…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.

American movies, Russian comic books, public works projects in Skopje, urban beautification in Krasnoyarsk – what are the conceptual ties that bind these distinct topics?

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”.

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

The link between the UW and Baltic singing traditions will be strengthened again this January as Guntis Šmidchens, head of the Baltic Studies Program, releases his new book, The Power of Song. The book explores the Baltic Singing Revolution of the 1980s and 1990s — a non-violent resistance movement to regain independence from the Soviet Union. Read

by Indra Ekmanis Can the dream of a basketball team represent the dream of a country? Director Marius Markevicius, argues “yes” in The Other Dream Team, a colorful film that merges the fight for an Olympic title with the struggle for an independent Lithuania. The film follows the careers of five Lithuanian basketball players, four of whom (Šarūnas

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