Study Group for Minority History SGMH

BASEES 2023 Opening Keynote
Professor Gwendolyn Sasse (Centre for East European and International Studies - ZOiS, Germany)
'Quo vadis Area Studies amidst Russia‘s War against Ukraine?'
University of Glasgow
31 March 2023

In our final episode (for now), we talk to Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell Junior. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. Besides a long-standing reputation for having been an early exponent and pioneer of Soviet and Nationalist Studies as areas of historical inquiry, Professor Suny has also garnered international recognition for his work on the South Caucasus before and after 1917, most notably Armenia.

Surveying how these fields of study he originally championed have since developed following the end of the Cold War in 1991, Suny not only provides us with a comprehensive retrospective but also offers an eloquent rebuttal to critiques of having normalised Soviet domination while seeking to delegitimise national identities. Such perspectives represent these specialisms' failure to break from a Western-academic mooring and provide an effective counter-discourse to nationalist narratives. Nowhere is this better encapsulated than in the Republic of Armenia. Despite ongoing efforts at producing a more balanced picture, understanding of the Soviet past continues to be subsumed into wider notions of perpetual victimisation at the hands of external aggressors. Through this, Suny weaves together the key analytical throughlines explored in this podcast and illustrates the many challenges for those who study minority history.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this week’s episode, Petre Matei (Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania) talks to Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth University) about the history of the Roma in Romania, from the late 19th century to the present. Petre Matei argues for a more nuanced history of the Roma, questioning dominant narratives of their persecution, deportation, and mass murder that tend to focus on the level of the state and/or of a monolithic Romanian nationalism by factoring in the local dimension, which in many cases was decisive in determining who was deported and who was not. He also emphasises the importance of seeing the Roma not exclusively as victims (of slavery, genocide, the Holocaust), but also as active agents partly shaping their own history – if not in circumstances of their own making. The discussion concludes by considering the educational potential of initiatives that examine both the local dimension of the Holocaust – and point out that it did not happen ‘elsewhere’ – and instances of Roma political mobilisation and resistance, in Romania and beyond.

Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania: https://www.inshr-ew.ro/proiecte/

The Forgotten Genocide. The Fate of the Sinti and Roma: https://romasinti.eu/

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this podcast, Timothy Blauvelt of Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, in conversation with Francis King of the University of East Anglia's East Centre, considers the early years of Soviet Abkhazia and its well-connected leader, Nestor Lakoba. The discussion ranges over Lakoba's role in the revolution, his career as the indispensable Bolshevik figure in Soviet Abkhazia, and what his story reveals about nationality policy and personal patronage in the pre-war USSR. It touches on themes considered at greater length in Timothy Blauvelt, Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom. The Trials of Nestor Lakoba (Routledge, 2021).

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

Jakub Beneš, Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, joins us to discuss the role of peasant communities and anti-urban sentiment in the socio-political landscape of Austria-Hungary, its successor states and the independent Balkans. Challenging earlier characterisations of the peasantry as inherently reactionary, Jakub considers how the growth of the modern metropolis gave rise to more distinctive forms of rural identity. Alongside greater political and cultural agency, this was accompanied by an increasing sense of alienation from the state and urban elites, predicated on majority fears of 'becoming a minority' in one's own land.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this episode, Austin Charron (University of Wisconsin-Madison, https://www.austincharron.com/) and Oleksandr-Martin Kysly (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) discuss the experiences of the Crimean Tatars before the Second World War and their forced deportation to Central Asia and Siberia in 1944. Our guests also consider the Crimean Tatars’ return to Ukraine from exile, following the lifting of the ban on their return in 1989, placing the so-called “Crimean Tatar problem” in the broader context of late-Soviet national policy and the subsequent challenges faced by the new Ukrainian government in the early 1990s. In addition, they also consider allegiances and the contested nature of Crimean Tatar affiliation to Ukraine in view of Russia's occupation of Crimea since 2014.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)