It is commonly believed that America and Europe are very different societies, and growing apart. A look at the data shows that the anecdotes are misleading and that the differences across the Atlantic have been overstated.

Peter Baldwin, Professor of History at UCLA, is author of several books on the comparative history of European and American state building, most recently, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS.

Introduction by FSI Senior Fellow Josef Joffe.

In her presentation "Russian Science Policy: Before and During the Economic Crisis," Irina Dezhina will outline the major characteristics of the R&D sector in Russia and offer an analysis of government science policy on the eve of the global financial crisis. She will also discuss the various reactions to the financial crisis in Russia, both by the federal government and the science sector, including companies investing in R&D. Finally, Dezhina will analyze the effectiveness of the Russian government's anti-crisis policy in terms of its impact on supporting science and innovation.

Irina Dezhina is a Head of Division at the Institute for the World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. She also teaches the course of “Modern Problems of Russian Science and Innovation Policy” at the State University – Higher School of Economics. Dezhina earned her candidate degree in science and technology policy studies in 1992 from the Institute of National Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and doctorate degree – in 2007 from the Institute for the World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

She was Senior Research Fellow at the Analytical Center on Science and Industrial Policy, a think tank for the Russian Ministry of Science and Technology Policy and State Committee on Industrial Policy (1993-1995). Dezhina was also a Fulbright Scholar at the MIT Program “Science, Technology, and Society” (1997), and worked as Science Policy Analyst at Stanford Research Institute International, Washington, DC, USA (1998-1999). For twelve years (1995-2007) she worked at the Institute for the Economy in Transition (Moscow), a Russian think-tank. She has served as a consultant for the World Bank, OECD, and New Eurasia Foundation, and the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (since 1999). Dezhina has more then 150 publications including 6 monographs.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europea and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and Department of History at Stanford University.

This event is sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for European Studies, and Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

Event Summary:

Professor Koll's presentation describes the "dekulakization" process in Estonia during the 1940s as a systematic class struggle campaign aimed at breaking up the cohesion of the perceived ruling rural bourgeoisie, so as to make Soviet influence in the region easier. Tools of the campaign included taxation, forced reduction in farm size, redistribution of livestock and equipment, political persecution, severe social stigmatization, and in some cases deportation to Siberia. The difficulty in identifying "kulaks" from an egalitarian countryside full of similarly small farms was addressed by enlisting locals to identify, to a surprising extent, perceived kulak members of their own communities. These were often neighbors, and sometimes family. Still, there remained a hazy line between perpetrators and victims, as Koll illustrates with a case study toward the end of her talk. Koll also discusses the role of German occupation during the early 1940s, and the German POW camps that followed, in the dekulakization process. In her concluding comments, Professor Koll notes the ambiguous nature of a campaign aimed at dividing a population across invisible lines, which nonetheless left no option for passive observation and made everyone choose a side. Koll notes that the effects of class warfare persist to this day among the rural Estonian population, in the pervasiveness of alcoholism and strong distrust between neighbors.

A discussion session following the presentation raised such issues as how locals came to be in the position of identifying kulaks; whether there were regional variations in deportation rates; what aspects of the Estonian environment facilitated dekulakization; where the Estonian case falls on a continuum of collectivization; and what the success rates was of appeals by families accused of being kulaks.