New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Those who claimed children as special objects of investigation were initially spread across a network of imperfectly professionalized scholarly and occupational groups based mostly in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology. From their various perspectives, they made ambitious claims about the contributions that their emergent expertise made to the understanding of, and intervention in, human bio-psycho-social development. The international movement that arose out of this catalyzed the institutionalization of new domains of knowledge, including developmental and educational psychology, special needs education, and child psychiatry.Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Oxford UP, 2020) charts the evolution of the child science movement in Russia from the Crimean War to the Second World War. It is the first comprehensive history in English of the rise and fall of this multidisciplinary field across the late Imperial and Soviet periods. Drawing on ideas and concepts emanating from a variety of theoretical domains, the study provides new insights into the concerns of Russia's professional intelligentsia with matters of biosocial reproduction and investigates the incorporation of scientific knowledge and professional expertise focused on child development into the making of the welfare/warfare state in the rapidly changing political landscape of the early Soviet era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will forgive you.” Love him or hate him, Richard Pipes (1923–2018), left an indelible mark on Russian and Soviet history in his long and remarkable life. This conversation delves into Pipes’ personal and intellectual biography, scholarly contributions, the role he played in shaping late Cold War policy and a generation of American historians of the Imperial and Soviet Russia. Have a listen to get a better sense of this humanist historian—described as both polemical and preeminently polite—who cast such a long shadow on academia in and beyond the Cold War. Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city, but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin. This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia (Cornell UP, 2026) by Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an ethnography of contemporary urban Buddhism in Buryatia, a republic within the Russian Federation. Kristina Jonutytė shows how—in this ethnically and religiously diverse borderland region—Buryat Buddhists are caught between an oppressive, militant Russian regime and the tenacity of local religious and cultural forms. As Dr. Jonutytė narrates, historically Buryat Buddhism has been tightly linked with the Russian state ever since the imperial period, a relationship with mutual interest and benefits. Yet everyday Buddhist practices point to a more complex picture, shedding light on precarity, minoritization, struggles for cultural sovereignty, and infrapolitical religious forms. Between the Buddha and the New Tsar reveals the important ways in which the urban setting is not just a backdrop to Buddhism, but that religion and the city are intertwined and mutually impactful. 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

Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Why did Operation Barbarossa fail? For more than eight decades, historians have offered one dominant answer: Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed from the outset. Vast distances, brutal weather, weak logistics and the overwhelming industrial power of the Red Army ensured that the Wehrmacht never had a realistic chance of success. But what if this familiar verdict is too comfortable — and too simplistic? In Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War (Helion and Company, 2026), Timothy Manion offers a bold, deeply researched re-examination of the most consequential campaign of the Second World War. Going far beyond the well-worn clichés of “General Winter” and German hubris, Manion places the story in a much longer arc: the evolution of military thought from the age of Napoleon through the catastrophe of 1914–18 and into the highly mechanised, manoeuvre-driven doctrines championed by both Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period. Drawing upon a vast range of previously overlooked archival records, Manion demonstrates that both armies entered the war expecting a rapid, decisive campaign — a return to war between generals, not economies. Early German successes seemed to prove them right. But as Manion reveals, the Wehrmacht’s apparent mastery of mobile warfare concealed profound flaws in decision-making, command structure and operational logic. Meanwhile, the Red Army —though battered — adapted faster and more its opponent understood. The result is a compelling challenge to the established consensus. Manion argues that Barbarossa did not collapse under the weight of numbers alone: German generalship and operational misjudgement played a far larger part than most accounts allow, while Soviet resilience and strategic learning proved decisive long before Stalingrad. Rich with analytical clarity, packed with detailed campaign studies, and supported by an extensive set of newly published archival maps and figures, Why Barbarossa Failed is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only how the 1941 campaign unfolded — but why its outcome shaped the entire course of the war. This is the story of two armies, two visions of modern warfare — and the decision points that sealed the fate of the Eastern Front.Timothy Manion earned dual degrees in mathematics and economics from Boston University. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Manion represented global financial institutions on Wall Street as outside counsel. Not satisfied with traditional explanations for the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Manion has undertaken an extensive investigation of the German and Soviet archives. The results of his study overturn the historical consensus on the campaign and are published here for the first time.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 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

Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool University Press, 2025) is a history of Communism and anti-Communism in the Spanish Civil War. It uses newly available archival material to reassess Soviet intervention in Spain and reappraise the role of Premier Juan Negrín. How did the Soviet operation affect attempts to rebuild the Republican justice system that the war had shattered? How did Negrín use the courts to combat wartime espionage and treason in the era of the Soviet mass repressions? How did wartime trials communicate politics, both domestic and international? Finally, how have Cold War politics distorted our understanding of Communism in the Spanish Civil War? Stalinism on Trial traces the Republic's tribunals through revolution and war, focusing in particular on the prosecution and "show trial" of the anti-Stalin Marxist party, POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), in whose militia George Orwell served. This small party was thrown onto centre stage when police arrested its leadership on suspicion of espionage and its leader, Andreu Nin, disappeared while in police custody. The ensuing prosecution and dramatic courtroom trial highlighted the contradictions of Soviet intervention in Spain. It also illustrated the disastrous impact that western anti-Communism and appeasement had on Spain's war effort. The book is at once a penetrating microhistory of the POUM's prosecution and an expansive transnational history of antifascism in interwar Europe. Jonathan Sherry is a historian and writer who holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

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