Talking Point: Russian and Slavonic Studies at the Crossroads: The Implications of the War in Ukraine

Talking Point: A Forum for Opening Critical Debate

This ‘Talking Point’ forum arose in the context of the crisis in Russian and Slavonic Studies prompted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the brutal ensuing war. It considers how the war is forcing scholars urgently to rethink their conceptualization of the field and completely to rewrite the curricula for their teaching programmes. Questions have arisen over the extent to which lessons from the broader ‘decolonization’ agenda that is being pursued in most other humanities disciplines have been sufficiently or appropriately applied to the curricula, artistic and literary canons, linguistic coverage, intellectual assumptions and geopolitical reach of Russian and Slavonic Studies, as well as over whether the field’s very title reflects a lingering bias towards an ‘imperial centre’. This bias, it is argued, comes at the expense of the multiple languages and rich cultural heritages of the peoples subjugated by the Russian and Soviet empires throughout their long histories. The collapse of the Soviet Union shifted the balance of power in the region, with some countries joining the EU and NATO, while others remained within Russia’s orbit. As geopolitical fault lines shift, so the boundaries of our field of study, and its very naming, have become contentious. Indeed, the multiple variants on names for our field to be found in institutions where it is represented (Russian and East European Studies; Slavonic Studies; Russian and Slavonic Studies; Russian and Eurasian Studies; even Eurasian Studies), remain tainted with more than a hint of an imperial aftertaste.