New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Russia and Eurasia about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Episodes

Catherine Merridale, "Moscow Underground" (HarperColins, 2025)

September 1, 2025 • 33 mins
Moscow Underground (HarperCollins, 2025) by Dr. Catherine Merridale is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin's tyranny. Moscow's glittering new subway is under construction at last. The first line will run through the centre of the city, cutting deep through Moscow soil. But futures cannot be created without digging up the past. Though Russia's leaders want to build a glorious Soviet capital...
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Elizabeth White, "A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

August 29, 2025 • 76 mins
A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the changes and continuities in ideas about Russian childhood from the 18th to the 21st century. It looks at how children were thought about and treated in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as how the radical social, political and economic changes across the period affected children. It explains how...
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Thane Gustafson, "Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future" (Oxford UP, 2025)

August 29, 2025 • 62 mins
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them. In Perfect Storm: Russia's Faile...
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Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, "The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents" (Hackett Publishing, 2017)

August 26, 2025 • 63 mins
"On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov have reinvigorated the study of a turning point in world history. Instead of rehashing the internal dynamics of the Bolshevik takeover, the authors have carefully juxtaposed the international ambitions of the Bolsheviks with the Revolution's reception around the world. Daly and Trofimov pair their lucid introductory essay with documents from Soviet offic...
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Nicholas Birman Trickett, "Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia" (Hurst, 2025)

August 25, 2025 • 42 mins
Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards an increasingly coercive authoritarianism, a hubristic challenge to the West, and all-out war with Ukraine. Decades of dependence on commodity exports, failure to invest and failure to consume enough have condemned not only the Russian Federation, but Eurasia more broadly, to stagnation a...
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Stephan Kieninger, "Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe Talbott, NATO, and Russia After the Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2025)

August 24, 2025 • 40 mins
This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s d...
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"Assignment Moscow" with author James Rodgers

August 20, 2025 • 56 mins
Is it possible to do independent journalism in today’s Russia? “The short answer is no,” James Rodgers tells me in our conversation about his insightful and scrupulously researched book Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Rodgers is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow. We first talk about Western coverage of the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union, when man...
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Georgiy Kasianov et al., "From 'the Ukraine' to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

August 17, 2025 • 51 mins
In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country’s domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Rojansky, and Mykhailo Minakov, guide...
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José Vergara, "All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature" (Cornell UP, 2021)

August 17, 2025 • 56 mins
All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce'...
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Inna Faliks, "Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage" (Backbeat Books, 2023)

August 15, 2025 • 45 mins
Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic artists of her generation. She has made a name for herself through commanding performances of standard piano repertoire, as well genre-bending, interdisciplinary projects, and inquisitive work with contemporary composers. This season, she gave the world premiere of Clarice Assad’s “Li...
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Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

August 14, 2025 • 55 mins
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in de...
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Michael Jabara Carley, "Stalin's Great Game: War and Neutrality, 1939-1941" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

August 13, 2025 • 89 mins
The period from September 1939 to early 1942 was crucial for Soviet foreign policy and coincided with the early stages of the Second World War, including the Great Patriotic War. In Stalin's Great Game, Michael Jabara Carley unpacks the complexities of Soviet diplomacy during this time, addressing key issues such as the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, Soviet views on the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, efforts to remain neutra...
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Ara Sarafian et al., "Microhistories in Armenian Studies" (Cal State Fresno Press, 2025)

August 12, 2025 • 60 mins
The articles appearing in this volume were presented at a conference entitled “Microhistories in Armenian Studies” organized by the Armenian Studies Program of California State University, Fresno, on September 22-23, 2023. They have since been edited and appear here in a single volume. The present study focuses on Armenian studies from a conceptual, theoretical and methodological approach. Each article, both in its methodological ...
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Alexander Mikaberidze, "Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2022)

August 7, 2025 • 71 mins
Every Russian knows him purely by his patronym. He was the general who triumphed over Napoleon's Grande Armée during the Patriotic War of 1812, not merely restoring national pride but securing national identity. Many Russians consider Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov the greatest figure of the 19th century, ahead of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, even Tolstoy himself. Immediately after his death in 1813, Kutuzov's rem...
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David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025)

August 6, 2025 • 47 mins
No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance. Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanist...
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Craig W. H. Luther, "Guderian's Panzers: From Triumph to Defeat on the Eastern Front (1941)" (Stackpole Books, 2025)

August 5, 2025 • 63 mins
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the blitzkrieg bogged down during the approach on Moscow. At the spearhead of the attack wa...
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William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025)

August 4, 2025 • 65 mins
Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explore...
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Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018)

August 3, 2025 • 60 mins
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, ...
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Richard W. Harrison, "The Soviet Army's High Commands in War and Peace, 1941–1992" (Casemate Academic, 2022)

July 28, 2025 • 102 mins
Richard W. Harrison's The Soviet Army's High Commands in War and Peace, 1941-1992 (Casemate Academic, 2022) is the first full treatment of the unique phenomenon of High Commands in the Soviet Army during World War II and the Cold War. The war on the Eastern Front during 1941–45 was an immense struggle, running from the Barents Sea to the Caucasus Mountains. The vast distances involved forced the Soviet political-military leadershi...
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John Givens, "The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak" (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)

July 27, 2025 • 66 mins
In The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Dr. John Givens of the University of Rochester discusses classics of Russian literature such as The Brothers Karamazov and Dr. Zhivago, as well as texts of less renown to English-speaking audiences, such as Tolstoy’s Resurrection. These texts and others, Givens suggests, portray Christ apophatically: th...
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