special reader’s position from which Tolstoy can see the similarity of writing techniques and identify himself with the characters in "The Bertrams. 3. The third paper in this section concentrates on Tolstoy's connections with the American religious movement Mind Cure and looks at his correspondence with spiritualist Christian preachers Lucy Mallory and Alice Bunker Stockham. Reading Mind Cure texts changed Tolstoy's ideas about Christianity and determined the religious credo of the novel “Resurrection” (1899). The genesis of late Tolstoy's favourite conceptions, such as the “loving communion of men”, the idea of an “inner” god living within every man, and the concept of a “good contagion”, can be traced from Tolstoy’s readings and correspondences with the Mind Cure activists.
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev re-examines the question of social control against the backdrop of institutional rivalries and bureaucratic spaces in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. Presenting four chapters of our forthcoming volume, this panel looks at how Soviet leaders defined and redefined socialist legality in the face of rising crime rates, while the procuracy, lower courts, Supreme Court, and other state institutions struggled to resolve important social issues like alimony, housing disputes, and juvenile delinquency. It explores the issue of popular agency and state institutions in the enforcement and negotiation of Soviet norms and how citizens asserted their own legal rights. We hope cast a new light on how the Stalinist and post-Stalinist state tried to discipline and control its citizens, and how people accommodated and occasionally resisted these attempts.
Practices of Solidarity inside Socialist Society II.
General Winter and the Snow Maiden: Cold in Russian Culture and History
This panel brings together four speakers whose papers will address different facets of Russia’s historical engagement with the cold as a cultural experience throughout the empire. Taken together, these four papers seek to explore the role of cold and climate in the culture of Russia and its empire. We will develop four main themes in our discussion. First, cold as an enemy; second, cold as an opportunity that may hold riches either natural or theoretical; third, cold as an adventure; and fourth, cold as metaphor for the very nature of the Russian state itself.
Literatures of the Russian Arctic area II
During the last decades, serious environmental issues associated with the Russian Arctic area, as well as the situation of the Northern Indigenous peoples, have attracted growing attention in public debate and in research. Within literary studies, the focus has mainly been on the descriptions of the North in Russian literature, particularly in earlier literature, while less attention has been paid to literature written by Northern writers and the late Soviet or contemporary context.
Two panels on literatures of the Russian Arctic area at BASEES 2023 address both Northern literature and descriptions of the North written by authors from elsewhere. The panels offer an extensive view to different genres from non-fiction to prose fiction, comics, and poetry, and include papers both on Indigenous writers’ and ethnically Russian writers’ works from the 1960s to the 2010s.
One of the starting points of the panels is the view that the literatures of the Nenets, Chukchi and Sámi have developed in the interface between different cultures, and in tight relation to Soviet literature. This connection is reflected in the narration in hybrid descriptions, or in the employment of such narrative modes as retrospective autobiographical narration, popular in late Soviet fiction at large.
Another important base for the panels is a multifaceted view of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman in Northern texts. While Arctic literatures often mediate an ecocentric – rather than anthropocentric – worldview, such processes and results of the Soviet conquest of the North as industrialization and urbanization are vividly present in the material analysed in the panels, and for their part question the image of the Arctic as a purely natural environment.
Ideology and the Putin System: Before and after 2022
Russian politics is often analysed in terms of rational actor theory, structuralism, institutionalism or democratisation theory. When it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shocked so many, a large part of the explanation can be found in the domain of culture, identity and ideology. Yet, the hybridity of ideological options in Russia, and the refusal of the Kremlin to codify a state ideology into clear doctrinal form, leaves analysts with serious challenges in arriving at consensus on what ‘ism’, if any, is most appropriate to describe the Putin system. We examine the development of ideology along several dimensions. In the first paper, Mark Bassin tracks the evolution great geopolitical vision of the Kremlin, “Greater Eurasia”, which has emerged from academic and intellectual discussions that Vladimir Putin has cultivated at the Valdai Forum. In the second paper, David Lewis examines the influence of the Schmittian concept of Grossraum in Russia, which has driven successive spatial projects, culminating in the war on Ukraine. In the third paper, Matthew Blackburn and Natalia Yudina analyse the reconfiguration of “patriotic forces” (systemic opposition, alternative media, patriotic NGOs, thinktanks and paramilitaries) over 2014-2022. The paper examines the extent to which reconfigured ‘patriotic forces’ operate as a loyal opposition, the distinctiveness of their ideological agendas as well as how the war in Ukraine has affected them. The final paper from Luke March assessed the role of nationalism in Russian foreign policy, balancing the clear incorporation of nationalist rhetoric into Kremlin discourse against continued lack of harmony with radical nationalists inside the country.
Her Side of The Story: Women Dissident Practices in the Soviet Union and Beyond
This panel will focus on the women’s experience of dissidence and resistance in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries, which are still largely overlooked in the scholarship. Not attempting to undermine or reverse the general understanding of dissent, the panel seeks to diversify its meaning but looking for and looking into specifically women’s practices, which developed outside the main known centres of the dissident movement. Additionally, it seeks to answer the question about the reasons for women's "invisibility" in the narratives of dissent.
Unlikely Political Connection?: Asia and Central Europe
Against a backdrop of communism and nationalism, the panel examines and compares the dissent, political and ideological "witch-hunt", the desire to live in democracy, bravery connected with human modesty and civic responsibility. Topics have been drawn from geographically distant countries - the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, Thailand and Taiwan but there is a strong comparative potential in them. In the case of communist Czechoslovakia, the panel examines Charter 77, Václav Havel, the dissent world and ideas, and the significant help of the Jan Hus Foundation (UK). In the case of the current Czech Republic - already 30 years after the fall of communism - the panel reflects on the development of relations with China and Taiwan. The contribution on Thailand introduces the tragic fate of the young left-oriented student Chit Phumisak in the intersection of nationalism and communism, and compares the positions, chances and choices of Chit Phumisak and Václav Havel, and their legacies.
Repression and dissent under socialism
Domestic Matriarchy vs. Public Patriarchy. Ascribing and Questioning Gender Roles in Central Europe after 1989
The end of the socialism and the soviet era in Central Europe led to liberalization in economic terms, but not in in the choice of life models. Major progressive developments have taken place in the sphere of modernization i.e. infrastructure and economics. However, in the sphere of modernity, the development was opposite: interferences between church and politics, homophobia, misogyny and aggression against minorities led to a paradoxical social situation, which Przemyslaw Czaplinski describes with the concept of belated modernity (Czaplinski 2018).
The panel scrutinizes the gender-specific aspects of this phenomenon that public narratives have been trying to shape positively: The emphasis has been put on the advantages of a classic role model that reduces the female sphere of power to the private whereas public discourses (politics, economy, culture) were to a large extent taken over by men. Slawomira Walczewska (1999) coined and problematized the term domestic matriarchy (i.e. the unnoticeable female way to exercise power over the whole family at home). Walczewska argues that this conception is misleading since women de facto disappeared from public life and the ascribed domestic influence was only a comforting narration for the loss of significance.
This questionable power division is however a universal phenomenon and becomes obvious especially when states regain independence: We observe pro-natalist and profamily policies in post socialist countries that rely to a large extent on traditional role models. In Hungary, a “care fare” (Fodor 2022) regime ascribes women a “natural responsibility” for care work, in Poland restrictive family policies and conservative sex education approaches in school foster traditional role models. In Ukraine, ambivalent cohesion of traditional gender roles occurred first through increased migration and now through war.
Our goal is to make aware of problems for society resulting from a binary role model but also to shed light on counter movements and strategies of female self-empowerment.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together both early career and established researchers from different disciplines (history, sociology, literature and cultural studies), focusing on the countries of Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, as well as Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Authoritarianism and disinformation
(In)visible hierarchies of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities: regional and translocal divides
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project that uncovers and deconstructs invisible structures and repetitive patterns of Soviet and Russia's post-Soviet colonial modernities. Based on a series of case studies, it seeks to bring to the fore the lack of reflection on complex hierarchical sociocultural and political relations that empower Russia’s quest for restoring its “greatpowerness” today.
Starting with the Thaw and up to 1985 semi- and unofficial local grassroots structures and diverse voices, including those from the Soviet republics and the autonomous national republics of RSFSR, played a prominent role in inaugurating a parallel public sphere. They even took part in preparing perestroika and became one of its pillars. Paradoxically, one of the outcomes of the process of “democratisation” during Gorbachev’s and later Yeltsin’s times for Russia was the new centralisation of power and the re-emergence of imperial ideas. This process intensified during Putin’s 2000s and 2010s. Many of these local and translocal groups now have fewer rights than they had during Brezhnev's stagnation and behind the Iron Curtain.
The papers in this panel, with their topics as diverse as the ideas of development of Russia’s Far East from the late 1980s, the fate of the Institute of Experimental Aesthetics in Kazan, and trajectories of amateur photography groups from mid-1970s up to the present, are united by our wish to reflect on the concepts of periphery and centre.
Resisting Russia’s War on Ukraine by Cultural Means
Multilingual Societies and Language Policies
Unlikely Political Connection?: Asia and Central Europe
Against a backdrop of communism and nationalism, the panel examines and compares the dissent, political and ideological "witch-hunt", the desire to live in democracy, bravery connected with human modesty and civic responsibility. Topics have been drawn from geographically distant countries - the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, Thailand and Taiwan but there is a strong comparative potential in them. In the case of communist Czechoslovakia, the panel examines Charter 77, Václav Havel, the dissent world and ideas, and the significant help of the Jan Hus Foundation (UK). In the case of the current Czech Republic - already 30 years after the fall of communism - the panel reflects on the development of relations with China and Taiwan. The contribution on Thailand introduces the tragic fate of the young left-oriented student Chit Phumisak in the intersection of nationalism and communism, and compares the positions, chances and choices of Chit Phumisak and Václav Havel, and their legacies.
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State
Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev re-examines the question of social control against the backdrop of institutional rivalries and bureaucratic spaces in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. Presenting four chapters of our forthcoming volume, this panel looks at how Soviet leaders defined and redefined socialist legality in the face of rising crime rates, while the procuracy, lower courts, Supreme Court, and other state institutions struggled to resolve important social issues like alimony, housing disputes, and juvenile delinquency. It explores the issue of popular agency and state institutions in the enforcement and negotiation of Soviet norms and how citizens asserted their own legal rights. We hope cast a new light on how the Stalinist and post-Stalinist state tried to discipline and control its citizens, and how people accommodated and occasionally resisted these attempts.
General Winter and the Snow Maiden: Cold in Russian Culture and History
This panel brings together four speakers whose papers will address different facets of Russia’s historical engagement with the cold as a cultural experience throughout the empire. Taken together, these four papers seek to explore the role of cold and climate in the culture of Russia and its empire. We will develop four main themes in our discussion. First, cold as an enemy; second, cold as an opportunity that may hold riches either natural or theoretical; third, cold as an adventure; and fourth, cold as metaphor for the very nature of the Russian state itself.
Repression and dissent under socialism
Authoritarianism and disinformation
Resisting Russia’s War on Ukraine by Cultural Means
Ruxit: Russia and the Council of Europe from beginning to an end
Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe (CoE) now has a beginning, middle, and end. How did that relationship change both Russia and the international organization that welcomed it? What can be learned from Russia’s tumultuous experience? This is not only of academic interest, since other CoE Member States also act in ways that increasingly challenge the core values of that organization – democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. How can the CoE respond to states that systematically challenge these principles as well as the practical operation of its key institutions? The presenters in this panel focus on a multi-disciplinary investigation of the political, legal, and theoretical issues raised by this fraught and hopeful relationship.
New perspectives on revolutionary Russia
This panel brings together new perspectives on the revolutionary period in late Imperial Russia. Panellists are presenting innovative research on interlocking aspects of the last years of Tsarist rule and the revolution.
Foreign policy
Crossing the Iron curtain: sports actors and the dynamics of sporting interactions during the Cold War
Entangled histories of the Cold War have shown that multilevel interactions took place across the Iron Curtain. Different types of actors (peoples, states, and institutions) cooperated and developed transnational connections, from the macro-level, to the regional- and micro-levels. Ideas, techniques, objects, and individuals circulated throughout the blocs, and between them. In sports, the Cold War period coincided with an era of growing internationalisation, catalysed by improving transportation and international connections, enhanced standards of living and a growth in leisure time, as well as by decolonisation and the adoption by newly independent countries of sports as a means of affirming independence, or to symbolise modernity.
In terms of sports historiography, the focus on these phenomena is relatively new. Histories of sport in Eastern Europe continue to be divided into a collection of national studies, with relatively frequent state-centric biases. This panel intends to examine how athletes, referees, and sports administrators, along with the techniques and methods that they employed, circulated through Europe and crossed the Iron Curtain on a regular basis. It will examine the dynamics of sports interactions during the Cold War, between the Western and the Eastern blocs, to analyse the actors engaged in them and to shed light on the impacts which such encounters had upon their socio-economic positions, achievements, and careers.
Identities in flux: engaging religion in periods of change
This panel brings together three papers that explore changing religious identities in different times, geographies and social contexts: from the changing social identities and opportunities of Russian Orthodox women in the nineteenth-century Baltic region, clerical and intellectual émigrés in Paris venerating St. Serafim Sarovskii in the 1920s and 1930s, to Muslim émigrés from post-Soviet North Caucasus adapting to a new European context. These papers examine the ways religious heritage (variously conceived) may be drawn upon to create, recreate and/or establish personal and community identities in periods of flux, such as rapid social change and geographic relocation. This panel is supported by the BASEES Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe study group.
Gender perspectives on the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration
The temporary employment of Yugoslav citizens in western countries was one of the most important migration phenomena in socialist Yugoslavia. In the early 1970s, one in every four Yugoslavs employed outside of agriculture and craft work was a Gastarbeiter. Legalised in 1963, the temporary employment abroad of Yugoslav workers made Yugoslavia an exceptional case, since no other socialist country in Cold War Europe allowed its citizens to work in the capitalist West. Because of that, the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration has received considerable scholarly attention. Yet there are still important gaps in the literature. One of those is the absence of gender perspectives. Although women were a large proportion of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter, we know very little about their migration experience. The impact of Gastarbeiter migration on gender norms, and on gender and labour policies in Yugoslavia as well as the countries of employment remains poorly investigated.
This panel addresses these gaps from different geographic and thematic perspectives. Covering topics such as the female experiences of employment abroad, return and reintegration, as well as the impact of Gastarbeiter migration on female employment in Yugoslavia, the panel offers unique insight into a phenomenon which has for too long been biased against female migrant workers. Given that the Gastarbeiter migration was one of the most important migratory phenomena not only in Yugoslavia but in post-1945 European history, the panel will be of interest not only for Yugoslav specialists but for anyone with an interest in gender and migration in contemporary European history.
Media re(production) of socialist ideology and local past
Economics, business, and industry – politics and policy
Theorising “the East” in Area Studies: reflexivity, westerncentrism, and positionality
This panel critically examines how we conduct “Area Studies” of the “east’. The papers all reflect on complex issues of power dynamics, Westerncentrism, and on the practical challenges of conducting research within the contested and unclear boundaries of “eastern Europe”. The case studies come from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, and are all deeply affected by Russia’s renewed and full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This adds a further layer of emotional and analytical complexity to how we, as scholars, conduct our research. The panel investigates how knowledge travels west-east, but also east-west, and asks us to take seriously our relative privileges, biases, assumptions, geographies, and powerlessness.
Social Agency in Conflict and Border Zones
Freed with No Right to Leave: Former Gulag Prisoners and Their Lives on the Soviet Periphery
The sprawling Soviet forced-labour system transformed the lives of tens of millions of people throughout more than three decades of terror, exploitation, and displacement. Life in the Gulag camps and colonies has been the subject of a growing field of study that includes the seminal work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, scholarship on Gulag economics, re-education, and internal colonization, and surprising discoveries about medicine, art, and even football in the camps. This panel will explore the impact of the Gulag on prisoners after their “release,” focusing on the residency restrictions that faced former inmates, often either forcing them to remain in their place of incarceration or barring them from the urban centres of the Soviet Union. These restrictions compelled former prisoners to build their lives on the periphery, engaging with local formal institutions as well as unofficial subcultures, shaping them, and being shaped by them. Communities of dissidents, writers, and theatre professionals made an indelible mark on their places of confinement, all the while maneouvering to stay connected to cultural and political life in the Soviet metropoles. A better understanding of the complex lives of former prisoners on the Soviet periphery will further illuminate the multifaceted interaction between the Gulag and Soviet life long after the camps were left to rust in the taiga.
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy
Women’s Writing and Feminist Perspectives
Visions of the Total Artwork: the Russian, Ukrainian and Eastern European Gesamtkunstwerk
Trans-Regional Exchange in Motion: Cultural Fluidity in Medieval and Early Modern Eastern Europe
This panel examines cultural exchange in late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe from the perspective of liminal transmissions. It considers how the post-structuralist tendency to “isolate” cultural phenomena according to “political” boundaries might mask cultural exchange in Eastern Europe in the context of trans-regional connections with Western European monarchies, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Byzantine Empire, and the Qipchaq Khanate. It locates transfers of social, political, and intellectual practices within the multi-layered and fluid networks of communications, merchants and pilgrims that enabled knowledge and ideas to circulate. On the one hand, the panel participants argue that cultural exchange was rarely based on emulation, but instead on active adaptation to local social, political, religious or other needs. On the other hand, the participants will underline the necessity of comparatively analysing cultural exchange, to show how certain practices became sophisticated aberrations while coexisting between various sociocultural traditions.
Theatre and Performance
Ruxit: Russia and the Council of Europe from beginning to an end
Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe (CoE) now has a beginning, middle, and end. How did that relationship change both Russia and the international organization that welcomed it? What can be learned from Russia’s tumultuous experience? This is not only of academic interest, since other CoE Member States also act in ways that increasingly challenge the core values of that organization – democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. How can the CoE respond to states that systematically challenge these principles as well as the practical operation of its key institutions? The presenters in this panel focus on a multi-disciplinary investigation of the political, legal, and theoretical issues raised by this fraught and hopeful relationship.
New perspectives on revolutionary Russia
This panel brings together new perspectives on the revolutionary period in late Imperial Russia. Panellists are presenting innovative research on interlocking aspects of the last years of Tsarist rule and the revolution.
Foreign policy
Media re(production) of socialist ideology and local past
Economics, business, and industry – politics and policy
Social Agency in Conflict and Border Zones
Women’s Writing and Feminist Perspectives
Visions of the Total Artwork: the Russian, Ukrainian and Eastern European Gesamtkunstwerk
Trans-Regional Exchange in Motion: Cultural Fluidity in Medieval and Early Modern Eastern Europe
This panel examines cultural exchange in late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe from the perspective of liminal transmissions. It considers how the post-structuralist tendency to “isolate” cultural phenomena according to “political” boundaries might mask cultural exchange in Eastern Europe in the context of trans-regional connections with Western European monarchies, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Byzantine Empire, and the Qipchaq Khanate. It locates transfers of social, political, and intellectual practices within the multi-layered and fluid networks of communications, merchants and pilgrims that enabled knowledge and ideas to circulate. On the one hand, the panel participants argue that cultural exchange was rarely based on emulation, but instead on active adaptation to local social, political, religious or other needs. On the other hand, the participants will underline the necessity of comparatively analysing cultural exchange, to show how certain practices became sophisticated aberrations while coexisting between various sociocultural traditions.
Theatre and Performance
Crossing the Iron curtain: sports actors and the dynamics of sporting interactions during the Cold War
Entangled histories of the Cold War have shown that multilevel interactions took place across the Iron Curtain. Different types of actors (peoples, states, and institutions) cooperated and developed transnational connections, from the macro-level, to the regional- and micro-levels. Ideas, techniques, objects, and individuals circulated throughout the blocs, and between them. In sports, the Cold War period coincided with an era of growing internationalisation, catalysed by improving transportation and international connections, enhanced standards of living and a growth in leisure time, as well as by decolonisation and the adoption by newly independent countries of sports as a means of affirming independence, or to symbolise modernity.
In terms of sports historiography, the focus on these phenomena is relatively new. Histories of sport in Eastern Europe continue to be divided into a collection of national studies, with relatively frequent state-centric biases. This panel intends to examine how athletes, referees, and sports administrators, along with the techniques and methods that they employed, circulated through Europe and crossed the Iron Curtain on a regular basis. It will examine the dynamics of sports interactions during the Cold War, between the Western and the Eastern blocs, to analyse the actors engaged in them and to shed light on the impacts which such encounters had upon their socio-economic positions, achievements, and careers.
Identities in flux: engaging religion in periods of change
This panel brings together three papers that explore changing religious identities in different times, geographies and social contexts: from the changing social identities and opportunities of Russian Orthodox women in the nineteenth-century Baltic region, clerical and intellectual émigrés in Paris venerating St. Serafim Sarovskii in the 1920s and 1930s, to Muslim émigrés from post-Soviet North Caucasus adapting to a new European context. These papers examine the ways religious heritage (variously conceived) may be drawn upon to create, recreate and/or establish personal and community identities in periods of flux, such as rapid social change and geographic relocation. This panel is supported by the BASEES Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe study group.
Gender perspectives on the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration
The temporary employment of Yugoslav citizens in western countries was one of the most important migration phenomena in socialist Yugoslavia. In the early 1970s, one in every four Yugoslavs employed outside of agriculture and craft work was a Gastarbeiter. Legalised in 1963, the temporary employment abroad of Yugoslav workers made Yugoslavia an exceptional case, since no other socialist country in Cold War Europe allowed its citizens to work in the capitalist West. Because of that, the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration has received considerable scholarly attention. Yet there are still important gaps in the literature. One of those is the absence of gender perspectives. Although women were a large proportion of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter, we know very little about their migration experience. The impact of Gastarbeiter migration on gender norms, and on gender and labour policies in Yugoslavia as well as the countries of employment remains poorly investigated.
This panel addresses these gaps from different geographic and thematic perspectives. Covering topics such as the female experiences of employment abroad, return and reintegration, as well as the impact of Gastarbeiter migration on female employment in Yugoslavia, the panel offers unique insight into a phenomenon which has for too long been biased against female migrant workers. Given that the Gastarbeiter migration was one of the most important migratory phenomena not only in Yugoslavia but in post-1945 European history, the panel will be of interest not only for Yugoslav specialists but for anyone with an interest in gender and migration in contemporary European history.
Theorising “the East” in Area Studies: reflexivity, westerncentrism, and positionality
This panel critically examines how we conduct “Area Studies” of the “east’. The papers all reflect on complex issues of power dynamics, Westerncentrism, and on the practical challenges of conducting research within the contested and unclear boundaries of “eastern Europe”. The case studies come from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, and are all deeply affected by Russia’s renewed and full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This adds a further layer of emotional and analytical complexity to how we, as scholars, conduct our research. The panel investigates how knowledge travels west-east, but also east-west, and asks us to take seriously our relative privileges, biases, assumptions, geographies, and powerlessness.
Freed with No Right to Leave: Former Gulag Prisoners and Their Lives on the Soviet Periphery
The sprawling Soviet forced-labour system transformed the lives of tens of millions of people throughout more than three decades of terror, exploitation, and displacement. Life in the Gulag camps and colonies has been the subject of a growing field of study that includes the seminal work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, scholarship on Gulag economics, re-education, and internal colonization, and surprising discoveries about medicine, art, and even football in the camps. This panel will explore the impact of the Gulag on prisoners after their “release,” focusing on the residency restrictions that faced former inmates, often either forcing them to remain in their place of incarceration or barring them from the urban centres of the Soviet Union. These restrictions compelled former prisoners to build their lives on the periphery, engaging with local formal institutions as well as unofficial subcultures, shaping them, and being shaped by them. Communities of dissidents, writers, and theatre professionals made an indelible mark on their places of confinement, all the while maneouvering to stay connected to cultural and political life in the Soviet metropoles. A better understanding of the complex lives of former prisoners on the Soviet periphery will further illuminate the multifaceted interaction between the Gulag and Soviet life long after the camps were left to rust in the taiga.
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy
Ruxit: Russia and the Council of Europe from beginning to an end
Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe (CoE) now has a beginning, middle, and end. How did that relationship change both Russia and the international organization that welcomed it? What can be learned from Russia’s tumultuous experience? This is not only of academic interest, since other CoE Member States also act in ways that increasingly challenge the core values of that organization – democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. How can the CoE respond to states that systematically challenge these principles as well as the practical operation of its key institutions? The presenters in this panel focus on a multi-disciplinary investigation of the political, legal, and theoretical issues raised by this fraught and hopeful relationship.
New perspectives on revolutionary Russia
This panel brings together new perspectives on the revolutionary period in late Imperial Russia. Panellists are presenting innovative research on interlocking aspects of the last years of Tsarist rule and the revolution.
Foreign policy
Media re(production) of socialist ideology and local past
Economics, business, and industry – politics and policy
Social Agency in Conflict and Border Zones
Women’s Writing and Feminist Perspectives
Visions of the Total Artwork: the Russian, Ukrainian and Eastern European Gesamtkunstwerk
Trans-Regional Exchange in Motion: Cultural Fluidity in Medieval and Early Modern Eastern Europe
This panel examines cultural exchange in late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe from the perspective of liminal transmissions. It considers how the post-structuralist tendency to “isolate” cultural phenomena according to “political” boundaries might mask cultural exchange in Eastern Europe in the context of trans-regional connections with Western European monarchies, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Byzantine Empire, and the Qipchaq Khanate. It locates transfers of social, political, and intellectual practices within the multi-layered and fluid networks of communications, merchants and pilgrims that enabled knowledge and ideas to circulate. On the one hand, the panel participants argue that cultural exchange was rarely based on emulation, but instead on active adaptation to local social, political, religious or other needs. On the other hand, the participants will underline the necessity of comparatively analysing cultural exchange, to show how certain practices became sophisticated aberrations while coexisting between various sociocultural traditions.
Theatre and Performance
Crossing the Iron curtain: sports actors and the dynamics of sporting interactions during the Cold War
Entangled histories of the Cold War have shown that multilevel interactions took place across the Iron Curtain. Different types of actors (peoples, states, and institutions) cooperated and developed transnational connections, from the macro-level, to the regional- and micro-levels. Ideas, techniques, objects, and individuals circulated throughout the blocs, and between them. In sports, the Cold War period coincided with an era of growing internationalisation, catalysed by improving transportation and international connections, enhanced standards of living and a growth in leisure time, as well as by decolonisation and the adoption by newly independent countries of sports as a means of affirming independence, or to symbolise modernity.
In terms of sports historiography, the focus on these phenomena is relatively new. Histories of sport in Eastern Europe continue to be divided into a collection of national studies, with relatively frequent state-centric biases. This panel intends to examine how athletes, referees, and sports administrators, along with the techniques and methods that they employed, circulated through Europe and crossed the Iron Curtain on a regular basis. It will examine the dynamics of sports interactions during the Cold War, between the Western and the Eastern blocs, to analyse the actors engaged in them and to shed light on the impacts which such encounters had upon their socio-economic positions, achievements, and careers.
Identities in flux: engaging religion in periods of change
This panel brings together three papers that explore changing religious identities in different times, geographies and social contexts: from the changing social identities and opportunities of Russian Orthodox women in the nineteenth-century Baltic region, clerical and intellectual émigrés in Paris venerating St. Serafim Sarovskii in the 1920s and 1930s, to Muslim émigrés from post-Soviet North Caucasus adapting to a new European context. These papers examine the ways religious heritage (variously conceived) may be drawn upon to create, recreate and/or establish personal and community identities in periods of flux, such as rapid social change and geographic relocation. This panel is supported by the BASEES Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe study group.
Gender perspectives on the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration
The temporary employment of Yugoslav citizens in western countries was one of the most important migration phenomena in socialist Yugoslavia. In the early 1970s, one in every four Yugoslavs employed outside of agriculture and craft work was a Gastarbeiter. Legalised in 1963, the temporary employment abroad of Yugoslav workers made Yugoslavia an exceptional case, since no other socialist country in Cold War Europe allowed its citizens to work in the capitalist West. Because of that, the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration has received considerable scholarly attention. Yet there are still important gaps in the literature. One of those is the absence of gender perspectives. Although women were a large proportion of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter, we know very little about their migration experience. The impact of Gastarbeiter migration on gender norms, and on gender and labour policies in Yugoslavia as well as the countries of employment remains poorly investigated.
This panel addresses these gaps from different geographic and thematic perspectives. Covering topics such as the female experiences of employment abroad, return and reintegration, as well as the impact of Gastarbeiter migration on female employment in Yugoslavia, the panel offers unique insight into a phenomenon which has for too long been biased against female migrant workers. Given that the Gastarbeiter migration was one of the most important migratory phenomena not only in Yugoslavia but in post-1945 European history, the panel will be of interest not only for Yugoslav specialists but for anyone with an interest in gender and migration in contemporary European history.
Theorising “the East” in Area Studies: reflexivity, westerncentrism, and positionality
This panel critically examines how we conduct “Area Studies” of the “east’. The papers all reflect on complex issues of power dynamics, Westerncentrism, and on the practical challenges of conducting research within the contested and unclear boundaries of “eastern Europe”. The case studies come from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, and are all deeply affected by Russia’s renewed and full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This adds a further layer of emotional and analytical complexity to how we, as scholars, conduct our research. The panel investigates how knowledge travels west-east, but also east-west, and asks us to take seriously our relative privileges, biases, assumptions, geographies, and powerlessness.
Freed with No Right to Leave: Former Gulag Prisoners and Their Lives on the Soviet Periphery
The sprawling Soviet forced-labour system transformed the lives of tens of millions of people throughout more than three decades of terror, exploitation, and displacement. Life in the Gulag camps and colonies has been the subject of a growing field of study that includes the seminal work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, scholarship on Gulag economics, re-education, and internal colonization, and surprising discoveries about medicine, art, and even football in the camps. This panel will explore the impact of the Gulag on prisoners after their “release,” focusing on the residency restrictions that faced former inmates, often either forcing them to remain in their place of incarceration or barring them from the urban centres of the Soviet Union. These restrictions compelled former prisoners to build their lives on the periphery, engaging with local formal institutions as well as unofficial subcultures, shaping them, and being shaped by them. Communities of dissidents, writers, and theatre professionals made an indelible mark on their places of confinement, all the while maneouvering to stay connected to cultural and political life in the Soviet metropoles. A better understanding of the complex lives of former prisoners on the Soviet periphery will further illuminate the multifaceted interaction between the Gulag and Soviet life long after the camps were left to rust in the taiga.
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy
Ruxit: Russia and the Council of Europe from beginning to an end
Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe (CoE) now has a beginning, middle, and end. How did that relationship change both Russia and the international organization that welcomed it? What can be learned from Russia’s tumultuous experience? This is not only of academic interest, since other CoE Member States also act in ways that increasingly challenge the core values of that organization – democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. How can the CoE respond to states that systematically challenge these principles as well as the practical operation of its key institutions? The presenters in this panel focus on a multi-disciplinary investigation of the political, legal, and theoretical issues raised by this fraught and hopeful relationship.
Foreign policy
Economics, business, and industry – politics and policy
Women’s Writing and Feminist Perspectives
Theatre and Performance
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy
Women’s Writing and Feminist Perspectives
War as a maker of nations? Nation-building in Ukraine as a result of Russia's war against Ukraine - discourses, identities, achievements
The topic presented in the title is usually discussed in the realm of international relations. Wars are destroying nations; they can also make them stronger. Nowadays there are few nations that can be built or rebuilt. And more often than not nations rise out of ethnicity. In the case of Ukraine Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014 is not at the end but at the beginning of nation-building in Ukraine. A nation-building process which is not based on ethnic nationalism but on civic nationalism, the idea of building up a modern democratic and multicultural society. As Serhii Plokhy wrote it in his book the ”Gates of Europe” (2015, 345): “Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine's difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.” As a matter of fact, nation-building in Ukraine is a process which has started already after the declaration of independence in 1991 and has been reinforced by the two Maidan movements of 2004 and 2013/14. But Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 on can certainly be considered as a major factor and catalyst of nation-building in Ukraine. This is part of a powerful discourse which can also be observed in survey data confirming the growth of national pride and civil Ukrainian identity. On the other hand, the war was also a catalyst for qualitative changes in the political regime in Ukraine, the modernization of political actors and, most importantly, the reduction of the influence of financial and industrial groups (oligarchs), the destruction of political and economic monopolies in the country. In combination with the rapid development of civil society, the change of political identities, the stabilizing role of the EU, also caused rapid institutional changes in the entire political system of Ukraine. The Europeanization process should also be mentioned here: it was an articulated choice of the orientation of nation-building ending the geopolitical ambivalence of Ukraine. The panel aims to examine such aspects as well as other indicators of nation-building. It looks at this process also in a temporal perspective allowing to assess the changes after 2013 and in 2022 on the levels of collective identity, language, political culture, attitudes towards Russia and EU and political institutions.
Ethnic and national groups, and migration
Institutions in Perestroika
The panel analyzes perestroika as an open, contingent process of reform and transformation. Perestroika challenged the Soviet state, institutions and individuals to adjust to a future that suddenly appeared open. Institutions and organizations -- while they could differ fundamentally in their origins, self-understandings, tasks and possibilities -- can be seen as interface and contact points between state and people. Besides, perestroika can also be perceived as a period of institutionalization. What can we learn from institutions about the dynamics that perestroika set in motion? The panel examines examples from three central areas of research that offer insights into the changes perestroika brought about: nationalities, environment/ecology, and religion/church.
Intersectional Feminist Practices of Everyday Creativity in Postsocialism
Social aspects of creativity have attracted increased research interest in the last two decades. At the same time, researchers in gender and feminist studies have contributed new perspectives and definitions of “creativity”. Little of the work has so far been done in the context of the former Eastern Bloc countries. This panel presents a concentrated effort to contribute to filling this research gap. It will take an expressly feminist perspective to address issues of creative memory-making that challenges state commemorative practices, intersections of gender and class in “authoring” textiles, and theoretizations of creativity through the perspective of the commons, with a focus on the transformation of care, labour and environmental and social relations. The papers will draw on studies conducted in several countries, but with a focus on the Czech Republic and Poland.
The panel presents the work conducted within the project on Everyday Creativity in (Post)socialism and brings together researchers from different institutions and countries, but hosted by the University of Graz, Austria in 2022-23.
Elites, Activism and Political Participation
Interwar population politics
Russian nationalism and de-Russification through the prism of media
Petroimaginations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Typewriters, Televisions, and Erotic Gadgets: The Materiality of Everyday Life in Eastern Europe
This panel explores the embodied experiences of everyday life under state socialism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia through the materiality of refrigerators, typewriters, and the various accoutrements of the erotic. Using ethnographic and archival research, the papers investigate the contingencies of human subjectivity as it is shaped by the inanimate objects that were produced, used, desired, bartered, gifted, repaired, and recycled in non-market economies in the 20th century.
Presenting Western as Russian: Tactics of Appropriation in Russian Visual Culture
From women and LGBTQ+ prosecution to activism and resistance
The Ukrainian Language Today: Bridging the Past and the Future
Empires' Multiple Peripheries
History writing between East and West
Memory politics and the Instrumentalisation of the past
Soviet Culture and its Evolution
Life-creation (Zhiznetvorchestvo) as a Driving Force in Inter-cultural Mediation
The term life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) usually refers to the Russian Silver Age writers’ strategies for merging art and life: they turned art into real life and real life into art (Paperno, Grossman, 1994). This panel proposes broadening the definition of this useful term to include not only the activities of Russian modernist writers, but any creative transformation of a life story into a narrative that serves spiritual, social, and political purposes.
Ethnic and national groups, and migration
War as a maker of nations? Nation-building in Ukraine as a result of Russia's war against Ukraine - discourses, identities, achievements
The topic presented in the title is usually discussed in the realm of international relations. Wars are destroying nations; they can also make them stronger. Nowadays there are few nations that can be built or rebuilt. And more often than not nations rise out of ethnicity. In the case of Ukraine Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014 is not at the end but at the beginning of nation-building in Ukraine. A nation-building process which is not based on ethnic nationalism but on civic nationalism, the idea of building up a modern democratic and multicultural society. As Serhii Plokhy wrote it in his book the ”Gates of Europe” (2015, 345): “Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine's difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.” As a matter of fact, nation-building in Ukraine is a process which has started already after the declaration of independence in 1991 and has been reinforced by the two Maidan movements of 2004 and 2013/14. But Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 on can certainly be considered as a major factor and catalyst of nation-building in Ukraine. This is part of a powerful discourse which can also be observed in survey data confirming the growth of national pride and civil Ukrainian identity. On the other hand, the war was also a catalyst for qualitative changes in the political regime in Ukraine, the modernization of political actors and, most importantly, the reduction of the influence of financial and industrial groups (oligarchs), the destruction of political and economic monopolies in the country. In combination with the rapid development of civil society, the change of political identities, the stabilizing role of the EU, also caused rapid institutional changes in the entire political system of Ukraine. The Europeanization process should also be mentioned here: it was an articulated choice of the orientation of nation-building ending the geopolitical ambivalence of Ukraine. The panel aims to examine such aspects as well as other indicators of nation-building. It looks at this process also in a temporal perspective allowing to assess the changes after 2013 and in 2022 on the levels of collective identity, language, political culture, attitudes towards Russia and EU and political institutions.
Intersectional Feminist Practices of Everyday Creativity in Postsocialism
Social aspects of creativity have attracted increased research interest in the last two decades. At the same time, researchers in gender and feminist studies have contributed new perspectives and definitions of “creativity”. Little of the work has so far been done in the context of the former Eastern Bloc countries. This panel presents a concentrated effort to contribute to filling this research gap. It will take an expressly feminist perspective to address issues of creative memory-making that challenges state commemorative practices, intersections of gender and class in “authoring” textiles, and theoretizations of creativity through the perspective of the commons, with a focus on the transformation of care, labour and environmental and social relations. The papers will draw on studies conducted in several countries, but with a focus on the Czech Republic and Poland.
The panel presents the work conducted within the project on Everyday Creativity in (Post)socialism and brings together researchers from different institutions and countries, but hosted by the University of Graz, Austria in 2022-23.
Elites, Activism and Political Participation
Interwar population politics
Russian nationalism and de-Russification through the prism of media
The Ukrainian Language Today: Bridging the Past and the Future
Empires' Multiple Peripheries
History writing between East and West
Soviet Culture and its Evolution
Institutions in Perestroika
The panel analyzes perestroika as an open, contingent process of reform and transformation. Perestroika challenged the Soviet state, institutions and individuals to adjust to a future that suddenly appeared open. Institutions and organizations -- while they could differ fundamentally in their origins, self-understandings, tasks and possibilities -- can be seen as interface and contact points between state and people. Besides, perestroika can also be perceived as a period of institutionalization. What can we learn from institutions about the dynamics that perestroika set in motion? The panel examines examples from three central areas of research that offer insights into the changes perestroika brought about: nationalities, environment/ecology, and religion/church.
Petroimaginations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Typewriters, Televisions, and Erotic Gadgets: The Materiality of Everyday Life in Eastern Europe
This panel explores the embodied experiences of everyday life under state socialism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia through the materiality of refrigerators, typewriters, and the various accoutrements of the erotic. Using ethnographic and archival research, the papers investigate the contingencies of human subjectivity as it is shaped by the inanimate objects that were produced, used, desired, bartered, gifted, repaired, and recycled in non-market economies in the 20th century.
From women and LGBTQ+ prosecution to activism and resistance
Memory politics and the Instrumentalisation of the past
Life-creation (Zhiznetvorchestvo) as a Driving Force in Inter-cultural Mediation
The term life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) usually refers to the Russian Silver Age writers’ strategies for merging art and life: they turned art into real life and real life into art (Paperno, Grossman, 1994). This panel proposes broadening the definition of this useful term to include not only the activities of Russian modernist writers, but any creative transformation of a life story into a narrative that serves spiritual, social, and political purposes.
War as a maker of nations? Nation-building in Ukraine as a result of Russia's war against Ukraine - discourses, identities, achievements
The topic presented in the title is usually discussed in the realm of international relations. Wars are destroying nations; they can also make them stronger. Nowadays there are few nations that can be built or rebuilt. And more often than not nations rise out of ethnicity. In the case of Ukraine Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014 is not at the end but at the beginning of nation-building in Ukraine. A nation-building process which is not based on ethnic nationalism but on civic nationalism, the idea of building up a modern democratic and multicultural society. As Serhii Plokhy wrote it in his book the ”Gates of Europe” (2015, 345): “Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine's difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.” As a matter of fact, nation-building in Ukraine is a process which has started already after the declaration of independence in 1991 and has been reinforced by the two Maidan movements of 2004 and 2013/14. But Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 on can certainly be considered as a major factor and catalyst of nation-building in Ukraine. This is part of a powerful discourse which can also be observed in survey data confirming the growth of national pride and civil Ukrainian identity. On the other hand, the war was also a catalyst for qualitative changes in the political regime in Ukraine, the modernization of political actors and, most importantly, the reduction of the influence of financial and industrial groups (oligarchs), the destruction of political and economic monopolies in the country. In combination with the rapid development of civil society, the change of political identities, the stabilizing role of the EU, also caused rapid institutional changes in the entire political system of Ukraine. The Europeanization process should also be mentioned here: it was an articulated choice of the orientation of nation-building ending the geopolitical ambivalence of Ukraine. The panel aims to examine such aspects as well as other indicators of nation-building. It looks at this process also in a temporal perspective allowing to assess the changes after 2013 and in 2022 on the levels of collective identity, language, political culture, attitudes towards Russia and EU and political institutions.
Intersectional Feminist Practices of Everyday Creativity in Postsocialism
Social aspects of creativity have attracted increased research interest in the last two decades. At the same time, researchers in gender and feminist studies have contributed new perspectives and definitions of “creativity”. Little of the work has so far been done in the context of the former Eastern Bloc countries. This panel presents a concentrated effort to contribute to filling this research gap. It will take an expressly feminist perspective to address issues of creative memory-making that challenges state commemorative practices, intersections of gender and class in “authoring” textiles, and theoretizations of creativity through the perspective of the commons, with a focus on the transformation of care, labour and environmental and social relations. The papers will draw on studies conducted in several countries, but with a focus on the Czech Republic and Poland.
The panel presents the work conducted within the project on Everyday Creativity in (Post)socialism and brings together researchers from different institutions and countries, but hosted by the University of Graz, Austria in 2022-23.
Elites, Activism and Political Participation
Interwar population politics
Russian nationalism and de-Russification through the prism of media
Presenting Western as Russian: Tactics of Appropriation in Russian Visual Culture
The Ukrainian Language Today: Bridging the Past and the Future
Empires' Multiple Peripheries
History writing between East and West
Soviet Culture and its Evolution
Institutions in Perestroika
The panel analyzes perestroika as an open, contingent process of reform and transformation. Perestroika challenged the Soviet state, institutions and individuals to adjust to a future that suddenly appeared open. Institutions and organizations -- while they could differ fundamentally in their origins, self-understandings, tasks and possibilities -- can be seen as interface and contact points between state and people. Besides, perestroika can also be perceived as a period of institutionalization. What can we learn from institutions about the dynamics that perestroika set in motion? The panel examines examples from three central areas of research that offer insights into the changes perestroika brought about: nationalities, environment/ecology, and religion/church.
Petroimaginations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture
Typewriters, Televisions, and Erotic Gadgets: The Materiality of Everyday Life in Eastern Europe
This panel explores the embodied experiences of everyday life under state socialism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia through the materiality of refrigerators, typewriters, and the various accoutrements of the erotic. Using ethnographic and archival research, the papers investigate the contingencies of human subjectivity as it is shaped by the inanimate objects that were produced, used, desired, bartered, gifted, repaired, and recycled in non-market economies in the 20th century.
From women and LGBTQ+ prosecution to activism and resistance
Memory politics and the Instrumentalisation of the past
Life-creation (Zhiznetvorchestvo) as a Driving Force in Inter-cultural Mediation
The term life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) usually refers to the Russian Silver Age writers’ strategies for merging art and life: they turned art into real life and real life into art (Paperno, Grossman, 1994). This panel proposes broadening the definition of this useful term to include not only the activities of Russian modernist writers, but any creative transformation of a life story into a narrative that serves spiritual, social, and political purposes.
War as a maker of nations? Nation-building in Ukraine as a result of Russia's war against Ukraine - discourses, identities, achievements
The topic presented in the title is usually discussed in the realm of international relations. Wars are destroying nations; they can also make them stronger. Nowadays there are few nations that can be built or rebuilt. And more often than not nations rise out of ethnicity. In the case of Ukraine Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014 is not at the end but at the beginning of nation-building in Ukraine. A nation-building process which is not based on ethnic nationalism but on civic nationalism, the idea of building up a modern democratic and multicultural society. As Serhii Plokhy wrote it in his book the ”Gates of Europe” (2015, 345): “Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine's difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.” As a matter of fact, nation-building in Ukraine is a process which has started already after the declaration of independence in 1991 and has been reinforced by the two Maidan movements of 2004 and 2013/14. But Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 on can certainly be considered as a major factor and catalyst of nation-building in Ukraine. This is part of a powerful discourse which can also be observed in survey data confirming the growth of national pride and civil Ukrainian identity. On the other hand, the war was also a catalyst for qualitative changes in the political regime in Ukraine, the modernization of political actors and, most importantly, the reduction of the influence of financial and industrial groups (oligarchs), the destruction of political and economic monopolies in the country. In combination with the rapid development of civil society, the change of political identities, the stabilizing role of the EU, also caused rapid institutional changes in the entire political system of Ukraine. The Europeanization process should also be mentioned here: it was an articulated choice of the orientation of nation-building ending the geopolitical ambivalence of Ukraine. The panel aims to examine such aspects as well as other indicators of nation-building. It looks at this process also in a temporal perspective allowing to assess the changes after 2013 and in 2022 on the levels of collective identity, language, political culture, attitudes towards Russia and EU and political institutions.
Intersectional Feminist Practices of Everyday Creativity in Postsocialism
Social aspects of creativity have attracted increased research interest in the last two decades. At the same time, researchers in gender and feminist studies have contributed new perspectives and definitions of “creativity”. Little of the work has so far been done in the context of the former Eastern Bloc countries. This panel presents a concentrated effort to contribute to filling this research gap. It will take an expressly feminist perspective to address issues of creative memory-making that challenges state commemorative practices, intersections of gender and class in “authoring” textiles, and theoretizations of creativity through the perspective of the commons, with a focus on the transformation of care, labour and environmental and social relations. The papers will draw on studies conducted in several countries, but with a focus on the Czech Republic and Poland.
The panel presents the work conducted within the project on Everyday Creativity in (Post)socialism and brings together researchers from different institutions and countries, but hosted by the University of Graz, Austria in 2022-23.
Interwar population politics
Russian nationalism and de-Russification through the prism of media
History writing between East and West
Soviet Culture and its Evolution
Interwar population politics
Russian nationalism and de-Russification through the prism of media
Presenting Western as Russian: Tactics of Appropriation in Russian Visual Culture
History writing between East and West
Memory politics and the Instrumentalisation of the past
Soviet Culture and its Evolution
Life-creation (Zhiznetvorchestvo) as a Driving Force in Inter-cultural Mediation
The term life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo) usually refers to the Russian Silver Age writers’ strategies for merging art and life: they turned art into real life and real life into art (Paperno, Grossman, 1994). This panel proposes broadening the definition of this useful term to include not only the activities of Russian modernist writers, but any creative transformation of a life story into a narrative that serves spiritual, social, and political purposes.
Memory politics and the Instrumentalisation of the past
Presenting Western as Russian: Tactics of Appropriation in Russian Visual Culture
Keynote 2
Urban Connections: Territorial Imaginations in Central Asia and Azerbaijan
This panel will review the crisscrossing urban histories of three major cities of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space: Baku, Tashkent and Bishkek. All papers will ask how municipal authority, commerce and development, property and class made themselves felt on the built environment of one of these three capitals, with an emphasis on historical change and communities in flux. The panel ultimately aims to spot consistencies and contrasts across these three case studies, offering fresh insights into modern urban history, economics and politics.
Intellectuals as Memory Generators – Forging the Origins of Nations, States, Religions, and People
The memory of origins is an oxymoron. Neither do we fully know these beginnings (of nations, religions, states, or perhaps of humanity) nor have they been preserved in our – even cultural – memory. Lost in the mists of the far past, these origins are both the mythical basis on which communities are built and simultaneously objects of archaeological, historical, and linguistic research, especially since the emergence of the era of nationalism. Although it seems trivial, we rarely pay attention to a simple fact: as far as human memory and history reach origins, they are celebrated. They are an essential element of an “invented tradition,” an “imagined community” such as a nation. In Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the twentieth century brought a whole series of such (millennium) anniversaries, studies of beginnings, political uses of origin stories, and conflicts over precedence in a given territory. Intellectuals were involved in many of these activities. They created or supported (national, religious, state) imagined communities, re-constructed traditions, and created a social memory of origins. Taking this argument as a starting point, this panel aims to trace such narratives of origins, anniversary events, and, above all, the role of intellectuals in their creation. We call for papers that would track, but simultaneously not limit themselves, to the framework we have envisioned above. We focus on modern Central Europe and the Balkans and have chosen intellectuals as “our heroes,” consciously restraining from defining them into narrow frames. We believe this openness will only serve better to the aim of this panel.
Russian domestic politics – institutions and information
New Directions in World War II History
'Weapons of the weak': Small acts of resistance during social upheavals
Opportunities for resistance of individuals in less privileged positions that emerge in social situations where the probability of greater power lies with others have been well documented in academic literature. Stories of moments of triumph against more powerful opponents provide important insight into the work of social structures to distribute power and disadvantage. However, opportunities and practices of resistance exercised by individuals outside organised movements remain relatively underexplored in non-Western contexts. This panel brings together papers that address whether/how Western theories of agency and small acts of resistance can be used in non-Western contexts.
Socialist and Communist Experiences of Women's Liberation in the West and the East, 1907-1930
The panel will discuss Soviet and Communist experiences of women during the pre-World War I and interwar period.
Vellia Luparello’s and Emiliano Giorgis’ paper will focus on the International Women’s Day by analysing its emergence in American and German socialist parties and the influence of the Russian women’s strike of February 1917 that helped give rise to the Russian Revolution, and eventually set the official date to March 8. Using Progressive Woman, the official organ of the Woman's Committee of the Socialist Party of America; letters and documents written by Antoinnette Konikow and Theresa Malkiel; as well as documents and resolutions of the Women Socialist International, the paper analyses how women socialist leaders in the US and Germany created "Woman's Day" to promote the enactment of women's suffrage.
Daria Dyakonova’s paper will analyse the early years (1920-1924) of the international Communist Women’s Movement and discuss its transnational character and its complex relationship with the Comintern’s leadership. Anchored in the movement’s archives and international magazine Die Kommunistische Fraueninternazionale, the paper will argue that despite the overall egalitarian discourse, the relations between men and women within the communist movement were tense and often characterized by prejudice against women. It will further discuss how such prejudices affected Communist Women’s campaigns designed to tackle the grievances of the “Women of the East.” It will then demonstrate how Communist women actively and effectively fought against such sexist attitudes.
Anne McShane’s paper will address the activities of the Zhenotdel (Woman’s Bureau) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1920s Soviet Central Asia. The research is based on a close reading of the Zhenotdel’s journal Kommunistka between 1920 and 1930, and is focused on the Zhenotdel’s work among veiled Muslim women in Uzbekistan.The paper will re-evaluate the work of Russian women activists in the region, including the Hujum campaign, and point to problematic narratives within academic literature, in particular the view of the Central Asian Zhenotdel as a loyal servant of the party leadership, nationally and locally.This paper will show that the involvement of the Zhenotdel in Central Asia has to be understood on the terms of the Zhenotdel’s struggle to make progress for its own programme while at the same time seeking to establish itself as a core part of the Soviet strategy in Central Asia.
Russia’s Natural Environment: Epistemologies and Materialities
The (neo)imperial imaginaries of nature and environment in contemporary Russian media
Reflections of Affective Experience in Latvian Poetry and Life Writing
Queer Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Russian Film, Literature, and Law
This panel considers the concept of ‘queer cross-cultural exchanges’ from a variety of perspectives. In which ways has Russian queer history been informed by the international exchange of ideas about queerness? How have queer people in Russia drawn from other cultural influences in their literary and cinematic works? How have relationships between Russians and queer people from other cultures been represented and used to symbolise real world politics on the page and on screen? And moreover, how are other cultures imagined more broadly in queer Russian-produced media, and crucially, how might decolonial theories illuminate these depictions?
The First World War in the Caucasus and Central Asia
This panel presents research in progress on the neglected histories of the First World War in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The presenters explore the attitudes of the Russian Imperial authorities towards different marginalised groups in this historical context. The papers in this panel consider how the experiences of refugees, prisoners of war and regular Central Asians can add to our understanding of the impact of the War on people in regions of the Empire, that have often been considered ‘peripheral’ in geographic and political terms. In doing so this panel offers new perspectives on how imperial control (or the lack thereof) manifested in practice in these regions and contributes new insights to wider histories of the First World War.
Security through militarized patriotism. Militarizing processes in Central Eastern European and post-Soviet states and their effects on civil society
Politics of Soviet and Post-Soviet Literary Self-Fashioning
Russian domestic politics – ideas, ideology, and propaganda
Russian migrants' anti-war activism
Central European Literatures and Cultures
The boundaries of Slavonic lexicography: new approaches to words, phrases and collocations
This panel examines the variety of units that can go to make up a glossary or a thematic dictionary: from Anglicims to set phrasal and collocations 'for all occasions’ to the cultural connotations of particular words. It will discuss such questions as: what relevant features of different languages and cultures can the listing of such units reveal? How can online and paper versions of such dictionaries help in language learning and everyday translation practice? What methodological and technical challenges might the compilers of such dictionaries face?
Urban Connections: Territorial Imaginations in Central Asia and Azerbaijan
This panel will review the crisscrossing urban histories of three major cities of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space: Baku, Tashkent and Bishkek. All papers will ask how municipal authority, commerce and development, property and class made themselves felt on the built environment of one of these three capitals, with an emphasis on historical change and communities in flux. The panel ultimately aims to spot consistencies and contrasts across these three case studies, offering fresh insights into modern urban history, economics and politics.
Intellectuals as Memory Generators – Forging the Origins of Nations, States, Religions, and People
The memory of origins is an oxymoron. Neither do we fully know these beginnings (of nations, religions, states, or perhaps of humanity) nor have they been preserved in our – even cultural – memory. Lost in the mists of the far past, these origins are both the mythical basis on which communities are built and simultaneously objects of archaeological, historical, and linguistic research, especially since the emergence of the era of nationalism. Although it seems trivial, we rarely pay attention to a simple fact: as far as human memory and history reach origins, they are celebrated. They are an essential element of an “invented tradition,” an “imagined community” such as a nation. In Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the twentieth century brought a whole series of such (millennium) anniversaries, studies of beginnings, political uses of origin stories, and conflicts over precedence in a given territory. Intellectuals were involved in many of these activities. They created or supported (national, religious, state) imagined communities, re-constructed traditions, and created a social memory of origins. Taking this argument as a starting point, this panel aims to trace such narratives of origins, anniversary events, and, above all, the role of intellectuals in their creation. We call for papers that would track, but simultaneously not limit themselves, to the framework we have envisioned above. We focus on modern Central Europe and the Balkans and have chosen intellectuals as “our heroes,” consciously restraining from defining them into narrow frames. We believe this openness will only serve better to the aim of this panel.
Russian domestic politics – institutions and information
New Directions in World War II History
'Weapons of the weak': Small acts of resistance during social upheavals
Opportunities for resistance of individuals in less privileged positions that emerge in social situations where the probability of greater power lies with others have been well documented in academic literature. Stories of moments of triumph against more powerful opponents provide important insight into the work of social structures to distribute power and disadvantage. However, opportunities and practices of resistance exercised by individuals outside organised movements remain relatively underexplored in non-Western contexts. This panel brings together papers that address whether/how Western theories of agency and small acts of resistance can be used in non-Western contexts.
Socialist and Communist Experiences of Women's Liberation in the West and the East, 1907-1930
The panel will discuss Soviet and Communist experiences of women during the pre-World War I and interwar period.
Vellia Luparello’s and Emiliano Giorgis’ paper will focus on the International Women’s Day by analysing its emergence in American and German socialist parties and the influence of the Russian women’s strike of February 1917 that helped give rise to the Russian Revolution, and eventually set the official date to March 8. Using Progressive Woman, the official organ of the Woman's Committee of the Socialist Party of America; letters and documents written by Antoinnette Konikow and Theresa Malkiel; as well as documents and resolutions of the Women Socialist International, the paper analyses how women socialist leaders in the US and Germany created "Woman's Day" to promote the enactment of women's suffrage.
Daria Dyakonova’s paper will analyse the early years (1920-1924) of the international Communist Women’s Movement and discuss its transnational character and its complex relationship with the Comintern’s leadership. Anchored in the movement’s archives and international magazine Die Kommunistische Fraueninternazionale, the paper will argue that despite the overall egalitarian discourse, the relations between men and women within the communist movement were tense and often characterized by prejudice against women. It will further discuss how such prejudices affected Communist Women’s campaigns designed to tackle the grievances of the “Women of the East.” It will then demonstrate how Communist women actively and effectively fought against such sexist attitudes.
Anne McShane’s paper will address the activities of the Zhenotdel (Woman’s Bureau) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1920s Soviet Central Asia. The research is based on a close reading of the Zhenotdel’s journal Kommunistka between 1920 and 1930, and is focused on the Zhenotdel’s work among veiled Muslim women in Uzbekistan.The paper will re-evaluate the work of Russian women activists in the region, including the Hujum campaign, and point to problematic narratives within academic literature, in particular the view of the Central Asian Zhenotdel as a loyal servant of the party leadership, nationally and locally.This paper will show that the involvement of the Zhenotdel in Central Asia has to be understood on the terms of the Zhenotdel’s struggle to make progress for its own programme while at the same time seeking to establish itself as a core part of the Soviet strategy in Central Asia.
Russia’s Natural Environment: Epistemologies and Materialities
Queer Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Russian Film, Literature, and Law
This panel considers the concept of ‘queer cross-cultural exchanges’ from a variety of perspectives. In which ways has Russian queer history been informed by the international exchange of ideas about queerness? How have queer people in Russia drawn from other cultural influences in their literary and cinematic works? How have relationships between Russians and queer people from other cultures been represented and used to symbolise real world politics on the page and on screen? And moreover, how are other cultures imagined more broadly in queer Russian-produced media, and crucially, how might decolonial theories illuminate these depictions?
Security through militarized patriotism. Militarizing processes in Central Eastern European and post-Soviet states and their effects on civil society
Russian domestic politics – ideas, ideology, and propaganda
Russian migrants' anti-war activism
Central European Literatures and Cultures
The boundaries of Slavonic lexicography: new approaches to words, phrases and collocations
This panel examines the variety of units that can go to make up a glossary or a thematic dictionary: from Anglicims to set phrasal and collocations 'for all occasions’ to the cultural connotations of particular words. It will discuss such questions as: what relevant features of different languages and cultures can the listing of such units reveal? How can online and paper versions of such dictionaries help in language learning and everyday translation practice? What methodological and technical challenges might the compilers of such dictionaries face?
The (neo)imperial imaginaries of nature and environment in contemporary Russian media
Reflections of Affective Experience in Latvian Poetry and Life Writing
The First World War in the Caucasus and Central Asia
This panel presents research in progress on the neglected histories of the First World War in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The presenters explore the attitudes of the Russian Imperial authorities towards different marginalised groups in this historical context. The papers in this panel consider how the experiences of refugees, prisoners of war and regular Central Asians can add to our understanding of the impact of the War on people in regions of the Empire, that have often been considered ‘peripheral’ in geographic and political terms. In doing so this panel offers new perspectives on how imperial control (or the lack thereof) manifested in practice in these regions and contributes new insights to wider histories of the First World War.
Urban Connections: Territorial Imaginations in Central Asia and Azerbaijan
This panel will review the crisscrossing urban histories of three major cities of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space: Baku, Tashkent and Bishkek. All papers will ask how municipal authority, commerce and development, property and class made themselves felt on the built environment of one of these three capitals, with an emphasis on historical change and communities in flux. The panel ultimately aims to spot consistencies and contrasts across these three case studies, offering fresh insights into modern urban history, economics and politics.
Intellectuals as Memory Generators – Forging the Origins of Nations, States, Religions, and People
The memory of origins is an oxymoron. Neither do we fully know these beginnings (of nations, religions, states, or perhaps of humanity) nor have they been preserved in our – even cultural – memory. Lost in the mists of the far past, these origins are both the mythical basis on which communities are built and simultaneously objects of archaeological, historical, and linguistic research, especially since the emergence of the era of nationalism. Although it seems trivial, we rarely pay attention to a simple fact: as far as human memory and history reach origins, they are celebrated. They are an essential element of an “invented tradition,” an “imagined community” such as a nation. In Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the twentieth century brought a whole series of such (millennium) anniversaries, studies of beginnings, political uses of origin stories, and conflicts over precedence in a given territory. Intellectuals were involved in many of these activities. They created or supported (national, religious, state) imagined communities, re-constructed traditions, and created a social memory of origins. Taking this argument as a starting point, this panel aims to trace such narratives of origins, anniversary events, and, above all, the role of intellectuals in their creation. We call for papers that would track, but simultaneously not limit themselves, to the framework we have envisioned above. We focus on modern Central Europe and the Balkans and have chosen intellectuals as “our heroes,” consciously restraining from defining them into narrow frames. We believe this openness will only serve better to the aim of this panel.
Russian domestic politics – institutions and information
New Directions in World War II History
'Weapons of the weak': Small acts of resistance during social upheavals
Opportunities for resistance of individuals in less privileged positions that emerge in social situations where the probability of greater power lies with others have been well documented in academic literature. Stories of moments of triumph against more powerful opponents provide important insight into the work of social structures to distribute power and disadvantage. However, opportunities and practices of resistance exercised by individuals outside organised movements remain relatively underexplored in non-Western contexts. This panel brings together papers that address whether/how Western theories of agency and small acts of resistance can be used in non-Western contexts.
Socialist and Communist Experiences of Women's Liberation in the West and the East, 1907-1930
The panel will discuss Soviet and Communist experiences of women during the pre-World War I and interwar period.
Vellia Luparello’s and Emiliano Giorgis’ paper will focus on the International Women’s Day by analysing its emergence in American and German socialist parties and the influence of the Russian women’s strike of February 1917 that helped give rise to the Russian Revolution, and eventually set the official date to March 8. Using Progressive Woman, the official organ of the Woman's Committee of the Socialist Party of America; letters and documents written by Antoinnette Konikow and Theresa Malkiel; as well as documents and resolutions of the Women Socialist International, the paper analyses how women socialist leaders in the US and Germany created "Woman's Day" to promote the enactment of women's suffrage.
Daria Dyakonova’s paper will analyse the early years (1920-1924) of the international Communist Women’s Movement and discuss its transnational character and its complex relationship with the Comintern’s leadership. Anchored in the movement’s archives and international magazine Die Kommunistische Fraueninternazionale, the paper will argue that despite the overall egalitarian discourse, the relations between men and women within the communist movement were tense and often characterized by prejudice against women. It will further discuss how such prejudices affected Communist Women’s campaigns designed to tackle the grievances of the “Women of the East.” It will then demonstrate how Communist women actively and effectively fought against such sexist attitudes.
Anne McShane’s paper will address the activities of the Zhenotdel (Woman’s Bureau) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1920s Soviet Central Asia. The research is based on a close reading of the Zhenotdel’s journal Kommunistka between 1920 and 1930, and is focused on the Zhenotdel’s work among veiled Muslim women in Uzbekistan.The paper will re-evaluate the work of Russian women activists in the region, including the Hujum campaign, and point to problematic narratives within academic literature, in particular the view of the Central Asian Zhenotdel as a loyal servant of the party leadership, nationally and locally.This paper will show that the involvement of the Zhenotdel in Central Asia has to be understood on the terms of the Zhenotdel’s struggle to make progress for its own programme while at the same time seeking to establish itself as a core part of the Soviet strategy in Central Asia.
Russia’s Natural Environment: Epistemologies and Materialities
Queer Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Russian Film, Literature, and Law
This panel considers the concept of ‘queer cross-cultural exchanges’ from a variety of perspectives. In which ways has Russian queer history been informed by the international exchange of ideas about queerness? How have queer people in Russia drawn from other cultural influences in their literary and cinematic works? How have relationships between Russians and queer people from other cultures been represented and used to symbolise real world politics on the page and on screen? And moreover, how are other cultures imagined more broadly in queer Russian-produced media, and crucially, how might decolonial theories illuminate these depictions?
Security through militarized patriotism. Militarizing processes in Central Eastern European and post-Soviet states and their effects on civil society
Politics of Soviet and Post-Soviet Literary Self-Fashioning
Russian domestic politics – ideas, ideology, and propaganda
Central European Literatures and Cultures
The boundaries of Slavonic lexicography: new approaches to words, phrases and collocations
This panel examines the variety of units that can go to make up a glossary or a thematic dictionary: from Anglicims to set phrasal and collocations 'for all occasions’ to the cultural connotations of particular words. It will discuss such questions as: what relevant features of different languages and cultures can the listing of such units reveal? How can online and paper versions of such dictionaries help in language learning and everyday translation practice? What methodological and technical challenges might the compilers of such dictionaries face?
The (neo)imperial imaginaries of nature and environment in contemporary Russian media
Reflections of Affective Experience in Latvian Poetry and Life Writing
The First World War in the Caucasus and Central Asia
This panel presents research in progress on the neglected histories of the First World War in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The presenters explore the attitudes of the Russian Imperial authorities towards different marginalised groups in this historical context. The papers in this panel consider how the experiences of refugees, prisoners of war and regular Central Asians can add to our understanding of the impact of the War on people in regions of the Empire, that have often been considered ‘peripheral’ in geographic and political terms. In doing so this panel offers new perspectives on how imperial control (or the lack thereof) manifested in practice in these regions and contributes new insights to wider histories of the First World War.
Urban Connections: Territorial Imaginations in Central Asia and Azerbaijan
This panel will review the crisscrossing urban histories of three major cities of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space: Baku, Tashkent and Bishkek. All papers will ask how municipal authority, commerce and development, property and class made themselves felt on the built environment of one of these three capitals, with an emphasis on historical change and communities in flux. The panel ultimately aims to spot consistencies and contrasts across these three case studies, offering fresh insights into modern urban history, economics and politics.
Intellectuals as Memory Generators – Forging the Origins of Nations, States, Religions, and People
The memory of origins is an oxymoron. Neither do we fully know these beginnings (of nations, religions, states, or perhaps of humanity) nor have they been preserved in our – even cultural – memory. Lost in the mists of the far past, these origins are both the mythical basis on which communities are built and simultaneously objects of archaeological, historical, and linguistic research, especially since the emergence of the era of nationalism. Although it seems trivial, we rarely pay attention to a simple fact: as far as human memory and history reach origins, they are celebrated. They are an essential element of an “invented tradition,” an “imagined community” such as a nation. In Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the twentieth century brought a whole series of such (millennium) anniversaries, studies of beginnings, political uses of origin stories, and conflicts over precedence in a given territory. Intellectuals were involved in many of these activities. They created or supported (national, religious, state) imagined communities, re-constructed traditions, and created a social memory of origins. Taking this argument as a starting point, this panel aims to trace such narratives of origins, anniversary events, and, above all, the role of intellectuals in their creation. We call for papers that would track, but simultaneously not limit themselves, to the framework we have envisioned above. We focus on modern Central Europe and the Balkans and have chosen intellectuals as “our heroes,” consciously restraining from defining them into narrow frames. We believe this openness will only serve better to the aim of this panel.
New Directions in World War II History
'Weapons of the weak': Small acts of resistance during social upheavals
Opportunities for resistance of individuals in less privileged positions that emerge in social situations where the probability of greater power lies with others have been well documented in academic literature. Stories of moments of triumph against more powerful opponents provide important insight into the work of social structures to distribute power and disadvantage. However, opportunities and practices of resistance exercised by individuals outside organised movements remain relatively underexplored in non-Western contexts. This panel brings together papers that address whether/how Western theories of agency and small acts of resistance can be used in non-Western contexts.
Queer Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Russian Film, Literature, and Law
This panel considers the concept of ‘queer cross-cultural exchanges’ from a variety of perspectives. In which ways has Russian queer history been informed by the international exchange of ideas about queerness? How have queer people in Russia drawn from other cultural influences in their literary and cinematic works? How have relationships between Russians and queer people from other cultures been represented and used to symbolise real world politics on the page and on screen? And moreover, how are other cultures imagined more broadly in queer Russian-produced media, and crucially, how might decolonial theories illuminate these depictions?
Russian domestic politics – ideas, ideology, and propaganda
The boundaries of Slavonic lexicography: new approaches to words, phrases and collocations
This panel examines the variety of units that can go to make up a glossary or a thematic dictionary: from Anglicims to set phrasal and collocations 'for all occasions’ to the cultural connotations of particular words. It will discuss such questions as: what relevant features of different languages and cultures can the listing of such units reveal? How can online and paper versions of such dictionaries help in language learning and everyday translation practice? What methodological and technical challenges might the compilers of such dictionaries face?
Urban Connections: Territorial Imaginations in Central Asia and Azerbaijan
This panel will review the crisscrossing urban histories of three major cities of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space: Baku, Tashkent and Bishkek. All papers will ask how municipal authority, commerce and development, property and class made themselves felt on the built environment of one of these three capitals, with an emphasis on historical change and communities in flux. The panel ultimately aims to spot consistencies and contrasts across these three case studies, offering fresh insights into modern urban history, economics and politics.
Politics of Soviet and Post-Soviet Literary Self-Fashioning
When societies (re-)create: Youth(ful) ideas and nascent politics in the South Caucasus
Our panel investigates the changing societal dynamics and political landscapes in the contemporary countries of the post-Soviet South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In our research projects, we put particular analytical emphasis on political ideologies of young people, prefigurative politics and new or re-occurring patterns of societal and political activism.
In four different contributions, three single cases studies and one comparative analysis, we examine nascent political and visible societal tendencies in a region which has undergone societal changes on the surface, however remains in the post-Soviet moment of precarious transformation.
Specific focus is put on new critical subjectivities, political identities and their embeddedness in political categories of right and left as well as liminal agency.
Political parties
Perspectives on Health, the Body and the Mind in the Soviet Union
This panel brings together new approaches to the history of health, the body and the mind in the USSR. Anna Toropova will examine film and Soviet psychiatry during the 1920s-1930s; Hannah Proctor will discuss Western perspectives on Soviet minds and bodies; and Claire Shaw will explore the concept of physical diversity under Stalinism.
New perspectives on the Russian Civil War
Conflict, communication, and politics in the Caucasus
Representation of gender and body in the Soviet culture
Transformations of Muslim Lives in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
Voting and elections
Post-Soviet and Post-Memory
Security through militarized patriotism. Militarizing processes in CEE and post-Soviet states and their effects on civil society (II)
Imagining the Orient in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
This panel considers representations of the Orient and Orientalism in the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods. We examine three distinct spheres - archaeology, ballet, and museums - in which knowledge about the Orient was constructed, reimagined, and presented through material and visual culture. Roman Osharov will talk about the history of the Turkestan Circle of Amateurs of Archaeology, a learned society in Turkestan, and its role in knowledge production about the Orient in the Russian Empire. Jordan Lian uses choreographic and scenographic analysis of Fokine’s adaptation of The Polovtsian Dances to consider the imaginative license of exoticisation in Diaghilev’s Les Saisons Russes productions. Mollie Arbuthnot considers the role of material objects and strategies of display in early Soviet attempts to redress imperial legacies in Central Asia, taking the Main Central Asian Museum as her case study. We will therefore examine continuities between the Imperial and early Soviet periods, as well as engage critically with the concept of “Orient” and “Orientalism” - what do these mean for our individual case studies, and in their different institutional framings, epistemological traditions, and historical contexts? This panel therefore contributes to the broader debate about the application of Saidian Orientalism to the Russian Imperial / Soviet case.
Border in/securities – at the nexus of space and emotions in Central- and Eastern Europe I
Borders, in particular those enclosing larger regions, nation states or supranational unions, are and have always been related to questions of insecurity and security. Recently, various crises and conflicts particularly in Central- and Eastern Europe have highlighted the relevance of understanding the role borders have in geopolitical dimensions as well as everyday life. They have given impulses to renegotiations of borders, more often than not in relation to aims of establishing security.
As socially constructed spatial structures, borders involve different perspectives and actors creating and negotiating them. This involves political elites in the center of the state, people living close to it or those wanting to cross it for various reasons, e.g. business, travel, seeking refuge. The Russian war in Ukraine, international migration dynamics, pandemics as SARS-CoV-2, climate change and other crises have led to increasingly closed borders and/or extremely selective border regimes to overcome them. At the same time, borders have proven to be places of hope generated by a perceived, expected or constructed better life and security on the “other” side.
Experiencing these border changes makes us aware of the complexity and conflicts of bordering and their differentiated entanglements with questions of being or feeling in/secure or safe. While border research has traditionally emphasized larger geopolitical questions of securitization, its regulations and materialisations, more recent social research has increasingly addressed the level of the everyday, the subjects and embodiments of insecurity and security at borders. This session aims at giving impulse to a differentiated debate of border in/securities and their entanglement with current social and political processes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Along recent and current research, we will discuss the influence of current events on the discursive negotiation, material representation and practices, that make borders in CEE- and how they relate to local as well as global dimensions of security and insecurity. Which actors are involved and in which way do contradicting effects occur in in/securing the border? How do these processes play out across different scales, affected by conflicting concepts and structures of in/securities, e.g. everyday needs vs. national, supranational, global geopolitical security aims? And last but not least, what emotions are connected or evoked with representations and perceptions of (in/secure) borders by different actors?
Queer Security and Belonging in Russia and Georgia
Queer people in Russia and Georgia are consistently framed as passive victims, yet this panel engages with the various ways in which these queer subjects demonstrate agency in their decision-making about security and belonging. How do they measure and mitigate risks to their personal security and the security of their families? How do queer Russians and Georgians navigate spaces—be they geographical, social, or digital—to find a sense of belonging in different communities in cases where they may otherwise feel excluded or threatened? How do they manage conflicts between their sense of national identity and LGBTQ+ identity? And finally, how do they decide when, and in what capacity, to be open about their queerness?
Social Values and Norms in the Contemporary Russia
History, Reproductive Rights, Social Change. Polish Society in Images and on Streets
Illuminating Misplaced Archives: Researching Soviet and Post-Soviet Photography in Latvia
Both photo club practices and applied photography of the Soviet and early Post-Soviet periods have been little researched due to the long-lasting lower hierarchical status of photography as an artistic discipline in Latvian art history. As art and memory institutions increasingly acquire photography archives and series from the second half of the 20th century, art researchers, curators and collectors face new challenges interpreting the legacy of Soviet and Post-Soviet photographers. The field still faces a lot of stigma surrounding the state-commissioned works and those produced in amateur photo clubs - their integration into the art photography canon is still in progress. Taking into account the fragmented history of Latvian photography, it is crucial to apply the methodological frameworks of critical theories: viewing archives through a posthumanist lens addresses the agency and materiality of photographs and allows for analysis of the circulation of archives as their status has shifted in the discourses of art during the Soviet period and in the present-day; addressing the portrayed bodies through the disability studies perspective highlights issues of representation of the diversity of embodiment and disqualification of people with disabilities in the Soviet Union; revision of the State commissioned archives underlines the conflicting notions on the modernist heritage in Latvia.
The researchers participating in this panel are three doctoral students working in different fields of art and culture. Their research interests cover photography and circulation of misplaced archives that have not yet been included in the canon of art history and therefore require revision of discursive practices.
When societies (re-)create: Youth(ful) ideas and nascent politics in the South Caucasus
Our panel investigates the changing societal dynamics and political landscapes in the contemporary countries of the post-Soviet South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In our research projects, we put particular analytical emphasis on political ideologies of young people, prefigurative politics and new or re-occurring patterns of societal and political activism.
In four different contributions, three single cases studies and one comparative analysis, we examine nascent political and visible societal tendencies in a region which has undergone societal changes on the surface, however remains in the post-Soviet moment of precarious transformation.
Specific focus is put on new critical subjectivities, political identities and their embeddedness in political categories of right and left as well as liminal agency.
Political parties
New perspectives on the Russian Civil War
Conflict, communication, and politics in the Caucasus
Representation of gender and body in the Soviet culture
Transformations of Muslim Lives in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
Voting and elections
Post-Soviet and Post-Memory
Security through militarized patriotism. Militarizing processes in CEE and post-Soviet states and their effects on civil society (II)
Border in/securities – at the nexus of space and emotions in Central- and Eastern Europe I
Borders, in particular those enclosing larger regions, nation states or supranational unions, are and have always been related to questions of insecurity and security. Recently, various crises and conflicts particularly in Central- and Eastern Europe have highlighted the relevance of understanding the role borders have in geopolitical dimensions as well as everyday life. They have given impulses to renegotiations of borders, more often than not in relation to aims of establishing security.
As socially constructed spatial structures, borders involve different perspectives and actors creating and negotiating them. This involves political elites in the center of the state, people living close to it or those wanting to cross it for various reasons, e.g. business, travel, seeking refuge. The Russian war in Ukraine, international migration dynamics, pandemics as SARS-CoV-2, climate change and other crises have led to increasingly closed borders and/or extremely selective border regimes to overcome them. At the same time, borders have proven to be places of hope generated by a perceived, expected or constructed better life and security on the “other” side.
Experiencing these border changes makes us aware of the complexity and conflicts of bordering and their differentiated entanglements with questions of being or feeling in/secure or safe. While border research has traditionally emphasized larger geopolitical questions of securitization, its regulations and materialisations, more recent social research has increasingly addressed the level of the everyday, the subjects and embodiments of insecurity and security at borders. This session aims at giving impulse to a differentiated debate of border in/securities and their entanglement with current social and political processes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Along recent and current research, we will discuss the influence of current events on the discursive negotiation, material representation and practices, that make borders in CEE- and how they relate to local as well as global dimensions of security and insecurity. Which actors are involved and in which way do contradicting effects occur in in/securing the border? How do these processes play out across different scales, affected by conflicting concepts and structures of in/securities, e.g. everyday needs vs. national, supranational, global geopolitical security aims? And last but not least, what emotions are connected or evoked with representations and perceptions of (in/secure) borders by different actors?
Queer Security and Belonging in Russia and Georgia
Queer people in Russia and Georgia are consistently framed as passive victims, yet this panel engages with the various ways in which these queer subjects demonstrate agency in their decision-making about security and belonging. How do they measure and mitigate risks to their personal security and the security of their families? How do queer Russians and Georgians navigate spaces—be they geographical, social, or digital—to find a sense of belonging in different communities in cases where they may otherwise feel excluded or threatened? How do they manage conflicts between their sense of national identity and LGBTQ+ identity? And finally, how do they decide when, and in what capacity, to be open about their queerness?
Perspectives on Health, the Body and the Mind in the Soviet Union
This panel brings together new approaches to the history of health, the body and the mind in the USSR. Anna Toropova will examine film and Soviet psychiatry during the 1920s-1930s; Hannah Proctor will discuss Western perspectives on Soviet minds and bodies; and Claire Shaw will explore the concept of physical diversity under Stalinism.
Imagining the Orient in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
This panel considers representations of the Orient and Orientalism in the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods. We examine three distinct spheres - archaeology, ballet, and museums - in which knowledge about the Orient was constructed, reimagined, and presented through material and visual culture. Roman Osharov will talk about the history of the Turkestan Circle of Amateurs of Archaeology, a learned society in Turkestan, and its role in knowledge production about the Orient in the Russian Empire. Jordan Lian uses choreographic and scenographic analysis of Fokine’s adaptation of The Polovtsian Dances to consider the imaginative license of exoticisation in Diaghilev’s Les Saisons Russes productions. Mollie Arbuthnot considers the role of material objects and strategies of display in early Soviet attempts to redress imperial legacies in Central Asia, taking the Main Central Asian Museum as her case study. We will therefore examine continuities between the Imperial and early Soviet periods, as well as engage critically with the concept of “Orient” and “Orientalism” - what do these mean for our individual case studies, and in their different institutional framings, epistemological traditions, and historical contexts? This panel therefore contributes to the broader debate about the application of Saidian Orientalism to the Russian Imperial / Soviet case.
Social Values and Norms in the Contemporary Russia
History, Reproductive Rights, Social Change. Polish Society in Images and on Streets
Illuminating Misplaced Archives: Researching Soviet and Post-Soviet Photography in Latvia
Both photo club practices and applied photography of the Soviet and early Post-Soviet periods have been little researched due to the long-lasting lower hierarchical status of photography as an artistic discipline in Latvian art history. As art and memory institutions increasingly acquire photography archives and series from the second half of the 20th century, art researchers, curators and collectors face new challenges interpreting the legacy of Soviet and Post-Soviet photographers. The field still faces a lot of stigma surrounding the state-commissioned works and those produced in amateur photo clubs - their integration into the art photography canon is still in progress. Taking into account the fragmented history of Latvian photography, it is crucial to apply the methodological frameworks of critical theories: viewing archives through a posthumanist lens addresses the agency and materiality of photographs and allows for analysis of the circulation of archives as their status has shifted in the discourses of art during the Soviet period and in the present-day; addressing the portrayed bodies through the disability studies perspective highlights issues of representation of the diversity of embodiment and disqualification of people with disabilities in the Soviet Union; revision of the State commissioned archives underlines the conflicting notions on the modernist heritage in Latvia.
The researchers participating in this panel are three doctoral students working in different fields of art and culture. Their research interests cover photography and circulation of misplaced archives that have not yet been included in the canon of art history and therefore require revision of discursive practices.
When societies (re-)create: Youth(ful) ideas and nascent politics in the South Caucasus
Our panel investigates the changing societal dynamics and political landscapes in the contemporary countries of the post-Soviet South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In our research projects, we put particular analytical emphasis on political ideologies of young people, prefigurative politics and new or re-occurring patterns of societal and political activism.
In four different contributions, three single cases studies and one comparative analysis, we examine nascent political and visible societal tendencies in a region which has undergone societal changes on the surface, however remains in the post-Soviet moment of precarious transformation.
Specific focus is put on new critical subjectivities, political identities and their embeddedness in political categories of right and left as well as liminal agency.
Political parties
New perspectives on the Russian Civil War
Conflict, communication, and politics in the Caucasus
Representation of gender and body in the Soviet culture
Transformations of Muslim Lives in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
Voting and elections
Post-Soviet and Post-Memory
Security through militarized patriotism. Militarizing processes in CEE and post-Soviet states and their effects on civil society (II)
Border in/securities – at the nexus of space and emotions in Central- and Eastern Europe I
Borders, in particular those enclosing larger regions, nation states or supranational unions, are and have always been related to questions of insecurity and security. Recently, various crises and conflicts particularly in Central- and Eastern Europe have highlighted the relevance of understanding the role borders have in geopolitical dimensions as well as everyday life. They have given impulses to renegotiations of borders, more often than not in relation to aims of establishing security.
As socially constructed spatial structures, borders involve different perspectives and actors creating and negotiating them. This involves political elites in the center of the state, people living close to it or those wanting to cross it for various reasons, e.g. business, travel, seeking refuge. The Russian war in Ukraine, international migration dynamics, pandemics as SARS-CoV-2, climate change and other crises have led to increasingly closed borders and/or extremely selective border regimes to overcome them. At the same time, borders have proven to be places of hope generated by a perceived, expected or constructed better life and security on the “other” side.
Experiencing these border changes makes us aware of the complexity and conflicts of bordering and their differentiated entanglements with questions of being or feeling in/secure or safe. While border research has traditionally emphasized larger geopolitical questions of securitization, its regulations and materialisations, more recent social research has increasingly addressed the level of the everyday, the subjects and embodiments of insecurity and security at borders. This session aims at giving impulse to a differentiated debate of border in/securities and their entanglement with current social and political processes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Along recent and current research, we will discuss the influence of current events on the discursive negotiation, material representation and practices, that make borders in CEE- and how they relate to local as well as global dimensions of security and insecurity. Which actors are involved and in which way do contradicting effects occur in in/securing the border? How do these processes play out across different scales, affected by conflicting concepts and structures of in/securities, e.g. everyday needs vs. national, supranational, global geopolitical security aims? And last but not least, what emotions are connected or evoked with representations and perceptions of (in/secure) borders by different actors?
Queer Security and Belonging in Russia and Georgia
Queer people in Russia and Georgia are consistently framed as passive victims, yet this panel engages with the various ways in which these queer subjects demonstrate agency in their decision-making about security and belonging. How do they measure and mitigate risks to their personal security and the security of their families? How do queer Russians and Georgians navigate spaces—be they geographical, social, or digital—to find a sense of belonging in different communities in cases where they may otherwise feel excluded or threatened? How do they manage conflicts between their sense of national identity and LGBTQ+ identity? And finally, how do they decide when, and in what capacity, to be open about their queerness?
Perspectives on Health, the Body and the Mind in the Soviet Union
This panel brings together new approaches to the history of health, the body and the mind in the USSR. Anna Toropova will examine film and Soviet psychiatry during the 1920s-1930s; Hannah Proctor will discuss Western perspectives on Soviet minds and bodies; and Claire Shaw will explore the concept of physical diversity under Stalinism.
Imagining the Orient in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
This panel considers representations of the Orient and Orientalism in the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods. We examine three distinct spheres - archaeology, ballet, and museums - in which knowledge about the Orient was constructed, reimagined, and presented through material and visual culture. Roman Osharov will talk about the history of the Turkestan Circle of Amateurs of Archaeology, a learned society in Turkestan, and its role in knowledge production about the Orient in the Russian Empire. Jordan Lian uses choreographic and scenographic analysis of Fokine’s adaptation of The Polovtsian Dances to consider the imaginative license of exoticisation in Diaghilev’s Les Saisons Russes productions. Mollie Arbuthnot considers the role of material objects and strategies of display in early Soviet attempts to redress imperial legacies in Central Asia, taking the Main Central Asian Museum as her case study. We will therefore examine continuities between the Imperial and early Soviet periods, as well as engage critically with the concept of “Orient” and “Orientalism” - what do these mean for our individual case studies, and in their different institutional framings, epistemological traditions, and historical contexts? This panel therefore contributes to the broader debate about the application of Saidian Orientalism to the Russian Imperial / Soviet case.
Social Values and Norms in the Contemporary Russia
History, Reproductive Rights, Social Change. Polish Society in Images and on Streets
Illuminating Misplaced Archives: Researching Soviet and Post-Soviet Photography in Latvia
Both photo club practices and applied photography of the Soviet and early Post-Soviet periods have been little researched due to the long-lasting lower hierarchical status of photography as an artistic discipline in Latvian art history. As art and memory institutions increasingly acquire photography archives and series from the second half of the 20th century, art researchers, curators and collectors face new challenges interpreting the legacy of Soviet and Post-Soviet photographers. The field still faces a lot of stigma surrounding the state-commissioned works and those produced in amateur photo clubs - their integration into the art photography canon is still in progress. Taking into account the fragmented history of Latvian photography, it is crucial to apply the methodological frameworks of critical theories: viewing archives through a posthumanist lens addresses the agency and materiality of photographs and allows for analysis of the circulation of archives as their status has shifted in the discourses of art during the Soviet period and in the present-day; addressing the portrayed bodies through the disability studies perspective highlights issues of representation of the diversity of embodiment and disqualification of people with disabilities in the Soviet Union; revision of the State commissioned archives underlines the conflicting notions on the modernist heritage in Latvia.
The researchers participating in this panel are three doctoral students working in different fields of art and culture. Their research interests cover photography and circulation of misplaced archives that have not yet been included in the canon of art history and therefore require revision of discursive practices.
When societies (re-)create: Youth(ful) ideas and nascent politics in the South Caucasus
Our panel investigates the changing societal dynamics and political landscapes in the contemporary countries of the post-Soviet South Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In our research projects, we put particular analytical emphasis on political ideologies of young people, prefigurative politics and new or re-occurring patterns of societal and political activism.
In four different contributions, three single cases studies and one comparative analysis, we examine nascent political and visible societal tendencies in a region which has undergone societal changes on the surface, however remains in the post-Soviet moment of precarious transformation.
Specific focus is put on new critical subjectivities, political identities and their embeddedness in political categories of right and left as well as liminal agency.
Political parties
New perspectives on the Russian Civil War
Representation of gender and body in the Soviet culture
Transformations of Muslim Lives in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia
Voting and elections
Post-Soviet and Post-Memory
Border in/securities – at the nexus of space and emotions in Central- and Eastern Europe I
Borders, in particular those enclosing larger regions, nation states or supranational unions, are and have always been related to questions of insecurity and security. Recently, various crises and conflicts particularly in Central- and Eastern Europe have highlighted the relevance of understanding the role borders have in geopolitical dimensions as well as everyday life. They have given impulses to renegotiations of borders, more often than not in relation to aims of establishing security.
As socially constructed spatial structures, borders involve different perspectives and actors creating and negotiating them. This involves political elites in the center of the state, people living close to it or those wanting to cross it for various reasons, e.g. business, travel, seeking refuge. The Russian war in Ukraine, international migration dynamics, pandemics as SARS-CoV-2, climate change and other crises have led to increasingly closed borders and/or extremely selective border regimes to overcome them. At the same time, borders have proven to be places of hope generated by a perceived, expected or constructed better life and security on the “other” side.
Experiencing these border changes makes us aware of the complexity and conflicts of bordering and their differentiated entanglements with questions of being or feeling in/secure or safe. While border research has traditionally emphasized larger geopolitical questions of securitization, its regulations and materialisations, more recent social research has increasingly addressed the level of the everyday, the subjects and embodiments of insecurity and security at borders. This session aims at giving impulse to a differentiated debate of border in/securities and their entanglement with current social and political processes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Along recent and current research, we will discuss the influence of current events on the discursive negotiation, material representation and practices, that make borders in CEE- and how they relate to local as well as global dimensions of security and insecurity. Which actors are involved and in which way do contradicting effects occur in in/securing the border? How do these processes play out across different scales, affected by conflicting concepts and structures of in/securities, e.g. everyday needs vs. national, supranational, global geopolitical security aims? And last but not least, what emotions are connected or evoked with representations and perceptions of (in/secure) borders by different actors?
Queer Security and Belonging in Russia and Georgia
Queer people in Russia and Georgia are consistently framed as passive victims, yet this panel engages with the various ways in which these queer subjects demonstrate agency in their decision-making about security and belonging. How do they measure and mitigate risks to their personal security and the security of their families? How do queer Russians and Georgians navigate spaces—be they geographical, social, or digital—to find a sense of belonging in different communities in cases where they may otherwise feel excluded or threatened? How do they manage conflicts between their sense of national identity and LGBTQ+ identity? And finally, how do they decide when, and in what capacity, to be open about their queerness?
Voting and elections
Poles and Jews in Mid-century Europe. Identity Building as a Tool of Minority Politics
Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in East-Central Europe before 1939
Politics of Waiting. Narratives beyond Wasting Time, and Linear Progression
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” This quote from Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy ‘Waiting for Godot’, depicts waiting as a waste of time; a conventional understanding in a world where value is produced through movement and progress. Social scientists, however, have engaged with the phenomenon of waiting as “waiting for something to change” (e.g., Hage 2003; Miyazaki 2004) and “waiting for nothing to change” (Frederiksen 2017) and emphasized the power imbalance in the ways in which waiting is experienced. We draw from these important contributions, but also interrogate the normative and progress-oriented conception of waiting as a ‘wasted time’ (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 89), and consider it as productive in its own right.
Bringing together ethnographies on memory, future-making, cross-border mobility, and housing in Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine, and Latvia, we explore the similarities and differences in the ways in which waiting is experienced. To do so, we tackle, but are not confined to questions like: How is waiting conceptualised by our interlocutors? How do they negotiate and act upon waiting? What does waiting reveal about past experiences, and hopes, dreams and anticipations about the future? What are the historical, social, political, economic, and intimate entanglements that put people in a waiting position?
Our empirical material elucidates the lived experiences of waiting and the multifaceted conditions of their production. Based on a thick description of what happens in the ‘meantime’ (Jansen 2015), we discuss a variety of engagements with and responses to waiting, of differently positioned individuals. We aim to uncover why and how waiting is political, but also examine the forces and agencies beyond state institutions. Lastly, we consider waiting to be a productive lens to examine the interplay of structural conditions and individual and collective hope, uncertainty, and endurance more broadly.
Constructing Identities: National and Transnational
Government and governance
Research challenges, ethics and data in the time of war
Russian foreign policy – regional activities
Trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia
The papers in this panel explore interlinked themes of trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia, from the late nineteenth century until 1920. Each focuses on a specific geography of the region: the Pamir mountains, Semirech’e, and the route of the Transcaspian railway. These areas, falling largely outside the settled region of Central Asia and/or being sparsely populated, are to some extent neglected in scholarship, particularly in comparative sense. The speakers take travel in some form as their foundation, using this as a lens through which to examine border-crossing, the mapping of landscapes, environmental and economic networks, and Anglophone ideas about Central Asia. Collectively, the papers ask important questions about how mobility in the region was experienced at various levels, from local communities to imperial officials, to foreign visitors; and the consequences of this in intellectual, social, economic and legal terms.
Social foundations of the war: multiscalar accounts of conflict and political economy
Social scientists have long argued that wars are profoundly transformative - be it by making and breaking social identities and bonds through discipline and combat, or because of death and destruction, the economic/social toll of organising large scale warfare, or by forging new social networks among and across combatants and civilians as groups, forging new and transforming old relations between state, society, and capital as social agents in dynamically changing shapes. This panel proposes to investigate the transformative effects of the war in Donbas and Crimea and the large scale Russo-Ukrainian war, both on Ukraine and Russian Federation and their displaced, refugee, and fleeing populations. Papers in this panel consider the transformative effects of war on society, particularly from the perspective of political economy. We present grounded and (micro-)empirical accounts that also zoom out to consider effects on the broader region itself (here understood as the post-Soviet space) and on the global dimensions of multivariate security (dis)orders, migration and climate politics, imperialism(s), de- and post-coloniality. The multi-scalar frame of historicised accounts developed through economic anthropology, sociology and feminist political economy engaged in this panel are particularly needed at this time.
Legitimation, identity politics, and "war nationalism" in Putin's Russia: strategies and fallout
The Putinist regime relies on nationalism and identity politics in its legitimation strategy. While this has been the case at least since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, it has been further ratcheted up in recent years. The four papers in this panel discuss various aspects of this policy.
Matthew Blackburn examines a the role of legitimation for regime stability over the last three years, interpreted through the categories of performance, ideology, and procedure. To do this, he examines major speeches, landmark policies and PR events on the federal level (the President, Prime Minister, State Duma, and Federation Council) and regional level (governors, and mayors) over the two years up to the invasion (2020-22) and the year following (Feb 2022-Feb 2023).
Jules Sergei Fediunin, Tora Berge Naterstad and Helge Blakkisrud examine how the Putin regime uses nationalism to legitimise the war in Ukraine. The paper draws on content and discourse analysis of material scraped from the websites of the Kremlin, the State Duma, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They explore how the meaning of selected nationalist tropes, such as "Russophobia", "de-Russification" and "national traitors", as well as their referent, have gradually changed.
Finally, Henry Hale and Regina Smyth in their papers both use new survey data (2021) from the Legituss project at the University of Oslo to analyze how traditionalist rhetoric is employed by the Putin regime. President Putin drew on such rhetoric in a novel way in 2020, when he attempted to mobilize support for a plebiscite on his escaping constitutional term limits by embedding (arguably even hiding) the term limit reset in a larger package of over 200 proposed constitutional amendments that included many traditionalist planks as well as socioeconomic promises. Hale examines whether people who adhere to traditionalist values were more likely to report having voted for the pro-authoritarian package of constitutional amendments. Smyth on the other hand probes the relationship between values and citizen support for - and engagement in - civic activism. She hypothesizes that if the state project is successful, traditional values should engender regime support and limit opposition activism.
Contested motherhood: between state politics and subjective/material experiences (Lithuania, Russia and Eurasian migrants in Sweden)
The panel is centered around ideas and practices of “good motherhood” expressed through political documents, media images and women’s stories. While historically maternity always was a part of cultural and national constructions, during last years the role of maternity seems to increase in the context of discussions on future of the nation, depopulation, patriotism and “traditional values”. The panel explores the constructions of motherhood in three different geographical, political and cultural contexts: social politics towards elderly women - mothers of several children - in Lithuania; promotion of “good motherhood” from the perspective of “traditional values” in Russia, and stories of migrant mothers from Central Asia and Caucasus about their experiences of being mothers in the context of growing (femo)nationalism in Sweden. Panel participants analyze both symbolic and embodied dimensions of the politics of motherhood on examples of the state pension for retired mothers (Lithuania) on the one hand and everyday practices of mothering while being migrants from post-Soviet countries (Sweden) on the other. The panel is a result of the ongoing research project “Maternity in the time of “traditional values” and femonationalism” (supported by the Baltic Sea Foundation, Sweden).
Joggling with the Transnational: Romanian Humanitarian Networks after Ceausescu's Nationalist Turn
Internationalism was one of the essential characteristics of socialist regimes across the globe during the 20th century, in relation to supporting solidarity, be it economic, revolutionary or humanitarian. But socialist governments also underwent nationalist turns in order to secure legitimity and the support of the masses in their respective countries. Thus, an apparent paradox occurred: they were not to abandon the transnational networks within which they functioned, and at the same time they were to employ nationlist tropes in their discourses. Humanitarian aid (beside the need for modernization) was one domain in which the discursive tensions were resolved.
This panel discusses the manner in which Romania acted as part of several transnational humanitarian networks during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the Romanian Communist regime turning towards a relentless form of nationalism during the 1970s, the country increased its international activity. At the same time, it adapted transnational networks to national specificities.
The panel seeks to explore the following questions: how did Romania manage Humanitarian Aid at UN level? What programs did it develop to support “Third World” countries? What happened to important, transnational networks, such as the Red Cross, once the Romanian socialist regime took a grip on its functioning and how did the regime manage western support in moments of crisis?
Global Soviet Union
The 1990s: Societies in transition
Russian Nationalism and Anti-Globalism
Decolonial Perspectives
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Ideas
Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in East-Central Europe before 1939
Politics of Waiting. Narratives beyond Wasting Time, and Linear Progression
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” This quote from Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy ‘Waiting for Godot’, depicts waiting as a waste of time; a conventional understanding in a world where value is produced through movement and progress. Social scientists, however, have engaged with the phenomenon of waiting as “waiting for something to change” (e.g., Hage 2003; Miyazaki 2004) and “waiting for nothing to change” (Frederiksen 2017) and emphasized the power imbalance in the ways in which waiting is experienced. We draw from these important contributions, but also interrogate the normative and progress-oriented conception of waiting as a ‘wasted time’ (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 89), and consider it as productive in its own right.
Bringing together ethnographies on memory, future-making, cross-border mobility, and housing in Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine, and Latvia, we explore the similarities and differences in the ways in which waiting is experienced. To do so, we tackle, but are not confined to questions like: How is waiting conceptualised by our interlocutors? How do they negotiate and act upon waiting? What does waiting reveal about past experiences, and hopes, dreams and anticipations about the future? What are the historical, social, political, economic, and intimate entanglements that put people in a waiting position?
Our empirical material elucidates the lived experiences of waiting and the multifaceted conditions of their production. Based on a thick description of what happens in the ‘meantime’ (Jansen 2015), we discuss a variety of engagements with and responses to waiting, of differently positioned individuals. We aim to uncover why and how waiting is political, but also examine the forces and agencies beyond state institutions. Lastly, we consider waiting to be a productive lens to examine the interplay of structural conditions and individual and collective hope, uncertainty, and endurance more broadly.
Constructing Identities: National and Transnational
Government and governance
Russian foreign policy – regional activities
Legitimation, identity politics, and "war nationalism" in Putin's Russia: strategies and fallout
The Putinist regime relies on nationalism and identity politics in its legitimation strategy. While this has been the case at least since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, it has been further ratcheted up in recent years. The four papers in this panel discuss various aspects of this policy.
Matthew Blackburn examines a the role of legitimation for regime stability over the last three years, interpreted through the categories of performance, ideology, and procedure. To do this, he examines major speeches, landmark policies and PR events on the federal level (the President, Prime Minister, State Duma, and Federation Council) and regional level (governors, and mayors) over the two years up to the invasion (2020-22) and the year following (Feb 2022-Feb 2023).
Jules Sergei Fediunin, Tora Berge Naterstad and Helge Blakkisrud examine how the Putin regime uses nationalism to legitimise the war in Ukraine. The paper draws on content and discourse analysis of material scraped from the websites of the Kremlin, the State Duma, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They explore how the meaning of selected nationalist tropes, such as "Russophobia", "de-Russification" and "national traitors", as well as their referent, have gradually changed.
Finally, Henry Hale and Regina Smyth in their papers both use new survey data (2021) from the Legituss project at the University of Oslo to analyze how traditionalist rhetoric is employed by the Putin regime. President Putin drew on such rhetoric in a novel way in 2020, when he attempted to mobilize support for a plebiscite on his escaping constitutional term limits by embedding (arguably even hiding) the term limit reset in a larger package of over 200 proposed constitutional amendments that included many traditionalist planks as well as socioeconomic promises. Hale examines whether people who adhere to traditionalist values were more likely to report having voted for the pro-authoritarian package of constitutional amendments. Smyth on the other hand probes the relationship between values and citizen support for - and engagement in - civic activism. She hypothesizes that if the state project is successful, traditional values should engender regime support and limit opposition activism.
Global Soviet Union
The 1990s: Societies in transition
Russian Nationalism and Anti-Globalism
Decolonial Perspectives
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Ideas
Poles and Jews in Mid-century Europe. Identity Building as a Tool of Minority Politics
Research challenges, ethics and data in the time of war
Trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia
The papers in this panel explore interlinked themes of trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia, from the late nineteenth century until 1920. Each focuses on a specific geography of the region: the Pamir mountains, Semirech’e, and the route of the Transcaspian railway. These areas, falling largely outside the settled region of Central Asia and/or being sparsely populated, are to some extent neglected in scholarship, particularly in comparative sense. The speakers take travel in some form as their foundation, using this as a lens through which to examine border-crossing, the mapping of landscapes, environmental and economic networks, and Anglophone ideas about Central Asia. Collectively, the papers ask important questions about how mobility in the region was experienced at various levels, from local communities to imperial officials, to foreign visitors; and the consequences of this in intellectual, social, economic and legal terms.
Social foundations of the war: multiscalar accounts of conflict and political economy
Social scientists have long argued that wars are profoundly transformative - be it by making and breaking social identities and bonds through discipline and combat, or because of death and destruction, the economic/social toll of organising large scale warfare, or by forging new social networks among and across combatants and civilians as groups, forging new and transforming old relations between state, society, and capital as social agents in dynamically changing shapes. This panel proposes to investigate the transformative effects of the war in Donbas and Crimea and the large scale Russo-Ukrainian war, both on Ukraine and Russian Federation and their displaced, refugee, and fleeing populations. Papers in this panel consider the transformative effects of war on society, particularly from the perspective of political economy. We present grounded and (micro-)empirical accounts that also zoom out to consider effects on the broader region itself (here understood as the post-Soviet space) and on the global dimensions of multivariate security (dis)orders, migration and climate politics, imperialism(s), de- and post-coloniality. The multi-scalar frame of historicised accounts developed through economic anthropology, sociology and feminist political economy engaged in this panel are particularly needed at this time.
Contested motherhood: between state politics and subjective/material experiences (Lithuania, Russia and Eurasian migrants in Sweden)
The panel is centered around ideas and practices of “good motherhood” expressed through political documents, media images and women’s stories. While historically maternity always was a part of cultural and national constructions, during last years the role of maternity seems to increase in the context of discussions on future of the nation, depopulation, patriotism and “traditional values”. The panel explores the constructions of motherhood in three different geographical, political and cultural contexts: social politics towards elderly women - mothers of several children - in Lithuania; promotion of “good motherhood” from the perspective of “traditional values” in Russia, and stories of migrant mothers from Central Asia and Caucasus about their experiences of being mothers in the context of growing (femo)nationalism in Sweden. Panel participants analyze both symbolic and embodied dimensions of the politics of motherhood on examples of the state pension for retired mothers (Lithuania) on the one hand and everyday practices of mothering while being migrants from post-Soviet countries (Sweden) on the other. The panel is a result of the ongoing research project “Maternity in the time of “traditional values” and femonationalism” (supported by the Baltic Sea Foundation, Sweden).
Joggling with the Transnational: Romanian Humanitarian Networks after Ceausescu's Nationalist Turn
Internationalism was one of the essential characteristics of socialist regimes across the globe during the 20th century, in relation to supporting solidarity, be it economic, revolutionary or humanitarian. But socialist governments also underwent nationalist turns in order to secure legitimity and the support of the masses in their respective countries. Thus, an apparent paradox occurred: they were not to abandon the transnational networks within which they functioned, and at the same time they were to employ nationlist tropes in their discourses. Humanitarian aid (beside the need for modernization) was one domain in which the discursive tensions were resolved.
This panel discusses the manner in which Romania acted as part of several transnational humanitarian networks during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the Romanian Communist regime turning towards a relentless form of nationalism during the 1970s, the country increased its international activity. At the same time, it adapted transnational networks to national specificities.
The panel seeks to explore the following questions: how did Romania manage Humanitarian Aid at UN level? What programs did it develop to support “Third World” countries? What happened to important, transnational networks, such as the Red Cross, once the Romanian socialist regime took a grip on its functioning and how did the regime manage western support in moments of crisis?
Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in East-Central Europe before 1939
Politics of Waiting. Narratives beyond Wasting Time, and Linear Progression
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” This quote from Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy ‘Waiting for Godot’, depicts waiting as a waste of time; a conventional understanding in a world where value is produced through movement and progress. Social scientists, however, have engaged with the phenomenon of waiting as “waiting for something to change” (e.g., Hage 2003; Miyazaki 2004) and “waiting for nothing to change” (Frederiksen 2017) and emphasized the power imbalance in the ways in which waiting is experienced. We draw from these important contributions, but also interrogate the normative and progress-oriented conception of waiting as a ‘wasted time’ (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 89), and consider it as productive in its own right.
Bringing together ethnographies on memory, future-making, cross-border mobility, and housing in Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine, and Latvia, we explore the similarities and differences in the ways in which waiting is experienced. To do so, we tackle, but are not confined to questions like: How is waiting conceptualised by our interlocutors? How do they negotiate and act upon waiting? What does waiting reveal about past experiences, and hopes, dreams and anticipations about the future? What are the historical, social, political, economic, and intimate entanglements that put people in a waiting position?
Our empirical material elucidates the lived experiences of waiting and the multifaceted conditions of their production. Based on a thick description of what happens in the ‘meantime’ (Jansen 2015), we discuss a variety of engagements with and responses to waiting, of differently positioned individuals. We aim to uncover why and how waiting is political, but also examine the forces and agencies beyond state institutions. Lastly, we consider waiting to be a productive lens to examine the interplay of structural conditions and individual and collective hope, uncertainty, and endurance more broadly.
Constructing Identities: National and Transnational
Government and governance
Russian foreign policy – regional activities
Legitimation, identity politics, and "war nationalism" in Putin's Russia: strategies and fallout
The Putinist regime relies on nationalism and identity politics in its legitimation strategy. While this has been the case at least since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, it has been further ratcheted up in recent years. The four papers in this panel discuss various aspects of this policy.
Matthew Blackburn examines a the role of legitimation for regime stability over the last three years, interpreted through the categories of performance, ideology, and procedure. To do this, he examines major speeches, landmark policies and PR events on the federal level (the President, Prime Minister, State Duma, and Federation Council) and regional level (governors, and mayors) over the two years up to the invasion (2020-22) and the year following (Feb 2022-Feb 2023).
Jules Sergei Fediunin, Tora Berge Naterstad and Helge Blakkisrud examine how the Putin regime uses nationalism to legitimise the war in Ukraine. The paper draws on content and discourse analysis of material scraped from the websites of the Kremlin, the State Duma, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They explore how the meaning of selected nationalist tropes, such as "Russophobia", "de-Russification" and "national traitors", as well as their referent, have gradually changed.
Finally, Henry Hale and Regina Smyth in their papers both use new survey data (2021) from the Legituss project at the University of Oslo to analyze how traditionalist rhetoric is employed by the Putin regime. President Putin drew on such rhetoric in a novel way in 2020, when he attempted to mobilize support for a plebiscite on his escaping constitutional term limits by embedding (arguably even hiding) the term limit reset in a larger package of over 200 proposed constitutional amendments that included many traditionalist planks as well as socioeconomic promises. Hale examines whether people who adhere to traditionalist values were more likely to report having voted for the pro-authoritarian package of constitutional amendments. Smyth on the other hand probes the relationship between values and citizen support for - and engagement in - civic activism. She hypothesizes that if the state project is successful, traditional values should engender regime support and limit opposition activism.
Global Soviet Union
The 1990s: Societies in transition
Russian Nationalism and Anti-Globalism
Decolonial Perspectives
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Ideas
Poles and Jews in Mid-century Europe. Identity Building as a Tool of Minority Politics
Trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia
The papers in this panel explore interlinked themes of trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia, from the late nineteenth century until 1920. Each focuses on a specific geography of the region: the Pamir mountains, Semirech’e, and the route of the Transcaspian railway. These areas, falling largely outside the settled region of Central Asia and/or being sparsely populated, are to some extent neglected in scholarship, particularly in comparative sense. The speakers take travel in some form as their foundation, using this as a lens through which to examine border-crossing, the mapping of landscapes, environmental and economic networks, and Anglophone ideas about Central Asia. Collectively, the papers ask important questions about how mobility in the region was experienced at various levels, from local communities to imperial officials, to foreign visitors; and the consequences of this in intellectual, social, economic and legal terms.
Social foundations of the war: multiscalar accounts of conflict and political economy
Social scientists have long argued that wars are profoundly transformative - be it by making and breaking social identities and bonds through discipline and combat, or because of death and destruction, the economic/social toll of organising large scale warfare, or by forging new social networks among and across combatants and civilians as groups, forging new and transforming old relations between state, society, and capital as social agents in dynamically changing shapes. This panel proposes to investigate the transformative effects of the war in Donbas and Crimea and the large scale Russo-Ukrainian war, both on Ukraine and Russian Federation and their displaced, refugee, and fleeing populations. Papers in this panel consider the transformative effects of war on society, particularly from the perspective of political economy. We present grounded and (micro-)empirical accounts that also zoom out to consider effects on the broader region itself (here understood as the post-Soviet space) and on the global dimensions of multivariate security (dis)orders, migration and climate politics, imperialism(s), de- and post-coloniality. The multi-scalar frame of historicised accounts developed through economic anthropology, sociology and feminist political economy engaged in this panel are particularly needed at this time.
Contested motherhood: between state politics and subjective/material experiences (Lithuania, Russia and Eurasian migrants in Sweden)
The panel is centered around ideas and practices of “good motherhood” expressed through political documents, media images and women’s stories. While historically maternity always was a part of cultural and national constructions, during last years the role of maternity seems to increase in the context of discussions on future of the nation, depopulation, patriotism and “traditional values”. The panel explores the constructions of motherhood in three different geographical, political and cultural contexts: social politics towards elderly women - mothers of several children - in Lithuania; promotion of “good motherhood” from the perspective of “traditional values” in Russia, and stories of migrant mothers from Central Asia and Caucasus about their experiences of being mothers in the context of growing (femo)nationalism in Sweden. Panel participants analyze both symbolic and embodied dimensions of the politics of motherhood on examples of the state pension for retired mothers (Lithuania) on the one hand and everyday practices of mothering while being migrants from post-Soviet countries (Sweden) on the other. The panel is a result of the ongoing research project “Maternity in the time of “traditional values” and femonationalism” (supported by the Baltic Sea Foundation, Sweden).
Joggling with the Transnational: Romanian Humanitarian Networks after Ceausescu's Nationalist Turn
Internationalism was one of the essential characteristics of socialist regimes across the globe during the 20th century, in relation to supporting solidarity, be it economic, revolutionary or humanitarian. But socialist governments also underwent nationalist turns in order to secure legitimity and the support of the masses in their respective countries. Thus, an apparent paradox occurred: they were not to abandon the transnational networks within which they functioned, and at the same time they were to employ nationlist tropes in their discourses. Humanitarian aid (beside the need for modernization) was one domain in which the discursive tensions were resolved.
This panel discusses the manner in which Romania acted as part of several transnational humanitarian networks during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the Romanian Communist regime turning towards a relentless form of nationalism during the 1970s, the country increased its international activity. At the same time, it adapted transnational networks to national specificities.
The panel seeks to explore the following questions: how did Romania manage Humanitarian Aid at UN level? What programs did it develop to support “Third World” countries? What happened to important, transnational networks, such as the Red Cross, once the Romanian socialist regime took a grip on its functioning and how did the regime manage western support in moments of crisis?
Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in East-Central Europe before 1939
Politics of Waiting. Narratives beyond Wasting Time, and Linear Progression
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” This quote from Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy ‘Waiting for Godot’, depicts waiting as a waste of time; a conventional understanding in a world where value is produced through movement and progress. Social scientists, however, have engaged with the phenomenon of waiting as “waiting for something to change” (e.g., Hage 2003; Miyazaki 2004) and “waiting for nothing to change” (Frederiksen 2017) and emphasized the power imbalance in the ways in which waiting is experienced. We draw from these important contributions, but also interrogate the normative and progress-oriented conception of waiting as a ‘wasted time’ (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 89), and consider it as productive in its own right.
Bringing together ethnographies on memory, future-making, cross-border mobility, and housing in Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Ukraine, and Latvia, we explore the similarities and differences in the ways in which waiting is experienced. To do so, we tackle, but are not confined to questions like: How is waiting conceptualised by our interlocutors? How do they negotiate and act upon waiting? What does waiting reveal about past experiences, and hopes, dreams and anticipations about the future? What are the historical, social, political, economic, and intimate entanglements that put people in a waiting position?
Our empirical material elucidates the lived experiences of waiting and the multifaceted conditions of their production. Based on a thick description of what happens in the ‘meantime’ (Jansen 2015), we discuss a variety of engagements with and responses to waiting, of differently positioned individuals. We aim to uncover why and how waiting is political, but also examine the forces and agencies beyond state institutions. Lastly, we consider waiting to be a productive lens to examine the interplay of structural conditions and individual and collective hope, uncertainty, and endurance more broadly.
Constructing Identities: National and Transnational
Government and governance
Russian foreign policy – regional activities
Legitimation, identity politics, and "war nationalism" in Putin's Russia: strategies and fallout
The Putinist regime relies on nationalism and identity politics in its legitimation strategy. While this has been the case at least since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, it has been further ratcheted up in recent years. The four papers in this panel discuss various aspects of this policy.
Matthew Blackburn examines a the role of legitimation for regime stability over the last three years, interpreted through the categories of performance, ideology, and procedure. To do this, he examines major speeches, landmark policies and PR events on the federal level (the President, Prime Minister, State Duma, and Federation Council) and regional level (governors, and mayors) over the two years up to the invasion (2020-22) and the year following (Feb 2022-Feb 2023).
Jules Sergei Fediunin, Tora Berge Naterstad and Helge Blakkisrud examine how the Putin regime uses nationalism to legitimise the war in Ukraine. The paper draws on content and discourse analysis of material scraped from the websites of the Kremlin, the State Duma, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They explore how the meaning of selected nationalist tropes, such as "Russophobia", "de-Russification" and "national traitors", as well as their referent, have gradually changed.
Finally, Henry Hale and Regina Smyth in their papers both use new survey data (2021) from the Legituss project at the University of Oslo to analyze how traditionalist rhetoric is employed by the Putin regime. President Putin drew on such rhetoric in a novel way in 2020, when he attempted to mobilize support for a plebiscite on his escaping constitutional term limits by embedding (arguably even hiding) the term limit reset in a larger package of over 200 proposed constitutional amendments that included many traditionalist planks as well as socioeconomic promises. Hale examines whether people who adhere to traditionalist values were more likely to report having voted for the pro-authoritarian package of constitutional amendments. Smyth on the other hand probes the relationship between values and citizen support for - and engagement in - civic activism. She hypothesizes that if the state project is successful, traditional values should engender regime support and limit opposition activism.
Global Soviet Union
Russian Nationalism and Anti-Globalism
Decolonial Perspectives
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Ideas
Poles and Jews in Mid-century Europe. Identity Building as a Tool of Minority Politics
Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in East-Central Europe before 1939
Trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia
The papers in this panel explore interlinked themes of trade, mobility and environment in late imperial Central Asia, from the late nineteenth century until 1920. Each focuses on a specific geography of the region: the Pamir mountains, Semirech’e, and the route of the Transcaspian railway. These areas, falling largely outside the settled region of Central Asia and/or being sparsely populated, are to some extent neglected in scholarship, particularly in comparative sense. The speakers take travel in some form as their foundation, using this as a lens through which to examine border-crossing, the mapping of landscapes, environmental and economic networks, and Anglophone ideas about Central Asia. Collectively, the papers ask important questions about how mobility in the region was experienced at various levels, from local communities to imperial officials, to foreign visitors; and the consequences of this in intellectual, social, economic and legal terms.
Social foundations of the war: multiscalar accounts of conflict and political economy
Social scientists have long argued that wars are profoundly transformative - be it by making and breaking social identities and bonds through discipline and combat, or because of death and destruction, the economic/social toll of organising large scale warfare, or by forging new social networks among and across combatants and civilians as groups, forging new and transforming old relations between state, society, and capital as social agents in dynamically changing shapes. This panel proposes to investigate the transformative effects of the war in Donbas and Crimea and the large scale Russo-Ukrainian war, both on Ukraine and Russian Federation and their displaced, refugee, and fleeing populations. Papers in this panel consider the transformative effects of war on society, particularly from the perspective of political economy. We present grounded and (micro-)empirical accounts that also zoom out to consider effects on the broader region itself (here understood as the post-Soviet space) and on the global dimensions of multivariate security (dis)orders, migration and climate politics, imperialism(s), de- and post-coloniality. The multi-scalar frame of historicised accounts developed through economic anthropology, sociology and feminist political economy engaged in this panel are particularly needed at this time.
Border in/securities – at the nexus of space and emotions in Central- and Eastern Europe II
My Tatars in Mordovia and other stories
Scotland's Ukrainians - their story
