New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

For all the American media coverage of President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia, what’s rarely heard are the voices of Russians themselves. Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary (East View Press, 2018), edited by Laurence Bogoslaw, surveys the range of opinions about Trump that have appeared in the Russian... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

From Stalin’s inner circle to Soviet dinner menus, the small nation of Georgia had a remarkable influence on the politics and culture of the USSR. Erik Scott, author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (Oxford University Press, 2016), traces how Georgians came to occupy... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his most important compositions including the Symphony of Psalms and Persephone.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Jonathan Daly is a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His newest book Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018), provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the criminal justice system in Russia from the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. Drawing from more than a decade of research of various ethnographic and historical sources, Roudakova approaches truth as a social... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important senses not Russians. There are Ingush,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Catholicism. A Russian noblewoman and Catholic convert living in Paris in the early to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In 2013, when the Russian State Duma passed a law banning the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors, some rushed to boycott Russian vodka. In Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017), Dan Healey provides historical context for the law and cautions against the easy application of recent... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Kimberly speaks with Dr. Christopher J. Lee about his newest book A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition (Lexington Books, 2017). A Soviet Journey was a travel memoir written by South African writer and anti-apartheid activist, Alex La Guma. The memoir describes La Guma’s experiences in Soviet Central Asia, Siberia,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2018), Mikhail Epstein offers strategies on how to engage with texts in the current continuum. Based on the subversion of linearity as a principle component of chronological construction of literary phenomena, Epstein’s new book emphasizes the idea... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from the environmental experience of Soviet communism? These are just some of the questions motivating historian Andy... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Kevin Bartig’s new book Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores multiple facets of one of the most famous film scores of the twentieth century, as well as the cantata Prokofiev adapted from the original music. Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Alexander Nevsky, about a thirteenth-century Russian national hero... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Brill, 2017), Susan Smith Peter discusses the origins of the creation of distinct provincial identities in European Russia and how this process was encouraged and even promoted by the autocracy as a way to gain information about the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

If any place (outside contemporary North Korea) can be called “Totalitarian,” it would be Stalinist Russia. Under the “Greatest Genius of All Time,” Soviet “citizens” enjoyed no free speech, no free press, and no free assembly. The one-party Bolshevik dictatorship deprived them of their voices, their property, their livelihoods, their... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Scrupulously studied and researched, the data that the author presents reflect social and political changes that have... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In The Last Days of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2016), Joshua Rubenstein recounts the events surrounding the dictator’s death and the sociopolitical vacuum it opened up at... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Before the revolution that—very unexpectedly—brought them to power, the Bolsheviks lived nomadic lives. They were always on the run from the authorities. That the authorities were always after them is not really a mystery, for all the Bolsheviks really wanted to do was take their authority away. What they would... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (Encounter Books, 2017), written by legal scholar Stephen F. Williams, uses a biographic account of the life and career of Vasily Maklakov to explore issues of legality and rule of law in Tsarist Russia from 1905, following the promulgation... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In the fourth podcast of Arguing History, Mark D. Steinberg and Michael David-Fox discuss the factors driving the Russian Revolutions of 1917. They consider how what is often remembered as two distinct events was in fact a multitude of different revolutions, reflecting the various goals of a diverse range of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles, shaping states and nations. A multifaceted nature of language is emphasized and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Eric Lee‘s The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (Zed Books, 2017) is about the Georgian Social Democratic/ Menshevik Revolution that took place in 1918. As the world celebrates the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lee uses this book to explore what happened in Georgia, where the Social Democrats /Mensheviks, led... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

At the close of the nineteenth century, Europe was teeming with apocalyptic dreams of destruction and renewal. In Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), Rebecca Mitchell traces how in late imperial Russia, music came to be seen as a transcendent force... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into the nature of writing but also into the contextual environments that happen to shape... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Julia Mickenberg tells the story of women both famous and unknown, committed radicals and adventure seekers who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. She explores their motivations and experiences, as well... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to be performing during the protests led to her study of immigration, integration and identity in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The title of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2017), tells you that this is a revisionist history, which argues that the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) were not merely brief explosions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans? What kind of venues host punk shows? Punk musician and writer Franz Nicolay explores these questions and much more in his Humorless Ladies of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Soviet Union under Stalin was very repressive. You could get sent to a GULAG (if not shot) for casually telling an “anti-Soviet” joke or pilfering ubiquitous “state property.” But, as James Heinzen points out in his excellent book The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953 (Yale University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. William Prigge analyzes how “nationalist” communists came to power in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Rebecca Gould‘s Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first existing comparative study of Chechen, Dagestani and Georgian literatures and a major contribution to the study of the cultures of the Caucasus. The book examines literary representations of anticolonial violence in the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European University Press, 2014), Melissa Chakars reveals not only how Soviet policies disrupted traditional Buryat ways of life, but also how Buryats adapted to build a modern educated society in the post-war period. Ethnic Buryats were proportionally over-represented... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure culture. Gleb Tsipursky undertakes an unexpected approach to illuminate some aspects of the USSR history, which have been previously disregarded. Describing leisure activities that were... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable (Routledge, 2017), a study of the transformations of the image of Chechnya in the Russian public sphere, Julie Wilhelmsen performs a post-structuralist revision of the Copenhagen schools concept of securitization a process by which state actors transform subjects into matters of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, complicates the traditional narrative of Jewish religious insularity within Imperial Russia in her new book on converts... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional representation of Russian women and village life in scholarship. Grounding the imagery of a Russian woman in the network of her relationship... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime published by Northern Illinois University Press. He focuses on the 20... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Victor Taki’s Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (I.B. Taurus, 2016) invites the reader to explore the captivating story of the relationship of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the 19th century, and highlights the role the Oriental world played in the shaping of Russian national idea... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. Platt structures his book around the dichotomy of what he sees as two different approaches to temporalities and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies