Tag
Russia
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Eisenstein’s Unrealized Worlds
Can a film that was never finished reveal the possibility of an alternative social system?
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Filling in Time Reading Vasily Grossman While Waiting for S
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns.
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Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
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“The War Conquers You Not Only Physically”: Darya Tsymbalyuk on Plants and Humans in Ukraine
For several years, Darya Tsymbalyuk has been drafting a new history of Ukraine’s Donbas that overturns our assumptions. Rather than focus on the industrialization and war that have dominated the region, she interviews locals and asks them to draw maps of their hometowns, based on their memories and emotional connections. The resulting maps—which emerge in…
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From One War to Another—Ukraine Facing Russia: An Interview with Volodymyr Vakhitov
They claim there is a “People of Donbass.” There is not.
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Deep Focus: “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming”
It’s hardly a secret, but, for a land that bills itself as a land of freedom and …
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America Learns What Russia Knew
How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information …
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Stadium Arts
On the way into Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium during this year’s World Cup, spectators found FIFA’s flagship Fan Shop in an unlikely spot: at the feet of a monumental statue to Lenin. The irony was unmistakable, but the effect was strangely appropriate. Here, embodied, was the paradox of Russia in the eyes of its foreign visitors:…
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Public Thinker: Timothy Snyder on Russia and “Dark Globalization”
Timothy Snyder has taken a region that resists understanding and made it …
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The Revolution’s Failed Promise to Women
On a recent research trip to Tbilisi, I stayed with a retired math professor and master storyteller named Tsiala in the communal apartment she’d remade …
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B-Sides: Alexei Tolstoy’s “Road to Calvary”
If you are a Russian writer called Tolstoy, you forever lurk in the great shadow cast by your namesake. After all, what could compare to War and Peace? Now …
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American Romances, Russian Realities
Readers of contemporary Anglo-American romance novels expect a certain kind of happily ever after. The protagonist is supposed to find a good partner who …
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Keyword of the Week: Russia
When we partnered with La Vie des Idées last year for a three-part series on “Russia Today,” we couldn’t have guessed how timely those essays would feel in 2017. This week’s Public Bookshelf features the articles in that series, as well as an essay by Masha Gessen on Putin’s effort to “retrofit” totalitarianism. Retrofitting Totalitarianism 12.15.2015 Masha Gessen No sooner…
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The Politics of Networking a Nation
In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR—a good illustration of the Soviet tendency toward…
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The Art of the Communist Museum: The Leon Trotsky House in Coyoacán
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Villa Coyoacán, Mexico, home to El Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, is now a posh neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, but it was hardly more than a provincial town on the outskirts of the capital when…
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Retrofitting Totalitarianism
No sooner did the Western media learn to think of Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian ruler than the Russian regime changed again. Since Putin returned to the office of president in March 2012, Russia has experienced …
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Russia, Today: Part 3
Legal scholar and anthropologist Monica Eppinger explores the origins and consequences of nationalism in Russia and Ukraine, while French sociologist Cécile Lefèvre analyzes Russia’s ongoing demographic and economic crisis …
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Totalitarian Sprawl
Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected a tempting illusion of homogeneity? This has been a central debate in the historiography of the Soviet era since the fall of the…
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Russia, Today: Part 2
Princeton historian Ekaterina Pravilova discusses the battle over rationality in Russian popular and academic circles, while French philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff explores the intellectual history of Putin’s political ideology …
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Russia, Today: Part 1
Amid the annexation of Crimea, the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, and an emerging proxy war in Syria, many commentators have proclaimed the beginning of a new Cold War between Russia and the West. But as ideologues on either side spread their messages through international organizations and news media, it has become increasingly difficult to…
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The Other Side of the Looking Glass
The absent original—a lost “authentic” text, accessible only through its corrupted traces—occupies a central place in the postmodern imagination. Often at the very core of novels, the image of an endlessly elusive source text works double duty: it grants a fictional world intertextual legitimacy, while simultaneously opening a void at its center. Andrei Bitov’s latest…
