Hungary’s parliamentary contest, coming up on 12 April, could become the year’s most consequential European election.

As the war following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 enters its fifth year, the attitude of the Russian public remains difficult to gauge.

A post-Soviet buddy comedy, “Mother Russia” captures Russia’s chaotic transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.

The goal of this working group is to interrogate the relationship between aesthetics and conservative politics.

As a female counterpart to "Putin the father," we might consider Ekaterina Mizulina, daughter of politician and traditional values advocate Elena Mizulina and wife of pro-Kremlin singer-songwriter Shaman.

When extraction becomes politically protected, resistance becomes easier to criminalize.

The events that followed the Decembrist Uprising cemented the close bond between conspiracy thinking and the Russian bureaucratic mentality.

In the Russian nineteenth century, the emotional states of enthusiasm and melancholy signified a rebellion against authority, tradition, and political order.

After the soldiers of Russia’s elite Semenovskii regiment mutinied in fall 1820, the officer entrusted with writing up the incident for Alexander I was none other than the philosopher Petr Chaadaev.

The diaries of Nikolai Turgenev (1789-1871) show how one young man living through a historical upheaval when “past” crumbled, “present” became unintelligible, and “future” foreclosed managed to reclaim his present and act for the future—both his own, and Russia’s.

References to psychoactive substances are surprisingly common in Stalin-era literature—and not only in “unofficial” or “underground” works.

The figure of Bauyrzhan Momyshuly (1910-1982), a Kazakh-Soviet military colonel and writer, helps establish historical continuity between pre-modern forms of Kazakh statehood and the present republic.

It is hard to overlook the fact that perhaps what matters most about the Decembrist bicentennial is its absence.

Both Nina Berberova and Olga Zilberbourg lack the comforts of a rooted identity. In its place, each author carves out a narrative space where survival itself becomes a form of authorship.

What defines post-Soviet family history is not what has been transmitted, like the inherited pain of Holocaust survivors’ descendants, but what has been missed.

During his time abroad, the Soviet poet, translator, jazzman, dancer, and choreographer Valentin Parnakh (1891–1951) constantly faced the question of choosing a new language for his poetry.

Although it may seem as though Croatia’s process of “Euro-Atlantic integration” has been completed, many political, social and economic challenges remain.

The 2022 horror film "QAS" may be the closest thing that Kazakhstan has to a genuine memorial to Stalin-era crimes against the nation.

The world’s first Nazi war crimes trial was held in July 1943, in the Soviet city of Krasnodar. Just six months after the city was liberated from German occupation, eleven defendants—all Soviet citizens—stood before a military tribunal, accused of collaborating with the enemy.

Before Catholicism became a dominant part of the Polish national imagination in the twentieth century, Poles carefully crafted visions of Poland-Lithuania’s past that interpreted the Commonwealth as a bastion of religious tolerance.

Prioritizing the Soviet-era splendor of Georgian sanatoria over their more recent role as shelters for internally displaced people erases a vital chapter of local history.

Markov illuminates a curious world often left unseen, writing zakoulki (nooks and crannies) and their absent-minded pedestrians into a portrait of twenty-first-century Russia that neither absolves nor condemns its subject matter.

This year’s Chopin Piano Competition boasts 84 participants from 20 countries competing for cash prizes and, more importantly, coveted concert and recording engagements and name recognition.

Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film “Russian Ark” may intend to affirm the redemptive power of art as Russia’s only salvation, but ultimately undermines that hope.

By the late 1920s, the Organization of Contemporary Architects’ affinity with American architectural principles left it vulnerable to attacks from rivals—and the Soviet state.

Natural-born skeptics, Albanians responded to the fanfare around Diella, as they have done throughout their troubled history, with world-class humor.

The late-Soviet women’s journal "Maria" challenges our assumptions about what Soviet feminism looked like—and how it could coexist with Orthodox Christian values.

By lowering travel costs, expediting visas, and facilitating transit routes, Belarus has strategically directed migrants toward the EU, turning migration into a form of coercion.

Jews had lived in the Velizh region under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, at times making up half the town’s population. The last Jewish inhabitant died in 1973.

My study of some 120 WWII-era Jewish evacuees to Uzbekistan sought to learn whether their experiences could be framed as a success of the Soviet doctrine of “friendship of the peoples.”

Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, its surprisingly strong economy has enabled the government to continuously replenish its military forces without implementing unpopular mass mobilization.

The Putin regime sees the archives Gulag survivors and their children have built as a threat because they lay bare Soviet crimes, juxtaposing these with the state-sponsored cult of the “Great Patriotic War.”

Some of Pushkin’s contemporaries associated Russian serfdom with American slavery—and hence, the poet’s youthful liberalism with his African ancestry.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are at the forefront of regional efforts in renewable energy investment, while also being the largest oil and gas-producing nations of Central Asia.

The Stalin-era "Short History of the USSR" subordinated both its critique and endorsement of empire to the celebration of state-building on either side of the revolutionary divide.

Since November 2024, massive student-led protests against government corruption have roiled Serbia, inspiring a nationwide movement demanding systemic change.

In Central Asia, more Internet content creation—e.g., posting and blogging—is associated with higher trust in the government and a higher likelihood of election participation.

When the Jewish defendants in the 1879 Kutaisi trial were finally acquitted, the judges’ decision was met with sustained applause in the courtroom.

In March 1879, in the Georgian city of Kutaisi, then part of the Russian Empire, nine Jewish men stood trial for allegedly killing a Christian child.

Through four case studies from the former Yugoslavia and its cultural legacy, I interrogate both canonical and marginal forms of the ethnopornographic imaginary.

When it comes to Rare Earth Elements, China dominates the global supply, with Russia holding a strategic, though still secondary, niche.

Folklore adapts to lived circumstances and living folk traditions are different from those of the past precisely because they are alive and suit their circumstances.

Formerly communist countries have undergone such dramatic transformations since 1991 that it's unclear if "post-communism" remains a meaningful analytical category.

Khrushchev’s quiet attempts at replacing the older generation of Party leaders played out differently in two Soviet republics on the USSR's western borderlands.

In post-Soviet Azerbaijan, the state has moved from religious neglect to active management of faith communities, balancing control over foreign influence with promotion of “traditional” religious expression.

In revolutionary Kyiv, Bronislava Nijinska's Ecole de Mouvement transformed dance education by uniting intellectual and physical training—creating artists, not just dancers.

Despite various challenges, family legacy continues to be preserved and passed on, shaping animistic practices and concepts among the Asiatic Yupik people in the North-Eastern Russian Arctic.

Some observers have predicted that Russia’s ethnic mosaic, and non-Russian peoples’ grievances, will drive the country’s future transformation. Recent history gives little reason to hope for such an outcome.

Recent scholarship on the Comintern has expanded our knowledge of communism’s importance to anti-imperialism, decolonization, and racial equality movements in the interwar period. This scholarship has also explained the movement's limits.

Walt Whitman became a canonical author first in socialist European circles, and then in the nascent Soviet Union.