{"id":457,"date":"2016-10-24T10:40:13","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T14:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/?p=457"},"modified":"2016-10-26T08:50:03","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T12:50:03","slug":"five-questions-for-peter-holquist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/2016\/10\/24\/five-questions-for-peter-holquist\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions for Peter Holquist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"17\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kazimir Malevich, Red Cavalry<\/em> (1928-1932)<\/p>\n

Note: \u00a0This is the third post in what will become an ongoing \u201cFive Questions with\u201d series where students enrolled in the Fall Havighurst Colloquium on Russia in war and revolution pose questions to the guest speakers who speak to the class. \u00a0Today\u2019s five questions were posed to Dr. Peter Holquist, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Nicholas Chanos, Drake Long, and Alec Vivian<\/p>\n

Question 1:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0How did you get started in this area of study?<\/p>\n

If you mean the international law of war\u2014actually, I came to it through undergraduate teaching.\u00a0 At Cornell University I developed an undergraduate lecture course together with Professor Isabel Hull, a German historian and a wonderful friend and scholar.\u00a0 (And we each have continued to teach this course we developed together by ourselves after I left Cornell\u2014she at Cornell, and me at Penn.)\u00a0 We organized the course in such a way that\u2014before we moved to treating the war proper\u2014the course covered the prewar economic, social and political structure of each country, as well as the general structures of the nineteenth-century world: imperialism, the financial order, and so on.\u00a0 And as part of the discussion of the prewar ecosystem, we discussed the emerging universe of the international law of war.\u00a0 And in discussing this question, you come across the truly curious and precocious role Imperial Russia played in these developments.\u00a0 So that set me off to explain this curious question.<\/p>\n

Question 2:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What’s the most shocking revelation in your research?<\/p>\n

Regarding this particular topic\u2014the 1915 Entente note, its pre-history and its after-history\u2014I would point to two moments.\u00a0 First, the role of Great Britain from late April through mid-May in delaying the issuing of the note.\u00a0 I spent nearly six months gathering materials in British archives and piecing together the reasoning for the British position.\u00a0 Equally, I was very surprised by the position taken by the US representatives on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference\u2019s Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions.\u00a0 Here too I spent several months researching and trying to understand its role.\u00a0 It was great fun, though, to explore these questions in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the National Archives of the United States, and private archives of the individual statesmen.<\/p>\n

Question 3:\u00a0Regarding the Civil War, does your research give any insight into how Russian emigres and internationals interpreted the atrocities? How did their narrative emerge?<\/p>\n

During the First World War, the Russian government established a commission to document the \u201catrocities\u201d committed by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.\u00a0 And during the Civil War, the anti-Soviet governments established very similar commissions to document Bolshevik \u201catrocities.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 As regards Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s, the most important role they played after the Civil War was in academic discussions about atrocities and crimes against humanity.\u00a0 The scholar Andre Mandelstam was a key figure here.\u00a0 Equally, Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 legal scholars played a very important role behind the scenes in developing the interwar legal regime for stateless refugees—they helped draw up the League of Nations legislation on refugees (the Nansen system).<\/p>\n

Question 4: What other period in Russian history would you like to research more in depth? Why?<\/p>\n

Hmm\u2026.\u00a0 I am pulled in two directions.\u00a0 Going backward, I have always been fascinated by the early nineteenth century and Russia\u2019s place in the Napoleonic era.\u00a0 I teach an undergraduate lecture course on \u201cThe Napoleonic Era through the Lens of Tostoy\u2019s\u00a0War and Peace<\/u>\u201d and get immense joy every time I teach it.\u00a0 And looking forward: I have long been fascinated by the Soviet experience in the Second World War, the \u201cGreat Patriotic War.\u201d\u00a0 How could one not be fascinated by this immense, tragic, and monumental topic?<\/p>\n

Question 5: What are the challenges and advantages historians of Russia and the USSR face now?<\/p>\n

On balance, we are fortunate that archives\u2014for most periods and for most topics\u2014are open and fairly accessible, both in the Russian Federation and in the former Soviet space.\u00a0 Of course, access for particular topics is uneven across this space.\u00a0 It is possible to work with materials of the KGB, say, in certain post-Soviet states.\u00a0 I would also say: we are very, very fortunate that the Soviet archival system over decades invested an immense amount of time and effort into cataloguing its archival collections.\u00a0 I think we researchers too often take for granted the immense effort the Soviet archival bureaucracy poured into cataloguing these vast holdings.<\/p>\n

The greatest inconvenience\u2014and I say inconvenience rather than challenge\u2014has been the changed interpretation of the visa rules for research visits.\u00a0 For a very long period it was possible to make short research visits to the Russian Federation using an easily-accessible tourist visa.\u00a0 The new insistence that foreign researchers working in the Russian Federation must have \u201chumanitarian-research visa,\u201d which itself requires the prior formal invitation of a Russian institutional body, has made it more cumbersome to plan research visit.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nicholas Chanos is a senior major in psychology, Drake Long is a senior majoring in diplomacy and global politics, and Alec Vivian is a senior majoring in music education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kazimir Malevich, Red Cavalry (1928-1932) Note: \u00a0This is the third post in what will become an ongoing \u201cFive Questions with\u201d series where students enrolled in the Fall Havighurst Colloquium on Russia in war and revolution pose questions to the guest … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-interviews","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":462,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}