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"The author’s passion for music and culture is enough for the novel to deliver a fascinating portrait of Kazak culture and a definitive record of the words between the music".

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

While reading the introduction to Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, I have come to the conclusion that if the term “woke” existed and could have been applicable to 18th century Russia, this [...]

Migration to the global cities of the Soviet Union plays an important part in the history of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Exploring the narratives of those moving to these global cities, Jeff [...]

What does it take to succeed in Russia? Wits, talent, and wiliness – or so claims Joshua Yaffah, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia. [...]