Wednesday, July 24, 2024, 5:00pm to 6:30pm
CGIS-Knafel/North Building, 3rd Floor, Room K-354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

A lecture by Orysia Kulick, Assistant Professor of Political Studies and of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba, Canada.
Moderated by Serhiy Bilenky, Research Associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Editor-In-Chief of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, and Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI).

Description:
Much like the current Russian president, Stalin was fixated on Ukraine, fearing a strong opponent to his rule 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. The ruthless “purges'' of the 1930s had consequences that Stalin himself could not have anticipated. They laid the groundwork for not only a generational demographic push from below, but also the rise of two general secretaries with deep ties to Ukraine: Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev and Brezhnev collectively ruled for the better part of 30 years, until Brezhnev’s death in 1982, when the KGB led by Yuri Andropov kicked all the Ukrainians out of Moscow and cut off the bureaucratic channels that had brought them there since the mid-1950s. How and why this happened is crucial for understanding Soviet politics. It also points to the existential and epistemological dangers of blindly accepting stories Russia likes to tell about itself.

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