New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Feb 02 2025 884 ep. 59 mins 1.9k
New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Russia and Eurasia about their New Books

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"We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto" (JewishGen, 2018)

Feb 02 2025 123 mins  
We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto (JewishGen, 2018) is a collection of memories from child survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, Belarus. These are rare and moving personal testimonies, and this is a book of some significance for it opens a window on the rarely told story of the Holocaust in Belarus, in particular the Minsk Ghetto. Between 1941 and 1943 appro

Eugene Finkel, "Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine" (Basic Books, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 36 mins  
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet, to Ukrainians, this attack was painfully familiar, the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign to divide and oppress Ukraine. In Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024), political scientist Eugene Finkel uncovers these deep roots of the R

Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Jan 28 2025 84 mins  
Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind

Viktoriya Fedorchak, "The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power" (Routledge, 2024)

Jan 28 2025 92 mins  
Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion. The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before t

Susan C. I. Grunewald, "From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Jan 26 2025 68 mins  
With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. Her archival research demonstrates that the Soviets saw the German prisoners of war as a source of labor at a time when the Soviet Union urgently needed

Gabriel Gavin, "Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh" (Hurst, 2025)

Jan 09 2025 54 mins  
From the collapse of the Soviet Union until late 2023, Armenia and Azerbaijan were fighting unrelenting hot and cold wars over Nagorno-Karabakh - a tiny 4,400-square-kilometre breakaway republic with a population under 150,000. That 30-year crisis ended within 24 hours in September 2023 when Azerbaijan attacked, Russian peacekeepers withdrew, and the last Karabakh Armenians left th

Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)

Jan 08 2025 55 mins  
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes. In

David A. Harrisville, "The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Jan 07 2025 63 mins  
When Nazi Germany launched the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, its leadership made clear to the Wehrmacht that it was waging a "war of extermination" against Germany's enemies. This meant that normal military conduct in war was to be dispensed with and soldiers would act more in accordance with the precepts of Nazi ideology. During the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, ho

Elissa Bemporad, "Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Jan 07 2025 61 mins  
The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews rituall

Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)

Jan 04 2025 76 mins  
In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as bot