Our online speaker series continues TODAY, September 19, at 3:00pm ET. Recordings of my talk last Monday and all future talks can be found here.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQQWW747jYQpIY30_Fm29xg
Cynthia Hooper, College of the Holy Cross, “What Went Wrong with Russia?”
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and the new president of an independent Russia, Boris Yeltsin, announced an overnight shift from Communism
to capitalism, most Western leaders rejoiced. It seemed that a superpower enemy was rapidly transforming itself into a U.S. ally. Cynthia Hooper will examine how Western scholars viewed Russia at the time and explore the assumptions and practices that shaped
the politics of economic transition. How did Russians view the U.S. during the Yeltsin years and how has this “memory” of the 1990s been re-shaped by Kremlin handlers and incorporated into Russian propaganda today? What does Russia’s war with Ukraine, in
the face of western sanctions, tell us about changes and continuities in the practice of dictatorial power?
Cynthia Hooper is
Director of Russian and Eastern European Studies and Associate Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross. She has extensive research experience having spent several years in the Russian cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Ekaterinburg,
and Samara. She has been a fellow at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. She has published widely on aspects of Soviet dictatorship during the Stalin era, particularly on the
experience of repression and the actions and attitudes of those involved in its organization and practice. Since the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2014, she has specialized in the study of contemporary Russian media strategies, writing on the subject
for, among others, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and for The
Conversation. She has been featured on CNN, Bloomberg News, ITV, and NPR and speaks frequently to businesses and consulting companies eager to learn more about Russian propaganda and disinformation, the current situation inside Russia, and the possible
consequences of the Ukraine-Russia conflict for Europe and the wider world.
Please come and please encourage your friends, students, and colleagues to attend. All can easily register to attend through any of the links in this message where you can
find more information about the series of events or directly at
this Zoom registration link.
Sincerely,
Steve Barnes
The Program on Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Mason University Presents:
"Russia's War on Ukraine in Historical Perspective": A George Mason University Online Speaker Series
Mondays 3:00-4:15 ET September 12-November 28, 2022
You can find detailed descriptions of each event and speaker
here.
On February 24, 2022, drawing upon a variety of demonstrably false historical analogies, Vladimir Putin ordered a mass invasion of Ukraine, extending a war that had been ongoing since 2014. Ukrainians have suffered horrific crimes at the hands of the Russian
invader, but Ukraine has inspired the world through its remarkable resistance and resilience. How can an understanding of history help us make sense of this earthshaking event?
When we try to understand the present, we always call upon our knowledge of the past in a variety of ways—through a search for origins, through historical causal explanation, through historical analogy, and through an exploration of the politicized use and
misuse of history by contemporary political and cultural figures. Often we only implicitly draw upon history to understand the present, but how do we explicitly build our base of historical knowledge and use it to understand current events?
What is Ukraine and how did it come to be the object of Putin’s violent obsession? How do Ukraine’s history and culture help us understand the rise of this nation and their resistance and resilience? How does the history of European imperialism, nationalism,
and post-colonialism help us understand Ukraine's post-Soviet independence? Can military history or the history of international law help us understand this war? What historical analogies are appropriate to our understanding of this war? Through this series,
our audiences will come to better understand Ukraine, Russia, and the events that shook the world in 2022.
You can find out more about this series
here.
Steven A. Barnes
Director, Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies
President, Southern Conference on Slavic Studies
Associate Professor of Russian and Soviet History
George Mason University
https://rest.gmu.edu/people/sbarnes3