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New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies: Daily Summaries Delivered
by New Books Network
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.Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.comSubscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
Latest Episodes
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- 1 weeks ago1h 15m
Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic with Irina Shevelenko (Cornell UP, 2024)
Irina Shevelenko's Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 2024) discusses the late-19th and early 20th century search for an archaic Russian folk tradition that could ground Russian art in an idiom independent of “The West.” While the [re]discovery of 14th and 15th century icon painting partially achieved this goal, Russian Modernists most often ended up creating art that was entirely new and which owed little to Russian folk tradition; the audience for this art was, after all, that same Western and Westernized elite. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 2 weeks ago1h 18m
Defeat at the Dnepr: The XLVIII Panzerkorps Counterattack at Kiev, November 1943 with Simon Waring (Casemate, 2026)
In late 1943, the German Army on the Eastern Front was in dire straits. Its southern army group had been pushed out of eastern Ukraine, and on 6 November 1943, Kiev—one of the Soviet Union’s largest cities—was retaken by an increasingly capable Soviet Red Army. To prevent the total collapse of his army group’s front line, Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein had no choice but to launch a counterattack to halt the Red Army’s advance and recapture the Ukrainian capital. On 7 November, two Panzer divisions attached to the XLVIII Panzerkorps plunged into the Red Army’s positions southwest of Kiev, stopping the Red Army in its tracks. Five days later, two more Panzer divisions joined the counterattack, and the XLVIII Panzerkorps achieved numerous tactical victories as it marched northeast.Commanded by General der Panzertruppen Balck after mid-November, the XLVIII Panzerkorps continued producing tactical success as it swept aside disorganized resistance from Soviet General Vatutin’s First Ukrainian Front, and recaptured important towns and logistics hubs on the path to Kiev. German hopes for the city’s recapture were dashed in late November, however, as Vatutin’s armies were finally able to stop the German advance, inflict heavy losses, and force Balck to end the counterattackIn his postwar memoir, General der Panzertruppen Balck claimed that meddling by higher-level commanders and poor weather squandered his efforts to recapture Kiev. His Soviet opponents claimed the opposite: a superior Red Army defeated the XLVIII Panzerkorps, and claims about poor weather were merely self-serving justifications for German failure. Defeat at the Dnepr: The XLVIII Panzerkorps Counterattack at Kiev, November 1943 (Casemate, 2026) is the first full-length treatment of this forgotten battle that definitively answers these questions, correcting the historical record on many unknown, ambiguous, and contentious details relating to the XLVIII Panzerkorps counterattack, and in doing so, shedding light on the nature of combat on the Eastern Front in late 1943.Simon Waring is a PhD candidate at the Royal Military College of Canada, whose research focuses on German-Soviet operations on the Second World War’s Eastern Front. This has not precluded his interest in other subjects, however. Simon also intensely studies U.S. Cold War history, Canadian defence and foreign policy, and the theory, history, and practical application of strategy. He is a frequent contributor to a variety of publications on strategic, defence, and security studies subjects, including SITREP: The Journal of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, and he is a Fellow with the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen's University. Simon lives and works from his home in Toronto, Canada.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- 4 weeks ago53 min
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 with Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney (U Notre Dame Press, 2017)
In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 The Red Wheel, Node III available in English now for the first time. Schwartz and Mahoney discuss the historical, literary, and cultural significance of MARCH 1917. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Oct 10, 202640 min
Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)
The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-sponsored Socialist Realism against its so-called opposite: Western art in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular. But can one version of art be the opposite of another?Julia Tatiana Bailey teases out the complexity and artificiality of the persistent narrative of US and Soviet artistic otherness. She explores why this notion was introduced and how it shaped the art of both countries. She also analyzes and deconstructs the ideological frameworks that have estranged the art of the USSR in Western art history. In doing so, Bailey reveals the Cold War biases and institutionalized responses that influence the politicized histories of art even today. Drawing on previously unpublished archival material from Russia and the US, Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism (University of Illinois Press, 2026) investigates how the myth of Soviet otherness contributed to America’s postwar artistic identity.Julia Tatiana Bailey is an art historian and curator and Director of Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Oct 9, 202657 min
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet with Daria S. Smirnova (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025) makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodsky’s force as a transnational poet derives paradoxically from an inward-looking stance that privileges “the trope of the room” and a practice of self-translation that is faithful to his own internal poetics rather than the poetic norms of the target tradition. The resulting bilingual poetics is one that, though not universally accepted by English readers, ultimately had a profound effect on the Anglo-American literary tradition and anticipated certain foreignizing tendencies that have become central to translation studies and theories of transnationalism. No less powerful than the book’s thesis is the elegant analyses, which encompass Brodsky’s Russian poetry, his translations from Russian to English, and his English-language essays.Daria Smirnova holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and a degree in Linguistics from Russia. Inspired by years of traveling between languages and cultures, her research explores literary translation, bilingualism, and transmediation. Daria's current archival research examines the role of translation in shaping literary canons.Amber Nickell is Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Oct 8, 202641 min
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts
Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it shaped.Michael’s new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), sets Russia beside the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires in order to uncover the things that connect them: universal monarchy, reliance on outsider elites, law in the service of the state. From the Mongol conquest to Putin's Russia. the steppe ends up explaining more than we’d expect it to. Michael is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Russia’s 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories and Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Steppe and Its Empires. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Oct 6, 202639 min
The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy with Nataliya Kibita (Oxford UP, 2024)
Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum: Despite 300 years of contact with Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine's post-independence period has been characterised by pluralism. To explain why and how Ukraine's and Russia's paths diverged, this monograph investigates the century-long and Soviet origins of regionalism in Ukraine, which the author argues are at the foundation of the modern Ukrainian institutional system. Drawing on unused archival material, the book re-examines the relationship between Moscow, Kyiv, and the Ukrainian regions in the period from spring 1917 to summer 1994 to demonstrate how interlinked political and economic incentives and constraints determined the opportunities and institutional interests of both the Ukrainian leadership and those of the Ukrainian regions, and how this institutional framework affected in turn the dynamic of the relationship between the central leadership in Moscow, the Ukrainian leadership, and the regions. The result - weak central authority and pronounced regionalism - was Ukraine's Soviet legacy, and the established power of regional clans made (post-Soviet) Ukrainian politics resistant to Russian-style authoritarianism, even when the Soviet centralised party-state system collapsed.Nataliya Kibita is a visiting academic at the University of Oxford in Russian and East European Studies. She is the author of Soviet Economic Management under Khrushchev: The Sovnarkhoz Reform (Routledge, 2013) and The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024).Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
- Oct 5, 202636 min
Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values with Julien Mailland (MIT Press, 2026)
A geopolitical and legal history of the bestselling videogame Tetris—the stunningly successful game that began in a Soviet research lab monitored by the KGB. Tetris—the game that would take the world by storm—was formally introduced to the West in 1987, at a time when Soviet technology exports were minimal and the Berlin Wall was still standing strong. Far from being a capitalist cultural product, the game had actually been designed in a Soviet computer lab tightly monitored by the KGB, at a time when Ronald Reagan referred to the USSR as the “evil empire.” So, how did Tetris jump the wall to become such a blockbuster? And why does a US company, The Tetris Company (TTC), now own the game, when it was the property of Mother Russia? Why has TTC been able to monopolize both the shape of the pieces which predated Tetris and the very concept of an electronic puzzle game with falling pieces, which flies in the face of traditional copyright law? Why and how have Soviet socialists morphed into hardcore capitalists? In Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values (MIT Press, 2026), Julien Mailland answers these questions and more, explaining the fascinating history of Tetris’ commercial success as a story of two systems radically opposed in histories, cultures, economics, and politics.Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since the early 1980s. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds three PhDs in game studies (LMU Munich, University of Passau & University of Vechta). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm HNU, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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About New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies
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.Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.comSubscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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