Abstract

Dissemination of waste recycling in the USSR is usually attributed to the second half of the 20th century, when Soviet economists fully realized the value of waste for the production of consumer goods. However, in the early Soviet Union, the use of waste was much broader than it appears to many researchers. Lack of many resources due to the World War I, the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War in Russia led to a rethinking the concept of waste and implementing widescale waste collecting programs. In the USSR in 1920s, rags were one of the most important types of waste which was demanded both by the domestic economy, particularly heavy industry, and export. In a country with a poor population, a shortage of consumer goods and limited access to them, real battles between rag pickers unfolded for the right to acquire rags. Using the case of the Ukrainian USSR, this talk will reveal the main actors in the market for collecting, buying, and selling rags, and the practices they used to fulfill the ever-growing plans of the Soviet economy. This research is based on the analysis of documents from Ukrainian archives, which have never before been investigated and introduced into scientific circulation.

Speaker: Tetiana Perga, Leading Researcher, Institute of World History,
National Academy of Science of Ukraine
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Chair: Sari Autio-Sarasmo, Senior University Lecturer, Vice-Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Online and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing
(max capacity in the room is 20 participants)

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Abstract

Early Stalinist show trials in the USSR represented for the political leadership a sort of interface between domestic and foreign policies. The systematic presence of the international dimension in these trials was influenced by ideological considerations that were central in the launching and realization of the Plan itself. At the same time, these trials were also used both as a means to mobilize European public opinion and as leverage in commercial negotiations with foreign powers. Indeed, during each trial, the charges were particularly focused on the countries with which the Soviet Union had pressing economic and financial issues to settle.

Based on the cross-analysis of Soviet and European sources, this talk will question this systematic and paradoxical coincidence of Soviet show trials during the First Five Year Plan, with ongoing international economic and commercial negotiations. I will argue that a multilevel comparative analysis of cases allows us to detect a recurrent scenario of Soviet action, that, rather than representing an example of blatant pressure on foreign counterparts, could be more neatly interpreted as a “management by crisis”.

Speaker: Anna Shapovalova, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bologna
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Chair: Anatoly Pinsky Visiting Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Venue: Online and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing
(max capacity in the room is 20 participants)

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Abstract

It is one of the common places of South East European and Balkan Studies that memory politics in the post-Yugoslav states fail to consolidate their cultures. Next to general problems in narrating and digesting the historical transformations of the last decades, revisionist and ethnically and religiously separatist movements complicate and undermine common memory politics and culture in the post-Yugoslav region additionally. Ongoing and mutually blaming explanations of the Yugoslav wars, accusations and self-justifications have sedimented into narratives of (competitive) victimhood.

The dysfunctional narratives of auto-victimization and the coin’s flip side, accusative narratives, produced a memory cultural impasse that is currently being opposed (next to research) only by artistic expressions. The arts (theater, film, literature, performance) find themselves in a position, in which political indignation has shifted into their responsibility.

In the seminar I will discuss one exemplary case: how the Srebrenica genocide killings committed in July 1995 in Eastern Bosnia are interpreted, narrated and performed on stage in theater plays (e.g. Srebrenica. Kad mi ubijeni ustanemo by Zlatko Paković), by performances in public space (Women in Black, Mathemes of Reassociation and Zentrum für politische Schönheit) and in film (Jasmila Zbanić’s Quo vadis, Aida?). What is arts’ commemorative contribution and what corrective responsibility can we ascribe to it?

Speaker: Miranda Jakiša, Professor of South Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Vienna Read more about the speaker

Chair: Brendan Humphreys, Senior Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Online and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing (max capacity in the room is 20 participants)

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Abstract

2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the expulsion from Soviet Russia of the influential philosophers, scientists, and cultural figures whom the Soviet regime labeled as ideological opponents, the event known to historians as the "Philosophy steamboat."
It is somehow ironic that in the year of the centennial celebration of this event, we witnessed another dramatic exodus of the Russian intelligentsia that, again, has been forced to leave the country and flee a tyranny that banishes reason and anything associated with freedom and free thought.

Leaving aside a question of the “humanitarian” justification of both expulsions of Russian intellectuals, in this paper, I will focus on the most controversial issue in Russian intellectual history, namely the relationship between state power and thought, a relationship which lies at the heart of both the 1922 deportation of the most talented thinkers and the 2022 mass exodus of Russian intellectuals.

I attempt to look at the oppressive role that the Soviet and post-Soviet state has played in Russian recent and current intellectual history by mainly focusing on the country’s philosophical life during several of its most turbulent periods since the October Revolution. I will first examine important events leading to the deportation of 1922. Then I will consider specific actions undertaken by the current regime that are directed toward the philosophical and broader intellectual community of liberal political and social orientation and that impose severe restrictions on intellectual freedoms, essentially undercutting and virtually banning freedom of thought and expression. I will conclude by offering some ideas about the unique nature and character of the antagonism between Putin’s regime and thought and reflect on reasons for the open opposition to genuine philosophy and generally any free thought in contemporary Russia. I will argue that at the core of the present hostility against free thought lies an attempt of the Russian political elite to institute a new official ideology to be used as an instrument of forcing the country back to archaism and – using terminology of the sociologist Lev Gudkov – to “recurring totalitarianism”.

Speaker: Marina Bykova, Professor of Philosophy, North Carolina State University
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Chair: Markku Kivinen, Emeritus Professor, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Online and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing

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Abstract

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world’s largest humanitarian aid agencies were largely nowhere to be seen. In their absence, tens of thousands of volunteers from Ukraine, Poland, and further abroad helped the more than 16 million displaced and war-affected Ukrainians. This massive volunteer response represents a case of “distributed humanitarianism,” which we argue is a post-Fordist form of humanitarian aid that disrupts the Fordist international aid industry that has existed since the end of World War II. Distributed humanitarianism, we argue, is faster, more cost-efficient, and more resilient than large-scale institutionalized aid. Presentation is based on field research conducted in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands between March and July 2022. (Co-author Elisabeth Cullen Dunn, Indiana University)

Speaker: Iwona Kaliszewska, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw

Chair: Dr. Kaarina Aitamurto, Head of Research Training, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Online via Zoom and Unioninkatu 40, Metsätalo C wing, room 17 
 

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Iwona Kaliszewska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on intersections among Islam, economy, state and anti-state violence, and more recently on war and humanitarian crisis. Iwona has been conducting research projects in Dagestan and Chechnya since 2004, and lately in Ukraine and in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. Her most recent book Putin, Violence and Sharia in the North Caucasus has just been published by the Cornell University Press.
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Abstract

Russia and Kazakhstan have rapidly decreased the use of prison as a form of punishment in the last 20 years. What is the place of the prison in the culture and politics of these two countries? What do people think is the purpose of prison and how well do the prisons of these countries fulfill this purpose? What characteristics are related to punitive attitudes towards criminals? Drawing on 24 focus groups in six locations across the two countries and two representative national surveys, this talk will discuss the drivers of decarceration and the relationship between this policy and public sentiment about how to deal with offenders, framing this within the broader history of Soviet repression and the Gulag. The seminar will also consider the data in light of the extensive use of prisoners as combatants in Russia's war on Ukraine. 

Speaker: Gavin Slade, Associate Professor of sociology, Nazarbayev University Read more.

Chair: Judith Pallot, Professor, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki; Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford

Venue: Online and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing (max capacity in the room is 20 participants)

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Abstract
In this lecture Visser draws on his ongoing research project that investigates how digital innovation unfolds in the context of Russia, with its strong state involvement and an autarchic turn. It focuses on agriculture, where large corporate farms (‘agroholdings’) are increasingly using technologies like drones, GPS-steered combines, big data and AI. The research studies how Russia’s longer-standing policy of food self-sufficiency, intersects with the new rush to build up technological sovereignty in response to Western sanctions. Drawing on earlier fieldwork and new desk-top research, it subsequently investigates what implications such techno-politics have for Russian agriculture, and global food security.

Over the past decade Russia transformed into the World’s largest grain exporter, with numerous African and Middle Eastern countries heavily dependent on its wheat. In the long-term Russia’s importance as food exporter is expected to rise further, with climate change bound to affect more southern located grain-exporting countries negatively. As such, the trajectory of agricultural innovation (or lack thereof) will have implications far beyond Russia itself.

Speaker: Oane Visser, Associate Professor, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam Read more

Chair: Daria Gritsenko, Assistant Professor in Russian Big Data Methodology, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Zoom and Unioninkatu 40, room 17, Metsätalo C wing (max capacity in the room is 20 participants)

Abstract
Often ‘illiberal’ forces are equated with populism, which is usually characterised as reactions to a loss of traditional values and ways of life, as well as to elitism. Social forces rooted in working class culture can be disparaged as ‘illiberal’, especially when they are juxtaposed with urban middle class activism.

Rather than writing off the politics of the weak and poor as reactionary or ‘illiberal’, this paper seeks to understand the nature of their social struggles and moral concerns. It examines the attitudes and values of the so-called ‘illiberal’ social forces in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. These social forces have emerged partly in response to elites’ economic and political domination, widespread social suffering and a sense of inequality. The feelings and evaluations of leaders and activists of these forces are understood on their own terms. In doing so, their accounts reveal their emotions and lay morality that combine both descriptions of how the world is, and aspirations of how the world ought to be. Recent political protests and uprisings in the region have arguably demonstrated that working class groups have been more active than middle class forces in demanding social change.

Speaker: Balihar Sanghera, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Kent  Read more.

Chair: Anna-Liisa Heusala, University Lecturer, Head of Discipline (Russian and Eurasian Studies), Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Zoom and onsite

Abstract
The remarkable progress achieved in some countries worldwide regarding gender and sexual equalities at the end of the 20th – early 21st century has met a growing wave of resistance taking different forms. Ukraine is among those countries where thanks to the political pressure from the European Union combined with the efforts of the local civil society, the laws to prevent and eliminate discrimination, protect women from domestic violence, and promote LGBT people’s rights were adopted in 2010-2017. However, this progress, too, was met by the opposition from the various conservative and religious groups.

The seminar talk will discuss anti-gender resistances and how their activities can be gendered and even queered. I argue that the activity of these groups fits into the definition of heteroactivism, or “the coordinated ideological response to sexual and gendered equalities rooted in an unwavering belief in the centrality of heteronormativity...as foundational to a healthy and sustainable society” (Browne and Nash 2017b, 645). Unpacking the mobilization frames used within the Ukrainian heteroactivist movement, the talk aims to complement our understanding of the regional dimensions of heteroactivism. The goal is to go further in studying commonalities and differences between spatial, cultural, and geographic specificities of ongoing ideological processes evolving against the background of resistance against gender and sexual equalities overlapping with emerging nationalisms and nation-state building in the post-soviet space.

Speaker: Maryna Shevtsova, Marie Sklodowska-Curie EUTOPIA-SIF COFUND Postdoctoral fellow and a Visiting Professor at the Sociology Department, University of Ljubljana; Senior FWO Fellow at KU Leuven, Read more.
Chair: Marianna Muravyeva, Professor of Russian Law and Administration, Aleksanteri Institute and Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki

Venue: Zoom and onsite

Abstract
Coordinated anti-regime voting in autocracies is an important prerequisite for the prospects of regime change. The existing literature traditionally considers opposition political parties as key drivers of voter coordination. Some authoritarian regimes, however, successfully discourage political opposition from coalition formation via either pork-barrel politics or selective repressions, or both. Is coordination of opposition-minded voters possible under such circumstances? If it does, what are the factors mediating the impact of coordinated anti-regime voting in autocracies? This manuscript seeks to answer these questions by investigating the ‘smart vote’ campaign in the course of Russian elections held from 2019 to 2021. The analysis is based on district-level data covering individual candidates’ election returns, affiliations, past electoral experience, other personal characteristics, and specific district-level properties. The analysis indicates that the ‘smart vote’ support significantly boosted the electoral results of individual candidates. The campaign’s effect was stronger in electoral districts located in capital cities of Russian regions than elsewhere. The ‘smart vote’ impact was, however, mitigated by high turnout rates.

Speaker: Mikhail Turchenko, independent scholar Read more.
Chair: Margarita Zavadskaya, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Zoom and onsite

Abstract
For any given regime, the power to control the official interpretation of national history is considered to be an important and efficient instrument for nation building and nation maintenance purposes. As pointed out by Michael Billig, “nations do not typically have a single history, but there are competing tales to be told” (Billig 1995: 71). Thus, historical narratives are subject to construction, re-construction, and contestation. School history textbooks—and the educational system in general—represent important locales for such struggles between competing historical narratives. 

As history books, school history textbooks represent a special genre. Complicated issues are as a rule reduced to undebatable “shared truths” ready for student consumption. In this context, the past is first and foremost meant to provide meaning to and legitimation of the present and to help staking out a common course for the future. With their near universal reach to entire cohorts of youths, school history textbooks are a powerful tool for spreading the message of the current regime of who and what the nation should be—and for legitimizing the powers-that-be.

In my paper, I examine continuity and change in how some key moments of Russian history are being presented in school history textbooks in the Russian Federation in order to explore changes in the understanding of the national self. Since textbooks have to be preapproved by the authorities to get on the list of recommended textbooks, these books can be taken to represent the official view on how these key moments are reinterpreted to fit the current approach to national history, and, thereby, also the current understanding of the national self.

I rely on Soviet school history textbooks in use in the early 1980s (pre-Perestroika) as a “baseline”. Then I trace how the narration of the same key events have been depicted in two sets of post-independence school history textbooks: textbooks that were in use in the mid-1990s (the first generation of post-Soviet textbooks), and the late 2010s (those currently in use), respectively. What historical “facts” remain constant? What has changed? And what can these shifting interpretations of historical events tell us about changes in the evolving understanding of the national self—and about the regime’s legitimation strategies?

Speaker: Helge Blakkisrud, Senior Research Fellow, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
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Chair: Markku Kangaspuro, Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Abstract
The formation of new and innovative businesses belongs to a standard cure of crony capitalism. The common expectation is that once established innovative businesses would combat the corrupt politico-economic systems from within. The unique qualities of high-tech businesses, such as transparent private ownership, autonomy from the state, mobility and trans-nationalization of corporate activities, make them to the widely assumed leaders of modernization who would demand better governance and policies from the state.

In the light of enduring bad governance, the (relatively) well-developed high-tech business in Russia failed to fulfil these expectations. Most accounts of the failed modernization in Russia made Russian state responsible, while the high-tech business is assigned the role of the victim. Acknowledging the significant contribution of the Russian state to bad governance, this study highlights the complicit role of the high-tech businesses. Drawing on evidence from statistical and survey data as well as in-depth interviews, it traces the mechanisms of business-state interactions through which the high-tech business participates in Russian crony capitalism and contributes to the persistence of bad governance in Russia. The study also suggests several explanations of the business behaviors.

Speaker: Inna Melnykovska, Assistant Professor in comparative political economy, Central European University, Vienna  Read more
Chair: Vladimir Gel’man, Professor of Russian politics, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Zoom and onsite

Abstract
At a time when the Russian state increasingly restricts journalistic freedoms, it is crucial to understand the ways in which Russian journalists push back against state pressure. My current book project explores the daily resistance tactics that journalists in Chechnya and Dagestan utilize to circumvent state-imposed censorship. My project draws from the data I collected over nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in the North Caucasus (2014- 2017), digital ethnography, and over a hundred interviews.

For this seminar, I will focus on discussing journalistic resistance practices in the republic of Dagestan. I will provide an overview of the Dagestani media field, and will explicate how Dagestani journalists employ creative resistance techniques and establish three distinct forms of resistance: textual, behavioral, and conceptual. I will particularly focus on the tactic of creating “safe spaces,” both physical and digital, by Dagestani journalists and activists, and speak about how these digital safe spaces contest the concept of “echo chambers.” I will also discuss how creating interconnected online safe spaces by journalists who work within an authoritarian environment is relevant to the understanding of the concepts of social media ecosystems and the highly debated role of the on-line technologies in resistance and protest movements.

Speaker: Elena Rodina, subject matter expert at MS in Communications, Northwestern University
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Chair: Olga Dovbysh, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki

Venue: Zoom

Abstract
This paper addresses different dimensions of remembering Muslim traditions in Russia’s Urals by exploring how remembering past Muslim figures becomes a spiritual practice in a Bashkir Sufi circle. Here, remembering the prophets, saints, and martyrs (awliya and shuhuda) does not simply mean revisiting the past and celebrating a Muslim heritage as in a secular and “horizontal” conception of time. Rather the connection with “dead” saints, prophets, and mythical figures such as the Bashkir hero Ural Batyr is also “vertical” in the sense that these holy figures intimate the living to become aware of the eternity that awaits them after death and that they can also glimpse in this world. These practices of remembering also translate into the reawakening of pilgrimage sites and a sacred geography. Although tangible and material, the revival of pilgrimages at the saints’ graves and construction of new mosques become an invitation to open one’s heart to the presence of God in this life, going beyond an immanent plane of existence. I connect my exploration of remembering as a spiritual practice to recent debates in the anthropology and sociology of religion on mediation, materiality, divine presence and the religious self. In particular, I want to foreground Muslim ontologies and epistemologies to propose new ways of approaching the relationship between human life and the divine and between immanence and transcendence.

Speaker: Lili Di Puppo, Aleksanteri  Visiting Fellow
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Chair: Judith Pallot, Research Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki; Professor Emerita, University of Oxford  
Venue: Zoom

Abstract
Messianism is often referred to as one of the inherent features of Russia’s culture and politics. It functions almost as a self-evident truth, i.e., everybody knows about Russian messianism and there is therefore no need to elaborate on it. The annexation of Crimea, the war in Ukraine and the so called “conservative turn” in Russian politics have revived talk of Russian messianism. Some have interpreted these developments as a manifestation of the revival of Russian messianic imperialism.

Considering the increasing prominence of messianism in the contemporary debate on Russia, it is surprising how little substantial data and analysis has been produced concerning the contemporary dynamics of this phenomenon. In regard to the fundamental issue whether contemporary Russian foreign policy is messianic, experts’ opinions are divided. Some hold that messianism disappeared with the fall of the USSR. This is also the position with which most of the Russian political elite would agree. Others, however, insist that the sense of mission is an indispensable part of the Russian worldview. In my talk, I will present the main findings of my research whose main goal was to characterise messianic motifs in the foreign policy of the Russian Federation (2000-2018).

Speaker: Alicja Curanović, Associate Professor, University of Warsaw. Read more.
Chair: Sirke Mäkinen, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Venue: Zoom