REEES Faculty Spotlight: Iknur Lider
Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh’s Turkish instructor Iknur Lider.
Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh’s Turkish instructor Iknur Lider.
Guest: Rossen Djagalov onย From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Guest: Trevor Erlacher on Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov published by Harvard University Press.
I attended a Belarus solidarity rally in Pittsburgh. Here’s what some of the protesters told me.
Guests: Dina Fainberg and Victoria Zhuravleva on the history of Russian and American mutual perceptions.
Guest: Martha Lampland on the commodification of labor in Socialist Hungary.
Guest: Charles Halperin onย Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
Guest: Ed Pulford on Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between published by Hurst.
Magdalena Stawkowski on the rural Kazakh communities in the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site.
Guest: Andrew Sloin on The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power published by Indiana University Press.
Guest: Sonja Schmid on Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry published by MIT Press.
Guest: Caress Schenk on Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia published by University of Toronto Press.
Guest: Jeff Sahadeo onย Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow published by Cornell University Press.
For the past few weeks, protests for fair elections in upcoming municipal polls have become weekly in Moscow and St. Petersburg as thousands have defied authorities to attend unsanctioned rallies. The police crackdown has been particularly harsh in Moscow. Protests on July 27 and August 3 resulted in over 2000 detentions. Images of police in riot gear wrestling citizens to the ground and beating peaceful protesters were reminiscent of the mass protests against election fraud in 2011-2012.
Members of the Russian Socialist Movement, a small Marxist, anti-Stalinist organization active in the Russian left, have been participants in local electoral campaigns and in the protests. Two RSM activists, Valeria Kovelishina and Ilya Budraitskis talk about the Russian Socialist Movement, their electoral work, the protests for democracy in Russia and what they might mean for the future.