Interview with Nikolay Koposov, research director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland and former dean of the Smolny college of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Saint-Petersburg State University (1998-2009). Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on October 7, 2010.
Prof. Koposov has written on early modern France, approaches to history, and the politics of historical memory in Russia. His works have been published in French and Russian, including most recently a French translation of his 2001 book originally published in Russian, How Historians Think (De l'imagination historique).
Interview Themes
The contours of the historical profession in the USSR in the 1970s (01:49)
Koposov's path to the study of history (08:03)
Political implications of doing social history in the USSR in the 1970s (13:10)
Political shifts in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the 1990s as reflected in the historical profession (16:45)
Koposov's cohort of like-minded historians (26:24)
Retrospective perspective on the period preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union (28:33)
On the collapse of communism from a historian's perspective (32:33)
Hopes and apsirations for St. Petersburg State in the 1990s (38:30)
The fate of St. Petersburg State from its founding until now (42:23)
Scholars who influenced Koposov (49:32)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/21952
