For an ethnically Turkish man from the Soviet Union, fighting with the Nazis was no betrayal.
Continue reading...Teymur Ateşli: A Traitor-Hero for the Cold-War Era
Irina LevinStalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia
Ilaria Parogni
What does Boris Nemtsov’s murder mean for Russia?
Joshua Tucker
The more I think about Nemtsov’s murder, the more worried I am about what comes next.
Continue reading...Distorting Russia: How the US Media Misrepresent Sochi, Putin, and Ukraine
Stephen F. Cohen
American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.
Continue reading...Admitted as a Tourist, Tried as a Spy
Diego Benning Wang
Then I was asked[…] to name the former US secret service workers that he believed were teaching at NYU, and to recount the anti-Russian information that they believed was being disseminated in my classes.
Continue reading...Mikhail Lermontov Part I: The Original Hipster
Harry Leeds
If Russian literature is a history of Pushkin imitators, then Lermontov came first, and he’s still the best. Many have tried imitate Pushkin’s style, but few went as far to write tragic poems about his hero’s death in a duel, and proceed to, years later, perish in a duel himself. People just aren’t committed to their writing like that anymore.
Continue reading...Does Ethnicity Matter? The Case of the Tsarnaev Brothers.
Nathaniel Knight
Could we really be so sure that the ethnic and religious background of the Tsarnaev brothers was completely irrelevant? Are we really doing ourselves any favors when, in our desire not to give offense, we stifle our drive to know and understand?
Continue reading...Off-White like Dzhokhar
Eliot Borenstein
What do Americans see when they look at the faces of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev? And do Russians see the same thing?
Continue reading...Whose Moscow is it, anyway?
Mariya Boston
Rustem Adagamov, known as Drugoi in his LiveJournal, a rather well-known photographer and public figure, posted a series of photos entitled “Курбан-байрам по-московски” – “Kurban-Bayram Moscow-style”, which was celebrated on Friday, October 26th. The photos and the captions to them are rather objective, but there is one line in his post that tells it all: “Это теперь тоже наша Москва и к ней нужно привыкнуть” – “Now this is our Moscow, too, and it’s time to get used to it”.
Continue reading...Living in Cossackworld
Mark Galeotti
Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at the NYU SCPS Center for Global Affairs. He blogs at In Moscow’s Shadows.
When is a Cossack not a Cossack? When he’s a metaphor.
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