All the Russias' Blog

A space for news and opinion, sponsored by The Jordan Center

Notes from the Manosphere, Part II

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The “age of rage,” a term dating to the 2010s, when the online culture wars began, is in full flower today. Reading Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” from our contemporary vantage point offers a warning about social fragmentation as a precursor for angry, megalomaniacal fantasies and rising chauvinism. Analyzing the Underground Man’s reactions shows that this often directionless rage is a coping mechanism that compensates for profound feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, despair, and loss of status.

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Notes from the Manosphere, Part I

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“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man,” says the Underground Man, the anti-hero of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel. Narrated by a disillusioned man who fails to fit into societal norms, Notes from Underground exposes the seamy underbelly of Russian society by showcasing the deep resentment certain individuals feel for both themselves and their social “betters.” If this narrative sounds familiar, it is because there is an entire radical movement online centered on this same resentment.

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Were the Liberals Stupid? Liberal Pedagogy in the Design of the Polish Post-Communist Transformation

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Interest in the 1989 post-Communist transformation in Poland has had its ups and downs, but seems to be on the rise again since 2015, when the national-conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, PiS) replaced the liberals at the state’s helm and launched a program of institutional changes under the general heading of a “Good Change.”

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A Push for Digital History in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies

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My research examines German prisoners-of-war (POWs) in the USSR from 1941 to 1956. My dissertation, which I am currently transforming into a book manuscript, treats the reasons that Soviets held POWs for so long after war’s end. On the basis of digital historical methods, I argue that Soviet authorities detained German POWs as a labor source for postwar reconstruction.

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