I have been fortunate to see a small part of what this country has to offer in terms of natural beauty and its vistas have amazed me, but my most exciting experiences in Slovenia have been opportunities to meet leading cultural figures. Dr. Michael Biggins, Head Slavic Librarian at The University of Washington and my professor of Slovene Language, put me in contact with Slovene author Drago Jančar and documentary filmmaker Andrej Doblehar. Drago Jančar is a widely respected contemporary European novelist, playwright, and essayist. His work is one of the focuses of my research; he is also one of my favorite authors. I had a chance to meet and sit down with Mr. Jančar for an hour to discuss his writing.

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.

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.

Jan Karski, the subject of the latest exhibit on the ground floor of the Allen Library. Karski was the Polish resistance fighter and intelligence courier who brought the first eye-witness reports out of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto and the transit depot outside of the Bełżec death camp. Karski’s biography reads like a spy-novel and his heroic legacy speaks powerfully to the virtues of courage, tolerance, and compassion. Karski is remembered and valorized among the Polish and Jewish communities disseminated around the world, as a true hero of WWII and the 20th Century as a whole. However, many remain woefully ignorant of his efforts.

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.

After living in Russia for one year and visiting again prior to my trip this summer, I thought that I would be very prepared for my experiences in St. Petersburg and Sochi. To my surprise, neither city was anything like Moscow or the lovely village of Beloomut, on the outskirts of Moscow.

Storytelling festivals are a fascinating phenomenon. Festivals and circles aimed at adults, first appearing in Western Europe and the United States in the early 1970s, have now become an established practice worldwide. In the United States, for example, the storytelling revival movement dates back to the Jonesborough Storytelling Festival in Tennessee, established in 1973. Among the post-communist countries, Slovenia shows an interest in not only studying collections of its native folktales, but in reviving traditional storytelling as an oral performance art aimed at adults.

After two six-hour layovers in Los Angeles and Istanbul, two trips through American security, three in-flight films, and four terrible hours of sleep, I was about to fulfill my life-long goal of traveling to Russia.

On Thursday, April 10, 2014, the Ellison Center produced a panel discussion on Ukraine and Russia in light of events in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. In case you missed the event, or if you want to refer back to some of the points, the individual panelists’ discussions are below.  

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 Sarah McPhee For weeks we have seen the viral image of the tandem toilets, incomplete construction and shoddy workmanship in Sochi. “There is no point hosting