Events

Events coming soon

Past events

• From Paris to Petrograd: The Paris Commune in the Russian Revolutionary Imagination

  October 16 2024
  
  The Centre for East European and Eurasian Studies (CEEES) invited Dr Andy Willimott (senior lecturer, QMUL) to present some of his latest research. Few historical events held as much meaning for the Soviets as the Paris Commune of 1871. Scholars have noted that Russia’s revolutionary elite, notably Lenin, wrote frequently about past revolutions--shoehorning Russia into a teleological and highly theoretical narrative of Marxist development. But little attention has been paid to how the tale of 1871--more so than 1789 or 1848--provided Soviet ideology with the emotional content and sense of relevance necessary to inspire popular engagement with the radical past.
  
  Examining how 1871 was told and retold, read and re-read, from the radical circles of the Russian revolutionary underground to the workers’ club activities of the Soviet period, Willimott recasts Soviet engagement with the revolutionary past. Out of this research emerges a better understanding of how the Soviets, and radical movements more broadly, sustained their sense of past, even as they avowedly declared their newness.
  
  This CEEES event saw Dr Andy Willimott deliver a paper on his award-winning research. Dr Joan Tumblety from the history department offered some brief comments on his paper, and this was followed by a question and answer session from the audience.

• Decolonisation in the history of the Russian Revolution

  January 3 to 5 2024
  
  This was the Study Group on The Russian Revolution's annual conference. The study group was established in 1973 and its aim is to promote new approaches to the study of the Russian Revolution, focusing on the period between 1880 and 1932. Affiliated to the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), the Study Group possesses a truly international membership. The Study Group and its annual conferences boast strong representation from scholars based in the UK, EU, the USA and Russia.
  
  The conference aimed to examine aspects of the history of the Russian Empire, revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union from 1880-1932, from a variety of (inter) disciplinary perspectives.
  
  We considered the theme of decolonisation in the history of the Russian Revolution. We wanted to unite well-established and more recent research approaches in pursuit of this aim. To do this, we sought to unite long-standing members of the SGRR and their perspectives on how the field has changed, and scholars at the earlier end of the careers, inviting new perspectives on the history of the Revolution that show cutting-edge research. Among other questions, the SGRR asks how study of the revolution has changed, and how things are likely to develop in the next couple of years against the backdrop of Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine.

• The Authoritarian International: Tracing How Authoritarian Regimes Learn in the Post-Soviet Space

  November 29, 2023
  
  In his new book 'The Authoritarian International: Tracing How Authoritarian Regimes Learn in the Post-Soviet Space,' Stephen Hall argues that democracies can preserve their norms and values from increasing attacks and backsliding by better understanding how authoritarian regimes learn.
  
  He focuses on the post-Soviet region, investigating two established autocracies, Belarus and Russia, and two hybrid-regimes, Moldova and Ukraine, with the aim of explaining the concept of authoritarian learning and revealing the practices that are developed and the sources of that learning.
  
  There are clear signs of collaboration between countries in developing best survival practices between authoritarian-minded elites. Learning does not just occur between states, rather it can happen at the intra-state level, with elites learning lessons from previous regimes in their own countries.
  
  Hall highlights the horizontal nature of this learning, with authoritarian-minded elites developing methods from a range of sources to ascertain the best practices for survival. Post-Soviet regional organisations are crucial for developing and sharing survival practices as they provide 'learning rooms' and training exercises.

• Masculinity and Postsocialism – Workshop

  September 8 2023
  
  The aim of this workshop was to generate comparative, inter-disciplinary perspectives on the changing shape of masculinities across post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia, reflecting equally on its shared history and on the divergent developments taking place both between and within countries across the region.
  
  Its contributors explored, inter alia: the different ways in which masculinity has been re-constructed and mobilised – by states, by markets – across Eastern Europe and Eurasia from the latter years of state socialism and its collapse to the present day; the impact of these constructions on gender and sexual relations and inequalities, including in spheres such as employment, social policy, the family and domestic violence; the ways men with differing social characteristics have negotiated these constructs in their everyday lives, and relations between them; and the various relations between national and global constructions of hegemonic masculinity across the region.

• Seminar Series – War in Ukraine: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future

  June 21 2023
  Conversations about research: conducting fieldwork in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus in the context of war
  
  June 7 2023
  Svitlana Babenko (Malmö University) and Irina Kuznetsova (University of Birmingham)
  Ukrainian refugees in the aftermath of the 2014 and 2022 invasions
  
  May 10 2023
  Nicola Ramsden (BEARR Trust)
  Supporting the humanitarian front in Ukraine, Poland and Moldova
  
  April 26 2023
  Natalia Levchuk (National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine)
  Demographic trends in Ukraine: before and after the war
  
  March 8 2023
  Zbigniew Wojnowski (University of Oxford) and Dana Mattingley (University of Cambridge)
  Ukraine versus Russia: History, Myth, War
  
  February 23 2023
  Dan Healey (University of Oxford)
  2023 Southampton Stonewall Lecture
  LGBTQ in a Time of War: The Queer History of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict
  
  February 8 2023
  Bettina Renz (University of Nottingham)
  Western estimates of Russian military capabilities and the invasion of Ukraine
  
  December 12 2022
  Jeremy Morris (Aarhus University, Denmark)
  Russian reactions to the war: defensive consolidation and resistance