Thursday, April 27, 2023
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
5:00 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ilia Venyavkin, Historian of Soviet Culture, Researcher at Russian Independent Media Archive
Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine, begun on February 24, 2022, stunned many observers as meaningless and unforeseen. That reaction came from an oversight. As this lecture will show, there have been groups of Russian ideologues rationalizing the Russian attack on Ukraine and even proclaiming it inevitable for years. Alexandr Dugin is the most prolific and influential of them. He has been reconfiguring and amplifying various conservative and anti-liberal theories for decades to convince his audiences that Russia is destined to engage in an apocalyptic battle with the West. While never directly connected to Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin, Dugin has been successful in spreading his ideas among the military ranks, media influencers and orthodox clergy. Tracing Dugin’s transformation from an anti Soviet dissident to a conspiracy theorist, geopolitician, national-bolshevik, and eurasianist, Ilya Venyavkin aims to reveal the deeper roots of ongoing war and give some insights into its future.
Ilia Venyavkin is a historian of Soviet culture and a journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet writer inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive and a research center of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He has taught Soviet culture at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine he started writing features on people and ideas that made this war possible. For the piece on Russian political technologist Timofey Sergeitsev he received an independent journalist prize Regkollegia.
Currently Venyavkin is holding a research position at the Russian Independent Media Archive (a joint initiative of Bard College and PEN America). He is writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail ovoronin@bard.edu.
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
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