Isabelle R. Kaplan, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, talks about her research on non-Slavic minorities in the Soviet Union in an interview to the HSE Look.
In 2001, ten years after the launch of reforms in Russia, 54% of Russians believed the main achievement of the reforms was the availability of consumer goods, rather than freedom of speech or the possibility of travelling abroad. A decade later, public attitudes had not changed, and the availability of goods on store shelves was still perceived as the number one priority. The massive trauma caused by scarcity was particularly strong. How it was addressed and in what way it influenced public attitudes after the USSR collapse is examined in a study by HSE professor Oleg Khlevnyuk.
Alexandr Voronovici,a second year postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, shared his experience of teaching transnational perspective on Soviet history to HSE students.
International Symposium "Cold War Matters: (In)Visible Economies of Things” organized by HSE Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History was held on December 16-17, 2019 in St. Petersburg. Simo Mikkonen, Academy of Finland Research Fellow and a member of the organizing committee, and Andreas Pacher, PhD Candidate at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and conference participant, talk about some aspects of the conference and their cooperation with HSE University.
In 1945, the Soviet Army seized the film archive of the Third Reich, the so-called Reichfilmarchive, and brought it from Berlin to Moscow. The archive contained thousands of movies from various countries. Since then, the German, American, and a few European trophies circulated throughout the Soviet Union despite a lack of an effective distribution license. This copyright violation turned out to be a stumbling block in the relations between the USSR and the USA, while the early Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers added a political twist to the conflict. Both countries were now using cinematography as a weapon in their fight, trying to do as much harm to the opponent as possible. Kristina Tanis, a researcher from HSE University, investigates the battles between the two film industries.
On November 21-22, HSE International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue organized an international conference ‘Memory As a Historical and Cultural Phenomenon: Russia and the West, XX-XXI Centuries’. HSE News Service has talked with one of the conference speakers, Richard Tempest, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about his vision of historical memory and his research of Solzhenitsyn.
