A founding father of the Soviet Union at the age of twenty nine, Nikolai Bukharin was the editor of Pravda and an intimate Lenin's exile. (Lenin later dubbed him "the favorite of the party.") But after forming an alliance with Stalin to remove Leon Trotsky from power, Bukharin crossed swords with Stalin over their differing visions of the world's first socialist state and paid the ultimate price with his life. Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, the stepdaughter of a high Bolshevik official, spent much of her life in prison camps and in exile after her husband's execution.

In his most recent book Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (2010), Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world's first socialist state went terribly wrong and why it was likely to veer off course through the story of two of Stalin's most prominent victims. Drawn from Hoover Institution archival documents, the story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina begins with the optimism of the socialist revolution and then turns into a dark saga of foreboding and terror as the game changes from political struggle to physical survival. Told for the most part in the words of the participants, it is a story of courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, misplaced idealism, missed opportunities, bungling, and, above all, love.

Paul Gregory holds the Cullen professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of nine books and many articles on the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography. He serves on the editorial boards of Comparative Economic Studies, Journal of Comparative Economics, Problems of Post-Communism, and Explorations in Economic History. He was the President of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies in 2007.

Paul Gregory served as an editor of the seven-volume History of Stalin’s Gulag (published jointly by Hoover and the Russian Archival Service), which was awarded the silver human rights award of the Russian Federation in 2006 and  is an editor of the three volume Stenograms of the Politburo of the Communist Party (published jointly by Hoover and the Russian Archival Service). Two of his edited works – Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag -- have been published by Hoover Press. His collection of essays entitled Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives was published in 2007. His co-edited work with Norman Naimark, The Lost Politburo Stenograms, was  published by Yale University Press in 2008 as was his most recent work Terror by Quota. Professor Gregory’s current research on Soviet dictatorship and repression is supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Hoover Institution Archives.

This event is co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

A graduate of the University of Tokyo and Stanford University, Yasuo Tanabe was Vice President of the Research Institute for Economy, Trade, and Industry in Tokyo and a career official at Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), later the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI). He will address Japan's policies on energy and climate change.

Emerging infectious diseases pose new international security threats because of the potential to inflict harm upon humans, crops, livestock, health infrastructure, and economies. H1N1’s impact on the Mexican economy in 2009, for example, has been estimated at almost 1% of Gross Domestic Product.

In this colloquium, Professor Ear will discuss his research on health and security in Southeast Asia, focusing on surveillance systems for emerging infectious disease. The experience of Cambodia and Indonesia demonstrates that the technical and human sides of surveillance systems are complementary inputs. Awareness of political, economic, and cultural issues is critical if policy-makers are to build more effective systems.

Visiting Assistant Professor Gireesh Shrimali from the Indian School of Business will be presenting work currently in progress at PESD: An examination of the role of the private sector in the diffusion of improved cookstoves through a comparative case study of private-sector commercial operations.  In particular, he will present relevant background, the methodology used in our research, and some preliminary results.

More than 2.4 billion people worldwide rely on traditional biomass for cooking, leading to negative health effects, lost productivity, and environmental harm. Improved cookstoves burn fuel more efficiently, requiring less fuel and resulting in decreased emissions.  Yet after more than twenty five years of effort, mainly by governments and NGOs, there has been little progress in disseminating such stoves more widely. Such programs have generally been less successful than anticipated due to issues of sustainability of subsidies, stove design, marketing and adoption of new stove products and scale of effort.  Increasingly, for-profit models run by the private sector are seen as potential solutions to these problems.  However, the participation of the private sector raises its own set of questions regarding how viable business enterprises can be created to serve lower income consumers.

Transitions from conflict raise hard questions about accountability for past violations.  Criminal prosecutions and other sanctions are increasingly prevalent, but amnesties remain common.  Some argue the latter are essential concessions to secure and sustain peace, given the threat of violent backlash from those potentially subject to repercussions, who typically seek to insulate themselves from liability.  Meanwhile, a conventional wisdom is that those who suffered harms want punitive justice and will tend to reject amnesty.  Backer and Kulkarni evaluate these claims using original data collected since 2002 via surveys of over 2,800 victims of war and repression in the diverse contexts of Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa.  Our initial finding is unexpected: similar majorities of the respondents in each country actually approve of amnesty.  Yet the backing is practical, ambivalent and qualified.  Most view amnesty as necessary to avoid further conflict, albeit unfair to victims.  This concern can be mitigated if perpetrators are subject to various forms of restorative and reparatory justice.  The willingness of many respondents to acquiesce to amnesty also coexists with a strong desire for accountability.  In addition, unparalleled panel survey data shows that such acceptance can decline dramatically over time, due to policy actions and inactions.  The analysis suggests the appeal of conditional amnesties of limited scope, backed by follow through on means of redress, including prosecutions.

In the Soviet Union speaking about the Gulag was forbidden until the period of perestroika. Nevertheless survivors of the Stalinist concentration camps wrote about the Stalinist practices of terror against the official politics of forgetfulness. Varlam Shalamov’s (1907-1982) prose, especially his “Kolyma Tales”, must be named along with Primo Levi or Jorge Semprun. But his texts rested unpublished for a long time and his aesthetic position is not as well-known as Solshenicyn.

Shalamov understood his own writing as an effort to find a new aesthetic after Kolyma, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. From his point of view, the author should be like Pluto, who came out of the Hades and told the truth about the fragility of man and civilization. The seminar will discuss Shalamov’s strategy of literary memory.

Dr. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein is a researcher at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL, Centre for Literary and Cultural Studies), Berlin. Since 2008, she has been head of the East Europe department at ZFL, and manager of projects on "The Topography of Europe's Plurale Cultures in View of its Eastward Shift," and "Aporias of Forced Modernization: Figurations of the National in the Soviet Empire." Her research topics include memory and autobiographical writing in 20th century Russian literature, cultural topographies, secularization and resacralization between East and West, and figurations of the national in the Soviet Empire. Dr. Thun-Hohenstein studied Russian language and literature at Lomonossow University Moscow.

Her publications include Gebrochene Linien: Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Broken lines: Autobiographical writing and camp-civilisation, Berlin Kadmos 2007). She is editor of the Collected Works of Varlam Shalamov; and, with W. St. Kissel, of Exklusion: Chronotopoi der Ausgrenzung in der russischen und polnischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (München 2006).

Richard Morse states that coal is the largest growing source of energy and that regulation and policy are beginning to play a larger role in the economy of coal power. Morse also discusses the heavy reliance on coal by developing countries and the need to understand and evaluate all mitigation options.

Exponential advances in the life sciences, particularly in the realm of biotechnology, have been held to raise the classic concerns of "dual-use" research: the same technologies that propel scientific advances critical to human health, the environment and economic growth also could be misused to develop biological weapons, including for bioterrorism.  However, there is significant disagreement as to whether this depiction appropriately frames the nature of the problem.  Some scientists have characterized the prevailing policy discourse on the life sciences as the "half-pipe of doom," a bipolar approach that artificially disaggregates and decontextualizes the promise and peril of advances in the life sciences.  The panel will discuss proposals to address such concerns, focusing on whether the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers a transferable model of scientific and policy consensus-building for issues of safety and security of biotechnology.      

Stephen J. Stedman joined CISAC in 1997 as a senior research scholar, and was named a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC and professor of political science (by courtesy) in 2002. He served as the center's acting co-director for the 2002-2003 academic year. Currently he directs the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford and CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. His current research addresses the future of international organizations and institutions, an area of study inspired by his recent work at the United Nations. In the fall of 2003 he was recruited to serve as the research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to stay on at the U.N. as a special advisor with the rank of assistant secretary-general, to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to CISAC. Before coming to Stanford, Stedman was an associate professor of African studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations on issues of peacekeeping in civil war, light weapons proliferation and conflict in Africa, and preventive diplomacy. In 2000 Scott Sagan and he founded the CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. Stedman received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1988.

Donald Kennedy is the editor-in-chief of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a CESP senior fellow by courtesy. His present research program entails policy on such trans-boundary environmental problems as: major land-use changes; economically-driven alterations in agricultural practice; global climate change; and the development of regulatory policies.

Kennedy has served on the faculty of Stanford University from 1960 to the present. From 1980 to 1992 he served as President of Stanford University. He was Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration from 1977-79. Previously at Stanford, he was as director of the Program in Human Biology from 1973-1977 and chair of the Department of Biology from 1964-1972.

Kennedy is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He served on the National Commission for Public Service and the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, and as a founding director of the Health Effects Institute. He currently serves as a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and as co-chair of the National Academies' Project on Science, Technology and Law. Kennedy received AB and PhD degrees in biology from Harvard University.

Drew Endy is a synthetic biologist with the Stanford Department of Bioengineering. He was a junior fellow and later an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT prior to coming to Stanford in September 2008 as an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering. Endy's research focus is on synthetic biology. With researchers at MIT he works on the engineering of standardized biological components, devices, and parts, collectively known as "BioBricks." He is one of several founders of the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, and invented an abstraction hierarchy for integrated genetic systems. Endy is known for his opposition to limited ownership and supports free access to genetic information. He has been one of the early promoters of open-source biology, and helped to start the Biobricks Foundation, a non-profit supporting open-source biology.

Tarun Chhabra is a JD candidate and Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow at Harvard Law School, and a doctoral candidate in international relations at Oxford University.  Tarun previously worked in the Executive Office of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and on the staff of Annan's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.  He also served as a consultant-advisor to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament initiatives. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Russia at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO) and received a Marshall Scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford, where he earned a MPhil in international relations and was an instructor in international relations at Stanford House.  He holds a BA from Stanford University, where he worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project and was in the honors program at CISAC. Tarun is a Fellow of the Truman National Security Project and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and Faculty Director of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. He also is co-chair of Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and will lead the fifth assessment report on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.  The author of more than 200 scientific publications, Field’s research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale. Field’s work with models includes studies on the global distribution of carbon sources and sinks, and studies on environmental consequences of expanding biomass energy. Field has served on many national and international committees related to global ecology and climate change and was a coordinating lead author for the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Field has testified before House and Senate committees and has appeared on media from NPR “Science Friday” to BBC “Your World Today”. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Field received his PhD from Stanford in 1981 and has been at the Carnegie Institution for Science since 1984.