Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

ISSN 1536-4003 University of California, Berkeley Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Spring 2010 Notes from the Director Volume 27, Number 1 Two thirds of my way through a term as acting director (while Yuri In this issue: Slezkine continues to take the waters at a major academic institution in Notes from the Director .................... 1 the South Bay) I would like to tell you what has been happening in a busy Nina Renata Aron semester at the Institute. Fashioning Russia: The production of a new Russian ‘other’ ................................... 2 In early March, our colleagues at Stanford’s Center for Russian, East Campus Visitors ............................... 8 European and Eurasian Studies organized the 34th annual Berkeley- Annual Teacher Outreach Conference Stanford Conference on Slavic and East European Studies, entitled Summary .......................................... 9 Memory and Media in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia, inviting UC Nina Bagdasarova Berkeley faculty members Luba Golburt (Slavic), Steven Lee (English), Revolving Power: A Diary of Another Kyrgyz and Anne Nesbet (Slavic and Film Studies) and Slavic collection librarian Revolution .........................................11 Allan Urbanic to present papers and moderate panels. Our executive Giving Opportunities .......................14 director Jeff Pennington capped proceedings with refl ections upon the Associates of the Slavic Center ......15 day’s events. Ekaterina Apostolova International Commercial Arbitration: The Professor Melissa Bokovoy of the University of New Mexico delivered Model Law and The Czech, Latvian, and this year’s annual Kujachich Endowed Lecture in Serbian and Slovak Arbitration Laws Compared .......16 Montenegrin Studies. In this talk, Professor Bokovoy examined how, in Peril From Periphery? The Politics the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Serbs, individually and collectively, commemorated and remembered the dead of the Balkan Wars and World of International Inequality Conference War One. Summary .......................................... 22 Faculty and Student News.............. 24 On April 15, UC Berkeley Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost (and 2009 AAASS Conference .............. 25 former Slavic Center director) Professor George Breslauer gave the Annual New Digital Collections at the Slavic Colin and Elsa Miller Lecture in Slavic Studies, addressing patterns of Library............................................. 27 leadership in Soviet and Post-Soviet [Russian] history, focusing upon Case-UC Berkeley Project.............. 28 circumstances under which Soviet and Russian leaders have defi ned and redefi ned the trajectory of policy, and how these leadership patterns shape our view of rhythms of change in Soviet and post-Soviet history. Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, A few days later, the Institute co-sponsored a day-long symposium East European, and Eurasian Studies honoring Professor Andrew Janos (Political Science) making use of University of California, Berkeley generous support from the Hertelendy Endowment in Hungarian Studies. Institute of Slavic, East European, and Former students and colleagues contributed original papers on a theme Eurasian Studies that has engaged Andrew for much of his career: Peril from the Periphery? 260 Stephens Hall # 2304 The Politics of International Inequality. Andrew concluded a day of Berkeley, CA 94720-2304 invigorating scholarship with his own musings – by turns gloomy and [email protected] hilarious but steadfastly sane – on the deeper forces shaping modern life. http://iseees.berkeley.edu Many thanks to Jason Wittenberg and Jeffrey Kopstein for undertaking the organization of this unforgettable event. Editor: Andrei Dubinsky Subscriptions are free of charge. On April 24 we closed our semester’s activities with our annual outreach Submit mailing changes, suggestions, conference, this year entitled From Old Regimes to New Democracies? corrections, or inquiries to the above Transitions in Eastern Europe, 1989-1990. Seven speakers from three address or call (510) 642-3230. disciplines considered the Soviet world’s transition through this heady period, including several Berkeley colleagues as well as specialists from Rice (Gale Stokes), McGill (James Krapfl ), Oberlin (Veljko Vujacic), and Stanford (Jovana Knezevic). In the next couple of weeks ISEEES will make available Fund, the Hungarian Studies Fund, the Fund for Romanian on its website podcasts of Professor Bokovoy’s lecture, the Studies, and the Colin and Elsa Miller Endowment Fund. presentations from the Andrew Janos Festschrift and this Detailed descriptions of these funds are found on page 14 of year’s outreach conference. Podcasts of these and other this newsletter and on our website at http://iseees.berkeley. selected events can be found under the “Events” tab on the edu/give. By making a gift to any of these funds, you will ISEEES website, http://iseees.berkeley.edu/. automatically become a member in our annual giving program: Associates of the Slavic Center. ISEEES was pleased to host a number of visiting scholars for the spring semester, many of them young faculty at their With your sustained support, ISEEES will continue to home institutions. These scholars represented a wide variety offer informative and exceptional programming, including of fi elds and disciplines, and their presence added to the our visiting speakers series, the annual Berkeley-Stanford academic richness which ISEEES fosters at UC Berkeley Conference in Slavic and East European Studies, the annual and in the local community. You can fi nd out more about Outreach Conference, the annual Colin Miller Memorial these visitors on pages 8-9 and 28. Lecture, the annual Peter N. Kujachich Lecture in Serbian and Montenegrin Studies, our biannual ISEEES Newsletter, In addition to our many events, ISEEES was busy this graduate student working groups, and faculty-student semester preparing its quadrennial application for the seminars. We look forward to seeing you and reconnecting U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource at one or more of these events throughout the course of next Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships academic year. programs. This is an important source of funding for the Institute, which entails a demanding and time-consuming Lastly, I would like to invite you to our annual fall application process; results of the competition are expected reception, to be held Thursday, September 30, from 4 – 6 mid-summer. Owing, however, to the vicissitudes of federal p.m., in the Alumni House on the UC Berkeley campus. funding and yet another impending cut in state funding for In the meantime, be sure to check our website, http:// ISEEES operations, we are more dependent than ever on iseees.berkeley.edu for additional events and updates to the the loyal support of private donors to maintain superior calendar. programming as well as research and academic support. As such, we have expanded opportunities for more targeted giving in order to encompass a variety of ISEEES programs. John Connelly These giving opportunities include: the ISEEES General ISEEES Acting Director Support Fund, the ISEEES Graduate Student Support Associate Professor of History Fashioning Russia: The production of a new Russian ‘other’ Nina Renata Aron Nina Renata Aron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley The titles of recent articles about Russian fashion say a lot. In recent years, numerous scholars have critiqued the Some, like “Slavs to Fashion,” “New Slavs of New York: unfortunate shorthand with which Western discourse has All Bling and No Borscht,” “From Russia With Luxe,” and frequently rendered postsocialist transition (Zhang 2001, “Glamour and Sickle” draw an explicit connection between Humphrey 2002, Yurchak 2006). This discourse presents the former Soviet socialist republic and sumptuousness. “a vision of (post)socialist transition as a progressive and Others, like “The USSR Is Back (On Clothing Racks)” or unilinear move toward a known end: liberal capitalism “Russia Challenges West...On Runway” seem to kindle and democratic polities” (Zhang 2001:5), and represents cold war-style anxiety, only to then playfully assuage it postsocialism through a series of binaries: public/private, parenthetically, as if to remind us to relax: we’re only offi cial/unoffi cial, state/society. In this formulation, talking about shopping. Russia is understood to be both immature—that is, a This paper will explore the discursive production of younger democracy, at an earlier developmental stage— Russia and Russianness in the United States. Through an and stalled, because its current patterns do not always engagement with Russia as it is treated in popular media indicate movement toward more familiar Western forms outlets, this paper aims to situate the fashioning of Russia in of democracy. The latter condition is framed alternately the contemporary American consumer consciousness, and to as the result of enduring Soviet practices—the stubborn link this fantasy of Russia to the broader geopolitical issues residue of a corrupt and failed system—or, according to a that inform Russian-American relations. path dependence model, as continuing proof of a historical disinclination toward participatory systems of government. ISEEES Newsletter Spring 2010 / 2 Anthropologists of postsocialism, among other scholars, Humphrey 2002, True 2003). I argue here that such changes have pointed to the

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