Vestnik – Issue 18, Fall 2015

Vestnik was launched by SRAS in 2004 as one of the world’s first online academic journals focused on showcasing student research. We welcome and invite papers written by undergraduates, graduates, and postgraduates. Research on any subject related to the broad geographic area outlined above is accepted. If you have written solid research eligible for publication according to the guidelines listed here, please submit it.

In this, its eighteenth issue, Vestnik focuses on both the importance of food and information to societies, states, and diplomacy.

We have a pair of entries on food-related issues. In American Perspectives on the 1955 U.S.-Soviet Agricultural Exchange, Lanna Demers, a first-year graduate student at Bowling Green State University, shows how grassroots-initiated agricultural diplomacy can open doors and build bridges even between arch rivals. Nadine Astrakhan, a recent graduate of the University of Oregon writes of the changing relationship between society, ideology, economics, and food throughout Soviet history in The Evolution and Dissolution of the Soviet Kitchen.

We also have several articles on information. Christopher Jarmas, an undergraduate at Tufts University describes the importance of framing events in the media in How the United States and the Soviet Union Fought over Information in Chernobyl’s Aftermath. In Photography in the Late Soviet Period, Jessica Werneke, a recent PhD from The University of Texas at Austin, discusses how photography was at once a journalistic, diplomatic, and propagandistic endeavor in the USSR. In Irony and Trauma in Ordinary Fascism, Morgan Shafter, a first-year Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, describes how a Jew told the story of the holocaust in an officially sanctioned Soviet film.

Lastly, Russia’s Volunteering Youth, Rikki Brown, a former SRAS student and recent US-Russia Social Expertise Exchange fellow, discusses Russia’s volunteer youth culture, the support they get from the community and government, and how they use social media to organize.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and informative. Share it with your friends, classmates, and colleagues if you do!

 

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About the Author

Josh Wilson

Josh has been with SRAS since 2003. He holds an M.A. in Theatre and a B.A. in History from Idaho State University, where his masters thesis was written on the political economy of Soviet-era censorship organs affecting the stage. He lived in Moscow from 2003-2022, where he ran Moscow operations for SRAS. At SRAS, Josh still assists in program development and leads our internship programs. He is also the editor-in-chief for the SRAS newsletter, the SRAS Family of Sites, and Vestnik. He has previously served as Communications Director to Bellerage Alinga and has served as a consultant or translator to several businesses and organizations with interests in Russia.

Program attended: All Programs

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