HIGHLIGHTS - Spring and Summer 2013

Among my favorite moments from the interviews recorded this spring and summer were Kim Scheppele's remarks during a roundtable on "Scholars as Public Intellectuals Weighing in on History and Politics in East-Central Europe" on how scholars can fill the gap created by the decline of journalism (min. 17:15), as well as Timothy Snyder's observations from the same roundtable on "being able to say 'no' in an interesting way" (min. 30:10). Other insights include Val Bunce's lament that eccentricity is no longer considered a virtue in the hiring process (min. 1:13:08), and Matt Evangelista's explanation (for the uninitiated historian) of "process tracing" and its limits (min. 1:13:44). On the lighter side, David Ost describes being a rock star for one night in Moscow during the 1970s (Part I, min. 28:19). Finally, Norman Naimark's thoughts on mentorship (min. 53:51) are simply unforgettable. 

Interview with Norman Naimark--July 26, 2013

Interview with Norman Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East European Studies at Stanford University. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on July 26, 2013.

Naimark is the author of several books including two on the nineteenth-century Russian and Polish revolutionary movements, a seminal work on The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (1997), another on ethnic cleansing, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (2002), and most recently a book on Stalin's Genocides (2011). He is also editor and co-editor of a number of volumes, such as The Establishment of Communist Regims in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 (1998) and Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (2003).

Interview Themes

The path Naimark followed to becoming a historian of East-Central Europe (1:17)
On Naimark's first visit to the region (Yugoslavia 1964/5 and Poland 68/9) (7:41)
How how Naimark came to write his dissertation on the 19th-century party, Wielki Proletariat [Great Proletariat] (11:35)
The origins of Naimark's first two books: The History of the "Proletariat": The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870-1887 (1979) and Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (1983) (13:28)
On asking "big questions" (26:25)
On writing history with the contemporary political situation in mind (34:22)
Area studies and inter-disicplinarity: parallel decline? (40:34)
How Naimark defines the region he studies (44:29)
Books that have had an intellectual influence on Naimark (48:29)
Naimark on mentorship and his own mentor, Wayne Vucinich (53:51) -- see also Naimark's essay on this topic "How Historians Repeat Themselves"
Commonalities between Naimark's students' work (1:05:10)
What remains to be done in the field of East-Central European history (1:11:22)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33685

Interview with David Ost--July 24 and 25, 2013

Interview with David Ost, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY in two parts, on July 24 and 25, 2013. 

Ost specializes in political economy, democratization, capitalism, and labor and is the author of one of the seminal works on Polish Solidarity titled Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (1990). He also wrote another prize-winning book, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Society (2005).

Interview Themes

Part I - July 24, 2013

How Ost went from studying History and Russian to Political Science (0:43)
On the interest of members of Ost's generation in the East Bloc (15:28)
Interactions with young people in the USSR in the 1970s (20:51)
Ost's first visit to Poland in 1976 (29:18)
On whether Ost has a secret police file on him (33:20)
How Ost came to translate Adam Michnik's The Church and the Left (34:11)
Ost on Michnik (41:55)
How Ost's two books came into being and how they're related (49:24)

Part II - July 25, 2013

How Ost came to be interested in labor history and how he sees class operating in the political realm (0:08)
Were there classes in Poland under communism? (6:33)
How uniquely Polish is the nature of class in Poland? (10:55)
What were the backgrounds of people in Poland who came to belong to different classes after the collapse of communism? (14:15)
Why the younger generation is interested in thinking about class again (20:09)
Ost's experiences teaching at the Central European University in Budapest and in Wrocław at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities there (24:47)
On students in Poland writing up their family member's experiences of work under communism and after (33:08)
Ost's activity as a public intellectual, writing for venues like The Nation, Newsweek Polska, the Chicago Tribune and other venues (35:23)
Transformations in area studies for the field and Ost's views on them (49:21)
Ost's current intellectual interests and directions (56:25)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33683

Interview with Matthew Evangelista--July 22, 2013

Interview with Matthew Evangelista, President White Professor of History and Political Science in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on July 22, 2013. 

Evangelista specializes in international and comparative politics and is the author of several books on a wide range of topics. These include—to name just a few—Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies published in 1989 by Cornell University Press, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (also by Cornell in 1999), a book on Chechnya titled The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (published in 2004), and most recently Gender, Nationalism, and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen published in 2011 with Cambridge.

Interview Themes

Evangelista's undergraduate training in Russian/Soviet history and literature and interest in politics (1:30)
Professors and others at Harvard who had an impact on Evangelista's intellectual trajectory (3:20)
The connection between Evangelista's interest in languages and literature and his current intellectual interests (6:15)
Evangelista's first visit to the USSR in 1979 (7:40)
On terminological slippages (between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, or foreign policy intentions versus foreign policy capacity) that inform attitudes and policy decisions (12:47)
On studying the Soviet Union as offering a way of seeing how power works in international relations (16:30)
The importance of the immediate post-WWII period and the 1980s in Evangelista's work (22:20)
The origins and nature of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell and changes in the Cornell Department of Government since Evangelista was a grad student the 1980s (27:27)
How we are still living with the legacy of the Cold War (34:00)
Evangelista's thoughts at the time on the Soviet Union's disarmament (38:48)
Gorbachev and the road to Putin (43:13)
To what extent should we try to move beyond the Cold War? (48:17)
On nationalism as an ideological alternative emerging out of the Cold War? (52:43)
The importance of ideology vs. institutions to Evangelista's understanding of Soviet military policy or Gorbachev's reforms (55:36)
Moments or events Evangelista has lived through that have proved significant for him intellectually (1:00:28)
Why Cold War studies is preoccupied with the matter of timing (1:03:18)
Are there different reasons why historians vs. political scientists look to history? And an explanation of "process tracing" (1:09:20)
How Evangelista's intellectual trajectory was influenced by area studies and what he thinks should be retained about area studies (1:18:52)
In training graduate students, what is it they most need? (1:22:23)
The origins of Evangelista's book on Gender, Nationalism, and War (1:24:04)
Evangelista's work on Chechnya and his sense of the scholar's role in weighing in on matters of contemporary political significance (1:28:18)
Should we only ever ask questions about where real power is because nothing else matters? (1:33:20)
Evangelista's current intellectual interests on bombing, among other things (1:37:30)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33684

Interview with Chip Gagnon--July 11, 2013

Interview with Chip Gagnon, professor of Political Science and currently the chair of the Department of Politics at Ithaca College. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on July 11, 2013.

Gagnon is the author of the book The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (published by Cornell University Press in 2006), which won the 2005 American Political Science Association's Prize for the Best Book on European Politics and Society and was Co-Winner of the 2006 Council for European Studies Best First Book Award.

Interview Themes

Gagnon's academic background and how he came to the field (1:00)
How Gagnon's study of languages affected the way he does political science (4:00)
Gagnon's view of the advantages and disadvantages of area studies for our field (6:45)
On how Gagnon's dissertation on Soviet-Yugoslav relations in the 1960s came into being (12:00)
Responses of people at the time to Gagnon's dissertation (15:50)
Gorbachev and Yugoslavia (18:04)
How Gagnon came to write The Myth of Ethnic War (20:42)
On whether the Yugoslav federal system was sustainable (23:04)
How Gagnon's came to "demobilization" as a way of explaining what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s (24:48)
Importance of the structure of the communist party in Yugoslavia for post-communist developments there (28:27)
Was nationalism built into the communist system in Yugoslavia? (32:15)
How important is history to what happened in Yugoslavia? (34:35)
Gagnon's views on what constitutes a responsible use of history (38:30)
To what extent should we attempt to think outside of constructed identities and pasts? (40:36)
How much of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was the result of internal versus external events/interventions? (43:09)
Comparison of the collapse of the USSR vs. Yugoslavia (47:15)
Gagnon's views on Slobodan Milošević (49:00)
On "going astray" and Gagnon's approach to political science and attraction to ethnography and anthropology (51:12)
How important are "the people" vs. elites and individual agency when thinking about Yugoslav history? (54:55)
On courses Gagnon teaches on "Whiteness and Multiculturalism" and "Pirates, Mercenaries and Missionaries" and how they relate to Yugoslavia and his current project on democracy promotion (1:01:03)
Where are the common problems and preoccupations with scholars who work on other parts of the world? (1:03:35)
On what Western Europe could learn from Eastern Europe (1:06:48)
How unusual is Ithaca in terms of the scholarly environment? (1:08:24)
Gagnon's current work and interests (1:10:22)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33682

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Scholars as Public Intellectuals Weighing in on History and Politics in East Central Europe (ASN Roundtable)

This is a recording of a roundtable discussion from the ASN (Association for the Study of Nationalities) 2013 annual convention at Columbia University on the theme of "Scholars as Public Intellectuals Weighing in on History and Politics in East Central Europe." It was recorded on April 19, 2013. 

The roundtable participants included Katherine Fleming (History, NYU), Florian Bieber (Political Science, University of Graz, Austria), Timothy Snyder (History, Yale), Kim Scheppele (International Affairs, Princeton), and István Deák (History-Emeritus, Columbia), with myself (Holly Case) as organizer and chair.

Roundtable Themes

Introduction of panelists (0:55)
How do you understand your own role as a public intellectual and which context do you see yourself as operating in primarily? (8:00) Fleming (8:55), Bieber (10:07), Snyder (12:40), Scheppele (17:06), Deák (18:37)
Who sets the agenda for public debate? How have events in East-Central Europe affected your career trajectory as public intellectuals? (21:52) Fleming (23:22), Bieber (24:55), Snyder (28:05), Scheppele (32:00), Deák (35:00)
What is your relationship to the country/countries that are the focus of your interventions as a public intellectual? (38:15) Fleming (39:08), Bieber (41:59), Snyder (45:23), Scheppele (49:55), Deák (54:22)
Why is it that women remain underrepresented among public intellectuals? (58:52) Fleming (59:54), Bieber (1:01:00), Snyder (1:01:38), Scheppele (1:03:17)
Audience questions: Do public intellectuals who do not speak up when people are spreading lies about history in effect legitimize those lies? (1:05:38) How has the social demand for public intellectuals evolved as a result of digital technologies? (1:08:44) How effective are the interventions of public intellectuals in influencing public attitudes/debate? (1:09:55) How do you represent your own country/culture to people from outside? (1:10:34) Deák (1:11:35), Scheppele (1:15:50), Snyder (1:19:34), Bieber (1:24:44), Fleming (1:29:13)
Audience questions: On the role of the post-communist transition in pushing women into the background (1:35:44) Why have most East-Central European economies struggled since the collapse of communism? (1:37:54) How much does engagement in public history influence academic writing? (1:39:35) Fleming (1:40:35), Bieber (1:42:17), Snyder (1:44:52), Scheppele (1:50:25), Deák (1:55:37)
To access roundtable discussion, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33424

Interview with Dennis Deletant--April 4, 2013

Interview with Dennis Deletant, Professor Emeritus of Romanian Studies at the University College London and now the Visiting Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. Interview conducted in Washington, D.C. on April 4, 2013.

Deletant has written a number of books and articles on Romanian history of the twentieth century, including Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his regime, Romania 1940-1944, published by Palgrave in 2006 and recently translated into Romanian. 

Interview Themes

How Deletant came to be interested in Romania in the mid-1960s (2:10)

Deletant's approach to the issue of "backwardness" in Romanian historiography (4:59)
What changed in Romania over the period of Deletant's study of it (10:45)
British views of Romania in the 1960s and '70s (15:25)
On what Deletant wanted his British students to know about Romania (16:09)
On the legacy of British scholars like Hugh Seton-Watson and R.W. Seton-Watson and others (18:24)
The 1980s in Deletant's career and Romanian history (23:36)
Writing about the difficult periods of Romanian history as a labor of love for Deletant (28:23)
Can the model of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) that we associate with Western Germany after WWII be "exported" to East-Central Europe? [on the role of the C.N.S.A.S. - National Council for the Study of the Archives of the Securitate] (33:52)
How Deletant came to get access to select Securitate (Romanian communist secret service) documents in 1993 (41:10)
On Deletant's own Securitate file (53:54)
Deletant's role as a Romanian expert giving interviews with the BBC (1:02:43)
Recent developments in Romania that are cause for concern (1:04:23)
Would there be a place for dissidence in Romania now? (1:07:00)
Was the 1989 revolution in Romania a real revolution? (1:08:40)
Deletant's sense of what scholars should be addressing now when writing about Romanian history and politics (1:10:08)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33423

Interview with Valerie Bunce--February 22, 2013

Interview with Valerie Bunce, the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and Professor of Government at Cornell University. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on February 22, 2013.

Bunce's work is mainly in comparative politics and international relations, with a geographical emphasis on East-Central Europe, the Balkans and the Soviet successor states. She’s the author of many articles and the book Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Collapse of Socialism and the State (published by Cambridge University Press in 1999), and has written another book together with Sharon Wolchik titled Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge, 2011).

Interview Themes

What brought Bunce to study the region (1:40)

On how a scholar's background relates to his/her disciplinary proclivities (3:50)

Bunce's formative early experiences and travels to Southeastern Europe [Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia] in the early 1970s (5:06)

Events of the past decades that have left a lasting impression on Bunce [Solidarity, collapse of Yugoslavia] (9:58)

The biggest surprises in the trajectory of the region since Bunce started studying it (20:07)

How the upheavals in the region have affected scholarly approaches to it (21:50)

Fallout in the field of Soviet studies of the collapse of the Soviet Union (25:03)

The national question under communism in the USSR and East-Central Europe (30:00)

Will the national question go away in the foreseeable future? (32:57)

Bunce's view on the nature of the interplay between policy/politics and culture (35:15)

Bunce's experiences with the policy world and the language used in academic vs. policy circles (36:57)

On knowledge of the region and democracy promotion (41:28)

Does the knowledge we have about the region give us special insight into what has taken place/is taking place elsewhere [Egypt]? (44:19)

On political scientists' growing lack of knowledge of the region's history (47:55)

Are "one-party" states back? (53:03)

Comparison of the situation in Russia and Hungary--is it remembering or forgetting communist party strategies in the two cases? (56:53)

How important is Southeastern Europe to Russian/Soviet history? (1:00:41)

What are the directions we can go with knowledge of this region in comparative terms? (1:04:10)

How does one know if a revolution/transition to democracy/authoritarianism is decisive or temporary? (1:07:04)

On training the next generation for work in this field (1:09:29)

Bunce mourns the loss of eccentricity in the younger generation of scholars and reflects on its causes (1:13:08)

To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33422

Interview with Wayles Browne--February 8, 2013

Interview with Wayles Browne, professor of linguistics at Cornell University. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on February 8, 2013.

Browne is a Slavic linguist specializing in Serbo-Croatian (or BCS - Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian). He has published on a variety of themes in Slavic and general linguistics and has taught nearly every Eastern European language during his time at Cornell. 

Interview Themes

On studying Slavic at Harvard in the time of Roman Jakobson (1:50)

Linguistics as an interdisciplinary field (10:47)

What is language? (12:55)

How languages evolve and become standardized (18:30)

Language as a national symbol and its relation to conflict (23:43)

Observing the fall of Yugoslavia as a linguist and someone with an attachment to the region (25:00)

On what drew people to Yugoslavia in the 1970s (29:30)

How Browne experienced Yugoslav federalism and its benefits/shortcomings (32:15)

Languages and dialects, from Slovene to Genoese (38:00)

Commonalities between Balkan/Southeastern European languages and languages that borrow structures--rather than simply vocabulary--from other languages (45:01)

Delights and challenges of translation from BCS (53:45)

What Browne has found gratifying in his career (57:47)

Changes in the field of linguistics and how Browne relates to them (1:03:25)

[apologies for the abrupt end to the interview due to a technical failure]

To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33421

HISTORY IN THE MAKING--Greece

Interviews with Alexandra Tsekeri and Dimitris, neighborhood assembly members and political activists in Athens, Greece. Interviews conducted in Athens, Greece on January 12, 2013.

These are the first in an informal series called "History in the Making," which includes interviews with individuals who are engaged in political activism or are otherwise living through events unfolding in East-Central and Southeastern Europe.

Interview Themes

Alexandra Tsekeri

PART I: Alexandra Tsekeri (in a cafe)

On neighborhood assemblies and their activities (1:30)

The nature of the Pangrati (Παγκράτι) neighborhood of Athens (3:42)

On how politics can be "read" from someone's appearance (8:45)

What is the "ideal community" that members of neighborhood assemblies are trying to create? (11:05)

On Tsekeri's experiences in New York and why she came back to Greece (19:02)

On events in Athens since 2008 and why she got involved in the neighborhood assembly (25:15)

Tsekeri speaks of her views on the Occupy movement in New York (30:50)

What was different about the protests at Syntagma Square 2010/2011 (34:40)

Tsekeri's views on the state and what it should (or shouldn't) do (41:57)

The differences in the political climate in different cities in Greece--Athens, Ioannina, Thessaloniki, Volos (48:58)

Local versus international influences on Tsekeri's political views and activism (50:54)

What are the functional alternative models to mainstream politics in Greece and elsewhere? (53:50)

On what the neighborhood assemblies do (58:25)

What is the goal of neighborhood assemblies in terms of community involvement? (1:14:05)

To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33420

Neighborhood assembly member putting up a poster of
solidarity with the Villa Amalias

PART II-Dimitris (at the clothing exchange)

How the neighborhood assemblies came into existence in 2008 (0:40)

On the role of neighborhood assemblies: not charity, not the state (8:50)

Positive historical and other models for the activism of today (10:38)

How neighborhood assemblies have evolved since 2008 (13:40)

What neighborhood assemblies should do in the future (14:42)

On people's responses to the emergence of neighborhood assemblies (16:08)

Dimitris's views on the extreme right (Golden Dawn) in Greece and its supporters (17:29)

How can politics confront the fear of the people about the future? (20:22)

What kinds of people are attracted to neighborhood assemblies? (21:41)

On the rhetoric of "crisis as opportunity" (23:39)

How to maintain political/organizational energy after Syntagma (25:08)

Dimitris's views on electoral politics (26:53)

On what it means to be an anarchist (27:40)

On what it is that Dimitris is fighting against (30:58)

Benefits to the individual and to the community of involvement in the movement (32:00)

Could these initiatives serve as a model for people in other places? (33:40)

On Dimitris's skepticism vis-a-vis the Occupy movement (34:46)

To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33420