China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, are parties to a dazzling array of of China-driven trans...

In his new book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ivan Simic explores how Yugoslav communists learned, adapted, and applied Soviet gender policies in their efforts to build their own egalitarian society a...

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic h...

Jonathan Waterlow’s new book It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! Humour, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin (1928-1941) (CreateSpace, 2018) delves into the previously understudied realm of humor in the Stalinist period,

The title of Svetlana Stephenson’s book Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Cornell UP, 2015) invites a number of questions: How do criminal and legal spheres conflate? Is the cooperation of criminal organizations and legal ins...

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses...

The publication of the seventh book of the Industrialisation of Soviet Russia series represents the culmination of a 70-year project that can be traced back to Edward Hallett Carr’s classic series The History of Soviet Russia. In this final volume,

In her new book, Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism: Popular Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Olga Velikanova uses a variety of sources, from NKVD reports, reports sent to the Central Committee from various ...

In studying the pre-Revolutionary films of Evgenii Bauer, Dr. Rachel Morley (Lecturer in Russian Cinema and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) discovered the ubiquity of the female performer as a cha...

How was the Soviet Union able to avoid issues of religious and national conflict with its large and diverse Islamic population? In his new book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017),

In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with ...

What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 during “the purge of the purgers?” In her newest book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Gr...

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ronald Reagan and an exploration of nuclear command and control operations.

There have been many histories and treatments of the Cold War, few however have the breath, range and definitiveness of Harvard Professor Odd Arne Westad’s new take on the subject: The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017).

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational,

Is there a difference between the Communist Party as an idea and the Communist Party in practice? A. James McAdams thinks so and takes the global approach to history to write a political and intellectual history of the Communist party.

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke,

For all the American media coverage of President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia, what’s rarely heard are the voices of Russians themselves. Russians on Trump: Coverage and Commentary (East View Press, 2018), edited by Laurence Bogoslaw,

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead,

From Stalin’s inner circle to Soviet dinner menus, the small nation of Georgia had a remarkable influence on the politics and culture of the USSR. Erik Scott, author of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (Oxfor...

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his ...

Jonathan Daly is a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His newest book Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018),

Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. Drawing from more than a decade of research of various e...

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name.

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important s...