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Winter Reading Series: Emil Draitser's "Farewell, Mama Odessa," Part II
When the Bolshoi Ballet came to town, Si and Zev printed their own playbills and, at the theater entrance, handed them to the theatergoers. Below the ballet cast of "Sleeping...
How the World Came to Use the Metric System, Part I
It took a 1918 Soviet decree to fully implement the metric system in Russia. But it was tsarist-era academician Boris Jacobi who had brought delegates from all over Europe and...
Don't Look Back: a review of the film My Joy
While lacking the leather-clad explosivity of Road Warrior and the melancholic drone of Red Lights, Sergei Loznitsa puts Russia on the map with his new on-the-road flick, My Joy. Where...
How the World Came to Use the Metric System, Part II
The metric system didn’t become international because it was more rational than other systems; it became international because some Russian academicians and their colleagues from Europe and the Americas made...
Brutality and Silence in Slaboshpytskyiy's The Tribe
In The Tribe, silence is the perfect cover for a mini-crime ring.
Radio Daze: Mysteries of The Russian Woodpecker
Over the course of the film, Alexandrovich develops the theory that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was intentionally set off to cover up the non-functionality of the supposedly seven-billion-ruble Pecker.
Interdisciplinarity and the Soviet Criminal
Ken Pinnow presented his ideas about criminal studies in the early Soviet period to the NYU Jordan Center Colloquium Series. He spoke about the unprecedented interdisciplinary work done in the...
"Neuzheli tak i nado, tak i budem zhitʹ?" Roman Neumoev and Egor Letov’s Divergent Notions of Death
Death cannot deliver us from the human condition because it *is* the human condition; the highest knowledge is simply knowledge of unending suffering.
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...
The Curious Incident of Putin's Asperger's Syndrome
What do a measles outbreak in Disneyland and Washington’s panic over Russia’s leadership have in common? Both of them are red scares that should have died out by the 1960s.
Sources or Theories? On a False Dichotomy in the Study of Russian Literary History, Part I
Here I’ll try to explain the origins of two positions in Russian academic circles, how they affect the way Western studies of Russian literature are perceived, and why this opposition...
"Radiant Futures" conference brings Soviet science fiction and fantasy out of the periphery
On April 8, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted a conference entitled “Radiant Futures: Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction.” The conference was convened by...
"Dreaming of Duskobor'e: 1917 and Canada's Dukhobors" with David McDonald, University of Wisconsin - Madison
David McDonald presented his research on Canada's Dukhobors, a religious group with origins in the Russian Empire, in a roundtable discussion with other scholars. Yanni Kotsonis moderated.
“Red and Brown”: Left-Patriotism in Russia, its Ideology and Social Base, 1993-2021
On February 22, Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia hosted Dr. Alexey Sakhnin, who spoke about the post-Soviet emergence of a political trend consisting of both leftism and right-wing...
A Soviet Imprimatur on Imperial Smut: Politizdat’s "Luka Mudishchev" as Parody of the Soviet Book
On January 11, 1970, the British émigré newspaper Wiadomości reported on the publication of a new Russian book, a pocket-sized volume that had been a London bestseller during late 1969....
Interview with Sean Guillory, Part II
"I think we who either produce or engage with academic work need to seriously reconsider what we do, why we do it, and whom we do it for. I remember...
Aren't Progressive Women Adorable? (The Turkish Gambit 1)
When the “progressive woman” becomes a character type in the middle of the nineteenth century, she is usually a figure of fun.
War and Pestilence: The Epidemiological Motif in L. N. Tolstoy's Historical Epic
In the motivic structure of "War and Peace," the “mythical” French "grippe" of Anna Petrovna Scherer occupies a unique position. It is a simultaneously socio-linguistic, satirical, historical, moral, and providential...