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Why no mass protests in Russia? Sociologist Greg Yudin Demonstrated Against the Invasion and Ended up in the Hospital. He Says We’re Living in a New Era.
The whole world is already realizing that February 24 marked the end of an entire huge postwar period, and now we’re living in a new era.
Do anti-corruption campaigns work? David Szakonyi presents evidence from Russia.
Research from Russia suggests that financial disclosure requirements may dissuade corrupt incumbents from seeking re-election.
Employee of the State, Enemy of the State: Teaching English in Moscow
I taught English as a Foreign Language in Moscow between 2019 and 2022, through mass student protests, increasing restrictions on freedom of speech, and, finally, a total break with Western...
Open Letter on the Termination of Russian Studies Faculty at Ohio University
Like you, we are wholeheartedly invested in the survival and recovery of higher education in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That recovery depends on the will of universities...
Solidarity and Shelter: An Immigrant Story
She hid her university diploma, which she would need to start a new life, in a sealed stationary package.
Passover 1934: An American Jewish Immigrant Story
As historians, most of the time we tell stories about strangers.
Malfunctioning Affective Infrastructures: How “Broken” Roads Become Sites of Belonging
Smoothly functioning infrastructures are unnoticeable; they attract attention only when they break down. However, even where infrastructures do not function as intended, they do not necessarily stop working altogether. Instead,...
Sergei Eisenstein and Immersion in Nature
On October 23, 2020, the Jordan Center hosted Joan Neuberger, Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin, for a talk on Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein’s...
Verbal Judo, or How Not to Commemorate International Holocaust Memorial Day
The President's speech was targeted less at Holocaust deniers than at political opponents, who dare to dispute post-Soviet Russia's official scenario of power, which privileges its people's tragic, heroic, and,...
What You Need to Know about the Protests in Poland
We do not expect the protests to dislodge PiS from power, any more than previous demonstrations have.
Medieval Knights in Central Moscow
Billed as “The world’s largest historical event,” Times and Epochs annually attracts hundreds of thousands of battle re-enactors, period-specific artisans, and uncostumed spectators for recreations of everything (or every time)...
Magic and Dragons and Swords, Oh My! Affect and the Medieval
As medieval knights, damsels, and lords descended on central Moscow this summer as part of the annual Times and Epochs festival, many of them saw their activities as specifically apolitical....
"Black Snow [Khara Khaar]": Sakhawood’s Latest Thriller is a Punishing, Yet Gripping Watch
No more than five minutes into Stepan Burnashnev's Black Snow, it becomes clear that Gosha is headed for big trouble. The winter landscape in the Sakha Republic is notoriously unforgiving,...
A Kaleidoscope of Vulnerabilities: Real and Perceived Threats to the Russian State
Russia watchers today generally discuss two critical vulnerabilities: the paradox of the "shrinking space" and putatively catastrophic demographic decline.
Digital Authoritarianism at War: Controlling Russia’s Information Space
The unprecedented sanctions and the exodus of many international technology companies from Russia is understandable, but their absence risks ceding the information space to the Kremlin. Cutting off Russian users...
Exodus: Russian Repression and Social “Movement”
In past research, we identified several broad trends in Russian civil society prior to the war, which we labeled enduring, evaporating, and adapting forms of activism. These terms captured, respectively,...
Reconceiving the Center: Correcting Our View of “Great” Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
By the end of the nineteenth century, fifteen percent of Russia's professional writers were women. If we are now rethinking the canon, a major step is to restore them to...
Sex and Death in Věra Chytilová's "Daisies" (1966)
Questions of individualism, waste, superfluousness, apathy, and death, at the forefront of Chytilová's exploration of social conditions in mid-century Czechoslovakia, remain eminently relevant not only to the country's “communist” period,...
Experts debate The Global History of Sport in the Cold War - Day 1
On October 23, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia opened the New York session of “The Global History of Sport in the Cold War,” a...
Technology, Ideology and Culture: Legacies of Soviet-African Relations
Historians and anthropologists discuss the impacts and legacies of Soviet-African relations of the 20th century.