New Books in Russian and Eurasian Stu...
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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951
Frank Wcislo, “Tales of Imperial Russia: The Li...
When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regim...
81 min
952
Rosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy: A Russia Life” (Ho...
I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts education, which convinced me that there was really nothing...
82 min
953
Andrew Gentes, “Exile, Murder, and Madness in S...
The Russian practice of exiling criminals, dissidents, and other marginal people to the remote corners of Siberia began in the 16th century as the Russian state conquered new lands in the east. Exile to Siberia continued in the Tsarist period and the S...
64 min
954
Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics o...
Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array...
66 min
955
Steven Barnes, “Death and Redemption: The Gulag...
Most Westerners know about the Gulag (aka “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the publication of that book in 1973 (and largely thanks to i...
72 min
956
Rodric Braithwaite, “Afgantsy: The Russians in ...
I was still in high school the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 1979. I remember reading about it in Time magazine and watching President Carter denounce it on TV. The Soviets, everyone said, were bent on ruling the world.
64 min
957
Jonathan Weiler, “Human Rights in Russia: A Dar...
A new documentary by Robin Hessman “My Presteroika” portrays the lives of five individuals who, as children, were raised in the Soviet Union but who now live in post-Soviet society. The documentary describes the challenges they faced as they tried to s...
60 min
958
Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the ...
“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his homeland in the Black Sea port city. Odessa was very much...
56 min
959
Louis Siegelbaum, “Cars for Comrades: The Life ...
A recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow “the car is king.” Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Russian life itself,
60 min
960
Daniel Treisman, “The Return: Russia’s Journey ...
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, journalists, academics, and policymakers have sought to make sense of post-Soviet Russia. Is Russia an emerging or retrograde democracy? A free-market or crony capitalism?
67 min
961
Maria Yatskova, “Miss Gulag” (Neihausen-Yatskov...
In this episode of NBRES, we’re doing something a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of interviewing an author about his or her new book, we are going to talk to filmarkerMaria Yatskova about her documentary film,
39 min
962
Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Ar...
I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson and myself.
54 min
963
Douglas Rogers, “The Old Faith and the Russian ...
What are ethics? What are morals? How are they constituted, practiced, and regulated? How do they change over time? My own research is informed by these question; so is Douglas Rogers‘. So it was only natural that I would be drawn to Rogers’ new book T...
63 min
964
Laurie Manchester, “Holy Fathers, Secular Sons:...
The lives, let alone the fates, of Imperial Russia’s priesthood have garnered little attention among historians. I think the reason is partially because the research of most Russian historians has been focused on explaining the country’s torturous mode...
53 min
965
Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The C...
Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and sisters. If, however, you were born and live in...
66 min
966
Christopher Ward, “Brezhnev’s Folly: The Buildi...
At the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress in 1974, Leonid Brezhnev announced the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, or BAM. This “Path to the Future” would prove to be the Soviet Union’s last flirt with socialist gigantism. The cost,
58 min
967
Thomas de Waal, “The Caucasus: An Introduction”...
On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the Unit...
46 min
968
Miriam Dobson, “Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag...
Examinations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy. Few scholars, however,
51 min
969
Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russia...
For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not ...
74 min
970
Claudia Verhoeven, “The Odd Man Karakozov: Impe...
Scan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you’ll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote. After all, Karakozov was no great theorist. He led no political organization.
54 min
971
J. Arch Getty, “Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iro...
When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror? We’ve learned a lot about Ezhov’s involvement in the Terror since the ope...
44 min
972
David Shearer, “Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Re...
The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most important of modern history, primarily because it shapes what we are likely to think about communism.
65 min
973
Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir” (O...
Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of humanity. For instance, it is at least imaginable that one day everyone will believe that zoos were [NB] pr...
59 min
974
Abbott Gleason, “A Liberal Education” (TidePool...
I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portion of it. The past itself is gone and cannot, outside...
80 min
975
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Russian Or...
There’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar.” I’ve scratched a Russian (I won’t say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It’s true,
59 min