Featured
This just in: Boris Berezovsky is still dead
Two days after his body was found by a bodyguard in his Berkshire home, Boris Berezovsky shocks the blogosphere by remaining deceased.
Forcing Consensus: A Show Debate in the Early GDR
Whereas Stalin’s show trials featured confessions and executions, the aim of the show debate was to persuade the institute’s council of party members at the institute, the party-group to drop...
How the Female Russian Nihilist Became a Tenacious Archetype
A sensational story about a Russian nihilist bomb plot gripped the imagination of the French reading public for a week in the autumn of 1906. The biggest mass-circulation newspapers published...
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...
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...
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...
What Immigration Is and Isn't (An Immigrant Story)
English is all around me, with Russian I have to go out of my way to find a living Russian language.
The Leviathan and the Gutter: Gefter.ru interviews NYU's Mikhail Iampolski (Part II)
It’s all very sad, I think. The capacity for thought has already disappeared, and now dignity is gradually being snuffed out, but I don’t see any solutions. People still depend...
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.
The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities
Among the crucial questions rarely discussed in the US political-media establishment: What is the role of the “neo-fascist” factor in Kiev’s “anti-terrorist” ideology and military operations?
A Day at the Zoo in Soviet Picture-Book Land
"For Eight Years They Sat There in Cellars Under Fire!" — On One False Narrative About Ukraine
Some of my Russian Facebook friends are seriously discussing the Putin narrative that claims that, over the past eight years, the Ukrainian military has subjected civilian populations in the so-called...
Fictional Gays and Real Meteorites in Chelyabinsk
Chelyabinsk is about the last place in Russian you’d expect to find any kind of gay movement, and comedians have taken advantage of this.
Reenactments of 1917 in Film: Conference Recap
In collaboration with NYU’s Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Cinema Studies, the Jordan Center welcomed speakers and guests November 17-18 for “Reenactments of 1917 in Film.” As...
Cold Snap (Part II): Russian Film after Leviathan
An auteurist orientation, therefore, is neither good nor bad, but it is certainly mismatched to an industry—especially during periods of robust growth—in which so-called “spectators’ cinema” [zritel'skoe kino] is in...
Coalition or Cold War with Russia?
This spreading threat cannot be contained, diminished, or, still less, eradicated without Russia.
Summer Reading Series: Mikhail Zoshchenko’s “Sentimental Tales,” Part V
Before long Apollo Semyonovich Perepenchuk sank deep into poverty.
Interview with Sean Guillory, Part I
"The sorry state of public discourse around Russia has led me to try to provide the most eclectic range of topics on my podcast. The idea is to show my...
The Baboon's War
There once was an island, and on that island grew a Coconut Grove. And in that Grove lived a Baboon — a very greedy Baboon.
Mikhail Lermontov Part I: The Original Hipster
If Russian literature is a history of Pushkin imitators, then Lermontov came first, and he’s still the best. Many have tried imitate Pushkin’s style, but few went as far to...