SPRING 2026

Yana Meerzon and Mikhail Kaluzhsky. "Performing Censorship: The Russian Case" 
March 26, 7 pm

Misha Friedman. "The Ethics of Prison Photography during Wartime" 
April 16, 6 pm 

A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children
April 23, 6 pm

A Guided Tour of the Tamizdat Project Library 
April 24, 3 - 6 pm

Tatsiana Astrouskaya. "Culture and Resistance: Intelligentsia, Dissident, and Samizdat in Soviet Belarus (1968-1988)" 
May 14, 6 pm
Yana Meerzon. "Performing Censorship: The Russian Case." Thursday, March 26, 7 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Hunter East Building (7th Floor). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

The 1993 Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and prohibits censorship, but in practice censorship has long functioned as a tool of state control. Historically, it has been a central mechanism of state power, dating back to the Tsarist era and continuing through the Soviet period. In the post-Soviet years, censorship took new shape under Boris Yeltsin, particularly during his second term (1996–1999), which marked the rise of conservative ideologies. Since Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power in 2000, the Russian government has enacted numerous laws and constitutional amendments regulating cultural production. These laws target language use, blasphemy, depictions of historical events, and representations of sexuality and gender identity. Their impact has been especially pronounced in the performing arts, where they are enforced not only through legislation but also through grassroots actions, such as protests by nationalist and religious groups, public disruptions, and personal denunciations.
Since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, censorship in Russia has become even more repressive, with harsh penalties for dissent, including fines, imprisonment, and exile. Performing Censorship: The Russian Case by Yana Meerzon and Mikhail Kaluzhsky traces the evolution of state censorship under Putin and illustrates how his regime has fostered a culture of intimidation, conformity, and violence, perpetuating Russia’s long history of control over artistic expression. In this talk, Prof. Meerzon will outline the book’s major arguments and present several case studies that exemplify these practices.
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Yana Meerzon is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of five books, including Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and, most recently, with Mikhail Kaluzhsky, Performing Censorship: The Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). She also co-edited nine collections of articles, including Palgrave Handbook on Theatre and Migration with Steve Wilmer (Palgrave 2023). Former President of Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR), she is now a co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration.

Mikhail Kaluzhsky is a playwright and author. A native of Novosibirsk, he now resides in Berlin. He works in documentary theater, and his plays have been performed in Russia, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, Finland, Latvia and the United Kingdom. Kaluzhsky worked as a curator of documentary projects at the Joseph Beuys Theater in Moscow (2010–2012) and a theater program at Sakharov Center in Moscow (2012–2014). He is the author of several non-fiction books and numerous articles on arts, politics and media.

Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center. Hunter East Building, 7th Floor 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Misha Friedman. "The Ethics of Prison Photography during Wartime." Thursday, April 16, 6 pm. Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 Hunter West Building). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Acclaimed photographer Misha Friedman will talk about his experience photographing in Ukrainian prisons for the past several years. He will showcase his recent work, including one portrait of an inmate that lead to a life-changing reaction, and will focus on the ethical aspects of photography of incarcerated individuals in wartime. 

Misha Friedman, born in Moldova, graduated with degrees from Binghamton University (1997) and London School of Economics (2000), where he studied economics and Russian politics. Since 2009, photography has become his profession. He was associated with Cosmos Photo Agency 2011 - 2018, and is now represented by Getty Images. A 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist, his widely-exhibited work has received numerous industry awards, including several Pictures of the Year (POYi). Misha lives in New York City.

Over the years, Misha’s reporting helped persecuted LGBTQ+ and political activists in Russia receive asylum in safe countries and find employment. His publication on the dilapidation of an infectious disease hospital prompted authorities to launch an investigation, and eventually, close it. His coverage of the businesses avoiding international economic sanctions in the illegally annexed Crimea drove pressure to enforce accountability. His investigation of cheating in chess led to the adoption of new, more rigorous, FIDE Grandmaster requirements. A best-selling pizza in a Kyiv restaurant is named after him. 
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Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 West Building) 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator one floor down, turn around, and look for Chanin Language Center (Insdorf Screening Room, B126), which will be on your right! 
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A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children. Thursday, April 23, 6 pm. Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 Hunter West Building). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Join us for a celebration of A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children, 1917-2017, edited by Olga Bukhina, Andrea Lanoux, and Kelly Herold, the first of two volumes of Russian literature for children and teens in English translation. It includes works of poetry and prose by thirty-six authors throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, translated into English by eighteen translators. The editors, together with one of the translators, Eugene Ostashevsky, will talk about their choices of texts and translation strategies. They will read excerpts, in both English and Russian, from Kornei Chukovsky, Daniil Kharms, and Alexander Vvedensky, as well as from contemporary authors (Grigory Oster, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, and Masha Rupasova).
 
Lanoux, Herold, and Bukhina are co-authors of the 2022 study Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991–2017. Ostashevsky is a scholar, poet, and translator, author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, and editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. Ostashevsky is a poet, translator, and scholar, whose latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets, explores the effects of living in a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, examines the challenges of communication between pirates and parrots. As a translator, he is best known for his work on OBERIU, a Russian avant-garde group of the 1920s and 1930s.  
 
Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 West Building) 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator one floor down, turn around, and look for Chanin Language Center (Insdorf Screening Room, B126), which will be on your right! 
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A Guided Tour of the Tamizdat Project Library. Friday, April 24, 3 - 6 pm. 13th Floor of the Hunter West Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Presented by the Tamizdat Project. 

On Friday, April 24, Tamizdat Project Library opens its doors for a guided tour of our collection! Come meet our special guests, whose books we have gratefully inherited over the years, and hear their stories about some of the tamizdat and samizdat volumes we will have on display. Join us to celebrate banned books from the Cold War to the present at Hunter College and read a recent article about our library in the New York Times!     
 
Tamizdat Project Library features banned books from the former USSR and the Eastern Bloc that were first published abroad years or decades before they could see the light of day at home during or after perestroika. It is also a repository of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian émigré books and periodicals. A special part of the library is devoted to books on censorship, emigration, and exterritorial publishing, signed or inscribed by the authors.

Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). 13th Floor of the West Building (Russian & Slavic Studies)

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the third floor and elevator up to Floor 13. Tamizdat Project Library is located in rooms 1327 and 1337. 
Picture
Amir Hamja for The New York Times
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Tatsiana Astrouskaya. "Culture and Resistance: Intelligentsia, Dissident, and Samizdat in Soviet Belarus (1968-1988)." Thursday, May 14, 6 pm. Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 Hunter West Building). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

In her book, Tatsiana Astrouskaya challenges the dominant narrative of Soviet Belarus as the most loyal of all Soviet republics by shifting attention from overt political opposition to a wide range of cultural resistance practices. For the first time in the historiography, Astrouskaya’s study examines, from a transnational perspective, the intellectual legacy and activities of Belarusian thinkers – such as the war novelist Vasil Bykaŭ (1924-2003), the anti-war and anti-nuclear activist Ales Adamovich (1927-1994), the former Gulag prisoner and poet Larysa Heniush, the radical anti-Soviet thinker and early advocate of Belarusian independence Zianon Pazniak (b. 1944), and the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski (b. 1962). The book traces their connections with Russian and Ukrainian intellectual circles as well as the Belarusian émigré community. Chronologically, the analysis spans the period from the Prague Spring and its violent suppression – which profoundly reshaped Soviet intellectuals’ understanding of themselves and of socialism – to 1988, when dissent in Belarus developed into an open political movement. By tracing the emergence and circulation of nonconformist ideas beyond the conventional chronology of late socialism, and by examining the blurred boundaries between center and periphery as well as between underground and official publishing, this book calls for a long-overdue rethinking of Soviet dissent.

Tatsiana Astrouskaya is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She studied Philosophy and Critical Social Theory in Minsk (Belarus) and Vilnius (Lithuania) before earning her PhD in Eastern European History in 2018 from the University of Greifswald (Germany). She is the author of the award-winning monograph Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus: Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses (1968–1988) (Harrassowitz, 2019), with Belarusian and Russian translations published in 2022 and 2025, respectively. Her work has appeared in leading journals and edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2024). Her research focuses on the history of cultural and political dissent, memory politics, and digital transformation in the post-socialist space. In addition to her academic work, Tatsiana is actively involved in civic and public history initiatives. Among others, she is a member of the editorial board of the London-based Belarusian émigré publishing house Skaryna Press and a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary H-Belarus network.

Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 West Building) 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator one floor down, turn around, and look for Chanin Language Center (Insdorf Screening Room, B126), which will be on your right! ​
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: [email protected]