IS[R]A Newsletter, April 2007

CONFERENCES

REVISITING PERESTROIKA - PROCESSES AND ALTERNATIVE

7th Annual Aleksanteri Conference

November 29 - December 1, 2007

The Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland

http://www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/conference2007

Keynote speakers (in alphabetical order):

Marietta Chudakova - Prof. at the World Literature Institute, Moscow; member

of Boris Yeltsin's Presidential Council; member, European Academy.

Boris Groys - Prof. of Philosophy and Media Theory, Hochschule für

Gestaltung, Karlsruhe; Global Distinguished Prof. of Rus. and Slav. Stds,

NYU

Boris Kagarlitsky - Director, Institute of Globalization Studies, Moscow;

former Deputy, Moscow City Soviet; dissident and former political prisoner.

Jutta Scherrer - Directeur d 'études, EHESS, Paris, Centre d'études du monde

russe, soviétique et post-soviétique / Interdisciplinaires des Faits

Religieux.

Alexei Yurchak - Associate Professor, University of California at Berkeley,

author of "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More".

Elena Zdravomyslova - Co-director of the Gender Studies Program, the

European University at St. Petersburg.

The political foundation for the reforms of Perestroika, whose outcome was

to seal the fate of the USSR, was laid in Mikhail Gorbachev's "basic theses"

of 1987. Twenty years down that road which led to the demise of an entire

way of life and the re-constellation of the international system, Helsinki's

Aleksanteri Institute is hosting an intellectual forum to revisit this era

of dramatic changes, reassessing causes and effects, while considering

alternative perspectives and paths not taken.

A Wide Scope for Debate

This call for papers is an open invitation for panels, papers and

suggestions for innovative formats (such as debates on new key publications,

round-tables or film presentations). It is addressed to scholars and

advanced graduate students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds,

including the social and political sciences, cultural studies, the arts and

humanities, law and economics. The direct relation of the

perestroika-process to the collapse of the Soviet bloc, leading to the end

of the Cold War means that contributions concerning Eastern Europe as well

as global repercussions are also very much welcome.

To stimulate topics for debate and the formation of panels, please find

below some questions indicating the wide, multi-disciplinary scope aimed at:

· Revolutions and Processes - Was the collapse of the

Soviet bloc a result of a series of contingencies, or deliberate political

decisions? Was economic collapse avoidable, and if so, for how long? Was the

restoration of capitalism inevitable, or were there alternative paths of

development? What role did ideas and cultural movements play in perestroika,

its pre-history and aftermath?

· Actors and Institutions - Which groups or traditions

emerged, which survived and which were neglected or "written out of history"

during the perestroika era? Did practices and customs genuinely see a

transformation in all fields of life - from the Kremlin to the kitchen

table? How was the role of women transformed? Did "parallel" and

"underground" cultures cease to exist?

· Generations, Retrospectives and Perspectives - How did

different age groups evaluate the changes, and how did people of different

"mind-sets" see each other? How do contemporary social formations assess the

perestroika era and how does this inflect the future?

Please consult our new website for discussion and much more

information: www.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/conference2007

Conference Schedule and Deadlines:

Panel Proposals / Innovative Formats Submissions: June 1, 2007

Individual Paper Submissions (circa 300 words): June 1, 2007

Notification of acceptance: July 2, 2007

Online Registration by November 1, 2007

Conference: November 29 - December 1, 2007

All proposals should be sent via the conference website, where an Extended

Call as well as a Discussion Forum for establishing panels is available.

Extra-Academic Programme

Information on a series of cultural events - artistic, documentary,

archival, literary and cinematic - will be found on the website as they are

confirmed.

The Annual Aleksanteri Conference is an international, multidisciplinary

conference organized by the Aleksanteri Institute, the Finnish Centre for

Russian and Eastern European Studies affiliated with the University of

Helsinki. Aleksanteri Conferences have attracted broad interest among

scholars as well as policy and opinion-makers from a wide variety of fields.

Organising committee:

Dr. Markku Kangaspuro (Head of Research) , Suvi Kansikas (Conference

Coordinator) , Senior Researcher Vesa Oittinen, Professor Pekka Pesonen,

Senior Researcher Aino Saarinen, Ivor Stodolsky (Conference Coordinator)

Welcome!

2007 AAASS NATIONAL CONVENTION (New Orleans, USA)

The 39th National Convention of the AAASS will be held at the New Orleans Marriott in New Orleans, Louisiana, from Thursday, November 15 through Sunday, November 18, 2007.

More details can be found at: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass/index.html

Among the many panels/roundtables that were accepted, the following are organized by IS[R]A members:

Panel I: New Approaches to Samizdat: The Circulation of Texts across Boundaries and Borders

Chair: Elina Bloch (City U New York)

Discussant(s): Friederike Kind-Kovacs (ZZF, Potsdam)

The term samizdat was first applied in the early 1960s to the unofficial publishing and dissemination of the texts of Russian writers who were banned by the Soviet government due to their resistance to the official norms of writing and were therefore unable to reach their readers. However, the title of this panel reflects our desire to move away from traditional approaches to samizdat as an isolated and largely Russian experience to a wider consideration of samizdat as a cross-fertilizing and boundary-crossing medium which flowed throughout the Eastern bloc.

Presenter(s):

Anna Chukur (U of Toronto): “Ukrainian Samvydav: Between Aesthetic and National Freedom”

Karl Lowenstein (Wisconsin Oshkosh U): “Discussions of Forbidden Texts inside the Writer's Union during the Thaw: When Does Literary Criticism Become Political Opposition?”

Karolina Ziolo (U of Sheffield): “The Existence of the Translated Literature in Polish Underground”

Panel II: The Transfer of Media between East and West during the Cold War: Tamizdat and its Agents

Chair: Anna Chukur (U of Toronto)

Discussant(s): Karolina Ziolo (Sheffield U)

What do we know today about the actual function of tamizdat publishing? How do we evaluate its significance in establishing an alternative European community reaching across the Iron Curtain during the period of the Cold War? This panel takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions of cultural history. The panel presents tamizdat as a social network of cultural agents on both sides facilitating uncensored production and distribution of media across political and ideological borders. Panelists will treat various tamizdat initiatives with a focus on literature and art coming out of Soviet Russia.

Presenter(s):

Valentina Parisi (U of Milano): “The Tamizdat Journal 'A-Ja' and Russian Unofficial Arts in the 70s-80s”

Ann Komaromi (U of Toronto): “Tamizdat Publishing: Motivation and Means”

Friederike Kind-Kovács (Center for Contemporary History Research): “An 'Other Europe' through Literature: Recreating a European Literary 'Kontinent'”

Panel III: Music in Postwar Underground Culture in East Central Europe

Chair: Olga Zaslavskaya (OSA, Budapest)

Discussant(s): Steven Lee (Stanford U)

Music played an integrative role in the formation and consolidation of underground cultures under state socialism in East Central Europe. It helped to create underground scenes which served as nuclei for the destabilization of the system later on. In its attempts to repress the underground music scene, the state imposed strategies very similar to the disruptive actions taken against samizdat activists, well documented by now in published secret service archive materials.

Presenter(s):

Miklos Sükösd (Central European U): “Independent Rock Music vs. Censorship and Secret Services: The Hardware behind the Facade of Goulash Communism in Hungary”

Rüdiger Ritter (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa): “Jazz and Rock: Two Worlds, Two Functional Systems - Demonstrated on Examples from Poland and Hungary”

Gertrud Pickhan (Free U, Berlin): “Polish Jazz and Visual Arts”

Panel IV: Parallel Societies and Networks of Resistance

Chair: Bent Boel (Aalborg U)

Discussant(s): Olga Zaslavskaya (OSA Archivum)

During the second half of the twentieth century the Soviet Empire enlarged to encompass several of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Communist rule obstructed but did not totally halt the free exchange of ideas, cultural initiatives, political views, and social discussion, which in turn led to the emergence of a “parallel society.” Taking examples from both the USSR and Czechoslovakia, the panel will discuss different forms of collaboration and communication both in the official and unofficial spheres, and ask how personal contacts between underground writers and publishers, scientists and scholars led to new ways of thinking on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Presenter(s):

Jirina Siklova (Charles U): “Smuggling Texts out of Czechoslovakia: Techniques and Contacts with Exiles”

Anna Eremeeva (Krasnodar State U of Culture and Arts): “Scientists and the Transfer of Literature between East and West during the Cold War”

Viatcheslav Menkovski (Belarusian State U): “Soviet Samizdat and American Sovietology: A Parallel History”

Panel V: Becoming a Dissident: Artists, Intellectuals, and the Origins of the Soviet Bloc Protest Movement

Chair: Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Yale U)

Discussant(s): Rossen Djagalov (Yale U)

Each of the papers in this panel examines major sources, aesthetic or intellectual, of Soviet Bloc dissident movements.

Presenter(s):

Michael Kopecek (Institute of Contemporary History, Prague): “Politics and Arts from Marxist to Chartist. Democratization, Authenticity and Opposition in Czechoslovakia and East Central Europe from 1968 to 1977”

Allan Reid (U of New Brunswick): “From Bartok to Butyrki: Gorbanevskaia's Poetry in the '60s”

Michael Kilburn (Endicott College): “Anti-Political Politics and Anti-Poetical Poetics: Negotiating Political Opposition and Aesthetic Freedom during Normalization in Czechoslovakia”

Roundtable: Visual Art and Postwar Alternative Culture

Chair: Jessie Labov (Stanford U)

Donna Oliver (Beloit College)

Heidrun Hamersky (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa)

W. Martin (Chicago U)

Wojtek Orlinski (Gazeta Wyborcza)

News, updates from IS[R]A members

KESTON INSTITUTE

Exciting new proposals for the future of Keston Institute, the well-known centre which was constantly vilified by the KGB during Soviet times for its championing of persecuted religious believers in communist countries, were presented at its Extraordinary General Meeting held in London on Saturday 24 March.

The members of Keston Institute voted unanimously in favour of transferring Keston’s library and unique archive of documents from Eastern Europe and Russia to Baylor University in Texas, USA, where a new Keston Research Center will be established, which will carry on the mission of Keston into the 21st century. Keston Institute, in the words of its President Canon Michael Bourdeaux, “has contributed to world history and shown that during the second half of the 20th century religion in Eastern Europe played a major role. This history can only be told in the future through Keston’s archive.”

The new Keston Research Center will form part of Baylor University’s Dawson Institute, which is devoted to the study of church-state relations and has a body of research students already engaged in study within Keston’s field. Keston’s library and archive will be housed in the new Keston Research Center and managed by library staff who have the expertise for maintaining the collection and conserving the now fragile paper used for producing samizdat during Soviet days. Baylor University’s library has a department devoted to digitising and is interested in getting much of Keston’s material onto the internet in the very near future.

Keston Institute’s Chairman, Mrs Xenia Dennen, reported that although Keston’s trustees had approached a great many institutions in both the UK and Europe, “either they showed no interest, or visited us and then withdrew, or were not able to offer suitable premises. Most were unfortunately not willing to house both the library and archive… Out of all the institutions approached by the Council, the Baylor option seems to us to be the best.” The exact terms of an agreement with Baylor University, she explained, would still have to be negotiated by Keston’s trustees before Keston’s collection was moved.

Keston Institute, while working closely with Baylor University, will continue to be active in the UK, managing its current finances, monitoring the future use of the library and archive, providing scholarships for students from Eastern Europe and elsewhere to work in the archive, and sponsoring lectures and study days as well as other projects in keeping with its objectives.

Keston’s members enthusiastically supported a suggestion made by Mr Anthony Packer, the Honorary Consul of Lithuania in Wales, that one of Keston’s most precious documents, an appeal for greater religious freedom addressed to the Soviet government in 1971 and signed by 17,000 Lithuanians, be returned to Lithuania and “given into the care of the Cardinal Archbishop of Vilnius to be kept in his Cathedral as a treasured relic”.

Contact:

Canon Michael Bourdeaux (President) tel : 01865 777276

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Mrs Xenia Dennen (Chairman) tel: 020 7353 5773

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PRESS RELEASE, 24 March 2007

Call for Participants for OSI-HESP Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching

ALTERNATIVE CULTURE BEYOND BORDERS: PAST AND PRESENT OF THE ARTS AND MEDIA IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION (2007-2010)

Deadline: 15 May 2007

The project is open to young faculty in institutions of higher education who intend to pursue comparative, interdisciplinary research on alternative culture(s), globalization, identities and the arts and media, with a geographical emphasis on post-communist transition countries. Fellowships are available for participants from Central and South-Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, NIS, Mongolia, and Turkey. Eligible disciplines include Anthropology, Archival and Museum Studies, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, History, History of Art, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.

Please see the program description and application information at http://alternativeculture.org

NEW PUBLICATIONS

Agnes Arndt. Intellektuelle in der Opposition. Diskurse zur Zivilgesellschaft in der Volksrepublik Polen

The peaceful revolutions in East Central Europe played a crucial role for the rediscovery of the concept of civil society. Concentrating on the case of Poland, Agnes Arndt reconstructs how prominent members of the democratic opposition shaped the notion civil society. She presents an important contribution to the current debates on civil society as well as to the understanding of the democratic change in Poland.

The book is going to appear in May 2007.

Agnes Arndt has studied history, politics and law in Berlin and Florence. She has worked as a project manager and a research assistant for the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and is currently writing her dissertation funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation at the Berlin School for Comparative European Research (BKVGE), Free University Berlin.

The INTERNATIONAL SAMIZDAT [RESEARCH] ASSOCIATION (IS[R]A) NEWSLETTER

calls on all IS[R]A members and other researchers and specialists working on topics related to samizdat and alternative culture, dissent, opposition and protest movements in the XX century to submit items for our next issue. We welcome announcements on archival and museum acquisitions, news regarding the processing of collections, calls for papers, project updates, and announcements on new publications and exhibitions.

We also invite articles on the themes above. Please email your submissions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Zaslavskaya Olga

IS[R]A Newsletter Co-Editor