October 8, 2024 | By Gabriela Forte (A27)

Amir Balafendiev (SF26) and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin (SF25) spent last summer promoting peaceful dialogue among citizens of feuding nations—their home countries, in fact.

Balafendiev hails from Russia, and Tsiarokhin is Belarusian-Ukrainian. In spring 2024, the pair earned a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant through Middlebury College to run an online seminar program for students in Russia, Ukraine, and neighboring Belarus. Noting that “the polarization of public discourse caused by the war has eliminated shared dialogue and reflection, increasing the likelihood that old hatreds will emerge in the future,” the pair founded the Svet Summer Seminar Program, hoping to bring light—“svet,” or “свет,” being the nations’ common word for “light”—to those experiencing the current conflict in Eastern Europe.

While some have been able to flee Eastern Europe, many citizens do not have the means to leave. Balafendiev and Tsiarokhin dedicated the Svet Summer Project to the region’s remaining teens, explaining that “while most war-related projects are directed at helping those who have left their homes, there is almost no attention given to those who have stayed because they could not leave.”

Over the course of 16 online seminars, the group read texts including Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, The Gulag Archipelago by Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Secondhand Time by Nobel recipient Svetlana Alexievich. Emphasizing the common experiences of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine under the former U.S.S.R., the two say, introduces “a humanistic perspective that overcomes national hatred and builds bridges over past conflicts.”

Bringing the St. John’s method of seminar-based discussion into these sessions, Balafendiev notes, proved essential to the program. “St. John’s gave me a unique method that is easily applied to anything,” he says. “I have always wanted to do things that are beneficial for a community of my region (or any other), and St. John’s equips me with knowledge that can be applied into improving it.” By combining a love of learning with a love for community, the project founders utilized their St. John’s education to cultivate an exploratory environment to push these students further.

The educational system of the former U.S.S.R. doesn’t emphasize the open-discussion classroom format, and the Svet Summer Seminar Program had the potential to “showcase the seminar as a powerful pedagogical method—something unpracticed and unknown in Eastern European educational institutions,” Tsiarokhin and Balafendiev explain. This might encourage students to ask difficult questions about author perspectives and delve deeply into selected texts, with the goal of encouraging “an international dialogue in which they…see what joins them rather than divides.”

Tsiarokhin emphasizes how a seminar’s value does not merely lie in its communal aspect, noting, “Even in an infernal political climate, seminar manages to provide a great psychological effect. It deepens our dignity and produces a real community feeling that overcomes ideological boundaries.”

In a demonstration of cross-campus collaboration, Tsiarokhin and Balafendiev reached out to Khafiz Kerimov, an Annapolis tutor from Russia, and invited him to join the project. Kerimov provided students with a write-up that outlined the seminar’s essence and helped train them as tutors, providing comments on the discussion’s methodology and format as well as guiding them in a mock seminar to help them gain their footing. “What I tried to emphasize in my write-up is that the point of the seminar is for participants to think together, with and off each other. Thinking absolutely requires stimulation and incitement by others—that’s the whole point of the seminar, as I see it,” Kerimov says.

Guiding teens from differing educational backgrounds through a new kind of learning was challenging. For example, students were often unfamiliar with proposing alternative viewpoints, or didn’t feel like they could answer questions posed without being called upon by a teacher. Tsiarokhin and Balafendiev mitigated this issue by continuing to emphasize the seminar format, encouraging them to express themselves all while keeping in contact with tutors such as Kerimov to share advice on how to push the conversation further.

Balafendiev noted that the participants demonstrated significant growth within two months, with Tsiarokhin commenting “I had never seen anyone improve as fast as these students did, which was actually quite singular, because they were younger than most of the freshman at St. John’s. They’re also all online in different time zones across Eastern Europe and Russia…[It] was incredibly surprising and pleasant to see that for me, especially as a tutor of theirs at the time.”

And they weren’t the only ones who experienced growth. “Doing a mock seminar on How the Steel Was Tempered was a fantastic experience that reminded me of literature classes in my Russian high school, where I was lucky to have the teacher that emphasized conversation, openness, and unprejudiced thinking when reading literary texts—much like the ideals pursued at St. John’s,” Kerimov says. “There are great teachers everywhere, no matter the education system. Kanstantsin and Amir gathered a wonderful group of teachers for their project—I learned from them as much as they learned from my experience in the St. John’s classroom.”

Reflecting on this project, Balafendiev and Tsiarokhin are grateful for the impact it generated in a single summer. “It finally felt like I was doing something important. I’m just a student,” Balafendiev says. “I don’t do great things every day. I read books, go to seminar … but when we were doing this project we felt that it was significant and had a positive impact …We were giving them the new approach to seeing the world…

“It also felt quite fulfilling because we were lucky enough to learn this educational method at St John’s, and now we were spreading it to our homes where it would hardly be practiced otherwise,” Tsiarokhin adds. “Since this course was a pleasant success, we’re trying to continue this course and make things happen on a more regular basis and on a larger scale; there’s a real tangible sense on how to proceed beyond simply a summer project. For me, it is elevating to constructively deal with those personal feelings I get in my more silent moments of the day: when I feel alienated from my home, when I miss the relatively peaceful times and experience a whole palette of nostalgia. Doing this project makes me cope with those heavy feelings in a more affirmative way.”

Summer 2024 is now over, but the Svet Summer Seminar Program has just begun. Balafendiev and Tsiarokhin are looking to expand—they hope to reach more students in this region and are currently working to apply for grants for the summer of 2025. The two are also launching another three-month course in January 2025 and are looking for donors. Their ongoing goal, they say, is to continue cultivating an environment of intellectual cooperation and cultural acceptance, “building a foundation of mutual understanding and a commitment to avoiding the horrors of war.”

Interested supporters are encouraged to contact Amir Balafendiev (abalafendiev(at)sjc.edu) and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin (kktsiarokhin(at)sjc.edu).