Keynote Address

THE DILEMMAS OF A ‘SOCIALIST’ EMPIRE: 
The USSR and Its Mission Civilisatrice

Keynote Address by Ronald Grigor Suny

October 11, 20245PM
A71 Louis A. Simpson
Ronald Grigor Suny

Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.  

He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program.  

He is author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972); The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993); The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the Soviet Union and the Successor States (Oxford University Press, 1998, 2011); “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015); Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (Verso Press, 2017); Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment (Verso Press, 2020); Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2020): and co-authored with Valerie Kivelson of Russia’s Empires (Oxford University Press, 2017).  

He is currently working on a book on the history of the nation-form and the recent upsurge of exclusivist nationalisms and authoritarian populisms: Forging the Nation: The Making and Faking of Nationalisms.