The Russian state may not be expansionist, but the Russian blogosphere certainly is. To be convinced, all you need to do is go onto LiveJournal (an ironic name for a platform that is nearly dead in the anglophone world, but enjoying a happy afterlife on the Runet).
This should come as no surprise. One can argue that, in addition to inventing the radio and baseball, Russia invented blogging as an analog pastime. After all, what was Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer if not the world's slowest blog?
Among anglophone Russianists, though, blogging is something of a niche phenomenon, at least for those of us who defended our PhDs in the previous millennium. One of the goals of this site is to change that situation a bit. All the Russias aims to produce blog posts that are relatively free of jargon, and that can appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. We Russianists are scattered across the globe, meeting annually at our conventions and sharing our ideas in the slow, but enduring medium of print. The web and social media give us a chance to exchange our thoughts in something closer to real time.
So I am hereby putting out the call: All the Russias welcomes submissions from guest bloggers. The topics are wide open, though I'm making a special plea to hear from specialists in the social sciences. Text posts should be no longer than 1000 words (and ideally, a lot less than that); multimedia submissions are particularly welcome. Posts may be in either English or Russian.
Submissions (to my email address, below) can be in the form of a completed text, or an idea and a writing sample. As editor, I will decide if the post fits, if it needs work, or if it should look for a more appropriate home. In other words, expect to be edited. But since this is a blog rather than an academic journal, peer review comes after publication (in the comments section).
Eliot Borenstein
Editor, All the Russias
eb7@nyu.edu
