Veronica Tsepkalo, Svetlana Tikhavoskaya, and Maria Kolesnikova

Revolution began in my native Belarus on August 9, 2020. It had been brewing for a couple of months before that, as the government had been trespassing the lines of legality by arresting and persecuting presidential candidates, detaining activists, and obscuring pre-election campaigning. It erupted openly the night after Alexander Lukashenko’s victory was announced at eighty percent. The lie was so overwhelmingly horrendous that people took to the streets--to be met by riot police in their most brutal form. At the time of this writing, there have been seventy-eight days of peaceful protests--not one window has been broken by protesters--dispersed by the police but coming together the next day.  

The story of women in this revolution is remarkable and also telling. The photo of three young female leaders of the presidential campaign--Maria Kolesnikova, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, and Veronica Tsepkalo--raising their hands in gestures of resilience (a V-sign, a fist, and a heart) has immediately become a meme. No wonder: the photo looks as if it was purposefully created for the global media market which is eager to pick up stories of women’s political leadership. But the situation under which these three courageous women united their headquarters and came together to lead the ‘uprising’ may not be so rosy.     

In fact, the situation reminds me of what took place at the beginning of the Polish Solidarity movement. I know about it from historian Shana Penn’s book Solidarity’s Secret. Penn writes that when, in December 1981, martial law was declared in Poland and about 3,500 male activists were arrested simultaneously, women were left in control of the organization for a period of time. A similar thing took place in Belarus, where two of the most promising presidential candidates were arrested and the third one had to leave the country. Ironically, it was repression against male leaders that had created a ‘structure of opportunity,’ as scholars of social movements call it, for women. At the same time, women are rarely seen by those in power as significant political actors, which is why they allowed for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, ‘an ordinary housewife’ to be registered as a candidate: they  saw no harm in her. As we currently know, they were mistaken: she achieved the impossible, mobilizing the whole nation to stand up for liberty and fairness.  

It is interesting to examine aspects of her story in greater detail. Upon being registered as a presidential candidate, Tikhanovskaya made her first public statement. To the amazement of many, she addressed her husband, who was (and still is) in jail, rather than her potential voters, saying: “Serezha, I love you very much, and I am doing this for you and for all those people who believed in you.” Several days later, when asked about her political program, she replied: “I am not a politician, I don’t know how to run a country. I am a technical candidate. I want to win to hold fair elections with other candidates participating.” Those statements created a stir not only in political circles, but also among feminists who might have expected a manifesto from a female candidate. Some commentators made allusions to Lenin's famous phrase about a kitchen maid (kukharka) running the state, while President Lukashenko suggested, only half-jokingly, changing the Constitution by adding a requirement of military service for anyone who intended to run for president. Social media responded immediately to suggest another constitutional amendment: only those who have given birth can be presidents. Unexpectedly, that exchange invoked a classical opposition between reproductive work, which is usually done ‘for love’ by women, and public ‘service,’ a prerogative of men.  This opposition remains at the core of the ongoing global discussion about gender equality and, more generally, relations between the personal and the political. 

The political position of Tikhanovskaya is certainly more complex than that of a naïve housewife. Speaking on National TV, she said: “My name is Svetlana Tikhavoskaya. I am thirty-seven years old. I was educated as a teacher and a philologist. I worked as a secretary and a translator, and I can speak Belarusian, Russian, and English. I am not a politician, it is my husband, Serguei Tikhanovsky, who was going to run for president, and this is why he is now in jail... I, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, am running for the President of Belarus to bring change and to hold new, open, fair elections after August 9th..” This declaration is not that of a ‘housewife,’ but of an autonomous and self-sufficient citizen who is confronting the state for the recognition of her – and everyone else’s - rights. 

Today, two of the three women who stood up against the state are out of the country--against their will--and the third, Maria Kolesnikova, who uses a ‘heart’ as her protest symbol, is a political prisoner. The story of her imprisonment deserves to be told. Maria was kidnapped one morning from a deserted city street in Minsk by men in balaclavas, who pushed her into a vehicle with no license plates and drove away.  Fortunately, a passerby was able to record this incident on her phone. For more than twenty-four hours men from the secret police questioned Maria, demanding that she leave the country, even threatening that they would ‘take her out’ --in one piece or in several. Eventually they took her to the Ukrainian border and attempted to ‘push her’ out the country, but she managed to rip up her passport and could thus not be deported. When this story became public (told by Kolesnikova’s fellow prisoners, whom authorities did deport), a commentator on social media exclaimed: “This woman has the balls of a titan,”  expressing, albeit in a politically “incorrect’ way, his admiration for her courage, resilience, and sense of purpose. 

During the months of protest, many women have been on the streets. From late August on, every Saturday has been a ‘women’s day,’ reserved specifically for women’s marches. At first it seemed that women protestors would be treated more mildly than men. No authorities wanted to publicly arrest women as the government wanted to avoid such negative publicity. Second, it seemed that initially both riot and regular police were somewhat at a loss of how to respond to women protesters: should they beat and arrest women en masse? Beating them would require breaking a certain taboo as gender stereotypes are deeply ingrained in culture and the individual psyche. After the protesters realized this, women began shielding men during rallies; however, this ‘Catch-22’ did not work for too long, and now both women and men are being detained.  The difference is women, upon detention, are provided with a package of supplies for women’s hygiene courtesy of Belarusian Red Cross. All this, of course, is a terrible price to pay for liberty and rights. But, at least the question of whether a woman can be elected president in my native country has been answered. Yes, she can! 

Elena Gapova, Professor of Sociology, Western Michigan University and Founder, Centre for Gender Studies, European Humanities University 

On November 18, 2020, the Constitutional Court of Romania is due to make a decision regarding the constitutionality of the National Education Law, which had been modified by the Romanian Senate on June 16, 2020. At that time, President Klaus Iohannis refused to promulgate the modified law and sent it to the Court.  The controversial bill is an amendment to the National Education Law and prohibits "in units, educational institutions, and all spaces intended for vocational education and training (including units providing extracurricular education)," activities "that spread the theory or opinion of gender identity, understood as the theory or opinion that gender is a concept different from biological sex and that the two are not always the same.”  With this blunt formula, Romanian senators decided that delineating the fundamental distinction between ”sex” and ”gender” is forbidden in academic and educational curricula and should not to be taught in universities. Just imagine a parliament legislating that gravitational force does not exist and should not to be taught in universities!  This prohibition is a gross infringement of academic freedom and a dangerous move in the direction of illiberal politics. 

In response, a group of Romanian academics--Ionela Băluță, Oana Băluță, Măriuca Oana Constantin, Georgiana Epure, and Liliana Popescu—authored an Amicus Curiae, which they submitted to the Romanian Constitutional Court on September 22, 2020. The Curiae was endorsed by the National University of Political and Administrative Studies (SNSPA) and other major universities in Romania, as well as universities, research centers and institutes, and academic associations around the world. It garnered 831 academic signatories worldwide, including world-renowned scholars of gender such as Judith Butler, Delphine Dulong, David Paternotte, Joan W. Scott, and Mieke Verloo. 

The Amicus Curiae highlights the unconstitutional character of the normative provisions proposed by the Law amending Article 7 of the National Education Law (no. 1/2011), while also emphasizing the importance--and necessity--of gender studies in democratic societies.  As such, it demonstrates that the modified law is flawed from a legal, academic, professional, and democratic perspective. 

Legally, it restricts the right to freedom of expression, undermines freedom of research, and represents serious challenges to academic autonomy.  In addition to  violating the Romanian Constitution (art. 30, 32), it violates the European Convention on Human Rights (art. 10), European Union law, and international treaties such as CEDAW and the Istanbul Convention adopted by the Council of Europe.

From an academic and democratic viewpoint, the modified Law of Education signifies an unwanted intervention in scientific approaches to academic inquiry, analysis, and expression. It prohibits not only activities that address theories and opinions related to the gendered dimension of human identity, but an entire legitimate discipline of study and research: Gender Studies. It contradicts the fundamental mission of academia, which is to produce knowledge and train future generations in a democratic spirit. In addition, Gender Studies plays a key role in training experts with respect to democratic governance, particularly equality of opportunity and gender equality. And, given our totalitarian past under the Ceaușescu regime, we greatly value democratic values in Romania.  

What lies behind this move in the Romanian Senate?  What was the motive for changing the Law of Education? The so-called "gender ideology." For some time now, the term "gender ideology" has appeared in Romanian public discourse and is used primarily by individuals who identify themselves as religious (Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians).  This is a nebulous term with no scientific or academic basis and its proponents claim that “gender does not exist because it cannot be seen.”  Can gravitational force be seen? Or, for that matter, other phenomena on the basis of which we explain the physical world?! 

The denial of homosexuality has a long history in Romania. However, in the last decade or so, there has been acceptance of some non-heteronormative identities, practices, and orientations, namely homosexuality and lesbianism. Transgender identities, by comparison, remain virtually unknown. Instead, transgender people have become the new "scapegoats,” targeted by adherents of a number of religious faiths for perverting youth. Such misinformation has been disseminated in the media, and it has been argued that transgender people, as well as the so-called “gender ideology propaganda” taught in schools, have provoked young people to change their gender identity on a whim. These stories do nothing but demonstrate ignorance, lack of openness and tolerance, and are, more generally, devoid of compassion, empathy, and love of others. They also instill in people's minds the expression "gender ideology,” which is associated with the possibility of whimsically changing one’s sex--and with the notion that teachers are “propagating” it.  Most importantly, these stories instill a great deal of fear. 

The expression "gender ideology" is itself an ideological product of those who reconstruct reality based on an imagery that has no relationship to lived experience. "Gender ideology" is the creation of people less preoccupied with knowledge than in controlling other people's minds and poisoning their souls with fear.  It is not surprising that the proponents of the term, “gender ideology” are connected to the local, Romanian version of “The National Prayer Breakfast,” a Christian meeting held annually in the United States. It has representatives in virtually all Romanian parties and spreads false information about what homosexuality means, inciting hatred against Romanians who do not assume or conform to heteronormative identities. 

The National Prayer Breakfast misinterprets biblical writings and promotes hatred rather than love. In addition, the ”Brothers” were committed soldiers in the case of the 2018 Referendum, designed to alter the marriage law to refer to unions as being between a man and woman only. Recently, the amendments to the Law on National Education were made by one of the members of the local National Prayer Breakfast, Senator Vasile Cristian Lungu of the conservative People’s Movement Party (Partidul Mișcarea Populară; PMP). 

If the US used to be (and still is) a source of democratic inspiration and practice, it has also, in the past few years, became a source of hate, undemocratic practices, and illiberalism. Therefore, democratic solidarity across borders is needed now more than ever.  We would like to thank academics, researchers, and centers and universities—in the US and around the world—that supported our legal action to the Constitutional Court in Romania. 

Liliana Popescu, Professor, National University of Political and Administrative Studies (SNSPA), Bucharest  

Esther Kingston Mann, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts-Boston 

The Association for Women in Slavic Studies is pleased to announce that the recipient of its 2020 Outstanding Achievement Award is Esther Kingston-Mann. After earning her PhD at Johns Hopkins University, in 1969 Kingston-Mann joined the History Department at University of Massachusetts at Boston, where she produced pathbreaking scholarship, worked tirelessly to make her institution a more diverse and inclusive place, and inspired successive generations of students. 

Kingston-Mann’s foundational body of scholarship is empirically driven, meticulously researched, and elegantly written. She has been at the vanguard of research on Russian rural life, with particular attention to gender, family and economy. Her work brings the methods of social and economic history into dialogue with anthropology, philosophy, political theory and literature to offer readers a panoramic view of the peasantry. Kingston-Mann has authored three monographs and edited one book on Russian history. Lenin and the Problems of Marxist Peasant Revolution, 1893-1917 (Oxford University Press, 1983) turned a sympathetic eye to the plight of the Russian peasant, emphasizing the possibilities that Lenin saw in the peasant commune. Her edited book (with Timothy Mixter), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics in European Russia, 1800-1921 (Princeton University Press, 1991) offers a seminal chapter by her that one colleague in Russian peasant studies said he “turns first to … for inspiration and to set [himself] on the right path” every time he sits down to start a new project. Her second monograph, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Rural Development (Princeton University Press, 1999) offers a sweeping reconstruction of ideas from the nineteenth through the end of the twentieth centuries. Her most recent book, Women, Land Rights and Rural Development (Routledge, 2017) demonstrates a scholar at the height of her interpretive prowess. This book offers a comparative study of rural women’s economic history in seventeenth century England, twentieth century Russia/USSR, and twentieth century Kenya. Moving beyond policies dictated by men, Kingston-Mann traces the role of women in rural development in these very different times and places, finding the kind of similarities that validate her comparative methodology. 

Impressive as her track record is in Russian peasant studies, some of her Slavic Studies colleagues may not be aware that she has simultaneously made an extraordinary contribution to scholarship on diversity and inclusion in higher education. In addition to writing numerous articles and book chapters, Kingston-Mann has edited three books on this topic: A Diversity Research Initiative: How Diverse Undergraduate Students Become Researchers, Change Agents, and Members of a Research Community (Ford Foundation/UMB 1999); Achieving against the Odds: How Academics Become Teachers of Diversity Students (with Tim Sieber, Temple University Press 2005) and Transforming Classroom Culture: Inclusive Pedagogical Practice (with Arlene Dallalfar and Tim Sieber, Palgrave, 2011). 

The publications on diversity and inclusivity grew out of work she began in the classrooms of UMB, but which expanded to encompass several significant administrative roles and research projects. Kingston-Mann’s commitment to diversity and inclusion was evident early on in her creation of UMB’s first-ever modern world history class, which challenged a Eurocentric curriculum. She later authored the university’s first sexual harassment guidelines. In the early 1990s she chaired a two-year-long student, faculty, and staff  Diversity Working Group, which led to the establishment of a university-wide diversity curriculum requirement. From 1991 to 2000, Kingston-Mann served as director of the Center for Improvement of Teaching (CIT), securing a $750,000 Ford Foundation grant to fund and sustain the Center’s faculty seminars on diversity and inclusion.  From 1998-99, she led a Ford Foundation-funded UMB-based Diversity Research Initiative to foster research skills among undergraduate students and from 2003-05 she served as a principle investigator on a Ford Foundation-supported effort to create the New England Center for Inclusive Teaching, Scholarship and Curriculum Change (NECIT). Supporting faculty seminars based on UMB’s CIT model, the consortium drew together seven New England colleges and universities. Also in 2003, Kingston-Mann received a Ford Foundation grant to create a student-scholars award program. Since 2005, this program has been known as the Kingston-Mann Awards for Student Excellence in Diversity/Inclusion Scholarship and includes undergraduate students in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. 

This illustrious resume speaks to a profound concern with forging a fair and welcoming environment for students who, for a range of reasons, felt that the university classroom was not a place where they were welcome or belonged.  A testimonial from one of Kingston-Mann’s students, now an Associate Professor of US history, illustrates how a pedagogy of empathy animated Kingston-Mann as a teacher and mentor. Thirty-five years after sitting in Kingston-Mann’s classroom, she writes that “the biggest impact she had was in her ability to see an individual (shy) student among the crowd.” Inviting this student, far from home and a bit adrift, to a holiday dinner at her house, Kingston-Mann’s kindness demonstrated, in this former student’s words, “dedication to teaching, not just to convey information, but as a holistic vocation meant to shape and improve lives.”  

Though a kind, generous teacher, Kingston-Mann was not one to shy away from a fight. Some fair, but pointedly worded letters to the editor are out there for those inclined to track them down. They combine a rapier wit with precise, evidence-based arguments. No doubt these same qualities—intellect and humor, but also open-heartedness—proved to be the secret ingredients to Kingston-Mann’s efficacy on multiple fronts. Both Slavic Studies and, more broadly, the tertiary sector are better for having had Ester Kingston-Mann in them. It is with gratitude that we recognize her accomplishments with the 2020 Outstanding Achievement Award. 

Ask Aleksandra!

With more than two decades of experience in Slavic Studies and lots of chutzpah, Aleksandra shares her hard-won wisdom. Under a cloak of anonymity, you can safely ask Aleksandra anything you like, and in doing so you'll help not just yourself but probably others as well who no doubt have the same questions. Please send your questions to awssnewsletter@gmail.com and put “Ask Aleksandra” in the subject line. 

Dear Aleksandra, 

I am a junior scholar with a young family. How have more senior scholars managed to keep their research going, particularly overseas, with small children? 

Archiveless in America 
 

Dear Archiveless, 

The eternal question: how to get to our happy place? I don’t mean that in some deeply philosophical way. I mean it quite literally—how do we carve out time from our domestic duties to spend the glorious, extended periods of time in-country that were enjoyed when doing doctoral research? Not just family life, but also job responsibilities can make long research trips a logistical nightmare. 

Such challenges would be good problems to have in this lost year of the novel coronavirus, but let us imagine a time in the future when field research will be possible once again. How can we juggle our jobs as parents to small children with the need to access distant sources? This issue demands bespoke solutions tailored to your circumstances. 

Some of us have partners who have flexible schedules and adventurous souls. They may be fellow academics liberated from the classroom in the summer months and thus able to travel. Or they may have an interest or expertise in the region that gives them their own, independent desire to go right where you need to go. They may be unemployed or underemployed, freeing them up to come along and take responsibility for the lion’s share of household duties, including childrearing and associated logistics because, let’s face it, those playdates aren’t going to schedule themselves. 

If you are lucky enough to be in such a situation, what do you do if your partner is not available for or interested in exhausting and unpaid, if at times satisfying, parenting duty all day? What if you are a single parent without a partner or other support person? You can track down parent groups on Facebook and ask about private day care facilities, many of which have on staff an English-speaking teacher who can ease the transition. Alternatively, you could engage a nanny, again tapping into these online communities for leads. 

The big downside to these options? Cost. It is great to be in the position of having a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it, especially if you have that money. But there are plenty of people who do not. For others, money may not be the only obstacle. 

A wide range of things can upend any hopes of research trips with the family in tow. Perhaps you have a child who has health or developmental concerns that make overseas travel complicated or even impossible. Or a partner whose work obligations get in the way. Or your partner has been there, done that, and is way, way over it. Or your partner has a crippling fear of flying and no amount of gentle, but evidence-based, conversations about how flying is safer than driving a car can persuade them. (I had a partner that ticked those last two on the list, so I speak here from experience. You will be glad to hear that the story did have a happy ending, by which I mean divorce.) 

If bringing your young child along is not in the cards, you still have choices. Shorter research trips may be the order of the day. Some repositories allow you to scan yourself silly (or pay them to do it). Many of us work where there are tight restrictions on the number of pages you can scan. This means taking copious notes, typed frantically, but carefully, and supplementing those notes with as many scans as you can get your hands on. On a month-long trip last year, I was able to type 200 single-spaced pages of notes, enough for a couple of articles that lay the groundwork for the book project. 

One month away from your child may be more than you want to do, but that does not mean your career has to die on the vine. For the first seven years of my child’s life I pursued a research project based on published sources and repositories in my home country. Was I on fire about it? No. But it kept my career sufficiently chugging along and it was the right choice for me at the time. 

These days my young adult son good-naturedly teases me about that time when he was seven years old and I went overseas, alone, for a one-month research trip. He enjoys telling people how I left him “on the steps of an orphanage,” i.e. in the loving, competent hands of his other parent. Freud says that jokes give us a window into an unconscious and he might say that this is no innocuous jest, but indicative of a psychological wound. But Freud was a sexist pig who had his own issues. I did the best I could with what financial, professional, and personal resources I had available to me and my son knows that. Whatever your decision about how to manage this tension between work and family, you will do the best you can and it will work out fine.  

Janet M. Powers and Marica Prozo. Circles on the Mountain: Bosnian Women in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. xix, 213 pp. notes. appendix.  

Reviewed by Rebecca Daviddi, McGill University 

Circles on the Mountain documents the socio-economic and emotional recovery of women from Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) following the Bosnian War. To comprehend how peace, conflict, and justice are achieved or maintained, peace strategists and scholars researching social conflict and peace stress women’s central role during a conflict and thereafter, emphasizing that it is too often obscured. This book addresses this gap by referring to the concept of social capital, broadly defined as social networks, informal structures, and norms that facilitate individual and collective action. As prefaced in the introduction, social capital accounts for the ties binding communities, which are frequently severed during wars. Grasping under which conditions different groups of people nurture bonding (exclusionary) or bridging (inclusionary) social relations is crucial for diverse and plural societies like Bosnia’s. Focusing on women’s experiences, this book targets peace strategists and others interested in social capital’s capacity to shape individual and collective action, in an ultimate effort to better understand dynamics of conflict, peace, and justice.  Read More

Zsófia Lóránd. The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xxii, 270, pp.  Hardcover  

Reviewed by Filip Mitričević, Indiana University

In The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia, Zsófia Lóránd presents us with a study of the surging women's movement in the later years of Tito's and early years of post-Tito Yugoslavia. Based primarily on the literature produced by the movement (academic texts, journal and press articles, and art), as well as interviews conducted with the women and men involved, the author aims to bring us the "language, concepts, and ideology [that] were the key elements to a new feminism in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s" – a movement with a mission to "rethink and challenge the socialist project of women's emancipation" (1). Dominated by the post-socialist narrative, histories of state socialism often reproduce the same binary categories of the previous era, "thus ignoring the ethical and aesthetic complexities of socialist life," as Lóránd states (7). One of the fortes of this book is that it positions the reader well to absorb the intricacies and nuances of life under state socialism, as well as to understand the motivation behind the "neo-feminist" movement in Yugoslavia. Read More 

Katy Turton. Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1870-1940. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xx+261 pp. hardcover & eBook. 

Reviewed by Alison Rowley, Concordia University 

Katy Turton’s latest book opens with a discussion of the wives of the Decembrists, where she describes how family ties were often stronger than a person’s loyalty to the state and how private acts could make very public statements.  From that example, and through a series of chapters devoted to experiences common to most Russian revolutionaries, this well-written and interesting book is able to highlight the centrality of family networks to anti-Tsarist activities, and demonstrate how little party affiliation ultimately mattered when it came to the logistics of everyday life in the revolutionary underground. Given that many studies use the term “family” to really mean a focus on women, another particular strength of the volume is the way in which the author considers the roles that men played in revolutionary families and how these affected their mindsets when it came to gender issues. Read More 

Yana Hashamova. Screening Trafficking: Prudent and Perilous. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2018. xiii + 210 pp., hard cover. 

Reviewed by Denise J. Youngblood, University of Vermont 

Yana Hashamova’s first film book, Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (2007), established her as a scholar able to shed new light on the old conundrum of Russia’s fraught relationship with the Western “other.”  In Screening Trafficking, Hashamova suggests that European and North American filmmakers have also needed to find new ways to present the “other” in a post-Soviet world, focusing on movies about sex trafficking. Of course, films concerning sexual exploitation can too easily become “sexploitation” themselves. Hashamova argues that the recurring screen representation of Russian and East European women as victims in the post-communist period has allowed Western audiences to continue to believe in their superiority, especially when these films are used by Western NGOs to “enlighten” East European girls and women about their potential for victimhood. This fine book demonstrates the existence of an insidious new variation of “white savior complex.” Read More

Maria O’Reilly.  Gendered Agency in War and Peace: Gender Justice and Women’s Activism in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 326 pp. (eBook).  

Reviewed by Jennifer A. Zenovich, California State University, East Bay 

In Gendered Agency in War and Peace: Gender Justice and Women’s Activism in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, Maria O’Reilly utilizes an International Relations perspective to account for the national peacebuilding project of post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), arguing for the need to achieve gender equity in deliberations about and enactments of post-war reconciliation, non-institutionalized healing processes, and operations of “justice.” O’Reilly uses discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, and interviews to analyze how women survivors of rape and genocide, women in post-war community organizing, and women searching for posthumous remains of male relatives seek justice in BiH.  Read More

Jennifer Carroll, Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.   

Jennifer Carroll’s, Narkomania is an important contribution to the study of Ukrainian social and political development and a testament to the power of ethnographic research to illuminate multiple, interweaved meanings in a complicated social situation--drug addiction and its treatment in post-soviet Ukraine. Carroll’s book will become standard reading in qualitative and ethnographic methods classes. 

Beginning her research in 2007 and continuing on and off over the next decade, Carroll crafted a research project that examined drug use in Ukraine, its medication-assisted treatment regime (MAT), clinics, clients, and practitioners, and how nongovernmental organizations, like the Global Fund, subverted local and governmental functions to pursue neoliberal agendas and set unrealistic expectations on the clinics and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health.    

Yet, this is more than a story of addicts and their treatment. As domestic and international conflict escalated in Ukraine, Carroll adapted the study’s scope and premise to incorporate the events of the Euromaidan revolution, the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the Russian-backed separatist insurgency in Donbass to examine how Ukraine, during the 2010s, discursively excluded addicts’ presence and claim to citizenship. By linking addiction, national identity, and state building, Carroll demonstrates how “othering” addicts by the state and its citizenry developed into a shared belief, “addiction imaginary,” that the state needed to protect the nation from addicts. Especially illuminating is how Ukrainians deployed fear of addicts in the discourses around the Euromaidan movement and the crises in Crimea and Donboss.  

As Michele Rivkin-Fish, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill notes, “Exposing the moralized judgments dogging drug users, Narkomania details the brutal modes of exclusion being deployed to redefine Ukraine's body politic. Jennifer J. Carroll both explains the origins and uses of this 'addiction imaginary,' and counters it with a profoundly humanizing portrait of the lives and fates of Ukrainians who use drugs." 

Narkomania’s intellectual scope and breadth and engagement with the field of medical anthropology, domestic and global health policy, ethnography, international relations, and contemporary national and regional politics is why the prize committee picked it for this year’s  

Heldt prize for best book by a woman in any area of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.   
 

Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 

Yellow Star, Red Star is a unique and invaluable study of Holocaust memory (and forgetting) in post-socialist Europe. Rather than following the well-trodden paths of memory studies to focus on Poland or Russia and their “problems with memory,” Subotić offers an in-depth analysis of Serbian, Croatian, and Lithuanian discourses and policies. Her study shows how joining the European framework of memorialization primarily serves the creation of new national identities rather than indicate a true reckoning with local participation in the genocide and a recognition of its victims. Even scholars who are deeply engaged in related discussions can benefit from her detailed analysis of particular events and long-term trends, which makes a strong case for recognizing the troubling entwinement of shaping Holocaust memory according to contemporary agendas on the one hand, and the criminalization of the communist and anti-fascist past on the other. 

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019. 

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920 is an extraordinary and innovative exploration of the transnational and colonial history of the Prussian East and its entanglement with German imperialism in East Africa. The book is transnational in its truest sense. By drawing on sources from Germany, Poland, Brazil and Argentina, Ureña Valeria delivers a multifaceted discussion of not only German imperialism and colonialism, but the colonized Poles’ own ambitions of colonial acquisition and colonization. This original account and the expertly developed theoretical framework that fuels the analysis mark a new stage in scholars of Eastern Europe’s engagement with postcolonial studies. 

Olga Peters Hasty, How Women Must Write:  Inventing the Russian Woman Poet. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2019. 

Olga Peters Hasty’s How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet provides a behind the scenes look at  Russia’s cultural history, focusing on the women who sought to challenge the status quo. The development of an imagined figure of a Russian female poet is presented within the social, political, and cultural contexts. Hasty examines the climate in which Russia’s women developed their own strategies as they faced both the constraints and the opportunities for poetic self-presentation in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This engaging analysis offers a thoughtful critique of the traditional hierarchies, which affected Russia’s largely masculine literary culture, as it uncovers the cultural dynamics that are crucial for our understanding of the fact that women poets were no mere parodists but artists in their own right. This accessible volume addresses an essential topic of women poets’ engagement with the gender norms of their time, which lead them to a place where they could shape their own artistic identity.   

Written by a literary scholar, this work presents its powerful arguments in a way that is accessible for a non-specialist. The transparency with which Hasty lays out the tools of literary analysis reinforces the profundity of her conclusions. Thus, the value of the work reaches beyond the field of Russian literary studies.    

Allison Leigh, “Il’ia Repin in Paris: Mediating French Modernism,” Slavic Review 78, 2 (2019): 434-55. 

This outstanding article provides a vital re-examination of the relationship between Russian artists and European artistic centres in the second half of the nineteenth century. Conceptually ambitious and beautifully written, Allison Leigh’s exploration of the production and reception of Il’ia Repin’s A Parisian Café (1875) makes a significant contribution to Russian and European art history, scholarship on the development of Russian nationality identity, and cultural histories of gender and sexuality. Leigh’s combination of sophisticated visual analysis and meticulous reading of Repin’s personal correspondence offers a highly original and compelling take on Russia’s unique confrontation with ‘modernity’.  

Honourable mention: 

Christine Varga-Harris, “Between National Tradition and Western Modernisation: Soviet Woman and Representations of Socialist Gender Equality as a “Third Way” for Developing Countries, 1956-1964,”  Slavic Review 78, 3 (2019): 758-781. 

Through a careful reading of the magazine Soviet Woman, Christine Varga-Harris sheds light on a neglected part of the history of women’s activism and socialist internationalism. The article expertly traces the ‘motif of global sisterhood’ in depictions of, and publications penned by, Soviet women living in non-European republics. In doing so, Varga-Harris persuasively argues that the magazine presented Soviet socialism as a ‘third way’ between traditional patriarchal modes and western conceptions of gender equality, as well as an alternative method for transitioning away from colonisation while retaining diverse national cultures.  

Dr. Magdalena Moskalewicz
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies is delighted to announce Dr. Magdalena Moskalewicz as the 2020 recipient of the Mary Zirin Prize for independent scholarship. An art historian, Moskalewicz examines the unique character of socialist artistic modernity, as it developed in the immediate postwar decades in the former Soviet bloc and the former Yugoslavia, with a special focus on Poland. Her PhD research examined experiments with painting in Poland in the aftermath of the post-Stalinist Thaw. She has published on experimental practices generated outside of the official art system: abstract painting, op- and kinetic art, conceptualism, and politically motivated neo-avantgardes, including their connections to the international network of Fluxus as well as on the international circulation of Polish modern art during the Cold War. More recently, she has turned her attention to state-sponsored art such as socialist realism. She has served as an A.W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and since 2016 she has been teaching as a lecturer/adjunct on short-term contracts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently she is working on a book titled: Non-Painting: Studies in Socialist Modernism in Poland, 1955-1970. She also contributed a chapter to The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (2020).  

Dr. Moskalewicz also curates projects focused on the contemporary moment, examining the postcommunist condition with postcoloniality. Her most acclaimed exhibition to date was the Polish Pavilion at the 56th Venetian Biennale, in 2015, with Halka/Haiti 18°48’05′′N 72°23’01′′W.  The project involved staging the Polish National opera Halka (1858) in Cazale, a Haitian village inhabited by descendants of Polish soldiers who had fought for Haitian independence in 1803. Halka/Haiti probed the relevance of nineteenth-century artistic forms for the representation of national identities in a complex, postcolonial context. She explored those issues in the accompanying book, which won the 2017 Jean Goldman Book Prize. Another exhibition and book project, The Travellers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe (Warsaw, 2016; Tallinn, 2017) problematized migration, displacement, and accelerated global mobility in relation to identity formation through works by contemporary artist-migrants.  

The Zirin judges think that the wide range of Dr. Moskalewicz’s interests, the depth of her research, her innovative approach to her subjects, her commitment to sustained independent scholarship, and—in the shows she curates and in her writing—her attention to women artists, all abundantly qualify her to receive the Mary Zirin Prize.

Marta Aleksandra Zboralska, PhD, History of Art, University College London, “The Matter of Chatter”  

Marta Aleksandra Zboralska’s lively and stimulating dissertation chapter “The Matter of Chatter,” from her recently defended dissertation “The Art of Being Together: Inside the Studio of Henryk Stazewski and Edward Krasinski,” focuses on Krasinski’s fragmentary and almost juvenile short poetry. Making an original argument for the interdependence of artistic production through dialogue and exchange, Zboralska productively situates Krasinski’s poetry at the border between linguistic and visual art and offers a nuanced picture of the embodied experience of gender in his poetry. This study carries important implications as much for Eastern European art history as for the history of conceptualism across national boundaries, the workings of gender in conceptualist art, and theories of signification and dialogue. 
   
Honorable Mention: 

Kamila Kociałkowska, PhD, History of Art, University of Cambridge, “Early Avant-Garde Book Design and Imperial Censorship”  

Ivana Polić, PhD Candidate in History at the University of California San Diego 

The Selection Committee is pleased to award the 2020 AWSS Graduate Research Prize to Ivana Polić, whose dissertation research focuses on children and childhood in the contested construction of Croatian national identity in post-conflict former Yugoslavia. Exploring the mobilization and indoctrination of children during and after the Yugoslav wars, Polić seeks to engage in an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways that state leaders sought to create ethnically exclusive models of future nationalist patriots. AWSS funding will support the final phase of her field research as she prepares to complete her dissertation in the spring of 2021. 

Frankie Tulley, University of Bristol, “‘The Performative Power of Discourse”: What role does state-released visual culture play in the construction of Putin’s masculinity?” 

This outstanding essay masterfully traces representations of Putin’s masculinity through the medium of state-issued photographs. Tulley’s work is firmly grounded in scholarly literature on masculinities and Russian visual culture, but her close analysis of her source base pushes scholarship forward by making a unique intervention into the field. This essay offers a panoramic view of representations of Putin’s masculinity as militarised, sexualised, paternal, and imbued with religious significance, while also drawing important comparisons with other historical figures and geographical contexts. This is a most impressive piece of scholarship, and we are looking forward to seeing this work in print. 

Tulley was nominated by Dr. Connor Doak and her work was submitted as part of the module “Gender in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Russia” at the University of Bristol. 

Alina Haliliuc, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Denison University, published a book chapter entitled "Understanding Affectively: Beyond the Hills as Cinematic Invitational Rhetoric" in Inviting Understanding: A Portrait of Invitational Rhetoric, eds. Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020): 247-263. 

Maya Nadkarni, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College, published Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary (Cornell University Press, 2020) about the changing fates of the socialist past in postsocialist Hungary. Spanning more than two decades of postsocialist transformation, it follows Hungary from the optimism of the early years of transition to its recent right-wing turn toward illiberal democracy.  

Joan Neuberger, Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin, was elected VP/President Elect of ASEEES. Her book This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell University Press, 2019) was awarded the AHA's George L. Mosse prize in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since 1500.

Oksana Koshulko, Deputy Head and Associate Professor of the Department of Global Economics, Alfred Nobel University, Dnipro, Ukraine, published (with Evgenia Makazan) an article “Exploration of importance of the ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Prevention of Violence against Women by the Ukrainian Government” in The Technium Social Sciences Journal. 9, no. 1 (2020): 543-549  

Sarah Phillips, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the REEI at Indiana University spent AY 2019/20 on sabbatical working on a new archival and interview project that examines Kurt Vonnegut's popularity in the 1970s Soviet Union and his role as a cultural and literary mediator. In addition to working on a book about the social and ideological life of Vonnegut's prose in the USSR, Phillips also hopes to write a biography of Vonnegut's primary literary translator, Rita Rait-Kovaleva (1898-1989). 

Anika Walke, Associate Professor of History at Washington University, St. Louis, announces a recent collaborative publication on the role of women and gender in the Belarusian protest movement: https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/node/58248 

Talia Zajac, has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies for the year 2020–2021. Her thesis for the License in Mediaeval Studies will focus on the role of royal brides as political actors, religious patrons, and cultural ‘bridge-builders’ in the cross-confessional marriages concluded between the ruling clan of Rus’ and Latin Christian dynasties (c. 1040 to c. 1240). She is also currently working on an English translation of and commentary on the eleventh-century personal prayer-book belonging to Gertruda of Poland, the wife of Iziaslav Yaroslavich. In spring 2021, Zajac will continue this research as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester.