Mirrors, Rooms, and one Very Big Building. A conversation with Yuri Slezkine on Russian ethnographers, the historiography of the Soviet Union and Literature

Abstract

Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California and director of the Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies at the same university. He was born in Russia, in the mid-1950s, and he graduated from Moscow State University. In the early-1980s, he went to Austin, Texas, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading figure of the so-called “Revisionist School”. Among Yuri Slezkine’s several contributions to the history of the Soviet Union and Russia, we find his PhD thesis Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, published by Cornell University Press in 1994. In 2004 he published a new book, The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2006), and he recently published The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017). This conversation was held in Lisbon in November 2017.