The lecture hall was filled to capacity for the event “Power, Geopolitics, Ideas,” featuring noted historian and Princeton professor Stephen Kotkin. Co-sponsored by the Ellison Center and the UW History Department, students, faculty, and community members from a variety of backgrounds gathered to hear Kotkin discuss his research on the most enigmatic, powerful, and dangerous man to ever walk the planet. “It’s 862 pages, but my good friend assures me that it reads more like 620,” he deadpanned to a chuckling crowd. Kotkin admitted that it is very difficult to discuss a book of such depth and breadth in just a couple of hours, but he was eager to provide insight into the scope of his research and to offer a more nuanced view of Stalin as a man and leader.

Chess has trained people to think strategically for centuries, and in former Soviet nations, chess is still considered a sport. The game originated on the Asian subcontinent and eventually made its way to Persia. The term “checkmate” comes from the words shah mat, “the king is dead,” and the Russian word for chess is essentially the same, shakhmati. Power and risk, intrinsic aspects of politics, are fundamental concepts of chess as well. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, UW alumnus and former UW student-body president, became fascinated with the game as a child. It was through this driving interest that he became a pupil of Bulgarian chess master Nikolay Minev. What he learned from Minev would help shape his future endeavors.

For several years now, Alexander Bedritsky, scientist and Putin’s appointed Presidential Delegate to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has been voicing concern over Russia’s melting permafrost and the threat it poses to the global climate balance. He could not have asked for a better rallying event than the sudden, spectacular birth of the Yamal crater. This past July, a 100-foot wide section of Siberian taiga burst open on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula. This anomaly was the result of underground pockets of methane fed by years of Siberia’s slowly melting permafrost.

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.

Uzbekistan follows a now well-established custom since its independence in 1991. Every year on December 8, the Day of the Constitution, the guiding theme for the coming year is announced. For example, 2014 was the year of the “Healthy Child”, 2004 the “Year of Love and Compassion.”

The Uzbekistan government has declared 2015 to be “The Year of Attention and Care for Elder People.”

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”.

As a National Resource Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, the Ellison Center offers master teacher workshops for local community educators. In cooperation with the Center for West European Studies, the Ellison Center was pleased to host a two part workshop for social studies teachers at the Jackson School on “Europe’s Transformative 20th Century: From a Continent of War and Division to a Continent of Peace.”

Thanksgiving holiday is a time of gratitude, family feasts, cozy nights and no-holds-barred shopping. Unless you are a graduate student or college senior. For us, it is a time for studying, writing, researching and worrying. There are many applications for internships, government programs and graduate schools to manage on top of our academic load just prior to dead week. You may be eating turkey at the table, watching football in the den, or waiting in line for a Hollywood blockbuster, but the question will inevitably come up — “So, what are your plans after graduation?”

Which types of contemporary Russian firms are most likely to use violence or corruption to resolve business disputes, and which types are most likely to utilize the law? Jordan Gans-Morse presented findings from an original survey of Russian businesses analyzing the relationships between firm-level characteristics and firm strategies relating to property rights.