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"I heard screams and thought it was important to record" Alexandra Kaluzhskikh, a Young Woman Who Secretly Recorded Audio of Officers Beating Her at a Moscow Police Station, Tells Her Story
A viral audio recording from March 6 — a day that saw both anti-war protests break out across Russia and the arrests of 4,400 people — documented the cruel beating...
“From Another Shore”: Zoom in Russian Literary Studies
Online technologies are, of course, a wonderful tool, but they do not solve the fundamental problems still discernible in our ways of conducting research on literature and culture in Russia...
Russia’s Tricky Opinion Polling: How to Read the Kremlin’s Survey Data on Support for the War in Ukraine
There’s no reason to suspect that “governmental” sociologists are falsifying results outright: a telephone poll conducted between February 28 and March 1 by a group of independent sociologists obtained more...
Open Letter on the Termination of Russian Studies Faculty at Ohio University
Like you, we are wholeheartedly invested in the survival and recovery of higher education in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That recovery depends on the will of universities...
On "Pragmatism" in Soviet and Russian Foreign Policy in the Middle East and Ukraine
"From Messianism to Pragmatism" was the subtitle of a seminal book on Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, published in 1993. The author, renowned scholar Alexey Vasiliev, argued that,...
Unexpected Telegram: The Assassination of a Pro-Kremlin Blogger
Tatarsky's assassination signals that the internet and social networks are now far more than either a haven for anti-Putin oppositional voices or a dark space for Kremlin trolls.
“Red and Brown”: Left-Patriotism in Russia, its Ideology and Social Base, 1993-2021
On February 22, Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia hosted Dr. Alexey Sakhnin, who spoke about the post-Soviet emergence of a political trend consisting of both leftism and right-wing...
Russians are protesting! Why? A Monkey Cage Symposium
Do the protests that took place across 99 cities in Russia on Sunday signify that meaningful change in Russian politics is likely?
Gazebos for the People: A Review Essay of Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops, Vols. I-II
In Herwig’s photos, bus stops blend in and interact with the environment in a way that seems at once intentional and strangely spontaneous.
Announcing: Working Group on 19th-century Russian Culture and Literature
Dostoevsky + 11 time zones: it’s why Russian studies is never going away. Or at least that’s what I was taught in graduate school—and indeed the brilliant cultural production of...
The Eternal Adolescent Savenko: Eduard Limonov, the Hooligan of Russian Literature and Politics, Dies in Moscow at the Age of 77
Eduard Limonov (né Savenko) died in a Moscow hospital on the evening of March 17, at the age of 77.
Navalny, NFTs, and the New Arena for Political Dissent
NFTs or “non-fungible tokens” grant their purchasers ownership over a form of digital media. Like Bitcoin, NFTs are recorded on a blockchain to promote transparency and enhance security. Unlike various...
The Power Practices of Neutrollization and Trickstery in International Digital Society
The design of the two Russia-linked disinformation campaigns exposed by Facebook reveals a peculiar mix of neutrollization and trickstery in action.
Russia’s “Great Game” in the Biden Era
Around an hour long including commercial breaks, "The Great Game" features two hosts, a moderator, and a rotating cast of expert commentators. Rather than just having Russian panelists, the show’s...
James Andrews on how the Moscow metro tells the story of socialism
There were no fortresses, which the Bolsheviks could not overcome.
All Blushes of Autumn: Russia’s Evolving “Red Lines” in the War on Ukraine, Part II
Has the West has already crossed Russia’s red lines? This possibility is unlikely: If Russia’s red lines had been crossed, then Russia would have escalated the conflict.
“C’mon, Turn Swan Lake on!”: The Belarusian Protests of 2020 and Memories of the 1990s
In the 2020 Belarusian demonstrations, references to perestroika and the 1990s abounded. In our recently published article, we showed that recalling the civic activism of 1989-1991 allowed a symbolic return to recent political upheavals in the sense of “picking up where we left off.”
What Were They Thinking? Russian intellectuals interpret the revolution, 1917-1922
Intellectual visions and destroyed dreams of the Revolution.