New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,” a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official sanction, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation. Guest: Regina Kazyulina (she/her), is the assistant director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a visiting assistant professor of history. She teaches in the Graduate Certificate Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research interests include everyday life under German occupation, the “Holocaust by Bullets,” and the gendered lived experiences of Soviet civilians. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Spirit of Socialism is a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. It examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse and the post-Soviet transition, embarked on a spirited and highly visible search for new meaning. Amid profound disorientation, these seekers found direction in their horoscopes, or behind gurus in saffron robes or apocalyptic preachers, or by turning from the most basic premises of official science and history to orient themselves anew. The beliefs they seized on and, even more, the questions that guided their search reveal the essence of late-Soviet culture and its legacy in post-Soviet Russia. To skeptical outsiders, the seekers appeared eccentric, deviant, and above all un-Soviet. Yet they came to their ideas by Soviet sources and Soviet premises. As Joseph Kellner demonstrates, their motley beliefs reflect modern values that formed the spiritual core of Soviet ideology, among them a high regard for science, an informed and generous internationalism, and a confidence in humanity to chart its own course. Soviet ideology failed, however, to unite these values in an overarching vision that could withstand historical change. And so, as The Spirit of Socialism shows, the seekers asked questions raised but not resolved by the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet order—questions of epistemic authority, of cultural identity, and of history's ultimate meaning. Although the Soviet collapse was not the end of history, it was a rupture of epochal significance, whose fissures extend into our own uncertain era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler's war; it was Stalin's war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin's goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain's self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin's war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin's armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin's War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House's International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage to learn more about their neighbor—with various degrees of success. Sometimes, it failed miserably, like Russia's early attempts to make contact with pre-Meiji Japan, or the debacle during the Russo-Japanese War. Other times, they were wildly successful, like during the Battle of Khalkin Gol or with Richard Sorge's spy ring during the Second World War. James D. Brown covers Russia and the Soviet Union's efforts to learn more about Japan in Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst, 2025), covering much both the famous examples of Russian spycraft, and the lesser-known missions—like Operation Postman, a successful effort to read the mail of Japanese diplomats in Italy. James is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, Japan. He is a specialist on East Asian politics and a regular media contributor, including for the BBC. His books include Japan, Russia and their Territorial Dispute (Routledge: 2016); and Japan's Foreign Relations in Asia (Routledge: 2018) and The Abe Legacy (Lexington Books: 2023) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Cracking the Crab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Papusza / Bronisława Wajs. Tears of Blood: A Poet's Witness Account of the Nazi Genocide of Roma (Brill, 2024) is nothing less of an academic, literary, and historical miracle. It is dedicated to a key figure of Romani literature, Bronisława Wajs, also known as Papusza. This book offers—for the very first time in history—the full version of Papusza's key work, Tears of Blood, which was considered lost for seventy years and circulated only in a highly reduced copy. This poem is a unique account by a woman about the Roma Holocaust in Eastern Europe during WWII. Beyond this important historical and literary document, the book also provides literary translations of this manuscript into several languages, including English, and has chapters written by leading researchers of Romani Studies who comment on the history of this text and the challenges behind making it available to the broader public. It took the team over three decades to locate the manuscript, transcribe it, translate it, and fill in the gaps in its history. Volha Bartash is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster in Germany and a co-convenor of the network “Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance.”  Tomasz Kamusella is Reader in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews, whose work focuses on language politics and nationalism. Host: Tatiana Klepikova is a Freigeist Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation and leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism at the University of Regensburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adopted 'homeland' to their socially constructed new 'ancestral' home in Armenia. The rich ethnographic research conducted over 6 years by the author reveals how women adjusted to new lives in Armenia, supported themselves through gendered work such as embroidery production, yet mostly challenge simple identities such as 'refugee' or 'repatriate, ' existing in a state of what the author terms "painful belonging". The book further reveals crucial insight into how experiences and traumatic memories of war in Syria and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reciprocally shape each other in the minds of the women interviewed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Felix Cowan about his new book, The Kopeck Press Popular Journalism in Revolutionary Russia, 1908–1918 (University of Toronto Press, 2025). The Imperial Russian penny press was a vast network of newspapers sold for a single kopeck per issue. Emerging in cities and towns across the empire between the 1905 Revolution and the onset of the First World War, these sensational tabloids quickly became the Russian Empire's most popular periodical genre. They appealed to a mass audience of poor and less-literate readers with their low prices and accessible language. The Kopeck Press presents a comprehensive study of this phenomenon, examining its role both as a media genre and its significance as a vital forum for lower class political culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Elana Gomel is a former senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she also served as department chair for two years. This book investigates the Russian community in Israel, analyzing the narratives through which Russian Jewry defines itself and linking them to the legacy of Soviet history. Gomel is also an award-winning fiction writer and the author of eight novels. The story of post-Soviet Jews in Israel illustrates a broader phenomenon of cultural divergence, in which history shapes distinct identities from a shared origin. In addition to marking a turning point in Israel's development, this story forms part of the larger global landscape shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gomel's book explores Russian immigration to Israel from a cultural rather than purely sociological perspective. It should be noted that the book was originally published in 2009 and serves as a snapshot of the situation 15 years after the massive wave of Russian immigration in the early 1990s. In our discussion, we will try to address some of the changes that have transpired in the country as well as in Elana's views. Elana Gomel, born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, is an academic with a long list of books and articles, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She has taught in Israel, Italy, and the United States, and is known in academia for her (purely theoretical) interest in serial killers, alien invasions, and rebellious AIs. She is the author of more than a hundred stories, several novellas, and five novels of dark fantasy and dark science fiction. Several of her stories have appeared in Best of the Year anthologies. She is a member of the HWA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What would it feel like To Run the World? The Soviet rulers spent the Cold War trying desperately to find out. In To Run The World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power, Sergey Radchenko provides an unprecedented deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow's claims to greatness. Perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape our world. Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko's books include To Run the World: the Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, forthcoming in 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westan  The World of the Cold War by Vladislav Zubok Zhou Enlai: A Life by Chen Jian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The history of Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire has largely been narrated as a unique period of equality, reform, and progress, often framing it as the backdrop to modern Turkey. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's exhortation to study the oppressed to understand the rule and the ruler, Talin Suciyan reexamines this era from the perspective of the Armenians. In exploring the temporal and territorial differences between the Ottoman capital and the provinces, Suciyan brings the unheard voices of Armenians into the present. Drawing upon the rich archival materials in both the Archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Ottoman Archives, Suciyan uses these to show the integral role Armenians played in all aspects of Ottoman life and argues that accounts of their lives are vital to accurate representation of the Tanzimat era. In shedding much needed light on the lives of those who were vulnerable, disadvantaged, and otherwise oppressed, Suciyan takes a significant step toward a more inclusive Ottoman history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In this volume, leading specialists examine the affinities and differences between the pan-Soviet famine of 1931–1933, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Kazakh great hunger, and the famine in China in 1959–1961. The contributors presented papers at a conference organized by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz's Hitler's War Against the Partisans During The Stalingrad Offensive: Spring 1942 to the Spring of 1943 (Frontline Books, 2025) explores the brutal and widespread partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during 1942-1943, detailing the Axis forces' anti-partisan efforts and the impact on the Soviet war effort. From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler's Ostheer, his Eastern Army, and its associated forces would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought. The preparations for the war against the partisans began before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, during which the Axis forces immediately put their plans into effect. The effects upon the newly conquered territories were soon being felt. The end of the initial phase of the German invasion of the Soviet Union was met by a Red Army winter offensive which began on 5 December 1941. As the author shows, this had repercussions behind the German lines, where the nascent Soviet partisan movement was attempting to grow and gain a foothold. By the spring of 1942 those early Soviet partisan units were ready to expand. The Germans, aware of the military situation both on the frontlines and in the rear of their armies, also prepared to counter the growing partisan threat. The partisans undoubtedly made a significant contribution to Stalin's war effort by countering Axis plans to exploit occupied Soviet territories economically, as well as providing valuable assistance to the Red Army by conducting systematic attacks against Hitler's rear communication network. As the German military planned to continue the Russian campaign into the summer of 1942, new security forces were gathered together and sent to the Soviet Union, and a new headquarters specifically organized to fight the guerrilla menace, was established. In this follow-up study, author Antonio Muñoz picks up the partisan and anti-partisan struggle in the East, where Hitler's War Against the Partisans During Operation Barbarossa left off. The struggle behind the frontlines in Russia proved to be as grand and epic as the fight along the front lines. Dr. Muñoz describes this war of attrition along the entire breath of the USSR. In 1942 the Ostheer, acting on Adolf Hitler's orders, launched their 1942 summer offensive which was aimed at capturing the Caucasus Mountains and the Russian oil fields that lay there. Dr. Muñoz not only covers the war behind the lines in every region of the occupied USSR, but also describes the German anti-partisan effort behind the lines of Army Group South, as its forces drove into the Caucasus Mountains, the Volga River bend and Stalingrad. No other work has included the guerrilla and anti-partisan struggle specific to the Stalingrad campaign. Muñoz manages to accomplish this, but also to convey the story of the rest of the partisan and anti-guerrilla war in the rest of the USSR from the spring of 1942 to the spring of 1943.Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz lives in New York City. He is a professor of history at Farmingdale State College in Long Island, New York. He is married, has two daughters and two grandchildren. His last work, published in 2018, covered the history of the German Secret Field Police in Greece, 1941-1944.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.Please check out my earlier interview with Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz on the previous volume in this series Hitler's War Against the Partisans During Operation Barbarossa June 1941 to the Spring of 1942 (Frontline Books, 2025) for the New Books Network.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Stalin's Gulag at War: Forced Labour, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2018) places the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. The author explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine's national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who'd died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe's largest land war in seventy-five years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries. Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation. Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine's dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia's 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (Routledge, 2020) investigates the underlying reasons for the longevity of détente and its impact on East–West relations. The volume examines the relevance of trade across the Iron Curtain as a means to facilitate mutual trust, as well as the emergence of new habits of transparency regardless of recurring military crises. A major theme of the book concerns Helmut Schmidt's foreign policy and his contribution to the resilience of cooperative security policies in East–West relations. It examines Schmidt's crucial role in the Euromissile crisis, his Ostpolitik diplomacy and his pan-European trade initiatives to engage the Soviet Union in a joint perspective of trade, industry and technology. Another key theme concerns the crisis in US–Soviet relations and the challenges of meaningful leadership communication between Washington and Moscow in the absence of backchannel diplomacy during the Carter years. The book depicts the freeze in US–Soviet relations after the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the declaration of martial law in Poland, and Helmut Schmidt's efforts to serve as a mediator and interpreter working for a relaunch of US–Soviet dialogue. Eventually, the book highlights George Shultz's pivotal role in the Reagan Administration's efforts to improve US-Soviet relations, well before Mikhail Gorbachev's arrival. This book will be of interest to students of Cold War studies, diplomatic history, foreign policy and international relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Richard Sorge is one of history's most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanising, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo during the 1930s and gathered intelligence credited with changing the course of the Second World War. It is an intriguing tale; but Sorge's spy ring was just one chapter in a much longer history of Russian and Soviet espionage in and against Japan. Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. James D Brown tells the extraordinary full story of Russian intrigue targeting Japan, from first encounters in the eighteenth century to the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945. Colourful episodes include Gojong, King of Korea, being smuggled into the Russian legation dressed as a woman in 1896; the 1927 ‘Tanaka Memorial', an infamous forgery purporting to be Japan's hidden plan for world domination; and the secret intelligence of ‘Nero', a Soviet agent supplying invaluable insight into Japanese strategy during the Second World War. From Russians murdered in broad daylight in Meiji Tokyo to Soviet honey traps and ‘white magic' at the Battle of Nomonhan, this is a landmark history of the covert struggle between two great powers of the modern age. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations. John Man, in his book Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict (Oneworld Publications, 2025), takes on this long history, combining it with his own on-the-ground experience seeing some of this history for himself. He starts with the Xiongnu—a nomadic group that's so unknown, historically, that we're forced to use the pejorative Chinese term for them—all the way to the Second World War, and the seminal Battle of Khalkin Gol, which halted the Japanese advance into Northern Asia. John Man is a historian specializing in Mongolia and the relationship between Mongol and Chinese cultures. He studied Mongolian as a post-graduate, and after a brief career in journalism and publishing, he turned to writing. John's books have been published in over twenty languages around the world and include bestselling biographies of Chinggis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Attila the Hun, as well as histories of the Great Wall of China and the Mongolian Empire. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Conquering the North. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Paul W. Werth, How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History (Bloomsbury, 2025) “Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big.” Thus Paul Werth begins his forthcoming book, How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History. The geographical expanse of the Russian Empire—known since the eighteenth century to span 1/6 of the earth—has been widely marveled upon. Scholars have explained Russia's size variously: an urge to the sea; a search for natural borders in landscapes lacking them; entrepreneurial happenstance; an insatiable hunger for conquest and more territory; a special world-historical mission. Explanations and answers, especially given Russia's invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, are highly charged. In this small book on a big topic, Werth assembles a rivetingly concise account of what constituted the territory of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation when. The result is a startlingly refreshing synthesis that sets him up to consider the deeper ‘hows' and ‘whys' of Russian expansion and longevity. Among multiple constructive insights, Werth's analysis lays bare numerous ways in which sovereignty can be more gray than black and white—thought-provoking circumstances he frames as ‘Russia Beyond' and ‘Russia Within'. Listen in on this conversation where we talk about this book slated for release in September 2025. Paul Werth is professor of History at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. In addition to the forthcoming How Russia Got Big, he is the author of four monographs, numerous scholarly articles, and two edited volumes on Imperial Russian history, as well as a textbook. He served as the editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies for many years. In 2022 he was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In the Spring of 2023 he was the Gerhard Casper Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and in Spring of 2024, a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits' clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin's grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian regime's ideological production process and the ways it is operationalized in both domestic and foreign policies. Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible and represents a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions. By placing the current Russian regime into a broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history, this book gives readers key insights into how the Russo-Ukrainian War became possible and the role ideology played in enabling it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Kevin Anderson's The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), this volume turns specifically to the ‘late Marx'. In this period (1869-82), Marx spent much of his time engrossed in the study of colonialism, agrarian Russia and India, Indigenous societies, and gender among many other less known topics of his interest. His notes, especially what come to be known as The Ethnological Notebooks, along with letters, essays and a scattering of published texts remain only poorly known (and in some cases unpublished or not yet fully translated into English) and form the backbone of Anderson's study. They evidence a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. Anderson shows how the late Marx sees a wider revolution that included the European proletariat being touched off by revolts by oppressed ethno-racial groups, peasant communes, and Indigenous communist groups, in many of which women held great social power. In our discussion, we highlight some of the key themes in the late Marx, bringing out the ways in which Marx is making connections across his writings, how colonial subjects in Ireland and India share commonalities and what can be seen when we look at communal social forms in Russia and among Native Americans. We also discuss why Marx can be seen as a decolonial thinker, consider what he might have produced had he lived longer and the ways in which the late Marx can be presented to students to complement his central themes of class and capitalism. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Tamar Shirinian is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her new book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke UP, 2024), studies the relationships between gender, sexuality, nationalism, political-economy, and social reproduction and how these are experienced, imagined, and felt—especially, in the postsocialist and post-Soviet world. Focused on the Republic of Armenia, Survival of a Perverse Nation examines LGBTQ and feminist organizations as well as grass roots initiatives, right-wing nationalist movements, and the links these formations have within geopolitics. In so doing, it offers us invaluable lessons for feminist theory and practice in the context of right-wing populist hegemony. About the host: Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In 2016 the United States was stunned by evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. But it shouldn't have been. Subversion—domestic interference to undermine or manipulate a rival—is as old as statecraft itself. In A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford UP, 2025) Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth provide a compelling ride through the history of subversion. They examine subversion's allure, its operational possibilities, and argue that, in our high stakes, changing technological landscape, a clear-eyed understanding of the history and parameters of subversion can help polities defend against it. Jill Kastner is a scholar in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. She has a doctorate in History from Harvard University. She specializes in Cold War crises in Berlin and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in The Nation and Foreign Affairs. William C Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. His most recent books are America Abroad: The United States' Global Role in the 21st Century (2018), Written with Stephen G Brooks, and The History of International Relations and Russian Foreign Policy in the 20th century (2020), co edited with Anatoly V. Torkunov and Boris F Martynov. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience of Armenians in Turkey in the 1940s, with a particular focus on the process of emigration to Soviet Armenia. The accounts, translated for the first time into English, are comprised of Soviet officials' reports and first-hand testimony by survivors of their lives during the post-genocide period, making this an invaluable new contribution to the existing collections of Armenian survival testimonies. Placing the archival records on emigration in the context of both life in post-genocide Turkey and the 'repatriation' (nergakht) project in the Armenian Diaspora, this book, which also includes the original Russian documents, will be a useful resource for researchers and students of Armenian and Turkish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands. Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In Lost Souls, Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.American enthusiasm for funding the refugee organizations taking care of DPs quickly waned after the war. It was only after DPs were redefined—from “victims of war and Nazism” to “victims of Communism”—in 1947 that a solution was found: the United States would pay for the mass resettlement of DPs in America, Australia, and other countries outside Europe. The Soviet Union protested this “theft” of its citizens. But it was a coup for the United States. The choice of DPs to live a free life in the West, and the West's welcome of them, became an important theme in America's Cold War propaganda battle with the Soviet Union. A compelling story of the early Cold War, Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (Princeton UP, 2024)is also a rare chronicle of a refugee crisis that was solved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What do Russians really want? Do they want authoritarianism and are they prepared to go along with a war of conquest and destruction? Or do they want something else? A landmark contribution to the field, Morris is the only social researcher to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, engaging with communities in Moscow, regional cities, as well as rural areas to bring perspectives on Russian everyday lives that are now entirely inaccessible to the West. Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) uses the lens of micropolitics, defined not as politics in miniature but instead as taking seriously the political content of people's normal lives revealed in their practices, interactions and discussions. Based on decades-long interactions with people from a diverse cross-section of society in Russia – from security service officers to factory workers, from unemployed young men to citizen journalists and activists, this is the most comprehensive insight to date into the complexity of Russian attitudes toward war, their government and the post-1991 political trajectory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today's crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine's sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West--from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2021), Plokhy examines Ukraine's search for its identity through the lives of major Ukrainian historical figures, from its heroes to its conquerors. This revised edition includes new material that brings this definitive history up to the present. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, Plokhy brings its history to vivid life as he connects the nation's past with its present and future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Who will defend Europe? The answer should be obvious: Europe should be able to defend itself. Yet, for decades, most of the continent enjoyed a defence holiday, outsourcing protection to the United States while banking an increasingly illusory ‘peace dividend'. Now, after three decades of reducing armed forces and drawing down defence industries, Europe finds itself close to unprotected—while Russia is intent on continuing its war of expansion, and the US is distracted and divided. In Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent (Hurst & Co., 2024), Keir Giles lays out the stark choices facing leaders and societies as they confront the return of war in Europe. He explains how the West's unwillingness to confront Russia has nurtured the threat, and that Putin's ambition puts the whole continent at risk. He assesses the role and deficiencies of NATO as a guarantor of hard security, and whether the EU or coalitions of the willing can fill the gap. Above all, Giles emphasises the need for new leadership in defence of the free world after the US has stepped aside— and warns that the UK's brief moment of setting the pace for Europe has already been squandered. Keir Giles has advised governments worldwide on the Russian threat. A senior fellow with Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, he is a regular commentator for the BBC and international media. His prescient books include What Deters Russia and Moscow Rules. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), anthropologist Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the lives of people who opposed Russia's Crimean operation, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. Via the narratives of people who traversed perilous geographies and world-altering events, Dr. Uehling traces the development of a new sense of social cohesion that encompasses diverse ethnic and religious groups. The result is a compelling story—one of resilience, transformation, and ultimately, the unwavering pursuit of freedom and autonomy for Ukraine, regardless of ethnicity or race. Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom demonstrates how understanding Crimea is essential to understanding Ukraine – and the war with Russia – today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Today I interviewed Charles Hecker about Zero Sum. The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025). Hecker, a journalist and business consultant, speaks with dozens of Western business executives, bankers, and financiers who reaped immense profits for themselves and their companies in the Russian market, which suddenly opened to foreigners after decades of state planning and economic autarky. These “riskophile” Westerners recall the early post-Soviet Russia as an unchartered territory where business “had a body count” and “violence was cheap, routine and almost casual”. In the 2000s Russia, now stabilized by Putin, offered unparalleled opportunities for those who had learnt to navigate its murky, gray environment. While some expressed concern over the unchallenged primacy of the supreme ruler presiding over arbitrary redistribution of property in favor of his cronies and the rapid consolidation of state ownership, the squeamish were far outnumbered by the opportunistic. Following Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent imposition of sweeping Western sanctions forced most Westerners to flee, often selling their companies for a fraction of their value and, in some cases, even giving it for free to their Russian partners. Looking back some regret “looking the other way” at the rampant corruption and lawlessness, while others admit that enrichment in Russia was always destined to be short-lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them together. The story of Jews and Ukrainians is presented in an impartial manner through twelve thematic chapters. Among the themes discussed are geography, history, economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, literature and theater, architecture and art, music, the diaspora, and contemporary Ukraine. The book's easy-to-read narrative is enhanced by 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts that explain specific phenomena or address controversial issues. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence (U Toronto Press, 2018) provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating land of Ukraine and two of its most historically significant peoples. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation. After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal suffering of the Soviet people during the war. Police dispersed unauthorized commemoration meetings of Jewish activists at Babyn Yar. A monument “for one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of the war” was erected in Babyn Yar in 1976, but the Holocaust was not mentioned in its inscription. With the collapse of communism, state anti-Semitism ended. Holocaust commemoration became an important part of national memory politics in independent Ukraine. In the last few decades, over thirty monuments have been built at Babyn Yar, which are dedicated to the memory of Jews, Roma, members of the resistance movement, and other people executed there. However, heated debates continue about the commemoration of the Babyn Yar massacre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden's “book club” secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers' luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden's books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War (Random House, 2025) is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Michael David Fox's Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard UP, 2025) provides a local, close-up look at the everyday workings of Nazi and Soviet power, in a particular region. It discusses such themes as the Soviet Terror of the late 1930's and the trauma of the collectivization of agriculture, earlier in the decade, as well as the further traumas of Nazi occupation. Especially interesting is its focus on life-trajectories of specific individuals who had daily to navigate the intricate workings of power, in brutalized, violent circumstances. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Shaun Walker, The Illegals (Knopf, 2025) is the definitive history of Russia's most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West.More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “illegals.” During the Second World War, illegals were dispatched behind enemy lines to assassinate high-ranking Nazis. Later, in the Cold War, they were sent to assimilate and lie low as sleepers in the West. The greatest among them performed remarkable feats, while many others failed in their missions or cracked under the strain of living a double life.Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB's most secretive program. A riveting spy drama peopled with richly drawn characters, The Illegals also uncovers a hidden thread in the story of Russia itself. As Putin extols Soviet achievements and the KGB's espionage prowess, and Moscow continues to infiltrate illegals across the globe, this timely narrative shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment, its messy aftermath, and its influence on our world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloombury, 2024) is a unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin's Chef,” went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule. Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group's origins and operations, Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) by John Lechner-the only journalist to report across its many warzones-brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise-but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over. Featuring exclusive interviews with over thirty Wagner Group members, Death Is Our Business is the terrifying true tale of the renegade militia that proved global instability is nothing if not an opportunity. John Lechner is a journalist and an independent researcher and consultant to NGOs and other institutions working in Africa. He holds a master's degree in foreign service from Georgetown University. He speaks Russian, French, Turkish, Georgian, Chechen, Sango, and more. His reporting has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the BBC and published in Foreign Policy, Lawfare, and War on the Rocks, among others. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, he lives in Washington, D.C. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (U Notre Dame Press, 2025) brings together ten of Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997. Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile, contemplating the materialism prevalent worldwide—forcibly imposed in the socialist East, freely chosen in the capitalist West—and searching for humanity's possible paths forward. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and—perhaps most centrally—the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit. These annotated speeches, including his timeless “Nobel Lecture” and “Harvard Address,” have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn's sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn's life. Ignat Solzhenitsyn is a pianist and conductor based in New York City. The middle son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he is translator and editor of several of his father's works in English. Daniel Moran's writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners' household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada. Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina's granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother's story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina's rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.” This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina's life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ECW Press, 2023) takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is a native of Kyiv. In this conversation, we discuss two books. Our Enemies Will Vanish (Penguin Press, 2024), is a nonfiction narrative chronicling Putin's invasion of Ukraine through the reporter Trofimov's eyes. No Country for Love (Abacus Books, 2024), is his novel tracing the path of a young woman, the character based on his grandmother, on an arduous journey starting in 1930s Soviet Ukraine. Both books, as different as they are, cast a revealing light on the oppressions visited on the diverse peoples of Ukraine. In our talk, Trofimov offers insights into the books and also a guide as to how the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war might be concluded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions. In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated. A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies