CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • 4.4 (15)
  • EDUCATION

CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public. As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.

  1. The Making and Unmaking of the Soviet People

    FEB 17

    The Making and Unmaking of the Soviet People

    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 an ethno-territorial federation and promoted minorities in politics, the economy, and culture. Alongside this embrace of diversity, however, a larger challenge remained. How could leaders forge cultural unity among an extraordinarily diverse citizenry? This talk investigates the dual promotion of unity and diversity in the Soviet Union through the lens of citizenship and identity, demonstrating that political and cultural elites promoted a civic identity built on active participation in public life that citizens embraced across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum. At the same time, the official rhetoric of equality, inclusion, and multiethnic representation coexisted with systemic inequalities that shaped lived experience and ultimately undermined the Soviet state. Drawing on a range of multilingual materials collected from across the former Soviet Union, this talk offers fresh perspectives on both the forging of Soviet unity and its long-term unmaking. The talk opens by describing new ways of conceiving civic identity after the revolution and the evolution of this identity under Stalin and his successors—in short, the making of the Soviet people—before detailing the fracturing of this civic identity in the 1980s. Combining the voices of both elites and ordinary citizens from across the country, the talk considers how ideas of equality and experiences of inequality profoundly shaped the rise and fall of Soviet citizenship. About the Speaker: Anna Whittington is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she focuses on citizenship and inequality across Soviet Eurasia. Her in-progress book manuscript, "Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People," traces the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse, based on multilingual research conducted across the former Soviet Union. Future projects include a history of perestroika from below and a history of enumeration in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

    46 min
  2. Identity and War: What the Russian War on Ukraine Teaches Us About the Causes of War

    JAN 30

    Identity and War: What the Russian War on Ukraine Teaches Us About the Causes of War

    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 heavily shaped Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the full-scale invasion. Hence, one of the challenges for International Relations theory is the need to update and improve our understanding of the role of identity in conflict and political violence. In this talk, Herrera maps out a theoretical framework for identity and conflict, and then discusses relevant aspects of identity in both Ukraine and Russia, with an emphasis on how identities might have contributed to the war and been changed as a consequence. About the Speaker: Yoshiko M. Herrera is Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on Russian and Eurasian politics, identity, and political economy. Herrera teaches courses on comparative politics, social identities and diversity, and a new course on the Russian war on Ukraine. She is also a former director of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia at UW-Madison. She is the author of two books and an influential co-edited volume on Measuring Identity. Her most recent co-authored article is “Don’t Look Back in Anger: Cooperation Despite Conflicting Historical Narratives” published in the "American Political Science Review."

    45 min
  3. A Man Who Changed the World: Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, 1906-1982

    11/14/2025

    A Man Who Changed the World: Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, 1906-1982

    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 literal and metaphorical sense.” But not for long. When it became clear by the end of the decade that market capitalism and democracy had not improved people’s lives, nostalgia for the Brezhnev era rightly raised the question of whether he had been given his just due and unfairly blamed for the shortcomings of the Soviet system. This reversal of fortune also makes clear that no Soviet leader has been as neglected or as misunderstood as Brezhnev and therefore no Soviet party boss is in such need of a fresh historical reassessment. Divided into two parts, my presentation will first make a case for Brezhnev, emphasizing his vision of guaranteeing stability, assuring peace, and letting people live well. Earlier I coined the term “Soviet man of peace,” to characterize Brezhnev. I emphasize this point here, arguing that his dream of wanting to be remembered as an asset for world peace made him a leader who changed the world. In part 2 of my presentation, I zoom in on the Leonid Brezhnev that, as his biographer, I might never know and propose what these unresolved questions might mean. Donald J. Raleigh is the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of Russian History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has authored, translated, and edited numerous books on modern Russian history including Revolution on the Volga (1986), Experiencing Russia’s Civil War (2002), Russia’s Sputnik Generation (2006) and Soviet Baby Boomers (2012). He currently is writing a biography of Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, research for which has taken him to archives in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the UK, and the US. This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History and University Lectures.

    49 min
  4. Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War

    11/14/2025

    Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War

    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 fields, and shelterbelts. Combining autoethnography with cultural and media analysis, and environmental data, Tsymbalyuk asks: what does it mean to inhabit a world under attack, what does it mean to live on contaminated land? Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya’s work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. Darya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press 2025). Among her many shorter scholarly publications is a double special issue on the environmental humanities of Ukraine co-edited with Tanya Richardson and forthcoming with East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Her other scholarly texts have been published by Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of International Relations and Development, Narrative Culture, REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, to name a few. Her public-facing writing appeared in BBC Future Planet, openDemocracy, The Funambulist, KAJET, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, and many other platforms. In 2023, she received Mary Zirin Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. In addition to writing, Darya also works with images through drawing, painting, collage, and film essays. You can learn more about her work here: https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/ This lecture is made possible in partnership with Wisconsin RISE-EARTH Initiative.

    44 min
  5. Elite Women on Trial in Post-Reform Russia, 1866-1884

    10/14/2025

    Elite Women on Trial in Post-Reform Russia, 1866-1884

    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 trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself. Sergei Antonov is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. He was born in Moscow and came to the US in 1992. Antonov earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and his J.D. from NYU Law. His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Harvard, 2016), won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize. His second book, Russia’s Rogue Masters: Elite Criminal Trials in the Age of Reform, 1866-1884, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026. This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History.

    53 min
  6. Scientific Atheism as an Ideological Discipline in Soviet Ukraine

    05/01/2025

    Scientific Atheism as an Ideological Discipline in Soviet Ukraine

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

    52 min
  7. Laurie Anderson, Emigre Culture, the KGB, and the Dream of Connecting: (Soviet) Latvian Artists in (West) Berlin, 1977-1992

    04/28/2025

    Laurie Anderson, Emigre Culture, the KGB, and the Dream of Connecting: (Soviet) Latvian Artists in (West) Berlin, 1977-1992

    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 relationships, awards, and creative possibilities. Mining archives in Berlin and Riga, this talk traces the origins of such exchanges in the 1970s, their evolution in the time of perestroika, and their end in an ill-fated endeavor to support the dream of the Latvian musician Hardijs Lediņš to record with Laurie Anderson in a newly reunited Berlin. About the Speaker: Kevin C. Karnes is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music and Divisional Dean of Arts at Emory University and Visiting Professor of Musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. His most recent book is Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (2021). His latest research considers techno music and club culture as both product and reflection of transnational exchange across reimagined European borders at the turn of the 1990s.

    44 min
  8. Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-hundred-year Quest to Dominate Ukraine

    04/18/2025

    Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-hundred-year Quest to Dominate Ukraine

    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 extreme version of Russia’s past efforts. But unlike in the past, the people of Ukraine have overcome their deep internal divisions, and this rise of civic Ukrainian nationalism explains the successful resistance to the invasion. About the Speaker: Eugene Finkel (UW PhD in Political Science) is the Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins SAIS. Finkel’s most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), and co-author of Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and other journals. Finkel also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.

    45 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.4
out of 5
15 Ratings

About

CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public. As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.

Information

  • Creator
    Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    175
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

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