On 24 March, join us for a lecture by INDEX's Scholar in Residence Dr Orysia Kulick.
Orysia Kulick holds a PhD in History from Stanford University. At INDEX, she further develops her research on How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics after Stalin. To share the key outcomes of the research, Dr Kulick will deliver a public lecture.
24 March at 13:30
Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, Ukrainian Catholic University (2A Kozelnytska Street, Lviv. Auditorium: 405)
The lecture will be held in English, with a Ukrainian-English Q&A session.
To join online, please follow the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89854742836?pwd=XsAbpHsz7FUnY4QzWOxKP2RxY36oWv.1
Meeting ID: 898 5474 2836
Passcode: 462007
Description
Much like the current Russian president, Stalin was fixated on Ukraine, fearing a strong opponent would emerge from the second-largest Soviet republic. Ukraine was endowed with natural resources and a political and cultural leadership that pushed for more autonomy from the very beginning of Soviet rule.
Stalin’s policies of the 1930s – collectivisation, industrialisation, and the ruthless “purges'' – had consequences that he himself could not have anticipated. They laid the groundwork for a generational demographic push from below, which resulted in the rise of two general secretaries with deep ties to Ukraine – Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. They brought with them to Moscow two cohorts of Ukrainian officials that had an outsized influence on Soviet policymaking in the 1950s-1980s.
This phenomenon tells us a great deal about how the Soviet Union changed after WWII and why Ukraine was so central to that process. The sparse treatment of this topic in the scholarship on the Soviet Union points to the existential and epistemological dangers of uncritically accepting stories Russia likes to tell about itself and how its territories were ruled.
This event is made possible through the cooperation of INDEX with the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
