Featured
Messy Things Betwixt and Between
"Because I have practiced law, I have seen what can potentially hobble a lawyer: namely, her insistence that things be tidy and fall within set parameters of unyielding doctrines. In...
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...
Distorting Russia: How the US Media Misrepresent Sochi, Putin, and Ukraine
American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.
Money Is Not Enough: The Role of Economic Incentives in Cooperative Nonproliferation Initiatives
The current main threats to Russian nuclear materials are determined insiders, coupled with a questionable commitment by Moscow to ensuring sustainability and improving security culture.
Open Letter in Support of DOXA
We demand that the charges against Natalia Tyshkevich, Vladimir Metyolkin, Armen Aramyan, and Alla Gutnikova be immediately dropped and that all four be released, and we express our wholehearted support...
Experts debate The Global History of Sport in the Cold War - Day 1
On October 23, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia opened the New York session of “The Global History of Sport in the Cold War,” a...
Where Does “South” Start in Central Asia? A Young Notion in the Making
Central Asian Studies is still considered a relatively young discipline, so its relationship to the Global South is a work in progress rather than a solidified trend. Yet as notions...
Very Nice! (Russia's Alien Nations)
Borat exemplifies a particular kind of Soviet and post-Soviet shame
“But We Are Always at Home”: Disability Activism, Solidarity, and Staying at Home in Russia
Ivan Bakaidov describes himself as a "web activist with cerebral palsy." In March 2020, as Covid-19 lockdown measures were announced in his hometown of Saint Petersburg, Bakaidov launched the hashtag...
The Final Battle between Good and Neutrality?
Today, the Leninskii District court in Kirov (what would those two Bolsheviks have made of it all?) is due to see the start of Alexei Navalny’s case, as he faces...
Talking with Yanni Kotsonis about "States of Obligation"
Most people would think taxes and Russia, and then think beatings, unfairness, repression, burden, squalor, and an overbearing state. That’s plain wrong.
Cold Snap (Part I): Russian Film after Leviathan
This essay provides context for roughly thirty-five current and upcoming Russian films, loosely clustered around four topics: directors; debuts; economic health; and dominant industry trends.
Papa Don’t Preach: The Church, Chekhov, and Checks and Balances
Тhis is the sort of story that gives someone like me an illicit thrill, the sense of satisfaction that comes when an institution you distrust once again behaves like a...
Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina
Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.
Passover 1934: An American Jewish Immigrant Story
As historians, most of the time we tell stories about strangers.
The Art of Empathy: An Interview with Russian Graphic Artist Victoria Lomasko
What we need right now in Russia are some hybrid forms of journalism that can address the problems with actually existing journalism.
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part III
Darya Fyodorovna came in and asked whether to serve them dinner, but the co-op operator was loping dreamily around the room. A porcelain Easter egg was hanging in the corner...
The Last Will and Testament of Sergei Esenin: Cultural History of a Mystification, Part II
On October 9th, 1927, already after the tragic death of Duncan herself, and again in the Sunday supplement to Hearst’s newspapers, there appeared yet another article, undoubtedly from the same...
The Last Will and Testament of Sergei Esenin: Cultural History of a Mystification, Part III
In the end, he was released as partially insane, for it was noted that he considered himself an incarnation of the Buddha and believed that he desperately needed money to...
Exegi Monumentum Aere Perennius: Poetry as Memory in Ukraine and Beyond
To say that contemporary literature engages with issues of memory may sound banal. In both prose and poetry, memory is everywhere. And when it comes to scholarship, the "memory boom"...