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Speakers will discuss the impact of the conflict between Georgia and
Russia on Ukrainian domestic politics and external relations with
Russia. How has the conflict affected the balance of power between
different parties and factions inside Ukraine? Do these events augur
more serious conflict between Russia and Ukraine in Crimea? How do
these events affect Ukraine’s prospects to join NATO and the EU?

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Dr. Békés will analyze the international context of the Prague Spring, from the beginning of the reform movement in January to the military intervention of five Warsaw Pact states on August 21. He will draw on his research in multiple archives.
While previous Soviet interventions in East Berlin (1953) and Hungary (1956) were unilateral decisions by Moscow, the crushing of the Prague Spring was a joint action preceeded by intensive coordination among the leaders of the Soviet bloc (excluding Romania). The Kremlin and its allies held seven multilateral summit meetings between March and August at which the East German, Polish, and Bulgarian leadership fostered a military option basically from the beginning while the Soviets and the Hungarians were working for a political solution until the last moment.
It will also be argued that the Warsaw Pact intervention in reality did not block, as often suggested, the evolution of a modest reform movement aimed merely at introducing “socialism with a human face.” On the contrary, archival evidence makes it clear that the political transformation that was underway in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 had gradually but rather quickly progressed from notions of a reformed socialist model towards the goal of a Western-type democratic system that would have been introduced in a short period of time without external intervention. This is indeed what happened in 1990.

Csaba BÉKÉS is founding director of the Cold War History Research Center and Senior Research Fellow at the 1956 Institute, both in Budapest. His main fields of research are Cold War history, the history of East–West relations, Hungary’s international relations after World War II, and the role of the East Central European states in the Cold War. He is the author or editor of 11 books and some 60 major articles and chapters, has participated in some 60 international conferences, and has been a visiting professor at New York University and at Columbia University. He is also a contributor to the forthcoming three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Cold War Studies and Cold War History.

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Between October 15 and December 13, 2008, the Eric Arthur Gallery, 230 College Street, will host the pathbreaking exhibition “Science, Planning, Expulsion: The National Socialist General Plan for the East.” This collection of never before seen photographs and expert commentary conveys the Nazi regime’s plan, submitted to Heinrich Himmler in 1941, to restructure the East racially, demographically, and spatially. The General Plan for the East was arguably the most far-reaching experiment in the use of the tools of scientific planning to re-shape society and built space.

Organized and supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the exhibition has been shown throughout Germany during 2007-2008. The Eric Arthur Gallery of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design of the University of Toronto is the only place to show this exhibition outside Germany. To launch the exhibition the University of Toronto will host an international symposium, October 15-17, 2008, at the Eric Arthur Gallery, which will bring together specialists on the history of science, race, population, and architecture to explore the implications of the General Plan for the East for our understanding of the relationship between science, the state, and the restructuring of space.

The Symposium is funded by the University of Toronto (Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science; The Joint Initiative in German and European Studies; the Ray and Rose Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies; Munk Centre for International Studies; Department of History; Office of the Dean, University of Toronto at Scarborough; and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design) and the German Research Association.

Registration Required: visit the web site link: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=6485

The Symposium opens on Wednesday, October15, at 5:00 pm with a Keynote Address by Professor Christopher Browning. The Symposium continues on Thursday between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm and on Friday between 9:30 am – 5:00 pm.

The Symposium program will be available on the website of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies: http://www.utoronto.ca/ceres

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True to tradition, the series will introduce new films from Ukraine to the Greater Toronto audience. The program features three Canadian premiers of recent works by the internationally renowned director Kira Muratova along with Nadia Koshman and Hanna Yarovenko.

Muratova’s “Dummy” is an intricately woven detective story with a surprise ending, Koshman’s “Fireflies” tells the story of emotional attachment between two children and Hanna Yarovenko’s “Fiesta” is a documentary about Ukrainian folk music and its growing attraction for modern urban youth.

Dummy, 2007
Director: Kira Muratova
Length: 32 min
This is Muratova’s take on the essence of happiness and its different understandings by different people. Is it morally justified to make a person happy for at least a couple of hours by lying to them and breaking all the basic moral norms?

Fireflies, 2005
Director: Nadia Koshman
Length: 36 min.
Raised in the city, young Sirozhka is taken for the summer to his grandmother’s place in the countryside. There, he discovers the Ukrainian village with its distinct rhythm of life, customs, and its quiet irresistible beauty. Most importantly he befriends a local girl, Katia.

Fiesta, 2007,
Director: Hanna Yarovenko
Length: 30 min
The protagonist is Mykhailo Koval, a retired village teacher, polyglot, bandura-player, and a great enthusiast of folk culture in its endless manifestations – music, crafts, embroidery, myth, theatre. His retirement marked a new chapter in his life – an indefatigable popularization of folk culture in his native village and around the country.

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This two-hour session will start off with two brief presentations by Marnie Bjornson (Dept. of Anthropology) and Sandra Bucerius (Centre for Criminology) on the ways in which Muslim immigrants are constructed and construct themselves as members (or not) of majority society. Marnie Bjornson analyzes the Netherlands’ new immigrant incorporation regime in the context of the risk society. The contemporary ‘integration’ regime casts multiculturalism as the greatest risk to ‘social cohesion’ and produces Muslim immigrants as new subjects of blame. Integration is made auditable through standardized language testing and such technologies of audit manage the activities, not merely of risky immigrants, but also of the teaching professionals who develop and administer them. Sandra Bucerius’ ethnographic research among drug dealing street gang in Frankfurt, Germany shows that a strong local identification can serve as a coping strategy for 2nd generation immigrants who struggle not only with a socially excluding and xenophobic German society, but also with their perception of their parents’ fear of becoming alienated from their Germanized children. These second generation immigrants experience social exclusion in the educational system and in the still-closed German citizenship regime, to the point where they are permanently labeled as foreigners and migrants. This has led them to create a positive sense of self through a strong local identification that has begun to eclipse other identities, especially ethnicity. These two presentations will serve as a starting point for a discussion on the ways in which immigrants, particularly of Muslim descent, are and are not conceived off as subjects and citizens in their new home countries.

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Prof. John (Ivan) Jaworsky has a PhD from Carleton University, and has taught and conducted research at the University of Waterloo (Department of Political Science) since 1987. The main themes of his research and publications are: civil-military relations in Ukraine; inter-ethnic relations in Ukraine; and the dissident movement and dissident legacy in Ukraine.

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In the second installment of the program “An Unknown Oleksandr Dovzhenko” the full-length feature film “Ivan” by the founder of Ukrainian national cinema will be screened.

Made in 1932 on the eve of the Holodomor (Great Famine-Genocide in Ukraine), the film-poem is about the construction of the Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Station (Dniprohes), about the life of a country lad by the name of Ivan, who along with other youth comes to build one of the greatest manifestations of the Soviet industrialization. Dovzhenko depicts the process of the protagonists transformation caused by industrialization.
Awards: The Venice International Film Festival, 1934, Award for the Best Program presented by a State (USSR)

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When treating the case of word stress in the masculine noun in Bulgarian and the adjacent dialects of eastern Macedonia and
southeastern Serbia, the comparative linguist is confronted with a particularly daunting puzzle, since most of the useful information
must be derived from the position of stress in only one particular form, namely the definite singular (e.g., bratut ‘the brother’ vs.
gradut ‘the town’). Why do some nouns shift the stress onto the article, while others do not? The answer to this question
sheds interesting light upon the history of Balkan Slavic and its relation to the rest of Slavic.

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The talk focuses on the main trends of current situation in the Russian archives: the policy of intellectual and research access, declassification, finding aids, Russian archival Internet.

Marina Sorokina is senior researcher in the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the division in the Foundation-Library “Russkoe Zarubezh’e” (Russia Abroad; mostly known as A.Solzenitcyn Foundation). She received her PhD in historical archives and specializing in the social history of Russian science including the history of Russian scientific emigration. She has collected, annotated and published a number of volumes of archival manuscript on Russian scholars, including most recently A.S.Lappo-Danilevsky, Politische Ideen im Russland des 18. Jahrhunderts: ihre Geschichte im Zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen Entwicklung der russischen Kultur und Politik (Böhlau, 2005) and Luidi i sudby: biobibliograficheskii slovar vostokovedov-zhertv politicheskogo terrora v sovetskii period (1917-1991) (Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2003). Her current project – “Community in Exile: Dictionary of the Russian Scholarly Emigration in XXth century.”

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The presentation will examine Soviet films made during and about the Cold War, paying special attention to the changes in their content and style in the context of the confrontation’s course. It will compare the grand-scale, talent-intensive propaganda productions of the late Stalin era – the conflict’s initial and acute phase; low-profile genre movies and “peaceful coexistence” extravaganzas reflecting Khrushchev’s balancing between confrontation and rapprochement; the upgrading of the spy genre as one of the reactions of the early post-Thaw period; ideological pretensions of the period of détente; and cinematic representations of the Soviet retreat and collapse.

Sergei Kapterev holds a Doctorate in Cinema Studies from New York University. His interests include film propaganda, war cinema and the Cinema of the Cold War, Soviet-American contacts in the sphere of cinema, the genre of expeditionary film, and representations of the Far East in Soviet and Russian film culture. This paper will focus on images of China produced by Soviet politicians, propagandists and filmmakers when China was seen as a key battleground of world revolution, as well as during the Soviet rearrangement of forces and concepts in the face of Japanese expansion. The paper will also touch upon some developments and trends which emerged in Soviet cinematic attitudes towards China after the establishment of the PRC.
He has recently published a book entitled Post-Stalinist Cinema and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1953-1960 (Saarbruecken: VDM Dr. Mueller, 2008)
Member of the Toronto-based Chemodan Films group.

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Kristin Kopp is an assistant professor of German studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research focuses on German-Polish cultural history, German colonialism, and German film. She is currently completing a book manuscript investigating the construction of Poland as German colonial space in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is co-editor of Die Großstadt und das Primitive: Text, Politik, Repräsentation (Metzler, 2004), which investigates the use of colonial categories to map urban space in the European metropolis at the turn of the century; Peter Altenberg: Ashantee. Afrika und Wien um 1900 (Löcker, 2008), on the most famous German-language text to depict the colonial “people shows” popular at the turn of the century; and a co-edited volume on contemporary instrumentalizations of memory narratives in German and Polish politics, culture, and commerce.

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Leonidas Donskis is a philosopher, historian of ideas, political commentator, and critic. He graduated from Lithuanian State Conservatoire (now Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater), majoring in philology and theater, and then pursued his graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Having received his first doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vilnius, he later earned his second doctorate in social and moral philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland.
His main scholarly interests lie in philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, philosophy of the social sciences, civilization theory, political theory, history of ideas, and studies in Central and East European thought.

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In contrast to states with “ethnic” national identities, the literature on immigration and citizenship holds that civic nations facilitate immigrants’ incorporation by founding membership on mutual adherence to distinctly liberal-democratic political principles and aspirations. The turn to aggressive immigrant integration policies across a range of Western European countries has challenged this belief. In particular, policies seeking to regulate immigrants’ religious attachments – by banning certain attire and practices or outlawing certain forms of speech – demonstrate that civic nations are able and willing to draw sharp boundaries that leave some groups out of membership in the liberal-democratic nation.

This workshop explores the idea of civic nation-building through a comparative discussion of integration politics and policy-making in Germany and the Netherlands. We hope to highlight both the broadly encompassing forces driving policy convergence and country-specific factors that have led to a surprising degree of variation between the two cases. In particular, we wish to explore how gender and sexuality have come to be implicated with liberal-democratic identity formation, often with the effect of excluding minority religious groups whose beliefs and practices are deemed “pre-modern” and thus illiberal. The workshop will be of interest to anyone interested in the politics of immigration and citizenship, the future of multiculturalism, and the tension filled relationship between freedom of religion and other core liberal-democratic principles, such as gender equality.

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Patsy Sörensen is the founder and director of Payoke, an NGO combating human trafficking based in the red-light district of Belgium. She pioneered Belgian counter-trafficking initiatives that set the precedent for worldwide efforts. She is a former Member of the European Parliament, City Councillor for Antwerp and she was recently appointed Member of the EU Experts Group on Human Trafficking.

She will speak on her work at Payoke and advocating change, and her exhibit “From the margins to the foreground” brings her work to life.

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Visar Berisha and Shpend Ahmeti of the GAP Institute for Advanced Studies, a policy think-tank based in Prishtina, will be leading a workshop on Kosovo ten months after declaring independence. The workshop will address the various social, political and economic, and international challenges facing the new state and the role of the international community, namely the European Union, in Kosovo.

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Exploring the shifts and changes in regulatory mechanisms through the prism of gender, youth, and sexuality, Jennifer Evans questions the notion that the decriminalization of same-sex sexuality in 1968 represented a triumph of the sexual revolution in East Germany. Instead, she examines how difficult the postwar negotiation of intimacy and identity was in relation to gay male sexuality. Decriminalization, while realizing a private sphere of intimacy for adult men, came at a cost for youths, whose actions, relationships, and identities were subjected to invasive monitoring via age of consent regulations and protective discourses of containment. Although homosexuality emerged as a public subject of debate, hard fought changes in the law did not always serve as a counterbalance to lingering notions of homophobia. 1970s fears about young men’s sexuality increased state involvement in the private sphere; but efforts to manage “unnatural desire” (in German widernatürliche Unzucht) also had a generative effect, injecting multiple discourses of masculinity in to public discourse, creating conditions for greater surveillance and social organization.

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Dr. Bataković was born in Belgrade in 1957. He graduated with a degree in history from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade and holds an M.A. in history from the same University. Dr. Bataković received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Paris -Sorbonne, Paris IV (/magna cum laude/). Research Fellow of various scholarly institutions, he was since 1998 teaching methodology of history and contemporary European and American history at the Belgrade University. He was Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2005-2007). From April 2001 to 2005 Dr. Bataković served as Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later Serbia and Montenegro) to the Hellenic Republic. In July 2005 he became Advisor to H. E. Boris Tadić, the President of Serbia and in November 2005, representing the President’s cabinet, was appointed a member of the Belgrade negotiating team at the UN-sponsored talks on the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo in Vienna. In July 2007 he was appointed Ambassador of the Republic of Serbia to Canada.