Many hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their ever-more authoritarian country since the start of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, joining a global exile community that had already been growing for years. They include leaders of the political opposition, civil society and media who have long opposed the Kremlin, are natural allies against Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a key hope for reestablishing any future free and open Russian society.
Please join the Institute of Current World Affairs, American Purpose and US Institute of Peace for the third in a series of hybrid panel discussions. Angela Stent will moderate a conversation with Alexander Abashkin, Dmitry Dubrovsky and Maria Yudkevich about Russian scholars in exile. How are they trying to keep teaching, researching and preserving Russia’s intellectual capital for future generations?
Russian scholars in exile
Thursday, Nov. 16, 10 a.m. ET
Zoom webinar
Moderator
Angela Stent is Director Emerita of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior adviser at the US Institute of Peace. She has served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, and in the Office of Policy Planning at the US State Department. Her latest book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.
Panelists
Alexander Abashkin is a Russian higher education professional who has been involved in developing Russian-American academic ties for the past 30 years. He is currently based in Tbilisi, where he is a coordinator of the Scholars Without Borders project run by the Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Previously, he was vice rector of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, where he oversaw international projects, and head of the Center for International Projects at the Russian Academy of National Economy.
Dmitry Dubrovsky is a researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. An expert on human rights in Russia, he was previously associate professor of international relations, political science, and human rights at St. Petersburg State University. He was also associate professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and has taught at Columbia University, Bard College and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Maria Yudkevich is an expert in comparative higher education based in Tel Aviv. Until this year, she was a distinguished professor and head of the Center for Institutional Studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, where she was also a vice-rector for research. She is co-editor of the book Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspectives.
Upcoming panel
Post-Putinist Russia
January TBD
What are the plausible scenarios for a post-authoritarian Russia? What are the main challenges facing institutional and social reform, including decolonialization, the understanding of history and Russian identity, interests of minority regions? What roles should the US and other Western countries be playing, what lessons learned from the post-Soviet 1990s?
Previous panels
Video: Russia’s new exiles: an overview
How do they deal with the assigning of collective guilt? How can Western countries tap their human capital in the battle for liberal democracy?
Video: Political opposition in exile
Who are they, what are they doing, planning, main challenges? Political activity inside vs. outside Russia, constituencies inside Russia.
Top photo: Moscow State University (Vyacheslav Argenberg, Wikimedia Commons)
