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  • Marisa Karyl Franz, "Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums" (Cornell UP, 2026)

    Marisa Karyl Franz, "Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums" (Cornell UP, 2026)
    2026/08/09
    Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority. Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to configure ideas about what counted as legitimate knowledge. Dr. Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category. Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past. Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology. Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacle, documentation and desire. By placing Siberia at the center of a broader intellectual and political history, Near and Desired Things challenges assumptions about where modern knowledge is made and redefines provincial spaces as sites of innovation and as forces that reshape the terms of empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    56 分
  • Yana Skorobogatov, "Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Yana Skorobogatov, "Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
    2026/08/08
    In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Yana Skorobogatov about her book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, 2026). From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly 40,000 citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness. Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. The book is a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 時間 1 分
  • Russia’s Jews in World War I

    Russia’s Jews in World War I
    2026/08/08
    When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5.7 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, by 1945, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction. In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust. Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler. Buy the book: here This book talk originally took place on February 25, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1分未満
  • Luca Anceschi, "Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion" (Routledge, 2026)

    Luca Anceschi, "Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion" (Routledge, 2026)
    2026/08/02
    Pandemic Politics in Central Asia: Authoritarian Contagion (Routledge, 2026) examines how the authoritarian regimes of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan exploited the Covid-19 pandemic to consolidate their political control over Central Asia. Through restrictive policies and strategic manipulation, these governments reshaped the region's politics and societies during 2020-2022. This volume offers readers an insight into three key areas where Central Asia's pandemic power grab was most visible: mobility control, whereby restrictive legislation limited freedom of movement and suppressed dissent; authoritarian information flows, whereby COVID-19-related measures aligned media and digital information to government messaging, further curtailing freedom of expression; and the international politics of the pandemic, whereby the regimes capitalised on global instability to strengthen their kleptocratic hold over Central Asia's politics and society. This book provides a detailed analysis of these strategies, offering a compelling exploration of how crises can be used to entrench authoritarianism. It is ideal for scholars, students, and professionals in political science, international relations, and Central Asian Studies. The book is also valuable to readers interested in understanding the intersection between public health crises and authoritarian governance. The Open Access version of this book, available here has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Adam Quinn is a Glasgow-based researcher whose work focuses on activism, social movements and state-society relations in the Post-Soviet space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 時間 1 分
  • Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

    Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
    2026/08/01
    In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neoliberal world. Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan (University of Toronto Press, 2025) examines this nuclear legacy through a decade-long ethnographic examination of the village of Koian, situated on the border of the test site. Facing residual radiation all around them and isolation, Koianers persist, reshaping their pastoral existence among the ruins and scientific debates surrounding genetic damage. Drawing on first-hand accounts and archival research, this book explores the resilience and everyday survival strategies of a community left behind to fend for itself in the shadow of nuclear testing. It offers a unique perspective on life in a nuclear zone and poses fundamental questions about human resilience and the impact of historical events on a collective identity. Atomic Collective sheds light on a community overlooked in the larger Cold War histories of atomic testing. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    56 分
  • Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History Through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE–1936 CE)" (Cambria, 2025)

    Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History Through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE–1936 CE)" (Cambria, 2025)
    2026/07/31
    Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History through Travelers’ Eyes (Cambria Press, 2026) is a comparative history of Eurasia told through travel writing and cross-cultural encounters. In this anthology, Anthony Barbieri pairs accounts from twenty-eight travelers across different historical periods, placing side-by-side travelers looking or going East with those looking or going West. Spanning from 400 BCE through to 1936, the anthology brings together ambassadors, monks, missionaries, merchants, and journalists in order to explore how people understood the cultures, societies, and worlds that they encountered through travel. Structured around these “parallel journeys,” the book highlights both similarities and differences in the ways travelers described foreign places and peoples. Some travelers used these encounters to criticize the societies they entered, while others turned outward observation into reflection on their own cultures. Across the anthology, travel writing emerges not simply as a way of describing a journey, but as a way of forging ideas about cultural difference, identity, religion, commerce, and political power. This anthology will appeal to readers interested in Eurasian history, travel writing, world literature, and cross-cultural exchange. It is also a flexible and engaging anthology perfect for classroom teaching, complete with both long and short versions of each account, helpful visuals, and contextual information — an excellent way to get students thinking about what it means to do comparison effectively. For another overview of the anthology, readers should check out Barbieri’s lecture “Beyond the Mountains and Seas,” available on YouTube here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    42 分
  • On Who Blew Up Nord Stream: A Conversation with Author Bojan Pancevski

    On Who Blew Up Nord Stream: A Conversation with Author Bojan Pancevski
    2026/07/28
    The September, 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines transporting Russian gas to Germany was perhaps the greatest single act of sabotage in modern history. In The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World (Henry Holt, 2026), Bojan Pancevski makes a compelling case that the culprit was an intrepid team of Ukrainian intelligence agents, military personnel and civilian divers. In our conversation, he explains how he came to this conclusion. And we touch on the wider issue of what Pancevski calls the “Cossack spirit,” at the heart of the determination of courageous and resourceful Ukrainians to resist, by all means available, Moscow’s efforts to subdue Ukraine. Pancevski is the chief European political correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and has considerable experience covering Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 時間 1 分
  • Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    2026/07/28
    Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published in multiple journals on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on the Irish Save the Children Fund. From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders. Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    20 分