New Books in Russian and Eurasian 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

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019).During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Starks illustrates how tobacco influenced facets of life, politics, morality, and culture in the 19th century from the perspectives of tobacco users, producers, and objectors. The book includes full-color ads for tobacco and papirosy cigarettes that add to the book’s rich prose. From Tolstoy’s anti-tobacco screed to the “Tobacco Queens” of St. Petersburg, Starks uses primary sources to craft an edifying narrative of the history of tobacco and tobacco consumption in the imperial period.Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

As Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularly relevant. Betsy Perabo’s book Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) is a unique and important contribution to this area of inquiry, representing a rare contemporary academic exploration of just war theory within Russian Orthodoxy in the context of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Perabo examines the conflict through the concept of an “interreligious war” between Christian and Buddhist nations, paying particular attention to the writings of Nikolai of Japan, the Russian leader of Orthodox Church in Japan, as well as Russian soldiers, chaplains, military psychologists, and missionary leaders. In this interview we discuss the genealogy of Christian just war theory, the Russian Orthodox mission in in the late 19th-early 20th century the Japanese and Russian perception of religious motivations and divine influence in the 1904-05 war, and the implications of this history for Russian militarism today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

101 years have passed since the murder of the Imperial Family of Russia at Yekaterinburg, but their appeal has not diminished.  Indeed, interest in the Romanovs is at a historic high as television and the Internet age enables ever more devotees to discover the sepia-tinged appeal of Tsar Nicholas II and his doomed family.Less attention is devoted to the members of Nicholas’s family of origin, including many who survived the slaughter of 1917, escaping Russia for lives of exile in Europe and North America. And of these, no one is more fascinating than Nicholas's own mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the Danish princess who captured the hearts of Russia when she arrived to marry the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich in 1866.C.W. Gortner's latest novel, The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (Ballentine Books, 2018) goes a long way to addressing this disparity.  The novel is an exceptionally well-researched, masterfully crafted account of Maria Fyodorovna from her upbringing in a cozy and modest childhood home in Denmark — which she shares with her sister, Alix, destined to be Britain's Queen Alexandra — to her final bittersweet moments in Russia in 1918.Gortner endows Maria Fyodorovna with the ability to see more than one side of an argument, and through her interaction with her father-in-law, the Tsar Liberator Alexander II, the reader gets keen insight into the urgent need for political and social reform in Imperial Russia.The tragic early death of Maria Feodorovna’s husband leaves her eldest son, Nicholas, woefully unprepared to assume the throne.  Gortner deftly draws the inevitable clash of wills between Maria and Alexandra, 'Nicholas's stubborn but strong-willed wife, who comes to entirely rely upon the Mad Monk Rasputin.  This struggle between the two women successfully drives the second half of the novel as war and revolution begin to overshadow the gilded Romanov world.Gortner's research shines through The Romanov Empress, and the resulting novel is several notches above many other attempts to recreate the hermetically sealed world of Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace in terms of both quality and accuracy.  His cameo portraits of the sprawling tribe of Romanovs are spot on — particularly that of Maria Feodorovna’s sister-in-law and sidekick, the redoubtable Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna the Elder.  But at the heart of the novel is Maria Fyodorovna herself — by no means perfect but trying hard to do what is right for the family and the country she loves in almost impossible circumstances.  Romanov fans will rejoice in this welcome addition to the canon.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

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be remembered that things were of course never so straightforward. As Jeremy Friedman shows in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, the 1960s-1980s Sino-Soviet Split(UNC Press, 2018) generated a much more fractious and divided global situation than today’s nostalgia would imply.Taking ideology seriously as a component of socialist foreign policy, Friedman’s new and compelling analysis shows how deep Moscow and Beijing’s disagreements ran, and argues that the division was based at heart on two quite different revolutionary agendas. Drawing on archives all over the world in multiple languages, Shadow Cold War traces the origins of these agendas in revolutionary experience in each of Russia and China, and reveals how these continued to manifest themselves as Soviet and Chinese interests competed in the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century. With China in particular now a major player in many of the locations discussed here, this book should be indispensable reading for anyone seeking clarity about how we got to where we are today.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

The story of where we come from is such an important aspect of our personal sense of self, the forefront of many conversations about national identity, community, and belonging. In a country like the United States, where so many of us are or are descended from immigrants, the answer to this question of heritage can be a complicated one that takes us back generations. And, with proliferation of home genealogy tests like AncestryDNA and 23andMe, people are learning more about their family histories than was ever thought possible. But what happens when the questions we have about our identities and parentage can’t be answered by a simple test?For writer Sophia Shalmiyev, the question was never “who is my mother,” but rather, “where has she gone?” Mother Winter: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2019) traces Shalmiyev’s journey from early childhood in Leningrad, Russia to parenthood in Portland, Oregon as she comes to terms with the ambiguous loss of the most important relationship in her life. Finding inspiration in great feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Rita Ackermann, Sappho, Anaïs Nin, and so many others, Shalmiyev masterfully weaves philosophy, literature, and art history with personal memory to craft a reading experience unlike any other.Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies nonfiction and teaches creative writing classes. She is also the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or visit her online at zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Sergei Zhuk’s Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (Tauris, 2018) offers an insightful investigation of the development of American studies in the Soviet Union, with a specific emphasis on Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. In spite of ideological differences, the US and the USSR established mutual interests to history and culture studies. One may suggest that this interest was not quite surprising: knowing an opponent’s background helps lead and win confrontations. This might be true in terms of the US—USSR relations. However, as Zhuk’s research demonstrates, the story is much more complicated. One of the decisive factors is the individual who happens to participate in this seemingly antagonistic collaboration of the West and the USSR. Through his personal story, Zhuk traces subtle modifications of ideological indoctrination which transpire when one gets acquainted with the “Other.” While detailing the establishment of American studies in the Soviet Union, Soviet Americana touches upon what ideological changes may occur through the introduction to seemingly alien culture, history, and language. Another innovative aspect of Zhuk’s books is an attempt to describe similarities and differences which characterize American studies as formed by Soviet Russian and Soviet Ukrainian scholars. Zhuk intriguingly notes that Soviet Americanists, when traveling to the US, were discovering (and modifying) not only their Soviet identity, but their Russian and Ukrainian identities as well. Soviet Americana is a complex and multilayered research contributing to the subversion of monolithic representation of Soviet/Russian cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor.  In it, we meet pirates, princes, and prelates; and while much divides the Slavs, Balts, Saxons, Poles, and Scandinavian peoples, much also unites them: rugged individualism and a desire to expand the boundaries of their known world.Caroline Boggis-Rolfe’s new book, The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples(Amberley, 2019) is a deep dive into this engrossing history.  It which opens with the prosperity of the Hanseatic League, that commercial confederation, which ruled the Baltic between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and closes with the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution.  Unlike other studies of the region which focus on subsets of the Baltic region: Scandinavia, Northern Germany, the Baltic States, Russia, and Poland, Boggis-Rolfe has undertaken the somewhat daunting task of examining 1000 years of the region’s history as one unified history.Boggis-Rolfe’s approach makes The Baltic Story eminently readable: rather than placing her material in strict silos, she weaves the stories of separate nations into a cogent chronological narrative, examining each nation at the zenith of its power, but through the lens of its relationship to its neighbors.  That being said, each chapter is an excellent stand-alone study, and in them we get the privilege of spending time with the bold Swedish monarchs who forged empires, the erudite Kings of Poland, the patrons of Copernicus; Peter the Great who hewed for Russia a “window on the West,” and the visionary Frederick II of Prussia, and a host of other equally fascinating personalities.The Baltic Story was born of Boggis-Rolfe’s two passions: her academic work on Voltaire and the Enlightenment and her many years of visiting Eastern Europe and the Baltic region.  She has a natural gift for story-telling, which makes the history of this region leap off the page.  Her tenacity and commitment to creating what did not previously exist — a complete study of the Baltic — is a boon for both amateur and seasoned historians, and anyone embarking on a voyage of discovery around the Baltic Sea.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

Zoya Andropova—soon to be known in her adopted country as Zoë Andropov—didn’t ask to be rescued from her Soviet orphanage, even after the arrest of her father, a strong supporter of the very regime that has now taken his life. But rescued she is, by well-meaning Americans, who soon dump her at a wealthy boarding school where she struggles to retain far more than her name. She takes refuge in literature, in particular by the émigré writer Lev (Leo) Orlov, whose science fiction transports her to more satisfying times and places.So perhaps it is no surprise that when Orlov shows up to teach at the school where Zoya, having nowhere else to go, has moved from student to worker, she tumbles into love with him, ignoring both his advances to the other girls and his very present and controlling wife. Zoya charts the evolution of this romantic triangle in her diary, which we read, interspersed with letters from Lev to his wife.As Adrienne Celt notes early on,Invitation to a Bonfire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) is inspired by the life of the well-known Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. But as the story builds, it leaves the details of Nabokov’s life and marriage behind, roaring out of a deliberately quiet academic beginning until it reaches a place that upends much of what we have believed up to that point.C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies