Pelevin’s werewolf tale uses the metaphor of a human-beast hybrid to describe a place beyond the strict binaries of (post-)socialism.

Continue reading...

Why are the claims and actions of Japan in the 1930s and Russia today so similar, despite vast differences between eras, cultural backgrounds, and underlying economic structures?

Continue reading...

The Russian military is deliberately targeting key farming-related assets and facilities with the aim of inflicting short- and long-term harm. Moreover, by blockading the Black and Azov seas, Russia controls how much Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and other food commodities reach global markets.

Continue reading...

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.

Continue reading...

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.

Continue reading...

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.

Continue reading...

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

Continue reading...

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.

Continue reading...

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.

Continue reading...

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.

Continue reading...