On 4 May 2023, Russian theater director Eugenia (Zhenya) Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk were detained in Moscow as suspects in a criminal case on “justifying terrorism” for their feminist play, “Finist the Brave Falcon.” Faced with this new act of intimidation of the artistic community in Russia, committed in violation of the constitutional principle of freedom of speech, we ask the international community for their support.
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The Russian government and state-affiliated private mercenary companies are forcing international students to fight in Ukraine.
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Paradoxically, Kadyrov’s leveraging of the war in Ukraine to catapult himself to success in Russian federal politics is jeopardizing his authority in Chechnya.
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As much as a quarter of Russian forces in Ukraine are estimated to come from paramilitary organizations. Should elite infighting break out into the open, or Russia palpably lose the “Special Military Operation,” this mass paramilitarization could have enormous ramifications.
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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 their rightful place.
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Analogies between post-colonialism and post-socialism should not be drawn too hastily; doing so requires, at the very least, examining the region’s active participation in policing Europe’s physical and symbolic borders.
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Like its vampiric subjects, the beleaguered film adaptation of Victor Pelevin’s novel “Empire V” can perhaps best be described as neither fully dead nor fully alive. A year after the postponement of its premiere due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the film remains trapped in a kind of cultural netherworld.
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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, organizational types that had persisted since the 1990s, those unable to survive, and those that adapted to Russia’s increasingly repressive environment. Here we examine a new trend in Russian civil society: escaping.
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As the Kremlin’s definition of conservatism evolved, it moved from privileging stability, to emphasizing control, to, finally, understanding conservatism as traditionalism. These shifts were both gradual and reactive, responding to changing domestic and external circumstances. The “healthy conservatism” of 2021, where our study culminates, provides a useful ideological platform for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine only months later. However, this outcome diverges sharply from the original premise of conservatism in Putin’s discourse—stability.
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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 institutions after February of last year. I taught a chilling set of classes only hours after Russia began bombing Kyiv. And as the government cracked down on connections with perceived enemies of the state, banned Facebook, Instagram, and the BBC, my students did not know how they should relate to me—the “enemy”—nor I them.
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Tatarsky’s assassination signals that the internet and social networks are now far more than either a haven for anti-Putin oppositional voices or a dark space for Kremlin trolls.
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The idea of conspiracy by secret societies became a pivotal official myth in the Russian Empire from the 1770s on, shaping governmental discourse, diplomatic relations, ideology, and security policy.
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Since the outbreak of the war, the Hungarian government has consistently objected to providing military aid to Ukraine to help the country defend itself from its Eastern aggressor. Hungary has also striven to use its power as an EU member state to minimize the breadth and effect of sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU. The Hungarian government has made it clear that rather than arms, only “peace” can bring an end to the conflict.
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The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia is pleased to announce the fourth annual Graduate Student Essay Competition. Submissions are due by Thursday, 1 June 2023 at 11:59 PM EST.
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One hundred years ago, the American Relief Administration, unofficially presided over by Herbert Hoover, concluded its famine relief campaign in Soviet Russia. From 1921 to 1923, the US sent more than 768 million tons of food and 125,000 medical packages to save the hungry in the Volga region.
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In charging the Russian leader, the ICC becomes the latest international institution to go public with well-documented evidence of his culpability for the war against Ukraine.
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Ales Bialiatski’s was one of the strangest Nobel lectures in history. Not only did the laureate not write it himself, he did not deliver it—at the time of the ceremony, he was in solitary confinement in Cell Block No. 1 in Minsk, Belarus.
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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 the 1750s. Undoubtedly, prostitution existed in Russia prior to this time, but its linkage to the influx of Western ideas during Peter’s reign, and crediting the first brothel to a non Russian, set up an important pattern of identifying prostitution and its social and symbolic implications with a Western, and not Russian, value system.
Continue reading...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 large cities like Moscow. Despite this diversity in real life, the sex workers (and their clients) featured in films and literature are almost exclusively depicted as white, ethnic Russians.
Continue reading...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 processes that have marked the Russian cultural space throughout the centuries.
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