CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public.
As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.
Publisher
Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
"'Radical Muslims': Anticolonial Solidarities Across Muslim Eurasia, 1914-1925"
Introduction by Francine Hirsch, Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History at UW-Madison.
About the lecture: The denouement of the Great War produced an arc of overlapping crises that stretched from Anatolia to India, which energized a number of anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements in the region. The Russian Revolution, itself a product of the war, offered a radical hope of remaking the world order on completely new lines. The collapse of both the Russian and the Ottoman empires had thrown open imperial borders and made mobility across them possible as never before. In this situation, Tashkent became a crossroads of (often self-proclaimed) revolutionaries from the former Ottoman Empire, Iran, and India. They were overwhelmingly Muslim but engaged in radical politics in which Islam played only a marginal role. The new Soviet regime espoused anticolonial rhetoric from the very outset and sought to harness anticolonial sentiment. In this short-lived conjuncture, Muslim activists encountered each other and the world’s first socialist regime. This talk will provide an account of this episode and explore the many ways in which new solidarities were born but also in which different groups often spoke past each other.
About the speaker: Adeeb Khalid is Jane & Raphael Bernstein Professor of History and Asian Studies at Carleton College. His work focuses on modern Central Asia, broadly defined, and which he situates in wide geographical and conceptual frames. His last book was Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book that explores transregional connections made in Tashkent during the era of the Russian Revolution.
20 Sept 2026
"A Voice in the Wilderness: The Vita Nova Publishing House and Its Anti-Nazi Program," a lecture by Michael Wachtel
This lecture was co-sponsored by European Studies, the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, and the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Introduction by Professor Irina Shevelenko (GNS+), CREECA Director.
About the Lecture: The talk is based on approximately 800 pages of unpublished correspondence between the Jewish philosopher and musician Evsei Davidovich Shor and the Protestant writer and publisher Rudolf Roessler. After leaving his native Russia in 1922 as the assistant to Vasily Kandinsky, Schor established himself as a student at the University of Freiburg, where he studied with Husserl and Heidegger and began to translate Russian philosophy into German (essays by Viacheslav Ivanov and Nikolai Berdiaev, both of whom he knew personally). In 1932 he moved to Berlin, where he encountered Roessler, at the time the publisher of the leading German theater journal, a position he would soon lose with the advent of the Nazis. The two men and their wives established an intense friendship that developed against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover. Both Shor and Roessler would emigrate, the former in 1933 (for a year in Italy, then in Palestine/Israel), the latter in 1934 (to Switzerland). In Luzern, Roessler founded the anti-Nazi publishing house Vita Nova. The correspondence between Shor and Roessler focuses on the early years of the publishing house’s activities. Wachtel pays special attention to the history of their most audacious publication, "Die Gefährdung des Christentums durch Rassenwahn und Judenverfolgung" (Racism and the Persecution of Jews as a Danger for Christianity, 1935).
About the speaker: Michael Wachtel, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, has been teaching Russian and European literature at Princeton University since 1990. His scholarship focuses on Russian poetry and poetics as well as German-Russian cultural relations. His most recent book is Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life (Columbia University Press, 2025). Among his current projects is an annotated edition of the complete correspondence of Evsei Schor and Rudolf Roessler.
12 Sept 2026
White Film: Tonality and Tone in Soviet Cinema
This lecture was co-sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History and Department of Communication Arts Film Colloquium. Introduction by Professor Jeff Smith, Department of Communication Arts, UW-Madison.
About the Lecture: When Soviet films were shown in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, reviewers often complained about their slow tempo and propagandistic appeals but praised their acting and cinematography. Although since 1930 the Soviet film industry relied primarily on domestic film stock, and photography suffered as a result, the feature films that made it to the U.S. were of relatively high technical quality. One of the practices Soviet cinematographers developed to achieve crisper images was “white film”: filming white elements against white backgrounds using sunlight. This approach resulted in a strikingly bright look that distinguished Soviet films from those made in Hollywood, which was then developing a fashion for high-contrast cinematography that eventually resulted in film noir.
About the Speaker: Maria Belodubrovskaya is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of "Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin" (2017) and has published works on Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet cinema, and various issues in film aesthetics.
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