Wilson Center Experts
Stephen Bittner
Title VIII Short-term Scholar
Kennan Institute
Expertise:
History
; Communism
; Russia and Eurasia
; Georgia
; Moldova
; Russia
; Ukraine
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of History, Sonoma State University
Wilson Center Project(s):
Whites and Reds: Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar
Bittner is Professor of History at Sonoma State University in California. He received his BA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his PhD from the University of Chicago.
Project Summary
The project will use the Soviet wine industry and viticulture as a means to examine both Soviet and Russian understanding of itself relative to Europe.
Major Publications
"A Negentropic Society?" forthcoming in Kritika in Spring 2013
The Many Lives of the Khrushchev's Thaw (Cornell, 2008)
The Kremlin's Scholar (Yale, 2007)
Previous Terms at the Wilson Center:
Oct 01, 2000 - Jun 01, 2001 - Kennan Research Scholar: "De-Stalinization and its Conflicts: Social and Cultural Change in Moscow’s Arbat District, 1953-1968" - Examination of the manner by which the de-Stalinization reforms played out at the local level in Moscow’s Arbat district. Using data gathered from archival documents, I show that de-Stalinization occasioned a process of political decentralization, which provided local-level institutions like the ration-level soviet, and the numerous scholastic and artistic soviets attached to the cultural institutions which lined the back streets of the Arbat district, with improved access to and increased authority over material resources, or enhanced control/oversight over affairs of local interest.