New Books Network

New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Society EN ↓ 1023 episodes

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠ newbooksnetwork.com ⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠ https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ ⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Sup...

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Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2011) 22.04.2011 1:07:48

Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and sisters. If, however, you were born and live in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/...

Christopher Ward, “Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism” (Pittsburgh UP, 2009) 08.04.2011 1:00:09

At the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress in 1974, Leonid Brezhnev announced the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, or BAM. This “Path to the Future” would prove to be the Soviet Union’s last flirt with socialist gigantism. The cost, poor planning, waste, and environmental damage associated with the construction BAM’s 2,687... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...

Thomas de Waal, “The Caucasus: An Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2010) 25.03.2011 48:06

On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the United States, but in a mountainous region south of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pre...

Miriam Dobson, “Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin” (Cornell UP, 2009) 15.03.2011 53:11

Examinations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy. Few scholars, however, have investigated how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over four million prisoners from labor camps and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Supp...

Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2010) 10.03.2011 1:16:18

For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not very old. According to the OED,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! htt...

Claudia Verhoeven, “The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009) 03.03.2011 56:08

Scan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you’ll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote. After all, Karakozov was no great theorist. He led no political organization. He hardly fit the image of the iron willed, revolutionary aesthetic who preached the maxim ‘The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Supp...

J. Arch Getty, “Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist” (Yale UP, 2008) 23.02.2011 46:23

When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so. But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror? We’ve learned a lot about Ezhov’s involvement in the Terror since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! h...

David Shearer, “Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953” (Yale UP, 2010) 10.12.2010 1:07:03

The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most important of modern history, primarily because it shapes what we are likely to think about communism. There are two schools of thought. On... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!...

Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir” (Oxford UP, 2010) 24.11.2010 1:01:36

Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable that one day everyone will believe that zoos were [NB] profoundly immoral. The future will condemn us... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premiu...

Abbott Gleason, “A Liberal Education” (TidePool Press, 2010) 28.10.2010 1:22:44

I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portion of it. The past itself is gone and cannot, outside... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcas...

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Orientalism” (Yale UP, 2010) 08.10.2010 1:01:42

There’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It’s true, however, that Russians have always known... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! ht...

John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) 09.07.2010 1:11:02

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wonder, then, that historians have expended oceans of effort and ink trying to explain why and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!...

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (Yale UP, 2009) 26.03.2010 1:03:58

I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope, the professions were not for him. He loved the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium me...

Charles King, “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus” (Oxford UP, 2008) 05.03.2010 1:11:40

There’s a concept I find myself coming back to again and again–“speciation.” It’s drawn from the vocabulary of evolutionary biology and means, roughly, the process by which new species arise. Speciation occurs when a species must adapt to new circumstances; the more new circumstances, the more new species. Thus one... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War” (Cornell UP, 2009) 20.11.2009 1:08:58

By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of building socialism. Certain “elements” needed to be sent... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a p...

Kees Boterbloem, “The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008) 26.02.2009 1:15:56

When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But the “Age of Discovery” continued well into the seventeenth century as Europeans continued to travel the globe in search of riches, fame and adventure. And... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a p...

Simon Morrison, “The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years” (Oxford UP, 2009) 20.02.2009 1:05:37

In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party created a large, well-funded cultural elite of which only two things were expected. First, that they practice their art. Second–and here’s the rub–that they... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by bec...

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917” (Cambridge UP, 2008) 07.02.2009 1:18:51

Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young. It’s a good story, and some of it’s even true. The reality, of course, was... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newboo...

Andrew Gentes, “Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008) 28.09.2008 1:05:23

Being “sent to Siberia” is practically a synonym for exile even in English-speaking countries. Why is this? In his fascinating new book Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Palgrave, 2008), Andrew Gentes explains. And it’s quite a story indeed. The tsars began to dispatch people to Siberia almost as soon as they... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Alex Rabinowitch, “Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising” (Indiana UP, 2008) 16.09.2008 1:13:03

It’s hard to know what to think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Was it a military coup led by a band of ideological fanatics bent on the seizure of power? Was it a popular uprising led by an iron-willed party against a bankrupt political order? Or something else? The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbo...

Katy Turton, “Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2007) 05.06.2008 1:05:05

A number of years ago I read Robert Service’s excellent biography of Lenin and came away thinking “We don’t really know enough about the women who surrounded Lenin throughout his life.” Katy Turton, a lecturer in modern European history at Queen’s University Belfast, has fixed that. Her Forgotten Lives: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom...

John Randolph, “The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism” (Cornell UP, 2007) 21.05.2008 1:06:17

John Randolph, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is our guest on the show this week. His book The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Cornell University Press, 2007) has just appeared. As a sometime Russian historian myself, I was... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom...

Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) 18.04.2008 1:12:09

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus on the Nazi period. He’s the author of a number of path-breaking books, including The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppor...