Registration required. Please note that all attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 Policies and Guidelines. Columbia University is committed to protecting the health and safety of its community. To that end, all visiting alumni and guests must meet the University requirement of full vaccination status in order to attend in-person events. Vaccination cards may be checked upon entry to all venues.
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a discussion with Marcel Garboś, István Deak Visiting Professor of East Central European Studies.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Russian empire and its international emigre colonies emerged as a vibrant laboratory of federalist thought and politics. While the multinational Soviet Union was the best-known and most internationally influential product of this milieu, the Bolsheviks were relative latecomers to federalism, drawing upon the established ideas of more moderate and generally overlooked socialist competitors. This presentation offers a glimpse into the international circulation of federal frameworks between late imperial Russia and the wider world, highlighting abortive yet ambitious attempts at incorporating models from Anglophone and German-speaking countries into projects of post-Tsarist order. Following the ideas and travels of Russian-, Ukrainian-, and Polish-speaking socialists, it locates this rich federalist imagination within pan-European and global contexts often elided in conventional Soviet-oriented narratives.
