New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

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 criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024). Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, a prolific scholar of Russian and Jewish literature and cinema, the memoirs tell the rich and poignant story of Goldis’s life and what it took for a Jew to navigate and survive in the halls of Soviet power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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 reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage.In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan, decentred.Morrison reexamines the relationship between Tchaikovsky's music, personal life, and politics; his support of Tsars Alexander II and III; and his engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus. Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer (Yale UP, 2024) unsettles everything we thought we knew--and gives us a vivid new appreciation of Russia's most popular composer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces reached the West. Who were they? Where were they located? What were they doing? How were they equipped? What were their intentions? NATO was lined up in West Germany to face these forces and relied on getting up-to-date intelligence to warn of any threat, 'Indicators of Hostility' that could be a precursor to an invasion.BRIXMIS, the British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, was on hand to provide that intelligence. Thanks to an obscure 1946 agreement between the British and Soviets that established 'liaison missions' in their respective zones of occupation, the British were able to send highly qualified military 'observers' into East Germany to roam (relatively) freely and keep an eye on what was going on. What started as 'liaison', a point of contact between the British and Soviet occupation forces, developed into a very sophisticated intelligence gathering operation, sending 'tours' out every day of the year, between 1946 and when the Mission closed in 1990. Andrew Long's BRIXMIS and the Secret Cold War: Intelligence Collection Operations Behind Enemy Lines in East Germany (Pen and Sword History, 2024) tells the story about these top-secret liaison tours. These tours were undertaken in high-performance, highly modified marked vehicles, with personnel in uniform and unarmed, apart from professional photographic equipment and occasionally some top-secret gadgets from the boffins back in the UK. They joined their French and American colleagues in snooping around the opposition, photographing military bases, equipment, and manoeuvres, and trying to evade capture by the secret police and counterintelligence units. They faced danger and violence daily, but thanks to their bravery and professionalism, the West had accurate and up to date information on what was happening in East Germany which help keep the peace all that time. This is the story of this little-known unit and their exploits behind enemy lines.Andrew Long, from Great Britain, is a military history researcher and author. His fascination with the Cold War began with a trip to West Berlin in 1986, traveling through Checkpoint Charlie to visit the East. Andrew’s writing comes from a desire to make sense of an extremely complex period in modern history, weaving together inter-relating stories involving politics, ideologies, personalities, technological advances, and geography. There is still much to be told on this fascinating subject. After a successful career in marketing, Andrew relocated to Cornwall and took up writing full time.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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 Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows that while the Red Army's rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolution, the subsequent collapse of the offensive had a more striking result. The Soviet military and political leadership drew the mistaken conclusion that they had not been defeated by the Polish Army, but by the forces of the capitalist world - Britain and France - who were perceived as having directed the war behind-the-scenes. They were taken aback by the strength of the forces of counterrevolution and convinced they had been overcome by the capitalist powers.The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2023) reveals that - in the aftermath of the catastrophe at Warsaw -Lenin, Stalin and other senior Bolsheviks were convinced that another war against Poland and its capitalist backers was inevitable with this perpetual fear of war shaping the evolution of the early Soviet state. It also further encouraged the creation of a centralised and repressive one-party state and provided a powerful rationale for the breakneck industrialisation of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The Soviet leadership's central preoccupation in the 1930s was Nazi Germany; this book convincingly argues that Bolshevik perceptions of Poland and the capitalist world in the decade before were given as much significance and were ultimately crucial to the rise of Stalinism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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 contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival political movements also enter the picture insofar as their acitivities influenced Soviet policies. Methodologically, the study shifts attention from a limited body of normative texts and their creators within the Soviet political and cultural elite to a wider array of practices, organizations, and players engaged in power struggles and production of knowledge about the past in different social domains. Specifically, it brings into focus groups not normally thought of as participants in the production of Soviet memory discourse, notably NKVD officers, Soviet archivists, Ukrainian nationalists, Nazi collaborators, and former partisans in the German-occupied territories.The book not only demonstrates the complexity of nation-shaping processes, but also restores agency to some seemingly powerless actors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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 Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story."When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be courted and then discarded depending on Moscow’s needs, and they know it. For their part, the Serbs depend on Russian political support in their campaign for a face-saving settlement of the long-running Kosovo dispute but know their economic success hinges on their ties to the EU and the US. Belgrade must "manipulate the superpower rivalry to secure economic resources from both superpowers and its political strategic autonomy".Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS, and a prominent media commentator on strategy in the Balkans.*His book recommendations were Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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 first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed--despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustasa and the Slovak Hlinka Party--to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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 Herzen, the Russian writer and thinker who emigrated in the mid-19th century.The waves of Russian emigration in the 20th century—beginning with those fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—led to the creation of numerous Russian-language publishing ventures, ranging from short-lived projects to long-standing institutions. Among the most well-remembered are the YMCA Press in Paris, Posev and Grani in Germany, and Ardis Publishing, founded in the early 1970s—not by Russians, but by American literary scholars.Exiled Russian publishers not only printed the works of fellow émigré authors but also played a crucial role in tamizdat—smuggling manuscripts deemed ideologically unacceptable by the Soviet regime out of the USSR, publishing them abroad, and then covertly reintroducing them into the country for clandestine distribution.After Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, prompting the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians, it was only a matter of time before new émigré publishing houses emerged.In this conversation, we speak with Feliks Sandalov, co-founder and director of StraightForward, one of the newly established Russian publishing initiatives in exile, about his work and the evolving landscape of Russian publishing abroad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. In Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes (Central European UP, 2024), László Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people.Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War discusses how anti-Jewish violence began during the revolution and civil war 1917-1920 raising questions of responsibility of civil and military authorities and the antisemitic propaganda spread by official mass media as well as deliberate exploitation of antisemitism for political purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies