Public lecture

Press release — 7 November 2014

Lev Shlosberg, Member of the Pskov Regional Assembly and the Director of the Pskovskaya Gubernia newspaper, will give a public lecture entitled

 Russian Society in an Undeclared War:
What Do People See and Think?

 on 12 November 2014 at 16:15–17:45 at the University of Tartu Faculty of Social Sciences and Education, Lossi 36,  room 214.

The lecture will be delivered in the Russian language (for the benefit of the audience, the speaker has been asked to speak clearly and not too fast, and it will be possible to ask questions in English).

Registration is required: please confirm your participation by sending an email to Varje Kuut at varje.kuut@ut.ee by Monday, November 10th.

Fifteen years of Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperial policies have led a significant part of Russian society to support all attempts at the restoration of the Soviet system inside the country and in the international arena. This support fully manifested itself during the annexation of Crimea and attempts to occupy parts of Eastern Ukraine. Pskov was in the centre of these events, because the special forces and airborne division located there were directly involved in both military operations. The military have thousands of family members living in the city, and thus it is much more difficult to conceal the information about both the fact of military involvement and the losses. The reaction of the authorities to the revelations about the servicemen who died in Ukraine and were buried in the area was especially radical, and sometimes criminal. The lecture will look at these events against the background of the general state of public opinion in Russia and outline possible scenarios for the future.

Lev Shlosberg graduated from the Faculty of History of the Pskov State Pedagogical University in 1985. In 1990, he founded an organization for social support of children and families at risk. Since 1992, he is the Director of the private Pskov Free University, since 1997 – Director of the Vozrozhdenie – Centre for Social Planning. He joined the oppositional Yabloko party in 1994, and in 1996 became the leader of the Pskov regional branch, in 2008 – the member of the party’s Federal Bureau. He has been the director of Pskovskaya Guberniya newspaper since 2001 and its editor in chief until 2013. In 2010, Lev Shlosberg was awarded the highest professional prize of the Russian Union of Journalists, the Golden Pen of Russia. In December 2011, he was elected into the Pskov Regional Assembly and became Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Legislation, Economic Policy and Local Self-Government.

The lecture is organized by the Centre of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu (http://ceurus.ut.ee)