Episodes

  • Aaron Donaghy, "The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

    Aaron Donaghy, "The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
    Mar 1 2026
    Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. These reversals, the book argues, were influenced by president's willingness to take risks, by their perception of credibility, and by the timing of their decision. Donaghy explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2021) traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Jeremy Black, "The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country" (Amberley, 2026)

    Jeremy Black, "The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country" (Amberley, 2026)
    Feb 21 2026
    The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began a new episode in history and was surrounded by a miscellany of historical claims. The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country (Amberley, 2026) is a succinct, up-to-date guide to the histories on offer about and from Russia, one that seeks to make sense of present issues and future prospects, as well as of the past. There is a heavy emphasis on war and international relations, but that is appropriate not only for the past but also for a present in which both are to the fore. Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725), an eager moderniser, was viewed as an un-Russian evil phenomenon in light of his denial of the divine identity of traditional Russian monarchy, his blasphemy, his theft of time from God when he changed the calendar, and his sacrilegious violation of the image of God in man when he forced men to cut off their beards. Vladimir Putin cuts off no beards, he is no moderniser; the fall of the Berlin Wall left him with an abiding mistrust of democracy and ‘People’s Power’. At Davos in 2000, American journalist Trudy Rubin asked a panel of top Russian officials: ‘Who is Mr Putin?’ None of them could answer, except to say: ‘He is the President of Russia.’ How did this KGB foreign intelligence officer become (temporarily) Trump’s favourite running dog of capitalism? To answer the question, we have to understand what Russia was. There is a continuity that will give us a clue about what it is and will become. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    56 mins
  • Denys Gorbach, "The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

    Denys Gorbach, "The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
    Feb 19 2026
    Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working-class and structures its relations with other social groups. The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class is written by Denys Gorbach, published in 2024 by Berghan Books. Denys Gorbach is a teaching and research adjunct at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

    Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
    Feb 16 2026
    Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states. For more than a decade, Dr. Alexis M. Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and public squares of cities once under communist rule, from Berlin in the west to Vladivostok in the east, recording thousands of cases of critical and satirical political street art and cataloging these artworks linguistically and thematically across space and time. Complemented by first-hand interviews with leading artists, activists, and politicians from across the region, Post-Soviet Graffiti provides theoretical reflection on public space as a site for political action, a semiotic reading of signs and symbols, and street art as a form of text. The book answers the question of how we conceptualize avenues of dissent under authoritarian rule by showing how contemporary graffiti functions not only as a popular public aesthetic, but also as a mouthpiece of political sentiment, especially within the post-Soviet region and post-communist Europe. A purposefully anonymous and accessible artform, graffiti is an effective tool for circumventing censorship and expressing political views. This is especially true for marginalized populations and for those living in otherwise closed and censored states. Post-Soviet Graffiti reveals that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    46 mins
  • Colleen M. Moore, "The Peasants' War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

    Colleen M. Moore, "The Peasants' War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
    Feb 14 2026
    During the First World War, Russia relied on the mass mobilization of its peasant population. In the summer of 1914, approximately four million peasants answered the state’s call to arms, while the millions who remained at home donated labour and other resources to the cause. Within three short years these same peasants were refusing to pay taxes or turn over their grain, dooming the autocracy to collapse.The Peasants’ War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025) argues that the experience of total war convinced peasants that the measure of a state’s legitimacy was its ability to safeguard the wellbeing of its subjects. When the autocracy failed to meet this standard, peasants rejected its authority by challenging four areas of wartime policy: the prohibition of vodka, the conscription of peasant families’ only workers, the redistribution of land belonging to enemy subjects, and the provisioning of the home front. The war awakened peasants to the reciprocal nature of the relationship between a state and its people. Colleen Moore investigates how peasants leveraged their wartime service to negotiate with the state for improved rights and privileges and how they used this power to shape the contours and legitimize the authority of the world’s first socialist state.The Peasants’ War charts the timing and success of the 1917 Russian Revolution by showing how total war flipped the script on peasant-state relations, transforming the state from something that peasants existed to serve into something that existed to serve peasants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    56 mins
  • Ann Komaromi, "Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society" (Cornell UP, 2022)

    Ann Komaromi, "Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society" (Cornell UP, 2022)
    Feb 7 2026
    Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomenon of the late Soviet era that provided an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. In bringing together research into the underground journals, bulletins, art folios, and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi reveals how samizdat helped to foster new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Komaromi’s approach combines literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory to show that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime, but a platform for developing informal communities of knowledge. In this way, samizdat foreshadowed the various ways in which alternative perspectives are expressed to challenge the authority of institutions around the world today. Ann Komaromi is a Professor within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her interests include alternative publishing, underground networks and nonconformist literature and art, especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    51 mins
  • Andrew Monaghan, "Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War" (Manchester UP, 2025)

    Andrew Monaghan, "Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War" (Manchester UP, 2025)
    Feb 3 2026
    A cutting-edge investigation of how Russia makes war. Russian strategy in the twenty-first century has been described in terms of 'hybrid' warfare, an approach characterised by measures short of war, such as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But as the invasion of Ukraine has brutally demonstrated, conventional armed violence remains a key element of Russian power. In Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War (Manchester UP, 2025), Andrew Monaghan offers a high-level view of Russian thinking about warfare. Drawing on extensive Russian sources, he addresses important questions that have been overlooked by most Western commentators: what is the military leadership's distinctive idea of twenty-first-century blitzkrieg? How does it understand holistic territorial defence? How does it manage the shifting balance between offence and defence? Introducing key concepts from Russian military thinking, Blitzkrieg and the Russian art of war is a crucial resource for understanding Russia's resurgent role on the global stage and the devastating threat the country poses to the international order. Andrew Monaghan is Academic Visitor at St Antony's College, Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He served as the editor of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) newsletter from 2016 to 2018 and is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 41 mins
  • Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)

    Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)
    Feb 3 2026
    When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left-right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people—age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving. This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 25 mins