It is my great pleasure to introduce the thirteenth edition of the UC Undergraduate Journal of East/Central European Studies. Written by contributors from universities across the US and Canada, the papers in this collection address topics in geopolitics, history, cultural studies, literature, art, religion, and public policy.

This journal originated as the proceedings of the 10th annual University of California Undergraduate Conference on Slavic and East/Central European Studies (held in 2007). Three of this year's papers (by Hannah Bennet, Leanna Kramer, and Melissa Miller) were initially presented at the twenty-second iteration of the conference, held at UCLA on April 20, 2019.

This year's volume opens with “Beyond Fort Ross: Defining Russia’s Impact on California,” in which Hannah Bennet (UCLA) highlights the myriad consequences of Russian colonial presence in nineteenth-century California.

The next two papers move to the present day and focus on the geopolitics of cyber warfare, a particularly pressing topic following the 2016 US presidential election. In “Cracking the Code: Russia’s Cyber Assault on Liberal Democracy,” Leanna Kramer (UCLA) analyzes the methods of Russian information warfare in the US, EU, and former Soviet States. Conor McDonald (UCLA) also addresses the methods and implications of Russian cyberaggression in “The Eastern Threat: Understanding and Counteracting Russian Cyber Activity in the Baltics.” Continuing the theme of Russian geopolitics, Naomi Kisel (UCLA) chronicles Vladimir Putin's growing relationship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in “Syria as Russian Proxy State: Countering US Interests in the Middle East.”

Shifting the focus from Russias’s international politics to the domestic, Melissa Miller (UCLA) addresses the humanitarian crisis resulting from the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church on Russian drug policy in her article “Putin and Patriarch Kirill’s Mutually Advantageous Relationship and its Effect on the Russian Federation’s Growing HIV Epidemic.”

The final two papers return readers to the nineteenth century, this time to literature, addressing the role of beauty in the works of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his paper “Images of Women in the Works of Ivan Turgenev,” Stephen J. Pastoriza (Bowdoin College) highlights the visual references used by male narrators in three of Turgenev's works—“Asya” (1858), “First Love” (1860) and Spring Torrents (1872) —to describe the women with whom they are infatuated. Finally, in her essay “The Beauty in the Epileptic: Dostoevsky’s Illness and its Mark on his Characters,” Katherine Smith (University of British Columbia) examines the epileptic seizures that Fyodor Dostoevsky suffered as reflected in two dramatically different characters, Prince Myshkin and Smerdyakov.

Some of these papers reflect the most pressing issues of the climate in which they were written, while others make interesting contributions to longstanding questions in the realm of art, literature, and history. We are grateful to our contributors for their compelling and interesting research, and we continue to welcome paper submissions from undergraduate students interested in Russia and East/Central Europe, as well as Eurasia.

In addition to the authors, we would like to thank the many people who make this journal possible: UCLA Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures undergraduate mentor Yelena Furman, who has contributed to the journal in a variety of essential capacities since its first volume in 2008; our online editor Susan Bauckus; Delaney Thurmond at the Center for World Languages; Leo Duarte, webmaster at the UCLA International Institute;
our incredible undergraduate editor Meagan Ford; and all of the members of our editorial board for their help in producing this volume. Finally, we would like to thank the Center for European and Eurasian Studies and the UCLA Office of the Dean of Humanities, whose financial contributions made this project possible.

As always, we remember the innumerable contributions of the late Professor Olga Kagan, whose dedication to undergraduate research led to the creation of the Undergraduate Conference and this journal.