New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies Podcast

On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" from 2022-08-23T08:00

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 fr...

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On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" from 2022-08-23T08:00

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 fr...

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Stanislav Kulchytsky, "The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor" (CIUS Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 fa...

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Michael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Mi...

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Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Frank Ellis, “The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists” (University Press of Kansas, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frank Ellis’ The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists (University Press of Kansas, 2011) introduces to English-language readers the riches of Sovi...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, a...

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Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia” (Harvard University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sanjay Subrahmanyam‘s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern...

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Eric Lee, "The Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge, April–May 1945" (Greenhill Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Russell Martin, “A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage in Early Modern Russia” (NIU Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You probably know the story about the king who issues a call for the most beautiful girls in the land to be presented to him as potential brides in a kind of “bride-show.” And you might think this ...

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Andrei Kushnir, "Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir" (Academic Studies Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Dan Healey, “Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939” (Northern Illinois UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey‘s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important...

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Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 co...

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Douglas Smith, “Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian nobility numbered about 1.9 million people, or 1.5 percent of the population. The 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War would all but obli...

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Coryne Hall, "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust" (Amberley, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Romano...

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David Brandenberger, “Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin” (Yale UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though most people would rightly consider capitalists to be the founders and masters of the science of “marketing,” communists had to try their hands at it as well. In the Soviet Union, they had a ...

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Elissa Bemporad, "Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 m...

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Mark Steinberg, “St. Petersburg: Fin de Siecle” (Yale UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Public discourse in the final decade of Imperial Russia was dominated by images of darkness and dread. Discussions of “these times” and “times of trouble” captured the sense that Russians were livi...

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Iva Glisic, "The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930" (NIU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Matthew Lenoe, “The Kirov Murder and Soviet History” (Yale University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled Bolshevik Party member, shot Sergei Kirov in the back of the head as the Leningrad Party boss approached his office in Smolny. The murder sent sho...

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Anne Lounsbery, "Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 an...

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Stephen Collier, “Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pipes matter. That’s right: pipes. Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows that the hulkish cylinders that snake throughout its cities are the lifeblood of urban space, linking apartment block af...

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Brendan McGeever, "Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Antis...

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Richard Sakwa, “The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Sakwa‘s new book, The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, 2011), comes at a moment in Russian political histo...

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Tatiana Linkhoeva, "Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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,...

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Melissa Caldwell, “Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russians’ dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of the former Soviet Union have visited dachas. Yet,...

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Andrew Monaghan, "Dealing with the Russians" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Anna Krylova, “Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All whit...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 schola...

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Karen Petrone, “The Great War in Russian Memory” (Indiana UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historical studies on the European memory of World War I are, to put it mildly, voluminous. There are too many monographs to count on a myriad of subjects addressing the acts of remembrance and com...

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Danielle Ross, "Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia" (Indiana UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Stephen White, “Understanding Russian Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen White‘s Understanding Russian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011) begins simply enough: “Russia is no longer the Soviet Union.” While this is a well-known fact, the details of Russi...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 educat...

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Francis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing ...

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Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 cen...

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Jan Plamper, “The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jan Plamper begins in his book, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale University Press, 2012), with two illuminating anecdotes that demonstrate the power and scope of Stalin’s pers...

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Alexander Watson, "The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 discarde...

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Jeffrey Mankoff, “Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I spoke with Jeffrey Mankoff, an adjunct fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and a visiting scholar ...

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Kevin O'Connor, "The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga" (NIUP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Jeff Sahadeo, “Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1903” (Indiana UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Konstantin von Kaufmann, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan from 1867 until his death in 1882, wanted to be buried in Tashkent if he died in office; so that, he said, ‘all may know that here is ...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ra...

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Michael David-Fox, “Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941” (OUP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

People who care about other places (and that’s not everyone) have always thought of Russia as a strange place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.” A good part of Russia is in Europe, but it’s not exactly “Eu...

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David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 argu...

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Artemy Kalinovsky, “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globa...

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Shoshana Keller, "Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Jarrod Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa” (Indiana UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Ah, nostalgia is such an illness, and what a beautiful illness. There is no medicine for it! And thank God there isn’t.” This was how one of the Soviet Union’s most famous jazz singers and actors,...

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The Origins of World War One from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, unne...

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Frank Wcislo, “Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most importa...

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Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Rosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy: A Russia Life” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts educ...

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Loretta E. Kim, "Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Andrew Gentes, “Exile, Murder, and Madness in Siberia, 1823-1861” (Palgrave, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Russian practice of exiling criminals, dissidents, and other marginal people to the remote corners of Siberia began in the 16th century as the Russian state conquered new lands in the east. Exi...

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Darra Goldstein, "Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 s...

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Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow a...

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Aliide Naylor, "The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front" (I.B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 th...

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Steven Barnes, “Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most Westerners know about the Gulag (aka “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the pu...

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Richard Pomfret, "The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, Ta...

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Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone s...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 McM...

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Jonathan Weiler, “Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform” (Lynne Rienner, 2004) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new documentary by Robin Hessman “My Presteroika” portrays the lives of five individuals who, as children, were raised in the Soviet Union but who now live in post-Soviet society. The documentary...

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Maria Taroutina, "The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams” (W.W. Norton, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his hom...

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Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 s...

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Louis Siegelbaum, “Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile” (Cornell UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow “the car is king.” Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Ru...

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Abdullah Qodiriy, "Bygone Days" (Bowker, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 si...

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Daniel Treisman, “The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev” (Free Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, journalists, academics, and policymakers have sought to make sense of post-Soviet Russia. Is Russia an emerging or retrograde democracy? A free-market or cro...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 work...

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Maria Yatskova, “Miss Gulag” (Neihausen-Yatskova & Vodar Films, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode of NBRES, we’re doing something a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of interviewing an author about his or her new book, we are going to talk to filmarkerMaria Yatskova about her doc...

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Mark Gamsa, “Manchuria: A Concise History” (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ra...

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Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson ...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Stat...

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Douglas Rogers, “The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are ethics? What are morals? How are they constituted, practiced, and regulated? How do they change over time? My own research is informed by these question; so is Douglas Rogers‘. So it was o...

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Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 A...

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Laurie Manchester, “Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia” (NI UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The lives, let alone the fates, of Imperial Russia’s priesthood have garnered little attention among historians. I think the reason is partially because the research of most Russian historians has ...

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Marlene Laruelle, "The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan" (Lexington Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 presi...

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Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and ...

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Sarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 liv...

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Christopher Ward, “Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism” (Pittsburgh UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress in 1974, Leonid Brezhnev announced the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, or BAM. This “Path to the Future” would prove to be the Soviet Union’s ...

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Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, "Night and Day: A Novel" (Academic Studies Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Thomas de Waal, “The Caucasus: An Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia we...

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Adele Lindenmeyr, "Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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: Sof...

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Miriam Dobson, “Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Examinations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy. Fe...

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Jennifer Utrata, "Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia" (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word ...

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The Treaty of Versailles One Hundred Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Claudia Verhoeven, “The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you’ll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote. After all, Karakozov was no great theoris...

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Paul Robinson, "Russian Conservatism" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 t...

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J. Arch Getty, “Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist” (Yale UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror? We’ve learned a lo...

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Beth Fischer, "The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan's Cold War Legacy" (UP of Kentucky, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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David Shearer, “Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953” (Yale UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most important of modern history, primarily because it...

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Alison Rowley, "Putin Kitsch in America" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable th...

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Katya Cengel, "From Chernobyl with Love" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 experienc...

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Abbott Gleason, “A Liberal Education” (TidePool Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portio...

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Roberto Carmack, "Kazakhstan in World War II: Mobilization and Ethnicity in the Soviet Empire" (UP of Kansas, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Uni...

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David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Orientalism” (Yale UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is f...

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Oleksandra Humenna, "Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development" (ADEF-Ukraine, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, hi...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 sh...

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John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wond...

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Lesley Chamberlain, "Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a...

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John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 counteract...

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Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speci...

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Roland Elliott Brown, "Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda" (FUEL, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population trans...

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Olga Zilberbourg, "Like Water and Other Stories" (WTAW Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Sol...

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Kees Boterbloem, “The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But the “Age of Discovery” continued well into the sev...

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David Brandenberger, "Stalin's Master Narrative" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Simon Morrison, “The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years” (Oxford UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party created a large, well-funded cultural elite...

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Charles Halperin, "Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 previou...

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Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917” (Cambridge UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young....

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Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, "The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great" (Liverpool UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Andrew Gentes, “Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Being “sent to Siberia” is practically a synonym for exile even in English-speaking countries. Why is this? In his fascinating new book Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Palgrave, 2008), Andrew Gentes e...

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Serhii Plokhy, "Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 pers...

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Alex Rabinowitch, “Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising” (Indiana UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s hard to know what to think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Was it a military coup led by a band of ideological fanatics bent on the seizure of power? Was it a popular uprising led by an ...

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Michael Khodarkovsky, "Russia's 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ar...

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Katy Turton, “Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A number of years ago I read Robert Service’s excellent biography of Lenin and came away thinking “We don’t really know enough about the women who surrounded Lenin throughout his life.” Katy Turton...

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Iain MacGregor, "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Checkpo...

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John Randolph, “The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism” (Cornell UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Randolph, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is our guest on the show this week. His book The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Rus...

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Sara Lorenzini, "Global Development: A Cold War History" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. ...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Donald Ostrowski, "Europe, Byzantium, and the 'Intellectual Silence' of Rus’ Culture" (Arc Humanities Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 R...

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Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian" (Northern Illinois UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 thr...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Tamara Hundorova, "The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s" (ASP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 th...

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Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Mich...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 nec...

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Joanna Lillis, "Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan" (I. B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 As...

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Larry Diamond, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, ...

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Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, "No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Yan Li, “China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 cou...

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Anastasia Denisova, "Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Westmins...

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Aaron Hale-Dorrell, "Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 hi...

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Bathsheba Demuth, "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 eco...

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Rico Issacs, "Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia" (I.B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 na...

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Keir Giles, "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Chatham House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. ...

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Mariëlle Wijermars, "Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema, and the State" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 th...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Institu...

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A. Lakhtikova, A. Brintlinger, and I. Glushchenko, "Seasoned Socialism: Gender and Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Jeff Sahadeo, "Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Betsy Perabo, "Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War" (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 particularl...

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C. W. Gortner, "The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna" (Ballentine Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Jeremy Friedman, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 reme...

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Sophia Shalmiyev, "Mother Winter: A Memoir" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 t...

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Sergei Zhuk, "Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists" (I.B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Uni...

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Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Adrienne Celt, "Invitation to a Bonfire" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Kristen Ghodsee, "Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism" (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 w...

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Botakoz Kassymbekova, "Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 re...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Un...

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Eleonory Gilburd, "To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Killi...

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Vahram Ter-Matevosyan, "Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Mark Galeotti, “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Gale...

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Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, To...

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John Etty, "Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 t...

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Timothy A. Sayle, "Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 m...

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John J. Curley, "Global Art and the Cold War" (Laurence King Publishers, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Kin...

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Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, ...

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John Givens, "The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak" (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Houri Berberian, "Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 tra...

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Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia" (Open Book Publishers, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 p...

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Henning Pieper, "Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 dur...

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Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Manu...

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Eliot Borenstein, "Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 dis...

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Federico Varese, "Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories" (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 tr...

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Rósa Magnúsdóttir, "Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 A...

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Joan Neuberger, "This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 dictato...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 contri...

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Keith Gave, "The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage" (Gold Star Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Wi...

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Andrew Sobanet, "Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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....

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Alexandre Kojève, "Atheism," trans by Jeff Love (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 twenti...

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Nicholas Breyfogle, "Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russia and Soviet History" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 o...

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Margaret Peacock, "Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Jessica Trisko Darden, Alexis Henshaw, and Ora Szekley, "Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars" (Georgetown UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 confl...

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David L. Hoffmann, "The Stalin Era" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Russi...

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Michael Cotey Morgan, "The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 t...

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Hassan Malik, "Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 y...

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Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Till Mostowlansky, "Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity Along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 High...

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Judd C. Kinzley, "Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 fir...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 h...

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Keith A. Livers, "Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 cons...

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Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan, "Transition Economies: Transformation, Development, and Society in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 in...

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Alun Thomas, “Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin” (I.B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. Th...

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Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader” (Academic Studies Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 se...

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Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 immigran...

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Jenifer Parks, “The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape” (Lexington Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, ...

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Roland Philipps, “A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean” (W.W. Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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,...

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Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 wr...

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Martin Saxer and Juan Zhang, eds., “The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders” (Amsterdam UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, a...

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Ivan Simic, “Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Elizabeth McGuire, “Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 the...

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Jonathan Waterlow, “It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin (1928-1941)” (CreateSpace, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 St...

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Svetlana Stephenson, “Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power” (Cornell University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 narra...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Olga Velikanova, “Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism: Popular Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 repor...

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Rachel Morley, “Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema” (I. B. Tauris, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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) d...

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Eren Tasar, “Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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John Bushnell, “Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th-19th Centuries” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 un...

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Lynne Viola, “Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 bo...

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Marc Ambinder, “The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983” (Simon & Schuster, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 comma...

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Cynthia A. Ruder, “Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space” (I. B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War: A World History” (Basic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Artemy M. Kalinovsky, “Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan” (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, sit...

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Anika Walke, “Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Laurence Bogoslaw, “Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary” (East View Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Steven J. Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History” (Liveright/Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Erik Scott, “Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Geor...

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Kimberly A. Francis, “Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 analytic...

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Jonathan Daly, “Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin” (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (Bloom...

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Natalia Roudakova, “Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. D...

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Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, “Russia’s Empires” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 lo...

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Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva, “Mother of the Church” (Northern Illinois UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 explor...

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Christine E. Evans, “Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. Wheth...

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Dan Healey, “Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi” (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 t...

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Christopher J. Lee, “Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition” (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Afric...

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Mikhail Epstein, “The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature” (Academic Studies Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 subve...

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Laura Engelstein, “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921” (Oxford University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Univer...

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Andy Bruno, “The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Kevin Bartig, “Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 c...

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Susan Smith-Peter, “Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Brill, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ident...

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Samantha Lomb, “Stalin’s Constitution” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 fre...

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Sarah D. Phillips, “Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine” (Indiana UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 a...

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Joshua Rubenstein, “The Last Days of Stalin” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, ...

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Yuri Slezkine, “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Stephen F. Williams, “The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution” (Encounter Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Vas...

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How Many Revolutions Did Russia Have in 1917? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 dist...

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Michael Flier and Andrea Graziosi, eds. “The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 al...

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Eric Lee, “The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921” (Zed Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Rebecca Mitchell, “Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (Ya...

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Robert W. Cherny, “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art” (U. Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Mykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Julia Mickenberg, “American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream” (U of Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Adriana Helbig, “Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration” (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 musician...

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Jacob Emery, “Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism” (Northern Illinois U. Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Franz Nicolay, “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar” (The New Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 musi...

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Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire” (U. of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Euro...

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Andrew Sloin, “The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 inven...

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James Heinzen, “The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Hei...

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William D. Prigge, “Bearslayers: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists” (Peter Lang, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Rebecca Gould, “Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 answer...

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Melissa Chakars, “The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia” (Central European UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 cult...

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Julia Alekseyeva, “Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution” (Microcosm Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 fam...

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Maria G. Rewakowicz, “Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets” (Academic Studies Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Julie Wilhelmsen “Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Ellie Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Histo...

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Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, “The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 represent...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Disciplin...

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Violeta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 represe...

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Chris Miller, “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Com...

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Victor Taki, “Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire” (I.B. Taurus, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Empi...

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Tatiana Zhurzhenko, "War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 practice...

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Jonathan Brooks Platt, “Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard” (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 centennia...

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Aubrey Menard, "Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East" (PRH SEA, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Democrac...

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Matthew Pauly, “Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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–officiall...

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M. Wodzi?ski and W. Spallek, "Historical Atlas of Hasidism" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Douglas Rogers, “The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism” (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, howev...

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Vadim Shneyder, "Russia's Capitalist Realism: Narrative Form and History in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov" (Northwestern UP. 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, Fyodo...

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Michael David-Fox, “Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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?” Wa...

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McKenzie Wark, “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 fam...

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Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Ronald Grigor Suny, "Stalin: Passage to Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 a...

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Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 comple...

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Neil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Toront...

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Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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David Brophy, “Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Xinji...

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Per Anders Rudling, “The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931” (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Pres...

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Valerie Sperling, “Sex, Politics and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Adeeb Khalid, “Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR” (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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) e...

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Timothy Nunan, “Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Y. Gorlizki and O. Khlevniuk, "Substate Dictatorship Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 So...

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Eileen M. Kane, “Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca” (Cornell University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 compell...

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Jonathan Schneer, "The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 me...

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Guntis Smidchens, “The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution” (University of Washington Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 movemen...

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Alexey Golubev, "The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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David E. Hoffman’s “The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal” (Doubleday, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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H. Shelest and M. Rabinovych, "Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict: The Case of Ukraine" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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David Frick, “Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in 17th-Century Wilno” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Wi...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Alexander Etkind, “Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Un...

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Jessica Zychowicz, "Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 activist...

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David R. Stone, “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (UP of Kansas, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 P...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. Brand...

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John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, “Bringing the Dark Past to Light” (U of Nebraska Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Jennifer J. Carroll, "Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 subst...

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Bilyana Lily, “Russian Foreign Policy toward Missile Defense” (Lexington Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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David R. Marples, "Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir" (E-International Relations, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 resea...

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Thane Gustafson, “Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 oi...

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John Connelly, "From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 wi...

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Jenny Kaminer, “Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture” (Northwestern UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 particul...

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Sören Urbansky, "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Alexander Cooley, “Great Game, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. Alexand...

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Joanna Stingray, "Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground" (Doppelhouse Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 th...

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Angela Stent, “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twentieth-First Century” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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James C. Pearce, "The Use of History in Putin's Russia" (Vernon Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (Vern...

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Oliver Ready (trans.), Vladimir Sharov, “Before and During” (Dedalus Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ch...

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Marco Puleri, "Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics" (Peter Lang, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 th...

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Willard Sunderland, “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Stephen Riegg, "Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801-1914" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 populat...

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Katherine Pickering Antonova, “An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Adam Teller, "Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Ivo Mijnssen, “The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia I” (Ibidem Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Soviet Union once boasted of its unparalleled political participation among youth. Belonging to outwardly political organizations, these Octobrists, Pioneers, and Komsomoltsy often represented ...

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Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 c...

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Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” (Schocken, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Ch...

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David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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,...

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Filip Slaveski, “The Soviet Occupation of Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 annihilat...

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Natan M. Meir, "Stepchildren of the Shtetl" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Sener Akturk, “Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 s...

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Will Smiley, "From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ca...

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Anne Gorsuch, “All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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’...

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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) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 hum...

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Anna Fishzon, “Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siecle Russia” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pretty much everyone understands what is called the “Cult of Celebrity,” particularly as it manifests itself in the arts. It’s a mentality that privileges the actor over the act, the singer over th...

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Sonya Bilocerkowycz, "On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine" (Mad Creek Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Olga Gershenson, “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe” (Rutgers UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fifty years of Holocaust screenplays and films -largely unknown, killed by censors, and buried in dusty archives – come to life in Olga Gershenson‘s The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish ...

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Nathan Spannaus, "Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abu Nasr Qursawi and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 reli...

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Waitman Beorn, “Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust is an old one. What might be called the “received view” until recently was that while a small number of German army units took part in anti-Jew...

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Iraj Bashiri, "The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan" (Lexington Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 perso...

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Denis Kozlov, “Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Russia’s collective memory, the Stalin terror is often remembered and referred to by its most grueling year: “1937.” Following Stalin’s death and the shocking revelations about his regime expose...

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Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (B...

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Peter Savodnik, “The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we...

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Diana T. Kudaibergenova, "Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 National...

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Steven Usitalo, “The Invention of Mikhail Lomonosov: A Russian National Myth” (Academic Studies Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mikhail Lomonosov is a well known Russian figure. As poet, geographer, and physicist, Lomonosov enjoyed access to the best resources that 18th century Russia had to offer. As a result, his contribu...

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Gregory Afinogenov, "Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 hi...

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Robert Gellately, “Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War” (Knopf, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual eli...

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Scott Levi, "The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia" (U Pittsburgh, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 C...

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Kate Brown, “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland,...

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Francine Hirsch, "Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Univers...

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Kees Boterbloem, “Moderniser of Russia: Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you can read in any Russian history textbook, a series of seventeenth-century tsars culminating in Peter the Great attempted to “modernize” Russia. This is not false: the Romanovs did initiate a...

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David Shimer, "Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference" (Knopf, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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'...

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Wendy Z. Goldman, “Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A period of mass repression and terror swept through the Soviet Union between the years of 1936-39. Following the shocking Kirov assassination and show trials of alleged factory saboteurs, paranoia...

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Archie Brown, "The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Donald J. Raleigh, “Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Cold War was experienced by millions around the world. For many, Soviets were the enemies, and nuclear war the threat. For millions more, however, the Cold War enemies and threats were differen...

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Mark Vincent, "Criminal Subculture in the Gulag" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 So...

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John Earl Haynes, et al., “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For decades, the American Right and Left argued about the degree to which the KGB infiltrated the U.S. political and scientific establishment. The Right said “A lot”; the Left said “Much less than ...

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Laura A. Dean, "Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia" (Policy Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 o...

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Ben Judah, “Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Debates about the nature of Putin’s rule abound. Is Putin a hard fisted authoritarian? Is he the master of the power vertical? An arbiter of competing clans? Or something else? In his Fragile Empir...

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Catherine Belton, "Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West" (FSG, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Pe...

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Barbara Engel, “Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Divorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual ...

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Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Vladimir Alexandrov, “The Black Russian” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vladimir Alexandrov‘s new book The Black Russian (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) tells the epic and often tragic story of Fredrick Bruce Thomas, an African American born to recently freed slaves, wh...

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Paul D’Anieri, "Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Russ...

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Eric Lohr, “Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it’s said they don’t much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr‘s new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard Universit...

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Why Did the Allies Win World War One? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Louis Menashe, “Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies” (New Academia, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did you see one of Eisenstein’s masterpieces “The Battleship Potemkin” and “Alexander Nevsky” in a Russian or Soviet history class? Were you captivated by Tarkovsky’s brooding long shots in movies ...

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Martina Cvajner, "Soviet Signoras: Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration" (U Chicago, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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: Pers...

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William Risch, “The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the Cold War few Westerners gave much thought to Western Ukraine, and its main city, Lviv. It was what happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg that really mattered, and so if one looked on a m...

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Alexander Gendler, "Khurbm 1914-1922: Prelude to the Holocaust" (Varda Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Meredith Roman, “Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier “tore off on a whole long lecture” that the Senat...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2008-04-18T19:33:10

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2008-04-18T19:33:10

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Podcasts by New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

All episodes

On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" from 2022-08-23T08:00

On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" from 2022-08-23T08:00

Stanislav Kulchytsky, "The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor" (CIUS Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frank Ellis, “The Damned and the Dead: The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists” (University Press of Kansas, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia” (Harvard University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Lee, "The Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge, April–May 1945" (Greenhill Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russell Martin, “A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage in Early Modern Russia” (NIU Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrei Kushnir, "Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir" (Academic Studies Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dan Healey, “Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939” (Northern Illinois UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas Smith, “Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Coryne Hall, "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust" (Amberley, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Brandenberger, “Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin” (Yale UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elissa Bemporad, "Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Steinberg, “St. Petersburg: Fin de Siecle” (Yale UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Iva Glisic, "The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930" (NIU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Lenoe, “The Kirov Murder and Soviet History” (Yale University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anne Lounsbery, "Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Collier, “Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brendan McGeever, "Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Sakwa, “The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tatiana Linkhoeva, "Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melissa Caldwell, “Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Monaghan, "Dealing with the Russians" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna Krylova, “Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karen Petrone, “The Great War in Russian Memory” (Indiana UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Danielle Ross, "Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia" (Indiana UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen White, “Understanding Russian Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karl Qualls, "Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Francis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jan Plamper, “The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alexander Watson, "The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeffrey Mankoff, “Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevin O'Connor, "The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga" (NIUP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeff Sahadeo, “Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1903” (Indiana UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael David-Fox, “Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941” (OUP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Artemy Kalinovsky, “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shoshana Keller, "Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jarrod Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa” (Indiana UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Origins of World War One from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frank Wcislo, “Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy: A Russia Life” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Loretta E. Kim, "Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Gentes, “Exile, Murder, and Madness in Siberia, 1823-1861” (Palgrave, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Darra Goldstein, "Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aliide Naylor, "The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front" (I.B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Barnes, “Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Richard Pomfret, "The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Weiler, “Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform” (Lynne Rienner, 2004) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Taroutina, "The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams” (W.W. Norton, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Louis Siegelbaum, “Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile” (Cornell UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abdullah Qodiriy, "Bygone Days" (Bowker, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Treisman, “The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev” (Free Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Yatskova, “Miss Gulag” (Neihausen-Yatskova & Vodar Films, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Gamsa, “Manchuria: A Concise History” (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Magnus Nordenman, "The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North" (Naval Institute Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas Rogers, “The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laurie Manchester, “Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia” (NI UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marlene Laruelle, "The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan" (Lexington Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Ward, “Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism” (Pittsburgh UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393