Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
171 episodes
3 weeks ago
Lecture by Sergei Antonov (Yale University). Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself.
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Lecture by Sergei Antonov (Yale University). Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself.
Writing the Soviet History of Philosophy in the 1960s–1980s
CREECA Lecture Series Podcast
47 minutes 16 seconds
9 months ago
Writing the Soviet History of Philosophy in the 1960s–1980s
About the Lecture:
During the 70 years of its existence, the Soviet Union claimed to be a communist state based on the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and, at the later stages, Vladimir Lenin. This made philosophy a mandatory course in every Soviet university and led to the creation of a peculiar version of the history of philosophy. Leading Soviet specialists, such as Valentin Asmus and Igor Narskii, interpreted the history of philosophy as a dialectical struggle of oppositions, such as materialism and idealism, religion and science, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Consequently, they divided philosophers of the past into two camps: allies, whose theories preceded dialectical materialism, and foes, who belonged to the idealistic camp. This talk will highlight the principal patterns of the Soviet approach to the history of philosophy and illustrate them through the case study of Igor Narskii’s interpretation of David Hume’s theory.
About the Speaker:
Viacheslav Zahorodniuk was an assistant professor at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He defended his PhD thesis, “The evolution of the ‘idea’ concept in the British philosophy of the 17-18th centuries,” devoted to Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s epistemology. Zahorodniuk was a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at the University, working on a project on Hume’s theory of knowledge. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Research in Humanities, working on the project “Early Childhood in the Early Modern: Locke’s Accounts on Children Perception.” His interests also include Soviet studies, and an article, “Painted Red: The Soviet interpretations of Hume’s epistemology,” is forthcoming in Hume Studies.
CREECA Lecture Series Podcast
Lecture by Sergei Antonov (Yale University). Russia’s landmark judicial reform of 1864 introduced the public jury trial and turned the courtroom into a protected forum for social and sometimes even political debates. This lecture will explore some of the most prominent criminal cases of the post-reform era that involved elite women accused of murder, forgery, and embezzlement. For the only time in Russian history, late imperial criminal trials exposed the hidden lives of Russia’s elites to public scrutiny and discussion, framing many key “questions” of the age, such as the limits of permissible violence, bourgeois privacy and autonomy, exercise of personal power, and profit-seeking. Also for the only time in Russia’s history, powerful persons could reliably expect to go on trial for major crimes, while also expecting that trial to be fundamentally fair. But the effects of this panoptic gaze were complex and ambiguous, and the narratives produced during the trials were unintentionally ambivalent not only about those being prosecuted, but also about the new governing regime itself.
