On a day when the news was silent about why the stock market had failed to open, and as protests were unfolding in major cities across Russia, watching ballet on TV felt profoundly dissonant.

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The Primary Party Organization was neither an instrument of managerial despotism nor a dysfunctional bureaucracy that workers exploited to deflect pressures on their living standards. Instead, it was a complicated, contradictory institution that both extended the reach of state power over society, and limited the control of the state over the concrete implementation of policy.

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For authoritarian regimes, however, investing in universities also poses a risk. Cultivating a robust system of higher education may facilitate the development of a middle class and politically active youth movements that may be inclined to advocate for democracy.

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In my recent experience leading English classes for Ukrainian refugees, I have noticed students fluidly moving between Russian and Ukrainian. This phenomenon is well-documented across Ukraine, and there’s no need to rehash it here. I’ll admit, however, to being surprised: wouldn’t war with Russia, the symbol of the Russian language (and home of its institutions, such as the Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language), produce antipathy toward it, at the very least? And wouldn’t this antipathy lead people to abandon Russian en masse in order to assert their Ukrainian patriotism and difference?

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For many of us who feel complicit—through language, citizenship, or background—in the crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine right now, it feels necessary to reassess the metaphors we have been using in discourse and fiction. Do the figures of power that these metaphors represent preserve and prescribe the status quo (which does not even seem to be “just” a status quo anymore)?

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Roberts never defends Stalin or his crimes, but he does affirm Stalin’s rationality, arguing that Stalin’s actions can be understood in light of his ideas. His steadfast pursuit of communist utopia, as expressed in Marxist ideology and the politics of class warfare, produced the politics of purge and famine that defined the Soviet 1930s. It was political principle, not personal psychosis, that led Stalin to act as he did.

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In a years-long attempt to reassert its influence in neighboring post-Soviet countries, and secure its borders from the West, Moscow has consistently been creating enemies along its borders. As of 2022, Russia is more than ever surrounded by hostile nations. The reason is Moscow’s unsustainable foreign policy, which creates more adversaries than allies, and thereby contradicts its strategic interests in the long run. 

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Some two decades ago, Serbs had bombs dropped on their heads, just like the Ukrainians right now. Yet some have displayed an obvious lack of sympathy for the current experience of ordinary Ukrainians. The silence of missing compassion is deafening, drowned out only by the voices supporting Putin.

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With seventy percent of shooting complete and a budget shortfall of 235 million rubles, “Empire V”‘s filmmakers turned to a novel form of fundraising: cryptocurrency. An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of “Bablos” tokens—named for the money-like substance that the vampires in Pelevin’s novel consume instead of blood—offered fans the chance to partake in a “first of its kind” cinematic crowdfunding project.

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If the first liberal arts academies in East Slavic lands swiftly attained a reputation for academic excellence, and were endorsed by both Church and state authorities, why was their introduction stalled until the seventeenth century?

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