CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

This lecture is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison Department of German, Nordic, Slavic+. About the Lecture: This talk will address the Pugachev Rebellion (1773-1775) in the Russian Empire, the most massive popular uprising in eighteenth-century Europe which brought together Cossacks, Russian serfs, and Bashkir nomads (to name just the major groups) in a common uprising against the Russian Empire and...

About the Lecture: This talk examines Soviet engagement with Black American literature by tracing unexpected continuities between Imperial Russian and Soviet approaches to race and cultural diplomacy. Through close analysis of literary criticism published in Soviet journals from the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly reviews of works by Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and W.E.B....

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History. About the Lecture: After the October Revolution, Bolshevik leaders inherited a vast geographic expanse that was home to some 200 different ethnicities—some 130 million people who needed to be integrated into the new Soviet order. To reverse prior oppression, Bolsheviks organized their polity as...

About the Lecture: The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has reinvigorated debates about the causes of war. The question of why Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war in 2022 does not seem to be answered by many usual explanations, e.g. material interests or threats to international security. Herrera argues that Russia’s imperial ambitions and sense of Russian national identity heav...

In 1991, as the USSR broke apart and its population became open to the reforming discourse of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program of perestroika, Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev set the tone for subsequent writing on Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, concluding that he was “a personality so mediocre and a politician so ordinary” that he “quickly disappeared from the political scene and also in the lit...

In this talk Darya Tsymbalyuk presents her recent book Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press, 2025). The book focuses on the impact of the Russian invasion on the more-than-human worlds of Ukraine, discussing how witnessing and experiencing environmental destruction profoundly changed our perceptions of familiar places and spaces such as forests, agricultural fie...

Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal tria...

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

About the Lecture: In this presentation, Karnes will talk about Maija Tabaka, who was the first Soviet citizen to be awarded the DAAD fellowship. Tabaka unwittingly opened doors to over a decade of artistic exchanges between Riga and West Berlin. She also provided an enduring model for arranging such collaborations, with offices of the Latvian KGB partnering with Latvian emigres to broker relation...

About the Lecture: In this book presentation, Finkel uncovers the deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Following the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. The Russian Empire, USSR and Putin’s Russia had long used violence to successfully crush Ukrainian efforts to chart a separate path. Today’s violence is just a more...

About the Lecture: Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, analysts and observers around the world were shocked and surprised that Ukraine did not fall in a matter of days or weeks. Instead people across the country resisted with both military and civilian means, halting the Russian advance. Surveys indicate that over 80% of the Ukrainian population contributed to the w...

[About the Lecture:] The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia’s governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Po...

About the Lecture: During the 70 years of its existence, the Soviet Union claimed to be a communist state based on the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and, at the later stages, Vladimir Lenin. This made philosophy a mandatory course in every Soviet university and led to the creation of a peculiar version of the history of philosophy. Leading Soviet specialists, such as Vale...

About the lecture: The legacy of past human activities strongly shapes current landscapes and ecosystems, with today’s actions set to leave similar long-term impacts. Predicting future landscape changes, however, requires a thorough understanding of past ones, yet most land and habitat change studies are limited to recent decades—starting only in the 1980s with the availability of 30-m satellite d...

About the Lecture: Georgia’s 26,000 rivers connect citizens to nature, to their childhood, to their unique regions, each of which has its “mother-river.” The sounds of rushing water as well as the sights and scents of riverside gatherings provoke powerful memories and remain central to Georgian identity. Rivers also form the republic’s economic backbone. This presentation will focus on late Soviet...

About the Lecture: The idea of Estonia as a Nordic country gained traction in the late 19th century alongside the rise of Estonian nationalism. As Germany and increasingly also Russia came to be perceived as historical adversaries of the Estonian nation, Sweden’s arguably benevolent influence on Estonia’s history in the 17th century ‘good old Swedish times’ provided the Estonian national movement...

Solidarity Networking and Ukrainian Mental Maps: Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project About the Lecture: I am an East European intellectual and political historian by training, and a student of map prejudices by practice. For a digitally activist Ukraine, the February 24th Archive is a polyphonic treasure trove of solidarity and resistance to Russia's war of aggressio...

About the Lecture: This conversation will be devoted to Elena Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country (2023), “a haunting book of rare courage,” as Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent, called it. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was he...

About the lecture: In December 1989, in officially recognizing the authenticity of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s secret protocol, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies evinced the hope that the globally divided historical consciousness of the Cold War would be replaced with a new conception of the past, reflecting “a whole and mutually interdependent world and increasing mutual understanding...

About the Lecture: The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to open classified U.S. files, and then to match those American primary sources with newly opened (and often now closed) archives in the former Soviet Union and countries of the Warsaw Pact. This presentation will draw on materials from the Archive to she...

About the lecture: This talk will offer an overview of Professor Shevelenko’s current book-length project and will focus on a few case studies. The book examines artistic and intellectual tendencies that shaped the thinking about the “age of extremes” (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s appellation for the twentieth century) during the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. This research analyzes the quest for n...

A Colonial Muslim History of China and the World The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi of Mullah Musa Sayrami (1836–1917) is celebrated as a monument of Uyghur literature and the preeminent Muslim history of nineteenth-century Xinjiang (East Turkestan). Yet it is more than a chronicle — it is a history of the world as seen from the heart of Eurasia and an argument about the nature of politics and faith. Sayrami’s...

From Moldova to Tajikistan, from Belarus to Uzbekistan: The Formulation and Flow of National Identity from the Late Czarist Times to Today Riordan will explore the formulation of identity over the past 150 years in Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus and Uzbekistan. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground work and research across all four countries, Riordan will discuss his findings on the trajectory of nati...

The lecture will provide insight into the particular (and sometimes peculiar) challenges Central Asian states faced in their energy systems during the first 30 years of independence as they struggled to provide reliable energy at home and secure resource markets abroad. It will then turn to examine what the global transition away from fossil fuels portends for Central Asia’s future. About the Spea...

Ostap Kin presented and read from his book, “Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond” on Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews in Babyn Yar. By the time the Soviet army recaptured Kyiv, the total number of people exterminated at the ravine had reached some 100,000 to 150,000. Th...