New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Vahram Ter-Matevosyan new book Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan,  examines the Kemalist ideology of Turkey from two perspectives. It discusses major problems in the existing interpretations of the topic and how the incorporation of Soviet perspectives enriches the historiography and our understanding of that ideology. To address these questions, the book looks into the origins, evolution, and transformational phases of Kemalism between the 1920s and 1970s. The research also focuses on perspectives from abroad by observing how republican Turkey and particularly its founding ideology were viewed and interpreted by Soviet observers. Paying more attention to the diplomatic, geopolitical, and economic complexities of Turkish-Soviet relations, scholars have rarely problematized those perceptions of Turkish ideological transformations. Looking at various phases of Soviet attitudes towards Kemalism and its manifestations through the lenses of Communist leaders, party functionaries, diplomats and scholars, the book illuminates the underlying dynamics of Soviet interpretations.Robert Elliott is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people.  He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running south into South East Asia and then turning west into South Asia and the Middle East.  This zone received a huge percentage of aid and support from the superpowers.  This zone saw by far the most military interventions by the superpowers.  And this zone saw millions of people die in conflicts tied to the Cold War.Chamberlin reminds us that these conflicts were not simply instigated and propelled by the superpowers.  Instead, the Cold War intersected with colonial and post-colonial conflicts in complicated and nonlinear ways.  Similarly, he argues that the nature of these conflicts changed dramatically over time, from Maoist people's revolutions to conflicts driven by sectarian struggles.By making the broader contours of this period clearer, Chamberlin is able to put genocides in Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and others into a common framework.   In doing so, he's written a book that is not explicitly about genocide, but says a great deal about genocidal violence in the second half of the twentieth century.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia (Yale University Press, 2018) by Mark Galeotti is an engrossing read about a topic mainstream scholarship has largely ignored: Russia’s criminal underworld. With Galeotti as our guide, we delve into the colorful world of the vory v zakone or “thieves of the code,” with their flamboyant nicknames, esoteric rituals, and vibrant body tattoos, which Galeotti explains are very much a gangster’s CV.The Vory traces the development of the Russian underworld  from the horse bandits and bank robbers of the nineteenth century, through the chaos of the Revolution and the Civil, when, as Galeotti says, “… the Bolsheviks won the war but lost their souls.”  Galeotti’s scholarship shines through the section on the vast sea change that takes place when during The Terror as the gangsters are co-opted by the State to help regulate the Gulag system.  The resulting “turf war” creates a new post-war type of gangster, the “avtorityet,” who adapt to service the needs of a society in chaotic transition.The Vory also looks at the ways the Putin administration has tamed the underworld, but also the ways in which the State and the underworld are now intrinsically linked; the government even outsources unseemly tasks to the underworld, as is clear in both the 2014 Annexation of Crimea and the ongoing frozen conflict in Donbas.Galeotti first became interested in Russian organized crime while interviewing veterans of Russia’s war with Afghanistan for his doctorate research.  He noted that many of the Afgantsy were drifting into ranks of the vorovsky mir or “thieves world.”  Since that time, he has delved into the topic with a unique methodology that fuses scholarship with personal encounter.  It takes a special researcher to ride around Moscow’s dodgy neighborhoods in a rickety squad car wearing a well-used bullet-proof vest, but Galeotti’s time has certainly not been wasted.  “The Vory” is a thrilling and gripping read filled with larger-than-life, compelling characters and spot-on historical analysis.  It is marvelous window into a secret world that is constantly evolving.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.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war.The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than not, its contents were the product of a process of co-creation, with all three groups playing a creative role in producing the magazine’s contents. With an engaging mix of visual analysis and theoretical sophistication, the author provides a window into everyday reading materials consumed by Soviet citizens.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history merits. Timothy A. Sayle, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, attempts to correct this. His fascinating new book, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines the history of NATO from its founding in the late 1940s through to its expansion in the post-Cold War era. Sayle shows how NATO wasn’t just any organization; it was, he writes, “an instrument of great-power politics and the basis for a Pax Atlantica.”Taking his readers deep into the decision-making of NATO and its member states from the 1940s to the 1990s, Sayle provides a new, innovative international history of the second half of the twentieth century. Enduring Alliance should interest historians and scholars from across subfields—military history, U.S. foreign policy history, Cold War history, and global governance studies.Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishers, 2019), this provocative image defined the binary logic of the Cold War and speaks to the larger importance of visuals in both the deployment of contemporary propaganda and in political resistance. A meticulously-researched and accessible monograph, Global Art and the Cold War demonstrates the crucial role of art in the greatest geopolitical conflict of the 20th century. Presenting a nuanced investigation of how the Cold War shaped major art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Conceptualism in the West and Socialism realism in the Eastern Bloc, Curley also challenging the traditional history of American Abstract painting in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism by integrating other regions including Asia, Africa, and Latin America in to the study. Art from the “Cold War peripheries”, writes Curley in his introduction, reveals that the dominant narrative of modernism was a Western construction, simultaneously expressing transnational modernity and nationalism to counter American and Soviet imperialism. Positioning all 20th century art as engaged in an inevitable conflict between two opposed models for modernity, Curley makes a compelling case for broadening the narrative of artistic creation in the period of the Cold War and its aftermath.John J. Curley is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art history, as well as photographic history.Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Professor Black, offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimension in each period. A must read for anyone interested in this time period of military and indeed global history.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 newest book, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Houri Berberian uses a transnational or transimperial approach to examine the interconnectedness of 1905 Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution and the Young Turk Revolution and the role that Armenian revolutionaries played in each. Dr. Berberian’s unique approach allows readers to see the linkages between these events that are often viewed as separate and encapsulated and see how the Armenians who lived at the epicenter of these events participated. She examines how Armenian revolutionary intellectuals were able to utilize another revolution, the technological revolution, to facilitate the spread of information, revolutionary literature, people and arms between these three empires and the widespread Armenian diaspora using steam ship, telegraphs and increased access to printing technology. She also examines how the revolutionaries indigenized and interpreted the various liberal and socialist ideas they now had greater access to in a way that fit the Armenian context: split between three empires and facing increased persecution and ethnic conflict. Listen in as we discuss the successes and failures of this understudied revolutionary movement and the lives and struggles of individual Armenian revolutionaries navigating the complex realties of living at the confluence of three empires in the throes of collapse and revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent history of Russian eugenics, reflects on a broad problem: How to acknowledge what eugenics movements worldwide have had in common, while doing justice to local differences that, for example, make the late Victorian eugenics of Francis Galton comparatively quite different from Russian eugenicists of the same period. Krementsov takes this story from the 1860’s to the present day, and in so doing, provides a fascinating analysis of the vicissitudes of Russian attempts to improve the human species. This history is of the utmost relevance for the present day. Eugenics is neither gone nor forgotten, and Krementsov’s account does much to explain why that is the case.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies