50TH JUBILEE
The Russian Major
at The University of Montana
April 21st and 22nd, 2017
Opening Reception and Keynote Speech
Friday, April 21st from 7:00-9:00 pm. The President’s Room of Brantley Hall.
7:00 Gathering
Keynote
speech:
“Now
and Then: What endures (in Russian culture)” by Dr. Tom Seifrid
7:15 Welcome & Introductions
8:00 Cake break! (gluten-free alternative: French macaroons)
8:15 Champagne toast in honor of our program and its past faculty members
8:30 Student awards and honors
8:40 First-year language tradition: “Людоед и принцесса” performed by Ethan
Holmes
8:45 Vocal performances
“Tatyana’s Letter” from Eugene Onegin ………………………………Tchaikovsky
Claire Robertson, Soprano
Scott Koljonen, Accompanist
“Lilacs” and “Spring Waters”…………………………………………………Rachmaninov
Holly Jacobs, Soprano
Scott Koljonen, Accompanist
SATURDAY, APRIL 22nd
Native American Center, room 105
10:00-12:00pm: POPULATIONS AND POLICY
Chair: Robert Greene, Associate Professor
“Industry and the Indigenous: the Case of the Yamal Nenets and Hydrocarbon
Extraction”
Ethan McKown
(MA candidate in Global Environmental Policy at American University)
“A Problem Definition Approach to the Conservation of the Lion in
Tanzania and Amur Tiger in Russia”
Travis Vincent
(MA candidate at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns
Hopkins University)
"The Bumpy Road to Democracy: Success and Failure in the Integration of
Ethnic Armenians in the Republic of Georgia"
Greta Starrett
(MA in International Studies from the University of Washington)
“Between Wartime Atrocity and the Genocide of the Jews: Early Soviet
Representations of the Nazi Death Camps and Polish Responses, 19441946”
Alana Holland
(PhD candidate in Modern Russian and East European History at the
University of Kansas)
1:30-3:30 pm: LITERATURE & FILM
Chair: Clint Walker, Associate Professor
“History as Motion: Time, Memory, and the Modern Jewish Experience in Jabotinsky’s
Pyatero and Bergelson’s Nokh Alemen”
Tyler Dolan
(PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at
the University of Illinois)
“Anatolii Lunacharskii and the Soviet Theater”
John Dunkum
(MA in History from University of Montana)
“ ‘Yesterday I was still a fool, but today I’m a bit wiser’: Reading Dostoevsky in
Contemporary America”
Justin Trifiro
(PhD candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at
The University of Southern California)
“Upstaging the Carnival:A Bakhtinian Take on Necrorealist Biopolitics”
Ellina Sattarova
(PhD candidate in Film Studies with a concentration in Slavic at
the University of Pittsburgh)
ABSTRACTS
“Industry and the Indigenous: the Case of the Yamal Nenets and Hydrocarbon
Extraction”
(Ethan McKown)
There has been a Russian presence in the arctic for centuries. The presence adopted a different
tone and nuance, however, following the discovery of valuable hydrocarbons such as oil, natural
gas, and coal. Inevitably, the extraction of natural resources from the tundra has impacted the
local environment – ecologically, socio-politically, economically, and culturally. This paper
examines the Russian extractive industry’s impact on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern
Siberia, home to the indigenous Nenets reindeer herders. To more fully understand the impacts
of the extractive industry on a group of arctic indigenous peoples, this paper explores the
relationship through three different lenses focused on the two present groups of Yamal
inhabitants – the Nenets and Russians. The first lens, political ecology, investigates the sociopolitical and cultural ties that the two groups bear towards the environment. The second lens,
economics, examines the groups’ relationship to markets, both to reindeer and to the extracted
resource, local and global. The third lens, science, provides a review of scientific literature that
helps answer what physical impacts the extractive industry has on the surrounding environment.
Ultimately, the paper concludes that the Russian impact on the environment has greatly changed
indigenous dynamics in the region. However, the relationship between the Russians, Nenets, and
their environment is complex, and does not fit the common colonial narrative. The future of the
region is uncertain, dependent on the state of the Russian economy, Russian geopolitical
interests, the resilience of the Nenets, and, of course, climate change.
“A Problem Definition Approach to the Conservation of the Lion in Tanzania and Amur
Tiger in Russia” (Travis Vincent)
Despite growing efforts and varied approaches to protect large cat species, populations have
continued to decline at a rapid rate. Conservationists must incorporate social, political,
managerial, and economic values into their strategies in order to correct this trend (Clark, 1992;
Dickman, Hazzah, Carbone, & Durant, 2014). A policy sciences approach provides just such a
framework that allows for the identification of existing policies and potential policy decisions,
taking into account relevant participants, values, perspectives, and sources of information
(Primm & Clark, 1996). The following paper defines conservation policy problems for large cats
globally and in middle and developing countries specifically using this framework. To ensure the
global nature of the study, the African lion in Tanzania and the Amur tiger (often called the
Siberian tiger) in Russia were chosen as subjects. The results showed that in the cases of the
African lion and the Amur tiger, threats were similar – illegal killing, encroachment,
connectivity, and enforcement, yet the policy recommendations are dissimilar. Tiger
conservation should focus on increasing and improving anti-poaching measures and habitat
protection, while lion conservation should develop buffer zones and create increase local value
for lions. Globally, increasing tolerance for large cats and halting the legal and illegal trade of
large cats is vital.
"The Bumpy Road to Democracy: Success and Failure in the Integration of Ethnic
Armenians in the Republic of Georgia" (Greta Starrett)
After the chaos that ensued during the 1990s, Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in 2003
seeking to rebuild Georgia into a functioning, unified state. One of the ways he tried to do this
was through the integration of national minorities into Georgian mainstream society. Significant
research has been done on his integration efforts with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but much less
has been done about his efforts with the Armenians of Samtskhe-Javakheti. This paper begins by
setting the stage for Saakashvili by looking at the actions of his predecessors and how they
influenced the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia. The second section provides a brief
examination of important Georgian laws that will provide the framework for what Georgia has
sought to achieve since independence regarding its ethnic minorities. The third section of the
paper explores what integrations means and examines specific actions that the Saakashvili
administration took in this region looking at education, language, civic participation, and
infrastructure rehabilitation. The fourth assesses the impact of Saakashvili’s actions – where he
had success and where he had failure. The fifth and final section explores why the Saakashvili
administration got the results it did and what Saakashvili’s legacy is today."
“Between Wartime Atrocity and the Genocide of the Jews: Early Soviet Representations
of the Nazi Death Camps and Polish Responses, 1944-1946” (Alana Holland)
Before and during World War Two, the Jewish Soviet-Ukrainian artist Zinoviy Tolkachov was
praised throughout the Soviet Union. By 1949 the Soviet state had rendered him disgraced and
took measures to ensure that his name remained in the shadows. He was the first Soviet artist to
officially depict the Nazi death and concentration camps in Poland in painting/drawing. I argue
that Tolkachov – a figure of the Ukrainian Jewish past whose name should be retrieved from an
imposed obscurity – occupied a crucial position negotiating Polish and Soviet interests for
representing the war during the precarious years of 1944-1946. Tolkachov departed from Soviet
political norms and depicted the inherently Jewish nature of the Holocaust, while depicting
Polish suffering more generally. In analyzing local responses to his work at public exhibitions
throughout Poland, I conclude that some Poles immediately sensed the inherently Jewish nature
of the Holocaust but resented the fact that this seemingly overshadowed ethnically Polish
suffering in the war. The responses elucidate early attempts to reframe wartime suffering in
ethnically Polish terms in the immediate post-liberation period. They also show how everyday
people responded to the Holocaust and thus helped determine its future interpretation in Poland
and Eastern Europe. Additionally, rather than viewing the Soviet Union as a monolithically
antisemitic regime that downplayed Jewish suffering in the Holocaust at all times, Tolkachov’s
exhibitions show the ambivalent Soviet stance on the “Jewish question” in the immediate postliberation period. Tolkachov provided a link for understanding the interplay of official versus
ordinary citizens’ responses to the Holocaust in the aftermath of WWII.
“History as Motion: Time, Memory, and the Modern Jewish Experience in Jabotinsky’s
Pyatero and Bergelson’s Nokh Alemen” (Tyler Dolan)
French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1896 Matter and Memory demanded a revolutionary change
in the conceptualization of the act of remembering; perception, for Bergson, is defined as “an
occasion for remembering,” and the relationship between perception and memory is crucial to
the defining of either term. Bergson importantly complicates his own theses on the
interrelatedness of action and memory and distinguishes between two forms of memory: “true”
memory, or memory par excellence - specific memory-contexts that exist in specific times- and
habit informed by memory - rote actions that escape time like turning a doorknob or walking a
repeated and well-worn path. Layered onto a literary context, we can imagine these concepts to
mean that a character is capable of moving through the world through a series of repetitive
motions by accessing this secondary “rote” memory alone. However, without an ability to call
upon and interpret “true” memory, be it personal or cultural, characters’ actions become jerky
and cyclical - they begin to behave as automatons, a major trope of modernist critique. Bergson’s
core understanding of the interpenetration of perception and memory, extrapolated to include allimportant cultural memory, changes the way we imagine the crises of Jewish modernity not just
in scale but in kind. The heroines of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Pyatero and David Bergelson’s Nokh
Alemen experience crises of memory that extrapolate to a cultural and socio-political context in
the layered worlds of their respective texts. These two characters are rendered inert for the bulk
of their works by their inability to perceive their worlds through their pasts; for both, the rupture
with the past, characteristic of Modernity, means not only loss of identity, but of possibility for
action. When these crises are resolved, core divergences of thought imagine disparate possible
futures for our heroines and, by proxy, for the Modern Jew in Europe.
“Anatolii Lunacharskii and the Soviet Theater” (John Dunkum)
The Soviet theater’s trajectory moved from a relatively polyphonic, even kaleidoscopic, fearless
art form to a narrower, formulaic one under Stalin at the end of the1920s. I examine this
evolution through the lens of the career of Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875-1933), who was the head
of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) from 1917 to 1929. In the twelve years that
encompass Lunacharskii’s tenure at Narkompros, I use four plays as focal points to explore how
their form and content, the controversies surrounding their productions, and the public’s reaction
to them explain and reflect the larger political and cultural disputes of the moment. In
scrutinizing Lunacharskii’s personal reflections, the bureaucratic machinations and cultural
polemics within Narkompros, as well as the public and critical reaction to a few specific plays, I
hope to contribute to an understanding of the causes and outcomes of the transformation of the
Soviet theater. Lunacharskii struggled to strike a balance to preserve traditional theaters, and to
delineate – censor – the limits of artistic experimentations explored by avant-garde directors,
whose creative momentum originated from the turn of the twentieth century. On a personal level,
Lunacharskii’s celebrated official moderation concealed a tragic – insofar as he did not
acknowledge it – intellectual and moral muddle.
“Yesterday I was still a fool, but today I’m a bit wiser”: Reading Dostoevsky in
Contemporary America (Justin Trifiro)
In June, 1870, in response to commentary on a recent public execution that took place in France,
Dostoevsky wrote to the critic Nikolai Strakhov, "Man on the surface of the earth does not have
the right to turn away and ignore what is taking place on earth." Implicit in Dostoevsky's moral
imperative is the idea that man is beholden to acknowledge and remain attentive to the plight of
others. This talk will consider the urgency of reading Dostoevsky's works in today's America, a
moment marked by dubious ethical standards particularly in the context of intrahuman relations.
“Upstaging the Carnival: A Bakhtinian Take on Necrorealist Biopolitics” (Ellina
Sattarova)
As the Soviet Union began to show signs of decay, Soviet cinema “celebrated” the imminent
death of the state with an overflow of on-screen corpses. Particularly prolific in this regard were
the necrorealists, whose short films explored the liminal state between life and death and
shocked the spectator with previously-taboo images of nudity, blood and excrement. Drawing on
the work of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben, Alexei Yurchak argues that the group’s
provocations can be discussed in political terms. The necrorealists enacted a redistribution of the
sensible by reclaiming from the state the privilege to draw the boundary between bare and
political life. Yurchak’s argument, however, hinges upon a disavowal of the group’s efforts in
visual arts. He chooses to focus on their early period, when the necrorealists experimented on
their own bodies (by sleeping in the forest, for example, or jumping in front of moving cars).
What Yurchak ignores, however, is that the necrorealists turned to cinema almost immediately
after they had developed an interest in the workings of death. The cinematic medium allowed the
necrorealists to produce netrupy, dead living beings that dwell in the zone of indistinction. But is
an on-screen withdrawal to “bare life” devoid of political potential, as Yurchak seems to
suggest? I tackle this question by examining the affinities and the tensions between necrorealism
and Bakhtinian concept of the carnival. Although necrorealism has a distinct carnivalesque
quality to it, it dismantles the boundary between life and death that remains intact in the
carnivalesque “pregnant death.” Thus unlike carnival that deals with exact opposites and
reinstates the status quo, once the temporarily authorized transgression is over, necrorealism
seems to overcome the limitations of the carnival by dissolving boundaries. Paradoxically,
however, this project is dependent on boundaries itself. To produce “living death,” the
necrorealists required the mediating shield of a cinematic screen and the safety of the editing
room, where “cutting” produced netrupy, rather than corpses.
BIOGRAPHIES
Ethan McKown : Ethan is enrolled in his final semester of the Global Environmental Policy MA
program at American University, School of International Service in Washington, D.C. He
graduated from the University of Montana with a double major in Political Science and Russian
in 2013. Since then, he has traveled and studied in Costa Rica and Armenia, in tandem with his
program in Washington. His thematic interests include environmental security, environmental
economics, natural resource development policy, water resource management, and resource
based conflict.
Travis Vincent: Travis is a second-year Master of Arts candidate at the Johns Hopkins School
of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Travis is a Flathead area native and
graduated from University of Montana in 2012 with degrees in Russian and Economics. While at
UM, he focused on identity and politics in literature and traveled to Vladimir and St. Petersburg
for Russian language study. In 2013, Travis received a Fulbright research scholarship to study
ethnic identity and politics in the Northwest Caucasus. In his Masters' program, he focuses on
governance issues in natural resource management, focusing on low and middle income
countries and regions - specifically Russia and Southern Africa.
Greta Starrett: Greta graduated from the University of Montana in 2013 with her Bachelor's in
Russian Language and Literature and a minor in Central and Southwest Asian Studies. Following
graduation, she spent a year in the Republic of Georgia on a Fulbright English Teaching
Assistantship. Her experience in Georgia led her to pursue a Master's Degree in International
Studies from the University of Washington. While in graduate school, she returned to Georgia on
a State Department internship where she was able to research ethnic minority integration in
Georgian society for the Embassy's Human Rights Report. She graduated with her Master of Arts
in June 2016. Currently, she lives in Colorado and works at a preschool, but still hopes to join
the diplomatic field one day.
Alana Holland: Alana is a PhD candidate in modern Russian and East European History at the
University of Kansas. She also has minor fields in Modern Europe and Nation/Empire. She
completed an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in 2015. She earned her BA in History from Arkansas State University in
2012 but spent 2009-2010 at the University of Montana as a member of the National Student
Exchange program. Much of her work focuses on Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. Her
dissertation project examines early postwar criminal trials in eastern Poland and the Soviet west.
She uses the analytical lens of emotion to understand how non-Jews in the Polish-Soviet west
responded to the fate of the Jews during and after WWII. Her project shows the early stages of
construction of memory of the Holocaust in Poland, and contributes to understanding the
aftermath and construction of memory in post-genocide societies.
Tyler Dolan: Tyler is a second year doctoral student in the Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures at the University of Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of Montana, where he
completed a Bachelor of Arts with majors in English Literature and Russian in 2010. His areas of
research broadly include Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian Literatures, questions related to
Slavic-Jewish identity and representation, trauma and memory studies, theories of nationalism,
and the city of Odessa as a cultural and artistic space.
John Dunkum: John Dunkum was an enlisted Navy man from 1982-87 and in his first year he
began his study of Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. In 2011 he
received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Montana, majoring in Russian, minoring in
Linguistics and Philosophy. Then in 2015 he received his Masters of Arts in History from the
University of Montana, where Robert Greene was his thesis advisor.
Justin Trifiro: Justin Trifiro graduated from the University of Montana in 2013 earning a BA in
Russian Language and Literature. During his undergraduate years at UM, he studied twice
abroad in Russia (in Moscow and St. Petersburg) and was the recipient of an ACTR essay prize,
a prestigious national award in foreign language composition. Trifiro is currently a Provostial
Doctoral Fellow in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern
California where he earned an MA in 2015. His research is oriented around 19th-century Russian
culture with a focus on the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Recently, Justin has
begun to professionally engage with aspects of Polish culture (20th century popular song and the
films of Krzysztof Kieślowski) through intensive summer language study at Jagiellonian
University in Kraków, Poland. He is in the formative stages of submitting a dissertation
prospectus that will examine the philosophical problem of friendship in Dostoevsky's major
fictions.
Ellina Sattarova: Ellina Sattarova is a PhD candidate in Film Studies with a concentration in
Slavic at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2010-11 she taught first-year Russian at UM through
the Fulbright Program and then received an M.A.in German from UM in 2013. She received her
M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. Her
dissertation explores the biopolitical turn in recent Russian cinema; it focuses on the work of
Aleksei Fedorchenko and Vasilii Sigarev and the ways in which their films conceptualize the
relationship between human life and political power.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER PROFESSOR TOM SEIFRID
We are very honored to have had Professor Seifrid as our keynote speaker. He has been an
inspiring and supportive colleague for many years. Dr. Seifrid completed his B.S. in Wildlife
Biology at UM, with a major in Russian, in 1978. He received his PhD from Cornell University
in 1984, and taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1982-85. He is currently
Professor in and chair of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of
Southern California. From 2013-14 he was president of the American Association of Teachers of
Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). He primarily studies twentieth-century
Russian literature and culture, particularly that of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s; Russian
philosophy of language of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; the life and works of
Vladimir Nabokov; and Polish language and culture. In addition to numerous articles on Russian
literature and culture, he is the author of Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge
UP, 1992), A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s ‘The Foundation Pit’ (Academic Studies Press,
2009), and The Word Made Self (Cornell UP, 2005), a study of the prolific body of writings
produced in Russia from roughly 1860 to 1930 which seek to define the nature of language (or
the Word, or Logos). He is currently working on a study of connections among ideology, literary
genre (including theater), and urban space in early Soviet culture. He has a strong secondary
interest in Polish language and culture.
TO EVERYONE WHO HAS JOINED US FOR THIS CELEBRATION:
ОГРОМНОЕ СПАСИБО!
Event Organizers:
Dr. Ona Renner-Fahey, Dr. Clint Walker, and Dr. Robert Green
Event Sponsors:
The Russian Studies Program at The University of Montana
UM’s Alumni Foundation
We also owe gratitude to: our administrative staff, Karen Blazevich and Olivia White, in the
Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures; our incredible colleague Alice
Harris, for all her help; talented UM art student Leann Skach for her fantastic logo design;
SRAS, for their valuable partnership, which has helped us fund this event; and UM’s Russian
Club--its President Lindsey Greytak and its many volunteer-happy members!