Tag: Russia

Stadium Arts

On the way into Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium during this year’s World Cup, spectators found FIFA’s flagship Fan Shop in an unlikely spot: at the feet of a monumental statue to Lenin. The irony was ...

Keyword of the Week: Russia

When we partnered with La Vie des Idées last year for a three-part series on “Russia Today,” we couldn’t have guessed how timely those essays would feel in 2017. This week’s Public Bookshelf ...

The Politics of Networking a Nation

In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for ...

Retrofitting Totalitarianism

No sooner did the Western media learn to think of Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian ruler than the Russian regime changed again. Since Putin returned to the office of president in March 2012, Russia has experienced ...

Totalitarian Sprawl

Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected ...

Russia, Today: Part 3

Legal scholar and anthropologist Monica Eppinger explores the origins and consequences of nationalism in Russia and Ukraine, while French sociologist Cécile Lefèvre analyzes Russia’s ongoing demographic and economic crisis ...

Russia, Today: Part 2

Princeton historian Ekaterina Pravilova discusses the battle over rationality in Russian popular and academic circles, while French philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff explores the intellectual history of Putin’s political ideology ...

The Other Side of the Looking Glass

The absent original—a lost “authentic” text, accessible only through its corrupted traces—occupies a central place in the postmodern imagination. Often at the very core of novels, the image of an ...