Wednesday, March 4, 20265:00 PM - 6:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 6275
The Center for European and Russian Studies is a cosponsor of the UCLA European History Colloquium. The next talk will be held on Wednesday, March, at 5pm PST, in Bunche 6275 and online via Zoom. Taylor Zajicek, professor of History at Williams College, will be joining us to speak on "The Stones Will Give Way: Diplomacy and Water Infrastructure in the Soviet-Turkish Borderland". Register to join us in person or online.
About the Talk
Except for an Arctic slice of Norway, East Anatolia was the only place where a NATO member directly abutted Soviet territory. Despite this, the Soviet-Turkish borderland plays only a bit part in most histories of the Cold War. What did this sensitive zone look like on the ground?
This presentation will trace the evolution of diplomacy and water management across Soviet Armenia’s border with the Turkish Republic, from the 1920s into the twenty-first century. In particular, the lecture will profile the transboundary Akhurian Reservoir Dam, which straddled the Iron Curtain at its most intimate point. The dam’s lifecycle—from proposal to operation—testifies to a little-known genealogy of cooperation that spanned Cold War blocs, economic regimes, and time periods. In East Anatolia, a specific combination of environmental concerns and developmentalist policies created a local logic that was only loosely related to the diplomatic rhetoric in Ankara, Moscow, Washington, and Yerevan.
About the Speaker
Dr. Taylor Zajicek is assistant professor at Williams College and a historian of modern Eurasia, the Middle East, and the spaces that connect them. His first book project, Black Sea, Cold War, is an environmental history of the greater Black Sea region from 1930 to the present. It explores the intersection of geopolitics, environmental change, and science in the formation of one of the ocean’s most contested bottlenecks.
The manuscript is based on Zajicek’s 2023 dissertation from Princeton University, which won prizes from Oxford University Press and the European Society for Environmental History. Black Sea, Cold War draws on archival research in eight countries—fieldwork generously sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, American Research Center in Turkey, and the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies among others.