Ksenia Krimer-Poluektova

Bio

Ksenia Poluektova-Krimer, Phd. (Berlin) studied Nationalism studies (MA) at the Central European University and Jewish Studies (MA) at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in History from the CEU and did her post-doc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She took part in various research and publishing projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, and Collegium Budapest. Since the summer of 2022 she has been a visiting research fellow and later, a Sacharow Fellow, at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF) in the ERC project “Perestroika from Below”. Her articles have appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Desk Russie, Open Democracy, etc.

Research project

My research on the reinvention of historical studies in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period in Russia and, more broadly, on educational reforms and university-building projects grew out of a long-standing interest in intellectual and value transformations in post-totalitarian societies and their impact on history writing and teaching. I have chosen to focus it on Yurii Afanas’ev (1934-2015) – historian, politician, one of the leaders of the democratic movement (often called a "foreman" of Perestroika), an early proponent (preceded only by Aron Gurevich) of the Annales school in the USSR. His most important, if short-lived, legacy and my main research focus, was the push for the reinvention of historical studies in Russia, which he sought to implement through the Russian State University for the Humanities, which he conceived and directed from 1991 to 2006. What were the blueprints of a post-Soviet Eastern European university that served to transform Institute of Historical Archives into RSUH? To what extent where they implemented and who were the diverse actors in the process? Was there any intellectual cross-pollination among other emergent universities across the post-communist space and beyond and within the country (including the CEU)? How successful was the process of translation (literally and metaphorically) and transplantation of western methodology onto the post-Soviet academia? In what way was the quest for new theoretical and methodological paradigms in Russian historical studies similar to or different from similar processes in East-Central Europe, that could, however critically, rely on the pre-Communist historiographic tradition and where the legacy of French historical anthropology and sociology was discovered and adopted much earlier? These are some of the questions that guide my research at the moment.