Parliaments are often seen as institutions peculiar to the Euro-American world. In contrast, their establishment elsewhere is frequently thought of as a derivative and mostly defective process. Such simplistic tales of unilateral and imperfect transfers of knowledge have led to a suboptimal understanding of non-Western experiences, as well as of…[Read more]

The chapter focuses on two new institutions, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia duma) and Political Consultative Council (Zizhengyuan), which were introduced in the Russian and Qing Empires, when the two imperial formations joined the global constitutional transformations. The names of the two bodies pointed to the statist (etatist) rather than…[Read more]

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have debated whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a coherent…[Read more]

Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between…[Read more]

The book is dedicated to the paradoxical era of the relationship between the Vainakhs and the Soviet state. The study opens with a description of the utopian attempts of the communist government to realize the old imperial dream: to evict the “restless” Chechens and Ingush outside the North Caucasus, to populate the liberated territories with…[Read more]

This book is about an unusual police investigation, in which a certain suicide, found in the bunker of the Imperial Chancellery, as it should be before the establishment of the truth, was called “victim”. This is a story about the work of Stalin’s special services in Germany, about palace intrigues and the hopes of people who imagined at the end…[Read more]

In July 1944, the Red Army was advancing through Eastern Poland when they discovered the first traces of the camps. On reaching Lublin they found an enormous compound behind barbed wire in the city’s suburb of Majdanek. Embedded with the Soviet army were film crews, who made the first images of a Nazi camp, among them the “flight survivors” Olga a…[Read more]

This book aims to uncover and assess changes in the EU’s foreign policy towards Ukraine in the times of wide-scale social protests in Kyiv. To accomplish this task, this book enlists and analyses documents, agreements, and treaties which establish the frameworks for EU-Ukraine cooperation. It also identifies the interests of lobbying groups in…[Read more]

This text consists of sections omitted from the published article due to space constraints. The games discussed here are “Mongol Matrix,” “After Catherine (the Great),” “Yalta, 1945,” and “Eyeball to Eyeball, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis.”

This article examines the link posited by Virilio and others between the camera shot and gun shot, arguing that this link operates differently in the context of Soviet vs. Western fantasies of agency, community and technology. Comparing THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of…[Read more]

The political system of early socialist-era Mongolia, established by the first Constitution in 1924, can be interpreted as a vernacular version of the Soviet system, in which the formally supreme representative body, the State Great Khural (“assembly”), was sidelined by the standing Presidium of the Small Khural and the Cabinet and eclipsed by the…[Read more]

In the early part of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the emperor sought to reform Russia through the creation of new European-style institutions. The aim was to ensure that Russia’s great-power status would be retained through updating its institutions, in line with a reform impulse dating back to Peter the Great and before. Among the new i…[Read more]

Discusses Irina Nikolaevna Il’ina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody [Civil Organizations in Russia in the 1920s], in Kritika 3, 1 (Winter 2002): 173-81; discussed by later works on “obshchestvennost'”

Discusses works on partisans, including:

Cerovic, Masha. Les Enfants de Staline: La guerre des partisans soviétiques
(1941–1944). L’Univers historique. Paris: Le Seuil, 2018. 366 pp. €25.00.
ISBN 978-2-0211-2167-4.

Kudriashov, S. V., ed. Partizanskoe dvizhenie v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi
voiny. Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossii…[Read more]

Housing as a trophy: the housing issue in bureaucratic practices and personal strategies of the Soviet military administration in Germany (1945-1949)

Collected volume review. Paweł Kowal, Georges Mink and Iwona Reichardt (eds.) “Three Revolutions: Mobilization and Change in Contemporary Ukraine.” Volume one. Stuttgart, Ibidem Verlag, 2019.

At the end of late Stalinism: the cult of vigilance and secrecy rituals (based on the materials of the Soviet military administration in Germany, 1945-1949)

Soviet consumer practices in the “small USSR”, 1945-1949 (based on the materials of the Soviet military administration in Germany)

Late Stalinism as an Ideological Practice. Party Life of Soviet Communists in Occupied Germany. 1945-1949 /

“Outrages” as a management concept.
Understanding the military-bureaucratic culture of the Soviet occupation regime in Germany (1945-1949)