Characterized by informality, a tendency to personalize official relationships, and, perhaps above all, by a desire to assert strength and power through a display of manliness, Soviet diplomacy often required a ritual demonstration of marksmanship skills and physical agility in order to challenge and rewrite the image of Soviet leaders as aging and inept apparatchiks.

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Despite the constantly shifting landscape of women’s involvement and engagement with Orthodoxy and the Church, those seeking to reconcile female religious subjectivity and current Church dogmas—particularly as articulated by reactionary clerics—continue to face difficulties.

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Flagging commitment to masculinist patriotism, alongside resurgent patriarchal peasant ideals, may have accelerated mass desertion from the Russian Imperial Army in the First World War and hastened the revolutions of February and October 1917.

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My chapter draws on Skovoroda’s metaphysics and epistemology to articulate a conception of Dostoevsky’s Zosima as a Russian Socrates.

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In May 2022, while wrapping up edits on my contribution to Socrates in Russia amidst a stream of dreadful news from the Ukrainian front, I learned that the eighteenth-century estate where Skovoroda spent his final years, and nearby which he was laid to rest, was destroyed by Russian air strikes. Hryhoriy Skovoroda is still here, invisibly, in our cultural memory. Our world has once again become the one that Skovoroda despised, described as “flesh and whips and tears.” No to war.

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The story of Socrates has long been a vessel for interpretation. Philosophers, writers, and artists in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Soviet and post-Soviet space have actively participated in this process, creating their own Socrateses for their respective eras and environments.

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Central Asia’s current process of Latinization is strongly linked to the legitimization of power, the construction of postcolonial identity, and the search for geopolitical balance between Russia and Turkey. At the same time, each state had its own agenda.

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One striking strategy employed by Ukrainian writers across various genres is what literary historian Kate McLoughlin calls “parapolemics”—that is, focus on the spatial or temporal “outskirts” of war.

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My mapping research showed that only 13 percent of all POW camps in the USSR were located in Siberia. Based on very rough figures for camp populations, it seems that the few Siberian camps also did not house the majority of the POW population. In theory, then, Siberian camps in particular should not define the majority POW experience. Why, then, did so many Germans tell me that their relatives had been in Siberia, specifically? Why was Siberian captivity the dominant trope among my respondents?

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Putin’s worldview owes less to apocalyptic fascisms like Nazism than to his experiences as a young man working in the Soviet intelligence service. At base, he is a conservative whose heart belongs more to the Soviet 1970s than to Imperial Russia.

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