Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

Russian culture in the 18th-19th centuries was created by intellectuals of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, rendering the notions of monolithic Russian language highly problematic. The hybridization of the Russian language with the vernacular idioms of Ukrainian, Yiddish, and German in Nikolai Gogol’s texts resulted from his negotiation with imperial values and signaled a subtle […]

Since the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine, Russian citizens' perception of the war has been one of the central issues discussed by scholars and the public alike. While quantitative surveys attempt to describe the structure and the dynamic of Russians' support for the war, they do not show how citizens perceive the conflict, what […]

Join us for another installment in our series of conversations hosted by Jordan Center Distinguished Journalist in Residence Dr. Yevgenia Albats. Throughout the year, Dr. Albats will be joined by leading experts – journalists, researchers, foreign service officers, and more – in one-on-one, public conversations regarding the most pressing issues in our understanding of Russia […]

Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Presidential Administration has launched myriad initiatives related to what looks like shaping a new state ideology: new repressive legislation, massive censorship in culture, a more rigid interpretation of tensions with the West and of Soviet history, new mandatory patriotism classes at schools […]

Georgian and Soviet investigates the constitutive capacity of Soviet nationhood and empire. The Soviet republic of Georgia, located in the mountainous Caucasus region, received the same nation-building template as other national republics of the USSR. Yet Stalin's Georgian heritage, intimate knowledge of Caucasian affairs, and personal involvement in local matters as he ascended to prominence left his […]

Please join us for another lecture in the Ukrainian Energy Studies series! The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has confirmed not only the centrality of energy to the war, but also the importance of Ukraine to global energy policy, with its far-reaching economic, environmental, and cultural consequences. This interdisciplinary series, co-organized by the Jordan […]

In 2009, Japanese art historian Oishi Masahiko argued that Matsumoto Toshio’s unabashedly queer, fervently experimental quasi-documentary Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) was the true inheritor of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde documentary Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This talk delves more fully into this comparison and explores the curious lineage connecting these two documentary filmmakers and film theorists. […]