New Books In Russian And Eurasian Studies

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage. As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago

With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. Her archival research demonstrates that the Soviets saw the German prisoners of war as a source of labor at a time when the Soviet Union urgently needed to rebuild and lacked manpower after its enormous war losses. Numerous Soviet enterprises, operating under dozens of ministries, used POWs contracted out by prison camp officials. Grunewald argues that the mistreatment of German POWs and their high death rates were the consequence not of retribution but of negligence, lack of coordination, and severe shortages, especially during the famine that followed the war. Those too weak to work were often repatriated. POWs were also subjected to intense antifascist reeducation so that once home, they would help win support among Germans for the Soviet Union; many former prisoners filled lead

From the collapse of the Soviet Union until late 2023, Armenia and Azerbaijan were fighting unrelenting hot and cold wars over Nagorno-Karabakh - a tiny 4,400-square-kilometre breakaway republic with a population under 150,000. That 30-year crisis ended within 24 hours in September 2023 when Azerbaijan attacked, Russian peacekeepers withdrew, and the last Karabakh Armenians left the enclave. While equivalent ethnic cleansings (deliberate or neglectful) have commanded Western diplomatic and media attention for decades, Nagorno-Karabakh has never captured attention outside the region. With Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh (Hurst, 2025), Gabriel Gavin is determined to redress that imbalance. Mixing history and reportage, Gavin explores this long-simmering ethnic conflict, how it has corrupted the politics and cultures of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and what it tells us about the decline of Russian external power and the failures of the West. *The author's book recommendations were High Cauca

In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes. In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power. Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across t

When Nazi Germany launched the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, its leadership made clear to the Wehrmacht that it was waging a "war of extermination" against Germany's enemies. This meant that normal military conduct in war was to be dispensed with and soldiers would act more in accordance with the precepts of Nazi ideology. During the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, how did average German soldiers interpret the war they were fighting? David A. Harrisville seeks to answer this question in his book The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 (Cornell University Press, 2021). Through letters, diaries, and other primary documents written during the war itself, German soldiers portrayed themselves as "noble" warriors undertaking a "righteous" mission to rid the world of the evils of Soviet Communism. This would later form the basis of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth that prevailed in postwar German society.  David A. Harrisville is an independent scholar.

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood in the celebration of Passover. Nowhere in Europe was the blood libel more tenacious, credible, and long lived than in the Russian Empire, particularly during the late Imperial period, which saw large scale pogroms and harsh restrictions visited upon the empire's Jewish population. The Russian Revolution of 1917 attracted many Jews to its cause, thanks in large measure to Bolshevik condemnations of antisemitism and persecution of the Jewish minority. These numbers grew in the wake of the brutal Civil War that followed from 1918 - 1922 when the White Army revived the pogrom with part

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities. The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, as Miles vi

When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia's Jews during this time.  A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I (Oxford UP, 2024) uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them. The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal

Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stalin in the Second World War. Based on meticulous archival research, it considers the interactions of the individual citizen and the Soviet state, weaving together the experiences of over three hundred ordinary men and women in Central Asia as they coped with their new roles on the front line or in the rear. Suffering incredible economic and physical hardship, racism and religious oppression, these mainly Muslim citizens were subjected to a forced process of Sovietization under the influence of Stalin's propaganda machine. Davis reveals how, while conscripts were all too often slaughtered or scapegoated in their regiments, the women and children left at home slaved in factories and communal farms to fuel the machinery of a war taking place thousands of kilometres away. She convincingly argues that the impact of forc

Based on original sources, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge UP, 2016) explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union. Gentiles' willingness to assist Jews was greater in lands that had been under Soviet administration during the inter-war period, while gentiles' willingness to harm Jews occurred more in lands that had been under Romanian administration during the same period. While acknowledging the disasters of Communist rule in the 1920s and 1930s, this work shows the effectiveness of Soviet nationalities policy in the official suppression of antisemitism. This book offers a corrective to the widespread consensus that homogenizes gentile responses throughout Eastern Europe, instead demonstrating that what states did in the interwar period mattered; relations between social groups were not fixed and destined to repeat themselves, but r

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor. In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by beco

Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia UP, 2024) examines political relations and literary translations between Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through to the 1960s. By drawing on a wide range of texts – from erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, to socialist realist novels and theatre – Ertürk argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution. A unique textual exploration, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture. Nergis Ertürk is Associate Professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (2011), which received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and editor of the Comparative Literature Studies journal. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and

Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Dr. Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to im

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature. Samuel Hodgkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Ya

Today I talked to Mie Nakachi about Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021) In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on demand. But in 1936, the Soviet leadership criminalized abortion: the collectivization of the early 1930s was followed by famine that took the lives of millions of people, and the government grew eager to recover the population. Drawing on an amazing wealth of archival material, Nakachi traces the dynamic of Soviet reproductive policies that were invariably guided by pronatalist goals but almost always had damaging consequences. The 1944 Family Law, aimed at making up for the enormous human losses of World War II (27 million people died, 20 million of them men), relieved men of parental responsibilities, legal or financial, thereby encouraging them to father children out of wedlock. Given the devastation of the war and inadequate levels of government support, many women sought to avoid such bir

The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives. This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archival research. In so doing, it contributes to the urgent task of decolonizing the field of Eastern European and Russian studies at this critical moment in the region's history. Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault's traces in Polish secret police archives

In 1941, the Franco regime established the Spanish Division of Volunteers to take part in the Russian campaign as a unit integrated into the German Wehrmacht. Recruited by both the Fascist Party ( Falange) and the Spanish army, around 47,000 Spanish volunteers joined what would become known as the "Blue Division." The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945: War, Occupation, Memory (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores an intimate history of the Blue Division "from below," using personal war diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as official documents from military archives in Spain, Germany, Britain, and Russia. In addition to describing the Spanish experience on the Eastern Front, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas takes on controversial topics including the Blue Division's proximity to the Holocaust and how members of the Blue Division have been remembered and commemorated. Addressing issues such as the behaviour of the Spaniards as occupiers, their perception by the Russians, their witnessing of the Holocaust,

Johanna Drucker’s Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) uncovers the enigmatic life and work of Ilia Zdanevich, better known as Iliazd, a revolutionary figure in modernist art and literature. The book explores Iliazd’s journey from his beginnings in the Russian Futurist avant-garde to his later experiments with artist books in Paris, where he collaborated with icons like Picasso and Matisse. Drucker’s work delves into Iliazd’s radical creativity, analyzing how his art blurred the boundaries between life and work. By shedding light on his largely overlooked contributions, the book reveals how Iliazd’s innovations helped redefine modernism for future generations. We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team constantly looking for ways to make the academic publishing industry grow and to promote groundbreaking academic publications to scholars, students, and enthusiasts globally. Based in the renowned publishing city of Leiden, we eat, sleep, and breathe publishing! Learn more abo

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, host Laura Laurent sits down with historian Benjamin Nathans to explore his groundbreaking new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Nathans offers a deep dive into the history of Soviet dissent, tracing the courageous efforts of Soviet citizens who risked everything to challenge the system from within, spanning from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism. By invoking the very laws of the Kremlin, these dissidents exposed the regime’s internal contradictions, playing a pivotal role in its eventual downfall. The discussion focuses on key figures in this movement, from well-known Nobel laureates like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to lesser-known but equally vital contributors. Nathans also touches on the broader implications of their struggles for modern authoritarian societies today. Benjamin Nathans, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a distinguished expert in Imperial Russia, the Soviet

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"—the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Masha Kirasirova explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Dr. Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualised and carried out by students, comrades, and activists—Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and age