Honorary Professor at the University of Chicago and Sydney University, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick gave a lecture on Stalin and Post-War Anti-Semitism in the USSR at the HSE’s International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences on Thursday 22nd October. In her talk, Professor Fitzpatrick looks at anti-semitism as a bone of contention between Stalin and his closest colleagues in the years when challenging the leader could have life-threatening consequence. As she explained in an interview with the HSE English News website, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interest in the ‘Jewish question’ came out of her latest book.
Stalin: Zhizn odnovo vozhdya or Stalin: New Biography of A Dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk, Leading Research Fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of WWII and Its Consequences, has won the Prosvetitel [Enlightener] 2015 Prize for Biography.
Challenging traditional explanations of history and taking a new view on the past is the hallmark of a good historian; re-examining the history of post-war Soviet agriculture and economics is no exception, according to Aaron Hale-Dorrell, who recently received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at the HSE International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences in September. Aaron Hale-Dorrell recently agreed to speak with the HSE news service about his research interests, his plans while at HSE, and his experiences living and working in Russia.
Zelenogorsk hosted an international conference on the history of diverse societies, as well as on the history of nationalism. The conference, which was called ‘Ruptures and Continuities in Histories of Empire: Federalism, Regionalism, and Autonomies as Alternative Political Imaginaries of Post-Imperial Political Order’, was organized by the Department of History at HSE - St. Petersburg and drew leading experts in the field of ‘new imperial history’.
On 1st to 3rd June, the remarkable Italian historian and one of the founders of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg will give a series of open lectures at the HSE. Professor Ginzburg has been invited to Moscow by the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI). His translator, Professor at the School of Philosophy, Sergey Kozlov spoke to the HSE News Service about how he was inspired to translate Ginzburg’s work into Russian which led to them becoming firm friends.
On Tuesday, May 19, at 6.00 pm, Alain Blum (Centre d’études franco-russe de Moscou, INED and EHESS in Paris) will give a talk at the International Research Seminar in Sociology (School of Sociology) called ‘Forgotten stories of deportees in the USSR — The multiple lives of a single individual’. Ahead of his lecture, he has spoken with the HSE news service on a variety of topics, including his experience as a demographer, his transition into Soviet history, and his upcoming research plans.
In his honorary lecture 'Twilight of an Empire', at the HSE April International Conference, Professor Guillermo Owen, Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, considers the case of the late Roman Empire - a once-powerful incumbent state which is beginning to lose its power - and compares it with examples nearer our own time. Professor Owen is a member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences, The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Barcelona, and the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World. He is associate editor of the International Game Theory Review. In an interview with the HSE English News service Professor Owen made comparisons in a game theory approach to the behaviour of the late Roman Empire and the Soviet Empire of the 1980s and 1990s.
With less than a month until the XVI International April Conference opens in Moscow, academics from HSE St Petersburg are preparing sections and seminars on a broad range of research topics from space exploration in pre-revolutionary Russia to contemporary happiness and work.
Social Historian, Franziska Exeler has focussed much of her research on the Soviet Union and the Second World War but at HSE she is asking students to find out what happened in other countries to try to understand the Soviet experience in a global context. She talked to the HSE English News website about teaching and researching at the HSE International Centre for History and Sociology, about discovering Moscow’s architecture and about her life as an academic in Russia.
In the year that marks the 70th anniversary of victory in the Second World War, we talk to Kristy Ironside, who received her BA and MA from the University of Toronto before going on to complete her PhD at the University of Chicago, and who is currently researching life in the Soviet Union in the post-war years. Kristy Ironside’s work examines what the War meant to ordinary people, how their lives changed — and how Soviet society coped with the aftermath.
