New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies
Interviews with Scholars of Russia and Eurasia about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 59 minutes
- Episodes
- 965
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2025
Michael David-Fox, "Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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 re…
01:00:54 |
Sat 03 May 2025
Shaun Walker, "The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West" (Knopf, 2025)
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 exa…
00:57:13 |
Tue 29 Apr 2025
Polly Jones, "Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin" (Bloombury, 2024)
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 represe…
01:13:44 |
Sat 26 Apr 2025
John Lechner, "Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare" (Bloombury, 2025)
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, …
01:26:03 |
Thu 24 Apr 2025
Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019)
Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign on…
01:07:42 |
Wed 23 Apr 2025
Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" (Yale UP, 2022)
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly bel…
01:18:26 |
Tue 22 Apr 2025
Ignat Solzhenitsyn, ed., "We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" (U Notre Dame Press, 2025)
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 conseq…
00:44:19 |
Sun 20 Apr 2025
Sasha Colby, "The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance" (ECW Press, 2023)
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…
01:22:00 |
Sat 19 Apr 2025
Understanding Ukraine: A Discussion with Author Yaroslav Trofimov
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 …
00:51:52 |
Thu 17 Apr 2025
Serhiy Kudelia, "Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2015)
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?…
00:57:43 |
Wed 16 Apr 2025
Xiaolu Ma, "Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930)" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930) (Harvard Asia Center, 2024) offers the first detailed account of the complex cultural, literary and intellectual r…
01:01:35 |
Sat 05 Apr 2025
Alexander Hill, "The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies" (Routledge, 2025)
The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies (Routledge, 2025) edited by Alexander Hill brings together historical and contemporary essays about Soviet and Russian military studies, …
01:16:27 |
Tue 01 Apr 2025
Mikhail Goldis, "Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the…
00:46:20 |
Fri 28 Mar 2025
Simon Morrison, "Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer" (Yale UP, 2024)
Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating real…
00:36:10 |
Tue 25 Mar 2025
Andrew Long, "BRIXMIS and the Secret Cold War: Intelligence Collecting Operations Behind Enemy Lines in East Germany" (Pen and Sword, 2024)
The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lin…
01:47:27 |
Mon 24 Mar 2025
Peter Whitewood, "The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy: Lenin’s Defeat and the Rise of Stalinism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Ru…
01:11:00 |
Sun 23 Mar 2025
Oleksandr Melnyk, "World War II as an Identity Project: Historicism, Legitimacy Contests, and the (Re-) Construction of Political Communities in Ukraine, 1939–1946" (Ibidem, 2022)
World War II as an Identity Project (Ibidem, 2022) explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contempor…
01:01:00 |
Sat 22 Mar 2025
Vuk Vuksanovic, "Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.
Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing …
00:41:58 |
Fri 21 Mar 2025
Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, "Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult" (Ibidem Press, 2014)
Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (Ibidem Verlag, 2014) is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the fir…
00:56:45 |
Thu 13 Mar 2025
Tamizdat under Putin: A Discussion with Publisher Feliks Sandalov
Russia has a long history of publishers operating from abroad, producing books and periodicals for a Russian-speaking audience. One notable example is The Bell (Kolokol), published by Alexander Herze…
00:58:59 |
Wed 05 Mar 2025
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