An international school of young historians, ‘Russian – Polish Entangled History: Scientific Reconstruction and Reflection in the Collective Memory’, took place in April at the School of History (HSE Moscow). Undergraduate and master’s students from HSE and the University of Warsaw took place in the event. Alexander Kamensky, Andrey Iserov, Dariusz Klechowski, Director of the Polish Cultural Centre in Moscow, and Leonid Gorizontov, who lead the organization of the Russian-Polish meeting.
Honorary Professor at the University of Chicago and Sydney University, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick gave a lecture on Stalin and Post-War Anti-Semitism in the USSR at the HSE’s International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences on Thursday 22nd October. In her talk, Professor Fitzpatrick looks at anti-semitism as a bone of contention between Stalin and his closest colleagues in the years when challenging the leader could have life-threatening consequence. As she explained in an interview with the HSE English News website, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interest in the ‘Jewish question’ came out of her latest book.
HSE has held its post-graduate humanities summer school 'History in the First Person: From Antiquity to Our Time'. The summer school was dedicated to texts written or recorded in the first person, as well as to various methods for analysing them. The school’s organizers and participants spoke with the HSE news service about what ego texts are, how representatives of different disciplines work with them, and how French methodology differs from Russian.
Challenging traditional explanations of history and taking a new view on the past is the hallmark of a good historian; re-examining the history of post-war Soviet agriculture and economics is no exception, according to Aaron Hale-Dorrell, who recently received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at the HSE International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences in September. Aaron Hale-Dorrell recently agreed to speak with the HSE news service about his research interests, his plans while at HSE, and his experiences living and working in Russia.
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, Assistant Professor in History, is completing his monograph The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment . It is in the process of being published by I.B. Tauris. The HSE Look talked to Unkovski-Korica about his topic and the highs and lows of the writing process.
In the year that marks the 70 th anniversary of victory in the Second World War, we talk to Kristy Ironside, who received her BA and MA from the University of Toronto before going on to complete her PhD at the University of Chicago, and who is currently researching life in the Soviet Union in the post-war years. Kristy Ironside’s work examines what the War meant to ordinary people, how their lives changed — and how Soviet society coped with the aftermath.
