The Duck of Minerva

Lisa Gaufman

Elizaveta Gaufman is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is the author of "Security Threats and Public Perception" (2017) and "Everyday Foreign Policy: Performing and Consuming the Russian Nation after Crimea" (2023)

Recent Posts

Indoctrinate Me Softly

Indoctrinate Me Softly

by | 1 December, 2022 | ,

“Some came to kill and the others came to protect” says the main male character with a charisma of a doorknob to his love interest in the “based on real events” movie “Crimea” (2017), financed by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The hour and a half epic features many equally deep and meaningful conversations between a female Ukrainian journalist from Kyiv and a male Russian soldier from Sebastopol whose romance is set against the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In its official annotation, “Crimea” promises not a saga of the two warring clans of Montague and Capulet. This is a story about...

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No, Critical Race Theory was not a “thing” in the Soviet Union

No, Critical Race Theory was not a “thing” in the Soviet Union

by | 5 November, 2021 | ,

According to a recent tweet, which I am not going to link to, "CRT" led to "multiple civil wars and transnational conflicts by the 1990s" in the Soviet Union. The simple answer is no, but let me explain in more detail. Some have dubbed the Soviet Union an "affirmative action empire" that glorified internationalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism; at home, however, one could see a much less rosy picture. The notion of nationality, which is bound in Western Europe to the concept of citizenship, derives in Russia from a Soviet atavism that included ‘Natsional’nost’ (ethnicity) in the vital...

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Light Summer Reading

Light Summer Reading

by | 21 July, 2021 | , ,

Ah, those days when you did not feel guilty for reading something that does not contain the term “poststructuralism” and/or footnotes. Back in my teenage years, I used to devour all the books I could get during the summer. I had some favorites: Alexandre Duma’s The Count of Monte-Christo (1844-1846) and The Valley of the Moon (1913) by Jack London. If the Monte Christo long-drawn out revenge plot is a great motivational read for staying in academia, The Valley of the Moon was a type of a comfort read with its slow-paced love story/farming manual features.  Following Paul Musgrave’s...

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Putin-Biden summit, but make it an 18th century gossip column

Putin-Biden summit, but make it an 18th century gossip column

by | 6 July, 2021 | ,

Gentle reader*, People that have an itch at scribbling generally entertain their visitors with their happy projects, high flights, and wonderful publications, therefore 'tis to be supposed this blogue is in great measure the subject of many a drawing-room or a Twitteur discourse. Hence, when the handsome city of Geneva has been suffused by the members of the ton aching to catch a glimpse of the illustrious statesmen that graced its palaces with their presence, it is but no wonder that this author had to reserve quite a bit of ink to illuminate their readers on the...

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