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Digital Authoritarianism at War: Controlling Russia’s Information Space
The unprecedented sanctions and the exodus of many international technology companies from Russia is understandable, but their absence risks ceding the information space to the Kremlin. Cutting off Russian users...
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...
Gender Trouble in The Double: Masculinity in Dostoevsky’s Novella and Ayoade’s Film
Right from the outset, Ayoade’s film establishes the presence of a masculine hierarchy.
Exodus: Russian Repression and Social “Movement”
In past research, we identified several broad trends in Russian civil society prior to the war, which we labeled enduring, evaporating, and adapting forms of activism. These terms captured, respectively,...
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...
Crime and Punishment in Today's Russia
Almost 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, crime and policy responses to it are critical to understanding the political dynamics of the region.
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...
Excerpt From Colleen Lucey's "Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia," Part I
The Great Reforms, initiated by Tsar Alexander II in the aftermath of Russia’s crushing defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), brought significant changes to the country’s social and legal institutions...
Ethical Questions in Researching the Religious Underground in Romania's Secret Police Archives, Part I
In their effort to curtail the clandestine practice of religion, the secret police produced a thorough database of names, places, biographies, activities, and networks. It created one of the most...
Ethical Questions in Researching the Religious Underground in Romania's Secret Police Archives, Part II
Several immediately identifiable problems arose in our talks: the problem of questioning the authority of the canonical historical narrative of the church elders based on documents that were created by...
Excerpt from "Sex Work in Contemporary Russia: A Cultural Perspective," Part II
The sex industry in Russia is multiethnic, with scholars estimating a significant number of female migrants (from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia) working as sex workers, especially in...
On Not Talking about Gender in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
As a graduate student in Russian literature, I wrote a dissertation and eventually a book about the body and the grotesque in nineteenth-century realism. As I look back, I can’t...
Technology, Ideology and Culture: Legacies of Soviet-African Relations
Historians and anthropologists discuss the impacts and legacies of Soviet-African relations of the 20th century.