Academia Archives - SRB Podcast: Recent Episodes
Academia Archives - SRB Podcast
Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh's Katie Manukyan.
The post REEES Faculty Spotlight: Katie Manukyan appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Guest: Lana Parshina on The Death of Hitler: The Final Word published by Da Capo Press.
The post Investigating Hitler’s Remains appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I wrote a review of Alexander Etkind's Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt and Michael McFaul's From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia for Bookforum. Unfortunately, the review is behind the dreaded paywall. So here's the pdf.
The post The Theater of Diplomacy appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Mikhail Zygar's The Empire Must Die provides a narrative timeline for the Russian Revolution as an allegory for Russia’s present.
The post The Russian Revolution as Past Made Present appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I review Doug Rogers' deconstruction of oil—not to uncover its relations of production—to trace the dispersion of its value in shaping the post-Soviet province of Perm.
The post The Materiality of Russian Oil appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Guest: Sheila Fitzpatrick on Stalinism.
The post Retrospective on Stalinism appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Guest: Alexander Rabinowitch on the Bolsheviks coming to power.
[spp-player]
The post A Life with the Russian Revolution appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Guest: Arch Getty on Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition.
[spp-player]
The post Stalin, Clans and Terror appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Guest: Russell Martin on the early modern Russian autocracy.
The post Autocracy, Marriage, and Power in Early Modern Russia appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Several years ago when I was living in Moscow I would often see people in the metro holding signs selling doctoral degrees. I even had a friend of a friend who earned money writing them on order. Fake diplomas, theses on order, and plagiarism. Already in 2006, Mikhail Kirpichnikov, the then head of State Commission […]
The post Pseudo-Doctorates in the Duma appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Stephen Kotkin and Slavoj Zizek discussed Kotkin’s Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 at the New York Public Library. Both the audio and video are available on the Library’s site but I thought I’d repost it here to increase exposure. [powerpress]
The post Kotkin and Zizek Discuss Stalin appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I wrote a review of Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s newly expanded edition of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin for OpenDemocracy. Here’s an excerpt: German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously said that President Vladimir Putin lives ‘in another world.’ Putin was delusional, out of touch with reality, and perhaps even crazy. Some observers have since […]
The post Putin’s World appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I learned this morning from my Facebook feed that the Academic Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) caught on fire destroying the third floor and causing the roof to cave in. There are conflicting reports on whether any of INION’s library perished in the flames. Vladimir Fortov, the president of the Russian Academy […]
The post Moscow’s INION Library Burns appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My review, “Demystifying the media caricatures of Pussy Riot” of Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot has been published in The World Today. Here’s an excerpt: Pussy Riot are now global celebrities. Their cause has been featured in articles, profiles, books and films. Since the amnesty of Nadya Tolokonnikova and […]
The post Pussy Riot’s Passion appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My review, “Russian politics has always been patrimonial,” for Russia Direct of J. Arch Getty’s new book Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition: What is striking about J. Arch Getty’s excellent new book, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition, is how little Stalin is in it. Sure, he’s there, but […]
The post Stalinist Patrimonialism appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Carl Schreck, who is so far the only journalist to cover the defunding of Title VIII, has done a service by writing another article on the issue. (The coverage might increase in the coming week. I did an interview with a Moscow Times reporter yesterday and his article should come out late next week.) In […]
The post Title VIII and Ambassador McFaul appeared first on SRB Podcast.
News that the State Department didn’t allocate funding for Title VIII, which provides funding for research and language programs related to the study of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, is just the latest example that our government sees little value in knowledge about foreign countries. “In this fiscal climate, it just didn’t make it,” a US […]
The post Defunding Title VIII appeared first on SRB Podcast.
In a recent column, “Incarceration Nation, Fareed Zakaria claimed that number of people in the United States under “correctional supervision” exceeded that of Stalinist Russia. The assertion comes via Adam Gopnik, who wrote an extensive article on the US prison system in January. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America–more […]
The post US Prison Industrial Complex Versus the Stalinist Gulag appeared first on SRB Podcast.
To follow up on my post calling for a conversation among Russia specialists about open access publishing, I decided to talk to someone who knows the ins-and-outs of the debate: Dan Cohen. Dan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy […]
The post Podcast: Open Access- an Interview with Dan Cohen appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The debate about open access among mostly Russian history specialists is expanding. Steve Barnes, the creator of Russian History Blog, has written a very informative post stressing the inevitability of change in how we conceive, produce and disseminate academic knowledge. Steve also provides informative links about some of the theories, experiments and successes in open […]
The post Open Access – a Defense appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Josh Sanborn has written a lengthy and detailed reply to my post on open access. I’m not planning to respond as I think it further reiterates the economic challenges of open access. I do want to draw attention to it. Here’s a snippet: The Finch Report is a set of recommendations created by a British […]
The post More on the Open Access Debate appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I don’t write much about academia here, and perhaps I should start. As many know, all is not entirely well in American academia, especially in the humanities. Budget cuts, the increasing use of massive open online courses, the perils of publishing, the strangeness and delights of academic culture, the dearth of tenure track employment, the […]
The post Let’s Start Talking about Open Access appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My article, “The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs,” has come out in the Fall 2012 issues of the Slavic Review. You can download it here. Here are the opening paragraphs: Komsomol literature in the 1920s repeatedly evoked the memory of the civil war as a means to inspire young communists to sacrifice themselves […]
The post On Shattered Selves and Young Communists appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Stephen Kotkin, Professor of History at Princeton University, reviewed five recent books on Putin in the 2 March issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Kotkin is a tour de force when it comes to all things Russia, and when I heard about the review, I scoured the internet looking for an accessible version, but to […]
The post Five Books on Putin appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I recently published a review of Igal Halfin‘s Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self in the journal NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928 (vol. 5, 2011). For those who want a taste of my academic work, here’s the review’s opening paragraph: For more than fifteen years, Igal Halfin has been a master craftsman in the academic […]
The post Red Autobiographies appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Lewis Siegelbaum about his book Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile is now online. Subscribe via ITunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Lewis Siegelbaum appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Daniel Treisman on his book The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev is online. Subscribe via ITunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Daniel Treisman appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Current competition: FY 2011. Cancelled. CANCELLATION NOTICE: On September 17, 2010 a notice was published in the Federal Register inviting applications for new awards under the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Program for FY 2011. The notice announced “an estimated $5,800,000 for awards under this competition. The actual level of funding, if any, depends […]
The post Killing Fulbright-Hays appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Doug Rogers on his book The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals is online. Subscribe via ITunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Doug Rogers appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Laurie Manchester on her book Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia is online. Subscribe via ITunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Laurie Manchester appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Chris Ward about his book Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism is now online. Subscribe via ITunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Chris Ward appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Thomas de Waal on his book The Caucasus: An Introduction is now online Subscribe via Itunes
The post New NBRES Interview with Thomas De Waal appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Some of you might remember review Maya Haber and I wrote of Miriam Dobson‘s book Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin. Now there’s an interview I did with Miriam about the book on the New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies site. Subscribe via Itunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Miriam Dobson appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My interview with Claudia Verhoeven on her book The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism is now online. Subscribe via Itunes.
The post New NBRES Interview with Claudia Verhoeven appeared first on SRB Podcast.
A few weeks ago, Marshall Poe, who runs New Books in History, offered me the opportunity to host the Russia and Eurasia channel on his New Books Network. I dutifully accepted. So after a fortnight of planning, getting the equipment, interviewing, and editing, the project’s first salvo went online yesterday with an interview with J. […]
The post New Books in Russia and Eurasia appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Studies of the Soviet gulag encompass a cottage industry of its own in Russian historiography. Since 1991, a torrent of studies have been published examining the gulag's construction, management, memory, and legacy. Few, however, have delved into how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over 4 million prisoners from labor camps and colonies to society between 1953 and 1958. It is for this reason that Miriam Dobson's Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin is a welcomed and refreshing edition to so-called "Gulag Studies."
The post Khrushchev’s Cold Summer appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Two weeks ago, I did a post on 75 years since the Kirov law. I was happy to find that the New Times published an interview with Matthew Lenoe whose forthcoming book, Kirov's Murder and Soviet History, is a hefty reexamination of the famous assassination. Below is a translation I did of the interview.
The post Dissecting Kirov’s Murder appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Today, I began research on Komsomol participation in collectivization and found this little tidbit in the archive.
The post From the Komsomol Archive appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Yesterday, December 1, was 75 years since the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization, and Stalin ally. It was on the night of December 1, 1934 that a certain Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party worker, shot Kirov in the secretary’s third floor office. Nikolaev was immediately caught and interrogated […]
The post The Kirov Law at 75 appeared first on SRB Podcast.
It has been a long haul and I’m slowly crawling out of my hole. For those who don’t already know, I filed my dissertation, We Shall Refashion Life on Earth! The Political Culture of the Communist Youth League, 1918-1928, on Monday. The process of filing was a bureaucratic nightmare in and of itself. Back and […]
The post There and Back Again appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Lewis Siegelbaum has a cover interview with Rorotoko for his recent book Cars for Comrades. I didn’t know about this interview until I received an email from Cornell University Press’ Publicity Manager. I should note, however, posting a blurb about Siegelbaum’s interview isn’t purely out of disinterest. He’s on my dissertation committee and bringing attention […]
The post A Historical Roadtrip in the Soviet Car appeared first on SRB Podcast.
It appears that some of Medvedev’s liberal posturing is producing concrete results. Or at least someone is getting the signals. Finally, fi-nal-ly Memorial has gotten its materials back from the St. Petersburg prosecutor. Twelve computer hard disks, or “Winchesters” as one report calls them, about 1000 business cards belonging to A. D. Margolis (the general […]
The post Memorial’s “Winchesters” Returned appeared first on SRB Podcast.
It turns out that Memorial’s court victory was short lived. According to Fotanka.ru, the St. Petersburg prosecutor appealed the Dzerzhinskii court’s February 24 ruling that went in Memorial’s favor. My hope, even jubilation, that this circus was finally over was premature. The case will now go to court for the third time. Irina Flige, the […]
The post Memorial Back to Court appeared first on SRB Podcast.
When the St. Petersburg office of Memorial was raided in December last year, the international media was aghast. Article after article saw the confiscation of Memorial’s database of archival materials and interviews of life under Stalin as proof that Stalinism was back in full force. Why else would police bother to raid the human rights […]
The post Memorial Vindicated, Again appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Here’s something that should wet the palates of scholars and induce wet dreams among the necrophiliacs of Soviet history. Ukraine announced that it plans declassify the entire KGB archive dating 1917-1991. The number of documents stamped “secret” and “top secret” is estimated at 800,000. The announcement comes after the law “On the declassification, promulgation, and […]
The post Ukraine Throws KGB Archive Doors Open appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Yaroslav Kuzminov, the head of the Higher School of Economics (VShE) in Moscow received a disturbing letter from the Main Department of Internal Affairs (GUVD). The letter strongly recommended that the dean expel “politically unreliable” students, reports Nezavisimaya gazeta. “Politically unreliable” in the police’s opinion, are those youth who participated in last December’s Dissenters March […]
The post Moscow Police Seek Expulsion of “Politically Unreliable” Students appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The human rights organization Memorial was victorious in the Dzerzhinsky district court on Tuesday when Judge Andrei Shabakov ruled that the police raid on their office was “unlawful.” The key issue driving Monday and Tuesday’s hearing was whether Memorial was given the right to have their lawyer present during the raid. Chief investigator Mikhail Kalganov […]
The post Memorial Raid Ruled Unlawful appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Memorial goes back to the Dzerzhinskii District Court on Monday to get a decision on whether the police raid on its St. Petersburg headquarters was lawful. This is the organization’s third hearing. The last one was postponed because the head investigator did not prepare his case materials. I’ll be sure to report on the hearing […]
The post Memorial Saga Continues appeared first on SRB Podcast.
David Woodruff gives a brutal assessment of Anders Aslund’s How Capitalism Was Built in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of the New Left Review. It’s unfortunate that the review is only accessible to subscribers. Readers should know Aslund’s own personal contribution to the building of Russian capitalism well. In the 1990s, he was part of the […]
The post Memorializing Market Bolshevism appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Since the raid on Memorial is hitting more and more English language news outlets, the most recent being in the Chicago Tribune, I figured it was time to give an update to the story. Since the raid on Memorial’s St. Petersburg’s office on 4 December there have been a few developments, but none that illuminates […]
The post Evidence Against Memorial Delayed appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Anyone who watches the goings on in Russia knows about last week’s police raid of the human rights organization Memorial in St. Petersburg. The six hour search by masked, truncheon wielding agents has received forceful, cautious and hysterical condemnation as people try to figure out why the hard drives and computer files, financial records, archival […]
The post The Day They Raided Memorial appeared first on SRB Podcast.
For those of you in the New York area, I will be a participant in “What is Russia Thinking? The Word from the Last of the Independent Media.” The event is organized by the Paul Klebnikov Fund, a foundation started by the late journalist’s family, and the Eurasia Foundation to honor Mikhail Fishman, this year’s […]
The post Event: “What is Russia Thinking?” appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I usually don’t cheerlead the work my adviser and friend, J. Arch Getty, but if you have any interest in his new book Stalin’s Iron Fist, read Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s review in the Telegraph. If you’re not familiar Getty’s work, over the last two decades he has single handedly rewritten the history of the Terror […]
The post Stalin’s Iron Fist appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I’ve been reading Slavoj Zizek‘s In Defense of Lost Causes and he has some interesting thoughts on revolutionary terror (Ch. 4, “Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao”) and Stalinism (ch. 5 ‘Stalinism Revisited, or, How Stalin Saved the Humanity of Man”). I thought I’d share this one passage I found interesting, The public prosecutor in […]
The post Zizek on the Soviet “empire of signs” appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Steve Barnes, Assistant Professor at George Mason University, has set up a invaluable site called Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. Barnes is an expert in the history of the Gulag. I had the pleasure of hearing paper of his at the “The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-1964” conference at the University College London in […]
The post The Many Days and Many Lives of the Gulag appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The introductory lecture of David Harvey’s online course Reading Marx’s Capital was nothing short of excellent. It was a clear exposition of how you must approach Capital if you want to read it seriously. Here is the second class as promised. This lecture covers Chapters One: The Commodity and Chapter Two: The Process of Exchange. […]
The post Reading Capital: The Commodity and Exchange appeared first on SRB Podcast.
This may not have much to do with Russia at present, but any discussion of Marx is never too far from thinking about Russia of the past. David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology at CUNY, has done an amazing service by making his course “Reading Marx’s Capital” available online. Harvey is one of the preeminent […]
The post Reading Capital with David Harvey appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My new eXile article, Nemtsov’s White Paper: Bombshell or Dud?, is now online. Here is an excerpt: Lilia Shevtsova, a fellow at Moscow’s Carnegie Center, called it a “bomb, which anywhere but in Russia would cause the country to collapse.” Writing in the New York Review of Books, Amy Knight called it “a devastating picture […]
The post Blackening the White Paper appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Two of my favorite magazines, the London Review of Books and Vanity Fair, have two must read articles on Russia in their recent additions. Vanity Fair‘s annual “Green Issue” is full of amazing articles, particularly Phillippe Sands’ well researched article “The Green Light,” which exposes how White House lawyers “legalized” the use of torture. In […]
The post Recommended Reading appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Washington Profile has an interesting interview with Professor David Foglesong about his book The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’: The Crusade for a ‘Free Russia’ since 1881. I reviewed Foglesong’s book here a few months ago. Below are a few excerpts from the interview that I found interesting and pertinent to understanding where America’s […]
The post Discussing the “Dark Double” appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My new eXile article, “Russian Academia Under Fire,” is now online. Here is an excerpt: On any given day, the Russian media is filled with reports of restaurants, clubs, factories, hospitals, schools, and apartments succumbing to the searing flames of Vulcan. Casualties are common. Fire is often the result of teenage pyromaniacs, defective wiring, discarded […]
The post Russian Academia Under Fire appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The 3 March issue of the Nation has two reviews of four recent books on Soviet history. The first review, “The Ice Forge,” written by Jochen Hellbeck, examines Lynne Viola’s Unknown Gulag and Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers. Viola’s book chronicles the deportation of Soviet “kulaks” during collectivization. About it Hellbeck writes, “The Unknown Gulag, is […]
The post Two Reviews of Four Books appeared first on SRB Podcast.
My first article for the eXile is now online. Here is an excerpt from “A Russian-Watcher’s Fairytale“: Russia and the world were stunned by the assassination of Vladimir Putin as he walked out of a midnight mass at the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on January 7, 2008.” This line is not out of […]
The post Social Science Fiction appeared first on SRB Podcast.
David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881, Cambridge University Press, 2007. “Civilization is spreading rapidly eastward, it cannot stop or go around Russia, and whether with bayonet or psalm-book the march will be made through every part of the Tsar’s dominion.” Such were the […]
The post The “Dark Double” appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I’m lovin’ the direction Moscow Through Brown Eyes is taking. Especially with Buster PhD’s meditations on race, immigration, and nationalism in Russia. I love how figures like W. E. B. Du Bois are drawn into the discussion to help us think about how race and racism are now calculated in post-Soviet spaces. On that note, […]
The post Moscow’s Brown Eyes appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I attended the AAASS National Convention this past weekend in New Orleans. I participated on two panels. A roundtable titled “Youth’s ‘Janus-Face Nature’: Youth and History in Russia/Soviet/Russia” and a panel called “Looking into the Past, Preparing for the Future: Civil War, Generations, and the Militarization of Soviet Youth, 1918-1941.” (The convention’s full program can […]
The post AAASS 2007 appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Anna Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia, trans. Arch Tait, Forward Scott Simon, Random House, New York, 2007. I’m told that when you begin reading a book you should always start with the title. It’s a small window into the tales between its covers. This […]
The post The World According to Anna appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Seventy years ago today the infamous Operational Order No. 00447 was approved by the Politburo of the Soviet Union. The Order launched, according to the document, “a campaign of punitive measures against former kulaks, active anti-soviet elements, and criminals.” In the appending memo to Stalin’s personal secretary, A. N. Poskrebyshev, M. P. Frinovsky, then deputy […]
The post Operational Order No. 00447 appeared first on SRB Podcast.
I was hoping to get to the controversy over the new strongly suggested for the Russian classroom, Noveyshaya istoriia Rossii 1945-2006. Kniga dlia uchitelia (A Contemporary History of Russia 1945-2006. A Book for the Teacher) and Global’nyi mir v XXI veka (The Global World in the 21st Century), but time did not allow it. Kommersant […]
The post Putin as Narratological Node in Russian History appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The past week has been big on the archive news. First the United States returned 80 stolen documents to the Russian Government. Now the FSB announces that it is making public documents relating to repression dating back to 1920-1950. Formerly a decree issued in 1992 made the documents only available to relatives who made formal […]
The post FSB Archive Sheds Light on Darkness appeared first on SRB Podcast.
So I start teaching a Russian History class in August. I’ve decided to focus on the Soviet period. The class is 18 weeks and that gives me some time to go over the period with care. I want to have a broad reading list of primary documents for the students to read. I want archival […]
The post Solicitations appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Archives are often the first casualties of revolutions. When Tsarist Russia imploded in 1917, revolutionaries quickly raided the Okhrana’s archives. Police documents revealed that one of Lenin’s close confidants, Roman Malinovski was unmasked as an Okhrana spy. He was quickly taken out and shot. War, Revolution, and Civil War reduced Russian central and local archival […]
The post Archive Fever appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Here is an important announcement for researchers. Kommersant reports: Russia’s Defense Ministry has declassified archive documents of Red Army and Navy for 1941 to 1945, RIA Novosti reported referring to Colonel Sergey Ilienkov, who heads the Archive Service at Defense Ministry. The secrecy labels were removed from documents stored in Defense Ministry’s Central Archive in […]
The post WWII Soviet Archives Declassified appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Anyone interested in the status of Russian archives should read the NY Times article, “Iron Archives.” However, some of its claims about the shrinking access to Russian archives should be put in context. For example, anything that is located in the infamous Presidential Archive is off limits, except if you have connections. I know a […]
The post Rusted Archives appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow adds to the MGU controversy with a comment on the matter from an alumnus. He also rightly puts the matter into the larger context of the Russian government’s battle with the Russian Academy of Sciences and their future direction. The collapse of the Russian academy is one of the worst […]
The post More on Russian Academia appeared first on SRB Podcast.
This past weekend, I attended the 38th National Convention for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Washington DC. It was a wonderful and exciting conference packed with hundreds of panels. Attending all the panels I marked in my program proved to be impossible. There were simply too many overlapping panels […]
The post AAASS Convention appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Yesterday I received the new issue of the New Left Review in the mail. NLR is one of my favorite journals and its arrival in my mailbox is always eagerly welcomed. One article immediately struck me; a short piece by Susan Willis titled “Guantanamo’s Symbolic Economy.” The article is empirically horrifying as it is theoretically […]
The post Recommended Reading appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Discussion of the (re)emergence of a cold war between the United States and Russia has heated up over the last year. The initial warm relationship between Bush and Putin has soured. There are no more weekends at the Crawford Ranch or in Putin’s po Moskvy residence. Diverging visions of a post-Cold War world along with […]
The post Cohen on the New Cold War appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The historiography on the relationship between Muslims, the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union has become a cottage industry in Eurasian historical studies. A slew of books have come out in the last five years as researchers think about the reasons for the dissolution of the Russian/Soviet Empire and the state’s relationships with its […]
The post Muslims in the Russian/Soviet Empire appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Though the following has little do with Russia, (though one might think of it in terms of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy forced down historians’ throats in the Soviet period), it concerns my profession and thus my livelihood. The state of Florida has passed and Jeb Bush has signed a bill banning “revisionist” history from Florida public […]
The post Florida Bans Historical “Revisionism” appeared first on SRB Podcast.
On the right side of this page you will find a “Currently Reading” section. The only reason why I mention this is because of the current book that is displayed, Georgi Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World Systems Biography. I’m sixty pages into it and I find it absolutely fascinating. I became […]
The post Georgi Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus appeared first on SRB Podcast.
A rather strange article appears in today’s Johnson’s Russia List #53 and I’m not sure why. It’s a piece by Alice Gomstyn called “Where the Cold War Still Rages” from the February 6, 2004 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Gomstyn revisits the “totalitarian”/”revisionist” debate that has structured Russian historical studies in the United […]
The post Revisiting the Great Debate appeared first on SRB Podcast.
The offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda were destroyed by fire on Tuesday. The building was a prime Soviet symbol. A classic 1930s constructivist structure, the building once housed Pravda, the main organ of the Communist Party. For several years it has been home to Komsomolskaya pravda, the former main organ of the Communist Youth League, or […]
The post KomPrav’s Archives Burn appeared first on SRB Podcast.
Have you forgotten all of your Sovietese? Can’t remember what ???? (????????? ???????????????? ????????? ??????????, Kazakh Socialist Soviet Republic), ??? (??? ????? ?????????, without the right to correspondence, part of a prison sentence that really meant execution), or ??? (????????-??????????????? ????????, party-state control) stands for? Don’t fret dear post-Soviet citizen or bewildered non-Russian academic; a […]
The post The Complete Dictionary of the Language of Council of Worker, Peasant and Red Army Deputies appeared first on SRB Podcast.
“The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” Such is the opening line of Yuri Slezkine’s intriguing and controversial book, the Jewish Century. Slezkine charts modernity through the journey of one, albeit significant, ethnic/religious group: Russia’s Jews. It’s a story about shedding and becoming, triumph and […]
The post Slezkine’s Mercurian Century appeared first on SRB Podcast.