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Moscow’s Story

Joy Neumeyer on Jade McGlynn, Memory Makers and Russia’s War. Twin studies, scholarly and less so, of the uses of the past in Putin’s war for Ukraine.

Matrix of War

Fine-grained tripartite analysis of the historical dynamics—Russia’s recovery and nationalist re-assertion, Ukraine’s internal political evolution, NATO expansionism—that produced the broader context in which the Kremlin launched its murderous war.

An Avoidable War?

In the first of three texts on the war for Ukraine, an examination of the narrative dominating Western media coverage—an unprovoked Russian assault, in which NATO, a defensive alliance of democracies, has played no role?

Towards the Abyss

The Ukrainian political sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko discusses the reasons for Kiev’s determined re-orientation to NATO and the European Union in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan uprising—and the disastrous upshots of Putin’s invasion for his country.

Russia by Numbers

Joy Neumeyer on Timothy Frye, Weak Strongman. Data-rich anatomization of Putin’s mode of rule and Russian views of it.

Burying Homo Sovieticus

Joy Neumeyer on Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity. Sociological inquiry into the bases of Putin’s support, beyond hoary anti-Soviet stereotypes.

Nihilism for Oligarchs

What is the state of Russian culture today, and what is its standing on the world stage? The multi-media extravaganza of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU—a controversy-courting product of the largesse of Russia’s oligarchic class—provides an instructive case study.

Dark Mirrors

Fine-grained reading of the films of Andrei Zvyagintsev, from the abstract allegories of his earlier work to the unsparing portrayals of contemporary Russia in Elena and Leviathan, exemplary of a new social turn in post-Soviet cinema. Reflections of class polarization and fables of power, with Orthodoxy as its prop.

Capitalisms After Communism

A leading Hungarian sociologist revises Weber’s notion of prebendal and patrimonial regimes to classify the new capitalist orders of the former Second World. Are governments from Budapest to Beijing now converging on the same models of politicized economy?

On Re-reading Life and Fate

Against conventional comparisons with War and Peace, Fredric Jameson offers a path-breaking formal reading of Vassily Grossman’s great fiction of the Battle of Stalingrad. The war against Hitler as crucible for a new collectivity, in which freedom finds itself, or as grounds of social—and thus narrative—totality.

Lives of Jughashvili

Tony Wood on Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume I and Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. Contrasting portrayals of the ‘man of steel’.

Incommensurate Russia

With the collisions over Ukraine, the contradictions in Russia’s relations with the West have been sharpened by sanctions and economic crisis. Perry Anderson on the spectre of Great Power status that still informs the post-multinational nation—and why, despite all the Kremlin’s attempts at integration with the US–EU, the country remains indigestible.

Putin’s World Outlook

Former Kremlin advisor and election manager offers a unique account of the Russian leader’s ideological formation and worldview. A Soviet-realist analysis of the failings of the USSR and the actual motivations of the capitalist states.

Ukraine’s Fractures

Antecedents and aftershocks of the Maidan protests. A Ukrainian sociologist discusses the riven political and ideological landscape laid bare by the fall of Yanukovych, and the tensions being stoked in the country’s east by Russian interference and Kiev’s ongoing military assault.

Annexations

After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.

Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947

Recently discovered diaries of the exiled novelist, with portraits of associates past and present, reflections on the Second World War, and vivid descriptions of the country where Serge lived out his final years.

In Soviet Arcadia

Fredric Jameson on Francis Spufford, Red Plenty. A documentary-cum-fable reconstructs the lost future of the Khrushchev era.

Collapse as Crucible

While Russia’s anti-Putin demonstrations have prompted talk of a civic awakening—led by a flat-pack middle class—the country’s overall social landscape remains largely unmapped. Tony Wood surveys its shifting structures since the Soviet collapse, and the consequences of marketization’s advance through the USSR’s ruins.

On the First Socialist Tragedy

Reflections from 1934 on man, technology and the dialectic of nature. Frailties and dangers of our advance within—and against—an unyielding environment.

Two Revolutions

How to explain the opposed outcomes for communism in Russia and China, after 1989? Classes and leaders, anciens régimes and external settings, examined in comparative perspective.

Marx and Montage

The author of Archaeologies of the Future unearths fragments from ‘ideological antiquity’ in Alexander Kluge’s recent film on Capital. Encounters with Eisenstein’s unrealized equivalent, seeking a cinematic transposition of the commodity fetish.

Post-Communist Aesthetics

Barry Schwabsky on Groys, Art Power. Essays on aesthetics and politics, founded on the disconcerting insights of late-Soviet conceptualism.

Notes from Tashkent

The life-world of social scientists in Uzbekistan, seen through an ethnographic prism. Monique Selim traces the material and intellectual struggles of post-Soviet scholars, and the instrumentalization of ethnicized knowledge by the Karimov regime.

The Economist’s Burden

David Woodruff on Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built. A vocal advocate of shock therapy casts a blinkered eye over its results in the former Eastern Bloc.

Imitation Democracies

What are the differences, and the commonalities, between the states that broke away from the USSR in 1991? Russia’s leading expert on the CIS analyses the range of regimes in the Caucasus and Central Asia, on the Baltic and the Black Sea, with a sharp comparative gaze.

Father-Mother

A screenplay from 1935, previously unpublished in English, by arguably the greatest Soviet writer. Amid far-reaching social transformation, notions of love, family and desire are also recast—with serious consequences for the simultaneously innocent and world-weary protagonists.

Year One in Petrograd

Steve Smith on Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power. The tumultuous first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd, meticulously rendered by a major revisionist historian.

Against Historical Realism

Within the epic sweep of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hayden White argues, three genres are braided together: historical, novelistic and philosophical. If the former two—and the battles, loves and deaths they recount—continue the line of European realism, in the third Tolstoy presents history as a force beyond human control, in a bid to dismantle ideologies of progress.

Contours of the Putin Era

Responding to Vladimir Popov, Tony Wood examines the geographical and social distribution of Russia’s recent economic growth. What are the priorities and outlook of the emerging business-state elite—and whom will Putin’s ‘stabilization’ benefit?

Russia Redux?

A balance-sheet of Russia’s post-Soviet fortunes, placing the devastating collapse of the 1990s and recent revival under Putin in comparative context. Vladimir Popov warns of the dangers—overvalued currency, oil dependence, crumbling infrastructure—on the road ahead.

Caucasian Crucibles

David Laitin on Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus. Can world-system theory and sociological fieldwork explain the bifurcating fates of the post-Soviet Caucasus?

Machiavellis for Postmoderns

Georgi Derluguian on Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics. Techniques of political legerdemain in the former Soviet states, and the swerving trajectories of its intelligentsia practitioners

Soviet Ice-Breaker

Ronald Suny on Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century. The stubborn heterodoxy of a former officer of the Red Army and leading scholar of the USSR.

Annals of Utopia

Tony Wood on Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow and Soul. Recently discovered works by the neglected giant of twentieth-century Russian letters. The singular language and multiple ambiguities of Platonov’s style, and heroic impasses of his life and times.

The Case for Chechnya

Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.

A Futurist Ark

Tony Wood on John Bowlt et al., eds, Nikolai Khardzhiev, A Legacy Regained. Matchless archive of art and writings from avant-garde Russia, and an old man at the mercy of the West.

Under Fond Western Eyes

Georgi Derluguian on Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall. The sociology of Western affections for Russian anomie, and standard explanations of current suffering.

Metamorphoses of Prince M

Tony Wood on G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky. A Russian–English Life. White Guard officer, Eurasian exile, and repatriated Marxist—the prince who rewrote Russian literary history.

A Suprematist Cinema?

Tony Wood on Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film. The reasons why Russia’s greatest avant-garde artist preferred Dziga Vertov to Sergei Eisenstein.

Bering’s Syndrome

Tony Wood on Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii. Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh. Russo-American literary–political relations, from Pushkin to Ayn Rand, in an ingeniously conciliatory mirror.

Woe to the Victor

Tony Wood on Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran. The strange career of Alexander Griboyedov, Russia’s satirist playwright and predator envoy to Persia.

Recasting Russia

What do the West’s belated plaudits for Putin’s gage to the war against terrorism—the Caucasus as proving-ground for the Hindu Kush—signify for Russia’s future in the world-system? Georgi Derluguian looks at the longue durée, from the Golden Horde to the IMF.

Putin’s Colonial War

Tony Wood on Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War. Putin’s campaign of colonial repression in Chechnya, and the contradictions of a courageous journalist’s response.

Mellon in Magnitogorsk

Tony Wood on Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. USSR and USA as alternative models of mechanized happiness in the inter-war world—and their outcome at the end of the Cold War.

Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German

Virtually unknown in the West, Aleksei German is regarded by Russians as their most radical and original film director. Tony Wood considers his techniques of disorientation, and the craft of induced paranoia in his latest movie about the Doctors’ Plot of 1953—its title taken from Beria’s triumphant shout to his chauffeur.

A Tale of Two Cities

Adventures in pursuit of house and home across three continents—from service with national liberation in Mozambique to the labyrinths of bureaucratic Moscow and the tribulations of DIY Chicago. An Armenian’s sly homage to upside-down internationalism.

When the Party Commits Suicide

“Finally, in the deluge of the conservative-liberal ‘Black Books’ on Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’, a work which not only meets the highest standards of historical research, but also enables us to grasp the unique social dynamics that culminated in the great purges of the 1930s: J. Arch Getty’s and Oleg . . .” read more

Che Guevaras in Turbans

“On 7 August 1999, caravans of well-armed and bearded men, wearing camouflage fatigues and Islamic skullcaps or headbands, crossed from Chechnya into the mountains of Daghestan. They were led by the two most famous field commanders of the recent Chechen war of independence—Shamil Basayev and Khattab. Basayev had . . .” read more

Changing Cities in Post-Soviet Russia

“Since at least 1992, successive Russian governments have been pressed by the imf to cut public spending, and, in particular, to eliminate the large public subsidy to housing inherited from the Soviet-era ‘communal economy’ of housing provision. Indeed, the Yeltsin presidency has witnessed a steady erosion of the . . .” read more

The Strategic Triad: The United States, Russia, and China

“The official end of the Cold War, marked by the growing incapacity and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, inevitably meant a reduction of us military expenditure. This had long been regarded as essential from a strictly economic point of view: the extraordinary prodigality of the . . .” read more