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.

Thomas de Waal, journalist, author, and expert on the unresolved conflicts in the South Caucasus, posed this question to a room full of students, professors, and community members in Kane Hall at the annual Herbert J. Ellison Memorial Lecture. De Waal’s talk, “Great Catastrophe: The Politics of the Armenian Genocide,” addressed a variety of issues, from human rights, to the complexity of human agency, and the complications of international politics. De Waal insisted that as a journalist — “an historian of the present”– it was his goal to make some sense of the suffering of the Armenians while understanding the current political issues which make acknowledgement of that suffering a challenge for many people.

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 Andrew Yarbrough For several months, countries and groups across the world have condemned the Russian anti-gay “propaganda” laws, a set of ill-defined legal jargon with the ignoble goal

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