…Today, nearly every historian of the Soviet twentieth century spends time at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for archival research. In the shadow of the university’s most distinctive landmark, the Hoover Tower, preeminent scholars scurry between buildings, chatting about projects on Civil War era Siberian despots, Boris Pasternak’s poetry, 1950’s Radio Free Europe, and perestroika’s political advisors. The main stacks of the Russia collection are housed in the first nine floors of the Tower itself, an obelisk dedicated to inquiry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

by Sarah Zaides One of the greatest benefits of being a graduate student is not only the unparalleled ability to pursue your own research interests, but the (often!) funded opportunities to travel and live abroad in pursuit of those interests. Since beginning my graduate career at the University of Washington, I have spent two summers

By Glennys Young Two days after the autumn quarter started, I headed for Moscow, Russia. I went to attend an event at Moscow’s Spanish Center (Ispanskii Tsentr, or, in Spanish, the Centro Español de Moscú.) On September 29, the Center held a program to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the evacuation of nearly 3,000 Spanish

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Herbert J. Ellison on October 9, 2012. Herb was a brilliant Russian historian, but also a visionary leader for the whole field and a cherished mentor to so many. In 30 years of distinguished service, Dr. Ellison left an indelible mark on the