New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

The border between Russia and China is one of the world’s longest, spanning thousands of miles. It’s one of the few extended land borders between two great powers, subject to years of history, conflict and cooperation. Yet for such an important division, there are surprisingly few crossings, with not one passenger bridge in operation.On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Caroline Humphrey and Franck Bille, is an in-depth study of this border. Looking at the divided island of Bolshoi Ussuriiskii and the border towns Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, On the Edge gives a picture of how people live, work and trade along this little-studied border.Franck Billé is Program Director at the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author and editor of three books about East Asia, including Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity.Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge, and founder of the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit. She is the author of several books about the anthropology of Inner Asia and recently edited and contributed to Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China–Russia Borderlands.We’re also joined by Yvonne Lau, who became interested in Russia and China’s long history and complex ties, and has been tracking developments along the Sino-Russian border ever since.In this interview, the three of us talk about, well, the border, and the people that live on either side of it.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On the Edge. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Although largely unknown in the West, the Russian novelist and political essayist Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev (1831-1891) has left a strong legacy in his homeland. He has often been compared to Friedrich Nietzsche, yet his writings predate those of his German counterpart by several decades. Also, unlike his German counterpart came to embrace a very ascetic form of Orthodox Christian faith. For decades he bravely clashed with many of the greatest minds of 19th century Russia on subjects ranging from ethics, art, geopolitics, Russia's place in the world, the historical cycles of civilizations, and especially religious faith. Glenn Cronin's Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev (Northern Illinois University Press, 2021) is the first major English-language study in over fifty years on this enigmatic figure of Russian intellectual history.Glenn Cronin is a contributing author to Ideology in Russian Literature and holds a PhD in Russian studies from the University of London.Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan.Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts.By looking at how national discourses are constructed and asking hard questions about why nations are imagined as exclusive and hostile to others, Embattled Dreamlands provides a unique insight into the development of national identity which will provide a great resource to students and researchers in sociology and history alike.Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Küchlya (1925), the first novel of the great Russian formalist Yury Tynyanov gives us a vividly written and moving recreation of the childhood, youth, beliefs and adventures of an eccentric and idealistic young poet and friend of Pushkin, tragically caught up in the Decembrist insurrection of 1825 against the Russian autocracy.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

This collection of articles, edited by Matthew Romaniello, Alison Smith,  Tricia Starks, takes up the history of material culture over the past several centuries of Russian history. Widely diverse objects such as maps, textiles, building materials, cigarette cases,fish guts (yes...), samovars, samizdat, and even the T-34 tank are viewed in light of their role in Russian society. Hence the collection's striking and unusual title: The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).  Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism: Education in the Japanese Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Yuka Kiruma Kishida makes a fresh contribution to the recent effort to re-examine the Japanese wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism by focusing on the experiences of students at Kenkoku University or “Nation-Building University,” abbreviated as Kendai (1938-1945). Located in the northeastern provinces of China commonly designated Manchuria, the university proclaimed to realize the goal of minzoku kyōwa (“ethnic harmony”). It recruited students of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Mongolian and Russian backgrounds and aimed to foster a generation of leaders for the state of Manchukuo. Distinguishing itself from other colonial schools within the Japanese Empire, Kendai promised ethnic equality to its diverse student body, while at the same time imposing Japanese customs and beliefs on all students. In this book, Yuka Hiruma Kishida examines not only the theory and rhetoric of Pan-Asianism as an ideal in the service of the Japanese Empire, but more importantly its implementation in the curriculum and the daily lives of students and faculty whose socioeconomic backgrounds were broadly representative of their respective societies. She draws on archival material which reveals dynamic exchanges of ideas about the meaning of Asian unity among the campus community, and documents convergences as well as clashes of competing articulations of Pan-Asianism. Kishida argues that an idealistic and egalitarian conception of Pan-Asianism exercised considerable appeal late into the Second World War, even as mobilization for total war intensified contradictions between ideal and practice. More than an institutional history, this book makes an important intervention into the historiography on Pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism.Yuka Hiruma Kishida is an associate professor of history at Bridgewater College in Virginia, specializing in modern East Asian history.Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

An interview with Kalani Pickhart, I Will Die in a Foreign Land (2021), a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. Russia is again amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. There are threats of more sanctions from the US and the EU, but those come with a tacit understanding that there is likely little that the world can do to stop Putin should he decide to invade. It is within this frightening context that Kalani Pickhart’s extraordinary novel, I Will Die in a Foreign Land, enters the scene. The novel itself is a beautiful pastiche of forms: novelistic plots mix with songs and folktales, manifests of passengers killed in downed planes or in the melee of protest, diaries and recordings, all working to build a feeling, the urge for a democratic voice to speak against violence and despair. Kalani and I discuss the burden of writing true in a work of fiction, and so much more!Books Recommended in this episode: Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner God Shot, Chelsea Bieker The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina The Power of the Dog (Film), Jane Campion Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

For the past 30 years, a group of Russian scholars have dedicated themselves to uncovering the crimes of Stalinism. Their organization, Memorial, has in that time made great strides in understanding the scale, nature and history of Stalin's repression. On 28 December 2021, Russia's highest court found that Memorial was in violation of the Russian Federation's law regarding "foreign agents" and ordered it to be closed.  In this interview, I talked with Benjamin Nathans about Memorial's history, work, and the reasons Putin decided to shut it down now. Nathans, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked with Memorial since the early 2000s. For more about Memorial, go here. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930 (Park Books, 2020), Anna Bokov examines the history of the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie) in Moscow, known most commonly by its acronym Vkhutemas. Operating between 1920 and 1930, Vkhutemas was a centre for developing new pedagogical methods to support mass education in art and technology. In this richly illustrated study, Bokov traces how radical experiments in art, architecture, and design were translated into systematic body of knowledge – and how this knowledge was then applied in various projects aimed at shaping modern Soviet society. From small utensils and furniture pieces to large-scale urban designs, the Vkhutemas influence was visible everywhere, and Bokov foregrounds the school’s impact both on the formation of modernism, along with its lasting creative legacy.Anna Bokov is an architect, urban designer, and historian specialising in the history of the avant-garde movements and design pedagogy. She is a faculty member at the Cooper Union and the City College in New York and Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture at ETH Zürich.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv―today the second-largest city in Bulgaria―was thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989, and which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being much younger than them. Eastern Europe! (New Europe Books, 2021) is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history.Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognito, with a sign on the border declaring “Here be monsters.” Tomek Jankowski's book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has been shaped by but has also left its mark on Western Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. It is a reader-friendly guide to a region that is all too often mischaracterized as remote, insular, and superstitious.The book comprises three parts, The first sums up modern linguistic, geographic, and religious contours of Eastern Europe, while the second, main part delves into the region's history, from the earliest origins of Europe up to the end of the Cold War. Closing the book is a section that makes sense of geographical name references -- many cities, rivers, or regions have different names -- and also includes an "Eastern Europe by Numbers" feature that provides charts describing the populations, politics, and economies of the region today. Throughout are boxed-off anecdotes ("Useless Trivia") describing fascinating aspects of Eastern European history or culture.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies