CREECA Lecture Series Podcast
CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public. As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.
Episodes
May 1, 2025 • 51 mins
Scientific Atheism as an Ideological Discipline in Soviet Ukraine by Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
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About the Lecture:
In this presentation, Karnes will talk about Maija Tabaka, who was the first Soviet citizen to be awarded the DAAD fellowship. Tabaka unwittingly opened doors to over a decade of artistic exchanges between Riga and West Berlin. She also provided an enduring model for arranging such collaborations, with offices of the Latvian KGB partnering with Latvian emigres to broker relationships, awards, and creative possib...
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April 18, 2025 • 45 mins
About the Lecture:
In this book presentation, Finkel uncovers the deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Following the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. The Russian Empire, USSR and Putin’s Russia had long used violence to successfully crush Ukrainian efforts to chart a separate path. Today’s violence is just a more extreme version of Russia’s past e...
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Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, analysts and observers around the world were shocked and surprised that Ukraine did not fall in a matter of days or weeks. Instead people across the country resisted with both military and civilian means, halting the Russian advance. Surveys indicate that over 80% of the Ukrainian population contributed to the war effort in some way (e.g. Onuch ...
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February 19, 2025 • 56 mins
[About the Lecture:]
The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia’s governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Power and Possession in the Russian ...
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February 2, 2025 • 47 mins
About the Lecture:
During the 70 years of its existence, the Soviet Union claimed to be a communist state based on the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and, at the later stages, Vladimir Lenin. This made philosophy a mandatory course in every Soviet university and led to the creation of a peculiar version of the history of philosophy. Leading Soviet specialists, such as Valentin Asmus and Igor Narskii, inter...
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December 5, 2024 • 41 mins
About the lecture: The legacy of past human activities strongly shapes current landscapes and ecosystems, with today’s actions set to leave similar long-term impacts. Predicting future landscape changes, however, requires a thorough understanding of past ones, yet most land and habitat change studies are limited to recent decades—starting only in the 1980s with the availability of 30-m satellite data or in the 2000s with commercial...
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November 10, 2024 • 46 mins
About the Lecture:
The legal repression of opposition protests in pre-war Russia is characterized by the deployment of a bifurcated repressive system. This system relies, on the one hand, on “administrative” offenses and, on the other hand, on the criminal justice system to punish protesters. Following the demonstrators from the streets to the police bus, the police precincts and the court, this talk analyzes the case of relativel...
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October 31, 2024 • 46 mins
About the Lecture:
Georgia’s 26,000 rivers connect citizens to nature, to their childhood, to their unique regions, each of which has its “mother-river.” The sounds of rushing water as well as the sights and scents of riverside gatherings provoke powerful memories and remain central to Georgian identity. Rivers also form the republic’s economic backbone. This presentation will focus on late Soviet Georgia, when hydroelectricity an...
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October 30, 2024 • 55 mins
About the Lecture:
The idea of Estonia as a Nordic country gained traction in the late 19th century alongside the rise of Estonian nationalism. As Germany and increasingly also Russia came to be perceived as historical adversaries of the Estonian nation, Sweden’s arguably benevolent influence on Estonia’s history in the 17th century ‘good old Swedish times’ provided the Estonian national movement with an alternative model not just...
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October 21, 2024 • 42 mins
Solidarity Networking and Ukrainian Mental Maps:
Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project
About the Lecture:
I am an East European intellectual and political historian by training, and a student of map prejudices by practice. For a digitally activist Ukraine, the February 24th Archive is a polyphonic treasure trove of solidarity and resistance to Russia's war of aggression. My archive bridges six main ...
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October 4, 2024 • 65 mins
About the Lecture: This conversation will be devoted to Elena Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country (2023), “a haunting book of rare courage,” as Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent, called it. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians w...
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September 30, 2024 • 53 mins
About the lecture: In December 1989, in officially recognizing the authenticity of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s secret protocol, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies evinced the hope that the globally divided historical consciousness of the Cold War would be replaced with a new conception of the past, reflecting “a whole and mutually interdependent world and increasing mutual understanding.” While there was cause for hope i...
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September 23, 2024 • 54 mins
About the Lecture: The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to open classified U.S. files, and then to match those American primary sources with newly opened (and often now closed) archives in the former Soviet Union and countries of the Warsaw Pact. This presentation will draw on materials from the Archive to shed light on major events of recent ...
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September 10, 2024 • 50 mins
About the lecture: This talk will offer an overview of Professor Shevelenko’s current book-length project and will focus on a few case studies. The book examines artistic and intellectual tendencies that shaped the thinking about the “age of extremes” (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s appellation for the twentieth century) during the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. This research analyzes the quest for narrative forms and techniques and, ...
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August 15, 2024 • 59 mins
A Colonial Muslim History of China and the World
The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi of Mullah Musa Sayrami (1836–1917) is celebrated as a monument of Uyghur literature and the preeminent Muslim history of nineteenth-century Xinjiang (East Turkestan). Yet it is more than a chronicle — it is a history of the world as seen from the heart of Eurasia and an argument about the nature of politics and faith. Sayrami’s work is also multilayered, polyvoc...
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August 6, 2024 • 74 mins
From Moldova to Tajikistan, from Belarus to Uzbekistan: The Formulation and Flow of National Identity from the Late Czarist Times to Today
Riordan will explore the formulation of identity over the past 150 years in Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus and Uzbekistan. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground work and research across all four countries, Riordan will discuss his findings on the trajectory of national identity and how it continues...
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July 22, 2024 • 48 mins
The lecture will provide insight into the particular (and sometimes peculiar) challenges Central Asian states faced in their energy systems during the first 30 years of independence as they struggled to provide reliable energy at home and secure resource markets abroad. It will then turn to examine what the global transition away from fossil fuels portends for Central Asia’s future.
About the Speaker: Theresa Sabonis-Helf is a Pro...
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April 24, 2024 • 46 mins
Ostap Kin presented and read from his book, “Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond” on Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.
About the Lecture: On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews in Babyn Yar. By the time the Soviet army recaptured Kyiv, the total number of people exterminated at the ravine had reached some 100,000 to 150,000. The name Babyn Yar has become synony...
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April 24, 2024 • 49 mins
Anna Nemzer and Ilia Venyavkin presented on their work with the Russian Independent Media Archive Project on Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.
About the Lecture: In this joint presentation, journalist Anna Nemzer and historian Ilia Venyavkin will discuss the work of the Russian Independent Media Archive — an initiative of PEN America and Bard College aimed at preserving the work of i...
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