In Pursuit of ‘Legality’ and ‘Justice’ – Minority Struggles in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (JUSTIMINO)

When Justice Happens in a Text: Deferred and Observed Justice in Qıyssa-i Yosıf (The Story of Yūsuf)

Introduction

My childhood fell in the 1990s, at a time when Kazan was experiencing its newly permitted Tatarness in great depth. I belonged to that generation of Kazan Tatars who had been promised a space in which Tatar could be spoken as their first language. This also included the emergence of children’s periodicals in Tatar.

When I was five or six years old, in one such magazine, Salawat Küpere (Rainbow), in a section devoted to the religious education of children and based on Qur’anic stories and stories about the prophets, I first encountered the story of Yūsuf the Beautiful and Zulaykhā (Fig. 1).

Illustrated spread of the story of Prophet Yūsuf from the children’s magazine Salawat Küpere (Rainbow), no. 2 (1990), pp. 10–11.

Continue reading When Justice Happens in a Text: Deferred and Observed Justice in Qıyssa-i Yosıf (The Story of Yūsuf)

Soviet Jeans and Fartsa: Law, Coercion, and the Soviet Grey Zone in Two TV Series

A few weeks ago, I first heard about Padomju džinsi (Soviet Jeans, 2024). It is a recent and very lively political tragicomedy about late Soviet Latvia. Director Stanislavs Tokalovs said that back in the early 2010s he had been offered the chance to make a series for Russia’s Channel One^[1]. But the two sides could not agree on the main point: how exactly to portray the Soviet 1960s and 1970s. As a result, the series came out much later, and in Latvia. It became a story not about the nostalgic ‘style of an era’, but about the mechanisms of coercion built into the late USSR. Continue reading Soviet Jeans and Fartsa: Law, Coercion, and the Soviet Grey Zone in Two TV Series

Der Kampf um die georgische Nation: neue Podcastfolge

In der neuen Folge des JUSTIMINO-Podcasts geht es um Georgien in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Wir haben Oliver Reisner zu Gast, der seit vielen Jahren in Tbilisi lebt und forscht. Es geht um die georgische Nationalbewegung vom späten Zarenreich bis heute, um die Rolle von nationalen Minderheiten und den Kaukasus als Ort der Vielfalt und historischen Hub der Globalisierung. Vor allem dreht sich das Gespräch aber auch um Georgien heute: den Zustand von Recht und Demokratie, den Einfluss Russlands sowie die Frage, ob und wie Forschung und Zusammenarbeit unter den Bedingungen einer zunehmend autoritären Ordnung noch funktionieren können. Einschalten lohnt sich!

Blood libel and Georgian Jews: new podcast and blogpost

A truly fascinating criminal case took place in the Caucasus around 1880. In the Kutaisi Trial, nine Georgian Jews were suspected of abducting and killing a Christian girl by the name of Sarra Modebadze. They had allegedly used her blood for religious purposes. This little-known case of blood libel – an accusation that Jews in Europe and beyond have repeatedly faced since the Middle Ages – is currently being investigated as part of the JUSTIMINO project. What does it tell us about justice in the tsarist Empire? How does it affect the study of Russian colonialism? And what was the outcome of the trial, along with its long-term consequences?

Continue reading Blood libel and Georgian Jews: new podcast and blogpost

Call for Contributions: Handbook of the Modern History of the Caucasus

Brainstorming Workshop

The editors of an upcoming Handbook of the Modern History of the Caucasus, Stefan B. Kirmse (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, ZMO) and Naira Sahakyan (American University of Armenia, AUA), invite scholars to participate in a one-day brainstorming workshop in Yerevan. This workshop aims to shape the forthcoming Handbook by fostering scholarly dialogue on potential contributions. See the Call for details.

Date: 6 May 2025

Location: American University of Armenia (AUA), hybrid format

Seeing through mum’s eyes: The “Russian grocery shop” in Regensburg and memories of the late Soviet era in Georgia

“Field Trip” with mum

The so-called “Russian grocery shops” in Germany are places that I have been observing since 2021. Initially as part of my ethnographic research in Osnabrück (Lower Saxony) and currently for my project in Bavaria.

I take these grocery shops as specific “places of transgression” to transnational and translocal worlds. The shops are fluid zones for blurring of borders – a space for tastes, smells, and ideas that “flow over” from other worlds. Continue reading Seeing through mum’s eyes: The “Russian grocery shop” in Regensburg and memories of the late Soviet era in Georgia

Podcast “Justice & Minorities” launched!

Check out our new history podcast Justice & Minorities! In the first episode “Khevsurs and Khevsureti. ‘Minorities’ in Imperial and Soviet Georgia” I talk to two young scholars who recently joined the JUSTIMINO team for a number of weeks: PhD candidate Anna Tchintcharauli (Ilia State University, Tbilisi) and BA student Bastian Marx (Potsdam University), who share an intriguing research interest, the Khevsur people of the Georgian highlands. Who are the Khevsurs? In what sense can they be viewed as a ‘minority’? And how can the study of this group help us understand the history of Soviet deportations?

“Can you see it, can’t you?” An Outsider’s Perspective on Life and Work at ZMO

S-Bahnhof ‘Nikolassee’

Somehow, you can always feel the difference between West and East, either in Georgia or in Germany. As a part of the historical West, Nikolassee remains much more ‘old and classy’ than other parts of Berlin that I had got to know on previous stays in the city. However, as my mind couldn’t follow the typical framing of West and East, I constantly sought out a Georgian analogue for this particular district, so that I could feel more at home during my stay. Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden seemed to be similar to Vake, Kurfürstendamm is Saburtalo, and Tegel is Gldani, etc. Other Georgians here can accept these comparisons or not, but it was a kind of ‘solo entertainment’ and therefore, I was the only ruler. Continue reading “Can you see it, can’t you?” An Outsider’s Perspective on Life and Work at ZMO

Book Review: A History of Russian Law

I recently published a review of Ferdinand Feldbrugge’s “History of Russian Law”, 1649-1917 (vol. 2, 2023) in The Russian Review. For anyone interested in imperial legislation, it is a highly useful guidebook, which, however, suffers from Continue reading Book Review: A History of Russian Law

New Book Reviews on Armenians in Imperial Russia

Why study the Russian-Armenian relationship during the imperial period? What can we learn from it about Russia’s treatment of ethnic and religious ‘Others’? And what does it tell us about the agency that non-Russians had in the process of empire-building? These are some of the main questions raised in Stephen Badalyan Riegg’s recent monograph Russia’s Entangled Embrace. The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801–1914.

Two JUSTIMINO scholars working on the history of the Caucasus, Gevorg Avetikyan and Stefan Kirmse, have engaged with this important book in separate reviews, Continue reading New Book Reviews on Armenians in Imperial Russia