MWNO - Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa

🔎 ARCHIVES / WOMEN III - and for those who cannot participate in the other two events, there is always the option to read the new issue of the CAHIERS D'HISTOIRE RUSSE, EST-EUROPÉENNE, CAUCASIENNE ET CENTRASIATIQUE of Cercec⤵️

GENDERING CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN HISTORY
Guest editors: Oksana Kis, Kseniia Kuzina et Olena Stiashkina
2026/1 Vol. 67

They ask: How can the national narrative change when women voice their stories of living through the long and turbulent 20th century? What do we learn about Ukraine’s history when the focus is on women? Or, using the straightforward question asked by Sherna Gluck “What's so Special about Women?”

‼️ NEW ISSUE • CAHIERS D'HISTOIRE RUSSE, EST-EUROPÉENNE, CAUCASIENNE ET CENTRASIATIQUE • "GENDERING CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN HISTORY" ["L’histoire contemporaine de l’Ukraine au prisme du genre"]

Sous la direction de Oksana Kis, Kseniia Kuzina et Olena Stiashkina

Cahiers d'histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique
2026/1 Vol. 67 https://shs.cairn.info/revue-cahiers-du-monde-russe-2026-1
Éditions de l'EHESS
241 pages

How can the national narrative change when women voice their stories of living through the long and turbulent 20th century? What do we learn about Ukraine’s history when the focus is on women? Or, using the straightforward question asked by Sherna Gluck “What's so Special about Women?”

This special issue focus on women’s experiences of rapid modernization that took place on the Ukrainian lands during the 20th century. Departing from the post-soviet traditions of focusing a historical inquiry chiefly on large-scale political struggles, macro-level economic processes and major institutional structures, this issue offers an anthropological approach to the history of Ukraine allowing to explore specific experiences and perspectives of different groups of women who found themselves in the whirlwind of big political, socio-economic and cultural phenomena and events. Examining Ukrainian history of the turbulent 20th century through the lenses of Ukrainian women’s lives allows to reveal and study some inconspicuous factors and dimensions of historical processes which are undetectable under regular optics of classical historical inquiry, but were nevertheless important drivers of historical developments.
The studies included in this issue allow to see women in their diversity: they were among victims and among perpetrators, they were rebels and conformists, losers and winners, some aspired to fulfill their ambitions and expand areas and forms of their activities, while others just tried to carry on coping with day to day challenges. These research explore everyday lives of women, including their consumer and cultural practices, professional pursuits, political engagements, wartime experiences, interactions with state authorities and law enforcement, and most importantly – women’s search for their part in a rapidly changing world.

The authors examine various realms (political, cultural, economic and social) where transformations of gender order and women’s emancipation “from above” overlapped and intertwined with other crucial social processes of urbanization, industrialization, struggle for nation-state building, class and ethnic clashes which prompted women to develop new complex identities. These articles cover the 20th century focusing mainly on Ukrainian women and representatives of other nations who resided on Ukrainian territories. Some studies address women’s experiences in large-scale developments, while others focus on the micro-level (local events and actors) or regional dimensions; individual women’s stories serve as cases illustrative for women’s grassroots agency. This issue aims to unfold the complexity, ambiguity and non-linearity of the Ukrainian historical experience in the 20th century as represented by women’s lives.

🔎 ARCHIVES / WOMEN II - For German speakers in , there is also the option to take part in the discussion of the Jewish photographer Rita Ostrovska and her recollectios of the in ⤵️

This is part of a project co-coordinated by the Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa - GWZO and the Dubnow-Institut in Leipzig: https://leibniz-lab-transformationen.de/gefoerdertesprojekt/erinnern-im-exil-ukrainische-perspektiven-auf-die-transformationszeit-nach-1991/?fbclid=IwY2xjawSd9ktleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETAzaFJWRk85Qk1uT3dHYkhKc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHgY-Zj-46PJLGu51z8oE1P09Hr1Rq5WSbQYhY8fT5uLrfWBvj9QGKDWQBlmE_aem_ISmleqcBAQdMNrkO1LrUkg

Erinnern im Exil: Ukrainische Perspektiven auf die Transformationszeit nach 1991
Schreibwerkstatt zu Gast im Dubnow-Institut

Am Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2026, ist der deutsch-ukrainischer Kultur- und Bildungsverein Oseredok Leipzig mit der Schreibwerkstatt »Erinnern im Exil: Ukrainische Perspektiven auf die Transformationszeit nach 1991« zu Gast im Dubnow-Institut. Anhand des Archivs der Fotografin Rita Ostrovska gibt Julia Roos Einblick in die Umbrüche jüdischen Lebens in der Ukraine der 1990er Jahre.
Die Schreibwerkstatt findet in Kooperation mit dem Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa - GWZO statt und wird gefördert durch das Leibniz-Lab »Umbrüche und Transformationen«.

Weitere Infos zur Schreibwerkstatt:
https://oseredok-leipzig.de/events/schreibwerkstatt-erinnern-im-exil-ukrainische-perspektiven-auf-die-transformationszeit-nach-1991/

Weitere Infos zum Seed-Money-Projekt des Leibniz Labs:
https://leibniz-lab-transformationen.de/gefoerdertesprojekt/erinnern-im-exil-ukrainische-perspektiven-auf-die-transformationszeit-nach-1991/

TODAY - Join us for Bruisch's book talk ⤵️

To avoid confusion - it is actualle EEST (Finland is on summer time...) You can still register for online participation: https://mwsosteuropa.hypotheses.org/17714

📢 BEYOND OIL & GAS – join us in for a book talk by our MWNO fellow Katja Bruisch ( College, Dublin) to discuss her findings about Russia's peat economy in her 'Burning Swamps. Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy'

📅 16.06.2026
🕔 16:00 EET - 17:30 EET → Wine reception 🍷
📍 MWNO Helsinki office / online
📖 Please, register for the event: https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/10931

📌 Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world's peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.

🔎 REVIEWS
‘Burning Swamps offers remarkable insights on the social, economic, and environmental life of the Soviet Union by recasting the global history of fossil fuels from the standpoint of peat extraction. Bruisch brilliantly foregrounds unanticipated ecologies, labor and gender inequities, regional and seasonal dependencies, and widespread irritations.'
Andy Bruno - Indiana University Bloomington

‘By recovering the history of Russia's reliance on peat as an industrial fuel from imperial through Soviet times, Katja Bruisch's Burning Swamps helps us appreciate just how central the margins can be to the rise of the fossil economy. A wonderful study relevant to all interested in energy, environment, and the endurance of extractivist states.'
Victor Seow - author of Carbon Technocracy

Society for Environmental History - ESEH

🏦 ARCHIVE - Pörzgen hat für mit Sören Urbansky, Katja Makhotina, Elie (Cercec) und Walter Sperling über die Probleme und Chancen der 'Zeitenwende' in der Archivarbeit gesprochen und welche Brücken das MWNO - Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa mit seiner Direktorin Sandra Dahlke sowie Kolleg:innen im Max Weber Stiftung - Georgia Branch Office in Tbilisi, Vokietijos istorijos institutas in Vilnius und dem Max Weber Forum Helsinki für die Wissenschaft baut. ⤵️

🔎 ARCHIVES – Where to find materials is a perennial question for historians. Less often, we gain an insight into how the repositories of knowledge we use came into being.

Check out the interview with one of the most important archivists of during the Cold War, Mario Corti, for the project ‚RFE/RL’s Samizdat Archives – Views from Within‘, developed by Katerina Belenkina at the Blinken OSA Archivum. ⤵️

Btw.: if you are interested in the materiality of Samizdat, check out Ann Komaromi’s article on the topic in Slavic Review:https://complit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/Ann_Komaromi-_The-Material-Existence-of-Soviet-Samizdat.pdf

“The Samizdat Unit was primarily focused on texts, not physical objects; on content rather than the medium that carried it.”

Read our latest interview with journalist and historian of the dissident movement Mario Corti, part of RFE/RL’s Samizdat Archives – Views from Within, a new Blinken OSA Archivum project developed by Katerina Belenkina.

Corti spent 25 years at Radio Liberty—15 of them in the Samizdat Unit and a further decade as head of the Russian Service. Before joining Radio Liberty, he worked at the Italian Embassy in Moscow in the early 1970s. Through his efforts, a substantial body of samizdat literature and documentation on political repression in the Soviet Union reached Western Europe, helping to preserve and disseminate voices that official channels sought to silence.

His recollections offer a unique perspective on the people and practices behind the Samizdat Archives, a collection built from materials smuggled across the Iron Curtain and preserved today at the Blinken OSA Archivum.

Read the interview:
https://archivum.org/entries/blog/the-samizdat-unit-was-primarily-focused-on-texts-not-physical-objects-on-content-not-the-information-carrier

🥂 CONGRATULATIONS to our new MWNO - Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa colleague, Olga Trufanova, on the successful defense of her PhD thesis 'Absorbing Siberia: Food and Early Modern Ethnographic Knowledge' at the Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien, University of Regensburg!

We are excited that she joined our MWNO Helsinki team with her new project “Communism without Growth?” Ecology, Economy, and The Limits of Growth in (Post)Soviet Space Since the 1970s.

🔎 https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/olga-trufanova

🔎 CfP.: 4th Remembering Spaces of Internment/ Se rappeler les espaces d'internement symposium
FOCUS: Interned bodies

📍 Helsinki
🏁 30 September 2026
📅 10-12 March 2027

Organized by: Mikhail Nakonechnyi, Prempain, Tepora with Aurélie Audeval, Nicolas Fischer, Laura Madokoro, Terrence Peterson, Grégory Tuban and Beth Weinstein

The 4th ReSI Symposium particularly invites researchers whose scope includes the historical Warsaw Pact countries, the Eastern Europe states (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, etc.), the Northern Europe states (Finland and the Scandinavian countries), and the Baltics states (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia). More specifically, this symposium will explore the Gulag system, amongst other topics will be explored. As a colonial enterprise with an explicit mission to colonize the frontier and exploit the natural resources of Soviet periphery, many important Gulag camps (e.g. Karlag, Sazlag) were situated in non-Russian colonized republics. Hence, the boundary between the colonial periphery and the imperial core was blurred. In addition, this 4th edition will explore spaces and logics through the body, paying particular attention to contributions that focus on the manipulation of health data. This call for papers is therefore broadly open to presentations of research concerning places of internment and their memory, across time periods, disciplines and perspectives adopted: social sciences, humanities, architecture, and the arts.

In particular, the organizers encourage proposals that address the following three themes:
- Relations between the penal and extrajudicial system
- Bodily health
- The body as a trace

For the full CfP go to:https://2f4003a9-9dcd-48bd-aae6-539ce0cc2752.filesusr.com/ugd/2ce76d_16ca9ef2160943f48b8618603e07014e.pdf

📢 BEYOND OIL & GAS – join us in for a book talk by our MWNO fellow Katja Bruisch ( College, Dublin) to discuss her findings about Russia's peat economy in her 'Burning Swamps. Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy'

📅 16.06.2026
🕔 16:00 EET - 17:30 EET → Wine reception 🍷
📍 MWNO Helsinki office / online
📖 Please, register for the event: https://mwseasteurope.hypotheses.org/10931

📌 Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world's peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.

🔎 REVIEWS
‘Burning Swamps offers remarkable insights on the social, economic, and environmental life of the Soviet Union by recasting the global history of fossil fuels from the standpoint of peat extraction. Bruisch brilliantly foregrounds unanticipated ecologies, labor and gender inequities, regional and seasonal dependencies, and widespread irritations.'
Andy Bruno - Indiana University Bloomington

‘By recovering the history of Russia's reliance on peat as an industrial fuel from imperial through Soviet times, Katja Bruisch's Burning Swamps helps us appreciate just how central the margins can be to the rise of the fossil economy. A wonderful study relevant to all interested in energy, environment, and the endurance of extractivist states.'
Victor Seow - author of Carbon Technocracy

Society for Environmental History - ESEH