Homepage

In the fourth edition of the Interfaith Friday Series, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion, moderated a number of questions with interfaith advocate Rabbi Burton Visotzky, who represented the Conservative Judaism faith for the Department of Religion’s series.

Visotzky is the Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the director at the seminary’s Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue. Visotzky is an active lecturer and scholar-in-residence throughout North America, Europe and Israel. Visotzky has been named to The Forward 50 and the Newsweek/ Daily Beast list of “The 50 Most Influential Jews in America.”

What follows is an abridged version of Visotzky’s conversation. Visotzky and Robinson’s remarks have been condensed for clarity.

From where you sit in your tradition, why should we be moving in an interfaith direction either here at Chautauqua or in the world?

Visotzky: The world is a small place, (and it’s) getting smaller every minute We are wired together. We read the news. We look at our phones. We hear everything that goes on. We can’t afford to be isolated. For Jews, we could never afford to be isolated. We were historically, up until 1948, always an isolated people, a minority in some other religion’s majority country. So, it was absolutely necessary for our survival to learn to get along with others. But that is a very practical thing to do. I also want to say we should do interfaith because it is the right thing to do, just to know to your neighbor. Many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, I was invited on a Friday by a colleague to go to his mosque and deliver the sermon, which was an unbelievable privilege.

First, he put me in the prayer line, which generally non-Muslims are not put into, and he just made it clear, “You’re my brother, you’re here.” Then I gave my little brotherhood talk and afterward, there were literally thousands of people there of every color of the rainbow and every socioeconomic class.

Some guy got right up in my face and said, “Why are you here?”

I was so taken aback. So, I just blurted out, “You are my neighbor.”

It was the right answer, and it is still the right answer. You are my neighbor, and that should be sufficient.

When you come to the metaphorical interfaith table, what gifts do you bring as a Jew to that table?

Visotzky: Surely one of the things Judaism has introduced into the world, and I think it is a mixed blessing, is the notion of monotheism. I think it’s a mixed blessing because monotheism carries with it a certain amount of intolerance for people who don’t believe the way you believe. Monotheismnis a gift because that recognition of God’s presence in the world is a big deal. The book of Leviticus has very disturbing commandments of us versus them, Jews versus non-Jews, Greeks versus Israeli, men versus women, gays versus straights. Leviticus also has some of the most progressive social legislation ever bequeathed in humanity. So that is also a gift, and those are things that are worth holding on to.

I think a lot of us Christians think Scripture is something to be put up on the mantle and worshiped and idolized in some ways at its worst, and yet Jews seems to think it is the stepping-off point to a great conversation.

Visotzky: Absolutely. We love God, and we love God spoken. You can’t have a lover up on the mantle. It doesn’t work. Your lover is someone you embrace. Your lover is someone you laugh with. Your lover is someone you argue with. Your lover is someone you learn to live with, whatever demands they may make of you. That is how we view (the) Torah, that we are constantly engaged.

One of my colleagues, Ed Greenstein, who teaches in Israel, is fond of taking either a book or the scroll itself and opening it up and says, “What does the Torah say?”

And then he says, “It won’t say anything unless you read it.”

Our engagement with Torah, our interpretation thereof, that is what makes (the) Torah a living document, and that is the living word of God.

What gifts do other religions bring to the table that you might benefit from?

Visotzky: Let me start with Christianity and Islam. I am continually wowed by the Christian notion that God loved humanity enough to come to the earth in human form and suffer like humans do. That is amazing to me. The high theology that I tend to have makes God very distant, and we need intimacy, we need the personhood of God. That is a gift that Christianity gave us thoroughly, which Jews have trouble with theologically, but nevertheless, we should appreciate its value. As for Islam, Jews are notorious for being very punctilious about the law. I often joke that the whole point of observing the kosher laws is so that there can be someone’s kitchen you won’t eat in. In Islam, the Quran makes demands of Muslims, but the demands are always tempered with,

“Try your best to do this and if you can’t quite get it, that’s good enough, too. Allah appreciates your intention.”

I like the wiggle room there. It is good to have buildings of the theology and the possibility of taking an incomplete.

Do you have any sacred texts or holy teachings that are telling you that yours is the one true religion?

Visotzky: Before I answer your question, and far be it from me to quote New Testament to the bishop, but I think it is the Gospel of John that says, “salvation is from the Jews.” So apparently there is more than one way, even in Christianity. What you point to there, Gene, is that all of us have difficult verses. If we choose to compare our best with your worst, that is not going to work well. It is easy to do, but it is really unfair. Let’s take our best and your best. Does the Torah have difficult verses? Absolutely. Does the Levitic tradition have difficult verses that are offensive to non-Jews? Absolutely. Do we have to raise them up and embrace them and make them our daily life? Absolutely not.

Do you have extremist practitioners of Judaism?

Visotzky: There are many different Jewish communities; there is not one unified Jewish community any more than there is unified Christianity, Islam, et cetera. I am certain because they have told me very clearly that there are Jews out there who think I am an extremist. I am an extremist because I am sitting and talking with an Episcopal bishop. That’s extreme, and that’s dangerous. I am an extremist because I advocated for the ordination of women as rabbis. I am an extremist because I advocated for the ordination of gays in my seminary. I am reluctantly non-Israel, and people say all kinds of nasty things about me for that. But I am going to do what I think is right and what God demands of me. So it is easy for me to label people I disagree with as extremists, and one of the great things about Judaism is baked into the cake— a kosher cake. There is this notion that we disagree, that there is disagreement and that “these and those” are both the word of the living God. We can disagree. When we disagree, even about the most extreme things, we do it for the sake of heaven. The moment it stops being for the sake of heaven, that is hatred, and hatred is what brought the destruction of the temple.

It’s not supposed to be easy to play Beethoven’s piano. A reputable Beethoven scholar had to negotiate for eight months with the piano’s owner —  the Hungarian National Museum — just to sound a few notes on it.  Pianist Shai Wosner played it when he was 12.

“Since my mother happens to be fluent in Hungarian and a good Jewish mother, she thought, you know, it doesn’t hurt to ask — and so she just did,” Wosner said. “And the museum attendant, this elderly lady, had this look to her like, ‘What do I care?’ So she opens this encasement that the piano was in and let me play some of Beethoven’s First Sonata.”

At 8:15 p.m. Saturday, July 21, in the Amphitheater, 30 years after playing Beethoven’s piano, Wosner will open this week’s Beethoven Festival playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, op. 15, with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Rossen Milanov. After intermission, the orchestra will also perform Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major, op. 36.

This will be the first time Chautauqua Institution has done a festival of this sort in recent years, said Deborah Sunya Moore, vice president
of performing and visual arts. The three Beethoven Festival concerts, she said, will be a chance for both orchestra and audience to get the full Beethoven experience — something Milanov thinks is vitally important.

Beethoven, Milanov said, is a member of a small group of composers whose music speaks so deeply to the human condition that time has not rendered it outdated. These composers — Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and a few others — explored problems endemic to the human condition that every new generation must address.

But it’s not just the philosophical aspect of his music that sets Beethoven apart, Milanov said. It’s also the craft itself.

“It’s absolutely fascinating how the emotional, philosophical, eternal message of the music is there,” he said. “But if you decide to go inside the music and see how it’s put together, you can see how both the emotional and the rational approach in his music are working so much hand in hand, which is, I think, what probably makes him the greatest.”

For Wosner, too, it’s the music itself that makes Beethoven worthy of such high praise. If the music wasn’t so compelling on its own, he said, listeners probably wouldn’t care about the context or the composer’s life as much.

“The vast majority of his pieces are so sincere and always in search of this ultimate musical truth. You just feel that every note is set in stone, and it just has to be that way. You believe every note that he writes. It’s the most amazing thing.”

–Shai Wosner, Pianist 

The pieces on Saturday night’s program are both from Beethoven’s younger days as a composer, often referred to as the early period. Both Wosner and Milanov see these works as foreshadowing the masterpieces that Beethoven had yet to write.

For example, Wosner said, in Piano Concerto No. 1, the slow movement communicates a maturity rare for young composers, hinting at some of the profound slow movements that Beethoven produced later on.

According to Milanov, Symphony No. 2 accomplishes a similar foreshadowing. The third movement is the first time Beethoven uses a scherzo, a jocular dance, in a symphony. It includes a wild fourth movement finale, and, like Piano Concerto No. 1, has a profound slow movement. All of those seeds would eventually grow into trademarks of Beethoven’s music, Milanov said, and so he thinks it’s important that music from the early period gets played.

“I always thought that at least here, Beethoven should not be represented only by his three most popular symphonies, which would be the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth, which people program more than anything else,” he said.

Wosner shares that sentiment. In his youth, the pianist mostly saw Beethoven as the “irascible” composer, full of passion and defiance — the side Beethoven portrayed in his most popular works. As the pianist grew older and studied more of Beethoven’s music, he realized that, statistically, most of the composer’s music portrays a more gentle, humorous, and optimistic man.

“His persona is not necessarily so much about defying fate, though the life story and the deafness may lead you to think that’s what he’s all about,” Wosner said. “Even more predominant than that is a sort of constant search for truth. And of course you could describe that as a struggle, too, but I see it as a broader thing. He’s always seeking to boil things down to this indivisible atom of music that is eternally true.”

What is a Theology of Resistance? According to the Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews, it is “a prophetic, multi-faith discourse and is intended to ignite conversations and spark faith leaders to fight injustice and dehumanization and cultivate Beloved Community.”

Mathews, an ordained American Baptist minister and a leading pastor in the multifaith movement for justice, will be the chaplain for Week Five at Chautauqua.

“My plan is to spend the week taking folks through the arc of the Theology of Resistance model: encounter, disrupt, reimagine, act,” he said.

He will preach at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday, July 22, ecumenical morning worship service in the Amphitheater. His sermon title will be “Resistance & Hope: The Spiritual Project of Organizing.” He will share his faith journey at Vespers 5 p.m. Sunday, July 22, in the Hall of Philosophy.

He will continue his sermon series at the 9:15 a.m. morning worship services in the Amphitheater. His sermon titles include “Hidden Figures: Women of the Resistance,” “The First Revolution: Encountering God, Self and the Other,” “Saying Yes by Saying No: The Healing Power of Disruption,” “Reimagination: Seeing Now What We Would Not See Before” and “Go Outside: That’s Where the Action Is.”

Mathews brings over 30 years of experience as a senior pastor, grassroots leader, psalmist and community organizer to his work as the director of clergy organizing for Faith in Action (formerly PICO National Network).

Since 2014, his leadership has centered on the Theology of Resistance, developed in the aftermath of the killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“A question posed to a caucus of PICO religious leaders provided the spark for what we have been calling a Theology of Resistance (TOR): Are you a chaplain to the Empire or a prophet of the Resistance?” he wrote in Trouble the Water: A Christian Resource for the Work of Racial Justice. “This provocative interrogation helped to initiate a national conversation about what informs our commitment to struggle together against injustice and dehumanization.”

Theology of Resistance considers three narratives: the story of self, the story of us and the story of now. These stories provide a framework for “a theo-ethical conversation that responds to the question, what does my faith teach me about resisting the logic and impulse of Empire in my self, in my relationships, (and) within the systems and structures that shape public life and within the broader culture?” he wrote.

Mathews engages these conversations as the host of the “Prophetic Resistance” podcast.

Mathews is president of the board of directors for Alliance of Baptists, a progressive Baptist movement for justice and healing. The founding convener of the Racial Justice and Multiculturalism Community of the Alliance of Baptists, Mathews earned a bachelor of arts degree in social sciences and communications from the University of Southern California and a master of divinity degree from the American Baptist Seminary of the West and the Graduate Theological Union.

For many, midlife is synonymous with crisis, and crises are to be avoided or prepared for with trepidation.

For others, midlife represents a significant turning point. It’s a reminder that lifespans aren’t infinite and that there may be no time like the present to figure out what they should do with their lives if they don’t already know.

Nearly 15 years ago, when Mary Jo – M.J. –Marggraff was 45, she began chasing her childhood dreams and rocketing them into outer space in ways she could never have conceived of when she was young.

“I’ve done some really fun, cool stuff,” Marggraff said. “When I went down to Hollywood (for the Hallmark morning show) and I took my Uber to the gate, I just thought, ‘OMG, how did I get here?’ ”

Now a pilot and project leader of experiments on the International Space Station, Marggraff will fill everyone in at 2 p.m. Saturday, July 21, in the Hall of Philosophy during the Contemporary Issues Forum when she gives a talk with the same title as her book, “Finding the Wow: How Dreams Take Flight at Midlife.”

Marggraff said that when she was a child, she left all of her cousins behind and moved with her family from Maryland to California, where she lived a middle-class suburban life. What she didn’t leave behind were her dreams.

“My room was filled with stars and planets and aircrafts,” Marggraff said. “This was the heart of a young child, but it didn’t intersect with the heart of my parents.”

Nobody in her family was the least bit comfortable with air flight. She said that her parents believed that if a person was smart, they took a train. The couple of times she flew as a child, she reveled in walking up and down the aisles, taking individually- wrapped soap as souvenirs and talking to the airline attendants (“stewardesses”) and the pilots.

Marggraff said her face was glued to the television screen as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite covered the extraordinary Apollo 11 spaceflight live. On July 21, 1969 – exactly 49 years before her talk for the Chautauqua Women’s Club – she watched as astronauts Neil Armstrong (mission commander) and Buzz Aldrin (pilot) became the first people to walk on the moon.

Other challenges she confronted were that she “didn’t know a female pilot,” and that during her undergraduate years at the University of California, Santa Barbara — where she majored in developmental psychology — she couldn’t afford flying lessons.

“I hung around with the scientists, facilitating their ideas,” Marggraff said. “I think that’s where my creativity came out.”

Intrigued by the business aspect of the educational world, she earned a master of science in education at Indiana University Bloomington in 1980.

With her unique background, Marggraff landed a job working for the University of California, in her “L.L. Bean look,” to “reimagine the UC campus at Santa Cruz.”

“UC, Santa Cruz was a very new campus,” she said. “It was out of step with where the traditional campus wanted to go. It was the hippie generation but with students with environmental and tech interests.”

Marggraff said that the dean of admissions was a great marketer.

“He said to his team, ‘Here’s what we need to do to get to this number (of students).’ He had everyone get up to speak,” Marggraff said. “He told me to get my hand out of my pocket. He shaped us up and had us help faculty learn how to be versatile. UCSC was strong in tech and the humanities.”

After a few years, Marggraff said she went “over the hill” to Cupertino to work for six years as a training manager at Hewlett-Packard. There she measured change in workplace performance, improved manufacturing processes, managed external training consultants and led training programs for management teams that focused on business mission, strategies for success and company culture.

She moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1991 with her husband Jim Marggraff, an MIT grad, serial entrepreneur, and patented inventor who co-founded StrataCom in 1986, which Cisco purchased for $4.5 billion a decade later (according to The Rotarian magazine).

At Genetics Institute, a biotech research and development firm in Cambridge, she managed employee, management and leadership training.

“It got gobbled up by the pharmaceuticals, as did other small genetics companies,” Marggraff said. “During that time, I’m having babies, and they let me go part-time, which was unheard of then.”

After five years at Genetics, however, Marggraff said she made another cross-country move.

“Jim had an opportunity — he’s an East Coaster — and we moved to the East Bay. He had to practically peel my fingers off the doorknob,” she said. “I loved Concord, and I didn’t want to move.”

Her husband’s opportunity would lead to the founding of LeapFrog — the second of a total of six companies he has founded, co-founded and/or led to date — and the invention of the LeapPad Learning System of interactive talking books for children.

“We like to say we left as two for the East Coast and came back as four,” Marggraff said. “When we moved, the kids were 4 and 6.”

After returning to California in 1996 and building a house, she asked herself: “What do I do? I can do the PTA, but I’m not really a PTA person. What I want to do is so unusual. People are saying, ‘You’re crazy.’ If I’m an outlier, what do their lives look like?”

Marggraff said that for a couple of years, she was a full-time stay-at-home mom. She did the PTA, cookie making, and school drop-offs and pick-ups. She said she liked to “demo projects.”

“The coup de gras was losing my planner,” Marggraff said. “It was a paper planner, but (change) had been coming.”

Saturday afternoon, she will share her story of turning her childhood dream of flying airplanes into a reality and becoming both a ground and flight instructor.

Moreover, Marggraff will talk about reawakening her interest in space. She has served as a mission support rep and space agent for Richard Branson’s commercial space line Virgin Galactic, led the team of STEM students that designed StarCatcher (a game for astronauts to 3D print and play on the International Space Station), founded GravityGames, which “inspires students for space,” co-founded Sunspot and wrote an inspirational memoir.

In addition, she may well share some of the findings from her research on “isolation that astronauts experience during long space flights.” Currently, Marggraff is a doctoral student at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

Gorbachev, Lenin, Stalin and Putin went beyond imagining the godless world John Lennon sang about — they built it.

At 2 p.m. Thursday, July 19, in the Hall of Philosophy, Ori Z. Soltes, a professor at Georgetown University, former director and curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum and lifelong scholar, discussed how Russia’s most memorable leaders of the past 75 years have shaped religion in his lecture, “The New and Old Russia: Between Millennia: Religion from Gorbachev to Putin,” as the last of Week Four’s interfaith theme, “Russia and Its Soul.”

Soltes was in Kiev when the Russian government officially returned control of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra monastery to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988.

“This was a very important moment and obviously symbolized the (need) to reopen the open acknowledgment of the importance (of Russia’s religion),” Soltes said.

As conversations about religion made a transition, so did government leadership. Three years after Soltes’ trip, Boris Yeltsin replaced Mikhail Gorbachev and became president in Russia’s first direct election.

Throughout the 1990s, Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim-occupied Russian republic in the North Caucasus, was a tipping point in Moscow conflicts.

“The Chechens were feeling pressed upon by the Russians, and the Russians were feeling pressed upon by the Chechens,” Soltes said.

In 1999, Russia went to war after Shamil Basayev, a Chechen Islamist and rival of secular leadership, led an invasion of Dagestan. Vladimir Putin took the lead in ending the spread of the insurgency to neighboring republics by starting a campaign to defeat the rebels.

That same year, Boris Yeltsin resigned as president, and Putin won the following election.

“(Putin) won rather quick popularity for suppressing the Chechen insurgency, although erratic violence continued for sometime thereafter,” Soltes said.

To contextualize this time period, Soltes quoted a 1993 article from The New York Times titled “Religion Returns to Russia, with a Vengeance.”

“While tradition put the Orthodox at an advantage, the established Church’s long coexistence with the Soviet state left it tainted,” he read. “All priests were carefully screened by the state, and many bishops and priests are still hounded by accusations of collaborating with the K.G.B.”

Soltes went on to explain how the article said even though the Russian Orthodox Church finally won freedom from state control, it still finds itself “bowed under the baggage of its past” in present day.

Soltes also referenced a section in the Times’ article about an event at the Lokomotiv Stadium in Moscow. In 1993, more than 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses gathered and stood and applauded for more than an hour as 2,000 neophytes took turns being baptized. In 2017, Putin classified Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organization.”

“Clearly, that must have been in response to what this article said back in 1993,” Soltes said. “The Church is running to the state to protect us from the invasion of all of these improper, incorrect, inaccurate Christian denominations and the like.”

Soltes believes Putin’s decision to outlaw Jehovah’s Witnesses makes it clear that throughout human history, “religion has never, ever, ever been disconnected from politics.”

“The Pharaoh rules because you believe if you are part of his constituency that he is at least ruling with the dignity of the gods, or at most, the god itself incarnated,” Soltes said. “Whether it is the Pharaoh, those desperate monarchs or whether it is the occasional American presidential candidate, religion and politics have always been interwoven.”

Soltes saw the intersection of religion and politics in the streets of Kiev in 1988 during a Pamyat rally. Pamyat is is an anti-Semitic organization that identifies itself as the “People’s National- patriotic Orthodox Christian movement,” Soltes said.

“I do not mean that the Church has associated itself with right-wing nationalism,” Soltes said. “I think that more often than not, the right-wing Russian nationalists associate themselves with the Church, (believing that) to be Russian is to be Russian Orthodox, and that’s how you have to be. There are not two ways about it.”

Soltes believes the “politics over religion” mentality is why some people might long for the return of the Soviet Union.

“We want to be dominant; we want not to be respected as much as feared,” he said. “And that is one of the things the young people who were mentioned this morning (at the 10:45 a.m. lecture) like about Putin — that he has made (Russia) feared again. A disturbing thought, at least in my mind.”

Soltes compared Putin to a leader of a cult, and said that there is something mystical to him about political figures who are seen in the public eye as someone “larger than life.”

“By mystical, I mean they’re perceived to have some more of a connection to something beyond them, and I think Putin has captured some of the imagination of his population with respect to that,” he said.

However, Soltes said, mysticism and masculinity go hand in hand for Putin because he is admired for “his macho as well.”

The same fear was directed toward Joseph Stalin. Soltes said even though Stalin murdered 30 million of his own people, he is still rising in popularity in present day as a symbol of another era when Russians were feared.

Soltes believes, in terms of fear, there is both a conscious and unconscious association between Putin and Stalin. And the comparisons do not end there. Although the two figures do not share the same name, Putin does share the same title “apropos of Jesus,” just like Vladimir Sviatoslavich, who brought Christianity to the Kievan Rus’, and Lenin, who created the Soviet Union.

“What a convenience,” Soltes said. “We’ve got the three Vlads, another trinity.”

Another similarity among these Russian leaders is the shifting support of religion.

Construction and restoration of Orthodox churches started in the 1990s and has continued under Putin’s leadership, as has the teaching of religion in schools. In January, Putin announced his initiative to incorporate Islam’s beliefs and language in Russian schools’ curriculums. However, in July, he approved a package of anti-terrorism laws that sent the opposite message. These laws forbid sharing faith in homes, online or anywhere other than recognized church buildings.

To Soltes, a symbol of these leaders’ fluctuating religious viewpoints is St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The cathedral was built under Nicholas I, completed under Alexander II and was designed to make a statement that St. Petersburg was the real capital of Russia, not Moscow.

It operated as a church until 1931, the same year Stalin blew up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Although Stalin did not blow up St. Isaac’s, he did convert it into a museum of religious history. However, at the end of the Soviet period, it was decided that the cathedral needed to be reverted back to an active church. It took until 2017 for the cathedral to be revived, and while there is currently an active chapel inside, part of the building still functions a museum.

“Of course, you pay to go in the museum,” Soltes said. “So, we are not stupid, are we? It is a source of income; why would we give that up just for faith?”

Soltes finished his lecture by reading a poem by Joseph Brodsky, a 20th-century poet who shifted from writing poetry in Russian to writing in English. The poem, “Elegy,” depicts the battle of spirituality in the heart and soul, Soltes said.

“ … now the place is abuzz with trading / in your ankles remnants, bronzes / of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises, / rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason, / laundered banners with imprints of the many / who since have risen,” Soltes read. “At sunrise, when nobody stares at one’s face, I often, set out on foot to a monument cast in molten / lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth ‘commander in chief.’ / But it reads ‘in grief,’ or ‘in brief,’ / or ‘in going under.’ ”

Straight No Chaser has crafted an exclusive set of songs for the audience at Chautauqua, also known as the group’s most energetic crowd.

The group is a 10-member, all-male a capella group from Indiana University, founded in 1996 and signed to Atlantic Records. Straight No Chaser won the Contemporary A cappella Recording Award for best holiday album (Holiday Spirits) in 2009.

Back at the Institution after two years, the group is excited to see the new Amphitheater. They will perform at 8:15 p.m. Friday, July 20, in the Amp.

“I haven’t seen the new theater, and I can’t wait to see all the people packed in there,” said Charlie Mechling, a singer in Straight No Chaser.

Seven years after the group’s first visit to the Institution, Mechling remembers being shocked about how many people came to that first show. He called it a “crazy experience.”

The group previously performed at Chautauqua in 2016, 2013, 2012 and 2011. Mechling said Chautauqua is the group’s ideal demographic, being both multigenerational and wellversed in arts.

“(The crowd) works perfect for our shows because they are so diverse,” Mechling said. “Looking into the crowd and seeing all age groups is a great sight, and we have something for all of them.”

Straight No Chaser has an album prepared to come out in the fall. The group’s last three albums are The Art of A Cappella (2016), The New Old Fashioned (2015) and Under the Influence (2013).

“We plan to give Chautauqua a taste of a few songs off our new album,” Mechling said.

Mechling is looking forward to seeing the crowd’s reaction to the new songs and hopes the show gets audience members on their feet.

“Last time I was here, the crowd was very energetic and rowdy,” Mechling said.

The group also has some old songs its members performed previously at the Institution, and they plan to bring them back.

“We have some oldies, but goodies, that we will be singing,” Mechling said. “But we have some different songs that we will also be doing.”

Mechling expects this year’s reactions from the crowd to outdo those from previous years.

“The crowds last time we were here, it was wild,” Mechling said. “I never heard a crowd stomping like that. The crowd was stomping endlessly and was lined around the fence.”

What do John F. Kennedy’s assassination, J. Edgar Hoover and the AIDS epidemic have in common? They were all influenced by Russian “active measures,” Alina Polyakova said at Thursday’s, July 19, 10:45 a.m. morning lecture in the Amphitheater.

Her lecture offered a topical approach to Week Four’s theme, “Russia and the West.”

“What a fantastic week to be talking about Russia,” she said. “I don’t think it could have been timed any better by Chautauqua Institution. I started to think the Institution actually knew something that none of us knew, but I swear to you, there was not collusion.”

Polyakova is the David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. She is also the author of The Dark Side of European Integration: Social Foundations and Cultural Determinants of the Rise of Radical Right Movements in Contemporary Europe and serves as a term member on Council on Foreign Relations.

During her graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, Polyakova studied far-right populism and nationalism in European countries. Her research led her to connect the dots between Italy’s right-wing Northern League, France’s National Front and Germany’s Left Party: they were all in contact with Russia.

This led her down a rabbit hole of Russian tactics, dubbed “active measures,” used to “influence the course of narratives around global events.” In the United States, these measures trace back to the 1950s.

“At that time, the KGB, the Russian intelligence services, developed a toolkit of active measures to try to undermine Western societies, discredit political leaders and also delegitimize Western values aboard,” Polyakova said.

The KGB created a subset charged with this task called “Service A,” she said.

“Service A was charged with orchestrating mostly nonviolent measures to destabilize the United States, specifically, and also to undermine U.S. public diplomacy and U.S. soft power aboard,” she said. “It would spread misinformation around the world, it would forge documents, and then it would attempt to undermine U.S. power using these techniques.”

Polyakova provided a number of colorful examples to illustrate this point; Service A tried to pin JFK’s assassination on the U.S. government, specifically that Lee Harvey Oswald was in cahoots with the CIA and FBI; it sent homophobic letters to United States newspapers claiming that J. Edgar Hoover was gay and a cross-dresser; and in the 1980s, it attempted to blame the AIDs epidemic on the United States government.

Service A escalated to more violent attacks in the 1960s when it infiltrated an activist group and set bombs off in predominantly black neighborhoods of New York City and attempted to blame the explosions on the Jewish Defense League.

“So we see this attempt to pit different parts of civilian society against each other,” Polyakova said. “And yes, in the Soviet era, the KGB also intervened in the U.S. elections.”

In 1976, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, known for his outspoken distaste for the Soviet Union, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Soviet Union feared his potential success, so Service A forged FBI documents claiming Jackson was a “closeted homosexual” and sent them to journalists and media outlets. Jackson did not receive the nomination.

Active measures continued in the 1980s and 1990s, but died off after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“After (President Vladimir Putin) came into power in 2000, active measures have once again become a favorite tool of Russian influence,” Polyakova said. “That’s largely because Putin’s rise to power has been defined, in hindsight, by the merger of the Russian intelligence agencies … with the Russian state.”

The merger of the Kremlin and Russian intelligence agencies, Polyakova said, would be like if the United States merged the FBI and CIA with the executive branch — where there was no separation between “wet operations” and statehood.

“This is the situation we have in Russia today,” she said. “But I think the bigger question is if all of these activities have been ongoing for decades throughout the 20th century, all throughout the Cold War, why have we now, today, been taken by surprise by Russian meddling in U.S. elections in 2016, but also in the majority of European elections since then?”

Polyakova said advancing technology, evolving societies and new perceived threats have contributed to this “surprise.” After 9/11, the United States switched from fearing Russia to fearing global terrorism. But while the United States forgot about Russia, Russia did not forget about it, she said.

“The world today is not black and white — the world today is gray,” she said.

And with these changes, Russian active measures have adapted. Polyakova referenced the invasion of Ukraine as an example:

In 2013, then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych backed out of a deal with the EU to bring Ukraine culturally closer to the West, and accepted a deal with Russia instead. Angered by this deal, Ukrainians protested, and Yanukovych eventually fled to Russia. Russia then invaded a weakened Ukraine.

After the invasion, Russian media broadcast an interview with a woman claiming to be a Ukrainian refugee who said she watched a mother and son get beaten and crucified during a siege by Ukrainian forces to take back the Russian- controlled East.

However, as this story spread around the world, news outlets quickly picked up on discrepancies in the woman’s story — the square in which she claimed the murders happened did not exist, nor were there other eyewitnesses, and the woman appeared in other broadcasts claiming to be someone else with another outrageous story.

Despite the inevitable debunking of this ruse, Polyakova said, the story “propped up Russia’s view that Ukraine was a fascist coup.”

“These stories that had proven to be false after a certain time were not just contained to Russian- speaking space,” Polyakova said. “They were seeping into how Americans or English or German journalists were writing about what was happening in Ukraine at that time.”

Polyakova fast-forwarded to another case that illustrates how Russia’s active measures have evolved for the 21st century:

In 2016, a 13-year-old Russian-German girl went missing. After she didn’t come home from school that day, her parents called the German police. Russian journalists quickly picked up on the story; Russia’s main channel began broadcasting that the girl was kidnapped and raped by Syrian refugees.

Eventually, the German police found the girl, who had not been kidnapped and had spent the night at her boyfriend’s house.

“What we saw in this case was evidence, really for the first time in a Western European country, of how several different elements of Russian influence work together in an orchestrated way,” Polyakova said. “First, a journalist from a Russian television station picked up the case and brought it to the main news in Russia.”

Then, Russian-operated stations broadcast the case to its affiliate stations in Germany, and the story caught fire on social media through right-wing Nazi groups pushing their anti-immigration agenda; Russian and German syndicates covered demonstrations forming across Germany.

“Lastly, the cherry on top was that the Russian foreign minister himself, Sergey Lavrov, made public comments about his concerns about the ability of the German police and legal system to take such cases seriously because of political correctness and to protect Russians abroad,” she said.

This led Polyakova to the most contemporary example of Russian active measures — the alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

“We know from congressional testimony by Facebook and other social media companies that the Russian government set up false Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts and Instagram accounts,” she said, “that the Russian government funded what it called ‘The Internet Research Agency’ in St. Petersburg, also known as ‘The Troll Farm.’ ”

“The Troll Farm” followed similar strategies conducted by Service A of the KGB, “once carried out in real life, but now in the digital domain,” Polyakova said. It set out to spread anger around “hot-button issues,” like race, immigration and gun rights. It pitted groups against each other, operating fake Black Lives Matter accounts while simultaneously fueling nationalistic movements.

“So the U.S. has been the latest experiment in Russia’s bigger test of these new digital disinformation toolkits,” she said. “And what we’ve seen emerge is this new ecosystem of disinformation, which unlike its predecessor, the Cold War, is much more cost-effective with lots of room for error. Its ambiguity is a great asset.”

The tools in Russia’s toolkit are toying with humans’ natural indulgence in “guilty pleasures,” Polyakova said.

“We as individuals, as human beings, cannot look away from trainwrecks — we like looking at information that’s illicit, that’s dirty, maybe a little sexy, that we’re not supposed to be looking at,” she said “And this is exactly what these tools are playing with.”

Recent hammers, screwdrivers and hacksaws in the Kremlin’s toolkit have been cyberattacks.

Russia struck Ukraine with a “ransomware” attack — an attack that threatens to delete data if a monetary amount is not surrendered to the perpetrator. Similar malware has been detected in critical United States infrastructures, according to Polyakova, including nuclear power plants, water treatment facilities and electrical grids.

“Think about what might happen if on election day there is a massive blackout — you don’t need to go that far,” she said. “Think what would happen if on election day, a couple hundred people show up to vote, and their names aren’t in the registry because those logs have been deleted. What will that mean, not really for the results of the election, but for the trust in the electoral process?”

But cyberattacks aren’t the only Russian active measure the United States should be wary of, Polyakova said.

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can create increasingly humanlike bots and imitate celebrities, even presidents, which Polyakova demonstrated with a video of a photorealistic artificial intelligence representation of former President Barack Obama that can be programmed to say anything.

Putin has said that whoever rules AI “will become the ruler of the world.” However, Polyakova does not think that will be Russia; instead, she thinks China will become a leader because of the immense data it collects on its people, which is crucial to the success of AI.

Putin is charged with rebuilding Russia as a superpower, per his social contract with the Russian people. They gave up their political rights and prosperity, but Russia will once again become a global player, whether it be through AI or through the annexation of Crimea, Polyakova said.

“In a way, what Russia is trying to do, what the Kremlin is trying to do, what Putin is trying to do, is balance out what is a very weak hand in the global economy, in the global geopolitical environment Russia has, by investing in these nonkinetic, asymmetric tools of influence,” she said. “They cannot compete in a real way with the United States or Europe on the economic front. …

“So chaos is cheap and Russia is very poor.”

After the conclusion of Polyakova’s lecture and a roaring applause from the audience, Dave Griffith, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, opened the Q-and-A by asking how technology, specifically technology used for fakery, will affect education.

“Already I think AI and machine learning are the most popular majors at MIT and CalTech,” Polyakova said. “So students, young people, understand this is the future and they want to have success in the skills they’ll have to have. This is happening less so in Europe; I think the United States will continue to lead in the tech center for those reasons.”

Polyakova also stressed the importance of civic education to better equip young people to navigate disinformation and “fake news.”

Griffith then asked a question from Twitter: Does the United States engage in active measures?

“The United States has made some terrible mistakes in its foreign policy — there’s no question about that — but we have a very different system here,” Polyakova said “… It’s because we have our democratic process here, wherethe independent media acts as a check on our government, where people are free to demonstrate or protest when they don’t agree with government actions … and eventually the government is held accountable.”

To close the morning, Griffith asked, “What gives you hope?”

“I actually have a lot of hope in younger people, not because I think young people are innately democratically minded … but because I think these young people grew up embedded in this new ambiguous digital environment and they are very skeptical,” Polyakova said “… But this is not a 20-minute problem, this is a 20-year problem that faces us. … I am hopeful, but what I like to do is sound the alarm.”

In 2013, the Russian government imposed an anti-gay propaganda law in an effort to reinforce traditional family values. The law forced many LGBTQ people, like journalist and author Masha Gessen, to flee the country with their families.

“(Gessen) is powerful in the perspective on what freedom is and how freedom can be endangered,” said Barbara Britton, member of Chautauqua’s LGBTQ and Friends Community. “It really is a cautionary tale for what we’re going through in our society right now.”

At 10:45 a.m. Friday, July 20, in the Amphitheater, Chautauquans will hear Gessen’s story thanks to the sponsorship of LGBTQ and Friends Community.

LGBTQ and Friends’ mission statement says it strives to “expand diversity within the greater Chautauqua community.” The group holds two weekly events: a meet and greet at 6 p.m. on Sundays on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall and a Brown Bag at 12:15 p.m. on Tuesdays in the Garden Room of Alumni Hall.

The group has also sponsored lectures, such as the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson’s talk last season in the Hall of Philosophy. In addition to sponsoring Gessen’s lecture this season, the LGBTQ and Friends Community was also involved in a weeklong dialogue on sexual orientation, gender and identity throughout Week Three in the Hall of Philosophy, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Chautauqua.

After reading Gessen’s book The Future is History, Britton knew that the author would be an influential voice to include in this season’s programming.

Gessen was a journalist in Russia for 20 years, writing about the state of the country, LGBTQ rights, medical genetics and various other topics. Gessen is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker and contributes to other publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

After the Russian Duma introduced, and would later pass, the anti-gay propaganda law five years ago, Gessen’s oldest adopted child was sent to the United States in fear of the government annulling the his adoption.

One reason the LGBTQ and Friends Community decided to underwrite Gessen’s lecture was because of Gessen’s powerful story, yet the group also wanted to do its part in supporting Chautauqua Institution.

“As a community, we want to be a supporter of Chautauqua and give back,” said Karen James, member of the LGBTQ and Friends Community. “(We’re) willing to sponsor speakers (and) willing to make that financial commitment.”

Catie Miller, member of the LGBTQ and Friends Community, said that sponsoring people to come and speak at Chautauqua is of “great educational value,” and the community benefits from being exposed to different perspectives.

Specifically, Britton said she hopes community members will take away from Gessen’s lecture the importance of “not losing your freedoms” because of propaganda. She and other members of LGBTQ and Friends hope that people will gain a better understanding of the struggles marginalized people are facing in their communities.

For more information on program underwriting opportunities, contact Karen Blozie, senior major gifts officer at the Chautauqua Foundation, at 716-357-6244 or kblozie@chq.org.

Joseph Stalin was not shaped by the Russian Revolution. He was one of its architects — a crude Georgian national who rose up the ranks of a Russian political movement to bring down the Romanov dynasty, taking all of its citizens down with them.

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 18, in the Hall of Philosophy, Ori Z. Soltes, a professor at Georgetown University, former director and curator of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum and lifelong scholar, gave his lecture, “God within the Godless Soviet Union: Majorities and Minorities,” as part of Week Four’s interfaith theme, “Russia and Its Soul.”

“Our Lady of Kazan,” also called “Mother-of-God of Kazan,” was one of the most revered icons within the Russian Orthodox Church, representing the Virgin Mary as the protector of the city of Kazan and a guardian of all of Russia.

There were multiple copies of “Our Lady of Kazan.” The original icon disappeared from Constantinople in 1438 and miraculously appeared in the 1550s. After that, the icon was stored in Kazan until it disappeared again in 1904.

“This explains why and how the Russians lost the Russo-Japanese War. ‘The Lady of Kazan’ was not there to protect the nation,” Soltes said.

To prevent a second defeat, Stalin ordered the icon to be attached to a plane to protect the city during the Battle of Moscow in 1941. Soltes said this “offers a paradox to Stalin” because he had previously blown up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Stalin had intended to use the land to build a palace for the supreme Soviets to meet, but this never happened and the site remained fallow.

During the same time period, Stalin decided that only “Soviet socialist realism” could appear in art, music and literature. Soviet composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev felt the pressure to scale back their work to align with Stalin’s requests.

“Within the musical world of the Soviet Union under Stalin, you have a two-world condition,” Soltes said. “The stuff (the composers) want to write that really feeds their own souls is not the stuff that they could have performed.”

Where literature was concerned, Soltes said, it was far more difficult for writers to incorporate their feelings toward Stalin and Russia because written language is more concrete than music, which is more open to interpretation. Because of this, writers were the most prominent group of people who perished under Stalin’s rule.

“There were some who managed to survive, (without whom) the Russians could not have survived,” Soltes said.

One poet in particular was Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova’s work flourished from the 1890s to the 1930s when she mastered the art of symbolism that “reacted against the realist literature that proceeded.”

“(Symbolism) meant that, sometimes, what I am writing has a meaning beneath the surface that only those really attuned to it can discern,” Soltes said.

Akhmatova became part of a symbolist poetry group called “acmeist,” whose members believed they were the “spiritual height of things.” Soltes said this group was important because its works caused the direction of spiritual writing to move away from traditional religious beliefs.

“I am not talking about Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim or Catholic,” he said. “I am talking about something which encompasses all of that and transcends all of that.”

In terms of visual art, artists from all over the country came together to create an underground world that was used to practice freedom of expression.

One team of young artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, created a form of subversive art that countered socialist realism.

“They take Soviet socialist realism, and they turn it on its head,” he said.

Another visual artist was Grisha Bruskin. Bruskin was Jewish and learned Hebrew from his father, although the teaching of that language was not sanctioned in Russia at the time. The background of Bruskin’s paintings were filled with Hebrew writing. Sometimes it was just a random combination of letters, but other times entire phrases or tracts could be interpreted.

Soltes said it was not that Jewish people like Bruskin had a different religion from other Russians, but a different nationality.

“The perspective of the Soviet Union of classification, with respect to Jews, is it’s a nation,” Soltes said. “(However,) that does not mean that you don’t make use of the old religious prejudices when you need them in order to suppress that particular group.”

According to Soltes, this nationality concept exhibits a “three-world condition.” Artists who produced their art for public consumption was one world, art produced to express one’s soul was the second and the the third was the question of to what extent can or should one express their nationality in their work, something Bruskin mastered by incorporating the Hebrew language.

During this period in Russian history, the population’s smallest minorities were Jews and Muslims.

In the 1700s, Poland was divided into sub-countries three different times. The third Polish division took place under the rule of Catherine the Great, empress of Russia.

“She suddenly found herself, by acquiring a piece of Poland, acquiring a substantial amount of Jews that she did not want,” Soltes said.

Catherine’s response was the Pale of Settlement, a designated territory within Russia where Jewish people were required to live, therefore restricting their rights.

Alexander II, the next emperor of Russia, tried to lift the settlement but was assassinated in 1881 before he could sign the necessary documents. After his assassination, Alexander III became emperor and enacted the May Laws, which Soltes said only further restricted Jewish rights with rules that prohibited them from living outside of larger cities and towns, owning or managing real estate, leasing land and operating their businesses on Sundays or other Christian holidays.

The May Laws were intended to be temporary restrictions, but were not lifted for 13 years until the start of the first Russian revolution in 1905. Soltes said the Jewish people identified strongly with the concept of a revolution.

“The idea that the problems of society are a function of uneven finances, if we can level that playing field then all the other kind of religious, racial and ethnic prejudices will go away, would — needless to say — appeal to the Russian Jews,” Soltes said.

In 1917, Vladimir Lenin, a Russian communist revolutionary, became Soviet Russia’s head of government. In 1922, when the revolution ended, Lenin decreed that the Jewish people’s official language in the new Soviet state would be Yiddish, as opposed to Russian.

“He thinks of the Jews as a national group more than as a religious group,” Soltes said. “A symptom of that mentality is that he starts to plan for a Jewish Autonomous Oblast.”

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was a federal entity of Russia in the far east that was created to be the new area in which Russian Jews would reside.

In 1924, Lenin died and Stalin continued planning the JAO. In the spring of 1928, Soltes said 654 Jews arrived to begin the new settlement.

“The summer was filled with torrential rains. It was a mess,” Soltes said. “By October, more than half of (the Jews) had left.”

In 1930, the capital of the JAO, Birobidzhan, was completed. In that same year, a Soviet propaganda film was created in Yiddish to encourage Jewish people to come settle in the capital. However, it took over a decade before the population increased.

“By 1937, the population was rather desolated because that is when Stalin had already begun to turn a corner with respect to all kinds of things, including his attitude toward Jews,” Soltes said.

When World War II started, there was an influx of Jewish people in the JAO, a majority being refugees from Nazi Germany. The population in Birobidzhan was rising, and at its peak reached more than 30,000; however, Stalin’s relationship with the Jewish residents was “uneasy,” Soltes said.

The culmination of that uneasiness occured in 1950 with “The Doctors’ Plot.” According to Soltes, Stalin came up with the idea that all of the Jewish physicians in Moscow were engaged in a conspiracy to slay the Soviet leaders. Stalin began a series of trials to test his theory, but died in 1953 before he could finish.

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a poet, released a poem called “Babi Yar” that revolved around the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in Kiev by the Nazis in 1941 and denounced the anti-Semitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union. Readers responded to Yevtushenko’s poem with outrage because there was no monument commemorating the massacre. Although a monument was erected in 1976, the Soviet Union claimed the fascists had massacred the Kievans.

During this era, Soltes said the Soviet Union supported the state of Israel because it thought Israel was going to become a socialist state, until it aligned with the United States in 1950.

“There (were) all kinds of ins, outs, up and downs in (the Soviet Union and Israeli) relationship over the course of decades,” Soltes said.

These “ups and downs” pertained not only to Judaism, but also to Islam.

“Russia, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia have dealt with Islam in a number of ways which are different from the ways in which they have dealt with Judaism,” Soltes said.

From the time of Kazan’s conquest in 1552 to the time of Catherine the Great, there was a systematic repression of Islam in the growing Russian empire, according to Soltes. Ultimately, six out of the 15 Soviet republics were Islam.

“Now, we are not dealing with the Muslims ‘on the other side of the fence’ in a political and not just religious way, but we have actually got them within (the borders),” Soltes said.

In 1910, the first mosque was built on Soviet soil. In 1917, there were 25,000 mosques across the Soviet Union, but Stalin turned in the other direction and started closing them down. By 1970, there were only 500, according to Soltes.

The Islam republics are demolished and during World War II, Stalin deported 500,000 Russian Muslims.

In reference to the historically frosty relationship between the United States and Russia that continues to this day, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared on Monday during the Helsinki summit that the Cold War was over. Foreign policy analyst Alina Polyakova said she agrees with him — to an extent.

“There was a very clear awareness to the United States that the Soviet Union was an adversary,” Polyakova said. “Today, we don’t have that clarity anymore. Today, most American don’t know what to think of Russia. They don’t know what to think of Putin. We don’t have this easy way of dividing the world into good guys and bad guys.”

For this reason, Polyakova said that terms like “Cold War 2.0” do not accurately reflect the current state of international tension.

“We’re in a much more problematic position with Russia than we were during the Cold War,” she said. “I don’t like the label because I think it actually underestimates the way we are in a different situation today.”

At 10:45 a.m. Thursday, July 19, in the Amphitheater, Polyakova, the David M. Rubenstein Fellow for Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, will discuss the relationship between the United States and Russia, continuing Chautauqua’s weeklong look at “Russia and the West.”

Polyakova’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among other media outlets. Her 2015 book, The Dark Side of European Integration: Social Foundations and Cultural Determinants of the Rise of Radical Right Movements in Contemporary Europe, describes the nationalist backlash to Europe’s economic integration. Additionally, she is an adjunct professor of European studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Two months before Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, a young Polyakova left the country with her family as refugees for Atlanta, Georgia. After graduating from Emory University, she returned to the continent in 2004 to study in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship.

“I started to notice that there was something happening in Europe,” she said. “At the time, Europe was sort of a safe space, but even in the mid-2000s, I started noticing certain trends.”

As part of her graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, Polyakova spent two years in Ukraine studying the rise of far-right political parties and interviewing their leaders. In 2012, she said she noticed a growing bond between these parties and Russia.

“I realized that if I wanted to be part of this conversation, I needed to leave the ivory tower and work on policy,” she said.

On top of Europe’s radicalized political parties, Polyakova said she was motivated to change course by the way countries like Germany and the United Kingdom were taken in by Russia’s disinformation efforts.

“I was shocked at the amount of Russian propaganda that was being launched not just at Ukraine, but at the international community,” she said, “and to what extent the Western media was uncritical of these narratives.”

In light of the Helsinki summit, Polyakova said there is no better time for Chautauquans to talk about how the United States and Russia interact.

Going into the meeting, Polyakova said that the United States and President Donald Trump held all the cards. Nevertheless, she said Trump’s lack of a clear agenda and Putin’s diplomatic experience gave Russia a victory.

“This is not his first time at the rodeo,” Polyakova said. “At the end of the day, we don’t know what happened in the one-on-one meeting between the two leaders, but certainly from the press conference I thought it was obvious that Putin ran the show.”

During the leaders’ joint press conference, Polyakova noted, Trump blamed the United States for the decline in relations, never mentioned Russian “infractions” in Syria, Crimea and Ukraine, and sided against U.S. intelligence agencies on Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election.

“To my mind, this is an embarrassing moment for the United States to look so weak when that weakness is unwarranted,” she said.

While Democrats and Republicans alike have condemned Trump’s actions at the summit, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov described the meeting as “fabulous … better than super,” according to Russian media.

“You never hear Lavrov use that kind of language,” Polyakova said.

Polyakova said that Putin’s success at the summit gave a huge boost to his approval ratings, which last week were at their lowest point since before Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“Clearly, for the domestic audience, Putin got exactly what he wanted,” she said. “He was seen as (being) on equal footing with the United States and not only that, as actually leading the United States at some points in explaining U.S. policy toward Russia to the audience, to the journalists in the room. I think Putin used this moment to shine, and that’s exactly how he’s being portrayed in the Russian media.”

Polyakova said that while her lecture will address the summit, her remarks will touch on how the past four United States presidents worked with the Kremlin.

After being floated around as an idea for years at Chautauqua, this week’s theme was chosen more than a year ago for the 2018 season, long before the Helsinki summit was announced. Nevertheless, Polyakova said she appreciates the theme’s synergy with the current national conversation.

“I’m very glad that my trip to Chautauqua has fallen how it has,” Polyakova said. “It will be nice to escape a little bit from the madness of Washington.”

President Boris Yeltsin left the Kremlin in 1999, leaving a vacant office and a hungry Vladimir Putin. After his landslide victory for the presidency, Putin, determined to show a unified, powerful Russia, set out to travel all of the country’s 11 time zones on New Year’s Eve — a Russian Santa Claus, as Nina Khrushcheva described it.

Putin’s plan proved flawed, and he never delivered his intended hourly speeches through his vast country. Khrushcheva, however, picked up where he left off; her journey inspired her upcoming book In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones, and her 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Wednesday, July 18, in the Amphitheater.

Khrushcheva is a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York City, a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an author, as well; her second book, The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey Into the Gulag of the Russian Mind, documents the history of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, her biological great-grandfather and adoptive grandfather, and his oldest son, Leonid.

She opened her lecture with technical difficulties — the projector malfunctioned, causing Khrushcheva to gesture to a blank screen behind her. She referred to the ordeal as another hacking attempt by Putin, making light of the situation. After a few moments, the display reappeared, and she recommenced her Week Four lecture on “Russia and the West.”

“This week’s topic, as we have mentioned a couple of times already, couldn’t have come at a better time,” she said, “even if the man of the hour, Vladimir Putin himself, would have arranged it.”

It can be difficult for the United States and Russia to view each other beyond the context of recent developments in Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, or the countries’ shared bleak, war-torn history, Khrushcheva said. For the United States, Putin is no more than a “villain,” she said, but in Russia — despite political and social corruption throughout his presidency — he has repaired infrastructure, and his people are rallying behind him.

“It has been over a quarter- century since the collapse of communism in 1991, but the U.S. has never quite stopped seeing it as a Cold War foe, and Russia itself often, and sometimes, prefers to be feared and not loved,” she said.

Her journey across Russia’s federal districts led her to dissect the attitudes of Russians, attempting to soften their perceived rugged behavior. She traveled from the far west, to a town bordering Eastern Europe, to the far east, on the border of Russia and Japan. While in the east, she stopped to “proudly wave at Sarah Palin,” she joked.

During this time, she observed three things about the country: Russia is “inherently incoherent;” it is defined by its past while longing for the future; and it is “homogeneous” despite its size and diverse regions and cultures.

Khrushcheva said U.S. foreign policy “should remember that Russia is not linear,” meaning that Russia holds tight to its narrative, rarely straying from its origins. She provided an example: an image (on a now working projector) of an emporium selling a portrait of Putin alongside the Russian Empire’s coat of arms — the double-headed eagle.

The double-headed eagle is a prominent and important symbol in Russia, she said. Originating in the Byzantine Empire in the 1450s, the image has since become standard for the Russian coat of arms throughout centuries. For Khrushcheva, the double-headed eagle represents the “split personality” of Russia.

Aside from Byzantine, Christian antiquity, Putin’s Russia has also preserved pieces from its communist past; a hammer and sickle sculpture sits outside a Joseph Stalin-era detention camp.

“That’s how Russia sees itself — all the way back in history,” she said.

Khrushcheva said Putin keeps these relics as “signs of great power.” She compared this to the preservation of Confederate flags and military statues in the American south.

In Russia, Putin has erected and maintained over 7,000 statues of Russian leaders, saints and inventors, including Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Ivan III, better known as Ivan the Great.

While traveling, Khrushcheva stumbled upon a statue isolated in the center of a roundabout. The statue, despite having stairs leading up to it, is inaccessible by car and dangerous to approach by foot. Skateboarders, however, are able to make it to the island.

Khrushcheva followed a group of skateboarders to the statue, and eventually to a coffee shop appropriately named “New York Coffee.” As a New Yorker herself, she felt compelled to go in. On the menu was a drink ominously named “Trump.”

“I ordered the drink. I thought, ‘I want to know what a Trump drink is’ — it had this disgusting orange syrup on top of it,” she said over a roar of laughter. “It (had) little to do with coffee, as little as Trump has to do with (the) presidency. I asked the waitress if (the drink) was in awe or in mockery (of Trump). She said it was whatever you want. That’s that split personality.”

Khrushcheva turned back to the statues and what they mean to both men in both countries. She compared Trump’s towers to Putin’s statues. For Putin, “these statues essentially … are monuments to Putin himself.”

He commissions statues of strong leaders he strives to mirror, saints to show “God is on Russia’s side” and military giants to demonstrate Russia’s power. Trump built Trump Tower to show off his wealth and power and, Khrushcheva said, as free advertising.

Putin’s demonstration of his state’s military power through monuments, specifically that of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, is evident of Putin’s paranoia of an international conspiracy against Russia, she said, its readiness for war, and Putin’s belief that he is “the protector of the motherland.”

“Russia celebrates the fact that it is culturally at war,” Khrushcheva said.

Khrushcheva continued to her last point: that Russia is a homogenous country despite economic, religious and geographic diversity.

“It is not a civilization, as Russians often say about themselves, but it is certainly a universe — it is a fortress of its own greatness,” she said.

On the screen flashed an image of Crimea and Vladivostok, a cosmopolitan city on the opposite side of Russia about 500 miles from Japan. The difference between the two is vast; however, Russia holds a firm grasp on Crimea as the key to its unified identity.

Russia claims Crimea to be its rightful territory because it was the location of the baptism of Vladimir I. Vladimir I was the grand prince of Kiev and is known as a prominent political figure in ancient Russia.

Khrushcheva read a sign painted on the side of a Vladivostok highway that was more telling: “The island — the Crimea island — is Russian, and Crimea is of Russian origins.”

“Just imagine,” she said, “a world apart, all of those time zones apart — you still have Crimea (completing) that fortress of greatness.”

For Khrushcheva, however, what makes Russia great is not the statues, the symbols, its power or its territories — it is the resilience of its people, which she said was evident when Russia hosted the World Cup earlier this month.

She began and ended her lecture with the World Cup, displaying photos of crowds gathered on the streets of Moscow and “alpha-male” Putin standing under an umbrella while other diplomats, including French President Emmanuel Macron, stood in the rain. According to Khrushcheva, Putin’s popularity has gone down since the World Cup because Russia’s people realized they don’t need the Kremlin or annexation to be great.

“During the World Cup, Russia didn’t launch any missiles, it didn’t take any territories, it didn’t stun the world with any new military initiatives, it didn’t show any new maps with potentially Florida,” she said. “Russia just followed the global rules for an international event and thus appeared for the world as a ‘regular country’ … and not a besieged fortress. This newly discovered globalism may prove challenging to Putin’s next years in power.”

After the conclusion of Khrushcheva’s lecture, Geof Follansbee, chief executive officer of the Chautauqua Foundation and Chautauqua Institution’s vice president of development, opened the Q-and-A.

He asked how this new “globalism” in Russia compared to the introduction of democracy after the Cold War.

“When Russia lost the Cold War, America was not a gracious winner. I’m really sorry, I hate to tell you that,” Khrushcheva said. “And so Americans came in and started telling Russians what to do and how to be. … At the time, Russians were willing to accept this teaching and lecturing, but one of the great appeals for Putin is that he said, ‘We’re not going to do it. Who are you to tell us what to do?’ … The Russians have had enough time since the Soviet time to grow into this democratization.”

Follansbee then opened the floor to questions from the audience. One attendee asked what Khrushcheva thought Putin’s biggest foreign policy mistake has been since his presidency began and what the Russian people think of his policies.

“Foreign policy is generally viewed favorably,” she said. “I think his mistake probably was the meddling (in the 2016 election). I don’t know if he would do it the same way this time around because he was warned that he would not be able to hide the Russian hand.”

To close the program, Follansbee asked if Khrushcheva if she could share some childhood memories of Nikita Khrushchev.

“It is wonderful to see Chautauqua and the beautiful nature and … I feel that, with sadness, it is wasted on me because when I was growing up, Khrushchev … was a great farmer. … And our chores would be to collect strawberries or do farming chores, and I think I started hating nature so much after that because I wanted to play,” she said. “And so now when I see a tree, I usually cross the street.”