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Money Is Not Enough: The Role of Economic Incentives in Cooperative Nonproliferation Initiatives
The current main threats to Russian nuclear materials are determined insiders, coupled with a questionable commitment by Moscow to ensuring sustainability and improving security culture.
Reconstructing Stalingrad: The Struggle to Rebuild and Redefine the "Hero City" After 1943, Part I
The surrender of the last of nearly 90,000 Axis soldiers in Stalingrad on February 2, 1943 marked a major turning point in the Second World War and, indeed, in twentieth-century...
Reconstructing Stalingrad: The Struggle to Rebuild and Redefine the "Hero City" After 1943, Part II
On Tuesday, June 15, 1943, the front page of "Stalingradskaia pravda" ran a letter to the editor, penned by a group of nineteen women led by a one A. M....
Reconstructing Stalingrad: The Struggle to Rebuild and Redefine the "Hero City" After 1943, Part III
Despite the campaign to rename the city from Stalingrad to Volgograd, and the attendant scrubbing of the leader’s image and name from public space, Stalinist culture was already ingrained in...
Teaching Race in Russia Part II: From Harlem to the “Soviet South”
My students, like Vladimir Nabokov before them, were surprised at how sexualized American racism was and how often black men were lynched for charges of even looking at white women.
Inventing the Russian Revolution in the Print Culture of 1917
Several decades ago, Keith Baker explored how the French Revolution was "invented" as people’s conceptions of revolution, and the role that they could play in it, transformed during 1789. Russians,...
Crime and Punishment in Today's Russia
Almost 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, crime and policy responses to it are critical to understanding the political dynamics of the region.
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...
Spies Like U.S.: "The Americans" and the Americans
On the face of things, "The Americans" should be pressing all sorts of buttons in the American psyche: crypto-communists! danger in the suburbs! our neighbors hate our freedoms! Moreover, since...
Teaching Race in Russia: Dispatches from “The Harlem Renaissance: From New York to Tashkent”
Why do American race relations reappear over and over again in discussions of the minority experience in the former Soviet Union?
Gothic Doubling and The Double, Gothically
Dostoevsky was well aware of the power of the gothic.
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...
Sergei Lavrov’s Canard of a “Jewish Hitler” and the (Un)logic of Antisemitism
Old habits die hard. One especially pernicious “habit” that has resurfaced during the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the claim that Adolf Hitler, the man who led the attempted annihilation...
The Sochi Citrus Project: a discussion with Johanna Conterio
Friday afternoon February 7th at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, Harvard PhD candidate Johanna Conterio presented her paper at an event made possible by the History of Science Working...
Alessandro Stanziani explores the history of Russian economy in a global perspective
The NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Department of History welcomed economic historian Alessandro Stanziani, Professor at École des hautes études en sciences sociales and...
A Coat of Not Many Colors: Vatnik (Russia' Alien Nations)
Vatnik takes visual inspiration from SpongeBob (he is roughly the same shape) and satirical inspiration from the work of Seth McFarlane.
Excerpt from "Sex Work in Contemporary Russia: A Cultural Perspective," Part I
The character of the female sex worker has recurred pervasively across time, space, and genre, repeatedly used by writers, filmmakers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians to explore anxieties about the disruptive...
Excerpt from "Sex Work in Contemporary Russia: A Cultural Perspective," Part II
The sex industry in Russia is multiethnic, with scholars estimating a significant number of female migrants (from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia) working as sex workers, especially in...
Excerpt from "Sex Work in Contemporary Russia: A Cultural Perspective," Part III
Prostitution existed in Russia for several centuries but became a widespread phenomenon during Peter I’s rule (1683–1725), with the first brothel or “public house” reportedly established by a German in...
Meanwhile, Back in "The Americans"…
This is Cold War paranoia packaged for viewers who are secure in the knowledge that the two superpowers will definitely not blow each other up, and that nothing Felicity does...