This seminar will focus on Susanna Rabow-Edling's book project about three governor's wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska in the period 1829-1864. Dr. Rabow-Edling will explore how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them. The seminar will focus on one of these women, Anna Furuhjelm.

Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.

Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.

Audio Synopsis:

Dr. Rabow-Edling's talk traces the journeys of three women - Elizabeth, Margareta, and Anna - from mainland Russia to Sitka, the capital of Russian Alaska, as governors’ wives. The presentation draws upon the women's diaries and letters home to explore the experience of being a Russian governor's wife in Alaska, including what was expected of the women as wives and mothers, as representatives of the Russian empire, and as participants in the "civilizing mission" of Russian Alaska. Dr . Rabow-Edling also explores how the women, especially Anna, experienced the social and religious environment of the time.

Elizabeth, Margaret and Anna had more in common than being governors' wives. All three came from the Western periphery of the empire - Finland, and the Baltics -  thus representing ethnic minorities. As Lutherans, they were also religious minorities. All three married Finnish governors. Each was young and newly married when they began their journey, and each gave birth to their first child en route to or upon arrival in Sitka.

While all three women were unprepared for the isolation of Sitka life,  they adjusted differently to their new environment. Anna, the least confident, was overwhelmed by the harsh weather, the wilderness, and the native as well as Russian residents. She shunned a public role and took refuge in the sphere of home and family. Margareta was more self-confident, highly educated, and comfortable in Sitka society. However, her arrival was marred by the death of her firstborn son, which drove her in to a lonely depression. Elizabeth was brave, energetic, and curious, as well as less enthusiastic about religion and motherhood. Dr. Rabow-Edling describes how the women engaged differently with the Russian 'civilizing mission,' which was premised on the idea that only European women could civilize native women. She also describes how interactions with the local orthodox church could be difficult, as when Anna was prevented from distributing Bibles to convert the local people.

In conclusion, Dr. Rabow-Edling highlights the clash between the ideals of “true womanhood” prevalent at the time – emphasizing piety, purity and domestication - and the realities and demands of frontier life.

A discussion session following the presentation raised questions regarding the effects of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the differences in gender roles between mainland Russia and Alaska, why these three governors chose Lutheran wives, and why Russia appointed so many Finnish governors.

A founding father of the Soviet Union at the age of twenty nine, Nikolai Bukharin was the editor of Pravda and an intimate Lenin's exile. (Lenin later dubbed him "the favorite of the party.") But after forming an alliance with Stalin to remove Leon Trotsky from power, Bukharin crossed swords with Stalin over their differing visions of the world's first socialist state and paid the ultimate price with his life. Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, the stepdaughter of a high Bolshevik official, spent much of her life in prison camps and in exile after her husband's execution.

In his most recent book Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (2010), Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world's first socialist state went terribly wrong and why it was likely to veer off course through the story of two of Stalin's most prominent victims. Drawn from Hoover Institution archival documents, the story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina begins with the optimism of the socialist revolution and then turns into a dark saga of foreboding and terror as the game changes from political struggle to physical survival. Told for the most part in the words of the participants, it is a story of courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, misplaced idealism, missed opportunities, bungling, and, above all, love.

Paul Gregory holds the Cullen professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of nine books and many articles on the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography. He serves on the editorial boards of Comparative Economic Studies, Journal of Comparative Economics, Problems of Post-Communism, and Explorations in Economic History. He was the President of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies in 2007.

Paul Gregory served as an editor of the seven-volume History of Stalin’s Gulag (published jointly by Hoover and the Russian Archival Service), which was awarded the silver human rights award of the Russian Federation in 2006 and  is an editor of the three volume Stenograms of the Politburo of the Communist Party (published jointly by Hoover and the Russian Archival Service). Two of his edited works – Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag -- have been published by Hoover Press. His collection of essays entitled Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives was published in 2007. His co-edited work with Norman Naimark, The Lost Politburo Stenograms, was  published by Yale University Press in 2008 as was his most recent work Terror by Quota. Professor Gregory’s current research on Soviet dictatorship and repression is supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Hoover Institution Archives.

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

In the Soviet Union speaking about the Gulag was forbidden until the period of perestroika. Nevertheless survivors of the Stalinist concentration camps wrote about the Stalinist practices of terror against the official politics of forgetfulness. Varlam Shalamov’s (1907-1982) prose, especially his “Kolyma Tales”, must be named along with Primo Levi or Jorge Semprun. But his texts rested unpublished for a long time and his aesthetic position is not as well-known as Solshenicyn.

Shalamov understood his own writing as an effort to find a new aesthetic after Kolyma, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. From his point of view, the author should be like Pluto, who came out of the Hades and told the truth about the fragility of man and civilization. The seminar will discuss Shalamov’s strategy of literary memory.

Dr. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein is a researcher at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL, Centre for Literary and Cultural Studies), Berlin. Since 2008, she has been head of the East Europe department at ZFL, and manager of projects on "The Topography of Europe's Plurale Cultures in View of its Eastward Shift," and "Aporias of Forced Modernization: Figurations of the National in the Soviet Empire." Her research topics include memory and autobiographical writing in 20th century Russian literature, cultural topographies, secularization and resacralization between East and West, and figurations of the national in the Soviet Empire. Dr. Thun-Hohenstein studied Russian language and literature at Lomonossow University Moscow.

Her publications include Gebrochene Linien: Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Broken lines: Autobiographical writing and camp-civilisation, Berlin Kadmos 2007). She is editor of the Collected Works of Varlam Shalamov; and, with W. St. Kissel, of Exklusion: Chronotopoi der Ausgrenzung in der russischen und polnischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (München 2006).

Soviet policy in Eastern Europe during the final year and immediate aftermath of World War II had a profound impact on global politics. By reassessing Soviet aims and concrete actions in Eastern Europe from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, Kramer’s essay touches on larger questions about the origins and intensity of the Cold War. The essay shows that domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with Iosif Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe. Stalin’s adoption of increasingly repressive and xenophobic policies at home, and his determination to quell armed insurgencies in areas annexed by the USSR at the end of the war, were matched by his embrace of a harder line vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. This internal-external dynamic was not wholly divorced from the larger East-West context, but it was, to a certain degree, independent of it. At the same time, the shift in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe was bound to have a detrimental impact on Soviet relations with the leading Western countries, which had tried to avert the imposition of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. The final breakdown of the USSR’s erstwhile alliance with the United States and Great Britain was, for Stalin, an unwelcome but acceptable price to pay.

Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: De-Stalinization, the Soviet Union, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Income Distribution and Social Transfer Policies in the Post-Communist Transition: Changing Patterns of Inequality. He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991, which, like his earlier books on the Soviet bloc, draws heavily on new archival sources from the former Communist world.

Co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.