Georgian Alexandre Khukhianidze and Russian Constantine Pleshakov, both visiting Mount Holyoke this year, add considerable luster and expertise to Central Asia and Caucasus Month events as well as departmental "buzz."
Khukhianidze, who is at the College with his family until May under a Fulbright research fellowship, is here to study the relationship of citizens to local government. He plans to spend the first semester on library research, then move into field work to examine the American experience of local power, how it is organized, and how it really functions here. "Gaining civil control over local power is very important in Georgia right now. The process of democratization is coming along in Tbilisi, Georgia's largest city, but in the countryside we still have total feudalism," he says. "There was no experience of democracy prior to communism. People still behave like subjects, not citizens, so we experience corruption, neglect of the people's interests, and no economic progress."
In Georgia, where Khukhianidze teaches at Tbilisi State University, he is a founding member of the Georgian arm of the international nongovernmental organization Fair Elections and Democracy. Founded in 1995 just before the country's first democratic elections, this U.S.-sponsored group promotes local and national monitoring of elections and accountability of elected officials. On his return to Georgia, Khukhianidze expects to teach a course on local power and citizen control and to organize training sessions to create citizen advisory councils around the country. This semester he is not teaching, but anticipates supervising students next semester who are interested in the topic of citizen control in emerging democracies.
Constantine Pleshakov, Five College visiting professor of international relations at Mount Holyoke, was affiliated with and director of the geopolitics department at the Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1986 to 1996. He has held many fellowships and positions abroad, and was previously at the Five Colleges as the Karl Lowenstein fellow at Amherst College in 1995.
Since 1996 Pleshakov has boldly embarked in new directions as a fiction writer, winning the Best Russian Short Story Prize in 1997. In Russian, he has published Physics: A Novel (1992) and Carp Farm: A Collection of Short Stories this year. Pleshakov is a prolific author and winner of numerous prestigious professional awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize in 1996 as coauthor of the best book on diplomatic history in English. The Flight of the Romanovs, cowritten with John Curtis Perry, will be published by Basic Books in March 1999. Pleshakov will be teaching a full course load at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and UMass. during his stay.
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