Faith Hillis
@FaithCHillis
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Teaches Russian/Ukrainian/European history @UChicago . Opinions my own.
Chicago, IL
Joined October 2014
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Utopia's Discontents is officially born April 30. Available for pre-orders now.
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I’m overwhelmed by media requests and friends asking me explain Ukrainian history. Since Putin has obfuscated history, I will do my best. But the main point you need to understand is that what happened last night is not about history.
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What matters is that Putin denies a sovereign state’s right to exist and to make its own domestic and foreign policy. And he invaded completely unprovoked (and even without the staged provocation that many expected). This is akin to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. That’s it.
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THREAD: What is happening in Ukraine is a catastrophe. But there is actually an effective non-military solution that would restrain Russia AND solve several pressing world issues in the process!
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They care very much about having these goodies. Take them away. Cut them off. Cancel their visas. Regulate offshoring. Stop blind trusts. Open money laundering investigations.
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There are many things complicated about Ukraine’s history, but they are essentially all academic right now.
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This remains one of the most baller moves in the political history of any country.
Six months ago, amid rumors he'd fled, Zelensky posted video from barricaded Kyiv. "The PM is here, the party leader is here, the President is here… We are all here. Our troops are here. Our citizens are here. Defending our independence. Glory to Ukraine!"
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This will cause pain in western economies. Stock markets will crash. The real estate market in many cities will deflate rapidly. But let's be honest, is that really so bad?
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Our cities will become more affordable. The plutocratic elite across borders will be held accountable to law. Political corruption that plagues our country and many others will be reduced.
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There's a similar fix with fossil fuels. Embargo Russian oil and gas. Move away from carbon. There will be an energy crisis? But won't this be worth it to address the climate crisis?
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Speaking as someone who was on the job market between 2008-10, let me assure you that "writing the best dissertation you can" doesn't cut it. You need a great dissertation, but you also need dumb luck. Anyone who thinks it's about sheer merit is deluded or dishonest.
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Putin and his cronies profess to hate the west, but they are in fact cosmopolitans who live an oligarchic lifestyle across borders. They shop in Monte Carlo and have ultra-luxury yachts parked in Barcelona.
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The accumulation of global capital helped to create the mess that we're in, and our current crisis provides an opportunity to rethink the system that has cause so many people so much pain.
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Their children live in European villas. They launder their money through real estate in London, NY and Miami and blind trusts. All of their assets are parked in offshore accounts.
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Now, I'm not optimistic that any of these things will happen. Obviously, an entrenched global elite that says they deplore Putin don't want to taken on this pain. But this all is truly possible.
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You might think that kefir has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism, but you'd be wrong. Thread.
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Apologies for previous typos, running on not a lot of sleep.
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Don't ever tell me my students are "snowflakes" again--not until you've stared into the barrel of an AK-47 shoved into your face because you have a political opinion.
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Welcome new followers, except the bots, the trolls suggesting that I should learn to read (I read in seven languages, thank you), and the people tweeting memes at me to mansplain how history works.
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As of yesterday, I’m a full professor. Never again will there be a designated meeting for people to talk about me behind my back! Grateful to the generous people who wrote letters and supported me over the years.
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OK, I'm doing this. RIP my mentions. Is NATO responsible for the war in Ukraine?
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Weird historical fact of the day: in 1892 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman opened an ice cream shop in Worcester, MA.
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My initial reaction to the first two episodes of The Chair: wow, what a functional department; everyone speaks to each other!
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Sedimentary trauma: this tower backs up to a park where the body of a young boy was found in 1911, spurring the Beilis affair. And just a stone’s throw away is Babyi Yar, where 30k Jews were murdered in 1941.
Strike reported on Kyiv TV tower — according to Telegram channels (unverified!!)
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One of the coolest (and weirdest) accidental archival discoveries ever: ideologically charged rolling papers from the Russian civil war. Full of anti-Soviet and antisemitic slogans, they implored Red Army troops to desert.
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Global capital was happy to benefit from Russia's stolen riches. But that makes Russia everyone's problem.
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Want to hit them where it hurts? Seize the real estate in London and NY, which will lead to a real estate crash. Cut off Russian gas and oil, which will lead to a fuel crisis like we haven't seen since the 70s.
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Grad student from Mariupol' looking to publish an expose about what is happening there in US media. Please contact me if you are interested, and I'll put you in contact.
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I just downloaded a tenure file that I agreed to review this summer. It is 1900 pages long.
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Yes, the hagiography of Elizabeth is grim, but in my field there are people who fervently and unironically love THE ROMANOVS.😬
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Happy 150th to Lenin! He is perhaps the most fascinating and remarkable historical figure I can think of, yet one whom I would never want to meet in real life because he was an insufferable twerp with few redeeming personal qualities.
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Thank you. The US invasion of Iraq was entirely unjustified and based on lies. It also set the stage for Putin’s intl project, which calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed “free world.” It is possible—even necessary—to oppose American imperialism AND Russian imperialism.
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Hey, everyone who now loves Ukraine! You know what Ukrainians did when their govt did unjust things that everyone hated? They quit going to work and occupied city centers. Twice. For months. Once in the dead of winter. They won both times. Just sayin’.
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And with that, I'm off to consume my morning kefir, with gratitude to the babushki who long ago taught me of its miraculous healing powers. H/t to Abraham Ascher, whose old but very good biography of Aksel'rod is the source of these wonderful details.
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On nukes: Ukraine once held about 1/3 of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, the third largest stockpile in the world. It voluntarily destroyed them in 1994!
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I’m about to write the most earnest thread I’ve ever done. It’s about what we can learn about the power of political possibility from history.
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Critiques focusing on NATO often forget this fact, depriving Eastern Europeans of agency. I get particularly irked by this when the critique comes from a left perspective yet mindlessly replicates the thinking of the Cold War imperialists that leftists deplore.
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And of course, as others rightly note, “luck” is an expansive concept, defined by many other social and economic factors. The point is that there is no way to effectively “prepare” to conquer the cruel randomness of an industry in collapse.
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I’m grateful and so honored to have been awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for Utopia’s Discontents. Thanks to ASEEES and the jury!
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AND Putin is an imperialist pulling straight from 19th c imperialist thought who is using old grievances about NATO to justify an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country. /FIN
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I’ve been getting lots of questions at events abt what I make of my “realist”colleague. I already did a long thread on NATO, but I will add this: listen to experts who speak Russian and Ukrainian, have lived in both countries, and understand the cultures.
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The cluelessness of the foreign policy establishment on NPR is unbelievable. They have no idea what has been unleashed…
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Live tweets of
@UChiUnited
/
@FJPUChicago
press conference on UChicago's withholding of degrees from 5 graduating students as a result of their alleged participation in encampment activities starting now...
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Tomorrow is the 68th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets—Stalin’s murder of the members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. These intellectuals played a key role in organizing poltical and material resistance again Hitler, especially among Jews.
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The problem is that the west has been complicit in the making of Putinism from the beginning. First, by stripping Russia for parts in the 1990s, then by gleefully allowing the kleptocrats to launder their money in western real estate and enterprise.
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Wow. Nothing--not strikes, not adjunctification, not the collapse of shared governance--seems to have radicalized faculty on my campus like yesterday's announcement that our retirement benefits are being slashed.
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The bad take to end all bad takes, Francis Fukuyama, 1989.
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In 1918, head-to-toe leather became all the rage among the Bolshevik elite. The style was inspired by the garb of the political police, or Cheka, and Trotsky became one of its most famous enthusiasts. Here he is in his leather suit.
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So students in distress over the police murdering a child are invited to seek help by calling the campus police, who shot an undergrad having a mental health crisis a few years ago? Really??
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I still can’t quite believe it, but yesterday I submitted the final version of Utopia’s Discontents to my publisher. This book was a joy to research and write, and it quite literally changed my life and how I move through and think about the world.
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I was happy to talk to the BBC for this deep dive into Russian/Ukrainian history. May be useful for the classroom.
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This introduction to Mutual Aid is mind-blowing. I’m increasingly comvinced that 19th century Russians figured out the solutions to most of our contemporary problems. I’m going to try to write something about how and why that is.
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When he returned, the bike was gone. The concierge explained he had accepted money to park the bike, not to look after it.
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Wondering if Lenin still biked in the Soviet Union, or if he happily abandoned this necessity of exile life in capitalist lands? / fin
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Nerd alert! Looks like the Hoover has digitized its basement card catalogue of police photos and anthropometrical records of Russian revolutionaries. Hours of fun await!
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But Lenin was somewhat clumsy (or, perhaps more accurately, effective at transmuting his psychic distress into physical pain).
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In 1910, on his way to the Bolshevik school he established in a Paris suburb, he collided with a car driven by a viscount, whom he sued. I can’t find anything about the outcome of the legal case.
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Aksel'rod worked day and night, shaking the bottles every two hours to keep them fresh. When another famous Marxist, Parvus, visited the factory in 1887, he quipped, "Pavel Borisovich, you will extract 'surplus value' from yourself."
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Yes, our field needs to take the damaging legacy of imperialism and chauvinism seriously, but this is sheer stupidity. Especially from an American, product of an imperial nation built through the same tradition of conquest.
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Just learned that the definition of a shtetl revolves not around Jews but around Polish nobles: they were private towns that grew out of Polish manors. Originally, Jews could only receive residence privileges in them if they participated in trade or sold alcohol.
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The bravery of these women is astonishing. The networks that protect abusers are so powerful that I’ve know tenured scholars, even endowed chairs (!), who are too terrified to take them on. The blowback is real. Heroines of the year.
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Yes, everyone needs to vote. But everyone also needs to think about and plan for now what happens if voting is not enough.
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NATO expansion definitely contributed to the sense of encirclement that formed Putin's thought and contemporary Russian nationalism. But NATO has relatively little to do with the current situation in Ukraine.
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In European exile, Lenin rode a bike almost everywhere. It was cost-efficient and an effective means to commune between mass meetings and party schools, which were often located on the periphery of cities like Munich, Geneva, and Paris.
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Reading about Polish nationalist attacks on "pedagogy of shame"--i.e. discussing what actually happened in WWII. A perfect parallel to attacks on critical race theory in this country. We need to be paying more attention to E. Europe as a barometer of where we are headed.
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My first book was about the Russian-Ukrainian encounter in 19th century Ukraine and why Russian nationalism emerged so strongly there. It is written for an academic audience, but will shed light for those interested in that question.
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An experiment in open-source education: I've decided to make the reading list for the class on the Soviet collapse that I'm teaching with
@leahmfeldman
open to the public, along with the commentaries I'm writing for my students.
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Just learned that our administration purged a very simple statement by our Rus/EE faculty denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, citing a 1967 report that bars faculty from making collective “political”statements. Yikes!
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There was only one problem: young, newly arrived revolutionaries, including Leon Jogiches, better known as Rosa Luxemburg's lover, sneered at Aksel'rod's economic comfort, denouncing his kefir-supported "bourgeois lifestyle."
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Happy birthday to Nadezhda Krupskaia. She’s 150 today, but still looking badass.
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In the early 1950s, the Menshevik party, now in exile in Morningside Heights, recorded protocols of their meetings in notebooks like these. Surreal.
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In 1904, he was consumed by his bitter split with the Mensheviks and especially his rupture with his longtime comrade, Martov. On his way to a party conference, he drove directly into the back of a tram in Geneva and nearly lost an eye.
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Putin, his face swollen with steroids, declares the government of Ukraine a band of drug addicts and characterizes the first Jewish leader of any Slavic country as a Nazi. That is the state of affairs this morning.
⚡️Путин обратился к военнослужащим армии Украины: «Берите власть в свои руки, похоже нам с вами будет легче договориться, чем с этой шайкой наркоманов и неонацистов, которая засела в Киеве и взяла в заложники весь украинский народ».
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NATO expansion was a remnant of the Cold War that was pushed by the Bush administration at the height of its imperialist frenzy;
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Unbelievable footage. This is going to go down in the annals alongside the Warsaw uprising.
Masses of ordinary Ukrainians are braving Russian invaders’ barrages to protest in occupied Kherson. A woman named Valentina Maganova says to the tune of gunfire: “We’re not afraid. Repost this across the world. Please, support us. Kherson is Ukraine!”
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Since I've been harshing on Trotsky's pleather in the Netflix show, let me share an interesting fact about the Bolshevik penchant for leather that I learned from Anne O'Donnell's 2014 Princeton dissertation.
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Fun fact: the late Soviet leaders were teenagers by American political standards. Andropov didn’t live to see 70. Brezhnev died at 75.
And to think we called the Soviet Union a gerontocracy.
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Happy International Women’s Day! Clara Zetkin, on Rosa Luxemburg’s left, is often credited as the inventer of the holiday, which became a major event in the Soviet Union. What is less well known is that Zetkin’s Marxist feminism has Russian origins in the first place.
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Truly, you’ve never lived until you’ve tried to track down the copyright status of long-defunct Yiddish anarchist newspapers and photos of revolutionaries taken by unidentified individuals in unknown countries.
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Here's my reading list. So excited!😍
UChicago undergrads: my winter class about the history of forgotten leftist movements is not showing up on time schedules, but is still being offered. You should be able to enroll in a few weeks once graduate enrollment occurs. Email me w questions, it's going to be a lot of fun.
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He also rode his bike from the outer reaches of Paris’ 13th arr. to the National Library almost every day. One day he paid a concierge to park his bike beside a staircase.
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By the early '90s, A's business really took off, allowing him to support his family, hire employees, and devote himself to writing full time. It's scarcely a stretch to say that kefir thus made great contributions to Russian Marxism.
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If you've ever been looking for a map of the travels of Russian revolutionaries (and frankly, who hasn't?), I have just the map for you!
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But Aksel'rod was still too poor to make a move possible. Enter fellow Marxist exiles Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, who loaned their friend 500 francs to rent a first-floor apartment with a cellar. Kautsky himself became a fan and wrote a long treatise on kefir's benefits.
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Admin announced it has cleared the encampment because it disrupted educational activities. That is 100% untrue, but now they’ve locked down the quad, preventing faculty from getting to their offices and forcing colleagues to cancel morning classes. Who is the actual disruptor?
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Utopia’s Discontents is off to the print shop and will begin shipping on April 16. Pre-orders are now available from the press and your favorite (hopefully independent) bookseller.
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No, I’m not watching, because I’m preserving my last few brain cells. But this is your friendly reminder that when they talked about Soviet gerontocracy, most of those guys were in their 60s.
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Here, he concedes that the issue is not simply one of American imperialism (which again, is a real thing): sovereign Eastern European states desired inclusion in NATO because they felt threatened by Russia.
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Not a great move to desecrate one of the most major Nazi war crime sites when you claim to be denazifying.
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I am deeply grieving the fact that I won't be in a Russian archive anytime soon. But here are some positive developments that could result from the tragic situation:
Russian historians, how do we change the expectation that grad students should spend a year in the archives in Russia? I’ll be writing an article rethinking this for
@abimperio
@aseeestudies
@profaks
@JoanNeuberger
@EUStudiesCenter
@FaithCHillis
@BASEES
@NYUJordanCenter
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Before you rush to condemn NATO without implicating Putin, please remember that two things can be true at once:
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3. All of the grievances that Putin expresses about NATO date to the 1990s and 2000s--that is now 20-30 years ago.
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