New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

It has long been a cliché to argue that Russian revolutionary movements have been inspired by varieties of 'utopian dreaming' – claims which, although not wrong, are too often used uncritically. With Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities (Bloomsbury, 2021), Mark D. Steinberg asks what utopia meant at the level of ideas, emotions, and lived experience by looking at the work of a wide range of actors, from political leaders to workers and peasants.Mark D. Steinberg is Professor Emeritus within the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He specialises in the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities, his recent books include The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and the extensively revised ninth edition of A History of Russia with Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford University Press, 2018).Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Roselyn Hsueh’s Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2022) presents a new framework for understanding how developing countries integrate into the global economy. Examining the labor-intensive textile sector and the capital-intensive telecommunications sector in China, India, and Russia, Hsueh shows how differences in the way elites perceive the strategic value of a sector can lead to dramatically different patterns of governance.Author Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is also the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization and scholarly articles and book chapters on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and development and globalization. She is a frequent commentator on international politics, finance and trade, and comparative economic development. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His own research focus is the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Anastasia Shesterinina begins Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) with an account of Georgian troops crossing into eastern Abkhazia, in the Southern Caucasus region adjacent Russia, on August 14, 1992. Thus the war that is the book’s subject began. Yet, people didn’t know it at the time. In fact, the question on people’s lips was: is this a war? The answer to the question was: yes. But the uncertainty to which the question gave voice led Shesterinina to the questions motivating this book, namely: how do ordinary people deal with uncertainty in civil war? How do they decide whether and in what way to mobilise, and for whom?On this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science Anastasia Shesterinina discusses her answers to these questions. Along the way, she also reflects on the inadequacies of theories that underestimate or overlook the uncertainty that pervades wartime conditions, particularly in wars’ earliest days; on the conduct and ethics of interview and ethnographic research in post-war settings; and, on the relevance of her research on Abkhazia for our understanding of the war in Ukraine today—and on why comparison of the two is, for her, not just an intellectually or politically interesting exercise.Mobilizing in Uncertainty is (with Mona El-Ghobashy’s Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, Stanford, 2021) joint winner of the 2022 Charles Taylor Book Award, awarded annually by the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods.Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and in Fall 2022 a fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community.The Pursuit of Europe: A History (Oxford UP, 2022) tells the story of the evolution of the "European project", from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a "Concert of Europe", right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need to find an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars had shown that if the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world they could now only do so together.To achieve that, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealously-guarded sovereign powers into a new form of trans-national constitutionalism. This the European Union has tried to do. In the process it has created not, as its enemies have claimed, a "super-state" but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a common body of values and aspirations.It is this, argues Anthony Pagden, that will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within, and to overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, which it faces from without. But it will only succeed in doing so if it also continues to evolve as it has over the pasttwo centuries.Anthony Pagden is Professor of Political Science and History, at The University of California, Los Angeles. He was educated in Chile, Spain, and France, and at Oxford. In the past two decades, he has been the reader in intellectual history at Cambridge, a fellow of King's College, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power: GDP, population size and health, and military might. Yet 25 years removed from its mid-1990s nadir following the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become a supremely disruptive force in world politics. Kathryn E. Stoner assesses the resurrection of Russia and argues that we should look beyond traditional means of power to assess its strength in global affairs. Taking into account how Russian domestic politics under Vladimir Putin influence its foreign policy, Stoner explains how Russia has battled its way back to international prominence.From Russia's seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine to its military support for the Assad regime in Syria, the country has reasserted itself as a major global power. Stoner examines these developments and more in tackling the big questions about Russia's turnaround and global future. Stoner marshals data on Russia's political, economic, and social development and uncovers key insights from its domestic politics. Russian people are wealthier than the Chinese, debt is low, and fiscal policy is good despite sanctions and the volatile global economy. Vladimir Putin's autocratic regime faces virtually no organized domestic opposition. Yet, mindful of maintaining control at home, Russia under Putin also uses its varied power capacities to extend its influence abroad. While we often underestimate Russia's global influence, the consequences are evident in the disruption of politics in theUS, Syria, and Venezuela, to name a few. Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford UP, 2020) is an eye-opening reassessment of the country, identifying the actual sources of its power in international politics and why it has been able to redefine the post-Cold War global order.Kathryn E. Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, all at Stanford University. She is the author orco-editor of five books, including Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, written and edited with Ambassador Michael A. McFaul, and Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine have brought scholarly and public attention to Ukraine's borders. Making Ukraine aims to investigate the various processes of negotiation, delineation, and contestation that have shaped the country's borders throughout the past century. Essays by contributors from various historical fields consider how, when, and under what conditions the borders that historically define the country were agreed upon. A diverse set of national and transnational contexts are explored, with a primary focus on the critical period between 1917 and 1954. Chapters are organized around three main themes: the interstate treaties that brought about the new international order in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the formation of the internal boundaries between Ukraine and other Soviet republics, and the delineation of Ukraine's borders with its western neighbours. Investigating the process of bordering Ukraine in the post-Soviet era, contributors also pay close attention to the competing visions of future relations between Ukraine and Russia. Through its broad geographic and thematic coverage, Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu's Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) illustrates that the dynamics of contemporary border formation cannot be fully understood through the lens of a sole state, frontier, or ideology and sheds light on the shared history of territory and state formation in Europe and the wider modern world.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Oriented for a general reading audience, Sergei Zhuk's book KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991 (Routledge, 2022) gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB special operations in Soviet Ukraine, which targeted especially the USA and Canada, using issues related to Soviet Ukrainian identity and cultural diplomacy of Soviet Ukraine after Stalin's death in 1953 until the perestroika of the 1980s.Concentrating on the period of the Cold War after Stalin and combining the counterintelligence documents from the KGB archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, with the official KGB correspondence and reports to the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine, this book offers an experimental view of the political and cultural history of relations between Soviet Ukraine and capitalist America through the prism of KGB operations against the US and Canada. Written from a hidden perspective of KGB operations from 1953 to the end of the 1980s, this book covers intelligence and counter-intelligence operations and the active measures of the KGB, but also various problems of anti-American cultural campaigns in Soviet Ukraine, sponsored by the KGB, involving the issues of cultural consumption, knowledge production, youth culture and national identity.Using carefully researched archive materials, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of KGB operations, the Cold War, counterintelligence and political and cultural history of the relations between Soviet Ukraine and the United States and Canada, and a role of cultural consumption in this history.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

This podcast is a recorded panel discussion on “War and Peace: America's Humane War and the Crisis in Ukraine.” The panel was part of the Annual Conference of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) held on May 12, 2022 at the University of Connecticut in Hartford. The discussion considers the recent book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, written by Samuel Moyn, and its relevance to the current war in Ukraine. The event featured the author (Moyn), as well as Silja Voeneky, of the University of Freiburg, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and Frauke Lachenmann, of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium. James Cavallaro, of the University Network for Human Rights, Yale Law School and Wesleyan University, was the moderator. The public address questions to the panelists in the second half of the event.Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University.Prof. Dr. Silja Vöneky (Voeneky) is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Law, Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law and Ethics of Law and an associated member of the Institute for Philosophy of Law. Since October 2019, she has served as the Vice Dean of the Freiburg Law Faculty.Frauke Lachenmann is an international lawyer and holds a PhD in English literature. She has worked for the UNHCR in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for International Law and the Max Planck Foundation for the Rule of Law in Heidelberg and has been a Visiting Researcher at Yale.James (Jim) Cavallaro is the Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He teaches at Wesleyan University, Yale Law School and UCLA Law School. Prior to co-founding the University Network, he served as a professor of law at Stanford Law School (2011-2019) and a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School (2002-2011).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has dramatically affected international politics, and the effects are also felt in East Asia. We have heard a lot about China’s position regarding the war, but the situation has also affected security and defense calculations in Japan, one of the key allies of the West in Asia. How did Japan react to the war, what has it meant for Japan's own territorial dispute with Russia, and how do the evolving East Asian, Indo-Pacific, and European security environments look from a Japanese perspective? In this episode, Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is joined by two specialists on Japanese society and politics, Dr. Kamila Szczepanska and Dr. Silja Keva, to answer these questions.Dr. Kamila Szczepanska is a University Lecturer at the Centre for East Asian Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Political Science and Contemporary History at the University of Turku. Dr. Silja Keva is a University Teacher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku.Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb historians: John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Alberta; David R. Stone, is a Professor in Russian Studies in the United States, Naval War College; Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.John-Paul Himka is an American-Canadian historian and retired professor of history of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Himka received his BA in Byzantine-Slavonic Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 1971 and 1977 respectively. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation was Polish and Ukrainian Socialism: Austria, 1867–1890. He received numerous awards for both excellence in teaching and in research. His work on Ukrainian history has been subject to widespread debate and discussion in Ukraine.David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies at the Naval War College, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies