New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019) draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region's links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era's other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Margarita Balmaceda’s Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a meticulous exploration of a complex system of energy supplies involving Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. While originating in Russia, energy supplies, as the author asserts, undergo changes and transformations when being delivered to various destinations. What do these changes inform about the nature of both energy resources and power? Offering an insightful framework in which the two concepts can be understood, Russian Energy Chains complicates the issue of energy supplies that are inextricable from the dynamics of power relations on the interstate level. In addition to acute commentaries on the current role and status of Russia in the energy market, Margarita Balmaceda offers references to various time periods to illustrate how politically and geographically entangled energy systems are. Russian Energy Chains provides a detailed account of the development of the energy power that Russia seems to both offer and usurp; the book guides the reader through the complexity of power relations that include Ukraine and the European Union and helps better understand the current debate about Nord Stream-2. On a larger level, Margarita Balmaceda invites the discussion of the future of the energy market in terms of domestic and international policies.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

Volodymyr Vynnychenko is one of the most ambiguous and controversial Ukrainian writers of the twentieth century. In an intricate and highly entangled way, his persona combines an artist and a statesman whose political views include both national aspirations of Ukraine and the pursuit of programs which were marked by socialist and federalist ideas. His writing opens a window into cultural and political contestations that were taking place in Ukraine in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Empire and on the eve of the creation of the Soviet Union. The complexity of these dramatic and drastic changes manifests itself in Vynnychenko’s writing, which is marked by psychological nuances and emotional crevices. George Mihaychuk’s Disharmony and Other Plays (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2020) invites the reader to delve into a psychological world of characters who try to deal with moral doubts, hesitations, and uncertainties. In the introduction, George Mihaychuk outlines the pillars of Vynnychenko’s dramas. The author situates Vynnychenko in the context of European modernism while providing trajectories that connect Vynnychenko to Hegel and Kant. The moral issues that Vynnychenko explores in and through his dramas resonate with the Dostoyevskian voice. His characters are split, tormented, haunted by the desire to be honest and genuine with themselves. Is it possible to be genuine with oneself? What does it mean to be honest with oneself, after all? George Mihaychuk’s Disharmony and Other Plays invites readers to take a bold journey into the deep and dark corners of the soul. 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

The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton UP, 2021), looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a new interpretation. Professor Jonathan Haslam, in the words of historian, Geoffrey Roberts, “the doyen of Soviet Diplomatic History”, looks at the neglected thread connecting them all: the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the inter-war period. Marshalling an array of archival sources, including records from the Communist International, Professor Haslam seeks to transform our understanding of the deep-seated origins of World War II, its conflicts, and its legacy.In Haslam’s interpretation fascism’s emergence in conjunction with the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, helped to upend the existing world order. World War I had economically destabilized many nations, and the threat of Communist revolt loomed large in the ensuing social unrest. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire, and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. The appeasement and political misreading of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that followed held back the spectre of rebellion—only to usher in the later advent of war.Illuminating ideological differences in the decades before World War II, and the continuous role of pre- and postwar Communism, The Spectre of War provides unprecedented context for one of the most momentous calamities of the twentieth century. While not everyone will agree with his thesis and his overall interpretation of Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period, Professor Haslam has written a book that will be required reading for anyone seriously interested in the period covered by the book. 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested in the streets and societies of Munich and Budapest in 1919. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, of 'fighting the world revolution', which was shared by residents of the two cities. In 1919, both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were focused on shaping the emerging new order according to their own worldview. In Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Eliza Ablovatski helps answer the question of why so many Germans and Hungarians chose to use their new political power for violence and repression.Eliza Ablovatski is Associate Professor of History at Kenyon College (Ohio), where she has just completed her term as chair of the History department. 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

German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft, or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree with the ambassador’s assessment; though they might find his use of the word “community,” with all its positive connotations, somewhat out of place. For if the Germans and Soviets built any community at all, the evidence suggests it was not built on mutual respect and cooperation. Rather it was built on hate—vicious, unbridled, unrelenting hate.Hate, however, can unite as powerfully as it divides. Ideologically, politically, culturally, economically, and socially, the Germans and the Soviets were diametrically opposed. But for a brief period during the interwar years, their mutual hatred of the post-First World War order overcame their mutual distrust to bring these two powers together in an uncharacteristic, but highly consequential, economic, technologic, and military partnership. Formalized with the signing of the Treaty of Ropallo in April 1922, this uneasy alliance saw the Soviet Union provide a safe haven for German rearmament in return for German investment, trade, and military assistance. German officers, businessmen, industrialists, and engineers relocated to secret sites throughout the Soviet Union to work on the design of tanks and aircraft, develop new chemical weapons capabilities, and train a new generation of German military leaders away from the prying eyes of the Allied powers. Simultaneously, Soviet officers learned the art of war from their German counterparts, while their country acquired the industrial base, manufacturing expertise, and military hardware it believed necessary to advancing the Communist cause.Understanding the grave significance of that exchange is the object of military historian Ian Ona Johnson’s recent work, Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2021). The Ropallo relationship, Johnson convincingly argues, can explain not only the outbreak of the Second World War, but also its conduct, especially on the Eastern Front. Germany’s rapid rearmament, the Nazification of the Reichswar, the Soviet military purges of the 1930s, and even British and French appeasement, Johnson maintains, can all trace their roots to the Ropallo era. Without the Soviet Union’s assistance, Germany would not have been able to so easily violate the Versailles treaty; nor would the German military have been able to so rapidly rearm. Close contact between German officers and the Soviet regime, Johnson observes, radicalized many in the Reichswar’s upper echelons, driving them into the open embrace of the National Socialists. Contact between these two groups also troubled Stalin, who feared Red Army officers were becoming contaminated by German ideology and culture. That fear, Johnson contends, resulted in the disastrous Red Army purges of 1936. And, Johnson argues, had the Germany Army not stolen a technological night march on the British and the French, appeasement may not have been as attractive a posture. Without Ropallo, Hitler’s early advances may have been more forcefully checked.Faustian Bargain is an insightful, incisive, exhaustively researched, and incredibly accessible look at a critical period in the lead up to the Second World War. Johnson provides a fresh lens through which to examine the most important questions surrounding the war, its origins, and its conduct. In doing so, Johnson reminds us that the story of the Second World War is in fact, as Brockdorff-Rantzau might have stated, the story of the the complex relationships built by an international “community of fate.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of some 350 extracts of this collection, but also a deep dive into the provenance, nature and applications of these Cold War era Soviet maps. Join us as we talk to co-authors John Davies and Alex Kent about the joys of working with maps, the difficulties they encountered researching the Soviet mapping programme, and their visions for the future. Listeners interested in contributing to John and Alex's research may contact them at author@redatlasbook.com. Prints of Soviet City Plans are also available on their website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Weaving together personal story and broad analysis, Bagila Burkhabayeva’s The Vanishing Generation: Revolution, Religion, and Disappearance in Modern Uzbekistan (Indiana UP, 2019) deals with the question of Islam and its repression during the period of Islam Karimov’s rule in newly independent Uzbekistan. As witness to the infamous Zhaslyk prison and the 2005 Andijan uprising, Bukharbayeva shares intimate details about Uzbekistan’s use of torture, kidnapping, and imprisonment against perceived religious extremists. Burkhabayeva’s book will be of great interest to scholars, journalists, and anyone interested in contemporary Islam, Central Asia, or newly-formed authoritarian states of the late 20th and early 21st century.Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University 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 position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those who launched them hoped to achieve.Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Harvard University Press, 2021) studies many attempts to chart an Asian policy—from bold imperial dreams of a thriving Russian Far East to Soviet efforts to inspire the developing world through soft power—and why all these policies ended up disappointing their drafters.In this interview, Chris and I talk about Russia’s engagement with the Far East, stretching from its initial forays on the Pacific Coast of North America through to the present day. We talk about why “pivots to Asia” are so hard: both for the Russians, and perhaps for other great powers considering the same policy.Chris Miller is an assistant professor of international history at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and co-director of the school's Russia and Eurasia Program. He is the author of Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). He has previously served as the associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He can be followed on Twitter at @crmiller1.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of We Shall Be Masters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

When people think of Russian food, they generally think either of the opulent luxury of the tsarist aristocracy or of post-Soviet elites, signified above all by caviar, or on the other hand of poverty and hunger--of cabbage and potatoes and porridge. Both of these visions have a basis in reality, but both are incomplete. The history of food and drink in Russia includes fasts and feasts, scarcity and, for some, at least, abundance. It includes dishes that came out of the northern, forested regions and ones that incorporate foods from the wider Russian Empire and later from the Soviet Union. Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia (Reaktion Books, 2021) places Russian food and drink in the context of Russian history and shows off the incredible (and largely unknown) variety of Russian food.Alison Smith is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Toronto. 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