St. John's students hoped to bring 'svet' — or Russian for light — with summer seminar

SANTA FE — Two St. John’s College foreign exchange students started an online summer seminar for students in their native countries of Russia and Ukraine with the aim of providing educational outreach to those who cannot leave their war-torn countries and bridging divides between people.

Russian native Amir Balafendiev and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin, a native of Belarus who later moved to Ukraine, were the brain children of the “Svet Summer Seminar Program: Toward a Lasting Peace in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.” The word “Svet" means "light" in Russian. Students from Belarus, a neighboring country which has provided operational assistance to Russia’s military during the war, could also participate in the seminar.

With the war between Russia and Ukraine raging on into its third year and incoming President Donald Trump pledging to end the conflict quickly and peacefully once he takes office in January, Balafendiev and Tsiarokhin have made their own pledge: to host more seminars next year, even if Tsiarokhin is graduating in 2025.

“We are not planning to continue our program — we are continuing our program,” Balafendiev said.

A second online course, starting in January, will allow Russian-speaking students, not just natives, to enroll, Balafendiev said. A separate course starting in March, which is based out of an international school in Armenia, will be taught in English.

To make the upcoming seminars possible, Tsiarokhin and Balafendiev plan to use remaining funds from the Kathryn W. Davis Collaborative, the foundation that allowed them to start the summer seminar.

“As far as I know, this is the first time that students, in a very formal way — explicitly — want to use the St. John’s College seminar mode as the way to solve a very big project, which is the psychology, history and toxicity of history that leads to conflict,” said Charles Bergman, senior adviser with the Office of Personal and Professional Development at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I instantly knew they had a winner.”

Tsiarokhin and Balafendiev approached Bergman last year with the idea of holding a seminar and wondered how they could secure funding for it. Bergman recommended the Projects for Peace Program, funded by the Davis Collaborative, which is based at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Projects for Peace funds at least 125 projects annually, each receiving $10,000 to pursue “innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues,” according to the Middlebury College website.

The seminars, in which Balafendiev and Tsiarokhin played a behind-the-scenes role, took on the classroom model of St. John’s in which faculty members, or “tutors,” act as guides to discussion rather than lecturers.

“At St. John’s College, we say the book is the professor and the tutor is the first among equals,” Bergman said. “It is a very powerful, pedagogical method and you don’t find it anywhere in Europe.”

The objective of the seminar was to “bring people that wouldn’t talk to each other, otherwise, together ... to talk about a shared path; focus on similarities and not the differences,” Tsiarokhin said.

For their project, Balafendiev and Tsiarokhin chose three books for students to read: Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How the Steel Was Tempered,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” and “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets” by Svetlana Alexievich, a 2015 Nobel Prize recipient for literature.

Ostrovsky’s novel is a fictionalized account of his experiences in fighting for the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War of 1918-22. Solzhenitsyn’s book documents prisons and labor camps by the Bolsheviks during the war. Alexievich’s book, a New York Times best-seller, is an oral history of the fall of the Soviet Union and the ushering in of Russia.

“I selected three texts that were all speaking to major historical trauma that all the three countries have shared,” Tsiarokhin said. “All of the texts are oriented to understand the conflicts in a very humanistic way.”

Aside from reading the assigned books, Balafendiev felt the students who participated in the seminar learned a lot through the St. John’s method of teaching.

“Receiving feedback students will tell us, ‘I never thought I would be good in such academical [sic] atmosphere,’” Balafendiev said. “If there are students like this, then there are many more that will enjoy it.”

Asked about his personal takeaway from the summer, Balafendiev said it felt good to share the values he learned at St. John’s with other foreign students.

“I’m hoping that as we continue to raise more funds for the project, we can expand it and deepen the presence of ‘Svet’ in the region to connect more people together,” Tsiarokhin said.

Editor’s note: This story has been amended to correct several statements. “Svet” is the Russian word for “light.” Tsiarokhin said the seminar will focus on similarities and not differences between students. Belarus has provided operational assistance to Russia during the conflict between it and Ukraine.