This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
Latest episodes
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1 h 18
Defeat at the Dnepr: The XLVIII Panzerkorps Counterattack at Kiev, November 1943 with Simon Waring (Casemate,…
In late 1943, the German Army on the Eastern Front was in dire straits. Its southern army group had been pushed out of eastern Ukraine, and on 6 November 1943, Kiev—one of the Sovi…
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53 min
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 with Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney (U Notre Dame Press, 2017)
In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhen…
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40 min
Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)
The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted…
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58 min
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet with Daria S. Smirnova (Academic Studies…
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025) makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodsky’s force as a transnational…
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41 min
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts
Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking on…
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40 min
The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy with Nataliya Kibita (Oxford UP, 2024)
Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum: Despite 300 years of contact with Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine's post-independence period has…
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1 h 12
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts with Michael Khodarkovsky (Yale U…
What is Russia? For two centuries, observers inside and outside the country have tried to answer that question, and most of them have looked west. The familiar story holds that Pet…
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37 min
Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values with Julien Mailland (MIT Press, 2026)
A geopolitical and legal history of the bestselling videogame Tetris—the stunningly successful game that began in a Soviet research lab monitored by the KGB. Tetris—the game that w…
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1 h 26
Into the Reich: The Red Army’s Advance to the Oder in 1945 with Prit Buttar (Osprey, 2025)
Enriched by extraordinary first-hand accounts, Prit Buttar's Into the Reich: The Red Army’s Advance to the Oder in 1945 (Osprey Publishing, 2025) is a fascinating history of the dy…
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46 min
Tamara Hundorova, "Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)
Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma (Academic Studies Press, 2026) explores transitional post-Soviet cultural consciousness in Ukraine at the beginning of the twenty-first cent…
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55 min
David L Hoffmann, "Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2026)
Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2026) examines the place of women in Soviet Russia from the 1917 Revolution through the post-World War II perio…
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34 min
Nikhil Kalyanpur, "Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets" (Cornel…
In Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets (Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Nikhil Kalyanpur examines a striking feature of today's…
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1 h 06
Tom Trier, "Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s" (Northern Illin…
Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s (Northern Illinois University Press, 2026) tells the story of the historical connections between t…
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1 h 00
Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, "'PS: Burn after Reading': The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espi…
After Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in 1945, Canada was shocked by the revelation that its own citizens were engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. "P.S. Burn afte…
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49 min
Ukrainian Men Fleeing Conscription: A Discussion with Writer Dan Storyev
Our conversation focuses on a groundbreaking article by Dan Storyev recently published in The Nation: “Millions of Ukrainian Men Are Fleeing a Cruel Conscription System.” Storyev w…
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51 min
After Putin: A Discussion with Political Scientist Julian G. Waller
Russian leader Vladimir Putin, at 73 years old, is still very much alive, yet the “After Putin” conversation is an active one inside and outside of Russia. What could come next and…
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55 min
Yulia Gradskova et al., "Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden" (CEU…
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Ca…
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59 min
Marisa Karyl Franz, "Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums" (Cornell UP,…
Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land an…
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1 h 01
Yana Skorobogatov, "Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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 19…
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57 min
Russia’s Jews in World War I
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 remnan…