|
General
Information
Programme
Accommodation,
Meals and Registration
Travel
Information
Abstracts
AB,
CDEF, GHIJ,
KL, MNO, PQR,
ST, UVWXYZ
Veremeeva, Natalia
von Zitzewitz, Josephine
Voronina, Olga
Voronkova, Anastasia
Wells, David
White, David
White, Stephen
Whitmore, Sarah
Wilson, James
Wright, Alistair S.
Yagodin, Dmitry
Young, Sarah J.
Yurchuk, Yuliya
Zabortseva, Yelena
Zimmerling, Anton
Ziolo, Karolina
Zvereva, Vera
|
Fitzwilliam
College, Cambridge, UK
27
– 29 March 2010
Abstracts
U-Z
Rotman, David
and Veremeeva,
Natalia
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP)/Eastern Partnership
(EaP) and Belarus: ‘the odd one out’?
Based on nation-wide surveys, focus-groups, elite interviews and school
essays conducted in Belarus during 2008-9, the paper sets to investigate
the progress and difficulties in the development of the Belarus-EU relations,
through the ENP and EaP perspectives. The paper will proceed in four sections.
Section one provides a brief historical overview of the Belarus-EU relations,
accounting for various difficulties and problems Belarus has experienced
on the path leading towards building a reciprocal and trustworthy cooperation.
Section two discusses particular progress made by Belarus in the process
of building relations with Europe (following the ‘boundary-politics’ framework
set in the first paper). Third section examines existing difficulties
and obstacles in facilitating this cooperation, from the Belarusian perspective.
In particular, the section examines the role of geopolitics (the Russian
factor, Belarus’ multi-vectored foreign policy, the lack of EU membership
aspirations, etc) and culture (public and elite perceptions; awareness;
attitudes/values and expectations) in the Belarus-EU relations. The paper
concludes by discussing the future prospects for the development of the
Belarus-EU relations, and objectives that Belarus sees as essential for
making the ENP/EaP effective and appealing for the participating sides.
von Zitzewitz,
Josephine
The ‘Virtual Museum of the Gulag’
The Virtual Museum of the Gulag (VGM) is a web project created by the
Research and Information Centre “Memorial” in St Petersburg. It is designed
to redress the absence of a central museum of the Soviet penal system
by uniting, in virtual space, exhibitions and objects relating to the
Gulag that are kept in over 300 remote regional museums in Russia and
the former member states of the USSR, as well as burial sites and traces
the Gulag left in land- and cityscapes. This presentation introduces the
basic version of the VGM, i.e. the database of virtual exhibits, which
will ultimately function in Russian, English and German and explores various
ways of creating interactive virtual exhibitions with these unique materials.
Voronina,
Olga
Polyphony and Narrative Distortion in Mikhail Bulgakov's The
Master and Margarita
The Soviet State in the 1930s sought to usurp and monopolise public discourse
in all areas of life striving towards ideological homogeneity and orthodoxy.
Regarding the church as one of the strongholds of organised resistance
the young Soviet state launched a vigorous anti-religious campaign under
the pretext of enlightenment of ‘backward’ Soviet population. In an attempt
to discredit the church and to rationalise religious belief the state-sponsored
movement circulated a series of anti-religious works stemming from the
European Bible-Babel debate. Participants of the debate controversially
saw the roots of Judaism in ancient pagan Oriental mythologies and variously
regarded Jesus Christ as a mythological or as a historical human figure.
Echoes of this controversy can be found in the opening chapter of Mikhail
Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The Moscow narrative strand famously
engages with the mechanisms of state repression and discourse regulation
by tracing the fates of the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate and Ivan’s
poem about Jesus Christ. However, it is the ancient Yershalaim strand
of the novel that addresses these issues on a subtler level by depicting
Yershalaim as a site of distortion and falsification of narratives about
Yeshua Ha-Notsri, Bulgakov’s Christ figure. My paper addresses the problems
of coherency and accuracy in the representation of Yeshua. I explore the
notion of narrative polyphony in the Yershalaim strand which codifies
resistance to the attempt of any single voice to impose an atheist or
any other ideological orthodoxy and to monopolise the production of meaning.
Voronkova,
Anastasia
Late-Soviet Ethno-national Mobilisation as Contentious Politics:
The Case of Nagorno-Karabakh
This paper examines the process of ethno-national mobilisation and radicalisation
in the Armenian-Azeri conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus
in the late 1980s. It uses insights and research findings from comparative
work on ethnic conflict, social movements and contentious politics in
an attempt to explain how latent communal divisions in this case were
transformed into violent conflict. By answering the question above I seek
to address one of the key puzzles in the study of ethnic conflict – why
did some communities engage in violent mobilisation while others did not?
I advocate a multicausal theoretical approach to ethnic activism that
demonstrates how strategies of mobilization are enabled or constrained
not only by political institutions but also by the shared cultural perceptions
and collective definitions of the groups involved which are used to justify
collective action. The necessity for this arises from the dissatisfaction
with static explanatory models that tend to fall on either side of the
traditional structure-agency debate without – for the most part- trying
to reconcile structural and agency-related variables. Building on the
‘contentious politics’ framework I outline the tenets of a more dynamic
approach and illustrate it with reference to Nagorno-Karabakh. Unlike
most analyses of this conflict which typically abstract from the differing
values, identities and interpretations of the participants, this paper
attempts to explicitly engage with this deep interpretative divergence
and to highlight the positions of the conflicting parties themselves.
I utilise interview data, documentary and press material collected during
fieldwork in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Wells,
David
Merezhkovsky’s “Simvoly” and the Early Development of Russian
Symbolism
One of the most prominent landmarks of the emerging Symbolist movement
in Russian literature was Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s 1892 collection of verse,
Simvoly (Symbols). As Valerii Briusov was later to note, this was one
of the first works to challenge the prevailing positivist tradition and
to embrace the themes, cultural preferences and broadly mystical view
of the world that determined Russian literary thinking for the next three
decades. Merezhkovsky is normally seen as a writer concerned with the
didactic expression of complex religious and philosophical ideas, and
indeed he largely abandoned writing poetry by 1900, turning his attention
rather to the more expansive genres of literary criticism and the novel.
While Simvoly embodies the ‘mysticism in content’ and (more problematically)
the ‘use of symbols’ which Merezhkovsky identified in 1891 in his lecture
‘O prichinakh upadki i o novykh techeniiakh v sovremennoi russkoi literature’
(On the reasons for the decline and on the new trends in contemporary
literature) as two of the three planks of the ‘new art’, the third plank,
‘stylistic impressionism’, very largely eluded him. Nevertheless, there
is evidence that when preparing Simvoly, Merezhkovsky did in fact pay
a good deal of attention to questions of poetic form. This paper examines
the verse structure, architectonics and imagery of Simvoly to suggest
that his contribution to the early development of Russian Symbolism is
more complex and further reaching than is sometimes acknowledged.
White,
David
Political Opposition in Russia: Dead, Dying or Dormant?
Throughout the Yeltsin period opposition parties flourished and, despite
Russia’s imbalanced institutional arrangements, were able to influence
policy and provide some checks and balances on unbridled executive power.
Under Putin, however, effective opposition was all but completely eliminated.
Some opposition parties were co-opted by the Kremlin to perform a role
of obedient, ‘loyal’ quasi-opposition. Those opposition forces unwilling
to play by the regime’s rules found themselves marginalised and frozen
out of the political process. The elimination of political competition
and the sidelining of effective opposition is a key factor in explaining
why the process of democratic consolidation in Russia has now stalled.
The failure of opposition parties can be understood both in terms of endogenous
factors, such as organisational failings and strategic errors on the part
of the parties themselves, and on exogenous factors over which opposition
parties have little or no control (for instance, Russia’s institutional
design and the huge imbalance in resources).
In 2005, Vladimir Gel’man referred to the Russian opposition as a ‘dying
species’. This paper, based on recent fieldwork and drawing on comparative
analysis of opposition strategies in one-party dominant regimes, searches
for signs of life amongst Russia’s opposition and examines possible future
opposition strategies.
White, David
The Not
So Strange Death of Liberal Russia
The history of liberal-democratic political parties in Russia has been
one of persistent electoral decline since the first post-Soviet parliamentary
elections of 1993. This paper analyses a range of endogenous and exogenous
factors that have contributed to this decline. It is argued that, whilst
the liberal-democratic agenda does not have mass appeal in Russia, the
policies of these parties have a wider potential appeal than voting figures
suggest. The paper concludes that exogenous causal factors – the institutional
design of Russia’s political system, the marginalisation of programmatic
opposition, the problem of media access, and the huge imbalance in resources
available to political parties – have played the determining role in the
electoral decline of Russia’s liberal-democratic parties.
White,
Stephen
People and Parties in Post-Communist Russia
Utilising recent focus group and survey data, this paper examines party
identity and attitudes towards political parties amongst the Russian electorate.
The paper will also focus on questions of political efficacy and the extent
to which parties form a linkage between the electorate and the state in
the minds of voters.
Whitmore,
Sarah
Watchdogs or Show-dogs? What was the Point of Parliamentary
Oversight in Putin’s Neo-patrimonial State?
Conceptualising Russia as a neopatrimonial state directs attention to
the patrimonial relations that pervaded formal institutions to reveal
increasing tensions within the state during Putin’s presidency. A case
study of oversight practices based on multi-method qualitative analysis
points to the emergence of legitimation as their key purpose, but also
to the growing contradictions between the controlling and legitimating
impulses of Putin’s regime because as oversight activities declined, became
harder to exercise, more evidently subject to external control, and ritualised,
then they became less effective as tools of regime legitimation and stabilisation.
At the same time deputies responded to the changes in their status and
influence by moving their resources towards the patrimonial sphere, most
notably utilising oversight institutions for direct and indirect private
interests, activities tolerated by the regime in exchange for political
loyalty. Lobbying in various guises and degrees of legitimacy was thus
also a key reason why some semblance of oversight activity remained evident
under Putin, while motivations such as constituency representation and
issue signalling became marginalised. Overall the meanings of oversight
activity identified point to significant tensions in the state edifice
which have yet to be resolved.
Wilson,
James
Training in Pronunciation: an Added Bonus or a Core Component
of Russian Language Programmes?
In recent years, teaching has taken a more communicative direction. Besides
participating in “conventional” oral classes, students are also required
to deliver prepared presentations, often working with specialised vocabulary,
or participate in spontaneous role plays in Russian in various situations.
However, it has been informally noted at many institutions that sections
of several students’ oral reports are often incomprehensible because of
poor pronunciation. Therefore, this project aims to address whether, in
view of changing trends in teaching and learning, courses in Russian pronunciation
should be included on undergraduate (UG) Russian language programmes.
In this paper, I compare the pronunciation of students of Russian from
the University of Sheffield who took module RUS3611 “The Sounds of Russian”,
a theoretical phonetics course with some practical training, to that of
students with no formal training in the rules of Russian pronunciation.
Students at various levels were recorded reading out words and phrases
from a word list intended to test particular phonological rules. The results
show: (1) the benefits of a “short” phonetics course on improving students’
pronunciation and (2) the aspects of Russian pronunciation that students
find most difficult. The study shows convincingly that poor pronunciation
is in most cases not the result of phonetic complexity but rather unfamiliarity
with basic phonetic and phonological rules and processes of Russian. The
paper leads to a discussion focusing on the following questions:
Can/should training in pronunciation be made part of UG training?
When should it be introduced?
How long should it last?
Wright,
Alistair S.
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries in Karelia During the Russian
Civil War
The Bolsheviks were never a domineering political force in Karelia prior
to July 1918. After the October revolution the Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries were the leading political parties in the region, a mantle
taken up, from the spring of 1918, by the Left SRs. Political tensions
did grow within the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition when the treaty of Brest-Litovsk
was signed but nevertheless they appear to have worked relatively harmoniously
up to the end of April 1918 when a power struggle for the presidium of
the Olonets provincial executive committee took place. The Bolsheviks
prevailed on this occasion but the Left SR’s influence in the Karelian
districts remained formidable and they managed to hamper the Bolsheviks’
attempts to introduce the kombedy and the food detachments. By July 1918
the Left SRs held a majority in the Povenets, Pudozh and Olonets districts
and in the Olonets provincial executive committee. This fact sparked off
another power struggle between the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks within
the background of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the ‘uprising’
of the Left SRs in Moscow. These events were highly significant for the
local Left SRs and put their efforts to gain control of Olonets province
as a whole in jeopardy. It was a blow from which they never recovered
and marked the beginning of the party’s decline as a combination of Bolshevik
maneuvering and Left SR reluctance to adjust their revolutionary principles
culminated in their complete demise from local politics by the winter
of 1918.
Yagodin,
Dmitry
Civic Engagement Practices in the Russian Political Blogosphere
Blogs as politically unrestrained communicative spaces attract new audiences,
activists and commentators. This seems to be particularly important in
the context of state-controlled traditional media, as it is the case with
Russia. So, the Russian Internet users have formed alternative online
forums where media consumption, deliberation and, finally, civic engagement
occur. The latter is understood here as an active position in problem
solving practices, and it contrasts with the notion of civic disengagement
– a passive observer role. Although the Russian blogosphere is being constructed
around various contexts, the political one is among the most remarkable.
It is especially true after the officially sanctioned blog community of
the Russian president joined the blogosphere in spring 2009.This report
explores participatory practices among users of political blog communities
in the Russian language segment of LiveJournal with an emphasis on the
concepts of civic engagement and disengagement. The analysis is based
on a survey data of 999 bloggers conducted in June 2009 and follows the
quantitative analytical tradition. Besides a merely descriptive introduction,
the report identifies the key models of experiencing civic (dis)engagement
among participants of three different blog communities, namely 1) protest
movement Namarsh_ru, 2) generally oriented Ru_politcs and 3) presidential
Blog_medvedev.
Young,
Sarah J.
Chekhov’s “Ostrov Sakhalin” and the Dark Other: Memory, Identity
and Estrangement
Anton Chekhov’s depiction of the Tsarist penal system in Sakhalin Island
is famous for the author’s attempt to categorize both the inhabitants
and every aspect of life on Sakhalin during his 1890 visit via a statistical
approach. However, what emerges as he documents his failure to complete
his census is a contrary image of the unknown and uncategorizable which
questions the possibility not only of colonization by penal settlement,
but also, conversely, of punishment and reform through colonization. The
paper examines how the different aspects of this conundrum that Chekhov
identifies, such as the nebulousness of laws, which leads to slippage
between categories of convicts and settlers, impact on the sense of identity
of not only the convicts, but all the inhabitants of Sakhalin, and ultimately
the author as well, as his initial industrious, inquiring persona is replaced
by an increasing sense of lassitude and hopelessness. The replacement
of surnames by nicknames and accidental designations such as ‘Can’t remember’
becomes emblematic of the wider problem of the colonization process, the
absence of cultural memory, and the erosion of the possibility of knowledge,
which results from the transience of the population. Consequently, a parodic
reversal of the structure of colonization becomes apparent. Far from bringing
enlightenment and progress to untamed lands, the colonizers themselves—both
convicts and free settlers—are reduced to a darkness which effaces difference
to the extent that the subjects of Chekhov’s study can neither remember,
see, nor know themselves. As questions of identity are linked to the discussion
of the nature of punishment and settlement, geographical remoteness becomes
a metaphor for a level of estrangement which fundamentally corrupts communication
and morality.
Yurchuk,
Yuliya
Shaping the Ukraine: Ukrainian Nation Building Since 1991
In the paper I focus my attention on the Ukrainian nation building process
from 1991 to 2008. Speaking about national identity I base my argumentation
on the theoretical findings of the main scholars representing the constructivist
school. First of all, I see national identity as a three-level construct
consisting of 1) the political project/model (embodied in state-building
practices); 2) intellectual interpretations of the nation (which provide
cohesion between past, present and future of the nation); 3) the image
of the nation shared by the community. These levels are interlinked; they
all affect each other to the extent that it is difficult to clear-cut
their limits. In my paper I am scrutinizing how the national identity
is articulated by politicians and intellectuals as well as how it is manifested
in cultural artifacts (e.g. monuments, expositions, etc.). I am analyzing
the dynamics of Ukrainian national discourse, which ideas of the nation
prevailed over time and which ideas were repudiated. In this regard, national
identity is an ever-changing reaction towards the changes in the society
inside and outside the state boundaries. So we can speak about the intentionality
that appears when individuals face choices as to the direction of change.
But this process is not a one-way process because the national identity
itself has a potential to shape the kind of reaction towards the changes
(in other words, the gamut of the reactions is restricted by the identity).
Zabortseva,
Yelena
Kazakhstan – Russian Relations in the Post-Soviet Era, 1991-2007
In this paper the relations between the two largest countries of the former
USSR (Kazakhstan and Russia) along with their strategic courses of development
will be investigated. While the multilateral foreign policy of Kazakhstan
has been an integral and vital part of its national policy, targeted towards
sustaining its independency; during the presidency of the first two Russian
presidents (especially during Eltsin’s presidency), considerable emphasis
had been placed on short-term and middle-term domestic priorities of development,
leaving many bilateral issues unresolved. However, the Eurasian region,
due to many factors, has inevitably shaped an important strategic agenda
within the international economic and political landscape; hence its role
in Russian policy has been increasing. The latter, among other factors,
might change established trends with the foreign policies of these countries.
Among the primary factors, influencing the bilateral relations, several
are discussed: trade and investment spheres, ethnic policy, cultural connections,
and geopolitical aspects and the influencing foreign policies of the countries.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of oil and gas in
the geopolitical structure of the region and the impact of natural resources
on Kazakhstan-Russia relations.
Zimmerling,
Anton
BE-auxiliaries and 2P Clitic Clusters in Early Slavic Languages
The paper aims at reconstructing the present indicative BE-auxiliaries
placement in Proto-Slavonic and early Slavic languages. I argue that 1st-2nd
person BE-auxiliaries were clausal 2P-clitics (except for South Russian
where they were VP-internal clitics) and were placed either after dative
and accusative pronouns (in Old Novgorod Russian, ONR) or in front of
them - this can be assumed for the prehistory of most Balcanic Slavic
varieties. I claim that 3rd person auxiliaries je(st’) and su(t’) were
cliticized only in the dialect period after the disintegration of Common
Slavic. ONR being an innovative dialect lost overt 3rd person BE-auxiliaries
before they could be cliticized. Carpatian Ukrainian shows the same development
but places 1st-2nd person forms (e)m, (e)s’, sme, ste in front of clitic
pronouns. The opposite extreme is exemplified by Slovene which retained
overt 3rd person BE-auxiliaries but located 3sg je in the same slot with
future BE-clitics derived from *bhu-stem: the latter are the youngest
BE-clitics in Slovene. Disjoint placement of older 1st-2nd person BE-clitics
vs younger 3rd person forms is also characteristic of Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian,
Macedonian, Vojvodina Rusinsky. The latest layer of BE-clitics – future
and plusquamperfect auxiliaries - invariably adjoin to the right (cf.
Slovene) or left (Carpatian Ukrainian) edge of the complex auxiliary clitics
+ pronominal clitics. 3rd person present BE-auxiliaries likely exhibited
the same features in early Slavic dialects: they adjoined to 2P-clusters
from either the right or the left but could neither split clusters nor
share the same slot with older 1st-2nd person BE-clitics.
Ziolo,
Karolina
Teaching Polish to Heritage Speakers: Challenges and Perspectives
Increasingly more heritage speakers of Polish are enrolling at departments
of Russian and Slavonic Studies and this trend is likely to continue with
the high level of Polish emigration. A combination of advanced language
skills and a good understanding of Polish culture (gained at home) is
highly desirable and could facilitate Polish-English intellectual exchange
in academia. However, gaps in heritage speakers’ language skills stop
them from fully realizing their potential. Although heritage speakers
are able to speak fluently on everyday topics, their writing and reading
skills are usually considerably less developed. They experience problems
in writing Polish and they find it difficult to comprehend more advanced
texts that contain vocabulary and constructions not characteristic of
everyday informal discourse. Such issues cannot be adequately dealt with
in “conventional” classes of Polish for native speakers of English. Moreover,
there are virtually no materials that heritage speakers can use to develop
their reading and writing skills independently. Therefore, I have developed
a pioneering language learning project aimed at developing heritage speakers’
reading and writing skills. In this paper, I focus on those aspects of
the course that have been designed to help students develop independent
learning and research skills and I present how Inquiry Based Learning
(IBL) can help develop reading and writing skills at an advanced level.
Although this research has been carried out with the aims of heritage
speakers in mind, I hope to show that the project is beneficial to all
advanced-level students of Polish.
Zvereva,
Vera
New Words in Girls' Blogs: Cultural Semantics and Functions
This paper aims to study an on-going process of the Russian linguistic
transformation on the Internet. It focuses on the texts of one of the
most dynamic and innovative groups of new media users, that is, of teenagers.
13-17-year-old bloggers are sensitive to a cultural and linguistic fashion
as well as to changes in styles of textual behavior. In their blogs,
teenagers try to "stay in touch" with actual trends in use of language
– creating or copying and spreading innovations, or even rejecting them
for the sake of tradition and the norm. I am going to analyze shifts in
lexicon and orthography in girls' on-line diaries at livejournal.com,
liveinternet.ru, and blogs.mail.ru. Special attention is paid to cultural
semantics of new words. What kind of meanings do these modified words
convey? In the girls' texts there is an intensive interaction of elements
of diverse discourses – for example, of "yazik padonkof", anime,
Soviet films and cartoons, fantasy, classical poetry, pop-culture songs,
the Russian political thesaurus, etc. I intend to talk about the ways
in which these discursive fragments are being used to express identity
of a virtual person.
Back
to Top of Page |
