Review

Despite spending a lot of time in Russia, I don’t like Russian food. For me, it has always been about buckwheat, mayonnaise covered “salads”, and rye bread. While in Russia, I preferred eating [...]

Alexandra Kollontai was one of the earlier Bolsheviks, joining the party already in 1915 and as one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive Stalin’s purges, she was a writer not only of political [...]

Have you ever read a book that was so good you couldn’t put it down? What about an academic text? That’s how I felt about Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence by Shoshana [...]

Artem Chekh is everywhere these days. From the lecture circuit at prestigious universities in the west to topping best-seller charts all over Eastern Europe, this writer-turned-soldier has a [...]

The first and only novel of Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie tells the absurd story of a character who is all too familiar to a young reader (until the parricide) – he is at the encore of [...]

First and foremost, Anna Starobinets’s memoir Look at Him is a testament to the sorrow of losing an unborn child. As such, it’s intended to comfort women and families suffering through the same [...]

The Great Nijinsky is a tragic tale of one of the greatest dancers of the early 20th century. Vaslav Nijinsky was a Polish dancer and choreographer whose works and legacy far overshadow his short [...]

Zooming in on the Baltic states, Aliide Naylor’s debut The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front takes the reader on a journey through time and space. Fragmented memories of [...]

Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination by Keith Livers is part of a recent cast of plucky new texts that blur the boundaries between academia and popular culture [...]

Raz Segal’s Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence 1914-1945 draws light to an under-researched tragedy and contextualizes the violence committed in Europe against [...]