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A Transnational History of Alaska by Susan Smith-Peter
The decision to sell and buy Alaska was informed by different types of empire each country chose to pursue.
Words Fail Us (Russia's Alien Nations)
The term’s origins had to be foreign, for precisely the same reasons that it is problematic.
Civil Society in 19th-Century Russia
Susan Smith-Peter discusses the shaping of Russian provincial identity amidst the Great Reforms.
New York Public Library Appoints Full-Time Slavic Curator
On October 15, 2018, Bogdan Horbal became the full-time Slavic curator at the New York Public Library. He holds a Ph.D. in history from University of Wrocław in Poland and...
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...
Grassroots Glasnost in East Berlin
On 30 May 1989, a black pictogram of a camera framed in red with a diagonal red slash appeared on two major landmarks in East Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz. The message...
Poor Liza and Russia’s Sentimental Marketplace
On December 11, 2020, the Jordan Center welcomed Prof. Kirill Ospovat for a talk on links between narrative modes and visions of economy that defined Russian sentimentalism. Through a close...
The Hobbit Menace (Russia's Alien Nations)
Fine, we'll be your evil empire.
On Translating the chinari
While their participation in OBERIU offered a crucial period of incubation for their thought and art, it is as chinari that Kharms, Vvedensky, Lipavsky, and Druskin assumed their most influential...
Theater Review: Jonathan Leaf's "Pushkin," Now Playing at New York's Sheen Center
When I saw the Sheen Center's new Pushkin play (which runs until August 25), I came aware of both the reverence I should have felt were I Russian and the...
Upcoming Columbia Event
In Search of Empire: the 400th Anniversary of the House of Romanov February 14th-16th 2013 Co-sponsored by the Bakhmeteff Archive, the Harriman Institute, the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia...
Alexis in America: The Grand Tour of a Russian Grand Duke, 1871-1872
The story of the Grand Duke’s trip is more than just a tale of forbidden love, political intrigue and colorful characters. It also touches upon important developments and events in...
Migration as a Tool for Expansion: Russia’s Geopolitical Carte Blanche Vis-à-vis Eurasian Union
Migration is key to Putin’s geopolitical strategy.
The Class of 2021 Looks Back
I remember the truck taking away the last books to the recycling center because we had a strict green policy and I remember the last prof who the cops had...
Messy Things Betwixt and Between
"Because I have practiced law, I have seen what can potentially hobble a lawyer: namely, her insistence that things be tidy and fall within set parameters of unyielding doctrines. In...
The Road to Serfdom (Russia's Alien Nations)
The New Russian offers a vision of social stratification that uses capitalism as a way station to serfdom
Excerpt from Joanna Stingray's "Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground," Part III
Yuri, Viktor, and I were like The Three Musketeers.
“Spiritual Materialism” and Realist Discourse
"To endlessly describe nothing but priests/ In my opinion, is boring and out of fashion;/ Now you’re writing in a declining family;/ Don’t blow it, L—v."
Excerpt from Timothy K. Blauvelt's "Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba," Part II
The relationship between the central Soviet leadership and the local national elites often resembled that of a grantor with a grantee: before the finalist selection has been made, the grantor...
Excerpt from "Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time," Part I
Only through self-commemoration could the Stalinist memory regime complete the intergenerational chain of memory, assuring individuals that their community possessed not only an ancient past, but also a limitless future.