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What the Soviet Story Teaches Us about Sincerity
The Soviet story is an instructive reminder of the risky dynamics that can unfold between claims to sincere expression, political pressure, and media manipulation.
The Boldino Dream and Its Discontents: Quarantine Stories of Russian Writers
The debate on productivity and isolation from the commitments of daily life revives an old question. Does quarantine boost or rather stifle inspiration? In pondering this question, it helps to...
RT: Influence, Persuasion, and Effects
Without evidence that a previously held attitude has changed as a result of RT’s message, we are not talking about persuasion.
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...
All the Russias: A Transnational Approach
A new approach underpins "Transnational Russian Studies," edited by Andy Byford, Connor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings, just published by Liverpool University Press. Our book opens up the map of Russian...
Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina
Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.
Strongmen, Regular Guys, and Killer Bunnies
If you can remember picking up a copy of the Washington Post on the morning of August 30th, 1979 you may recall the shock of reading a front-page headline announcing...
What counts as corruption?
It would be difficult to argue that the Russian political system is squeaky clean. However, the ways in which the media defines corruption are skewed to classify what may be...
The European Court’s Pro-Gay Ruling Is Great Anti-Gay Propaganda
The ECHR ruling plays right into the Kremlin’s favorite narrative: Western liberalism is not only offensive to traditional values, but also out to get Russia.
Russian Meddling and Fake News, Part One: Sell Me More Diapers and Napkins, Please
“Russian affairs” have became a hot topic taken up by writers who lack the proper expertise or necessary restraint
A Semester of Diaspora at the Jordan Center
What would change if the emigration were renamed and recast as a diaspora, not to keep up with the fashion but to seriously consider what vistas it might open, what...
“Dead Men Don’t Read Tolstoy. A Philip Marlowe Mystery”
“And the students? Didn’t they deserve a little Nabokov?”
Hacking, Heckling, and Conspiracy: Interview with Julia Ioffe
What you need is something we don’t have yet in the case of the election, and might never have, which is somebody from the inside saying, “Here’s how we did...
Russian Studies is Thriving, not Dying
At least in Political Science, Russian studies is alive and well.
The New Russian and the American Psycho (Russia's Alien Nations)
The New Russians of Death Comes by Internet would make excellent cult leaders
"With the Slavonic Tongue One Cannot Be a Scholar": A Revised Assessment of Liberal Arts Culture in East Slavic Lands
If the first liberal arts academies in East Slavic lands swiftly attained a reputation for academic excellence, and were endorsed by both Church and state authorities, why was their introduction...
“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...
Putin: the man who arranges the blocks
The entirely brilliant Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris by Pig With The Face Of A Boy, encapsulates what we could call Russia’s long...
Russia greets the end of the world
For those of you not already consumed by fire in the molten pits or, worse, living without wi-fi, there are no more shopping days left before the Mayan Apocalypse.
Mikhail Lermontov Part II: The Flesh Mop
Borrowed culture, without full cognizance of origin, is still pervasive in much of the hipster culture of Russia.