The Ellison Center at the University of Washington The Ellison Center at the University of Washington

Nargis Kassenova is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center. Prior to joining the center, she was an associate professor at the Department of International Relations and Regional Studies of KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). She is the former founder and director of the KIMEP Central Asian Studies Center (CASC) and the China and Central Asia Studies Center (CCASC). Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in international cooperation studies from the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University (Japan). Her research focuses on Central Asian politics and security, Eurasian geopolitics, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, governance in Central Asia, and the history of state-making in Central Asia. 

Temur Umarov is a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. His research is focused on Central Asian countries’ domestic and foreign policies, as well as China’s relations with Russia and Central Asian neighbors. A native of Uzbekistan, Temur Umarov has degrees in China studies and international relations from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). He holds an MA in world economics from the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing). He is also an alumnus of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center’s Young Ambassadors and the Carnegie Endowment’s Central Asian Futures programs.

This webinar will be moderated by Scott Radnitz (Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington).

David Ost is a professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. He has written widely on eastern Europe, with a focus on Poland, labor, class, democracy, and the radical right. His books include Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, Workers After Workers’ States, The Defeat of Solidarity, and the edited collection “Class After Communism.” Recent articles include “Why (Which) Workers Often Oppose (Which) Democracy?”, “REN PILL Politics in Poland,” and “The Surprising Right-Wing Relevance of the Russian Revolution.” He is currently finishing a book titled “Red Pill Politics: Fascism and Right-Wing Populism.”

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine just before dawn on 24 February 2022, it marked his latest and most overt attempt to brutally conquer the country and reshaped the world order. Christopher Miller, the Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and the foremost journalist covering the country, was there on the ground when the first Russian missiles struck and troops stormed over the border. But the seeds of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West were sown more than a decade earlier.

This is the definitive, inside story of its long fight for freedom. Told through Miller’s personal experiences, vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with unforgettable characters, The War Came to Us takes readers on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine’s modern history. From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas in the far east to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea, where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine’s peninsula, to the bloody battlefields where Cossacks roamed before the Kremlin’s warlords ruled with iron fists; and through the horror and destruction wrought by Russian forces in Bucha, Bakhmut, Mariupol, and beyond.

With candor, wit and sensitivity, Miller captures Ukraine in all its glory: vast, defiant, resilient, and full of wonder. A breathtaking narrative that is at times both poignant and inspiring, The War Came to Us is the story of an American who fell in love with a foreign place and its people – and witnessed them do extraordinary things to escape the long shadow of their former imperial ruler and preserve their independence.

Contrary to Putin’s expectations, most Ukrainians responded to Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine by a stronger attachment to their country and nation. One element of this attachment is an embrace of the national language at both the symbolic and communicative levels. Not only did Ukrainians come to love their language more than before, but they also started to speak it more often in their everyday lives. Or so they say.

Volodymyr Kulyk is Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has also taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and other Western scholarly institutions. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity as well as political and media discourse in contemporary Ukraine, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Professor Kulyk is the author of four books, the latest of which is Movna polityka v bahatomovnykh kraïnakh: Zakordonnyi dosvid ta ioho prydatnist’ dlia Ukraïny (Language Policies in Multilingual Countries: Foreign Experience and Its Relevance to Ukraine) that was published in Kyiv in 2021. Currently he is an Adjunct Professor, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University.

Mutations of “Lenin” The Sacred Core of Sovereignty: Soviet, Post-Soviet, Anti-Soviet

Alexei Yurchak is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. His interests include political anthropology, linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, anthropology of the
image and Soviet and post-Soviet studies. He is the author of the award-winning book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. He is currently finishing a book on the political, scientific and aesthetic histories of Lenin’s body that has been maintained by a unique laboratory science for a century.

Józef Piłsudski, Founding Father of Modern Poland, and his Plan for Ukrainian Independence

Joshua D. Zimmerman is Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, where he holds the Eli & Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies and East European Jewish History. He is the author of Józef Piłsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland(Harvard, 2022), The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945(Cambridge, 2015), which appeared in Polish translation in 2018, and Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914 (Wisconsin, 2004). He is also editor of two contributed volumes: Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (2005), and Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath (2003). Zimmerman’s articles in the popular press have appeared in The Washington Post, Politico, The Daily Beast, The Times of Israel, The Kyiv Post, Engelsberg Ideas, and Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw).