If Vladimir Putin did indeed come from a family with ties to the Soviet nomenklatura, that would illuminate the role of personal connections in an allegedly egalitarian and meritocratic society. It also resonates with recent research emphasizing the continuities in Russia’s ruling elite across the 1917 and 1991 regime transitions, due to the persistence of networks of favors and “human capital” across the generations.
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It is symbolic that the most enduring legacy of the Soviet Union on the African continent is the Kalashnikov pattern rifle.
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Written in 1995, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s “Medea and Her Children” merges “byt” and “bytie” by portraying the spiritual satisfaction found in the everyday.
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As the sole example of early Soviet supernatural horror (or perhaps even horror as such), “The Bear’s Wedding” offers insight into the shape of the dreadful in the early Soviet Union.
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In today’s Russia, where government propaganda consistently denies society’s inherent complexity, Project 1917 offers a space that supports civil discourse and challenges official narratives. Only when history belongs to the people and authentically reflects how they lived can societies hope to move forward.
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To understand how and why certain tech companies come to be seen as “harbingers of freedom” and how this reputation impacts their role as actors in contentious politics, we examine Telegram’s practices during the 2020 Belarus protests against presidential election fraud.
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Ivan Bakaidov describes himself as a “web activist with cerebral palsy.” In March 2020, as Covid-19 lockdown measures were announced in his hometown of Saint Petersburg, Bakaidov launched the hashtag campaign #ButWeAreAlwaysAtHome (#AMyVsegdaDoma) on Facebook, VKontakte, and Instagram.
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While inveighing against Western colonialism, Putin wants the world to forget that Russia is the only European state that has engaged in a reconquest of its former imperial dominions.
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Taken together, Khersonskii’s posts imagine a future multilingual society that recognizes the civic obligation of understanding and speaking Ukrainian. His own bilingualism, meanwhile, helps mitigate language conflict by modeling flexibility within individual linguistic practice.
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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.
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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 Russian cultural stars decisively. I write this as a mostly Russophone person.” What triggered this turn against Russian by one of its most sophisticated artistic users? Is the shift to Ukrainian in Khersonskii’s linguistic practice consistent and irreversible? And, if a leading Russophone poets takes such a dim view of the language, can the end of Russian-language literature in what the Russian state arrogantly calls its “near abroad” be far behind?
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As the famous Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov pointed out in a June article for “The New Statesman,” the atrocities of recent months have made it quite likely that Russian will cease to exist as a language of culture in Ukraine.
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Pelevin’s werewolf tale uses the metaphor of a human-beast hybrid to describe a place beyond the strict binaries of (post-)socialism.
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Why are the claims and actions of Japan in the 1930s and Russia today so similar, despite vast differences between eras, cultural backgrounds, and underlying economic structures?
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The Russian military is deliberately targeting key farming-related assets and facilities with the aim of inflicting short- and long-term harm. Moreover, by blockading the Black and Azov seas, Russia controls how much Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and other food commodities reach global markets.
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Characterized by informality, a tendency to personalize official relationships, and, perhaps above all, by a desire to assert strength and power through a display of manliness, Soviet diplomacy often required a ritual demonstration of marksmanship skills and physical agility in order to challenge and rewrite the image of Soviet leaders as aging and inept apparatchiks.
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Despite the constantly shifting landscape of women’s involvement and engagement with Orthodoxy and the Church, those seeking to reconcile female religious subjectivity and current Church dogmas—particularly as articulated by reactionary clerics—continue to face difficulties.
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Flagging commitment to masculinist patriotism, alongside resurgent patriarchal peasant ideals, may have accelerated mass desertion from the Russian Imperial Army in the First World War and hastened the revolutions of February and October 1917.
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My chapter draws on Skovoroda’s metaphysics and epistemology to articulate a conception of Dostoevsky’s Zosima as a Russian Socrates.
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In May 2022, while wrapping up edits on my contribution to Socrates in Russia amidst a stream of dreadful news from the Ukrainian front, I learned that the eighteenth-century estate where Skovoroda spent his final years, and nearby which he was laid to rest, was destroyed by Russian air strikes. Hryhoriy Skovoroda is still here, invisibly, in our cultural memory. Our world has once again become the one that Skovoroda despised, described as “flesh and whips and tears.” No to war.
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