Join the seminars and discussions in Metsätalo, Unioninkatu 40, or via Zoom!
The seminars are not recorded.
If you have any questions about our Visiting Fellows Programme or the upcoming seminars, don't hesitate to be in touch with Anna Korhonen.
"Historical Narratives in Propaganda: Cases Russia and Ukraine" Concept, methodology, and content of a coursebook project
Speaker: Sergii Pakhomenko, Associate Professor, Mariupol State University
Chair: Markku Kangaspuro, Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
The Russian-Ukrainian war has highlighted the active use of historical and memorial factors as propaganda tools in both domestic and foreign policy. On the Russian side, the manipulation of history serves not only to ideologically justify aggression but also to shape the international order according to a preferred interpretation. Conversely, Ukraine's response includes debunking Russian narratives using academic insights, alongside promoting its own sometimes mirroring historical propaganda, often justified by “defensive nationalism”. This topic naturally garners interest among international audiences.
The objective of the coursebook presented in the seminar is to cater to this interest through a lecture course designed for international students of social sciences. The coursebook offers an in-depth exploration of the historical background of Russian-Ukrainian relations and delves into the specific role of history in ideological, informational, and political conflicts. It also equips students with the skills to deconstruct propaganda myths and narratives, fostering an understanding of how they develop and function.
The coursebook helps students engage with questions such as: What constitutes a historical narrative or myth? Why are these important in identity construction, and how can they be employed by propaganda? What characterizes modern propaganda, and what role does historical memory play in the "post-truth" era? How do modern official Russian historical narratives conflict with Ukrainian ones, and how are these narratives reflected in memorial politics? The author analyzes separate plots of these narratives, examining their propaganda potential and implementation, such as ‘legacy’ of Kyivan Rus, the cult of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the demonization versus glorification of figures like Stepan Bandera, etc.
The foundation of this book project is the culmination of several years of teaching this subject. The book merges the concepts of a student guide and a coursebook; It not only presents educational material thematically in line with the course syllabus but also serves as a guide through the complexities of historical narratives and propaganda. The concept of multimodality is crucial here, enabling students to view propaganda and narrative as cultural artifacts. These are the results of human activity, manifesting in textual, audio, visual, and linguistic forms—such as politicians' statements on historical topics, propaganda posters and billboards, political advertising, social media videos, and Internet memes. The integration of these diverse modes underscores the multimodality that researchers encounter when studying propaganda constructs.
Authoritarian Disciplining and Making Obedient Citizens in Post-Soviet space
Speaker: Diana T. Kudaibergen, Lecturer in Central Asian Politics and Society, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London
Chair: Sirke Mäkinen, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Abstract
TBA
Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East
Speaker: Victoria Donovan, Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies, Director of the Centre for Global Postsocialisms, University of St Andrews
Chair: Anatoly Pinsky, Research Fellow, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
In this talk, Victoria Donovan will introduce how decolonial thinking has informed her research and projects, as well as her new book Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (2025). Life in Spite of Everything is a cultural portrait of Ukraine’s east before it was devastated by Russia’s full-scale invasion. It is a history on foot through the beautiful Donetsk and Luhansk regions, a celebration of its past and present, and its people’s tenacity, creativity and independence. Travelling from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of Mariupol, from a warehouse rave in Sievierodonetsk to an abandoned gypsum mine near Bakhmut, the physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought to vivid life. But above all else, by spotlighting those whose lives were embedded there until the full-scale Russian invasion – curators, artists, railway workers, young people who have grown up amidst instability and destruction – Life in Spite of Everything amplifies local voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.
Sacred or False? Religion and Disinformation in the EU Enlargement Debate
Speaker: Iuliia Korniichuk
Chair: Elina Kahla, Research Coordinator, Principal Investigator, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Although Orthodoxy is often perceived as being at odds with the ideals of a unified Europe, an increasing number of Orthodox-majority states are embracing a pro-European course—albeit not without significant challenges. Today, in addition to the four Orthodox-majority countries already in the EU, two-thirds of the current candidate countries also have an Orthodox majority.
At the same time, this shift has coincided with a surge in both anti-Western and anti-European disinformation campaigns, which have become more sophisticated and diverse in form, with religion taking on a central role. While the political instrumentalisation of religion is not new, contemporary disinformation strategies are increasingly complex and multi-layered, raising pressing questions about the boundaries of freedom of religion in democratic societies, as well as the more nuanced role of religion in contemporary politics.
The seminar will centre on the discussion of the role of religion and religious rhetoric in disinformation campaigns surrounding the potential EU integration of countries in Europe’s “Orthodox belt”. How has the use of religion in such campaigns changed since the Russian-Ukrainian war? What challenges does this present to democratic societies?
Managing Spoiled Russian Identity: Stigma, Empire and Masculine Subject Positioning during the Russia-Ukraine War
Speaker: Marina Yusupova, Lecturer in Sociology, Edinburgh Napier University
Chair: Yuliya Brin, Doctoral Researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
This talk will discuss how global condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting stigma of belonging to an ‘aggressor state’ shape Russian masculinities. Drawing on biographical interviews with Russian men in Russia, the UK, and those who relocated to European and Mediterranean countries after the war, it explores how they navigate this stigma. I identify three stigma management strategies: ‘splitting and blaming,’ ‘disclaiming agency,’ and ‘turning to counter-discourses.’ Building on scholarship that theorises stigma as a form of power, I show that stigmatisation and stigma management take place within the context of global coloniality where Russia is marked by imperial difference (a ‘second-rate’ empire) and inter-imperiality – an entanglement among empires through competition, collaboration, and conflict. By focusing on masculine subject positioning, I reveal how participants’ imaginaries of masculinity are deeply intertwined with imaginaries of empire, theorising the nexus between masculinity and empire as a crucial site of making sense of this ongoing war.
Speaker: Aksana Ismailbekova, Research Fellow, Leibniz-Zentrum-Moderner Orient (ZMO)
Chair: Anna-Liisa Heusala, University Lecturer, Discipline Coordinator (Russian and Eurasian studies) Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, residents of Alma, a village in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, were faced with many new challenges. Economic crisis and the elimination of welfare supports forced an entire generation to become labour migrants in Russia. Those ‘left behind’ – grandparents and children – were sustained by migrants’ remittances and charitable activities, but at a cost. As villagers at home and in the Alma diaspora built upon existing kinship structures to create new practices of charity and mutual aid on the lines of Islamic teaching, both migrants and the left behind suffered from the ‘dark side of kinship’ that the crisis revealed. Migration is destructive of both the nuclear family and wider village life, but it provides an opportunity for lineages to be mobilized for collective social action that is both local and translocal. In the research for a monograph presented in the seminar, the author interviewed several people in both Alma and its Moscow-based diaspora. Their experiences of creative response to adversity are at the heart of this text: those responses created a ‘moral economy of migration’ that became territorialized as kinship was de-territorialized.
Speaker: Libora Oates-Indruchová, Professor of Sociology of Gender, University of Graz
Chair: Sari Autio-Sarasmo, University Lecturer, Vice-Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp holds an iconic place not only in the history of British women’s movement, but also in the history of the international peace movement of the 1980s. In the scholarship on East Central Europe there has been growing interest in the global involvement of the Eastern Bloc countries in women’s activism, but a link to the Greenham Common protests has been only little explored. My research of the Czech print media from the 1980s shows that there was sustained coverage of the protests at the time also in the Eastern Bloc. This preliminary research indicates that Greenham Common women were co-opted as “allies” for the discourse on the involvement of the Communist women’s organizations in the international peace movement and that at the same time there is absolute silence about any links to the Second Wave of the women’s movement or, indeed, about the existence of any women’s movement at all. I will discuss the silences and accentuations in the coverage of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the Czech press and the contexts, in which this example of women’s protest was placed by various actors in the Czech environment, such as, the international peace movement, Cold War politics and the gender culture of late state socialism.
Speaker: Sergii Pakhomenko, Associate Professor, Mariupol State University
Chair: Markku Kangaspuro, Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
The Russo-Ukrainian war became a trigger for the intensification of processes of desovietisation and derussification of symbolic space, public and cultural life in Ukraine and Latvia. Among the most illustrative cases are the dismantling of the Monument to the “Liberators” of Soviet Latvia and a number of similar episodes in Ukraine (changing the coat of arms of the Motherland monument, renaming the Arch of Friendship of Peoples, etc.). These processes correspond to decolonising political and media rhetoric and are legitimised in the relevant laws.
Considering the academic and political discourse of the two countries, I try to consider whether postcolonial theory is applicable to explaining the desovietisation and derussification of public space in Ukraine and Latvia. Is it appropriate to examine the multiplier effect of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the political and cultural practices of the two countries through the lens of postcolonial studies? How reflexive is the discourse of decolonisation in academic Ukraine and Latvia? What differences in the practices of desovietisation/derussification can be observed in the two countries and how are they reflected in the legal and socio-political field? How are the struggle for identity preservation, the securitisation of memory and the emotionally charged so-called ‘cancel culture’ intertwined in these processes?
Speaker: Alexey Golubev, Associate Professor, University of Houston
Chair: Una Bergmane, Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
My talk will discuss the anti-colonial scholarship produced by Soviet Marxist historians in the 1920s and early 1930s, in which the course of Russian history was explained as a process that was driven by commercial capitalism and included colonial expansion, violence against indigenous people, their dispossession, assimilation, and genocide, and the erasure of their cultures and histories. These critical studies of the Russian imperial expansion, their infrastructure, and their scholars formed what I refer to as the early Soviet school of historical anticolonialism. Overlapping with interwar Soviet nationalities policy, the agenda of early Soviet historical anticolonialism was epistemologically distinct as it sought to provide a historically accurate and rigorous critique of capitalism and imperialism by revealing their past crimes. Up to this day, this scholarship remains the most consistent effort to decolonize Russian history from within the Russian academic community. I will discuss the heuristic potential of this scholarship as well as the ways through which it can contribute to the current debates about Russia’s imperial legacy.
Speaker: Roy Allison, Professor of Russian and Eurasian International Relations, University of Oxford
Chair: Katri Pynnöniemi, Associate Professor of Russian security studies, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki and the Finnish National Defense University
With its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian justifications for the use of force have shifted from earlier claims which were often legally arguable, if unpersuasive, to political, historical and openly revanchist claims which lie outside the domain of international law and the UN Charter system. Russian actions and narratives also override core principles of the European security order of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, Paris Charter and the OSCE.
This appears to leave little to regulate and constrain Russia’s exercise of military Realpolitik or the risks of wider escalation with Western states. As will be discussed, there remains uncertainty about the role of residual legal principles on neutrality law and the belligerent status of states. Looking forward, there is also uncertainty whether Russia would comply with formal treaty instruments, as public international law, in future negotiations on Ukraine. However, research suggests that, beyond formal regulation, certain tacit codes of conduct or norms of competition may be emerging around the war – these form rules of prudence rather than law. Such codes could serve as ‘guardrails’ to help restrain further dangerous escalation. Evidence for this is derived from a process of discursive signalling, of interactive communications between Russia, Ukraine and Western states. However, the medium-term prospect for the operation of core principles of a European security order beyond the EU and NATO zone remain poor.
Speaker: Luca Anceschi, Professor of Eurasian Studies, University of Glasgow
Chair: Vladimir Gel’man, Professor of Russian politics, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
It is to define the praxis of crisis management consolidated in Central Asia before the eruption of the Covid pandemic that my seminar devotes its core attention. To this end, I look at the key dynamics regulating emergency politics in the region before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Intended as a contribution to recent debates in the emerging field of Critical Disaster Studies, my presentation will look initially at how officials in Soviet Central Asia addressed a series of emergency situations, including the 1966 earthquake that destroyed Tashkent and the long-term environmental crisis erupted in Eastern Kazakhstan as the Soviet nuclear testing programme continued. Reconstructing the crisis management praxis of the Soviet era is in turn conducive to the operationalisation of the seminar’s second analytical prong, one that, specifically, looks at a more recent repertoire of emergency responses, which officials in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan framed to address three context-specific emergencies: a fire in Kazakhstan’s capital city, a severe storm in provincial Turkmenistan, and the failure of a large water reservoir in Uzbekistan.
Speaker: Sergii Pakhomenko, Associate Professor, Political Science and International Relations Department, Mariupol State University
Chair: Markku Kangaspuro, Director, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
In this seminar, I identify and classify the historical narratives of Russian propaganda, and the goals and methods of using history as a tool of influence.
The following issues are covered in the report:1) What are the main narratives of memory politics in Russian Federation and Ukraine based on; 2) How the denial of the Ukrainian narrative builds not only the Kremlin's understanding of Ukrainian history but also its policy towards the modern Ukrainian state; 3) Whether references to history serve as ideological support for Russian aggression or whether it constitutes one of the goals to destroy Ukrainian identity.
In general, I try to clarify the algorithm for securitizing Kremlin's version of history that is being used to justify and argue for a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. I consider those internal and external tasks that Russian politics of historical memory is designed to solve, show the key myths of the official narrative -- above all the myth of the “Great Victory” in World War II -- and, finally, trace a number of specific cases of planting this narrative in the occupied Ukrainian territories
Speaker: Laura A. Henry, Professor of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College
Chair: Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, Professor of Russian Environmental Studies, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
How do environmentalists continue their activism under conditions of increasingly authoritarian governance? In the 1990s, Russian environmentalists developed strategies to expand the movement in a period of political instability and economic recession. Over time, many of the conditions that facilitated early forms of activism changed. Foreign funding for civil society development declined sharply even as new digital spaces for activism emerged. The Russian government became less and less tolerant of criticism from civil society, particularly from those designed as foreign agents. These trends culminated in a new wave of repression following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Throughout, Russian activists have adapted to and challenged shrinking space for advocacy while making the case for environmental causes. Their activist strategies both embody and complicate Hirschman’s ideal types of loyalty, voice and exit in ways that illuminate how environmentalism may endure under authoritarian regimes at home and in exile. This paper, based on data drawn from interviews with Russian environmentalists, will examine activists’ strategic adaptation to changing political conditions in recent decades. The paper will pay particular attention to how the experience of migration and exile challenges the forms of environmentalism undertaken by Russian activists who fled the country since Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Speaker: Dr. Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University/Visiting Fellow, Aleksanteri Institute
Chair: Jouni Järvinen, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
At the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the issue of internal displacement had already created major challenges for the Ukrainian state. With an official number of 1.5 million people from Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea displaced across the rest of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government had not created and implemented a singular policy about displacement since the illegal annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Yet the status of “internally displaced person” (IDP) continued to exist as an official state status, with changing benefits and limitations through 2021.
This presentation explores IDP engagement with state actors and institutions as they processed their displacement. It is based on analysis of interviews with IDPs in Kyiv, Lviv, and Dnipro in 2014-2016, in the immediate aftermath of the first invasion (2014) and before the newly elected Poroshenko government had the capacity to develop policies to support IDPs. It also assesses Ukrainian state policies toward IDPs that were created and implemented in this time period, paying special attention to the changing responsibility for displaced people among various Ukrainian government institutions. The gaps left by the state created the space for self-organized responses to displacement among ordinary Ukrainians, as well as for the intervention of international humanitarian aid organizations, many of which remained in Ukraine through 2021. This presentation concludes with a consideration of the implications of even larger numbers of displaced people on the feasibility of reintegration of Ukraine’s currently occupied territories in the future.
Speaker: Kristina Jonutytė, Associate Professor, Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University
Chair: Kaarina Aitamurto, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
The war in Ukraine has escalated discussions of ethnic identity and belonging among non-ethnic-Russian populations in the Russian Federation. Many are redefining what it means to be an ethnic minority in Russia and their place in the country’s social and political fabric. Such negotiations of belonging take place amidst long-term racialisation and discrimination of ethnic minorities in Russia. The war has intensified discussions of these issues online and among the diaspora, and ethnic anti-war movements have become prominent. At the same time, the public field in Russia is extremely limited for expression of critical views. Many in Russia seek to justify losses of minority soldiers using the official patriotic narratives provided by the Russian state in a concerted discursive effort to increase the connection of ethnic minorities to the state.
Thus, the war seems to have become an important point of shifts in Buryat identity, especially as new diaspora communities are growing abroad as a consequence of the war. After “partial mobilisation” in the Russian Federation took off in September, 2022, thousands of men from Buryatia fled to Mongolia to escape conscription. This paper, based on ethnographic with them, explores the ways in which the new arrived Buryat men in Ulaanbaatar reflected on their position at a time of great uncertainty. In their narratives, the different strands of Russian, Buryat and Mongolian identity were intertwined, reflecting their multifaceted sense of belonging. This paper analyses the findings of these interviews and the hybridity and ambiguity as experienced by Buryat interlocutors.
Speaker: Max Trecker, Postdoctoral Researcher, Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe
Chair: Katalin Miklóssy, Jean Monnet Chair, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Like no other country in Europe, Ukraine served as a projection surface for economic ideas in the modern era. These ideas came on the one hand from different strata of the Ukrainian population, but on the other hand from non-autochthonous actors. In some cases, Ukraine was seen as a component of a larger (imperial) economic space, and in other cases, as an independent economic entity that was not primarily dependent on integration into other economic spaces in order to unfold its full imagined potential. All these ideas had in common that they attested to Ukraine's – in theory – great potential, provided that the space was only reshaped in the right way. The project focuses on the period between the beginning of industrialization in Ukraine and the contemporary period. The following questions take center stage: Why was Ukraine repeatedly the focal point of large-scale economic planning? Why could these imaginaries be reproduced over a long period of time? Who were the subjects behind the idea of Ukraine as a potent economic space at what time? The methodological inspiration for comes from the use of discourse analysis in historical studies. The focus is on the production and circulation of economic knowledge about Ukraine and its utilization. The project is located at the interface of economic and cultural history and combines social sciences and humanities approaches.
Speaker: Petru Negură, Researcher, Institute of Legal, Political and Sociological Research in Chisinau
Chair: Anna Tarasenko, Research Fellow, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
This seminar will explore and explain the binary social representations, and ambivalence of state policies, towards a specific category of the poor -- homeless people -- in the Republic of Moldova.
A representative survey, conducted in 2017, highlights respondents’ high perceived social distance towards homeless people. Only 21% of respondents would accept homeless people “in the vicinity of their home,” and 20% would accept them “on the streets of their locality”. Against this background, it seems striking that nearly all (93%) respondents were, however, willing to help a homeless person if he or she asked for help.
In my presentation, I will explain this apparent contradiction between high social distance and willingness to help by corroborating this finding with three sets of data:
1) semantic and statistical analysis of the social representations of homeless people in the 2017 survey,
2) print and visual media analysis of the representations of homeless people, and
3) analysis of the state’s policies towards homeless people in recent decades.
Additionally, I will present the results of a socio-historical analysis of the policies applied by state institutions in the Republic of Moldova and the former Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) regarding homeless people in the late Soviet period and post-socialist transformation. The research discussed in the seminar is part of my book-length project Labour, Help and Stigma of the Homeless in Moldova.
Wed, Nov 22 | 15.00-16.30 (Helsinki time)
Unioninkatu 40, room 17
Streamed via Zoom
Speaker: Natasha Danilova, Senior Lecturer
Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen
Chair: Anna Tarasenko, Research Fellow
Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Since February 2022, many commentors have provided various assessments of Russian society’s response to war in Ukraine by focusing on the position of men-dominated political and military leadership, male conscript/reserve/recently mobilised or recruited soldiers or male dominated paramilitary groups. This presentation shifts the focus to women’s roles as part of war-meaning making.
Drawing on content analysis of official newspapers, we highlight the paradoxical representation of Russian women as both invisible and indispensable to the Russian state war efforts as well as Putin’s ‘traditional (family) values project. We observe that women, including soldiers’ mothers and female military-family members, are either barely mentioned, or their roles are narrowly framed through reporting on their engagement in mostly war-supportive, hyper-feminine, ‘traditional’ activities such as knitting soldiers’ socks and/or camouflage nets. The reporting on the popular digital news media (Meduza and MediaZona) expands this framing through reporting on women-military family members’ legislative, predominantly, complaint-focused activism, but it also deploys a gendered frame of ‘patriotic distress’/confusion represent women as emotionally and politically conflicted (Co-author: Dr Jenny Mathers, University of Aberystwyth).
30 Aug | 15.00-16.30 (Helsinki time)
Unioninkatu 40, room 17
Streamed on Zoom
Speaker: Olena Uvarova, Associate Professor
Odesa National Medical University
Chair: Elina Kahla, Principal Investigator, Liaison Manager
Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
By studying European international affairs in the 18th-19th century and the solution to the Eastern Question, one can see the ideological component of diplomatic and military-political relations between European countries and the Ottoman Empire. The ‘Patronage Policy’ to Ottoman subjects of the Christian faith is an example - a tool that was actively used by the Russian Empire, emphasizing ancient ties and religious commonality. ’Patronage Policy’ is understood as Russia's protection of Ottoman Christians with the help of provisions in intergovernmental treaties and as an invitation to resettle on Russian lands, providing benefits and privileges. The focus of the Russian authorities has always been on the Greeks, who at the end of the 18th - first third of the 19th centuries were at the stage of struggle for their independence.
During the seminar, the speaker will consider the genesis and ambivalent nature of the ’Patronage Policy’; the motives that guided the tsarist government in its implementation; international circumstances that affected its specific tasks; philhellenic tendencies in Russian society; the basis of the hopes of the Greeks in Russia's liberation mission; the socio-economic and cultural development of Greek communities on the territory of the empire; and the subjective and objective consequences of Greek-Russian relations. Based on the conclusions, it will be possible to draw historical parallels with modern times.
Sept 13 | 15.00-16.30 (Helsinki time)
Unioninkatu 40, room 17
Streamed on Zoom