New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Gennady Estraikh, "The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia" (Bloombury, 2023)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Gennady Estraikh. His book titled, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) was published as a part of the "Russian Shorts" series. Gennady Estraikh's book explores the birth, growth, demise and afterlife of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). The History of Birobidzhan looks at how the shtetl was widely used in Soviet propaganda as a perfect solution to the 'Jewish question', arguing that in reality, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the JAR played a key, and essentially detrimental, role in determining Jewish rights and entitlements in the Soviet world. Estraikh brings together a broad range of Russian and Yiddish sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, travelogues, memoirs, belles-letters, and scholarly publications, as he describes and analyses the project and its realization not in isolation, but rather in the context of developments in both domestic and international life. As well as offering an assessment of the Birobidzhan project in the contexts of Soviet and Jewish history, the book also focuses on the contemporary 'Jewish' role of the region which now has only a few thousand Jewish occupants amongst its residents.

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Stephen F. Jones, "The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands.

The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921 (Harvard University Press, 2026) is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Professor Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and the Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia’s social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government—protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Professor Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia’s democracy during a moment of acute global instability.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, the capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Dr. Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works.

Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Kristan Stoddart, "Russia's Hybrid Warfare Offensive Against the West" (de Gruyter, 2025)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Kristan Stoddart's Russia's Hybrid Warfare Offensive Against the West (de Gruyter, 2025) is a timely and systematic analysis of Russian hybrid warfare with a particular focus on Russian cyberespionage and cyberwarfare. It especially analyzes Russian policy from the election of President Vladmir Putin in 2000 to date.

It takes a long term, long lens, view of Russian policies and actions internationally and domestically, fundamentally questioning the relationship and boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare.

The most up-to-date and systematic analysis of Russia’s hybrid warfare.
Draws on a wide range of multi-disciplinary literature.
Questions the boundaries between active measures, espionage, cyberespionage, and hybrid warfare.

Dr. Kristan Stoddart is an Associate Professor at Swansea University where he is director of the Geopolitical Challenges Research Institute. Previously he was a Reader in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. From 2014 to 2017, Kristan was part of a £1.2 million project examining Cyber Security Lifecycles funded by Airbus Group and the Welsh Government. He also was a member of the UK’s Independent Digital Ethics in Policing Panel for around four years through to 2018. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of eight books and many articles and book chapters.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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Donald Sassoon, "Revolutions: A New History" (Verso Books, 2025)

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Revolutions: A New History (Verso Books, 2025) is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Katharina Wiedlack, "Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Under Western Eyes: Vulnerable Minorities and the Russian State in New Cold War Cultures (Academic Studies Press, 2025) examines the New Cold War between Anglophone Western and Russian media, focusing on its coverage of LGBTIQ+ topics and representations of Russian femininity, masculinity, racial and gender diversity, and disability. It interrogates how the Anglophone media constructs images of vulnerable bodies and groups in Russia, juxtaposing them with the vengeful state and the powerful figure of Putin. These media discourses delineate and unify liberal values as American and Western and contrast them with "backward" Russian values. Paradoxically, in its endeavor to accentuate American dominance and its role in global affairs, various news outlets and entertainment media amplify homophobic, heteronormative, and racist narratives stemming from Russian sources and lend support to Putin's self-portrayal as a formidable opponent to the West. While the West expresses outrage at Putin’s criminalization of LGBTIQ+ activity, it draws on homophobic language to mock his shirtless horse-riding and “bromance” with Trump; the West condemns Russia's oppression of women, yet peddles the Orientalist idea of the "Slavic Femme"―that is, the hypersexualized trickster.

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Matthew P. Romaniello, "Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cornell UP, 2025) is a history of eighteenth-century naturalists and physicians who were involved in the creation of a classification system for the people of the Russian Empire. These Enlightened scholars traveled through Russia describing its people, landscape, and customs. In an era when climate was seen as a significant factor affecting health and bodies, these men wondered: How did the Russians, a "cold" people—phlegmatic or melancholic, according to humoral theory—manage an empire?

The experiences and observations of doctors and scholars working within the Russian Empire contributed to advances in understanding and/or treating diseases like scurvy, smallpox, and more. Key insights were embedded in the travel writings and correspondences of colorful eighteenth-century figures who Romaniello brings to life with vibrant biographies. Medical knowledge was entangled with stories of culture and imperial politics as well. In Europe's Laboratory, Romaniello’s deft contextualization helps make sense of these intextricable branches of eighteenth-century taxonomies as he demonstrates that the Russian Empire was a part of global knowledge networks.

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Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic with Mia Bennett

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. In this episode, Mia Bennett—co-author with Kalus Dodds of Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (Yale UP, 2025)—discusses the state of the Arctic today, highlighting the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition, as well as how the region is becoming a space for experimentation in everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global, from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition. If you are to read one book to understand the Arctic today, from its history to global stakes, this is the one.

—

Mia Bennett is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. She is a 2025-26 British Academy Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Outer Space Studies at University College London and a Fulbright Arctic Initiative scholar. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, she traces, maps, and critiques processes of Arctic frontier-making from the edges of settler-colonial states and orbits of space powers like China to the depths of Indigenous lands.

She is currently examining how the frontiers of the Arctic and outer space are intersecting through case studies involving the rise of Starlink satellite internet and the development of commercial spaceports and ground stations in places like Kodiak, Alaska and Svalbard, Norway. She has done fieldwork on bridges, both real and imagined, in the Russian Far East, on a new highway to the Arctic Ocean in Canada’s Northwest Territories, atop the melting Greenland Ice Sheet, and inside air-conditioned offices in Singapore.

Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (Yale University Press 2025)

Cryopolitics (started by Mia)

A complete list of Mia’s publications on GoogleScholar.

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Scott M. Kenworthy, "The People's Patriarch: Tikhon Bellavin and the Orthodox Church in North America and Revolutionary Russia" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

On October 28, 1917, just days after the Bolsheviks seized power, the great Council of the Russian Orthodox Church voted to restore the patriarchate, which had been abolished by Peter the Great two centuries earlier. The Council chose Tikhon (Bellavin), the son of a humble village parish priest, to be head of Russia's largest religious confession. At the time, the majority of Orthodox Christians were devoutly religious. Tikhon's vision of the Church, which he began putting into practice during his years as the Orthodox bishop of North America (1898-1907), was that of an organic body which welcomed the participation of all believers. The Bolsheviks had other ideas. They aimed to create a revolution that would be carried out by the state on behalf of the people. And they sought to eradicate religion as "superstition" and not only to disestablish the Church, but to destroy it altogether. Although the alternate Russia which Tikhon represented would be crushed by the superior force of the Bolsheviks, he helped navigate the Church through immense challenges so that, in the end, the Orthodox Church outlived the Soviet experiment. The People's Patriarch tells the story of the clash of visions for the new Russia in 1917 through the lens of the humble man chosen to lead the Church, whose life exemplifies the transformations within the Orthodox Church in late Imperial Russia and its fate during the Revolution. The People's Patriarch is the first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's most important Orthodox Christian leaders, based on an exhaustive use of previously untapped primary sources, including Tikhon's letters and encyclicals, previously classified documents from the top Bolshevik leadership and Soviet secret police, and materials from a dozen archives in five countries.

Scott M. Kenworthy is Professor in the History Department at Miami University (Ohio), where he also teaches for the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and Religious Studies programs.

Roland Clark is a Professor of Modern European History at the University of Liverpool.

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Kristina Jonutytė, "Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia (Cornell UP, 2026) by Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an ethnography of contemporary urban Buddhism in Buryatia, a republic within the Russian Federation. Kristina Jonutytė shows how—in this ethnically and religiously diverse borderland region—Buryat Buddhists are caught between an oppressive, militant Russian regime and the tenacity of local religious and cultural forms. As Dr. Jonutytė narrates, historically Buryat Buddhism has been tightly linked with the Russian state ever since the imperial period, a relationship with mutual interest and benefits. Yet everyday Buddhist practices point to a more complex picture, shedding light on precarity, minoritization, struggles for cultural sovereignty, and infrapolitical religious forms. Between the Buddha and the New Tsar reveals the important ways in which the urban setting is not just a backdrop to Buddhism, but that religion and the city are intertwined and mutually impactful.

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Nana Osei-Opare, "Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana's Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.

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The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of Sholem Aleichem

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. Jonathan Brent, Executive Director at YIVO, Jeremy Dauber, author of the recently published book, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, and Adam Kirsch joined each other on stage for a lively discussion about the fascinating life and work of the "Jewish Mark Twain.”

This discussion originally took place on October 17, 2013.

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The Jews in Poland-Lithuania and Russia: 1350 to the Present Day

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

For centuries, Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world. Until World War II, this area was home to over forty percent of world Jewry: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland, and nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union. Although the majority of American and European Jews originate from Eastern Europe, the history of this life and civilization is not well known, or has been reduced to a story of persecution and martyrdom. In his masterful three-volume history, The Jews in Poland and Russia: 1350 to the Present Day, Polonsky avoids sentimentalism and mythologizing, and provides a comprehensive and detailed account of this great civilization. From the towns and shtetls where Jews lived, to the emergence of Hasidism and the Haskalah movement, to the rise of Jewish urbanization, and Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, Polonsky’s book dispels myths about this culture, while demonstrating the importance of Poland and Russia as a great center of Jewish life.

Winner of the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies, and the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the best book on the history of Poland published in a foreign language between 2007 and 2011.

This book talk originally took place on October 22, 2013

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Timothy Manion, "Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War" (Helion, 2026)

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Why did Operation Barbarossa fail? For more than eight decades, historians have offered one dominant answer: Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed from the outset. Vast distances, brutal weather, weak logistics and the overwhelming industrial power of the Red Army ensured that the Wehrmacht never had a realistic chance of success. But what if this familiar verdict is too comfortable — and too simplistic?

In Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War (Helion and Company, 2026), Timothy Manion offers a bold, deeply researched re-examination of the most consequential campaign of the Second World War. Going far beyond the well-worn clichés of “General Winter” and German hubris, Manion places the story in a much longer arc: the evolution of military thought from the age of Napoleon through the catastrophe of 1914–18 and into the highly mechanised, manoeuvre-driven doctrines championed by both Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period.

Drawing upon a vast range of previously overlooked archival records, Manion demonstrates that both armies entered the war expecting a rapid, decisive campaign — a return to war between generals, not economies. Early German successes seemed to prove them right. But as Manion reveals, the Wehrmacht’s apparent mastery of mobile warfare concealed profound flaws in decision-making, command structure and operational logic. Meanwhile, the Red Army —though battered — adapted faster and more its opponent understood.

The result is a compelling challenge to the established consensus. Manion argues that Barbarossa did not collapse under the weight of numbers alone: German generalship and operational misjudgement played a far larger part than most accounts allow, while Soviet resilience and strategic learning proved decisive long before Stalingrad.

Rich with analytical clarity, packed with detailed campaign studies, and supported by an extensive set of newly published archival maps and figures, Why Barbarossa Failed is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only how the 1941 campaign unfolded — but why its outcome shaped the entire course of the war.

This is the story of two armies, two visions of modern warfare — and the decision points that sealed the fate of the Eastern Front.
Timothy Manion earned dual degrees in mathematics and economics from Boston University. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Manion represented global financial institutions on Wall Street as outside counsel. Not satisfied with traditional explanations for the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Manion has undertaken an extensive investigation of the German and Soviet archives. The results of his study overturn the historical consensus on the campaign and are published here for the first time.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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Gudrun Persson, "Russian Military Thought: The Evolution of Strategy Since the Crimean War" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The development of the Russian military's strategic thought is an understudied and thus misunderstood subject in the West. Strategy in Russia encompasses the broader context of foreign and domestic policy as well as the military's ties to the country's leadership. The military's strategic thought is closely linked to Russia's existence as a state and explains patterns of Russian confrontation.

In Russian Military Thought: The Evolution of Strategy Since the Crimean War (Georgetown UP, 2025), the renowned scholar Gudrun Persson offers novel insights into Russian military thought on doctrine and strategy, from the Crimean War to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Persson dismantles the simplistic notion that Russian military thought is "backward," instead presenting a deeper analysis of the drivers that influence the changes in Russian military strategy. Through archival research based on Russian language sources, Persson offers a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on theoretical insights from history and political science that enable her to make a nuanced, qualitative analysis.

This book will be essential reading for practitioners, scholars, and students who seek to understand the mind-set of the current Russian leadership and the constraints that shape Russia's future possibilities.
Gudrun Persson is an associate professor of Slavic studies at Stockholm University. She is the author of Learning from Foreign Wars: Russian Military Thinking 1859–1873 and a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of War Sciences, Chatham House, and the Swedish Writers' Union.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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Jonathan Sherry, "Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool University Press, 2025) is a history of Communism and anti-Communism in the Spanish Civil War. It uses newly available archival material to reassess Soviet intervention in Spain and reappraise the role of Premier Juan Negrín. How did the Soviet operation affect attempts to rebuild the Republican justice system that the war had shattered? How did Negrín use the courts to combat wartime espionage and treason in the era of the Soviet mass repressions? How did wartime trials communicate politics, both domestic and international? Finally, how have Cold War politics distorted our understanding of Communism in the Spanish Civil War? Stalinism on Trial traces the Republic's tribunals through revolution and war, focusing in particular on the prosecution and "show trial" of the anti-Stalin Marxist party, POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), in whose militia George Orwell served. This small party was thrown onto centre stage when police arrested its leadership on suspicion of espionage and its leader, Andreu Nin, disappeared while in police custody. The ensuing prosecution and dramatic courtroom trial highlighted the contradictions of Soviet intervention in Spain. It also illustrated the disastrous impact that western anti-Communism and appeasement had on Spain's war effort. The book is at once a penetrating microhistory of the POUM's prosecution and an expansive transnational history of antifascism in interwar Europe.

Jonathan Sherry is a historian and writer who holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.

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Aaron Donaghy, "The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. These reversals, the book argues, were influenced by president's willingness to take risks, by their perception of credibility, and by the timing of their decision.

Donaghy explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2021) traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began.

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Jeremy Black, "The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country" (Amberley, 2026)

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began a new episode in history and was surrounded by a miscellany of historical claims. The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country (Amberley, 2026) is a succinct, up-to-date guide to the histories on offer about and from Russia, one that seeks to make sense of present issues and future prospects, as well as of the past. There is a heavy emphasis on war and international relations, but that is appropriate not only for the past but also for a present in which both are to the fore. Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725), an eager moderniser, was viewed as an un-Russian evil phenomenon in light of his denial of the divine identity of traditional Russian monarchy, his blasphemy, his theft of time from God when he changed the calendar, and his sacrilegious violation of the image of God in man when he forced men to cut off their beards.

Vladimir Putin cuts off no beards, he is no moderniser; the fall of the Berlin Wall left him with an abiding mistrust of democracy and ‘People’s Power’. At Davos in 2000, American journalist Trudy Rubin asked a panel of top Russian officials: ‘Who is Mr Putin?’ None of them could answer, except to say: ‘He is the President of Russia.’ How did this KGB foreign intelligence officer become (temporarily) Trump’s favourite running dog of capitalism? To answer the question, we have to understand what Russia was. There is a continuity that will give us a clue about what it is and will become.

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Denys Gorbach, "The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working-class and structures its relations with other social groups.

The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class is written by Denys Gorbach, published in 2024 by Berghan Books.

Denys Gorbach is a teaching and research adjunct at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin.

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Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states.

For more than a decade, Dr. Alexis M. Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and public squares of cities once under communist rule, from Berlin in the west to Vladivostok in the east, recording thousands of cases of critical and satirical political street art and cataloging these artworks linguistically and thematically across space and time. Complemented by first-hand interviews with leading artists, activists, and politicians from across the region, Post-Soviet Graffiti provides theoretical reflection on public space as a site for political action, a semiotic reading of signs and symbols, and street art as a form of text.

The book answers the question of how we conceptualize avenues of dissent under authoritarian rule by showing how contemporary graffiti functions not only as a popular public aesthetic, but also as a mouthpiece of political sentiment, especially within the post-Soviet region and post-communist Europe. A purposefully anonymous and accessible artform, graffiti is an effective tool for circumventing censorship and expressing political views. This is especially true for marginalized populations and for those living in otherwise closed and censored states.

Post-Soviet Graffiti reveals that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them.

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Colleen M. Moore, "The Peasants' War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

During the First World War, Russia relied on the mass mobilization of its peasant population. In the summer of 1914, approximately four million peasants answered the state’s call to arms, while the millions who remained at home donated labour and other resources to the cause. Within three short years these same peasants were refusing to pay taxes or turn over their grain, dooming the autocracy to collapse.
The Peasants’ War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025) argues that the experience of total war convinced peasants that the measure of a state’s legitimacy was its ability to safeguard the wellbeing of its subjects. When the autocracy failed to meet this standard, peasants rejected its authority by challenging four areas of wartime policy: the prohibition of vodka, the conscription of peasant families’ only workers, the redistribution of land belonging to enemy subjects, and the provisioning of the home front. The war awakened peasants to the reciprocal nature of the relationship between a state and its people. Colleen Moore investigates how peasants leveraged their wartime service to negotiate with the state for improved rights and privileges and how they used this power to shape the contours and legitimize the authority of the world’s first socialist state.
The Peasants’ War charts the timing and success of the 1917 Russian Revolution by showing how total war flipped the script on peasant-state relations, transforming the state from something that peasants existed to serve into something that existed to serve peasants.

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Ann Komaromi, "Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomenon of the late Soviet era that provided an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. In bringing together research into the underground journals, bulletins, art folios, and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi reveals how samizdat helped to foster new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Komaromi’s approach combines literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory to show that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime, but a platform for developing informal communities of knowledge. In this way, samizdat foreshadowed the various ways in which alternative perspectives are expressed to challenge the authority of institutions around the world today.

Ann Komaromi is a Professor within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her interests include alternative publishing, underground networks and nonconformist literature and art, especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Andrew Monaghan, "Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A cutting-edge investigation of how Russia makes war.

Russian strategy in the twenty-first century has been described in terms of 'hybrid' warfare, an approach characterised by measures short of war, such as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But as the invasion of Ukraine has brutally demonstrated, conventional armed violence remains a key element of Russian power.

In Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War (Manchester UP, 2025), Andrew Monaghan offers a high-level view of Russian thinking about warfare. Drawing on extensive Russian sources, he addresses important questions that have been overlooked by most Western commentators: what is the military leadership's distinctive idea of twenty-first-century blitzkrieg? How does it understand holistic territorial defence? How does it manage the shifting balance between offence and defence?

Introducing key concepts from Russian military thinking, Blitzkrieg and the Russian art of war is a crucial resource for understanding Russia's resurgent role on the global stage and the devastating threat the country poses to the international order.

Andrew Monaghan is Academic Visitor at St Antony's College, Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.

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Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?

Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left-right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people—age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.

This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.

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Mark Harrison, "Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged: it raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised the effectiveness of government officials, eroded citizens' trust in institutions and in each other, and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. The result is what Dr. Mark Harrison in Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism (Stanford University Press, 2023) calls the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: a bargain in which the Soviet state accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring its own survival.

This book is the first comprehensive, analytical, multi-faceted history of Soviet secrecy in the English language. Dr. Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives, this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one the core role of secrecy in building and stabilising the communist states of the twentieth century; the other the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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All You Need to Know about Russian Politics Today

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Host Licia Cianetti talks to two Russian experts, Vladislav Gorin and Alexandra Prokopenko, about the state of Russian domestic politics today. As Russia’s war of invasion in Ukraine rages on and Russians live under an ever more repressive authoritarian regime, we discuss how we got here: what made the invasion of Ukraine possible, what is keeping Putin in power, how both the regime’s relationship with both the elites and the people has evolved over Putin’s 26 years in power, and what a future Russia without Putin might look like. A transcript of the conversation is available here.

Guests:

Vladislav Gorin is a journalist at the Russian independent media company Meduza, which is based in Riga (Latvia) and has been designated as an “undesirable organisation” by the Russian government. Vladislav hosts a great podcast (in Russian) called Что случилось (What happened). You can find the English language reporting from Meduza here. As it is illegal and unsafe for people in Russia to contribute to Meduza and even share links from independent media sources, Meduza currently survives on donations from people outside of Russia. You can find their donations campaign here.

Alexandra Prokopenko is a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, and before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine she has worked as a journalist reporting from the Kremlin, as an adviser to the Central Bank of Russia, and at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. Her book From Sovereigns to Servants. How the War Against Ukraine Reshaped Russia’s Elite will be out in English in summer 2026 (it is available to preorder) and it was already published in Russian (here).

Presenter:

Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR.

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Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution.

In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention.

Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies’ numerous atrocities.

Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Douglas Greene, "In Stalin's Shadow: Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials" (Resistance Books, 2025)

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we’d be better avoiding in our attempts to build towards socialism. He does still have some scattered defenders though, putting out books and articles trying to turn his legacy into something commendable that we ought to try and build upon today. Returning today is Douglas Greene, who is not one of his defenders, but instead has written a book exploring the defenses of Stalin with his new book In Stalin’s Shadow: Leon Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials (Resistance Books, 2025). Much of the text is concerned with fact-checking, going through the middle decades of the twentieth century to give a critical accounting of Stalin, but one that nonetheless holds onto the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Beyond this fact-checking mission though, the book also takes this time as an opportunity to reflect on some of the deeper structures of thought that might lead one to defend Stalin. Rather than a simple mistake that can be easily corrected with a couple new facts, Greene sees neo-Stalinism as a sort of leftist conspiracy theory, one that mirrors much of the paranoia of Stalin’s own time. The book then is an opportunity to reflect on what sort of reasoning takes us into these sorts of dead-ends, and what sorts of reasoning might be needed to help us start building towards a truly revolutionary future.

Much of the content of this book builds on Greene’s previously published book The Dialectics of Saturn, which we discussed a couple years ago.

Douglas Greene is an independent historian. His many previous books have included A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism, Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union and The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade's Revenge, all of which have been discussed previously on this show. He is a frequent contributor to Left Voice.

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Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Clare Griffin's book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) introduces the reader to the dynamic and complex world of early modern Russian medical drugs, from the enthusiasm for newly imported American botanicals to the disgust at Western European medicines made from human corpses.

Based on a unique set of previously unused sources, this book is the first study of how the Russian Empire took part in the early modern global trade in medical drugs. The extensive and detailed records kept by the Moscow court show how ingredients produced elsewhere and passed through the massive, long-distance trade network of the early modern world were finally consumed. Looking at medicine as materia medica gives us a different perspective than when looking at practitioners, texts, and ideas.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Bruce Berglund, "The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power" (Triumph Books, 2026)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

An eye-opening account of how Russia's leaders have used sports as a political tool to solidify their global power

"Victories in sport do more to cement the nation than a hundred political slogans." This was the pep talk Russian athletes heard in 2000 from their new president, Vladimir Putin. And so, for more than two decades, Putin has used sports like his Soviet predecessors to stoke nationalism at home, boost prestige abroad, and cement his position as leader.

The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold is the first book to fully examine the intersection of Russian sports and geopolitical power, from the dominant Soviet teams of past Olympics to recent doping scandals and international sanctions. With new research from Olympic archives, records of the Soviet bloc and current Russian media, historian Bruce Berglund shows how Moscow's leaders have defied the rules of the game for decades as the world's governing bodies turned a blind eye.

Featuring oligarchs, sportocrats, and famous athletes from Olga Korbut to Alex Ovechkin, this is a timely investigation into the gears of power, nationalism, and money that drive the Russian sports machine.

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Prit Buttar, "To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-42" (Osprey, 2023)

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The city of St. Petersburg held great significance to the Russian Empire when Peter the Great first built the city in 1703. It was intended to be Russia's "window to the West" and usher in Russia's place as a modern European power. It also replaced Moscow as the capital of the growing empire that stretched across two continents. It was also the site of the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in 1917. Subsequently the city was renamed Leningrad in honor of the founder of the Soviet Union.

During World War II (1939-1945), the city would play a critical role as an unconquerable fortress city that withstood years of siege with the explicit intention of starving its inhabitants into complete submission to Nazi Germany's war aims. The epic story of this saga is the subject of Prit Buttar's To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-42 (Osprey Publishing, 2023). Relying upon extensive research into both Soviet and German sources, Prit Buttar chronicles the first few years of the siege in great detail.

Prit Buttar is the author of ten critically acclaimed books. His most recent publication was Meat Grinder: The Battles for the Rzhev Salient, 1942–43 (Osprey, 2022). Prit originally studied medicine at Oxford and London before joining the British Army as a doctor. He latterly worked as a General Practitioner for several years. He now writes exclusively from his home in rural Scotland where he can also indulge his hobbies for wildlife and astro photography.

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Filip Kovacevic, "KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2025) offers a first-ever glimpse into the mysterious and long-ignored world and work of Soviet spies- and counterspies-turned-writers.

Once out of active service, many former spies have turned to writing spy fiction. They drop the dagger and pick up the pen. Some are very successful, like James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming or the novelists John Le Carré and Graham Greene. Their Soviet counterparts have rarely been afforded the same attention or examination.

Drawing on materials from KGB archives and Soviet publications long out of print, KGB Literati offers the first-ever account of spy fiction written, frequently with institutional support, by Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence officers. Spy fiction can give insights into the operational workings of clandestine agencies and the personal dimensions of secret service work. By analysing the literary output of KGB spies and counterspies, the book shows that for the KGB, this type of intervention into Soviet popular culture was a crucial component of their overall counterintelligence strategy. These texts played an instrumental role in the Soviet state’s efforts to neutralize and counter Western cultural influences on the Soviet population.

Dr. Filip Kovacevic’s research is of great relevance today, given that a large segment of the Russian ruling elite is still composed of former KGB officers, including Russian president Vladimir Putin. KGB Literati illuminates the deep-seated KGB myths, values, aspirations, and fears that continue to have a profound impact on the foreign and domestic policies of the Russian Federation.

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Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi, "Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production" (CEU Press, 2025)

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi to talk about their edited volume, Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production. The volume explores the lasting impact of the communist era across Central and Eastern Europe, with chapters thematically threaded through by concepts including curation, immersion, interaction, humor, and authenticity. In the podcast we talked about what it means to “replay” communism, about the trauma/nostalgia paradigm in relation to cultural production, and about inter-generational experiences of media depicting the communist period.

You can purchase a copy here.

You can find out more about the Replaying Communism project here. If you would like to cooperate with Anna and Lucy, or you have a similar project, please contact them via the replayingcommunism@gmail.com email address.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Anna Zhelnina, "Private Life, Public Action: How Housing Politics Mobilized Citizens in Moscow" (Temple UP, 2025)

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Renovation, an urban renewal plan in Moscow that was announced in the spring of 2017, proposed to demolish thousands of socialist-era apartment buildings. In a country where it is rare under an authoritarian government, residents supported or opposed the redevelopment by mobilizing and organizing into local alliances. They were often shocked by their neighbors who were excited about the new housing or those suspicious of being displaced.

Private Life, Public Action: How Housing Politics Mobilized Citizens in Moscow (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Anna Zhelnina traces how residents impacted by the relocation plan became activists despite having little to no experience organizing or even forming political affiliations and opinions. Dr. Zhelnina details the ways in which neighbors engaged in collective action, as well as the individual and structural changes these interactions caused.

Dr. Zhelnina develops the concept of “housing strategies” to explain how residents’ debates with their neighbors about housing were shaped by their private life strategies. She applies her findings about housing in Moscow to ongoing questions about political mobilization, demonstrating how public engagement is shaped by historical and social contexts. Examining the intersection of housing, politics, and citizenship in contemporary Russia, Private Life, Public Action offers a new way to look at urban change.

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Anna Shadrina, "The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia" (UCL Press, 2025)

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia (UCL Press, 2025) by Dr. Anna Shadrina examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the role of grandmothers as primary caregivers due to men’s traditional estrangement from family life. This expectation places grandmothers, or babushkas, in a position where they prioritise childcare and housework over their careers, making them unpaid family carers reliant on the state and their children.

Dr. Shadrina situates older Russian women’s experiences within the post-Soviet redefinition of the nation, analysing their portrayal in popular media and biographical narratives of women aged 60 and over in Russia and the UK. It addresses class and racial disparities, noting how some women outsource family duties to less qualified women, and emphasises age as a significant but overlooked axis of social inequality. From a feminist perspective, the book explores citizenship as both a status and a practice of inclusion and exclusion. By focusing on older women’s rights to participate in private and public spheres, it discusses the new social inequalities that emerged after the USSR’s collapse. Despite prioritising others’ interests, older Russian women actively engage in economic citizenship, though their struggles for recognition are often excluded from formal economy and politics.

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Jochen Hellbeck, "World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews" (Penguin Group, 2025)

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0000

In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism. Often elided, if not simply forgotten, is the Soviet Union’s crucial role in that fight. With this book, acclaimed historian Jochen Hellbeck rectifies this omission by relocating the ideological core of the conflict. It was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat—in fact, “World Enemy No. 1.” Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany and the world. And so, on June 22, 1941, a German army of three million attacked the Soviet Union to exterminate “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hitler’s cardinal obsession. While Europe’s Jews were expelled, exiled, and persecuted by the Nazis, Soviet Jews were immediately slated for elimination. The Soviet lands thus became ground zero for systematic extermination, which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.
Hellbeck plumbs newly declassified archives and previously undiscovered sources—testimonies, diaries, and dispatches from soldiers and civilians, Soviet and German—to offer a unique history that takes account of both sides. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis’ most fervid rallying cry, and documents their annihilatory ambitions on the battlegrounds in the East. Widely disseminated accounts of German atrocities mobilized millions of Soviet citizens to join a people’s war against the hated invaders. Hellbeck tracks the desire for revenge that drove the Red Army on its path of reconquest, an advance that further inflamed the belief in a murderous “Bolshevik Jew,” stirring the Germans to fight to the bitter end. Recounted here in vivid detail are the events at Babi Yar, the Battle of Stalingrad, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the arrival of the Red Army in the Nazi capital. Finally, Hellbeck reckons with the West’s persistent disregard of the Soviet Union’s incalculable contribution to winning the war—and its sacrifice of twenty-six million citizens—as anti-communism and the Cold War turned erstwhile allies into mortal enemies.
Hellbeck’s eye-opening work is an astonishing new reading of both the Second World War and how its history has been told.

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Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.
In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.
By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. As explored in Videotape (Bloomsbury, 2025), by Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy in the Object Lessons series, the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment.

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Dustin Condren, "An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the unfinished cinematic projects developed and abandoned by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein between 1927 and 1937. Centred on seven major film concepts, the book examines what it means for a work of art—particularly a film—to remain unfinished or unrealised, and how these projects fit within Eisenstein’s broader theoretical and practical framework. Offering unique insight into the history of film production in Stalinist Russia, An Imaginary Cinema contrasts Eisenstein’s experiences with both the Soviet film industry and Hollywood, and considers the technological transitions that shaped early cinema.

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Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, "Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation" (PublicAffairs, 2025)

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

1991 ushered in a new epoch of hope as Russia marched toward democracy and prosperity on the ruins of the Soviet Union. In 2025 those hopes for a thriving, democratic Russia have not panned out. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov lived it as journalists in Russia from the start of Putin’s reign. Specialists in documenting Russia’s secret services, they’ve reported many, many important stories over the past decades. Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation (PublicAffairs, 2025) tells an intimate story of a group of friends in journalism whose view diverged against the backdrop of Putin’s revanchist, authoritarian rule. Soldatov and Borogan narrate the personal, perplexing, and painful story of the friends and colleagues who assimilated Kremlin-aligned views as the authors themselves moved from opposition journalists to exiles under threat from the Putin’s regime. This conversation scratches the surface of the book’s riveting and important attempt to make sense of polarization and allegiances with weighty consequences.

Andrei Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist in exile, co-founder and editor of Agentura ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999.

Irina Borogan is a Russian investigative journalist in exile. Borogan reported on terrorist attacks in Russia, including hostage takings in Moscow and Beslan. In 1999 Borogan covered the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, in 2006 she covered the Lebanon War and tensions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She chronicled the Kremlin’s campaign to gain control of civil society and strengthen the government’s police services under the pretext of fighting extremism.

Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are currently fellows at King’s College London and the Center for Europan Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are co-authors of four books: The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (2010); The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (2015); The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad (2019);and Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation (2025).

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Susanna Rabow-Edling, "The First Russian Revolution: The Decembrist Revolt Of 1825" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist Revolt, Susanna Rabow-Edling published The First Russian Revolution: The Decembrist Revolt Of 1825 (Reaktion Books, 2025), a new book about the first Russian Revolution. Though the 1825 coup attempt failed in its aspiration to change how Russia was governed, that failure has nevertheless cast a long shadow across Russian history since.

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Eric Lee, "The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism" (McFarland, 2025)

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For three years following the Russian Revolution, the small South Caucasian country of Georgia was a democracy, but Stalin later ordered the Red Army to invade and to bring the country back under Russian rule. Communist attacks on political opponents, trade unions, cooperatives, and even the church sparked resistance, and an armed uprising broke out across the nation in 1924. It was swiftly crushed, with massacres of thousands, including hostages. Social Democratic and Labor parties across Europe reacted with shock and indignation. Soviet opponents began to describe communism as “red fascism” and their own movement as “democratic socialism.” What followed—including Socialist support for the creation of NATO—resulted from the Georgian uprising and its aftermath. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine a century later, the long-forgotten Georgian experience examined in The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism (McFarland, 2025) seems more relevant than ever.

The website for this book is here

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Martyn Whittock, "Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine" (Biteback, 2025)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Western Europe, we typically associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords and the attacks on the monasteries and settlements of north-western Europe. This popular image rarely includes the river systems of Russia and Ukraine, the wide sweep of the Eurasian steppe, the far shores of the Caspian Sea, the incense and rituals of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the high walls and towers of the city of Constantinople. Yet for many Viking raiders, traders and settlers, it was the road to the East that beckoned.

These Viking adventurers founded the Norse–Slavic dynasties of the Rus, which are entangled in the bitterly contested origin myths of Russia and Ukraine. The Rus were the first community in the region to convert to Christianity – in its Eastern Orthodox form – and so they are at the heart of the concept of ‘Holy Russia’. Russian rulers have frequently referenced these Norse origins when trying to enhance their power and secure control over the Ukrainian lands, most recently demonstrated by Vladimir Putin as his justification for seizing Crimea and invading Ukraine.

In Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine (BiteBack Publishing, 2025), historian Martyn Whittock explores the important but often misunderstood and manipulated role played by the Vikings in the origins of Russian power, the deadly consequences of which we are still living with today.

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Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko "In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos" (MIT Press, 2023)

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.

A faded image of a family gathered at a festively served dinner table, raising their glasses in unison. A group of small children, sitting in orderly rows, with stuffed toys at their feet and a portrait of Lenin looming over their heads. A pensive older woman against a snowy landscape, her gaze directed lovingly at a tombstone. These are a few of the evocative images in In Visible Presence by Dr. Oksana Sarkisova and Dr. Olga Shevchenko, an exquisitely researched book that brings together photographs from Soviet-era family photo archives and investigates their afterlives in Russia.
In Visible Presence explores the photographic images' singular power to capture a fleeting moment by approaching them as points of contestation and possibility. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and interviews, as well as internet ethnography, media analysis, and case studies, In Visible Presence offers a rich account of the role of family photography in creating communities of affect, enabling nostalgic longings, and processing memories of suffering, violence, and hardship. Together these photos evoke youthful aspirations, dashed hopes, and moral compromises, as well as the long legacy of silence that was passed down from grandparents to parents to children.
With more than 250 black and white photos, In Visible Presence is an astonishing journey into domestic photography, family memory, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the Soviet past that is as timely and powerful today as it has ever been.

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Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As the First World War drew to a close and regimes began to collapse across Europe, British officials plotted a daring campaign to send an unlikely band of maverick soldiers, diplomats and spies to the chaotic region around the Caspian Sea. Their mission: to block the advance of the Turks, to hold back the rising Bolsheviks and prevent a Turkish-inspired jihad overwhelming India, and to secure the vital supply of oil from Baku.
It was an almost impossible task, but Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Nick Higham tells the gripping stories of the remarkable and enterprising characters at the centre of it all, who would be tested to the limit. There was Lionel Dunsterville, the inspiration for Kipling's Stalky and commander of the expedition; Ranald MacDonell, a Scottish aristocrat and diplomat who smuggled millions of roubles for the war effort; Edward Noel, a seemingly indestructible soldier who was held hostage for sixty-five days in horrific conditions; Toby Rawlinson, the younger brother of one of Britain's most senior generals and a brilliant inventor; and Reginald Teague-Jones, a spy who printed his own currency and would eventually emerge as an author at the age of ninety-nine.
Drawing on personal diaries, memoirs and once-secret government archives, Mavericks brings to life a cast of eccentric heroes who survived against all odds to tell their extraordinary tales. This is a propulsive story of boldness and intrigue, set in a forgotten corner of the Great War where the rules were made to be broken.

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Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period.

Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga.

Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries.

Guest: Maria Fedorova (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of agriculture, food insecurity, US-Russia/Soviet relations, and transnational history.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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Aram G. Sarkisian, "Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era" (NYU Press, 2025)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era (NYU Press, 2025) is an Immigration and labor history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the US

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of immigrants from the borderlands of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires built a transnational church in North America. The community that church leaders called American Orthodox Rus’ was created by and for working people, and transformed believers’ identities as Eastern European migrants, as Orthodox Christians, and as American workers.

Given how strongly the Russian Orthodox Christian community was tied to working class industrial life, this book makes the case that we cannot understand the scope of working class and immigrant religion in the United States without understanding American Orthodox Rus’. The work Russian Orthodox immigrants did in the Progressive Era United States occurred in factories, foundries, and mines; they lived mainly in industrial cities and mining towns; and they almost immediately got caught up in the most pivotal—and sometimes violent—political and social crises of their times, both nationally and internationally. To address their needs in these contexts, the Russian Orthodox Church expanded its missionary efforts in North America, forming a network of social and material aid for working-class believers. This book traces the rapid growth of this transnational religious world, then explores its unexpected collapse under the weight of the First World War, a global pandemic, and the transnational reach of revolutionary political change in Russia. A story of challenge and resilience, Orthodoxy on the Line complicates dominant paradigms in the study of labor and North American Religions.

Guest: Aram G. Sarkisian (he/him) is a historian of religion, immigration, and labor in the United States.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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Illiberalism, Putin, and the Politics of Religion

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, Eli Karetny speaks with Marlene Laruelle, Research Professor at George Washington University and director of the Illiberalism Studies Program, about the rise of illiberalism in Russia and beyond. They explore how illiberal movements define themselves against liberalism, Russia’s evolution since the 1990s, and how Putin has woven together competing narratives of nationalism, Eurasianism, and conservatism. The conversation also examines the growing role of religion in Russian politics, the appeal of Russia for parts of the American right, and the eschatological language shaping Russian elites’ views of the war in Ukraine.

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Meredith L. Roman, "The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparative fashion here for the very first time. The book also examines the extra-legal measures that both the KGB and FBI employed to destroy them.
The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Meredith Roman innovatively compares Soviet human rights activists' exposure of the workings of the Soviet police state with the miniature, city-level surveillance police states that the Black Panthers exposed as operating across the United States. It illuminates the legal tactics of counter-surveillance that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers employed as a means of restraining acts of state-sanctioned violence. The book also highlights how the U.S. production of knowledge about Soviet 'dissidents' reified white supremacist, anti-communist notions of dissent, human rights, and state violence that facilitated the repression of the Black Panthers and the mass incarceration of African Americans as criminals.
Dr. Roman disrupts the enduring Cold War binaries of authoritarianism-democracy and oppression-freedom that obscure our understanding of the complex, overlapping histories of these two superpowers. Dr. Roman convincingly argues that the Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers' vast documentation of domestic human rights abuses and the repressive measures that they faced for mobilizing to end them serve as an important societal reminder; they reaffirm that genuine democracy and the safeguarding of human rights are incompatible with authoritarian practices, the conditions of racial capitalism, and the ideology of national security.

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Rivals in a Tight Embrace Russia, China, and the Central Asian Chessboard

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This podcast episode by Alevtina Solovyeva traces Central Asia as the enduring crossroads “between empires,” where caravan routes outlast the borders drawn over them. It opens with the Silk Roads: trade as the region’s original superpower – moving goods, ideas, and identities. The narrative then tracks how Qing–Russian rivalry and the 19th century “Great Game” layered governors, railways, and taxes onto steppe and peoples, then the Soviet period engineered republics, industries, and pipelines while China watched, split, and later recalibrated. Independence for the five Central Asian states after 1991 reset the board: Russia remained the familiar security habit; China re-entered with capital and corridors, culminating in the Belt and Road. Multi-vector tendencies took hold as Turkey, Iran, Japan, Korea, the U.S., and the EU pressed in. The 2022, start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, accelerated internal and external processes concerning Central Asia as a strategic area, as well as a Russia-China partner-rivalry across energy, transport, finance, and soft power. Four platforms – SCO, EAEU, BRICS, and BRI – showcase both cooperation and competition, with BRI as the physical layer that forces choices on routes, rules, and control. Looking to 2025-2030, three stress tests loom: the terms of Power of Siberia-2, corridor races (CKU vs. Kazakh/Middle Corridor routes), and “security creep.” Central Asia has become a focal arena for international actors amid deep shifts in power balances and rules. It is a fast-moving environment with open-ended trajectories, multiple internal and external agents and situational theatres where interests intersect.

Dr. Alevtina Solovyeva is the Head of the Centre for Oriental Studies and Mongolian Research Laboratory at the University of Tartu. She specializes in Asian studies, Chinese and Mongolian studies, folklore studies, historical and social anthropology, and social sciences.

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Michael Jabara Carley, "Stalin's Gamble: The Search for Allies Against Hitler, 1930-1936" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Shedding light on the origins of the Second World War in Europe, Stalin's Gamble: The Search for Allies Against Hitler, 1930-1936 (University of Toronto Press, 2023) aims to create a historical narrative of the relations of the USSR with Britain, France, the United States, Poland, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the 1930s. The book explores the Soviet Union's efforts to organize a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, in effect rebuilding the anti-German Entente of the First World War.

Drawing on extensive research in Soviet as well as Western archives, Michael Jabara Carley offers an in-depth account of the diplomatic manoeuvrings which surrounded the rise of Hitler and Soviet efforts to construct an alliance against future German aggression. Paying close attention to the beliefs and interactions of senior politicians and diplomats, the book seeks to replace one-sided Western histories with records from both sides. The book also offers an inside look at Soviet foreign policy making, with a focus on Stalin as a foreign policy maker as well as his interactions with his colleagues. Told in a fascinating narrative style, Stalin's Gamble attempts to see the European crisis of the 1930s through Soviet eyes.

Michael Jabara Carley is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal.

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Bradley A. Gorski, "Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Bradley Gorski, a literary and culture scholar, examines the breakneck commercialization of Russian book publishing and of Russian literature more broadly – in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, thousands of new publishers emerged, up from a mere two hundred at the Soviet Union’s end. The notion of the “bestseller” quickly came to dominate the new market, fueling he rise of immensely popular genres such as detective novels, including its zhenskii variety (detective novels written by women and featuring female sleuths. Gorski artfully weaves together the evolution of the book market - from the chaos of the early post-Communist years to the near-monopoly in the 2000s - with literary analysis of some of the most prominent post-Soviet authors. At early stages, post-Soviet literature often reflected a degree of optimism about the Western ideal of personal liberty and embraced what sociologist Boris Dubin called a Russian version of the “American success story”. In recent years, however, the Russian literary market has taken a distinctly illiberal turn, exemplified by the writer Zakhar Prilepin, a bestselling author turned jingoistic patriot who fought in the Donbas region of Ukraine and inspired many of his admirers to join the front.

Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025)

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Dani Belo, "Russian Warfare in the 21st Century" (Routledge, 2025)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dani Belo's Russian Warfare in the 21st Century: An Incentive-Opportunity Intervention Model (Routledge, 2025) provides a comprehensive analysis of Russia's foreign policy in gray zone conflicts, with a particular focus on its interventions in Ukraine.

Challenging conventional views, the book contends that Russia's use of varied gray zone tactics is influenced by both system-level incentives and domestic-level opportunities, which are integrated here into the Incentive-Opportunity Intervention (IOI) Model. The book examines case studies including Abkhazia, Crimea, Odesa, Kharkiv, and the Donbas, demonstrating how local ethnic-based movements and perceptions of regional retreat shape Moscow's coercive strategies. It highlights the reactive nature of Russia's tactics, driven by perceived threats to its protector role, and the significant role of ethnic and political dynamics in the region. The study underscores the importance of understanding these motivations for effective conflict resolution and suggests that protecting minority rights could mitigate such interventions. Policy recommendations emphasize the need for nuanced approaches that address both geopolitical and local dynamics. Ultimately, the book calls for future research to apply the IOI Model to other great powers, enhance the generalizability and applicability of the findings, and highlight the potential for multilateral coordination in promoting minority rights as a strategy for conflict prevention.

This book will be of much interest to students and policy practitioners working on Russian foreign policy, international security, Eastern European politics, and International Relations.

Dani Belo is an Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security and Director of the Global Policy Horizons Research Lab, Webster University in St. Louis, USA.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

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Vera Michlin-Shapir, "Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (Cornell UP, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalization on its formation, something which has been largely overlooked. This approach sheds new light on the Russian case, revealing a dynamic Russian identity that is developing along the lines of other countries exposed to globalization. Vera Michlin-Shapir shows how along with the freedoms afforded when Russia joined the globalizing world in the 1990s came globalization's disruptions.

Michlin-Shapir describes Putin's rise to power and his project to reaffirm a stronger identity not as a uniquely Russian diversion from liberal democracy, but as part of a broader phenomenon of challenges to globalization. She underlines the limits of Putin's regime to shape Russian politics and society, which is still very much impacted by global trends. As well, Michlin-Shapir questions a prevalent approach in Russia studies that views Russia's experience with national identity as abnormal or defective, either being too weak or too aggressive.

What is offered is a novel explanation for the so-called Russian identity crisis. As the liberal postwar order faces growing challenges, Russia's experience can be an instructive example of how these processes unfold. This study ties Russia's authoritarian politics and nationalist rallying to the shortcomings of globalization and neoliberal economics, potentially making Russia "patient zero" of the anti-globalist populist wave and rise of neo-authoritarian regimes. In this way, Fluid Russia contributes to the broader understanding of national identity in the current age and the complexities of identity formation in the global world.

Guest: Vera Michlin-Shapir (she/her), is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's Russia Institute, King's College London.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke here

Linktree here

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Chelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian socialities makes visible how race operates. Historical and political science frameworks prevail in the study of post-Cold War East European societies, yet as West Ohueri shows, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge can equip scholars to ask questions that they might otherwise not consider, illustrating how racialization is ongoing and enduring in a period that she terms the communist afterlife. Encountering Race in Albania, through the unexpected optic of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, offers significant insights into into broader understandings of race in a global context.

Chelsi West Ohueri is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at University of Texas, Austin. Her work focuses on ethnographic studies of race and racialization, belonging, marginalization, and medical anthropology, primarily in Albania and Southeast Europe.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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David Welsh, "The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europes Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europe’s Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. David Welsh examines the evolution of rail transport and a number of railway workforces across Europe in the modern era, from around 1880 to 2023.
Each chapter explores how, within the context of a social railway, rail workers developed distinct national and international perspectives on the nature of their work and their roles in societies and states. Dr. Welsh convincingly argues that workers formed a raft of entirely new and enduring organisations such as trade unions that, in turn, became ramparts of hope. Welsh goes on to consider how the insurgent character of these organisations produced moments of fury during tumultuous periods in the 20th century. The Social Railway and its Workers in Europe's Modern Era, 1880-2023 explores the national and European contexts in which both characteristics came to the fore, including the ecology of fossil fuel technology (coal and oil). Above all, it argues that social, economic and political forces are not simply external 'scene-shifting' but integral to the history of railway systems.
The book examines the cultural construction of European railways through literature, art and other forms of writing as well as recent oral history. It also includes a detailed investigation of the role played by nationalisation and public ownership in Europe. In the context of neoliberalism and globalization, it proposes a 21st century programme for the social railway.

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Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and offers timely keys to Russian national interests which can help the United States get Russia right.

As US-Russian relations scrape the depths of Cold-War antagonism, the promise of partnership that beguiled American administrations during the first post-Soviet decades increasingly appears to have been false from the start. Why did American leaders persist in pursuing it? Was there another path that would have produced more constructive relations or better prepared Washington to face the challenge Russia poses today?

With a practitioner's eye honed during decades of work on Russian affairs, Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, deftly traces the evolution of opposing ideas of national purpose that created an inherent tension in relations. Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023) identifies the blind spots that prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. Distilling the Putin factor to reveal the contours of the Russia challenge facing the United States whenever he departs the scene, Graham lays out a compelling way to deal with it so that the United States can continue to advance its interests in a rapidly changing world.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached by email here or via his website. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Catherine Merridale, "Moscow Underground" (HarperColins, 2025)

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Moscow Underground (HarperCollins, 2025) by Dr. Catherine Merridale is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin's tyranny.

Moscow's glittering new subway is under construction at last. The first line will run through the centre of the city, cutting deep through Moscow soil. But futures cannot be created without digging up the past. Though Russia's leaders want to build a glorious Soviet capital, what holds them in a fatal grip is history: old mud and bones.

Anton Belkin is an Investigator at the Procuracy, a sensitive job at a dangerous moment on the road to the Show Trials. He is also someone who needs to keep his head down. His artist father was once the darling of the revolutionary avant-garde, a painter whose work could inspire devotion and great sacrifice. But now his dreams are out of place, too loud and red in Stalin's world of sterile rules and rubber stamps.

Anton is dragged into a murder case. A prominent archaeologist, working alongside the subway dig, has been killed in a deserted mansion. Though Anton doesn't want the job, his former lover, Vika, who is now a powerful member of the secret police, browbeats him into paying a visit to the site with her. Against his better judgement he is drawn to follow though, embarking on investigations that will almost certainly get him killed.

Deep underground, he finds a priceless secret that could genuinely unlock the future but links him to a vicious internecine fight for power in the young Soviet state. In the process, he is forced to reconsider the history he shares with Vika and the bonds that bind them both.

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Elizabeth White, "A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the changes and continuities in ideas about Russian childhood from the 18th to the 21st century. It looks at how children were thought about and treated in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as how the radical social, political and economic changes across the period affected children. It explains how and why childhood became a key concept both in Late Imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union and looks at similarities and differences to models of childhood elsewhere.
Focusing mainly on children in families, telling us much about Russian and Soviet family life in the process, Elizabeth White combines theoretical ideas about childhood with examples of real, lived experiences of children to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject. The book also offers a comprehensive synthesis of a wide range of secondary sources in English and Russian whilst utilizing various textual primary sources as part of the discussion.
This book is key reading for anyone wanting to understand the social and cultural history of Russia as well as the history of childhood in the modern world.

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Thane Gustafson, "Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them.

In Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future (Oxford University Press, 2025), Russia analyst Thane Gustafson reinterprets the story of Russia's failed opening to the West, focusing on its economic, technological, and social aspects, and the role they played in its ultimate failure. These parallel events are essential for understanding what happened and what went wrong. Yet they have received much less attention than the military and geopolitical aspects of the current conflict. Gustafson tells the story of the West's entry into Russia, the arrival of Russians into the West, and the conflicting emotions and responses these aroused on both sides, contributing to the ultimate breakdown of relations and the unprecedented hurricane of Western sanctions. The book concludes with an examination of possible futures under a new generation of leaders.

A measured and nuanced account of the evolution of Russia's economic relations with the world, Perfect Storm illuminates the longer history of Russia's opening to the West, from its achievements and disappointments to the complexity of the post-invasion sanctions regime and Russia's responses to them.

Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Klimat (2021), The Bridge (2020), and Wheel of Fortune (2012).

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, "The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents" (Hackett Publishing, 2017)

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

"On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov have reinvigorated the study of a turning point in world history. Instead of rehashing the internal dynamics of the Bolshevik takeover, the authors have carefully juxtaposed the international ambitions of the Bolsheviks with the Revolution's reception around the world. Daly and Trofimov pair their lucid introductory essay with documents from Soviet officials, intellectuals in South America, W. E. B. Du Bois in the United States, and others, so readers will quickly realize how revolutionary ideas cross oceans and transcend geopolitical boundaries. The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents (Hackett Publishing, 2017) thus takes a topic once reserved for students of Russian history and places it in a world historical perspective; those interested in global history, European history, and, of course, those fascinated by events in Petrograd and Moscow will find ample sources of inspiration in this text. As the Russian Federation is now exerting its influence on a global scale, the time is ripe to consider the Russian Revolution in such broad terms." ―Nigel Raab, Loyola Marymount University

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Nicholas Birman Trickett, "Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia" (Hurst, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards an increasingly coercive authoritarianism, a hubristic challenge to the West, and all-out war with Ukraine. Decades of dependence on commodity exports, failure to invest and failure to consume enough have condemned not only the Russian Federation, but Eurasia more broadly, to stagnation and conflict. Only time will tell if Russia and its neighbours can escape the zero-sum politics of austerity in a world of rapidly evolving geopolitical, energy and climate crises.

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Stephan Kieninger, "Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe Talbott, NATO, and Russia After the Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews with former government officials, he sheds light on NATO’s opening, its missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and other vexed issues. Kieninger argues that a careful look at Talbott’s statecraft rebuts Putin’s claims that the West exploited Russia’s weakness after the Cold War, demonstrating that the Clinton administration and its NATO allies sought to include Russia at every step. An illuminating and comprehensive account of US diplomacy during the Clinton years, Securing Peace in Europe provides vital insight into the complex relations between Russia and the West.

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"Assignment Moscow" with author James Rodgers

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Is it possible to do independent journalism in today’s Russia? “The short answer is no,” James Rodgers tells me in our conversation about his insightful and scrupulously researched book Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Rodgers is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow. We first talk about Western coverage of the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union, when many foreign correspondents, famously John Reed, openly identified with the Bolshevik cause and cheered it on. We discuss, too, the dubious example of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who infamously denied the reality of famine in Ukraine in the Stalin period. And we close with a discussion of journalism in the Putin era and the challenges that all journalists, including Russians, face. As Rodgers acknowledges, much of the best reporting on what is happening inside of Russia comes from Russian exiles with good internal sources. Such reporting does not get wide attention in the West but represents a valuable dissident Russian journalism tradition that took root in the glasnost era of the 1980s and has endured.

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Georgiy Kasianov et al., "From 'the Ukraine' to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country’s domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Rojansky, and Mykhailo Minakov, guides its readers through the labyrinthine developments that provide a wide spectrum of views and approaches that help receive a better understanding of the contemporary history of Ukraine. While detailing how independent Ukraine was taking shape locally, the editors and contributors of the volume simultaneously position Ukraine in the international environment that arouse after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is thus inscribed into the international political map, which further complicates and advances the surveys presented in the volume. After the collapse of the USSR, the country faced a number of challenges: in addition to learning how to construct and narrate its own history, the new independent state also had to find a way to present itself to the global community. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine outlines trajectories that illustrate a gradual process of the country’s political awareness, ambitions, and maturity. Thirty years may seem like an inconsiderable amount of time for a new independent state. The material presented in the book proves otherwise. In a concise and yet acute way, the contributors touch upon the most challenging and sensitive issues which have shaped the recent history of Ukraine: ranging from the enthusiastic support of independence to the current Russian-Ukrainian war, the volume constructs a multilayered historical scene which at the same time invites further surveys and elaborations.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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José Vergara, "All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses.

The creative reworkings, or translations, of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history.

All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.

José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College.

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Inna Faliks, "Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage" (Backbeat Books, 2023)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic artists of her generation. She has made a name for herself through commanding performances of standard piano repertoire, as well genre-bending, interdisciplinary projects, and inquisitive work with contemporary composers.

This season, she gave the world premiere of Clarice Assad’s “Lilith” concerto, composed for her. Ljova’s “Voices” for piano and historical recording was composed for her and commissioned by the Milken Center of American Jewish Music in 2020.Faliks created a one-woman show “Polonaise-Fantasie, Story of a Pianist”, an autobiographical monologue for pianist and actress, premiered in New York’s Symphony Space and performed worldwide. A committed chamber musician, she has had notable collaborations with Rachel Barton Pine, Gilbert Kalish, Ron Leonard, Fred Sherry, Ilya Kaler, Colin Carr, Wendy Warner, Clive Greensmith, and Antonio Lysy, among many others.Inna Faliks has been featured on radio and television throughout the world. She co-starred with Downton Abbey’s Lesley Nicol in “Admission – One Shilling,” a play for pianist and actor based on the life of the great British pianist, Dame Myra Hess.Her CD releases, Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel on Navona Records and The Schumann Project Volume 1, on MSR Classics, received rave reviews, and were named to several “best of 2021” lists. With her all-Beethoven CD release on MSR, WTTW called Faliks “High priestess of the piano, concert pianist of the highest order, as dramatic and subtle as a great stage actor.”

Sound of Verse, was released in 2009, featuring music of Boris Pasternak, Rachmaninoff and Ravel. “Polonaise-Fantasie, Story of a Pianist” on Delos captures her autobiographical monologue-recital with short piano works from Bach to Carter.Faliks is founder and curator of Music/Words, an award-winning poetry-music series: performances in collaboration with distinguished poets. Her long-standing relationship with Chicago’s WFMT radio has led to multiple broadcasts of Music/Words, which she produced alongside some of the nation’s most recognized poets in performances throughout the United States.A past winner of many prestigious competitions, Inna Faliks is currently Professor of Piano and Head of Piano at UCLA.

In Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage (Backbeat Books, 2023) Faliks provides a globe-trotting account of her upbringing as a child prodigy in the Soviet Union, the perils of immigration, and the struggle to assimilate as an American. She chronicles years of training with teachers and her steady rise in the world of classical music. With a warm and playful style, Faliks helps non-musicians understand the experience of becoming a world-renowned concert pianist. The places she grew up, the books she read, and the poems she memorized as a child all connect to her sound at the piano. The way she hears and shapes a musical phrase illuminates both classical music and elite performance. She explores how a person’s humanity makes their art honest and voice unique, and how the lifelong challenge of retaining that voice is fueled by balancing the demands of musicianship and being human. Throughout, Faliks provides powerful insights into the role of music in a world of conflict, change, and hope for a better tomorrow.

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Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond.

Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators—and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad.

Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2022) is aimed at a general audience, synthesizing a vast amount of qualitative and quantitative research by the authors and many other scholars. The book is highly readable, with a great mix of anecdotes and examples along with plain-English explanations of academic research findings. However, it also provides an excellent overview of contemporary global authoritarianism for academics. Almost every claim in the book has an endnote reference to the original research for those who want to follow up. The endnotes mean that despite its moderately intimidating 340-page heft, the main text is a very approachable 219 pages.

Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including in particular the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.

In 2021-22, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and he was recently named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A graduate of Oxford University (B.A. Hons.) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1995), he has published five books and numerous articles in leading political science and economics journals including The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review, as well as in public affairs journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has been a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics

Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focuses on the political economy and governance of China.

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Michael Jabara Carley, "Stalin's Great Game: War and Neutrality, 1939-1941" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The period from September 1939 to early 1942 was crucial for Soviet foreign policy and coincided with the early stages of the Second World War, including the Great Patriotic War. In Stalin's Great Game, Michael Jabara Carley unpacks the complexities of Soviet diplomacy during this time, addressing key issues such as the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, Soviet views on the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, efforts to remain neutral in Europe, Soviet relations with both Britain and Nazi Germany, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers.

Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archives in France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR, Carley offers a comprehensive narrative that explores Soviet intelligence activities, especially of the "Cambridge Five" spy ring and Nazi Germany's preparations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The book also re-evaluates historiographical debates on Stalin's interpretation of Soviet intelligence and Hitler's intentions towards the USSR. The third volume in Carley's trilogy on the origins and early conduct of the Second World War, Stalin's Great Game provides a fresh re-examination of key events and interpretations by both Western and Soviet historians, introducing new ideas and perspectives on this critical period.

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Ara Sarafian et al., "Microhistories in Armenian Studies" (Cal State Fresno Press, 2025)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The articles appearing in this volume were presented at a conference entitled “Microhistories in Armenian Studies” organized by the Armenian Studies Program of California State University, Fresno, on September 22-23, 2023. They have since been edited and appear here in a single volume.

The present study focuses on Armenian studies from a conceptual, theoretical and methodological approach. Each article, both in its methodological approach and its unique archival material, offers new insights by blending micro and macrohistorical perspectives on the major issues they address in Armenian Studies.

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Alexander Mikaberidze, "Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Every Russian knows him purely by his patronym. He was the general who triumphed over Napoleon's Grande Armée during the Patriotic War of 1812, not merely restoring national pride but securing national identity. Many Russians consider Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov the greatest figure of the 19th century, ahead of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, even Tolstoy himself. Immediately after his death in 1813, Kutuzov's remains were hurried into the pantheon of heroes. Statues of him rose up across the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union. Over the course of decades and centuries he hardened into legend.

As award-winning author Alexander Mikaberidze shows in Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (Oxford UP, 2022), Kutuzov's story is far more compelling and complex than the myths that have encased him. An unabashed imperialist who rose in the ranks through his victories over the Turks and the Poles, Kutuzov was also a realist and a skeptic about military power. When the Russians and their allies were routed by the French at Austerlitz he was openly appalled by the incompetence of leadership and the sheer waste of life. Over his long career--marked equally by victory and defeat, embrace and ostracism--he grew to despise those whose concept of war had devolved to mindless attack.

Here, at last, is Kutuzov as he really was--a master and survivor of intrigue, moving in and out of royal favor, committed to the welfare of those under his command, and an innovative strategist. When, reluctantly and at the 11th hour, Czar Alexander I called upon him to lead the fight against Napoleon's invading army, Kutuzov accomplished what needed to be done not by a heroic charge but by a strategic retreat. Across the generations, portraits of Kutuzov have ranged from hagiography to dismissal, with Tolstoy's portrait of him in War and Peace perhaps the most indelible of all. This immersive biography returns a touchstone figure in Russian history to human scale.

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David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025)

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.

Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.

Scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the “Silk Road,” which might be better called the Horse Road. Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization.

David Chaffetz is an independent scholar with a lifelong passion for Middle Eastern and Inner Asian history. His 1981 book, several times republished, A Journey through Afghanistan, earned praise from Owen Lattimore, the then doyen of Inner Asian studies in America and the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and has written for the South China Morning Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. His most recent book, Three Asian Divas, describes the important role of elite women entertainers in the transmission of traditional Asian culture.

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Craig W. H. Luther, "Guderian's Panzers: From Triumph to Defeat on the Eastern Front (1941)" (Stackpole Books, 2025)

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the blitzkrieg bogged down during the approach on Moscow. At the spearhead of the attack was General Heinz Guderian, one of the most celebrated and controversial commanders of the war, who commanded a tank group in the center of the German front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Guderian's Panzers reconstructs Barbarossa from the perspective of Generaloberst Guderian and his 2nd Panzer Group. With the German war machine at the height of its martial prowess in June 1941, Guderian's group of 250,000 men and 900 tanks rapidly broke through the Soviet frontier defenses and thrust some 600 kilometers into Soviet Russia in a matter of weeks--in doing so playing an integral part in the successful encirclement (cauldron) battles of Belostok-Minsk (June/July 1941) and Smolensk (July/August 1941); each of these battles resulting in the loss of several Soviet armies and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Despite having sustained alarming losses of personal and equipment in these opening battles, Guderian pushed his men, and himself, to even greater achievements, culminating in the triumphant cauldron Battle of Kiev in the Ukraine (September 1941) that obliterated Soviet Southwestern Front and resulted in the capture of over 600,000 Red Army POWs. It was, perhaps, Germany's greatest victory in WWII, and Guderian had made it happen.

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William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.
Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library.

William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books.

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Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Starks illustrates how tobacco influenced facets of life, politics, morality, and culture in the 19th century from the perspectives of tobacco users, producers, and objectors. The book includes full-color ads for tobacco and papirosy cigarettes that add to the book’s rich prose. From Tolstoy’s anti-tobacco screed to the “Tobacco Queens” of St. Petersburg, Starks uses primary sources to craft an edifying narrative of the history of tobacco and tobacco consumption in the imperial period.

Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.

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Richard W. Harrison, "The Soviet Army's High Commands in War and Peace, 1941–1992" (Casemate Academic, 2022)

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Richard W. Harrison's The Soviet Army's High Commands in War and Peace, 1941-1992 (Casemate Academic, 2022) is the first full treatment of the unique phenomenon of High Commands in the Soviet Army during World War II and the Cold War.

The war on the Eastern Front during 1941–45 was an immense struggle, running from the Barents Sea to the Caucasus Mountains. The vast distances involved forced the Soviet political-military leadership to resort to new organizational expedients in order to control operations along the extended front. These were the high commands of the directions, which were responsible for two or more fronts (army groups) and, along maritime axes, one or more fleets.

In all, five high commands were created along the northwestern, western, southwestern, and North Caucasus strategic directions during 1941–42. However, the highly unfavorable strategic situation during the first year of the war, as well as interference in day-to-day operations by Stalin, severely limited the high commands' effectiveness. As a consequence, the high commands were abolished in mid-1942 and replaced by the more flexible system of supreme command representatives at the front. A High Command of Soviet Forces in the Far East was established in 1945 and oversaw the Red Army's highly effective campaign against Japanese forces in Manchuria.

The Far Eastern High Command was briefly resurrected in 1947 as a response to the tense situation along the Korean peninsula and the ongoing civil war in China, but was abolished in 1953, soon after Stalin's death. Growing tensions with China brought about the recreation of the Far Eastern High Command in 1979, followed a few years later by the appearance of new high commands in Europe and South Asia. However, these new high commands did not long survive the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and were abolished a year later.

The book relies almost exclusively on Soviet and post-communist archival and other sources and is the first unclassified treatment of this subject in any country, East or West.
Richard W. Harrison earned his Undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Georgetown University, where he specialized in Russian Area Studies. He later earned his doctorate in War Studies from King’s College London. He also was an exchange student in the former Soviet Union and spent several years living and working in post-communist Russia. He has taught Russian History and Military History at the US Military Academy at West Point. Dr. Harrison lives with his family near Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

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John Givens, "The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak" (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Dr. John Givens of the University of Rochester discusses classics of Russian literature such as The Brothers Karamazov and Dr. Zhivago, as well as texts of less renown to English-speaking audiences, such as Tolstoy’s Resurrection. These texts and others, Givens suggests, portray Christ apophatically: that is, by showing who Christ was not, in order to illuminate who Christ therefore must be. In addition to the novels themselves, Givens cites sources such as personal correspondence and important theological works, thus bringing an English-speaking public to greater depth of understanding than would be possible simply by reading Russian novels in translation. Though focused on a specific topic, Givens’ book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in familiarizing themselves with some of the “greats” of the Russian literary canon.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Regina Kazyulina, "Women Under Suspicion: Fraternization, Espionage, and Punishment in the Soviet Union During World War II" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,” a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official sanction, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation.

Guest: Regina Kazyulina (she/her), is the assistant director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a visiting assistant professor of history. She teaches in the Graduate Certificate Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research interests include everyday life under German occupation, the “Holocaust by Bullets,” and the gendered lived experiences of Soviet civilians.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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Joseph Kellner, "The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse and the post-Soviet transition, embarked on a spirited and highly visible search for new meaning. Amid profound disorientation, these seekers found direction in their horoscopes, or behind gurus in saffron robes or apocalyptic preachers, or by turning from the most basic premises of official science and history to orient themselves anew. The beliefs they seized on and, even more, the questions that guided their search reveal the essence of late-Soviet culture and its legacy in post-Soviet Russia.

To skeptical outsiders, the seekers appeared eccentric, deviant, and above all un-Soviet. Yet they came to their ideas by Soviet sources and Soviet premises. As Joseph Kellner demonstrates, their motley beliefs reflect modern values that formed the spiritual core of Soviet ideology, among them a high regard for science, an informed and generous internationalism, and a confidence in humanity to chart its own course. Soviet ideology failed, however, to unite these values in an overarching vision that could withstand historical change.

And so, as The Spirit of Socialism shows, the seekers asked questions raised but not resolved by the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet order—questions of epistemic authority, of cultural identity, and of history's ultimate meaning. Although the Soviet collapse was not the end of history, it was a rupture of epochal significance, whose fissures extend into our own uncertain era.

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Sean McMeekin, "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2021)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.

Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.

McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army.

This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.

A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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James D.J. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025),

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage to learn more about their neighbor—with various degrees of success. Sometimes, it failed miserably, like Russia’s early attempts to make contact with pre-Meiji Japan, or the debacle during the Russo-Japanese War. Other times, they were wildly successful, like during the Battle of Khalkin Gol or with Richard Sorge’s spy ring during the Second World War.

James D. Brown covers Russia and the Soviet Union’s efforts to learn more about Japan in Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst, 2025), covering much both the famous examples of Russian spycraft, and the lesser-known missions—like Operation Postman, a successful effort to read the mail of Japanese diplomats in Italy.

James is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, Japan. He is a specialist on East Asian politics and a regular media contributor, including for the BBC. His books include Japan, Russia and their Territorial Dispute (Routledge: 2016); and Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia (Routledge: 2018) and The Abe Legacy (Lexington Books: 2023)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Cracking the Crab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Volha Bartash, Tomasz Kamusella, and Viktor Shapoval eds., "Papusza/Bronislawa Wajs. Tears of Blood: A Poet's Witness Account of the Nazi Genocide of Roma" (Brill, 2024)

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Papusza / Bronisława Wajs. Tears of Blood: A Poet’s Witness Account of the Nazi Genocide of Roma (Brill, 2024) is nothing less of an academic, literary, and historical miracle. It is dedicated to a key figure of Romani literature, Bronisława Wajs, also known as Papusza. This book offers—for the very first time in history—the full version of Papusza’s key work, Tears of Blood, which was considered lost for seventy years and circulated only in a highly reduced copy. This poem is a unique account by a woman about the Roma Holocaust in Eastern Europe during WWII. Beyond this important historical and literary document, the book also provides literary translations of this manuscript into several languages, including English, and has chapters written by leading researchers of Romani Studies who comment on the history of this text and the challenges behind making it available to the broader public. It took the team over three decades to locate the manuscript, transcribe it, translate it, and fill in the gaps in its history.

Volha Bartash is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster in Germany and a co-convenor of the network “Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance.”

Tomasz Kamusella is Reader in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on language politics and nationalism.

Host: Tatiana Klepikova is a Freigeist Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation and leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism at the University of Regensburg.

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Anahid Matossian, "Syrian-Armenian Women Migrants in Armenia: Gender, Identity and Painful Belonging" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adopted 'homeland' to their socially constructed new 'ancestral' home in Armenia. The rich ethnographic research conducted over 6 years by the author reveals how women adjusted to new lives in Armenia, supported themselves through gendered work such as embroidery production, yet mostly challenge simple identities such as 'refugee' or 'repatriate, ' existing in a state of what the author terms "painful belonging". The book further reveals crucial insight into how experiences and traumatic memories of war in Syria and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reciprocally shape each other in the minds of the women interviewed.

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Juliane Fürst, "Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first chronological history of Soviet hippies, tracing their beginnings in the 1960s through the movement’s maturity and ritualization in the 1970s. It is also a rich analysis of key aspects of Soviet hippiedom, including ideology, kaif, materiality, and madness - both enacted and imposed. Flowers Through Concrete uncovers, in particular, the lost history of women who participated in the Soviet hippie movement. Fürst makes a number of important arguments in Flowers Through Concrete. Despite obvious antagonisms, she argues that Soviet hippies and late Soviet socialist reality meshed so well that a stable symbiotic, although hostile, relationship emerged. She asserts that personal evidence, such as oral history, is "one of the most exciting historical sources, whose weaknesses sometimes work for rather than against the historian". She engages seriously with and makes visible the role of her own authorial self-reflection in historical analysis. And, last but not least, as Fürst herself says, the story of Soviet hippies is a really good story.

Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students.

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Felix Cowan, "The Kopeck Press: Popular Journalism in Revolutionary Russia, 1908-1918" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Felix Cowan about his new book, The Kopeck Press Popular Journalism in Revolutionary Russia, 1908–1918 (University of Toronto Press, 2025). The Imperial Russian penny press was a vast network of newspapers sold for a single kopeck per issue. Emerging in cities and towns across the empire between the 1905 Revolution and the onset of the First World War, these sensational tabloids quickly became the Russian Empire’s most popular periodical genre. They appealed to a mass audience of poor and less-literate readers with their low prices and accessible language. The Kopeck Press presents a comprehensive study of this phenomenon, examining its role both as a media genre and its significance as a vital forum for lower class political culture.

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Sergey Radchenko, "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What would it feel like To Run the World? The Soviet rulers spent the Cold War trying desperately to find out. In To Run The World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, Sergey Radchenko provides an unprecedented deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow's claims to greatness. Perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape our world.

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko’s books include To Run the World: the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, forthcoming in 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book Recomendations:

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westan

The World of the Cold War by Vladislav Zubok

Zhou Enlai: A Life by Chen Jian

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Elana Gomel, "The Pilgrim Soul: Being a Russian in Israel" (Cambria Press, 2009)

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Elana Gomel is a former senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she also served as department chair for two years. This book investigates the Russian community in Israel, analyzing the narratives through which Russian Jewry defines itself and linking them to the legacy of Soviet history. Gomel is also an award-winning fiction writer and the author of eight novels.

The story of post-Soviet Jews in Israel illustrates a broader phenomenon of cultural divergence, in which history shapes distinct identities from a shared origin. In addition to marking a turning point in Israel’s development, this story forms part of the larger global landscape shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gomel’s book explores Russian immigration to Israel from a cultural rather than purely sociological perspective. It should be noted that the book was originally published in 2009 and serves as a snapshot of the situation 15 years after the massive wave of Russian immigration in the early 1990s. In our discussion, we will try to address some of the changes that have transpired in the country as well as in Elana's views.

Elana Gomel, born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, is an academic with a long list of books and articles, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She has taught in Israel, Italy, and the United States, and is known in academia for her (purely theoretical) interest in serial killers, alien invasions, and rebellious AIs. She is the author of more than a hundred stories, several novellas, and five novels of dark fantasy and dark science fiction. Several of her stories have appeared in Best of the Year anthologies. She is a member of the HWA.

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Talin Suciyan, "Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces" (Syracuse UP, 2023)

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The history of Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire has largely been narrated as a unique period of equality, reform, and progress, often framing it as the backdrop to modern Turkey. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's exhortation to study the oppressed to understand the rule and the ruler, Talin Suciyan reexamines this era from the perspective of the Armenians. In exploring the temporal and territorial differences between the Ottoman capital and the provinces, Suciyan brings the unheard voices of Armenians into the present. Drawing upon the rich archival materials in both the Archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Ottoman Archives, Suciyan uses these to show the integral role Armenians played in all aspects of Ottoman life and argues that accounts of their lives are vital to accurate representation of the Tanzimat era. In shedding much needed light on the lives of those who were vulnerable, disadvantaged, and otherwise oppressed, Suciyan takes a significant step toward a more inclusive Ottoman history.

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Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn, "Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective" (CIUS Press, 2016)

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this volume, leading specialists examine the affinities and differences between the pan-Soviet famine of 1931–1933, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Kazakh great hunger, and the famine in China in 1959–1961. The contributors presented papers at a conference organized by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in 2014.

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Antonio J. Muñoz, "Hitler's War Against the Partisans During the Stalingrad Offensive: Spring 1942 to the Spring of 1943" (Frontline, 2025)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz's Hitler’s War Against the Partisans During The Stalingrad Offensive: Spring 1942 to the Spring of 1943 (Frontline Books, 2025) explores the brutal and widespread partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during 1942-1943, detailing the Axis forces' anti-partisan efforts and the impact on the Soviet war effort.

From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler’s Ostheer, his Eastern Army, and its associated forces would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought.

The preparations for the war against the partisans began before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, during which the Axis forces immediately put their plans into effect. The effects upon the newly conquered territories were soon being felt.

The end of the initial phase of the German invasion of the Soviet Union was met by a Red Army winter offensive which began on 5 December 1941. As the author shows, this had repercussions behind the German lines, where the nascent Soviet partisan movement was attempting to grow and gain a foothold. By the spring of 1942 those early Soviet partisan units were ready to expand. The Germans, aware of the military situation both on the frontlines and in the rear of their armies, also prepared to counter the growing partisan threat. The partisans undoubtedly made a significant contribution to Stalin’s war effort by countering Axis plans to exploit occupied Soviet territories economically, as well as providing valuable assistance to the Red Army by conducting systematic attacks against Hitler's rear communication network.

As the German military planned to continue the Russian campaign into the summer of 1942, new security forces were gathered together and sent to the Soviet Union, and a new headquarters specifically organized to fight the guerrilla menace, was established. In this follow-up study, author Antonio Muñoz picks up the partisan and anti-partisan struggle in the East, where Hitler’s War Against the Partisans During Operation Barbarossa left off.

The struggle behind the frontlines in Russia proved to be as grand and epic as the fight along the front lines. Dr. Muñoz describes this war of attrition along the entire breath of the USSR. In 1942 the Ostheer, acting on Adolf Hitler’s orders, launched their 1942 summer offensive which was aimed at capturing the Caucasus Mountains and the Russian oil fields that lay there.

Dr. Muñoz not only covers the war behind the lines in every region of the occupied USSR, but also describes the German anti-partisan effort behind the lines of Army Group South, as its forces drove into the Caucasus Mountains, the Volga River bend and Stalingrad. No other work has included the guerrilla and anti-partisan struggle specific to the Stalingrad campaign. Muñoz manages to accomplish this, but also to convey the story of the rest of the partisan and anti-guerrilla war in the rest of the USSR from the spring of 1942 to the spring of 1943.
Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz lives in New York City. He is a professor of history at Farmingdale State College in Long Island, New York. He is married, has two daughters and two grandchildren. His last work, published in 2018, covered the history of the German Secret Field Police in Greece, 1941-1944.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.
Please check out my earlier interview with Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz on the previous volume in this series Hitler's War Against the Partisans During Operation Barbarossa June 1941 to the Spring of 1942 (Frontline Books, 2025) for the New Books Network.

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Wilson T. Bell, "Stalin's Gulag at War: Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War" (University of Toronto Press, 2018)

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Stalin's Gulag at War: Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2018) places the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. The author explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war.

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Yaroslav Hrytsak, "Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries.

Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation.

Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine’s dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia’s 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

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Danielle Leavitt, "By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years.

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Stephan Kieninger, "The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz" (Routledge, 2018)

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (Routledge, 2020) investigates the underlying reasons for the longevity of détente and its impact on East–West relations. The volume examines the relevance of trade across the Iron Curtain as a means to facilitate mutual trust, as well as the emergence of new habits of transparency regardless of recurring military crises. A major theme of the book concerns Helmut Schmidt’s foreign policy and his contribution to the resilience of cooperative security policies in East–West relations. It examines Schmidt’s crucial role in the Euromissile crisis, his Ostpolitik diplomacy and his pan-European trade initiatives to engage the Soviet Union in a joint perspective of trade, industry and technology. Another key theme concerns the crisis in US–Soviet relations and the challenges of meaningful leadership communication between Washington and Moscow in the absence of backchannel diplomacy during the Carter years. The book depicts the freeze in US–Soviet relations after the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the declaration of martial law in Poland, and Helmut Schmidt’s efforts to serve as a mediator and interpreter working for a relaunch of US–Soviet dialogue. Eventually, the book highlights George Shultz’s pivotal role in the Reagan Administration’s efforts to improve US-Soviet relations, well before Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival. This book will be of interest to students of Cold War studies, diplomatic history, foreign policy and international relations.

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John Man, "Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict" (Oneworld Publications, 2025)

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations.

John Man, in his book Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict (Oneworld Publications, 2025), takes on this long history, combining it with his own on-the-ground experience seeing some of this history for himself. He starts with the Xiongnu—a nomadic group that’s so unknown, historically, that we’re forced to use the pejorative Chinese term for them—all the way to the Second World War, and the seminal Battle of Khalkin Gol, which halted the Japanese advance into Northern Asia.

John Man is a historian specializing in Mongolia and the relationship between Mongol and Chinese cultures. He studied Mongolian as a post-graduate, and after a brief career in journalism and publishing, he turned to writing. John’s books have been published in over twenty languages around the world and include bestselling biographies of Chinggis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Attila the Hun, as well as histories of the Great Wall of China and the Mongolian Empire.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Conquering the North. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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James D. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025)

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Richard Sorge is one of history’s most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo during the 1930s and gathered intelligence credited with changing the course of the Second World War. It is an intriguing tale; but Sorge’s spy ring was just one chapter in a much longer history of Russian and Soviet espionage in and against Japan.

Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. James D Brown tells the extraordinary full story of Russian intrigue targeting Japan, from first encounters in the eighteenth century to the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945. Colourful episodes include Gojong, King of Korea, being smuggled into the Russian legation dressed as a woman in 1896; the 1927 ‘Tanaka Memorial’, an infamous forgery purporting to be Japan’s hidden plan for world domination; and the secret intelligence of ‘Nero’, a Soviet agent supplying invaluable insight into Japanese strategy during the Second World War.

From Russians murdered in broad daylight in Meiji Tokyo to Soviet honey traps and ‘white magic’ at the Battle of Nomonhan, this is a landmark history of the covert struggle between two great powers of the modern age.

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Paul W. Werth, "How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Paul W. Werth, How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History (Bloomsbury, 2025)

“Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big.” Thus Paul Werth begins his forthcoming book, How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History. The geographical expanse of the Russian Empire—known since the eighteenth century to span 1/6 of the earth—has been widely marveled upon. Scholars have explained Russia’s size variously: an urge to the sea; a search for natural borders in landscapes lacking them; entrepreneurial happenstance; an insatiable hunger for conquest and more territory; a special world-historical mission. Explanations and answers, especially given Russia’s invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, are highly charged.

In this small book on a big topic, Werth assembles a rivetingly concise account of what constituted the territory of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation when. The result is a startlingly refreshing synthesis that sets him up to consider the deeper ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of Russian expansion and longevity. Among multiple constructive insights, Werth’s analysis lays bare numerous ways in which sovereignty can be more gray than black and white—thought-provoking circumstances he frames as ‘Russia Beyond’ and ‘Russia Within’. Listen in on this conversation where we talk about this book slated for release in September 2025.

Paul Werth is professor of History at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. In addition to the forthcoming How Russia Got Big, he is the author of four monographs, numerous scholarly articles, and two edited volumes on Imperial Russian history, as well as a textbook. He served as the editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies for many years. In 2022 he was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In the Spring of 2023 he was the Gerhard Casper Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and in Spring of 2024, a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala.

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Marlene Laruelle, "Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits' clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin's grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian regime's ideological production process and the ways it is operationalized in both domestic and foreign policies. Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible and represents a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions. By placing the current Russian regime into a broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history, this book gives readers key insights into how the Russo-Ukrainian War became possible and the role ideology played in enabling it.

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Kevin B. Anderson, "The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism" (Verso, 2025)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), this volume turns specifically to the ‘late Marx’. In this period (1869-82), Marx spent much of his time engrossed in the study of colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender among many other less known topics of his interest. His notes, especially what come to be known as The Ethnological Notebooks, along with letters, essays and a scattering of published texts remain only poorly known (and in some cases unpublished or not yet fully translated into English) and form the backbone of Anderson’s study. They evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson shows how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power.

In our discussion, we highlight some of the key themes in the late Marx, bringing out the ways in which Marx is making connections across his writings, how colonial subjects in Ireland and India share commonalities and what can be seen when we look at communal social forms in Russia and among Native Americans. We also discuss why Marx can be seen as a decolonial thinker, consider what he might have produced had he lived longer and the ways in which the late Marx can be presented to students to complement his central themes of class and capitalism.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), along with other texts.

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Tamar R. Shirinian, "Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia" (Duke UP, 2024)

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Tamar Shirinian is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her new book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke UP, 2024), studies the relationships between gender, sexuality, nationalism, political-economy, and social reproduction and how these are experienced, imagined, and felt—especially, in the postsocialist and post-Soviet world. Focused on the Republic of Armenia, Survival of a Perverse Nation examines LGBTQ and feminist organizations as well as grass roots initiatives, right-wing nationalist movements, and the links these formations have within geopolitics. In so doing, it offers us invaluable lessons for feminist theory and practice in the context of right-wing populist hegemony.

About the host: Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

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Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth, "A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2016 the United States was stunned by evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. But it shouldn’t have been. Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—is as old as statecraft itself. In A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford UP, 2025) Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth provide a compelling ride through the history of subversion. They examine subversion’s allure, its operational possibilities, and argue that, in our high stakes, changing technological landscape, a clear-eyed understanding of the history and parameters of subversion can help polities defend against it.

Jill Kastner is a scholar in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. She has a doctorate in History from Harvard University. She specializes in Cold War crises in Berlin and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in The Nation and Foreign Affairs.

William C Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. His most recent books are America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (2018), Written with Stephen G Brooks, and The History of International Relations and Russian Foreign Policy in the 20th century (2020), co edited with Anatoly V. Torkunov and Boris F Martynov.

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands. Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls, Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.
American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union.

A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (Princeton UP, 2024)is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved.

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Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience of Armenians in Turkey in the 1940s, with a particular focus on the process of emigration to Soviet Armenia. The accounts, translated for the first time into English, are comprised of Soviet officials' reports and first-hand testimony by survivors of their lives during the post-genocide period, making this an invaluable new contribution to the existing collections of Armenian survival testimonies. Placing the archival records on emigration in the context of both life in post-genocide Turkey and the 'repatriation' (nergakht) project in the Armenian Diaspora, this book, which also includes the original Russian documents, will be a useful resource for researchers and students of Armenian and Turkish history.

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Jeremy Morris, "Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What do Russians really want? Do they want authoritarianism and are they prepared to go along with a war of conquest and destruction? Or do they want something else? A landmark contribution to the field, Morris is the only social researcher to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, engaging with communities in Moscow, regional cities, as well as rural areas to bring perspectives on Russian everyday lives that are now entirely inaccessible to the West. Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) uses the lens of micropolitics, defined not as politics in miniature but instead as taking seriously the political content of people's normal lives revealed in their practices, interactions and discussions. Based on decades-long interactions with people from a diverse cross-section of society in Russia – from security service officers to factory workers, from unemployed young men to citizen journalists and activists, this is the most comprehensive insight to date into the complexity of Russian attitudes toward war, their government and the post-1991 political trajectory.

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Serhii Plokhy, "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine" (Basic Books, 2015)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today's crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine's sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West--from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2021), Plokhy examines Ukraine's search for its identity through the lives of major Ukrainian historical figures, from its heroes to its conquerors.

This revised edition includes new material that brings this definitive history up to the present. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, Plokhy brings its history to vivid life as he connects the nation's past with its present and future.

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Keir Giles, "Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent" (Hurst & Co., 2024)

Wed, 28 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Who will defend Europe? The answer should be obvious: Europe should be able to defend itself. Yet, for decades, most of the continent enjoyed a defence holiday, outsourcing protection to the United States while banking an increasingly illusory ‘peace dividend’. Now, after three decades of reducing armed forces and drawing down defence industries, Europe finds itself close to unprotected—while Russia is intent on continuing its war of expansion, and the US is distracted and divided. In Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent (Hurst & Co., 2024), Keir Giles lays out the stark choices facing leaders and societies as they confront the return of war in Europe. He explains how the West’s unwillingness to confront Russia has nurtured the threat, and that Putin’s ambition puts the whole continent at risk. He assesses the role and deficiencies of NATO as a guarantor of hard security, and whether the EU or coalitions of the willing can fill the gap. Above all, Giles emphasises the need for new leadership in defence of the free world after the US has stepped aside— and warns that the UK’s brief moment of setting the pace for Europe has already been squandered.

Keir Giles has advised governments worldwide on the Russian threat. A senior fellow with Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, he is a regular commentator for the BBC and international media. His prescient books include What Deters Russia and Moscow Rules.

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Greta Lynn Uehling, "Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), anthropologist Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling illuminates the untold stories of Russia’s occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the lives of people who opposed Russia’s Crimean operation, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. Via the narratives of people who traversed perilous geographies and world-altering events, Dr. Uehling traces the development of a new sense of social cohesion that encompasses diverse ethnic and religious groups. The result is a compelling story—one of resilience, transformation, and ultimately, the unwavering pursuit of freedom and autonomy for Ukraine, regardless of ethnicity or race. Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom demonstrates how understanding Crimea is essential to understanding Ukraine – and the war with Russia – today.

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Claire Knight, "Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 23 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema.

Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results.

Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.

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Charles Hecker, "Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I interviewed Charles Hecker about Zero Sum . The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025).

Hecker, a journalist and business consultant, speaks with dozens of Western business executives, bankers, and financiers who reaped immense profits for themselves and their companies in the Russian market, which suddenly opened to foreigners after decades of state planning and economic autarky.

These “riskophile” Westerners recall the early post-Soviet Russia as an unchartered territory where business “had a body count” and “violence was cheap, routine and almost casual”.

In the 2000s Russia, now stabilized by Putin, offered unparalleled opportunities for those who had learnt to navigate its murky, gray environment.

While some expressed concern over the unchallenged primacy of the supreme ruler presiding over arbitrary redistribution of property in favor of his cronies and the rapid consolidation of state ownership, the squeamish were far outnumbered by the opportunistic.

Following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent imposition of sweeping Western sanctions forced most Westerners to flee, often selling their companies for a fraction of their value and, in some cases, even giving it for free to their Russian partners.

Looking back some regret “looking the other way” at the rampant corruption and lawlessness, while others admit that enrichment in Russia was always destined to be short-lived.

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Paul R. Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovskiĭ-Shtern, "Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence" (U Toronto Press, 2018)

Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them together.

The story of Jews and Ukrainians is presented in an impartial manner through twelve thematic chapters. Among the themes discussed are geography, history, economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, literature and theater, architecture and art, music, the diaspora, and contemporary Ukraine. The book's easy-to-read narrative is enhanced by 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts that explain specific phenomena or address controversial issues. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence (U Toronto Press, 2018) provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating land of Ukraine and two of its most historically significant peoples.

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Victoria Khiterer, "Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration" (Purdue UP, 2025)

Sun, 11 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation.

After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal suffering of the Soviet people during the war. Police dispersed unauthorized commemoration meetings of Jewish activists at Babyn Yar. A monument “for one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of the war” was erected in Babyn Yar in 1976, but the Holocaust was not mentioned in its inscription.

With the collapse of communism, state anti-Semitism ended. Holocaust commemoration became an important part of national memory politics in independent Ukraine. In the last few decades, over thirty monuments have been built at Babyn Yar, which are dedicated to the memory of Jews, Roma, members of the resistance movement, and other people executed there. However, heated debates continue about the commemoration of the Babyn Yar massacre.

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Charlie English, "The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War" (Random House, 2025)

Sun, 04 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.
From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s “book club” secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers’ luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden’s books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.
Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War (Random House, 2025) is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

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Michael David-Fox, "Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Sat, 03 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Michael David Fox's Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard UP, 2025) provides a local, close-up look at the everyday workings of Nazi and Soviet power, in a particular region. It discusses such themes as the Soviet Terror of the late 1930's and the trauma of the collectivization of agriculture, earlier in the decade, as well as the further traumas of Nazi occupation. Especially interesting is its focus on life-trajectories of specific individuals who had daily to navigate the intricate workings of power, in brutalized, violent circumstances.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Shaun Walker, "The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West" (Knopf, 2025)

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Shaun Walker, The Illegals (Knopf, 2025) is the definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West.
More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “illegals.” During the Second World War, illegals were dispatched behind enemy lines to assassinate high-ranking Nazis. Later, in the Cold War, they were sent to assimilate and lie low as sleepers in the West. The greatest among them performed remarkable feats, while many others failed in their missions or cracked under the strain of living a double life.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB’s most secretive program. A riveting spy drama peopled with richly drawn characters, The Illegals also uncovers a hidden thread in the story of Russia itself. As Putin extols Soviet achievements and the KGB’s espionage prowess, and Moscow continues to infiltrate illegals across the globe, this timely narrative shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment, its messy aftermath, and its influence on our world at large.

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Polly Jones, "Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin" (Bloombury, 2024)

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloombury, 2024) is a unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus.

The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

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John Lechner, "Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare" (Bloombury, 2025)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin's Chef,” went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule.

Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group's origins and operations, Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) by John Lechner-the only journalist to report across its many warzones-brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise-but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over.

Featuring exclusive interviews with over thirty Wagner Group members, Death Is Our Business is the terrifying true tale of the renegade militia that proved global instability is nothing if not an opportunity.

John Lechner is a journalist and an independent researcher and consultant to NGOs and other institutions working in Africa. He holds a master's degree in foreign service from Georgetown University. He speaks Russian, French, Turkish, Georgian, Chechen, Sango, and more. His reporting has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the BBC and published in Foreign Policy, Lawfare, and War on the Rocks, among others. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, he lives in Washington, D.C.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign oneself to obscurity, writing only for “the desk drawer” or “without permission.”

Vasily Grossman challenged that binary choice, creating some of the most compelling and uncompromising fiction and journalism of the century, but also enduring heartbreaking censorship. Her excellent new biography, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (Yale University Press, 2019) brings the life and work of this often-overlooked writer into brilliant focus. Biography of a writer — particularly one with Grossman’s output — can be tricky to pull off, but Popoff’s extensive research is elegantly arranged into a very readable narrative, in which we follow Grossman through the harrowing experiences of witnessing first hand, famine in the 1920s, the Terror of the 1930s, the carnage of World War II, and the dull ache of censorship in the post-war Soviet Union.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" (Yale UP, 2022)

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics.

Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin’s personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more.

Geoffrey Roberts is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin’s General, and the acclaimed Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Ignat Solzhenitsyn, ed., "We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" (U Notre Dame Press, 2025)

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (U Notre Dame Press, 2025) brings together ten of Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997.

Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile, contemplating the materialism prevalent worldwide—forcibly imposed in the socialist East, freely chosen in the capitalist West—and searching for humanity’s possible paths forward. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and—perhaps most centrally—the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit.

These annotated speeches, including his timeless “Nobel Lecture” and “Harvard Address,” have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn’s sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn’s life.

Ignat Solzhenitsyn is a pianist and conductor based in New York City. The middle son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he is translator and editor of several of his father’s works in English.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics.

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Sasha Colby, "The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance" (ECW Press, 2023)

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners’ household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada.

Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina’s granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother’s story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina’s rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.”

This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina’s life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ECW Press, 2023) takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us.

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Understanding Ukraine: A Discussion with Author Yaroslav Trofimov

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is a native of Kyiv. In this conversation, we discuss two books. Our Enemies Will Vanish (Penguin Press, 2024), is a nonfiction narrative chronicling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine through the reporter Trofimov’s eyes. No Country for Love (Abacus Books, 2024), is his novel tracing the path of a young woman, the character based on his grandmother, on an arduous journey starting in 1930s Soviet Ukraine. Both books, as different as they are, cast a revealing light on the oppressions visited on the diverse peoples of Ukraine. In our talk, Trofimov offers insights into the books and also a guide as to how the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war might be concluded.

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Serhiy Kudelia, "Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2015)

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions.

In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated.

A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements.

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Xiaolu Ma, "Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930)" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930) (Harvard Asia Center, 2024) offers the first detailed account of the complex cultural, literary and intellectual relationships between Russia, Japan and China in the modern era. In this wide-ranging interview, author Xiaolu Ma reflects on the remarkable process of Russian culture reaching China through the prism of Japan and Japanese. What happens when translation takes place through an intermediary language? How did Russian literature and ideas get reimagined in the two-step exchange to Japanese and Chinese?

This interview begins with the Professor Ma’s personal reflections on the experience of studying Russian literature in China, before turning to a broad overview of China’s encounter with Russia via Japan. The interview then zooms in on a few of the examples explored in Transpatial Modernity, bringing to life a network of cultural exchange, including such celebrated names as Pushkin, Lu Xun, and the Russian nihilists.

Transpatial Modernity is recommended for anyone interested in processes of cultural exchange and translation, as well as for those with interest in China, Japan and Russia during the extraordinary half-century between the 1880s and 1930s.

Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK.

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Alexander Hill, "The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies" (Routledge, 2025)

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies (Routledge, 2025) edited by Alexander Hill brings together historical and contemporary essays about Soviet and Russian military studies, to offer a comprehensive volume on the topic.

Comprising essays written by acknowledged specialists, the handbook examines the development of the Russian and Soviet armed forces from the Napoleonic Wars all the way through to the course and conduct of the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. Divided into thematic and chronological sections, the volume looks at wars fought by the Tsarist regime through to the First World War; the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’, from 1941 to 1945; the Cold War (including the Soviet war in Afghanistan); and Russia’s post-Soviet wars and military development. In addition, the volume also includes a section that analyses a number of ‘overarching themes’, including the development of Russian and Soviet airpower, partisan warfare, counterinsurgency and the role of women in Russian and Soviet armed forces. The volume concludes with an essay looking at whether, using the historical material and material on the conduct of the war in Ukraine, we can reasonably talk of a ‘Russian way of war’.

This volume will be of considerable interest to students of the Soviet Union and Russia, strategic studies and military history.

Alexander Hill is a Professor in Military History at the University of Calgary, Canada, and a fellow of its Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Red Army and the Second World War (2017).

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Mikhail Goldis, "Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024).

Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, a prolific scholar of Russian and Jewish literature and cinema, the memoirs tell the rich and poignant story of Goldis’s life and what it took for a Jew to navigate and survive in the halls of Soviet power.

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Simon Morrison, "Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage.

In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan, decentred.

Morrison reexamines the relationship between Tchaikovsky's music, personal life, and politics; his support of Tsars Alexander II and III; and his engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus. Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer (Yale UP, 2024) unsettles everything we thought we knew--and gives us a vivid new appreciation of Russia's most popular composer.

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Andrew Long, "BRIXMIS and the Secret Cold War: Intelligence Collecting Operations Behind Enemy Lines in East Germany" (Pen and Sword, 2024)

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces reached the West. Who were they? Where were they located? What were they doing? How were they equipped? What were their intentions? NATO was lined up in West Germany to face these forces and relied on getting up-to-date intelligence to warn of any threat, 'Indicators of Hostility' that could be a precursor to an invasion.

BRIXMIS, the British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, was on hand to provide that intelligence. Thanks to an obscure 1946 agreement between the British and Soviets that established 'liaison missions' in their respective zones of occupation, the British were able to send highly qualified military 'observers' into East Germany to roam (relatively) freely and keep an eye on what was going on. What started as 'liaison', a point of contact between the British and Soviet occupation forces, developed into a very sophisticated intelligence gathering operation, sending 'tours' out every day of the year, between 1946 and when the Mission closed in 1990. Andrew Long's BRIXMIS and the Secret Cold War: Intelligence Collection Operations Behind Enemy Lines in East Germany (Pen and Sword History, 2024) tells the story about these top-secret liaison tours.

These tours were undertaken in high-performance, highly modified marked vehicles, with personnel in uniform and unarmed, apart from professional photographic equipment and occasionally some top-secret gadgets from the boffins back in the UK. They joined their French and American colleagues in snooping around the opposition, photographing military bases, equipment, and manoeuvres, and trying to evade capture by the secret police and counterintelligence units. They faced danger and violence daily, but thanks to their bravery and professionalism, the West had accurate and up to date information on what was happening in East Germany which help keep the peace all that time. This is the story of this little-known unit and their exploits behind enemy lines.

Andrew Long, from Great Britain, is a military history researcher and author. His fascination with the Cold War began with a trip to West Berlin in 1986, traveling through Checkpoint Charlie to visit the East. Andrew’s writing comes from a desire to make sense of an extremely complex period in modern history, weaving together inter-relating stories involving politics, ideologies, personalities, technological advances, and geography. There is still much to be told on this fascinating subject. After a successful career in marketing, Andrew relocated to Cornwall and took up writing full time.

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Peter Whitewood, "The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy: Lenin’s Defeat and the Rise of Stalinism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows that while the Red Army's rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of the capitalist world - Britain and France - who were perceived as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced they had been overcome by the capitalist powers.

The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2023) reveals that - in the aftermath of the catastrophe at Warsaw -Lenin, Stalin and other senior Bolsheviks were convinced that another war against Poland and its capitalist backers was inevitable with this perpetual fear of war shaping the evolution of the early Soviet state. It also further encouraged the creation of a centralised and repressive one-party state and provided a powerful rationale for the breakneck industrialisation of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The Soviet leadership's central preoccupation in the 1930s was Nazi Germany; this book convincingly argues that Bolshevik perceptions of Poland and the capitalist world in the decade before were given as much significance and were ultimately crucial to the rise of Stalinism.

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Oleksandr Melnyk, "World War II as an Identity Project: Historicism, Legitimacy Contests, and the (Re-) Construction of Political Communities in Ukraine, 1939–1946" (Ibidem, 2022)

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

World War II as an Identity Project (Ibidem, 2022) explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival political movements also enter the picture insofar as their acitivities influenced Soviet policies. Methodologically, the study shifts attention from a limited body of normative texts and their creators within the Soviet political and cultural elite to a wider array of practices, organizations, and players engaged in power struggles and production of knowledge about the past in different social domains. Specifically, it brings into focus groups not normally thought of as participants in the production of Soviet memory discourse, notably NKVD officers, Soviet archivists, Ukrainian nationalists, Nazi collaborators, and former partisans in the German-occupied territories.

The book not only demonstrates the complexity of nation-shaping processes, but also restores agency to some seemingly powerless actors.

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Vuk Vuksanovic, "Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.

Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story.

"When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be courted and then discarded depending on Moscow’s needs, and they know it. For their part, the Serbs depend on Russian political support in their campaign for a face-saving settlement of the long-running Kosovo dispute but know their economic success hinges on their ties to the EU and the US. Belgrade must "manipulate the superpower rivalry to secure economic resources from both superpowers and its political strategic autonomy".

Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS, and a prominent media commentator on strategy in the Balkans.

*His book recommendations were Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

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Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, "Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult" (Ibidem Press, 2014)

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (Ibidem Verlag, 2014) is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed--despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustasa and the Slovak Hlinka Party--to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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Tamizdat under Putin: A Discussion with Publisher Feliks Sandalov

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Russia has a long history of publishers operating from abroad, producing books and periodicals for a Russian-speaking audience. One notable example is The Bell (Kolokol), published by Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer and thinker who emigrated in the mid-19th century.

The waves of Russian emigration in the 20th century—beginning with those fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—led to the creation of numerous Russian-language publishing ventures, ranging from short-lived projects to long-standing institutions. Among the most well-remembered are the YMCA Press in Paris, Posev and Grani in Germany, and Ardis Publishing, founded in the early 1970s—not by Russians, but by American literary scholars.

Exiled Russian publishers not only printed the works of fellow émigré authors but also played a crucial role in tamizdat—smuggling manuscripts deemed ideologically unacceptable by the Soviet regime out of the USSR, publishing them abroad, and then covertly reintroducing them into the country for clandestine distribution.

After Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, prompting the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians, it was only a matter of time before new émigré publishing houses emerged.

In this conversation, we speak with Feliks Sandalov, co-founder and director of StraightForward, one of the newly established Russian publishing initiatives in exile, about his work and the evolving landscape of Russian publishing abroad.

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László Borhi, "Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" (Central European UP, 2024)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. In Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes (Central European UP, 2024), László Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people.

Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience.

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Victoria Khiterer, "Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920" (Edwin Mellen, 2015)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War discusses how anti-Jewish violence began during the revolution and civil war 1917-1920 raising questions of responsibility of civil and military authorities and the antisemitic propaganda spread by official mass media as well as deliberate exploitation of antisemitism for political purposes.

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Irina Rebrova, "Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus" (de Gruyter, 2020)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The main objective of Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus (de Gruyter, 2020) is to locate the grass roots initiatives of remembering the Holocaust victims in a particular region of Russia which has a very diverse ethnic structure and little presence of Jews at the same time. It aims to find out how such individual initiatives correspond to the official Russian hero-orientated concept of remembering the Second World war with almost no attention to the memory of war victims, including Holocaust victims. North Caucasus became the last address of thousands of Soviet Jews, both evacuees and locals. While there was almost no attention paid to the Holocaust victims in the official Soviet propaganda in the postwar period, local activists and historians together with the members of Jewish communities preserved Holocaust memory by installing small obelisks at the killing sites, writing novels and making documentaries, teaching about the Holocaust at schools and making small thematic exhibitions in the local and school museums. Individual types of grass roots activities in the region on remembering Holocaust victims are analyzed in each chapter of the book.

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Christina Kiaer, "Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (U Chicago Press, 2024) presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends.

Christina Kiaer traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. In so doing, she demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers’ imaginations by evoking the elation of collectivity, making viewers not just comprehend but truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limit case of the system he inhabited and helped to create.

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Shay A. Pilnik, "The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War" (Purdue UP, 2025)

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prevailing binary conceptions of Babyn Yar as exclusively a Holocaust or a “Great Patriotic War” story. It is neither the exclusive product of Soviet censorship nor individual dissidents. Babyn Yar is more than a physical space where untold horrors took place. Symbolically, it is the ultimate meeting point of so many disparate threads of Soviet culture: the state and the artist, the Jew and the non-Jew, and the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War. Ultimately, it is a place that reveals the frailty and courage of those who bear witness to atrocity.

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Trevor Wilson, "Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Trevor Wilson about his new book, Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Their conversation delves into the intellectual currents of interwar Europe, placing the enigmatic figure of Alexandre Kojève into this unique cultural landscape. The conversation touches on how key philosophical concepts shift in translation, the influence of émigré culture, and the broader currents of Russian philosophy, including the philosophy of Sophia and Kojève’s vision of the "end of history." Dr. Wilson also reflects on the challenges of translating philosophical texts written in multiple languages (and Kojève’s notoriously illegible Russian handwriting).

Beyond philosophy, the conversation explores writing routines and the often-overlooked infrastructures that make academic work possible.

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Laurel Victoria Gray, "Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first comprehensive work in English on the three major regional styles of Uzbek women's dance – Ferghana, Khiva and Bukhara – and their broader Silk Road cultural connections, from folklore roots to contemporary stage dance. The book surveys the remarkable development from the earliest manifestations in ancient civilizations to a sequestered existence under Islam; from patronage under Soviet power to a place of pride for Uzbek nationhood. It considers the role that immigration had to play on the development of the dances; how women boldly challenged societal gender roles to perform in public; how both material culture and the natural world manifest in the dance; and it illuminates the innovations of pioneering choreographers who drew from Central Asian folk traditions, gestures and aesthetics – not Russian ballet – to first shape modern Uzbek stage dance. Written by the first American dancer invited to study in Uzbekistan, this book offers insight into the once-hidden world of Uzbek women's dance.

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Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle. In the podcast we talked about why the relations between Canada and the countries of the Eastern bloc have so far been underreseached, about the large Central and Eastern European diaspora in Canada and their role in shaping foreign policy, and also about Canada’s reaction to the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the 1968 Prague Spring.

You can purchase a physical copy here.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Peter Whitewood, "The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military" (UP of Kansas, 2015)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin. There followed a massive military purge, from the officer corps through the rank-and-file, that many consider a major factor in the Red Army's dismal performance in confronting the German invasion of June 1941. Why take such action on the eve of a major war? The most common theory has Stalin fabricating a "military conspiracy" to tighten his control over the Soviet state. In The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military (UP of Kansas, 2015), Peter Whitewood advances an entirely new explanation for Stalin's actions--an explanation with the potential to unlock the mysteries that still surround the Great Terror, the surge of political repression in the late 1930s in which over one million Soviet people were imprisoned in labor camps and over 750,000 executed.

Framing his study within the context of Soviet civil-military relations dating back to the 1917 revolution, Whitewood shows that Stalin sanctioned this attack on the Red Army not from a position of confidence and strength, but from one of weakness and misperception. Here we see how Stalin's views had been poisoned by the paranoid accusations of his secret police, who saw spies and supporters of the dead Tsar everywhere and who had long believed that the Red Army was vulnerable to infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies engaged in a conspiracy against the Soviet state. Recently opened Russian archives allow Whitewood to counter the accounts of Soviet defectors and conspiracy theories that have long underpinned conventional wisdom on the military purge. By broadening our view, The Red Army and the Great Terror demonstrates not only why Tukhachevskii and his associates were purged in 1937, but also why tens of thousands of other officers and soldiers were discharged and arrested at the same time. With its thorough reassessment of these events, the book sheds new light on the nature of power, state violence, and civil-military relations under the Stalinist regime.

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Jonathan Haslam, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, but its origins are visible as far back as the aftermath of the Cold War, when newly independent Ukraine moved to the center of tense negotiations between Russia and the West. The United States was a leading player in this drama. In fact, Jonathan Haslam argues, it was decades of US foreign policy missteps and miscalculations, unchecked and often reinforced by European allies, that laid the groundwork for the current war.

Isolated, impoverished, and relegated to a second-order power on the world stage, Russia grew increasingly resentful of Western triumphalism in the wake of the Cold War. The United States further provoked Russian ire with a campaign to expand NATO into Eastern Europe--especially Ukraine, the most geopolitically important of the former Soviet republics. Determined to extend its global dominance, the United States repeatedly ignored signs that antagonizing Russia would bring consequences. Meanwhile, convinced that Ukraine was passing into the Western sphere of influence, Putin prepared to shift the European balance of power in Russia's favor.

Timely and incisive, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine (Harvard UP, 2025) reveals the assumptions, equivocations, and grievances that have defined the West's relations with Russia since the twilight of the Soviet Union--and ensured that collision was only a matter of time.

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (2024), Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs. American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West’s welcome of them, became an important theme in America’s Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union. A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved.

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Hal Brands, "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World" (Norton, 2025)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-rich landmass possesses the bulk of the global population, industrial might, and potential military power; it touches all four of the great oceans. Eurasia is a strategic prize without equal―which is why the world has been roiled, reshaped, and nearly destroyed by clashes over the supercontinent.

Since the early twentieth century, autocratic powers―from Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Soviet Union―have aspired for dominance by seizing commanding positions in the world’s strategic heartland. Offshore sea powers, namely the United Kingdom and America, have sought to make the world safe for democracy by keeping Eurasia in balance. America’s rivalries with China, Russia, and Iran are the next round in this geopolitical game. If this new authoritarian axis succeeds in enacting a radically revised international order, America and other democracies will be vulnerable and insecure.

In The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) Hal Brands, a renowned expert on global affairs, argues that a better understanding of Eurasia’s strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today’s world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics―with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

Hal Brands, coauthor of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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"We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto" (JewishGen, 2018)

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto (JewishGen, 2018) is a collection of memories from child survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, Belarus. These are rare and moving personal testimonies, and this is a book of some significance for it opens a window on the rarely told story of the Holocaust in Belarus, in particular the Minsk Ghetto. Between 1941 and 1943 approximately 80,000 Jews lived in or pass through that place of terror; as a result of starvation and repeated brutal pogroms most did not survive. A few were helped by brave Byelorussian locals who risked their own lives to save them. Others, many of them mere children like the narrators of these stories, managed to escape to the partisans living in the nearby forests. Having reached the relative safety of partisan camps, some even returned to Minsk to rescue their families and neighbours. Several of their dangerous missions are described within the pages of this powerful book. These stories which recount the memories of the Minsk Ghetto survivors are a testimony to the extraordinary power and resilience of the human spirit.

This book was published by I.P. Logvinov Publishers in Russian in 2012. This translation from the original Russian to English is a project that was initiated, facilitated and managed by the UK Charity The Together Plan.

This is an interview with Debra Brunner and Artur Lipshitz.

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Eugene Finkel, "Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine" (Basic Books, 2024)

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet, to Ukrainians, this attack was painfully familiar, the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign to divide and oppress Ukraine.

In Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024), political scientist Eugene Finkel uncovers these deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine is a key borderland between Russia and the West, and, following the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. Russia has long used genocidal tactics—killings, deportations, starvation, and cultural destruction—to successfully crush Ukrainian efforts to chart an independent path. As Finkel shows, today’s violence is simply a more extreme version of the Kremlin’s long-standing policy. But unlike in the past, the people of Ukraine—motivated by the rise of democracy in their nation—have overcome their deep internal divisions. For the first time, they have united in favor of independence from Russia.

Whatever the outcome of the present war, Ukraine’s staunch resistance has permanently altered its relationship to Russia and the West. Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024) offers the vital context we need to truly understand Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

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Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage.

As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light.

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Viktoriya Fedorchak, "The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power" (Routledge, 2024)

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion.

The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022. It is not a new war, but the intensity of the warfighting revived many discussions about the conduct of inter-state warfare, which has not been seen in Europe for decades. This book does not aim to offer an exhaustive operational analysis of the war, but rather provides a preliminary systematic analysis across various domains of warfare using the concept of fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides. First, the book discusses the conceptual component and the post-Cold War adaptations of the Soviet strategic tradition by both the Ukrainian and the Russian Armed Forces. Following that, it gives an evaluation of the various aspects of warfighting in the land, air, maritime and cyber domains. Then, the book examines the role of international allied assistance, sanctions and weapons delivery in strengthening the resilience of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The book concludes with some comments on the role of inter-state warfare in the current strategic environment and future warfare.

This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, defence studies, foreign policy, Russian studies and international relations.

Viktoriya Fedorchak is a lecturer in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She is the author of British Air Power (2018) and Understanding Contemporary Air Power (2020).

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Susan C. I. Grunewald, "From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. Her archival research demonstrates that the Soviets saw the German prisoners of war as a source of labor at a time when the Soviet Union urgently needed to rebuild and lacked manpower after its enormous war losses. Numerous Soviet enterprises, operating under dozens of ministries, used POWs contracted out by prison camp officials. Grunewald argues that the mistreatment of German POWs and their high death rates were the consequence not of retribution but of negligence, lack of coordination, and severe shortages, especially during the famine that followed the war. Those too weak to work were often repatriated. POWs were also subjected to intense antifascist reeducation so that once home, they would help win support among Germans for the Soviet Union; many former prisoners filled leadership roles in East Germany after the establishment of two German states in 1949. The last POWs returned to Germany in early 1956.

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Gabriel Gavin, "Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh" (Hurst, 2025)

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

From the collapse of the Soviet Union until late 2023, Armenia and Azerbaijan were fighting unrelenting hot and cold wars over Nagorno-Karabakh - a tiny 4,400-square-kilometre breakaway republic with a population under 150,000. That 30-year crisis ended within 24 hours in September 2023 when Azerbaijan attacked, Russian peacekeepers withdrew, and the last Karabakh Armenians left the enclave.

While equivalent ethnic cleansings (deliberate or neglectful) have commanded Western diplomatic and media attention for decades, Nagorno-Karabakh has never captured attention outside the region. With Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh (Hurst, 2025), Gabriel Gavin is determined to redress that imbalance. Mixing history and reportage, Gavin explores this long-simmering ethnic conflict, how it has corrupted the politics and cultures of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and what it tells us about the decline of Russian external power and the failures of the West.

*The author's book recommendations were High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland by Tom Parfitt (Headline, 2023) and Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020 — translated by Elisabeth Jaquette).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack.

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Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes.

In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power.

Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Polity, 2024) is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Elissa Bemporad, "Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood in the celebration of Passover.

Nowhere in Europe was the blood libel more tenacious, credible, and long lived than in the Russian Empire, particularly during the late Imperial period, which saw large scale pogroms and harsh restrictions visited upon the empire's Jewish population. The Russian Revolution of 1917 attracted many Jews to its cause, thanks in large measure to Bolshevik condemnations of antisemitism and persecution of the Jewish minority. These numbers grew in the wake of the brutal Civil War that followed from 1918 - 1922 when the White Army revived the pogrom with particular vigor.

What happened after the Bolshevik victory is the subject of Elissa Bemporad's new book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford UP, 2019), which won the National Jewish Book Award (Modern Jewish Thought and Experience). Bemporad probes the underbelly of the "Soviet myth"— that the USSR had eradicated the pogroms, banished the notion of a blood libel to the scrapheap of other opiates for the people, and vanquished antisemitism as part of the regime's broad anti-religious campaign — and discovers that both pogroms and the blood libel had a robust afterlife in the USSR.

As she traces changing attitudes towards Jews in the USSR, Bemporad also examines the uneasy and often ambivalent but mutually dependent, and ever-shifting relationship between the regime and the Jewish population as the Soviet century unfolds. Legacy of Blood looks at the re-emergence of overt antisemitism in the occupied territories of the USSR during World War II and the troubled return of the Jews to mainstream society after the war. The result is a meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and eminently readable book that adds much to both Jewish and Russian historical scholarship.

Elissa Bemporad is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History, Queens College of CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, vol I (NYU Press).

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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David A. Harrisville, "The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

When Nazi Germany launched the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, its leadership made clear to the Wehrmacht that it was waging a "war of extermination" against Germany's enemies. This meant that normal military conduct in war was to be dispensed with and soldiers would act more in accordance with the precepts of Nazi ideology. During the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, how did average German soldiers interpret the war they were fighting? David A. Harrisville seeks to answer this question in his book The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 (Cornell University Press, 2021). Through letters, diaries, and other primary documents written during the war itself, German soldiers portrayed themselves as "noble" warriors undertaking a "righteous" mission to rid the world of the evils of Soviet Communism. This would later form the basis of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth that prevailed in postwar German society.

David A. Harrisville is an independent scholar. He has held various academic positions, including, most recently, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Furman University.

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Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.

The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, as Miles vividly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.

As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Written with style and verve, Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin.

Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub.

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Polly Zavadivker, "A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia's Jews during this time.

A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I (Oxford UP, 2024) uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them.

The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, writers, artists, and political leaders. This is a history of the first state violence and military aggression directed at Jewish civilians anywhere in modern Europe. It is a history of refugees, so numerous and scattered across Russia that they represented the fate of the Jewish nation itself. And it is a history of how Russia's Jews formed the largest and most influential humanitarian campaign in their history, and of their leaders and institutions that endured long past the years of war and revolution.

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Vicky Davis, "Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stalin in the Second World War. Based on meticulous archival research, it considers the interactions of the individual citizen and the Soviet state, weaving together the experiences of over three hundred ordinary men and women in Central Asia as they coped with their new roles on the front line or in the rear. Suffering incredible economic and physical hardship, racism and religious oppression, these mainly Muslim citizens were subjected to a forced process of Sovietization under the influence of Stalin's propaganda machine.

Davis reveals how, while conscripts were all too often slaughtered or scapegoated in their regiments, the women and children left at home slaved in factories and communal farms to fuel the machinery of a war taking place thousands of kilometres away. She convincingly argues that the impact of forced assimilation, cultural indoctrination, anti-Semitism and re-education on the region were as great as the daily fight for survival in wartime. The legacy of the period is almost as complex, with struggles over the ownership and revision of history continuing even today.

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based writer and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context.

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Marianne Kamp, "Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor.

In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world.

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Diana Dumitru, "The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Based on original sources, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge UP, 2016) explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union. Gentiles' willingness to assist Jews was greater in lands that had been under Soviet administration during the inter-war period, while gentiles' willingness to harm Jews occurred more in lands that had been under Romanian administration during the same period. While acknowledging the disasters of Communist rule in the 1920s and 1930s, this work shows the effectiveness of Soviet nationalities policy in the official suppression of antisemitism. This book offers a corrective to the widespread consensus that homogenizes gentile responses throughout Eastern Europe, instead demonstrating that what states did in the interwar period mattered; relations between social groups were not fixed and destined to repeat themselves, but rather fluid and susceptible to change over time.

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Nergis Ertürk, "Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia UP, 2024) examines political relations and literary translations between Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through to the 1960s. By drawing on a wide range of texts – from erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, to socialist realist novels and theatre – Ertürk argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution. A unique textual exploration, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture.

Nergis Ertürk is Associate Professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (2011), which received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and editor of the Comparative Literature Studies journal.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Alissa Klots, "Domestic Service in the Soviet Union; Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework.

Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Dr. Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world.

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Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

Samuel Hodgkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Iranian Studies, Philological Encounters, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, and Cahiers d'Asie centrale.

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Mie Nakachi, "Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Mie Nakachi about Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021)

In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on demand. But in 1936, the Soviet leadership criminalized abortion: the collectivization of the early 1930s was followed by famine that took the lives of millions of people, and the government grew eager to recover the population. Drawing on an amazing wealth of archival material, Nakachi traces the dynamic of Soviet reproductive policies that were invariably guided by pronatalist goals but almost always had damaging consequences. The 1944 Family Law, aimed at making up for the enormous human losses of World War II (27 million people died, 20 million of them men), relieved men of parental responsibilities, legal or financial, thereby encouraging them to father children out of wedlock. Given the devastation of the war and inadequate levels of government support, many women sought to avoid such births. Their only recourse was abortion, which remained illegal and, as a result, often led to grave medical complications or even death—on top of being criminally punishable. Doctors were generally sympathetic to the women’s plight but they could not challenge the system. It was only in the mid-1950s that abortion was decriminalized, but until the end of the Soviet Union, modern contraception was barely available and abortion remained the primary method of birth control.

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Cristina Vatulescu, "Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives.

This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archival research. In so doing, it contributes to the urgent task of decolonizing the field of Eastern European and Russian studies at this critical moment in the region's history. Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault's traces in Polish secret police archives; tackles the files, reenactment film, and photo albums of a socialist bank heist; pits autofiction against disinformation in the secret police files of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller; and takes on the digital remediation of Soviet-era archives by analyzing contested translations of the Iron Curtain trope from its 1946 origins to the current war in Ukraine. The result is a bona fide reader's guide to Eastern Europe's ongoing archival revolution.

Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University and the author of Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police Archives in Soviet Times (Stanford, 2010).

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, "The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945: War, Occupation, Memory" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1941, the Franco regime established the Spanish Division of Volunteers to take part in the Russian campaign as a unit integrated into the German Wehrmacht. Recruited by both the Fascist Party ( Falange) and the Spanish army, around 47,000 Spanish volunteers joined what would become known as the "Blue Division."

The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945: War, Occupation, Memory (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores an intimate history of the Blue Division "from below," using personal war diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as official documents from military archives in Spain, Germany, Britain, and Russia. In addition to describing the Spanish experience on the Eastern Front, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas takes on controversial topics including the Blue Division's proximity to the Holocaust and how members of the Blue Division have been remembered and commemorated. Addressing issues such as the behaviour of the Spaniards as occupiers, their perception by the Russians, their witnessing of the Holocaust, their commitment to the war aims of Nazi Germany, and their narratives on the war after 1945, this book illuminates the experience of Spanish combatants and occupied civilians.

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S4E15 To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: A Conversation with Dr. Benjamin Nathans

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, host Laura Laurent sits down with historian Benjamin Nathans to explore his groundbreaking new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Nathans offers a deep dive into the history of Soviet dissent, tracing the courageous efforts of Soviet citizens who risked everything to challenge the system from within, spanning from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism. By invoking the very laws of the Kremlin, these dissidents exposed the regime’s internal contradictions, playing a pivotal role in its eventual downfall.

The discussion focuses on key figures in this movement, from well-known Nobel laureates like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to lesser-known but equally vital contributors. Nathans also touches on the broader implications of their struggles for modern authoritarian societies today.

Benjamin Nathans, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a distinguished expert in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, Jewish history, and the history of human rights. His previous acclaimed works include Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia. Nathans is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and is recognized for his expertise on Russian and Eastern European history.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"—the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter.

The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Masha Kirasirova explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Dr. Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualised and carried out by students, comrades, and activists—Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualising these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes Soviet history into postcolonial studies and global history.

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J. Arch Getty and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Reflections on Stalinism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa talks with Lewis H. Siegelbaum, who, along with J. Arch Getty, edited Reflections on Stalinism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024), a collection of essays by twelve prominent scholars in the field who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of Stalinism as an authoritarian dictatorship determined to build a version of socialism in the Soviet Union at all costs. The conversation explores the impetus behind the collection and its development, thematic approaches to studying Stalinism, memories of traveling to Soviet archives, and even reflections on mortality.

Other NBN episodes mentioned in this podcast include:

Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile by Lewis H. Siegelbaum, hosted by Sean Guillory;
Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian by Lewis H. Siegelbaum, hosted by Steven Seegel;
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans, hosted by Marshall Poe.

Alisa Kuzmina is a PhD Candidate at the University of Minnesota, specializing in Cultural Cold War history, with a focus on Soviet and American marriage policies and the social-cultural norms surrounding them.

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Ali Igmen, "Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Alisa talks with Ali İğmen, Professor of Central Asian History and the Director of the Oral History Program at California State University. In his book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan, Dr. İğmen examines Soviet Russia’s efforts to reshape local Kyrgyz culture into Soviet culture, as well as the ways in which the local Kyrgyz responded to these attempts. This is the first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan, which profoundly influenced the future of Kyrgyz cultural identity and helped foster the work of many artists, including the renowned novelist Chingiz Aitmatov.

The film mentioned in the episode is The First Teacher, a 1965 drama directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, based on Chinghiz Aitmatov's book of the same name.

The project Alisa refers to is Можно без политики? (Can We Do It Without Politics?) which traces the political implications of culture in an authoritarian society.

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S4E14 Our Enemies Will Vanish: A Conversation with Yaroslav Trofimov

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Join us as we discuss Yaroslav Trofimov’s recent publication, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin, 2024). We dive into the history of his journalism, the personal account of his reporting, and the ongoing war on Ukraine.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the grueling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath.

For Trofimov, this war is deeply personal. He grew up in Kyiv and his family has lived there for generations. In his book, with deep empathy and local understanding, Trofimov tells the story of how everyday Ukrainian citizens—doctors, computer programmers, businesspeople, and schoolteachers—risked their lives and lost loved ones. He blends their brave and tragic stories with expert military analysis, providing unique insight into the thinking of Ukrainian leadership and mapping out the decisive stages of what has become a perilous war for Ukraine, the Putin regime, and indeed, the world.

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Karine Rashkovsky, "An Improbable Life: My Father's Escape from Soviet Russia" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2024)

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From evading the KGB and disassembling a downed American plane to narrowly escaping a life sentence in Siberia, Reuven Rashkovsky’s story is a gripping tale of coming of age, searching for belonging, and daring to escape the tightly controlled Soviet regime.

Relayed in his point of view by his daughter, Dr. Karine Rashkovsky, An Improbable Life: My Father's Escape from Soviet Russia (Cherry Orchard Books, 2024) tells the story of a man who has been at the center of some of the most dramatic and tumultuous events in modern history, from World War II to the Six-Day War to the collapse of the USSR, providing insight into the world of Soviet Jewry and the almost insurmountable obstacles to getting out. Filled with quirky, revealing anecdotes, An Improbable Life is a valuable historical resource for anyone intrigued by culture and identity in the Soviet Union from the last days of Stalin to the Brezhnev era and the paradox and perils of being outcast—and possibly heroic—in that time and place. With the return of a totalitarian, imperialist Russia, Rashkovsky’s story is all too relevant to today’s struggles. Here is an improbable true story of what can indeed, be possible.

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Peter Sarandinaki, "In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is a thrilling, true-life detective story about the search for the missing members of the Romanov royal family, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and one family's involvement in the hundred-year-old forensic investigation into their deaths, clandestine burials, and the recovery and authentication of the remains.

Peter Sarandinaki is a retired sea captain now living in Toms River, New Jersey, with his wife. He is the great-grandson of Lieutenant General Sergei Nikolaevich Rozanov, the White Army commander in the eastern Amur region of Russia who was among the first men to enter the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were murdered. Sarandinaki has worked on the Romanov case for more than thirty years.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Larry E. Holmes, "Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921–1985" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921-1985 (Indiana University Press, 2024), Larry E. Holmes shows us how Soviet football culture regularly disregarded official ideological and political imperatives and skirted the boundaries between socialism and capitalism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both mind and body. Within that same decade, however, it blew up, becoming the most popular spectator sport in the USSR and growing into a fiercely competitive business with complex regional and national bureaucracies, a strong international presence, and a conviction that victory on the field was also a victory of Soviet supremacy. Writing as both historian and fan, Holmes focuses his study on the provincial Kirov team Dinamo from 1979 to 1985, when the club played at both its worst and its best. Spurred by a dismal 1979 season, the team's administrators and regional authorities had two options: obey Moscow's edict to reduce expenditures on professional sports or seek out new—and often illicit—funding sources to fill out a team of champions. Drawing on rich archival materials as well as newspapers and interviews with former players, Win or Else reveals the foundations of Soviet sports culture—and the hazards that teams faced both in victory and in loss.

Larry E. Holmes was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Alabama. Holmes passed away on November 30, 2022, in Kirov, Russia.

Editor Samantha Lomb is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. She is author of Stalin's Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Alexis Peri, "Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies.

In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women's letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a "diplomacy of the heart" that led them to question why their countries were so divided.

Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other's world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents.

A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women (Harvard UP, 2024) offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of "enemy" and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.

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Susan Grant, "Soviet Nightingales: Care Under Communism" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Soviet Nightingales: Care under Communism (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Grant examines the history of nursing care in the Soviet Union from its nineteenth-century origins in Russia through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society. In the interview, we explore Susan's approach to navigating an extensive timeline, the significance of care as a central concept within the female-dominated nursing profession, and the importance of flexibility when working with a diverse range of sources, some of which can be challenging to locate.

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Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides” (Princeton UP, 2010)

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 20:00:00 -0000

Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mass death. In total, Stalin is responsible for the murder of roughly 10 million Soviet citizens. Again, this is well established.

What is not well established is what to call Stalin’s crimes. As Norman Naimark points out in his thought-provoking Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton UP, 2010), historians and others have been peculiarly conflicted about this issue. Everyone agrees it’s mass murder. But is it “genocide,” with all that term entails? Etymologically, it doesn’t seem so: gens is Latin for “people who claim common descent,” that is, a clan, tribe, or even nation. The Kulaks were not a gens. Historically, genocide doesn’t fit well either: after World War II, the UN decided that it would mean “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial religious group, as such.” Again, the Kulaks are none of these things.

Naimark, however, argues Stalin’s crimes should be considered genocide on three grounds. First, he demonstrates that some of Stalin’s attacks were genocide under the UN definition, for example his exile and starvation of minority ethnic groups. Second, he shows that some of those who sought to define genocide during and after World War II did not intend to restrict it to gens: they included political groups, that is, entities like the Kulaks. The Soviets and others demanded these groups be removed from the definition, and they were. Third, he demonstrates that international law has evolved, and with it the legal meaning of genocide: recent proceedings in the Baltic states, for example, have broadened the definition.

Some might ask “What does it matter what we call it?” I think it matters a lot. Words are not only an interpretation of the world, but they are also a reflection of who we are. The words the Nazis used to describe their crimes–“final solution,” “transport to the East,” “special handling”–tell us much about them. The words the Stalinists used to describe their crimes–“purge,” “evacuation,” “re-education”–tell us much about them as well. And so we have to ask: What does our persistent failure to call Stalin’s crimes “genocide” say about us? Nothing very good, I think.

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Nick Lloyd, "The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Norton, 2024)

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Norton, 2024)--the first major history of that arena in fifty years--the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record.

Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world.

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Robert Rozett, "Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front During the Second World War" (Yad Vashem, 2014)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Soviet Union. Some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. They fell prey to battle, starvation, disease, and grinding labor, aggravated immensely by brutality and even outright murder at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers responsible for them.

Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front During the Second World War (Yad Vashem, 2014) constitutes a unique and invaluable chapter in the mosaic of Holocaust history. The laborers’ personal accounts speak powerfully to every Jewish family that lived under Hungarian rule during the Holocaust years, because it is their own personal story, but it is not one to be kept in the family alone, since it is profoundly relevant to all people.

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Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (Basic Books, 2024)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe.

In To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes. Tracing Communism's ascent from theory to practice, McMeekin ranges from Karl Marx's writings to the rise and fall of the USSR under Stalin to Mao's rise to power in China to the acceleration of Communist or Communist-inspired policies around the world in the twenty-first century. McMeekin argues, however, that despite the endurance of Communism, it remains deeply unpopular as a political form. Where it has arisen, it has always arisen by force.

Blending historical narrative with cutting-edge scholarship, To Overthrow the World revolutionizes our understanding of the evolution of Communism--an idea that seemingly cannot die.

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Samuel J. Hirst, "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order.

In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Samuel Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics.

As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism.

Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics.

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Zeev Levin, "Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939" (Brill, 2015)

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939 (Brill, 2015), Zeev Levin seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of government efforts to socialize the Jewish masses in Uzbekistan, a process in which the central Soviet government took part, together with the local, republican and regional administrations and Soviet Jewish activists. This research presents a chapter in the history of the Jews in Uzbekistan, as well as contributing to the study of the socialization process of the Jewish population in the USSR in general. It also contributes to the study of relations among political and government bodies and decision makers. The study is based on archival documents and provides a unique glance at the implementation of Soviet nationalities policy towards Bukharan Jews while comparing it to other national minority groups in Uzbekistan.

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Anthony Tucker-Jones, "The Fall of Berlin: The Final Days of Hitler's Evil Regime" (Sirius, 2024)

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In April 1945, Soviet forces descended on Berlin in the final phase of the war in Europe. The fighting was fierce as soldiers fanatically loyal to the Nazi party - and those afraid of the vengeance their opponents might enact - sought to stave off the end of the regime as long as possible.

Even as it became clear that defeat was inevitable, Hitler and his subordinates determined to fight to the bitter end, resulting in a bitter, brutal end to the war. As the Russian tanks crushed the remaining pockets of resistance, the city was turned into a nightmarish dystopia. Pillage, plunder, mass rape and unceasing destruction followed.

Anthony Tucker-Jones in The Fall of Berlin: The Final Days of Hitler's Evil Regime (‎Sirius, 2024) provides a vivid account with contemporary photographs, the author covers both German and allied viewpoints, exploring explores the strategies, the battles, the civilian experiences and the personalities involved in this fateful the final days of the Third Reich.

Anthony Tucker-Jones, a former intelligence officer, is an author, commentator and writer who specializes in military history. He has over fifty books to his name as well as several hundred features online and in print. His latest study provides a fascinating account of the last days of Nazi rule in Berlin and its subsequent liberation by Allied forces.

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Michael David-Fox, "The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) compiles an array of recent scholarship that draws on newly available archival evidence. This interview with the book's editor, Dr. Michael David-Fox, summarizes what these new findings add up to, and highlights specific arguments made by the collection's authors. While Russian archives are presently difficult to access, Ukrainian archives have proved to contain a trove of information about the Soviet-era secret police. The authors in this collection have broken much new interpretive ground, and the essays are universally engaging and provocative.

About the book: Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.

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Jack Margolin, "The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024) exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before.

Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in its wake, Jack Margolin traces the Wagner Group from its roots as a battlefield rumour to a private military enterprise tens of thousands-strong that eventually comes to threaten Putin himself. He follows individual commanders and foot soldiers within the group as they fight in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa, sometimes alongside fellow military contractors from the United Kingdom and the US. He shows Wagner mercenaries committing atrocities, plundering oil, diamonds, and gold, and changing the course of conflicts from Europe to Africa in the name of the Kremlin’s strategic aims.

In documenting the Wagner Group’s story up to the dramatic demise of its chief director, Evgeniy Prigozhin, Margolin demonstrates that Wagner was not an aberration, but a manifestation of the new geopolitical order of global capital, global crime and of the entrepreneurs that thrive in it.

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Mikhail Zygar, "War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine" (Scribner, 2023)

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players--from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin's moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin's plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here.

In 1996 to 2004, Ukraine became an independent post-Soviet country where everyone was connected to the former empire at all levels, financially, culturally, psychologically. However, the elite anticipated that the empire would be back and punish them. From 2004 to 2018, there were many states inside one state, each with its own rulers/oligarchs and its own interests--some of them directly connected with Russia. In 2018, a new generation of Ukrainians arrive, and having grown in an independent country, they do not consider themselves to be part of Russia--and that was the moment when the war began, as Putin could not tolerate losing Ukraine forever.

Authoritative, timely, and vitally important, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Scribner, 2023) is an unique overview of the war that continues to threaten the future of the entire world as we know it.

Mikhail Zygar, a journalist, filmmaker, and public historian, was founding editor-in-chief in 2010 of Russia’s only independent news TV channel, Dozhd (TVRain), which provided an alternative to Kremlin-controlled state television and gave a platform to opposition voices. He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of Project 1917, a website revisiting the Russian Revolution through myriad eye-witness perspectives. The New York Times has described Zygar as “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced young journalists.” Winner of the International Press Freedom Award in 2014, Zygar is the author of All the Kremlin’s Men (2016), the #1 bestseller in Russia that has been translated into over twenty languages, and The Empire Must Die (2017), a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.

Zygar openly protested against the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and then left Russia. He reported on the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha in 2022 and was charged with “distributing false information about Russia’s military.” In 2023 he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. He has written for based Der Spiegel in Germany and The New York Times in the USA and writes a substack newsletter, “The Last Pioneer.”

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Isaac Nakhimovsky, "The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress. Examining how the Holy Alliance could figure as both an idea of progress and an emblem of reaction, Dr. Nakhimovsky offers a novel vantage point on the history of federative alternatives to the nation state. The result is a clearer understanding of the recurring appeal of such alternatives—and the reasons why the politics of federation has also come to be associated with entrenched resistance to liberalism’s emancipatory aims.

Dr. Nakhimovsky connects the history of the Holy Alliance with the better-known transatlantic history of eighteenth-century constitutionalism and nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery and war. He also shows how the Holy Alliance was integrated into a variety of liberal narratives of progress. From the League of Nations to the Cold War, historical analogies to the Holy Alliance continued to be drawn throughout the twentieth century, and Nakhimovsky maps how some of the fundamental political problems raised by the Holy Alliance have continued to reappear in new forms under new circumstances. Time will tell whether current assessments of contemporary federal systems seem less implausible to future generations than initial liberal expectations of the Holy Alliance do to us today.

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Yakov Feygin, "Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed.

What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society.

Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform (Harvard UP, 2024) explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reimagined by a new breed of reformers focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition.” From Khrushchev on, influential schools of Soviet planning measured Cold War success in the same terms as their Western rivals: productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual, with reformers taking a novel approach to economics. Instead of trumpeting their ideological bona fides and leveraging their connections with party leaders, the new economists stressed technical expertise. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers over the future of central planning and the state’s relationship to the global economic order.

Feygin argues that Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse. Yet the legacy of reform lingers, its factional dynamics haunting contemporary Russian politics.

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John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the struggle against cholera. Davis’ birds-eye view of this hundred-year period illustrates that the conditions allowing cholera to flourish were the same set of conditions that helped create the collapse of the tsarist regime during the First World War. Credit for elimination of cholera must go to the Bolsheviks, both for implementing tsarist-era medical theory, and especially for making war on cholera in a organized, systematic manner that the old regime was variously unable or unwilling to achieve.

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Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as during the Referendum campaign of 2016 and the 2017 general election.

The Letter, addressed to the leadership of the British Communist Party, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, the Letter’s publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a “Red Scare” in the media. Labour blamed (erroneously) the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been an establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it.

The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call “fake news”. Now, former Chief Historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Dr. Gill Bennett, who headed up an official inquiry into the Zinoviev Affair in the late 1990s, takes another look at this matter in a fascinating book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). Employing research skills honed by forty-years work at the Foreign Office, Dr. Bennett entrances the reader with this still fascinating detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

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Cynthia A. Ruder, “Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space” (I. B. Tauris, 2018)

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space (I. B. Tauris, 2018), Cynthia Ruder explores how the building of the Moscow canal reflected the values of Stalinism and how it was used to create distinctly Soviet space, both real and imagined. She discusses the canal as a physical construct: an massive and important infrastructure project that would allow Moscow to have a steady supply of drinking water and create enough water pressure to allow for the construction of high rises, as well as a shipping channel that connected Moscow to the Volga and the Russian heartland and the rest of the world via the Baltic, White and Caspian seas, as well as the imagined spaces created, such as Moscow becoming “a port of five seas.” Ruder examines the Stalinist political system’s ability to tame and control water, bending it in service of socialism, and how these achievements were memorialized in art, song and literature. But she also explores the darker side of canal construction, the use of Gulag labor, the human cost it exacted and how this too was reflective of a Stalinist world-view. Building Stalinism provides an excellent look into the pervasive nature of Stalinism and its complex modern legacy..

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What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After being the posterchild of democratization, today Central and Eastern Europe is often seen as the region of democratic backsliding. In this episode, Milada Vachudova and Tim Haughton talk with host Licia Cianetti about how ethno-populist and illiberal politicians have been reshaping the region’s politics, how people have gone to the streets to protest against anti-democratic and corrupt governments, and the many ways in which post-communist Europe is actually not that different from democracies in the “West”.

Milada Anna Vachudova is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has recently co-edited a special section about “Civic Mobilization against Democratic Backsliding in Post-Communist Europe”.
Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. In the podcast he discusses hir recent articles on elections in Slovakia and Poland, and in Slovenia.
Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Co-Director of CEDAR. She has recently co-authored a chapter on Central and Eastern Europe for the Routledge Handbook of Autocratization.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

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Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociological problem of the usage of new media (social media, the Internet, digital technologies, messaging applications) by young people in political participation. This book not only sheds light on the ways in which new media use contributes to the nature of political participation in Kazakhstan and Russia, but also explains why citizens use these tools in their civic engagement. Dr. Sairambay sets his sights on what occurs downstream, i.e., not in the minds of political leaders and/or well known oppositionists, but on the ground in specific contexts such as cities, towns, and villages by young people.

For a similar interview in the Russian language, see Dr. Sairambay’s podcast episode with the University of Tartu’s Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies.

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Cassio de Oliveira, "Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great Terror was constructed around them.

In Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) Cassio de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters - rogues and storytellers - who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances. Combining new readings of canonical works with in-depth analysis of neglected texts, Writing Rogues explores the proliferation of characters left on the sidelines of the communist transition, including gangsters, con men, and petty thieves, many of them portrayed as ethnic minorities. The book engages with scholarship on Soviet subjectivity as well as classical picaresque literature in order to explain how the subversive rogue - such as Ilf and Petrov’s wildly popular cynic and schemer Ostap Bender - in the process of becoming a fully fledged Soviet citizen, came to expose and embody the contradictions of Soviet life itself.

Writing Rogues enriches our understanding of how literature was called upon to participate in the construction of Soviet identity. It demonstrates that the Soviet picaresque resonated with individual citizens’ fears and aspirations as it recorded the country’s transformation into the first communist state.

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Steven J. Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History” (Liveright/Norton, 2018)

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their neighbors, a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores destroyed. What concerns Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018) is less what happened and more the legacy, reception, and interpretation of those facts, both at the time and today. Pogrom is a study of the ways in which the events of Kishinev in 1903 astonishingly acted as a catalyst for leftist politics, new forms of anti-semitism, and the creation of an international involvement with the lives of Russian Jews.

In an introduction that sets the context of Russian-Jewish life at the opening of the 20th century, and five essay like chapters that follow, Professor Zipperstein uses different types of sources, marshaled from archives across the world in concert with well known accounts, to weave together a study of the ways in which the pogrom has been received and imagined from a myriad of different perspectives. A poetic memorialization by the man that would become the “national poet” of Israel, Haim Nachman Bialik, based on his eyewitness account, a journalistic investigation by Michael Davitt in Within the Pale: The True Story of the Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia culled from newspaper reports published around the world, as well as previously unknown connections to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to American radical politics. We read of an provincial event that captured the imagination of an international community, Jew and non-Jew alike, and provided them with a peephole into the lives of Russian Jewry. In many ways, this reception was paradoxical: by some, Jews were perceived as victims of popular violence, while others saw them as masterminds of a media-driven conspiracy.

In an age where much of our relationship with world events is shaped by often times contradictory media perspectives, Pogrom speaks to the ways in which this operates and its unwitting consequences. Here, Kishinev does not represent a pristine memory of a single story but rather exposes many of the historical trends of the 20th century and helps us further understand the relationships between media and power, between violence and empathy, and the ways in which we come to understand the unfolding narratives around us.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, if both Descartes and my mother are correct then I am not.

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Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism mean in the Soviet Union? What was its relationship with religion? In her new book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, Dr. Victoria Smolkin explores how the Soviet state defined and created spaces for atheism during its nearly 70-year history.

The Soviet state often found itself devising reactions to religion in terms of belief and practice. Religion, particularly Orthodox religion, was an ideological, political and spiritual problem for the state. The state, particularly during the Khrushchev era, needed to fill the ideological and spiritual void the absence of religion created in the hearts and minds of Soviet people. From the Soviet League of the Militant Godless to a cosmonaut wedding in the Moscow Wedding Palace, Smolkin’s use of primary sources effectively illustrates just how diverse the meaning of atheism could be from Lenin to Gorbachev. Smolkin’s work goes beyond the traditional accounts of Soviet atheism as a symptom of authoritarianism or as a secularization project to show that Soviet atheism’s purpose was fundamentally tied to the fate religion.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.

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Maria Taroutina and Allison Leigh, "Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940 (Manchester UP, 2023) features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire. It also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia's colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the east and the west.

Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History and Slavic Studies at Brown University.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art and Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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Marc Ambinder, “The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ronald Reagan and an exploration of nuclear command and control operations. Ambender weaves together accounts of military exercises, false alarms, and espionage to tell the story of how close the U.S. and the former Soviet Union came to nuclear war in 1983. The Brink is a narrative-style book that also details the evolution of U.S. nuclear war decision-making practices, continuity of government planning, and U.S. interactions with NATO and allies in during the 1980s.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Barbara Emerson, "The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century" (Hurst, 2024)

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia--the Great Game--and, towards the end of the century, East Asia.

The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, 2024) presents for the first time the Russian perspective on this 'game', drawing on the archives of the Tsars' Imperial Ministry. Both world powers became convinced of the expansionist aims of the other, and considered these to be at their own expense. When one was successful, the other upped the ante, and so it went on. London and St Petersburg were at war only once, during the Crimean War. But Russophobia and Anglophobia became ingrained on each side, as these two great empires hovered on the brink of hostilities for nearly 100 years.

Not until Britain and Russia recognized that they had more to fear from Wilhelmine Germany did they largely set aside their rivalries in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which also had major repercussions for the balance of power in Europe. Before that came a century of competition, diplomacy and tension, lucidly charted in this comprehensive new history.

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David L. Hoffmann, "The Stalinist Era" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book The Stalinist Era(Cambridge University Press, 2018), David L. Hoffmann focuses on the myriad ways in which Stalinist practices had their origins in World War I (1914-1918) and Russian Civil War era (1918-1920). These periods saw mass mobilizations of the population take place not just in Russia and the early Bolshevik state, but in many other nations, too.

In order to place Stalinism in this more comparative context, Hoffmann draws on a variety of primary archival sources. The Stalinist Era also provides a broad synthesis of recent work on Stalinism, and so interested readers will be able to follow his bibliography to much of the key historical work on the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Following its treatment of the Russian Civil War, The Stalinist Era takes readers through the NEP (New Economic Policy) period, the “building socialism” era of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, the Purges of the late 1930’s, the Second World War, and the final postwar Stalin years. Finally, Hoffmann suggests, there are important ways in which Stalinism did not die with Stalin himself.

The Stalinist Era combines an effective synthesis of the entire Stalin period, while at the same time, putting forth a specific and engaging argument that Stalinism mirrors many broader trends in modern nations. Historical writing should encourage comparative thinking, and Hoffmann’s book does exactly that.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Alexandra Popoff, "Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ayn Rand is a provocative and polarizing figure. Strongly pro-capitalist and anti-communist, Rand was a dogmatic preacher of her moral philosophy. Based on what she called "rational self-interest", Rand believed in prosperity-seeking individualism above all.

Alexandra Popoff's deeply researched biography traces Rand's journey from her early life as a privileged secular Jew in pre-revolution St. Petersburg, through the deprivations of life in Crimea during the Russian Civil War, and across the world to a new life in the United States in the 1920s. These early experiences influenced Rand's views, which she expressed in her sharp critique of Soviet Russia in her first major novel, We The Living.

In Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success (Yale UP, 2024) We follow Rand's extraordinary career in early Hollywood as an apprentice scriptwriter with Cecil DeMille and her evolution into an accomplished novelist of tightly plotted, intellectual stories. Her strong promotion of laissez-fair capitalism and creative, high achieving "supermen" willing to risk everything to achieve their goals came through in her two best selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Following her literary career Rand focused on her philosophical theory of Objectivism and became a cult-like figure to many of her devoted followers.

Video: Mike Wallace interview with Ayn Rand from 1959.

The Dragonbear in the Geopolitics of the 21st Century

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is the “dragonbear”? It is a metophor of an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. In this episdoe, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to geostrategist Velina Tchakarova about the dragonbear in the geopolitics of the 21st century.

What does the Dragonbear really aim to achieve in global affairs? First and foremost, it is about counterbalancing arising centrifugal forces in all fields — from economy, finance, trade, diplomacy, to military, defense and strategic alliances. But it also has a lot to do with Russia and China’s overlapping understanding that the world is in a system transformation, whose results are unpredictable and whose implications might be very dangerous for them. Velina Tchakarova’s previous position as the Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) in Vienna is marked by profound contributions to understanding the geopolitical domain and its implications for various sectors. In her current consulting firm, FACE For A Conscious Experience, Velina leverages her broad network and practical experience as a geopolitical strategist to deliver tailored solutions, helping the public and private sector adeptly navigate the complex geopolitical terrain. In this episode, Velina Tchakarova articulates that the unpredictable trajectory of Russia's war against Ukraine may force Putin to align Russia more closely with China’s geopolitical and geoeconomic interests, increasing dependencies within the dragonbear modus.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

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Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything?

Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Elena Borisova, "Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life" (UCL Press, 2024)

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Dr. Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative and moral aspects of (im)mobility, she shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources.

This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.

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Benjamin Nathans, "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile--and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton UP, 2024) is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Benjamin Nathans's vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents--from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was "simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people."

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin's Russia--and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

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Bastiaan Willems, "Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intra-ethnic violence engulfed the country.

In Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Königsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat into Germany, after three years of brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, contributed significantly to the spike of violence which occurred throughout the country immediately prior to defeat. Soldiers arriving with an ingrained barbarised mindset, developed on the Eastern Front, shaped the immediate environment of the area of operations, and of Nazi Germany as a whole. Willems establishes how the norms of the Wehrmacht as a retreating army impacted behavioural patterns on the home front, arguing that its presence increased the propensity to carry out violence in Germany.

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Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, "The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history.

The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history.

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Ed Pulford, "Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.

Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Ebony Nilsson, "Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Ebony Nilsson explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, and uncovers how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, proof of capitalist countries' superiority. But for a few, this was not the case. Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East for West, but remained left-wing or pro-Soviet.

Drawing on interviews, government records and surveillance dossiers from multiple continents this book explores how these refugees' ideas took root in new ways. As these radical ideas drew suspicion from western intelligence these everyday lives were put under surveillance, shadowed by the persistent threat of espionage. With unprecedented access to intelligence records, Nilsson focuses on how a number of these left-wing refugees adjusted to life in Australia, opening up a previously invisible segment of postwar migration history, and offering a new exploration of life as a Soviet 'enemy alien' in the West.

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Alexander Sasha Kondakov, "Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia" (UCL Press, 2022)

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally.

The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon. The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.

This book is available open access here.

Alexander Sasha Kondakov is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

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Jonathan Dimbleby, "Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. In his latest work, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Oxford UP, 2024), Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political, and diplomatic events of the final months on arguably the most crucial front of World War 2.

Dimbleby draws on previously untranslated accounts from ordinary Russian and German soldiers to chronicle the curtain call of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Endgame 1944 provides insights into the major German and Russian players balanced off with accounts of the trials of individual soldier..

Dimbleby has enjoyed a long career in television beginning with ITV and BBC where he covered world affairs. He presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. He has also worked in radio with BBC 4. His book Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of historical non-fiction. He is also Chair of Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund named after his father.

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Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2019)

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Last week, I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and the behind-the-scene details of its making. Ghodsee is a professor in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of nine books and many more articles and essays.

Second World, Second Sex addresses a telling gap in the historiography of women rights movements – the contributions of the Second World women rights activists. While careful not to idealize the socialist authoritarian regimes, Ghodsee reveals how deeply problematic and unfair it is to define feminism based on Western-inspired definitions of self-fulfillment or grassroot activism and to dismiss the achievements of women’s state organizations in the Eastern bloc as top-down policies and socialist propaganda.

Aiming to retell the UN Decade for Women from a non-Western perspective, this book follows the participation of the Bulgarian and Zambian delegations in the international conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The author makes use of a painstaking multi-site archival research and compassionate oral histories, to reconstruct the conferences and their context of arduous preparations and ideological tensions. The book’s approach to the conferences is very factual but also offers a lot of context, which helps the reader to better understand the main points of conflict between the Western delegates and the delegates from the developing and non-aligning countries. Ironically, what was rebranded in the 1990’s as “intersectionality” was the main argument of the state socialist women activists much earlier, namely, that the discussions of women’s rights separately from other social injustices such as racism, imperialism and colonialism are ultimately futile.

Curiously enough, Ghodsee’s comparative overview of the state of women’s rights before the UN Decade reveals that socialist states were forerunners of women’s rights with generous maternal leaves and state-run childcare among others. Moreover, the author reminds us, that the US government’s attention to women’s issues in the 1960s was actually a direct response to the threat coming from the USSR where women’s brains and forces were put into service of the rivalry with the West.

Thus, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Ghodsee sees the current political and cultural hegemony of the West as rather disadvantageous in terms women’s rights. There is no rivalry to push governments to do better and women remaining in the periphery hardly benefit from having equal access to the free market in their crime-ridden and economically dependent from the West countries with dismantled welfare systems.

Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.

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Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organized around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term “animal style,” this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia.

In Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh UP, 2024) Art historian Petya Andreeva’s research shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbors to showcase worldliness and control over the nomadic “other.”

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Maryna Shevtsova, "Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices" (Lexington Books, 2024)

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices came out with Lexington Books at the two-year’s mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2024. This volume undertakes an exploration of how gender norms have been transgressed and cultural expectations of womanhood and manhood evolved within the context of the war in Ukraine, ongoing since 2014. Edited by Maryna Shevtsova, it gives voice to feminist scholars and practitioners from Ukraine and the wider Central and Eastern European region who share their perspectives on the complex interconnection between gender and warfare.

Table of contents is available here.

Maryna Shevtsova is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

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Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, "The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.

Michoel Rotenfeld has translated Goldenshteyn’s autobiography into English and provided an extensive introduction and helpful notes throughout the text. Rotenfeld’s translation, The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea, was published in 2023 by Touro University Press.

Michoel Rotenfeld is a historical researcher and the associate director of Touro University Libraries.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, "The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today.

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Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience.

Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.

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Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using lessons. Here, what are denoted as borderline historical events, demonstrating both time-specific and time-transcending qualities, are suggested as useful materials. Scholarly works on the Holocaust and Soviet terror, from Raul Hilberg's and Robert Conquest's classic works of the 1960s to more recent books by Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, are analyzed to identify lessons of history, and their change during a full half-century.

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David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019)

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as the Wehrmacht's first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942 (FSG, 2019), David Stahel argues that it was in fact their first strategic success in the east. The mismanaged Soviet Counteroffensive became a phyrric victory as both sides struggled with strategic leadership and supply. German generals, caught between Stalin's hammer and Hitler's anvil, found loopholes in increasingly irrational orders to hold at all costs. Drawing on official war diaries, journals, memoirs, and correspondence, Stahel's latest installment in his reevaluation of the eastern front delivers a vivid account that challenges what you thought you knew about the war in the Soviet Union.

David Stahel is the author of five previous books on Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union. He completed an MA in war studies at King's College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. His research primarily concentrates on the German military in World War II. Dr. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

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Victoria Khiterer, "Jewish City Or Inferno of Russian Israel?: A History of the Jews in Kiev Before February 1917" (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Victoria Khiterer's book Jewish City Or Inferno of Russian Israel?: A History of the Jews in Kiev Before February 1917 (Academic Studies Press, 2017) describes the history of Jews in Kiev from the tenth century to the February 1917 Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kiev Jewish community was one of the largest and wealthiest in the Russian Empire. This book illuminates the major processes and events in Kievan Jewish history, including the creation of the Jewish community, the expulsions of Jews from the city, government persecution and Jewish pogroms, the Beilis Affair, the participation of Jews in the political, economic, and cultural life of Kiev, and their contribution to the development of the city.

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Elena Kochetkova, "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024)

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024), Elena Kochetkova examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests. The book explores evolving Soviet policies of wood consumption, discussing how professionals working in the forestry industry of the Soviet state viewed the present and future of forests by considering them both a natural resource and a trove of industrial material. The book also discusses how post-Soviet industry has abandoned these socialist practices and the idea of nature as a complicated ecosystem that provides a crucial service to society. Within the context of the current environmental crisis, the book invites readers to reevaluate state socialism as a complex phenomenon with sophisticated interactions between nature and industry. In so doing, it contributes a fresh perspective on the activities of socialist experts and their view of nature, shedding light on Soviet state industrial and environmental policy and its continuing legacy in the present day.

Elena Kochetkova is Associate Professor in Modern European Economic History at the Department of Archeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. She served as a Secretary of the European Society of Environmental History from 2019 to 2021.

Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories.

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Tracey German, "Russia and the Changing Character of Conflict" (Cambria Press, 2023)

Sat, 25 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's actions in and around Ukraine in 2014, as well as its activities in Syria and further afield, sparked renewed debate about the character of war and armed conflict, and whether it was undergoing a fundamental shift. One of the enduring features of conflict over the centuries has been its state of flux. This perpetual state of evolution requires states to regularly monitor how military force is being wielded, either by allies or adversaries, in order to be able to plan and prepare for future war.

Tracey German's Russia and the Changing Character of Conflict (Cambria Press, 2023) explores Russian views of the changing character of conflict and the debates that have emerged about how future wars might evolve. Since 2014 there has been wide-ranging discussion about Russia's "new way of war", with labels such as hybrid warfare, grey-zone operations and the Gerasimov doctrine dominating Western analyses. However, there has been scant analysis of Russian perspectives on the changing character of conflict and what future wars may look like: Western attempts to understand how and why Russia uses force have tended to rely upon mirror-imaging and an expectation of similar strategic behaviors. There is a paucity of literature examining Russian views of conflict and war, particularly literature based on Russian-language sources.

Using a range of Russian sources, this book helps us develop a greater understanding of Russian military thought, the range of perspectives a peer competitor holds and the particular analytical processes that take place, rather than mirror-imaging. It sets out the trends and debates in Russian military thought, tracing the evolution of this thinking in open-source material, particularly military journals, formal policy documents and speeches, and outlines the implications of Russian conclusions regarding the characteristics of contemporary and future conflict. The experiences of individual states foster different visions of future conflict and how states envisage military force being used, either by themselves or potential adversaries. It is vital to understand the process of observation and assessment that other states are engaged in.

Tracey German is a Professor of Conflict and Security in the Defence Studies Department at King's College London. Her research focuses on Russian foreign and security policies, particularly Russia’s use of force, and how its neighbors have responded, as well as Russian strategic culture and military thought. She speaks Russian and has traveled extensively across the post-Soviet area.

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Yaroslav Trofimov, "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence" (Penguin, 2024)

Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin, 2024), he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer and annex Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, redrawing the map of Europe in a few short weeks with seismic geopolitical consequences. Ukrainian resistance—determined, nimble, often heroic—upset those plans. Trofimov’s eloquent reporting of resistance in Ukraine is simultaneously clear-eyed and complex; his account is as illuminating as it is riveting. In this conversation of May 2024, he talks as well about how the situation is evolving.

Yaroslav Trofimov, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is a seasoned war reporter and a native of Kyiv, Ukraine.

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Choi Chatterjee, "Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Wed, 15 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022) uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire.

Choi Chatterjee analyzes the concepts of nation and empire, selfhood and subjectivity, socialism and capitalism, and revolution and the world order in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In doing so she rethinks many historical narratives that bluntly posit a liberal West against a repressive, authoritarian Russia. Instead Chatterjee argues for a wider perspective which reveals that imperial practices relating to the appropriation of human and natural resources were shared across European empires, both East and West.

Incorporating the stories of famous thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, among others. This unique interpretation of modern Russia is knitted together from the varied lives and experiences of those individuals who challenged the status quo and promoted a different way of thinking. This is a ground-breaking book with big and provocative ideas about the history of the modern world, and will be vital reading for students of both modern Russian and world history.

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Julia A. Cassiday, "Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) provides a critical and nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Vladimir Putin’s first two decades in power. It traces how the performance of Russian citizenship has been remolded according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. The book also demonstrates that while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity.

Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism has been shortlisted for the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize.

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Katya Hokanson, "A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Mon, 13 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores a new dimension of Russian imperialism: women actively engaged in the process of late imperial expansion. The book investigates how women writers, travellers, and scientists who journeyed to and beyond Central Asia participated in Russia's "civilizing" and colonizing mission, utilizing newly found educational opportunities while navigating powerful discourses of femininity as well as male-dominated science.

Katya Hokanson shows how these Russian women resisted domestic roles in a variety of ways. The women writers include a governor general's wife, a fiction writer who lived in Turkestan, and a famous Theosophist, among others. They make clear the perspectives of the ruling class and outline the special role of women as describers and recorders of information about local women, and as builders of "civilized" colonial Russian society with its attendant performances and social events. Although the bulk of their writings, drawings, and photography is primarily noteworthy for its cultural and historical value, A Woman's Empire demonstrates how they also add dimension and detail to the story of Russian imperial expansion and illuminates how women encountered, imagined, and depicted Russia's imperial Other during this period.

Katya Hokanson is an associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon.

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Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)

Sun, 12 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023).

The book is available Open Access, click here to download.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure.

Per and Achim’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Lawrence Freedman, "Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine" (Penguin, 2023)

Wed, 08 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world examines Europe's most important conflict since World War II.

More than any other modern war, the fight between Russia and Ukraine has been a tough testing ground for modern weapons and operational concepts. In Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine (Penguin, 2023), Sir Lawrence Freedman assesses the contrasting strategies of the two sides. Ukraine has fought along classical lines, seeking victory through battle. Russia has adopted a more total approach, combining conventional battles with attacks on Ukraine's socio-economic structure. Freedman explains why the apparently superior Russian force has been unable to defeat and subjugate Ukraine.

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Sean Griffin, "The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 07 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Sean Griffin's book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus (Cambridge UP, 2019), takes on the question of the source materials for the Primary Chronicle, one of the most important texts for the study of medieval Russia. Griffin argues that key portions of the Chronicle have their origin in Byzantine liturgy. This thesis has broad implications for what is and can be known about the early Rus.' Griffin further argues that Rus' state power had a direct interest in liturgy, and he is carrying this interest forward into a forthcoming book on technologies of power in present-day Russia. Listeners interested in this latter topic should be interested in the present interview; the manner in which the Russian state has sacralized its power illustrates fascinating continuities, from the early Rus' to the present day.

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Rustam Alexander, "Gay Lives and ‘Aversion Therapy’ in Brezhnev’s Russia, 1964–1982" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

Mon, 06 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contributes to our scant knowledge about the practices that many would call a Soviet proto-type of 'aversion therapy'. It also helps us understand the way homosexual people faced "queer dilemmas" of the self and how they sought to reconcile their queer desire with being Soviet.

Tatiana Klepikova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

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"The US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Mon, 06 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work camps for Tunisian Jews, brothels in which women were forced to have sex with soldiers, and prisons and penal camps for Wehrmacht personnel. Most of these sites have not been described in detail in the existing historical literature, and a substantial number of them have never been documented at all. The volume also includes an introduction to the German prisoner of war camp system and its evolution, introductions to each of the various types of camps operated by the Wehrmacht, and entries devoted to each individual camp, representing the most comprehensive documentation to date of the Wehrmacht camp system.

Within the entries, the volume draws upon German military documents, eyewitness and survivor testimony, and postwar investigations to describe the experiences of prisoners of war and civilian prisoners held captive by the Wehrmacht. Of particular note is the detailed documentation of the Wehrmacht's crimes against Soviet prisoners of war, which have largely been neglected in the English-language literature up to this point, despite the fact that more than three million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity. The volume also provides substantial coverage of the diverse range of conditions encountered by other Allied prisoners of war, illustrating both the substantial privations faced by all prisoners of war and the stark contrast between the Germans' treatment of Soviet prisoners and those of other nationalities. The volume also details the significant involvement of the Wehrmacht in crimes against the civilian populations of occupied Europe and North Africa. As a result, this volume not only brings to light many detention sites whose existence has been little known, but also advances the decades-old process of dismantling the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht," according to which the German military had nothing to do with the Holocaust and the Nazi regime's other crimes.

Dallas Michelbacher and Alexandra Lohse are applied research scholars at USHMM.

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Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000-mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back. They immortalised their journey in a popular travelogue entitled One-storied America (published as Little Golden America in the US), a suite of newspaper articles, and a series of photographs.

In Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reconstructs this epic journey, exploring Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with a vast range of characters, from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors’ notes, archival material in both Russia and the US, and even FBI files, she reveals the role played by ordinary individuals in shaping foreign relations as Ilf, Petrov and the immigrants, communists, and fellow travellers who served as their hosts, guides, and translators became creative actors in cultural exchange between the two countries.

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is Professor of History at West Chester University. In addition to her latest book Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (2024), she is the author of Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (Routledge Falmer, 2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press 2015).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Illia Ponomarenko, "I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Fri, 03 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The spring 2022 battle for Kyiv was "one of the most tragic – and the most bizarre – events in modern history," writes Illia Ponomarenko. "Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine sustained the most critical blow and unexpectedly delivered Russia the greatest and most defining defeat of this war. It spelt a stunning end to the Kremlin’s megalomaniac plans of an easy conquest of a 40-million-person nation. Ukraine did it alone, by itself, still with very little defence aid from the West, And that uneven victory altered the course of European history".

In I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv (Bloomsbury, 2024), Ponomarenko recalls life in Ukraine's capital during the delusional, extended Christmas leading up to Russia's full-scale invasion, after the shock and awe of the first night and the fight for the northern suburbs, and amid the joy of victory.

It is the story of a nation, a city, a reporter and his friends, family, and colleagues. A founder and defence editor of the Kyiv Independent, which he left last summer to write the book, Ponomarenko mixes reporting with polemic. The mixture has turned this 32-year-old native Russian speaker from southern Donbas into one of the war’s biggest media personalities with 1.2 million Twitter followers.

*The authors' book recommendations are Babi Yar: The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust by Anatoly Kuznetsov as "A. Anatoli" (first published in Russian in 1966; in English translation by David Floyd with Vintage Classics, 2024) and Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence by Yaroslav Trofimov (Penguin, 2024).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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Jen Stout, "Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War" (Polygon, 2024)

Thu, 02 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

As a teenager in Shetland, Jen Stout fell in love with Russia and, later, Ukraine – their languages, cultures, and histories.

Although life kept getting in the way, she eventually managed to pause her BBC career and take up a nine-month scholarship to live and work in Russia. Unfortunately, this dream only came true in November 2021, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders. Three months later, she left Russia but only got as far as Vienna before heading back into Ukraine via Romania with a rucksack and a handful of freelance contracts.

In Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Cost of Russia’s War (Polygon, 2024), we experience Europe’s biggest land war since 1945 through the eyes of a war reporter, photographer, and cultural observer during tours in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv, and close to the frontline in Donbas.

Via railway workers, soldiers, writers, activists, and old women sleeping in bunkers, we encounter stoical resistance. Stout writes: "I was finding warmth and determination all over the place when what editors expected was fear and despair. I tried to explain that the resilience I described wasn't an individual phenomenon but society-wide. The more Russia attacked Ukrainian society; the less inclined people were to anything remotely resembling despair. They only got angrier".

A freelance journalist, Jen Stout was a reporter at CommonSpace in Glasgow and for the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press before joining BBC Scotland in 2018.

*The author's book recommendations are The Face of War: Writings from the Frontline 1937-1985 by Martha Gellhorn (Eland, 2016 - first published in 1959), The Letters Of Martha Gellhorn selected and edited by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus, 2006), and Island by Aldous Huxley (Vintage Classics, 2005).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story.

The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Asif Siddiqi on Rockets, Prisons, Pop Songs, and So Much More

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History at Fordham University, about the arc of his career and his wide-ranging interests and work. The pair start by discussing Siddiqi's wonderful book, The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), a history of the social and cultural trends, including a heavy dose of science fiction and mysticism, in Russia and the Soviet Union that led to Sputnik. They then talk about Siddiqi's other projects and interests from prisons to pop songs to global histories of space infrastructures. They also discuss the promises of recent turns to global and international research projects and stories in the history of technology.

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Steven Ujifusa, "The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I" (HarperCollins, 2023)

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg.

This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line, who created a transportation network of trains and steamships to carry them across continents and an ocean; and J. P. Morgan, mastermind of the International Mercantile Marine (I.M.M.) trust, who tried to monopolize the lucrative steamship business. Though their goals were often contradictory, together they made possible a migration that spared millions from persecution. Descendants of these immigrants included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Estée Lauder, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Lauren Bacall, the Marx Brothers, David Sarnoff, Al Jolson, Sam Goldwyn, Ben Shahn, Hank Greenberg, Moses Annenberg, and many more--including Ujifusa's great grandparents. That is their legacy.

Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York's Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I (HarperCollins, 2023) is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, Ujifusa's story offers original insight into the American experience, connecting banking, shipping, politics, immigration, nativism, and war--and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time.

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Maria Snegovaya, "When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In her new book, When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024), Maria Snegovaya argues that, contrary to the view that emphasizes the sociocultural aspects (xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc.) of the rise of the populist right, especially in postcommunist Europe, the rise of the populist right is inextricably linked to the pro-market, Neoliberal reforms of the left, which had the effect of disenfranchising working-class and other voters, and providing an natural opportunity for the right to gain power.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

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Egor Lazarev, "State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Egor Lazarev explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives?

The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.

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Louis Howard Porter, "Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Before Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organisations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organisations for the first time, including the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. As a result, it enabled Soviet diplomats, scholars, teachers, and even some blue-collar workers to participate in global discussions on topics ranging from their professional specialties to worldwide problems.

Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Louis Porter investigates Soviet relations with one of the most prominent of these organisations, UNESCO, to present a novel way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Drawing on unused archival material from the former USSR and elsewhere, the book examines the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations and lesser-known activities of world governance. These unexamined dimensions of everyday participation in the UN's bureaucracy, conferences, publications, and technical assistance show the body's importance for a group of Soviet "one-worlders," who used the UN to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev governments sought to use their participation as a means of spreading Soviet influence within Western-dominated international organisations but discovered that this required risk-taking and a degree of openness for which the Soviet leadership and domestic institutions were often unprepared.

Moving beyond debates over the successes and failures of UN diplomatic activities, Reds in Blue offers fresh perspectives on how Soviet citizens became citizens of the world and advocated for opening up Soviet society in ways that transcended Cold War categories without abandoning a sense of loyalty to their homeland. In doing so, it recaptures a space where East and West worked together towards a future without international conflict in the years before détente.

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Alexandrina Vanke, "The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle" (Manchester UP, 2024)

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses.

The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle (Manchester UP, 2024) challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia’s post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism.

The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

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Kevin P. Reihle, "The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service" (Georgetown UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Since its founding in 1995, the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, has regained the majority of the domestic security functions of the Soviet-era KGB. Under Vladimir Putin, who served as FSB director just before becoming president, the agency has grown to be one of the most powerful and favored organizations in Russia. The FSB not only conducts internal security but also has primacy in intelligence operations in former Soviet states. Their activities include anti-dissident operations at home and abroad, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, criminal investigations of crimes against the state, and guarding Russia's borders.

In The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service (Georgetown University Press, 2024), Kevin P. Riehle provides a brief history of the FSB's origins, placed within the context of Russian history, the government's power structure, and Russia's wider culture. He describes how the FSB's mindset and priorities show continuities from the tsarist regimes and the Soviet era. The book's chapters analyze origins, organizational structure, missions, leaders, international partners, and cultural representations such as the FSB in film and television.

Based on both English and Russian sources, this book is a well-researched introduction to understanding the FSB and its central role in Putin's Russia.

Kevin P. Riehle is lecturer in intelligence and security studies at Brunel University London. He also spent over 30 years in the US government as a counterintelligence analyst. He is the author of two previous books, including Soviet Defectors: Revelations of Renegade Intelligence Officers, 1924-1954 (2020).

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George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America" (Pegasus Book, 2024)

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.

So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America (Pegasus Book, 2024), is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Isaac Deutscher, "Lenin's Childhood" (Verso, 2024)

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

On January 21, 1924 and at the age of 53, Vladimir Lenin passed away. We’ve now had a century of a world without him, but also a century of a world undeniably changed by his imprint. In commemoration of his life, Verso has recently put out a collection of classic works both by and about this pivotal figure. One of these books, a short biographical sketch called Lenin’s Childhood, is the topic of today’s conversation, although it’s really only a jumping off point for my guest and I to talk about the book’s author, the Marxist historian and biographer Isaac Deutscher. Best known for his biographies of Stalin and his trilogy on Trotsky, Lenin’s Childhood is the only completed piece of an attempted two-volume study that would’ve completed his biographical work, and set the stage for a greater study of Russian history in general. While his untimely death in 1967 cut his work short, he still left a rich body of writing worth wrestling with. Throughout our conversation, we discuss Deutscher’s life, work and legacy, and encourage listeners to revisit his work as still relevant for contemporary readers.

Our guest today, Gonzalo Pozo, wrote the introduction to the new edition of Lenin’s Childhood, and is currently working on a biography of Isaac Deutscher.

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Eileen Kane et al., "Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford UP, 2023) presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. These archival, autobiographical, and literary sources, introduced by specialists and in some cases by pairs of scholars with complementary language expertise, highlight connections long obscured by disciplinary cleavages between Slavic and Middle East studies. Taken together, the thirty-four chapters of this book show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They reveal the transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. Above all, they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have embodied and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars and spies. A set of new maps helps orient readers amid the expansion and collapse of empires, border changes, population transfers, and creation of new nation-states that occurred during the two centuries these sources cover.

Eileen Kane teaches modern European history at Connecticut College, where she also directs the Program in Global Islamic Studies. A historian of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, she is the author of Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. She is the 2017 recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship and is currently writing a history of Jewish and Muslim migrations from Russia to the Middle East.

Masha Kirasirova is assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of exchanges between the Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East. She is finishing a book called The Eastern International: Culture, Power, and Politics in Soviet-Arab Relations. Her articles have appeared in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Ab Imperio, Iranian Studies, and Mediterranean Politics.

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University. A historian of modern Arabic literature and its global ties, she is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost and the translator of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Arabic novel Ice, set in 1973 Moscow. Her current book project, Another East: Arab Writers, Moscow Dreams, reconstructs some literary legacies of Arab-Russian and Arab-Soviet cultural ties during the long 20th century. She also writes about Arabic theatre for global audiences.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

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Erica L. Fraser, "Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union" (U Toronto Press, 2019)

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Catastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society.

Erica L. Fraser's book Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union (U Toronto Press, 2019) combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.

Erica L. Fraser is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University.

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Alina Nychyk, "Ukraine Vis-à-Vis Russia and the EU: Misperceptions of Foreign Challenges in Times of War, 2014-2015" (Ibidem Press, 2023)

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ukraine Vis-à-Vis Russia and the EU: Misperceptions of Foreign Challenges in Times of War, 2014-2015 (Ibidem Press, 2023) investigates the making of Ukraine’s foreign policy towards the European Union and Russia between February 2014 and February 2015. To contextualize the events of the first year of the Russian-Ukrainian War, Nychyk lays out the history of the EU-Ukraine-Russia triangle since 1991 and draws lessons relevant for the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The book is based on her doctoral research and rests on a game-theory-inspired approach to foreign policy analysis. It relies on 38 elite interviews, official documents, and media reports.

Nychyk uncovers various mutual misperceptions in EU-Ukraine-Russia relations. Looking at Ukraine’s ‘side of the story’, her analysis shows how Russian assertiveness and the EU’s passivity, but also Ukrainian leaders’ limited crisis management experience and erroneous policy decisions contributed to worse outcomes for Ukraine. The latter included poor analysis of foreign interlocutors, trust in their good intentions, and corruption. After 2015, a persistence—although with certain changes—of some of these pathologies left Ukraine in a weaker position in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

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Legal Cultures in the Russian Empire

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Law. How does the state form and use it? How do people use and shape it? How does law shape culture? How does the practice of law change over time in a modernizing colony? What was stable and what was malleable in the application of law in early modern Russia versus its Central Asian colony in the Empire’s final century? What’s the difference between a bribe and a gift?

These are some of the questions at the heart of this fascinating conversation about two books that probe the theoretical and instrumental underpinnings, as well as the everyday practice, of law in different periods and regions of the Russian Empire. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge UP, 2012) by Nancy Kollmann analyzes the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Visions of Justice: Sharī’a and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Brill, 2017; available open access) by Paolo Sartori excavates civil law practice to explore legal consciousness among the Muslim communities of Central Asia from the end of the eighteenth century through the fall of the Russian Empire, situating his work within a range of debates about colonialism and law, legal pluralism, and subaltern subjectivity. Paolo Sartori and Nancy Kollmann explore overlaps, divergence and much more that emerge from their respective findings in these deeply researched books.

Paolo Sartori is a Senior Research Associate and the Chairman of the Commission for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and the Journal of Central Asian History (Brill). In addition to Visions of Justice, authoring several scholarly articles and co-editing essay collections, Sartori has co-authored two books, Seeking Justice at the Court of the Khans of Khiva (19th–Early 20th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2020), co-authored with Ulfat Abdurasulov and Éksperimenty imperii: adat, shariat, i proizvodtsvo znanii v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2019), co-authored with Pavel Shabley.

Nancy Kollmann is the William H. Bonsall Professor of History at Stanford University in California. In addition to Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (2012), she is the author of Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547 (1987), By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (1999); The Russian Empire, 1450–1801 (2017), and Visualizing Russia in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming August 2024).

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Dariusz Tołczyk, "Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes under Western Eyes" (Indiana UP, 2023)

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The most heinous Soviet crimes - the Red Terror, brutal collectivization, the Great Famine, the Gulag, Stalin's Great Terror, mass deportations, and other atrocities - were treated in the West as a controversial topic. With the Cold War dichotomy of Western democracy versus Soviet communism deeply imprinted in our minds, we are not always aware that these crimes were very often questioned, dismissed, denied, sometimes rationalized, and even outright glorified in the Western world. Facing a choice of whom to believe -the survivors or Soviet propaganda- many Western opinion leaders chose in favor of Soviet propaganda. Even those who did not believe it behaved sometimes as if they did.

Blissful Blindness: Soviet Crimes under Western Eyes (Indiana UP, 2023) explores Western reactions (and lack thereof) to Soviet crimes from the Bolshevik revolution to the collapse of Soviet communism in order to understand ideological, political, economic, cultural, personal, and other motivations behind this puzzling phenomenon of willful ignorance. But the significance of Dariusz Tolczyk's book reaches beyond its direct historical focus. Written for audiences not limited to scholars and specialists, this book not only opens one's eyes to rarely examined aspects of the twentieth century but also helps one see how astonishingly relevant this topic is in our contemporary world.

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Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

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Leona Toker, "Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading" (Indiana UP, 2019)

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion.

Toker's twofold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as on the ways in which each text documents the writer's experience and in which fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. References to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers; the book explains them and shows how they form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of Gulag literature, and this text presents new thinking about how Gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil.

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Ilmari Käihkö, "'Slava Ukraini!': Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance 2014–2023" (Helsinki UP, 2023)

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In wake of the Maiden Revolution of 2013-14, the pro-Russian government of Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in place of a regime seeking a more pro-Western orientation. Russia in response occupied the Crimea and helped instigate numerous pro-Russian separatist movements in the eastern regions of the country, leading to the creation of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic in the Donbas region. Faced with both external and internal threats to its national sovereignty, thousands of Ukrainians formed themselves up into volunteer units to help meet these challenges. Although having an ambiguous legal status, these volunteer units did prove relatively effective on the battlefield given the situation. These units helped galvanize Ukraine with a new generation of national heroes whose legacy is still shaping the nation in light of the 2022 Russian invasion. Ilmari Käihkö provides a detailed look into these volunteer units and their legacy in "Slava Ukraini!": Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance, 2014-2023 (Helsinki University Press, 2023).

Ilmari Käihkö is an associate professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defense University, and a veteran of the Finnish Defense Forces. His research focuses on cultural sociology of war, underpinned by ethnographic study of contemporary war and warfare.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Michael Kimmage, "Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

One war, three collisions: Russia with Ukraine, Europe, and the US. On the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Michael Kimmage analyses the disparate factors that led to war in Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (OUP Press, 2024).

"After a few anomalous years of peace, Europe became in 2022 what it has always been, an epicentre of conflict, the fault line around which the biggest and worst geopolitical earthquakes tend to occur".

A member of the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the US State Department where he handled the Ukraine/Russia portfolio from 2014-2016, Michael Kimmage is now a Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC.

*The authors' book recommendations are Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, 2002) and The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy (Allen Lane, 2023).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How can territory and peoples be organized? After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically?

In Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton UP, 2023), historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in practice—offered alternative routes out of empire. The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into a project to include France’s African territories in plans for European integration. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds. Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of Russian imperial power. While both the system of purportedly sovereign states and the concentrated might of large economic and political institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in welfare and power, Burbank and Cooper‘s study of political imagination explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike destinies.

This is Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper second major scholarly collaboration. They previously co-authored Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Frederick Cooper is Professor Emeritus of History at New York University. His research has focused on 20th-century Africa, empires, colonization and decolonization, and citizenship. Among his books are Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005); Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (2014); Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (2014); Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018); and Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2nd ed., 2019).

Jane Burbank is Professor Emerita, New York University. Her areas of research are Russian political culture, law, and empire. Her works include Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 (1986); Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (2004); Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, edited with David L. Ransel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, edited with Mark von Hagen and Anatolyi Remnev (2007).

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Rachel Applebaum, "Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell University Press, 2019), Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious.

Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe―and, ultimately, its collapse.

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Gregory Wallance, "Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian Empire’s practice of exiling political prisoners to Siberia.

What Kennan saw on his journey shook him to his very core, forcing him to question his respect for the Russian Empire. And as writer Gregory Wallance explains in his book Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kennan’s advocacy upon his return turned U.S. views from Russia away from being a faraway friend to something far more skeptical.

Gregory Wallance is a lawyer and writer in New York City. He is the author of Papa's Game (Ballantine Books: 1982) which received a nonfiction nomination for an Edgar Allan Poe Award; America's Soul In the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR's State Department, And The Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy (Greenleaf Book Group: 2012), The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and Her Nili Spy Ring (Potomac Books: 2018), and the historical novel Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane's Recollection of Dred Scott And the Supreme Court Case That Started the Civil War (Greenleaf Book Group: 2015). He is currently an opinion contributor for The Hill.

Today, Gregory and I talk about Kennan, his many trips to Siberia, and the effect his journalism had on American views of Russia.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Into Siberia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon

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Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, some one million Russians have fled the country and gone into exile. Motivated by opposition to the war, by guilt for their country's deeds, by personal hatred for the Czar-like Putin, and by a vision of a better Russia, shorn of autocracy, the exiles have mounted an organized resistance to Putin's rule.

The resistance includes followers of the imprisoned Putin opponent Alexi Navalny, dissident Russian Orthodox priests, and journalists feeding Russians back home the kind of coverage that Kremlin-controlled media censors. Most aggressively, some exiles are actively aiding the Ukrainian fight against Russia's armed forces in hopes of hastening Russia's defeat and Putin's demise.

Paul Starobin, a veteran analyst of Russia, travels to places like Armenia and Georgia to meet with exiles and has conversations with prominent figures throughout Europe and America, as he takes measure of this rebellion--and its potential to fix a nation plagued by revanchist imperial dreams.

Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, is an indispensable work for anyone trying to understand Russia today--to go beyond Putin's propaganda and the tightly controlled narrative inside the country, and look outside its borders to the diaspora of Russian exiles, who are imagining and fighting for the future of their country.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Serhiy Bilenky, "Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today.

Making innovative use of methods of social and cultural history, gender studies, literary theory, and sociology, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) explores the history of Ukraine throughout the long nineteenth century and offers a unique study of its pluralistic society, culture, and political scene. Despite being subjected to different and conflicting power models during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ukraine was not only imagined as a distinct entity with a unique culture and history but was also realized as a set of social and political institutions. The story of modern Ukraine is geopolitically complex, encompassing the historical narratives of several major communities - including ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Russians - who for centuries lived side by side. The first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Ukraine in English, Laboratory of Modernity traces the historical origins of some of the most pressing issues facing Ukraine and the international community today.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a Preceptor in Ukrainian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.

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Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, "The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Can we predict the future? In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science (Cornell UP, 2023), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University, tells the story of Soviet and Post-Soviet attempts to order economy and society using a variety of scientific and management techniques. The analysis is wide ranging, demonstrating the contemporary importance, as well as the historical context, of prediction and its associated intellectual and governmental champions. Rich with details, as well as accessible and fascinating, the book is essential reading across history and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how we know the past present and future of the modern world.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

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Bedross Der Matossian, "The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Bedross Der Matossian's The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2023), based on new research, sheds light on the history of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party, a major Armenian revolutionary party that operated in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Persia and throughout the global Armenian diaspora. Divided into sections which cover the origins, ideology, and regional history of the SDHP, the book situates the history of the Hnchaks within debates around socialism, populism, and nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The SDHP was not only an Armenian party but had a global Marxist outlook, and scholars in this volume bring to bear expertise in a wide range of histories and languages including Russian, Turkish, Persian and Latin American to trace the emergence and role this influential party played from their split with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the events of the Armenian genocide to the formation of the first Armenian Republic and then Soviet Armenia. Putting the Hnchaks in context as one of many nationalist radical groups to emerge in Eurasia in the late 19th century, the book is an important contribution to Armenian historiography as well as that of transnational revolutionary movements in general.

Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Curtis Fox, "Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict" (30 Press Publishing, 2023)

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The on-going war in Ukraine continues to highlight the distinct differences between how Russia operates large-scale military operations from the usual manner NATO military forces often engage themselves. What accounts for the Russian way of war? A common term used to describe Russian military strategy in the 21st century is "hybrid warfare" that seeks to subvert an enemy force in manners other than direct confrontation. Curtis L. Fox argues in his book Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition & Conventional Military Conflict (30 Press Publishing, 2023) that this approach to warfare is rooted in Russian history and explains much of Russia's conduct in the war in Ukraine thus far.

Curtis L. Fox is a former Green Beret and served as a demolitions and combat engineering expert on a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, as well as other operational duties and missions. He separated from the Army in 2016 to attend the MBA program at Georgetown before re-entering public service in the Department of Defense.

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Anton Weiss-Wendt, "On the Margins: Essays on the History of Jews in Estonia" (CEU Press, 2017)

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, Anton Weiss-Wendt's On the Margins: Essays on the History of Jews in Estonia (CEU Press, 2017) is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940-41 are among the issues addressed in the book but most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia.

Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps and develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration during the Holocaust. The book also explores the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of today's Estonian population from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.

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Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

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Calder Walton, "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is the history of the secret war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage, sabotage, and subversion were the Kremlin's means to equalize the imbalance of resources between the East and West before, during, and after the Cold War. There was nothing "unprecedented" about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was simply business as usual, new means used for old ends.

The Cold War started long before 1945. But the West fought back after World War II, mounting its own shadow war, using disinformation, vast intelligence networks, and new technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is a "deeply researched and artfully crafted" (Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the US President) story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honor, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow where troll farms, synthetic bots, and weaponized cyber-attacks being launched woefully unprepared West. It is about the rise and fall of Eastern superpowers: Russia's past and present and the global ascendance of China.

Mining hitherto secret archives in multiple languages, Calder Walton shows that the Cold War started earlier than commonly assumed, that it continued even after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, and that Britain and America's clandestine struggle with the Soviet government provided key lessons for countering China today. This "authoritative, sweeping" (Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Embers of War) history, combined with practical takeaways for our current great power struggles, make Spies a unique and essential addition to the history of the Cold War and the unrolling conflict between the United States and China that will dominate the 21st century.

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Simon Shuster, "The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky" (William Morrow, 2024)

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Since Simon Shuster's November 2023 Time cover story ("Nobody believes in our victory like I do - Nobody"), anyone with an interest in the war in Ukraine has been waiting for his fly-on-the-wall study of command. Finally, The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow, 2024) is out.

Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years. Before joining Time, he worked in the region for the Moscow Times, Reuters, and AP. He first met Ukraine’s leader and his entourage when Zelensky was running for president in 2019 and built enough trust to be granted sustained wartime access three years later. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the Ukrainian principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, his national security advisor, and the chief of staff of the armed forces – The Showman provides a unique insight into the conduct of the war from the top.

*The authors' book recommendations are Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham (Bantam Press, 2019) and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick (Viking, 1993).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Democracy, Great Powers, and the Russia-Ukraine War. A Discussion with Stefan Wolff

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How helpful is the democracy-authoritarianism binary when it comes to our understanding of contemporary conflict? What is the state of the Russia-Ukraine war? And how has it affected the great power rivalry between the United States and China? Listen to Stefan Wolff and Petra Alderman talk about the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, the state of the Russia-Ukraine war, and whether democracy is likely to lose out from the heightening tensions between the three great powers: the United States, Russia, and China.

Stefan Wolff is a Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. He is well-known for his research on the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He is also an expert on post-conflict state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies and has written extensively on the geopolitics and geo-economics in Eurasia, including great power competition between Russia, China, and the West. He is a regular contributor to The Conversation and a co-founder of the Navigating the Vortex.

Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.

Please note that this episode was recorded in December 2023. All mentions of ‘this year’ refer to 2023 and mentions of ‘last year’ refer to 2022.

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Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the workings of the British Russia Company and the commercial entanglements of the British and Russian empires in the long eighteenth century.

This innovative and highly readable monograph challenges the long-held views of Russian economic backwardness in the early modern period and stresses the importance of personal histories and individual agency in global economic dynamics. By focusing on diplomatic and commercial careers of a fascinating set of characters, Romaniello charts vibrant knowledge and information-sharing networks that were essential for the success of both empires in the Eurasian economic and geopolitical arenas.

A non-conventional economic history, Enterprising Empires traverses the micro-historical and the macro-economic to reevaluate Russian commercial prowess before 1800 and illuminate an overlooked area of Anglo-Russian cooperation and rivalry.

Matthew Romaniello is an Associate Professor of History at Weber State University and a historian of the Russian empire, commodities, and medicine. He is currently the editor of The Journal of World History and the former editor of Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies.

Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu.

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Yaroslav Trofimov, "Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence" (Penguin, 2023)

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Since February 2022, a string of books have been published about the war in Ukraine but, for the most part, these have been histories and political studies. Only now are the “first drafts of history” from war reporters starting to emerge.

Christopher Miller and Andrew Harding published last summer and they will be followed, in late January, by Simon Shuster’s inside account of Volodymyr Zelensky’s war. But, beating Shuster by a fortnight, is Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin Press, 2024) - an account of the first year of the full-scale invasion combining history, frontline reporting, and flashes of emotion from the Wall Street Journal's Kyiv-born chief foreign-affairs correspondent

"Being in a country at war,” he writes, “one is rarely distressed by the causalities of the invading army ... But, in the forests outside Lyman, these freshly dead Russian men with their civilian backpacks containing their meagre possessions, with their sleeping bags and pouches of fever and pain medication, were no longer anonymous and generic invaders. I looked at their faces and felt anger".

Yaroslav Trofimov joined the Wall Street Journal in 1999 – reporting from Rome, Singapore, Pakistan, Dubai, and Afghanistan where he covered the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. Since January 2022 – a month before the invasion – he has been working out of Ukraine. This is his third book.

*The authors' book recommendations are Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine by Timothy Snyder (Yale University Press, 2005) and Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (first published in Italian in 1944, the latest edition from Adelphi, 2014; translated into English and published in 2007 by NYRB Classics).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Kateryna Malaia, "Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture before and after 1991" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991 (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) Kateryna Malaia examines the transformation of domestic spaces and architecture during the period of perestroika (1985-1991) and the first post-Soviet decades. In analysing how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers altered their homes amidst a period of profound socio-cultural change, Malaia provides unique insight into the relationship between the transformation of domestic spaces and the transition of Soviet urbanites into post-Soviet citizens.

Kateryna Malaia is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the evolution of residential architecture, the politics of monument construction and demolition, how the collapse of the USSR has transformed urban dwellings, and housing insecurity. Malaia’s writing has been published in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, PLATFORM, Architectural Histories, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Pavel Khazanov, "The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows in The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse (U Wisconsin Press, 2023), after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project.

Khazanov’s careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class. Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a “lost Russia,” Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladamir Putin) successfully steered Russia into oligarchy and increasing autocracy. The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition.

This book can be purchased a discounted rate for a limited time using the code ASEES23WISC here.

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Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017), Eren Tasar argues that the Soviet Union was successful in building its relationship with Muslims in Central Asia because it created a space for Islam within the state’s ideology.

Exploring sources from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, Tasar gives readers an understanding of how the USSR created and used institutions to manage Islam following World War II. Soviet and Muslim provides a new prospective on the relationship between Islam and the Soviet state as it shows that the relationship between them was not based on government oppression of religion, rather it was one of accommodation and flexibility on both sides. Tasar also shows the continuities between tsarist and Soviet policy towards Muslims in Central Asia, and places Soviet Muslim policy in a global context.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a history professor.

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Christine E. Evans, “Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television” (Yale UP, 2016)

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in the Brezhnev era was anything but boring. Whether producing music shows such as Little Blue Flame, game shows like Let's Go Girls or dramatic mini-series, the creators of Soviet programming in the 1950s through 1970s sought to produce television that was festive. Evans demonstrates that television programmers conducted audience research and audience voting as they attempted to meet Soviet citizens' expectations and hold their interest. Rather than stagnating, the producers and filmmakers experimented with multiple forms, in particular in presenting the news. In this interview, Christine Evans discusses her thoroughly researched and entertaining study, and what we can learn about Soviet society in the Brezhnev era through the television it created and watched.

Christine E. Evans is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Amanda Jeanne Swain is associate director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. She has published articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe. Amanda can be contacted at amandajswain@gmail.com.

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Scott D. Seligman, "Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead.

The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international support for the puppet state of Manchukuo—and it’s the subject of Scott Seligman’s latest book, Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

In this interview, Scott and I talk about Harbin, the major players in Semyon’s abduction and murder, and how the investigation and trial became an international sensation.

Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the national award-winning author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac: 2020), The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac: 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo (Hong Kong University Press: 2013)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Murder in Manchuria. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and how it interrelates with issues of human mobility.

In this richly informative and captivating book, Park focuses on the movement of Koreans around the point where China, Russia and Korea converged from the mid-19th century onwards. Deftly moving between intimate migrant experiences and higher-level government activity, the author’s interweaving of the personal and the political gives us a newly grounded perspective on several large empire-states and how they came to understand sovereignty, population and loyalty in the 19th and 20th centuries. These understandings continued to reverberate in the decades that followed, and many remain with us in the present.

Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia.

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Olga V. Solovieva, "The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently" (Oxford UP. 2023)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Olga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in post-war debates on cultural and political reconstruction.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Russia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile.

In China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale UP, 2023), Philip Snow provides a full account of the relationship between these two global giants. Looking at politics, religion, economics, and culture, Snow uncovers the deep roots of the two nations' alignment. We see the shifts in the balance of power, from the wealth and strength of early Qing China to the Tsarist and Soviet ascendancies, and episodes of intense conflict followed by harmony. He looks too at the experiences and opinions of ordinary people, which often vastly differed from those of their governments, and considers how long the countries' current amicable relationship might endure.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Christine Abely, "The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

February 2024 will mark the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory in Crimea and the Donbas and two years since its full-scale invasion.

While military assistance from Ukraine’s allies has been gradual and cautious, retaliatory sanctions have been impressive. "The sanctions imposed against Russia beginning in late winter 2022 were sweeping, historic and rolled out with stunning rapidity,” writes Christine Abely in The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Yet, until now at least, most Russians have been insulated from their effects. As the war reaches an attritional stalemate and Putin waits for NATO's resolve to fracture, the sanctions and their lagged effects are taking on critical importance.

Christine Abely is an assistant professor at New England Law in Boston. Previously, she taught at Boston University School of Law after a career at Massachusetts law firms specialising in business litigation, and international trade and sanctions law. While she has published papers on sanctions, food and sports law, The Russia Sanctions is her first book.

*The authors' book recommendations are Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests by Agathe Demarais (Columbia University Press, 2022) and The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson (Princeton University Press, second edition 2016).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Gary Saul Morson, "Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press, 2023), Dr. Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.

Dr. Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. The debate concerned what Russians called “the accursed questions”: If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life’s essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the “tiny alternations of consciousness”? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Dr. Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi—the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one’s actions. And, throughout, Dr. Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian culture: how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny.

What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world’s elusive complexity—a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions.

Gary Saul Morson is without a doubt one of the leading specialists on 19th and 20th century Russian literature. He is professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. And he is perhaps one of the few writers who has written for both The New Criterion and the New York Review of Books.

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Vladyslav Besedovskyy, "Uniforms and History of the Soviet Airborne in Afghanistan" (Safar, 2023)

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0000

The central focus of Vladyslav Besedovskyy's book Uniforms and History of the Soviet Airborne in Afghanistan (Safar, 2023) is a massive collection of high-quality photographs that illustrate the progression of the conflict. It tracks the development and application of Soviet russian military uniforms and equipment from 1979 to 1989. Accompanying texts narrate the soldiers’ lives in relation to the broader history of the 40th Army. The book covers the following topics:

--Conscription and basic training

--Invasion of Afghanistan

--Mounted and dismounted operations

--Notable operations

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Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, "Seven Myths of the Russian Revolution" (Hackett, 2023)

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

"This fascinating volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the Russian Revolution, from World War I to consolidation of the Bolshevik regime. The seven myths include the exaggeration of Rasputin's influence; a purported conspiracy behind the February Revolution; the treasonous Bolshevik dependence on German support; the multiple Anastasia pretenders to the royal inheritance; the antisemitic claims about 'Judeo-Bolsheviks'; distortions about America’s intervention in the civil war; and the 'inevitability' of Bolshevism. In each case the authors analyze the facts, uncover the origins of the myth, and trace its later perseverance (even in contemporary Russia). To assist readers, the volume includes three reference guides (people, terms, dates), nine maps, and twenty-nine illustrations. The result is immensely valuable for undergraduate courses in Russian history."

—Gregory L. Freeze, Raymond Ginger Professor of History, Brandeis University.

Jonathan Daly is Professor of History, University of Illinois Chicago.

Leonid Trofimov is Senior Lecturer in History, Bentley University.

Polina Popova is a Ph.D. Candidate at UIC (History department) and an adjunct lecturer at Columbia College Chicago teaching Russian and Soviet History

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Olena Stiazhkina, "Cecil the Lion Had to Die" (HURI, 2023)

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1986 Soviet Ukraine, two boys and two girls are welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward. Following a Soviet tradition of naming things after prominent Communist leaders from far away, a local party functionary offers great material benefits for naming children after Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933. The fateful decision is made, and the local newspaper presents the newly born Ernsts and Thälmas in a photo on the front page, forever tying four families together.

In Cecil the Lion Had to Die (HURI, 2023), Olena Stiazhkina follows these families through radical transformations when the Soviet Union unexpectedly implodes, independent Ukraine emerges, and neoimperial Russia occupies Ukraine's Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Just as Stiazhkina's decision to write in Ukrainian as part of her civic stance--performed in this book that begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian--the stark choices of family members take them in different directions, presenting a multifaceted and nuanced Donbas.

A tour de force of stylistic registers, intertwining stories, and ironic voices, this novel is a must-read for those who seek deeper understanding of how Ukrainian history and local identity shapes war with Russia.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a Preceptor in Ukrainian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.

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Michael W. Doyle, "Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War" (Liveright, 2023)

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Michael W. Doyle's book Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (Liveright, 2023) offers an urgent examination of the world barreling toward a new Cold War.

By 1990, the first Cold War was ending. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact was crumbling; following Russia’s lead, cries for democracy were being embraced by a young Chinese populace. The post–Cold War years were a time of immense hope and possibility. They heralded an opportunity for creative cooperation among nations, an end to ideological strife, perhaps even the beginning of a stable international order of liberal peace.

But the days of optimism are over.

As renowned international relations expert Michael Doyle makes hauntingly clear, we now face the devastating specter of a new Cold War, this time orbiting the trilateral axes of Russia, the United States, and China, and exacerbated by new weapons of cyber warfare and more insidious forms of propaganda.

Such a conflict at this phase in our global history would have catastrophic repercussions, Doyle argues, stymieing global collaboration efforts that are key to reversing climate change, preventing the next pandemic, and securing nuclear nonproliferation. The recent, devastating invasion of Ukraine is both an example and an augur of the costs that lay in wait.

However, there is hope.

Putin is not Stalin, Xi is not Mao, and no autocrat is a modern Hitler. There is also an unprecedented level of shared global interest in prosperity and protecting the planet from environmental disaster.

While it is unlikely that the United States, Russia, and China will ever establish a “warm peace,” there are significant, reasonable compromises between nations that can lead to a détente. While the future remains very much in doubt, the elegant set of accords and non-subversion pacts Doyle proposes in this book may very well save the world.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu or via andrewopace.com.

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Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, "The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0000

In the current context, where Vladimir Putin justifies his war against Ukraine by insisting on an inevitable, unbroken teleology that binds Kyiv to Moscow, he need to critically reexamine such interpretations is painfully evident.

Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski's book The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom (Reaktion Books, 2023) takes a brave and important step in that direction by charting a history of Kyivan Rus’ through the framework of a history of families. The Ruling Families of Rus is not polemical; rather, through an erudite and trenchant exploration of the region’s history through local families and the marriages that manifested their priorities and strategies, this book reveals a fascinating history that brings us much closer to how ruling elites at the time approached and understood their world while also including women in histories that have often been told by “reading past” the roles women played. In short, this fascinating examination of the development of Rus, Lithuania, Muscovy, and Tver and their relationships with the Mongols, Byzantines, and others reveals a history close to the sources and quite different from the one Vladimir Putin tells.

The Ruling Families of Rus will appeal to scholars interested in the medieval history of eastern Europe. It contains beautifully produced illustrations and contextualized stories that will be a treasured resource for those who teach about this region and period. Have a listen to this conversation to get a sense of why.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Martin C. Dean, "Investigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death" (Lexington Books, 2023)

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Investigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death (Lexington Books, 2023) pieces together the story of the destruction of Kyiv's Jews using history's shattered fragments. Martin Dean traces their journey out of the city, using discarded clothing and distinctive terrain as a trail of breadcrumbs to identify the killing site in the ravine. Shadowy figures in photographs and escape stories from the mass grave reveal the suffering of many that is documented by the survival of just a few. Using aerial photographs, ground photographs, and extensive eye-witness testimony, the author locates specific incidents in the topography to explain what happened on September 29-30, 1941.

Interwoven into the main narrative, this book examines the massacre's broader context. Respective chapters describe efforts by Jews to flee the city, the escalation of Nazi mass shootings, and the plunder of Jewish property. During its occupation of Kyiv, the Gestapo established a network of prison camps and deployed a special unit to exhume and burn the corpses at Babyn Yar, covering up the crime before their hasty retreat. Postwar, the ravine was scarred by a terrible mudslide in 1961. Then Soviet redevelopment and memorial plans sought to erase both the topography and the Jewish identity of this symbolic site of Holocaust memory.

Martin C. Dean is historical consultant based in Washington DC, who works for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, the University of Cologne, and other organizations as researcher and lecturer.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples—the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths—all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world.

Professor Kenneth W. Harl’s newest book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2023) vividly re-creates the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever ready to learn from their more advanced neighbors. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own.

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Ian Probstein, trans., "Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context.

The English translations presented in Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Academic Studies Press, 2022) are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.

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Peter Samsonov, "IS-2: Development, Design, and Production of Stalin's Warhammer" (Military History Group, 2022)

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The IS-2 is the quintessential Soviet heavy tank from World War 2. Heavily armored and boasting a fearsome 122mm gun, this tank matched the German panzers on the Eastern front by more than just its fierce appearance.

In Peter Samsonov's book IS-2: Development, Design, and Production of Stalin's Warhammer (Military History Group, 2022), this tank's history is told from the beginning of the Soviet heavy tank programme until the very end of World War 2, in the most detailed and complete account of its development, design and production available in English. Supported by extensive research of Russian language sources, this publication includes a comprehensive breakdown of prototypes, the Soviet analysis of weaknesses in German tanks including the Tiger and Panther, the development of the 122mm gun, the principles of the new tank's armor layout and a wealth of technical data.

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Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel, "Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States" (Polity, 2023)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Russia and Ukraine have alternative histories and alternative destinies. After the Soviet Union collapsed - depending on who you spoke to – they were either a single people artificially divided and destined for reunification, or one nation with a distinct history, culture, and language serially repressed by a dominant neighbour.

In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2023), Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel argue that: "The root of the difficult Russia–Ukraine relationship is the misaligned understanding of Soviet dissolution – as the end of common statehood or as its reinvention".

Maria Popova is a Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal. Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of comparative politics at the Department of Political Science at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

*The authors' own book recommendations are: [Popova] Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism by Milada Anna Vachudova (OUP Oxford, 2005) and Courage and Fear by Ola Hnatiuk - translated by Ewa Siwak - (Academic Studies Press, 2019) and [Shevel] Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) and In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas by Stanislav Aseyev - translated by Lidia Wolanskyj - (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Paul Le Blanc, "Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution" (Pluto Press, 2023)

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Returning to the New Books Network today is Paul Le Blanc, here to discuss his new book Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (Pluto Press, 2023). The book deals with Lenin’s life and thought, looking at his ideas in their original context. Starting from his early development and thoughts on the importance of the vanguard, through the revolutions of 1917 and to his political mistakes and attempt at course-correction in the final years of his life, Le Blanc’s study is an accessible and informative survey for students and activists wondering what lessons Lenin might have to offer us today.

Paul Le Blanc is a professor of history at La Roche University. He is the author of numerous books on labor, class struggle and radical political movements, including Revolutionary Collective, which we discussed last year. He has also helped edit some volumes of the ongoing Collected Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

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Andrew Monaghan and Richard Connolly. "The Sea in Russian Strategy" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The common perception of Russia's status as a great power is often portrayed as being based largely on land power. Being the largest country in the world and fielding massively large field armies, there is some considerable truth to this perception. By contrast, when concerning Russian capabilities as a naval power, the picture is different. Common references to the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Kursk submarine incident of 2000, and more recently the sinking of the Moskva warship in 2022 tend to portray Russia's naval abilities as very negligible at best.

Nevertheless, this common perception is very misleading. Russia has in the 21st century been highly active in establishing itself as a major maritime power on the global stage, and these efforts have even accelerated since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. Andrew Monaghan and Richard Connolly have co-edited The Sea in Russian Strategy (Manchester University Press, 2023), bringing together top-tier scholars and experts to analyze Russia's growing maritime strength and how it should not be underestimated.

Andrew Monaghan is Director of the Russia Research Network and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

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David K. Zimmerman, "Ensnared Between Hitler and Stalin: Refugee Scientists in the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the 1930s, hundreds of scientists and scholars fled Hitler’s Germany. Many found safety, but some made the disastrous decision to seek refuge in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The vast majority of these refugee scholars were arrested, murdered, or forced to flee the Soviet Union during the Great Terror. Many of the survivors then found themselves embroiled in the Holocaust. Ensnared Between Hitler and Stalin: Refugee Scientists in the USSR (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores the forced migration of these displaced academics from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union.

The book follows the lives of thirty-six scholars through some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. It reveals that not only did they endure the chaos that engulfed central Europe in the decades before Hitler came to power, but they were also caught up in two of the greatest mass murders in history. David Zimmerman examines how those fleeing Hitler in their quests for safe harbour faced hardship and grave danger, including arrest, torture, and execution by the Soviet state. Drawing on German, Russian, and English sources, Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin illustrates the complex paths taken by refugee scholars in flight.

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Maxim Shrayer, "I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah" (Academic Studies Press, 2013)

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Academic Studies Press, 2013), based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it.

Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin's regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky's principal Shoah poems.

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Erin Baggott Carter and Brett L. Carter, "Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A dictator's power is secure, the authors begin in this muscular, impressive study, only as long as citizens believe in it. When citizens suddenly believe otherwise, a dictator's power is anything but, as the Soviet Union's collapse revealed. This conviction – that power rests ultimately on citizens' beliefs – compels the world's autocrats to invest in sophisticated propaganda.

Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Erin Baggott Carter and Dr. Brett L. Carter draws on the first global data set of autocratic propaganda, encompassing nearly eight million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. The authors document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and its opponents, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it.

The book explains why Russian President Vladimir uses Donald Trump as a propaganda tool and why Chinese state propaganda is more effusive than any point since the Cultural Revolution.

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Nicole Eaton, "German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell UP, 2023) reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes.

Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own―in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes.

German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

Nicole Eaton is Associate Professor of History at Boston College.

Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria.

“Pro-Fascist, Anti-Nazi: Austrian Catholics weaponized religion against Hitler but for fascism," Commonweal, 2023
"Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938," Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023
"Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019
"Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017.

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Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar, "The Russia-Ukraine War, Volumes 1-2" (CEU Press, 2023)

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series, host Bálint Madlovics sat down for a fascinating discussion on the impact of the war on Ukraine’s patronal democracy, with his co-editor Bálint Magyar and with Oksana Huss, Mikhail Minakov and Kálmán Mizsei, who all contributed to the new volumes from CEU Press on the Russia-Ukraine War. Volume one is entitled Ukraine's Patronal Democracy and the Russian Invasion and volume two Russia's Imperial Endeavor and Its Geopolitical Consequences.

Both volumes are available open access through the Opening the Future initiative. You can download volume one on Ukraine here and volume two on Russia here.

The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in the CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Anthony Tucker-Jones, "Battle of the Cities: Urban Warfare on the Eastern Front" (Pen & Sword Military, 2023)

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The common image of World War II (1939-1945) is that of swift armored maneuver advances supported by combined arms, especially overwhelming air support. What often is neglected is that the difficult and often brutal task of urban combat was a common feature of the conflict as well. Although a few famous examples such as Stalingrad, Leningrad, and later Berlin receive considerable attention, this is too often a neglected aspect of historical examination of the Eastern Front. In response to this, Anthony Tucker-Jones outlines several other important incidents of urban combat in his book Battle of the Cities: Urban Warfare on the Eastern Front (Pen and Sword Military, 2023).

Anthony Tucker-Jones spent nearly twenty years in the British Intelligence community before establishing himself as a defense writer and military historian. He has written extensively on aspects of warfare in the Second World War and has written over thirty books.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Writing the History of Money and Monetary Policy

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the time of Catherine the Great through the Soviet period, and the history of money during the time of time of the French Revolution. Their conversation delves not only into the past, but into the economic theories and assumptions that underlay the present. Pravilova is the author of The Ruble: A Political History (Oxford UP, 2023). Spang is the author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard UP, 2017).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Valerie Kivelson et al., "Picturing Russian Empire" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher. It follows that grappling with Russia’s imperial history is inescapable. After all, “[s]elective, exaggerated or patently false reimaginings” of the past “have been central to Russia’s justification of its claims on its neighbor to the southwest,” write today’s guests in the introduction to his new edited volume. Picturing Russian Empire offers a rich, sweeping overview of the history of Russia from the tenth century to the present through the connections between empire and visuality. Using thought provoking images, Picturing Russian Empire presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history.

Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Picturing Russian Empire consistently raises big historical questions to stimulate readers to think about images as embedded in the diverse, lived worlds of the Russian empire. The authors challenge the reader to not only to see images as the creations of individuals, but as objects circulating among viewers in a variety of contexts, creating new impressions, meanings, and experiences.

Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Cartographies of Tsardom, Desperate Magic, and Autocracy in the Provinces.

Joan Neuberger Professor emerita of at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include: This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell: 2019) and Hooliganism: Crime, Culture & Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914.

Sergei Kozlov is senior researcher at Tiumen State University in Siberia, Russia and a trained medievalist.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Roger R. Reese, "Russia's Army: A History from the Napoleonic Wars to the War in Ukraine" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Czar Alexander III (1845-1894) is reported to have stated that "Russia only has two allies: the army and the navy." Military power has always been important to Russia in establishing itself as a great power, especially as the largest country in the world spanning two continents. Beginning with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815), Russia has been involved in many major military conflicts that have engulfed Europe to the present day - especially the on-going war in Ukraine since February 2022. What is the exact nature of the Russian army, and what can be said about its long-term historical role as the guardian of Russian sovereignty? These are the subjects addressed comprehensively in Roger R. Reese's Russia's Army: A History from the Napoleonic Wars to the War in Ukraine (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023). Unlike most works that address only a specific period of Russian military history, Reese's book examines the Czarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods.

Roger R. Reese is Professor of History at Texas A&M University and has authored numerous articles and books on the Russian military, including Why Stalin's Soldiers Fought: The Red Army's Military Effectiveness in World War II.

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On Wars: A Discussion with Michael Mann

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

“Irrationality rules” in war, Michael Mann writes in his magisterial 2023 book, On Wars (Yale UP, 2023), a history that begins with the Roman Republic and ancient China and works its way through the world wars of the 20th century and up to present times. Mann is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His irrationality thesis, which posits that many wars are the product of miscalculations by over-confident rulers with little regard for their own people, offers an insightful and persuasive challenge to the Realist school on war, which stresses a rational aspect to the designs of war-making states. Then, too, Mann notes, wars can be driven by religious convictions and by a lust for revenge. Our conversation touches on the conflict in Israel-Palestine reignited by the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians in October, 2023 as well as on the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war launched by Vladimir Putin in February, 2022.

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January.

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Marat Grinberg, "The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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Owen Matthews, "Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine" (Mudlark, 2022)

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

An astonishing deep dive into the war in Ukraine - from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol.

The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War - and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime - and Russia itself - at risk of destruction. Why?

Drawing on over 25 years' experience working in Moscow, journalist Owen Matthews provides the answer. He takes us inside the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of nationalist fantasy and bad information - and into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky. Using the testimonies of captured Russian conscripts and the last journalists in besieged Mariupol, Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine (Mudlark, 2022) uncovers what unfolded on the ground, while interviews with Putin's close network pull back the curtain on the decision-making process inside the Kremlin. With its panoramic view, Overreach is the authoritative, unmissable account of the conflict that shocked Europe to its core.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish, "Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How did the Soviet Union control the behaviour of its people? How did the people themselves engage with the official rules and the threat of violence in their lives?

In Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish's book Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State (U Toronto Press, 2023), the contributors examine how social control developed under Stalin and Khrushchev. Drawing on deep archival research from across the former Soviet Union, they analyse the wide network of state institutions that were used for regulating individual behaviour and how Soviet citizens interacted with them. Together they show that social control in the Soviet Union was not entirely about the monolithic state imposing its vision with violent force. Instead, a wide range of institutions such as the police, the justice system, and party-sponsored structures in factories and farms tried to enforce control.

The book highlights how the state leadership itself adjusted its policing strategies and moved away from mass repression towards legal pressure for policing society. Ultimately, Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev explores how the Soviet state controlled the behaviour of its citizens and how the people relied on these structures.

Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.

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The Family in History, History in the Family: National Identity in Nineteenth-century Kyiv and Immigration Politics in West Germany after 1955

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In two new books, Fabian Baumann and Lauren Stokes examine the past through the lens of family structures and relations. In Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023), Baumann investigates the origins of Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms through the story of the Shul’gin family (in Ukrainian, Shul’hyn). Baumann argues that becoming Russian or Ukrainian in tsarist-era Kyiv was a deliberate choice, and that family life was a crucible of nationalist socialization. Likewise, in Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford UP, 2022), Lauren Stokes demonstrates that guest workers from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere were savvy in challenging a division between work life and family life that the West German state crafted to limit family migration. Baumann is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg. Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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C. J. Wagevier, "Fighting for Napoleon's Army in Russia: A POW's Memoir" (Pen and Sword, 2023)

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1812 the French emperor Napoleon decided to invade Russia. For this purpose, he gathered an army of half a million men and women, consisting of soldiers from all nationalities, including French, German and Italian. Serving in this army was Carel Johannes Wagevier, an officer in the 125th Regiment of the Line, which was staffed by mostly Dutch soldiers. Full of confidence, they went to war and began the long journey to the East. What followed was a horrific expedition deep into the Russian interior, a chaotic retreat, and captivity. Just like his fellow soldiers, Wagevier endured the cold, the stresses of combat, and the hunger that besieged the army. After fighting at the battle of Berezina in November 1812, he was taken prisoner and transported all the way to the Russian interior. In 1814 he and his remaining fellow officers were released, and together they started the journey back home.

During his travels across Russia, he made notes of events that occurred or meetings that seemed memorable, including ones of unexpected generosity as well as sudden cruelty. These notes were later expanded into his memoir and published in 1820. Now, for the first time ever, they have been translated into English by Samuel De Korte in Fighting for Napoleon's Army in Russia: A POW's Memoir (Pen and Sword, 2023).

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Rory Finnin, "Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions.

In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action.

Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these remarkable texts to light and contextualizing them among Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian representations of Crimea from 1783, Rory Finnin provides an innovative cultural history of the Black Sea region. He reveals how a "poetics of solidarity" promoted empathy and support for an oppressed people through complex provocations of guilt rather than shame.

Forging new roads between Slavic studies and Middle Eastern studies, Blood of Others is a compelling and timely exploration of the ideas and identities coursing between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – three countries determining the fate of a volatile and geopolitically pivotal part of our world.

Matthew D. Pauly is an associate professor at Michigan State University. His focus is Russia and Eastern Europe. @MatthewDPauly.

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Christopher P. Atwood, "The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources" (Hackett, 2021)

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this interview we deep dive into the historiographical issues of the texts in The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (Hackett, 2021), edited and translated by Christopher P. Atwood, with Lynn Struve. For a complementary, more general interview of the book dealing with the period under discussion listeners can also check out the July 2023 interview with Professor Atwood over at the Chinese Literature Podcast.

Rise of the Mongols offers readers a selection of five important works that detail the rise of the Mongol Empire from a Chinese perspective. Three of these works were written by officials of South China's Southern Song dynasty and two are from officials from North China writing in the service of the Mongol rulers. Together, these accounts offer a view of the early Mongol Empire very different not just from those of Muslim and Christian travelers and chroniclers, but also from the Mongol tradition embodied in The Secret History of Mongols.

The five Chinese source texts (in English translation, each with their own preface):

Selections from Random Notes from Court and Country since the Jianyan Years, vol.2, by Li Xinchuan
"A Memorandum on the Mong-Tatars," by Zhao Gong
"A Sketch of the Black Tatars," by Peng Daya and Xu Ting
"Spirit-Path Stele for His Honor Yelü, Director of the Secretariat," by Song Zizhen
"Notes on a Journey," by Zhang Dehui

Also included are an introduction, index, bibliography, and appendices covering notes on the texts, tables and charts, and a glossary of Chinese and transcribed terms.

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Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, "Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering" (Academic Studies Press, 2018)

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history.

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Books in Early Modern Europe

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

If you are reading this, it’s probably hard—nearly impossible—to imagine a world without writing—without print, books, newspapers, signs, graffiti, advertisements, forms, letters, texts, internet memes, and New Books Network blogposts like this one. How would you do your work? How would you communicate with your friends and family? How would you learn about the world around you?

The historians in this conversation have written path-breaking books that deepen our understanding of an age when the written word was still emerging as a feature in everyday life. These books focus on different places—Russia and the Netherlands—where writing and print emerged quite differently but they share a deep erudition and ambitious methodological creativity in endeavoring to account for the ephemeral.

Simon Franklin is emeritus professor of Russian history at University of Cambridge, Clare College. His books include Writing Society and Culture in Early Rus, 950–1300 (2002), The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (1996), co-authored with Jonathan Shepard, and Information and Empire: mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600–1850 (2017), co-edited with Katherine Bowers. In The Russian Graphosphere, 1450–1850 (Cambridge UP, 2019) Franklin reconstructs with deep erudition and carefully contextualized sleuthing the concrete and conceptual ways in which people in Russia from the mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries encountered various types of writing.

Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen are historians at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Pettegree’s books include The Invention of News (2014), Brand Luther: 1517, printing and the making of the Reformation (2015), and most recently, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict (2023). Arthur der Weduwen followed up his award-winning first monograph, Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century with the newly released State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age (2023). As has Simon Franklin, they have brought great creativity to the history of texts. Known for its now world-famous still life paintings produced by the affluent incubator of capitalism that was the seventeenth-century Netherlands, Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2020) shows us that what was going onto the canvases in the Dutch Golden Age paled in comparison to what was coming off the printing presses. With many unexpected revelations, this ambitious attempt to account for the (perhaps?) countless texts that did not survive demonstrates how the production, distribution, and consumption of books was central to economic, political, and cultural life in seventeenth-century Netherlands. They continue to collaborate on the Universal Short Title Catalogue and have also co-authored The Library: A Fragile History (2021).

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

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Daniel Satinsky, "Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy: Through American Eyes" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy: Through American Eyes (Routledge, 2023) captures the essence of the period when Russians and Americans collaborated in creating new structures of government and new businesses in completely uncharted conditions. It presents the experiences of key American participants in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia during a time when Americans thought anything was possible in Russia. Using an analytic framework of foreground ideas (Western, liberal & neo-liberal) and background forces (Russian cultural influences, nationalism, and lingering Soviet ideology), it examines the ideas and intentions of the people involved. First-person interviews with consultants, businesspeople, and citizen diplomats help capture the essence of this turbulent reform period through the eyes of those who experienced it and presents the importance of this experience as a piece of the puzzle in understanding contemporary Russia. It will be an invaluable resource for students of international relations, Russian studies majors, researchers, and members of the general public who are trying to understand the evolution of the current antagonism between the US and Russia.

Daniel Satinsky, J.D., M.A.L.D., Consultant, Author, and Associate of Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Isaac McKean Scarborough, "Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities across the Soviet Union, however, these reforms led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence.

Focusing on Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Dr. McKean Scarborough describes how this city experienced skyrocketing unemployment, a depleted budget, and streets filled with angry young men unable to support their families. Tajikistan was left without financial or military resources, unable and unprepared to stand against the wave of populist politicians of all stripes who took advantage of the economic collapse and social discontent to try to gain power. By May 1992, political conflict became violent and bloody and engulfed the whole of Tajikistan in war. Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of how this war came to be, and how it was grounded in the reform and collapse of the Soviet economy that came before.

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Gwendolyn Sasse, "Russia's War Against Ukraine" (Polity, 2023)

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Nineteen months since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the books are coming thick and fast.

Fortunately, each tells a different and compelling story. Like other recent books, Gwendolyn Sasse’s Russia's War Against Ukraine (Polity, 2023) analyses three decades of diverging Russian and Ukrainian politics and society, burgeoning Russian neo-imperialism, and Western temerity.

Unique to this book, however, is the restoration of Crimea to centre-stage in the conflict. The war didn’t start in February 2022 when Russian and Ukrainian troops battled on the northern outskirts of Kyiv. It didn't even start in April 2014 when Ukrainian forces tried to retake Sloviansk. "Russia's war against Ukraine began with the annexation of Crimea on 27 February 2014,” writes Professor Sasse, and the signal it sent to secessionists in the Donbas. It may only be 69 years since the Soviet government assigned Crimea to Ukraine but, as she explains, Russia's claim to the peninsular is no stronger. Crimea threads through the book on post-Soviet Ukrainian and Russian histories, the war, and its potential aftermath.

Gwendolyn Sasse directs the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and is a professor at Humboldt university. Before that, she was a professor of comparative politics at Oxford and taught at the Central European University and the London School of Economics. Her 2007 book - The Crimea Question - won the Alec Nove Prize for scholarly work in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet studies.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present by Serhii Plokhy (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021) and 100 Kinder: Kindersachbuch über den Alltag von Kindern auf der ganzen Welt by Christoph Drösser and Nora Coenenberg (Gabriel Verlag, 2019)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and also hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Alex J. Bellamy, "Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars" (Agenda Publishing, 2023)

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia’s return to Great Power status.

But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin.

"War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes".

Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Gary Saul Morson, "Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.

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Erik R. Scott, "Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world's attention during the Cold War. Their stories were told in sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. In contrast to other refugees, they were pursued by the states they left even as they were sought by the United States and other Western governments eager to claim them. Taking part in a risky game that played out across the globe, defectors sought to transcend the limitations of the Cold War world.

Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World (Oxford University Press, 2023) follows their treacherous journeys and looks at how their unauthorized flight gave shape to a globalized world. It charts a global struggle over defectors that unfolded in a crowded courtroom in Paris, among rival intelligence agencies operating in the shadows of an occupied Europe, in the forbidden border zones of the USSR, in the disputed straits of the South China Sea, on a hijacked plane 10,000 feet in the air, and around the walls of Soviet embassies. In doing so, the book reveals a Cold War world whose borders were far less stable than the notion of an "Iron Curtain" suggests. Surprisingly, the competition for defectors paved the way for collusion between the superpowers, who found common interest in regulating the unruly spaces through which defectors moved. Disputes over defectors mapped out the contours of modern state sovereignty in previously contested places, and defection's ideological framework hardened borders by reinforcing the view that asylum should only be granted to migrants with clear political claims. Although defection all but disappeared after the Cold War, it helped forge an international refugee system whose legacy and limitations remain with us to this day

Erik R. Scott is Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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The Future of Ukraine: A Discussion with Christopher Miller

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already changed the world. Why did it happen? Who is winning? How will it end? Christopher Miller is the author of The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Antony Kalashnikov, "Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Antony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stalinist-era architectural forms has endured. Why this should be so is a question worth pondering, and Monuments for Posterity does just that, in addition to offering a fresh reading of Stalinist architecture in its own time.

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Ainsley Morse, "Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature" (Northwestern UP, 2021)

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ainsley Morse's book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (Northwestern UP, 2021) traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‑garde trends. In the more repressive environment following Stalin’s rise to power, experimental aesthetics were largely relegated to unofficial and underground literature, but unofficial writers continued to author children’s books, which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time.

Word Play focuses on poetry as the primary genre for both children’s and unofficial literature throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature poets‑cum‑children’s writers—Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Grigoriev, Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Dmitri Prigov—whose unpublished work was not written for children but features lexical and formal elements, abundant humor, and childlike lyric speakers that are aspects of the childlike aesthetic. The book concludes with an exploration of the legacy of this aesthetic in Russian poetry today. Drawing on rich primary sources, Word Play joins a growing literature on Russian children’s books, connecting them to avant-garde poetics in fresh, surprising ways.

Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Prit Buttar, "To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-42" (Osprey, 2023)

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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The Shadow War between America and Russia

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Western analysts and media often assess the prospect that Moscow might use nuclear weapons as the war in Ukraine grinds on, possibly to a flailing Russia’s disadvantage. George Beebe, though, injects a less-familiar element into this grim dynamic: What are the chances that Washington might resort to nukes, should the direction in the war turn sharply against U.S.-backed Ukraine? Or enter the conflict directly with NATO air support for beleaguered Ukrainian foot soldiers? These are awkward questions but Beebe is well equipped to parse them. He is the Director of Grand Strategy for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington and in an earlier career in government he served as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis.

The springboard for our discussion is his 2019 book, The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe (St. Martins Press, 2019). It’s a sober and an incisive look at a vital topic—and as characterizes Beebe’s assessments generally, his take is unsparing of prevailing U.S. foreign policy establishment wisdoms.

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A Better Way to Buy Books

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Ryan Tucker Jones, "Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans.

In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission’s rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior.

And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

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Endre Sashalmi, "Russian Notions of Power and State in a European Perspective, 1462-1725: Assessing the Significance of Peter's Reign" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Endre Sashalmi's book Russian Notions of Power and State in a European Perspective, 1462-1725: Assessing the Significance of Peter's Reign (Academic Studies Press, 2022) highlights the main features and trends of Russian “political” thought in an era when sovereignty, state, and politics, as understood in Western Christendom, were non-existent in Russia, or were only beginning to be articulated. It concentrates on enigmatic authors and sources that shaped official perception of rulership, or marked certain changes of importance of this perception. Special emphasis is given to those written and visual sources that point towards depersonalization and secularization of rulership in Russia. A comparison with Western Christendom frames the argument throughout the book, both in terms of ideas and the practical aspects of state-building, allowing the reader to ponder Russia’s differentia specifica.

Endre Sashalmi is a professor of history at the Department of Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Pécs (Hungary), and is a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main fields of academic interest and research are comparisons of Western and Russian political thought and political iconography from the 15th to the 18th century, as well as the issue of state formation in Russia and in early modern Europe.

Steven Usitalo is a specialist in Russian and Soviet history, modern genocide studies, and the history of film. He is the recipient of several research grants. He co-edited an anthology on Russian history and published a monograph on the Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov. Dr. Usitalo is finishing a substantially revised Russian translation of his book on Mikhail Lomonosov. His research focuses on two areas: Russian/Soviet and Armenian film, and the history of the Roma in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. When time allows, he is at work on a study of the genocide of the Roma peoples on Soviet territory during World War II.

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Elise Herrala, "Art of Transition: The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2021)

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Art of Transition: The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2022) investigates contemporary art in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union. By drawing on historical and ethnographic research, this study examines the challenges faced by Russian artists in building a field of art as their society underwent rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation. In doing so, the book constructs a genealogy of the contemporary field of post-socialist art, and illuminates how Russians have come to understand themselves and their place in the world.

Elise Herrala is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Haverford College. She is a sociologist of art and culture, and her research examines the dynamics of cultural production, and in particular the ways in which culture functions to reproduce inequality.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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On the (Still Bright) Future of Nostalgia

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

I am joined on “America and Beyond” by historian Peter Fritzsche for an appreciation of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books), the landmark book published by the late Svetlana Boym in 2001. I do not use the word “landmark” lightly. The Future of Nostalgia is, first, impressively prescient. Pages, as in Boym’s chapter on “Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return to Origins,” sound eerily present day. But even more than that, Boym, who died in 2015 from cancer, at the age of 56, bequeathed a rich vocabulary for plumbing the contemporary meanings of nostalgia. Her essential distinction between restorative nostalgia, the politically-toxic desire to “rebuild the lost home,” and reflective nostalgia, the often-sentimental longing for shards of the personal past, endures. In these terms, nostalgia can be a poison—or a cure. My conversation with Peter Fritzsche, author of the 2004 book Stranded in the Present, revisits Boym’s wonderful work and meanders its way into topics like nostalgia as a frame for grasping Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Enjoy.

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Samuel Ramani, "Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution" (Hurst, 2023)

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Eight years after annexing Crimea, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022. For Vladimir Putin, this was a legacy-defining mission--to restore Russia's sphere of influence and undo Ukraine's surprisingly resilient democratic experiment. Yet Putin's aspirations were swiftly eviscerated, as the conflict degenerated into a bloody war of attrition and the Russian economy faced crippling sanctions. How can we make sense of his decision to invade?

Samuel Ramani's Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst, 2023) argues that Putin's policy of global counter-revolution is driven not by systemic factors, such as preventing NATO expansion, but domestic ones: the desire to unite Russians around common principles and consolidate his personal brand of authoritarianism. This objective has inspired military interventions in Crimea, Donbas and Syria, and now all-out war against Kyiv.

Ramani explores why Putin opted for regime change in Ukraine, rather than a smaller-scale intervention in Donbas, and considers the impact on his own regime's legitimacy. How has Russia's long-term political and foreign policy trajectory shifted? And how will the international response reshape the world order?

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Toward a More Expansive View of Medieval Europe: Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the importance of thinking beyond Western Europe and talking across language and geographical divides. Raffensperger is author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus in the Medieval World, 988-1146 (Harvard UP, 2012). Joanna Drell is the author of Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194 (Cornell UP, 2002). Her recent article “The Luxuriant Southern Scene: Textiles as Reflections of Power in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily” is also a focus of conversation. It is published in Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Mediterranean, 800-1700.

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Mark Edele, "Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story" (Melbourne University, 2023)

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"That Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically so radically since 1991 is partially due to their position vis-à-vis the imploded empire they emerged from," writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).

As its subtitle suggests, this short work - "a book by an outsider written for outsiders" - has big ambitions to explain the immediate, long-, and very long-term reasons for the war. How did two so similar yet so different nations emerge? How can “outsiders” separate national myths from true origin stories? Who started the war and how will it end?

Mark Edele is a Russianist who became - in his own words - a historian of the Soviet Empire largely due to his "encounter with Ukraine and its history". Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne, he was born and raised in southern Bavaria and educated at the universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow, and Chicago, where he completed his doctoral research on Soviet World War II veterans under Sheila Fitzpatrick.

*The author's own book recommendations for the Writers' Writers tip sheet are German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad by Nicole Eaton (Cornell University Press, April 2023) and The Rider by Tim Krabbé (Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2016 – first published 1978).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Jacob Mikanowski, "Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land" (Pantheon Books, 2023)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Eastern Europe, the moniker, has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone now, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics, or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe and Croatia is in the Eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide history, defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (Pantheon Books, 2023) is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived the brink of being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour recounting the rise and fall of the great empires—Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian—the dawn of the modern era, the ravages of Fascism and Communism, as well as Capitalism, the birth of the modern nation-state, and more. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity, and eclecticism, and a people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating.

The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe, and a powerful corrective that re-centers our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil, "Ukraine's Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited" (Transcript Publishing, 2023)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's large-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022 once again made Ukraine the focus of world media. Behind those headlines remain the complex developments in Ukraine's history, national identity, culture and society. Addressing readers from diverse backgrounds, Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil's Ukraine's Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited (Transcript Publishing, 2023) approaches the history of Ukraine and its people through primary sources, from the early modern period to the present. Each document is followed by an essay written by an expert on the period, and a conversational piece touching on the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine. In this ground-breaking collection, Ukraine's history is sensitively accounted for by scholars inviting the readers to revisit the country's history and culture. With a foreword by Olesya Khromeychuk.

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Xenia A. Cherkaev, "Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice (Cornell UP, 2023) is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself.

A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the economy leads it to trample over all that which ought to be private. Underlying this image, and the neoliberal state phobia it justified, is the question of how individual interests ought to relate to the public good in a large modern society, which, it is assumed, cannot possibly function by the non-private logics of householding. This book tells the story of a large modern society that did.

Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. For more information, visit robinsteiner.net.

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Andrii Portnov, "Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Andrii Portnov's Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s capital’ and ‘the heart of Ukraine’) is seen through the prism of key threads in the modern history of Europe: the imperial colonization and industrialization, the war and the revolution in the borderlands, the everyday life and mythology of a Soviet closed city, and the transformations of post-Soviet Ukraine. Designed as a critical entangled history of the multicultural space, the book looks for a new analytical language to overcome the traps of both national and imperial history-writing.

John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is finishing a dissertation that examines the aftermath of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor).

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Yiannis Kokosalakis, "Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Yiannis Kokosalakis' book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921–1941 (Cambridge UP, 2023) presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists made up of ordinary people. While far removed from the levers of power, they were nevertheless charged with promoting the Party's programme of revolutionary social transformation in their workplaces, neighbourhoods, and households. Their regular meetings, conferences and campaigns have generated a voluminous source base. This rich material provides a unique view of the practical manifestation of the Party's revolutionary mission and forms the basis of this insightful new narrative of how the Soviet republic functioned in the period from the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 to its invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941.

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Christopher Miller, "The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine just before dawn on 24 February 2022, it marked his latest and most overt attempt to brutally conquer the country, and reshaped the world order. Christopher Miller, the Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and the foremost journalist covering the country, was there on the ground when the first Russian missiles struck and troops stormed over the border. But the seeds of Russia's war against Ukraine and the West were sown more than a decade earlier.

This is the definitive, inside story of its long fight for freedom. Told through Miller's personal experiences, vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with unforgettable characters, The War Came To Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes readers on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine's modern history. From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas in the far east to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea, where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine's peninsula, to the bloody battlefields where Cossacks roamed before the Kremlin's warlords ruled with iron fists; and through the horror and destruction wrought by Russian forces in Bucha, Bakhmut, Mariupol, and beyond.

With candor, wit and sensitivity, Miller captures Ukraine in all its glory: vast, defiant, resilient, and full of wonder. A breathtaking narrative that is at times both poignant and inspiring, The War Came To Us is the story of an American who fell in love with a foreign place and its people - and witnessed them do extraordinary things to escape the long shadow of their former imperial ruler and preserve their independence.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Alexander Hill, "The War on the Eastern Front: The Soviet Union, 1941-1945 - A Photographic History" (Pen & Sword Military, 2021)

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The War on the Eastern Front: The Soviet Union, 1941-1945 - A Photographic History (Pen & Sword Military, 2021), Professor Alexander Hill has collected photographs from the brutal conflict on the Eastern Front and the extraordinary experience of the soldiers and civilians who were caught up in it. The book covers the formation of Soviet military forces and the conflicts leading up to the war to the final phases in Manchuria. Photographs and captions in the book take the reader from the Nazi-Soviet Pact through Operation Barbarossa to the tide-shifting battles at Stalingrad and Kursk and the collapse of Nazi forces in Berlin in 1945. Each chapter features an introduction along with extensive descriptions of the battlefields, shattered towns, and combatants left behind by two titanic armies locked in a devastating war.

Professor Alexander Hill teaches military history at the University of Calgary in Canada and is an expert on the military and political history of Russia and the Soviet Union post-1917. Professor Hill is the author of The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2019); The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-45: A Documentary Reader (Routledge, 2008); and The War Behind the Eastern Front: Soviet Partisans in North West Russia 1941-1944 (Routledge, 2006).

Rick Northrop is an ex-journalist and undergraduate student in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He can be reached at rnorthrop2001@gmail.com

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Archaeology and Nomadism in the Russian Empire: An interview with Ismael Biyashev

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the second half of the 19th century, both professional and amateur archaeologists, surveyors, and explorers of the “periphery” of the Russian Empire became increasingly interested in the perceived ancient nomadic histories of Siberia, Central Asia, and Ukraine. Their excavations of “nomadic sites” associated with the Scythians or the Mongol Empire were aimed not just at scientific investigation and scholarly inquiry, but were also born out of and contributed to discourses around modernity, race, ethnicity, and nationhood during the later days of the Russian Empire’s colonial expansion. Ismael Biyashev’s PhD research (University of Illinois-Chicago, 2023) charts the emergence, historical development, and global networks of the field of “nomadic archaeology,” examining how members of the Russian intellectual elite perceived and presented a nomadic past as a means of articulating contemporary Russian identity and visions for the future.

For further open-access reading on this topic, see Ismael’s “Peripheral Histories” blog post here.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023).

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Dr. Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.

When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.

A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.

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Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, "Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Why do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never attacked Jews.

Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2018) is a novel social-scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust. It locates the roots of violence in efforts to maintain Polish and Ukrainian dominance rather than in anti-Semitic hatred or revenge for communism. In doing so, it cuts through painful debates about relative victimhood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of perpetrators and victims. Pogroms, they conclude, were difficult to start, and local conditions in most places prevented their outbreak despite a general anti-Semitism and the collapse of the central state. Kopstein and Wittenberg shed new light on the sources of mass ethnic violence and the ways in which such gruesome acts might be avoided.

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Jade McGlynn, "Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Why aren't ordinary Russians more outraged by Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Inside the Kremlin's own historical propaganda narratives, Russia's invasion of Ukraine makes complete sense. From its World War II cult to anti-Western conspiracy theories, the Kremlin has long used myth and memory to legitimize repression at home and imperialism abroad, its patriotic history resonating with and persuading large swathes of the Russian population.

In Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia (Bloomsbury, 2023), Russia analyst Jade McGlynn takes us into the depths of Russian historical propaganda, revealing the chilling web of nationwide narratives and practices perforating everyday life, from after-school patriotic history clubs to tower block World War II murals. The use of history to manifest a particular Russian identity has had grotesque, even gruesome, consequences, but it belongs to a global political pattern - where one's view of history is the ultimate marker of political loyalty, patriotism and national belonging. Memory Makers demonstrates how the extreme Russian experience is a stark warning to other nations tempted to stare too long at the reflection of their own imagined and heroic past.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Alfred J. Rieber, "Stalin As Warlord" (Yale UP, 2022)

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Second World War was arguably the defining moment in the history of the Soviet Union. In Stalin as Warlord (Yale University Press, 2022), eminent Russia specialist Alfred J. Rieber examines Stalin as a wartime leader, arguing that his policies were profoundly paradoxical. In preparation for the war, Stalin mobilized the whole of Soviet society in pursuit of his military goals and intensified the centralization of his power. Yet at the same time, his use of terror weakened the forces vital to the defense of the country. In his efforts to rebuild the country after the devastating losses and destruction, he suppressed groups that had contributed immeasurably to victory. His steady, ruthless leadership through war cultivated a legacy that burdened the Soviet Union, and continues to burden Russia through its present-day invasion of Ukraine.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in The Times Literary Supplement.

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Serhii Plokhy, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" (Norton, 2023)

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.

In The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2023), Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault--on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament--the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia's ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.

Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia's idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post-Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Jane Rogoyska, "Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth" (Oneworld, 2021)

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary.

Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth (Oneworld, 2021) explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake - the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators - whose quest for the truth in the face of an inscrutable, unknowable, and utterly ruthless enemy came at great personal cost.

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Andrew Harding, "A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine" (Ithaka, 2023)

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

From 2-13 March 2022 - only a week into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv.

Looking back, the commander of the 300 professional troops that repulsed the attacks with the help of civilian volunteers concluded that this "one small, decisive and improbable victory … almost certainly saved Ukraine from a larger encirclement and most likely from the prospect of defeat".

In A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine (Ithaka, 2023), Andrew Harding tells the story of the battle for Voznesensk through the eyes of its participants - from commander "Formosa" to 32-year-old mayor Yevhenii to the "archipelago of stranded, pensionless pensioners" like Svetlana eking out a living and redefining their identities through war.

Although he has been reporting from the front line for the BBC since March 2022, Andrew Harding is the BBC’s Africa correspondent and has lived in Johannesburg since 2009. Africa was the subject of his two previous books - The Mayor of Mogadishu and These Are Not Gentle People - but he began his career in Moscow and Tbilisi and has covered conflicts in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, and Kosovo.

*The author's own book recommendations are Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival by Luke Harding (Guardian Faber Publishing, 2023) and Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (MacLehose Press, 2021)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Rotem Kowner, "Tsushima" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of Tsushima, in which the Japanese Imperial Navy defeated the Russian Imperial Navy, was unprecedented in many ways. It marks the first naval victory of an Asian power over a major European power; the most devastating defeat suffered by the Imperial Russian Navy in its entire history; and the only truly decisive engagement between two battleship fleets in modern times. In addition, the Battle of Tsushima was also the most decisive naval engagement of the Russo-Japanese War and one that exerted a major impact on the course of that war. Its impact was so dramatic, in fact, that the two belligerents concluded a peace agreement within three months of the battle's conclusion. Beyond the military and diplomatic realms, being the first great defeat of a “Western” “power” by a non-Western modern military the battel had profound implications across Asia and the colonial world.

Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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James Crossland, "The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and immigration waves bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into the bodies of presidents, police chiefs and emperors. This wave of terrorism was seized upon by an outrage-hungry press that peddled hysteria, conspiracy theories and, sometimes, fake news in response, convincing many a reader that they were living through the end of days.

Against the backdrop of this world of fear and disorder, The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism (Manchester UP, 2023) chronicles the journeys of the men and women who evoked this panic and created modern terrorism - revolutionary philosophers, cult leaders, criminals and charlatans, as well as the paranoid police chiefs and unscrupulous spies who tried to thwart them. In doing so, this book explains how radicals once thought just in their causes became, as Pope Pius IX denounced them, little more than 'devils risen up from Hell'.

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Danny Orbach, "Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War" (Pegasus Books, 2022)

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Danny Orbach about his book Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (Pegasus Books, 2022).

Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the enigmatic tale of Nazi fugitives in the early Cold War has never been properly told—until now. In the aftermath of WWII, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals “to the ends of the earth.” Yet many slipped away to the four corners of the world or were shielded by the Western Allies in exchange for cooperation. Most prominently, Reinhard Gehlen, the founder of West Germany's foreign intelligence service, welcomed SS operatives into the fold. This shortsighted decision nearly brought his cherished service down, as the KGB found his Nazi operatives easy to turn, while judiciously exposing them to threaten the very legitimacy of the Bonn Government. However, Gehlen was hardly alone in the excessive importance he placed on the supposed capabilities of former Nazi agents; his American sponsors did much the same in the early years of the Cold War. Other Nazi fugitives became freelance arms traffickers, spies, and covert operators, playing a crucial role in the clandestine struggle between the superpowers.

From posh German restaurants, smuggler-infested Yugoslav ports, Damascene safehouses, Egyptian country clubs, and fascist holdouts in Franco's Spain, Nazi spies created a chaotic network of influence and information. This network was tapped by both America and the USSR, as well as by the West German, French, and Israeli secret services. Indeed, just as Gehlen and his U.S sponsors attached excessive importance to Nazi agents, so too did almost all other state and non-state actors, adding a combustible ingredient to the Cold War covert struggle. Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the tangled and often paradoxical tale of these Nazi fugitives and operatives has never been properly told—until now.

Danny Orbach is a Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust.

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Mikhail Shishkin, "My Russia: War Or Peace?" (RiverRun Press, 2023)

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In his timely My Russia: War or Peace? (RiverRun Press, 2023), Mikhail Shishkin provides a searing account of Russian political culture that explains both Putin's autocratic regime and its invasion of Ukraine. An Russian emigre who has lived in Switzerland for many years and writes in Russian and German, Shishkin traces the roots of Russia's problems, from 'Kievan Rus' through to the current Russian Federation. He explores the uneasy relationship between state and citizens, explains Russian attitudes to people's rights and democracy, and proposes that there are really two Russian peoples: the disillusioned and disaffected, who suffer from 'slave mentality', and those who embrace 'European' values and try to stand up to oppression. It is also a deeply personal account intertwining his family's history with Russia's tumultuous past century.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here.

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Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas Morton, Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, joins me to share more about his research into Mongol imperial expansion and the Mongol conquests of the Near East. In this episode, we talk about practices of Mongol nomadism and mobility; how Mongol identity can be defined and understood; and where and when the Mongol empire finally collapsed.

Part one is here.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

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Sofia Samatar, "The White Mosque: A Memoir" (Catapult, 2022)

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make themselves available for conscription, and pushed forward by prophecies of the imminent return of Christ, over a hundred families travel in a grueling journey, eventually building a settlement and church that locals still remember fondly today.

Over a century later, the author Sofia Samatar comes across this story when exploring her own Mennonite heritage–and learns that there’s an organized tour. Thus begins a pivot key to her latest book, The White Mosque (Catapult, 2022), combining both historical narrative and travel writing, as Mennonites past and present make the journey to Central Asia.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press: 2013) and The Winged Histories (Small Beer Press: 2017); the short story collection Tender (Small Beer Press: 2017); and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has appeared in several 'best of the year' anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Samatar holds a PhD in African languages and literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and she currently teaches African literature, Arabic literature in translation and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

In this interview, Sofia and I talk about both the Mennonite travels to Central Asia, her own journey alongside it–and how that connects to her own experience as someone with multiple backgrounds.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The White Mosque. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Anna Schur, "The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia" (Northwestern UP, 2022)

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia (Northwestern UP, 2022) explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II's judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary scholars have typically interpreted these representations either as the common, cross‑cultural critique of lawyerly unscrupulousness and greed or as an expression of Russian hostility toward Western legalism, seen as antithetical to traditional Russian values. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict in terms of the two professions' competition for cultural authority.

Anna Schur combines historical research and literary analysis to argue that the first generations of Russian trial lawyers shaped their professional identity with an eye to the celebrated figure of the writer and that they considered their own activities to be a form of verbal art. A fuller understanding of writers' antipathy to the law, Schur contends, must take into account this overlooked cultural backdrop. Laced with the better‑known critique of the lawyer's legalistic proclivities and lack of moral principle are the writer's reactions to a whole network of explicit and implicit claims of similarity between the two professions' goals, methods, and missions that were central to the lawyer's professional ideal. Viewed in this light, writers' critiques of the law and lawyers emerge as a concerted effort at protecting literature's exclusive cultural status in the context of modernization and the rapidly expanding public sphere.

The study draws upon a mix of well-known and rarely studied nineteenth-century authors and texts—with particular attention paid to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin—and on a wide range of nonliterary sources, including courtroom speeches, guides to forensic oratory, legal treatises, and specialized press.

Anna Schur is a professor of English at Keene State College in New Hampshire. She is the author of Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment (Northwestern University Press).

Yelizaveta Raykhlina is a historian of Russia and Eurasia and holds a PhD from Georgetown University. She is a faculty member at New York University. To learn more, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

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Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia.

Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin's tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds (Princeton UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about--one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

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Simon Dreher and Wolfgang Mueller, "Foreigners in Muscovy: Western Immigrants in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Russia" (Routledge, 2023)

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This interview delves into a book that is indebted to the scholarly work with which New Books Network founder, Marshall Poe, began his career: ‘A People Born to Slavery’: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Cornell UP, 2000), a seminal critical study of perceptions of Russia as derived from early modern foreigners’ accounts.

Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries, the State of Muscovy emerged from being a rather homogenous Russian-speaking and Orthodox medieval principality to becoming a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. Not only the conquest of the neighboring Tatar Khanates and the colonization of Siberia demanded the integration of non-Christian populations into the Russian state. The ethnic composition of the capital and other towns also changed due to Muscovite policies of recruiting soldiers, officers, and specialists from various European countries, as well as the accommodation of merchants and the resettlement of war prisoners and civilians from annexed territories. The presence of foreign immigrants was accompanied by controversy and conflicts, which demanded adaptations not only in the Muscovite legal, fiscal, and economic systems but also in the everyday life of both native citizens and immigrants.

This book combines two major research fields on international relations in the State of Muscovy: the migration, settlement, and integration of Western Europeans, and Russian and European perceptions of the respective "other".

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Socialist Cultures and Politics of Secularism and Atheism

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Two new books on secularism and atheism in German and Soviet socialist cultures are reshaping scholarly understandings of the relationship between socialism and religion. Todd Weir and Victoria Smolkin show that socialist secularism and atheism were not concerned solely with destroying a tool of class oppression, as Marx had envisioned, but with creating a positive faith in science and materialism. Todd Weir is Professor on the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen and the author of the forthcoming Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany, 1800-1933. Victoria Smolkin is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Wesleyan University and the author of A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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New Histories of Violence in and around the Second World War

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Why does state-led and intercommunal violence occur? How do past episodes of mass violence reverberate in the present? How do victims and perpetrators make sense of each other in the aftermath of mass violence? What are the ethical and professional obligations of historians who uncover episodes of mass violence in the course of their research? These questions, and the difficult search for answers, are at the core of recent books by Nicole Eaton and Max Bergholz about violence in the context of the Second World War. Eaton is the author German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell UP, 2023). Bergholz is the author of Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell UP, 2016).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Doug Enaa Greene, "Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union" (Lexington, 2023)

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

As capitalism’s popularity wanes and socialism’s popularity increases, there remains a massive shadow cast by the history of actually existing socialism, Stalin being the primary pillar. His violent rule in the form of secret police, staged trials, forced confessions and suppression of liberation for workers both in the USSR and internationally are regularly brought up as the inevitable endpoint of any political progress, socialist or otherwise. Environmental protections, affordable housing, universal healthcare or even a guarantee of a modest living wage and social safety net today; gulags tomorrow. This is the ‘dialectic of Saturn,’ a phrase that points back to Greek mythology in which Saturn devours his own children. This idea has been applied for over a century now to discuss and discredit revolutionary politics, whether from reactionaries seeking to protect private property, or even self-described socialists unable to imagine things playing out any other way.

But was Stalinism the inevitable product of the Russian Revolution? And are all revolutions doomed to eventually turn on themselves, losing all the gains they might make in a self-destructive race to the bottom of Saturn’s stomach? Douglas Greene argues that this dialectic is really a pseudo-dialectic, a false narrative that has been imposed for over a century in his new book Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union (Lexington Books, 2023).

Taking the dialectics of Saturn head on, he spends the first several chapters surveying the ways in which this narrative has been developed and applied, taking on a massive collection of figures, from the Frankfurt School to Winston Churchill and back to Domenico Losurdo, showing how a repressive totalitarianism is seen as the inevitable horizon of any revolutionary activity. The book then turns to the thought of Leon Trotsky, who offered a critique of Stalinism that managed to walk the tightrope of maintaining a materialist critique of Stalin that nevertheless continued to believe in revolutionary possibility.

Thoroughly researched and covering a vast swathe of historical and theoretical territory, the book not only tries to recover a lost political ideal, but brings to the forefront burning theoretical questions over the nature of history and reason, and whether or not we can ever escape our current moment in search of a new one, a topic that has been present in much of Greene’s writings, along with his collaborator Harrison Fluss, who contributed the foreword. Some of these related writings include:

Douglas Greene is an independent Marxist historian. His previous books are Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Poltics of Revolution and A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Soclialism. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets, including Left Voice, Monthly Review Online and Counterpunch.

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James H. Meyer, "Red Star over the Black Sea: Nazim Hikmet and His Generation" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century.

In Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford University Press, 2022), James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers," individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close.

Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies.

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Halyna Kruk, "A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails" (Arrowsmith Press, 2023)

Sat, 27 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"We act like children with our dead," Halyna Kruk writes as she struggles to come to terms with the horror unfolding around her: "confused, / as if none of us knew until now/ how easy it is to die." In poem after devastating poem, Kruk confronts what we would prefer not to see: "a person runs toward a bullet/ with a wooden shield and a warm heart..." Translated with the utmost of care by Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) is a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.

These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine's most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. In a dark recapitulation of evolution itself, Kruk writes: "nothing predicted the arrival of humankind..../ nothing predicted the arrival of the tank..." Her taught, lean lines can turn epigrammatic: "what will kill you will seduce you first," or they can strike you like Lomachenko's lightening jabs: "flirt, Cheka agent, bitch."

Leading readers into the world's darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection. Naming serves as a shield, albeit a wooden one. The paradox is that after the bullets have been fired and the missiles landed, the wooden shield, the printed book, reconstitutes itself.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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Selcen Küçüküstel, "Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia" (Berghahn, 2021)

Mon, 22 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia (Berghahn Books, 2021), focuses on concepts of domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. Examining subsistence methods and lifestyle practices like hunting rituals and herding techniques in detail, Selcen Küçüküstel’s ethnographic account of contemporary lifeways and belief systems among the Dukha illuminates the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. Her research centers the role of the landscape in mediating and shaping human-animal interactions and encounters, capturing how the Dukha experience the landscape of the taiga as both their ancestral home and as a place with its own more-than-human agency. In this episode, we discuss the history of the Dukha, practices of pastoralism and hunting in northern Mongolia, the effects of contemporary political and environmental change on the Dukha, and Selcen’s methodological approach to her research as both a journalist and anthropologist.

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Empires after World War II: The Cases of the USSR and France

Sat, 20 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Where lay the fissures of Soviet power in Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Why did France fail in its postwar efforts to make its African colonies part of France itself? In two complementary books, Rachel Applebaum and Emily Marker explore the soft-power mechanisms of the Soviet and French empires after World War II. Their findings shed light on not only the distinctive characteristics of postwar empires, but on the reasons why Soviet internationalism and the unique French model of decolonization ultimately failed. Applebaum is author of Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell UP, 2019). Marker is the author of Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell UP, 2022).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)

Thu, 18 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China.

It’s an inopportune start to four centuries of trade, diplomacy, imperialism, ideology–and a lot of personal griping between different Russian and Chinese leaders, as charted by Philip Snow’s China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023)

Snow writes of Russian territorial grabs, China’s reliance on its northern neighbor for diplomatic support and training, Russia’s confused attitude towards Asia—and then the rapid reversal of power and status with the death of Stalin.

In this interview, Philip and I talk about the China-Russia relationship, spanning four centuries–and what that history tells us about China and Russia’s relations today.

Philip Snow has traveled extensively in Russia and China since the 1960s and has lived in Hong Kong since 1994. An expert in China’s international relations, he is the author of The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (Cornell University Press: 1989) and The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press: 2003)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China and Russia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Serhii Plokhy, "The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History" (Norton, 2023)

Fri, 12 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes Serhii Plokhy at the end of The Russo-Ukrainian War (Norton, 2023).

But that's not all, says the man acclaimed by the Financial Times as “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine” - author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space".

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute.

*The author's own book recommendations are The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale (Hurst, 2022) and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer (Allen Lane, 2023)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Katherine Bowers, "Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Thu, 11 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (U Toronto Press, 2022) argues that nineteenth-century Russian writers actively engaged with narrative models borrowed from European gothic fiction to articulate experiences such as fear, dread, and anxiety in realist literature. By examining a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address issue such as urban life, the women question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family, Katherine Bowers reveals the myriad ways in which political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism.

Katherine Bowers is an Associate Professor within the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an expert in Russian literature and culture, and her research interests include genre, narrative, environmental humanities, imagined geography, and digital humanities. She is also actively involved in the field of Dostoevsky studies and is a co-editor of A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (2018) and Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity (2021).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, "Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia" (Fordham UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism.

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham UP, 2022) highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends.

Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation.

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Mark Galeotti, "Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Fri, 05 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Mark Galeotti's book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of a rejuvenated Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield. Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers.

Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world. There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades. There is no author better placed to demystify the capabilities of the Russian military and give a glimpse into what the future may hold.

Putin's Wars is an engaging and important history of a reawakened Russian bear and how it currently operates both at home and abroad to ensure Russia is front and centre on the world stage.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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John McCannon, "Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

Wed, 03 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. John McCannon's new biography of Russian artist, mystic, and all-around fascinating character Nicholas Roerich follows its subject from his artistic beginnings in the 1880's to the end of his life in India, in the 1940's. While not generally a household name in the English-speaking world, Roerich's influence punches over its weight. Roerich worked on the Rite of Spring, with Stravinsky, attempted to create a pan-Buddhist state in Asia, and may have influenced the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. All this and more, makes Roerich a wonderful character for a biography, and Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) brings out that character, in all its engaging and sometimes maddening complexity.

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Ostap Kin, "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" (HURI, 2022)

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 2017 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI, 2022) create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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Evert van der Zweerde, "Russian Political Philosophy: Anarchy, Authority, Autocracy" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Evert van der Zweerde in his 2022 book Russian Philosophy: Anarchy, Authority, Autocracy (Edinburgh University Press) details a through history of political thought from the very beginning of the Rus' up to the 21st century.

Political philosophy in Russia has always sought, and sometimes found, a middle way between embracing anarchy and searching for authority. Political philosophy in Russia has never before been the subject of a scholarly monograph. While historical factors make this understandable, the topic deserves our attention more than ever, now that Russia, after a short Soviet century, has regained self-assurance as a world power. Its unique historical trajectory, and the specific role of philosophy in it, are of interest to many fields of research and, beyond that, broader audiences. A focus on political philosophy as it existed and exists in Russia despite periods of marginalisation and suppression, allows us to understand its specific character, importance and relevance, and to realise that, in trying to think philosophically, critically, and reflectively about the political reality that shapes them, Russian thinkers are not essentially different from philosophers elsewhere. Hence, many lessons that can be learned from this subject.

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Volodymyr Rafeyenko, "The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad" (HURI, 2023)

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2023) is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z--an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in the occupied Donbas after Russia's initial aggression in 2014.

With elements of magical realism, Volodymyr Rafeyenko's novel combines a wicked sense of humor with political analysis, philosophy, poetry, and moral interrogation. Witty references to popular culture--Ukrainian and European--underline the international and transnational aspects of Ukrainian literature. The novel ends on the hopeful note that even death cannot have the final word: the resilient inhabitants of Z grow in power through reincarnation.

This is an interview with The Length of Days' translator, Sibelan Forrester.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).

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The Future of Eastern Europe: A Discussion with Zsuzsanna Szelényi

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with a range of responses in Eastern Europe – with some leaders offering muted solace to Vladimir Putin and others arming Ukraine. To learn more about why that has happened and the future Eastern Europe Owen Bennett Jones has been speaking to Zsuzsanna Szelényi a Hungarian writer, politician, and foreign policy expert. Szelényi is the author of Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary (Hurst, 2022).

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Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman, "Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus" (U Rochester Press, 2020)

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context.

When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russia into the North Caucasus. Hoping to find safety, they came to a region the Soviets had struggled to pacify over the preceding 20 years of their rule. The Jewish refugees were in especially unfamiliar territory, as the North Caucasus had been mostly off-limits to Jews before the Soviets arrived, and most local Jewish communities were thus small. The region was not known as a hotbed of traditional antisemitism. Nevertheless, after occupying the North Caucasus in the summer and autumn of 1942, the Germans exterminated all the Jews they found - at least 30,000 - aided by local collaborators.

While scholars have focused on local collaboration during the German occupation and on the subsequent Soviet deportations of entire North Caucasian ethnic groups, the region has largely escaped the attention of Holocaust researchers. This volume, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, addresses that gap. Contributors present richly documented essays on such topics as German killing operations, decision-making by Jewish refugees, local collaboration, rescue, and memory, taking care to integrate their findings into the broader contexts of Holocaust, North Caucasian, Russian, and Soviet history.

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Paul Hansbury, "Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia-Ukraine War" (Hurst, 2023)

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The war in Ukraine is entering what could well be its decisive phase as Kyiv prepares a counter-offensive and Russia announces plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus as early as the summer.

More than ever before, this moves Belarus onto the front line of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its confrontation with NATO. Yet, for three decades, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka has tried to walk a tightrope between hugging Moscow close and clinging onto policy independence that is domestically popular and secures power for him, his family, and his allies. His increasing economic dependence and the war to his south have forced “Europe’s last dictator” to pick a side.

In Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia–Ukraine War (Hurst, 2023), Paul Hansbury explains why Lukashenka had no choice but to buckle. He writes that "a 'quiet' annexation of Belarus to Russia is largely happening, even if many Belarusians are unaware of the fact" and “the outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war has arguably become the decisive factor shaping Berlarus's future statehood”.

Educated at Birkbeck, University of London, and St Antony's College Oxford, Paul Hansbury is a consulting analyst whose doctoral research was into the foreign policies of small powers - using Belarus as his primary case study.

*His own book recommendations were Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha (Simon & Schuster, 2014) and Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad (Penguin Classics, 2007 - first published 1904).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Elena Pedigo Clark, "Trauma and Truth: Teaching Russian Literature on the Chechen Wars" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The collapse of the USSR was relatively bloodless. The Chechen Wars were not. A tiny nation on the edge of Russia, Chechnya brought one of the largest armies in the world to its knees. Elena Pedigo Clark, Trauma and Truth: Teaching Russian Literature on the Chechen Wars (Academic Studies Press, 2023) examines significant works about these wars by some of Russia’s leading contemporary war authors, including Anna Politkovskaya, Arkady Babchenko, and Zakhar Prilepin. Combining close reading of the texts with descriptions of the authors’ social and political activities and suggestions on how to teach these challenging authors and texts, Trauma and Truth traces the psychological effects of the wars on their participants, and concludes with a discussion of what this means for Russia today.

Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

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Vitalii Ogiienko, "The Holodomor and the Origins of the Soviet Man: Reading the Testimony of Anastasia Lysyvets" (Ibidem Press, 2022)

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Anastasia Lysyvets’s memoir Tell us about a happy life … (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia …), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets’s testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do.

In The Holodomor and the Origins of the Soviet Man: Reading the Testimony of Anastasia Lysyvets (Ibidem Press, 2022), Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets’s text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations.

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A Warning to the West: A Conversation with Sergiu Klainerman

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Sergiu Klainerman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Born in communist Romania, he sees disturbing parallels between life in the Soviet Bloc and the "soft totalitarianism" or "pre-totalitarianism" taking root in America. He joins the show to discuss these parallels and reflect on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 speech, "A World Split Apart."

Klainerman's essay "Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address" is here.

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Natasha Rogoff, "Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former Soviet Union. With the Muppets envisioned as ideal ambassadors of Western values, no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be.

In Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Natasha Lance Rogoff brings this gripping tale to life. Amidst bombings, assassinations, and a military takeover of the production office, Lance Rogoff and the talented Moscow team of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and puppeteers remained determined to bring laughter, learning, and a new way of seeing the world to children in Russia, Ukraine and across the former Soviet empire. With a sharp wit and compassion for her colleagues, Lance Rogoff observes how cultural clashes colored nearly every aspect of the production--from the show's educational framework to writing comedy to the new Russian Muppets themselves--despite the team's common goal. Brimming with insight and nuance, Muppets in Moscow skillfully explores the post-Soviet societal tensions that continue to thwart the Russian people's efforts to create a better future for their country. More than just a story of a children's show, this book provides a valuable perspective of Russia's people, their culture, and their complicated relationship with the West that remains relevant even today.

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Andrew Long, "Secrets of the Cold War: Espionage and Intelligence Operations from Both Sides of the Iron Curtain" (Pen and Sword History, 2022)

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Cold War was a major geopolitical contest between the United States and the Soviet Union over predominance over the entire world. Unlike the previous two world wars, the two superpowers could not afford to go directly to war with one another due to the reality of nuclear weapons. As a result, the covert work of spies and secret agents proved to be the main battlefield where the two superpowers would contest each other. Not surprisingly, this period also witnessed the rise of enduring staples of spy fiction - most famously Ian Fleming's fictional spy character James Bond.

However, as the common saying goes, the truth is often more fascinating than fiction. Many of the true stories of covert operations and spies are covered in Andrew Long's Secrets of the Cold War: Espionage and Intelligence Operations - From Both Sides of the Iron Curtain (Pen and Sword History, 2022).

Andrew Long is a British military history researcher and author. His fascination with the Cold War began with a trip to West Berlin in 1986, traveling through Checkpoint Charlie to visit the East. Andrew’s writing comes from a desire to make sense of an extremely complex period in modern history, weaving together inter-relating stories involving politics, ideologies, personalities, technological advances, and geography. There is still much to be told on this fascinating subject. After a successful career in marketing, Andrew relocated to Cornwall and took up writing full time.

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Catherine Wanner, "Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2022) reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future. If Ukraine is “ground zero” in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out.

Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be weaponized and securitized to advance political agendas in Ukraine and beyond. These practices, Catherine Wanner argues, enable religiosity to be increasingly present in public spaces, public institutions, and wartime politics in a pluralist society that claims to be secular.

Based on ethnographic data and interviews conducted since before the Revolution of Dignity and the outbreak of armed combat in 2014, Wanner investigates the conditions that catapulted religiosity, religious institutions, and religious leaders to the forefront of politics and geopolitics.

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Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov, "Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia" (Brill, 2022)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The world as seen by a Qur’an specialist in late imperial and early Soviet Russia.

Alfrid Bustanov and Vener Usmanov's book Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia (Brill, 2022) tells a dramatic story of ’Abd al-Majid al-Qadiri, a Muslim individual born in the Kazakh lands and brought up in the Sufi environment of the South Urals, who memorized the entire Qur’an at the Mosque of the Prophet. In Russia he travelled widely, performing the Qur'an recitations. The Stalinist terror was merciless to him: in total, he spent fifteen years of his life in labour camps in Solovki, in the North, and Tashkent, in the south. At the end of his life, al-Qadiri wrote the fascinating memoirs that we analysed and translated in this book for the first time. Al-Qadiri’s life account allows us to look at the history of Islam in Russia from a new angle. His lively language provides access to everyday concerns of Russia’s Muslims, their personal interactions, their emotions, and the material world that surrounded them. Al-Qadiri’s book is a book of memory, full of personal drama and hope.

Alfrid Bustanov is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam

Aruuke Uran Kyzy is a History Ph.D. student at Stanford University in the Transnational, Global, and International (TIG) field with a focus on trans-imperial Naqshbandiyya Sufi networks across the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Central Asia near the turn of the 18th century.

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Iain MacGregor, "The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II" (Scribner, 2022)

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II are sacrosanct. The foundation of the Soviets’ hard-won victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. To Russians it was a pivotal landmark of their nation’s losses, with more than two million civilians and combatants either killed, wounded, or captured during the bitter fighting from September 1942 to February 1943. Both sides endured terrible conditions in brutal, relentless house-to-house fighting.

Within this life-and-death struggle, Soviet war correspondents lauded the fight for a key strategic building in the heart of the city, “Pavlov's House,” which was situated on the frontline and codenamed “The Lighthouse.” The legend grew of a small garrison of Russian soldiers from the 13th Guards Rifle Division holding out against the Germans of the Sixth Army, which had battled its way to the very center of Stalingrad. A report about the battle in a local Red Army newspaper would soon grow and be repeated on Moscow radio and in countless national newspapers. By the end of the war, the legend would gather further momentum and inspire Russians to rebuild their destroyed towns and cities.

This story has become a pillar of the Stalingrad legend and one that can now be analyzed and told accurately. The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II (Scribner, 2022) sheds new light on this iconic battle through the prism of the two units who fought for the very heart of the city itself. Iain MacGregor traveled to both German and Russian archives to unearth previously unpublished testimonies by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. His riveting narrative lays to rest the questions as to the identity of the real heroes of this epic battle for one of the city’s most famous buildings and provides authoritative answers as to how the battle finally ended and influenced the conclusion of the siege of Stalingrad.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Jade McGlynn, "Russia's War" (Polity, 2023)

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and nine years since its annexation of Crimea and occupation of Ukraine’s far east, why are so many Russians still behind this brutal and disastrous project? Where are the mass protests? Why is President Vladimir Putin still apparently popular and secure?

In Russia's War (Polity Press, 2023), Jade McGlynn uses a decade of research into Russia’s politics of memory and propaganda and close to 60 post-invasion interviews with prominent Russians to explain why: "historical nationalism" and an autocratic method that breeds a special form of apathy. “The risk and pointlessness sit on people's resolve like a sediment, deliberately laid and carefully layered over the years," she writes.

Jade McGlynn is a Leverhulme Early Career Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. A frequent contributor to the BBC, Deutsche Welle, The Telegraph and The Spectator her next book – Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia – will be published by Bloomsbury Press in June.

*Her own book recommendations are The Naked Year by Boris Pilnyak (Ardis, 2013 - translated by Alexander Tulloch, first published in Russian in 1922) and The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker (OUP, 2018).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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Sudha Rajagopalan, "Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India" (Routledge, 2023)

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

At the intersection of history, material culture studies, and post-socialist memory studies, Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India (Routledge, 2023) is an oral history of socialist globalisation constructed around the journeys of Cold War era Soviet objects in India and Cuba. During the Cold War, an important means to perpetuate Soviet ideals of modernisation and anti-imperialist solidarity across the world was the circulation of ‘banal’ objects, produced in the Soviet Union and purchased, awarded, and gifted for use in homes across the world. Based on oral accounts of Indian and Cuban interlocutors, this book examines the itineraries of Soviet objects such as cars, washing machines, cameras, books, nesting dolls, porcelain, and many other things. Explored this way, the Cold War is a matter of personal, affective, everyday experience. At the same time, by indicating the cohabitation of things in their home from around the world, interlocutors also go on to undercut simple geopolitical binaries that pit Soviet against American techno-politics. Accounts of Soviet objects in India and Cuba reveal a bricolage of preferences that crisscrossed ideological dualities of East vs West, communist vs capitalist, making for an alternative cosmopolitanism that was in equal measure shaped by personal, local, and national histories and experiences.

Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements.

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Keir Giles, "Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as well the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's place in the world is a matter of fierce debate among world leaders and analysts. For decades it was regarded as irrelevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin came to power with the intent of improving Russian influence on the world stage. How does the Russian leadership intend to achieve this goal of relevancy on the world stage? Keir Giles addresses these issues in Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You (‎Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Keir Giles is Senior Consulting Fellow for the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre. He has spent three decades explaining Russia, for the BBC, the UK Ministry of Defence, Chatham House, NATO and in the private sector. His previous publications include Russia's 'New' Tools for Confronting the West (2016), the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (2016) and Moscow Rules (2019).

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Suzanna Eibuszyc, "Memory Is Our Home: Loss and Remembering--Three Generations in Poland and Russia 1917-1960s" (Ibidem, 2022)

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A courageous young woman escaping Nazi Germany, with no choice other than to leave her family behind...

Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc was born in Warsaw near the end of World War I, the youngest of six children. Little Roma grows up to become a striking, opinionated woman, but her life in its current form is about to change completely. The first shots in World War II are fired when Hitler and Nazi Germany invade Poland, turning all the Jews of Europe into their targets. In a decision full of resourcefulness and courage, Roma escapes Poland and leaves for Soviet Russia, in order to save her life. At first, she believes she will be reunited with her family within a few weeks, but reality proves different. As time goes by, her flight broadens Eastward. And with it, the feelings of guilt and regret that would haunt her for the rest of her life, for having left her siblings behind.

Suzanna Eibuszyc's book Memory Is Our Home (Ibidem, 2022) is a powerful historical memoir and a gripping true-life story, a first-hand account, about love and loss, hopes and dreams for a better world and a rich, living testimony of Jewish life.

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War, Optimism, Humility: A Conversation with Literary Critic Mariia Shuvalova

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This episode of How To Be Wrong is a conversation with Mariia Shuvalova, a lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Fulbright Scholar (Harriman Institute, Columbia University in the city of New York, 2019–2020) and co-founder and head of the non-governmental organization New Ukrainian Academic Community. Joining us from Kyiv, Mariia talks about her experiences of the Russian invasion, imperialism, and Ukrainian identity, as well as her thoughts on anger and humility in the face of war. It’s an inspiring conversation.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Svetlana Lavochkina, "Dam Duchess" (Whiskey Tit, 2018)

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Svetlana Lavochkina's book Dam Duchess (Whiskey Tit, 2018) invites readers to take a surreal journey into the past: the construction of Dnipro Dam, the Stalinist regime, the fate of the aristocrats of the Russian Empire, the horrors of the Holodomor, the memory of the Cossack Hetmanate that travels from generation to generation, the Soviet harrowing of life and psyche. To survive in the Soviet Union, one has to learn how to adjust to the system that embraces fear and intimidation to impose a distorted sense of loyalty and comradeship. Agreements can certify the collapse of empires, but the individual’s memory of violence sanctioned by brutal regimes will travel through years, decades, and generations. Lavochkina’s Dam Duchess calls for compassion that can easily be lost once terror is normalized.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007). In her dissertation on Richard Brautigan, she focuses on postmodernism in American literature. Currently, she is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian program at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY).

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Oleksandra Keudel, "How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine" (Ibidem, 2022)

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine (Ibidem, 2022), Oleksandra Keudel proposes a novel explanation for why some local governments in hybrid regimes enable citizen participation while others restrict it. She argues that mechanisms for citizen participation are by-products of political dynamics of informal business-political (patronal) networks that seek domination over local governments. Against the backdrop of either competition or coordination between patronal networks in their localities, municipal leaders cherry-pick citizen participation mechanisms as a tactic to sustain their own access to resources and functions of local governments. This argument is based on an in-depth comparative analysis of patronal network arrangements and the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms in five urban municipalities in Ukraine during 2015-2019: Chernivtsi, Kharkiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, and Odesa. Fifty-seven interviews with citizen participation experts, local politicians and officials, representatives of civil society and the media, as well as utilization of secondary analytical sources, official government data, and media reports provide a rich basis for an investigation of context-specific choices of municipal leaders that result in varying mechanisms for citizen participation.

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Megan Swift, "Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Based on sources from rare book libraries in Russia and around the world, Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (U Toronto Press, 2020) offers a vivid exploration of illustrated children’s literature and reading under Lenin and Stalin – a period when mass publishing for children and universal public education became available for the first time in Russia. By analyzing the illustrations in fairy tales, classic "adult" literature reformatted for children, and war-time picture books, Megan Swift elucidates the vital and multifaceted function of illustrated children’s literature in repurposing the past.

Picturing the Page demonstrates that while the texts of the past remained fixed, illustrations could slip between the pages to mediate and annotate that past, as well as connect with anti-religious, patriotic, and other campaigns that were central to Soviet children’s culture after the 1917 Revolution.

Megan Swift is an associate professor of Russian Studies at the University of Victoria and author of Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Susan Colbourn, "Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles―intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war―highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time.

At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned.

Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis―from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination.

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Nomadic Pastoralism Among the Mongol Herders

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Nomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol Herders: Multispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is based on anthropological research Charlotte Marchina carried out between 2008 and 2016 to investigate the spatial features of nomadic pastoralism among the Mongol herders of Mongolia and Southern Siberia. In addition to classical survey methods, Charlotte used GPS tracking to analyze the ways in which pastoralists envision and concretely occupy the landscape, which they share with their animals, non-herders, and invisible entities and deities. In this episode, we discuss differences between pastoralism in Mongolia and Siberia, changes in Mongol herding throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and how animals and animal knowledge of the landscape shape pastoralist systems.

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Megan Buskey, "Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return" (Ibidem-Verlag, 2023)

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Megan Buskey about her book Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (Ibidem-Verlag, 2023).

When Megan Buskey’s grandmother Anna dies in Cleveland in 2013, Megan is compelled in her grief to document her grandmother’s life as a native of Ukraine. A Ukrainian American, Buskey returns to her family’s homeland and enlists her relatives there to help her in her quest—and discovers much more than she expected. The result of this extraordinary journey that traces one woman’s story across Ukraine’s difficult twentieth century, from a Galician village emerging from serfdom, to the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe during World War II, to the Siberian hinterlands where Anna spent almost two decades in exile before receiving the rare opportunity to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Yet Megan’s wide-ranging inquiries keep leading her back to universal questions: What does family mean? How can you forge connections between generations that span different cultures, times, and places? And, perhaps most hauntingly, how can you best remember a complicated past that is at once foreign and personal?

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Martin K. Dimitrov, "Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived.

Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Martin K. Dimitrov shows in Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (Oxford UP, 2023), substantial variability exists in the survival of nondemocratic regimes, with single-party polities having the longest average duration. Offering a systematic theory of the institutional solutions to the dictator's dilemma, Dimitrov argues that single-party autocracies have fostered channels that allow for the confidential vertical transmission of information, while also solving the problems associated with distorted information.

To explain how this all works, Dimitrov focuses on communist regimes, which have the longest average lifespan among single-party autocracies and have developed the most sophisticated information-gathering institutions. Communist regimes face a variety of threats, but the main one is the masses. Dimitrov therefore examines the origins, evolution, and internal logic of the information-collection ecosystem established by communist states to monitor popular dissent. Drawing from a rich base of evidence across multiple communist regimes and nearly 100 interviews, Dimitrov reshapes our understanding of how autocrats learn--or fail to learn--about the societies they rule, and how they maintain--or lose--power.

Listeners interested in how authoritarian regimes gather information and use it to maintain political control should also check out the NBN interviews with Iza Ding, on how China's bureaucrats make a show of responsiveness even when they can't deliver, Jeremy Wallace, on the role of quantification in China's authoritarianism, Daniel Treisman, on how dictators around the world try to control their public image, Jennifer Pan, on how China uses its limited welfare state to hold power, journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin on China's surveillance state, and Yao Li, Manfred Elfstrom, and Lynette Ong on China's protests.

Martin K. Dimitrov is Professor of Political Science at Tulane University.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Kiril Feferman, "If We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42" (Academic Studies Press, 2020)

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

If We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42 (Academic Studies Press, 2020) is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters, Kiril Feferman provides a history of the Ginsburgs as they debate whether to evacuate their home of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and are eventually swept away by the Soviet-German War, the German invasion of Soviet Russia, and the Holocaust. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Soviet Union, presenting one Soviet region as an illustration of wartime social and media politics.

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Greta Lynn Uehling, "Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2023) provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war.

What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas that began in 2014 and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete.

In Ukraine, landscapes filled with death and destruction prompted attentiveness to human vulnerabilities and the cultivation of everyday, interpersonal peace. Uehling explores a constellation of social practices where ethics of care were in operation. People were also drawn into the conflict in an everyday form of war that included provisioning fighters with military equipment they purchased themselves, smuggling insulin, and cutting ties to former friends. Each chapter considers a different site where care can produce interpersonal peace or its antipode, everyday war.

Bridging the fields of political geography, international relations, peace and conflict studies, and anthropology, Everyday War considers where peace can be cultivated at an everyday level.

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Soviet Hippies and German “Other ‘68ers”: A Conversation about Youth Non-Conformity and Protest

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On first glance, Soviet hippies would seem to have little in common with right-wing student protestors in West Germany in 1968. Yet as Juliane Fürst and Anna von der Goltz point out, both groups were non-conformists in their respective milieus, and both groups sought to carve out space for individual freedom and expression amid political forces that privileged sacrifices for the common good. Juliane Fürst is the author of Flowers through Concrete: Adventures in Soviet Hippieland. Anna von der Goltz is the author of The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany.

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Sarah M. Zaides, "Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire" (Libra Kitap, 2022)

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In existing scholarship on Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire, there were three typical fates available to Russia's Jews on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution: they could remain in the shtetl, leave for a new life in America, or participate in the Russian Revolution.

Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire (Libra Kitap, 2022) traces a fourth path, following the saga of Ashkenazi Jews who instead crossed the Black Sea to join their Sephardic coreligionists in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople and later Istanbul, or who joined agricultural farming communities in the Western Aegean sponsored by the Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association. There, they considered, and reconsidered, the possibilities open to them, including eventual migration to Palestine, Western Europe, North America, and Argentina, Others stayed and forged a new life as an Ashkenazi minority in Istanbul, creating new organizations, places of worship, and political practices. These Russian Jewish migrants give us insight into the ethnic, religious, and political challenges as well as aspirations during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire on the brink of Turkish statehood.

Sarah M. Zaides received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Washington, where she currently serves as the Associate Director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.

Makena Mezistrano is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University where she studies Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in the modern Ottoman and post-Ottoman context.

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Rethinking the End of the Russian and Habsburg Empires

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Historians often think of World War I and the period surrounding it as the acme of nationalism in European politics. In two very different books, Joshua Sanborn and Dominique Kirchner Reill have recently questioned several core assumptions in the literature on this period, such as the idea that national state-building precipitated the end of empire, and that the politics of nationalist grievance were paramount among the post-imperial peoples of Central Europe. Sanborn is the author of Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2015). Reill is the author of The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard UP, 2020).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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Sofia Gavrilova, "Russia's Regional Museums: Representing and Misrepresenting Knowledge about Nature, History and Society" (Routledge, 2022)

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Sofia Gavrilova's Russia's Regional Museums: Representing and Misrepresenting Knowledge about Nature, History and Society (Routledge, 2022) presents the results of extensive research into the very interesting phenomenon of local museums—kraevedschskyi museums—in Russia’s regions. It outlines how numerous such museums are, how long they have existed, what they display, and how this has changed, or not, from Soviet times up to the present. It shows how the museums’ displays often are about nature, history, and society. It goes on to discuss how what is portrayed represents particular interpretations of knowledge— including the heroism of the Soviet past, a colonial-style view of Russia’s very many non-Russian people, and the failure to mention things which might present Russia in a critical way. The book is much more than ‘museum studies’: it sheds a great deal of light on how Russians think about themselves and about how this self-view is fostered, and it also highlights the vast regional differences which exist in Russia.

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Lyudmyla Khersonska, "Today is a Different War" (Arrowsmith Press, 2023)

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Today is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what's in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems.

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Jangar: The Heroic Epic of the Kalmyk Nomads

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Saga Bougdaeva is the translator of the first English version of Jangar (University of California Press, 2023), the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads. The Kalmyks are the Western Mongols of Genghis Khan’s medieval empire in Europe. Today, Kalmykia is situated in the territory that was once the Golden Horde, founded by Genghis Khan son’s Juchi. Although their famed khanates and cities have long since disappeared under the sands of the Great Eurasian Steppe, the Kalmyks have witnessed, memorized, and orally transmitted some of the most transformative developments, both victorious and tragic, in the history of civilizations. A tribute to the protectors of the mythical country Bumba, Jangar reflects the hopes and aspirations of the Kalmyk people as well as their centuries-long struggle for cultural survival. Dr. Bougdaeva’s translation is more than a tribute to the artistic creativity and imagination of the Kalmyk people—it is also an important step in their struggle for cultural survival. It was only after centuries of oral transmission that the songs and stories surrounding Jangar were written down. When the first translation, into Russian, finally appeared, Stalin had the entire Kalmyk population deported to Siberia and ordered that their national literature be eliminated from the published world. This Soviet repression has had enormous consequences for world literature, silencing nomadic voices and keeping hidden their distinctive contributions.

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Natasha Lance Rogoff, "Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

It’s the early 1990s, and the USSR is no more. An intrepid young American TV producer has been given a seemingly foolhardy task: bringing the beloved children’s show Sesame Street to Russia, and the rest of the post-Soviet sphere.

This is the premise of Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)—a memoir from that aforementioned producer, Natasha Lance Rogoff. Amidst car bombings, soldiers kidnapping Elmo, and a collapsing ruble, Lance Rogoff assembles a team of Russian creatives to adapt Sesame Street into Ulitsa Sezam, as the show is known in Russian. While culture clashes ensue at first, they eventually give way to cross-cultural empathy, as Lance Rogoff poignantly illustrates in the book. It’s a story that feels especially resonant in the present day, with Russia and the West again at opposite ends of a daunting geopolitical divide.

Lance Rogoff talks with the New Books Network's Anthony Kao about how she came to produce Sesame Street in Russia, and gives us a taste of the adventures contained within Muppets in Moscow.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater.

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Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Among all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific priorities over the past 400 years.

Ruth Rogaski’s extraordinary new book Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows how these acts of knowing have brought multiple Manchurias into existence as people, culture, nature and ecology have been entangled in diverse ways at different points in time. Today, perhaps befitting its status as a contested and layered borderland space, ‘Manchuria’ itself is a contested term, but this only makes Rogaski’s beautifully written multi-perspectival and multilingually-sourced history of this fascinating region all the more valuable.

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Tim Harte, "Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020)

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Tim Harte's Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) looks at sport as artistic subject matter, in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. In sport, artists found inspiration that could be applied both to improvement of the self and to social progress as artists defined it. In the long run, the constraints of the Socialist Realist aesthetic came to constrain the creative freedom of artists, but until the late 1920's, sport served as a focus of genuine artistic interest, for its own sake and for its ability to provide a reservoir of metaphors that artists could use to make broader, more ideological commentary.

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Anthony Tucker-Jones, "Kursk 1943: Hitler's Bitter Harvest" (History Press, 2018)

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The year 1943 was a pivotal one on the Eastern Front during World War II. The Axis had suffered a catastrophic defeat at the battle of Stalingrad earlier in the year, but wished to attempt to regain the initiative later in the summer by launching a massive offensive code-named "Operation Citadel" at the Red Army at Kursk. The Red Army heavily entrenched themselves and waited for the Germans to attack. What followed was one of the most dramatic battles of the Second World War. This is the subject of Kursk 1943: Hitler's Bitter Harvest (History Press, 2018) by Anthony Tucker-Jones.

Anthony Tucker-Jones spent nearly twenty years in the British Intelligence community before establishing himself as a defence writer and military historian. He has written extensively on aspects of warfare in the Second World War and has produced several other books for The History Press.

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Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, "Monumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow" (Routledge, 2022)

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Monumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow (Routledge, 2022) asks us to consider: what stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a single name is added to an endless list.

What do acts of accumulation of names of the dead affirm when they are concretised in monuments and performance events? The key premise is that multimodal inscriptions of names of the dead entail a political, aesthetic and conceptual movement between singularity and multitude that honours each dead name yet conveys the scale of a mass atrocity without reducing it to a number.

Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, the book yields a new perspective on the politics of archival and historical justice while it critically engages with the debates on relations and distinctions between names and numbers of the dead, monumental art and its political effects, law and history, image and text, the specific one and the infinite many.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Maria Sonevytsky, "Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine" (Wesleyan UP, 2019)

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (Wesleyan UP, 2019), Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is finishing a dissertation that examines the aftermath of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor).

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Postscript: Narrative and Influence Activities in the Russo-Ukraine War

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

For almost a year now, we have been absorbing news and information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are a variety of different, or competing, narratives to explain and define what we understand about the origins of this conflict and the ongoing military successes and failures on the ground in Ukraine and in Russia. I had the chance to interview Jordan Miller for PostScript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) about his work on narrative and attempts to influence the activities within the field of battle in Ukraine. Miller is finishing his dissertation on this topic at the War Studies Program at the Royal Military College of Canada. Miller’s research specifically focusses on these narrative dynamics, which are influential to battlefield success and potentially the outcome of this war. In our discussion, we examine the various points of information that were being put forward by Russia and by the United States before Russia moved into Ukraine in February of 2022. The intention of this approach is to “inoculate” the public by highlighting the misleading or false narratives that will be forthcoming to try to shape global understandings of the war. As the war progressed, Ukraine also actively tried to shape perception of its own capacity, heroics, and commitment to success against Russian aggressions. We also saw a shift in approaches in the fall and winter since there was concern about the impact of energy scarcity in western Europe and in Ukraine.

Miller’s work builds on basic concepts like propaganda – and what ultimately makes this effective within situations like Ukraine, or other global military contests. As we discuss on the podcast, the images and ideas that have come out of Ukraine—of humanized citizens and soldiers, of the citizen army there that has come forward to push against the Russian war machine, of soldiers adopting cats and dogs as they continue to fight—all contribute to an overall concept of the Ukrainian people and their capacity to potentially defeat the Russian Army. Ukrainian efforts in this regard also speak to particular audiences, like NATO member countries and their citizens, the United Nations General Assembly, as well as to Russian citizens and soldiers. This kind of effort—to communicate ideas and images to key audiences is an important component of the useful implementation of narrative within the field of battle, even if it is not on the battlefield itself.

Join us for this conversation about the capacity to manage narrative within global political situations – and how this applies, in particular, the current war in Ukraine.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Frank Wolff, "Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund" (Haymarket Books, 2021)

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Frank Wolff's ground-breaking Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund (Haymarket Books, 2021) investigates how this social movement transformed itself from one of the most important revolutionary protagonists in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and yidishkayt for Jews in North and South America. By following thousands of activists’ paths from the shtetlekh of Eastern Europe to the working-class Yiddish neighborhoods of New York and Buenos Aires, Wolff traces the patterns of activism and networks that connected these revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in a richly detailed social history of this seminal transnational movement.

Frank Wolff is a senior researcher in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Osnabrück and a board member of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies with a focus on historical border regimes, Jewish history and law in social history, and on approaches to the mediation of history/public history. Starting in the summer, he will lead a research group on border studies at the Center for Interdisciplinary Study at Bielefeld University.

Miriam Chorley-Schulz (neé Schulz) holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She is an incoming Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and currently works as the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Miriam is the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present.

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Adam Lajeunesse, "Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty" (UBC Press, 2016)

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which legal basis to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic waters.

In Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada's Arctic Maritime Sovereignty (UBC Press, 2016), Adam Lajeunesse, a Professor of Public Policy and Fellow of the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, guides readers through the evolution of Canada's Arctic sovereignty, showing how the Northwest Passage and the surrounding waters became Canadian. Listen to this engaging podcast to understand what inspired Lajeunesse to write the book, what are the main points of his argument, and how its insights are still relevant today.

Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada.

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Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many of us have likely seen photos of the Aral Sea, and the rusted Soviet-era ships, sitting in the desert with no water in sight. The Aral Sea is now just 10% of its former volume, shrinking down from what was once the fourth-largest body of inland water in the world, after what writer Jeff Fernside calls “one of the worst human-caused environmental catastrophes.”

Jeff traveled to the region as a Peace Corps volunteer. Afterward, he turned his experiences into an essay collection, Ships in the Desert (Santa Fe Writers Project: 2022), where Jeff writes about the families he met, his thoughts on missionaries, and his visit to the Aral Sea, where he saw “a fleet of rusting Soviet fishing ships, hammer and sickle still clearly discernible on many, sitting bolt upright in desert sands as if plowing through ocean waves.”

Jeff Fearnside is the author of the short-story collection Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: 2006), which won the 2005 SFWP Awards Program. He is also the author of the chapbook A Husband and Wife Are One Satan (Orison Books: 2021), winner of the Orison Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Story, and many others.

In this interview, Jeff and I talk about what inspired his essays, including what he saw in the barren Aral Sea.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ships in the Desert. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Tricia Starks, "Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Seeing cigarette smoking as a cultural phenomenon of Western modernity is perhaps easier when the test case is outside the US where the narrative is dominated by Big Bad Tobacco and litigation. Tricia Starks's two volume study does just that. Her second volume, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2022) traces the rise and fall of cigarettes during the Soviet period. (Her first volume covered the pre-Revolutionary era.) In a beautifully written and jargon-free account illustrated with dozens of color plates, Starks tracks how the early revolutionaries tried unsuccessfully to combat mass smoking, how subsequent Soviet leaders made peace with it, and how in the post-war period, Soviet health authorities slowly made inroads against smoking, albeit with different arguments than those used in the anti-tobacco campaigns in the West.

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Alessandro Iandolo, "Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the middle of the 20th century, there was a passionate affair, between the Soviet empire and newly independent West African states. It was a short, intense, and acrimonious love story built on shared dreams for a noncapitalist future. Alessandro Iandolo’s new book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell UP, 2022), explores the history of this unlikely romance. The book traces the rise and fall of the Soviet Union’s engagement with these three West African nations, which Iandolo argues were at the center of the Soviet search for development in the Third World.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

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Franziska Exeler, "Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process?

In Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Cornell UP, 2022), Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war?

Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Regine A. Spector, "Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2017)

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia (Cornell UP, 2017) delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region--they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best characterized as islands of order in a chaotic national context.

Spector draws on interviews, archival sources, and participant observation to show how traders, landowners, and municipal officials create order in the absence of a coherent government apparatus and bureaucratic state. Merchants have adapted Soviet institutions, including trade unions, and pre-Soviet practices, such as using village elders as the arbiters of disputes, to the urban bazaar by building and asserting their own authority. Spector's findings have relevance beyond the bazaars and borders of one small country; they teach us how economic development operates when the rule of law is weak.

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The Russo-Ukrainian War from a Military Point of View

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

On February 24 2022, Vladimir Putin shocked the world by invading Ukraine. In this short interview, veteran military historian Jeremy Black looks at the conflict from a military point of view. Why have the Russians done so badly? Why have the Ukrainians done so well? And what are the prospects for victory by either side?

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Svetlana Lavochkina, "Carbon: Song of Crafts" (Lost Horse Press, 2020)

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Donetsk, the black gem of Ukraine―Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe's east: Svetlana Lavochkina sends readers on a double odyssey with two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose. A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon: Song of Crafts (Lost Horse Press, 2020) is told in polyphonic verse―a prayer for the beloved, anguished city.

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Sean Patterson, "Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917-1921" (U Manitoba Press, 2020)

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the chaos of the end of WWI, the Russian Civil War, and a brief period of Ukrainian independence there occurred a series of massacres of German Mennonites. Sean Patterson's recent book Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917-1921 (University of Manitoba Press, 2020) analyzes the varying historical memories of these massacres. Patterson's book raises numerous and timely issues of national memory and identity, and contains much poignant reflection on the problems faced by an historically pacifist community facing down violent circumstances. What it means to be a member of a national community is an interesting and important question in any circumstances, but the construction of Ukrainian national identity is a subject of more-than-casual interest, in 2022. Makhno and Memory discusses a complicated and important series of event in accessible fashion, and usefully circumscribes what can and cannot be known about Nestor Makhno's specific role in those events.

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Ian Garner, "Stalingrad Lives!: Stories of Combat and Survival" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the fall of 1942, only the city of Stalingrad stood between Soviet survival and defeat as Hitler’s army ran rampant. With the fate of the USSR hanging in the balance, Soviet propaganda chiefs sent their finest writers into the heat of battle. After six months of terrifying work, these men succeeded in creating an enduring epic of Stalingrad. Their harrowing tales of valour and heroism offered hope for millions of readers. “Stalingrad lives!” went the rallying cry: the city had to live if the nation was to stave off defeat.

In Stalingrad Lives!: Stories of Combat and Survival (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022) Ian Garner brings together a selection of short stories written at and after the battle. They reveal, for the first time in English, the real Russian narrative of Stalingrad - an epic story of death, martyrdom, resurrection, and utopian beginnings. Following the authors into the hellish world of Stalingrad, Garner traces how tragedy was written as triumph. He uncovers how, dealing with loss and destruction on an unimaginable scale, Soviet readers and writers embraced the story of martyred Stalingrad, embedding it into the Russian psyche for decades to come. Featuring lost work by Vasily Grossman alongside texts by luminaries such as Konstantin Simonov, Viktor Nekrasov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalingrad Lives offers a literary perspective on the Soviet Union at war.

Ian Garner is a cultural historian and translator in Kingston, Ontario. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2017 after studying at the University of Bristol and the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. Follow Ian on Twitter.

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Mariëlle Wijermars et al., "The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

How has digitalisation changed Russian politics? How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed Russia studies? What is special about Russia’s approach to algorithmic governance and internet control? Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics from Maastricht University, Mariëlle Wijermars, talks about her ongoing research on Russian politics, internet policy and platform governance.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Mariëlle Wijermars also talks about The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies. This open-access handbook was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020 and was edited by Mariëlle together with Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Kopotev.

This handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization.

Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars is an Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She is currently a CORE Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where she researches internet freedom and the human rights’ implications of internet policy and platform governance, in particular in authoritarian states.

You can connect with Mariëlle Wijermars on Twitter @Marielle_W_ and on Mastodon @Marielle_W@mastodon.social.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Elena Goodwin, "Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

From governesses with supernatural powers to motor-car obsessed amphibians, the iconic images of English children's literature helped shape the view of the nation around the world. But, as Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia (Bloomsbury, 2021) reveals, Russian translators did not always present the same picture of Englishness that had been painted by authors.

In this book, Elena Goodwin explores Russian translations of classic English children's literature, considering how representations of Englishness depended on state ideology and reflected the shifting nature of Russia's political and cultural climate. As Soviet censorship policy imposed restrictions on what and how to translate, this book examines how translation dealt with and built bridges between cultures in a restricted environment in order to represent images of England.

Through analyzing the Soviet and post-Soviet translations of Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne and P. L. Travers, this book connects the concepts of society, ideology and translation to trace the role of translation through a time of transformation in Russian society. Making use of previously unpublished archival material, Goodwin provides the first analysis of the role of translated English children's literature in modern Russian history and offers fresh insight into Anglo-Russian relations from the Russian Revolution to the present day. This ground-breaking book is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Russian history and literary translation.

Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Sandra Frimmel, "Art Judgements: Art on Trial in Russia After Perestroika" (Vernon Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an unusually large number of court cases against artists and curators in Russia. Focusing on prominent cases against the organizers of the exhibitions Caution, Religion! (2003) and Forbidden Art 2006 (2007), Frimmel examines the ways in which the meaning of art and its socio-political effects are argued in court. By placing these cases in a historical context, and comparing them with a number of international case studies, Art Judgements: Art on Trial in Russia After Perestroika (Vernon Press, 2021) reveals how these proceedings have intensified juridical power over artistic freedom (of speech) in Russia over the past two decades.

Sandra Frimmel is Research Coordinator of the Centre of Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) and an affiliate of the Department for Slavic Studies at the University of Zürich. Her research interests include Russian art from 19th century through to today, as well as the concepts of art, law, justice, power, and society.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Zvi Preigerzon, "Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022)

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Alex Lahav about his edition and translation Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022).

Zvi Preigerzon wrote memoirs about his time in the Gulag in 1958, long before Solzhenitsyn and without any knowledge of the other publications on this subject. It was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the harsh reality of Soviet Gulags. Even after the death of Stalin, when the whole Gulag system was largely disbanded, writing about them could be regarded as an act of heroism. Preigerzon attempted to document and analyze his own prison camp experience and portray the Jewish prisoners he encountered in forced labor camps. Among these people, we meet scientists, engineers, famous Jewish writers and poets, young Zionists, a devoted religious man, a horse wagon driver, a Jewish singer of folk songs, and many, many others. As Preigerzon put it, "Each one had his own story, his own soul, and his own tragedy."

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Muhammet Koçak, "Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence" (Lexington, 2022)

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Turkey and Russia are two of the most significant powerhouses in Eurasia. The foreign policies of two countries directly impact the regional dynamics in Black Sea, Central Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Balkan regions. The changes in the bilateral relations between the two countries go well beyond the Black Sea region. In the past, the Russian Empire played a significant role in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey took part in containing the USSR during the Cold War by joining the NATO in 1952. In the twenty-first century, however, Turkey and Russia invested in bilateral trade and established significant partnerships in the strategic defense and energy sectors. In the same period, the competition between Turkey and Russia heightened, giving way to military confrontation in multiple fronts. Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence (Lexington, 2022) argues that the changing balance of power in the region has triggered adjustments in the foreign policies of Russia and Turkey in the twenty-first century. The decline of the US influence in the region have brought about increased engagement between Turkey and Russia in the form of partnerships and competition for influence.

Muhammet Koçak received his PhD in International Relations from Florida International University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Kiril Feferman, "The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus" (Yad Vadhem, 2016)

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Kiril Feferman's The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Yad Vadhem, 2016) presents a comprehensive account of the Jews in the Crimea and the North Caucasus in the Holocaust years. Based on extensive archival research, Feferman covers the life and destruction of the Jewish population in the region and describes in detail the relations between Jews and non-Jews before and during the war; the evacuation of Jews into these regions and out of them; the German occupation and the annihilation of the Ashkenazi Jewish population; the fate of non-Ashkenazi Jews in the area; Jewish responses; and reactions of local populations, including Cossacks, devout Orthodox Christians and Muslims.

Objective factors, such as the availability of German manpower and food, weather and geographic conditions, in addition to subjective factors, such as the attitudes of Wehrmacht commanders, left their imprint on the implementation of the “Final Solution” policy in these areas. By the time the Germans occupied the Crimea in November 1941, it was absolutely clear to them that the Jews had to be eliminated. All the more so when they came to dominate the North Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Yet, the Nazi decision-makers were vexed by the need to clarify who was a Jew. The case of the Ashkenazi Jews was clear-cut, and their fate was similar to that of their brethren elsewhere in Europe. However, the Germans faced a formidable difficulty in categorizing the non-Ashkenazi Karaites and Krymchaks in the Crimea, and Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus, who, according to the Nazi world-view, shared some but not all racial and religious characteristics of Jews. Subsequently, German investigation involved a thorough pseudo-scientific analysis of racial and religious features by the Nazi academy, as well as SS “researchers.”

Set against the background of the ongoing murder of Ashkenazi Jews in these regions and local politics with geo-political implications, this research title also focuses on the support – or lack thereof – lent to Karaites, Krymchaks and Mountain Jews by local Muslims. These interwoven histories cover a hitherto unexplored terrain in Holocaust history, and offer a fascinating window into the history of the Crimea and the North Caucasus and the fate of their Jewish inhabitants during World War II.

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Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism.

Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Lucan Way is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.

The previous book by both authors is Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent paper is “Can the Rebel Body Function without its Visible Heads? The Role of Mid-Level Commanders in Peacebuilding.”

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William Inboden, "The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink" (Dutton, 2022)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0000

With decades of hindsight, the peaceful end of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was strong, stable, and would last into the next century. Ronald Reagan entered the White House with no certainty of what would happen next, only an overriding faith in democracy and an abiding belief that Soviet communism—and the threat of nuclear war—must end.

William Inboden's The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (Dutton, 2022) reveals how Reagan’s White House waged the Cold War while managing multiple crises around the globe. From the emergence of global terrorism, wars in the Middle East, the rise of Japan, and the awakening of China to proxy conflicts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Reagan’s team oversaw the worldwide expansion of democracy, globalization, free trade, and the information revolution. Yet no issue was greater than the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. As president, Reagan remade the four-decades-old policy of containment and challenged the Soviets in an arms race and ideological contest that pushed them toward economic and political collapse, all while extending an olive branch of diplomacy as he sought a peaceful end to the conflict.

Reagan’s revolving team included Secretaries of State Al Haig and George Shultz; Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci; National Security Advisors Bill Clark, John Poindexter, and Bud McFarlane; Chief of Staff James Baker; CIA Director Bill Casey; and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Talented and devoted to their president, they were often at odds with one another as rivalries and backstabbing led to missteps and crises. But over the course of the presidency, Reagan and his team still developed the strategies that brought about the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion and remade the world.

Based on thousands of pages of newly-declassified documents and interviews with senior Reagan officials, The Peacemaker brims with fresh insights into one of America’s most consequential presidents. Along the way, it shows how the pivotal decade of the 1980s shaped the world today.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

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Vladislav M. Zubok, "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union" (Yale UP, 2021)

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century.

Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale UP, 2021) sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances--and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

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James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'.

At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first 'decolonisation' of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the study, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants - who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Inna Perheentupa, "Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia: An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources" (Policy Press, 2022)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Inna Perheentupa's book Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia: An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources (Policy Press, 2022) is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends. As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neoconservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts of feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilize and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Nicholas Morton, "The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East" (Basic Books, 2022)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:00:00 -0000

For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As Nicholas Morton reveals in The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia. The Mongol Storm is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.

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Andrew Spria, "Foreshadowed: Malevich’s "Black Square" and Its Precursors" (Reaktion Books, 2022)

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

When Kasimir’s Malevich’s Black Square was produced in 1915, no one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous five hundred years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists, and censors alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first time. Foreshadowed: Malevich’s "Black Square" and Its Precursors (Reaktion Books, 2022) explores the resonances between Malevich’s Black Square and its precursors, revealing layers of meaning that are often overlooked but which are as relevant today as ever.

In this interview, Allison Leigh explores these ideas with Andrew Spria. Their conversation ranges from how Andrew chose the overall structure for the book and his process of researching it, to why Malevich’s canvas should be seen as one of the most interesting and beautiful paintings ever made.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega, "Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan" (Gaudy Boy, 2022)

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A man is arrested for a single typo, a woman gets on buses at random, and two friends reunite in a changed world.... Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022) brings together the voices of thirteen female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The twenty-four stories in Amanat, translated into English from Kazakh and Russian, comprise a groundbreaking survey of women's writing in the Central Asian country over its thirty years of independence, paying homage to the rich but largely unrecorded oral storytelling tradition of the region. Contemplating nostalgia, politics, and intergenerational history in a time altered by modernity, Amanat acutely traces the uncertainties, struggles, joys, and losses of a corner of the post-Soviet world often unseen and overlooked.

Utterly absorbing, Amanat is an invitation to listen-the women of Kazakhstan have stories to tell.

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Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth.

International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a "peace that is no peace" everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, empowering the nuclear club and, above all, the United States, to push sanctions and even preventive war against atomic outlaws, all in humanity's name.

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Lan Anh Hoang, "Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Vietnam and Russia share a common socialist history dating back to the Cold War. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Vietnam’s đổi mới reforms, Russia has also become a destination for Vietnamese labour migrants who dream of making their fortune. Working in markets, garment factories, and as small traders – both legally and illegally - they live precarious lives, harassed by police, loan sharks, market bosses, and criminals. While huge profits can be made, these migrants are acutely vulnerable to sudden changes in market conditions and government policy, not to mention the bitter Russian cold. In Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty (Amsterdam UP, 2020), Lan Anh Hoang presents an astonishing account of the struggles of Vietnamese migrants in Russia. The book also raises broader issues: about the global phenomenon of labour migration of unskilled Asian workers; and most poignantly, about how conditions of acute uncertainty and dependence on the market in a foreign land, upset migrants’ normal conceptions of social values and morality.

Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty won the 2022 Association of Mainland Southeast Asian Scholars (AMSEAS) prize for best first book.

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.

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Olena Braichenko et al., "Ukraine: Food and History" (O. Braichenko, 2020)

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Ukraine: Food and History (O. Braichenko, 2020) tells about the past and present of Ukrainian cuisine. It includes recipes of dishes that everyone can cook and local products, which together present Ukraine’s cultural diversity and rich heritage. Learn from the book about the culinary traditions of Ukraine which are still alive nowadays, as well cooking techniques, and ways of product preservation. The authors pay special attention to the way Ukrainian cuisine is presented whether during a diplomatic reception or a family dinner. Since table setting, and decoration also create atmosphere of the event and guests’ experience.

This book is available open access here.

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Sofya Glazunova, "Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) examines various forms of Russian online anti-establishment resistance, focusing in particular on the period between 2016 and 2019. Grounded in qualitative content analysis of the YouTube videos and social media activities of opposition activist Alexey Navalny and his associates, the book covers the history of digital resistance associated with this cohort, its style and strategies, and the impact that this form of political communication has had on the Russian public sphere.

Sofya Glazunova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Glazunova specialises in political communication, digital resistance, Russian media, disinformation, fake news, and digital propaganda. In addition to Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (2022), she is the co-author of the Global Disinformation Index report entitled Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in Australia (2021).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Darra Goldstein, "The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food" (U California Press, 2022)

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food (U California Press, 2022) unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers readers a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians' ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia's social structures from within. This is a domestic history of Russian food that serves up a deeper history, demonstrating that the wooden spoon is mightier than the scepter.

Darra Goldstein is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita, at Williams College and founding editor of Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture, named Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She is author of six award-winning cookbooks, including Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, and Fire + Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking, which was nominated for a James Beard, IACP, and The Art of Eating awards. Darra also serves as a series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture and has written for Gourmet, Saveur, Bon Appetit, and The New York Times. Follow Darra on Instagram.

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Kees Boterbloem, "Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725: A Forgotten Friendship" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Once upon a time, it was said that Russia was isolated and ignorant until Peter the Great opened Russia to the West and ushered in modernization. While Tsar Peter I surely did look to the West in his quest to modernize Russia, these processes were underway well before Peter ever launched his first sailboat. Thousands of Europeans who lived in Moscow under the first Romanovs contributed in myriad ways to these modernizing processes. A significant portion of them were from the Netherlands, the small republic at Europe’s edge that threw off its Spanish overloads, mastered its marshy littoral, and went to become the economic powerhouse of seventeenth-century Europe. Building from the unfinished work of the late Jordan Kurland, Kees Boterbloem’s Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725: A Forgotten Friendship (Lexington Books, 2021) guides us through one of Russia’s most important early modern relationships. This brisque and engaging read introduces us to the diplomats, merchants, mercenaries, and shipwrights, who mediated all manner of exchanges between Russia and the Netherlands, offering a fresh perspective on how this important relationship changed before and during the reign of Peter I.

Erika Monahan is an editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russia and Eurasian Studies and associate professor of History at the University of New Mexico. In 2023-2024 she is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow with the University of Cologne.

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Eli Gumener, "A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir Of Sorrow" (Slavica, 2022)

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Michael Eli Nutkiewicz about his translation A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir Of Sorrow (Slavica, 2022).

Eli Gumener’s 1921 Yiddish memoir, A Ukrainian Chapter, is a rare historical source about relief work spanning the two most devastating years of the pogroms in the Russian Civil War. He concentrates on the collapse of Jewish communities in Podolia, a region in southwest Ukraine. Gumener worked for the major Russian and American organizations that were active in providing aid to Jewish victims during both World War I and the Russian Civil War. Thus, he presents a unique perspective on leaders, parties, and institutions struggling to respond to the suffering and dislocation that came with wild episodes of violence. This annotated translation serves as a roadmap for the reader by clarifying the social and political contexts in which the events took place. A Ukrainian Chapter is a contribution to the history of pogroms, relief work, and Jewish party politics, through the day-to-day experience of a witness “in the trenches.”

Born in Marijampole (near Vilnius) in 1886 and trained for the law in St. Petersburg, Eli (Illia) Gumener (1886–1941?) was a representative and investigator for the Committee to Aid Jewish Pogrom Victims (EKOPO) and the Russian Red Cross. After the Civil War, he worked on behalf of Jewish war orphans for the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJC) in the Białystok region. A Ukrainian Chapter was published in Vilnius in 1921. In 1925 Gumener moved to Novogrudok, Poland (now in Belarus) where he continued to be engaged in communal affairs, including as a city councilman from 1929 to 1934. He and his wife and daughter were murdered during the Holocaust in late 1941 or early 1942.

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Ephraim (Alexander) Kholmyansky, "The Voice of Silence: The Story of the Jewish Underground in the USSR" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Ephraim (Alexander) Kholmyansky's book The Voice of Silence: The Story of the Jewish Underground in the USSR (Academic Studies Press, 2021) is the personal story of an underground Hebrew teacher in the communist Soviet Union who was sentenced to prison after false claims by the KGB. He kept a hunger strike for 207 days to draw international solidarity. But his book is more than exotic memoir literature. It is a vivid, touching and thoughtful account of his Jewish spiritual growth, a painful discovery of the most subtle inner aspects of faith.

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Natasha Lance Rogoff, "Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing appeared perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children living in the former Soviet Union. With the Muppets envisioned as ideal ambassadors of Western values, no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be.

Brimming with insight and nuance, Muppets in Moscow skillfully explores the post-Soviet societal tensions that continue to thwart the Russian people’s efforts to create a better future for their country. More than just a story of a children’s show, this book provides a valuable perspective of Russia’s people, their culture, and their complicated relationship with the West that remains relevant even today.

Natasha Lance Rogoff is an award-winning television director, producer and writer of more than 25 years. Her previous credits include executive producer of Ulitsa Sezam (Sesame Street in Russia) and producer of Plaza Sesamo (Sesame Street in Mexico.) After studying at the Leningrad State University, she wrote about Soviet underground culture, as well as one of the earliest exposé of Soviet government persecution of the Russian LGBTQ community in the San Francisco Chronicle. Her 1985 film, Rock Around the Kremlin, about underground rock artists, aired on ABC TV’s “20/20. Lance Rogoff embedded herself with hardline Russian communist fascists for two years, filming “Russia for Sale” which aired on ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel the night of the failed 1991 coup that ended the Soviet Union. She is now an Associate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies Department at Harvard University and lives between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter and follow the book on Facebook.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Daniel Scarborough, "Russia's Social Gospel: The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The late Russian Empire experienced rapid economic change, social dislocation, and multiple humanitarian crises, enduring two wars, two famines, and three revolutions. A "pastoral activism" took hold as parish clergymen led and organized the response of Russia's Orthodox Christians to these traumatic events. In Russia's Social Gospel: The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution (U Wisconsin Press, 2022), Daniel Scarborough considers the roles played by pastors in the closing decades of the failing tsarist empire and the explosive 1917 revolutions.

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Jonathan Brunstedt, "The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge UP, 2021), Jonathan Brunstedt examines how Soviet society, a community committed to the Marxist ideals of internationalism, reconciled itself to notions of patriotist, Russian nationalism, and the glorification of war. Brunstedt does through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II – arguably the central defining event of the Soviet epoch. The book shows that while the experience and legacy of the conflict did much to reinforce a sense of Russian exceptionalism and Russian-led ethnic hierarchy, the story of the war enabled an alternative, supra-ethnic source of belonging, which subsumed Russian and non-Russian loyalties alike to the Soviet whole. The tension and competition between Russocentric and 'internationalist' conceptions of victory, which burst into the open during the late 1980s, reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space. The book sheds new light on long-standing questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the patriotic revival of the war's memory in Russia today.

Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell.

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Eleanor Knott, "Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Moldova, the number of dual citizens has risen exponentially in the last decades. Before annexation, many saw Russia as granting citizenship to-or passportizing-large numbers in Crimea. Both are regions with kin majorities: local majorities claimed as co-ethnic by external states offering citizenship, among other benefits. As functioning citizens of the states in which they reside, kin majorities do not need to acquire citizenship from an external state. Yet many do so in high numbers.

Eleanor Knott's book Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) explores why these communities engage with dual citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing data collected from ordinary people in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and 2013, just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of calm. Perhaps surprisingly, the discourse and practice of Russian citizenship was largely absent in Crimea before annexation. Comparing the situation in Crimea with the strong presence of Romanian citizenship in Moldova, Knott explores two rarely researched cases from the ground up, shedding light on why Romanian citizenship was more prevalent and popular in Moldova than Russian citizenship in Crimea, and to what extent identity helps explain the difference.

Kin Majorities offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on how citizenship interacts with cross-border and local identities, with crucial implications for the politics of geography, nation, and kin-states, as well as broader understandings of post-Soviet politics.

Joan Francisco Matamoros Sanin is an anthropologist dedicated to Medical Anthropology as well as public education and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. He has a MsC and a PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Mexico's National Autonomous University. Matamoros has ample ethnographic experience in urban and rural areas in Mexico and Ecuador. You can find him on his Spotify and YouTube Platform (AnthropoMX) and in New Books Network. Currently he is a tutor in the Center for Regional Cooperation for Adult Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a postdoctoral fellow in CIESAS-Unidad Pacífico Sur (acronym in spanish for the South Pacific Center of Research in Advance Studies in Social Anthropology).

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Anton Weiss-Wendt and Nanci Adler, eds., "The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin's Russia" (Indiana UP, 2021)

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In post-Soviet Russia, there is a persistent trend to repress, control, or even co-opt national history. By reshaping memory to suit a politically convenient narrative, Russia has fashioned a good future out of a "bad past."

While Putin's regime has acquired nearly complete control over interpretations of the past, Anton Weiss-Wendt and Nanci Adler's edited volume The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin's Russia (Indiana UP, 2021) reveals that Russia's inability to fully rewrite its Soviet history plays an essential part in its current political agenda. Diverse contributors consider the many ways in which public narrative shapes Russian culture—from cinema, television, and music to museums, legislature, and education—as well as how patriotism reflected in these forms of culture implies a casual acceptance of the valorization of Stalin and his role in World War II.

The Future of the Soviet Past provides effective and nuanced examples of how Russia has reimagined its Soviet history as well as how that past still influences Russia's policymaking.

Cynthia M. Horne is a Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University.

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Matthias Bernt, "The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg" (Wiley, 2022)

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Matthias Bernt demonstrates how different institutional arrangements have resulted in the facilitation, deceleration or alteration of gentrification across time and place. The book is based on empirical studies conducted in Great Britain, Germany and Russia and contains one of the first-ever English language discussions of gentrification in Germany and Russia. It begins with an examination of the limits of the widely established “rent-gap” theory and proposes the novel concept of the “commodification gap.” It then moves on to explore how different institutional contexts in the UK, Germany and Russia have framed the conditions for these gaps to enable gentrification. The Commodification Gap is an indispensable resource for researchers and academics studying human geography, housing studies, urban sociology and spatial planning.

Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter.

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Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

An alienated society divided into groups and classes suspicious of one another does not pose an especially great problem for an authoritarian regime that does not legitimize itself through fair elections. In contrast, democratic institutions presuppose a consensus about obeying common “rules of the game” and rely on a culture of trust and reciprocity. For democratic consolidation, citizens must respect and participate in shared democratic institutions. For instance, they should trust courts as the final arbiters in adjudicating disputes and respect judicial decisions even if they disagree with them. They should also recognize results of elections, even if their favorite candidate loses.

– Monika Nalepa, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (2010)

This book tackles three puzzles of pacted transitions to democracy. First, why do autocrats ever step down from power peacefully if they know that they may be held accountable for their involvement in the ancien régime? Second, when does the opposition indeed refrain from meting out punishment to the former autocrats once the transition is complete? Third, why, in some countries, does transitional justice get adopted when successors of former communists hold parliamentary majorities? Monika Nalepa argues that infiltration of the opposition with collaborators of the authoritarian regime can serve as insurance against transitional justice, making their commitments to amnesty credible. This explanation also accounts for the timing of transitional justice across East Central Europe. Nalepa supports her theory using a combination of elite interviews, archival evidence, and statistical analysis of survey experiments in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Here are Monika’s book recommendations and links to the articles mentioned in this interview:

Anne Meng’s Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes;
Bryn Rosenfeld’s The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy;
Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century;
Milena Ang and Monika Nalepa’s chapter ‘What can Quantitative and Formal Models Teach us About Transitional Justice’
Monika Nalepa and Barbara Piotrowskaw’s article ‘Clean sweep or picking out the ‘bad apples’: the logic of secret police purges with evidence from Post-Communist Poland’.

See also Professor Nalepa’s discussion with Miranda Melcher about her latest Cambridge University Press release - After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability on the NBN.

Monika Nalepa’s research focuses on transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. She teaches courses in game theory, comparative politics, and transitional justice at the University of Chicago.

Keith Krueger lectures part-time in the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University.

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The Future of Vladimir Putin: A Discussion with Philip Short

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

President Vladmir Putin – the son of a foreman at a railway carriage works – is today one of the most powerful individuals on earth. What drives him? What does he want his legacy to be? Was he once a liberal? What is he now? After 22 years in power what do we know about him. The Western press often portrays him as an irrational monster – how does he see himself? Owen Bennett Jones speaks to Philip Short who has studied the man for 8 years and written a well-reviewed and comprehensive biography of the Russian President: Putin (Henry Holt & Company, 2022).

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Agha Bayramov, "Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region" (Routledge, 2022)

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Caspian Sea region has hitherto largely been investigated from a New Great Game' perspective that depicts the region as a geopolitical battleground between regional and external great powers, where tensions have been exacerbated by the sea's rich natural resources, strategic location, and legal disagreements over its status.

Agha Bayramov,'s book Constructive Competition in the Caspian Sea Region (Routledge, 2022), by contrast, portrays a new image of the region, which still acknowledges the difficulties and problematic starting situation of power politics there. It, however, seeks to show that there are ways forward by identifying mechanisms and means to transform the New Great Game' into processes of functional co-operation. Drawing on theoretical insights from a functionalist framework, this book examines three intertwined case studies, namely the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC), the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), and the Caspian Environmental Program (CEP). It shows that lessons learned from environmental co-operation have influenced the discussion over the uncertain legal status of the sea, which culminated in the signing in 2018 of the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. This book analyzes the three phases of the BTC and the SGC projects: the planning of the pipeline, its construction, and its use, none of which have been adequately addressed yet. This book illustrates the increasing role of actors beyond and besides the states in the Caspian Sea region, such as transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations, and intergovernment organizations.

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he also edits Europe-Asia Studies.

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On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "The Brothers Karamazov"

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Brothers Karmazov is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel. In it, he presents his ideas about culture, the human soul, and God, and he uses his characters, the brothers Ivan, Dimitri, and Alyosha, as examples of his philosophical ideas. These brothers have to reconcile with the past, but also for their part in it. This book was a response to the conditions in Russia at the time it was written. And since then, it’s continued to shape philosophy itself. Yuri Corrigan is an Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Boston University. He studies the intersections of philosophy, religion, and psychology in modern Russian and European literature. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self and is working on two new books, titled Soul Wars and Chekhov as a Moral Thinker. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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The Future of Cold War: A Discussion with Sergey Radchenko

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works.

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Alexander Mikaberidze, "Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

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Daniel B. Rowland, "God, Tsar, and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia" (Northern Illinois UP, 2020)

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In God, Tsar and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois UP, 2020), Dr. Daniel Rowland collects close to 50 years of scholarship, between two book covers. The de facto mandate on Russian tsars to take advice, and the importance of biblical and liturgical imagery to Muscovite political culture, are among the important themes emerging from this collection of scholarship.

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Ofer Fridman, "Russian 'Hybrid Warfare': Resurgence and Politicization" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When Russia occupied the Crimea in 2014, a term appeared called “hybrid warfare” to describe the doctrine and strategies of the Russian military. One consistent issue was that there was never any consensus on what exactly "hybrid warfare" even meant other than a novel use of military and non-military means to undermine and defeat an enemy nation. What exactly is “hybrid warfare” and are the Russians true masters of this supposedly new form of warfare? These issues are addressed in Ofer Fridman's book Russian Hybrid Warfare: Resurgence and Politicization (Oxford University Press, 2022). Originally published in 2018, this episode will discuss the recent updated 2022 edition.

Ofer Fridman is Director of Operations at the King's Centre for Strategic Communications and a research fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history.

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How to Avoid More Damage from the Russian War on Ukraine

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Western coalition supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia has so far been thought to be solid and reliable, but there may be vulnerabilities in that support. Even as Russia seems to be in disarray on the battlefield and elsewhere, it's been believed all along that Vladimir Putin would use his control over oil and gas resources on which Europe depends to assert leverage over the West in the conflict and heating costs are indeed rising just as the cold weather is descending. The US is less affected by the vicissitudes of energy supplies, but it is hardly immune to these concerns either.

This week on International Horizons, Marcus Stanley from Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft discusses the attitudes of Americans towards the war on Ukraine and how they seem to be more concerned with inflation than the war. Stanley also delves into the challenges of reaching an agreement between Russia and Ukraine and the possible solutions where mediation seems the only way out. He also warns about the need for intervention before an escalation with devastating consequences for Ukrainians and effects on the US and NATO, the prospects of winter without gas in Europe, and the consequences for Russia of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.

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The Two Russias

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the late 1980s, Hollywood reflected the real world thaw in the Cold War by depicting the idea of two Russias: the cold bureaucratic state run by grey men intent on propping up a crumbling regime, and the beautiful, little known country of real, everyday Russians who live rich and full lives despite it all. Our three films this week show the two Russias in different ways and in different stages of the 1980s Cold War. White Nights, the story of a Russian ballet dancer who defected to America and is forced to return, came out in December 1985. The Hunt for Red October, based on a 1984 Tom Clancy novel, was released in March 1990, a few months after the world changed. The Russia House, based on John le Carre’s 1989 novel came out Christmas Day, 1990, exactly one year before the Soviet Union closed up shop for good.

Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here.

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Sean Brennan, "The KGB and the Vatican: Secrets of the Mitrokhin Files" (CUA Press, 2022)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that, for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government’s policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this, especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This valuable primary source collection also contains a historical introduction written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at the University of Scranton.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Donald Ostrowski, "Russia in the Early Modern World: The Continuity of Change" (Lexington, 2022)

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Russia in the Early Modern World: The Continuity of Change (Lexington, 2022), Donald Ostrowski takes on the long-lived narrative that Peter the Great's reign constituted a pivot point in Russian history. Before Peter, this narrative generally says, there was continuity and even stagnation; after the Petrine Revolution, however, was dynamism, Westernization, and so on. Thoroughly documented and creatively organized, Professor Ostrowski's book suggests that this long-establish narrative has its roots in nineteenth-century Russian historical scholarship that was less attentive to the evidence than it should have been.

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Ian W. Campbell, "Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917" (Cornell UP, 2017)

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), Ian W. Campbell investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Hoping to better govern the region, tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about an unfamiliar environment and population. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to represent themselves and their landscape to the tsarist state. Because tsarist officials were uncertain of what the steppe was, and disagreed on what could be made of it, Kazaks were able to be part of these debates, at times influencing the policies that were pursued.

Drawing on archival materials from Russia and Kazakhstan and a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals in Russian and Kazak, Campbell tells a story that highlights the contingencies of and opportunities for cooperation with imperial rule. Kazak intermediaries were at first able to put forward their own idiosyncratic views on whether the steppe was to be Muslim or secular, whether it should be a center of stock-raising or of agriculture, and the extent to which local institutions needed to give way to imperial institutions. It was when the tsarist state was most confident in its knowledge of the steppe that it committed its gravest errors by alienating Kazak intermediaries and placing unbearable stresses on pastoral nomads. From the 1890s on, when the dominant visions in St. Petersburg were of large-scale peasant colonization of the steppe and its transformation into a hearth of sedentary agriculture, the same local knowledge that Kazaks had used to negotiate tsarist rule was transformed into a language of resistance.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her work focuses on histories of nomad-state relationships and uses of architecture in nomadic contexts, with a focus on the Middle East.

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Andrey V. Ivanov, "A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1825" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the long eighteenth century. Though the Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, A Spiritual Revolution argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observers called a religious revolution.

Embedded with lively portrayals of historical actors and vivid descriptions of political details, A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1825 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) is the first large-scale effort to fully identify exactly how Western thought influenced the Russian Church. These new ideas played a foundational role in the emergence of the country as a modernizing empire and the rise of the Church hierarchy as a forward-looking agency of institutional and societal change. Ivanov addresses this important debate in the scholarship on European history, firmly placing Orthodoxy within the much wider European and global continuum of religious change.

Andrey Ivanov, Associate professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Plattsville.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell, 2016).

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Sasha Senderovich, "How the Soviet Jew Was Made" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew – not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In his monograph How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022), Sasha Senderovich finds this new cultural figure through close readings of post-1917 Russia/Yiddish literature, films, and reportage. Suddenly mobile after more than a century of restrictions under the tsars, Jewish authors created characters who traversed space and history, carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost world. Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

Sasha Senderovich is an Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Miriam Chorley-Schulz is the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.

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Joseph Torigian, "Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao" (Yale UP, 2022)

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Unfortunately, one takeaway for readers of this book should be the difficulty that not only outside analysts but even party insiders face when trying to understand elite politics in Leninist regimes. Sinologists have always struggled to see inside the “black box,” and the track record is not strong. Yet getting history right is immensely important, as the past is one of the few places that allow us to understand structural features that might persist.

– Joseph Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion (2022)

The political successions in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, respectively, are often explained as triumphs of inner‑party democracy, leading to a victory of “reformers” over “conservatives” or “radicals.” In traditional thinking, Leninist institutions provide competitors a mechanism for debating policy and making promises, stipulate rules for leadership selection, and prevent the military and secret police from playing a coercive role. Here, Joseph Torigian argues that the post-cult of personality power struggles in history’s two greatest Leninist regimes were instead shaped by the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence. Mining newly discovered material from Russia and China, Torigian challenges the established historiography and suggests a new way of thinking about the nature of power in authoritarian regimes.

Professor Torigian’s insightful and accessible journal articles with hyperlinks and book recommendations from this interview for listeners interested in exploring related concepts and ideas:

Open Access Global Studies Quarterly article ‘A New Case for the Study of individual Events in Political Science’ as mentioned regarding influence of historical institutionalism in his approach;
Open Access Journal of Cold War Studies article which serves as a sequel to his book – ‘You Don’t Know Khrushchev Well: The Ouster of the Soviet Leader as a Challenge to Recent Scholarship on Authoritarian Politics’;
Robert Caro’s Working : Researching, Interviewing, Writing;
David Halloway’s Stalin and The Bomb;
Chinese University of Hong Kong’s 中华人民共和国史 (Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guoshi)
Theda Skopol’s States and Social Revolutions – A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China which is required reading for students in his masters-level class on China and Russia.

See also Joseph’s illuminating ‘War on the Rocks’ post-doc blog post of January 2017 in which, among other things, he correctly anticipates the PRC’s top leadership succession as non-event.

Joseph Torigian is assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington D.C. His research focuses on the study of the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy. His research agenda draws upon comparative politics, historical institutionalism and international relations with a focus on relevant questions about the long-term political trajectories of both China and Russia.

Keith Krueger lectures part-time in the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University.

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Alexandr Dugin, Russia’s Imperial Philosopher: Into the Mind of a Russian Political Theorist

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

We look at the mind behind Russia’s imperial vision, Aleksandr Dugin. Political theorist Matt McManus walks us through this far-right thinker’s strange and often contradictory ideas, from: his geopolitical clash-of-civilizations narrative, his flirtation with left-wing postmodernism, his Nietzschean great man-visions, his rejection of all things liberal, and his more ancient and mystical imagination.

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Fritz Bartel, "The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them.

In a sweeping narrative, The Triumph of Broken Promises (Harvard University Press, 2022) tells the story of how the pressure to break promises spurred the end of the Cold War. In the West, neoliberalism provided Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with the political and ideological tools to shut down industries, impose austerity, and favor the interests of capital over labor. But in Eastern Europe, revolutionaries like Lech Walesa in Poland resisted any attempt at imposing market discipline. Mikhail Gorbachev tried in vain to reform the Soviet system, but the necessary changes ultimately presented too great a challenge.

Faced with imposing economic discipline antithetical to communist ideals, Soviet-style governments found their legitimacy irreparably damaged. But in the West, politicians could promote austerity as an antidote to the excesses of ideological opponents, setting the stage for the rise of the neoliberal global economy.

Fritz Bartel is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, "Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This comprehensive three-volume reference work collects and summarizes the wealth of information available in the field of transitional justice. Transitional justice is an emerging domain of inquiry that has gained importance with the regime changes in Latin America after the 1970s, the collapse of the European and Soviet communist regimes in 1989 and 1991, and the Arab revolutions of 2011, among others. The Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (Cambridge UP, 2013), which offers 287 entries written by 166 scholars and practitioners drawn from diverse jurisdictions, includes detailed country studies; entries on transitional justice institutions and organizations; descriptions of transitional justice methods, processes and practices; examinations of key debates and controversies; and a glossary of relevant terms and concepts.

This podcast will review both the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice and preview the second edition, forthcoming in March 2023. We explore new country entries, an expanded scope of formal and informal transitional justice and accountability mechanisms, and a broader range of civil society groups, informal organizations, national and international actors engaged in global transitional justice processes. Dr. Stan provides some comments on the evolution of the field of transitional justice over the past 25 years, hinting at some of the legal and normative shifts in the future.

Cynthia M. Horne is a Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University.

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On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Born into an aristocratic family, Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s life was forever changed when he served as an officer in the Crimean War. The brutality he witnessed during the war transformed him from a privileged, aristocratic author to a non-violent anarchist. War and Peace explores the brutal reality of what happens when we make war more humane. Tolstoy’s work has inspired nonviolent pacifist movements across the globe and influenced leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Samuel Moyn is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and more. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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Adrienne Edgar, "Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Adrienne Edgar's Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples—Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an outstanding study of the evolution of intermarriage practices in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan across the Soviet era and beyond. Based on substantive oral history research work, plus extensive engagement with published and unpublished Soviet sources, the book tells an intriguing story, one that delves into the ever intriguing process of ethnic mixing. As a phenomenon that transcended revolution, war, de-Stalinisation, and independence in a remote part of the Soviet Union, intermarriage becomes a vehicle for a wider argument focusing on the racialization of identities. Edgar’s engaging prose engage with wider process, including the inexorable involution of Soviet internationalism and the rise of primordialism, top describe how mixed couples and families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan were painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union.

Adrienne Edgar is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she works on the history of the Soviet Union, especially the history of Central Asia in the Soviet period. She is the author of Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan

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Mark D. Steinberg, "Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

It has long been a cliché to argue that Russian revolutionary movements have been inspired by varieties of 'utopian dreaming' – claims which, although not wrong, are too often used uncritically. With Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities (Bloomsbury, 2021), Mark D. Steinberg asks what utopia meant at the level of ideas, emotions, and lived experience by looking at the work of a wide range of actors, from political leaders to workers and peasants.

Mark D. Steinberg is Professor Emeritus within the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He specialises in the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities, his recent books include The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and the extensively revised ninth edition of A History of Russia with Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Christina E. Crawford, "Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2022) is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929.

Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making.

Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

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Roselyn Hsueh, "Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Roselyn Hsueh’s Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2022) presents a new framework for understanding how developing countries integrate into the global economy. Examining the labor-intensive textile sector and the capital-intensive telecommunications sector in China, India, and Russia, Hsueh shows how differences in the way elites perceive the strategic value of a sector can lead to dramatically different patterns of governance.

Author Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is also the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization and scholarly articles and book chapters on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and development and globalization. She is a frequent commentator on international politics, finance and trade, and comparative economic development. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China.

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Anastasia Shesterinina, "Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Anastasia Shesterinina begins Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) with an account of Georgian troops crossing into eastern Abkhazia, in the Southern Caucasus region adjacent Russia, on August 14, 1992. Thus the war that is the book’s subject began. Yet, people didn’t know it at the time. In fact, the question on people’s lips was: is this a war? The answer to the question was: yes. But the uncertainty to which the question gave voice led Shesterinina to the questions motivating this book, namely: how do ordinary people deal with uncertainty in civil war? How do they decide whether and in what way to mobilise, and for whom?

On this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science Anastasia Shesterinina discusses her answers to these questions. Along the way, she also reflects on the inadequacies of theories that underestimate or overlook the uncertainty that pervades wartime conditions, particularly in wars’ earliest days; on the conduct and ethics of interview and ethnographic research in post-war settings; and, on the relevance of her research on Abkhazia for our understanding of the war in Ukraine today—and on why comparison of the two is, for her, not just an intellectually or politically interesting exercise.

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is (with Mona El-Ghobashy’s Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, Stanford, 2021) joint winner of the 2022 Charles Taylor Book Award, awarded annually by the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods.

Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and in Fall 2022 a fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU.

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Anthony Pagden, "The Pursuit of Europe: A History" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community.

The Pursuit of Europe: A History (Oxford UP, 2022) tells the story of the evolution of the "European project", from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a "Concert of Europe", right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need to find an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars had shown that if the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world they could now only do so together.

To achieve that, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealously-guarded sovereign powers into a new form of trans-national constitutionalism. This the European Union has tried to do. In the process it has created not, as its enemies have claimed, a "super-state" but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a common body of values and aspirations.

It is this, argues Anthony Pagden, that will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within, and to overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, which it faces from without. But it will only succeed in doing so if it also continues to evolve as it has over the past

two centuries.

Anthony Pagden is Professor of Political Science and History, at The University of California, Los Angeles. He was educated in Chile, Spain, and France, and at Oxford. In the past two decades, he has been the reader in intellectual history at Cambridge, a fellow of King's College, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

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Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu, "Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine have brought scholarly and public attention to Ukraine's borders. Making Ukraine aims to investigate the various processes of negotiation, delineation, and contestation that have shaped the country's borders throughout the past century. Essays by contributors from various historical fields consider how, when, and under what conditions the borders that historically define the country were agreed upon. A diverse set of national and transnational contexts are explored, with a primary focus on the critical period between 1917 and 1954. Chapters are organized around three main themes: the interstate treaties that brought about the new international order in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the formation of the internal boundaries between Ukraine and other Soviet republics, and the delineation of Ukraine's borders with its western neighbours. Investigating the process of bordering Ukraine in the post-Soviet era, contributors also pay close attention to the competing visions of future relations between Ukraine and Russia. Through its broad geographic and thematic coverage, Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu's Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) illustrates that the dynamics of contemporary border formation cannot be fully understood through the lens of a sole state, frontier, or ideology and sheds light on the shared history of territory and state formation in Europe and the wider modern world.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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Kathryn E. Stoner, "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet 25 years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs. Taking into account how Russian domestic politics under Vladimir Putin influence its foreign policy, Stoner explains how Russia has battled its way back to international prominence.

From Russia's seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine to its military support for the Assad regime in Syria, the country has reasserted itself as a major global power. Stoner examines these developments and more in tackling the big questions about Russia's turnaround and global future. Stoner marshals data on Russia's political, economic, and social development and uncovers key insights from its domestic politics. Russian people are wealthier than the Chinese, debt is low, and fiscal policy is good despite sanctions and the volatile global economy. Vladimir Putin's autocratic regime faces virtually no organized domestic opposition. Yet, mindful of maintaining control at home, Russia under Putin also uses its varied power capacities to extend its influence abroad. While we often underestimate Russia's global influence, the consequences are evident in the disruption of politics in the

US, Syria, and Venezuela, to name a few. Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford UP, 2020) is an eye-opening reassessment of the country, identifying the actual sources of its power in international politics and why it has been able to redefine the post-Cold War global order.

Kathryn E. Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, all at Stanford University. She is the author orco-editor of five books, including Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, written and edited with Ambassador Michael A. McFaul, and Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia.

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Sergei Zhuk, "KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991" (Routledge, 2022)

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Oriented for a general reading audience, Sergei Zhuk's book KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991 (Routledge, 2022) gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB special operations in Soviet Ukraine, which targeted especially the USA and Canada, using issues related to Soviet Ukrainian identity and cultural diplomacy of Soviet Ukraine after Stalin's death in 1953 until the perestroika of the 1980s.

Concentrating on the period of the Cold War after Stalin and combining the counterintelligence documents from the KGB archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the official KGB correspondence and reports to the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine, this book offers an experimental view of the political and cultural history of relations between Soviet Ukraine and capitalist America through the prism of KGB operations against the US and Canada. Written from a hidden perspective of KGB operations from 1953 to the end of the 1980s, this book covers intelligence and counter-intelligence operations and the active measures of the KGB, but also various problems of anti-American cultural campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, sponsored by the KGB, involving the issues of cultural consumption, knowledge production, youth culture and national identity.

Using carefully researched archive materials, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of KGB operations, the Cold War, counterintelligence and political and cultural history of the relations between Soviet Ukraine and the United States and Canada, and a role of cultural consumption in this history.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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War and Peace: America's Humane War and the Crisis in Ukraine

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This podcast is a recorded panel discussion on “War and Peace: America's Humane War and the Crisis in Ukraine.” The panel was part of the Annual Conference of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) held on May 12, 2022 at the University of Connecticut in Hartford.

The discussion considers the recent book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, written by Samuel Moyn, and its relevance to the current war in Ukraine. The event featured the author (Moyn), as well as Silja Voeneky, of the University of Freiburg, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Frauke Lachenmann, of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium. James Cavallaro, of the University Network for Human Rights, Yale Law School and Wesleyan University, was the moderator. The public address questions to the panelists in the second half of the event.

Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University.

Prof. Dr. Silja Vöneky (Voeneky) is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Law, Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law and Ethics of Law and an associated member of the Institute for Philosophy of Law. Since October 2019, she has served as the Vice Dean of the Freiburg Law Faculty.

Frauke Lachenmann is an international lawyer and holds a PhD in English literature. She has worked for the UNHCR in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for International Law and the Max Planck Foundation for the Rule of Law in Heidelberg and has been a Visiting Researcher at Yale.

James (Jim) Cavallaro is the Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He teaches at Wesleyan University, Yale Law School and UCLA Law School. Prior to co-founding the University Network, he served as a professor of law at Stanford Law School (2011-2019) and a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School (2002-2011).

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Japan’s Reaction to Russia’s War in Ukraine

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has dramatically affected international politics, and the effects are also felt in East Asia. We have heard a lot about China’s position regarding the war, but the situation has also affected security and defense calculations in Japan, one of the key allies of the West in Asia. How did Japan react to the war, what has it meant for Japan's own territorial dispute with Russia, and how do the evolving East Asian, Indo-Pacific, and European security environments look from a Japanese perspective? In this episode, Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is joined by two specialists on Japanese society and politics, Dr. Kamila Szczepanska and Dr. Silja Keva, to answer these questions.

Dr. Kamila Szczepanska is a University Lecturer at the Centre for East Asian Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Political Science and Contemporary History at the University of Turku. Dr. Silja Keva is a University Teacher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku.

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Ukrainian Nationalism in Historical Context

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb historians: John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Alberta; David R. Stone, is a Professor in Russian Studies in the United States, Naval War College; Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

John-Paul Himka is an American-Canadian historian and retired professor of history of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Himka received his BA in Byzantine-Slavonic Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 1971 and 1977 respectively. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation was Polish and Ukrainian Socialism: Austria, 1867–1890. He received numerous awards for both excellence in teaching and in research. His work on Ukrainian history has been subject to widespread debate and discussion in Ukraine.

David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies at the Naval War College, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.

Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners.

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Andrew Monaghan, "Russian Grand Strategy in the Era of Global Power Competition" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The status of Russia as a world power has been fiercely debated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although often ignored, Russia came back into the international limelight in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and recently in 2022 with the war in Ukraine. However, what are the underlining precepts behind Russian behavior on the international stage, and how do Russian leaders perceive their country’s place in the world? To answer these questions is Russian Grand Strategy in the Era of Global Power Competition (Manchester University Press, 2022) edited by Andrew Monaghan.

Dr. Andrew Monaghan is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. This spring he was a George F Kennan Fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. He is the author of a number of books on Russia, including Dealing with the Russians.

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Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A Jackson, "Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia: Worlds Ever More Enchanted" (NIAS Press, 2022)

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What is the relationship between Spirit Possession Rituals and Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia?

How has modernity transformed Spirit Possession cults in the 21st century and what has led to the efflorescence of possession rituals across Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in recent decades?

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson joined Terese Gagnon on the Nordic Asia Podcast handing out important insights of their new edited volume Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia, Worlds ever More Enchanted that was published with NIAS Press in March 2022. Spirit Possession examines the upsurge of spirit cults and diverse forms of magical ritual in Buddhist Southeast Asia by exploring the interplay of neoliberal capitalism, visual media, the network cultures of the Internet, and the politics of cultural heritage and identity.

Visit the NIAS Press Webshop to find the book and get your copy here.

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière is an anthropologist at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and former director of its Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE). She specializes on Burma-Myanmar, where she has conducted regular field research since the 1980s, and has written widely on religion and rituals.

Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Thai cultural history at the Australian National University. Over the past four decades, he has written extensively on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Thailand as well as critical approaches to Asian area studies. His ongoing research includes studying media and masculinity in Thai gay cultures and religion and ritual in Thai communities affected by HIV.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Catherine Gibson, "Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford UP, 2022) examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies.

Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.

Catherine Gibson is a historian of modern eastern Europe, currently a research fellow at the University of Tartu in Estonia.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

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David L. Sloss, "Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies.

Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world. Sloss calls for cooperation among democratic governments to create a new transnational system for regulating social media to protect Western democracies from information warfare. Drawing on his professional experience as an arms control negotiator, he outlines a novel system of transnational governance that Western democracies can enforce by harmonizing their domestic regulations. And drawing on his academic expertise in constitutional law, he explains why that system―if implemented by legislation in the United States―would be constitutionally defensible, despite likely First Amendment objections. With its critical examination of information warfare and its proposal for practical legislative solutions to fight back, this book is essential reading in a time when disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine democracy.

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Zarina Burkadze, "Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020" (U Rochester Press, 2022)

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In her book Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020 (University of Rochester Press, 2022), Zarina Burkadze argues that great power competition may distribute political power in a way that causes a democratic regime to emerge, supporting her argument with evidence from an impressive array of archival sources as well as from sixty-six interviews with state officials, opposition leaders, foreign diplomats, media and nongovernmental representatives, and other experts. While the case study of Georgia is the central concern of the narrative, the book’s final chapter provides an important cross-case comparison of democratization efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine.

Zarina Burkadze is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ilia State University. She did her postdoctoral studies as a Fulbright scholar at George Washington University and earned her doctoral degree in political science at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include democratization, democracy, and autocracy promotion.

Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark.

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Olga Bertelsen, "In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s" (Lexington Books, 2022)

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Olga Bertelsen's In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022) focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s-1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s-1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, "active measures" designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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Tomek Jankowski, "Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know about the History (and More) of a Region That Shaped Our World and Still Does" (New Europe, 2021)

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau once gave a press conference while visiting Washington, during which he famously said: "Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." For many of the countries in eastern Europe, this must also ring true, except that the elephant hasn’t necessarily been the same bedfellow. At different points, particularly over the last 2 centuries, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have all caused smaller neighbors to be very nervous––with just cause.

With the current situation in Eastern Europe, as Ukraine and potentially other nations fight for their right to exist, it seems a timely moment to talk to Tomek Jankowski about the recent release of the 2nd edition of his book, Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know about the History (and More) of a Region That Shaped Our World and Still Does, published by Academic Studies Press and New Europe Books. The book is a great hybrid – it can be read all the way through as a fast-paced and easily digestible tour through the history of a region most people in Western Europe and North America don’t know well, or it can be used as a reference text; a reader can dip into it to find answers to questions.

In our far ranging conversation, we discuss the common dynamics and cultural legacies that we can see today as a result of the historical reality that many eastern European countries share. National identity is a complex and contested subject, no more so than in Eastern European where some nations have only existed for short periods of time or, in other cases, national sovereignty has come and gone depending on the era.

In addition to the invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then this year, many other nations that share border with Russia - the Baltic states, Finland, and Moldova – are also feeling increasingly vulnerable. Others, such as Serbia and Hungary, are offering either official or popular support for Russian’s aggression but it is a very contested issue. We discuss the roots of these various reactions.

On the subject of Russia, Jankowski addresses why Putin has repeatedly framed the current war using the language and summoning the ghosts of the Soviet Union’s role in WWII. Even 80 years on. He reminds the listener of Russian sacrifices and losses in that war, explains how they were remembered and understood in the Soviet Union under Stalin, Khrushchev and later leaders, and how they are remembered and understood in Russia today.

Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020)

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Matthew Mark Silver, "Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics" (U Alabama Press, 2020)

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics (U Alabama Press, 2020) moves away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations—and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores.

Silver examines events in three key locales—Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States—during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia’s czarist empire.

In his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States’ melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver’s analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement—and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.

Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref

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Maksim Goldenshteyn, "So They Remember: A Jewish Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Thu, 26 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember: A Jewish Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust.

In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered.

Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners.

In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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K. Friedla and M. Nesselrodt, "Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival (Academic Studies Press, 2021) tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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Putin's War on Ukraine in Historical Perpective

Tue, 24 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

With the war in Ukraine showing no signs of stopping anytime soon, it was thought a worthwhile idea to have an informed discussion with four expert historians of 19th and 20th century European and Eastern European, diplomatic and military history. As you can readily see from the below biographies, this is a superior and award-winning panel. Please listen and enjoy.

University of Exeter, Professor of History Jeremy Black discusses various aspects of the subject at length with Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society in this new episode of 'Arguing History: Slavery in World History'. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred & fifty books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”

Professor Thomas Otte teaches Diplomatic, International and Military History. He is the author or editor of some fifteen books, including, most recently, the award-winning July Crisis: How the World Descended into War, Summer 1914 (CUP, 2014); he has also has published numerous essays in edited collections and articles in leading journals, including the English Historical Review, Historical Journal, and History. Professor Otte is widely regarded as being one of the leading diplomatic historians of his generation.

Professor David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.

Alex Watson's latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners.

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How to Start a Successful Academic Podcast: A Discussion with Sean Guillory

Tue, 24 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Sean Guillory. Sean did something pretty remarkable (and hard): He started a successful academic podcast. It's called the SRB Podcast and deals with Russian and Eurasian affairs. In the interview, Sean explains how he did it, how he does it, and his current project, a wonderful narrative podcast called Teddy Goes to the USSR. I highly recommend you subscribe to the SRB Podcast and Teddy Goes to the USSR. You can follow Sean on Twitter here: @seansrussiablog.

Sean Guillory is the Digital Scholarship Curator at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Olga Bertelsen, "In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s–1970s" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Olga Bertelsen’s timely book, In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022), focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine—a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB “active measures” against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their personal friendships, formal and informal interactions, and how they dealt with repression and arrests. Her book demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s–1970s. Bertelsen shows that, in the face of intense KGB operations, Kharkivite writers and intellectuals attempted to survive in the state’s “labyrinth” with their integrity, creativity, and human relationships intact. This book sheds light on the history of Soviet intelligence tactics and the creative intelligentsia, and helps explain the legacies of Soviet/Russian state violence that are erupting once more in Ukraine.

Olga Bertelsen is an Associate Professor of Global Security and Intelligence at Tiffin University’s School of Criminal Justice and Social Sciences in Ohio, USA.

Anna Bisikalo is a PhD candidate in history at Harvard University. She is writing a dissertation on the social history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Western Ukraine from 1945 to the early post-Soviet period.

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Charters Wynn, "The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880-1936" (Brill, 2022)

Wed, 18 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Charters Wynn's book The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880-1936 (Brill, 2022) is an English-language biography of Mikhail Tomsky. It reveals Tomsky's central role in all the key developments in early Soviet history, including the stormy debates over the role of unions in the self-proclaimed workers’ state. Charters Wynn’s compelling account illuminates how the charismatic Tomsky rose from an impoverished working-class background and years of tsarist prison and Siberian exile to become both a Politburo member and the head of the trade unions, where he helped shape Soviet domestic and foreign policy along generally moderate lines throughout the 1920s. His failed attempt to block Stalin’s catastrophic adoption of forced collectivization of agriculture would tragically make Tomsky a prime target in the Great Purges. Listen in!

Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.

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Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith, "Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991" (Peter Lang, 2020)

Fri, 13 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise "official" Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith's book Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991 (Peter Lang, 2020) explores changes to the poetry canon – an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory – to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon.

Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991 situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.

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Victoria A. Malko, "The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Fri, 13 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Victoria A. Malko's book The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Lexington Books, 2021) focuses on the first group targeted in the genocide known as the Holodomor: Ukrainian intelligentsia, the "brain of the nation," using the words of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and enshrined it in international law. The study's author examines complex and devastating effects of the Holodomor on Ukrainian society during the 1920-1930s. Members of intelligentsia had individual and professional responsibilities. They resisted, but eventually they were forced to serve the Soviet regime. Ukrainian intelligentsia were virtually wiped out, most of its writers and a third of its teachers. The remaining cadres faced a choice without a choice if they wanted to survive. The author analyzes how and why this process occurred and what role intellectuals, especially teachers, played in shaping, contesting, and inculcating history. Crucially, the author challenges Western perceptions of the all-Union famine that was allegedly caused by ad hoc collectivization policies, highlighting the intentional nature of the famine as a tool of genocide, persecution, and prosecution of the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia, clergy, and grain growers. The author demonstrates the continuity between Stalinist and neo-Stalinist attempts to prevent the crystallization of the nation and subvert Ukraine from within by non-lethal and lethal means.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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Katie Stallard, "Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 06 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Present-day relations between ‘the West’ and each of China, Russia and North Korea are often fractious to say the least, yet today’s global atmosphere of menace or crisis just as often has to do with history as it does with contemporary disagreements. All states of course seek ‘usable pasts’ which may or may not be in conflict with one another, but as Katie Stallard shows in Dancing on Bones, leaders in each of Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang have of late gone to particularly great lengths to shape historical narratives which justify their grip on power.

Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and research in each of these three critically important countries, Stallard mixes analysis of political and historical events with first-hand interviews and reportage to offer a vivid sense of how history is put to ever-changing uses and why this matters. Accessibly written and richly referenced, Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea (Oxford UP, 2022),sheds compelling light on often-under-considered connections between three countries which share much beyond their status as perceived ‘revisionist’ powers.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia.

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Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes

Wed, 04 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Soviet Republic once held tremendous sway over the politics of Central Asia as the grand hegemon of the region. But now, in the post-Soviet world, geopolitics in this region is influenced by other powers, including the European Union (EU), and Central Asia’s own tilt towards China. In this changed environment, is the EU adjusting its policies to foster strong democracies in the region free from authoritarian influences, both foreign and domestic? Will these changes be enough to ensure regional stability and human security and focus on good governance and development?

In the second episode of our new themed series Migration, Dr. André W.M. Gerrits, professor of International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University, talks about the changing political players in the Central Asian region and its implications and way forward for the EU and Russia, in the context of his work “Central Asia Under Brussels’ and Moscow’s Eyes”, published by Brill.

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Charles J. Halperin, "Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory Since 1991" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Charles Halperin's latest work on Ivan the Terrible analyzes Ivan's image in post-Soviet Russian memory. Halperin addresses a wide variety of sources: textbooks, popular histories, conspiracy theories, and scholarly works, as well as both films and books about films. What emerges from analyses of these sources, is the reality that Ivan is often an empty vessel into which Russians of all kinds can pour their prior commitments. Halperin's previous work demonstrates the complexity of Ivan and the difficulties inherent in attempting to say anything for certain about this mysterious monarch. Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory Since 1991 (Academic Studies Press, 2021) demonstrates that the Russian historiography of Ivan IV is equally as complex and difficult to generalize about. Russians have sanctified Ivan, demonized him, and nearly every possible position between these two poles can find its exponents.

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Susanne Schattenberg, "Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for eighteen years, a term of leadership second only in length to that of Stalin. He presided over the Brezhnev Doctrine, which accelerated the Cold War, and led the Soviet Union through catastrophic foreign policy decisions such as the invasion of Afghanistan. To many in the West, he is responsible for the stagnation (and to some even collapse) of the Soviet Union. But much of this history has been based on the only two English-language biographies (both published before Brezhnev's death and without access to archival sources) and Brezhnev's own astonishingly untrue memoirs – written for propaganda purposes.

Newly translated from German, Susanne Schattenberg's magisterial book, Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman, published by ‎I.B. Tauris (2021), systematically dismantles the stereotypical and one-dimensional view of Brezhnev as the stagnating Stalinist by drawing on a wealth of archival research and documents not previously studied in English. The Brezhnev that emerges is a complex one, from his early apolitical years, when he dreamed of becoming an actor, through his swift and surprising rise through the Party ranks. From his hitherto misunderstood role in Khrushchev's ousting and appointment as his successor, to his somewhat pro-Western foreign policy aims, deft consolidation and management of power, and ultimate descent into addiction and untimely death. For Professor Schattenberg, this is the story of a flawed and ineffectual idealist - for the West, this biography makes a convincing case that Brezhnev should be reappraised as one of the most interesting and important political figures of the twentieth century.

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Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

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India’s Ukrainian Dilemma

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian war in Ukraine has placed India in a difficult situation: how to retain the historically good relationship with Russia, without jeopardizing the increasingly important strategic partnership with the USA? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Ravinder Kaur, Henrik Chetan Aspengren and Sunniva Engh to analyze the diplomatic tightrope that India has had to walk over the war in Ukraine, and draw out the implications of India handling of its Ukrainian Dilemma for the country’s position in the world, and for global geopolitics more broadly.

Sunniva Engh is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oslo.

Henrik Chetan Aspengren is a Research Fellow at the Asia Programme at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

Ravinder Kaur is an Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies and directs the Centre of Global South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious dissidence, independent learning, and self-legitimating rulership. Crossley finds that political traditions of Central Asia insulated rulers from established religious authority and promoted the objectification of cultural identities marked by language and faith, which created a mutual encouragement of cultural and political change. As religious and social hierarchies weakened, political centralization and militarization advanced. But in the spheres of religion and philosophy, iconoclasm enjoyed a new life.

The changes cumulatively defined a threshold of the modern world, beyond which lay early nationalism, imperialism, and the novel divisions of Eurasia into “East” and “West.” Synthesizing new interpretive approaches and grand themes of world history from 1000 to 1500, Crossley reveals the unique importance of Turkic and Mongol regimes in shaping Eurasia’s economic, technological, and political evolution toward our modern world.

Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) is an expansive work of global history that implies a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualise not only the nomadic peripheries of sedentary societies, but those very sedentary societies themselves. An eye-opening read for those interested in the premodern history of the Eurasian continent.

Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen where they work on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty. They are interested in questions of identity, and the complexities of working with different kinds of sources textually and materially. They can be reached at lance.pursey@abdn.ac.uk.

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Melissa M. Lee, "Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship—which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures—overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes ungoverned space. Enemy governments empower insurgents to destabilize the state and create ungoverned territory. This kind of foreign subversion is a powerful instrument of modern statecraft. But though subversion is less visible and less costly than conventional force, it has insidious effects on governance in the target state.

To demonstrate the harmful consequences of foreign subversion for state authority, Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020) marshals a wealth of evidence and presents in-depth studies of Russia's relations with the post-Soviet states, Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s, and Thai subversion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1980s. The evidence presented by Lee is persuasive: foreign subversion weakens the state.

She challenges the conventional wisdom on statebuilding, which has long held that conflict promotes the development of strong, territorially consolidated states. Lee argues instead that conflictual international politics prevents state development and degrades state authority. In addition, Crippling Leviathan illuminates the use of subversion as an underappreciated and important feature of modern statecraft. Rather than resort to war, states resort to subversion. Policymakers interested in ameliorating the consequences of ungoverned space must recognize the international roots that sustain weak statehood.

Melissa M. Lee is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She studies the international and domestic politics of statebuilding and state development. Lee is the author of Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her work has received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 Helen Dwight Reid (now Merze Tate) award, APSA’s European Politics and Society Section 2020 Best Article Prize, and Perry World House’s Emerging Scholar Global Policy Prize. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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Kelly Herold et al., "Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991-2017" (Brill, 2021)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991-2017 (Brill, 2021) explores the rise of a new body of literature for children and teens following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent transformation of the publishing industry. Lanoux, Herold, and Bukhina first consider the Soviet foundations of the new literature, then chart the influx of translated literature into Russia in the 1990s. In tracing the development of new literature that reflects the lived experiences of contemporary children and teens, the book examines changes to literary institutions, dominant genres, and archetypal heroes. Also discussed are the informal networks and online reader responses that reflect the views of child and teen readers.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Sherzod Muminov, "Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender.

Those eleven years are the subject of Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Sherzod Muminov. The book tells the story of the Japanese prisoners: how they were captured, their time in the camps, and how they tried to acclimatize to Japan after their release.

Sherzod Muminov is a Lecturer in Japanese History at the University of East Anglia and winner of the inaugural Murayama Tsuneo Memorial Prize. He is a historian of transnational and international processes in East Asia and Eurasia, whose primary research deals with Japan’s makings as a modern nation from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to present day, through the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire and its remaking as a nation-state following defeat in World War II.

Fellow New Books Network host Shatrunjay Mall joins us for this interview. Shatrunjay is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

The three of us talk about the experience of the Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, their life in camps, how they handled their return to Japan—and how the experience has repercussions today for Japan and its relations with Russia.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Eleven Winters of Discontent. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Ayşe Zarakol, "Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ayse Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It uses that vast history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline. How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending - the Rise of the West and the decline of the East - into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result?

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec, "Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook" (Northern Illinois UP, 2020)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2020) weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.

Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.

Valerie A. Kivelson teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History. Christine D. Worobec is professor emerita at Northern Illinois University.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Eiren L. Shea, "Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange" (Routledge, 2020)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Mongol period (1206-1368) marked a major turning point of exchange - culturally, politically, and artistically - across Eurasia. The wide-ranging international exchange that occurred during the Mongol period is most apparent visually through the inclusion of Mongol motifs in textile, paintings, ceramics, and metalwork, among other media. In

In Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020), Eiren Shea investigates how a group of newly-confederated tribes from the steppe conquered the most sophisticated societies in existence in less than a century, creating a courtly idiom that permanently changed the aesthetics of China and whose echoes were felt across Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe.

Eiren Shea is Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College.

Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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Lucy Ward, "The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus" (ONEWorld, 2022)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Within living memory, smallpox was a dreaded disease. Over human history, it has killed untold millions. In the eighteenth century, as epidemics swept Europe, the first rumours emerged of effective treatment: a mysterious method called inoculation.

But a key problem remained: convincing people to accept the preventative remedy, the forerunner of vaccination. Arguments raged over risks and benefits, and public resistance ran high. As smallpox ravaged her empire and threatened her court, Catherine the Great took the momentous decision to summon the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale from Hertford to St Petersburg to carry out a secret mission that would transform both their lives. In The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus (ONEworld, 2022), Lucy Ward expertly unveils the extraordinary story of Enlightenment ideals, female leadership and the fight to promote science over superstition.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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China’s International Relations and the Ukraine Crisis

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the ground of global politics, and one of the key questions has been China’s position in the situation. In this episode, Dr. Matti Puranen analyses China’s international relations and strategic position in the context of the Ukraine crisis and China’s relationship with Russia. The newfound Western unity in response to the situation may also complicate China’s relations with Finland. According to Dr. Puranen, Finland’s traditionally good relationship with China has already shown some signs of cooling in recent years. We also discuss the implications of the current situation for Taiwan and China’s overall visions regarding the existing international order.

Read Dr. Puranen’s article “Sino-Russian Relations Already Bear Signs of a Military Alliance” (with Juha Kukkola) in the National Interest and his articles “Finland’s China Shift” (with Jukka Aukia) and “China-Finland: Beijing’s ‘Model Relationship’ in Europe?” in The Diplomat.

Matti Puranen is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Warfare of the Finnish National Defense University. His research focuses on strategy and international relations, particularly China and Chinese strategic thought.

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Vanessa Rampton, "Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the conclusion to Vanessa Rampton's new book on Russian liberalism, the author remarks that "the prospects for liberal development in countries such as Russia...seem as remote as ever." (185). Covering the period from Catherine the Great to the early 20th century, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2020) provides the reader with plentiful evidence that this is the case. Rampton argues that at the core of liberalism is an ongoing compromise between competing claims, as with the interplay between positive and negative liberty. As liberalism currently finds itself under attack from multiple sides, Rampton's case Russian case study is valuable. Russian soil's general hostility liberalism illuminates some of the ideas' strengths and weaknesses, and the historical conditions under which it is and is not likely to flourish.

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Tinatin Japaridze, "Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism" (Lexington Books, 2022)

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Tinatin Japaridze about her book Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism (Lexington Books, 2022).

In this timely interview, Japaridze discusses not only the legacy of Stalin, but also her personal reflections in growing up in Georgia during the Cold War, and her experiences in the immediate drama of post Cold-War Moscow. To add to her both personal and professional reflections on legacy and nationalism, she attended an American school where she integrated into the west. Thus her reflections on McDonaldization and its fallout are both driven by an acute level of professional study as well as personal empathy for the individuals who live in the times we come to call historical. This same interest in both the human and the institutional informs her exploration of memory and particularly museums as sites of the construction of nostalgia and shame. In a compelling moment, Japaridze notices a brand new pair of boots in an exhibit that labeled them Stalin's.

She takes us into our universe as the curator shares a secret: they were never worn by Stalin and surely stitched well after his death in 1953. Almost sixty years later, Stalin like these boots, are refashioned, imagined, and put into place as an observable reality for the next generation. And that next generation, her generation, peers through the glass and suspects they are not as they have been neatly labeled by curators of the past. With Russia waging war in Ukraine in a bid that seems driven by a macabre nationalism or fun-house of mirrors Stalinist nostalgia, Japaridze's book is more necessary than ever. What she felt was opaque is now in plain sight, no longer hiding. While Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and those who came after him, had an ideology, however manipulated, Japaridze draws the curtain back on today's empty-rhetoric old-fashioned land grab by Putin.

Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History.

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Sandy Gall, "Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud" (Haus Publishing, 2021)

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

On September 9th, 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. Coming just two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Massoud’s assassination is thus one of those points in history that invites couterfactuals: was it a warning of things to come? And what might have happened in Afghanistan had the assassination failed?

Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud (Haus Publishing, 2021) guides readers through the guerilla’s life—including his campaigns against the Communists, the Soviets and the Taliban—and how he became a target for Al Qaeda. The book was written by legendary journalist Sandy Gall, who traveled to Afghanistan on many occasions, meeting with Massoud several times.

Carlotta Gall—who worked with her father Sandy to report and write Afghan Napoleon—joins us for this episode of the Asian Review of Books podcast. She is the Istanbul Bureau Chief for The New York Times, and a longtime reporter on Afghanistan and Pakistan. She’s also the author of The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2014).

In this interview, Carlotta and I talk about Massoud–his life, his campaigns, and his work. We also talk about how Afghanistan’s story over the last two decades—including the end of the U.S. occupation—changes how we understand Massoud’s life.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Afghan Napoleon. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Carter R. Johnson, "Partition and Peace in Civil Wars: Dividing Lands and Peoples to End Ethnic Conflict" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Partition and Peace in Civil Wars: Dividing Lands and Peoples to End Ethnic Conflict (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Carter Johnson examines whether partition is an effective means to resolve ethnic and sectarian civil wars. He argues that partition is unlikely to end ongoing ethnosectarian civil wars, but it can increase the likelihood of preventing civil war recurrence, as long as the partition separates civilians and militaries.

The book presents in-depth case studies of Georgia–Abkhazia and Moldova–Transnistria, in addition to cross-national comparisons of all ethnosectarian civil wars between 1945 and 2004. This analysis demonstrates when partitioning a country can help transform an identity-based civil war into a lasting peace.

Highlighting practical and moral challenges of separating ethnosectarian groups, Dr. Carter contends that complete partitions cannot be easily implemented by the international community, and this limits their applicability. He also demonstrates that ethnosectarian civil wars are driven less by inter-group antagonisms and more by state breakdown, meaning displaced minorities can reintegrate peacefully after partition as long as a minimal level of state-building has been completed. The book ends by examining whether partition would be useful for five contemporary conflicts: Iraq, Ukraine–Donbass, Afghanistan, Sudan–South Sudan, and Serbia–Kosovo.

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Mark Edele, "Debates on Stalinism" (Manchester UP, 2020)

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Debates on Stalinism (Manchester University Press, 2020) considers some of the major debates about Stalinism during and after the Cold War. Was ‘Stalinism’ a system in its own right, or just one stage in the overall development of Soviet society? Was it an aberration from Leninism, or the logical conclusion of Marxism? Was its violence an expression of revenge of the Russian past, or the result of a revolutionary mindset? In approaching these questions, the book unpacks complex historiographical debates in which evidence, politics, personality, and biography are entangled. In doing so, Debates on Stalinism allows readers to better understand the history of history writing, and sheds light on contemporary controversies and conflicts in the successor states of the Soviet Union, and in particular Russia and Ukraine.

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states. He is the inaugural Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2015-2019). His recent publications include The Soviet Union: A Short History (Wiley Blackwell, 2018), Debates on Stalinism (Manchester University Press, 2020), The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative History with Martin Crotty and Neil J. Diamant (Cornell University Press, 2020), and Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Profile page: https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/794083-mark-edele

Twitter: @EdeleMark

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Togzhan Kassenova, "Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This month we are delighted to host Togzhan Kassenova on our NBN Central Asian Studies podcast. Dr Kassenova is the author of the beautifully researched yet very readable Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. Would it give up these fire-ready weapons--or try to become a Central Asian North Korea? This book takes us inside Kazakhstan's extraordinary and little-known nuclear history from the Soviet period to the present.

Equipped with intimate personal perspective and untapped archival resources, Togzhan Kassenova introduces us to the engineers turned diplomats, villagers turned activists, and scientists turned pacifists who worked toward disarmament. With thousands of nuclear weapons still present around the world, the story of how Kazakhs gave up their nuclear inheritance holds urgent lessons for global security.

Togzhan Kassenova is senior fellow at the University at Albany, SUNY and a nonresident fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Follow her on Twitter @tkassenova

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan

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Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, "On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It's a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world's political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world's most consequential and enigmatic borderlands.

It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to "revive" their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to "Europe," building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil's Cathedral to woo tourists.

Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border (Harvard UP, 2021) testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

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David A. Harrisville, "The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

David A. Harrisville is an independent scholar. He has held various academic positions, including, most recently, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Furman University.

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Jeremy Black, "The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Strategies for a World War" (Roman and Littlefield, 2022)

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The wars between 1792 and 1815 saw the making of the modern world, with Britain and Russia the key powers to emerge triumphant from a long period of bitter conflict. In his innovative book, The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Strategies for a World War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), master historian, Jeremy Black focuses on the strategic contexts and strategies involved, explaining their significance both at the time and subsequently. Reinterpreting French Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, strategy, and their consequences, he argues that Napoleon’s failure owed much to his limitations as a strategist. Black uses this framework as a foundation to assess the nature of warfare, the character of strategy, and the eventual ascendance of Britain and Russia in this period. Rethinking the character of strategy, this is the first history to look holistically at the strategies of all the leading belligerents from a global perspective. It will be an essential read for military professionals, students, and history buffs alike.

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Edward Tyerman, "Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

I am joined for my interview with Edward Tyerman by Ed Pulford, another host on our channel. Together, we discuss Edward’s new book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021). Internationalist Aesthetics examines how knowledge of China is produced in the early Soviet period through the aesthetic idiom of internationalism. Tyerman shows how artist intellectuals, especially Sergei Tretyakov, the book’s protagonist, make China affectively sensible for Russian audiences. Each chapter takes on a separate medium: travelogue, stage, film, and “bio-narrative,” to think through how Soviet aesthetes negotiate old and new forms to demystify China, a nation that even in the revolutionary environment of 1920s Russia, was still understood through recourse to orientalist tropes. The book ultimately spans a very short period, a slither of the 1920s, a moment of opportunity before the Guomindang’s persecution of the communists in China in 1927 and a moment of aesthetic possibility before the purges of the 1930s in Russia. Join us in our conversation about how a certain mode of “Chinese studies” emerges in the media aesthetics of this turbulent period.

Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

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Daniel Chirot, "You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world--from the late eighteenth century to today--to provide important new answers to these critical questions.

From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, You Say You Want a Revolution? explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others--and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms.

Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Mark Edele, "Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two.

Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens – Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime – to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan.

In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe.

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Albert Baiburin, "The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR" (Polity Press, 2022)

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Polity Press, 2021), Albert Baiburin provides the first in-depth study of the development and uses of the passport, or state identity card, in the former Soviet Union. This richly empirical book will be of great interest not only to students and scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union, but to to anyone interested in the shaping of identity in the modern world. The Soviet Passport was first published in Russian in 2017; this is the first English-language translation of the book.

First introduced in 1932, the Soviet passport took on an exceptional range of functions, extending not just to the regulation of movement and control of migrancy but also to the constitution of subjectivity and of social hierarchies based on place of residence, family background, and ethnic origin. While the basic role of the Soviet passport was to certify a person’s identity, it assumed a far greater significance in Soviet life, with wide-ranging social, economic and geographical consequences. Passport ownership became the signifier of an acceptable social existence, and the passport itself became part of the life experience and self-perception of those who possessed it.

In this interview, I was joined by the book's translator, Stephen Dalziel. We discussed the role of passports in Soviet and pre-Soviet society, including the revolutionary abolition of the Tsarist passport system and the subsequent introduction of the Soviet passport system. We also discussed the process of translation, both for this book and for Stephen's previous translation projects. We hope you enjoy our conversation.

Albert Baiburin (the book's author, who could not join us) is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the European University at St Petersburg.

Stephen Dalziel (my interviewee) is the book's translator. He is a Soviet expert and former BBC correspondent. He now runs DLC Training and Consulting, and is keen to take on more translation work.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Stanislav Aseyev, "In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas" (HURI, 2022)

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian journalist and writer born in Donetsk, which at present remains occupied by Russia-backed militants. Sometime after the beginning of the occupation, he was captured for his political views by the militants of the occupied parts of the Donbas and sentenced to 15 years. On the eve of 2020, Aseyev was released in a prisoner exchange. Currently Stanislav Aseyev lives in Kyiv. Aseyev received a number of awards recognizing his active social and political position (including the Free Media Award (2020), the National Freedom of Expression Award (2020). He is also a recipient of the Shevchenko National Prize, the highest state prize of Ukraine for works of culture and arts.

Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022; translated into English by Lidia Wolanskyj) helps understand a highly entangled and complicated background of the current Russo-Ukrainian war. This book—a chronological account of the events that started in November of 2013, on the one hand, and a collection of journalistic reflections that attempt to explain almost surreal and absurd developments, on the other—documents how the Donbas turned into another flashpoint, following Crimea, whose emergence is directly connected to the Russian Federation and provides commentaries on Russia’s role in sustaining the current war. In Isolation is written from within the zone of conflict; it emerges from the very epicenter of the war that signals not only interstate rifts but also splits that tear apart families and cause uneasiness in long-term friendships.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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Timothy K. Blauvelt, "Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Timothy Blauvelt’s book Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba (Routledge, 2021), explores the complexity of Soviet Nationality Policy and patronage relationships among the Soviet elite by focusing on Nestor Apollonovich Lakoba, the Chairman of the Abkhazian Council of Commissars (Sovnarkom) and Abkhazia's colourful, hyper-connected and Zelig-like local power broker. Small in stature and hard of hearing, Lakoba earned an outsized reputation as a gracious Caucasian host with an easy-going spirit, known for his pithy Abkhazian folk sayings and his connections to absolutely everybody who mattered, reputedly having the ear of Stalin himself. Lakoba seemed at odds with the prototypical loud and gruff Stalinist party boss, but he was in his own way no less ruthless, despotic and cunning in his deployment of patronage and the political capital that this subtropical region had to offer.

Local ethnic elites like Lakoba realized the advantages of representing the “titular” nationality of a territory to consolidate their position and authority and to extract resources from the centre(s) (even in territories like Abkhazia, where the titular nationality did not comprise a majority of the population). At the same time, they understood the importance of maintaining the trust and loyalty of their own “constituencies,” among both the titular masses and the other titular elites, in order prevent the emergence of a rival grouping that could position itself as a credible substitute. The goal was to maintain the trust and loyalty of both patrons above and of clients below, while at the same time cultivating an aura of irreplaceability. The patrons in the centre (in this case, primarily the Transcaucasian and Georgian Party leadership in Tiflis) required a credibly representative titular leadership grouping on the ground in the titular territories. But once the choice had been made, those in the centre often found themselves constrained by that choice: the success of the patron depended on the success of the client. This gave the latter considerable power over the former to extract resources and to guarantee protection, so long as the client remained the “only game in town,” costlier to replace than to maintain. Yet this situation was far from static: as the emphasis in Soviet nationality policy changed from support for the many smaller ethnic groups in the 1920s to favouring the larger nationalities with union republics from the mid-1930s (and even towards “cleansing” entire populations of potentially disloyal ethnicities), the imperative to maintain titular leadership groups in the autonomous units fell away. The rules of the game changed fundamentally. Listen in to learn more about this fascinating history of power and politics!

Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.

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Regina Smyth, "Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008–2020" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability. Russia 2008–2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Regina Smyth reveals how much electoral competition matters to the Putin regime and how competition leaves Russia more vulnerable to opposition challenges than is perceived in the West. Using original data and analysis, Smyth demonstrates how even weak political opposition can force autocratic incumbents to rethink strategy and find compromises in order to win elections. Smyth challenges conventional notions about Putin's regime, highlighting the vast resources the Kremlin expends to maintain a permanent campaign to construct regime-friendly majorities. These tactics include disinformation as well as symbolic politics, social benefits, repression, and falsification. This book reveals the stresses and challenges of maintaining an electoral authoritarian regime and provides a roadmap to understand how seemingly stable authoritarian systems can fall quickly to popular challenges even when the opposition is weak. A must-read for understanding Russia's future and the role of elections in contemporary autocratic regimes.

Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit https://annazhelnina.com/ or follow Anna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnnaZhelnina

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Melissa Feinberg, "Communism in Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Communism in Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021) is a groundbreaking new survey of the history of Eastern Europe since 1945. It examines how Communist governments came to Eastern Europe, how they changed their societies and the legacies that persisted after their fall. Written from the perspective of the 21st century, this book shows how Eastern Europe’s trajectory since 1989 fits into the longer history of its Communist past.

Rather than focusing on high politics, Communism in Eastern Europe concentrates on the politics of daily life, melding political history with social, cultural and gender history. It tells the history of this complicated era through the voices and experiences of ordinary people. By focusing on the complex interactions of everyday life, Communism in Eastern Europe illuminates the world Communism made in Eastern Europe, its politics and culture, values and dreams, successes and failures.

This book is an engaging introduction to the history of Communist Eastern Europe for any reader. It is ideal for adoption in a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses in 20th-century European history.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Ola Hnatiuk, "Courage and Fear" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019)

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 05:00:00 -0000

Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, Lviv… The city, which is located in the western part of Ukraine, evokes a highly entangled past that contains references to a number of nations, ethnicities, empires, states, and communities. They have their own (hi)story and they claim their right to make this story visible.

Ola Hnatiuk’s Courage and Fear (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019) focuses on the crossroads of Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian dwellers that happened to share one geographical space that, however, was fragmentized and diversified, shared and contested at a time. In addition to these three communities, there is an overbearing shadow of both Soviet and Nazi occupants. The triangle of the knotty relations of Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian residents that makes one travel back in time in hopes to understand how contested legacy took shape and what influence it exercised on generations is further complicated by the arrival of forces whose status was hard to define. Hnatiuk delicately guides her readers into and through these entanglements and attempts to offer routes for uneasy and complicated conversations which, one way or another, touch upon the issues of choice and compromise, courage and responsibility, fear and hope. These are never black-and-white. Courage and Fear exposes unhealed wounds and invites readers to confront the uncomfortable and the painful.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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David L. Hoffmann, "The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Over 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, but the collective memory of the conflict remains potently present for the people of the Russian Federation. Professor David Hoffman, editor of a new collection of essays about war memory in “Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia” suggests that this is no accident. Together with an impressive, interdisciplinary roster of academic contributors, Hoffman examines how the current leadership of Russia has put war memory at the heart of national identity, and used it as a powerful unifying force.

Professor Hoffman and his fellow contributors were inspired by the memory studies of Pierre Nora, and in the fifteen well-crafted essays that make up The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2021) they examine a wide range of what Nora called the “lieux de mémoire” or sites of memory, which includes textbooks, memorials, monuments, archives, and films. Hoffman’s choice of this international group of scholars, working in Russia, Ukraine, Britain, France, Norway, Austria, Germany and the United States across a range of academic disciplines, from film to sociology ensures that the essays offer a wide range of viewpoints and subjects, moving in a deft chronological sweep from just after the war to the present day.

World War II, known in Russia today as The Great Patriotic War, was a defining moment for the twenty-four-year-old Soviet State. If the Revolutions of 1917 created the USSR, it was the hard-won victory over the Nazis in The Great Patriotic War that turned it into a Great Power. The cost of that victory remains breath-taking today: 27 million men and women lost their lives, major cities were destroyed, and millions were left displaced. No family escaped the collective trauma, which is still felt today.

In examining the sites of memory, the essays in “Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia” offer a comprehensive look at the developing deployment of war memory, particularly by the current Russian leadership. Although Vladimir Putin was not alive during World War II, he has sought to weave his own personal narrative into that of the memory of the Great Patriotic War. Putin revived and expanded the countrywide commemorations of May 9 or Victory Day, which provided the vivid backdrop to his first inauguration ceremony in 2000. As president and prime minister, Putin spearheaded a renewed respect for the dwindling cadre of World War II veterans, and by creating state-of-the-art historical museums dedicated to the war, he ensured that war memory is kept alive for a new generation of Russians.

“Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia” also explores the changing narratives around Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, the Holocaust, Lend-Lease, local media, and other key aspects of the collective memory of World War II in Russia. While the collection is a valuable contribution to the emerging scholarship on World War II memory begun by Nina Tumarkin and others, I suspect that “Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia” will ultimately enjoy a much wider audience: the essays offer rich insight into the mindset of Russia’s leaders and people, at a moment of heightened tensions between Russia and the West.

Professor David Hoffman is Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor.

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Colin Thubron, "The Amur River: Between Russia and China" (Harper, 2021)

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

It’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent.

In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper, 2021), which traces the path of the Amur from its origins in Mongolia to its end-point in the Pacific Ocean. We also discuss what means to be a travel writer in today’s world—which has undergone a recent and rapid expansion, and even more recent and rapid collapse, of travel.

Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first books were about the Middle Eas—Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. But later he was drawn to the lands which he says his generation was brought up to fear: the Soviet Union and Communist China.

In 1982 he traveled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey described in Among the Russians (Ulverscroft: 1989). From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind The Wall: A Journey Through China (Random House: 1987), The Lost Heart of Asia (Random House: 1994), In Siberia (Penguin: 2000), Shadow of the Silk Road (Chatto & Windus: 2006) and To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto & Windus: 2011).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Amur River. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style.

In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski’s “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century.

Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura.

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Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, "On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The border between Russia and China is one of the world’s longest, spanning thousands of miles. It’s one of the few extended land borders between two great powers, subject to years of history, conflict and cooperation. Yet for such an important division, there are surprisingly few crossings, with not one passenger bridge in operation.

On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Caroline Humphrey and Franck Bille, is an in-depth study of this border. Looking at the divided island of Bolshoi Ussuriiskii and the border towns Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, On the Edge gives a picture of how people live, work and trade along this little-studied border.

Franck Billé is Program Director at the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author and editor of three books about East Asia, including Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity.

Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge, and founder of the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit. She is the author of several books about the anthropology of Inner Asia and recently edited and contributed to Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China–Russia Borderlands.

We’re also joined by Yvonne Lau, who became interested in Russia and China’s long history and complex ties, and has been tracking developments along the Sino-Russian border ever since.

In this interview, the three of us talk about, well, the border, and the people that live on either side of it.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On the Edge. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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David Leupold, "Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory" (Routledge, 2020)

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan.

Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts.

By looking at how national discourses are constructed and asking hard questions about why nations are imagined as exclusive and hostile to others, Embattled Dreamlands provides a unique insight into the development of national identity which will provide a great resource to students and researchers in sociology and history alike.

Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

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Glenn Cronin, "Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev" (Northern Illinois UP, 2021)

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Although largely unknown in the West, the Russian novelist and political essayist Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev (1831-1891) has left a strong legacy in his homeland. He has often been compared to Friedrich Nietzsche, yet his writings predate those of his German counterpart by several decades. Also, unlike his German counterpart came to embrace a very ascetic form of Orthodox Christian faith. For decades he bravely clashed with many of the greatest minds of 19th century Russia on subjects ranging from ethics, art, geopolitics, Russia's place in the world, the historical cycles of civilizations, and especially religious faith. Glenn Cronin's Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev (Northern Illinois University Press, 2021) is the first major English-language study in over fifty years on this enigmatic figure of Russian intellectual history.

Glenn Cronin is a contributing author to Ideology in Russian Literature and holds a PhD in Russian studies from the University of London.

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Yuri Tynianov, "Küchlya, Decembrist Poet: A Novel" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2021)

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Küchlya (1925), the first novel of the great Russian formalist Yury Tynyanov gives us a vividly written and moving recreation of the childhood, youth, beliefs and adventures of an eccentric and idealistic young poet and friend of Pushkin, tragically caught up in the Decembrist insurrection of 1825 against the Russian autocracy.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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Matthew P. Romaniello, et al., "The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Fabergé, 1600-Present" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

This collection of articles, edited by Matthew Romaniello, Alison Smith, Tricia Starks, takes up the history of material culture over the past several centuries of Russian history. Widely diverse objects such as maps, textiles, building materials, cigarette cases,fish guts (yes...), samovars, samizdat, and even the T-34 tank are viewed in light of their role in Russian society. Hence the collection's striking and unusual title: The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

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Yuka Hiruma Kishida, "Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism: Education in the Japanese Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism: Education in the Japanese Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Yuka Kiruma Kishida makes a fresh contribution to the recent effort to re-examine the Japanese wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism by focusing on the experiences of students at Kenkoku University or “Nation-Building University,” abbreviated as Kendai (1938-1945). Located in the northeastern provinces of China commonly designated Manchuria, the university proclaimed to realize the goal of minzoku kyōwa (“ethnic harmony”). It recruited students of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Mongolian and Russian backgrounds and aimed to foster a generation of leaders for the state of Manchukuo. Distinguishing itself from other colonial schools within the Japanese Empire, Kendai promised ethnic equality to its diverse student body, while at the same time imposing Japanese customs and beliefs on all students. In this book, Yuka Hiruma Kishida examines not only the theory and rhetoric of Pan-Asianism as an ideal in the service of the Japanese Empire, but more importantly its implementation in the curriculum and the daily lives of students and faculty whose socioeconomic backgrounds were broadly representative of their respective societies. She draws on archival material which reveals dynamic exchanges of ideas about the meaning of Asian unity among the campus community, and documents convergences as well as clashes of competing articulations of Pan-Asianism. Kishida argues that an idealistic and egalitarian conception of Pan-Asianism exercised considerable appeal late into the Second World War, even as mobilization for total war intensified contradictions between ideal and practice. More than an institutional history, this book makes an important intervention into the historiography on Pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism.

Yuka Hiruma Kishida is an associate professor of history at Bridgewater College in Virginia, specializing in modern East Asian history.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Kalani Pickhart, "I Will Die in a Foreign Land" (Two Dollar Radio, 2021)

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

An interview with Kalani Pickhart, I Will Die in a Foreign Land (2021), a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. Russia is again amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. There are threats of more sanctions from the US and the EU, but those come with a tacit understanding that there is likely little that the world can do to stop Putin should he decide to invade. It is within this frightening context that Kalani Pickhart’s extraordinary novel, I Will Die in a Foreign Land, enters the scene. The novel itself is a beautiful pastiche of forms: novelistic plots mix with songs and folktales, manifests of passengers killed in downed planes or in the melee of protest, diaries and recordings, all working to build a feeling, the urge for a democratic voice to speak against violence and despair. Kalani and I discuss the burden of writing true in a work of fiction, and so much more!

Books Recommended in this episode:

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
God Shot, Chelsea Bieker
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina
The Power of the Dog (Film), Jane Campion

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Putin's Attempt to Hide the Crimes of Stalinism

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

For the past 30 years, a group of Russian scholars have dedicated themselves to uncovering the crimes of Stalinism. Their organization, Memorial, has in that time made great strides in understanding the scale, nature and history of Stalin's repression. On 28 December 2021, Russia's highest court found that Memorial was in violation of the Russian Federation's law regarding "foreign agents" and ordered it to be closed.

In this interview, I talked with Benjamin Nathans about Memorial's history, work, and the reasons Putin decided to shut it down now. Nathans, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked with Memorial since the early 2000s. For more about Memorial, go here.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Anna Bokov, "Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930" (Park Books, 2020)

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930 (Park Books, 2020), Anna Bokov examines the history of the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie) in Moscow, known most commonly by its acronym Vkhutemas. Operating between 1920 and 1930, Vkhutemas was a centre for developing new pedagogical methods to support mass education in art and technology. In this richly illustrated study, Bokov traces how radical experiments in art, architecture, and design were translated into systematic body of knowledge – and how this knowledge was then applied in various projects aimed at shaping modern Soviet society. From small utensils and furniture pieces to large-scale urban designs, the Vkhutemas influence was visible everywhere, and Bokov foregrounds the school’s impact both on the formation of modernism, along with its lasting creative legacy.

Anna Bokov is an architect, urban designer, and historian specialising in the history of the avant-garde movements and design pedagogy. She is a faculty member at the Cooper Union and the City College in New York and Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture at ETH Zürich.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Tomek Jankowski, "Eastern Europe! Everything You Need to Know" (New Europe Books, 2021)

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0000

When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv―today the second-largest city in Bulgaria―was thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989, and which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being much younger than them. Eastern Europe! (New Europe Books, 2021) is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history.

Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognito, with a sign on the border declaring “Here be monsters.” Tomek Jankowski's book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has been shaped by but has also left its mark on Western Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. It is a reader-friendly guide to a region that is all too often mischaracterized as remote, insular, and superstitious.

The book comprises three parts, The first sums up modern linguistic, geographic, and religious contours of Eastern Europe, while the second, main part delves into the region's history, from the earliest origins of Europe up to the end of the Cold War. Closing the book is a section that makes sense of geographical name references -- many cities, rivers, or regions have different names -- and also includes an "Eastern Europe by Numbers" feature that provides charts describing the populations, politics, and economies of the region today. Throughout are boxed-off anecdotes ("Useless Trivia") describing fascinating aspects of Eastern European history or culture.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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Paul Bushkovitch, "Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power 1450-1725" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The transfer of power is something every must state attend to (and preferably by peaceful means). Remarkably, this fundamental aspect of statecraft was governed by custom rather than law into the eighteenth century in Russia. In Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power 1450-1725 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Paul Bushkovitch traces the history of how tsars (and earlier, grand princes) came to the Russian throne. Overturning generations of scholarship, Bushkovitch shows that there were various means by which a ruler came to govern Russia. Russian grand princes often designated their eldest sons to the throne in their lifetime, but primogeniture was neither codified nor the only option. The Russian elite on certain occasions elected the new tsar, and women multiple times found themselves at the pinnacle of state power. Deploying decades of erudition and archival sleuthing, Bushkovitch offers a thought-provoking front row view on the evolution of determining the heir and succession politics in early modern Russia.

Erika Monahan is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

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East Asian Cold War History with a Maritime Twist

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

When did the Cold War in East Asia really begin? According to ADI-NIAS researcher Kuan-Jen Chen, the answer is 1945 – if we view the Cold War through a maritime lens. In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, KJ explains how he is using Japanese and Taiwanese sources to gain a more nuanced perspective on East Asian Cold War maritime history, which is far from a simple narrative of American naval dominance. KJ also discusses the relevance of the Cold War context to understanding recent geostrategic developments in the region, and why he is trying to put international historians into a more fruitful dialogue with scholars of international relations.

Kuan-Jen Chen (https://kjchen.net/) is the Asian Dynamics Initiative-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He has published articles in various journals including Cold War History and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. KJ is currently completing a book based on his Cambridge PhD, entitled The Making of America’s Maritime Order in Cold War East Asia: Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security.

KJ was recently jointly awarded Taiwan’s 2021 Openbook Award in Translation for his co-translation into Chinese of Barak Kushner’s Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice, Harvard 2015 (see NBN podcast here).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts can be found here. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

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Lucie Fremlova, "Queer Roma" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Lucie Fremlova's book Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021) offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of queer Roma, which are very diverse regionally and otherwise, pose a fundamental challenge to one-dimensional, negative misrepresentations of Roma as homophobic and antithetical to European and Western modernity.

The book platforms Romani agency and voices in an original and novel way. This enables the reader to feel the individuals behind the data, which detail stories of rejection by Romani families and communities, and non-Romani communities; and unfamiliar, ground-breaking stories of acceptance by Romani families and communities. Combining intersectionality with queer theory innovatively and applying it to Romani Studies, the author supports her arguments with data illustrating how the identities of queer Roma are shaped by antigypsyism and its intersections with homophobia and transphobia.

Thanks to its theoretical and empirical content, and its location within a book series on LGBTIQ lives that appeals to an international audience, this authoritative book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It will a be useful resource for libraries, community and social service workers, third-sector Romani and LGBTIQ organisations, activists and policymakers.

Dr. Lucie Fremlova is an independent researcher who works at the interface between academia, social movements and policy. Her close-up, transdisciplinary research focuses on ethnic, ‘racial’, sexual and gender identities, particularly in relation to queer Roma. Her article ‘LGBTIQ Roma and queer intersectionalities: the lived experiences of LGBTIQ Roma’, published by the European Journal of Politics and Gender in 2019, won the EJPG 2021 Best Article and the Council for European Studies Gender and Sexuality Research Network 2019 Best Article Award. Her article ‘Non-Romani researcher positionality and reflexivity: queer(y)ing one’s privilege’ was the most-read article published in 2019 in volume 1, number 2 of the Critical Romani Studies Journal.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Jeffrey Brooks, "The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.

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Bogdan Popa, "De-Centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War" (Manchester UP, 2021)

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Bogdan Popa’s De-Centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (Manchester University Press, 2021) seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Alex Panasenko, "The Long Vacation: A Memoir" (Iris Press, 2020)

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners.

When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his family, tramped westward with the retreating German army. The Long Vacation is Alex Panasenko’s war memoir, remembering the formative, often harrowing experiences that shaped his character.

In this conversation, Mr. Panasenko discusses the extremities of life, death, terror, lust, and hunger from a child’s perspective, and with a child’s canny reactions aimed at survival, even when the prospect seemed most unlikely. With things falling apart around him—laws, governments, the conventions of the adult world—Panasenko came to rely only on himself. Consequently, as an adolescent in the chaotic period following the war, he became an astonishingly successful black marketeer in the liberated Bavarian town of Memmingen. Finally, Mr. Panasenko reflects on his life in the 75 years since the war, including his forty years as a biology teacher at Berkeley High School in northern California.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Empire; he had the privilege of being one of Alex Panasenko’s biology students in 1993-94.

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Aaron Weinacht, "Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America (Lexington, 2021) argues that the core commitments of the nihilist movement of the 1860's made their way to 20th century America via the thought of Ayn Rand. While mid-nineteenth-century Russian nihilism has generally been seen as part of a radical tradition that culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the author argues that nihilism's intellectual trajectory was in fact quite different. Analysis of such sources as Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What is to Be Done? (1863) and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), archival research in Rand's papers, and broad attention to late-nineteenth century Russian intellectual history all lead the author to conclude that nihilism's legacy is deeply implicated in one of America's most widely-read philosophers of capitalism and libertarian freedom.

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Brigid O'Keeffe, "Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Hoping to unite all of humankind and revolutionize the world, Ludwik Zamenhof launched a new international language called Esperanto from late imperial Russia in 1887. Ordinary men and women in Russia and all over the world soon transformed Esperanto into a global movement. Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomsbury, 2021) traces the history and legacy of this effort: from Esperanto's roots in the social turmoil of the pre-revolutionary Pale of Settlement; to its links to socialist internationalism and Comintern bids for world revolution; and, finally, to the demise of the Soviet Esperanto movement in the increasingly xenophobic Stalinist 1930s. In doing so, this book reveals how Esperanto - and global language politics more broadly - shaped revolutionary and early Soviet Russia.

Based on extensive archival materials, Brigid O'Keeffe's book provides the first in-depth exploration of Esperanto at grassroots level and sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked area of Russian history. As such, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russiawill be of immense value to both historians of modern Russia and scholars of internationalism, transnational networks, and sociolinguistics.

Brigid O'Keeffe is professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomsbury, 2021) and New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is currently preparing a manuscript titled, "The Multiethnic Soviet Union and Its Demise" for Bloomsbury’s “Russian Shorts” Book Series.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Anna Machcewicz, "Civility in Uncivil Times: Kazimierz Moczarski's Quiet Battle for Truth, from the Polish Underground to Stalinist Prison" (Peter Lang, 2020)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Civility in Uncivil Times: Kazimierz Moczarski’s Quiet Battle for Truth, from the Polish Underground to Stalinist Prison (Peter Lang, 2020), Anna Machcewicz offers a powerful case study in the ethics and logistics of bearing witness in response to the two forces that brutalized Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century: Nazism and Stalinism. Civility in Uncivil Times is a biography of Kazimierz Moczarski (1907-1975), a Polish lawyer, journalist, and political prisoner. A major figure in the Polish Underground State in the final months of World War II, Moczarski is nonetheless best known for sharing a postwar Stalinist prison cell with SS general Jürgen Stroop, liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto. After serving one of the longest prison terms in the history of communist Poland - eleven years - Moczarski reconstructed his conversations in forensic detail in a book published after his death under the title Conversations with an Executioner. Machcewicz’s book makes a major contribution to the scholarship on Stalinist political imprisonment, while also illuminating the possibilities for serious civic engagement in post-Stalinist societies.

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Fiona Hill, "There Is Nothing for You Here: Opportunity in an Age of Decline" (Mariner Books, 2021)

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to the remarkable Fiona Hill about her new memoir There Is Nothing for You Here: Opportunity in an Age of Decline (Mariner Books, 2021). We talked about the decline of older coal and steel industries (and economic dislocation generally), how this decline relates to the rise of populism in the Russia and the West, and her decision to join the Trump administration as a national security advisor. She is insightful and interesting about all of it. Enjoy.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Diana Kelly, "The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov" (Emerald, 2020)

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In this podcast Diana Kelly, author of The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov (Emerald, 2020), tells us of the advantages of using a biography to explore a contested topic such as Taylorism. In this case by mapping the life and works of a Russian engineer, Walter Polakov, who was very active and helped shape the Taylor Society in the 1920s as well as the adoption of diffusion of Taylorism, given Polakov's friendship and interaction with key figures of the time, such as H. L Gantt.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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David Moon et al., "Place and Nature: Essays in Russian History" (White Horse Press, 2021)

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through the areas they study, seeing them as living places, interviewing inhabitants and marveling at the beauty and harshness of the environment they study. Join us as we talk with Nicolas Breyfogle, David Moon and Alexandra Bekasova about their journeys and research, how the two intertwined and how that granted them new perspectives on the Russian and Soviet environment.

Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.

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Timur Dadabaev, "Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations: Beyond Empires" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

This month we discuss the post-coloniality of Central Asia's International relations with Timur Dadabaev, the author of Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations: Beyond Empire (Routledge, 2021). This book, which brings together new writing and other material previously published by Dadabaev, re-reads the international politics of Central Asia through a very original post-colonial lens. Dadabaev, a Japan-based scholar who hails from the region himself, engages with the existing literature to depict and explain existing inter-state relations in Central Asia, to ultimately construct fairer International Relations along the Silk Road. There is plenty of empirical grounding for the alternative views illustrated by Dadabaev, who suggests that Western International Relations, when studying Central Asia, repeated the same mistakes that Russian Marxists made when they attributed a narrative of modernity along the lines of the progress made in Germany and Russia. The book does also engage critically with Uzbekistan’s foreign policy and also sheds lights on the prospects of coordinated development of Central Asia and Afghanistan. A very topical reading, which we're very pleased to discuss on NBN Central Asian Studies.

Timur Dadabaev is Profess of International Relation in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. His latest books include Transcontinental Silk Road Strategies. Comparing China, Japan and South Korea in Uzbekistan [Routledge 2019] and Japan in Central Asia. Strategies, Initiatives, and Neighboring Powers [Palgrave MacMillan 2016].

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan

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Thane Gustafson, "Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

With COP26 and high fossil fuel prices, energy is back in the headlines. And Russia, as one of the world’s largest producers of hydrocarbons, is part of the conversation--most recently, in Putin’s refusal to expand oil production to ease global prices.

The world is coming up on three major transitions—peak use of fossil fuels, renewables competing with non-renewables, and a warming climate likely to surpass the 1.5 degree threshold set by the IPCC.

What do those trends mean for Russia: a great power, a major oil and gas producer, an Arctic country covered in permafrost, and an economy with strong, but increasingly outdated, levels of technological development.

Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Professor Thane Gustafson, examines how Russia might react—or be forced to react—to a changing environment and energy market.

In this interview, the three of us will talk about how Russia will have to change as the world warms. As the world shifts to renewables, will Russia be able to keep up? As Arctic ice melts, will Russia see shipping opportunities? And will climate change get greater salience among the Russian public?

Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. A widely recognized authority on Russian political economy and formerly a professor at Harvard University, he is the author of many books, notably The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe (Harvard University Press: 2020) and Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Harvard University Press: 2017), as well as Russia 2010: And What It Means for the World (Vintage: 1995), coauthored with Daniel Yergin.

We’re also joined in this interview by Yvonne Lau. Yvonne is the Asia Markets Reporter for Fortune Magazine, with a longtime interest in Russia, especially its post-Soviet economic development and its growing ties with China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Klimat. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Barbara Martin, "Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika (Bloomsbury,, 2019), Barbara Martin traces the careers of four prominent figures: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research into these four authors, Martin provides a new account of dissident history writing in the Soviet Union from the post-Stalin Thaw through to the Brezhnev era and Perestroika. Dissident Histories illuminates the challenges associated with researching, writing and publishing Soviet history and the critical impact that this work had on intellectual life in the Soviet Union.

Barbara Martin is a postdoctoral researcher within the Department of History at the University of Basel.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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James Kapaló and Kinga Povedák, "The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

This new book by James Kapaló and Kinga Povedák explores the complex intersection of secret police operations and the formation of the religious underground in communist-era Eastern Europe. In sixteen chapters, The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021) looks at how religious groups were perceived as dangerous to the totalitarian state whilst also being extremely vulnerable and yet at the same time very resourceful. In this podcast James and Kinga talk about what is special about secret police archives and how they allow us to explore the material culture, including things like photographs and food, of clandestine and secretive communities. They argue that stories from the archives continue to shape present day religious communities and postsocialist societies more generally as well as reflecting upon what comparing movements from eight different countries shows us that we might miss from looking just at one or two case studies.

Roland Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, President of the Society for Romanian Studies, and a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.

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Grant T. Harward, "Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

What motivated conscripted soldiers to fight in the Romanian Army during the Second World War? Why did they obey orders, take risks, and sometimes deliberately sacrifice their lives for the mission? What made soldiers murder, rape, and pillage, massacring Jews en masse during Operation Barbarossa? Grant Harward’s ground-breaking book Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2021) combines military history, social history, and histories of the Holocaust to offer a new interpretation of Romania’s role in the Second World War. In this interview he talks about his surprising discussions with veterans, his notion of “atrocity motivation” as an unexplored reason why soldiers commit horrific acts during wartime, the relative military effectiveness of the Romanian army, the role of the Orthodox Church, and the content of propaganda aimed at soldiers. As he explains, Harward’s research opens up whole new fields of research for military historians and others interested in the relationship of war to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and violence.

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Molly Thomasy Blasing, "Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image.

Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to writing the photograph is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.

Molly T. Blasing holds degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (AB, 2002) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA, 2006; PHD, 2014). After teaching at Florida State University, Wellesley College, and Oberlin College, she joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky as Assistant Professor of Russian Studies in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2021.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Christopher Coker, "The Rise of the Civilizational State" (Polity Press, 2019)

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In recent years the resurgence of great power competition has gripped the headlines, with new emerging powers (such as Russia and China) seeking to challenge the American and Western hegemony that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. While the geopolitics of the Cold War era were based on ideology, the current geopolitics appear to be based more on cultural and civilizational identities. In his pioneering book The Rise of the Civilizational State (Polity Press, 2019), renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker examines in depth how Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia not only seek to challenge Western powers, but also operate under very different conceptions of how the world should be structured. Instead of the standard nation-state and liberal internationalism that Western power operate under, both powers insist more on the civilizational basis of both the state and world order.

Christopher Coker is Director of the London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank LSE Ideas. He was Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, retiring in 2019. He is a former twice serving member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute, a former NATO Fellow and a regular lecturer at Defense Colleges in the United Kingdom, United States, Rome, Singapore, Tokyo, Norway and Sweden.

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Marshall Poe on Getting Post-Soviet Russia Wrong

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of How To Be Wrong we talk with Marshall Poe, founder and head of the New Books Network, about his work as an historian of Russia and his ideas about making mistakes as a researcher. The interview explores Marshall’s own experience with error and his ideas about the relationship between uncertainty, truth, and expertise.

John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Vladimir Alexandrov, "To Break Russia's Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks" (Pegasus, 2021)

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The latest book by Vladimir Alexandrov is a brilliant examination of the enigmatic Russian revolutionary, Boris Savinkov.

Although now largely forgotten outside Russia, Boris Savinkov was famous, and notorious, both at home and abroad during his lifetime, which spans the end of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the Soviet Union. A complex and conflicted individual, he was a paradoxically moral revolutionary terrorist, a scandalous novelist, a friend of epoch-defining artists like Modigliani and Diego Rivera, a government minister, a tireless fighter against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and an advisor to Churchill. At the end of his life, Savinkov conspired to be captured by the Soviet secret police, and as the country’s most prized political prisoner made headlines around the world when he claimed that he accepted the Bolshevik state. Alexandrov argues that this was Savinkov’s final play as a gambler, staking his life on a secret plan to strike one last blow against the tyrannical regime.

To Break Russia's Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks (Pegasus, 2021) reads like a spellbinding thriller. Professor Alexandrov’s biography of Boris Savinkov not only sheds light on one of the most fascinating figures in Russian history, but also prompts speculation about how the history of Russia may have played out differently if the former terrorist turned government minister had achieved his goals.

Interview conducted by Lynne Hartnett, Associate Professor of History at Villanova University. Professor Hartnett is the author of The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution and is currently writing a book about Russian political exiles in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. She is also the author and narrator of two courses for The Great Courses: Understanding Russia: A Cultural History and The Great Revolutions of Modern History

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Svitlana Biedarieva, "Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art (Ibidem Press, 2021) focuses on political and social expressions in contemporary art of Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. It explores the transformations that art in Ukraine and the Baltic states has undergone since their independence in 1991, discussing how the conflicts and challenges of the last three decades have impacted the reconsideration of identity and fostered resistance of culture against economic and political crises. It analyzes connections between the past and the present as seen by the artists in these countries and looks at their visions of the future.

Contemporary Ukrainian art portrays various perspectives, addressing issues from controversial historical topics to the present military conflict in the East of the country. Baltic art speaks out against the erasure of past historical traumas and analyzes the pertinence of its cultural scene to the European community. The contributions in this collection open a discussion of whether there is a single paradigm that describes the contemporary processes of art production in Ukraine and the Baltic countries.

With contributions by Ieva Astahovska, Svitlana Biedarieva, Kateryna Botanova, Olena Martynyuk, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Lina Michelkeviče, Margaret Tali, and Jessica Zychowicz.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, "Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia" (Routledge, 2021)

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge, 2021), edited by Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, offers the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary overview of key issues in Central Asian Studies. The 30 chapters by leading and emerging scholars summarise major findings in the field and highlight long-term trends, recent observations, and future developments in the region. The handbook features case studies of all five Central Asian republics and is organised thematically in seven sections: History, Politics, Geography, International Relations. Political Economy, Society and Culture, Religion. An essential cross-disciplinary reference work, the handbook offers an accessible and easy to understand guide to the core issues permeating the region to enable readers to grasp the fundamental challenges, transformations and themes in contemporary Central Asia. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students of the region and those working in the field of Area Studies, History, Anthropology, Politics and International Relations.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University.

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Anna Saunders et al., "Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In 1917, the adoption of the revolutionary Mexican Constitution and the October Revolution shook the foundations of international order in profound, unprecedented and lasting ways. These events posed fundamental challenges to international law, particularly to foundational concepts of property, statehood and non-intervention, and the role of law itself.

Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) asks what we might learn about international law from analysing how its various sub-fields have remembered, forgotten, imagined, incorporated, rejected or sought to manage the revolutions of 1917. It shows that those revolutions had wide-ranging repercussions for the development of laws relating to intervention, human rights, investment, alien protection and state responsibility, and for the global economy subsequently enabled by international law and overseen by international institutions. The varied legacies of 1917 play an ongoing role in shaping political struggle, global anti-imperialist and anti-racism movements to this day. Listen in and see how these complex events shaped international law, human rights and anti-imperialist movements globally.

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Yuri Kostenko, "Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament: A History" (HURI, 2020)

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Yuri Kostenko’s Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2020) is a meticulous account of how the Ukrainian government made a decision in the 1990s to give up the nuclear status. The book includes unique documents from the private archive, which Yuri Kostenko shares with the readers. Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament provides not only an account of nuclear weapons elimination in Ukraine, but also offers a broader picture of the political environment in which Ukraine found itself after the fall of the USSR. What political players participated in the construction of the newly formed independent state? What challenges did the country face? In addition to this retrospective approach, the book also provides insights into the present moment, particularly in terms of the ongoing armed conflict initiated by Russia in 2014. Yuri Kostenko mentions that the occupation of the Crimea and the subsequent Russian military aggression against Ukraine were not a surprise to him. The book engages with the consequences of the nuclear disarmament and prompts the readers to draw parallels between the decisions that were made in the 1990s and the current international position that was created for Ukraine.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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Marlene Laruelle, "Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia" (UCL Press, 2021)

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This month we are delighted to host one of the most important voices in Central Asian Studies worldwide: Professor Marlene Laruelle from George Washington University in DC, to discuss her latest, Open Access book Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia (UCL Press 2021).

This is a much-anticipated book, which is going to become the go-to resource for every reader interested in nationalism in Central Asia. Bringing together for the first time Laruelle's articles on Central Asian nationalism, the book offers an intriguing overview of 30 years of nation-building in the region, linking back the choices made in the different nationalising states to concepts and constructs of nationhood developed during the Soviet era.

The first part of this very readable book looks comparatively at the nationalism processes as developed in the southern part of the region [Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. Uzbekistan] while the second segment features a collection of Laruelle's writing on the many complexities associated with nation-building in Kazakhstan, Central Asia's multi-national state par excellence.

Marlene Laruelle is Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. Her latest books include Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (Cornell University Press, 2021) and Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. Follow him on Twitter @anceschistan

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Serhii Plokhy, "The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present" (HURI, 2021)

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Serhii Plokhy’s The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021) includes discussions that focus on the major milestones of the history of Ukraine, ranging from the first ancient mentionings of the territory to the recent Russian military aggression against Ukraine. The book offers a concise and comprehensible commentary on the most contested and controversial issues, including the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, the Pereiaslav Agreement, historical and political representations of Ivan Mazepa, the formation and the collapse of the USSR, the Chornobyl disaster, and the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war, to name but a few. Providing thoroughly researched materials, the essays are important contributions that enrich and detail the study of Ukraine; additionally, the book inscribes Ukraine into a broader, global historical and political context. In this regard, The Frontline is an invitation to think about Ukraine not only as a territory whose history was overshadowed for a long time by the overbearing presence of Russia, but also as a historical and political unit that participated in and propelled a number of changes that led to major geopolitical shifts that eventually entailed the transformation of how the region was perceived and understood at the local and global levels.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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Eliyana R. Adler, "Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Between 1940 and 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. In Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2020), Eliyana Adler provides the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences.

Eliyana Adler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

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Edward Schatz, "Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

I could not think of a better way to start my tenure as host of New Books in Central Asian Studies than discussing Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements & Symbolic Politics in Central Asia (Stanford University Press 2021) with its author, Prof Edward Schatz from the University of Toronto. The book offers a privileged vantage point to assess the political relevance that symbols--in this case those emanated by the United States--continue to hold vis-à-vis attitudes, agendas, and strategies of social movements.

The book is rich in details, showcases the results of an exciting long-term research agenda, and does a fantastic job in tracing the long, slow trajectory of anti-American sentiments in post-Soviet Central Asia, focusing on how the many shifts in the US regional image have been observed, digested, and acted upon by three audiences as diverse as Islamic activists, social mobilisers, and labour activists. This is a timely book, one that will have even more resonance now that Central Asia has entered the post-US era.

Edward Schatz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His previous books include Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009).

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he also edits Europe-Asia Studies.

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Jan Matti Dollbaum et al., "Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Everyone has heard of Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia's opposition to Putin's rule. But what do we really know of him? Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? (Oxford, 2021) provides the first detailed description of Navalny's history and trajectory. Most importantly, Ben Noble, Morvan Lallouet, and Jan Matti Dollbaum turn the one-dimensional, cartoon-like image of Navalny in the West into a nuanced portrait, properly situated in the context of modern Russia.

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John-Paul Himka, "Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. John-Paul Himka's Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944 (Ibidem Press, 2021) delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia--UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under German occupation in 1941-44. The extent of OUN's and UPA's culpability in the Holocaust has been a controversial issue in Ukraine and within the Ukrainian diaspora as well as in Jewish communities and Israel. Occasionally, the controversy has broken into the press of North America, the EU, and Israel.

Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors, Soviet investigations, German documentation, documents produced by OUN itself, and memoirs of OUN activists, it has been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Jeffrey Veidlinger, "In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (Metropolitan Books, 2021) repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of the award-winning books, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. He is the chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former vice-president of the Association for Jewish Studies.

Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at lwaters@utep.edu or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

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Rano Turaeva and Rustamjon Urinboyev, "Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Turaeva and Dr. Urinboyev have brought together a number of studies which explore the daily survival strategies of people within the context of failed states, flourishing informal economies, legal uncertainty, increased mobility, and globalization. As they show, many people who are forced by the circumstances to be innovative and transnational, have found their niches outside formal processes and structures. The book provides a thorough theoretical introduction to the link between labour mobility and informality and comprises convincing case studies from a wide range of post-socialist countries. Overall, it highlights the importance of trust, transnational networks, and digital technologies in settings where the rules governing economic and social activities of mobile workers are often unclear and flexible. Finally, the book shows how many of the processes surrounding labor, mobility, and informality in Russia and Central Asia shared similarities with broader global trends.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University.

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Olesya Khromeychuk, "A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister" (Ibidem, 2021)

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This book is the story of one death among many in the war in eastern Ukraine. Its author is a historian of war whose brother was killed at the frontline in 2017 while serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Olesya Khromeychuk takes the point of view of a civilian and a woman, perspectives that tend to be neglected in war narratives, and focuses on the stories that play out far away from the warzone.

Through a combination of personal memoir and essay, Khromeychuk attempts to help her readers understand the private experience of this still ongoing but almost forgotten war in the heart of Europe and the private experience of war as such. A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister (Ibidem, 2021) will resonate with anyone battling with grief and the shock of the sudden loss of a loved one.

Dr. Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian and writer. She received her PhD in History from University College London. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at the University of Cambridge, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and King’s College London. She is author of A Loss. The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister (Stuttgart: ibidem, forthcoming) and ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division (Peter Lang, 2013). She is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Patrice M. Dabrowski, "The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine" (Northern Illinois UP, 2021)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Patrice M. Dabrowski's book The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2021) tells story of how the Tatras, Eastern Carpathians, and Bieszczady Mountains went from being terra incognita to becoming the popular tourist destinations they are today. It is a story of the encounter of Polish and Ukrainian lowlanders with the wild, sublime highlands and with the indigenous highlanders--Górale, Hutsuls, Boikos, and Lemkos--and how these peoples were incorporated into a national narrative as the territories were transformed into a native/national landscape.

The set of microhistories in this book occur from about 1860 to 1980, a time in which nations and states concerned themselves with the frontier at the edge. Discoverers not only became enthralled with what were perceived as their own highlands but also availed themselves of the mountains as places to work out answers to the burning questions of the day. Each discovery led to a surge in mountain tourism and interest in the mountains and their indigenous highlanders.

Although these mountains, essentially a continuation of the Alps, are Central and Eastern Europe's most prominent physical feature, politically they are peripheral. The Carpathians is the first book to deal with the northern slopes in such a way, showing how these discoveries had a direct impact on the various nation-building, state-building, and modernization projects. Dabrowski's history incorporates a unique blend of environmental history, borderlands studies, and the history of tourism and leisure.

Patrice M. Dabrowski has taught and worked at Harvard, Brown, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Vienna. She is currently an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a member of the Board of Directors of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA), and editor of H-Poland. Dr. Dabrowski is the author of three books: Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (2004), Poland: The First Thousand Years (2014; paperback edition, 2016), and The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine (release date: October 15, 2021). In 2014 she was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Vladislav Davidzon, "From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine" ( Academica Press, 2020)

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. The 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” heralded a tremendous transformation of Ukrainian politics and society that has continued to ripple and reverberate throughout the world. These unprecedented events also wrought a remarkable cultural revolution in Ukraine itself. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the presidency of the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review, focusing on newly emergent trends in film, literature, painting, design, and fashion. The journal became an East European cultural institution, publishing outstanding writers in the region and beyond. From his vantage point as a journalist and editor, Davidzon came to observe events and know many of the leading figures in Ukrainian politics and culture, and to write about them for a Western audience. Davidzon later found himself in the center of world events as he became a United States government witness in the Ukraine scandal that shook the presidency of Donald Trump. From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Academica Press, 2020) tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Sarah J. Young, "Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Prison" (UCL Press, 2021)

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 1884, sixty-eight prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum-security prison at Shlissel'burg Fortress near St. Petersburg. Inhuman conditions in the prison caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, and over half died. However, the survivors fought back to reform the prison and improve the inmates' living conditions. Their memoirs enshrined their experience in revolutionary mythology and served as an indictment of the Tsarist autocracy's loss of moral authority. Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Prison (UCL Press, 2021) features three of these memoirs--translated into English for the first time--as well as an introductory essay that analyzes the memoirs' construction of a collective narrative of resilience, resistance, and renewal. The first extended study of these memoirs in English, this book uncovers an important episode in the history of political imprisonment. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the Russian revolution, carceral history, penal practice and behaviors, and prison and life writing.

Dr. Sarah J. Young is Associate Professor of Russian at University College London, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, culture and thought.

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Paul Werth, "1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

When considering pivotal years in Russian history, one naturally thinks of 1861 (the Serf Emancipation), the 1905 Revolution, or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Dr. Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution (Oxford UP, 2021), invites us to reconsider that list of revolutionary years. Werth’s wide-ranging discussion analyzes such subjects as Pushkin’s death and Petr Chadaaev’s criticism of Russia’s past, to the Khiva campaign in which the Russian’s learned all they ever wanted to know about camels, but were afraid to ask. By the end of this engaging narrative, the reader comes to realize that post-1837 Russia was clearly on track (literally, in the case of the new railways) to become a different sort of place than it had been before. The era of Nicholas I has, with some justification, been portrayed as a stagnant, stultifying period. Werth’s book, however, demonstrates that the events of 1837, from the heir’s cross-country trip to the burning of the Winter Palace, did in fact add up to a “Quiet Revolution.”

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Nadieszda Kizenko, "Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives.

Nadieszda Kizenko's book Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2021) brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.

Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Maria Stepanova, "The Voice Over: Poems and Essays" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Is it just a coincidence that three books by the major Russian writer Maria Stepanova have appeared in English in 2021? Why does Maria Stepanova deploy such a rich variety of voices and forms? What are the challenges of translating her poetry? Who are the pantheon of deceased writers who seem to haunt her every line?

In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work.

Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.

(US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize.

Her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was published by Bloodaxe Books, also in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards.

Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Additional translations are by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva.

For a video of the May 2021 launch event for The Voice Over, featuring Maria Stepanova and several of the translators, see

Book Launch of Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over: Poems and Essays – A Reading and Conversation – CREECA – UW–Madison (wisc.edu)

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.

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A Brief Look at the Life and Times of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The rich and complex prose of the celebrated Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a detailed look at the fabric of European literary and social discourse and continues to attract scholarly attention, even 200 years after his birth.

2021 marks the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth. To commemorate this occasion, join us in conversation with Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, as she takes us through the brief-yet-colourful life, most notable works, and myths surrounding the celebrated Russian author.

The discussion is an extension of “The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review”, published by Brill and edited by Prof. Vladiv-Glover.

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A. S. Agadjanian and S. M. Kenworthy, "Understanding World Christianity: Russia" (Fortress Press, 2021)

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Christianity is a global religion. It's a fact that is too often missed or ignored in many books and conversations. In a world where Christianity is growing everywhere but in the West, the Understanding World Christianity series offers a fresh, readable orientation to Christianity around the world. Understanding World Christianity is organized geographically, by nation and region. Noted experts, in most cases native to the area of focus, present a balanced history of Christianity and a detailed discussion of the faith as it is lived today. Each volume addresses six key "intersections" of Christianity in a given context, including the historical, denominational, sociopolitical, geographical, biographical, and theological settings. Understanding World Christianity: Russia (Fortress Press, 2021) offers a compelling glimpse into the vibrant and complex picture of Christianity in the Russian context. It's an ideal introduction for students, mission leaders, and any others who wish to know how Christianity influences, and is influenced by, the Russian context.

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Gökten Dogangün, "Gender Politics in Turkey and Russia: From State Feminism to Authoritarian Rule" (I. B. Tauris, 2019)

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Both Russia and Turkey were pioneering examples of feminism in the early 20th Century, when the Bolshevik and Republican states embraced an ideology of women's equality. Yet now these countries have drifted towards authoritarianism and the concept of gender is being invoked to reinforce tradition, nationalism and to oppose Western culture. Gökten Dogangün's book Gender Politics in Turkey and Russia: From State Feminism to Authoritarian Rule (Bloomsbury, 2019) explores the relationship between the state and gender equality in Russia and Turkey, covering the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Republican Revolution of 1923 and highlighting the very different gender climates that have emerged under the leaderships of Putin and Erdogan.

The research is based on analysis of legal documents, statistical data and reports, as well as in-depth interviews with experts, activists and public officials. Dogangün identifies a climate of 'neo-traditionalism' in contemporary Russia and 'neo-conservatism' in contemporary Turkey and examines how Putin and Erdogan's ambitions to ensure political stability, security and legitimacy are achieved by promoting commonly held 'family values', grounded in religion and tradition. The book reveals what it means to be a woman in Turkey and Russia today and covers key topics such as hostility towards feminism, women's employment, domestic violence, motherhood and abortion. Dogangün provides the first comparative study that seeks to understand the escalation of patriarchy and the decline of democracy which is being witnessed across the world.

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Zuza Zak, "Amber & Rye: A Baltic Food Journey: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania" (Allen & Unwin, 2021)

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Food writer Zuza Zak’s latest book, Amber & Rye: A Baltic Food Journey: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Allen & Unwin, 2021) is a remarkable exploration of one of Europe’s better-kept secrets: the food and culture of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, known collectively as the three “Baltic States.” But as “Amber & Rye” proves so ably, each of these countries has its own unique and distinct culinary roots and culture, and each country is currently experiencing a lively culinary renaissance, which makes “Amber & Rye” an especially timely and welcome addition to this season’s new cookbooks.

Zak’s initial inspiration was her Lithuanian grandmother’s tales of her youth in Vilnius, and these memories launched Zak on a quest to discover the heart of the region through an examination of its food. The cuisines of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are very much a reflection of their terrain and are shaped by the bracing climate of the Baltic sea. Fish — be it fresh, salted, or smoked— is a major player in each country’s cuisine, as are meat, grains, root vegetables, mushrooms, berries, and the region’s incomparable dairy products. With some influences from their near neighbors: Russia, Germany, Poland, and Scandinavia, the Baltic States’ cuisines remain magnificently their own — as Zak emphasizes throughout “Amber & Rye.”

“Amber & Rye’s” adroit structure offers recipes from all three countries in chapters that cover breakfast, appetizers, soups, main courses, salads, desserts, and beverages and a delightful section on the region’s famous pickles, ferments, and preserves. In the approachable style and easy-to-follow recipes that made Zak’s first book, “Polska” such a success, the recipes of “Amber & Rye” showcase the building blocks of Baltic cuisine such as kama, hemp butter, and herring in fresh and engaging recipes, which are easy to replicate in an ordinary home kitchen.

The recipes are sandwiched between insightful travel essays about the cities Zak visited on her Baltic odyssey, which offer keen insight into the individual history and culture of each place. The region’s rich history includes membership in the commercial powerhouse of the Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League, the era dominated by the crusading Teutonic Knights, and the strategic alliance between Lithuania and Poland, which made the region a major power broker in the sixteenth century. Zak also charts the more recent struggle of the three Baltic countries to preserve their unique heritage and traditions alive during the seventy years of Soviet rule, and the key role played by music, art, culture, and of course food in the ultimate success of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia reclaiming their heritage and enjoying the freedom to celebrate it today.

The title, “Amber & Rye” is an apt choice. Rye is omnipresent in the Baltic countries — a tenacious, life-giving grain that is found in almost every meal. Amber, the ancient substance formed from the sap of conifer trees, is a potent symbol in each of the three counties: of energy, power, and the preservation of memory. In “Amber & Rye” Zuzu Zak has captured both the life force and the power of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and made them available to readers through her delightful and compelling exploration of the cuisines, culture, and history of these three Baltic countries.

Zuza Zak is a food writer based in London, where she is a Ph.D. student at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Zak’s debut cookbook, “Polska: New Polish Cooking,” was selected as one of the best cookbooks of 2016 on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Program. “Amber & Rye” is published in America by Interlink Publishing.

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Rebecca Friedman, "Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

From the nostalgic landed estate with its backward gaze to the present-focused and efficient urban apartment to the utopian communal dreams of a Soviet future, the idea of time was deeply embedded in Russian domestic life. I sat down with my mentor, Rebecca Friedman to talk about her new book, Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia: Time at Home which was published in August, 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing. Dr. Friedman is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University. She is the author of Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University and co-editor for a number of volumes about gender in Russia.

Dr. Friedman is the first to weave together these twin concepts of time and space in relation to Russian culture and, in doing so, this book reveals how the revolutionary domestic experiments reflected a desire by the state and by individuals to control the rapidly changing landscape of modern Russia. Drawing on extensive popular and literary sources, both visual and textual, this fascinating book enables readers to understand the reshaping of Russian space and time as part of a larger revolutionary drive to eradicate, however ambivalently, the 19th-century gentrified sloth in favor of the proficient Soviet comrade. As Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia explains, amidst such public turmoil Russians turned inwards, embracing and carefully curating the home in an effort to express both personal and national identities.

This was a wonderful and engaging conversation about the past, the present, the future, and the Russian-ness of it all. Enjoy!

Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba.

Twitter: @RozzmeryPV

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Bogdan C. Iacob et al., "1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019) draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region's links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era's other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Margarita M. Balmaceda, "Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union" (Wilson Center, 2021)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Margarita Balmaceda’s Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a meticulous exploration of a complex system of energy supplies involving Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. While originating in Russia, energy supplies, as the author asserts, undergo changes and transformations when being delivered to various destinations. What do these changes inform about the nature of both energy resources and power? Offering an insightful framework in which the two concepts can be understood, Russian Energy Chains complicates the issue of energy supplies that are inextricable from the dynamics of power relations on the interstate level. In addition to acute commentaries on the current role and status of Russia in the energy market, Margarita Balmaceda offers references to various time periods to illustrate how politically and geographically entangled energy systems are. Russian Energy Chains provides a detailed account of the development of the energy power that Russia seems to both offer and usurp; the book guides the reader through the complexity of power relations that include Ukraine and the European Union and helps better understand the current debate about Nord Stream-2. On a larger level, Margarita Balmaceda invites the discussion of the future of the energy market in terms of domestic and international policies.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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Volodymyr Vynnychenko, "Disharmony and Other Plays" (CIUS Press, 2020)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Volodymyr Vynnychenko is one of the most ambiguous and controversial Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century. In an intricate and highly entangled way, his persona combines an artist and a statesman whose political views include both national aspirations of Ukraine and the pursuit of programs which were marked by socialist and federalist ideas. His writing opens a window into cultural and political contestations that were taking place in Ukraine in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Empire and on the eve of the creation of the Soviet Union. The complexity of these dramatic and drastic changes manifests itself in Vynnychenko’s writing, which is marked by psychological nuances and emotional crevices. George Mihaychuk’s Disharmony and Other Plays (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2020) invites the reader to delve into a psychological world of characters who try to deal with moral doubts, hesitations, and uncertainties. In the introduction, George Mihaychuk outlines the pillars of Vynnychenko’s dramas. The author situates Vynnychenko in the context of European modernism while providing trajectories that connect Vynnychenko to Hegel and Kant. The moral issues that Vynnychenko explores in and through his dramas resonate with the Dostoyevskian voice. His characters are split, tormented, haunted by the desire to be honest and genuine with themselves. Is it possible to be genuine with oneself? What does it mean to be honest with oneself, after all? George Mihaychuk’s Disharmony and Other Plays invites readers to take a bold journey into the deep and dark corners of the soul.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

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Jonathan Haslam, "The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton UP, 2021), looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a new interpretation. Professor Jonathan Haslam, in the words of historian, Geoffrey Roberts, “the doyen of Soviet Diplomatic History”, looks at the neglected thread connecting them all: the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the inter-war period. Marshalling an array of archival sources, including records from the Communist International, Professor Haslam seeks to transform our understanding of the deep-seated origins of World War II, its conflicts, and its legacy.

In Haslam’s interpretation fascism’s emergence in conjunction with the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, helped to upend the existing world order. World War I had economically destabilized many nations, and the threat of Communist revolt loomed large in the ensuing social unrest. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire, and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. The appeasement and political misreading of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that followed held back the spectre of rebellion—only to usher in the later advent of war.

Illuminating ideological differences in the decades before World War II, and the continuous role of pre- and postwar Communism, The Spectre of War provides unprecedented context for one of the most momentous calamities of the twentieth century. While not everyone will agree with his thesis and his overall interpretation of Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period, Professor Haslam has written a book that will be required reading for anyone seriously interested in the period covered by the book.

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Eliza Ablovatski, "Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested in the streets and societies of Munich and Budapest in 1919. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, of 'fighting the world revolution', which was shared by residents of the two cities. In 1919, both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were focused on shaping the emerging new order according to their own worldview. In Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Eliza Ablovatski helps answer the question of why so many Germans and Hungarians chose to use their new political power for violence and repression.

Eliza Ablovatski is Associate Professor of History at Kenyon College (Ohio), where she has just completed her term as chair of the History department.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Ian Ona Johnson, "Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft, or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree with the ambassador’s assessment; though they might find his use of the word “community,” with all its positive connotations, somewhat out of place. For if the Germans and Soviets built any community at all, the evidence suggests it was not built on mutual respect and cooperation. Rather it was built on hate—vicious, unbridled, unrelenting hate.

Hate, however, can unite as powerfully as it divides. Ideologically, politically, culturally, economically, and socially, the Germans and the Soviets were diametrically opposed. But for a brief period during the interwar years, their mutual hatred of the post-First World War order overcame their mutual distrust to bring these two powers together in an uncharacteristic, but highly consequential, economic, technologic, and military partnership. Formalized with the signing of the Treaty of Ropallo in April 1922, this uneasy alliance saw the Soviet Union provide a safe haven for German rearmament in return for German investment, trade, and military assistance. German officers, businessmen, industrialists, and engineers relocated to secret sites throughout the Soviet Union to work on the design of tanks and aircraft, develop new chemical weapons capabilities, and train a new generation of German military leaders away from the prying eyes of the Allied powers. Simultaneously, Soviet officers learned the art of war from their German counterparts, while their country acquired the industrial base, manufacturing expertise, and military hardware it believed necessary to advancing the Communist cause.

Understanding the grave significance of that exchange is the object of military historian Ian Ona Johnson’s recent work, Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2021). The Ropallo relationship, Johnson convincingly argues, can explain not only the outbreak of the Second World War, but also its conduct, especially on the Eastern Front. Germany’s rapid rearmament, the Nazification of the Reichswar, the Soviet military purges of the 1930s, and even British and French appeasement, Johnson maintains, can all trace their roots to the Ropallo era. Without the Soviet Union’s assistance, Germany would not have been able to so easily violate the Versailles treaty; nor would the German military have been able to so rapidly rearm. Close contact between German officers and the Soviet regime, Johnson observes, radicalized many in the Reichswar’s upper echelons, driving them into the open embrace of the National Socialists. Contact between these two groups also troubled Stalin, who feared Red Army officers were becoming contaminated by German ideology and culture. That fear, Johnson contends, resulted in the disastrous Red Army purges of 1936. And, Johnson argues, had the Germany Army not stolen a technological night march on the British and the French, appeasement may not have been as attractive a posture. Without Ropallo, Hitler’s early advances may have been more forcefully checked.

Faustian Bargain is an insightful, incisive, exhaustively researched, and incredibly accessible look at a critical period in the lead up to the Second World War. Johnson provides a fresh lens through which to examine the most important questions surrounding the war, its origins, and its conduct. In doing so, Johnson reminds us that the story of the Second World War is in fact, as Brockdorff-Rantzau might have stated, the story of the the complex relationships built by an international “community of fate.”

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John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of some 350 extracts of this collection, but also a deep dive into the provenance, nature and applications of these Cold War era Soviet maps.

Join us as we talk to co-authors John Davies and Alex Kent about the joys of working with maps, the difficulties they encountered researching the Soviet mapping programme, and their visions for the future.

Listeners interested in contributing to John and Alex's research may contact them at author@redatlasbook.com. Prints of Soviet City Plans are also available on their website.

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Bagila Bukharbayeva, "The Vanishing Generation: Revolution, Religion, and Disappearance in Modern Uzbekistan" (Indiana UP, 2019)

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Weaving together personal story and broad analysis, Bagila Burkhabayeva’s The Vanishing Generation: Revolution, Religion, and Disappearance in Modern Uzbekistan (Indiana UP, 2019) deals with the question of Islam and its repression during the period of Islam Karimov’s rule in newly independent Uzbekistan. As witness to the infamous Zhaslyk prison and the 2005 Andijan uprising, Bukharbayeva shares intimate details about Uzbekistan’s use of torture, kidnapping, and imprisonment against perceived religious extremists. Burkhabayeva’s book will be of great interest to scholars, journalists, and anyone interested in contemporary Islam, Central Asia, or newly-formed authoritarian states of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University

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Chris Miller, "We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those who launched them hoped to achieve.

Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Harvard University Press, 2021) studies many attempts to chart an Asian policy—from bold imperial dreams of a thriving Russian Far East to Soviet efforts to inspire the developing world through soft power—and why all these policies ended up disappointing their drafters.

In this interview, Chris and I talk about Russia’s engagement with the Far East, stretching from its initial forays on the Pacific Coast of North America through to the present day. We talk about why “pivots to Asia” are so hard: both for the Russians, and perhaps for other great powers considering the same policy.

Chris Miller is an assistant professor of international history at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and co-director of the school's Russia and Eurasia Program. He is the author of Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). He has previously served as the associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He can be followed on Twitter at @crmiller1.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of We Shall Be Masters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Alison K. Smith, "Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia" (Reaktion Books, 2021)

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

When people think of Russian food, they generally think either of the opulent luxury of the tsarist aristocracy or of post-Soviet elites, signified above all by caviar, or on the other hand of poverty and hunger--of cabbage and potatoes and porridge. Both of these visions have a basis in reality, but both are incomplete. The history of food and drink in Russia includes fasts and feasts, scarcity and, for some, at least, abundance. It includes dishes that came out of the northern, forested regions and ones that incorporate foods from the wider Russian Empire and later from the Soviet Union. Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia (Reaktion Books, 2021) places Russian food and drink in the context of Russian history and shows off the incredible (and largely unknown) variety of Russian food.

Alison Smith is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Toronto.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Andrew Jenks, "Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth" (Anthem Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Andrew Jenks' book Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth (Anthem Press, 2021) explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations.

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics.

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

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Russell E. Martin, "The Tsar's Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia's Rulers, 1495-1745" (Northern Illinois UP, 2021)

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The dominant impression of Russia in the news media and politics, even today, is that it is and always has been an autocratic power controlled by a single despotic ruler. But historians of the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries have long realized that this vision was to some extent a myth projected by the central authorities to support a system that was in fact oligarchic but competitive in nature. A fundamental step in recognizing the gap between that myth and reality was the identification of marriages between aristocratic clans as a determinant in political alliances, followed by a new understanding of patron-client relations and other interpersonal connections within the elite.

In The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russian Rulers, 1495–1745 (Northern Illinois UP, 2021), Russell E. Martin explores the ways in which the weddings of tsars and lesser members of the royal family worked to integrate brides and their families into the elite while moderating tensions among the nobility. The whole occasion was elaborately choreographed and developed over time as the needs of the original dynasty, the Daniilovichi, to extend and sustain the lineage by managing the number of heirs gave way to the new Romanov dynasty’s attempts to establish its legitimacy, followed by a squabble for power between two branches of the later Romanovs (Peter the Great and his descendants). And the stakes were high—the book is full of examples of poisoned brides, recalcitrant exiles, bridegrooms executed for failing to judge the balance correctly, and more. Through this in-depth but beautifully written study, we gain a new appreciation of the importance of ceremony and ritual in creating and promoting visions of how the world does and should work at specific points in time.

C. P. Lesley is the pen name of Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, a historian of Muscovite Russia who hosts New Books in Historical Fiction. Under her real name, she translated and edited The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest novel, Song of the Sisters, appeared in 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Timothy Frye, "Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Putin is not the unconstrained, all-powerful boogeyman he is made out to be in the popular Western media. So says Timothy Frye, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in his new book,

Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (Princeton UP, 2021). Drawing on more than three decades of research, and reams of data from within Russia itself, Frye depicts a "personal autocrat", but one subject to numerous constraints and trade offs. And the shows of force we have seen in recent years, from his treatment of opposition figures to the planning for the upcoming election, highlight those weaknesses. Regardless of your view of Putin, you will want to hear about and understand the challenges that he faces.

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Marta Dyczok, "Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidoscope from Hromadske Radio 2016-2019" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Marta Dyczok's book Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidoscope from Hromadske Radio 2016-2019 (Ibidem Press, 2021) is like a time capsule containing a selection of interviews that aired on Hromadske Radio's Ukraine Calling show. They capture what people were thinking during a critical time in the country's history, from the July 2016 NATO Summit through to Volodymyr Zelenskyy's 2019 landslide election victories. Decision makers, opinion makers, and other interesting people commented on events of the day as well as larger issues. Topics range from politics to sports, religion, history, war, books, diplomacy, health, business, art, holidays, foreign policy, anniversaries, public opinion to freedom of speech. Interview guests include Canada's then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, writer Andrey Kurkov, Crimean political prisoner Hennadii Afanasiev, who was tortured in 2014, Ukraine's acting Health Minister Ulana Suprun, American analyst/journalist Brian Whitmore, UNHRC's Pablo Mateu, ethnologist Ihor Poshyvailo, investment banker Olena Bilan, Tufts University's Daniel Drezner, a cameo appearance by Boris Johnson, and many more. Together these interviews provide a unique, diverse, and kaleidoscopic perspective conveying the substance, atmosphere, and flavor of Ukraine while it was on the receiving end of a hybrid war from Russia.

Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University, Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Most of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on.

Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard University Press: 2021), the empire that he built continued to shape, incubate and grow the political cultures it conquered. Even as the empire formally splintered, the ties that bound together the Mongols continued to play a critical role in the growth of new identities and cultures.

More information can be found in Marie’s article for Quillete: How the (Much Maligned) Mongol Horde Helped Create Russian Civilization.

In this interview Marie and I talk about the empire the Mongols built: how it grew, what it covered, and how it changed. We discuss how the Mongols changed those they ruled and those they bordered against, and the geopolitical system they built.

Marie Favereau is Associate Professor of History at Paris Nanterre University. She has been a member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a research associate at the University of Oxford for the major project Nomadic Empires. Her books include The Golden Horde and the Mamluk Sultanate (published in French) and the graphic novel Gengis Khan.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Horde. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, "Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc (Routledge, 2021) puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe's east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers' reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets.

Studying the eastern European 'iconosphere' leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies.

Dr Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius teaches art history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was Curator and Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw, as well as Guest Professor at the Humboldt University Berlin. Her publications include Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (Polish Academy, 2000), National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (National Museum in Warsaw, 2001); Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (Black Dog 2011, with Natalia Zarzecka), and From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Ashgate 2015, with Piotr Piotrowski). She is working on a new project on the history of caricature as a medium.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Rossen Djagalov, "From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) addresses this historical blind spot by recounting the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema: the Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958-1991) and the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968-1988). The inclusion of writers and filmmakers from the Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia and extensive Soviet support aligned these organizations with Soviet internationalism. While these cultural alliances between the Second and the Third World never achieved their stated aim - the literary and cinematic independence of the literatures and cinemas of these societies from the West - they did forge what Ngugi wa Thiong'o called "the links that bind us," along which now-canonical postcolonial authors, texts, and films could circulate across the non-Western world until the end of the Cold War.

In the process of this historical reconstruction, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism inverts the traditional relationship between Soviet and postcolonial studies: rather than studying the (post-)Soviet experience through the lens of postcolonial theory, it documents the multiple ways in which that theory and its attendant literary and cinematic production have been shaped by the Soviet experience.

Jessica Bachman is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington.

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L. Bordetsky-Williams, "Forget Russia: A Novel" (Tailwinds Press, 2020)

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

"Your problem is you have a Russian soul," Anna's mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve UConn senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War-and a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror. As Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents, and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien culture for the first time, she must come to terms with the aspects of the past that haunt her own life. With its intricate insight into the everyday rhythms of an almost forgotten way of life in Brezhnev's Soviet Union, Forget Russia (Tailwinds Press, 2020) is a disquieting multi-generational epic about coming of age, forgotten history, and the loss of innocence in all of its forms.

L. Bordetsky-Williams (aka Lisa Williams) is the author of Forget Russia, published by Tailwinds Press, December 2020 (https://www.forgetrussia.com). She has also published the memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf, The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, and three poetry chapbooks. She is a Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey and lives in New York City.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

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Stephen V. Bittner, "Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar (Oxford UP, 2021) tells the story of Russia's encounter with viniculture and winemaking. Rooted in the early-seventeenth century, embraced by Peter the Great, and then magnified many times over by the annexation of the indigenous wine economies and cultures of Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, viniculture and winemaking became an important indicator of Russia's place at the European table. While the Russian Revolution in 1917 left many of the empire's vineyards and wineries in ruins, it did not alter the political and cultural meanings attached to wine. Stalin himself embraced champagne as part of the good life of socialism, and the Soviet Union became a winemaking superpower in its own right, trailing only Spain, Italy, and France in the volume of its production.

Whites and Reds illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, and, of course, the growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries. Because wine was domesticated by virtue of imperialism, its history reveals many of the instabilities and peculiarities of the Russian and Soviet empires. Over two centuries, the production and consumption patterns of peripheral territories near the Black Sea and in the Caucasus became a hallmark of Russian and Soviet civilizational identity and cultural refinement. Wine in Russia was always more than something to drink.

Stephen Bittner is Professor of History at Sonoma State University. In addition to Whites and Reds, he is the author of The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw (2008) and the editor of Dmitrii Shepilov’s memoir, The Kremlin’s Scholar (2007).

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief.

Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth century. In the past few decades, scholarship has started emphasizing other aspects of the three hundred year Mongol project--after all, waves of destruction don't tend to also be referred to by names like "Pax Mongolica," or "the Mongolian Peace."

In this majestic new study, Marie Favereau (Paris Nanterre University) takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. For three centuries, the Mongol Empire was no less a force for global development than the Roman Empire. The Horde--ulus Jochi, one of the four divisions of Chingghis Khan's Empire--was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its unique political regime--a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility--reswarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative.

The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard UP, 2021) is an ambitious, accessible, beautifully written portrait of an empire little understood tand too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Marie Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.

Christopher S Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas.

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Sean McMeekin, "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2021)

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.

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Adeeb Khalid, "Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021), Adeeb Khalid presents a comprehensive narrative of modern Central Asian history based on original research and an exhaustive synthesis of recent scholarship.

Khalid explores how the modern forces of empire, revolution, and communism (and its collapse) have shaped both the "Russian" and "Chinese" parts of Central Asia from the 18th century to the present. Countering portrayals of Central Asia as a remote and inaccesible land on the peripheries of modern history, the author demonstrates how the region's connectivity and its participation in global exchanges of goods and ideas shaped its developments in the modern period. Students, specialists, and non-specialists will be delighted by Khalid's ability to capture the complexity of modern Central Asian history and deliver it in a readily accessible format.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University

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Stephen M. Norris, "Museums of Communism: New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe" (Indiana UP, 2020)

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism: New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe (Indiana UP, 2020) explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Andrei P. Tsygankov, "Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry" (Polity, 2019)

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In recent times, US-Russia relations have deteriorated to what both sides acknowledge is an “all time low.” Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and Putin’s continued support for the Assad regime in Syria have placed enormous strain on this historically tense and complex relationship. In Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry (Polity, 2019), Andrei Tsygankov challenges the dominant view that US-Russia relations have entered a new Cold War phase. Russia’s US strategy, he argues, can only be understood in the context of a changing international order. While America strives to preserve its global dominance, Russia—the weaker power—exploits its asymmetric capabilities and relations with non-Western allies to defend and promote its interests, and to avoid yielding to US pressures. Focusing on key areas of conflict and mutual convergence—from European security to China and the Middle East, as well as cyber, nuclear, and energy issues—Tsygankov paints a nuanced and unsentimental picture of two countries whose ties are likely to remain marked by suspicion and conflict for years to come.

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Paul J. Contino, "Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs" (Cascade Books, 2020)

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Paul Contino’s Catholic reading of Dostoevsky’s final masterwork, premised on the novel’s “powerful capacity to inspire readers to be better people”, follows hero Alyosha Karamazov’s spiritual maturation as a “monk in the world”, his ministry to his brothers, and his ultimate message of hope. In Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs (Cascade Books, 2020), Contino argues that Alyosha exemplifies incarnational realism – a theologically-informed way of life in which the human being apprehends reality in the light of Christ’s incarnation and acts upon it – in his relationships with those around him, resisting totalization in favor off attentiveness to the particularities of human experience. In this interview we discuss the theological underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s narrative, the relationship between characters Alyosha and The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin as two attempts to portray Christian love in action, the recurring problem of theodicy in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, squaring Dostoevsky’s criticism of Catholicism with a Catholic reading of his novel, teaching The Brothers Karamazov, and reading Dostoevsky counter-culturally.

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Larry E. Holmes, "Revising the Revolution: The Unmaking of Russia's Official History of 1917" (Indiana UP, 2021)

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The clash between scholarship and politics—between truth and propaganda— had always been a conflict of great importance. In the 1920s the Commission for the Collection, Study, and Publication of Materials on the October Revolution and History of the Communist Party (Istpart, in abbreviated Russian) was formed. Istpart’s historians were tasked with preserving the documentary record, compiling memoirs, and upholding ideological conformism within the national narrative of the 1917 revolution. In Revising the Revolution: The Unmaking of Russia's Official History of 1917 (Indiana UP, 2021), Larry E. Holmes focuses on the work of Istpart’s main office in Moscow and of its branch in Viatka. Istpart initially hoped to abide by the demands of both scholarship and politics when formulating the principles of historical research and when writing about the 1917 revolution. In that effort, Istpart in Moscow and its affiliate in Viatka acted sometimes in concert but often in conflict. Istpart’s initial faith in a symbiosis of scholarship and politics eroded, slowly at first, then rapidly. However, they quickly realized that the party rejected any version of history that suggested nonideological or nonpolitical sources of truth. By 1928, Istpart had largely abandoned its mission to promote scholarly work on the 1917 revolution and instead advanced the party's master narrative.

Revising the Revolution explores the battle for the Russian national narrative and the ways in which history can be used to centralize power. This book addresses two issues of relevance to today’s Russian Federation. Once again the center’s politicians demand of professional historians a useful and not necessarily objective rendition of the past. Yet this authoritarian state with its power-vertical, as Vladimir Putin likes to call it, cannot always get its way without resistance from below. As recent events in Ekaterinburg and Khabarovsk indicate, people in Russia’s provinces, as in Viatka earlier in Istpart’s history, act on their own interests and, in the case of officials, in the interests of the institutions and the region they represent.

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Andrei Znamenski, "Socialism As a Secular Creed" (Lexington Books, 2021)

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The predominantly secular focus of socialism can often obscure the parts of its ideology that reflect the elements it inherited from Western religious thinking. In Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History (Lexington Books, 2021), Andrei Znamenski shows how this religious inheritance created elements within it that were closer in form to a belief system than a philosophy. These religious elements were most prevalent in socialism’s formative period, as Znamenski identifies the debt the socialist world-view owed to Christian millennialist ideas that were current in the early 19th century. Because of this the socialist world-view soon echoed the Christian one, with the working class becoming the chosen people who were anticipated to be the vanguard leading the world to the promised land of a socialist system. These elements persisted even as socialism focused on social engineering and nationalist forces caused socialist thinking to branch off into different forms. This continued in the 20th century as the economic conditions changed, as the “embourgeoisement” of the working classes and the post-World War II desire to disassociate from Soviet-style socialism led many socialists to turn instead to culture as the means towards attaining their millennialist vision.

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Kristy Ironside, "A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In spite of Karl Marx's proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lost on Soviet leaders, despite official Communist Party dogma. Money, Ironside demonstrates, mediated the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens and was at the center of both the government's and the people's visions for the maturing Communist project. A strong ruble--one that held real value in workers' hands and served as an effective labor incentive--was seen as essential to the economic growth that would rebuild society and realize Communism's promised future of abundance.

In A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union (Harvard UP, 2021), Ironside shows how Soviet citizens turned to the state to remedy the damage that the ravages of the Second World War had inflicted upon their household economies. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, progress toward Communism was increasingly measured by the health of its citizens' personal finances, such as greater purchasing power, higher wages, better pensions, and growing savings. However, the increasing importance of money in Soviet life did not necessarily correlate to improved living standards for Soviet citizens. The Soviet government's achievements in "raising the people's material welfare" continued to lag behind the West's advances during a period of unprecedented affluence. These factors combined to undermine popular support for Soviet power and confidence in the Communist project.

Kristy Ironside is an Assistant Professor of Russian history at McGill University. She focuses on the economic, social, and political history of the Soviet Union.

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Georgiy Kasianov et al., "From 'the Ukraine' to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Thu, 27 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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Dina Fainberg, "Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

Tue, 25 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists covered the rival superpower and how two distinctive sets of truth systems, professional practices, and political cultures shaped international reporting.

Fainberg explores private and public interactions among multiple groups that shaped coverage of the Cold War adversary, including journalists and their sources, editors, news media executives, government officials, diplomats, American pundits, Soviet censors, and audiences on both sides. Foreign correspondents, Fainberg argues, were keen analytical observers who aspired to understand their host country and probe its depths. At the same time, they were fundamentally shaped by their cultural and institutional backgrounds--to the point that their views of the rival superpower were refracted through values of their own culture. International reporting grounded and personalized the differences between the two nations, describing the other side in readily recognizable, self-referential terms.

Fundamentally, Fainberg demonstrates, Americans and Soviets during the Cold War came to understand themselves through the creation of images of each other. Drawing on interviews with veteran journalists and Soviet dissidents, Cold War Correspondents also uses previously unexamined Soviet and US government records, newspaper and news agency archives, rare Soviet cartoons, and individual correspondents' personal papers, letters, diaries, books, and articles. Striking black-and-white photos depict foreign correspondents in action. Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

Dina Fainberg is an Assistant Professor in Modern History and History BA Director at City, University of London. She has earned her PhD in Modern Russian and Modern US History from Rutgers University in 2012.

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Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 21 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the coalition launched an unprecedented experiment to re-establish European security. With over one million troops remaining in France, they established the Allied Council to mitigate the threat of war and terror and to design and consolidate a system of deterrence. The Council transformed the norm of interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order.

In her new book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge UP, 2020), she reveals how, long before commercial interest and economic considerations on scale and productivity dictated and inspired the project of European integration, the common denominator behind this first impulse for a unification of Europe in norms and institutions was the collective fight against terror.

George Giannakopoulos is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. He has recently guest edited the special issue Britain, European Civilization and the idea of Liberty” for the History of European Ideas (2020)

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Faith Hillis, "Utopia's Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 18 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In April 1917, Lenin arrived at Petrograd's Finland Station and set foot on Russian soil for the first time in over a decade. For most of the past seventeen years, the Bolshevik leader had lived in exile, moving between Europe's many "Russian colonies"--large and politically active communities of emigres in London, Paris, and Geneva, among other cities. Thousands of fellow exiles who followed Lenin on his eastward trek in 1917 were in a similar predicament. The returnees plunged themselves into politics, competing to shape the future of a vast country recently liberated from tsarist rule. Yet these activists had been absent from their homeland for so long that their ideas reflected the Russia imagined by residents of the faraway colonies as much as they did events on the ground. The 1917 revolution marked the dawn of a new day in Russian politics, but it also represented the continuation of decades-long conversations that had begun in emigration and were exported back to Russia.

In Utopia's Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s (Oxford UP, 2021), Faith Hillis examines how emigre communities evolved into revolutionary social experiments in the heart of bourgeois cities. Feminists, nationalist activists, and Jewish intellectuals seeking to liberate and uplift populations oppressed by the tsarist regime treated the colonies as utopian communities, creating new networks, institutions, and cultural practices that reflected their values and realized the ideal world of the future in the present. The colonies also influenced their European host societies, informing international debates about the meaning of freedom on both the left and the right. emigres' efforts to transform the world played crucial roles in the articulation of socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and Zionism across borders. But they also produced unexpected--and explosive--discontents that defined the course of twentieth-century history.

This groundbreaking transnational work demonstrates the indelible marks the Russian colonies left on European politics, legal cultures, and social practices, while underscoring their role during a pivotal period of Russian history.

You can check out the book companion site and maps for Utopia’s Discontents at here.

Faith Hillis is associate professor of Russian History at the University of Chicago. She is on Twitter @FaithCHillis and her website is here.

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Hannah Barker, "That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Wed, 12 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Before the Transatlantic slave trade ravaged the western coast of Africa, immense numbers of persons were taken from their homes and carried across the Black and Mediterranean Seas as involuntary passengers. This trade is the subject of Hannah Barker’s remarkable study, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Professor Barker provides a comprehensive overview of this tangled, multiethnic trade in human beings. Professor Barker is uniquely equipped to do so because she brings a knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. Since this trade brought captives both to Mamluk Egypt and late medieval Italy, previous studies, hampered by linguistic limitations, have not examined the trade in its totality. Barker is able to marshal both Arabic and Latin sources to provide a truly comprehensive picture of slaving and slavery. The result is a work that is both detailed and synoptic, and is essential reading for scholars of late medieval Europe and North Africa.

Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England.

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Tetyana Lokot, "Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)

Mon, 10 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digital social media to engage in public discontent and offers a critical examination of the hybrid reality of protest where bodies, spaces and technologies resonate. It argues that the augmented reality of protest goes beyond the bodies, the tents, and the cobblestones in the protest square, incorporating live streams, different time zones, encrypted conversations, and simultaneous translation of protest updates into different languages. Based on more than 60 interviews with protest participants and ethnographic analysis of online content in Ukraine and Russia, it examines how citizens in countries with limited media freedom and corrupt authorities perceive the affordances of digital media for protest and how these enable or limit protest action. The book provides a nuanced contribution to debates about the role of digital media in contentious politics and protest events, both in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University.

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Amelia M. Glaser, "Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Wed, 05 May 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.

The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020) effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York-based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee's "God's Black Lamb," Moyshe Nadir's "Closer," and Esther Shumiatsher's "At the Border of China."

These poets dreamed of a moment when "we" could mean "we workers" rather than "we Jews." Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she also directs the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Jewish Studies, programs.

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Marko Dumancic, "Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

Wed, 05 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Marko Dumancic's book Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties (University of Toronto Press, 2021) charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period - often described as "The Thaw" - between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming increasingly suburbanized, rebellious, consumerist, household-oriented, and scientifically complex. The dramatic tension of 1960s cinema revolved around the male protagonists' inability to navigate the challenges of postwar life.

Selling over three billion tickets annually, the Soviet film industry became a fault line of postwar cultural contestation. By examining both the discussions surrounding the period's most controversial movies as well as the cultural context in which these debates happened, the book captures the official and popular reactions to the dizzying transformations of Soviet society after Stalin.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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David Rainbow, "Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2019)

Wed, 05 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Conflicting notions about the dynamics of race in Russia and the Soviet Union have made it difficult for both scholars and other observers of the region to understand rising racial tension in Russian and Eurasian societies. Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a Global Context (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019) is an interdisciplinary anthology that brings together historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists of Russia, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America to examine the intersection between ideas about race and racializing practices. In this interview, editor David Rainbow (University of Houston) discusses Russian and Soviet ideologies in a global history of race, defining the evolving understanding of race vis-à-vis nationality and ethnicity in Russia, accounting for state sanctioned racist practice in the ostensibly antiracist Soviet state, the legacy of Alexander Pushkin, the consequences of a prevailing attachment to Russian exceptionalism in the study of race, challenges for North American scholars studying the subject, and key takeaways for the undergraduate classroom.

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Clemena Antonova, "Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky's Theory of the Icon" (Routledge, 2019)

Wed, 05 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Often referred to as “the Russian Leonardo”, religious philosopher and Orthodox parish priest Pavel Florensky was a pivotal figure in the Russian religious renaissance at the turn of the 20th century. In Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky's Theory of the Icon (Routledge 2019), art historian Clemena Antonova (Research Director at Eurasia in Global Dialogue, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna) challenges prevailing readings of Florensky’s oeuvre, presents an analysis of the thinker’s theory of pictorial space in the icon, and argues for the relevance of his thought to contemporary debates on religion and secularism. In this interview we discuss the religious and pictorial turn in contemporary modernity, the clash between Russian Orthodox clergy and theologians and religious philosophers in the early 20th century, the influence of St. Gregory Palamas on Florensky and his contemporaries, the Slavophile roots and fin-de-siecle manifestations of the theory of full unity, the limits of Florensky’s work in art history, and the challenges that contemporary scholars of Russian religious thought encounter when confronting its problematic aspects.

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Rustamjon Urinboyev, "Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia," (U California Press, 2020)

Tue, 04 May 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Rustam Urinboyev presents rich ethnographic material to reconceptualize how migrants adapt to new legal environment in hybrid political regimes that are neither democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. Focused on Uzbek labor migrants from the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan, Urinboyev’s book makes an important contribution to the literature on migration studies, socio-legal scholarship and Russian and Central Asian Studies by ethnographically demonstrating how Uzbek migrants negotiate the Russia’s immigration legal regime by relying on various informal and illegal practices that offer alternative means of adaptation under the conditions of shadow economy. Placing emphasis on the agency of Uzbek labor migrants, Urinboyev shows how they use informal channels to secure employment, wages, and other forms of protection despite the difficulty of operating within the official legal framework. Accessible to a wide audience, the book will be of interest to policy makers, scholars, students, and anyone else interested in contemporary global migration, Central Asia, and Russia. The book was published open-access and can be found here.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University.

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Carol Any, "The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority Under Stalin" (Northwestern UP, 2020)

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Carol Any’s The Soviet Writer’s Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority Under Stalin (Northwestern University Press, 2020) covers the writer’s union’s formation and functions, from its inception in 1932 to the aftermath of de-Stalinization. This coverage is placed in context of the pre-1932 Association of Proletarian Writers, and so the book provides a useful interpretation of Soviet writers’ interrelationships as well as their relationship with the state, for much of the Soviet era. Particularly interesting is how Any analyzes the psychological universe Soviet writers inhabited. Many writers wrote what they were supposed to; some resisted doing so. But either way, the state was largely successful at controlling the intellectual terms of engagement for Soviet writers in its official union.

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Stella Ghervas, "Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Stella Ghervas's Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press, 2021) is a bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace.

Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification.

Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a "spirit" of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars.

Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

Stella Ghervas is Professor of Russian History at Newcastle University (UK) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is also an Associate of the History Department at Harvard University and Visiting Professor at Harvard Summer School since 2015. Her main interests are in intellectual and international history of modern Europe, with special reference to the history of peace and peace-making, and in Russia’s intellectual and maritime history.

She is the author of Alexandre Stourdza (1791-1854): Un intellectuel orthodoxe face à l’Occident (1999), Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance (which won several book prizes, including the Guizot Prize from the Académie Française, 2008) and Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (2021), and the editor of Penser l’Europe – Quarante ans d’études européennes à Genève (2003), Lieux d’Europe: Mythes et limites (2008) and A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsburg, with David Armitage, 2020).

Her website is at https://www.ghervas.net/ and you can follow her on Twitter @StellaGhervas

Steven Seegel, Professor of History, University of Northern ColoradoMaphead, Founding Board @H__Ukraine, Borderologist, Translator for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Podcast Host, Proud Slow Runner, Dog Valet

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Janet Hartley, "The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River” (Yale UP, 2021)

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Volga begins as a small trickle in the Valdai Hills in the north of Russia, and broadens and expands as it heads south, past the storied medieval cities of Tver, Kostroma, and the great trading hub of the nineteenth century, Nizhniy Novgorod, down to Kazan, the capital of Muslim Tatarstan, then Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin, on to Samara, site of the great peasant revolts led by Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachyov. From there, the river flows down to Volgograd, better known as Stalingrad, where the Red Army pushed back the seemingly unstoppable Nazi offensive during World War II, and finally down to Astrakhan, where the Mongol invaders kept their court until Ivan the Terrible conquered the city in 1556. Then, finally, the mighty river empties into the Caspian Sea. So much of Russian history has played out on the banks of this mighty river.

The Volga cleaves European Russia from north to south and divides it from east to west, and for centuries, the mighty Volga has challenged and inspired Russians in their quest for expansion, modernization, and self-identification. The river and its role in Russian history is the subject of a new book by Professor Janet Hartley, Emeritus Professor of International History at the London School of Economics: “The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River” (Yale University Press, 2021).

The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River (Yale UP, 2021) examines the role of the river in Russia’s development as a political and economic power, but also the river’s enormous impact on Russian culture and national identity. Though the structure of the book is chronological, Hartley brings in the major events of Russian history as convenient mile markers, but it is the compelling narrative of social history which pulls us into the slipstream of the book.

Several through lines emerge in Hartley’s account of “Mother Volga.” The river divides Russia from East to West, and often this division plays out in stories of contrasts: Muslim versus Christian, outlaws versus the state, pirates versus traders, and invading armies pitted against each other. But the river also unites Russia along the North/South axis, acting as a conduit for trade, culture, and political ideas.

As Russians struggled through the centuries with their national identity, the Volga offered a potent symbol and cultural touchstone, which was amplified in poetry, painting, song, and later famously in sculpture. Though the river is most commonly evoked as a “mother” figure, Hartley points out that throughout Russian history rulers have often sought to “tame” the Volga: Ivan the Terrible famously had the river whipped, and contemporary poets portrayed the river as a supplicant to Catherine II as she expanded the borders of the Russian empire. Hartley also takes us inside twentieth-century attempts to tame the Volga, which have resulted in lasting environmental harm to the life-giving river, and leaves us hopeful that the generation now coming of age will take on the challenge of redressing this damage.

Janet Hartley is Professor Emeritus of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she worked for over 30 years.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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Serhiy Zhadan, "The Orphanage" (Yale UP, 2021)

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Ukrainian literary scene today is particularly vibrant. The voice of Serhiy Zhadan is distinct, well-known, and easily-recognizable. In 2021, Yale University Press published his novel titled The Orphanage (Yale UP, 2021), which originally appeared in 2017. In this interview, translators Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler talk about their team work on the novel translation into English. This is not their first translation of Zhadan’s works: Voroshilovgrad in their translation was published a few years ago. When answering the question about why they chose The Orphanage as their translation project, Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler mentioned that they wanted to make this novel available to Anglophone readers. They find it transformative, as such that can change the way we look at life.

Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler share their reading of the novel while drawing attention to the episodes that they found compelling. They also comment on the language of Serhiy Zhadan and how they tried to render the most essential linguistic nuances so that the English version of the text had a similar impact on readers as the original on those who read in Ukrainian. The Orphanage is a commentary on the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict but the events that are depicted in the novel seem to take place outside of some specifically marked location: these are, however, easily recognized by everyone who is displaced—physically or imaginatively—by the current war. This simultaneous sense of both everywhere and nowhere enables an insight into a war beyond the limits of states and nations. As Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler point out, a humane dimension is the center of Zhadan’s The Orphanage.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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Douglas M. O'Reagan, "Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Douglas O’Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations.

Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself.

Douglas M. O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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Philip Cunliffe, "Lenin Lives!: Reimagining the Russian Revolution 1917-2017" (Zero Books, 2017)

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

While a number of books came out on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, few seriously considered how the 20th century would have unfolded differently if the violent forces of counter-revolution and White terror had not crushed the Marxist dreams of a new future. What if the revolution had successfully spread to Western Europe and the United States of America? What would have happened if Rosa Luxemburg was not murdered by Freikorps thugs? What if the colonial empires had turned into non-racist mechanisms for egalitarian global development? As historians, we are not supposed to ask these “what if” questions, but our friends in political science can engage in such thought experiments. Philip Cunliffe’s Lenin Lives! Reimagining the Russian Revolution 1917-2017 (Zero Books, 2017) dares to ask these questions and then to carefully think through the answers. This counter-factual history plays out the consequences of a successful Russian and, more importantly, German Revolution. Cunliffe explores how not only politics and economics would have followed different historical trajectories (for example: no fascism!), but he also considers the environmental and scientific consequences of Lenin living just a little longer. Above all, Lenin Lives! is an exercise in historical empathy and social optimism. How would early 20th century Marxists have shaped the world had they not been subjected to generations of violent repression? Could they have built a better world?

Dr. Philip Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer in International Conflict at the University of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations. His research interests include Peacekeeping, Humanitarian Intervention, Responsibility to Protect, Self-Determination, Sovereignty, Critical Theory, and IR Theory. He is the author of Legions of Peace: UN Peacekeepers from the Global South (2013), Cosmopolitan dystopia: International intervention and the failure of the West (2020) and The New Twenty Years’ Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019 (2020). He has also published several anthologies. If his voice sounds familiar, you may recognize it from Aufhebunga Bunga, which bills itself as the global politics podcast at the end of the End of History.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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James White, "Unity in Faith?: Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800-1918" (Indiana UP, 2020)

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. J. M. White’s new book, Unity in Faith?: Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800-1918 (Indiana University Press, 2020) discusses the Russian Orthodox/Old Believer schism. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Russian government decided, largely for reasons of state, to bring the schismatic Old Believers back into the Orthodox fold. This desire resulted in the creation of edinoverie (“unity in faith”), and a set of institutions that attempted to allow Old Believers to practice their pre-1650’s rituals, while increasingly subjecting them to the authority of the church, and by extension, the state. Dr. White’s book is a history of this edinoverie. Along the way, readers learn a great deal about the relationship between the Russian church and the state, and about the inner logics of a major religious schisms, whose lessons apply to Russian history and beyond. Religious history is often neglected in the history of late imperial Russia, and this book also helps to rectify that imbalance.

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Oksana Kis, "Survival As Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Oksana Kis’s Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Press, 2021) fundamentally contributes to the Gulag studies through its essential intervention into the conventional framework of researching the Gulag as a system of measures to control the individuals and the collectives. The work draws readers' attention to the survival strategies of the individual who has to learn how to make sense of life again under the inhumane and dehumanizing conditions.

Oksana Kis builds her research on diaries, memoirs, documents which were created by the Gulag detainees. Her main characters are Ukrainian women who were arrested and sent to the Gulag on the basis of accusation or suspicion of national engagements. A meticulously researched body of documents provides insight into the everyday life of the women who were forced to re-invent their lives, while trying to maintain some sense of normalcy. Can there be any normalcy in the Gulag? And what is “a normalcy” in the Gulag? With her book, Kis asks and pursues these questions and invites readers to subvert their horizon of expectations. There is some sort of normalcy in the Gulag, but one has to reinvent herself in order to create and accept it. In this regard, the book surpasses the boundaries of one national community: the discussion that it initiates invites readers to expand their understanding of the Gulag life. Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the USSR, post-Soviet studies, and Ukraine.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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Bruce Berglund, "The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports" (U California Press, 2020)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Bruce Berglund, author of The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports (University of California Press, 2020). In this sweeping look at hockey, Bruce Berglund examines how a niche sport became a global favorite. Hockey has crossed cultures from North America to Europe and Asia, and has been a political flashpoint several times, most notably during the Summit Series of 1972 and the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Berglund’s research combs the archives of Central and Eastern Europe, and he gives a thorough overview of hockey from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The impact of players like Wayne Gretzky, the influence of youth leagues and the emergence of women in the sport are areas that Berglund explores. Berglund weaves his research with his own personal experiences with hockey to create a compelling narrative. An “anxious child of the Cold War,” Berglund examines the rise of the Soviet hockey team — the Red Machine — and how it took over the international game. Berglund also explores the beginnings of hockey, which descended from a game called bandy. He demonstrates that hockey, while a passion for fans in Canada, has spread worldwide. The Stanley Cup, long a Canadian point of pride, now resides in Tampa, Florida, showing how even in warm-weather climates, hockey has made inroads.

Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs.

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Matthew Frear, "Belarus under Lukashenka: Adaptive Authoritarianism" (Routledge, 2020)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Often called “Europe’s last dictator”, Alexander Lukashenka has ruled Belarus – a land-locked European country of close to 10 million people bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland and two Baltic states - since 1994.

For more than a quarter-century, his regime has consistently rigged votes but blatant election fraud in 2020 triggered rolling protests that spread beyond the usual suspects and beyond Minsk and appear, for the first time, to threaten Lukashenka's hold on power.

Will he survive? Who is this former border guard and collective-farm manager, and how did he hang on to power while the likes of Slobodan Milošević and Viktor Yanukovych fell? Using the framework of “adaptive authoritarianism”, Belarus under Lukashenka: Adaptive Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2020) explains how and hints at what may happen next.

Matthew Frear is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of History at Leiden University. He researches Russian and Eurasian politics, and comparative authoritarianism with a special focus on Belarus. He holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham and previously taught there and at Aston University before joining Leiden in 2013.

*The author's own book recommendation is In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak, translated by Sam Garrett (Vintage, 2008).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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Anne Searcy, "Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was one way that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union tried to cultivate goodwill towards their countries. As Anne Searcy explains in her book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2020), dance was part of this effort. She focuses on two tours of the USSR undertaken by American troupes when the American Ballet Company visited the Soviets in 1960, and when choreographer George Balanchine returned to the country of his birth in 1962 with his New York City Ballet Company. These popular tours functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. Although geo-political tensions feature in the book, Searcy is just as concerned with the reception of these tours by Soviet and American critics, and how they filtered their opinions on the dances and performers they saw through local aesthetic debates, tinged by political realities.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Siobhán Hearne, "Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Siobhán Hearne's Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. This study examines how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted amid rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization around the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines the lives and challenges of different groups who engaged with the world of prostitution, including women who sold sex, the men who paid for it, mediators, the police, and wider urban communities.

Drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Policing Prostitution illustrates how prostitution was an acknowledged, contested, and ever-present component of lower-class urban society in the late imperial period. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham University in the UK. She is also one of the editors of the website Peripheral Histories, a collaborative digital history project exploring ‘peripheral’ spaces in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet world.

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Arthur Koestler, "Darkness at Noon" (Scribner, 2019)

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process.

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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Janet M. Hartley, "The Volga: A History" (Yale UP, 2021)

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

"The Volga! There is a mystery, a charm in all mighty rivers, which has ever made us gaze upon them with an interest beyond that inspired by other great and glorious sights; but to look on the largest of the European rivers gave a thrill of joy surpassing all former pleasure of the kind."

This quote by Robery Bremner in 1830 opens Professor Janet M. Hartley’s latest history, The Volga: A History (Yale University Press, 2021). The book uses the Volga to frame the history of Russia: from its pre-Russian state through the growing Russian Empire, and ending with the Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation. The book presents the Volga as both a divider between “East and West”, but also a meeting ground of different cultures and ideas — and how that drove efforts to create the Russian identity.

In this interview, Janet and I talk about the Volga, and its central place in Russian history. We talk about how the Volga connects to trade, cultural exchange and the formation of the Russian state and identity. Finally, we explore what we gain by looking at a country’s history through a geographical feature like a river.

Janet Hartley is Professor Emeritus of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she worked for over 30 years. She is the author of seven books on Russian history including Siberia: A History of the People (Yale University Press: 2014). She has also edited or co-edited 7 books and written many articles on Russian history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Volga. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator

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Simon Wickhamsmith, "Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921-1948)" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How does revolution literature help to engage Mongolia’s nomadic population with the utopia of a “new society” promised by the Mongolian People’s Revolution Party? In Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Simon Wickhamsmith explores the relationship between literature and politics in the period between the 1921 socialist revolution and the first Writers’ Congress in 1948.

He argues that the literature of this time “helped to frame the ideology of socialism and the practice of the revolution for those Mongolians who had little understanding of what it could offer them.” Through discussing the works of Mongolian writers such as D. Natsagdorg, S. Buyannemeh, Ts. Damdinsüren, and D. Namdag, who wrote on education, health care, religion, and labor, the book reveals how these writers represented the new Mongolia and the difficulties that accompanied with it.

Wickhamsmith reminds us that although the period between 1921-1948 saw a sustained literary development in Mongolia assisted in part through the financial and moral sponsorship of the Soviet Union, many writers also suffered from censorship and even torture and death. Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 is one of the first books of its kind to translate some of the works by these writers into English, including works of poetry, fiction, and drama.

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Karl Schlögel, "The Scent of Empire: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow" (Polity, 2021)

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today New Books in History features Karl Schlögel, Professor Emeritus at the Europa Universitat Viadrina, Frankfort to talk about his new book, The Scent of Empires: Chanel no. 5 and Red Moscow, out this year, 2021 with Polity Press.

Can a drop of perfume tell the story of the twentieth century? Can a smell bear the traces of history? What can we learn about the history of the twentieth century by examining the fate of perfumes?

In this remarkable book, Karl Schlögel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world’s most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French perfumers – Michel Beaux and Auguste Michel – developed related fragrances honouring Catherine the Great for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Beaux fled Russia and took the formula for his perfume with him to France, where he sought to adapt it to his new French circumstances. He presented Coco Chanel with a series of ten fragrance samples in his laboratory and, after smelling each, she chose number five – the scent that would later go by the name Chanel No. 5. Meanwhile, as the perfume industry was being revived in Soviet Russia, Auguste Michel used his original fragrance to create Red Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Piecing together the intertwined histories of these two famous perfumes, which shared a common origin, Schlögel tells a surprising story of power, intrigue and betrayal that offers an altogether unique perspective on the turbulent events and high politics of the twentieth century.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Krista Goff, "Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2021) is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR.

Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

Krista Goff is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union who specializes in the study of nationalism, citizenship, empire, ethnic conflict, oral history, and the North and South Caucasus. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan, A.M. from Brown University, B.A. with honors from Macalester College, and studied at universities in St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, and Baku.

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Olga V. Solovieva and Sho Konishi, "Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm" (Cambria, 2021)

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian cultural presence in Japan after the Meiji Revolution was immense. Indeed, Japanese cultural negotiations with Russian intellectuals and Russian literature, art, theology and political thought, formed an important basis for modern Japanese transnational intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production. And yet, despite the depth and range of “Japan’s Russia,” this historical phenomenon has been markedly neglected in our studies of modern Japanese intellectual life. This absence may be attributed to the fact that “Japan’s Russia” as idea and cultural expression developed outside the logic of Western modernity. There has been an interconnected logic behind this ignorance, a systematic lacuna in our historiography that tied method to historical actors, concept to theory.

Olga V. Solovieva and Sho Konishi's Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria, 2021) seeks to depart from this logic in order to identify thoughts and practices that helped produce a dynamic transnational cultural phenomenon that we identify as “Japan’s Russia.” It does so by orchestrating case studies from cutting-edge scholarship originating in multiple disciplines, each with its own methodological and theoretical implications.

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Trevor Erlacher, "Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Ukrainian nationalism made worldwide news after the Euromaidan revolution and the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014. Invoked by regional actors and international commentators, the "integral" Ukrainian nationalism of the 1930s has moved to the center of debates about Eastern Europe, but the history of this divisive ideology remains poorly understood.

This timely book by Trevor Erlacher's Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov (Harvard UP/Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021) is the first English-language biography of the doctrine's founder, Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973), the "spiritual father" of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Organizing his research of the period around Dontsov's life, Erlacher has written a global intellectual history of Ukrainian integral nationalism from late imperial Russia to postwar North America, with relevance for every student of the history of modern Europe and the diaspora.

Thanks to the circumstances of Dontsov's itinerant, ninety-year life, this microhistorical approach allows for a geographically, chronologically, and thematically broad yet personal view on the topic. Dontsov shaped and embodied Ukrainian politics and culture as a journalist, diplomat, literary critic, publicist, and ideologue, progressing from heterodox Marxism, to avant-garde fascism, to theocratic traditionalism.

Drawing upon archival research in Ukraine, Poland, and Canada, this book contextualizes Dontsov's works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Trevor Erlacher completed his Ph.D. in Russian and East European History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. He was a Fulbright fellow in Ukraine in 2014-2015, and a recipient of the Neporany Dissertation Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies. He currently serves as an Academic Advisor, Program Coordinator, and Editor for the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Amanda Brickell Bellows, "American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination" (UNC Press, 2020)

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian.

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (UNC Press, 2020) provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Pey-Yi Chu, "The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the Anthropocene, the thawing of frozen earth due to global warming has drawn worldwide attention to permafrost. Contemporary scientists define permafrost as ground that maintains a negative temperature for at least two years. But where did this particular conception of permafrost originate, and what alternatives existed?

The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides an intellectual history of permafrost, placing the phenomenon squarely in the political, social, and material context of Russian and Soviet science. Pey-Yi Chu shows that understandings of frozen earth were shaped by two key experiences in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. On one hand, the colonization and industrialization of Siberia nourished an engineering perspective on frozen earth that viewed the phenomenon as an aggregate physical structure: ground. On the other, a Russian and Soviet tradition of systems thinking encouraged approaching frozen earth as a process, condition, and space tied to planetary exchanges of energy and matter. Aided by the US militarization of the Arctic during the Cold War, the engineering view of frozen earth as an obstacle to construction became dominant. The Life of Permafrost tells the fascinating story of how permafrost came to acquire life as Russian and Soviet scientists studied, named, and defined it.

Pey-Yi Chu is an associate professor of history at Pomona College, where she teaches courses in modern European history.

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Ethan Pollock, "Without the Banya We Would Perish" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Blog Post:

In Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Ethan Pollock discusses one of life’s basic questions—How do people get clean?—in a way that embeds those everyday practices into a sophisticated historical context.

From legends about medieval Kievan rulers, to everyday Russians in the Soviet era, the banya has been a consistent part of everyday life. While its existence has been continuous, the meanings assigned to the banya have been at once diffuse, contradictory, and reflective of prevailing cultural and political trends and questions. Dr. Pollock’s book addresses these themes and more, in this fascinating historical survey.

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Alexander Morrison, "The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Alexander Morrison’s study of the conquest of Central Asia offers new perspectives on a topic long obscured by misleading grand narratives. Based on years of research in several countries, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge UP, 2020) not only outright debunks many of these older narratives, but also provides us a detailed military and diplomatic history of the conquest, one which pays specific attention to the contingency and logistics of its multi-stage process. Based on an enormous number of Russian-language materials and supplemented with Persianate chronicles, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian and Central Asian history, military history, or the history of colonialism and comparative empires.

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Rachel Applebaum, "Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

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Roger R. Reese, "The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917" (U Kansas Press, 2019)

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Roger Reese’s recent book, The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917 (University of Kansas, 2019), takes a deep dive into the internal workings of the Russian army. Focusing particularly on relations between officers and the rank and file, as well as on divisions within the officer corps itself, Reese notices that conditions for soldiers did gradually improve, over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, these improvements for the rank and file, and the gradual transition to an army based on merit rather than on past traditions of aristocratic honor, proved unable to withstand the pressures of World War One. In this context, breakdown of discipline and loyalty in the army then played an important role in the end of the Russian monarchy.

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Anne Eakin Moss, "Only Among Women, "Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940" (Northwestern UP, 2019)

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940 (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Anne Eakin Moss examines idealized relationships between women in Russian literature and culture from the age of the classic Russian novel to socialist realism and Stalinist film. Her book reveals how the idea of a community of women—a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest—originates in the classic Russian novel, fuels mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumes a place of privilege in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.

Rethinking the significance and surprising continuities of gender in Russian and Soviet culture, Eakin Moss relates this tradition to Western philosophies of community developed by thinkers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jean-Luc Nancy. She shows that in the 1860s friendship among women came to figure as an organic national collectivity in works such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a model for revolutionary organization in Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?.

Only Among Women also traces how women’s community came to be connected with new religious and philosophical notions of a unity transcending the individual at the fin-de-siècle. Finally, in Stalinist propaganda of the 1930s, the notion of women’s community inherited from the Russian novel reemerged in the image of harmonious female workers serving as a patriarchal model for loyal Communist citizenship.

Anne Eakin Moss is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University.

Colleen McQuillen is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California.Follow her on Twitter @russianprof

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William C. Brumfield, "Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky" (Duke UP, 2020)

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In his latest authoritative book, Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), while also putting his own magisterial career into sharp perspective. Brumfield updates and interprets several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s iconic images with his own late twentieth and early twenty-first century versions, and the result is an extraordinary study of two photographers and two Russias.

Prokudin-Gorsky was a polymath, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, and eminently talented photographer, who pursued an over-arching goal of bringing color to the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky combined a strong grounding in both the science and the arts, which gave him easy mastery over the technology. But he was also a gifted entrepreneur, able to see the vast mainstream potential of photography, and throughout his career, he championed the rights of photographers and led the industry in its professional development. From the beginning of his professional life, he pursued his goal to produce color photography, but throughout his career, he was a vocal champion for his colleagues, assuming the editorship of Russia’s “Amateur Photography,” and campaigning successfully for photographers to assert ownership of their work.

Prokudin-Gorsky’s groundbreaking use of glass slides to produce color soon came to the attention of the Imperial Family — passionate shutterbugs themselves — and Prokudin-Gorsky secured an invitation to present his slides to Nicholas II. The tsar became a staunch supporter of Prokudin-Gorsky, ordering the Minister of Ways and Communications to furnish Prokudin-Gorsky with a specially designed railway car for his laboratory, and access to river transport. The tsar also gave Prokudin-Gorsky an enviable laissez-passer for the entire empire, and an order that enabled the photographer to solicit aid from all government officials. For the next six years, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout Imperial Russia on several regional expeditions, sponsored by the Ministry of Ways and Communications, capturing the emerging industrial might of the empire. But along the way, he also captured the natural beauty of Russia’s wilder corners: the majestic Caucasus, the arid desert of Central Asia, and the dense forests of the Urals.

Did Prokudin-Gorsky understand that he was documenting a world that would soon disappear? For disappear it soon did, and Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia in 1918, bringing with him thousands of color slides. Fast forward half a century, and enter William Craft Brumfield, who began documenting Russia’s architecture in the 1970s. He was a natural choice to curate a public exhibition of Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection for the Library of Congress in 1986, and his association with the Library and the collection has continued to this day. “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” is the magnificent culmination of this decades-long collaboration.

William Craft Brumfield is the foremost Western expert on Russian architecture, and taught at some world’s most renowned centers of Slavic studies, including Harvard, Tulane, and the Pushkin Institute. In 2019, in recognition of Brumfield’s contribution to Russian culture, President Putin awarded him with Russia’s highest honor for a foreigner: The Order of Friendship.

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Nina Jankowicz, "How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Barely a month after the riot on the Capitol Building, the United States is no more adept at fending off foreign information operations than it was four years ago, when “fake news” and “information operations” became household terms. Why has the United States been so slow to adapt, and what can it do to reverse the tide?

In How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2020), Nina Jankowicz, a Disinformation Fellow at the Wilson Center, explores how five central and eastern European countries have fared in their battles against Russian information operations. Though Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic still have their struggles, each has lessons to offer the United States—if only it would listen.

On this episode, I talk with Nina about what makes Russian information operations so effective, how victims should repair their information ecosystems, and what Alexei Navalny can teach the West about waging information battles against the Kremlin.

Please be advised: We get a surprise guest in the middle of the podcast, when Nina’s dog makes a quick cameo!

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Fabrizio Fenghi, "It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020)

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin's regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition.

To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a "counter-intelligensia." It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.

Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a specific focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture.

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Katherine Zubovich, "Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 2021), Professor Katherine Zubovich of the University of Buffalo of the State University of New York takes us into one of the more turbulent eras in the 874-year history of Moscow, the decades long effort to transform Russia’s ancient second city into the triumphant capital of the new socialist state.

Before the revolutions of 1917, Moscow was known for its “forty times, forty churches,” and by these distinctive onion-shaped cupolas, which once soared above the two and three-story skyline, Muscovites navigated their city. Today, many of those churches are only distant memories and the new markers of the city’s horizons are seven soaring skyscrapers, affectionately known as “Stalin’s wedding cakes,” or simply as the “vysotniye” or the “tall buildings.” Two are ministries, two are hotels, two are elite residential buildings, and one houses Moscow State University. Zubovich uses these iconic buildings as the skeleton of her story, taking us through the many iterations of the Soviet vision of an idealized capital. Zubovich’s grounding in Art History serves her particularly well in the first half of the book as she examines evolving vision for the new Moscow, including the government’s ambitious plans to construct a massive Palace of Soviets as the hub of the new architectural ensemble. Moscow Monumental is particularly interesting in its carefully researched account of the pre-war Soviet drive to involve Western architects and engineers in the construction projects.

Zubovich’s stamina as a field researcher pays off in the second half of the book, as her focus shifts to the human cost of this urban renewal in the post-war era. Here she weaves in narratives of the construction workers who built the skyscrapers, many of them newly released GULAG prisoners, and those of ordinary citizens whose lives were uprooted by the project. These voices of everyday Soviet citizens come to brilliant life through Zubovich’s adroit use of letters sent by ordinary Soviet citizens, petitioning the government for assistance in relocation as neighborhoods are razed to the ground to make way for the new skyscrapers. Zubovich does an excellent job portraying this ostensibly classless society, in which Muscovites are ironically divided between those who are literally moving “up” into elite skyscraper apartments and those who are being forced “out” to the hastily constructed, and barely habitable new neighborhoods of the city’s periphery.

Moscow Monumental is a fascinating story of architecture, politics, urban development, and social history, which perfectly captures the aspirational arc of Moscow’s first six decades as the capital of the USSR.

Katherine Zubovich is an assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. Zubovich is also working on a short book, Making Cities Socialist to be published as part of the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series. Follow her on Twitter at @kzubovich.

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Khatchig Mouradian, "The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918" (MSU Press, 2020)

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Michigan State University Press, 2020) is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. Khatchig Mouradian challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor. He ultimately argues that, despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress unhindered—unarmed resistance proved an important factor in saving countless lives.

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) atColumbia University. Mouradian has published articles on concentration camps, unarmed resistance, the aftermath of mass violence, midwifery in the Middle East, and approaches to teaching history. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journalThe Armenian Review. Mouradian has taught courses on imperialism, mass violence, urban space and conflict in the Middle East, the aftermaths of war and mass violence, and human rights atWorcester State UniversityandClark Universityin Massachusetts, Rutgers University andStockton Universityin New Jersey, and California State University – Fresno in California.In January 2021, Mouradian was appointed Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division (Near East Section) at the Library of Congress.

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Gennady Estraikh, "Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century" (ASP, 2020)

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 05:00:00 -0000

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Yiddish speaking immigrants actively participated in the American Socialist and labor movement. They formed the milieu of the hugely successful daily Forverts (Forward), established in New York in April 1897.

In Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Academic Studies Press, 2020), Gennady Estraikh describes how the Forverts’ editorial columns and bylined articles―many of whose authors, such as Abraham Cahan and Sholem Asch, were household names at the time―both reflected and shaped the attitudes and values of the readership. Estreikh focuses on the newspaper’s reaction to the political developments in the home country. Profound admiration of Russian literature and culture did not mitigate the writers’ criticism of the czarist and Soviet regimes.

Gennady Estraikh is a Clinical Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Previously he was the Managing Editor of the Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland) from 1988 to 1991. Estraikh’s scholarship focuses on Jewish intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries with an accent on Yiddish literary milieus. He has written fifteen co-edited scholarly volumes, and several books in Yiddish.

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Bill Sewell, "Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45" (UBC Press, 2019)

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do local residents and colonial settlers manage to live side-by-side in new imperial arrangements?

In Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45 (University of British Columbia Press 2019), Bill Sewell examines how Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other civilians in northeast Asia sought to inscribe Manchuria as theirs, and how Japanese imperial architects and civilians in Changchun engaged in diverse empire-building efforts that transformed the city into a modern urban capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell argues that "Constructing empire was a mundane and popularly imagined affair as well as a diplomatic, political, and military one." Although studies on empire tend to focus on elite decisions or actions, Sewell contends that "popular dimensions must also be considered to grasp fully empire's nature."

Constructing Empire also reminds us that Changchun, a city in northeast China and today's Jilin province, was a regional trade hub in Qing Inner Asia before the arrival of foreign empire builders. Although the land on which the city was built originally belonged to the Mongolian Front Gorlos Banner, Changchun's first cityscape was constructed by its Chinese settlers in the Qing. After the Russo-Japanese War, Changchun became a boundary between the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in northeast China and a transfer point for travel between Europe and Asia.

Although the Japanese presence in Manchuria was initially under military authority following the Russo-Japanese War, Sewell observes that the presence of Japanese civilians became increasingly strong after the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) established transportation infrastructures, coal mines, power-generation facilities, factories, experimental farms, and railway-zone towns.

Under Japanese occupation, Changchun was renamed Xinjing (J: Shinkyō) and became the capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell shows that constructing empire in Xinjing occurred in diverse contexts and was motivated by colonial imaginaries that allowed Japanese civilians to perceive the urban city and its spaces as places of work, worship, recreation, and residence.

Residents of Xinjing were also segregated between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese, with access to spaces and resources in the city unequally distributed. Sewell points out that behind the façades of Pan-Asianism, the Japanese recreated in Xinjing much of the lifestyle that characterized life back home, demonstrating that "there was a closer allegiance to Japanese customs and society than to anything broadly Pan-Asia."

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

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Kathryn Ciancia, "On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state.

As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs.

Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford UP, 2020) offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book's central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.

Kathryn Ciancia is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has taught since 2013. She holds a BA from Oxford University, an MA from University College-London, and a PhD from Stanford University. Her first book, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World, has just been published by Oxford University Press. She is now at work on a new book about the role of Poland's global consular network in policing the boundaries of citizenship between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Cold War.

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David Nasaw, "The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War" (Penguin, 2020)

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries.

The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany.

A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (Penguin, 2020) tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com.

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F. B. Chang and S. T. Rucker-Chang, "Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

F. B. Chang and S. T. Rucker-Chang's Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles the movements for - and expressions of - equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights and paradigms in Romani studies.

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Serhy Yekelchyk, "Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In 2020, Oxford University Press published a second edition of Serhy Yekelchyk’s Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2020). This series is based on the reference format that allows to concisely present the most essential information on both generic and most recent acute issues. One will find in this addition answers to the questions pertaining to Kyivan Rus, the Cossacks, as well as the notorious Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654. In addition to this information, the book contains chapters that concisely describe both the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. These chapters are followed by inquiries into Russia’s occupation of the Crimea and the Donbas war which is supported by the Kremlin. Yekelchyk emphasizes that the Euromaidan was, on the one hand, the Ukrainians’ response to the corrupt regime which was being normalized by Yanukovych and his supporters; on the other hand, it was also a response to the turn to Russia, which Yanukovych promoted and supported: “Popular dissatisfaction with the corrupt regime had been mounting for years, but the sudden diplomatic turn from Europe to Russia was simply the last straw” (93). For the Ukrainians, “Europe” represented democratic values which were systematically violated by Russia: “‘Europe’ served as a popular shorthand slogan implying democracy, rule of law, and economic opportunity—all the things ordinary citizens found lacking in Yanukovych’s Ukraine” (93).

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is viewed by Yekelchyk as part of Putin’s ambitions to restore the mightiness of Russia—in terms of global positioning—within the traditions of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Yekelchyk’s book also contains brief inquiries into the most recent developments around the Russo-Ukrainian conflict on the international level: the evaluation of the presidency of Petro Poroshenko and his decisions during the years of the most active conflict; the investigation of the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines passenger flight; the international sanctions against Russia; the recent controversy about the Steinmeier Formula. There are sections which address the alleged meddling of the Ukrainian authorities in the 2016 presidential election in the US and the current presidency of Volodymyr Zelensky. With Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know, Serhy Yekelchyk shares his outstanding expertise that helps understand the complex overlaps and developments that shape the historical and political environment in contemporary Ukraine.

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Olena Palko, "Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Olena Palko’s Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic Press 2020) offers an intriguing investigation that zeroes in on the intersection of history and literature, politics and literature. The main focus of the book is comprised of two iconic figures in the history of Ukrainian literature: Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Khvyl’ovyi. Through a complex and multilayered investigation of archival materials and historical documents, Olena Palko further advances the understanding of the formative years in the history of Soviet Ukraine. The two protagonists around whom the book seems to revolve offer additional venues for unraveling the highly entangled history not only of Ukraine under the Soviet Union but also of the Soviet Union itself. The theoretical framework of the book allows to consider multiple developments and influences that contributed to the specificity of the Soviet establishment in Ukraine. As the author of the book emphasizes, the conversation about the Soviet years in Ukraine asks not only for scrupulous reading of various documents but also for the acceptance of inherent ambiguities that the Soviet presence brought forth in Ukraine and beyond. Making Ukraine Soviet highlights the entangled and contested political and historical developments that took place in Soviet Ukraine, particularly during the first decade of the USSR; it also invites the readers to look at the writings by Tychyna and Khvyl’ovyi as an additional venue to not only better understand the milieu in which the writers worked but to also see how their writing responded to the environment that within a few years underwent profound and drastic changes.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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Myroslav Shkandrij, "Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory" (Academic Studies Press, 2019)

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Myroslav Shkandrij’s Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory (Academic Studies Press, 2019) offers an insight into the development of the Ukrainian avant-garde, a topic which still remains unjustifiably understudied. The book is an important contribution to the reevaluation of the artistic legacies of the world-renowned artists: Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, Mykhailo Boichuk, Vadym Meller, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Dziga Vertov. As the title of the book prompts, the focus is made on the Ukrainian heritage and background that the above-mentioned artists manifested in and through their works. Here Shkandrij initiates an intervention into the scholarship that for many years dismissed the Ukrainian contribution when discussing the avant-garde development.

Drawing attention to national and ethnic choices that the artists used to make, but which happened to be silenced or ignored in the subsequent critical reviews and investigations, the book, however, does not suggest to embrace a one-sided approach. Shkandrij balances the local and international contexts when outlining the Ukrainian color of the avant-garde artists that became recognized world-wide. Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine provides complex and multilayered milieus that help better understand how the Ukrainian pattern became to be dismissed or devalued in the conversations about the international avant-garde. The book welcomes a multifaceted approach to the discussion of how the artists developed their techniques, which seem to have responded to a multinational and multiethnic environment which appeared authentic for Ukraine at the beginning of the twentieth century. The subtitle of the book—contested memory—is a welcoming gesture towards further investigations of the Ukrainian avant-garde, which appears to be inherently grounded in a diversity of influences and overlaps that establish deep cultural bonds with the international movement.

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Stanley J. Rabinowitz, "And Then Came Dance: The Women Who Led Volynsky to Ballet's Magic Kingdom" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz once again immerses us into the world of ballet and Akim Volynsky with his book And Then Came Dance: The Women Who Led Volynsky to Ballet's Magic Kingdom (Oxford UP, 2019). In this interview, Rabinowitz discusses his path to this book which is a lovely addition to his first book on Volynsky as well as some sage advice in publishing manuscripts.

Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.

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Keith A. Livers, "Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can conspiracy theories communicate about those who engage with them and about those who are this way or the other implicated?

With Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Keith A. Livers explores the conspiracy theory on the theoretical and practical levels. The book offers a solid background that helps historicize the conspiracy preoccupations in Russia. By connecting the conspiracy manifestations in Russian culture across the centuries, Livers successfully demonstrates how deeply engrained the conspiracy culture is in Russia. The book analyzes in detail a diverse cultural material that includes, among others, Pelevin’s and Bekmambetov’s works: by combining chronologically diverse material, Livers looks into and dissects the mechanism of the persistent sustainability of conspiracy culture in Russia. An inseparable part of the conspiracy theory is history, which appears to be part of political dimensions: this aspect is extensively commented on by Livers. Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination complicates the issue of conspiracy culture and brings it to the level of discussion that offers insights into the current position of the Russian Federation on the local and global levels.

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Aubrey Menard, "Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East" (PRH SEA, 2020)

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Mongolia is sometimes seen as one of the few examples of a successful youth-led revolution, where a 1990 movement forced the Soviet-appointed Politburo to resign. In Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East (Penguin Random House SEA: 2020), Aubrey Menard profiles many of today’s young activists in Mongolia, in a wide array of different areas like pollution, feminism, LGBT rights, and journalism.

In this interview, we discuss several of the activists profiled in her book, as well as discuss the development of Mongolia's democracy. We talk about whether we can think about young Mongolians as a "generation", and whether the country's experience supports or challenges normal democratic theory. We also touch base on what's been happening in Mongolia since she published her book.

Aubrey Menard is an expert on political transitions, elections and democracy, working on democracy and governance issues in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Central America and the United States. She lived in Mongolia as a Luce Scholar from 2015 to 2016. You can follow her on Twitter at @AubreyMenard.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of Young Mongols. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

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Tatiana Zhurzhenko, "War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) analyzes the shaping of the commemorative space in the three post-Soviet countries that used to share commemorative practices and memorial space in general. For the reader outside of the Soviet space, “war,” which is mentioned in the title of the book, will most likely not evoke a specific historical event that the book, in fact, refers to—WWII. Moreover, for the contemporary, “non-Soviet” reader, the title will most likely refer to the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine. For readers, who are well familiar with Soviets’ past, the book will signal, first and foremost, the Second World War, the event which occupies an extensive memorial space for the majority of the post-Soviet countries and their peoples. The editors and the contributors of War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus analyze how the memory of the war shapes the historical, political, and cultural dimensions of the three countries. While during the USSR, this memory was shared by the Soviet republics, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, each of these republics appeared to undertake their own trajectories in terms of integrating the war narratives and memory about them into their independent post-Soviet memorial programs.

The book nuances the mnemonic divergences that the three countries illustrate when they deal with how the Second World War can be and should be represented in commemorative practices of their nations. Interestingly, these divergencies are dictated to some extent by how each of these countries views their Soviet legacy. Russia presents itself as a main successor of the Soviet Union and this factor considerably shapes the way in which today’s Russia promotes the official historical narrative of WWII as one of the narratives that mobilizes and unites the Russians. While Belarus follows Russia’s steps in trying to use the war narrative to unite the Belarusians through the creation of some grand-narrative, Ukraine in many cases takes a different route. In Ukraine, there is an attempt to put the narrative and the memory of the Second World War not so much in the Soviet context, but in the European one. One of the signals in this regard is the adoption of the poppy flower emblem as a symbol of war remembrance. War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus delves into the complexities of memory politics, which help investigate the convergences and divergences of the memorial practices that the post-Soviet countries are currently engaging with.

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M. Wodziński and W. Spallek, "Historical Atlas of Hasidism" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large-format maps and a wealth of illustrations, charts, and tables, this one-of-a-kind atlas charts Hasidism’s emergence and expansion; its dynasties, courts, and prayer houses; its spread to the New World; the crisis of the two world wars and the Holocaust; and Hasidism’s remarkable postwar rebirth.

This spatial history of a movement that has often been understood as aterritorial combines painstaking source work, cartographic skill, and inventive visualisations to create a masterful contribution to the history of Hasidism and the history of religion more broadly.

Marcin Wodziński is Professor of Jewish History and Literature, and head of the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław (Poland).

Waldemar Spallek is Assistant Professor of geographic information systems and cartography at the University of Wrocław (Poland).

Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz.

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Vadim Shneyder, "Russia's Capitalist Realism: Narrative Form and History in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov" (Northwestern UP. 2020)

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Vadim Shneyder's new book, Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern, 2020) examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia's industrial revolution. During Russia's first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. Prepare yourself for an innovative perspective on Anna Karenina, The Idiot and other 19th-century Russian classics.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his family in Palestine, in 1946. In her book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back (Oxford UP, 2020), Israeli scholar Stefani Hoffman has provided the English-speaking world with its first full translation of Margolin’s story, which reiterates the importance of individual human dignity, no matter the circumstances.

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Ronald Grigor Suny, "Stalin: Passage to Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Ronald Suny’s recent biography of the young Stalin, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton UP, 2020) covers “Soso” Jughashvili’s life up to the 1917 Revolution. Suny provides a wealth of detail as to the young Stalin’s life, and he embeds that life story in the broader story of Bolshevism. The Stalin that emerges from Suny’s portrait was skilled at navigating Party in-fighting an effective at speaking both to workers and to intellectuals. This biography does much make sense of the later Stalin, the perpetrator of the Purges.

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Erica Marat, "The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In her book, The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press, 2018), Erica Marat provides an answer to a very important question: “What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force?” Marat looks as specific case studies – in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan – in order to identify and analyze instances where public mobilization challenged the conduct of police offers and their use of violence. In her analysis, she considers the legacies of Soviet policing, but also identifies important factors that led to policing’s reform. The book is valuable reading for those following contemporary issues in Central Asia and the post-Soviet space, as well those interested broadly in the problems of police violence and the challenge of police reform.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD Student at The Ohio State University.

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Y. Gorlizki and O. Khlevniuk, "Substate Dictatorship Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union" (Yale UP, 2020)

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Starting after the Second World War and taking the story through to the Brezhnev era, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk's Substate Dictatorship Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2020) charts the strategies of Soviet regional leaders, paying particular attention to the forging and evolution of local trust networks.

Beginning with the late Stalinist period, Gorlizki and Khlevniuk describe and evaluates the relatively successful mechanisms Stalin used to keep regional networks and bosses (usually Obkom First Secretaries) in check while simultaneously devolving power to the regional governments. When Khrushchev came to power, following Stalin’s death, he removed many of these mechanisms which included oversight bodies such as the Party Control Commission and delegations from the Central Committee in an effort to reform the bureaucracy. This led to an unprecedented level of bureaucratic fraud, perpetrated primarily through family circle trust networks of regional bureaucrats who covered up each other’s malfeasance. The culmination of this trend was the Riazan scandal when the Obkom First Secretary engaged in a number of shady practices such as buying meat from markets in other regions, counting slaughtered animals twice and straight up fabrication to meet the massively unrealistic quotas Khrushchev had set as part of his Seven Year Plan. The resulting scandal undermined Khrushchev’s political capital and contributed to his downfall. Brezhnev took a different tact to managing regional governments by reducing the insane pressures to fulfill quotas they had faced under Stalin and Khurshchev and ending the rotational scheme Stalin had put in to place to try to make sure regional bosses could not develop their own nepotistic networks. Listen in to learn about how authoritarian regimes delegated power and how successful or unsuccessful these methods were and how they fundamentally shaped Soviet history.

Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here.

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Jonathan Schneer, "The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

History in the making can be messy. As a tale told years later by historians, it is usually a clean narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and a mostly logical and foreordained end. Much of that messiness gets lost. Not in Jonathan Schneer's new book, The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia (Oxford UP, 2020). Schneer's recounts the story of a young British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, sent to Soviet Russia soon after the October Revolution in 1917. Initially seeking some sort of accommodation with the Bolsheviks, Lockhart ends up plotting to overthrow the regime. The plot--set for September 1918--fails for all sorts of reasons, not least of which the plotters were outsmarted at every turn by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the newly formed Cheka. The plot and its failure are a minor footnote of history. The book's great value is its description of the chaos in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Western intelligence efforts, the political geography of early Soviet Russia, and the personal lives of many of the leading characters. Lockhart's leading lady at the time of the plot, Moura von Benckendorff, is her own "force of history." For her, the Lockhart plot would end up being only one of many exciting moments of a long and dramatic life.

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Alexey Golubev, "The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell UP, 2020) is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community.

Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."

Alexey Golubev is a scholar of Russian history with a focus on social and cultural history of the twentieth century. He has a Cand.Sc. (kandidatskaya) degree from the Petrozavodsk University (2006) and a Ph.D. degree from the University of British Columbia (2016). Since 2017 he has worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Houston.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at University of Northern Colorado.

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H. Shelest and M. Rabinovych, "Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict: The Case of Ukraine" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The articles presented in Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict: The Case of Ukraine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) aim to explore the current political and administrative challenges that Ukraine is facing.

The volume draws particular attention to the issues that have been escalated and intensified since the inception of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. From a diversity of perspectives, the contributors explore the nature of the current challenges, as well as possible ways for dealing with them. One of the central points and issues that the volume highlights is regional diversity. As the editors and contributors make it clear, diversity can be used as an advantage and a disadvantage on both political and legal levels: the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia illustrates a number of ways in which regional diversity can be manipulated and misused. The volume emphasizes that Ukraine is a multiethnic country which has always hosted a diversity of ethnic groups, with a number of linguistic traditions: this factor should be presented as one of the aspects for managing the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, in which ethnic issues have been extensively manipulated by the Russian authorities. One of the largest contributions of the volume lies in the terminological clarification, with an emphasis on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, including the Crimea annexation, which produces an effective legal platform for the integration of Ukrainian issues into the European and global contexts.

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Jessica Zychowicz, "Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2020) tells the unique story of a generation of artists, feminists, and queer activists who emerged in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a focus on new media, Zychowicz demonstrates how contemporary artist collectives in Ukraine have contested Soviet and Western connotations of feminism to draw attention to a range of human rights issues with global impact.

In the book, Zychowicz summarizes and engages with more recent critical scholarship on the role of digital media and virtual environments in concepts of the public sphere. Mapping out several key changes in newly independent Ukraine, she traces the discursive links between distinct eras, marked by mass gatherings on Kyiv's main square, in order to investigate the deeper shifts driving feminist protest and politics today.

Dr. Jessica Zychowicz was recently a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine (2017-18) and is currently based at the University of Alberta. She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and been hosted in residencies and invited talks at Uppsala University Institute for Russian and East European Studies in Sweden; the University of St. Andrews in Edinburgh; NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, among others. She earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan and holds a degree from UC Berkeley.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at University of Northern Colorado.

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A. Wylegala and M. Glowacka-Grajper, "The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine" (Indiana UP, 2020)

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In a century marked by totalitarian regimes, genocide, mass migrations, and shifting borders, the concept of memory in Eastern Europe is often synonymous with notions of trauma. In Ukraine, memory mechanisms were disrupted by political systems seeking to repress and control the past in order to form new national identities supportive of their own agendas. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, memory in Ukraine was released, creating alternate visions of the past, new national heroes, and new victims. This release of memories led to new conflicts and "memory wars."

How does the past exist in contemporary Ukraine? The works collected in The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (Indiana UP, 2020), edited by Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, focus on commemorative practices, the politics of history, and the way memory influences Ukrainian politics, identity, and culture. The works explore contemporary memory culture in Ukraine and the ways in which it is being researched and understood. Drawing on work from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists, the collection represents a truly interdisciplinary approach. Taken together, the groundbreaking scholarship collected in The Burden of the Past provides insight into how memories can be warped and abused, and how this abuse can have lasting effects on a country seeking to create a hopeful future.

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Brandon M. Schechter, "The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press) uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon Schechter attends to a diverse array of things―from spoons to tanks―to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians.

Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting.

Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. Schechter argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. In The Stuff of Soldiers, he describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.

Brandon Schechter is currently a faculty fellow at NYU-Shanghai. Before that he served as the Elihu Rose Scholar in Modern Military History at NYU, and a post doctoral fellow at the Davis Center for the Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History, University of Northern Coloradod

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Jennifer J. Carroll, "Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2019) considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on "normal" citizens.

Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of "good" citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public.

Dr. Jennifer J. Carroll is a medical anthropologist, research scientist, and subject matter expert on substance use and public health interventions to prevent overdose. She earned her PhD in cultural anthropology and her MPH in epidemiology at the University of Washington. She currently holds appointments as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

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David R. Marples, "Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir" (E-International Relations, 2020)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

David R. Marples' new book Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir (E-International Relations, 2020) describes the author's academic journey from an undergraduate in London to his current research on Ukraine and Belarus as a History professor in Alberta, Canada. It highlights the dramatic changes of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, his travel stories, experiences, and the Stalinist legacy in both countries. It includes extended focus on his visits to Chernobyl and the contaminated zone in the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as a summer working with indigenous groups in eastern Siberia. Visiting Belarus more than 25 times since the 1990s, he was banned for seven years before the visa rules were relaxed in 2017. In the case of Ukraine, it chronicles a transition from a total outsider to one of the best-known scholars in Ukrainian studies, commenting on aspects of the coalescence of scholarship and politics, and the increasing role of social media and the Diaspora in the analysis of crucial events such as the Euromaidan uprising and its aftermath in Kyiv.

David R. Marples is a Distinguished University Professor of Russian and East European History, University of Alberta.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

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John Connelly, "From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

John Connelly’s new book – From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) – is an encyclopedic but lively narrative that captivates both those familiar with old stories about the region and novices who are seeking introduction to this vast laboratory of European modernity. Passionate, erudite, and insightful, the book pursues answers to the central question of Eastern European history: why does nationalism persist as the organizing principle of political life in a region where it has produced such tragedies?

Connelly traces the rise of nationalism in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman lands; the creation of new states after the First World War and their later absorption by the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Bloc; the reemergence of democracy and separatist movements after the collapse of communism; and the recent surge of populist politics throughout the region.

John Connelly is a Professor of History at the University of California Berkley who works in the fields of modern Eastern European social and political history, the history of education, nationalism studies, and the history of Catholicism.

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Sören Urbansky, "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often lose out to larger-than-life figures like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. A book that combines a look at the history of the Sino-Russian border with a focus on the experiences of everyday borderlanders is thus very valuable, and this is exactly what is offered by Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton University Press).

Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Urbansky’s book draws most of its insights from a particular region of steppe – the Argun river basin – around the point where today Russia and China also converge with the eastern end of Mongolia. As well as giving a sense of the border’s formation over 300 years, Urbansky’s biperspectival look from both Russian and Chinese sides shows how the inter-state boundary took shape as a result of actions by local people, whose lives have in turn been transformed by existence next to a geopolitical faultline.

Sören Urbansky is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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Joanna Stingray, "Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground" (Doppelhouse Press, 2020)

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground (Doppelhouse Press, 2020) is Joanna Stingray’s autobiographical account of her time on the underground music scene in the USSR and Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time Joanna met and worked with some of the most important names in Russian rock like Boris Grebenshchikov of Aquarium and Victor Tsoi of Kino. She also had encounters with both the KGB and FBI who were incredulous that an American girl would come to the USSR just to listen to rock. Listen in as she describes the creativity, inspiration and events that helped create iconic underground Russian rock.

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James C. Pearce, "The Use of History in Putin's Russia" (Vernon Press, 2020)

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

History matters in Russia. It really matters, so much so that the state has a "historical policy" to help legitimize itself and support its policy agenda. The Use of History in Putin's Russia (Vernon Press, 2020), James C. Pearce examines how the past is perceived in contemporary Russia and analyses the ways in which the Russian state uses history to create a broad coalition of consensus and forge a new national identity. Central to issues of governance and national identity, the Russian state utilises history for the purpose of state-building and reviving Russia's national consciousness in the twenty-first century.

Assessing how history mediates the complex relationship between state and population, this book analyses the selection process of constructing and recycling a preferred historical narrative to create loyal, patriotic citizens, ultimately aiding its modernisation. Different historical spheres of Russian life are analysed in-depth including areas of culture, politics, education, and anniversaries. The past is not just a state matter, a socio-political issue linked to the modernisation process, containing many paradoxes.

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Marco Puleri, "Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics" (Peter Lang, 2020)

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Marco Puleri’s Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2020) examines a complex process of identity formation in the context of exposure to a diversity of linguistic and cultural influences. Puleri zeroes in on contemporary Ukraine to explore the specificities of cultural overlapping and the power it exercises on the individual’s construction of self. As the title prompts, the emphasis is made on hybrid identities, which Puleri views from the perspective of epistemological multivalences. The discussion of the formation and function of hybrid identities is rooted not only in cultural and linguistic diversities, but also in complex historical and political processes.

In Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian, Puleri attempts to unravel entangled clusters that signal identity hybridity: the book offers an ample collection of instances that manifest the overlapping and collaboration of multiple narratives that construct various identities. The book discusses in detail the writers who write (or wrote) in Russian, but live in Ukraine. Puleri asks a legitimate question, to which it is hard to find an answer: how does one categorize such literature? Is it Russian? Even though it is not written in Russia and it is not written by writers who consider themselves Russians. Is it Ukrainian? It is not written in Ukrainian, but it is written by writers who identify themselves as Ukrainians. The question itself is further complicated by the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which makes the question sensitive and at times uncomfortable. In Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian, Puleri considers a variety of aspects, attempting to delicately approach the question of hybrid identity, which in the present combination—Ukrainian and Russian components—may evoke further anxieties and complications.

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Stephen Riegg, "Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801-1914" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801-1914 (Cornell University Press, 2020) traces the relationship between the Romanov state and the Armenian diaspora that populated Russia's territorial fringes and navigated the tsarist empire's metropolitan centers.

By engaging the ongoing debates about imperial structures that were simultaneously symbiotic and hierarchically ordered, Stephen Badalyan Riegg helps us to understand how, for Armenians and some other subjects, imperial rule represented not hypothetical, clear-cut alternatives but simultaneous, messy realities. He examines why, and how, Russian architects of empire imagined Armenians as being politically desirable. These circumstances included the familiarity of their faith, perceived degree of social, political, or cultural integration, and their actual or potential contributions to the state's varied priorities.

Based on extensive research in the archives of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yerevan, Russia's Entangled Embrace reveals that the Russian government relied on Armenians to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. Analyzing the complexities of this imperial relationship―beyond the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians―allows us to study the methods of tsarist imperialism in the context of diasporic distribution, interimperial conflict and alliance, nationalism, and religious and economic identity.

Stephen Badalyan Riegg is a Texas A&M Arts and Humanities Fellow for 2020-23. He can be reached at sriegg@tamu.edu.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

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Adam Teller, "Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Rescue the Surviving Souls is the first book to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight, and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural, and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day.

Teller pays particular attention to those thousands of Jews sent for sale on the slave markets of Istanbul and the extensive transregional Jewish economic network that coalesced to ransom them. He also explores how Jewish communities rallied to support the refugees in central and western Europe, as well as in Poland-Lithuania, doing everything possible to help them overcome their traumatic experiences and rebuild their lives.

Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century (Princeton University Press, 2020) offers an intimate study of an international refugee crisis, from outbreak to resolution, that is profoundly relevant today.

Adam Teller is a Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Princeton University. He is the author of Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania: The Jews on the Radziwiłł Estates.

Robin Buller is a Doctoral Candidate in History at UNC Chapel Hill and a 2020-2021 dissertation fellow with the Association for Jewish Studies.

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Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops, trees and shrubs, as well as weeds. Following their example, and drawing on the expertise of émigré Russian-Jewish scientists, the US Department of Agriculture introduced more plants, agricultural sciences, especially soil science; and methods of planting trees to shelter the land from the wind. By the 1930s, many of the grain varieties in the Great Plains had been imported from the steppes. The fertile soil was classified using the Russian term 'chernozem'. The US Forest Service was planting shelterbelts using techniques pioneered in the steppes. And, tumbling across the plains was an invasive weed from the steppes: tumbleweed. Based on archival research in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, this book explores the unexpected Russian roots of Great Plains agriculture.

David Moon is a history professor at the University of York in the UK and holds an honorary professorship at University College London. He is a specialist on Russian, Eurasian, and transnational environmental history. He began his career as a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, at the southern end of the Great Plains, and completed his new book as a visiting professor at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, in the heart of the Eurasian steppes.The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores connections between these two regions, is his fifth book. He would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for supporting his work.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at University of Northern Colorado.

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Natan M. Meir, "Stepchildren of the Shtetl" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford University Press, 2020) tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust.

Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists.

Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe―from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery―Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority.

Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies in the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He also serves as a museum consultant and leads study tours of Eastern Europe with Ayelet Tours.

503-828-5303, meir@pdx.edu

Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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Will Smiley, "From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his book From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), Will Smiley examines the emergence of rules of warfare surrounding captivity and slavery in the context of Ottoman-Russian military rivalry between 1700 and 1878. This remarkably well-researched and carefully argued monograph uncovers a vibrant inter-imperial legal regime, challenging many conventional narratives about the expansion of modern international law and the European states system. Its pages provide ample material with which we can rethink the supposed linear decline of Ottoman state power and the nature of pre-modern diplomacy, sovereignty, and governance in Eurasian empires.

While traditional accounts of modern international law mainly focus on intellectual and political developments in the Western world, Smiley shows how two states on the European periphery worked out their own rules – their own international law governing the movement of captives, slaves, and prisoners of war across imperial frontiers. The story that emerges is not one of the Ottoman state’s joining an outside system of law. On the contrary, both in the eighteenth century and the even more challenging nineteenth, the Sublime Porte actively shaped the rules by which it was bound.

Will Smiley is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of New Hampshire and a historian of Eurasia, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and international law.

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Madina Tlostanova, "What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Azerbaijani writer Afanassy Mamedov who frame the post-Soviet condition through the experience and expression of community, space, temporality, gender, and negotiating the demands of the state and the market. In foregrounding the unfolding aesthesis and activism in the post-Soviet space, Tlostanova emphasizes the important role that decolonial art plays in providing the foundation upon which to build new modes of thought and a decolonial future.

Madina Tlostanova is professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden).

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Sonya Bilocerkowycz, "On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine" (Mad Creek Books, 2019)

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

It’s been a difficult year in America. From plague, to protests, to politics, there have never been so many lives at stake, nor so many questions about the future of our country.

Since his election in 2016, questions have been raised about president Trump’s too-close-for-comfort ties to Russian leadership and intelligence. Lately, his antagonism toward infectious disease science and CDC guidelines in addition to his deployment of federal troops into American cities to silence protestors have led many to compare the current regime to authoritarian governments of long ago wars.

But the truth is, very little about these tactics are new. In other parts of the world, such as in Ukraine, citizens know them, resist them, and subvert them in a way Americans are just learning how to.

In her striking debut, On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine (Mad Creek Books), author Sonya Bilocerkowycz speculates on the possibility of future revolutions built on the lessons of revolutions past—both big, and small. Her essays expertly weave personal narrative as a member of the Ukrainian-American diaspora into research about Ukrainian myth, politics, history, art, and more, in one great cultural examination of Ukraine that is as timely as it is thoughtful.

Bilocerkowcyz’s unique perspective as a Ukrainian-American sheds necessary light onto the darkness of America’s current political moment, her voice a guide to finding our way home.

Today on New Books in Literature, please join us as we sit down with Sonya Bilocerkowcyz to learn more about On Our Way Home from the Revolution, available now.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com

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Nathan Spannaus, "Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

What were some of the major transformations taking place for Muslim communities in the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century? How did the introduction of a state-backed structure for Muslim religious institutions alter Islamic religious authority in the empire? And who exactly was Abu Nasr Qursawi and what was his reformist project to grapple with this situation?

These are some of the questions asked by Nathan Spannaus in his book, Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book offers a novel intervention in the study of early-modern Islamic thought, whose conventional geographical contours often focus on the Middle East and South Asia. Spannaus shows us that eighteenth-century Russia was also blooming with its own indigenous Islamic scholarly discourses that encompassed theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and more. These discourses were neither totally disembodied from wider concurrent global trends in Islamic thought, nor completely dependent on them. He examines the work of one Abu Nasr al-Qursawi, an erudite and intrepid scholar who criticized clerical institutions for stagnating the development of Islamic jurisprudence and theology by foreclosing independent juristic reasoning. In doing so, Spannaus meticulously demonstrates how Qursawi radically critiqued the established tradition while simultaneously embarking on his project of interpretive reform, all while maintaining fidelity to the discursive modes and fields of that tradition.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Iraj Bashiri, "The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan" (Lexington Books, 2016)

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 04:00:00 -0000

In The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan (Lexington Books) Iraj Bashiri provides an overview of the Civil War in Tajikistan that emerged amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Based on personal observations, interviews, and a variety of primary and secondary publications, Bashiri places the conflict in a broader historical context, paying careful attention to longstanding tensions that came to the forefront in the early 1990s. These include ideology, regionalism, and, most importantly, disagreements over the role of religion in the functioning of the state.

This book will be useful for students, scholars, and any others interested in the recent history of Tajikistan and Central Asia.

Iraj Bashiri is one of the leading scholars in the fields of Central Asian studies and Iranian studies with a focus on Tajik and Iranian identity.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020)

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Book, 2020). Although the German invasion was the cause of the outbreak of World War II, oddly there has not been much by way of English language treatments of this pivotal historical episode. With this fine and highly readable narrative history, Moorhouse more than makes up for this omission. Combing English, German and crucially Polish language sources, Moorhouse reveals to the reader the German campaign from start to finish. Along the way showing that stereotypical Western images of the Polish army: cavalry charging tanks, are mythological in nature and inaccurate. Moorhouse also details for the reader the shameful refusal of the British and French governments to assist their Polish ally. Equally well illustrated is the Soviet Union’s invasion of Eastern Poland. With the Soviet mythology that the invasion was mostly ‘peaceful’ and well-received, just that: a myth. In short, Roger Moorhouse presents to the reader a highly interesting narrative history of an important historical episode. All from the author of Berlin at War and The Devil’s Alliance.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Diana T. Kudaibergenova, "Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Diana T. Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial.

Dr. Kudaibergenova is a political sociologist who studies different intersections of power relations through concepts of state, nationalizing regimes and different ideologies. Trained as sociologist at Cambridge, she is currently a Research Associate on the leading UK Global Challenges Research Fund grant COMPASS that is based at the Centre of Development Studies (Department of Politics and International Studies) at the University of Cambridge.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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Gregory Afinogenov, "Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The ways in which states and empires spy on and study one another has changed a great deal over time in line with shifting political priorities, written traditions and technologies. Even on this highly diverse global background, however, the long process of licit and illicit familiarization between Russia and China as Eurasian neighbours is a particularly compelling story, one told in engrossing detail in Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press).

Moving from the first engagements between seventeenth-century Muscovy and the Qing imperium, through the reformist era of Peter the Great, and up to nineteenth-century Russian annexation of late-Qing territory, the author tells dozens of richly-sourced tales of envoys, agents and missionaries and the worlds of information they wove.

As well as making us look in new ways at how knowledge is authored and acted upon politically, Spies and Scholars is a trove of insights into the centuries-long entanglements which have shaped Sino-Russian relationships up to the present.

Gregory Afinogenov is Assistant Professor of Imperial Russian History at Georgetown University and Associate Editor at Kritika, the leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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Scott Levi, "The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia" (U Pittsburgh, 2020)

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book, The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), Scott Levi brings new perspectives into the historiography of early Modern Central Asia. Levi reflects on recent scholarship to identify multiple causal factors that contributed to the Bukharan crisis of the 18th century. These include climate change, the global silver trade, the innovation of new gunpowder and weapon technologies, and a number of political transformations in surrounding states. In identifying these multiple factors, Levi challenges dominant narratives in Central Asian history which themselves are holdovers from Orientalist historiography that have primarily characterized early modern Central Asia as an isolated region facing multiple decades of economic, political, and social decline. This book is commendable both for its sophisticated arguments and its accessibility to specialists and non-specialists alike. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and casual readers interested in Central Asian, economic, and global history during the period in question.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at The Ohio State University.

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Francine Hirsch, "Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal  (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that Anglo-American dominated histories capture the moment while missing the story.

Drawing upon secret archives open for a few brief years during Russia’s liberalization, Francine Hirsch takes readers behind the scenes to private parties and late-night deliberations where the Nuremberg Principles took shape. A vital corrective told through the messy and all too human negotiations behind a trial that changed everything and almost never happened.

Francine Hirsch is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2005) received the Herbert Baxter Adams, Wayne S. Vucinich, and Council for European Studies book prizes. She specializes in Russian and Soviet History, Modern European History, Comparative Empires, Russian-American Engagement, and the History of Human Rights.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

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David Shimer, "Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference" (Knopf, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The "guard is tired." With that simple phrase, the newly installed Bolshevik regime in Russia dismissed the duly elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918. And, one might say, so started Russia's century-long interference in elections and electoral outcomes. In his new book Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference (Knopf, 2020), David Shimer narrates in meticulous but page-turning detail a century of covert electoral interference, by both the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and continuing to this day with a focus on post-Soviet Russia's efforts to affect US politics. His account of the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential election makes for frightening and gripping reading. Its implications for the 2020 election are equally clear. The US needs to come up with a means to counter Russia's now well-developed expertise in disrupting and weakening American democracy. Time is running out.

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Archie Brown, "The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

What brought about an end to the Cold War has long been a subject of speculation and mythology. One prominent argument is that the United States simply bankrupted the Soviet Union, outspending the Soviets on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars"). Renowned Soviet and Russian scholar, Professor Archie Brown in his latest work rejects any simple answers.

In The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War (Oxford UP, 2020), Brown focuses on the human element, and in particular on the main figures involved--Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. His book looks at them both as individuals and as engaged in a dynamic that between 1985, when Gorbachev came to power and 1989, when Reagan left office, brought about not only an easing of East-West tensions but a great deal more. Brown cogently argues that the Cold War ended at an ideological level with Mikhail Gorbachev's speech at the United Nations in December 1988, when he announced that the people of every country had the right to choose their own government. The Cold War ended on the ground when the peoples of Eastern Europe took Gorbachev at his word in 1989 and Soviet troops were ordered to stay in their barracks.

The standard narrative of the end of the Cold War--that it was won by the threat of American military power and spending--has underpinned support for the use of force in the Middle East (including the invasion of Iraq in 2003), the expansion of NATO, and advocacy of a hard line toward contemporary Russia. On the other side of the divide, the view that the United States set out to break up the Soviet Union and undermine Russia is widely accepted in Russia today and has led to a hardening of both domestic and foreign policy. Subversive of both of these narratives, Professor Brown's book will is set to become the standard work dealing with this highly important topic.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Mark Vincent, "Criminal Subculture in the Gulag" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Most Gulag scholarship focuses on political prisoners and, as a result, our knowledge of the camps as a lived experience remains relatively incomplete.

Criminal Subculture in the Gulag: Prisoner Society in the Stalinist Labour Camps, 1924–53 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) draws on Gulag journals, song collections, tattoo drawings and dictionaries of slang, to explore the lives of the recidivist criminals and criminal gangs that originated in the Gulag under Stalin.

Join us to listen as Mark Vincent maps the Gulag 'penal arc' of prisoners across initiation tests, means of communication, the importance of card playing, punishment rituals, tattooing rituals, and conflict between the vory v zakone and the other prisoners and camp staff.

Mark Vincent is an independent scholar who obtained his PhD in 2015 from the University of East Anglia, UK.

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Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017)

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the history of cotton agriculture and irrigation in Soviet Central Asia. Based on published sources and archival research conducted in Tashkent, Obertreis’ monograph offers new insights into the nature of Russian Imperial and Soviet statecraft, as well as the technical and ideological motivations behind the transformation of the Central Asian environment. This book is valuable reading for anyone interested in Russia and Central Asia, past or present.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at The Ohio State University.

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Laura A. Dean, "Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia" (Policy Press, 2020)

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue of human trafficking in Eurasia.

In her 2020 monograph Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia (Policy Press, 2020), Dr. Dean analyzes the development and effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies and institutions in Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, explores challenges to crafting and enforcing policies and aiding victims, and evaluates best practices based on country-to-country comparison.

We discuss common misconceptions about human trafficking, the impact of institutionalized gender inequalities on efforts to combat labor and sexual exploitation, the mixed results of United States and Western European involvement, the challenges of controversial fieldwork as an American scholar in Eurasia, and the book’s key takeaways for policy makers and activists.

Dr. Dean also introduces the Human Trafficking Policy Index - her new, innovative tool for measuring the scope of human trafficking policy.

Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch.

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Catherine Belton, "Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West" (FSG, 2020)

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Russian state is back. That may not be a big surprise to Russia watchers. The degree to which it is a KGB state, however, is documented in great detail in Catherine Belton's new book Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020). Certain elements of the KGB were playing a "long game" as early as the 1980s and saw the need for an alternative to the sclerotic late Soviet system. And they were going to be part of that post-Soviet regime. Fast forward 20 years later, these security and intelligence officials are still playing a long game financially, moving billions of dollars around off-shore to forward the interests of the Russian state, and their own.

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Paul D’Anieri, "Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Paul D’Anieri’s Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) documents in a nuanced way the development of the current military conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The book includes a meticulous account of numerous developments which, according to D’Anieri, led to the war that still remains officially undeclared.

The roots of the conflict can be found in the beginning of the end of the USSR: different visions that Russian and Ukrainian politicians and officials had regarding the development of their countries gradually contributed to the growing gap—political and ideological—between Russia and Ukraine.

D’Anieri’s study comprises a number of insightful and interesting comments on the political developments: interviews and conversations, which reveal the views of Russian and Ukrainian political players, help reconstruct the dynamic that eventually led to the Ukrainian revolutions and to the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2014.

One of the strongest aspects of the book is the inclusion of the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia into the international political context: D’Anieri illustrates how the conflict, on the one hand, appeared to emerge as a consequence of international processes; on the other hand, it appears to be shaping to a larger extent the current international dynamic.

Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War completes a number of goals: documenting the current conflict and outlining the main reasons is one of them. Additionally, the book provides insights into understanding Ukraine as an independent state which in the West has long been confused with the Russian territory. This understanding is inseparable from the histories and developments of the neighboring countries, including Russia in the first place.

However, it should also be noted that the history and understanding of Russia will always be abridged without a closer look at the countries that at some point happened to be under Russia’s influence. On a larger scale, Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War is an attempt to break a traditional approach of viewing Ukraine as a country that has long been understood indirectly through the Russian lens.

D’Anieri brings Ukraine as a geopolitical unit to the forefront to reveal the complex and entangled history of its north-eastern neighbor.

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Why Did the Allies Win World War One?

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more horrendous event. Perhaps nothing was as unexpected in this conflict as the sudden termination of the same in November 1918. From that time to this, historians have been considering why Germany and its allies decided to terminate the conflict when they did. Here to consider the matter once again, in this newest episode of Arguing History is Professor of History Emeritus Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Exeter. And a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge with a First, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.”

Dr. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs

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Martina Cvajner, "Soviet Signoras: Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration" (U Chicago, 2019)

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Jana Byars talks with Martina Cvajner, Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Trento, about her new book, Soviet Signoras: Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration (University of Chicago Press, 2019). This book focuses on a group of women who migrated from areas in the former Soviet Union to northern Italy, following them from the first days of their arrival and their early work as elderly home caregivers, as they build personal lives and networks, through the establishment of a meaningful community. Dr Cvajner spent almost two decades with the women she studies, developing friendships and long-term connections. This personal interest shines through in the book and in our talk. She has a genuine affection for her subjects and approaches them not just as research material, but as whole humans, with complex stories. As a review noted, “By zeroing in on these elements of personal identity, she reveals previously unexplored sides of the social psychology of migration, colouring our contemporary discussion with complex shades of humanity. ”Our discussion discusses the importance of sexuality, the relationship between gender and migration, and explores the benefits of long-term ethnographic research.

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Alexander Gendler, "Khurbm 1914-1922: Prelude to the Holocaust" (Varda Books, 2019)

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The murder of two-thirds of European Jews, referred to by many as the Holocaust, did not begin June 22, 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, or September 1, 1939, with the beginning of WWII, or with 1938 Kristallnacht, or even with the 1933 rise of Hitler. According to Alexander Gendler, it began on August 1, 1914, with the start of WWI, of which WWII was just its continuation. It was then that Russia's Imperial Army of Nicholas II committed the now largely forgotten genocide of Russian Jews. His new book, Khurbm 1914-1922: Prelude to the Holocaust (Varda Books, 2019), is the most extensive collection of eye-witness testimonies and official communications revealing the genocidal destruction of Jewish life by the Russian army during World War I.

Alexander Gendler, a former NPR “Morning Edition” commentator, syndicated columnist, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Op-Ed page, is the Editor-in-Chief of the Forgotten Genocide project sponsored by the Center for Jewish Life Studies.

Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Stanislav Kulchytsky, "The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor" (CIUS Press, 2018)

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Stanislav Kulchytsky’s The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor (CIUS Press, 2018) presents a meticulous research that unveils the mechanism of the Holodomor as a man-made famine, which was launched in Ukraine by the Soviets as a punitive and controlling measure undertaken to discipline and suppress those, peasants in the first place, who might have rebelled against the Soviet programs such as collectivization. With this book, Kulchytsky offers a complex approach to understanding the Holodomor: from the origins of the Soviet Union to the development of sophisticated programs that were designed to secure the stability and unequivocal dominance of the totalitarian regime, masked, however, as a “universal virtue” for all Soviets.

As with the Soviet Union, the famine of 1932-1933 asks to consider multiple components that led to one of the most tragic and traumatic episodes in the history of Ukraine in the 20th century: the methodological frame that Kulchytsky provides takes into account these multiple components and helps convincingly track the crimes that were performed by the Soviet officials. Moreover, the work can also be read as a confession of the scholar who lived through all stages of ideological indoctrination whose task was to raise scholars who would devotedly serve the regime. Kulchytsky opens his book with his personal story of how he started investigating the Holodomor under the Soviet Union: required by the Communist Party officials, the research went into a completely different direction and yielded the results that the Party could not foresee.

The book is the evidence of scholarly integrity and of the resilience towards the Party’s demands of obedience and cooperation. In spite of a number of works written about the USSR, it still remains to some extent terra incognita: particularly those areas that could shed some light on how the Soviet Union, that was built at the expense of millions of lives, lasted for decades; and why today there are attempts in Russia, which considered itself the main heir of the USSR, to revive the “glory” of its leaders—Stalin in the first place—and of life under the Soviet Union. The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor provides detailed research of the traumatic episode in the history of Ukraine; it shows the mechanism of the totalitarian regime; and it takes us one step closer to the understanding of how the USSR emerged and developed.

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Eric Lee, "The Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge, April–May 1945" (Greenhill Books, 2020)

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Eric Lee's new book The Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge, April–May 1945 (Greenhill Books, 2020) tells the story of the events leading up to the little-known revolt of Georgian Wehrmacht recruits against the Germans on the island of Texel, which was part of the Atlantic Wall fortifications off the Dutch coast. These Georgians had been captured as POWs and recruited into or “volunteered” for the Georgian Legion, a Wehrmacht unit made up of former Soviet Georgian troops, often given the choice to join or die. They served unreliably on the Eastern Front before being transferred to the West. There they plotted revolt against the Germans from 1944 in conjunction with Dutch Communist resistance fighters.

The revolt was sparked in 1945, as Hitler was hiding in his Fuhrerbunker and the Red Army advancing on Berlin, by news the Georgians were going to be sent to the mainland in what would likely have been a deadly stand against the Allies. Unwilling to die for the Germans, the Georgian Wehrmacht soldiers launched a surprise revolt, slitting the throats of over 400 Germans on the island of Texel in a night. The revolt devolved into all out warfare as the Germans turned the sea batteries on the island and the Georgians took no prisoners while Dutch civilians were caught in the crossfire. The revolt ended when both Georgians and Germans surrendered to Canadian troops. Most of the Georgians were repatriated without reprisal to the USSR where they lived quiet lives. Eric Lee walks us through these events and discusses the legacy of the Texel revolt in the USSR and modern Georgia.

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019)

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common themes, styles, motifs, and even pigments that circulated across the continents. Drawing on visual as well as textual sources from eight unique locations that spanned between Siena in Italy and Quanzhou in China, Roxann Prazniak maps out in Sudden Appearances an elaborate thirteenth-century network of cultural and commercial exchanges that “produced an ascendant materialism and intervisuality that emphasized human agency.”

Join me as I discuss Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art (University of Hawaii Press 2019) with Dr. Prazniak.

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to the Republic of China, Tibet, and the Empire of Japan.

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Andrei Kushnir, "Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir" (Academic Studies Press, 2020)

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir (Academic Studies Press, 2020), Andrei Kushnir documents the story of his father, Wasyl Kushnir, who was born in the western part of Ukraine in 1923. The book is based on Wasyl Kushnir’s memoirs and it includes a number of photos that help reconstruct his personal story. Narrating his family story, Wasyl Kushnir goes back to the second half of the 19th century and takes the reader to the present moment: the story provides a glimpse into a family that seems to be shaped by all the atrocities of the 20th century. World War I, the collapse of the two empires, the advancement of the Soviets, dekulakization, collectivization, the Holodomor, World War II, Nazi German labor camps, exiles to Siberia, immigration to the USA: these events undoubtedly leave an imprint on the individual’s life. At times, the book reads like a movie plot: Wasyl Kushnir is a character whose life unfolds as the countries and the peoples survive though tragedies and hardships. While Andrei Kushnir pays tribute to his family by introducing the audience to the story of his father and his family, he also creates a unique way to open up historical moments through personal narratives and stories. The center of the book is the story of Wasyl Kushnir, but it gives a panoramic overview of the events that shaped not only an individual life, but the lives of nations and the destinies of the countries. This is a narrative that provides an opportunity to emphasize the fate of the individual and to present a linear presentation of historical developments. For this reason, the book is very personal and rather unbiased at the same time; the book provides insight into the life of a beloved person and it opens up the tragedies of generations on a global level. Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir is a book of memories that documents an individual life in an intimate and delicate way and it arranges numerous pieces of history not only of Ukraine, but its neighbors as well, which produces space for remembering and commemoration on private and public levels

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Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020)

Thu, 28 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Alexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social construction of territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia. In his analysis of Japan’s rows over the “Northern Territories” (with Russia), the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (China), and Takeshima/Dokdo (Korea), Bukh reveals in detail how the nonstate actors that he calls “national identity entrepreneurs” manufacture and maintain national salience for what are often militarily, economically, and geographically relatively unimportant territories, moving them from the national margins to the core in times of crisis. Bukh follows an often colorful cast of civil society actors as he places each dispute within the macro-level geopolitical climate of its times as well as the micropolitics of national crises and tensions between national regions and capitals. By marshaling a broad range of sources and compiling the histories of these disparate but interlinked disputes, These Islands makes a significant and welcome contribution to international relations and security audiences as well as specialists in the East Asian region.

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Coryne Hall, "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust" (Amberley, 2020)

Wed, 27 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe was anchored on one end by the redoubtable Queen Victoria (1819 -1901), the doyenne of sovereigns, and at the opposite end by the autocratic Romanov dynasty — four successive emperors who ruled Russia during Victoria's own 63-year reign. Between these great powers lay the rising military power of Prussia, which concerned both Britain and Russia, and a decaying Ottoman Empire from which both hoped to benefit, as well as shipping routes vital to both countries' commercial and military interests. These and numerous other concerns made the relationship tense at the best of times. But Victoria's large family was also entangled with the Romanovs through the complicated web of royal and dynastic marriages that linked the ruling houses of Europe.

These political and personal ties are the subject of royal biographer, Coryne Hall's new book, Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust (Amberley, 2020). Ms. Hall is a seasoned royal biographer and chronicler, who has delighted royal buffs with her authoritative biographies of Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, and her exploration of royal Princesses who served as wartime nurses as well as the Imperial estates in the Crimea. In "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs," Ms. Hall delves into the extensive trove of Queen Victoria's diaries and personal correspondence to construct an ambitious and highly informative portrait of her six-decade relationship with the Romanovs, which is at times cordial and diplomatic and at other times overtly hostile.

The first encounter takes place "off stage" as far as Victoria is concerned, but very much sets the stage for the tension to come. Victoria's aunt, Juliane of Saxe-Coburg Saalfeld's miserable marriage to Russia's Grand Duke Constantine ended — most extraordinarily for the time — in divorce. The Coburg family felt that Juliane had been very badly treated by the Romanovs, a sentiment that was inherited by the next generation of Coburgs, which included Victoria and her cousin and future husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

Before Albert linked his name in perpetuity with that of Victoria, however, the 20-year-old Queen was swept off her feet — quite literally— by the dashing Grand Duke Alexander, son and heir of Tsar Nicholas I. On a visit to London in 1839, the Grand Duke made quite an impression on the young Queen; all thoughts of poor Aunt Julie and the prudent warnings of Lord Melbourne and Victoria's Coburg Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, were forgotten as Victoria indulged in champagne and her first "crush" on the future Tsar Alexander II.

The heady attraction did not last. Though Nicholas I and Victoria exchanged courteous, diplomatic correspondence, they were destined to clash in one of the nineteenth century's most brutal conflicts: the Crimean War, in which the British prevailed and Nicholas was driven to an early grave.

Coryne Hall is the author of 12 books, including A Biography of the Empress Marie Feodorovna 1847-1928, Imperial Dancer. Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs, and Imperial Crimea: Estates, Enchantment & the Last of the Romanovs. Follow Coryne Hall on Twitter.

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Iva Glisic, "The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930" (NIU Press, 2018)

Thu, 21 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Critics have often characterized Russian Futurism as an expression of utopian daydreaming by young artists who were unrealistic in their visions of Soviet society and naïve in their comprehension of the Bolshevik political agenda.

In The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Iva Glisic challenges this view, demonstrating that Futurism took a calculated and systematic approach to its contemporary socio-political reality. This approach ultimately allowed Russia's Futurists to devise a unique artistic practice that would later become an integral element of the distinctly Soviet cultural paradigm. Drawing upon a unique combination of archival materials and employing a theoretical framework inspired by the works of philosophers such as Lewis Mumford, Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, Fred Polak, and Slavoj Žižek, The Futurist Files presents Futurists not as blinded idealists, but rather as active and judicious participants in the larger project of building a modern Soviet consciousness. This fascinating study ultimately stands as a reminder that while radical ideas are often dismissed as utopian, and impossible, they did―and can―have a critical role in driving social change. It will be of interest to art historians, cultural historians, and scholars and students of Russian history.

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Anne Lounsbery, "Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Mon, 18 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In her journey through the greatest monuments of 19th- and early 20th-century Russian literature, as well as through lesser-known works from women and regional writers, Anne Lounsbery (Professor and Chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University) investigates the long-standing trope of the “provinces” – an imaginary space of static non-modernity where time stands still and where residents nurse an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the capitals of the Empire. In this conversation about her 2019 monograph Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019).

Dr. Lounsbery discusses how the provincial space and person evolved in 19th-century literary culture, how it became a topic of fascination for scores of writers, how the literary provincial space differed from its reality, and how Russian literary explorers of this space related to their Western European counterparts.

Diana Dukhanova is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI.

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Brendan McGeever, "Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 15 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Dr Brendan McGeever, Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, traces the complex history of the Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution. McGeever examines Bolshevik and Jewish communists' attempts to confront antisemitism, including within the revolutionary movement itself. McGeever's book, based on brilliant archival research, is highly readable, provocative and thoughtful.

Dr Max Kaiser teaches at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au

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Tatiana Linkhoeva, "Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Thu, 14 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

A century ago it wasn’t a virus whose spread was eliciting reactions around the world, but an idea. As Russia’s 1917 October Revolution distended itself across north Asia and reverberated globally, socialism acted – not unlike today’s pandemic – as a Rorschach test revealing divisions in societies and politics, and to some offering cautious hope for a new world which might be constructed in the aftermath.

Tatiana Linkhoeva’s meticulously detailed Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Cornell University Press, 2020) shows that Japanese responses to Soviet socialism during the 1920s and 30s were no exception to this. Indeed given the country’s situation at the time, the diversity of views on the revolution held by various government factions, the military, and society at large was especially diverse. But whether seeing this moment as an ideological or a geopolitical cataclysm, a threat or an opportunity for Japan’s growing imperial domain, or a fillip for the leftist ideas percolating through intellectual circles at this time, every Japanese observer of ‘Red October’ and its aftermath revealed something vital about Japan itself at this pivotal time.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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Andrew Monaghan, "Dealing with the Russians" (Polity, 2019)

Wed, 13 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Are the generals fighting the last war? In Dealing with the Russians (Polity, 2019), Andrew Monaghan argues that Western policy makers are using an outdated Cold War model of ideology, language and institutions, which is wholly unsuited for understanding, engaging, and countering where necessary Russia in the 21st century. One of England's leading experts on Russia, Monaghan argues Western policy makers need to let go of the past Cold War rhetoric and come up with modern tools to manage the current stage of the three-century long "Russia and the West" policy conundrum.

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Danielle Ross, "Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia" (Indiana UP, 2020)

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In her new book Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (Indiana University Press, 2020), Danielle Ross looks at how the Tatars of Kazan participated in the formation of the Russian empire through their various activities in trade, settlement, clerical work, intellectual culture, and trade. By centering on the Muslims in Kazan, Tatar Empire looks more closely at the role of Tatars in the creation of Russian empire, while simultaneously putting the history of the Volga-Ural Muslims in a broader, more global historical context.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at The Ohio State University.

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Karl Qualls, "Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Karl Qualls' new book Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951 (University of Toronto Press, 2020) examines how the Soviet Union raised and educated nearly 3,000 child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. An analysis of the archival record and numerous letters, oral histories, and memoirs reveals that this little-known story exemplifies the Soviet transformation of children into future builders of communism and illuminates the educational techniques shared with other modern states. Classroom education taught patriotism for the two homelands and the importance of emulating Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. Extra-curricular clubs and activities reinforced classroom experiences and helped discipline the mind, body, and behaviors. Adult mentors, like the heroes studied in the classroom, provided models to emulate and became the tangible expression of the ideal Spaniard and Soviet. The Basque and Spanish children thus were transformed into hybrid Hispano-Soviets fully engaged with their native language, culture, and traditions while also imbued with Russian language and culture and Soviet ideals of hard work, camaraderie, internationalism, and sacrifice for ideals and others.

Even during their horrific evacuation to the Soviet interior during World War II, the twenty-two Soviet boarding schools designed specifically for the Spanish refugee children – and better provisioned than those for Soviet children – served these displaced niños for fourteen years and transformed them into Red Army heroes, award-winning Soviet athletes and artists, successful educators and workers, and aids to Fidel Castro in building Cuba after his revolution. Stalin’s Niños also sheds new light on the education of non-Russian Soviet and international students and the process of constructing a supranational Soviet identity.

Karl Qualls is Professor of History and the John B. Parsons Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from 'wasteland' into productive agricultural land. Though ostensibly about bringing modernity, progress, and prosperity to the deserts, the transformation of Central Asia's landscapes through tsarist- and Soviet-era hydraulic projects bore the hallmarks of a colonial experiment.

In her book Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Maya K. Peterson brings a fresh perspective to the history of Russia's conquest and rule of Central Asia.

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Alexander Watson, "The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands" (Basic Books, 2020)

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The opposing powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable by October 1914. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this soon resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl. The great siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the Great War. In the defence of the fortress and the struggle to relieve it Austria-Hungary suffered some 800,000 casualties.

Almost unknown in the West, this battle was one of the great turning points of the conflict. If the Russians had broken through in the Fall of 1914, they could have invaded Central Europe and probably knocked Austria out of the war. But by the time the fortress fell in March 1915, the Russian’s strength was so sapped they could go no further.

In The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands (Basic Books, 2020), Professor Alexander Watson, Professor of History at the University of London, prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, has written one of the great epics of the First World War. Comparable to Stalingrad in 1942-3, Przemysl shaped the course of Europe's future. This book, described by Sir Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, as a ‘splendid book’, is a must read for both layman and scholar alike. It is based upon voluminous archival research and is without a doubt the definitive treatment of the subject.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Kevin O'Connor, "The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga" (NIUP, 2019)

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Latvia's elegant capital, Riga, is one of Europe's best-kept secrets. Strategically located on the Eastern Baltic coast at the mouth of the River Daugava, Riga was founded in the early 13th century as a trading hub, a military outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, and a base for Roman Catholic prelates to convert both the pagan natives and the Orthodox Christians of Rus.

Kevin O'Connor's new book, The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019) charts the fascinating history of Riga from the earliest days to Peter the Great's conquest of the much-coveted trading port in the early 18th century.

O'Connor's book recounts in fascinating detail the personalities who shaped and dominated Riga's political and economic history. For six centuries, Riga's fortunes rose and fell in step with major political events of Europe, as the uneasy triumvirate of the church, military, and merchants balanced control and power over the city, ever hopeful to keep goods such as furs, timber, resin, and beeswax flowing from the vast Russian forest lands, through Riga and onto the rest of the known world. O'Connor introduces us to the infamous Livonian Brotherhood of the Sword — a military order of knights based in the city, canny and diplomatic prelates, and the notorious Brotherhood of the Blackfaces, one of the city's professional associations.

From the outset, Riga was a multi-national and polyglot city, much as it remains today. Her membership in the Hanseatic League — the European economic fraternity, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly on trade — greatly enhanced the city's prestige and economic influence, as Germans, Poles, and other Hansa members established successful trading relationships with Riga's guilds. Riga's rapid adoption of Protestantism in the 16th century forged other strong links with her neighbors and separated her even further culturally from the growing might of Russia.

Though Rigans cherished their independence, the history of their city is one of almost constant occupation or rule of a foreign power, as the larger players in the Baltic constantly fought to gain the prize that was the city on the Daugava. O’Connor’s accounts of German, Polish, and later Swedish occupations help readers understand why the city developed in the way it did.

O'Connor leaves us at Riga’s nadir. As plague ravishes the war-torn city, Tsar Peter the Great captures Riga as part of his conquest of the Eastern Baltic in the Great Northern War, which established the Russian Empire as the preeminent naval power in the Baltic Sea, but relegates Riga to a second-tier trading hub. Moreover, O'Conner suggests, Russia's conquest of the city forces Riga to adopt "Eastern," which never sits comfortably with the centuries of Riga's primarily "Western" culture and nature. We are left hoping that perhaps now, as Riga sloughs off the Soviet occupation, she will once more take her rightful place in the Baltic’s panoply of prosperous ports.

The House of Hemp and Butter is an impeccably-researched and very engagingly written account of Riga's fascinating social, economic, and political history.

Kevin O'Connor is the Chair of History at Gonzaga University.

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

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David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019)

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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Shoshana Keller, "Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence" (U Toronto Press, 2019)

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 04:00:00 -0000

Shoshana Keller’s new book, Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence (University of Toronto Press, 2019) provides an excellent introduction and overview of the history of Central Asia, from roughly the 14th century to the present. Focused on the territory of contemporary Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, this book offers a general narrative of Central Asian history (and Central Asian entanglements with Russia) for undergraduate students, Central Asian scholars, and interested readers.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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The Origins of World War One

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unnecessarily plunging itself and the rest of Europe in a futile effort to keep together its tottering Monarchy? Was it Tsarist Russia? Attempting to both expand its influence in the Balkans at the expense of both Austria and Germany and at the very same time, seeking to bolster its own tottering monarchy by showing its aggrieved public that Mother Russia was backing the cause of its down-trodden, Slavic brothers. Was it Kaiserreich Germany? Aiming in the famous thesis of 20th-century German historian Fritz Fischer, to launch a Great War to establish itself as the hegemonic power on the European continent? A war which its military leaders stated repeatedly, Germany could only win if war occurred in the next few years. Was it France? Aiming in conjunction with its Russian ally to start a war with the aim of regaining the two lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Was it Liberal England? Hoping for the final success of the policy of ‘encirclement’ of Germany, commenced by Edward VII?

The origins of the Great War is one of the most fascinating and enthralling subjects in modern History. Which oceans of ink, almost (but not quite) matching the oceans of blood spilled during the war itself, have been devoted to the subject. From the immediate outbreak of the war to the centenary anniversary in 2014, master historians have researched and written on it. Now to bring the topic to the audience of New Books Network, are Jeremy Black, Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, without a doubt, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world and Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society. Please listen to this most interesting of podcast.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019)

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation (Custom House, 2019), Steve Vogel tells the astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War—and the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed it.

Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries. Success would provide the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service access to a vast treasure of intelligence. Exposure might spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. Yet as the Allies were burrowing into the German soil, a traitor, code-named Agent Diamond by his Soviet handlers, was burrowing into the operation itself. . .

Betrayal in Berlin is a heart pounding account of the operation. He vividly recreates post-war Berlin, a scarred, shadowy snake pit with thousands of spies and innumerable cover stories. It is also the most vivid account of George Blake, perhaps the most damaging mole of the Cold War. Drawing upon years of archival research, secret documents, and rare interviews with Blake himself, Vogel has crafted a true-life spy story as thrilling as the novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton.

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Loretta E. Kim, "Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019)

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) is the first monograph published in English on the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has inhabited northeast Asia for centuries. Since the seventeenth century, the Orochen has settled in the region of Manchuria that became the eastern borderland between China and Russia after the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk. In this book, Loretta E. Kim shows that the Orochen, while sandwiched between these two empires and later republics, reinforced the legal division of the territories and served as human markers that substantiated the demographic demarcation outlined in treaties and other legally binding agreements. Through detailed analysis of Qing official documents, Ethnic Chrysalis reveals that the Orochen, like Manchuria’s other natives, played important roles in the development and maintenance of the Qing borderland not just as its inhabitants but also as economic and cultural intermediaries between officials and commoners on both sides of the interstate border. What emerges is a clear agency in these indigenous people and their capacities to instigate changes that they needed in policies and institutions to preserve their economic, social, and cultural interests.

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan.

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Darra Goldstein, "Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore" (Random House, 2020)

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0000

If you are even remotely interested in Russian cuisine, you probably have an oil-stained, batter-spattered copy of the 1983 classic cookbook, A Taste of Russia, by Darra Goldstein lurking on your shelves. You might also have Goldstein's award-winning Fire + Ice, her masterful exploration of Nordic cuisine, or the authoritative The Georgian Feast, which introduced readers to the marvelous flavors of the Caucuses. Make room for Goldstein’s latest triumph: Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore (Random House, 2020)

Not content to rest on her considerable laurels, Goldstein set out on a challenging but ultimately rewarding journey to discover the "quintessential flavors of Russia." Braving the extreme cold of Russia's Arctic, Goldstein journeyed to a part of Russia where ancient methods are still being employed to produce flavors and dishes that fuse the traditional with the innovative.

With Goldstein's compelling signature style of combining history, culture, and food, Beyond the North Wind is both an engaging travelogue and an appetite-whetting cookery book, filled with new interpretations of classic Russian peasant food. Here are the hearty soups, stews, and braises, but also innovative fish dishes, creative desserts, and revamped pies and pastries. Discover the tangy sweetness of local berries, the crisp flavors of Arctic herbs, flavored salts, and the umami of whole grains. This is a cuisine close to the earth, shaped by long winters and short, intense growing seasons. Above all, this is a story of resilience: of the Russian people and their tenacious ability to survive and thrive in adversity, be it political, economic, or climatic, and their inimitable spirit that celebrates the here-and-now with hospitality and zeal.

Darra Goldstein is the author of Fire + Ice, which was nominated for a James Beard, IACP, and The Art of Eating awards. She is the founding editor of Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture, named Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. Darra also serves as a series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture and has written for Gourmet, Saveur, Bon Appetit, and The New York Times. Follow Darra on Twitter, and Instagram.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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Aliide Naylor, "The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front" (I.B. Tauris, 2020)

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Baltics are about to be thrust onto the world stage. With a 'belligerent' Vladimir Putin to their east (and 'expansionist' NATO to their west), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are increasingly the subject of unsettling headlines in both Western and Russian media. But how real are these fears, subject as they are to media embellishment, qualification and denial by both Russia and the West? What do they mean for those living in the Baltics - and for the world?

In The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Aliide Naylor takes us inside the geopoltitics of the region. Travelling to the heart of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania she explores modernity in the region that birthed Skype, investigates smuggling and reports of troop movements in the borderlands, and explains the countries' unique cultural identities. Naylor tells us why the Baltics matter, arguing persuasively that this region is about to become the new frontline in the political struggle between East and West.

Aliide Naylor is a freelance journalist focusing on Russia and eastern Europe, her writing has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, POLITICO Europe, frieze, Vice, among others. Naylor has travelled to all corners of the Baltic states and has also lived in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, where she served as Arts Editor at The Moscow Times.

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Richard Pomfret, "The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Richard Pomfret’s The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2019) looks at the economies of the five former Soviet Republics of Kazkahstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, considering the different trajectories of each of the countries. The book provides an overview of the experience of these economies in the 1990s, before looking specifically at each of the independent countries. The book’s final chapters look at problems of regional cooperation and global trade, as well as the influence and impact of major world powers (China, Russia, the EU, and the United States) on Central Asia. This book is useful reading for scholars, diplomats, policy-makers, and anyone else with an active interest in international politics and economy.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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Maria Taroutina, "The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival" (Penn State UP, 2018)

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018)

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude.

Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history.

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Abdullah Qodiriy, "Bygone Days" (Bowker, 2019)

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Mark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel O’tkan Kunlar (Bygone Days) brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences. The story, which simultaneously follows the personal story of a Muslim reformer and trader and the court struggles between the rulers of Central Asia, gives us a glimpse into early Soviet Central Asia, as well as the world of Central Asia on the eve of 19th-century Russian Imperial conquest. Yet, Qodiriy’s Bygone Days is much more than that; it addresses universal themes of cultural and political change, the place of tradition in societies, questions of reform and revolution, to name a few. Reese’s wonderful translation offers an opportunity to learn more about Uzbekistan past and present and offers something for anyone interested in Central Asia, literature, or the triumphs and tragedies of modernizing societies.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

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Mark Gamsa, “Manchuria: A Concise History” (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The term ‘Manchuria’ conjures up all manner of evocative associations for people interested in East Asian and world history, from the Manchu founders of China’s last imperial dynasty, to Russian railroads and Japanese empire on the Asian mainland. Up to now, however, there hasn’t really been a particularly obvious place to look for a satisfying source of information about these and other aspects of the region’s fascinating past and present.

Mark Gamsa’s Manchuria: A Concise History (I. B. Tauris, 2020) therefore meets a significant need, deftly weaving together the many diffuse strands which make up the history of what we now call northeast China. Conveniently broken down into easily digestible chunks, each dealing with a key historic juncture and the parties involved, the book sheds light on both known and overlooked aspects of Manchurian life.

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Magnus Nordenman, "The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North" (Naval Institute Press, 2019)

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Magnus Nordenman explores the emerging competition between the United States and its NATO allies and the resurgent Russian navy in the North Atlantic. This maritime region played a key role in the two world wars and the Cold War, serving as the strategic link between the United States and Europe that enabled the flow of reinforcements and supplies to the European Allies. Nordenman shows that while a conflict in Europe has never been won in the North Atlantic, it surely could have been lost there.

With Vladimir Putin’s Russia threatening the peace in Europe following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the North Atlantic and other maritime domains around Europe are once again vitally important. But this battle will in many ways be different, Nordenman demonstrates, due to an overstretched U.S. Navy, the rise of disruptive technologies, a beleaguered NATO that woke up to the Russian challenge unprepared for high-end warfighting in the maritime domain, and a Russia commanding a smaller, but more sophisticated, navy equipped with long-range cruise missiles. Nordenman also provides a set of recommendations for what the United States and NATO must do now in order to secure the North Atlantic in this new age of great power competition.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

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Marlene Laruelle, "The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan" (Lexington Books, 2019)

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan (Lexington Books, 2019), edited by Marlene Laruelle, looks at the younger generations of Kazakhstan that have come of age during the post-Soviet presidency of Nursultan Nazarbayev. A collection of essays, the book presents new approaches for thinking about the “post-Soviet”-ness of Kazakhstan and for making sense of important political, cultural, and social changes in Kazakhstan during the country’s encounter with global capitalism. The volume is important reading for scholars, professionals, and curious minds interested in understanding contemporary Kazakhstan.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Sarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018)

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? To what extent did their new lives remain explicitly Jewish?

In Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah Wobick-Segev tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s―such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp―fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

Sarah Wobick-Segev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, "Night and Day: A Novel" (Academic Studies Press, 2019)

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Christopher Fort’s new translation of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s Night and Day: A Novel (Academic Studies Press, 2019) (Kecha va Kunduz) gives readers a chance to dive into the world of early 20th century Uzbek literature and understand the complex social problems of late Russian imperial Turkestan. This book will be interesting for a wide range of readers, including those interested in the history of Russia and Central Asia, as well as the nature of colonial and post-colonialism in those contexts. Finally, Fort’s translation brings attention to Cho’lpon, an important figure in Uzbek literary life who tragically became a victim of Stalinist terror.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Adele Lindenmeyr, "Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019)

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Once one of the wealthiest members of the Russian aristocracy, Sofia Panina spent her final years living on a pension while in exile from her homeland. Adele Lindenmeyr’s book Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) recounts the eventful life of this remarkable woman, who through her dedication to helping others broke many of the barriers facing the women of her era. The daughter of a count and the granddaughter of an industrialist, at an early age Panina was removed from her widowed mother’s care and enrolled in a boarding school. After a failed marriage at a young age, Panina focused on a career in philanthropy, establishing a settlement house in St. Petersburg that provided needed services for the workers living in the city. In the aftermath of the February Revolution in 1917 Panina served on the Petrograd city council and as an assistant cabinet minister—the first female cabinet member in world history – before the Bolshevik Revolution in November led to her trial and imprisonment. Though the Bolsheviks’ victory in the civil war forced Panina into exile for the rest of her life, Lindenmeyr shows how her life remains relevant to Russians today, as they gain a renewed appreciation for her many achievements.

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The Treaty of Versailles One Hundred Years On

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, notwithstanding its importance as perhaps the most important of the twentieth-century, has not seen the same level of interest? Is this relatively indifference due to the fact that it is still regarded by some (in the words of John Maynard Keynes) as a 'Carthaginian Peace', which lead inevitably to the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War? To discuss this and other aspects of the Treaty, in the podcast channel, 'Arguing History', are Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho, of the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement".

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century

European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Jennifer Utrata, "Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia" (Cornell UP, 2015)

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Jennifer Utrata in her book, Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Cornell University Press, 2015), investigates what she calls a “quiet revolution” in the Russian family after the fall of the Soviet Union. Based on over 150 interviews with single mothers, non-resident fathers, and dutiful grandmothers, Utrata seeks to dispel many myths that surround single motherhood, namely that a single mother’s life is defined by material struggles. In order to achieve this, Utrata delves into the ways that Russians have come to define motherhood and fatherhood, with the former understood widely in Russian society as essential and powerful and the latter understood as nonessential and weak. Indeed, Utrata demonstrates that men and women have internalized the failure of Russian men to materially support their families. This portrayal of men, in combination with the failed Soviet state which removed many protective measures for mothers, has produced a social discourse about family life in which single mothers are not stigmatized. Utrata’s observations, although rooted in evidence taken from the New Russia, nevertheless have relevance to the larger discussion about the factors that have led to a global rise in single motherhood.

Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.

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Paul Robinson, "Russian Conservatism" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Paul Robinson's new book, Russian Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a comprehensive examination of the roots and development of the hardy strain of conservative political thought in Russian history.

Robinson begins by tackling the thorny question of how to define conservatism in the Russian context and introduces readers to the "principle of organicism." The use of natural metaphors by Russian conservatives to define their fundamental beliefs is potent: change and development must be organic, and, as Nikolai Berdiaev asserted, "…consist of a healthy reaction to violation of organic nature."

Armed with this definition, Robinson expertly guides us through the development of conservative thought in Russia, beginning with the reign of Alexander I and ending with Vladimir Putin. Along the way, Robinson pauses to introduce the Slavophiles, Pan Slavs, Eurasianists, and the emigre thinkers such as Ivan Ilyin, now enjoying a return to favor amongst Russian elites.

Unlike many historians who bring the narrative to a screeching halt in October 1917, Robinson offers us a through-line for the continued development of Russian conservatism during the Soviet century from the heady days of revolution to the return of more “traditional” values and trappings in the run up to World War II. This approach offers a new perspective on the topic, as does Robinson's deft division of each period into a separate and thorough examination of the cultural, political, and socio-economic branches of the movement.

Professor Robinson writes fluidly and engagingly about his topic; "Russian Conservatism" is a magisterial work, and a must-read for students of Russia's past as well as those of her present, and certainly those eager to divine her future.

Paul Robinson is Professor of History of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is author of several books, including The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941, and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, Supreme Commander of the Russian Army which won the Society for Military History's distinguished book award for biography, and most recently, co-author of Aiding Afghanistan. He blogs about his research and Russia regularly at https://irrussianality.wordpress.com.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an award-winning author and American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and author of two books: "Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow," and "Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History."

Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Beth Fischer, "The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan's Cold War Legacy" (UP of Kentucky, 2019)

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Every time that I teach any portion of a course dealing with Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War, I gird myself for the inevitable myth-busting that I’m going to do. The idea that Reagan won the Cold War by bankrupting the Soviet Union through heavy military expenditures has become a piece of commonly accepted wisdom about the 40th president. In the eyes of Reagan’s defenders, the military buildup the president began in the early 1980s forced the Soviets to either accept a reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, or in trying to keep up with the weight of the military buildup ruined their own economy in the process. Consequently, toughness and a commitment to a strong military were the triumphalist lessons of the Cold War.

Beth Fischer’s The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan's Cold War Legacy (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) challenges this interpretation of Reagan’s Cold War foreign policy. Fischer argues that the military buildup was actually deeply counterproductive, frightening the Soviet leadership and delaying meaningful negotiations for several years. In lionizing President Reagan, triumphalists ignore the contributions that Reagan did make to ending the Cold War: a willingness to think radically about the elimination of nuclear weapons and to negotiating with his Soviet counterparts. Contemporary policymakers would do well to avoid the belligerent lessons offered by triumphalists and instead ought to pay attention to Reagan’s actual conduct during the Cold War.

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Alison Rowley, "Putin Kitsch in America" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019)

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In her book, Putin Kitsch in America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), Alison Rowley examines the outsized influence that Vladimir Putin, both the man and the myth, have had on US political discourse in the last decade. Starting with the 2008 election, Rowley demonstrates how Putin’s frontier masculinity--best illustrated by the ubiquitous shirtless picture--has served as an important foil for US political figures, particularly Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Rowley examines various kitsch mediums, from seemingly innocuous coloring books and finger puppets, to more risque Putin bikinis and thongs, to the x-rated Trump-Putin slash fiction. Importantly, Rowley’s head-first plunge into Putin kitsch would not have been possible without the internet and on-demand printing and publishing services. Her book therefore also offers thoughtful commentary on what it means to be a political in the digital age, and offers Putin kitsch as an optimistic counterpoint to the quite dire predictions about democracy’s relationship to the internet.

Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.

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Katya Cengel, "From Chernobyl with Love" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Katya Cengel’s From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is an engaging memoir of a Western newspaper reporter’s youthful experiences in Latvia and Ukraine, in the turbulent years from the late 1990’s through the early 2000’s. Interspersed with lively anecdotes, the author brings a unique perspective on the struggles of the post-Soviet era, from the day-to-day vicissitudes of “getting by,” to the broader struggles and dynamics that led to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

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Roberto Carmack, "Kazakhstan in World War II: Mobilization and Ethnicity in the Soviet Empire" (UP of Kansas, 2019)

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Roberto Carmack’s Kazakhstan in World War II: Mobilization and Ethnicity in the Soviet Empire (University Press of Kansas, 2019) looks at the experience of the Kazakh Republic during the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War. Using a variety of archival materials, newspapers, and individual memoirs, Carmack looks at important topics of the war experience in Kazakhstan, including mobilization, deportations, forced labor, and the role of propaganda. Carmack’s work will help readers understand the Soviet Union’s role as a multi-national empire and how the wartime experience affected the relationship between the multiple ethnicities of the Soviet Union.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Oleksandra Humenna, "Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development" (ADEF-Ukraine, 2018)

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development (ADEF-Ukraine LTD, 2018) offers a program that includes complex strategies for the economic development of Ukraine. This program was developed on the basis of data that were collected and analyzed by leading economists and researchers of Ukraine. When designing strategies that will help improve the current economic situation in the country, the authors of the project evaluate both domestic and international conditions that can create a positive context for Ukraine’s economic growth. According to the contributors to Ukraine 2030, one of the strategic and fundamental components for a positive economic change is the individual: Ukraine has a remarkable potential for joining a cohort of countries with strong economies. To embrace this potential, however, the country has to deal with a number of challenges which are connected not only with the present moment (war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea) and which aggravate the economic stability, but also with a number of problems whose roots go back to the Soviet times. As the authors of the book note, Ukraine, in spite of the fact that she has been independent for almost thirty years, is still coping with the Soviet heritage. Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development offers an insightful overview of the present economic situation and a profound program for the economic improvement in Ukraine.

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Lesley Chamberlain, "Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Count Sergey Semyonovich Uvarov, once proclaimed by Aleksandr Herzen as a ‘Prometheus of our day’, has in the past 160 years become something of an also-ran in Russian History. Notwithstanding his manifold contributions to the Russian education system as Minister of Education for more than fifteen years. And of course his invention of the holy trinity of 19th-century Russian conservatism: ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’. Uvarov’s time in the shadows of Russian history is now however over thanks to the veteran writer and journalist, Lesley Chamberlain’s biography. In the Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Chamberlain delineates Uvarov's career and shows how one of the most cosmopolitan of men, became in the course of his official career the inventor of much that can be seen in to-day's xenophobic and nationalistic Russia of Vladimir Putin. How a celebrated men of letters and correspondent of Goethe, became in due course the opponent and hounder of Aleksandr Pushkin and Pyotr Chaadaev. All this from the acclaimed author of Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia and The Philosopher Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. In short, the ‘Ministry of Darkness’ is a must read for any serious student of modern Russian history. In the words of Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University: “A wise, nuanced, and admirably readable work of intellectual history, this book is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand the complexities and contradictions of Russian conservatism.”

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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Roland Elliott Brown, "Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda" (FUEL, 2019)

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In the arc of Soviet history, few government programs were as tenacious as the anti-religious campaign, which systematically set out to debunk organized religion as "the opium of the people." This political storm of heaven lasted from the earliest days of Bolshevik power up until the early eighties, when it simply ran out of steam, as did the Soviet State. But while it lasted, the anti-religious campaign was a sustained and virulent attack on the centuries-old bedrock of Russian culture and left a wave of violence and destruction in its wake.

Faced with an almost feudal society and a population of predominantly illiterate peasants, the State cannily deployed one of its most potent propaganda weapons: the vibrant graphic art illustration in posters and atheist magazines that were distributed throughout the USSR. For a superstitious peasant, the images of an idealized Soviet worker smashing the idols of Orthodox Christianity must have been as horrific as they were ultimately compelling.

The iconography of the anti-religious campaign is front and center of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, a fascinating new book by Roland Elliott Brown, published by FUEL Media. In it, Brown examines the anti-religious campaign through a unique collection of illustrations, posters, and the cover art of two prominent atheist magazines gathered for the first time in an English-language publication with full translations of the illustrations, as well as a very cogent overview of the history of the anti-religious campaign.

Brown begins with the violent beginning of Christianity in Russia, when Grand Prince Vladimir baptized Russia at the point of a sword, then ordered the pagan idols to be burnt in Kyiv. He traces the rise in significance of the Church during the crucial 250-year Tatar Mongol Yoke and its subsequent relegation by Tsar Peter the Great to the status of the Government Department until 1917.

The decades just after the Russian Revolution were the most violent and active of the anti-religious campaign when the Government sanctioned the widespread destruction of church property, the imprisonment of priests and nuns, and the closure of all religious-affiliated schools and charities. World War II offers the Church a brief respite and the opportunity to show its loyalty to the Soviet State during the critical years 1941-1945.

Many of the later illustrations highlight Soviet success in space exploration to underscore the tenants of atheism, but all too soon, the Soviet Union and the anti-religious campaign limp towards their own demise in the 1980s.

Brown is a London-based journalist and arts writer. He has written articles for The Guardian, The Spectator, Foreign Policy and The Moscow Times. He has also worked as a regular contributor and editor for the London-based news site IranWire, where he wrote about politics and human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Follow Roland on Twitter (@rolandebrown) or visit the book’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/godlessutopia/

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Riga, Latvia, and Massachusetts. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History. She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Fodor’s, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Olga Zilberbourg, "Like Water and Other Stories" (WTAW Press, 2019)

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

The phenomenon of the Russian emigre writer is nothing new. Exile seems almost as necessary a commodity as ink to many of Russia's most celebrated writers, including Alexander Herzen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Josef Brodsky, and Sergei Dovlatov. For these titans of Russian literature, leaving was a binary choice, for some imposed upon them, for others a wrenching decision. For each, the idea of being "other" and "apart" was a rich lode of material, to be endlessly mined.

A new generation of Russian emigres is blessed — or cursed — with the ease of long-haul flights and frequent flyer miles, Skype and FaceTime, Google translate, and regulations that seem anyway to be more forgiving about former citizens traveling to and fro between their old homes and new. For them, the border has become far more porous than it ever was, and the choices are now more nuanced. However, there are still plenty of cultural minefields to navigate. To this generation that includes writers as disparate as Gary Shteyngart and Irina Reyn comes Olga Zilberbourg with a new collection of short stories, Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press, 2019)

Zilberbourg is a native of St. Petersburg and came of age in that cultural well-spring of literary genius. When perestroika offered the option to emigrate, Zilberbourg's Jewish family considered it long and hard, ultimately choosing to remain in place. Zilberbourg decided to go to school in the United States and ended up staying in the country. She currently teaches comparative literature in San Francisco, and somehow finds time to craft her unique and very compelling short stories.

Perhaps it is the paucity of time that has turned Zilberbourg into a master of the craft of "flash fiction" honed and made famous by the likes of Lydia Davis and Barbara Henning. Some stories in “Like Water” are mere paragraphs or even sentences. One distills the entire work-life balance for women into one cogent — and heartbreaking — sentence. These stories deal with the same kind of issues that Zilberbourg's Russian predecessors grappled with for centuries: the sense of disconnect at the heart of the emigre experience. But she also explores more universal themes such as the challenges of motherhood, the double-edged sword that is the mother-daughter relationship, the pathos of a missed opportunity, and the perennial hit and miss of trying to meld two cultures into a single whole.

Olga Zilberbourg is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, and currently makes her home in San Francisco, California. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Feminist Studies, Confrontation, World Literature Today, Tin House's The Open Bar, Narrative Magazine, and other print and online publications. She won the 2017 San Francisco's Litquake Writing Contest and the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize. Follow Olga on Twitter, or visit her website, zilberbourg.com.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Western Massachusetts. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History. She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. She is currently at work on a historical novel. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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David Brandenberger, "Stalin's Master Narrative" (Yale UP, 2019)

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In this interview, David Brandenberger discusses his new edited volume (created in concert with RGASPI archivist and Russian historian Mikhail Zelenov) Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of 'The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course' (Yale University Press, 2019). The Short Course was designed to be the definitive party narrative, but the party purges and Stalin’s own personal preferences led to him stripping out the traditional historical framework of heroes and villains, offering instead theory and an institutional history readers often had a hard time connecting with or understanding. Brandenberger talks about Stalin’s role in the writing and editing process, why such changes were made, how these changes reflected Stalin’s changing beliefs and changes in party policy. What Brandenberger reveals is quite different from the normal image of Stalin as the center of a cult of personality, always one step ahead of his perceived enemies. Listen in to find out why the Short Course is central to understanding Stalinism and how a critical reading of it challenges existing views on Stalin as a man, theorist and politician.

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Charles Halperin, "Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, Dr. Charles Halperin provides a new analysis of Ivan’s reign, as well as valuable syntheses of previous scholarship on one of Russian’s most infamous rulers. Halperin argues that we should move beyond old questions about Ivan’s sanity. Instead, we should reject the notion of Russian “exceptionalism,” place Ivan in comparative context, and evaluate his reign with the recognition that Ivan’s problems were often similar to those faced by contemporary monarchs. With careful attention to evidence and detail, Halperin’s Ivan IV emerges as a ruler at once less—and more—mysterious than in previous treatments of this subject.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, "The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great" (Liverpool UP, 2019)

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Liverpool University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly monograph devoted to the comprehensive analysis of the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762-1796), as well as the first to examine the conventions of letter-writing by an 18th-century monarch after Louis XIV. Presenting a rich history of Catherine’s personal development as a letter writer in the context of 18th-century elite epistolary practice and drawing on contemporary epistolary theory, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California) makes a significant contribution to the study of the Russian Enlightenment by re-evaluating the place that Catherine sought to occupy in the intellectual and cultural landscape of her time and detailing the central role that the letter played in her self-fashioning as an Enlightenment monarch. Rubin-Detlev argues that, contrary to the dominant scholarly tradition which argues that Catherine rejected Enlightenment ideals in the wake of the French Revolution, her epistolary corpus presents a much more complex image of a ruler whose own self-image remained unaltered to the end of her life.

Mentioned in the podcast: CatCor, the digital correspondence of Catherine the Great.

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Serhii Plokhy, "Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

What happened when Americans and Soviets fought alongside one another against Hitler? How did relations at Poltava airbase reveal cracks in the Grand Alliance? Serhii Plokhy tells the story of personal relationships and high geopolitics in his new book Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2019). Using a wealth of memoirs and recently declassified secret police files, Plokhy captures the intimate detail of a culture clash that chilled relations before Nazism was even defeated.

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His book exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Enemies of the People. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

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Michael Khodarkovsky, "Russia's 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Dissecting and digesting the history of the Soviet "experiment" can be a frustrating exercise for academics and a Sisyphean task for laymen; the endeavor demands scrutiny of the facts — and they are legion — but we must also grapple with the dystopian atmosphere and cruel indifference to human life, which characterizes the period. These challenges make the triumph of Professor Michael Khodarkovsky's new book, Russia's 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), all the more impressive.

Khodarkovsky has taken a novel approach to charting the century by crafting one hundred vignettes, one for each year of the century. Each vignette plunges us into a moment of history, art, politics, science, or international relations, and in each, we add a building block to the tower of interpretation Khodarkovsky constructs in this slim but incredibly impactful book. Even seasoned historians will find Russia's 20th Century a compelling lens through which to consider the entire arc of the Soviet century with entirely fresh eyes.

Several themes emerge as the narrative moves each decade. The horrific cost of the Soviet experiment emerges early and is a recurring leitmotif throughout the narrative in heartrending incidents that transport us to the horror of the Gulags, the tragedy Siege of Leningrad, and a drier, but no less thought-provoking examination of the 1959 Census. Khodarkovsky shows us a Soviet state that is out of step with the needs of its citizens and profoundly tone-deaf to its concerns.

Khodarkovsky’s distinguished academic career includes decades of work on the history of ethnic minorities at the edges of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The plight of minorities seeps in throughout Russia's 20th Century in ways that bring us right to current events, including a strong narrative of Ukraine's continuing struggle to achieve autonomy and Russia's dogged refusal to allow it.

As the episodes draw us further and further towards the end of both the century and the Soviet Union itself, a pithy pastiche of Boris Yeltsin invites us to consider that titanic but conflicted character in a new light. Professor Khodarkovsky ends his narrative with the chilling coda that is the emergence of Vladimir Putin in Russian national politics. Russia's 20the century ends with this rather bleak assessment: "Russia was entering the twenty-first century in the same basic set of principles and values it had maintained throughout the twentieth century." But for those who cherish the hope that Russia can break out of its pernicious cycle in the twenty-first century, Khodarkovsky's book is a must-read.

Professor Michael Khodarkovsky is a professor of history at Loyola University, specializing in Early Modern and Imperial Russia, Imperial Borderlands, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Non-Russian peoples of Russia, Eurasia, Ottoman empire, Comparative Empires and Colonialisms, Orientalism. He received his MA and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Professor Khodarkovsky is a frequent commentator and contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Ekho Moskvy.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Western Massachusetts. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History. She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. She is currently at work on a historical novel.

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Iain MacGregor, "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth" (Scribner, 2019)

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

There is perhaps no more iconic symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall, the 96-mile-long barrier erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe. In Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth (Scribner, 2019), Iain MacGregor draws upon interviews with a wide range of people to recount the history of the wall and how it affected the lives of the people on either side of it. Through their firsthand experiences he recounts the tension-filled hours when East German workers began constructing the first elements of what became an elaborate series of obstacles that restricted access to the two sides of the partitioned city. As Berliners gradually adapted to the presence of the wall, thousands of people on the eastern side risked their lives in their search for ways around, above, and below the barriers to gain their freedom in the West. As MacGregor explains, underlying much of this was the assumption by nearly all sides of the permanence of the wall, a belief that was proven false by the dramatic events of November 1989 which resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reuniting of the two sides of the German city.

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Sara Lorenzini, "Global Development: A Cold War History" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

As Dr. Sara Lorenzini points out in her new book Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton UP, 2019), the idea of economic development was a relatively novel one even as late as the 1940s. Much of the language of development was still being invented or refined by experts and policymakers. And yet, within a few decades, the idea of foreign aid for development had become a critical soft power tool for the United States, the Soviet Union, and the European powers during the Cold War. Newly independent states, meanwhile, articulated a need for development aid to help them overcome the impoverishing legacy of colonialism.

Dr. Lorenzini’s book charts the development of this idea beginning in the early middle of the twentieth century until the late 1980s, when the end of the Cold War took some of the impetus away from demands for development aid. In addition to showing how the superpowers and Europeans participated in development schemes, she pays close attention to the role of multinational organizations in trying to facilitate and coordinate these demands while granting a voice to those in the Global South seeking development. The book is a useful reminder to those that development as an idea is never uncomplicated, and that the support for development had powerful domestic roots in addition to its international connections.

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Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian" (Northern Illinois UP, 2019)

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century―from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up through the implosion of the Soviet Union and beyond. Siegelbaum recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery in the tumult of student rebellion at Columbia University during the Vietnam War, graduate study at Oxford, and Moscow at the height of détente. His story takes the reader into the Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and the newly independent Uzbekistan.

An intellectual autobiography that is also a biography of the field of Anglophone Soviet history, Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian (Northern Illinois UP, 2019) is a guide for how to lead a life on the Left that integrates political and professional commitments. Siegelbaum reveals the attractiveness of Communism as an object of study and its continued relevance decades after its disappearance from the landscape of its origin.

Through the journey of a book that is in the end a romance, Siegelbaum discovers the truth in the notion that no matter what historians take as their subject, they are always writing about themselves.

Siegelbaum is the author of books on the effort to mobilize industry in tsarist Russia during World War I (1983), the Stakhanovite movement of the 1930s (1988), the Soviet state and society in the 1920s (1994), and the award-winning Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (2008). He co-authored with Jim von Geldern the award-winning website “Seventeen Moments in Soviet History,” an online sourcebook used extensively to teach Soviet history, and with Leslie Page Moch Broad is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (2014). He has edited two books and co-edited six others, most recently Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands (2019) with Krista Goff. His memoir, Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian, is published by Northern Illinois University Press.

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Donald Ostrowski, "Europe, Byzantium, and the 'Intellectual Silence' of Rus’ Culture" (Arc Humanities Press, 2018)

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In Europe, Byzantium, and the “Intellectual Silence” of Rus’ Culture (Arc Humanities Press, 2018), Dr. Donald Ostrowski pens a fresh look at an old question: Why did intellectual path of Medieval Russian culture differ so much from its counterparts in Western Europe? In a phrase: Why was there no Russian Abelard? In addition to deep analysis of the primary sources, Ostrowski provides a window into the history of historians debating this question. The book concludes by arguing that Rus’ was not in fact “silent” at all. Rather, Rus’ intellectual culture simply spoke on a different frequency than that of Medieval Western Europe. Dr. Ostrowski’s book has already generated an academic journal symposium in Russian History (volume 46), and is an important addition to how historians understand the early history of Rus’ in relationship to the rest of the world.

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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Tamara Hundorova, "The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s" (ASP, 2019)

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Tamara Hundorova’s The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (Academic Studies Press, 2019) is a compelling study of the literary changes that mark Ukrainian literature at the end of the 20th century. As the title of the book prompts, a starting point—or rather a triggering moment for further metamorphoses—is the Chornobyl catastrophe. However, this trajectory is further complicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two events—different in its nature and affects—produce a unique environment for literary, ideological, and political responses. Tamara Hundorova looks at the literary process from the perspective of postmodern dialogical shifts. But what are the premises of Ukrainian postmodernism? How does it develop vis-à-vis its numerous “foreign” counterparts? How does the Soviet past shape the specificities of Ukrainian postmodernism? In The Post-Chornobyl Library, postmodernism is discussed in terms of traumas. As Tamara Hundorova argues, in Ukrainian literature postmodernism, which is characterized by multiple masks, roles, and functions, provides tools for dealing with traumas: ecological, ideological, existential, private and public. Postmodernism also evokes apocalyptic themes; however, the sense of end or exhaustion is complemented by new “replenishments.” According to Tamara Hundorova, the carnivalesque becomes one of the most productive devices to engage with the traumatic. The Post-Chornobyl Library offers an insightful examination of how literature responds to traumas and engages with restorations, re-discoveries, and vitalities.

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Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries' prospects for economic growth uncertain.

Mandelbaum further argues that the key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, including free elections and the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty. Yet, since recent history has shown that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth has a dual message: while the world has a formula for peace, there is no way to ensure that all countries will embrace it

Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Joanna Lillis, "Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan" (I. B. Tauris, 2018)

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Joanna Lillis’ Dark Shadows, Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan (I. B. Tauris, 2018) takes the reader on a penetrating, colourfully written journey into the recesses of a little known Central Asian nations on the frontier of tectonic shifts across Eurasia. Kazakhstan, a sparsely populated oil-rich former Soviet republic that shares borders with Russia and China that stretch thousands of kilometres, in which demographics amount to geopolitics, walks a tight rope in a world increasingly dominated by leaders who to varying degrees define their states in civilizational rather than national terms. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and stirring of unrest in two regions of Ukraine coupled with veiled threats uttered by Russian President Vladimir Putin raise the spectre of Kazakhstan’s worst nightmares. China’s brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims, including ethnic Kazakhs, in its troubled north-western province of Xinjiang fuels long-standing public suspicion of Chinese ambitions and put the government between a rock and a hard place. Led for almost three decades until he recently stepped down, former Communist party boss Nursultan Nazarbayev has moulded Kazakhstan in his image: an authoritarian state with some trappings of democracy that increasingly are being curtailed. Lillis paints a compelling picture of a nation that is still grappling with the consequences of Joseph Stalin’s devastating disruption of its demography and identity as it seeks forge its path in a post-Nazarbayev era against the backdrop of big power jockeying for influence in the heart of Eurasia. With the keen eye of a journalistic fly on the wall and the ability to turn words into images, Lillis portrays a strategically important country at the crossroads of geopolitics that are likely to shape an emerging new world order.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

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Larry Diamond, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" (Penguin, 2019)

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Larry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, and it’s easy to admire China’s growth while looking past things like increasing surveillance and lack of respect for norms and the rule of law.

We’ve wanted to do an episode on China for a long time, and we are very excited to have Larry Diamond with us to discuss it. China plays an integral role in his new book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Penguin, 2019) and he’s studied the region and its politics for decades.

Larry is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.

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Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, "No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn describes in a very on point and straight forward way how displacement has become a chronic condition for more than 60 million people.

Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful practice have been blown apart. No Path Home is the engaging result of more than sixteen years of fieldwork in Georgian IDP camps.

Anna Domdey is a post-graduate student in Cultural Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Goettingen, Germany.

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Yan Li, “China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination" (Routledge, 2018)

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The warmth of China and Russia’s present-day relationship is sometimes said to reprise 1950s ties between Mao’s PRC and the Soviet Union, even if that remains a poorly understood period in both countries. Still less understood, moreover, is the deep Soviet cultural influence on China which accompanied this era of socialist alliance, and this in part is why Yan Li’s China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (Routledge, 2018)is such an invaluable book.

Presenting a fascinating compendium of insights into the ways that Soviet fashion, literature, architecture, language and many other things washed over China during the mid-20th century, Li offers a sophisticated argument that this all fed into an entire framework for socialist modernity which China sought to adopt at this crucial period in its history. This was not always a one-way street, and this book also highlights instances where Chinese people were hesitant to embrace Soviet ways of doing things. But even as we look at this earlier ‘Chinese Dream’ from a temporal remove of over six decades, there can be little doubt that it left a mark on China that is still palpable today, and therefore deserves our attention.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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Anastasia Denisova, "Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts" (Routledge, 2019)

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

How have memes changed politics? In Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts(Routledge, 2019), Anastasia Denisova, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Westminster, gives both a history of internet memes as well as an analysis of key case studies of their impact on politics and society. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with Russian and American politics, as well as a nuanced and even-handed assessment of specific and well-known memes. In the current complex political moment the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand how the internet may shape forthcoming elections.

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Aaron Hale-Dorrell, "Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2018)

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and dairy (which would be corn fed) following decades of austerity during collectivization and WWII. Khrushchev touted corn as crucial to building a society equal to the US in material abundance. Hale-Dorrell discusses Khrushchev’s plan to implement industrial farming in the collective and state farm system through increased mechanization, adoption of American techniques, a rejection of Lysenkoism, and mass mobilization of the Komsomol and other youth. But still the corn crusade failed to achieve the transformation that Khrushchev promised.

Unlike other historians who have focused on Khrushchev being at fault for this failure, Hale-Dorrell examines the bureaucratic attitudes, lack of resources, and the widespread Soviet campaign mentality frustrated the implementation of Khrushchev’s policies. Regional and local officials interpreted central directives to suit their own needs. Their policies took on a life of their own and a local flavor that often resulted in policies substantially different from and less transformative than Khrushchev had intended. In some places, local and regional officials relied on outright fraud or deception to meet quotas or avoid planting corn. What emerges through all this is a portrait of the Soviet Union that is chaotic, progressive if only slowly and deeply interconnected with other countries through the exchange of trade goods and scientific knowledge, all of which flies in the face of the traditional view of the USSR as isolated, backwards and governed by top down, command style party and state bureaucracy. Listen in!

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Bathsheba Demuth, "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" (W. W. Norton, 2019)

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years.

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019) breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans―the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia―before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?

Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history.

Bathsheba Demuth is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. As an environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has lived in Arctic communities from Eurasia to Canada. Demuth has a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University, and an M.A. and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Steven Seegel (NBN interviewer) is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

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Rico Issacs, "Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia" (I.B. Tauris, 2018)

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Rico Issacs uses cinema as an analytical tool to demonstrate the constructed and contested nature of Kazakh national identity. By first tracing the evolution of Kazakh national identity formation and then analyzing data from individual interviews and the Kazakh films themselves, Issacs demonstrates the multiple ways that Kazakh national identity has been cast and interpreted, both past and present. This book is essential reading for scholars of Central Asia, nationalisms and national identity, or those with a broader interest in film, Central Asia, or the study of nation building.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Keir Giles, "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Chatham House, 2019)

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Chatham House, 2019), by Chatham House Senior Russian expert, Keir Giles provides the sophisticated and curious reader a primer to help explain Putin’s Russia.

As per Giles, Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders, Tsars, Commissars and Presidents alike for centuries have thought and acted based on their country’s much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the Tsars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage with Russia without attempting to understand how Russians look at the world is a recipe for repeated disappointment and frequent crises.

Keir Giles, describes how Russian leaders have used consistent doctrinal and strategic approaches to the rest of the world. These approaches may seem deeply alien in the Western world, but understanding them is essential for successful engagement with contemporary Russia. Giles argues that understanding how Moscow’s leaders think and act—not just Vladimir Putin but his predecessors and eventual successors—will help their counterparts in the West develop a less crisis-prone and more productive relationship with Russia.

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Mariëlle Wijermars, "Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema, and the State" (Routledge, 2018)

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In her new book, Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema and the State (Routledge, 2018), Mariëlle Wijermars discusses how history is being reimagined by in pop culture and by the Russian government to give legitimacy and a sense of history to the Putin regime. She discusses the political reimagining overtime of figures such as Ivan the Terrible, Aleksandr Nevskii and the Romanovs. Listen in for this timely and fascinating discussion about the fluidity of historical memory and imagination and how this is used by modern regimes to create narratives that give themselves legitimacy and power.

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Larry Holmes, "War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power: The Center, Periphery, and Kirov’s Pedagogical Institute, 1941–1952" (Lexington Books, 2012)

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Larry Holmes’ book, which first appeared in English in 2012, was released in Russian this year. In War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power: The Center, Periphery, and Kirov’s Pedagogical Institute, 1941–1952 (Lexington Books, 2012), Holmes uses the case study of the Pedagogical Institute during the war years to explore power relationships in the institute and between local/ regional power and central power in Moscow. The Pedagogical Institute was forced to evacuate to the small provincial town of Iarnask to make room for the People’s Commissariat of Forest Industry (Narkomles) and workers from the Commissariat of Aviation Industry, which had been evacuated from Moscow, in buildings in Kirov. Coming from Moscow the Commissariats, particularly Narkomles, were given priority in the allocation of resources and the Pedagogical Institution was squeezed out. In a similar manner, evacuated academics, mainly non communist professors from Leningrad and other large cities were also given priority in resource allocation in Iaransk, receiving much higher food rations than the Pedagogical Institutes staff, which primarily consisted of senior teachers, who were party members. Upon returning to Kirov at the end of the war, the Pedagogical institute was met with utter destruction of its property. Narkomles had allowed the heating to freeze clogged and destroyed the sewage system and burned the wood floors for heat. With the blessing and support of the city and regional party and state organizations the Pedagogical Institute campaigned against Narkomles seeking compensation for its destroyed property. While not entirely successful, the Pedagogical Institutes appeals to the central Committee and particularly Kosygin meant that Narkomles had to provide recompense for the destroyed property. Holmes highlights these fault lines that developed within the Pedagogical institution and between different tiers of Soviet power, noting that the business of governance in the USSR was far messier and more complicated that the traditional to down command style model ascribed to the USSR. Regional authorities could successfully challenge central institutions as long as they did not question the system.

Larry and I discuss not just the book but the translation process and the reception of his work in Russia, where his book is very different from the traditional Soviet and Russian triumphalist narratives that focus on the front and citizens pulling together to beat the Nazis. Russian editions of his book are available in hardback in over 20 libraries in Russia including Hertzen Library in Kirov and the Lenin Library in Moscow. Larry is a bit of a Luddite with no website or social media but welcomes comments and questions about his work at his email lehviatka@bellsouth.net.

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A. Lakhtikova, A. Brintlinger, and I. Glushchenko, "Seasoned Socialism: Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life" (Indiana UP, 2019)

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In their introduction to Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life (Indiana University Press, 2019), Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko invite the reader to “imagine a society where food is managed by officialdom like a controlled substance and everyone is addicted to it.”

Food plays a pivotal role throughout Russian history, but perhaps no more so than during the Soviet era, when the perennial Russian cycle of feast and famine took on a highly political aspect. Access to food was a powerful tool wielded by the State, from the Kholodomor to the ration cards of the eighties, Soviet citizens were forced to make daily choices about food, which often brought with them unwelcome moral dilemmas.

For a topic that is such a fulcrum of political, economic, sociological, and historical, studies, far too little scholarship on the topic has been produced either in Russia or the West. We can posit the reasons why: probably too feminine a topic, definitely too domestic, not serious, too private, but the fact is indisputable and the lack of relevant scholarship of Russian culinary studies makes Seasoned Socialism all the more timely and welcome.

This collection of essays by noted scholars from a range of fields, including literary studies, film studies, food studies, history, and sociology examines the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s era. In them, we discover oral history, personal cookbooks, memorable scenes from the Golden Age of Soviet Cinema, poetry, and even stories of survival in the Gulags. We are transported inside steamy communal apartment kitchens and out to the welcome fresh air of a dacha. We discover the lore of the cabbage and the magic of tea, and we come to know the people whose lives revolved around sourcing, preparing, and enjoying food in the late Soviet Era.

Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life joins the canon of “must-reads” for serious students of Russian and Soviet history, culture, and, of course, cuisine.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Jeff Sahadeo, "Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Cornell University Press, 2019), Jeff Sahadeo looks at the migrant experiences of peoples from the Caucuses and Central Asia in the late Soviet and early Post-Soviet periods ( 1960s-1990s). He explores the various factors that drew these migrants to the two Soviet capitals, which were the seat of the former colonial empire. Using oral histories as well as documentary evidence, he researches how they integrated with the local population, what sort of prejudices they faced and to what extent they were welcomed as part of the Soviet brotherhood of peoples. Sahadeo also examines how the relatinship between these southern migrants and the Russian majority changed over time as the USSR fell apart and nationalistic discourse became more prevalent. The migrant experience in the later years of the USSR is incredibly relevant in today’s world where migration from from former colonial peripheries to colonial centers has become common place and has generated nationalist, reactionary politics in response.

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Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019).

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.

Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Betsy Perabo, "Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War" (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

As Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularly relevant. Betsy Perabo’s book Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) is a unique and important contribution to this area of inquiry, representing a rare contemporary academic exploration of just war theory within Russian Orthodoxy in the context of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Perabo examines the conflict through the concept of an “interreligious war” between Christian and Buddhist nations, paying particular attention to the writings of Nikolai of Japan, the Russian leader of Orthodox Church in Japan, as well as Russian soldiers, chaplains, military psychologists, and missionary leaders. In this interview we discuss the genealogy of Christian just war theory, the Russian Orthodox mission in in the late 19th-early 20th century the Japanese and Russian perception of religious motivations and divine influence in the 1904-05 war, and the implications of this history for Russian militarism today.

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C. W. Gortner, "The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna" (Ballentine Books, 2018)

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

101 years have passed since the murder of the Imperial Family of Russia at Yekaterinburg, but their appeal has not diminished. Indeed, interest in the Romanovs is at a historic high as television and the Internet age enables ever more devotees to discover the sepia-tinged appeal of Tsar Nicholas II and his doomed family.

Less attention is devoted to the members of Nicholas’s family of origin, including many who survived the slaughter of 1917, escaping Russia for lives of exile in Europe and North America. And of these, no one is more fascinating than Nicholas's own mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the Danish princess who captured the hearts of Russia when she arrived to marry the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich in 1866.

C.W. Gortner's latest novel, The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (Ballentine Books, 2018) goes a long way to addressing this disparity. The novel is an exceptionally well-researched, masterfully crafted account of Maria Fyodorovna from her upbringing in a cozy and modest childhood home in Denmark — which she shares with her sister, Alix, destined to be Britain's Queen Alexandra — to her final bittersweet moments in Russia in 1918.

Gortner endows Maria Fyodorovna with the ability to see more than one side of an argument, and through her interaction with her father-in-law, the Tsar Liberator Alexander II, the reader gets keen insight into the urgent need for political and social reform in Imperial Russia.

The tragic early death of Maria Feodorovna’s husband leaves her eldest son, Nicholas, woefully unprepared to assume the throne. Gortner deftly draws the inevitable clash of wills between Maria and Alexandra, 'Nicholas's stubborn but strong-willed wife, who comes to entirely rely upon the Mad Monk Rasputin. This struggle between the two women successfully drives the second half of the novel as war and revolution begin to overshadow the gilded Romanov world.

Gortner's research shines through The Romanov Empress, and the resulting novel is several notches above many other attempts to recreate the hermetically sealed world of Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace in terms of both quality and accuracy. His cameo portraits of the sprawling tribe of Romanovs are spot on — particularly that of Maria Feodorovna’s sister-in-law and sidekick, the redoubtable Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna the Elder. But at the heart of the novel is Maria Fyodorovna herself — by no means perfect but trying hard to do what is right for the family and the country she loves in almost impossible circumstances. Romanov fans will rejoice in this welcome addition to the canon.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Jeremy Friedman, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World" (UNC Press, 2018)

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be remembered that things were of course never so straightforward. As Jeremy Friedman shows in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, the 1960s-1980s Sino-Soviet Split(UNC Press, 2018) generated a much more fractious and divided global situation than today’s nostalgia would imply.

Taking ideology seriously as a component of socialist foreign policy, Friedman’s new and compelling analysis shows how deep Moscow and Beijing’s disagreements ran, and argues that the division was based at heart on two quite different revolutionary agendas. Drawing on archives all over the world in multiple languages, Shadow Cold War traces the origins of these agendas in revolutionary experience in each of Russia and China, and reveals how these continued to manifest themselves as Soviet and Chinese interests competed in the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century. With China in particular now a major player in many of the locations discussed here, this book should be indispensable reading for anyone seeking clarity about how we got to where we are today.

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Sophia Shalmiyev, "Mother Winter: A Memoir" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The story of where we come from is such an important aspect of our personal sense of self, the forefront of many conversations about national identity, community, and belonging. In a country like the United States, where so many of us are or are descended from immigrants, the answer to this question of heritage can be a complicated one that takes us back generations. And, with proliferation of home genealogy tests like AncestryDNA and 23andMe, people are learning more about their family histories than was ever thought possible. But what happens when the questions we have about our identities and parentage can’t be answered by a simple test?

For writer Sophia Shalmiyev, the question was never “who is my mother,” but rather, “where has she gone?” Mother Winter: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2019) traces Shalmiyev’s journey from early childhood in Leningrad, Russia to parenthood in Portland, Oregon as she comes to terms with the ambiguous loss of the most important relationship in her life. Finding inspiration in great feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Rita Ackermann, Sappho, Anaïs Nin, and so many others, Shalmiyev masterfully weaves philosophy, literature, and art history with personal memory to craft a reading experience unlike any other.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies nonfiction and teaches creative writing classes. She is also the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or visit her online at zoebossiere.com.

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Sergei Zhuk, "Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists" (I.B. Tauris, 2018)

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Sergei Zhuk’s Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (Tauris, 2018) offers an insightful investigation of the development of American studies in the Soviet Union, with a specific emphasis on Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. In spite of ideological differences, the US and the USSR established mutual interests to history and culture studies. One may suggest that this interest was not quite surprising: knowing an opponent’s background helps lead and win confrontations. This might be true in terms of the US—USSR relations. However, as Zhuk’s research demonstrates, the story is much more complicated. One of the decisive factors is the individual who happens to participate in this seemingly antagonistic collaboration of the West and the USSR. Through his personal story, Zhuk traces subtle modifications of ideological indoctrination which transpire when one gets acquainted with the “Other.” While detailing the establishment of American studies in the Soviet Union, Soviet Americana touches upon what ideological changes may occur through the introduction to seemingly alien culture, history, and language. Another innovative aspect of Zhuk’s books is an attempt to describe similarities and differences which characterize American studies as formed by Soviet Russian and Soviet Ukrainian scholars. Zhuk intriguingly notes that Soviet Americanists, when traveling to the US, were discovering (and modifying) not only their Soviet identity, but their Russian and Ukrainian identities as well. Soviet Americana is a complex and multilayered research contributing to the subversion of monolithic representation of Soviet/Russian cultural history.

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Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019)

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor. In it, we meet pirates, princes, and prelates; and while much divides the Slavs, Balts, Saxons, Poles, and Scandinavian peoples, much also unites them: rugged individualism and a desire to expand the boundaries of their known world.

Caroline Boggis-Rolfe’s new book, The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples(Amberley, 2019) is a deep dive into this engrossing history. It which opens with the prosperity of the Hanseatic League, that commercial confederation, which ruled the Baltic between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and closes with the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Unlike other studies of the region which focus on subsets of the Baltic region: Scandinavia, Northern Germany, the Baltic States, Russia, and Poland, Boggis-Rolfe has undertaken the somewhat daunting task of examining 1000 years of the region’s history as one unified history.

Boggis-Rolfe’s approach makes The Baltic Story eminently readable: rather than placing her material in strict silos, she weaves the stories of separate nations into a cogent chronological narrative, examining each nation at the zenith of its power, but through the lens of its relationship to its neighbors. That being said, each chapter is an excellent stand-alone study, and in them we get the privilege of spending time with the bold Swedish monarchs who forged empires, the erudite Kings of Poland, the patrons of Copernicus; Peter the Great who hewed for Russia a “window on the West,” and the visionary Frederick II of Prussia, and a host of other equally fascinating personalities.

The Baltic Story was born of Boggis-Rolfe’s two passions: her academic work on Voltaire and the Enlightenment and her many years of visiting Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. She has a natural gift for story-telling, which makes the history of this region leap off the page. Her tenacity and commitment to creating what did not previously exist — a complete study of the Baltic — is a boon for both amateur and seasoned historians, and anyone embarking on a voyage of discovery around the Baltic Sea.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Adrienne Celt, "Invitation to a Bonfire" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Zoya Andropova—soon to be known in her adopted country as Zoë Andropov—didn’t ask to be rescued from her Soviet orphanage, even after the arrest of her father, a strong supporter of the very regime that has now taken his life. But rescued she is, by well-meaning Americans, who soon dump her at a wealthy boarding school where she struggles to retain far more than her name. She takes refuge in literature, in particular by the émigré writer Lev (Leo) Orlov, whose science fiction transports her to more satisfying times and places.

So perhaps it is no surprise that when Orlov shows up to teach at the school where Zoya, having nowhere else to go, has moved from student to worker, she tumbles into love with him, ignoring both his advances to the other girls and his very present and controlling wife. Zoya charts the evolution of this romantic triangle in her diary, which we read, interspersed with letters from Lev to his wife.

As Adrienne Celt notes early on,Invitation to a Bonfire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) is inspired by the life of the well-known Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. But as the story builds, it leaves the details of Nabokov’s life and marriage behind, roaring out of a deliberately quiet academic beginning until it reaches a place that upends much of what we have believed up to that point.

C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

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Kristen Ghodsee, "Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism" (Duke UP, 2017)

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

I am a child of the so-called transition in Bulgaria and growing-up I could never understand why my parents and grandparents would spend our family gatherings talking about the socialist past. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much socialism and its end are imprinted on my grandparents’, my parents’ and my generation and that such dramatic changes cannot just be bygones. Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent many years digging into the layers of East European socialist and post-socialist experience trying to give voice to more nuanced narratives about this time, and I was very happy to once again have the chance to talk with her, this time about her book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism (Duke University Press, 2017). In this very personal book with essays and short stories, Ghodsee describes the post-socialist realities of the victims of the greedy neoliberalism that has dismantled their social safety nets and expresses her frustration about the continuing tendency to reduce the twentieth-century East European state socialisms to Stalinism and the Gulags. While acknowledging the many crimes committed in the name of the communist ideal by these regimes, she insists that there were some good aspects and policies from which our present governments could learn, if they would be willing to leave aside the oversimplified and blackwashed tale they cherish so much. “After thirty of years of nursing this terrible hangover from the experience of twentieth century state socialism in Eastern Europe maybe it’s time that we take a little sip and start to clear our heads and figure out where we go from here” Ghodsee says. I invite you to listen and read what she has to say about our need for the proverbial hair of a dog* to sober us up after the heavy drinking of socialism in the twentieth century. Maybe a little bit more of the same could paradoxically help?

Check out my previous interview with Kristen Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex and Ghodsee’s blog - https://kristenghodsee.com/blog

*Note for ESL listeners: the proverb “a hair of the dog” is a shortening of “a hair of the dog that bit you” and it is when you drink a little bit of alcohol to cure a hangover. It comes from an old belief that when you are bitten by a rabid dog, you need to take a medicine containing a hair of the dog that bit you to be cured of rabies.

Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada

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Botakoz Kassymbekova, "Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016)

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University.

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Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2019)

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.

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Eleonory Gilburd, "To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture" (Harvard UP, 2018)

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West. A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers. A year after Stalin’s death, author and commentator Ilya Ehrenburg published the novel that would give a name to this era, “The Thaw,” which probed the limits of cultural expression, now expanded by Khrushchev’s political pivot.

One of the critical hallmarks of The Thaw is an almost immediate deluge of foreign culture into the Soviet Union, which for most of the population was entirely new: in pre-revolutionary Russia, culture was the prerogative of wealthy aristocrats and intellectuals, and for the much of the first three decades of the nascent Soviet state, access to foreign culture was strictly forbidden. Suddenly, the vast country was flooded with international books, films, paintings, and music. The impact was seismic, and the reverberations are still felt today.

To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture(Harvard University Press, 2018), by Eleonory Gilburd, is a deep dive into this phenomenon, which spans period from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Gilburd looks at the perfect cultural and social storm created by the combination of more liberal politics, foreign culture and the technology to make it accessible to 11 time zones. But Gilburd doesn’t limit herself to the impact of culture on the Soviet population, rather she examines the ways in which Soviet cultural interpreters made foreign cultural artifacts “about us.” In Gilburd’s study, we see how translators dug deep into Russian street language to bring Holden Caufield to the page, how film distributors brought Fellini’s neorealism to the steppes of Kazakhstan, and how Ilya Ehrenburg gently reintroduced a nation to the beauty of French Impressionism. This is as much a story of translators, commentators, and curators as it is of their audience.

“To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture” was short-listed for the 2019 Pushkin House Prize.

Eleonory Gilburd is an Assistant Professor of Soviet History and the College at the University of Chicago, and the author of “The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s.” She received her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkley in 2010.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Vahram Ter-Matevosyan, "Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Vahram Ter-Matevosyan new book Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, examines the Kemalist ideology of Turkey from two perspectives. It discusses major problems in the existing interpretations of the topic and how the incorporation of Soviet perspectives enriches the historiography and our understanding of that ideology. To address these questions, the book looks into the origins, evolution, and transformational phases of Kemalism between the 1920s and 1970s. The research also focuses on perspectives from abroad by observing how republican Turkey and particularly its founding ideology were viewed and interpreted by Soviet observers. Paying more attention to the diplomatic, geopolitical, and economic complexities of Turkish-Soviet relations, scholars have rarely problematized those perceptions of Turkish ideological transformations. Looking at various phases of Soviet attitudes towards Kemalism and its manifestations through the lenses of Communist leaders, party functionaries, diplomats and scholars, the book illuminates the underlying dynamics of Soviet interpretations.

Robert Elliott is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, Duke University.

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Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018)

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people. He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running south into South East Asia and then turning west into South Asia and the Middle East. This zone received a huge percentage of aid and support from the superpowers. This zone saw by far the most military interventions by the superpowers. And this zone saw millions of people die in conflicts tied to the Cold War.

Chamberlin reminds us that these conflicts were not simply instigated and propelled by the superpowers. Instead, the Cold War intersected with colonial and post-colonial conflicts in complicated and nonlinear ways. Similarly, he argues that the nature of these conflicts changed dramatically over time, from Maoist people's revolutions to conflicts driven by sectarian struggles.

By making the broader contours of this period clearer, Chamberlin is able to put genocides in Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and others into a common framework. In doing so, he's written a book that is not explicitly about genocide, but says a great deal about genocidal violence in the second half of the twentieth century.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994.

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Mark Galeotti, “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia” (Yale UP, 2018)

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia (Yale University Press, 2018) by Mark Galeotti is an engrossing read about a topic mainstream scholarship has largely ignored: Russia’s criminal underworld. With Galeotti as our guide, we delve into the colorful world of the vory v zakone or “thieves of the code,” with their flamboyant nicknames, esoteric rituals, and vibrant body tattoos, which Galeotti explains are very much a gangster’s CV.

The Vory traces the development of the Russian underworld from the horse bandits and bank robbers of the nineteenth century, through the chaos of the Revolution and the Civil, when, as Galeotti says, “… the Bolsheviks won the war but lost their souls.” Galeotti’s scholarship shines through the section on the vast sea change that takes place when during The Terror as the gangsters are co-opted by the State to help regulate the Gulag system. The resulting “turf war” creates a new post-war type of gangster, the “avtorityet,” who adapt to service the needs of a society in chaotic transition.

The Vory also looks at the ways the Putin administration has tamed the underworld, but also the ways in which the State and the underworld are now intrinsically linked; the government even outsources unseemly tasks to the underworld, as is clear in both the 2014 Annexation of Crimea and the ongoing frozen conflict in Donbas.

Galeotti first became interested in Russian organized crime while interviewing veterans of Russia’s war with Afghanistan for his doctorate research. He noted that many of the Afgantsy were drifting into ranks of the vorovsky mir or “thieves world.” Since that time, he has delved into the topic with a unique methodology that fuses scholarship with personal encounter. It takes a special researcher to ride around Moscow’s dodgy neighborhoods in a rickety squad car wearing a well-used bullet-proof vest, but Galeotti’s time has certainly not been wasted. “The Vory” is a thrilling and gripping read filled with larger-than-life, compelling characters and spot-on historical analysis. It is marvelous window into a secret world that is constantly evolving.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more.

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Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war.

The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will.

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John Etty, "Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons" (UP of Mississippi, 2019)

Thu, 30 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than not, its contents were the product of a process of co-creation, with all three groups playing a creative role in producing the magazine’s contents. With an engaging mix of visual analysis and theoretical sophistication, the author provides a window into everyday reading materials consumed by Soviet citizens.

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Timothy A. Sayle, "Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 28 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history merits. Timothy A. Sayle, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, attempts to correct this. His fascinating new book, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines the history of NATO from its founding in the late 1940s through to its expansion in the post-Cold War era. Sayle shows how NATO wasn’t just any organization; it was, he writes, “an instrument of great-power politics and the basis for a Pax Atlantica.”

Taking his readers deep into the decision-making of NATO and its member states from the 1940s to the 1990s, Sayle provides a new, innovative international history of the second half of the twentieth century. Enduring Alliance should interest historians and scholars from across subfields—military history, U.S. foreign policy history, Cold War history, and global governance studies.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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John J. Curley, "Global Art and the Cold War" (Laurence King Publishers, 2019)

Mon, 27 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishers, 2019), this provocative image defined the binary logic of the Cold War and speaks to the larger importance of visuals in both the deployment of contemporary propaganda and in political resistance. A meticulously-researched and accessible monograph, Global Art and the Cold War demonstrates the crucial role of art in the greatest geopolitical conflict of the 20th century. Presenting a nuanced investigation of how the Cold War shaped major art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Conceptualism in the West and Socialism realism in the Eastern Bloc, Curley also challenging the traditional history of American Abstract painting in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism by integrating other regions including Asia, Africa, and Latin America in to the study. Art from the “Cold War peripheries”, writes Curley in his introduction, reveals that the dominant narrative of modernism was a Western construction, simultaneously expressing transnational modernity and nationalism to counter American and Soviet imperialism. Positioning all 20th century art as engaged in an inevitable conflict between two opposed models for modernity, Curley makes a compelling case for broadening the narrative of artistic creation in the period of the Cold War and its aftermath.

John J. Curley is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art history, as well as photographic history.

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Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)

Wed, 22 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Professor Black, offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimension in each period. A must read for anyone interested in this time period of military and indeed global history.

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Houri Berberian, "Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds" (U California Press, 2019)

Tue, 07 May 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In her newest book, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Houri Berberian uses a transnational or transimperial approach to examine the interconnectedness of 1905 Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution and the Young Turk Revolution and the role that Armenian revolutionaries played in each. Dr. Berberian’s unique approach allows readers to see the linkages between these events that are often viewed as separate and encapsulated and see how the Armenians who lived at the epicenter of these events participated. She examines how Armenian revolutionary intellectuals were able to utilize another revolution, the technological revolution, to facilitate the spread of information, revolutionary literature, people and arms between these three empires and the widespread Armenian diaspora using steam ship, telegraphs and increased access to printing technology. She also examines how the revolutionaries indigenized and interpreted the various liberal and socialist ideas they now had greater access to in a way that fit the Armenian context: split between three empires and facing increased persecution and ethnic conflict. Listen in as we discuss the successes and failures of this understudied revolutionary movement and the lives and struggles of individual Armenian revolutionaries navigating the complex realties of living at the confluence of three empires in the throes of collapse and revolution.

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Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia" (Open Book Publishers, 2018)

Thu, 02 May 2019 10:00:00 -0000

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent history of Russian eugenics, reflects on a broad problem: How to acknowledge what eugenics movements worldwide have had in common, while doing justice to local differences that, for example, make the late Victorian eugenics of Francis Galton comparatively quite different from Russian eugenicists of the same period. Krementsov takes this story from the 1860’s to the present day, and in so doing, provides a fascinating analysis of the vicissitudes of Russian attempts to improve the human species. This history is of the utmost relevance for the present day. Eugenics is neither gone nor forgotten, and Krementsov’s account does much to explain why that is the case.

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Henning Pieper, "Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In his book, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Henning Pieper, examines the conduct of the SS Cavalry Brigade during World War II. The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a dual role: SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front. Pieper’s book highlights an understudied aspect of both the Holocaust and World War II.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk.

Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Eliot Borenstein, "Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, conspiratorial thinking has taken deep root in contemporary Russia, moving from the margins to the forefront of cultural, historical, and political discourse and fueled by centuries-long prejudices and new paranoias. In his characteristically witty, irreverent style, Eliot Borenstein (Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies, Collegiate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Acting Chair of East Asian Studies, and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University), draws on popular fiction, television, internet, public political pronouncements, religious literature, and other materials to trace the origins, history, and modern manifestations of Russian konspirologiia in Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2019). We discuss popular conspiracy theories such as the Harvard Project and the Dulles Plan, why and how conspiratorial thinking has flourished in post-Soviet Russia, the dynamics of paranoia and melodrama and the roles of anti-Semitism and homophobia in framing and shaping conspiracy theories, the construct of Russophobia as a key element in nationalist ideology, and the influence of the changing U.S.-Russia relationship on konspirologiia in recent years.

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Federico Varese, "Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories" (Princeton UP, 2011)

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about transnational crime one of the themes will be about how globalisation has made it easier for organized crime groups to operate. You will also see another chapter about how large mafia style groups are spreading outside their traditional domains. But there have been very few studies, other than individual case studies, of how this occurs and what circumstances help or hinder this expansion of operation. Federico takes a rigorous approach to try and answer these questions. He not only looks at how groups expand but also compares successful expansion to unsuccessful cases. He asks what features of the social environment allowed one group to succeed and another to fail. His answers are surprising and they reveal some cumbersome characteristics of large, structured organised crime groups which make it difficult for them to expand their operations to new environments. This is a very enjoyable book to read as it combines detailed stories with strategic data. Federico has clearly put many years of research into this work and the result adds significant new insights for organized crime research.

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Rósa Magnúsdóttir, "Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Rósa Magnúsdóttir of Aarhus University, explores depictions of America in post-war Soviet propaganda. While the 1945 “meeting on the Elbe” marked a high point in United States/Soviet friendship, official relations deteriorated quickly thereafter.

Enemy Number One incorporates a wide range of source material such as letters by Soviet citizens, popular magazines, Voice of America broadcasts, and a wide range of secondary scholarly literatures. Among the author’s conclusions based on this body of evidence, are that Russian state propaganda differentiated between “good” and “bad” Americans, that state propaganda to the contrary, everyday people in the USSR never lost a sense that WWII had been the site of genuine friendship between Americans and Soviet citizens, and, intriguingly, that Soviet propaganda could have been far more effective in the United State than it in fact was.

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Joan Neuberger, "This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Most of the time, this podcast focuses on the products of those who create historical fiction—specifically, novels. But what goes into producing a work of historical fiction—especially in a dictatorship where the wrong choice, or even the right choice at the wrong moment, can send the unwitting author to the Gulag? And what if the creator is not an unknown toiling in the dark to produce manuscripts “for the desk drawer,” as the Soviet literati used to say, but the nation’s foremost filmmaker operating at the personal behest of Joseph Stalin? Such is the dilemma that faces Sergei Eisenstein in 1941, when he begins his unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible, an epic ordered by the Soviet government to glorify the Russian past and justify state terror.

Often written off, especially in the West, as a toady to Stalin, Eisenstein—as Joan Neuberger nimbly shows in her new and fascinating study, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell University Press, 2019)—approached his complicated and risky project with a mixture of enthusiasm and caution. Over the course of five years, despite complaints about budget overflows and production delays, through exile and war and shifts in the party line, personal conflicts and health problems, Eisenstein skillfully alternated between tactics of submission and defiance in support of his idiosyncratic but richly textured portrayal of a tortured autocrat whose childhood traumas led him to ever more extreme exercises of power, even as his excesses stripped him of friends and family, leaving him alone against the endless, unstoppable waves—of progress? of the future? of his own battered conscience? Only the viewer can decide.

Part I won the Stalin Prize, the USSR’s highest honor, although not without controversy. Stalin personally banned Part II before release, and Eisenstein died with Part III unfinished. In this master work about a master filmmaker, Neuberger shines a light on all three. In doing so, she highlights the many decisions any author must make while balancing historical accuracy against dramatic potential and character motivation against a verifiable past. Fortunately, for most of us the stakes are nowhere near as high as they were for Sergei Eisenstein.

C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Keith Gave, "The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage" (Gold Star Publishing, 2018)

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Keith Gave spent six years in the NSA during the Cold War, but his most daring mission may have come later, while working as a sports writer. In the late 1980s, Gave was asked by the Detroit Red Wings to reach behind the Iron Curtain and initiate contact with the team's newest draft picks, two players on the Soviet Union's famed Red Army hockey club. His hazardous quest helped pave the way for an unforgettable era in hockey, one that would eventually feature five former Soviet players playing together in Detroit, leading their team to an elusive Stanley Cup championship.

Some sensitive and bizarre details of how the Russian Five was assembled were never disclosed before Gave told all in his book The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage (Gold Star Publishing, 2018), and in the documentary The Russian Five, for which Gave served as a producer. Gave, who covered hockey for the Detroit Free Press for 15 years, talks about how a hockey beat writer ended up writing a real-life spy thriller.

Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com.

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Andrew Sobanet, "Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality" (Indiana UP, 2018)

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In his 1924 biography of Mahatma Gandhi, writer Romain Rolland embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and decried the “dictators of Moscow” and the “idolatrous ideology of the Revolution.” Seven years later, in a startling reversal, Rolland expressed his support for the USSR and confidence in Soviet leaders: “The builders had to dirty their hands; we have no right to act like we are disgusted.” What accounts for this striking about-face? How did Rolland, and other French leftists, come to celebrate and actively promote the authoritarian regime of Joseph Stalin? In Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality, Dr. Andrew Sobanet examines the intellectual trajectories of Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, and their role in the rise of Stalinism and the cult of Stalin in France from the 1930s through the 1950s. His book also sheds light on contemporary global politics with the recent rehabilitation of Stalin’s image in Russia under Vladimir Putin and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

Andrew Sobanet, is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of politics and literature. His research interests include the twentieth-century novel, the contemporary novel, autobiography, non-fiction film, feature film, and twentieth-century history. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (U of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana University Press, 2018). He has also published widely on Vichy France. Since 2011, he has been Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary French Civilization. He is currently serving as chair of the Department of French and Francophone studies, a position he also held from 2009 to 2015.

Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris.

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Alexandre Kojève, "Atheism," trans by Jeff Love (Columbia UP, 2018)

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 05:00:00 -0000

Columbia University press has just released a new translation of a work by philosopher Alexandre Kojève, simply titled Atheism, translated by Professor Jeff Love. Considered to be one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.

Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.

Jeff Love is Research Professor of German and Russian at Clemson University in South Carolina. His publications include books on Tolstoy, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, as well as a translation of Friedrich Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Nicholas Breyfogle, "Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) that brings together multiple perspectives on Russian and Soviet environmental history. Starting with the story of two dams built 150 years apart, Breyfogle discusses both continuity and change in how Russian and Soviet citizens and its various governments viewed the environment. The focus of the volume is contextualizing and “de-exceptionalizing” Russia and the USSR by placing Russian and Soviet environmental history in a global context as well as demonstrating how the environment can profoundly impact the course of human history. Listen in as we discuss both the tragedies and triumphs of Russian and Soviet environmental policies, ecology and conservation, such as dam building, collectivization, industrialization, eco-tourism and the rise of the Soviet environmental movement.

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Margaret Peacock, "Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2014)

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

In Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (University of North Press, 2014), Margaret Peacock analyzes the various ways in which images of children were put to use, in Soviet and American Cold War propaganda. From the Boy Scouts to the Pioneers, ubiquitous images of children portrayed the superiority of communism/capitalism.

Where children were used to showcase superiority, equally powerful were images of children as needing protection. In the United States, images of the child helped explain the need for nuclear testing and fallout shelters. From a Soviet point of view, children were likewise to be protected: from the evils of capitalist consumerism, from the rapacious nuclear warmongering of the West.

Even as children were used to promote the officially sanctioned view of the American/Soviet state, those same images, Dr. Peacock shows, could be used to subvert that view. Post-Stalin Soviet films criticized the status quo using images of the child to do so. Suspect American mothers hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities managed to subvert the aims of that body by hauling their children right along with them.

Utilizing archival and published evidence from a wide variety of Russian and American sources, Dr. Peacock has written an engaging history of the uses to which images of children have been put, in service of a conflict that spanned at least half the last century and whose consequences remain with us.

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Jessica Trisko Darden, Alexis Henshaw, and Ora Szekley, "Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars" (Georgetown UP, 2019)

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019), investigates the mobilization of female fighters, women’s roles in combat, and what happens to women when conflicts end. The book focuses on three case studies of asymmetric conflicts. Jessica Trisko Darden contributes research looking at Ukraine, Alexis Henshaw discusses the civil war in Columbia, and Ora Szekley provides insights into conflict involving Kurdish groups. The book includes lessons for policy makers on women’s motivations for joining armed groups and unique issues facing female combatants during reintegration.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Michael Cotey Morgan, "The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan to tell you that you are profoundly wrong. Based upon voluminous archival research in eight countries and in five languages, his book, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War(Princeton University Press, 2018) provides the reader with the first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War.

The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation on both sides of the the Iron Curtain. This gripping book explains the Final Act’s emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major figures, and the conflicting designs for international order that animated the negotiations.

The definitive history of the origins and legacy of this important agreement, The Final Act shows how it served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War, and how, when that conflict finally came to a close, the great powers established a new international order based on Helsinki’s enduring principles.

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Hassan Malik, "Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there? The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there? It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes. In Dr. Hassan Malik's meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018), the Tsarist government's relationship to foreign investors, mostly French bondholders, becomes a lens to judge the efficacy of Sergei Witte, Russia's reformist finance minister and, briefly, prime minister, in the early 20th century. The same approach is applied on the eve of World War I where the state of international investment in Russia provides a perspective on the existing debate as to whether Russia was on the road to recovery or revolution when World War I broke out. During the war and in 1917, Western bankers generally seem indifferent to the risks that are emerging from Russia. Indeed, an American bank, the forerunner to Citibank, was opening up branches in Russia in late 1917 as the Bolsheviks were taking power. Soviet Russia's repudiation of its Western debts now seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome, but Malik documents how it came about and the debates among the Bolsheviks as to how to handle Russia's government debt. Beyond students of Russian history, readers interested in how governments can fail, and how risk can appear in a financial system thought stable and safe will find this book of great interest.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) examines the post-World War II origins of the relationship between science and politics. Science’s self-concept as politically neutral and dedicated to empirical observation free of bias has often been at odds with its collaboration with the purposes of the Cold War state. Wolfe demonstrates how an understanding of the differences between Western and Marxist science obscured the hidden political objectives. Scientists holding an apolitical view of science became unwitting agents of the U.S. war against the spread of communism led by the Central Intelligence Agency. Multiple scientific and cultural institutions engage in formal and informal cultural diplomacy, espionage, ideological laden science education in underdeveloped nations, and became activists for the human rights of scientists across the globe. Thus, they expanded U.S. influence abroad. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the utopian belief of science as operating in the service of intellectual freedom and internationalism continues even as it depends heavily on government funding for its existence.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Till Mostowlansky, "Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity Along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

In eastern Tajikistan, the Trans-Pamir Highway flows through the mountains creating a lunar-like landscape. In his latest work, Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity Along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), Dr. Till Mostowlansky explores the lives of individuals who live alongside the highway. From the myth of Neil Armstrong hearing the azan while landing on the moon to fascinating interviews, Azan on the Moon uses rich ethnographic sources to illustrate how modernity is both enforced and challenged in the Pamir region. Mostowlanksy complicates our understanding of modernity as individuals who once were on the forefront of the Soviet modernizing project during the building of the Pamir highway now navigate life on the margins of the Tajik state. His work demonstrates how marginality and modernity are not mutually exclusive, but rather, are interconnected in the Pamir mountains.

Till Mostowlansky is an Ambizione Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.

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Judd C. Kinzley, "Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other related questions, discussing both why and how the Chinese state has today managed to make itself so forcefully present so far from the country's heartlands.

Kinzley's fascinating new resource-centric perspective on the state incorporation of Xinjiang retrains our eyes on the material and physical dimensions to politics, showing how treasured items from oil to tungsten have attained a totemic political role as “a critical but largely overlooked factor in shaping the region’s connections to China, regional neighbours and indeed the world” (p.7). Deftly handling its multilingual and multi-perspectival scholarship, 'Natural Resources and the New Frontier' accounts for how successive ‘layers’ left by state and non-state actors - Chinese and Russian as well as British - have institutionalised the presence of outside actors in Xinjiang over time. These dynamics, Kinzley shows, also underlie much of the discord evident between Han Chinese immigrants and indigenous Turkic groups in this troubled region today.

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Jinping Wang, "In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China 1200-1600" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018)

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity moving through time, insights into the endlessly contingent, local and contested events which have occurred in this part of East Asia over time are always valuable. This arguably applies all the more the further back in history we look, and so Jinping Wang's In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200-1600 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) offers a welcome trove of detail concerning an especially crucial period.

Beginning at the conjuncture of two 'foreign' Chinese dynasties – the Jurchen-Jin and Mongol-Yuan – Wang carries us all the way forward into the Ming era, discussing throughout the complex ways in which local people responded to the Mongol invasion of northern China from the 13th century. Radical transformations in local lives emerge through Wang's focus on Shanxi province and a host of evocative characters from wandering nuns to dispossessed literati, canal managers and warlords’ wives. Based on not-previously-studied stele inscriptions and on-the-ground fieldwork, the book charts political, social and religious changes some of which, the author shows, had a long afterlife. It is these sorts of historical continuities which, whilst perhaps not permitting us to talk about ‘China’ in an entirely uncritical and broad-brushed way, certainly make studying the country’s long history a compelling and important pursuit in the present.

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Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan, "Transition Economies: Transformation, Development, and Society in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union" (Routledge, 2018)

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 13:11:00 -0000

We spoke with the author Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan. His book Transition Economies: Transformation, Development, and Society in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2018) is a very interesting contribution to the understanding of Soviet economies and their transition, or transformation, as Aleksandr argues. In his book he also discusses the aspect of human transition. I started our conversation asking ‘transition towards what?’ Towards western market economies? Is the field of transition economics affected by the emergence of the successful Chinese model? We briefly discussed the variety of models among the soviet and eastern European nations and how differently they completed their transition.

His interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Providing full historical context and drawing on a wide range of literature, this book explores the continuous economic and social transformation of the post-socialist world. While the future is yet to be determined, understanding the present phase of transformation is critical. The book’s core exploration evolves along three pivots of competitive economic structure, institutional change, and social welfare. The main elements include analysis of the emergence of the socialist economic model; its adaptations through the twentieth century; discussion of the 1990s market transition reforms; post-2008 crisis development; and the social and economic diversity in the region today. With an appreciation for country specifics, the book also considers the urgent problems of social policy, poverty, income inequality, and labor migration.

Gevorkyan believes that the transformational experience of the “transition” economies must be studied objectively and needs to be more fully integrated within the broader field of economic development. It cannot be reduced to examples of economic models, which is the tendency in literature, but needs to be viewed in its historical continuity with many implications on social evolution.

This excellent book is an important tool for graduate students, scholars and policy makers.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 13:04:00 -0000

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Alun Thomas, “Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin” (I.B. Tauris, 2018)

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 11:00:18 -0000

In his new book, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Alun Thomas examines the understudied experiences of Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads in the NEP period. Thomas begins his book by examining enduring problems nomads faced such as increased European settlement that lead to sharp conflicts...

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Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader” (Academic Studies Press, 2018)

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 11:00:16 -0000

Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018) offers a compelling investigation of the genre whose development was significantly reshaped in the second half of the 20th century. In her introduction to this volume, Anindita Banerjee outlines the specificity of Russian science fiction literature and cinema and...

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Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States” (NYU Press, 2018)

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 10:00:30 -0000

From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist origin stories to horror stories of transnational adoption of children from Russia. In her latest...

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Jenifer Parks, “The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape” (Lexington Books, 2016)

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 10:00:12 -0000

Today we are joined by Jenifer Parks, Associate Professor of History at Rocky Mountain College. Parks is the author of The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape (Lexington Books, 2016), which asks how Soviet bureaucrats maneuvered the USSR into the Olympic movement and...

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Roland Philipps, “A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean” (W.W. Norton, 2018)

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 10:00:42 -0000

Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy, intelligent, and secretive man’s betrayal of his country and his friends, family and...

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Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:00:53 -0000

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Martin Saxer and Juan Zhang, eds., “The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders” (Amsterdam UP, 2017)

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:00:46 -0000

China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, are parties to a dazzling array of of China-driven transformations unfolding on a vast scale in economics, politics,...

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Ivan Simic, “Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:00:07 -0000

In his new book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ivan Simic explores how Yugoslav communists learned, adapted, and applied Soviet gender policies in their efforts to build their own egalitarian society after World War II. Attending to the gap between ideas and practices, he discusses how...

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Elizabeth McGuire, “Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 10:00:43 -0000

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic hue. As Elizabeth McGuire relates in the rich, persuasive and utterly engrossing Red...

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Jonathan Waterlow, “It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin (1928-1941)” (CreateSpace, 2018)

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 10:00:27 -0000

Jonathan Waterlow’s new book It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin (1928-1941) (CreateSpace, 2018) delves into the previously understudied realm of humor in the Stalinist period, exploring how average citizens used humor to understand the contradictions of their daily reality and to relieve the stress...

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Svetlana Stephenson, “Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power” (Cornell University Press, 2015)

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 10:00:46 -0000

The title of Svetlana Stephenson’s book Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Cornell UP, 2015) invites a number of questions: How do criminal and legal spheres conflate? Is the cooperation of criminal organizations and legal institutions inherent to a society structure? In what way do...

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Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 10:00:16 -0000

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses of insanity. Reich discusses the interesting literary preoccupations of Soviet psychiatrists and psychiatric discourse in the post-Stalin era...

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R.W. Davies, et al., “The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937-1939” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:00:43 -0000

The publication of the seventh book of the Industrialisation of Soviet Russia series represents the culmination of a 70-year project that can be traced back to Edward Hallett Carr’s classic series The History of Soviet Russia. In this final volume, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: Soviet Economy and...

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Olga Velikanova, “Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism: Popular Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:00:15 -0000

In her new book, Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism: Popular Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Olga Velikanova uses a variety of sources, from NKVD reports, reports sent to the Central Committee from various Soviet regions and even American intelligence reports to explore the rational behind the liberal...

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Rachel Morley, “Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema” (I. B. Tauris, 2016)

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 10:00:39 -0000

In studying the pre-Revolutionary films of Evgenii Bauer, Dr. Rachel Morley (Lecturer in Russian Cinema and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) discovered the ubiquity of the female performer as a character in the cinema of this era, from “Oriental” and “Gypsy” dancers...

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Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 10:00:48 -0000

How was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017), Eren Tasar argues that the Soviet Union was successful in building its relationship...

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John Bushnell, “Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th-19th Centuries” (Indiana UP, 2017)

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 10:00:48 -0000

In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with high populations of Old Believers. In Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old...

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Lynne Viola, “Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:00:22 -0000

What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 during “the purge of the purgers?” In her newest book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2017),...

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Marc Ambinder, “The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 10:00:50 -0000

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Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War: A World History” (Basic Books, 2017)

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:00:04 -0000

There have been many histories and treatments of the Cold War, few however have the breath, range and definitiveness of Harvard Professor Odd Arne Westad’s new take on the subject: The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017). In a book which takes the reader from the economic crisis...

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Artemy M. Kalinovsky, “Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan” (Cornell UP, 2018)

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 10:00:12 -0000

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational, welfare and agricultural development projects within the broader historiography of post-colonial economic developmental projects in the Third World. The Soviet Union and...

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A. James McAdams, “Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party” (Princeton UP, 2017)

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 10:00:47 -0000

Is there a difference between the Communist Party as an idea and the Communist Party in practice? A. James McAdams thinks so and takes the global approach to history to write a political and intellectual history of the Communist party. In Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the...

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Anika Walke, “Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Thu, 24 May 2018 10:00:29 -0000

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and Partisans:...

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Laurence Bogoslaw, “Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary” (East View Press, 2018)

Wed, 23 May 2018 10:00:21 -0000

For all the American media coverage of President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia, what’s rarely heard are the voices of Russians themselves. Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary (East View Press, 2018), edited by Laurence Bogoslaw, surveys the range of opinions about Trump that have appeared in the Russian...

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Steven J. Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History” (Liveright/Norton, 2018)

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 10:40:03 -0000

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Erik Scott, “Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 10:00:15 -0000

From Stalin’s inner circle to Soviet dinner menus, the small nation of Georgia had a remarkable influence on the politics and culture of the USSR. Erik Scott, author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (Oxford University Press, 2016), traces how Georgians came to occupy...

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Kimberly A. Francis, “Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 10:00:58 -0000

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his most important compositions including the Symphony of Psalms and Persephone....

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Jonathan Daly, “Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin” (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 10:00:58 -0000

Jonathan Daly is a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His newest book Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018), provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the criminal justice system in Russia from the...

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Natalia Roudakova, “Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:00:29 -0000

Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. Drawing from more than a decade of research of various ethnographic and historical sources, Roudakova approaches truth as a social...

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Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising” (Stanford UP, 2015)

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:00:13 -0000

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure...

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Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, “Russia’s Empires” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:00:07 -0000

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important senses not Russians. There are Ingush,...

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Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva, “Mother of the Church” (Northern Illinois UP, 2016)

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 10:00:54 -0000

In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Catholicism. A Russian noblewoman and Catholic convert living in Paris in the early to...

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Dan Healey, “Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi” (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 11:00:12 -0000

In 2013, when the Russian State Duma passed a law banning the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors, some rushed to boycott Russian vodka. In Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017), Dan Healey provides historical context for the law and cautions against the easy application of recent...

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Christopher J. Lee, “Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition” (Lexington Books, 2017)

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 11:00:18 -0000

Kimberly speaks with Dr. Christopher J. Lee about his newest book A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition (Lexington Books, 2017). A Soviet Journey was a travel memoir written by South African writer and anti-apartheid activist, Alex La Guma. The memoir describes La Guma’s experiences in Soviet Central Asia, Siberia,...

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Mikhail Epstein, “The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature” (Academic Studies Press, 2018)

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 11:00:31 -0000

In The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2018), Mikhail Epstein offers strategies on how to engage with texts in the current continuum. Based on the subversion of linearity as a principle component of chronological construction of literary phenomena, Epstein’s new book emphasizes the idea...

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Laura Engelstein, “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921” (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 11:59:53 -0000

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames...

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Andy Bruno, “The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:00:32 -0000

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from the environmental experience of Soviet communism? These are just some of the questions motivating historian Andy...

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Kevin Bartig, “Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:00:59 -0000

Kevin Bartig’s new book Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores multiple facets of one of the most famous film scores of the twentieth century, as well as the cantata Prokofiev adapted from the original music. Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Alexander Nevsky, about a thirteenth-century Russian national hero...

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Susan Smith-Peter, “Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Brill, 2017)

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 11:00:36 -0000

In Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Brill, 2017), Susan Smith Peter discusses the origins of the creation of distinct provincial identities in European Russia and how this process was encouraged and even promoted by the autocracy as a way to gain information about the...

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Samantha Lomb, “Stalin’s Constitution” (Routledge, 2017)

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 18:16:08 -0000

If any place (outside contemporary North Korea) can be called “Totalitarian,” it would be Stalinist Russia. Under the “Greatest Genius of All Time,” Soviet “citizens” enjoyed no free speech, no free press, and no free assembly. The one-party Bolshevik dictatorship deprived them of their voices, their property, their livelihoods, their...

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Sarah D. Phillips, “Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine” (Indiana UP, 2010)

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:48:43 -0000

In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Scrupulously studied and researched, the data that the author presents reflect social and political changes that have...

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Joshua Rubenstein, “The Last Days of Stalin” (Yale UP, 2016)

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 11:00:32 -0000

On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In The Last Days of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2016), Joshua Rubenstein recounts the events surrounding the dictator’s death and the sociopolitical vacuum it opened up at...

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Yuri Slezkine, “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution” (Princeton UP, 2017)

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 11:00:31 -0000

Before the revolution that—very unexpectedly—brought them to power, the Bolsheviks lived nomadic lives. They were always on the run from the authorities. That the authorities were always after them is not really a mystery, for all the Bolsheviks really wanted to do was take their authority away. What they would...

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Stephen F. Williams, “The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution” (Encounter Books, 2017)

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 11:00:32 -0000

The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (Encounter Books, 2017), written by legal scholar Stephen F. Williams, uses a biographic account of the life and career of Vasily Maklakov to explore issues of legality and rule of law in Tsarist Russia from 1905, following the promulgation...

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How Many Revolutions Did Russia Have in 1917?

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 11:00:16 -0000

In the fourth podcast of Arguing History, Mark D. Steinberg and Michael David-Fox discuss the factors driving the Russian Revolutions of 1917. They consider how what is often remembered as two distinct events was in fact a multitude of different revolutions, reflecting the various goals of a diverse range of...

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Michael Flier and Andrea Graziosi, eds. “The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective” (Harvard UP, 2017)

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 11:00:43 -0000

Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles, shaping states and nations. A multifaceted nature of language is emphasized and...

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Eric Lee, “The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921” (Zed Books, 2017)

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 18:18:13 -0000

Eric Lee‘s The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (Zed Books, 2017) is about the Georgian Social Democratic/ Menshevik Revolution that took place in 1918. As the world celebrates the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lee uses this book to explore what happened in Georgia, where the Social Democrats /Mensheviks, led...

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Rebecca Mitchell, “Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire” (Yale UP, 2015)

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 10:00:04 -0000

At the close of the nineteenth century, Europe was teeming with apocalyptic dreams of destruction and renewal. In Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), Rebecca Mitchell traces how in late imperial Russia, music came to be seen as a transcendent force...

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Robert W. Cherny, “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art” (U. Illinois Press, 2017)

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 20:14:55 -0000

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences...

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Mykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012)

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 10:00:48 -0000

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into the nature of writing but also into the contextual environments that happen to shape...

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Julia Mickenberg, “American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream” (U of Chicago Press, 2017)

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 11:50:32 -0000

In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Julia Mickenberg tells the story of women both famous and unknown, committed radicals and adventure seekers who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. She explores their motivations and experiences, as well...

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Adriana Helbig, “Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration” (Indiana UP, 2014)

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 16:24:33 -0000

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to be performing during the protests led to her study of immigration, integration and identity in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race,...

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Jacob Emery, “Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism” (Northern Illinois U. Press, 2017)

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 15:58:06 -0000

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused...

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Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, “The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 22:34:58 -0000

The title of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2017), tells you that this is a revisionist history, which argues that the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) were not merely brief explosions...

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Franz Nicolay, “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar” (The New Press, 2016)

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 21:47:22 -0000

What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans? What kind of venues host punk shows? Punk musician and writer Franz Nicolay explores these questions and much more in his Humorless Ladies of...

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Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire” (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 22:38:26 -0000

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation...

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Andrew Sloin, “The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power” (Indiana UP, 2017)

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 10:00:03 -0000

In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the...

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Jonathan Schlesinger, “A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule” (Stanford UP, 2017)

Sat, 13 May 2017 12:14:45 -0000

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes...

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James Heinzen, “The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953” (Yale UP, 2016)

Fri, 12 May 2017 11:46:32 -0000

The Soviet Union under Stalin was very repressive. You could get sent to a GULAG (if not shot) for casually telling an “anti-Soviet” joke or pilfering ubiquitous “state property.” But, as James Heinzen points out in his excellent book The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953 (Yale University...

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William D. Prigge, “Bearslayers: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists” (Peter Lang, 2015)

Tue, 02 May 2017 10:00:28 -0000

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. William Prigge analyzes how “nationalist” communists came to power in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic...

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Rebecca Gould, “Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus” (Yale UP, 2016)

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 20:22:00 -0000

Rebecca Gould‘s Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first existing comparative study of Chechen, Dagestani and Georgian literatures and a major contribution to the study of the cultures of the Caucasus. The book examines literary representations of anticolonial violence in the...

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Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016)

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 11:43:03 -0000

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what...

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Melissa Chakars, “The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia” (Central European UP, 2014)

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 15:40:52 -0000

In The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European University Press, 2014), Melissa Chakars reveals not only how Soviet policies disrupted traditional Buryat ways of life, but also how Buryats adapted to build a modern educated society in the post-war period. Ethnic Buryats were proportionally over-represented...

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Gleb Tsipursky, “Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016)

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 19:21:00 -0000

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure culture. Gleb Tsipursky undertakes an unexpected approach to illuminate some aspects of the USSR history, which have been previously disregarded. Describing leisure activities that were...

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Julia Alekseyeva, “Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution” (Microcosm Publishing, 2017)

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 19:16:25 -0000

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in...

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Maria G. Rewakowicz, “Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets” (Academic Studies Press, 2014)

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 20:06:35 -0000

In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which,...

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Julie Wilhelmsen “Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable (Routledge, 2017)

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 11:00:39 -0000

In Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable (Routledge, 2017), a study of the transformations of the image of Chechnya in the Russian public sphere, Julie Wilhelmsen performs a post-structuralist revision of the Copenhagen schools concept of securitization a process by which state actors transform subjects into matters of...

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Ellie Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford UP, 2016)

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 23:23:02 -0000

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, complicates the traditional narrative of Jewish religious insularity within Imperial Russia in her new book on converts...

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Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, “The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2013)

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 20:27:48 -0000

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional representation of Russian women and village life in scholarship. Grounding the imagery of a Russian woman in the network of her relationship...

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Edward Cohn, “The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime” (NIU Press, 2015)

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 02:13:50 -0000

Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime published by Northern Illinois University Press. He focuses on the 20...

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Violeta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War” (Routledge, 2013)

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 02:08:54 -0000

In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World...

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Chris Miller, “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy” (UNC Press, 2016)

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 15:46:42 -0000

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail...

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Victor Taki, “Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire” (I.B. Taurus, 2016)

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:07 -0000

Victor Taki’s Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (I.B. Taurus, 2016) invites the reader to explore the captivating story of the relationship of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century, and highlights the role the Oriental world played in the shaping of Russian national idea...

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Jonathan Brooks Platt, “Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard” (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 19:56:49 -0000

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and...

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Matthew Pauly, “Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 11:30:33 -0000

Matthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officially termed Ukrainization–that was introduced in Ukraine during the formative years of the Soviet Union. Out of a massive amount of archival records and documents,...

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Douglas Rogers, “The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism” (Cornell UP, 2015)

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 19:28:12 -0000

Ever since the accidental discovery of oil in Perm in 1929, the so-called “Second Baku” has been known to be an industrial hub as well as the home to a GULAG labor camp. In post-Soviet times, however, Perm has become a new cultural center on Russia’s map. In his book...

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Michael David-Fox, “Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2015)

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 04:00:19 -0000

It’s been a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This anniversary marks a good occasion to ask a seemingly simple question: “What was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?” Was it Russia in a new wrapper? Or was it something new and unheralded in world history? Was...

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McKenzie Wark, “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene” (Verso, 2015)

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 21:56:14 -0000

McKenzie Wark’s new book begins and ends with a playful call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) creates a conversation between work from two very different Soviet and American contexts. After guiding readers through the work and...

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Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 18:44:56 -0000

In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the Soviet space program as a combination of engineering and imagination, both necessary to achieve the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Beginning in the late 19th century,...

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Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012)

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 18:37:11 -0000

In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political, and philosophical connections that were accompanying the history of the countries constituting the USSR. Mark...

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Neil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016)

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 19:49:34 -0000

In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the peninsula. For many readers, Crimea seems as remote today as it was when colonized...

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Yanni Kotsonis, “States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 15:38:16 -0000

I have to admit that I was quite intimidated by a book on taxation in imperial Russia. But States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republics (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) is an award winning book so I decided to give it a try....

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Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016)

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 21:31:12 -0000

Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016) traces the history of early efforts to network the...

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David Brophy, “Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier” (Harvard UP, 2016)

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:35:21 -0000

Bringing together secondary and primary sources in a wide range of languages, David Brophy’s new book is a masterful study of the modern history of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) joins what have usually been...

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Per Anders Rudling, “The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931” (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)

Mon, 23 May 2016 10:59:38 -0000

I don’t often have a chance to read books that focus solely on Belarus, which is exactly why I was intrigued by The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). Per Anders Rudling‘s study seeks to answer a basic question Why is there today an...

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Valerie Sperling, “Sex, Politics and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Mon, 23 May 2016 10:58:36 -0000

The prevalence of media that reinforces a traditional masculine image of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, is at the core of Valerie Sperling‘s analysis of gender norms and sexualization as a means of political legitimacy. Not surprisingly, the cover of her book Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford...

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Adeeb Khalid, “Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR” (Cornell UP, 2015)

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 14:29:42 -0000

In what promises to become a classic, Adeeb Khalid’s (Professor of History, Carleton College), Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Cornell University Press, 2015) examines the interaction of nationalism and religious reform in 20th-century Muslim Central Asia. How does the desire and anticipation of revolution generate...

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Timothy Nunan, “Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 13:05:56 -0000

The plight of Afghanistan remains as relevant a question as ever in 2016. Just what did the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the international occupation of this country accomplish? Will an Afghan government ever exercise effective control over its territory and build a modern, prosperous integrated nation-state? How will Afghanistan...

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Eileen M. Kane, “Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca” (Cornell University Press, 2015)

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 18:33:51 -0000

In her gripping new book Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Cornell University Press, 2015), Eileen M. Kane, Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College, presents a compelling narrative of the Russian empire’s patronage of the Hajj in the late nineteenth century. Through a careful study of a variety...

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Guntis Smidchens, “The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution” (University of Washington Press, 2014)

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 12:26:13 -0000

In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged Soviet rule. The leaders of each of these movements espoused nonviolent principles, but the capacity for violence was always there – especially as Soviet authorities engaged in violent...

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David E. Hoffman’s “The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal” (Doubleday, 2015)

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 18:03:18 -0000

David E. Hoffman‘s The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Doubleday, 2015) was first brought to my attention in a superb interview conducted with the author at The International Spy Museum. The story immediately captivated my attention and I realized this would be a...

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David Frick, “Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in 17th-Century Wilno” (Cornell UP, 2013)

Fri, 09 Oct 2015 15:41:23 -0000

In 1636, King Wladyslaw IV’s quartermaster surveyed the houses of Wilno in advance of the king’s visit to the city. In Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Cornell University Press, 2013), David Frick begins with this house-by-house account to reveal the complex relationships among the city’s...

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Alexander Etkind, “Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied” (Stanford UP, 2013)

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 16:42:55 -0000

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is...

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David R. Stone, “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (UP of Kansas, 2015)

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 11:31:43 -0000

Readers wanting to learn more about the Great War on the Eastern Front can do no better than David R. Stone‘s new work, The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (University Press of Kansas, 2015). The last work to treat this comprehensively was Norman Stone’s (no...

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John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, “Bringing the Dark Past to Light” (U of Nebraska Press, 2013)

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 12:30:53 -0000

I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocaust related sights. And I’ll ask them to...

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Bilyana Lily, “Russian Foreign Policy toward Missile Defense” (Lexington Books, 2014)

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 15:38:45 -0000

The current conflict in Ukraine has reopened old wounds and brought the complexity of Russia’s relationship with the United States and Europe to the forefront. One of the most important factors in relations between the Kremlin and the West has been the issue of Ballistic Missile Defense, particularly as a...

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Thane Gustafson, “Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia” (Harvard UP, 2014)

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 16:04:00 -0000

Russia’s economy hinges on its ability to produce and sell natural resources. Especially oil. It comes as no surprise that the collapse of Soviet Union ushered in a mad scramble for control over oil resources. The oligarchs who sat atop the treasure trove of oil production following post-Soviet privatization, clashed...

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Jenny Kaminer, “Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture” (Northwestern UP, 2014)

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 13:20:25 -0000

Jenny Kaminer‘s new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particular, the evolving myths of the figure of the “bad mother.” Her study examines how political, religious, economic, social, and cultural...

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Alexander Cooley, “Great Game, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2014)

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 13:57:39 -0000

Central Asia is one of the least studied and understood regions of the Eurasian landmass, conjuring up images of 19th century Great Power politics, endless steppe, and impenetrable regimes. Alexander Cooley, a professor of Political Science at Barnard College in New York, has studied the five post-Soviet states of Kyrgyzstan,...

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Angela Stent, “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twentieth-First Century” (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 14:14:57 -0000

In 2005, the Comedy Central Network aired an episode of “South Park” in which one of the characters asked if any “Third World” countries other than Russia had the ability to fly a whale to the moon. During a press conference that took place two years later, Russian President Vladimir...

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Oliver Ready (trans.), Vladimir Sharov, “Before and During” (Dedalus Books, 2014)

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 11:28:08 -0000

Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented characters, made-up dialogue, the filling in of vague or unknowable events and personalities. Through the more or less careful manipulation of historical truth, the...

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Willard Sunderland, “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 13:49:20 -0000

The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) is an engaging new take on the...

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Katherine Pickering Antonova, “An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia” (Oxford UP, 2012)

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 12:57:39 -0000

Katherine Pickering Antonova‘s An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2012) investigates the Chikhachevs, members of the middling nobility in the pre-emancipation era. The book’s principal characters are Andrei, a graphomaniacal paterfamilias who (conveniently for historians) enlists his entire family in diary...

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Ivo Mijnssen, “The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia I” (Ibidem Press, 2014)

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 17:10:19 -0000

The Soviet Union once boasted of its unparalleled political participation among youth. Belonging to outwardly political organizations, these Octobrists, Pioneers, and Komsomoltsy often represented the spirit of Soviet youth. They were engaged, well-informed, and enthusiastic about their country. In his book, Back To Our Future! History, Modernity, and Patriotism According to...

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Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” (Schocken, 2014)

Sun, 13 Jul 2014 12:45:14 -0000

There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood, and mixing said blood into Passover matzo....

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Filip Slaveski, “The Soviet Occupation of Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 05:00:07 -0000

For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation–against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil. The Germans killed millions upon millions of Red Army soldiers, Communist Party officials, and ordinary...

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Sener Akturk, “Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge UP, 2012)

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 15:15:50 -0000

What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during seven decades of Soviet rule? What led German leaders to finally grant guest workers from Southern and...

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Anne Gorsuch, “All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin” (Oxford UP, 2011)

Thu, 22 May 2014 10:43:01 -0000

Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t even imagine that such a specialized shop could exist’.” Well-stocked shops, attractive cafes, and medieval streets were...

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