The seminars explore this region in the present and past times, through lenses of a broad range of disciplines and methodologies.
These talks are held on Zoom and take place in the afternoon at 15:00 Helsinki time (UTC +3), unless stated otherwise. The presentations are followed by comments given by Aleksanteri Institute’s researchers and scholars from among the Visiting Fellow alumni, and a Q & A session. See below for details and register to the sessions!
Aleksanteri Alumni Talks continue along with the Visiting Fellows Research Seminars that feature ongoing research by scholars whom we are hosting at the University of Helsinki within the frame of the Visiting Fellows Programme.
Many of our online seminars are recorded and you can watch the Alumni Talk videos on our YouTube channel. Most recordings are available for the time being while some may be available only for a two-week period.
Abstract
This Alumni talk discusses our newly launched project Sensing as a Refugee: Vulnerable Bodies on the Move, supported by Kone Foundation (2023-2026). The project considers the experience of refugeehood and forced migration primarily as a bodily experience and addresses the current wave of war-caused migration to Finland from the perspective of the vulnerable body. It integrates scientific, practical, and artistic methods to explore the bodily adaptation of refugees with chronic illnesses to the new reality.
The research is theoretically informed by the phenomenology of the body and the conception of new materiality that focuses on the interdependence of the body and the environment. We will articulate and discuss our anxiety about sensitivity of the fieldwork and the need for carefully designed methods of communication with traumatized people.
The project has a practical dimension and aims at researching policy solutions, institutional design of care provision, challenges, and outcomes. The project also plans an art part, and in the talk, we will share our first thoughts on the collaboration of the social sciences and the arts for the goals of our project.
Venue: Online and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing (max capacity in the room is 20 participants)
Register here to get the seminar link
Visiting Fellow Alumni Elena Bogdanova and Anna Tarasenko will be joined by the other two members of the project, Elena Nikiforova, and Tatiana Slobodianyk.
Elena Nikiforova is associated with the Centre for Independent Social Research in Helsinki and has published on borders, memory, and migration. Her current research interests include the sociology of space and migration; studies of borders and border communities; the studies of neighbourship, and the Anthropocene. Elena has degrees from the Limerick and St. Petersburg State universities. She currently lives in Athens, Greece, but conducts research in Estonia, Finland, and Russia.
Tatiana Slobodianyk’s experience and education combine health care and art (photography and video production). She holds medical education (Medical College, Kremenchuk, Ukraine) and has six years of experience in a maternity hospital in Kharkiv. Her media and art expertise were obtained at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts and Odesa Theater University. Tatiana also worked as a leader of the department of video-content production in the Media holding Finansoff (Ukraine). Tatiana has a substantial art portfolio and has taken part in Ukrainian and Finnish documentary festivals. In winter-spring 2023, Tatiana was a resident of the Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP).
About the Speakers
Dr. Elena Bogdanova is a Research Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. She has previously been an Associate Professor at the European University at St. Petersburg. She received Candidate of Sciences degree in sociology in 2006 and a PhD degree from the University of Eastern Finland in 2021. Bogdanova has published nearly 60 articles. Her research interests include the sociology of aging, research of justice and regulative systems, Soviet society and post-socialist transformations, and qualitative research methods. Bogdanova is author of Complaints to the Authorities in Russia: A Trap between Tradition and Legal Modernization (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Communism and Consumerism: The Soviet Alternative to the Affluent Society (Brill, 2015). Elena was an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow in 2011.
Dr. Anna Tarasenko is a Research Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. She holds a PhD in Political Science. She is an expert on the study of social policy and institutions in Russia, using both qualitative and quantitative methods of empirical analysis. She is principal investigator of the project “Sensing as a Refugee: Vulnerable Bodies on the Move” (2023-2026). Anna has recently published the article “Outsourcing Elderly Care to Private Companies in Russia: (non)Compliance and Creative Compliance as Responses to the Principal-Agent Problem” in East European Politics. Her co-authored and co-edited research has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies and in the Routledge Advances in Social Work series. Anna was an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow in 2015.
Alumni Elena Bogdanova and Anna Tarasenko will be joined by the other two members of the project, Elena Nikiforova, and Tatiana Slobodianyk.
Abstract
Business is not expected to provide public goods and care about the wider society’s needs, but in the war-torn Ukraine it often does. In the territories that have been less affected by hostilities and occupation, a large number of Ukrainian companies demonstrate remarkable resilience by continuously adapting their production processes and logistics to meet the dynamic challenges of the war. The adaptation strategies of some companies go far beyond their commercial interests and have a strong social component. They prioritize humans first and put profit second. Despite making financial losses and without any state command from the top, these Ukrainian companies of every size continue to pay salaries, offer additional benefits and services to their employees and local communities, and at the same time provide humanitarian aid and donations to support the people and the Ukrainian army. In doing so, these companies contribute to a broad societal resilience and develop their autonomy not only from the state but also from the particularistic interests of their economic sector or region. The corporate interests thus align with the national ones in a bottom-up way. But why do some Ukrainian businesses respond to the war by providing assistance to the broader society and the state, while others act much more ruthlessly and with a narrow profit-oriented logic?
The talk analyses the various patterns of adaptation strategies to Russia’s full-scale invasion that Ukrainian companies exhibit. Based on my current research, I will provide several explanations for the development of business autonomy in Ukraine’s corporate world. Accurate understanding of the roots of Ukrainian business autonomy will not only contribute to political economy and business studies but can also inform Ukraine’s future reconstruction plans.
Comments: Dr. Elena Denisova-Schmidt, Research Associate, University of St. Gallen (HSG); Research Fellow, Center for International Higher Education, Boston College
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Register here for the Zoom seminar link
Inna Melnykovska is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Central European University. She received a doctoral degree in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, held visiting positions at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and was awarded the Strategy and Policy Fellowship of the Smith Richardson Foundation.
She specializes in International and Comparative Political Economy with an emphasis on the interaction of global, regional and domestic forces in the shaping of modern political regimes and economic systems in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. She is an expert on the dynamics of state-business relations in the region (foci: Russia and Ukraine). Her research has been published in Journal of Common Market Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, and Post-Soviet Affairs, among others.
Inna was an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow in 2022.
This Alumni talk builds on my book Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia (University of California Press, 2020) and discusses the current events and dynamics around the topic. While migration has become an all-important topic of discussion around the globe, mainstream literature on migrants' legal adaptation and integration has focused on case studies of immigrant communities in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt to a new legal environment in the ever-growing hybrid political regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. This book takes up the case of Russia—an archetypal hybrid political regime and the third largest recipients of migrants worldwide—and investigates how Central Asian migrant workers produce new forms of informal governance and legal order. Migrants use the opportunities provided by a weak rule-of-law and a corrupt political system to navigate the repressive legal landscape and to negotiate—using informal channels—access to employment and other opportunities that are hard to obtain through the official legal framework of their host country. This lively ethnography presents new theoretical perspectives for studying immigrant legal incorporation in similar political contexts.
Comments: Sherzod Eraliev, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Rustam Urinboyev is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University. He is an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar, studying migration, corruption, governance and penal institutions in the context of Russia, Central Asia and Turkey. He holds a PhD in sociology of law from Lund University. In the past, he worked as a senior researcher in the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, a visiting postdoc at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen and a postdoctoral fellow at the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia (2020), published by the University of California Press. Rustam was an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow in 2017.
This Alumni talk will discuss my forthcoming book Politics of Uncertainty: the United States, the Baltic Question and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (OUP, 2023). Thirty years after the Soviet collapse Politics of Uncertainty investigates the interplay between international and domestic dynamics in the Soviet disintegration process. Based on extensive multilingual archival research, this book recovers the voices of local actors in Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius in its examination of the triangular relations between Washington, Moscow, and Baltic independence movements.
Occupied and annexed by the USSR in 1940, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the first Soviet republics to push the limits of Perestroika and seek independence. The Baltic problem, at first seemingly minor, increasingly gained international visibility and by 1990 risked derailing issues that mattered in the eyes of both Soviet and American leaders—the transformation of the Soviet state and transformation of the European order.
During my talk, I will analyze Soviet and American policies towards Baltic claims for independence highlighting how at times of deep historical change the disruption of existing power structures causes uncertainty that limits the agency of the powerful and opens windows of opportunity for those seen as marginal.
Comments: Markku Kangaspuro, Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Una Bergmane is Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. She holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris. In the past, she has been a Fox International Fellow at Yale University, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki University (Faculty of Social Sciences, Political History Discipline). Una was an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow in 2018.
Europeans have been showing robust solidarity with Ukraine for over two hundred days, and higher education and research institutions across the EU and North America are no exception. Several international initiatives coordinated by volunteers have been founded specifically to help Ukrainian students and scholars. In addition, many universities rechanneled their resources to create new positions and fellowships for Ukrainians. Finally, various organizations and programs, such as Fulbright or MSCA, pulled up their resources to accept more Ukrainians this year. Now that some time has passed, at the beginning of the new academic year, it is a good moment to look back and reflect on what has proved efficient and where there is still much to be done.
This alumni talk will engage with some challenges and problems that displaced Ukrainian scholars and students face in Ukraine and abroad as well as will address some of the best practices up to the date. Instead of being too critical or overly optimistic regarding what has and what has not been done, the goal is to prompt a safe and constructive discussions about the ways in which fellow scholars in Finland and in other countries can support Ukrainian academics and scholars at risk.
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Maryna Shevtsova is a Ukrainian political scientist and LGBTQ rights activist. She is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a Senior FWO Fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium. She has PhD in Political Science from Humboldt University, Berlin. In the past, she was a Fulbright scholar (University of Florida) and a Swedish Institute Fellow (Lund University). She also had visiting fellowships with the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, and with the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her book, LGBTI Politics and Value Change in Ukraine and Turkey: Exporting Europe? was published with Routledge in 2021.
She is a co-founder of Equal Opportunities Platform, a Dnipro-based Ukrainian NGO working towards combatting discrimination and promoting gender equality, and a Board member of AtGender, European Feminist Research Network. Her research centers on sexual diversity and equality, homophobia, on migration, on democratization and social struggle in Central Eastern European region and Turkey. She is also involved in three initiatives helping researchers from Ukraine: UGS - Ukrainian Global scholars, UGU, Ukrainian Global Universit and ScienceforUkraine. Maryna joined the Aleksanteri Institute as an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow in August-September 2022.
Mykhailo Romanov is a Ukrainian scholar of penitentiary law and a prisoners’ rights activist. He is an Associate Professor at the Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University and at the Poltava University of Economics and Trade, and about to join the Aleksanteri Institute as an Academy of Finland funded researcher. He has PhD in Penal Law from the Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University and is an author of over forty scientific publications including four monographs and two co-authored books. He is also a penitentiary expert for the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG) and a temporary member of the working group on drafting the law on penitentiary system in Ukraine.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrated its one-hundredth birthday in 2021. Its durability poses a twofold question: How has the party survived thus far? And is its survival formula sustainable in the future? My forthcoming book, The Adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party (Cambridge University Press, 2022) argues that the CCP has displayed a continuous capacity for adaptation, most recently in response to the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the collapse of communism in Europe. As the CCP evaluated the lessons of 1989, it identified four threats to single-party rule: economic stagnation; socioeconomic discontent; ideological subversion; and political pluralism. These threats have led to adaptive responses: allowing more private activity; expansion of the social safety net; promotion of indigenous cultural production; and rival incorporation into the party. Although these responses have enabled the CCP to survive thus far, each is reaching its limit. As adaptation stagnates, the strategy has been to increase repression, which creates doubt about the ongoing viability of single-party rule.
Comments: Catherine Owen, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Exeter
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, University of Helsinki
Martin K. Dimitrov is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies at Tulane University. His books include Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013); The Political Logic of Socialist Consumption (Ciela Publishers, 2018); Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022) and The Adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022).
A tension exists within contemporary practices of American and European diplomacy, which formally acknowledge a Westphalian logic of state sovereignty but nonetheless violate this logic on a causal basis. This paper analyzes one example of this phenomenon. In Macedonia (now North Macedonia), American and European diplomats have long held a prominent role in the country’s politics. On the one hand, these diplomats routinely signal the sovereign responsibility of the Macedonian state over political decision-making. At the same time, through media interviews and press conferences, these diplomats also publicly broadcast their policy preferences for Macedonia and thereby intervene in political decision-making. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the public speech of US and EU diplomats in Macedonia/North Macedonia and analyzes the rhetorical strategies by which they simultaneously assert and compromise the country’s sovereign right over political decision-making. As the paper argues, this dynamic fueled perpetual anxiety about the character and quality of Macedonia’s sovereignty.
Both Macedonian political leaders and US and EU diplomats thus engaged in recurrent assertions and evaluations of Macedonian sovereignty. However, rather than defusing public anxieties about Macedonia’s sovereignty, these political performances only renewed and intensified them. In this context, the question of sovereignty functioned as a trap, that is, as an ever anxious space of sovereign performances that could not possibly satisfy the contradictory expectations placed upon them.
Comments: Senior Researcher Brendan Humphreys, Aleksanteri Institute
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Andrew Graan is a Researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. A cultural and linguistic anthropologist, his research examines the politics of public spheres in North Macedonia. He earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2010. His current project, “Brand Nationalism: Neoliberal Statecraft and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia,” sponsored by the Kone Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation, examines how the coordinated efforts to regulate public communication that are found in nation branding projects constitute a wider program of economic and social governance.
His most recent essay, “Seeing Double: Political Polarization and the Identity Politics in (North) Macedonia, before and after the Prespa Agreement,” appears in The End of the Macedonian Question? Identity Politics after the Prespa Agreement, edited by Vasiliki Neofotistos. His article, “What was the Project? Reflections on Genre and the Project Form,” is forthcoming in The Journal of Cultural Economy. A full list of his publications can be found here.
This Alumni talk will discuss the findings of Ghodsee’s recent co-authored book, Taking Stock of Shock, Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2021)
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than 400 million people suddenly found themselves in a new reality, a dramatic transition from state socialist and centrally planned workers' states to liberal democracy (in most cases) and free markets. Thirty years later, post-socialist citizens remain sharply divided on the legacies of transition. Was it a success that produced great progress after a short recession, or a socio-economic catastrophe foisted on the East by Western capitalists? Taking Stock of Shock aims to uncover the truth using a unique, interdisciplinary investigation into the social consequences of transition—including the rise of authoritarian populism and xenophobia. Showing that economic, demographic, sociological, political scientific, and ethnographic research produce contradictory results based on different disciplinary methods and data, Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein triangulate the results. They find that both the J-curve model, which anticipates sustained growth after a sharp downturn, and the "disaster capitalism" perspective, which posits that neoliberalism led to devastating outcomes, have significant basis in fact. While substantial percentages of the populations across a variety of post-socialist countries enjoyed remarkable success, prosperity, and progress, many others suffered an unprecedented socio-economic catastrophe. Ghodsee and Orenstein conclude that the promise of transition still remains elusive for many and offer policy ideas for overcoming negative social and political consequences.
Comments: Linda Cook, Professor emerita, Brown University
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member in the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of ten books including, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press, 2010); The Left Side of History; World War Two and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe (Duke University Press, 2015); Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th Century Communism, (Duke University Press, 2017), Second World, Second Sex (Duke University Press, 2019), and Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions with Mitchell A. Orenstein (Oxford University Press, 2021). In 2012, she won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies, and she was a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2016.
Russia’s Civilizational Politics: Ideological Discourses and Analytical Perspectives
Maslovskiy:
The concept of civilizational politics has been elaborated in the field of international relations but recently it has also been used in research on internal politics of several states. Studies of Russian civilizational politics mostly draw on the constructionist approach and focus on ideological discourses. The talk will first of all address the studies of ‘civilizationism’ as an ideological current. I will argue that this line of research can be complemented with ideas borrowed from civilizational analysis in historical sociology. In particular, the talk will demonstrate that the multiple modernities perspective allows us to re-consider the issue of historical legacies in post-Soviet Russia. The presentation will substantiate using the concept of interpretation of modernity for research on Russian civilizational politics. Thus, different ideological ‘ecosystems’ in today’s Russia (Laruelle 2017) actually develop their own interpretations of modernity which may include civilizational traits. The talk is based on my recent publications as well as on work in progress which is funded by the RFBR grant no. 19-011-00950.
Mjør:
In Russia, “civilizationism,” that is a view of the world as made up of separate, distinct civilizations, became popular already in the 1990s, and included both the production of new texts on “Russian civilization” and an active engagement with the classics of Danilevsky, Spengler and Toynbee. The civilizational paradigm was mainly advanced by oppositional figures and groups critical of the Yeltsin regime and more generally of Westernism and globalization. In the new millennium, it eventually became mainstream, having been advanced by both the Kremlin, regime-supportive circles as well as for more opportunistic purposes. My talk will focus on how the civilizational discourse of contemporary Russia can be understood as a combination of several classical identity-forming topoi – anti-Westernism, Slavophile notions about Russian spirituality, Russia’s imperial legacy as “genuine” multinationality formed around an ethnically Russian core – with more recent concepts from the political vocabulary: statehood, anti-globalism and multipolarity. The appeal of the civilizational paradigm, it will be argued, lies in its holistic ability to combine various notions of Russia, while highlighting internal coherence, external difference, and global significance. Moreover, it involves the story of how this Russia was challenged by competing, “Western” conceptions in the 1990s that falsely described it as a “national state” and not a “civilization.”
Comments: Markku Kivinen, Professor Emeritus Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Mikhail Maslovskiy is Leading Researcher at the Sociological Institute of the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St.-Petersburg. His research focuses on contemporary social theory, historical sociology, and political sociology. In particular, he discusses modernization processes in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia from the multiple modernities perspective.
His recent publications include: Maslovskiy, M. (2019) Russia against Europe: A Clash of Interpretations of Modernity? European Journal of Social Theory, 22(4): 533-547; Maslovskiy, M. (2020) Contemporary Civilizational Analysis and Russian Sociology. In: S. Turoma & K. Mjør (eds.) Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media and Academia. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 206-220; Maslovskiy, M. (2021) Posleslovie [Afterword]. In: Arnason, J. Tsivilizatsionnye patterny i istoricheskie protsessy [Civilizational Patterns and Historical Processes]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, pp. 290-299. Mikhail was a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2009 and 2013.
Kåre Johan Mjør (PhD) is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Bergen and a research librarian at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. He was a visiting fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2013, the collaboration with which has resulted in the edited volume Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia (2020, co-edited with Sanna Turoma, published by Routledge as part of the series Studies in Contemporary Russia). Research interests include ideologies in contemporary Russia, Russian intellectual history, philosophy, and literature. Kåre was a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2013.
What role is Alexei Navalny and his team likely to play in the future of oppositional politics in Russia? With Navalny himself behind bars, and his team and supporters facing an ongoing, unprecedented crackdown, has the Kremlin successfully removed the threat posed by the man and his movement? Ben Noble will address these and other questions, drawing on his recent book on Navalny – Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? (Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press) – co-authored with Jan Matti Dollbaum and Morvan Lallouet. Ben was a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2018.
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/navalny/ – use discount code NAVALNY25 for 25% off when ordering directly from Hurst
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/navalny-9780197611708?cc=us&lang=en – use discount code ADISTA5 for 30% off when ordering directly from OUP.
Comments: Jussi Lassila, Senior Researcher, Finnish Institute of International Affairs
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Dr Ben Noble is Associate Professor in Russian Politics at University College London, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), and a Senior Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Ben’s research focusses on authoritarianism, legislative politics, comparative politics, and Russian domestic politics. He regularly contributes to media discussions about contemporary Russian domestic politics, with bylines and commentary in general-audience outlets, including CNN, Newsweek, The Telegraph, The Washington Post ‘Monkey Cage’, El Mundo, Vedomosti, BBC News Russian, and The Moscow Times. He tweets as @Ben_H_Noble
Beginning in the1960s, the public celebration of the World War II victory in the Soviet Union acquired the characteristics of a state-sanctioned cult, which included ubiquitous monuments, commemorative rituals, and mass media productions devised, in part, to legitimate the aging political elite. Even amid the USSR’s collapse, the war remained, in the words of one Western chronicler at the time, the only “unquestionable victory of the regime.”
How did the war victory become the centerpiece of late-socialist commemorative ritual in the USSR? This paper explores the origins of the war cult, tracing it to ideological debates that emerged in the aftermath of Stalin’s death and subsequent denunciation. The dismantling of Stalin’s cult of personality exposed longstanding tensions between Russocentric and “internationalist” conceptions of the war victory, which had previously been subsumed to the Stalin cult. The paper argues that the war’s large-scale veneration developed as a means of diffusing Russophile and neo-Stalinist resistance to Khrushchev’s ideological project of “returning to the Soviet present” and of forging of a supra-ethnic, “Soviet” community of people. As many Russophile intellectuals grew concerned about the preservation of unique ethnic identities, histories, and hierarchy in the face of Khrushchev’s agenda, ideologists attempted to forestall this crisis by appealing to the war victory as the only mythology capable of reconciling Russian nationalist-oriented priorities with the ideological objectives of the party leadership.
Thus, the paper contends, the war cult that arose under Leonid Brezhnev was less a break with the commemorative politics of the Khrushchev era than their fulfillment.
Comments: Markku Kangaspuro, Director Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Jonathan Brunstedt is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on nationalism and cultural memory in the Soviet Union and wider world, with a particular emphasis on the representation and commemoration of war. Among his publications is The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Brunstedt is currently a Title VIII Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and was previously a visiting fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, in 2019.
Despite a growing number of studies featuring "informality" in their title, including many from the post-socialist region, little has been done to reach a consensus on what informality means, how to measure it and more generally to develop a widely agreed and shared theorization. A significant number of studies rely on intuitive understandings of the phenomenon, often intended as “the opposite of formal”, contributing to topical confusion rather than better defining what informality may be. The article that this seminar talk is based on, surveys extant literature on informality from a cross disciplinary perspective, tracing its origins and evolutions since the middle of the XX century. It then engages with the vast literature on informality that has emerged from post-socialist spaces, exploring the growing number of studies on the region to identify possible contributions of Eurasian scholars to global debates in informality-related fields, including corruption studies, shadow economy, informal governance and everyday construction of the political. By cross-comparing regional and world literature, I will attempt to provide a coherent framework for delineating and understanding “informality studies”, outlining its main characteristics to better understand the phenomenon, its applicability, and its boundaries. I will conclude with a call for more attention to the political dimensions of informality and ways in which measurement of informality can be used both as a proxy for quality of governance and to better investigate state-citizen relations. Being more visible in spheres of public life where a state fails to regulate, or regulates without taking into account the ultimate needs of society, informality could be used as a lenses to identify, and study, alternative forms of governance in a fashion already pointed out by feminist geographers.
Comments: Dr. Elena Denisova-Schmidt, Research Associate, University of St.Gallen (HSG), Research Fellow, Center for International Higher Education (CIHE), Boston College
Abel Polese (Dublin City University; Ritsumeikan University; Al Farabi Kazakh National University; Tallinn University) is a researcher, trainer, writer, manager and fundraiser. His interest in theory and practice of development led him to work across disciplines, conduct research and design interventions in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Thanks to his experience with the Global Young Academy, he deepened his interest for mental health in academia and support for scholars at risk and researchers from the Global South. He is the author of “The SCOPUS Diaries and the (il)logics of Academic Survival: A Short Guide to Design Your Own Strategy and Survive Bibliometrics, Conferences, and Unreal Expectations in Academia”, a reflection on academic life, research careers and the choices and obstacles young scholars face at the beginning of their career.
His recent publications include
Abel was Visiting Fellow in 2019 and is the Coordinating PI of two Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions projects with the Aleksanteri Institute as one of the partners: a doctoral training project “Mapping Uncertainties, Challenges and Future Opportunities of Emerging Markets: Informal Barriers, Business Environments and Future Trends in Eastern Europe, The Caucasus and Central Asia” (MARKETS), and a research staff exchange scheme titled “An exploration into the changing nature of business environments, informal barriers and emerging markets in the post-Soviet region”.
‘Cultural branding’ meets feminism in Russia: Reebok’s #BeMoreHuman campaign
Reebok, the global sportswear and footwear brand, launched its #BeMoreHuman campaign in Russia in 2019. The campaign turned to be controversial and caused 'online firestorm' among the consumers, marketing professionals, fashion industry representatives, activists, influencers, and other actors. The use of acute social issues in advertising campaigns by brands is known as ‘cultural branding’. In case of the Reebok’s campaign, the company offers a particular view on gender identity. Yet, the gender identity has a contingent character. We show how and why this contingent character of gender identity should be taken into account when global brands enter various national markets. Drawing from poststructuralist discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) and applying it to the discussion around Reebok’s #BeMoreHuman campaign in Russia, the presentation will analyze the online firestorms that it triggered. The discussion will revolve around different meanings of gender identity that various actors articulate. The talk is based on a work in progress for an article co-authored with Tatiana Romashko from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Comments: Olga Dovbysh, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Olga Gurova is an Associate Professor in consumption studies at Aalborg University in Denmark. Her research interests are consumption studies, fashion, entrepreneurship, sustainability and qualitative methods of social research. She is the author of the books Fashion and the Consumer Revolution in Contemporary Russia (Routledge, 2015) and Soviet Underwear: Between Ideology and Everyday Life (New Literary Observer, 2008, in Russian). Her articles were published in Journal of Consumer Culture, Consumption, Markets and Culture, International Journal of Consumer Studies, Consumer Culture Theory: Research in Consumer Behavior, Cultural Studies, International Journal of Fashion Studies, The Design Journal, Fashion Practice and Fashion Theory (Russian Edition), among others. Gurova enjoys experimenting with unconventional methods of research dissemination, such as research-based and artistic films, and with innovative teaching methods.
Olga was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2018.
Energy Threat or Energy Temptation? Russian Energy Chains from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union
Scholars have often asked: how has Russia used energy as a weapon and element of threat against post-Soviet states such as Ukraine. Yet we cannot understand the threat of Russia’s energy power without also understanding the temptation Russian energy also means for many within these states --from the temptation of corruption-related profits to transportation fee income to subsidized prices-- benefits that are acquired through participation in the value chains of Russian energy exports. It is this tension between energy threat and temptation in the arch between Vladivostok and Brussels that creates the puzzle that the book presented here -- Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021) -- seeks to solve.
Following three energy molecules (a natural gas molecule, an oil molecule, and a coal molecule) traveling from production jn Siberia to final use in Germany via Ukraine, the book analyzes how the physical characteristics of different types of energy, by shaping how they can be transported, distributed, and even stolen, affect how each is used―not only technically but also politically. Both a geopolitical travelogue of the journey of three fossil fuels across continents and an analysis of technology’s role in energy politics, this book forces us to rethink our view of “energy power” and how it can be used. (For more details see https://cup.columbia.edu/book/russian-energy-chains/9780231197496).
Comments: Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, Professor in Russian Environmental Studies, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Margarita Zavadsakaya, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Margarita M. Balmaceda (PhD, Princeton University) is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. Concurrently, she heads the Study Group on “Energy materiality: Infrastructure, Spatiality and Power” at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg (Germany). She is currently on sabbatical as Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Her research analyzes the connections between natural resources, international relationships and political development, with a special expertise in energy politics (oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, renewables), steel and the metallurgical sector in Ukraine, the former USSR, and the EU.
Her books include: The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (U. of Toronto Press, 2013), Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus’ Impending Crisis (CEU Press, 2014), and Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2008).
She has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungary, and Germany, and was in residence at the Aleksanteri Institute as Visiting Fellow in 2009 and as Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow in 2010-2011.
Her new book, Russian Energy Chains: the Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union will be published by Columbia University Press in April 2021
Stuck in Transition: Rebranding Post-socialism as the Global East?
Post-socialism as the main frame for understanding change in countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the FSU has been criticised as no longer relevant and oriented towards the past rather than the future. Yet, a new conceptual frame is still in the making. As diverging transition paths have led to variegated outcomes, including democracy, authoritarianism, and some ‘in between’ cases, the early-stage optimism gave way to growing scepticism about the validity of the transition paradigm. The multiplicity of post-socialisms does not fit easily into any overarching concept such as ‘transition’, ‘democratisation’, or ‘democracy with adjectives’. Hence, there have been attempts to rethink, revive, or rebrand the debates seemingly stuck ‘in transition’.
Human geographers also contribute to these debates by seeking to conceptually frame this part of the world that was defined as the ‘Soviet Bloc’ or ‘the Second World’. Attempts to find a new synthesis have formed around three arguments. First, framing diverse processes in the former socialist countries as part of totalising process of the installation of the global neoliberal order (Golubchikov 2016). Second, developing a post-colonial critique of transition and expecting post-socialist societies to “speak back” to the hegemonic core (Borén and Young 2016). Third, conceptualising the Global East as a de-territorialised phenomenon (Tuvikene 2016), an “epistemic space – a liminal space in-between North and South” (Müller 2020). While these conceptualisations try to overcome the limitations of the transition paradigm and offer new promising perspectives, many questions remain unsolved. Can democracy and market be a universal ideal? Can dividing the world into the Global North, South, and East be a way forward? What can/should be expected from countries ‘stuck in transition’?
Comments: Professor Sanna Turoma, Tampere University; Aleksanteri Institute colleague from 2009 to 2020. See Sanna’s research profile here
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Dr Nadir Kinossian is Senior Researcher in the Department of Regional Geography of Europe at Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig, Germany (https://leibniz-ifl.de/en/). Nadir’s research interests include regional development, spatial policy, urban governance, and the post-socialist city. Currently, Nadir leads ‘Agents of Change in Old-industrial Regions in Europe’ (ACORE) project (https://acore-project.eu/), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. He is also Co-investigator in the ORA project ‘Beyond Left Behind Places: Understanding Demographic and Socio-economic Change in Peripheral Regions in France, Germany and the UK’.
Nadir was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2012 and 2019.
Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000 to 1900: The Power of Magic
In her talk Dr. Worobec will provide an overview of what the systematic study of witchcraft laws, references, and eventually trials in Russia and Ukraine between 1000 and 1900 reveal about the evolving political ramifications of witchcraft beliefs, the place of magical practices in daily life, and the extraordinary power of magical words. She will highlight differences and similarities between Ukrainian and Russian practices as well as the ways in which Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft persecutions differed from their European counterparts. The talk is based on Worobec's latest publication, Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook (Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020), co-edited with Valerie A. Kivelson (University of Michigan).
Comments: Anatoly Pinsky, Visiting Professor, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2016)
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Christine D. Worobec is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of History at Northern Illinois University, USA. She has published widely on nineteenth-century Russian and Ukrainian peasants, women and gender issues, and religious history. Her monographs, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton 1991) and Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press 2001), won the Heldt Prize. She is the recipient of the 2008 Association for Slavic Women's Studies' Outstanding Achievement Award as well as the 2017 Association for Slavic, East Europe, and Eurasian Studies' Distinguished Contributions Award. Her most recent publication is Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook (Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020), co-edited with Valerie A. Kivelson. Christine was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2011.
Regional Governors as Putin's Agents or Stakeholders? The story that COVID-19 pandemic tells about center-regional relations in Russia
The COVID-19 crisis has provided an opportunity to re-evaluate how federal relations work in today’s authoritarian Russia. In particular, the talk will demonstrate that the crisis has confirmed that the regional governors are an integral part of maintaining stability of the non-democratic regime in Russia. Because the whole system, and thereby the political careers of the incumbent governors, depend on Putin's popularity, the governors have an interest in maintaining this popularity – even at the expense of their own popularity in the eyes of their regional populations. This, in its turn, means that they are in fact not just agents, but also stakeholders in maintaining the authoritarian status quo in Russia.
During the course of the pandemic, regional governors have demonstrated their loyalty and willingness to shield President Putin from taking political responsibility for unpopular measures associated with COVID-19. Further, the talk will show that the tasks that Moscow assigns to the regions during the pandemic are consistent with the goals of maintaining regime stability but create no incentives for improving the quality of governance in the regions.
The most recent manifestation of the regional authorities’ loyalty was a large-scaled campaign to prevent youth protests launched in response to January 2021 protests in support of Alexei Navalny.
Comments: Vladimir Gel’man, Professor of Russian Politics, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
The recording will be available later.
Irina Busygina is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Higher School of Economics at Saint Petersburg. Her research interests include comparative federalism and regionalization, Russian domestic and foreign policy, and Russia-EU relations. Her latest publications are ‘Russia, Post-Soviet Integration, and the EAEU: The Balance between Domination and Cooperation’, Problems of Post-Communism, 2020 (with Mikhail Filippov, published online in September, DOI: 10.1080/10758216.2020.1803755; ‘The Hows and Whys of Reforming Russian Federalism’, Russian Politics & Law (Published online August 18, 2020, DOI: 10.1080/10611940.2019.1784624; ‘Russian Federalism: Informal Elite Games Against Formal Democratic Institutions’, PONARS Memo, N 656, June, 2020; and Russia-EU Relations and the Common Neighborhood: Coercion Versus Authority. UK: Routledge, 2018. Irina was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2014 and Academy of Finland-funded Visiting Researcher in 2015 and in 2016.
Varieties of Russian Activism today
In this presentation we reflect on a critical question in Russian politics that lies at the heart of our co-edited book project for Indiana University Press forthcoming in 2021: how do Russians act together to pursue shared goals through civic activism? This question demonstrates our break with existing studies in which Russian society is alternatively depicted as either passive—content with the strong leadership of President Putin—or nationalist and supportive of new Cold War policies. On the contrary, our contributing authors show Russians acting together to educate, inform, or engage fellow citizens, providing new insight into the continual change occurring in Russian politics and society. Common themes that link our studies are the accumulation of shared grievances, the role of identity and shared information, and the influence of opportunities, and resources. Considered together we highlight the dynamic nature of Russian society and civic organization as social forces gain experience and resources to make demands of governmental, economic, and cultural leaders.
Comments: Margarita Zavadskaya, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Jeremy Morris is Associate Professor in Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His latest book is Everyday Postsocialism: Working-class Communities in the Russian Margins, published by Springer (2016). Jeremy writes a popular academic blog about Russia at postsocialism.org. He was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2014.
Andrey Semenov is Associate Professor of Political Science and Senior Researcher at the Center for Comparative History and Politics (Perm State University, Russia). His most recent research on mobilization, opposition and civic activism in Russia has appeared in Russian Politics, Social Movements Studies, and Demokratizatsiya. Andrey was Academy of Finland-funded Visiting Researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2019.
Regina Smyth is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and a 2020-2021 Wilson Center Fellow. She studies the evolution of state-society relations and state responsiveness in autocratic and transitional regimes, focusing on elections, protest, and legislative decision-making. Her most recent book is Elections, Protest, and Autocratic Regime Stability: Russia 2008-2020 published by Cambridge University Press. Smyth's working papers and her commentary can be found at her website: www.reginasmyth.com. Regina was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2014.
Counter-Enlightenment populism in post-socialist European Union: ‘Village-fascists’ in Slovakia
Dr. Juraj Buzalka will address the post-socialist populist movements in East Central Europe, and in Slovakia in particular. In his recent ethnographic research, Buzalka probed into the phenomenon that he calls village fascism, the radical version of Counter-Enlightenment populism. He shows how the combination of socialist modernization, agrarian legacies of pre-socialist and socialist eras, mobilized by the politics of memory, produce political movement challenging the liberal European project. The presentation focuses on the relatively prosperous citizens of post-socialist European Union who show an ardent support for radical politics. He employs a perspective of ‘cultural economy of protest’ that helps to understand the paradox of the European project as an actual societal progress and at the same time a cultural trauma for post-peasants, the bulk of post-socialist citizens who are connected to the countryside and feel that real power in society shall be defined and based there.
Comments: Katalin Miklóssy, Head of Discipline in Eastern European and Balkan Studies, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute.
Juraj Buzalka is an Associate Professor of social anthropology at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. His research interests include anthropology of social and political movements, cultural economy, politics of memory, populism, politics of religion, particularly in the region of East Central Europe. He has just published his monograph Cultural Economy of Protest in Post-Socialist European Union: Village Fascists and their Rivals (Routledge 2020). His first monograph was Nation and Religion: The Politics of Commemoration in South-east Poland (Lit 2007). Juraj was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2009.
Neo-Eurasianism Kazakhstani-style: foreign policy, power and identity in the Nazarbayev era
Luca Anceschi researched for almost a decade the many ways in which ideas and constructs associated with Eurasia influenced the making of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy. This talk will present the key findings of this long-term research project, focusing mostly on the Nazarbaev era [1992-2019] while also shedding light on possible foreign policy avenues for post-Nazarbaev Kazakhstan.
The talk will illustrate the many narratives whereby the Nazarbayev regime articulated its visions for Eurasia and described Kazakhstan’s role in the wider Eurasian geopolitical space, touching upon the complex relationship that Kazakhstan established with Russia both bilaterally and within a series of multilateral organisations, including the highly controversial Eurasian Economic Union. Presenting the regime’s domestic power considerations as a key driver of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy-making will represent one of the talk’s main discussion points. The talk is based on Luca’s latest book, Analysing Kazakhstan’s Foreign Policy—Regime neo-Eurasianism in the Nazarbaev era (Routledge 2020).
Comments: Anna-Liisa Heusala, Head of Discipline in Russian and Eurasian Studies, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute
Moderator: Anna Korhonen, Head of International Affairs, Aleksanteri Institute
Luca Anceschi teaches Central Asian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he also edits Europe-Asia Studies. He is the author of Turkmenistan’s Foreign Policy–Positive Neutrality and the Consolidation of the Turkmen Regime (2009) and Analysing Kazakhstan’s Foreign Policy: Regime New-Eurasianism in the Nazarbaev Era (2020), both published by Routledge.
Anceschi was Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in 2015.