Author: Blair

My research, both in college and during my Fulbright, has always centered on the peasantry.  This intellectual preoccupation dates back to my first university history course in the winter of my freshman year. The course was “The History of Imperial Russia,” and the final exam question I chose to answer was as follows: “Was the Russian Revolution logical in the sense that A+B=C? In other words, was it, by 1917, inevitable?” For me, the key to the answer, without question, lay with the country’s largest social group: the peasantry.  The following fall, I took one of Northwestern’s most popular courses: “An Introduction to Russian Literature. That quarter we read Anna Karenina and the Brothers Karamazov”, diving into the world of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. As I read the story of Levin cultivating his land and working alongside his peasants, I had the sense that what Tolstoy described was, in large part, at odds with the historical reality. As I had learned from my...

I’ve always been fascinated by history precisely because it lies at the root of so much of what we encounter in the modern world. The world is just a long sequence of cause and effect. When I read the news or visit a new country, my mind immediately starts trying to form a chain, linking the past with the present in an effort to understand: How on earth did we get here?  Currently, I live in Moscow, but that’s only a small part of my story. My life began somewhere else, and, as can be expected, how and where I grew up played a large role in bringing me to this moment.  I am a proud representative of Middle America. I’ll take Chicago over New York any day, and I think the West Coast is far too chill. My middle school is, quite literally, located in the middle of a cornfield, and yes, there is something to be said for Midwestern values....

“If your significant other cheated on you, would you want to know?” my Russian professor asked. I immediately froze, looking to my friend Ryan at my right, trying to gauge his expression. We were sitting in the middle of our phonetics class, a regular part of our study abroad program in Moscow. We had just read the first few pages of “Anna Karenina”, the part when Prince Stepan awakes to find his house in turmoil after his wife realizes he has been carrying on an affair with the governess. “Of course,” I responded, without giving it much thought. Cheating had always been an act that I considered inherently wrong—along with stealing, murdering, and lying. Ryan nodded his head in agreement. “Really? Are you sure? Well, consider this.” My phonetics teacher began telling her own tragic story of an unfaithful husband—how she had learned of a one-time incident, promptly  requested a divorce, and didn’t see him for twenty years. Standard enough. But then, she continued....

My brother often likes to ask me, “Why do you always act like you know where you’re going when you don’t?” My boyfriend often wonders how I managed to get this far in life.  Fair question. Full disclosure, within just a few months of moving to Moscow, I lost my new Russian bank card, misplaced several re-loadable metro cards, left my apartment keys on the garbage chute, and was involved in an incident that required police assistance.  And these were far from my first debacles on foreign soil. My first test of “survival” came a year before, a few weeks after I had moved to Nizhny. In college, I studied abroad twice in Moscow, but this was always under the supervision of a fully-staffed, Northwestern-approved study abroad program. I spent nearly all my time with a cohort of other American students, lived with a host family, and was never more than a phone call away from my Resident Advisor. But in...