National Identity in Russia from 1961 : Traditions & Deterritorialisation
Participants
The structure of the project involves a network of 40 scholars, including a core group of 4 Russian
and 5 British academics, each of whom will work on a particular aspect of our general theme.
CORE
GROUP:
Professor
Albert Baiburin (European University, St Petersburg), is a leading
Russian expert in semiotics and in the study of Russian traditional peasant
culture, especially ritual; publications include The
House in the Rituals and Beliefs of the Eastern Slavs [Zhilishche v
obryadakh i predstavleniyakh vostochnykh slavyan] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983;
reprinted Moscow, 2005). Edited publications include Ethnic
Behaviour Stereotypes [Etnicheskie stereotipy povedeniya] (Leningrad;
Nauka, 1985) and Ethnic
Stereotypes of Male and Female Behaviour [Etnicheskie stereotipy muzhskogo i zhenskogo povedeniya] (Leningrad:
Nauka, 1991; co-editor Igor’ S. Kon).
Recent publications include articles on attitudes to the word and language
in traditional Russian culture, and an essay on the semiotics of the
ethnographical museum for Neprikosnovennyi
zapas magazine. He has also led projects in the field of ethnic
tolerance, an area that is extensively developed at the European University.
For this project, he plans to write a book on the Soviet/Russian passport as
a means of constructing ethnic and personal identity.
Dr
Dmitry Baranov is Curator of the Russian Ethnographical Collections
at the Russian Ethnographical Museum in St Petersburg. He has published a
large number of articles on Russian peasant beliefs and practices,
particularly those relating to pregnancy and childbirth. Recently, he has
begun working on the history of ethnography in Russia; an article about the
conceptual assumptions behind the famous data-collection project organised
by Prince V. N. Tenishev in the late nineteenth century is forthcoming in Antropologicheskii
forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture (St Petersburg).
For the current project, he will extend this work into the Soviet
period and discuss the presentation of ‘traditional culture’ in the
Soviet and post-Soviet ethnographical museum, drawing on archival resources
at the REM.
Dr
Birgit Beumers (Bristol) is an internationally recognised specialist
in Russian cinema; her publications include an edited volume of essays, Russia
on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris,
1999), as well as studies of the cinema of Nikita Mikhalkov, an introduction
to Russian cultural studies, Pop
Culture Russia! (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2005), and many articles and
reviews. She was the editor of a special issue of Slavic
Review on Russian cinema. For a more complete list of publications click
here. For the current project, she intends to extend
and update her work on the ‘national idea’ in Russian cinema, analysing
this in the context of a broader project on contemporary Russian film.
Dr
Andy Byford (Durham) has published in Russian cultural
history, especially on the professional self-representation of Russian literary academics in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (cf. Literary Scholarship in
Late Imperial Russia: Rituals of Academic Institutionalization, Oxford:
Legenda, 2007). He has also published on the emergence of Russian
'child study' (paedology) and its roots in fin de siècle Russian
pedagogy, psychology,
psychiatry and social hygiene. His current project is on national self-definition and
collective remembering among Russian migrants in the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, focusing
especially on the construction and transmission of national culture among Russians currently domiciled in Britain.
Professor
Catriona Kelly (Oxford) has published extensively in the field of
Russian cultural history, especially from 1900. Her recently-completed
monograph, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, to be published
by Yale University Press in 2007, includes material on patriotic education
for children in the Soviet period, a subject on which she has also published
an article in the Russian literary and cultural magazine, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Review). Her contribution
to the project will be a monograph on cultural memory and multiculturalism
in Leningrad/St Petersburg from 1961, as well as articles on patriotic
education for children in post-Soviet Russia, and on the ‘new tradition’
of the ‘palace of marriages’, which emerged in the late 1950s.
Dr
Anna Kushkova (European University, St Petersburg) is noted
for her work on conflict in Russian village culture (the cultural history of
quarrels and gossip, the role of the ‘comrades’ courts’ in the 1960s).
Recently, she has begun work on the history of food, and its relationship
with perceptions of national identity, in late Soviet and post-Soviet
Russian culture (cf. her article on ‘Russian Salad’, salad
oliv’e, published in Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie early in 2006). She will be extending this
discussion in her work for the project.
Dr
Stephen Lovell (King’s
College London) has published extensively
in the field of Russian cultural history, including The
Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); (ed., with A. Ledeneva and A. Rogachevsky), Bribery
and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the
1990s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); and the prizewinning study, Summerfolk:
A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2003). For this project he has written a history of the Soviet Union and Russia
since 1941. This
is forthcoming as The Shadow of War: The Soviet Union and Russia, 1941 to the
Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Dr
Elena Omelchenko (Ulyanovsk) is well known for her work in the field
of sociology, and has an especial interest in youth issues and in
regionalism in contemporary Russia. Her publications include The
Heroes of Our Time. Sociological Studies [Geroi nashego vremeni:
Sotsiologicheskie ocherki], Ulyanovsk: Srednevolzhskii nauchnyi tsentr,
2000) and Youth and Drugs: An Overview
(Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2003); she also edited (ed.) The Thirteenth Step. An Analysis of Regional Anti-Drug Abuse Social
Policies [Trinadtsatyi shag. Opyt analiza antinarkoticheskikh
regional’nykh sotsial’nykh politik] (Ulyanovsk: Ulyanovsk State
University, 2002).
Professor
Hilary Pilkington (Warwick) is a leading specialist in the sociology
of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, with a particular interest in Russian
youth. She has also published extensively in the area of ethnic identity in
contemporary Russia, including Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998); with E. Omelchenko, M. Flynn, U.
Bliudina, and E. Starkova, she edited Looking
West? Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures (University Park
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); and with G.
Yemelianova, she was the editor of Islam
in Post-Soviet Russia: Public and Private Faces (London and New
York:RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). For this project, she and Dr Omelchenko will
investigate attitudes to ethnic identity and ‘otherness’ among young
people, basing their analysis on questionnaires, interviewing, and fieldwork
in St Petersburg and Vorkuta.
Dr
Josie von Zitzewitz (Oxford) recently completed her doctoral
dissertation at Oxford on the literature of the 'Religious Renaissance' in
1970s USSR. As a Post-Doctoral Fellow on the project she will be developing
her work on Viktor Krivulin, one of the most important 'unofficial' poets of
that decade, focusing on Krivulin’s indebtedness to various Silver Age
figures. She will also be investigating the problem of preserving the
material memory of the Gulag on the basis of the 'Virtual Museum of the
Gulag' (www.gulagmuseum.org), a
project run by 'Memorial' St Petersburg in which she has been involved since
2003.
PROJECT
STUDENTS:
Rowenna
Baldwin (Warwick) studied at St Andrews University and received an
MA Honours in Ancient History and Russian in 2005 and an MLitt in Central
and East European Studies in 2006. In 2006-07 she worked as a British
Council language assistant at two universities in Samara, Russia. At the
British Council offices she also ran a discussion club aimed at promoting
cultural fusion between Britain and Russia. At Warwick, Rowenna is reading
for a PhD in Sociology under the supervision of Professor Hilary Pilkington.
Her thesis, provisionally entitled ‘Patriotic Education in post-Soviet
Russia’,
will focus on the educational programme in 'patriotism' that has been
implemented in Russian schools for several years. In particular, she will be
examining the experiences of students and teachers who have been involved in
such programmes.
Victoria
Donovan (Oxford) received
a BA with First Class Honours in Politics and a Modern Language from Bristol
University in 2000. She completed an MA in East European Studies at the
University of Bologna in 2007, during which she lived in St Petersburg and
studied at the Faculty of International Relations at St Petersburg State
University. At Oxford, Victoria is reading for a DPhil in Medieval and
Modern Languages under the supervision of Professor Catriona Kelly. Her
DPhil project, ‘Nestolichnaya kultura: Regional and National Identity
in post-1961 Russian Culture’, will involve a comparative study of
local identities and cultural memory in three towns with medieval origins in
North-Western Russia (Novgorod, Pskov and Vologda).
PROJECT
INTERVIEWERS:
Svetlana
Amosova
Aleksandra
Kasatkina
Irina
Nazarova
PARTNER
INSTITUTIONS:
‘Region’
Research Centre, Ulyanovsk State University, was set up in 1995, and has
conducted intensive research in youth problems since then. At the centre of
a strong national and international network, including CREES (University of
Birmingham) and Warwick as well as institutions in Russia, it is a
non-profit making operation whose research results have been of practical
use to regional and municipal authorities and to public organisations, and
have been widely publicised in the mass media.
The
European University, St Petersburg is a state-accredited but
independent post-graduate university with five faculties (Arts, Economics,
Ethnology, History, and Social Sciences). Founded in 1995, it has rapidly
become one of the premier educational and intellectual centres in St
Petersburg, and indeed in the Russian Federation. Many of its staff have
studied or taught at Western universities, and there is an excellent small
library including many Western journals and publications; the European
University’s own publishing house issues large numbers of almanacs and
journals in the humanities and social sciences. Distinguished Western
academics (recently including Marshall Sahlins and Quentin Skinner) make
frequent visits to give lectures. Conferences and workshops organised by the
University regularly include non-Russian academics and make a point of
fostering scholarly dialogue across the East-West divide. Like the Region
Centre, the European University is a major contributor to the creation of a
civil society in Russia, above all through programmes such as the in-service
course for government officials, ‘Ethnic Tolerance in Russia’.
WIDER NETWORK:
Levon Abrahamian (Erevan) (National identity: Armenia)
Catherine Andreyev (Oxford) (Russian emigration)
Mark Bassin (UCL) (Eurasianism)
Vitaly Bezrogov (Moscow) (Religious revival in Russian education)
Nancy Condee (Pittsburgh) (National identity in Russian cinema)
Francis Conte (Paris) (Russian popular culture)
Evgeny Dobrenko (Sheffield) (Non-Russian Soviet literature)
Jan Fellerer (Oxford) (Polish, Ukrainian and Czech linguistic nationalism in the 19th century)
Boris Firsov (European University, St Petersburg) ('Mentality' in Russia)
Roy Foster (Oxford) (National identity: Ireland)
Yoram Gorlizki (Manchester) (Regional politics in Russia)
Anne Gorsuch (UBC) (Tourism in Russia)
Bruce Grant (New York) (National identity: Azerbaijan)
Elza-Bair Guchinova (Moscow/Erevan) (National identity: Kalmykia)
Nick Harney (UWA, Perth) (National identity in the Italian diaspora)
Julie Hessler (Oregon) (Russian views of ‘the Third World’)
Geoffrey Hosking (London) (Russian nationalism in historical perspective)
Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge) (‘Cosmopolitanism’ in Russia/the CIS)
Andrew Jenks (California State) (The military-industrial complex in Russia/USA)
Markus Kaiser (Bielefeld) (Russian Diaspora in Germany)
Martha Lampland (UC Davis) (National identity: Hungary)
Katerina Levidou (Oxford) (National idea in Russian émigré and East European music)
Martin McLaughlin (Oxford) (National identity: Italy)
Mike Nicholson (Oxford) (Solzhenitsyn and nationalism)
Sergei Oushakine (Princeton) (National identity: Siberia)
Dimitris Papanikolaou (Oxford) (National identity: Greece)
György Peteri (NTNU) (National identity: Hungary)
Alexandra Piir (European University, St Petersburg) (Ethnic Minorities in Education)
Robert Pyrah (Oxford) (Cultural history of 20th-century L'viv, Ukraine)
Alim Sabitov (Almaty) (National identity: Kazakhstan)
Anton Shekhovtsov (Sevastopol) (Russian far right)
Jeremy Smith (Birmingham) (Non-Russian minorities)
Ron Suny (Michigan) (National identity: Russia/CIS)
Aleksandr Titov (Birmingham) (Russian regionalism)
Vera Tolz (Manchester) (National identity: Russia)
Ilia Utekhin (European University, St Petersburg) (Visual sources on Russian identity)
Nikolai Vakhtin (European University, St Petersburg) (Language and identity in Russia/Siberia)
Andrew Wachtel (Northwestern) (Migrancy in Slovenia/Italy)
Faith Wigzell (UCL) (Russian folk traditions)
Alexander Wöll (Regensburg/Oxford) (Russian nationalism with reference to other East European cultures)
Svetlana Yaroshenko (St
Petersburg) (National identity: Russia)