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101. Book Talk. Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a presentation of the book Contemporary Ukrainian Art and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives (ibidem Press, 2021). The event will feature presentations by the volume’s editor Svitlana Biedarieva and contributors Ieva Astahovska, Olena Martynyuk, and Margaret Tali with moderator Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute). This volume focuses on political and social expressions in contemporary art of Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. It explores the transformations that art in Ukraine and the Baltic states has undergone since their independence in 1991, discussing how the conflicts and challenges of the last three decades have impacted the reconsideration of identity and fostered resistance of culture against economic and political crises. It analyzes connections between the past and the present as seen by the artists in these countries and looks at their visions of the future. Contemporary Ukrainian art portrays various perspectives, addressing issues from controversial historical topics to the present military conflict in the East of the country. Baltic art speaks out against the erasure of past historical traumas and analyzes the pertinence of its cultural scene to the European community. The contributions in this collection open a discussion of whether there is a single paradigm that describes the contemporary processes of art production in Ukraine and the Baltic countries. With contributions by Ieva Astahovska, Svitlana Biedarieva, Kateryna Botanova, Olena Martynyuk, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Lina Michelkevičė, Margaret Tali, and Jessica Zychowicz.
Topic:
Nationalism, Arts, Culture, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia

102. Book Talk. Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Stalin’s Millennials examines Joseph Stalin’s increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalin—the one projected by the generation that saw the tail end of the USSR, the post-Soviet millennials. This book is not a biography of one of the most controversial historical figures of the past century. Rather, through a combination of sociopolitical commentary and autobiographical elements that are uncommon in monographs of this kind, the attempt is to explore how Joseph Stalin’s complex legacies and the conflicting cult of his irreconcilable tripartite of personalities still loom over the region as a whole, including Russia and, perhaps to an even deeper extent, Koba’s native land—now the independent Republic of Georgia, caught between its unreconciled Soviet past and the potential future within the European Union.
Topic:
Nationalism, Governance, Leadership, Trauma, and Memory
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Soviet Union, and Georgia

103. Environmental Activism in Russia

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Our panel of distinguished experts will discuss the growing environmental activism movement in Russia. We will be joined by both academics and activists who will explore the unique challenges that environmental activists have faced and continue to endure in Russia. They will also assess the results achieved to date by the Russian environmentalist movement, both from those operating within the country and those abroad.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, and Activism
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

104. Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic, Eugene Raikhel

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years. Raikhel's book is more than a story about the treatment of alcoholism. It is also a gripping analysis of the many cultural, institutional, political, and social transformations taking place in the post-Soviet world, particularly in Putin's Russia. Governing Habits will appeal to a wide range of readers, from medical anthropologists, clinicians, to scholars of post-Soviet Russia, to students of institutions and organizational change, to those interested in therapies and treatments of substance abuse, addiction, and alcoholism.
Topic:
Health, Mental Health, Alcohol, Post-Soviet Space, and Addiction
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

105. Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice. Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.
Topic:
Nationalism, Arts, Culture, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe and Soviet Union

106. What’s Next? Experts Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join us for a special meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. This event is also cosponsored by the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU and the Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Military Strategy, Strategic Interests, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

107. Sanctioning Russia: Implications and Expectation

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West rapidly adopted unprecedented sanctions on Russia. These included a series of export controls and the sanctioning of the Russian Central Bank, major institutions in the financial sector as well as individual “oligarchs” who live and conduct business outside of the country. In addition to these government actions by the United States, the European Union and the UK, hundreds of Western private companies have withdrawn from the Russian market or suspended operations, further exacerbating Russian economic uncertainty. How likely are the sanctions to pressure Russia to halt its campaign in Ukraine, what is their purpose and logic, and what additional measures could be imposed?
Topic:
Economics, Hegemony, Sanctions, Conflict, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

108. Book Talk. #WomenofBiH

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute for a talk with Amila Hrustić Batovanja and Masha Durkalić, two co-authors of the book #WomenofBiH, now newly available in English. Dijana Jelača (Brooklyn College) will participate as a discussant with Tanya Domi (Harriman Institute) as moderator. #WomenOfBiH is an artistic, activist, and research initiative comprised of biographies of over fifty BiH women who have broken stereotypes and advocated for women’s rights and emancipation. Each woman was illustrated by a different woman illustrator/designer/artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a book about first female artists, writers, poets, social workers, national heroines, directors, scientists, musicians, doctors, activists, professors, and other exceptional women from BiH. The initiative was started with the goal of increasing the visibility of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to encourage similar educational initiatives. It celebrates women who were trailblazers and pioneers in women’s rights and emancipation, who achieved worldwide fame in their respective fields of work and are some of the greatest treasures of BiH. The book was published in 2019 and has since traveled to more than fifty countries. The publishing of the book was financed by Open Society Foundation and by more than 500 crowdfunding supporters from all over the world. In 2020, the second edition of the book was published in Bosnian, as well as an English edition of 650 copies, supported by OSCE in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Topic:
Women, Feminism, Activism, and Gender
Political Geography:
Europe and Bosnia and Herzegovina

109. Book Talk. La Nijinska by Lynn Garafola

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Overshadowed in life and legend by her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska had a far longer and more productive career. An architect of twentieth-century neoclassicism, she experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and created her greatest work - Les Noces - under the influence of its avant-garde. Many of her ballets rested on the probing of gender boundaries, a mistrust of conventional gender roles, and the heightening of the ballerina's technical and artistic prowess. A prominent member of Russia Abroad, she worked with leading figures of twentieth-century art, music, and ballet, including Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Poulenc, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Frederick Ashton, Alicia Markova, and Maria Tallchief. She was also a remarkable dancer in her own right with a bravura technique and powerful stage presence that enabled her to perform an unusually broad repertory. Finally, she was the author of an acclaimed volume of memoirs in addition to a major treatise on movement. Nijinska's career sheds new light on the modern history of ballet and of modernism more generally, recuperating the memory of lost works and forgotten artists, many of them women. But it also reveals the sexism pervasive in the upper echelons of the early and mid-twentieth-century ballet world, barriers that women choreographers still confront. Lynn Garafola is Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College, Columbia University. A dance historian and critic, she is the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance, and the editor of several books, including The Diaries of Marius Petipa, André Levinson on Dance (with Joan Acocella), José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir, and The Ballets Russes and Its World. She has curated several exhibitions, including Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World, Diaghilev's Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath, and, most recently, Arthur Mitchell: Harlem's Ballet Trailblazer.
Topic:
Arts, Culture, Feminism, Russian Revolution, and Gender
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

110. Finding Common Ground: Intercultural Dialogue Among Youth in North Macedonia

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Marija Krstevska will discuss her trajectory as a girl raised in a mono-ethnic environment to a young advocate for intercultural acceptance. She is the Secretary General of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, a youth organization in Kumanovo, North Macedonia. Through that organization, she has created learning opportunities within non-formal education for diverse groups of learners, advocated for direct involvement in community decision-making, and supported youth participation through inclusive policies. She will discuss the importance of active citizenship, capacity building, and non-formal education in fostering intercultural dialogue among youth.
Topic:
Education, Culture, Youth, Activism, and Gender
Political Geography:
Europe and North Macedonia

111. Book Talk. Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System by Hikmet Karčić

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a discussion with genocide scholar Hikmet Karčić, author of Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System (University of Michigan Press, 2022), in conversation with discussant John Cox, director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies at UNC Charlotte. Moderated by Tanya Domi (SIPA/Harriman Institute).
Topic:
Genocide, Torture, Discrimination, Humanitarian Crisis, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe and Bosnia and Herzegovina

112. Book Talk. Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism by Slavenka Drakulic

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a book talk with Slavenka Drakulic, author of Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism (Penguin Books, 2021), an evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism. This event is part of the Collective Memory and Democratic Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe series organized by Harriman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Čarna Pištan, and will be introduced by Aleksandar Bošković co-director of the East Central European Center.
Topic:
Communism, State Building, Post Cold War, Post-Soviet Space, and Anti-Communism
Political Geography:
Europe

113. Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: Reflections on Historical and Psychological Dimensions

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Mariam Antadze will discuss the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and its mental health and psychosocial implications on communities. Focusing on how war affects mental health and psychosocial development facilitates a better understanding of trauma experienced by people who are directly or indirectly affected. Among the topics Antadze will discuss: Russia's post-Soviet invasions chronologically; what we have learned from Russia's war in Georgia; understanding how sociopolitical and psychological factors interact in war trauma; psycho- and mental health needs that arise from war; and justice as a healing factor.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Military Strategy, Mental Health, Health Crisis, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

114. The First Deportation of Hungarian Jews in World War II, 1941

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
This talk emerges from a book project examining the history and events leading up to the first deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1941. During the first weeks of the campaign against the Soviet Union, the wartime Hungarian government deported more than 20 thousand "foreign” Jews to occupied Soviet territories. Most of them became the victims of the massacre of Kamenetsk-Podolsk in late August. This crime ushered in the period of the Holocaust that Father Patrick Desbois and Paul A. Shapiro have called the "Holocaust by bullets." The talk returns to and takes up the question of "alien Jews” in the period between 1919 and 1941 in East-Central Europe in general and in Hungary in particular, examining how government decrees were used by state authorities in Hungary and in Romania to make it very difficult for Jews to prove their citizenship. The authorities were thus able to 'create' 'aliens' out of unwanted Jews almost without limit. An analysis of these processes exposes the techniques used by nationalist regimes to incite hatred against different groups in society.
Topic:
Genocide, Citizenship, Holocaust, Humanitarian Crisis, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe and Hungary

115. Disability and the War in Ukraine: Organized Support

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a panel discussion on disability and the war in Ukraine, organized by Svetlana Borodina (Harriman Institute). This event will feature the voices of the people who have been working to support people with disabilities in Ukraine during this war. They will speak about their first-hand experiences and the impact that this war has had on the lives of people with disabilities in Ukraine.
Topic:
War, Disability, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

116. Russian-Turkish Relations: Past & Present

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
As Istanbul hosts Russian and Ukrainian negotiators for peace talks to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Turkey balances between Ukraine and Russia, Russian-Turkish relations may be entering a new phase. Relations between the two states have grown increasingly fraught in recent years, as the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia’s role in Syria and the Middle East come up against Turkey’s growing influence in the region. Panelists will discuss relations between Russia and Turkey by analyzing the historical legacies of the Russian and Ottoman empires, and by situating current policies in the broader context of Turkish and Russian relations with NATO, Europe, and the U.S.
Topic:
Diplomacy, International Cooperation, Bilateral Relations, and Alliance
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Turkey

117. How Did Left-Wing Print Culture Experiment with Capitalism?

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
While many avant-garde periodicals enthusiastically embraced various aspects of the booming post-WWI economy and technology of the core countries, their imagined readership remained the proletariat or “the masses.” Although the predominantly left-wing avant-garde outlets were overflowing with articles exploring the perspectives opened up by Fordism, Taylorism, standardization, and rationalization, not only did their intended working-class readership experience the everyday regime of “scientific management,” but many of them, especially Hungarian organized workers in the industrial centers of the East Coast, actively fought it. Adopting the approaches of periodical studies, book history, and the cultural history of social life, this presentation has a twofold ambition. First, to understand what kind of political economy was envisioned by the avant-garde journals of the 1920s, especially concerning their interpretation of the distinguishing characteristics of the capitalist economic order. Second, to explore how working-class readers—either trade unionist social democrats or revolutionary communists—understood, re-created, or performed some of the techniques promoted by avant-garde journals: using tactics like speaking choirs, “living journals,” political collages, and workers’ photography to critique that same economic reality of post-WWI capitalism. Through the study of hitherto largely unexplored primary sources, including avant-garde periodicals and leaflets, editorial material, secret police accounts, Comintern documents, and annotated pages of avant-garde and labor movement publications, this lecture investigates how the avant-garde radical imagination about capitalism resonated in the larger ecosystem of workers’ culture. It also explores the significant role of centers like New York City—a global hub of avant-garde periodicals, the heart of surging Fordist capitalism, and a battlefield for multi-ethnic organized workers, including a large number of Hungarian immigrants—played in the formation of a Hungarian-language counter-hegemonic public sphere.
Topic:
Media, Work Culture, Leftist Politics, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe, Hungary, North America, and United States of America

118. The Parallels of Russian Bellicosity in the Balkans in the Example of Ukraine

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Just last month, the Russian Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina issued issued a startling threat to the Bosnian government’s aspirations to join NATO. “Bosnia and Herzegovina have the right to decide whether to be a member of NATO, but Moscow reserves the right to respond to such an opportunity,” he said. Russia warned Bosnia and Herzegovina that it could be the Kremlin's next target following Ukraine. This is not the first time Russia has threatened Bosnia. The parallels to Russia’s threats to Ukraine are unerringly uncanny. Bosnia’s significance to Western powers and to Russia stems from the same fact: The country is located squarely at the intersection of NATO and Russian influence. The West recognizes some of the potential Bosnia could have if it were brought into the NATO bloc, but seems not to understand the ramifications of the country slipping into Kremlin-induced disarray. For its part, Russia is just being consistent: Just as it unsuccessfully attempted to prevent Montenegro and North Macedonia from joining NATO, so too is it trying to halt Bosnian aspirations toward the same goal. Bosnia and threatened Balkan states North Macedonia and Montenegro remain fragile to Russian manipulation of its proxies in all of these countries and in the Balkan neighborhood.
Topic:
Defense Policy, NATO, Regional Cooperation, Military Strategy, and Hegemony
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Ukraine, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

119. Eyes that Lead: The History of Guide Dogs for the Blind in East Central Europe and Beyond

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The lecture explores a hitherto overlooked episode in the history of the human-animal relations: the establishment of professional guide dog training after the First World War, which had its origins in Central Europe. Under this scheme, dogs became helpers, and, furthermore, equal partners to disabled soldiers and soon thereafter also to blind civilians. The lecture shows how the resultant cooperation between guide dogs and their owners placed the human–animal bond on a new footing. It also reveals how an idea initiated by veterans of the German and Austro-Hungarian army spread across the world and what adjustments were necessary to make the scheme suitable for different economic, cultural and social settings. In a broader context the lecture seeks to call attention to the potentials of the burgeoning fields of animal studies and disability histories for the study of East Central Europe.
Topic:
Culture, Disability, and Animals
Political Geography:
Europe

120. Byzantium as Seen by the White Russians in Constantinople

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
or the broad public in pre-revolutionary Russia, Byzantium belonged to religious discourse; it also became a battle cry for Russian imperialism. And, by an irony of history, it was that long-coveted Byzantium that greeted the White Russians as they, orphaned refugees, disembarked in Constantinople following their defeat in the Civil War. What sentiments did the Byzantine monuments inspire in them? It appears that their attitudes were more nuanced than pure nostalgia or dismissal. Sergey A. Ivanov is a member of the British Academy. He has published more than 200 scholarly works on Byzantine culture and the relations between Byzantium and the Slavs. Among his monographs are Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford, 2006), “Pearls Before Swine:” Missionary Work in Byzantium (Paris, 2015) and "Византийская культура и агиография" (Moscow, 2020, Byzantine Culture and Hagiography). His guidebook "В поисках Константинополя" was first published in Russian in 2011, went through three editions and was translated into Bulgarian and Turkish. It was published in English as In Search of Constantinople. A Guidebook Through Byzantine Istanbul and Its Surroundings in March 2022.
Topic:
Culture, Urban, Cities, and Monuments
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Turkey, and Istanbul