Tag "history"

Settling new territories and the northern regions, and erecting new cities and giant industrial facilities constituted the bright facade of the Soviet Union. But the story behind the scenes concerned the people’s health. The populace paid a high personal price for being able to deliver triumphant reports on the construction of socialism, and the consequences of those hardships are felt to this day. Using a study by researchers from HSE and the Semashko National Institute of Public Health, IQ looks at why the era of stagnation was a period of increased illness and mortality.

This summer, the HSE Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences was reorganized to become the HSE Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Oleg Budnitskii, Doctor of Historical Sciences, head of the Centre and director of the Institute, talked to the HSE News Service about the new division.

Known for its particularly tactile culture, the Eastern Roman Empire maintained rather complex customs when it came to kissing—on the lips, the shoulders, the chest, and the feet. Emperors and nobles, military leaders, and even monks engaged in the practice unsparingly. Based on the research of Sergey Ivanov, professor of history and philology at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies of HSE University, IQ has prepared a short guide to Byzantine kisses.

Alexandr Voronovici,a second year postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, shared his experience of teaching transnational perspective on Soviet history to HSE students.

International Symposium "​Cold War Matters: (In)Visible Economies of Things” organized by HSE Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History was held on December 16-17, 2019 in St. Petersburg. Simo Mikkonen, Academy of Finland Research Fellow and a member of the organizing committee, and Andreas Pacher, PhD Candidate at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and conference participant, talk about some aspects of the conference and their cooperation with HSE University.

In 1945, the Soviet Army seized the film archive of the Third Reich, the so-called Reichfilmarchive, and brought it from Berlin to Moscow. The archive contained thousands of movies from various countries. Since then, the German, American, and a few European trophies circulated throughout the Soviet Union despite a lack of an effective distribution license. This copyright violation turned out to be a stumbling block in the relations between the USSR and the USA, while the early Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers added a political twist to the conflict. Both countries were now using cinematography as a weapon in their fight, trying to do as much harm to the opponent as possible. Kristina Tanis, a researcher from HSE University, investigates the battles between the two film industries.

On November 21-22, HSE International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue organized an international conference ‘Memory As a Historical and Cultural Phenomenon: Russia and the West, XX-XXI Centuries’. HSE News Service has talked with one of the conference speakers, Richard Tempest, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about his vision of historical memory and his research of Solzhenitsyn.

On October 18, Professor Kimmo Rentola (University of Helsinki) presented his recent book, Stalin and the Fate of Finland,in an event hosted by HSE’s International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences. HSE News Service spoke with Professor Rentola about how he became interested in history, his book, and what brings him to HSE University.

On September 5, Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, presented her paper on voluntary repatriation of Russians from China to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1960. The presentation was part of the research seminar, ‘Boundaries of History’, held regularly by the Department of History at HSE University in St. Petersburg. HSE News Service spoke with Laurie Manchester about her research interests, collaborating with HSE faculty members, and the latest workshop.

The cold war not only influenced the ideology and military sector of the Soviet Union, but served as an engine that jumpstarted its consumer economy — in particular, the food industry. In an article published in the journal Russian History, HSE historian Elena Kochetkova traces the development of the Soviet dairy industry and the production of dairy packaging in the post-war period. Her article recounts how milk became a staple of state propaganda and how Tetra Pak packaging came to be used in the USSR.