Russian-Speaking Latvians at the Borders of Global History

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release:

About the lecture: In December 1989, in officially recognizing the authenticity of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s secret protocol, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies evinced the hope that the globally divided historical consciousness of the Cold War would be replaced with a new conception of the past, reflecting “a whole and mutually interdependent world and increasing mutual understanding.” While there was cause for hope in the immediate post-Soviet years that such a “flat earth” of shared accounts of history—the foundation for a world of shared political values—would emerge, subsequent decades led to renewed, often weaponized fragmentation of historical vision across political borders, and especially at the border separating Europe from the Russian Federation. However, in distinction from the Cold War opposition of ideologically differentiated accounts of history, current standoffs relate to the application of the most basic terms—empire, nation, fascist, genocide, socialist, liberal—which are applied on both sides of borders and conflict zones, yet with opposed significance. Rather than a confrontation of historical ideologies, this is a standoff of historical ontologies. In this presentation of his recently published book Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders, Platt will examine the etiology of this ontological conflict, as it emerges from the experience of a population that has been located since the end of the Cold War in the interstitial zone at the borders of Europe: Russian-speaking Latvians. Their world, riven by contradiction, offers a vantage, as through a keyhole, toward globally shared conditions of historical and political incoherence and conflict at the start of the twenty-first century.

About the speaker: Kevin M. F. Platt is professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work focuses on Russian and East European culture, history, poetry, and fiction. He is author or editor of a number of scholarly books, among them Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell, 2011), Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin, 2019), and, most recently, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders (Cornell/NIUP, 2024). His translations of Russian and Latvian poetry have appeared in World Literature Today, Jacket2, Fence, and other journals. He is the founder and organizer of the poetry translation symposium Your Language My Ear. His current project is entitled "Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds."