Siberian Studies Working Group

This working group plays an active role in RSW programming by bridging anthropology, history, society, and environmental and technology studies to explore the issues important to Siberia today, including the social and political effects of engineering projects in the region; the effects of oil and gas exploration on Siberian communities and on the environment; and investigating ethnographic and literary accounts of Siberia's history, culture, and people.

Siberian Studies Working Group

 

COVID-19 and Russian Political Economy

Understanding the economic effects of COVID on Russia’s regions is the focus of a joint project to be undertaken by IU’s Michael Alexeev (Professor of Economics), Andrei Yushkov (PhD student at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs), and Prof. Leonid Polishchuk, political economist at HSE Moscow. This research will also invite a new colleague to the RSW collective—Dr. Maria Litvinova, a recently-hired postdoctoral fellow at the IU School of Public Health specializing in epidemiology from a health economics perspective. The team will investigate where, why, and how Russian regional administrations imposed restrictions on their populations, and what the impacts were of these restrictions on the economy and death rates. This project will involve significant data collection work on the timing and the nature of restrictions in Russia’s regions and various other variables on reported and actual death rates, economic variables, etc. With its focus on Russia’s regions, and important intersecting civil society concerns such as state-citizen relations, restrictions on movement and work, and public health measures, this project has a foothold in both the RSW’s main research clusters.