New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

The status of Russia as a world power has been fiercely debated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although often ignored, Russia came back into the international limelight in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and recently in 2022 with the war in Ukraine. However, what are the underlining precepts behind Russian behavior on the international stage, and how do Russian leaders perceive their country’s place in the world? To answer these questions is Russian Grand Strategy in the Era of Global Power Competition (Manchester University Press, 2022) edited by Andrew Monaghan.Dr. Andrew Monaghan is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. This spring he was a George F Kennan Fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. He is the author of a number of books on Russia, including Dealing with the Russians.Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What is the relationship between Spirit Possession Rituals and Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia?How has modernity transformed Spirit Possession cults in the 21st century and what has led to the efflorescence of possession rituals across Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in recent decades?Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson joined Terese Gagnon on the Nordic Asia Podcast handing out important insights of their new edited volume Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia, Worlds ever More Enchanted that was published with NIAS Press in March 2022. Spirit Possession examines the upsurge of spirit cults and diverse forms of magical ritual in Buddhist Southeast Asia by exploring the interplay of neoliberal capitalism, visual media, the network cultures of the Internet, and the politics of cultural heritage and identity.Visit the NIAS Press Webshop to find the book and get your copy here.Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière is an anthropologist at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and former director of its Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE). She specializes on Burma-Myanmar, where she has conducted regular field research since the 1980s, and has written widely on religion and rituals.Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Thai cultural history at the Australian National University. Over the past four decades, he has written extensively on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Thailand as well as critical approaches to Asian area studies. His ongoing research includes studying media and masculinity in Thai gay cultures and religion and ritual in Thai communities affected by HIV.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

Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford UP, 2022) examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies. Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.Catherine Gibson is a historian of modern eastern Europe, currently a research fellow at the University of Tartu in Estonia.Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies. Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world. Sloss calls for cooperation among democratic governments to create a new transnational system for regulating social media to protect Western democracies from information warfare. Drawing on his professional experience as an arms control negotiator, he outlines a novel system of transnational governance that Western democracies can enforce by harmonizing their domestic regulations. And drawing on his academic expertise in constitutional law, he explains why that system―if implemented by legislation in the United States―would be constitutionally defensible, despite likely First Amendment objections. With its critical examination of information warfare and its proposal for practical legislative solutions to fight back, this book is essential reading in a time when disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine democracy.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond.Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators—and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad.Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2022) is aimed at a general audience, synthesizing a vast amount of qualitative and quantitative research by the authors and many other scholars. The book is highly readable, with a great mix of anecdotes and examples along with plain-English explanations of academic research findings. However, it also provides an excellent overview of contemporary global authoritarianism for academics. Almost every claim in the book has an endnote reference to the original research for those who want to follow up. The endnotes mean that despite its moderately intimidating 340-page heft, the main text is a very approachable 219 pages.Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including in particular the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.In 2021-22, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and he was recently named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A graduate of Oxford University (B.A. Hons.) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1995), he has published five books and numerous articles in leading political science and economics journals including The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review, as well as in public affairs journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has been a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied EconomicsPeter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focuses on the political economy and governance of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In her book Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020 (University of Rochester Press, 2022), Zarina Burkadze argues that great power competition may distribute political power in a way that causes a democratic regime to emerge, supporting her argument with evidence from an impressive array of archival sources as well as from sixty-six interviews with state officials, opposition leaders, foreign diplomats, media and nongovernmental representatives, and other experts. While the case study of Georgia is the central concern of the narrative, the book’s final chapter provides an important cross-case comparison of democratization efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine.Zarina Burkadze is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Ilia State University. She did her postdoctoral studies as a Fulbright scholar at George Washington University and earned her doctoral degree in political science at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include democratization, democracy, and autocracy promotion.Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Olga Bertelsen's In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022) focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s-1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s-1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, "active measures" designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.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

Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics (U Alabama Press, 2020) moves away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations—and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores.Silver examines events in three key locales—Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States—during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia’s czarist empire.In his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States’ melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver’s analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement—and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau once gave a press conference while visiting Washington, during which he famously said: "Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." For many of the countries in eastern Europe, this must also ring true, except that the elephant hasn’t necessarily been the same bedfellow. At different points, particularly over the last 2 centuries, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have all caused smaller neighbors to be very nervous––with just cause.With the current situation in Eastern Europe, as Ukraine and potentially other nations fight for their right to exist, it seems a timely moment to talk to Tomek Jankowski about the recent release of the 2nd edition of his book, Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know about the History (and More) of a Region That Shaped Our World and Still Does, published by Academic Studies Press and New Europe Books. The book is a great hybrid – it can be read all the way through as a fast-paced and easily digestible tour through the history of a region most people in Western Europe and North America don’t know well, or it can be used as a reference text; a reader can dip into it to find answers to questions.In our far ranging conversation, we discuss the common dynamics and cultural legacies that we can see today as a result of the historical reality that many eastern European countries share. National identity is a complex and contested subject, no more so than in Eastern European where some nations have only existed for short periods of time or, in other cases, national sovereignty has come and gone depending on the era.In addition to the invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then this year, many other nations that share border with Russia - the Baltic states, Finland, and Moldova – are also feeling increasingly vulnerable. Others, such as Serbia and Hungary, are offering either official or popular support for Russian’s aggression but it is a very contested issue. We discuss the roots of these various reactions.On the subject of Russia, Jankowski addresses why Putin has repeatedly framed the current war using the language and summoning the ghosts of the Soviet Union’s role in WWII. Even 80 years on. He reminds the listener of Russian sacrifices and losses in that war, explains how they were remembered and understood in the Soviet Union under Stalin, Khrushchev and later leaders, and how they are remembered and understood in Russia today.Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember: A Jewish Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust.In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered.Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners.In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies