Moderated by Megan K Duncan Smith, Programs Coordinator at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
IN-PERSON
A casual lunch will be provided.
In the 1920s, Ukrainian demographers were in the leading position in Soviet demography. The central force was the world’s first demographic institute founded in Kyiv in 1919 and its director M. V. Ptukha. Born into the family of a zemstvo clerk in Oster, Chernihiv region in Ukraine in 1884, M. V. Ptukha became a prominent demographer with European training. As the Soviet Union’s only demographic institute, the Kyiv demographic institute produced pioneering and fundamental work for Ukrainian and Soviet demography and greatly contributed to economic and social planning in the Soviet Union.
However, in the 1930s, Stalinist repression threatened Ptukha’s life and work and forced the closure of the institute in 1938. The institute was revived only in 2002 after the independence of Ukraine. What happened to the rich research conducted in the institute? How did Ptukha survive the repression and rebuild his career for the rest of his life? What were the short and long-term impacts of the repression on Ukrainian and Soviet demographic studies and economic planning? This talk explores these questions through an analysis of the repression and eventual revival of Ptukha’s research on the demographic projection for Ukraine.
Mie Nakachi is Professor of Global Studies at Hokusei Gakuen University and Research Associate at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. She holds a doctoral degree in history from the University of Chicago. Nakachi’s monograph, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021) analyzed the centrality of Ukraine in the making of the postwar Soviet reproductive policy and the impact of this policy on postwar women. This book won the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2022 and also received an honorable mention from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies in 2022. Nakachi also coedited a comparative analysis of population policies, Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy (Oxford UP, 2016).
This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Ukraine Study Group.
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LOCATION:Pritsak Memorial Library at HURI STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250423T160000Z DTEND:20250423T173000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR