New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

In I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Academic Studies Press, 2013), based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, S...

German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell UP, 2023) reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and pe...

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series, host Bálint Madlovics sat down for a fascinating discussion on the impact of the war on Ukraine’s patronal democracy, with his co-editor Bálint Magyar and with Oksana Huss, Mikhail Minakov and Kálmán Mizsei, who all contributed to the new volumes from CEU Press on the Russia-Ukraine War. Volume one is entitled Ukraine's Patronal Democracy and the Ru...

The common image of World War II (1939-1945) is that of swift armored maneuver advances supported by combined arms, especially overwhelming air support. What often is neglected is that the difficult and often brutal task of urban combat was a common feature of the conflict as well. Although a few famous examples such as Stalingrad, Leningrad, and later Berlin receive considerable attention, this i...

What do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the time of Catherine the Great through the Soviet period, and the history of money during the time of time of the French Revo...

Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher. It follows that grappling with Russia’s imperial history is inescapable. After all, “[s]elective, exaggerated or patently false reimaginings” of the past “have been central to Russia’s justification of its claims on its neighbor to the southwest,”...

Czar Alexander III (1845-1894) is reported to have stated that "Russia only has two allies: the army and the navy." Military power has always been important to Russia in establishing itself as a great power, especially as the largest country in the world spanning two continents. Beginning with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815), Russia has been involved in many major militar...

“Irrationality rules” in war, Michael Mann writes in his magisterial 2023 book, On Wars (Yale UP, 2023), a history that begins with the Roman Republic and ancient China and works its way through the world wars of the 20th century and up to present times. Mann is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His irrationality thesis, which posits that many wars are...

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and...

An astonishing deep dive into the war in Ukraine - from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War - and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime - and Russia itself - at ris...

How did the Soviet Union control the behaviour of its people? How did the people themselves engage with the official rules and the threat of violence in their lives? In Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish's book Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State (U Toronto Press, 2023), the contributors examine how social control developed under Stalin and Khrushchev....

In two new books, Fabian Baumann and Lauren Stokes examine the past through the lens of family structures and relations. In Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023), Baumann investigates the origins of Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms through the story of the Shul’gin family (in Ukrainian, Shul’hyn). Baumann argues that bec...

In 1812 the French emperor Napoleon decided to invade Russia. For this purpose, he gathered an army of half a million men and women, consisting of soldiers from all nationalities, including French, German and Italian. Serving in this army was Carel Johannes Wagevier, an officer in the 125th Regiment of the Line, which was staffed by mostly Dutch soldiers. Full of confidence, they went to war and b...

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim...

In this interview we deep dive into the historiographical issues of the texts in The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (Hackett, 2021), edited and translated by Christopher P. Atwood, with Lynn Struve. For a complementary, more general interview of the book dealing with the period under discussion listeners can also check out the July 2023 interview with Professor Atwood over at the Chines...

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-d...

If you are reading this, it’s probably hard—nearly impossible—to imagine a world without writing—without print, books, newspapers, signs, graffiti, advertisements, forms, letters, texts, internet memes, and New Books Network blogposts like this one. How would you do your work? How would you communicate with your friends and family? How would you learn about the world around you? The historians in...

Creating the Post-Soviet Russian Market Economy: Through American Eyes (Routledge, 2023) captures the essence of the period when Russians and Americans collaborated in creating new structures of government and new businesses in completely uncharted conditions. It presents the experiences of key American participants in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia during a time when Americans thought anythin...

Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for re...

Nineteen months since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the books are coming thick and fast. Fortunately, each tells a different and compelling story. Like other recent books, Gwendolyn Sasse’s Russia's War Against Ukraine (Polity, 2023) analyses three decades of diverging Russian and Ukrainian politics and society, burgeoning Russian neo-imperialism, and Western temerity. Unique to this...

"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia’s return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According t...

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom. Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Ru...

Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world's attention during the Cold War. Their stories were told in sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. In contrast to other refugees, they were pursued by the states they left even as they were sought by the United States and other Western governments eager to claim them. Taking part in a risky game that played out across t...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already changed the world. Why did it happen? Who is winning? How will it end? Christopher Miller is the author of The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Hear him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign corr...

Antony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stali...