Group members
Events
Directors
Charlie Walker is Associate Professor in Comparative Sociology. His research has addressed transformations relating to gender, social class, employment, education and social protection in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania.
George Gilbert is Lecturer in Modern Russian History at the University of Southampton. His publications include The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia (2016) and, as editor, Reading Russian Sources (2020). He has also written on articles on various aspects of the social, cultural, and political history of late imperial Russia, focusing on the history of right-wing movements and political and religious martyrdom.
Steering Group
Mark Cornwall is Professor of Modern European History, specializing in the late Habsburg empire and its twentieth-century successor states. His research mainly focuses on the Czech, Hungarian and Yugoslav regions. In 2022, the Czech Academy of Sciences awarded him the ‘Palacký Medal for Merit in the Historical Sciences’ for his research on Czech history. He is currently writing a history of treason in the late Habsburg empire.
John Glenn is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations. His work has covered political developments in Central Asia and Russia.
Claire Le Foll is an Associate Professor of History, specialising in the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research focuses on Belarus and looks at the experience of national minorities, especially Jews, in Belarus during the imperial and Soviet period. She has published on the political and cultural interactions in literature, art, cinema and the circulation of knowledge among various ethnic groups.
Brienna Perelli-Harris is Professor of Demography. She is interested in changes in the family around the world, including fertility decline in Ukraine and Russia. Over the past few years, she has collaborated with colleagues to study the well-being of Internally Displaced Persons, depopulation, and fertility uncertainty in Ukraine.
Ranka Primorac is an Associate Professor of African Literature in the Department of English, University of Southampton. Her interest in World Literature has, in recent years, led her to begin investigating literary and cultural links between Africa and the Balkans region.
Peter Rodgers is Professor of Strategy and International Management in Southampton Business School. He has researched extensively across primarily Ukraine and Russia, on themes such as non-market strategies, corruption, informal economies and transnational migrant entrepreneurship.
Joanna Sofaer is Professor of Archaeology. She has worked extensively in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and Romania.
Julie Vullnetari is Associate Professor of Human Geography. Her research has explored links between migration and development, borderlands and socialist everyday life in the context of Albania, and Southeast Europe. She has published in numerous journals and is working on a book titled ‘Surveillance and Resistance: A Historical Ethnography of Albania’, documenting everyday life during the country’s communist/socialist years.
Kamil Zwolski is Associate Professor in International Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Security Governance. He is also Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
CEEES Inaugural Seminar Series – War in Ukraine: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future
Western estimates of Russian military capabilities before and after Russia's invasion of Ukraine – Bettina Renz, Professor of International Security, University of Nottingham.
This event will take place from 17:00-18:00 on Wednesday 8 February and is online only (Zoom). Please use this link to Eventbrite to register.
Russian reactions to the war: defensive consolidation and resistance’ – Jeremy Morris, Professor of Global and Russian Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark
This event will take place from 15:00-16:00 on Wednesday 14 December and is online only (Zoom).Please use this link to Eventbrite to register.
Study group on the Russian revolution
Annual Conference, 4 – 6 January 2023
Southampton University, Southampton, UK
All panels will take place in the Hartley Suite, Building 38, Highfield Campus, University of Southampton
Conference theme: Brotherhood of Nations? Centenary Perspectives on the creation of the USSR
Languages: English, Russian
Format: in person and online
Wednesday 4 January
12:30-1:30 pm: Welcome, Lunch, and Registration
1:30-3.00 pm Panel 1: Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects
Chair: Semion Lyandres
Jonathan Davis, Lenin, London and the Labour Party
Jamie Bryson, Portents of Revolution? Okhrana Reports in 1916
3.00-3.30 pm: Coffee, tea, and biscuits
3.30-4 pm: Alistair Dickens, Russian History from School to University: An Update
4.15-6.15 pm Panel 2: The Russian Revolution and Transnational Connections
Chair: Jenny Grieve-Laing
Sam Foster, Diverging Paths?: The South Slavic Left and Revolutionary Russia before 1922
Anna Lively, Transnational Humanitarian Relief, Press Networks, and Representations of Famine in Soviet Russia and Ireland, 1921-25
Marie-Josée Lavallée, Laying Down the Stage for Revolution: the October Revolution, Brest-Litovsk and the Revival of the Austrian Workers’ Movement in Early 1918
End of day one
6.15 pm: Pub drinks, followed at 7.30pm by dinner at Oxford Brasserie, 33-34 Oxford St, Southampton, SO14 3DS.
Thursday 5 January
09:30-11 am Panel 3: 1917 and its Ramifications
Chair: Lara Green
Konstantin Tarasov, Citizen soldiers. Civil Principles of the Russian Revolutionary Army in 1917
Michael Melancon, Misunderstanding/Understanding 1917’s October Revolution: Bolshevik or Soviet Revolution
Geoff Swain, World Revolution: 1920 Revisited
11-11:30 am: Coffee, tea, and biscuits
11:30 am – 1 pm Panel 4: Petitions and Penality in Early Soviet Russia
Chair: Daniel Orlovsky
Lara Douds, Petitioning the Soviet ‘President’: the ‘Priemnaia Kalinina’, 1919-46’
Aaron Retish, Prison Poetry: The Language of Revolution in Prisoners’ Petitions
Mark Vincent, Shaping the Punitive Empire: Questions of Nationality in the Early Soviet Penal Periphery
1–2 pm: Lunch (Hartley Suite)
2–3 pm: SGRR AGM.
3-3:30 pm: Coffee, tea, and biscuits
3:30pm-5:30 pm Panel 5: Nationalities – Ukraine and the Caucasus
Chair: Charlotte Alston
Ridvan Chitil, O. F. Numanzade on Bolshevik Nationality Politics in the Caucasus (Омар Фаик Нуманзаде о национальной политике большевиков на Кавказе)
Christopher Gilley, Ukrainian State-Building and Antisemitic Violence: History, Historiography and Instrumentalisation
Gary Lawson, Brotherhood of Nations? Centenary Perspectives on the Creation of the USSR. Semashko and the Birth of Soviet Health Resorts in Crimea
Grigorii Grigoryev, The image of Najmuddin Gotsinsky (1859-1925) in the historical narratives of modern Dagestanis
5:30-6:30 pm: Roundtable: The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Russian Revolution
End of day two
7.15pm: Dinner, Marco’s Bar Ristorante Cicchetti, 35-36 Oxford Street, Southampton, SO14 3DS.
Friday 6th January
09:30-11:00 am Panel 6: Revolutionary politics
Chair: George Gilbert
Alexis Pogorelskin, The Early Years of Edvard Gylling in Karelia
Mark Conliffe, On Citizenry, Revolution, and the Relationship of Anatolii Lunacharskii and Vladimir Korolenko
Michael C. Hickey, Solomon Gurevich and the Attempt to Chart a Moderate Socialist Revolutionary Path in Provincial Russia in 1917
11:00-11:30 am: Coffee, tea, and biscuits
11:30-1:00 pm Panel 7: Ideology and Rhetoric in Nationalities Policies
Chair: Sam Foster
Stefan Gužvica, From the Taiga to the British Seas: The Russian Revolution as a World Revolution, 1917–1923
Ksenia Butuzova, Revolutionary Enlightenment: Ideology and Didactics of Soviet Rebuses (1922–1930)
Boris Gorshkov, A Revolutionary Childhood: Ideals, Declarations, Challenges, and Realities
1-2pm: Lunch (Hartley Suite)
2-4pm Panel 8: Culture and Society in Early Soviet Russia
Chair: TBC
Jari Parkkinen, Internationalism, Russocentrism and affirmative actions: Debating the revolution in music in the early Soviet Union
Nikolay Sarkisyan, The Historical-Revolutionary Museums of Petrograd-Leningrad, 1917–1941
Pavel Stepanov, “International education of the masses”: Screening the Paris Commune in the 1920-1930s Workers’ Club
End of conference
With thanks to our sponsors: BASEES, and the School of History, University of Southampton.
In association with CEEES (Centre for East European and Eurasian Studies, University of Southampton)
Call for Papers
Annual Conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution
The 48th Conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution will take place from 4-6 January 2023 at the University of Southampton, UK.
The Study Group was established in 1973 and it aim to promote new approaches to the study of the Russian Revolution, focusing on the period between 1880 and 1932. Affiliated to the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), the Study Group possesses a truly international membership. The Study Group and its annual conferences boast strong representation from scholars based in the UK, EU, the USA and Russia.
We invite individual papers or full panel proposals on any aspect of the history of the Russian Empire, revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union from 1880-1932, and we welcome a variety of (inter) disciplinary perspectives.
In the context of Putin’s abuse of history in the rhetoric of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and because our conference falls within days of the centenary of the creation of the USSR in December 1922, this year’s theme is ‘Brotherhood of Nations? Centenary Perspectives on the creation of the USSR.’ We hope to organize one or more sessions that aim to de-colonise the history of the ‘Russian’ revolution by inviting submissions on perspectives from the peripheries of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union or the Nationalities Question, 1880-1932’ (especially but not exclusively, the Ukrainian dimensions). We also hope to invite two keynote speakers with specialisms in Ukrainian history in this period.
The conference languages are English and Russian.
All those interested in attending and/or presenting papers should contact the conference organiser Dr George Gilbert at g.gilbert@soton.ac.uk and Dr Lara Douds, Secretary of the SGRR at lara.douds@northumbria.ac.uk.
Paper proposals should consist of a short abstract of c. 300 words, as well as the contact details and institutional affiliation of the author(s).
The call for papers will close on 31 August 2021. Papers will need to be submitted in December to allow for pre-circulation amongst the group before the conference.
Postgraduates presenting papers at the Study Group may be eligible to apply for a subsidy of some of the conference costs if they are unable to obtain other funding.