Past Events

The Russian System of personalized power has been demonstrating an amazing capacity for survival even in the midst of decay. It has defied many predictions and ruined many analytical narratives. Today the Russian authoritarian rule is trying to prolong its life by turning to repressions at home and by containing the West. Russia, kicking over the global chess board with the war in Ukraine, returns to the international scene as a revisionist and revanchist power. The Russian Matrix demise will be painful, and it already has brought about  Russia’s confrontation with the West....

During this seminar, Professor Kotsonis will discuss his recent book, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic (2014).  The discussion will focus on the introduction, “A Short History of Taxes: Russia and the World from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries,” as well as chapters 5 and 6, “Mass Taxation in the Age of the Individual: The New Personal Taxation in Russia and the World” and “The Income Tax as Modern Government: Assessment, Self-Assessment, and Mutual Surveillance,” which...

The lecture considers the evolution of Russian, European, and North American tax systems in the context of the formation of a modern polity. It argues that all states moved toward a system of revenue that was at once respectful of certain immunities and rights, and more intrusive and inquisitive about the individual citizen and enterprise. Tax systems embody the duality of modern citizenship: the person has the right to be left alone, and the person is more transparent and vulnerable than ever before.

Yanni Kotsonis is professor of history at...

Lena Jonson presents her book "Art and Protest in Putin´s Russia" (London & New York: Routledge, 2015). This is a book about Russian contemporary art and its social context. The presentation will focus on the following two questions: What role did art play for the awakening of civil society that preceded the large mass protests in Moscow of 2011-2012? What has happened to the art scene and the protest movement since May 2012 when Putin made an utmost authoritarian-conservative agenda the official Russian policy?

Lena Jonson...

Beginning 2000, successive Russian cabinets pushed to implements wide-ranging reforms in education and science. From the introduction of SAT-like testing in high schools and the focus on measurable performance indicators at universities to the 2013 reform of the Academy of Sciences, these policies were explicitly inspired by the "neoliberal" paradigm and international best practices. Surprisingly, these reforms have not been rolled back even after the overall change of policy direction in 2013-2014. This raises the broader question of the role played by the "...

Despite some superficial similarities, relations between Russia and the U.S. today are sufficiently different from the past that they cannot accurately be described as a conflict in the same category as the Cold War. U.S.-Russia relations have been severely strained over the crisis in Ukraine, but management of the crisis alone will not be enough to restore productive relations between Washington and Moscow or to repair the damage to European security.

The best hope may be a return to the principles of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act through an inclusive region-wide dialogue, similar...

During the seven days in late August 1968, when Czechoslovakia was occupied by troops from five countries of the Warsaw Pact, ten-, perhaps hundreds of thousands of photographs were taken. Many of the images have been published and exhibited, by they have never been analysed in any systematic way so far. They are, however, definitely worth to be examinated carefully - as images that mirror not only pain and terror, but also the ways how Czech and Slovak photographers claimed a position in the global humanitarian discourse.

Martina Winkler, professor of history at...

For conference agenda and information see event website:https://dlcl.stanford.edu/events/poetry-and-politics-20th-century-boris-pasternak-his-family-and-his-novel-doctor-zhivago