Russia and Race Lecture Series 4, Anika Walke. "Was Soviet Internationalism Anti-Racist? [...]"

Prof. Anika Walke (Washington University in St. Louis) delivers a lecture titled “Was Soviet Internationalism Anti-Racist? Toward a History of Foreign Others in the USSR” as part of the Russia and Race Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages, College of Arts and Sciences, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and African and African-American Studies.

Abstract: Beginning in 1958 and until the late 1980s, students from the so-called “developing countries” studied in Soviet universities—in Moscow and Leningrad, as well as in Tashkent and Kharkov. These students benefited from the Soviet government’s ambitions to expand its influence in the new independent post-colonial states, but also experienced difficulties in everyday life in Soviet society. Clashes took place due to a lack of resources and equipment, the privileges of foreign students that distinguished them from the ranks of their Soviet peers, social control in dormitories and classrooms, and political disputes. This talk uses the experiences of foreign students in the USSR to analyze the potential and failure of internationalism to challenge racist ideology and practices.
Abou the speaker: Anika Walke is Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, with affiliations in International and Area Studies; Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Walke was educated at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia, before she completed her doctorate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Anika’s research and teaching interests include World War II and Nazi genocide, migration, nationality policies, and oral history in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe. Her book, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015), weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. A current research project is devoted to the long aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II in Belarus. Anika Walke is affiliated with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative; she currently serves as Co-PI of “The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events,” an NEH-funded endeavor to develop a Historical GIS of Nazi-era ghettos in Eastern Europe.
More about Prof. Walke: https://history.wustl.edu/people/anika-walke

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