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Commercializing 1917: The Russian Revolution in Finnish Popular Songs
The Russian Revolution of 1917 left a deep imprint on popular culture across and beyond the collapsing empire. Popular songs, circulated in printed form, were among the first media to...
Person or Persons Unknown
Everyone loves to be proven right, but novelists don’t often expect it — especially five hundred years after the period where their books are set. After all, that’s half the...
Penile Servitude and the Police State
Sunday before last, on the drizzly police holiday, Petersburg performance artist Petr Pavlensky (b. 1984) sat stark naked in Moscow's sacred center and nailed his scrotum to the cold cobblestones...
Benjamin Nathans revisits the drama behind the Soviet dissident movement
We have the basic plot of the story, but we don’t know the drama behind the plot.
Back in the U**R: Russia’s New Profanity Wars
Really? We’re going back to х**, п***а, е****, and б***?
The Eye of Sauron over Moscow, or, Revenge of the Orcs
Nothing says “Evil Empire” like the Eye of Sauron.
Another Face of Soviet Nostalgia: Daniil Kharms
Taken to the limit, nostalgia for Kharms permits the union of seemingly incompatible elements — according to its logic, there is no contradiction in, say, enjoying the author's dark comedy...
Russia is building a new Napster — but for academic research
What will future historians will see as the major Russian contribution to early 21st-century Internet culture? It might not be troll farms and other strategies for poisoning public conversation —...
The Dustpan of History (Russia's Alien Nations)
"Sovok" circulated the same way as the best critical or anti-Soviet cultural phenomena did during Soviet times: as folklore
The Fellowship of the Wrong (Russia's Alien Nations)
Perhaps the Eye of Sauron is a bit too “on the nose”?
There and Back Again (Russia's Alien Nations)
Was the Soviet Union the model for Mordor?
Fall Reading Series: Sergei Gandlevsky's "Illegible," Part I
In contemporary Russian literary life, Gandlevsky’s stature as a poet is indisputably great; he is less well known as a prose writer, although his novels and essays have been critically...
Fall Reading Series: Sergei Gandlevsky's "Illegible," Part II
Sergey Gandlevsky has written that his very first childhood poem, written on the occasion of the transfer to another school of the “beautiful, stern” little girl he had a crush...
Book Review: Sophie Kotzer's "Nationalism and the Soviet State During the Gorbachev Years, 1985-1991"
Sophie Kotzer’s "Nationalism and the Soviet State During the Gorbachev Years, 1985-1991" (Routledge, 2021) examines the changing relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the state, and society through the...
Anti-Hegemonic Code-Switching: The Case of Odesa Poet Boris Khersonskii, Part I
In 2018, Boris Khersonskii, Ukraine’s most famous Russian-language poet, wrote on Facebook—in Ukrainian: “My credo is: in Odesa, obstruct the Russian language gently, but oppose boorishness on the part of...
Anti-Hegemonic Code-Switching: The Case of Odesa Poet Boris Khersonskii, Part II
Immediately after Euromaidan, Khersonskii began to reflect on his own precarious position as a Russophone patriot of Ukraine who had published his poetry primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Love, Peace, and Developed Socialism: A Talk by Juliane Fürst
The first wave of hippies was indeed a community largely made up of urban and privileged children of elites, who were better connected to the West and therefore had more...
“The Best Defense against Russian Possessiveness”: Ukraine in Polish Underground Publications, 1976-1989
“There is no independent Poland without independent Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania” remains the basis of Poland’s Eastern policy.