New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

The warmth of China and Russia’s present-day relationship is sometimes said to reprise 1950s ties between Mao’s PRC and the Soviet Union, even if that remains a poorly understood period in both countries. Still less understood, moreover, is the deep Soviet cultural influence on China which accompanied this era of socialist alliance, and this in part is why Yan Li’s China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (Routledge, 2018)is such an invaluable book.Presenting a fascinating compendium of insights into the ways that Soviet fashion, literature, architecture, language and many other things washed over China during the mid-20th century, Li offers a sophisticated argument that this all fed into an entire framework for socialist modernity which China sought to adopt at this crucial period in its history. This was not always a one-way street, and this book also highlights instances where Chinese people were hesitant to embrace Soviet ways of doing things. But even as we look at this earlier ‘Chinese Dream’ from a temporal remove of over six decades, there can be little doubt that it left a mark on China that is still palpable today, and therefore deserves our attention.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

How have memes changed politics? In Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts(Routledge, 2019), Anastasia Denisova, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Westminster, gives both a history of internet memes as well as an analysis of key case studies of their impact on politics and society. Offering a rich and detailed engagement with Russian and American politics, as well as a nuanced and even-handed assessment of specific and well-known memes. In the current complex political moment the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand how the internet may shape forthcoming elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and dairy (which would be corn fed) following decades of austerity during collectivization and WWII. Khrushchev touted corn as crucial to building a society equal to the US in material abundance. Hale-Dorrell discusses Khrushchev’s plan to implement industrial farming in the collective and state farm system through increased mechanization, adoption of American techniques, a rejection of Lysenkoism, and mass mobilization of the Komsomol and other youth. But still the corn crusade failed to achieve the transformation that Khrushchev promised.Unlike other historians who have focused on Khrushchev being at fault for this failure, Hale-Dorrell examines the bureaucratic attitudes, lack of resources, and the widespread Soviet campaign mentality frustrated the implementation of Khrushchev’s policies. Regional and local officials interpreted central directives to suit their own needs. Their policies took on a life of their own and a local flavor that often resulted in policies substantially different from and less transformative than Khrushchev had intended. In some places, local and regional officials relied on outright fraud or deception to meet quotas or avoid planting corn. What emerges through all this is a portrait of the Soviet Union that is chaotic, progressive if only slowly and deeply interconnected with other countries through the exchange of trade goods and scientific knowledge, all of which flies in the face of the traditional view of the USSR as isolated, backwards and governed by top down, command style party and state bureaucracy. Listen in!Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years.The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019) breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans―the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia―before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history.Bathsheba Demuth  is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. As an environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has lived in Arctic communities from Eurasia to Canada. Demuth has a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University, and an M.A. and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.Steven Seegel (NBN interviewer) is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Film and Identity in Kazakhstan: Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture in Central Asia (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Rico Issacs uses cinema as an analytical tool to demonstrate the constructed and contested nature of Kazakh national identity. By first tracing the evolution of Kazakh national identity formation and then analyzing data from individual interviews and the Kazakh films themselves, Issacs demonstrates the multiple ways that Kazakh national identity has been cast and interpreted, both past and present. This book is essential reading for scholars of Central Asia, nationalisms and national identity, or those with a broader interest in film, Central Asia, or the study of nation building.Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The 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

From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Chatham House, 2019), by Chatham House Senior Russian expert, Keir Giles provides the sophisticated and curious reader a primer to help explain Putin’s Russia.As per Giles, Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders, Tsars, Commissars and Presidents alike for centuries have thought and acted based on their country’s much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the Tsars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage with Russia without attempting to understand how Russians look at the world is a recipe for repeated disappointment and frequent crises.Keir Giles, describes how Russian leaders have used consistent doctrinal and strategic approaches to the rest of the world. These approaches may seem deeply alien in the Western world, but understanding them is essential for successful engagement with contemporary Russia. Giles argues that understanding how Moscow’s leaders think and act—not just Vladimir Putin but his predecessors and eventual successors—will help their counterparts in the West develop a less crisis-prone and more productive relationship with Russia.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. 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 new book, Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema and the State (Routledge, 2018), Mariëlle Wijermars discusses how history is being reimagined by in pop culture and by the Russian government to give legitimacy and a sense of history to the Putin regime. She discusses the political reimagining overtime of figures such as Ivan the Terrible, Aleksandr Nevskii and the Romanovs. Listen in for this timely and fascinating discussion about the fluidity of historical memory and imagination and how this is used by modern regimes to create narratives that give themselves legitimacy and power.Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Larry Holmes’ book, which first appeared in English in 2012, was released in Russian this year. In War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power: The Center, Periphery, and Kirov’s Pedagogical Institute, 1941–1952 (Lexington Books, 2012), Holmes uses the case study of the Pedagogical Institute during the war years to explore power relationships in the institute and between local/ regional power and central power in Moscow. The Pedagogical Institute was forced to evacuate to the small provincial town of Iarnask to make room for the People’s Commissariat of Forest Industry (Narkomles) and workers from the Commissariat of Aviation Industry, which had been evacuated from Moscow, in buildings in Kirov. Coming from Moscow the Commissariats, particularly Narkomles, were given priority in the allocation of resources and the Pedagogical Institution was squeezed out. In a similar manner, evacuated academics, mainly non communist professors from Leningrad and other large cities were also given priority in resource allocation in Iaransk, receiving much higher food rations than the Pedagogical Institutes staff, which primarily consisted of senior teachers, who were party members. Upon returning to Kirov at the end of the war, the Pedagogical institute was met with utter destruction of its property. Narkomles had allowed the heating to freeze clogged and destroyed the sewage system and burned the wood floors for heat. With the blessing and support of the city and regional party and state organizations the Pedagogical Institute campaigned against Narkomles seeking compensation for its destroyed property. While not entirely successful, the Pedagogical Institutes appeals to the central Committee and particularly Kosygin meant that Narkomles had to provide recompense for the destroyed property. Holmes highlights these fault lines that developed within the Pedagogical institution and between different tiers of Soviet power, noting that the business of governance in the USSR was far messier and more complicated that the traditional to down command style model ascribed to the USSR. Regional authorities could successfully challenge central institutions as long as they did not question the system.Larry and I discuss not just the book but the translation process and the reception of his work in Russia, where his book is very different from the traditional Soviet and Russian triumphalist narratives that focus on the front and citizens pulling together to beat the Nazis. Russian editions of his book are available in hardback in over 20 libraries in Russia including Hertzen Library in Kirov and the Lenin Library in Moscow. Larry is a bit of a Luddite with no website or social media but welcomes comments and questions about his work at his email lehviatka@bellsouth.net.Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In their introduction to Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life (Indiana University Press, 2019), Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko invite the reader to “imagine a society where food is managed by officialdom like a controlled substance and everyone is addicted to it.”Food plays a pivotal role throughout Russian history, but perhaps no more so than during the Soviet era, when the perennial Russian cycle of feast and famine took on a highly political aspect.  Access to food was a powerful tool wielded by the State, from the Kholodomor to the ration cards of the eighties, Soviet citizens were forced to make daily choices about food, which often brought with them unwelcome moral dilemmas.For a topic that is such a fulcrum of political, economic, sociological, and historical, studies, far too little scholarship on the topic has been produced either in Russia or the West. We can posit the reasons why: probably too feminine a topic, definitely too domestic, not serious, too private, but the fact is indisputable and the lack of relevant scholarship of Russian culinary studies makes Seasoned Socialism all the more timely and welcome.This collection of essays by noted scholars from a range of fields, including literary studies, film studies, food studies, history, and sociology examines the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s era.  In them, we discover oral history, personal cookbooks, memorable scenes from the Golden Age of Soviet Cinema, poetry, and even stories of survival in the Gulags.  We are transported inside steamy communal apartment kitchens and out to the welcome fresh air of a dacha.  We discover the lore of the cabbage and the magic of tea, and we come to know the people whose lives revolved around sourcing, preparing, and enjoying food in the late Soviet Era.Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life joins the canon of “must-reads” for serious students of Russian and Soviet history, culture, and, of course, cuisine.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England.  Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life.  She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door:  Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow.  Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In his new book, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Cornell University Press, 2019), Jeff Sahadeo looks at the migrant experiences of peoples from the Caucuses and Central Asia in the late Soviet and early Post-Soviet periods ( 1960s-1990s). He explores the various factors that drew these migrants to the two Soviet capitals, which were the seat of the former colonial empire. Using oral histories as well as documentary evidence, he researches how they integrated with the local population, what sort of prejudices they faced and to what extent they were welcomed as part of the Soviet brotherhood of peoples. Sahadeo also examines how the relatinship between these southern migrants and the Russian majority changed over time as the USSR fell apart and nationalistic discourse became more prevalent. The migrant experience in the later years of the USSR is incredibly relevant in today’s world where migration from from former colonial peripheries to colonial centers has become common place and has generated nationalist, reactionary politics in response.Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies