New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"—the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platf...

In this episode, Alisa talks with Lewis H. Siegelbaum, who, along with J. Arch Getty, edited Reflections on Stalinism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024), a collection of essays by twelve prominent scholars in the field who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of Stalinism as an authoritarian dictatorship determined to build a version of socialism in the Soviet Union at...

Join us as we discuss Yaroslav Trofimov’s recent publication, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin, 2024). We dive into the history of his journalism, the personal account of his reporting, and the ongoing war on Ukraine. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very of...

In this episode, Alisa talks with Ali İğmen, Professor of Central Asian History and the Director of the Oral History Program at California State University. In his book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan, Dr. İğmen examines Soviet Russia’s efforts to reshape local Kyrgyz culture into Soviet culture, as well as the ways in which the local Kyrgyz responded to these attem...

From evading the KGB and disassembling a downed American plane to narrowly escaping a life sentence in Siberia, Reuven Rashkovsky’s story is a gripping tale of coming of age, searching for belonging, and daring to escape the tightly controlled Soviet regime.  Relayed in his point of view by his daughter, Dr. Karine Rashkovsky, An Improbable Life: My Father's Escape from Soviet Russia (Cherry Orcha...

In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is a thrilling, true-life detective story about the search for the missing members of the Romanov royal family, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and one family's involvement in the hundred-year-old forensic investigation into their deaths, clandestine burials, and the recove...

In Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921-1985 (Indiana University Press, 2024), Larry E. Holmes shows us how Soviet football culture regularly disregarded official ideological and political imperatives and skirted the boundaries between socialism and capitalism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both mind and body....

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies. In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s....

In Soviet Nightingales: Care under Communism (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Grant examines the history of nursing care in the Soviet Union from its nineteenth-century origins in Russia through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society. In the interview, we explore Susan's approach...

Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mass death. In total, Stalin is respo...

Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the col...

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe. In To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism f...

From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Soviet Union. Some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. They fell prey to battle, starvation, disease, and grinding labor, aggravated immensely by brutality and even outright murder at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers responsible for them...

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order.  In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey,...

In Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939 (Brill, 2015), Zeev Levin seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of government efforts to socialize the Jewish masses in Uzbekistan, a process in which the central Soviet government took part, together with the local, republican and regional administrations and Soviet Jewish activists. This re...

In April 1945, Soviet forces descended on Berlin in the final phase of the war in Europe. The fighting was fierce as soldiers fanatically loyal to the Nazi party - and those afraid of the vengeance their opponents might enact - sought to stave off the end of the regime as long as possible. Even as it became clear that defeat was inevitable, Hitler and his subordinates determined to fight to the bi...

The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) compiles an array of recent scholarship that draws on newly available archival evidence. This interview with the book's editor, Dr. Michael David-Fox, summarizes what these new findings add up to, and highlights specific arguments made by the collection's authors. While Russian archives are presently di...

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024) exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before. Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in its wake, Jack Margolin traces the Wagner Group from its roots as a battlefield rumo...

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky...

The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peace...

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed. What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction withi...

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the...

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whiteha...

In Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space (I. B. Tauris, 2018), Cynthia Ruder explores how the building of the Moscow canal reflected the values of Stalinism and how it was used to create distinctly Soviet space, both real and imagined. She discusses the canal as a physical construct: an massive and important infrastructure project that would allow Moscow to have a s...

After being the posterchild of democratization, today Central and Eastern Europe is often seen as the region of democratic backsliding. In this episode, Milada Vachudova and Tim Haughton talk with host Licia Cianetti about how ethno-populist and illiberal politicians have been reshaping the region’s politics, how people have gone to the streets to protest against anti-democratic and corrupt govern...