With the U.S. Presidential Election only a month away and the ongoing war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine receives increasingly less attention. After a flurry of mobilization in the immediate wake of the invasion, campus activists seemed to have moved on. Yet, the war has had lingering effects on attitudes and practices among students and staff, creating new divisions and deepening old ones.
At Tufts, the war has altered pedagogy and sparked serious debate about the role of the Russian Program. Several articles in the Tufts Daily last fall took aim at the Russian Program, calling on it to be “decolonized” and criticizing it for “supporting the genocide of Ukrainians” through its Russian cultural events. The Tribune investigated these claims to determine how the Russian Program at Tufts has changed since the outbreak of war from the perspective of Russian and Ukrainian professors and students.
Professor Marina Aptekman, a senior lecturer in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, teaches Russian language along with a variety of other cultural courses. As one of the only full-time faculty members at Tufts who teaches the Russian language, she has been at the forefront of the changes to the Russian Program since the invasion of Ukraine.
According to Professor Aptekman, “[p]rior to the war, there was a really intensive cultural program, but now the culture and the politics are not really separated.” For instance, the Russian Department at Tufts used to host an annual “Russian Music Festival” in collaboration with the Russian Slavic Student Association. This concert was free for Tufts students, faculty, and the broader Medford/Somerville community, drawing around 350 attendees each year and funded by the Russian Program. The event’s focus was not limited to only Russian culture and included Ukrainian, Georgian, Romani, and Russian-Jewish cultural programming. Professor Aptekman described the annual concert as one of her “biggest achievements in the department.”
After the outbreak of the war in 2022, Professor Aptekman and the Russian Program decided to convert the Russian Musical Festival into a fundraiser concert for Ukraine. She said, “[t]his year, let’s not do the music festival. It’s not the time for that. Let’s do a fundraising concert for Ukraine.” The Program secured the venue, found performers, and advertised the concert, attracting over 300 attendees. The Russian Program ultimately decided not to list itself as a sponsor out of fear it would be construed as insensitive.
Despite their efforts to raise awareness and money for Ukraine, the Program has faced criticism for attempting to hold other cultural events.
When the Program organized “Russian Tea” events for students to practice the language outside of class, articles in the Tufts Daily lambasted these events as “supporting the genocide of Ukrainians” and called on the Program to “host fundraisers to collect funds to aid Ukraine in defense and recovery.”
In response, the Program attempted to shift away from Russian events and focus on promoting other Eastern European cultures. Professor Aptekman recounted one instance where she advertised an event teaching students to make Ukrainian peace dolls. She said, “[i]n the villages in Ukraine and western Russia, people are making dolls, and they use these dolls as the symbol of peace.” When they did this, however, they were called colonizers and accused of cultural appropriation.
“We posted the event, and the next day we got a hundred hate messages from communities all around Boston. [They said] the Russian Program wants to colonially appropriate Ukrainian culture. We are going to boycott the event.” As a result, similar events have either been canceled or covertly advertised only to students taking Russian courses.
Last year, the Program held events such as workshops on Georgian, Indigenous Russian, and Uzbek art. They had to balance recruitment efforts with seemingly inevitable accusations of cultural appropriation, negatively affecting turnout. To Aptekman, this means “in the end, we don’t have anything Ukrainian, and we don’t have anything Russian.”
From the Russian Program’s perspective, they could do nothing to avoid criticism. They would have likely been accused of insensitivity if they took credit for their event supporting Ukraine. Yet, in remaining an anonymous sponsor, they met backlash from community members for their perceived inaction.
To understand the criticism of the Program, we also spoke with Artem Dinh, a master’s student at Tufts who called on Tufts last year to “decolonize” the Russian Program. In his opinion piece in The Daily, he criticized the aforementioned cultural events and took aim at the Russian and East European Studies major. Although not a student of the major himself, he believes students are not receiving an “adequate” education because the degree can be awarded to students “who take most if not all Russian courses.” Instead, the Program is “offering Eastern European studies without really offering Eastern European studies,” Dinh said it was “disrespectful to students.”
Both SIS and the Program website appear to confirm this narrative. The majority of the courses listed for the major have “Russia” or “Russian” in the name or course description. However, the list of courses on the website includes all that have ever fulfilled one of the major’s requirements, stretching back 40 years. Many of these courses have not been offered in decades, and the current list offers a wide breadth of multicultural educational opportunities.
The fact that “Russia” is included in the title of a course can be misleading. For instance, much of the subject matter in “Russian Literature and Revolution” is centered on pre-Revolution or Revolutionary Russia, which are different entities from the current political regime. There are also courses on Czech and Jewish voices in Russian culture, the Russian diaspora, native communities of Mongolia and Siberia, and the politics of Ukraine. Professor Aptekman stressed that “the department hires comparativists, rather than people in a single field. If you look at the courses offered this year, there is only one course on Russian culture.”
Professor Oxana Shevel, a Ukrainian Professor of Political Science and the Director of the International Relations Department at Tufts, described how she and her departments at Tufts have changed their teaching style and curriculum since the war. According to Shevel, one of the possible cultural requirements for the International Relations Major that was once called “Russian culture” has been broadened and renamed this fall to “Russian and Eastern European Culture.” In the past, students who petitioned to have Ukrainian Foreign Policy courses fulfill this requirement were denied. While Professor Shevel and others would like to see this expanded to include Central Asia, it is a productive start.
“If you look at the list of cultures…[o]ne of them was called Russian culture, that was the name. So now it’s going to be called Russian and Eastern European culture….It’s going to account for classes that aren’t Russia-centered.”
Professor Shevel’s course this semester, titled “PS 138-02: Ukraine in Peace & War: Identity, Society, Democracy,” features an in-depth look at the contemporary politics of Ukraine through some of the main theories of comparative politics. The class features a mix of students from all different backgrounds and seeks to “question some of the sort of simple one-sided narratives that have been coming from the region.”
Shevel described the war as “really a wake-up call,” partially because she “underestimated Putin’s determination to extinguish the Ukrainian nation.”
The war challenged her belief that “you can always have two sides to a story” because the invasion was “one of the clearest cases of an aggressive war, and there is no way to justify both sides of it.” The war has also changed the way that Professor Shevel approaches learning.
When it comes to the cultural events hosted by the Russian Program, Professor Shevel takes a skeptical approach. “When scholars have pushed against these appropriations, they have been presented as killjoys for raising this question… When the article was published, I did not expect the Russian department to necessarily agree with it, again because there is an academic argument and discussion to be had to an extent…but I think to hold it at the time, I think it was insensitive even with good intentions.”
“But that creates a problem. I’m sure the organizers didn’t mean to come across in this way, but that’s kind of what happens sometimes. We don’t think we are doing something somebody else might find offensive, but then, upon reflection, we realize this. If you take examples from this country: people dressing in blackface or dressing, as you say, as Native Americans. I’m sure when they did this, they did not mean to promote the genocide of Native Americans, but to a Native American, it would come as very offensive, and that’s something to sort of keep in mind….At the same time, here is the position of Ukranian students whose families have been bombed by Russia. Is this a time to celebrate this culture?”
Regarding the Russia and Eastern Europe Major, Professor Shevel said, “I certainly think the study of Russian culture, events about Russian culture, literature belongs in the major,” but that “how it is done and what is understood by ‘Russian culture’ matters….My personal preference would be to expand it further still – to include Central Asia for sure, and consider dropping Russia as a designation, and call it Central Asia and Eastern European Culture.”
Though Shevel wishes to see more courses covering a broader regional and historical scope, she recognizes the challenges of hiring new faculty specializing in niche subjects at a small university. However, one small step she suggests is to include more representative coverage in other courses. She cited her Introduction to Comparative Politics course as an example. When talking about a “Parliamentary presidential system, France is a good example, sure. But so is Poland. So is Ukraine. So [are] so many other countries in the non-western world.” In this way, “the kind of reading material” and “illustrative examples” we use are important to “decolonize the curriculum.”
Finally, Professor Shevel discussed how students spread awareness about the war and Ukrainian culture on campus. Although the Ukrainian community on campus is very small, “they have already done quite a bit.” Last year, the “Ukraine: Connected Histories & Vibrant Cultures” exhibit in the Tisch Library highlighted Ukrainian heritage. Additionally, some students at Tufts have established a community with other Ukrainian students in the Boston area. The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute has become a hub for students from the region.
Professors Shevel and Aptekman both support broader cultural representation in their respective programs, and mostly agree on their vision for the cultural role of the Russian Program.
Despite her misgivings, Shevel believes, “As a part of academic education to students taking Russian, Russian culture and Russian classes, I don’t think they should just stop doing this. How it is done, and what kinds of things are promoted is important… We must find out if Russia itself needs to be decolonized… but I certainly think the study of Russian culture, events and literature belongs in the major. We must think of what kinds of voices have not been present.”
Professor Aptekman believes that the Russian Program can be a vehicle to promote Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbekistan, Latvian, or other cultures. She offers an open invitation to students: “Write to me and say let’s do something together.”
Photo by Tomás Gómez Revelo (December 2023)