How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics after Stalin

A lecture by Orysia Kulick, Assistant Professor of Political Studies and of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba, Canada

Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online. 

About the Lecture

Much like the current Russian president, Stalin was fixated on Ukraine, fearing a strong opponent to his rule would emerge from the second largest Soviet republic. Ukraine was endowed with natural resources and a political and cultural leadership that pushed for more autonomy. The ruthless “purges'' of the 1930s had consequences that Stalin himself could not have anticipated. They laid the groundwork for not only a generational demographic push from below, but also the rise of two general secretaries with deep ties to Ukraine: Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev and Brezhnev collectively ruled for the better part of 30 years, until Brezhnev’s death in 1982, when the KGB led by Yuri Andropov kicked all the Ukrainians out of Moscow and cut off the bureaucratic channels that had brought them there since the mid-1950s. How and why this happened is crucial for understanding Soviet politics. It also points to the existential and epistemological dangers of blindly accepting stories Russia likes to tell about itself. 

About the Speaker

Dr. Orysia Kulick is an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, where she is cross appointed between two departments – Political Studies and German and Slavic Studies. She teaches a range of courses on Ukrainian culture and society, Russian and comparative politics, and the politics of memory.

Dr. Kulick received her PhD in History from Stanford University in 2017, where her studies focused on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. Her research is on regional elites in post-Stalin Soviet Ukraine, the personal networks that shaped its relations with Moscow, and how both influenced politics in the center of Soviet power. She’s working on a book titled provisionally How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics after Stalin. Her second project is a microhistory of the concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora, which follows a small group of Ukrainian nationalists into underground tunnels, where the Nazis manufactured their infamous V-1 and V-2 missiles.

Prior to coming to Manitoba, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Toronto. In Dublin, her research was linked to COURAGE, a Horizon2020 funded research project that explores the cultural heritage of dissent in former socialist countries. The project created an online registry of collections about |about “cultural opposition” in Eastern Europe with the involvement of twelve partner institutes located in Hungary, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, and Lithuania, as well as Ireland and the UK.

Before beginning her studies at Stanford University, Orysia worked as a research editor in the investment-banking sector in Kyiv. She also completed a dual master’s degree program at the University of Michigan in 2006 in Public Policy and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. During that time, she received a Fulbright fellowship to Ukraine in 2003-2004, where she researched civic mobilization in the context of the 2004 presidential elections.

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the HUSI Public Lecture Series and the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks  in advance of the session.

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