This blog post was due to focus on the rewriting of Russia’s past and present in a new history school textbook, but now we sadly can add to it the rewriting of Russia’s future through the untimely death of Alexei Navalny.
Tag: Russia
Lev Rubinshteĭn (1947-2024) : an anti-war Moscow poet with Ukrainian Jewish roots
This week saw the death following a road accident of the poet and activist Lev Rubinshteĭn (Rubinstein). Rubinshteĭn is most closely associated with Russia and especially Moscow, where he lived and died and and whose son he was most famous as through his status as one of the founders of Moscow conceptualism. Yet while Russia’s dissident and artistic scenes have lost a shining light through his death, Ukraine has also lost a friend (he consistently spoke out against Russian aggression again Ukraine) and a son too: Rubinshteĭn was born in Moscow to Jewish parents who both came from Ukraine. Continue reading “Lev Rubinshteĭn (1947-2024) : an anti-war Moscow poet with Ukrainian Jewish roots”
Offensive purchases : ebooks in favour of the Russian war against Ukraine
As the latest newsletters from our department and from the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group show, the questions of how best [a] to handle and catalogue and [b] instruct our readers about the offensive material in our libraries is a very live one. Of *course* we have such material – research libraries inevitably acquire titles that represent the negative aspects of the world our academics and students research and not only the positive ones. A big issue lies in making sure that our readers understand that the presence of a particular book or other item in Cambridge collections does not equate with the endorsement of its contents by library or academic staff.
This issue has been in my mind as I’ve been undertaking the distasteful task of selecting and cataloguing various pro-war Russian books (all ebooks, since they are easier to buy at the moment than print books). It would be easiest of all not to buy them in either form, but it is important that our readers can see what is being published in Russia during the all-out war against Ukraine, to get a feeling for the kinds of material being pushed at the Russian reading public. Continue reading “Offensive purchases : ebooks in favour of the Russian war against Ukraine”
The war on Russian writers against the war on Ukraine
Next week will see the launch of collaborative work to bring some of the UL’s Ukrainian material together into a pop-up exhibition. This week, we will focus briefly again on the effect Russia’s war on Ukraine is having on its own country, this time through the prism of the leaked list of authors that the Moscow Dom Knigi bookshop network have apparently banned their staff from putting on display (a full ban is thankfully not in place); an article in Russian about this can be found here. The ban largely relates to the authors’ appearance on the list of ‘foreign agents’ (inoagenty) this blog has mentioned before, which ultimately boils down to their stance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Continue reading “The war on Russian writers against the war on Ukraine”
Decolonisation and Russia’s war against Ukraine
When the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group was set up in September 2020, its members agreed that the group’s terms of reference should include the following: “We recognise that while the primary colonial legacy in Cambridge libraries relates to the British Empire, Cambridge also holds material relating to other colonial powers, past and present, and this is also part of our decolonisation focus.” The wording came about because I was keen to ensure that non-British colonial legacies should not be overlooked when we hold such extensive collections from all around the world.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a devastating reminder of these other colonial legacies. Putin has openly compared his “military operation” against Ukraine to Peter I’s wars of expansion (or, more specifically, wars of reclamation, in Putin’s narrative). In the library context, decolonisation work to address the colonial past and its violent embracing in the present involves many areas of library activities. This post provides just a few initial suggestions, and I hope that future posts will pick up specific defined and achievable projects that come out of these. Continue reading “Decolonisation and Russia’s war against Ukraine”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine : the February 2022 Slavonic item of the month
There had been other plans for this month’s blog post, but Putin’s invasion of Ukraine yesterday and its unfolding violence and tragedy are all any of us can think about now.
In this blog, we normally point readers to books but of course in the current situation, books will follow and internet resources are what we need for information now. This list put together by a New Mexico State University academic of freely available news sources in English from Ukraine, Russia, and more is a good starting place. Please click on the tweet below to see the list.
https://twitter.com/DrO_aorzoff/status/1497092314761601032
Here is the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies twitter account too: https://twitter.com/CamUkrainistyka.
The events of these last two days have been devastating and almost unbelievable for those of us fortunate to be far away from the violence, but many Ukrainians and commentators have taken pains to point that Putin’s incursions into Ukraine started nearly 8 years ago, with war in the east and the taking of Crimea. The hybrid war in eastern Ukraine had in its direct form already taken many thousands of lives, including that of the brother of Dr Olesya Khromeychuk, who was one of two language specialists who taught me Ukrainian here when I was getting my feet under the table. Her book, A loss : the story of a dead soldier told by his sister, has recently been bought by the UL.
As previous blog posts have detailed, the UL has bought academic and source material from Ukraine and from Russia (as well as from further afield) about these tragic times, and we will continue to do so as far as we can in the light of the overwhelming new invasion.
We will also continue to hope and work for peace as private individuals (through contacting MPs and supporting charities) and hope for a kind and genuine welcome in the UK and elsewhere for Ukrainians fleeing the conflict. The sanctions being correctly levied against Putin and his Russian elite will have an awful impact on ordinary Russians too, many of whom have already been brave enough to risk arrest and imprisonment by peacefully protesting the war, and we think of them too. We have many books about Putin, some academic but some ‘popular’ publications too – about him and by him (eg this and this) – to have examples of such material being published into the Russian book market.
As librarians, we are also looking at ways of helping our Ukrainian counterparts. Since I first published this blog post, the UK Slavonic librarian network COSEELIS has published a statement of support for Ukraine and committed in it to seeking and listing initiatives to provide professional aid to Ukrainian libraries and archives.
Mel Bach
‘Memoirs of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Women’ online collection : the September 2021 Slavonic item of the month
This short (and slightly late) September Slavonic blog celebrates a new open-source collection of women’s memoirs from the last 70-odd years of the Russian Empire.
Some resources on racism and anti-racism in Eastern Europe
The latest in our series of racism/anti-racism posts relates to Eastern Europe. This is just the beginning of a collection of resources on the topic, and future posts will include material to broaden our coverage to include more areas, countries and topics: this list covers mostly Ukraine, Russia and part of the Balkans. Continue reading “Some resources on racism and anti-racism in Eastern Europe”
Extra Russian eresources available into September
Good news – access to these three resources has generously been extended by East View for Cambridge staff and students until 30 September 2020.
East View have opened up access to their Rossiĭskaia gazeta Digital Archive, Novaia gazeta Digital Archive, and Essential Russian Classics e-book collection to Cambridge staff and students until the 31st of July.
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A splendid buffet : the June 2020 Slavonic item of the month
This month, I wanted to draw attention to a growing open access resource called Prozhito which provides diaries written by the great and the good and the ordinary. At the time of writing, Prozhito (“Lived”, the passive past participle) contains diaries in Russian by 5755 authors, in Ukrainian by 104, and in Belarusian by 58.
A volunteer-led initiative which started in 2014, Prozhito has since 2019 been a joint project with the European University in St Petersburg. The latter’s English-language summary of the project is here. The Russian-language Prozhito “About” page is here.
Continue reading “A splendid buffet : the June 2020 Slavonic item of the month”
Languages across Borders 