Robert F. Byrnes
Russian and East European Institute

Martina Bergamaschi is a visiting graduate student on exchange from Bologna University in Italy. Her Master’s degree will be in Interdisciplinary Research and Studies on Eastern Europe. Last fall semester, she completed an exchange at St. Petersburg State University at the faculty of international relations. Here at IU she is taking Russian language and topical classes and working on her thesis.

MB: Can you tell me a bit about your research?

MBe: I’m currently working on research for my graduate thesis. I’m still at the beginning, but what I want to do is take history textbooks from all five Central Asian countries and compare their respective narrations of three historical events: the October Revolution, the Red Terror, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I want to see how each country presents these events and their relationship with narratives of national identity. I also want to include Russia in this research to see if Russia is being identified as an "other" against these new national identity narratives.

MBe: Last year I had a geopolitics of Central Asian course, which was my first time studying that area and it became very interesting for me. I had the opportunity to visit Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the summer, and that expanded my interest even further. On the subject of history textbooks, I wrote a paper last year involving history textbooks in Russia. This is a well-researched subject for Russia, but not so much for the case of Central Asian countries. So I thought it would be useful to do this research on textbooks in Central Asia since it is an understudied area.

MB: Last semester you studied abroad in St. Petersburg at St. Petersburg State University. Can you talk a bit about your experience? Do you have any advice for students who might want to study abroad in Russia?

MBe: So this was actually my second exchange in Russia. In undergrad, I spent a semester studying in Moscow at Moscow State University, where I studied the Russian language. University in Russia was quite different; it was very different from my experience in Italy, and especially from my experience here in the United States. What I would suggest is that although you will learn a lot from the university and your teachers, you can also learn a lot from the city. Russia has an amazing cultural life. Make sure you go to an exhibition or a play. These types of cultural activities are very easy to do and affordable, and they are the best way to learn about a nation’s cultural life.

MB: What is the relationship like between Italy and Russia?

MBe: Even now in this moment of crisis between the US and Russia, Italy tries to play a less harsh, mediating role. In Italy there have been a lot of discussions about whether or not we should continue sanctions against Russia. I think because of our history there is more of a connection between Italy and Russia. Italy in the past had a very large communist party, so because of this shared factor we’ve had a common past and have always been closer to each other than Russia has been with other European states. This is a common problem with EU states since every nation has their own bilateral agreements and different history.

MB: Indiana University is one of the few programs in the United States that still has a Russian studies program. What do you think are the merits of receiving an education in regional studies?

MBe: I am a believer in the importance of international studies. A chance to study another culture and another language enriches you so much. It doesn’t even really matter which country, but a chance to experience something else, live in a new place, and learn about different cultures is really important for understanding the world. Especially with the current situation in the US, studying Russia and relations between both countries gives you the knowledge to really do something important. It equips you to work in foreign service or foreign affairs, where you can affect positive change in the world.

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MB: Can you give me a summary of your research?

AD: When it comes to my research, I either focus on the European Union, on Russia, or on the relations between the two. With the European Union, my PhD thesis was about how different external shocks impact the way the integration proceeds in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice of the European Union. Currently what I am doing with my coauthors is studying the European Parliament. Using a dataset of 100,000 questions addressed by Members of the European Parliament to the European Commission or to the Council of Ministers, we are studying the sentiments expressed in these questions, and we have found that the emotions attached to these questions are to a large extent determined by an MEP’s nationality. When it comes to Russia, for the last couple of years together with my colleagues from the Higher School of Economics we studied how the Putin administration came up with, and then implemented, all the reforms that took place in the early 2000s. What I am interested in now is local politics and how local communities react to these federal-level reforms–whether they try to adjust these reforms in ways that suit local communities. What I’m interested in is whether there’s one reform implemented in the whole country or many different reforms with an overarching federal-level idea behind them and also whether by using those reforms the state can become more present in any given locality. I also sometimes write about EU-Russia relations, particularly about how the EU and Russia have cooperated in the area of visa facilitation and abolition.

MB: I wanted to ask more about the visa situation. Can you describe what’s going on?

AD: In 2004, there was the ‘big bang’ enlargement of the EU involving 10 new member states, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe. With this enlargement, an issue for Russia appeared with the Kaliningrad region. Before the enlargement, there was a visa-free transit between the mainland Russia and Kaliningrad. When Poland and Lithuania were entering the EU, one of the requirements was to enact a visa regime, which created a problem for the Russians trying to travel between the mainland and the Kaliningrad region. In 2002, Putin proposed to get rid of visa requirements between the EU and Russia in general, solving the transit problem altogether. The EU was rather chilly in reacting to this initiative, requiring Russia to complete a list of technical tasks before the issue would be considered. It wasn’t a symmetrical relationship, but hierarchical. Yet, Russian foreign policy soon became more assertive and the Kremlin started to push for more symmetrical relations, even managing to launch what was called the Visa Dialogue. Still, the EU continued to list technical tasks which Russia was not fond of: for example protecting the rights of the LGBTI individuals who might travel to Russia (according to the EU, to do that Russia had to abolish its restrictive legislation on gay propaganda, etc). With the events of 2014, basically all the high-level relations between Russia and the EU have been suspended. And there will be no visa waiver for quite a while, that is for sure.

MB: You mentioned sanctions and putting a halt on the Visa dialogue. How else has the situation in Ukraine impacted EU-Russia relations?

AD: It has put a halt really on everything. The EU and Russia used to cooperate in what was known as the Four Common Spaces–common economic space, common space for external security, for internal security, and finally for research, education, and culture. These spaces were first launched in 2003, but in 2005 a package of Road Maps was signed to implement these spaces, and cooperation had been ongoing since then. Now with the Ukraine situation, cooperation in these spaces is basically frozen or suspended.

MB: I know you’re teaching a class this semester at IU. Can you describe what your class is about?

AD: We are studying EU-Russian relations from the collapse of the Soviet Union to today. The first segment of the course treats the evolution of Russian foreign policy since 1985. The second segment addresses the European Union. What I want students to learn is how the EU works. People tend to think that the EU is such a special case, but I want to show students that normal political science theories and methods can be used to study the EU’s political system. The third segment is on EU-Russian relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. We are focusing on important events that have shifted relations, starting with the Partnership and Cooperation agreement of 1994, then the Kosovo crisis, the Second Chechen war, the Four Common Spaces, and, of course, the Ukrainian crisis. I also hope we will be able to talk about how we can find some hypothetical solutions to these problems.

MB: Indiana University is one of the few programs in the United States that still has a Russian studies program. What do you think are the merits of receiving an education in regional studies?

AD: I know that sometimes people think such programs are a clear sign of tensions between the countries and are simply a desire to “know one’s enemy.” Personally, I don’t like this interpretation. I think it’s more about learning to understand each other and how you can cooperate. You need to be equipped with the knowledge on how to deal with and understand other cultures. It seems that since the collapse of the Soviet Union there have been some deep misunderstandings between what the Russians thought, what the US thought, and what the Europeans thought. Maybe having more of such programs would ameliorate such situations and make cooperative dialogue more possible.