UW History PhD alumna Kate Brown has been repeatedly honored throughout 2014, and most recently at the ASEEES conference with the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, for her monograph Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. The work draws upon official records and personal interviews to tell the story of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia, the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium.

Considering the controversy surrounding some recent ambassadorial appointments, it is encouraging to see that UW alumnus Allan Mustard has become the new Ambassador to Turkmenistan. A native of Brady, Washington, Mustard earned B.A. in political science and Slavic languages and literature in 1978 from the University of Washington. Of Ambassador Mustard’s 29 years in the Foreign Service, 20 of those years were spent at U.S. missions abroad. He began his foreign service career as a member of the Foreign Agricultural Service through the USDA. He speaks Russian, German, and basic Spanish.

The Ellison Center is pleased to announce that graduate alumnus Taylor Zajicek was awarded the ASEEES Graduate Student Essay Prize for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for his paper “Modern Friendship: The ‘New Turkey’ and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, 1933-1934”.

Dr. Virgina Martin’s lecture about Kazakh nomadic political culture over the first ten years of Russian rule in the Middle Horde Kazakh Steppe was held in Thompson 317 at 1:30pm today.

Dr Martin presented her recent research which explores local political views and practices of service, loyalty and governance as she works to challenge the standard outdated nationalist and statist historiographies on resistance and bureaucratization of the Kazakhs during this period.

This article is part of the Ellison Center blog Series on Sochi. Click here to read more as we cover the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia!    By William D. Frank Thirty-three medals awarded across 11 biathlon events are up for grabs in Sochi — Norway, Austria and the Czech Republic snagged the first

by Jack Coombes After graduating from the University of Washington in 2011 with an MAIS in REECAS, I accepted a position as resident director of American Councils’ Russian language program in Vladimir, Russia. I still remember how excited I was on my first day of work. It felt like two years of intensive graduate study

by Austin Malloy I couldn’t believe what was happening, and that I was there, right in the center of it all. Wedged between a crowd of over 50,000 Russian citizens protesting on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s presidential inauguration and rows upon rows of OMON (Russian Special Forces Police) in full riot gear, I knew

by Amanda Swain When I arrived in Lithuania in January 2009 for an eight month research trip, I did not imagine that I would spend 20 out of the next 36 months living in Vilnius and Kaunas. My purpose was to gather archival documents for my dissertation concerning two days of popular unrest that followed

By Laura A. Dean Čaka iela, a main street running through the Latvian capital of Riga, was named for the famous Latvian writer Aleksanders Čaks, but in the post-communist period it has become synonymous with something more sinister. I first crossed this street in 1999, while studying abroad at the University of Latvia through my