Organized by the Center for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC) with the support of the "Parcours et territoires" research unit of the Institut national d'études démographiques (INED). Coordinated by Alain Blum (EHESS and INED), Masha Cerovic (EHESS) and Catherine Gousseff (CNRS-EHESS).

Monday from 5 pm to 7 pm (room M. & D. Lombard, 96 bd Raspail 75006 Paris), from 4 November 2019 to 15 June 2020.

This seminar focuses on sources and methods in history and social sciences in the fields of the USSR, Russia, Caucasus, Central Asia and Central Europe. A different speaker at each session presents his or her research. It takes the form of a workshop, for half of its sessions around a topic renewed each year. After focusing in the last two years on war violence and empire exodus, the workshop designed within the CERCEC seminar on social norms and practices, aims to address periods of political transition through the mobility and migration they have brought about and, at the same time, the new challenges they have created for "rebuilding society".Several transition periods, in addition to the aftermath of the world wars, have undergone major reconfigurations, including the Thaw (massive returns from camps, but also late repatriations of Poles from the Soviet Union and prisoners of war), the return of Russian speaking people from Central Asia in the 1970s,the impetus given to migration during the break-up of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the USSR in 1991, not to mention the conflict-related migration that has since broken out in the former Soviet space.Based on different historical cases considered in their singularity, the workshop will try to identify demographic dynamics, the characteristics of trajectories and their impact on social spaces.  

• 18 November 2019 - Elena Kochetkova (Vyshka, HSE, Saint-Pétersbourg) - "Cold War Forest Power: Forest Resources and Technological Development in the USSR, 1950s-1980s"
• 25 November 2019 - Katharina Friedla (Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah) - " ' When the Shabbat became Sunday…' Religious and Social Life of Polish Jews in the USSR during the Second World War"
• 2 December 2019 - Clare Anderson (University of Leicester) - "The Carceral Archipelago: a global history of convicts and penal colonies"
• 10 February 2020 - Maciej Górny (DHI, Warsaw) - "The Red and the black. How nationalist were Stalinist historiographies of East Central Europe?"
• 11 May 2020 - Wilson Bell (Thompson Rivers University) - "44 Lenin Avenue: Siberia’s 20th century history as told through its most remarkable building"
• 25 May 2020 - Aleksandr Kamenski (Haut-Collège d’économie, Moscou) - "Peter the Great: A Stumbling Stone of Russian History"

 Photo credit: An exhausted Russian forced laborer takes a rest on luggage in April 1945 in Würzburg at a collection point for forced deported people. She was liberated by units of the 7th American army and waits for her repatriation - Image ID: KECNTX alamy.com