New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies New Books Network

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.
Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.
Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally. 
The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon. The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.
This book is available open access here. 
Alexander Sasha Kondakov is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.
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Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Ebony Nilsson explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, and uncovers how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, proof of capitalist countries' superiority. But for a few, this was not the case. Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East for West, but remained left-wing or pro-Soviet.
Drawing on interviews, government records and surveillance dossiers from multiple continents this book explores how these refugees' ideas took root in new ways. As these radical ideas drew suspicion from western intelligence these everyday lives were put under surveillance, shadowed by the persistent threat of espionage. With unprecedented access to intelligence records, Nilsson focuses on how a number of these left-wing refugees adjusted to life in Australia, opening up a previously invisible segment of postwar migration history, and offering a new exploration of life as a Soviet 'enemy alien' in the West.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. In his latest work, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Oxford UP, 2024), Jonathan Dimbleby chronicles the military, political, and diplomatic events of the final months on arguably the most crucial front of World War 2.
Dimbleby draws on previously untranslated accounts from ordinary Russian and German soldiers to chronicle the curtain call of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Endgame 1944 provides insights into the major German and Russian players balanced off with accounts of the trials of individual soldier..
Dimbleby has enjoyed a long career in television beginning with ITV and BBC where he covered world affairs. He presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. He has also worked in radio with BBC 4. His book Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of historical non-fiction. He is also Chair of Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund named after his father.
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Last week, I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and the behind-the-scene details of its making. Ghodsee is a professor in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of nine books and many more articles and essays.
Second World, Second Sex addresses a telling gap in the historiography of women rights movements – the contributions of the Second World women rights activists. While careful not to idealize the socialist authoritarian regimes, Ghodsee reveals how deeply problematic and unfair it is to define feminism based on Western-inspired definitions of self-fulfillment or grassroot activism and to dismiss the achievements of women’s state organizations in the Eastern bloc as top-down policies and socialist propaganda.
Aiming to retell the UN Decade for Women from a non-Western perspective, this book follows the participation of the Bulgarian and Zambian delegations in the international conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The author makes use of a painstaking multi-site archival research and compassionate oral histories, to reconstruct the conferences and their context of arduous preparations and ideological tensions. The book’s approach to the conferences is very factual but also offers a lot of context, which helps the reader to better understand the main points of conflict between the Western delegates and the delegates from the developing and non-aligning countries. Ironically, what was rebranded in the 1990’s as “intersectionality” was the main argument of the state socialist women activists much earlier, namely, that the discussions of women’s rights separately from other social injustices such as racism, imperialism and colonialism are ultimately futile.
Curiously enough, Ghodsee’s comparative overview of the state of women’s rights before the UN Decade reveals that socialist states were forerunners of women’s rights with generous maternal leaves and state-run childcare among others. Moreover, the author reminds us, that the US government’s attention to women’s issues in the 1960s was actually a direct response to the threat coming from the USSR where women’s brains and forces were put into service of the rivalry with the West.
Thus, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Ghodsee sees the current political and cultural hegemony of the West as rather disadvantageous in terms women’s rights. There is no rivalry to push governments to do better and women remaining in the periphery hardly benefit from having equal access to the free market in their crime-ridden and economically dependent from the West countries with dismantled welfare systems.
Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
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Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organized around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term “animal style,” this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. 
In Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh UP, 2024) Art historian Petya Andreeva’s research shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbors to showcase worldliness and control over the nomadic “other.”
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