“I remember as a kindergartner, watching [the] news with my grandfather. … [The] Soviet government presented [a] certain image of Western news, that everything was bad,” Associate Professor of Political Science Oxana Shevel said, reflecting on her upbringing under communist rule in Kyiv, Ukraine. “As a young child, you don’t question it.”
Today, as Director of Tufts’ International Relations Program, a scholar of comparative politics of the post-Soviet region and an authoritative, scholarly voice on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, Shevel studies the political dynamics that so meaningfully shaped the environment she grew up in.
Looking back on the conditions that set her on the path to where she is currently, Shevel specifically emphasized the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost reforms. Those reforms, especially the glasnost policies, ended state censorship and introduced freedom of the press during her teenage years, providing new opportunities to think critically about the world around her. As her intellectual curiosity developed, her personal experiences drew her to questions of political identity.
“My grandfather [and] my father were members of the Communist Party. ... At the same time, they thought of themselves as Ukrainians,” she explained. She went on to discuss Russification during the Soviet period — an effort to assimilate minority cultures within the USSR into the dominant Russian one.
“I knew that we spoke Ukrainian at home, but that was kind of less prestigious,” she said. “I think that’s partly what motivated me to study nationalism … these changes in identity, including [those] I saw in my own extended family.”
“I sometimes even use vignettes from my family history to illustrate theoretical points that I teach in class,” Shevel added.
Despite the opportunities presented by Soviet reforms, Shevel faced significant barriers when it came to studying politics. As an undergraduate, the closest discipline to political science available to her was “Scientific Communism.” The Soviet field of international relations was reserved almost exclusively for men.
With the options available to her, Shevel studied English and French as an undergraduate at Kyiv State University. During her final year there, political events changed the course of her life.
“The year I graduated, the Soviet Union collapsed, and that’s when various opportunities appeared to study abroad. … I was one of the first recipients of the George Soros scholarship for students from Ukraine to study in the U.K.,” Shevel said.
At the University of Cambridge, Shevel completed a master’s degree in international relations. She then went on to earn a doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University, specializing in the comparative politics of the post-communist region, which remains her academic focus today.
Shevel relished the opportunity to finally study nationalism in a serious academic setting. “[It] was really kind of revelational to read literature about it,” she said.
Going through the American education system for the first time, Shevel noticed major differences from her experience in the Soviet system.
“Sometimes Americans, in Europe in particular, have this reputation of not being very erudite [in] geography and facts,” she said. “In the Soviet Union, … you summarize[d], you memorize[d] … but [were not] really taught to critically assess.”
Shevel provided a personal anecdote from graduate school to illustrate her point.
“We had to write [a] critique of some set of books,” she explained. “I got a comment back that said, ‘this was a good summary, but what do you think?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to think something critical about these scholars for all these famous books.’”
Today, Shevel has two decades of experience as a professor in the United States under her belt, and the diversity of her educational background still informs the way she teaches.
“Having had intellectual history in both systems, … as I teach here [at Tufts], I try to combine the best of both. Yes, I have to have a map quiz, … but that by itself is not going to be enough,” she said.
Discussing her time at Tufts in further depth, Shevel expressed that the university has offered a rich intellectual community in her area of expertise since she arrived in 2007.
One way Shevel has taken advantage of that community is through her collaboration with Associate Professor of Political Science Kelly Greenhill in teaching the course “Migration, Refugees, and Citizenship in a Globalized World.”
“[We] both have studied migration and refugee questions,” Shevel said. “She studies … security concerns, foreign policy concerns. … My work has been more [about] how these policies are made domestically in non-western countries.”
Greenhill commented on her experience co-teaching with Shevel. “Every time we’re in the classroom together, I learn something new,” she said.
Shevel mentioned exchanging ideas with faculty from other departments, too, including Associate Professor of History Rachel Applebaum, who teaches a course on Eastern European communism.
Shevel also reflected more specifically on teaching Tufts undergraduates, highlighting her efforts overseeing senior thesis projects.
“[Students] were using the theories that we read in class, including some from my own work on citizenship, but then applying them to completely different cases,” Shevel said. “This intellectual growth from the students is very, very gratifying.”
Outside of her undergraduate teaching, Shevel has become extremely busy with speaking engagements and media appearances since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as an authoritative scholarly voice on the subject.
She spoke to the challenges of communicating to a broader audience.
“To strike the balance of [being] able to summarize in a short, accessible way to the general public but still that the point itself would be valid given the complexity that you, as an expert, know about … is actually a really hard skill,” Shevel said.
According to her, the book she published with co-author Maria Popova this past January, “Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States,” intends to strike just this balance.
Over the course of the text, Shevel and Popova argue that the “growing domestic political divergence between Russia and Ukraine post-1991” is a root cause of the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Shevel noted that even as she has become busier and has had to communicate to more diverse audiences for projects like her collaboration with Popova, key components of her work have stayed consistent.
“As far as [the] intellectual focus of my work, it actually hasn’t changed that much because, if anything, the war reinforced these very ideas that I’ve been thinking about and working on,” Shevel said.
She went on to offer an example, dissecting Putin’s claim — intellectually inaccurate in her view — that Ukraine is not a real nation.
“[Nations] are constructed in this process of various social, political, economic changes. … After 1991, the elites, … and then also more gradually, the public [caught] up with this idea that Ukrainians are a distinct nation. … Russia completely refuses to accept this idea,” she said.
To Shevel, this interpretation of recent history offers a much better explanation of the present conflict’s origins than alternative theories that focus on NATO enlargement. She also believes that these dynamics underlie the unpromising prospects of a negotiated compromise or swap of land as paths to peace.
These themes will be the subjects of the new course that Shevel is teaching during the fall semester, called “Ukraine In Peace & War: Identity, Society, Democracy.”
“The fact … that now I can actually teach a class specifically on the politics of Ukraine is also something that I’m grateful for, even though it in some sense happened for tragic reasons,” she said.
The social and political intricacies of Ukraine through time that Shevel covers in her courses have been apparent in her real-life experiences with the country’s diaspora in the Greater Boston Area.
Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, where Shevel is an associate, serves as a prime example. Shevel expressed that the institute provides a vibrant intellectual hub for the Greater Boston area’s small Ukrainian community and has its origins in Eastern Europe’s tumultuous political history.
“Ukrainians who came to the U.S. after the Second World War, many of them escaping communist rule, … they felt very strongly the need to preserve Ukrainian culture [and] Ukrainian language. And they fundraised to establish this Ukrainian Research Institute,” she said.
Shevel also noted communism’s effects on cultural differences within Boston’s Ukrainian population. Ukrainians in the diaspora whose families left the country generations before them, according to her, are more religious, while Ukrainians who grew up under Soviet anti-religious rule are less so.
“After the fall of the Iron Curtain, I started meeting Ukrainians who grew up abroad,” Shevel said. “One time I was invited to a Christmas celebration. … It was all very nice, but I could not relate.”
In this instance and many others, Shevel’s life, the course of her career, and the narratives of identity that she bears witness to have been shaped in particularly evident ways by the very social and political dynamics that she studies for a living.
With all this in mind, one might expect that for Shevel, the interrogation of the narratives that she has internalized herself, and their connections to social and political realities, would be almost second nature. According to her, however, this expectation would be mistaken.
“The invasion made me realize in particular that certain things that we think that we know, we have to question, ‘How do we know them?’” she said. “I kind of remind myself when I think about the countries of the region [that I] know less about — I have certain stereotypes. … state power creates a lot of these narratives, and what was the state power at the time?”
Given her life trajectory and area of scholarship, Shevel’s articulation of her own need to continue questioning the sources of her knowledge should serve as a reminder to the Tufts community that our intellectual responsibility is an active one and demands conscientiousness. How we fulfill that intellectual responsibility shapes the world we live in.
