New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

View on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] For decades, the American Right and Left argued about the degree to which the KGB infiltrated the U.S. political and scientific establishment. The Right said "A lot"; the Left said "Much less than you think." Both sides did a lot of finger-pointing and, sadly, slandering. Things got very ugly. At the crux of the problem, though, was a lack of reliable information about exactly what the KGB had done and how successful (or not) they had been in recruiting Americans. That changed in the mid-1990s. The United States de-classified the results of the "Venona Project,"–an intelligence initiative that involved the surveillance of secret Soviet cable traffic during World War Two–and Alexander Vassiliev, a Russian journalist, made his notebooks on KGB activities in the U.S. available to researchers. For the first time, scholars such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr could measure the success of KGB spying in the U.S. during the Cold War. The results are eye-opening, as Haynes and Klehr explain in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press, 2009). Though it's probably unwise to speak of "winners and losers" in the debate over KGB spying in the U.S., Haynes and Klehr show that the Soviets, though often bungling, had done a pretty fair job of tapping sympathetic American Leftists and stealing American secrets. That said, they also discovered that some of those the Right had accused of spying (e.g., Robert Oppenheimer) were in fact innocent. This is a fascinating book and should be read by everyone interested in Cold War espionage.

Ben JudahView on AmazonDebates about the nature of Putin's rule abound. Is Putin a hard fisted authoritarian? Is he the master of the power vertical? An arbiter of competing clans? Or something else? In his Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (Yale University Press, 2013), Ben Judah offers another view: Russia is a brittle system Putin holds together by sheer presence and will. Since becoming coming to power, Putin has served as the lead architect of a failed modern state. And the system's persistent hollowness has rendered him its primary prisoner. Russia is trapped in a conundrum. It can't survive without Putin but it can't live much longer with him either. Hence the main images in Judah's narrative are examples of decay and slow disintegration. Having traveled from the Baltic to the Pacific, Judah provides a lively narrative interspersed with voices from the centers of power to the distant periphery and back to Moscow's rumbling streets. This last political space, the realm of the haphazard opposition, is the most recent sign of Putinism fragility. By the end, readers are left wondering where exactly Russia's future lies. And Judah's prognosis? It is a vision informed by past nightmares, present specters, and future phantasmagoria.

Barbara EngelView on AmazonDivorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual impotence, or exile. Marriage as an unbreakable religious sacrament still held. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, Russian perceived a "crisis of marriage" as social and economic change upset the traditions of wedlock and family life. Where, then, did a discordant couple turn? As Barbara Engel shows in Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell UP, 2011), appealing to the Imperial Chancellery for the Receipt of Petitions served as an extra-legal means of marital separation. Through the Chancellery, supplicants, overwhelming of which were married women, could get the legal right to live separate from their husbands. But these appeals reveal much about married life in Russia. Through these cases, Engel spins a lively and intimate tale of marital conflict, gender identity, home life, and Russian women's efforts to assert an autonomous selfhood and identity by challenging nuptial traditions.

Eric LohrView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it's said they don't much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr's new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2012), this reputation is at once deserved and undeserved.  It's true that at various moments in Russian history, foreigners have not been permitted to enter Russia, let alone become citizens (or, in an earlier period, "subjects") of the state. But, intermittently, the Russian state actively recruited foreigners, and especially foreign experts and capital, to aid in economic development. In the period after the Great Reforms, for example, the Russian state actively encouraged foreign investment and immigration. Late Imperial Russia seemed to be on a kind of glide path to a modern notion of citizenship. As Eric explains, all that ended with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 (with catastrophic economic results). Listen in.

Meredith RomanView on AmazonIn December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier "tore off on a whole long lecture" that the Senator wished he could remember because it was "the best speech I could ever make in my life on antiracialism. Boy, he really gave me a talking to." Thus beings Meredith Roman's fascinating book Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937 (Nebraska UP, 2012). At first read, the image of animated Khrushchev haranguing a US Senator with "the best speech" the latter ever heard on the topic of race seems out of place, odd, and to some extent even comical. After all, what could Khrushchev really have known about race in America to impress an American? Khrushchev's fluency in "speaking antiracism" was no mere preformative dig at the United States. In fact, many African American travelers and expatriates to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were astonished how much its citizens knew and were concerned about American race relations. In Opposing Jim Crow, Roman shows that antiracism was a genuine vernacular constructed through show trials, antiracist campaigns, media, and representations of racial oppression in the United States. It was through American racism that the USSR was crafted into a morally superior, raceless society. Nothing reinforced this idea more than the adoption of Soviet antiracist discourse by American Americans visitors, expatriates, and sympathizers themselves. But more importantly, it was via these multiple intersections that speaking antiracism became an important, and until now ignored, component in the effort to create new Soviet people in the 1930s.

Michael GordinView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy] When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author. He is, rather, a prominent historian of science at Princeton University. But his work intersects with the subject-matter of this podcast in a number of ways. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War asked us to consider what might have been had Tokyo refused to surrender and the US had continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Mike will soon start co-teaching a class on invented languages which includes a unit on Klingon. And the main subject of this interview, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), touches on both the history of science fiction, key themes within the genre, and where much of its source material comes from. Indeed, while this channel will continue to focus on new books within the SF and Fantasy genres, it will also interview scholars and practitioners whose expertise illuminates and enhances our understanding of those genres. I hope this interview does so for its listeners. For those of you interested in a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, you should check out Michael's forthcoming interview on the New Books in Science, Technology, and Society channel.

Dan HealeyView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Gender Studies] I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey's work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important contribution our understanding of the history of homosexuality; Healey's new book follows logically from his previous one. In Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), he takes us from the establishment of a gay identity and community to the new Russian state as it seeks to define its position vis a vis sexuality. With the Bolshevik revolution, revolutionaries decided to modernize Russian sexual science and beliefs. Russian sexual scientists were already in conversation with their Western European colleagues and sought to modernize and rationalize sexual relations between women and men. Policy makers introduced a number of reforms to aid in the process of modernization. They abolished the age of consent, for instance, and replaced it with an age of maturity. Bolsheviks also envisioned a modern role for science in the new Russian state – one that brought the psychiatrists into the justice system. These new sexual experts began to link sex crimes to mental disease, described and diagnosed sexual psychopathy, and they began a systematic investigation of the bodies of hermaphrodites. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics discusses these developments and their impact on sexual beliefs and the regulation of sexuality. Given the archival record, Healey does not attempt to predict how these changes influenced sexual experience. Court records, he notes, are largely silence on the impact that "modern visions" of sexuality had on young rape victims, for instance. Instead, Healey does what the records allow him to do: trace the changing role of sexual experts and sexual science of people of the young Russian nation tried to distance themselves from the old tsarist beliefs – yet lapsed over and over again into traditional notions of sexuality. Listen as Dan Healey tells us about his new book, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics.

Douglas SmithView on AmazonAt the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian nobility numbered about 1.9 million people, or 1.5 percent of the population. The 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War would all but obliterate this class, as many nobles were dispossessed, killed or driven into exile. By 1921, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, could rightly boast, "The landowners as a class have disappeared, the bourgeoisie has been declassed, the political masters are now non-entities." Indeed, as the Civil War ebbed, no more than 50,000 former nobles, or twelve percent of its prerevolutionary population, remained in Russia. It is the story of those former nobles that stayed in Soviet Russia that Douglas Smith's Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) seeks to tell. Through the trials and tribulations of two prominent noble families, the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns, Smith paints a general picture of how the former nobility experienced life and death under the Soviets.  But that is not all. Former People is ultimately an incredibly readable, vivid, emotional human story of survival, accommodation, and reconciliation.

David BrandenbergerView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Though most people would rightly consider capitalists to be the founders and masters of the science of "marketing," communists had to try their hands at it as well. In the Soviet Union, they had a particularly "hard sell." The Party promised freedom, peace, and prosperity; it delivered oppression, war, and poverty. So how do make people believe in what will be rather than what manifestly is? David Brandenberger explores how the Party did it in his terrific book Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin (Yale University Press, 2011). The answer, in short, is badly. At first, the message they sent–clashing -isms, class struggle, "contradictions"–was too abstract for most folks on the street. The people wanted heros. So the Soviet propagandists gave them heros: flyers, arctic explorers, and, of course Lenin and the "Old" Bolsheviks. That worked pretty well until Stalin et al. began to kill the heros in the Purges. The problem wasn't that dead heroes don't make good heroes. They do. Discredited dead heros, however, an another story. They can't be heros at all. In fact, they have to be rubbed out of history  entirely. And so they were. So, once "the dialectic" campaign had failed and the "heroes" campaign had foundered, what was left for the propagandists to work with. Well, Stalin still worked, and he in fact crowded most everyone out of the picture ("Father of Nations!" "Universal Genius!" "Greatest General of All Time!"). But was that enough? Perhaps not. So the propagandists fell back on some very bourgeois totems: the Church and Nation. See how they did it in David's wonderful book!

Mark SteinbergView on AmazonPublic discourse in the final decade of Imperial Russia was dominated by images of darkness and dread. Discussions of "these times" and "times of trouble" captured the sense that Russians were living on the "edge of abyss" from which there was "no exit." It was this sense of imminent doom, or simply the stasis of despair, argues Mark Steinberg in his book St. Petersburg: Fin de Siècle (Yale UP, 2011), that defined the social and cultural experience of the denizens of Russia's "Window to the West." And the apocalyptic visions not so much foreshadowed 1917, as they unmasked modernity's promise of progress as an illusion. Much of St. Petersburg: Fin de Siècle is about experience: the everyday and the emotional; the sensual and the physical. After all, the prosaic experience of modernity was not of a society ruled by the geometry of order, but assaulted by the incongruity of chaos. As Steinberg shows the clanking of street cars, the bustle of the crowd, the shadows of the alley, and the unfamiliarity of the stranger make modernity an experience wrought with anxiety, trepidation, and even trauma. St. Petersburg may be Russia's city of light with its wide thoroughfares, colorful architecture, and white nights, but these illuminations cast dark shadows.

Matthew LenoeView on AmazonOn 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled Bolshevik Party member, shot Sergei Kirov in the back of the head as the Leningrad Party boss approached his office in Smolny. The murder sent shockwaves throughout the Soviet leadership, which with Stalin as its helmsman, used it to concoct a wider conspiracy that fingered oppositionists as the true plotters. By 1937, Stalin had used the murder to initiate full blown political terror against his former political enemies, military leaders, intellectuals, former classes, and ordinary people. When the smoke cleared in the summer of 1938, 2.5 million people had been arrested and an estimated 700,000 had been shot, including many of the purgers themselves. Kirov's murder is considered by most to be the crucial spark that ignited this conflagration of death. But who really killed Kirov? Was Nikolaev a lone gunman? Or did Stalin orchestrate Kirov's murder to eliminate a potential rival and justify mass murder? Until recently, the "Stalin did it" theory served as the historical consensus despite skepticism from a few. No longer. In his 832 page tome The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (Yale University Press, 2010), Matthew Lenoe rakes a fine toothed comb over the available evidence about the murder to decisively settle the debate and examine its place in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. Moreover, as part of Yale's Annals of Communism series, the book contains 172 translated documents, most from Soviet archives. Did Stalin plot to kill Kirov? Lenoe convincingly shows that the most plausible answer to this persistent question is no. Stalin was guilty of many, many things, and certainly used the murder to his political advantage, but Kirov's murder was the work of Nikolaev and Nikolaev alone.

Stephen CollierView on AmazonPipes matter. That's right: pipes. Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows that the hulkish cylinders that snake throughout its cities are the lifeblood of urban space, linking apartment block after apartment block into a centralized network. But pipes are more than tentacles that form the Russian social state. As Stephen Collier argues in his Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton UP, 2011), their physical organization act as structural impediments to neoliberal reform. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Collier demonstrates that the intransigence of the mundane innards of the former Soviet social state–pipes, wires, budgets, apartment blocks, bureaucratic routines and social norms–require us to rethink our standard narratives of neoliberalism as everywhere and behind everything. Rethinking the actual implementation of neoliberalism in Russia's turbulent 1990s takes Collier to the provinces, specifically the mono-industrial towns of Belaya Kalitva and Rodniki. There, Soviet postwar urban planning networked industrial development, population, and social welfare with the factory as the central node in what Collier calls "enterprise-centric social modernity." The factory served as the khoziain, from which radiated the city's utilities, schools, health care, and cultural centers, planned according to measured norms of allocation and output. But what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed? How did reformers decouple Russia's integrated social welfare from its economic production? Surprisingly, Collier finds that despite neoliberalism's tendencies toward privatization and monetarization, the relics of Soviet modernity forced reformers to preserve basic aspects of the Russian social state.

Richard SakwaView on AmazonRichard Sakwa's new book, The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, 2011), comes at a moment in Russian political history when uncertainty is once again in the headlines and on the lips of experts and journalists. While Sakwa's book is principally about how Dmitri Medvedev became Russia's third President, The Crisis of Russian Democracy is more importantly an analysis of the institutions and dynamics that animate Russian politics today. Rejecting the typologies of "democracy with adjectives," as Sakwa calls it (like semi-authoritarian democracy or sovereign democracy or transitional democracy), he identifies competing institutions in Russia ("the dual state"), and studies them dynamically in order to document the interaction of various social and political forces. Sakwa's concept of the dual state describes the permanent struggle and imbalance between Russia's administrative regime and its constitutional state apparatus. Rooted firmly in the nitty gritty details of Kremlinology and intrigue, Sakwa's methodology also allows him to explore the role that ideological norms play in Moscow high politics. The result is a fascinating medley of perspective — one that any scholar of Russia cannot help but find appealing.

Karen PetroneView on AmazonHistorical studies on the European memory of World War I are, to put it mildly, voluminous. There are too many monographs to count on a myriad of subjects addressing the acts of remembrance and commemoration of the so-called war to end all wars. But when it comes to Russia, from which 15 million men fought, 2 million died, 5 million were captured and an estimated 1.5 million civilians perished, there is a strange historiographical silence. In fact historians of Russia speak more often of an absence of memory because the Bolshevik revolution labeled WWI as an "imperialist war," and thus rendering its remembrance illegitimate. It is because of this silence that Karen Petrone's The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012) is such an illuminating and refreshing book. Petrone shows that much like their European counterparts Russians produced a rich memory of the war, even within the strictures of the Soviet system. And the issues that memory addressed were many we assume were forbidden in Soviet Russia: the sacred and the religious, Russian nationalism and patriotism, and the war's physical and psychological traumas, to name a few. In Petrone's study, Russia is rightly restored as part a pan-European reckoning with the Great War, the remembrance and commemoration of which was far reaching and impossible to tame despite the Bolsheviks' best attempts.

Stephen WhiteView on AmazonStephen White's Understanding Russian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011) begins simply enough: "Russia is no longer the Soviet Union." While this is a well-known fact, the details of Russia's postcommunist transition — the emergence of a party system and presidential government, as well as the dismantling of the planned economy and construction of modern political communication — have rarely been as consciously and seamlessly fit into the setting of Russia's immediate present. Stephen White's ambitious text tracks the most significant developments in Russia's post-Soviet formation, and more importantly plugs those events back into the framework of today, equipping readers with the context required for a deeper reading of contemporary Russian politics. Understanding Russian Politics tackles all the biggest components of Russian statecraft and social transformation over the past twenty-five years. In my interview with Professor White, we discussed topics as current as President Medvedev's 2012 legal initiative to liberalize political party registration in Russia, as well as the role the previous winter's street demonstrations played in prompting such reforms offered by the Kremlin. In this context, White addressed the constitutional legacy of Yeltsin's super presidential state, and explained why Putin's economic policies have deviated from the extreme market liberalism of Russia in the early 1990s. Our conversation finished on the subject of Russian foreign policy and domestic interest groups, highlighting the roles that competing schools of thought play in policymaking today.