Through 50 years of Soviet occupation, Latvia was effectively erased from the political map. He explained that he never aspired to become a diplomat, but following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had the opportunity to try diplomatic work because all of the communists had been barred from political and military offices. Much like in Estonia, only young people were left to run the country. Razāns, 23 years old at the time, imagined he would find some other work after a year, at most. Now he is the Ambassador to the United States.

Thirty-five presenters and session chairs convened at the Simpson Center at the University of Washington on the first Saturday in May for the 21st Annual Northwest Regional Conference for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies (REECAS NW). Nine panels – packed with presentations ranging from teaching Russian language to heritage speakers, to literature, politics, arts, architecture, ethnicity, religion, to gender identity and women’s role in society – sparked the interest of almost 50 Conference attendees.

Over 30 Seattle area K-12 teachers learned the latest on “Global Asia: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” this year thanks to a unique, decade-long collaboration between The Seattle Times and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

Greta Starett is a first-year graduate student at the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies. Her photos of Georgia are stunning.

Most people remember the story of Jason and the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece. What most people do not realize is that the setting of the myth is substantiated by the discovery of the Sakdrisi Gold Mine. The Bronze Age mine was acknowledged to be 5,000 years old in the early 2000s, the oldest known gold mine in the world. Sakdrisi was declared a cultural heritage site archaeological and scientific excavations began in 2006 by Georgian and German academics. This status was revoked in 2013 by the Georgian Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection in order to allow RMG Gold, a Russian-owned mining company, to exploit the site for the remaining gold. RMG contributes to approximately 10% of the Georgian economy.

Willard Sunderland, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, has had a long-time problem. Since graduate school, all of his scholarly energies have been directed toward finding something that no longer exists — the Russian Empire. The Ellison Center and the History Department sponsored Professor Sunderland’s visit to the Jackson School, where he gave a talk to promote his new book “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution.” Sunderland’s approach to analyzing the twilight of the Russian Empire, a land with tremendous cultural diversity, was to search through the space and time of a single life — that of the infamous Baron Ungern.

The concept of a “pivot” is often examined from the perspective of Russia’s interactions with China. Liz Wishnick, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair University, explained how China views the American rebalancing of its foreign policy priorities. As Asian countries become increasingly influential on the world stage, the United States and Russia have taken more active roles as Pacific powers.

Mikhail Alekseev, Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University, analyzed the emerging modern Sino-Russian relationship through public views on Chinese migration in the Russian Far East since 2000. Based upon mass opinion surveys in Russia in 2000, 2005, 2013, and 2014, Alekseev found a significant decline in negative perceptions of Chinese migration among residents of the Russian Far East, particularly as a threat to sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia. The opinion surveys addressed perceptions of geopolitical threat, xenophobic prejudices, central government authority, economic valuations, and intergroup contact.

The Soyuz Symposium, an intimate conference designed to connect contemporary scholars working the fields of socialism and post-socialism, was hosted by the Ellison Center on the final weekend of February 2015. This event brought together more than two-dozen scholars from numerous disciplines to share their work on the history, social politics, and lived experiences of socialism and post-socialism throughout the European, Central Asian, and East Asian regions. The theme of this year’s Symposium was “Shifting Territories: Historical Legacies and Social Change.” Conference participants tackled these concepts by presenting their research in six panels over a period of two days.

With the memory of the Charlie Hebdo shooting still raw, the BBC ran a story about a daring satirical magazine that ran from 1906 until 1931 in Azerbaijan. The next day, Soyuz Symposium attendees, UW students, faculty and community members, gathered in Kane Hall to hear New York University’s Anthropology Professor Bruce Grant talk about the 100-year-old publication, Molla Nasreddin, and its founder, Jalil Mammadguluzadeh.