New Books In Russian And Eurasian Studies

Blog Post: In Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Ethan Pollock discusses one of life’s basic questions—How do people get clean?—in a way that embeds those everyday practices into a sophisticated historical context.  From legends about medieval Kievan rulers, to everyday Russians in the Soviet era, the banya has been a consistent part of everyday life. While its existence has been continuous, the meanings assigned to the banya have been at once diffuse, contradictory, and reflective of prevailing cultural and political trends and questions. Dr. Pollock’s book addresses these themes and more, in this fascinating historical survey. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarian

Alexander Morrison’s study of the conquest of Central Asia offers new perspectives on a topic long obscured by misleading grand narratives. Based on years of research in several countries, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge UP, 2020) not only outright debunks many of these older narratives, but also provides us a detailed military and diplomatic history of the conquest, one which pays specific attention to the contingency and logistics of its multi-stage process. Based on an enormous number of Russian-language materials and supplemented with Persianate chronicles, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian and Central Asian history, military history, or the history of colonialism and comparative empires. 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 familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell University Press, 2019), Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom

Roger Reese’s recent book, The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917 (University of Kansas, 2019), takes a deep dive into the internal workings of the Russian army. Focusing particularly on relations between officers and the rank and file, as well as on divisions within the officer corps itself, Reese notices that conditions for soldiers did gradually improve, over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, these improvements for the rank and file, and the gradual transition to an army based on merit rather than on past traditions of aristocratic honor, proved unable to withstand the pressures of World War One. In this context, breakdown of discipline and loyalty in the army then played an important role in the end of the Russian monarchy. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociologica

In Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940 (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Anne Eakin Moss examines idealized relationships between women in Russian literature and culture from the age of the classic Russian novel to socialist realism and Stalinist film. Her book reveals how the idea of a community of women—a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest—originates in the classic Russian novel, fuels mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumes a place of privilege in Stalinist culture, especially cinema. Rethinking the significance and surprising continuities of gender in Russian and Soviet culture, Eakin Moss relates this tradition to Western philosophies of community developed by thinkers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jean-Luc Nancy. She shows that in the 1860s friendship among women came to figure as an organic national collectivity in works such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a mo

In his latest authoritative book, Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), while also putting his own magisterial career into sharp perspective. Brumfield updates and interprets several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s iconic images with his own late twentieth and early twenty-first century versions, and the result is an extraordinary study of two photographers and two Russias. Prokudin-Gorsky was a polymath, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, and eminently talented photographer, who pursued an over-arching goal of bringing color to the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky combined a strong grounding in both the science and the arts, which gave him easy mastery over the technology. But he was also a gifted entrepreneur, able to see the vast mainstr

Barely a month after the riot on the Capitol Building, the United States is no more adept at fending off foreign information operations than it was four years ago, when “fake news” and “information operations” became household terms. Why has the United States been so slow to adapt, and what can it do to reverse the tide? In How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2020), Nina Jankowicz, a Disinformation Fellow at the Wilson Center, explores how five central and eastern European countries have fared in their battles against Russian information operations. Though Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic still have their struggles, each has lessons to offer the United States—if only it would listen. On this episode, I talk with Nina about what makes Russian information operations so effective, how victims should repair their information ecosystems, and what Alexei Navalny can teach the West about waging information battles against the Kremlin. Pl

In Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 2021), Professor Katherine Zubovich of the University of Buffalo of the State University of New York takes us into one of the more turbulent eras in the 874-year history of Moscow, the decades long effort to transform Russia’s ancient second city into the triumphant capital of the new socialist state. Before the revolutions of 1917, Moscow was known for its “forty times, forty churches,” and by these distinctive onion-shaped cupolas, which once soared above the two and three-story skyline, Muscovites navigated their city. Today, many of those churches are only distant memories and the new markers of the city’s horizons are seven soaring skyscrapers, affectionately known as “Stalin’s wedding cakes,” or simply as the “vysotniye” or the “tall buildings.” Two are ministries, two are hotels, two are elite residential buildings, and one houses Moscow State University. Zubovich uses these iconic buildings as the

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin's regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition. To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a "counter-intelligensia." It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) shows how certain forms of

The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Michigan State University Press, 2020) is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. Khatchig Mouradian challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor. He ultimately argues that, despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress u

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Yiddish speaking immigrants actively participated in the American Socialist and labor movement. They formed the milieu of the hugely successful daily Forverts (Forward), established in New York in April 1897.  In Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Academic Studies Press, 2020), Gennady Estraikh describes how the Forverts’ editorial columns and bylined articles―many of whose authors, such as Abraham Cahan and Sholem Asch, were household names at the time―both reflected and shaped the attitudes and values of the readership. Estreikh focuses on the newspaper’s reaction to the political developments in the home country. Profound admiration of Russian literature and culture did not mitigate the writers’ criticism of the czarist and Soviet regimes. Gennady Estraikh is a Clinical Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Previously he wa

What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do local residents and colonial settlers manage to live side-by-side in new imperial arrangements? In Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45 (University of British Columbia Press 2019), Bill Sewell examines how Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other civilians in northeast Asia sought to inscribe Manchuria as theirs, and how Japanese imperial architects and civilians in Changchun engaged in diverse empire-building efforts that transformed the city into a modern urban capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell argues that "Constructing empire was a mundane and popularly imagined affair as well as a diplomatic, political, and military one." Although studies on empire tend to focus on elite decisions or actions, Sewell contends that "popular dimensions must also be considered to grasp fully empire's nature.

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state. As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grou

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries. The international community coul

F. B. Chang and S. T. Rucker-Chang's Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles the movements for - and expressions of - equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights and paradigms in Romani studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2020, Oxford University Press published a second edition of Serhy Yekelchyk’s Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2020). This series is based on the reference format that allows to concisely present the most essential information on both generic and most recent acute issues. One will find in this addition answers to the questions pertaining to Kyivan Rus, the Cossacks, as well as the notorious Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654. In addition to this information, the book contains chapters that concisely describe both the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. These chapters are followed by inquiries into Russia’s occupation of the Crimea and the Donbas war which is supported by the Kremlin. Yekelchyk emphasizes that the Euromaidan was, on the one hand, the Ukrainians’ response to the corrupt regime which was being normalized by Yanukovych and his supporters; on the other hand, it was also a response to the turn to Russia, which Yanukovych promoted and supported: “Popular dissatisfaction with the corrupt

Olena Palko’s Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic Press 2020) offers an intriguing investigation that zeroes in on the intersection of history and literature, politics and literature. The main focus of the book is comprised of two iconic figures in the history of Ukrainian literature: Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Khvyl’ovyi. Through a complex and multilayered investigation of archival materials and historical documents, Olena Palko further advances the understanding of the formative years in the history of Soviet Ukraine. The two protagonists around whom the book seems to revolve offer additional venues for unraveling the highly entangled history not only of Ukraine under the Soviet Union but also of the Soviet Union itself. The theoretical framework of the book allows to consider multiple developments and influences that contributed to the specificity of the Soviet establishment in Ukraine. As the author of the book emphasizes, the conversation abou

Myroslav Shkandrij’s Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory (Academic Studies Press, 2019) offers an insight into the development of the Ukrainian avant-garde, a topic which still remains unjustifiably understudied. The book is an important contribution to the reevaluation of the artistic legacies of the world-renowned artists: Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, Mykhailo Boichuk, Vadym Meller, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Dziga Vertov. As the title of the book prompts, the focus is made on the Ukrainian heritage and background that the above-mentioned artists manifested in and through their works. Here Shkandrij initiates an intervention into the scholarship that for many years dismissed the Ukrainian contribution when discussing the avant-garde development. Drawing attention to national and ethnic choices that the artists used to make, but which happened to be silenced or ignored in the subsequent critical reviews and investigations, the book, however, does not suggest to embrace a one-sided approach

Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz once again immerses us into the world of ballet and Akim Volynsky with his book And Then Came Dance: The Women Who Led Volynsky to Ballet's Magic Kingdom (Oxford UP, 2019). In this interview, Rabinowitz discusses his path to this book which is a lovely addition to his first book on Volynsky  as well as some sage advice in publishing manuscripts.   Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical da

Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can conspiracy theories communicate about those who engage with them and about those who are this way or the other implicated?  With Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Keith A. Livers explores the conspiracy theory on the theoretical and practical levels. The book offers a solid background that helps historicize the conspiracy preoccupations in Russia. By connecting the conspiracy manifestations in Russian culture across the centuries, Livers successfully demonstrates how deeply engrained the conspiracy culture is in Russia. The book analyzes in detail a diverse cultural material that includes, among others, Pelevin’s and Bekmambetov’s works: by combining chronologically diverse material, Livers looks into and dissects the mechanism of the persistent sus