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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.
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,...
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...
Heroes and Zeros: Ded Moroz and Yuri Olesha
Who's your hero: Yuri Olesha, Ded Moroz, or Tyler Durden?
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....
Exhibition Review: "Gastev: How to Work"
"How To Work," a recent exhibition of early Soviet labor rationalization techniques held at Moscow's Na Shabolovke gallery, raises critical questions about the body's role in the exploitative networks of...
How the Female Russian Nihilist Became a Tenacious Archetype
A sensational story about a Russian nihilist bomb plot gripped the imagination of the French reading public for a week in the autumn of 1906. The biggest mass-circulation newspapers published...
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...
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...
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...
Did Russia Really Just Shut the Door on International Human Rights Law?
When Putin signed this law, the hyperbolic headlines and apparent ignorance of the Russian legal system, not to mention of international law were ... not unexpected.