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Raquel Greene explores construction of race in 1920s Soviet children's literature
The Soviets condemned American slavery and European colonialism as part of their civilizing mission, but their negative assessments of race and specifically Africanness was still informed by the West.
Diana Greene introduces her project on 19th-century Russian women's novels
Why are there no canonical 19th-century Russian women novelists?
Red Goes Green: A Contemporary Ecological Reading of a Soviet Classic
“Pkhents,” written by Abram Tertz, the pen name of Andrei Sinyavsky, is the story of an incognito extraterrestrial stranded in the Soviet Union. He’s not one of the stereotypical little...
Is a Crocodile Longer Than It Is Green? (Russia's Alien Nations)
On the level of logic, you can prove anything.
Reading Nabokov in Greenwich Village (A Pedagogical Field Note*)
Forget Reading Lolita in Tehran--the strangest place I found myself reading Nabokov was in a Russian literature class.
A New Treatise for Russian Renewables
Soviet Bullsh*t and New Russian Spell-Casting (Russia's Alien Nations)
Green is not just the color of the crocodile, it is the color of the money that he conjures out of thin air.
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...
Sofia Perovskaia: Virgin Mother of the Soviet Union
Soviet director Lev Arnshtam’s 1967 film "Sofia Perovskaia" followed the life and death of its eponymous hero, one of the leaders of the terrorist organization that assassinated the Russian tsar...
Falshfasad: Disavowed Infrastructure and Everyday Mate-realism in Wild Capitalist Moscow
On September 17, 2021, the Jordan Center hosted Michał Murawski for the talk “Falshfasad: Disavowed Infrastructure and Everyday Mate-realism in Wild Capitalist Moscow.” Murawski is a Lecturer in Critical Area...
Shaving Eisenstein in Manhattan
An old-fashioned shave, with a razor that in Russian they call “dangerous”; an uncannily private scene performed under an open sky, 800 feet over the sidewalks of the greatest city...
Faces of Fear: An Investigation of Horror Cinema Guided by Leonid Lipavsky (Part I)
There’s something too light and easy about the way blood abandons its home and becomes a self-sufficient, warmish puddle—which may be living or not. Slowly leaving its captivity, it begins...
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part II
Railroad engineers used to refer to tracks in the feminine: “get up on her,” they’d say about the fifth track, or “she’s a tough one, the eleventh.”
New-Generation Warfare and the Fringe Right: How Russian Interference Impacts Right-Wing Extremism in the US, Part II
It is difficult to say whether anyone, Russia included, could purposely engineer another QAnon movement. However, QAnon is a masterclass in manipulating an audience by playing to its expectations and...
The Class of 2021 Looks Back
I remember the truck taking away the last books to the recycling center because we had a strict green policy and I remember the last prof who the cops had...
Azerbaijan: Brutality, Corruption, and yet a Thriving Oil Deal with the EU
The EC’s continued drilling and purchasing of oil does not encourage policy reform in Azerbaijan. Rather, it might make reform impossible.
Hulk Smash Stupid Russia Theories
Monocausal explanations have the virtue of catchiness and the vice of absurdity.
Russia vs. PornHub: Lie Back and Think of the Motherland
Apparently, people would rather do anything else—watch porn, have gay sex—than engage in heterosexual intercourse.
Totalitarian Speech: Putin’s "National Traitors"
If you read the speech for content, it becomes nonsensical.
Re-Imagining Women at War: Kantemir Balagov’s "Beanpole" (2019)
Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s "The Unwomanly Face of War" (1985), an oral history of women who served in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, Kantemir Balagov’s arresting 2019...