Russia

Background
Pitt’s Office of Child Development (OCD) is re-training caregivers and making structural changes at orphanages in St. Petersburg, Russia, in an effort to promote more responsive caregiving for the children, who range in age from birth to 4 years.

OCD’s intervention team has brought about improved mental, physical, and socio-emotional conditions among the babies, and a better outlook among the caregivers. Because resources are scarce and orphanages are not a social-political priority, the system has been difficult to change Recently, however, scholars in the Russian Federation have called for changes in the care environment.

Background
Pitt’s Office of Child Development (OCD) is re-training caregivers and making structural changes at orphanages in St. Petersburg, Russia, in an effort to promote more responsive caregiving for the children, who range in age from birth to 4 years.

OCD’s intervention team has brought about improved mental, physical, and socio-emotional conditions among the babies, and a better outlook among the caregivers. Because resources are scarce and orphanages are not a social-political priority, the system has been difficult to change Recently, however, scholars in the Russian Federation have called for changes in the care environment.

Background

A member of the executive board of the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, Berkowitz is coeditor of the Journal of Comparative Economics and director of graduate studies for Pitt’s economics department. He has published more than 20 research papers and books, including “The Evolving Pattern of Internal Market Integration in Russia,” Economics of Transition (2001) and "Entrepreneurship and the Evolution of Income Distributions in Poland and Russia," (with John E. Jackson), in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2006).

Background
A professor of history, Chase is at work on Murder Most Sacred, Murder Most Foul, a book-length manuscript that uses the assassination of Leon Trotsky to examine the rise and nature of threat construction, scapegoating, conspiratorial worldviews, and political violence among communists in the USSR, Spain, Mexico, and the United States in 1935-40.

Chase's published books include Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–39 (Yale, 2001); Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (University of Illinois Press, 1987, 1990); and Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki Putevoditel, with Jeffrey Burds, E.A. Tiurina, S.V. Pasolova, A.K. Sokolov (Moscow, 1994).

Background

Harris is the editor of the University of Pittsburgh Press’ Russian and East European Series and a core faculty member for Pitt’s Center for Russian and East European Studies. He is the author of many books and publications, including The Split in Stalin's Secretariat (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), Subverting the System: Gorbachev's Reform of the Party's Apparat (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies (National Academy Press [with David N. DeJong], chapter 8, 1997).

Background

Nancy Condee is a specialist in contemporary Russian culture and cultural politics, imperial and postcolonial theory, and post-Soviet popular culture. She is a film scholar in Pitt’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and is on Pitt’s Film Studies faculty.

A former senior associate member of St. Antony’s College at Oxford University and a member of the Russian Guild of Cinema Scholars and Critics (Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation), Condee, for more than a decade, has been one of two U.S. scholars annually invited to and supported by the Kinotavr Film Festival (Sochi), Russia’s leading postsocialist film festival. She served for six years as chair of the board of directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the largest U.S. grant agency for social-science research in the former socialist bloc.

Condee is coeditor of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. Her latest book is The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford University Press).

Background
Padunov teaches courses on the history of Russo-Soviet cinema, contemporary Russian media, and the history of Russian popular culture.

His publications have appeared in The Harriman Institute Forum, Isskustvo kino, The Nation, New Formations, New Left Review, October, Voprosy literatury, and Wide Angle. They include Star Above Almaty: Kazakh Cinema Between 1998 and 2003 (2004); On the Benefits of Cine-Lingualism (1998); Views of the Present as Visions of the Past (1996); and ‘Large Loose Baggy Monsters:’ The Poetics of Excess in Contemporary Russian Culture (1996).

Padunov is the deputy editor of Kinokultura, an electronic journal on the contemporary Russian film industry. Every May since 1999, he has directed the annual Russian Film Symposium in Pittsburgh. Together with Pitt professor Nancy Condee, he directed the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture (1990-93), supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.