Legacies of Empire in Russian History

Joint session of the seminar “Boundaries of History” of the Faculty of History and Center for Historical Research, and the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. March 13, at 18.00.
Speaker: Ronald G. Suny  “Legacies of Empire in Russian History”.

The public lecture is organized by the network of Empire and Nationalism Studies (net.abimperio.net). 

Ronald Suny is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.

Professor Suny is a world-renowned historian with an admirable breadth of interests across the Eurasian field in both spatial and temporal terms. Professor Suny’s intellectual interests have centered on the non-Russian nationalities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, particularly those of the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia). The “national question” was an area of study that was woefully neglected for many decades until peoples of the periphery mobilized themselves in the Gorbachev years. His aim has been to consider the history of imperial Russia and the USSR without leaving out the non-Russian half of the population, to see how multi-nationality, processes of imperialism and nation-making shaped the state and society of that vast country. This in turn has led to work on the nature of empires and nations, studies in the historiography and methodology of studying social and cultural history, and a commitment to bridging the often-unbridgeable gap between the traditional concerns of historians and the methods and models of other social scientists.

Professor Suny is particularly noted for his studies of the social history of the 1917 revolution, the history of the Caucasus in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and post-Soviet period. This research resulted in the following published monographs: The Baku Commune, 1917-1918 (Princeton University Press, 1972); The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993); The Soviet Experiment (Oxford University Press, 1998). Professor Suny's contribution to the theory and history of nationalism in comparative perspective took the form of the pathbreaking monograph, which reconsidered the role of nationalism in the making of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and provided theoretical account for its comparative strengths and weaknesses: The Revenge of the Past (Stanford University Press, 1993). His historical research on nationalism and empire in Russian and Soviet history and in comparative perspective resulted in the following mostly noted by scholars books: A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2001); and A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2011). Professor Suny's insightful and pioneering work on nationalism and empire is an obligatory citation not just across the Russian and Eurasian studies field, but also in the global historiography.

 

Directions: Saint-Petersburg, Soyuza Pechatnikov st, 16, office 301.

Contact Information: Maria Ukhvatova

                               E-mail: mukhvatova [AT] hse [DOT] ru