Persecuted for Opposing the Ukraine War, Russian Scholar Teaches at Bowdoin

"I lost my job because, like so many Russians, I am against the war in Ukraine," said Kurilla, who is now the Visiting Tallman Scholar in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Bowdoin College.

He was among thousands of academics who signed a petition condemning Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Some of those who spoke out found themselves behind bars, some joined the exodus of activists leaving Russia to continue their work in exile, and some, like Kurilla, stayed put in their homeland, where life became more and more intolerable.

"Despite the increasingly autocratic nature of Putin's regime, I was able to carve out enough academic freedom to continue teaching in St. Petersburg," said the professor of history and international relations.

"Putin is repressive, but randomly repressive. While Stalin would simply have arrested everyone opposing the war, Putin's strategy has been more about creating a climate of fear by targeting people at random," said Kurilla. "Opposing the Kremlin is a gamble."

Crunch time for Kurilla came in January 2024, when he left for a sabbatical at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. On the eve of his departure, the university authorities in St. Petersburg informed him they would no longer sign off on his academic leave and if he went to the US, he would be fired for absenteeism. A couple of months later, that's exactly what happened.

"After reading some of the investigative journalism that's been done on the subject, my guess is that the university leadership was under increasing pressure from the FSB [federal security service] to get rid of any faculty who had signed the antiwar petition," explained Kurilla. "Professors like me had become 'toxic.'" Kurilla was fired in March 2024, and in June the entire political science department in St. Petersburg was shut down. "In fact," he pointed out, "any area of study that the Kremlin considered a political threat was suppressed, including the sociology department, which was reorganized in order to get rid of the gender studies program."

Kurilla said he is both shocked and saddened by how much his former university has changed since the full-scale Ukraine war got underway. "The European University was always Western-oriented, integrated into global academia, with trustees from Europe and the US. This has changed now, and all foreigners are excluded from the board of trustees."

Kurilla's plight is part of a bigger story, he said. "So many academics have suffered in Russia, and some of them are in prison, so I'm grateful to have my freedom." He still keeps in touch with former colleagues in Russia, he said, but they are nowhere near as vocal as they were about expressing their opinions.

"Putin is repressive, but randomly repressive. While Stalin would simply have arrested everyone opposing the war, Putin's strategy has been more about creating a climate of fear by targeting people at random. Opposing the Kremlin is a gamble."

Exploring Russia-US Relations
His arrival in the US this year is the latest chapter in Kurilla's longstanding relationship with the country. He first came as a student in 1990, spending a semester at Kent State University in Ohio. He went on to specialize in American history, particularly the country's relationship with Russia.

This semester he's teaching a course called Frenemies: Russia and the United States from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (RUS 24/22 HIST 24/22). Students are learning how the two countries have served as mirror images of each other for much of the last two and a half centuries, "dark twins" that used the image of the other country for domestic political purposes, said Kurilla, who will return to take up an appointment at Wellesley after leaving Bowdoin.

"Russia and the US have often been allies, or at least found themselves on the same side," he added. "Russia sent warships to help the Union side in the US Civil War, while during the previous decade America provided support to Russia in the Crimean war, which was fought against a coalition of European powers." Then, of course, there were the two World Wars of the twentieth century, when the nations were firm allies against Nazi Germany.

"Furthermore," commented Kurilla, "Russian history has always featured prominent figures who were sympathetic to the US and wanted to learn from them to reform Russian economic efficiency. Tsar Nicholas the First hired American engineers to help build railroads in the mid-nineteenth century while in the 1920s and 1930s the Bolsheviks employed thousands of American experts to help with industrialization efforts."

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