Featured
A Vicious Circle: How Did Russia End Up "Surrounded by Enemies"?
In a years-long attempt to reassert its influence in neighboring post-Soviet countries, and secure its borders from the West, Moscow has consistently been creating enemies along its borders. As of...
The Yogis of the Arbat
In August 1918, Andrei Bely wrote a short story called “The Yogi.” I recall this fact when, one early morning exactly one hundred years later, I find myself outside a...
Cold Snap (Part I): Russian Film after Leviathan
This essay provides context for roughly thirty-five current and upcoming Russian films, loosely clustered around four topics: directors; debuts; economic health; and dominant industry trends.
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...
Cold Snap (Part II): Russian Film after Leviathan
An auteurist orientation, therefore, is neither good nor bad, but it is certainly mismatched to an industry—especially during periods of robust growth—in which so-called “spectators’ cinema” [zritel'skoe kino] is in...
"Empire V" meets Generation "Z": The Awkward Business of a Would-Be Blockchain Blockbuster in Wartime
With seventy percent of shooting complete and a budget shortfall of 235 million rubles, "Empire V"'s filmmakers turned to a novel form of fundraising: cryptocurrency. An Initial Coin Offering (ICO)...
Of Mice and Men: Why Animal Studies Matter
On Monday, May 6, the Jordan Center hosted the last event in this semester’s diasporas series. While our previous sessions have focused on human interaction in both politics, history, and...
The Abuses of Enchantment (Russia's Alien Nations)
Tolkien has been accused of many things, but subtlety is not among them.
Excerpt from Victoria Phillips' "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy," Part II
This week, "All the Russias" is delighted to feature excerpts from Victoria Phillips' book, "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy," out in 2019 from Oxford University Press....
Firebird: From Slavic Mythology to American Identity
Originally choreographed by Michel Fokine for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910, Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird" has been restaged many times and remains a popular ballet around the world and especially in...
The Great Symbolic War, or Why Felix Dzerzhinsky is Back
The return of the past in Putin’s Russia resembles a mass-scale historical reenactment. The revived Dzerzhinsky again looks to the West—toward Poland and the Baltics—while the gentlemen who proclaimed themselves...
From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries
Professors Hilary Appel and Mitchell A. Orenstein discuss a new approach to examining post-communist Eastern European economic policies offered in their book “From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in...
Shaving Eisenstein in Manhattan
An old-fashioned shave, with a razor that in Russian they call “dangerous”; an uncannily private scene performed under an open sky, 800 feet over the sidewalks of the greatest city...
Bitter Taste: How Gorky Saved Pushkin’s Honor by Closing His Café, Part II
The hysterical reaction by the Soviet establishment to an apparently innocent incident — a reaction that struck at least one Western observer as symptomatic, but still curious — was deeply...
Excerpt from Victoria Phillips' "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy," Part III
This week, "All the Russias" is delighted to feature excerpts from Victoria Phillips' book, "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy," out in 2019 from Oxford University Press....
Pinochet in Prague: Visions of Authoritarian Reform During the Transformation of Eastern Europe
A strange sight greeted visitors in Prague’s old town in spring 1994: at a stall selling memorabilia of the recently discarded ideology of state socialism, the former Chilean military dictator...
Forcing Consensus: A Show Debate in the Early GDR
Whereas Stalin’s show trials featured confessions and executions, the aim of the show debate was to persuade the institute’s council of party members at the institute, the party-group to drop...
"With the Slavonic Tongue One Cannot Be a Scholar": A Revised Assessment of Liberal Arts Culture in East Slavic Lands
If the first liberal arts academies in East Slavic lands swiftly attained a reputation for academic excellence, and were endorsed by both Church and state authorities, why was their introduction...
Rewriting Russian History Through Cinematic Representations of Revolutionary Terrorism
Russian revolutionary terrorism is a perennial subject for state-sanctioned historical reconstruction, receiving a wide variety of treatments in cinema from the early Soviet period to the present day.
Putin: Fascist or "Merely" Soviet? Part II
Putin’s worldview owes less to apocalyptic fascisms like Nazism than to his experiences as a young man working in the Soviet intelligence service. At base, he is a conservative whose...