Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

In 1882, the interior of one of the Moscow Kremlin’s oldest structures, the Faceted Palace, received a total makeover to mark the upcoming coronation of Alexander III. Described as a “restoration,” the project entailed the complete repainting of frescoes whitewashed over in the Petrine period and known only through a written description. Peasant painters from Palekh were commissioned to reconstruct the iconographic program in a style that combined traditional icon painting with current academic norms of spatial realism. Now considered…

Join us for an exciting conversation with Joanna Stingray, hosted by Mikhail Danilin of NYU Russian and Slavic Studies! This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting. Released in September 2020, Joanna Stingray’s inspiring and poetic memoir Red Wave: An American in the Soviet Music Underground introduces Western audiences to the legendary musicians of Soviet rock through her improbable Cold War heroics as a young New Wave musician who, in 1985, produced Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the…

In the last five years, Russia has seen a sharp rise in the number of films produced by regional film studios, as well as of films that choose for a shooting location not just a provincial setting, but remote places (for example, Filipp Yuriev’s Whaler Boy, 2020). This led, on the one hand, to an upturn in film production in the autonomous republics, particularly Yakutia (Sakha), Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, but also to a nation-wide (and international) awareness of such films.…

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.  "In the brief civil war that followed the collapse of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin's pro-Western government was opposed by a strange coalition that the neoliberal media called "the communofascists" or "the red- and-browns." These clichés were part of a campaign to discredit and de-humanize the resistance to the radical market reforms. But much of the opposition unexpectedly agreed with this ideological identification. The famous writer Alexander Prokhanov called his 1999…

Join us for another installment of the 19v seminar. This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.  This talk will explore how the pastoralism of Notes from a Hunter neither ignores history nor gives up on the nostalgic dream of frozen time as it moves between poles of dynamism and repose and struggles with the relentless expectations of progress together with the complacency of self-acceptance. While characters battling against the past and dissatisfied with the present become the…

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.  Professor Norihiro Naganawa will present on his ongoing book project, which explores early Soviet Russia’s engagement with Central Asia, Iran and the Red Sea through a biography of one Tatar revolutionary and Soviet diplomat, Karim Abdraufovich Khakimov (1890-1938). With Putin’s Russia returning to the Middle East against a backdrop of the collapse of Pax Americana that thrived since the Gulf War of 1991, Khakimov is now celebrated as a forerunner…

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.  In this talk, Dr. Anton Sobolev will unpack the technology of the Russian government propaganda and manipulation of online discussions, and establishes the causal effect of government interventions on the online behavior of social media users. Using a novel database on the activity of the state-sponsored online propagandists masquerading as ordinary citizens, the so-called “trolls”, he estimates the impact of troll interventions in online conversation by combining matching techniques with…

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.   Whether it be of Robert E. Lee, Tsar Nicholas II, Huey Long or the head of the NKVD Feliks Dzerzhinsky, political statuary evokes a range of impassioned responses from groups as varied as the Proud Boys and Identity Evropa in the United States, and the Double-Headed Eagle and Izborsk Club in the Russian Federation. The ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA on August 12, 2017 protested the removal…