Featured
Theater Review: Jonathan Leaf's "Pushkin," Now Playing at New York's Sheen Center
When I saw the Sheen Center's new Pushkin play (which runs until August 25), I came aware of both the reverence I should have felt were I Russian and the...
How the Soviet Experience Shapes Crime and Punishment in Russia Today
Russia has been justifiably called a Mafia-state. Yet for two centuries it had been making steady progress toward the rule of law and a predictable, impartial, accessible, and fair criminal...
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...
Upcoming Columbia Event
In Search of Empire: the 400th Anniversary of the House of Romanov February 14th-16th 2013 Co-sponsored by the Bakhmeteff Archive, the Harriman Institute, the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia...
Snowden in Moscow: The Interview
"I’ve been recognized every now and then. It’s always in computer stores. It’s something like brain associations, because I’ll be in the grocery store and nobody will recognize me. Even...
Talking with Scholarly Publishers (Historia Nova Prize Part II)
What advice would you give a young scholar when submitting a manuscript to your press?
Fandorin Meets Dracula (WQ 13)
There is precious little bloodsucking in Akunin’s oeuvre, which I’ve long considered a serious flaw.
Stories Not About Putin, or Masha Gessen Bikes to the Kremlin
Authoritarian Fun Fact: when the political culture and mechanisms of power all revolve around one man (sexist language intended), the accidental consequences of that man's actions can be both disheartening...
Viy as Dracula: Selling “Russian literature” One More Time
Just imagine the clash of civilizations when the two parties drink together; eventually, the rational Englishman starts seeing irrational things—all the ugly monsters, demons, and witches that contemporary CGI can...
The Ballad of Sonya and Louie: An Immigrant Story
I had thought my family was Russian, but then when I went to college, I found out we were just Jews.
Russia is Attacking Western Liberal Democracies
Russia is engaging in an orchestrated, strategic campaign whose purpose is to erode liberal democracy in Europe and the United States.
Our Pushkin?
Pushkinists know that today is a holiday. The first graduating class of the Tsarkoe Selo Lyceum annually celebrated the anniversary of their first day of school by gathering, drinking, and...
The Central Asian Antigay Movement in Global and Local Perspective
Russia, in short, did not drive Kyrgyzstan’s anti-LGBTI upswell any more than Moscow propelled the upswell of anti-LGBTI rhetoric at Virginia school board meetings. What political entrepreneurs in Russia did...
Very Nice! (Russia's Alien Nations)
Borat exemplifies a particular kind of Soviet and post-Soviet shame
The Fandom Menace (Russia's Alien Nations)
Nationalism as fandom