Project MUSE®: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian HistoryTWOProject MUSE®Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History1538-50001531-023xLatest articles in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Slavic Studies as an Object of Transnational Repression
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990484
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When, in June 2025, the Russian Ministry of Justice declared the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) an “undesirable organization,” many European scholars were surprised to learn that the largest network in the field had not already been designated as such. By that point, US, British, or German research and funding institutions were facing a gradual escalation of pressure: their Russian partners had been labeled “foreign agents” since 2012 (e.g., Memorial in 2014), and, especially after February 2022, these institutions themselves were increasingly classified as “undesirable organizations.” Although ASEEES joined this group relatively late, some scholarly and research networks—such
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallSlavic Studies as an Object of Transnational Repression2026-05-15text/htmlen-USSlavic Studies as an Object of Transnational Repression2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®169042026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Stones Will Give Way: Diplomacy and Water Infrastructure in the Soviet-Turkish Borderland
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990485
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On a hill in today’s Armenia, within eyeshot of the Turkish border, a nineteenth-century church sits across from the ruins of a medieval caravanserai. Behind them, the foundation stones of a second church peak out of the grass. Apart from these structures and a scrubby road, the hill is empty. The impression is that the preserved church and caravanserai fell out of the sky, plucked from their respective eras. How to explain this lonely juxtaposition? The answer lies down the hill, past a two-lane highway and a village of cinderblock homes.There, rising from the marsh, is the Akhurian Reservoir Dam. The hilltop church dates to 1862. Its modest belltower was added later. The caravanserai, by contrast, recalls the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallThe Stones Will Give Way: Diplomacy and Water Infrastructure in the Soviet-Turkish Borderland2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Stones Will Give Way: Diplomacy and Water Infrastructure in the Soviet-Turkish Borderland2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1689402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Growing Better: Culture and Agriculture in the Post-Stalin Era
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990486
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Nikolai Mikhailov struggled to be good at his job. It was the summer of 1955, and the humorless bureaucrat had just taken the post of Soviet minister of culture following an unsuccessful stint as ambassador to Poland.1 It promised to be a less hostile assignment, but the title of minister of culture did not command much respect. Created only two years earlier, it already had a bad reputation when Mikhailov came on board in March. As one of the poorer and less politically powerful Soviet state ministries, the Ministry of Culture had effectively become a dumping ground for problematic bureaucrats—the Moscow-based equivalent of ambassador to Mongolia.2 But Mikhailov took the job seriously. When he asked Soviet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallGrowing Better: Culture and Agriculture in the Post-Stalin Era2026-05-15text/htmlen-USGrowing Better: Culture and Agriculture in the Post-Stalin Era2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1552242026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Friendship of the Peoples Reconfigured: The Rise of the Shamakhmudovs as Patriarchs of the Soviet Family of Nations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990487
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The Shamakhmudov family photographSource: Reproduced in the Montana Standard, Butte, 13 September 1955, 8.Thus, by placing the family story within the broader sociopolitical context, the article underscores the role of regional political and cultural actors in shifting notions of postwar Sovietness. By offering a nuanced history of the Shamakhmudovs’ ascension to all-Soviet (and beyond) recognition, this article shows that Soviet Central Asians were not just “mimicking” Moscow-generated formulaic discourses but were producing hybrid narratives of national Sovietness.During the Cold War, when archetypical Sovietness was inextricably linked to Russianness, one Uzbek family made headlines in the US press for being
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallFriendship of the Peoples Reconfigured: The Rise of the Shamakhmudovs as Patriarchs of the Soviet Family of Nations2026-05-15text/htmlen-USFriendship of the Peoples Reconfigured: The Rise of the Shamakhmudovs as Patriarchs of the Soviet Family of Nations2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1457282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Miss USSR: The Entrepreneurship and Exploitation of Women during Perestroika
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990488
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A young woman, shimmering in a black sequined gown, gracefully approaches a man standing a few paces away. He turns to her and asks, “Tell me, would you like to have a lot of money?” The glamorous woman, Evgeniia Karpova, shrugs her shoulders and smiles. “Of course!” she replies. “And how much would you like?” he inquires. “Fifteen rubles? Twenty-five thousand?,” listing off sums as if about to retrieve a wad of bills from his tuxedo pocket. Karpova thinks, her oversized earrings sparkling, before answering: “A million. That’s a pile.” “And what will you do with the money …” he demands, adding after a long pause, “… in Yakutsk?” Karpova laughs. So do 2,500 other people watching their exchange. It is May 1989, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallMiss USSR: The Entrepreneurship and Exploitation of Women during Perestroika2026-05-15text/htmlen-USMiss USSR: The Entrepreneurship and Exploitation of Women during Perestroika2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1599442026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Making of Scenarios of Power
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990489
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Professor Wortman’s book has transformed the intellectual landscape for studying imperial Russian history and will surely become a classic.Thirty years have passed since the first volume of Richard S. Wortman’s Scenarios of Power appeared in 1995, and it goes without saying that the work is a classic. Widely reviewed at the time of its release, the book made waves—lauded as a field-changing book while also sparking controversy. The combination is true of any real classic, as a doyenne of the field, Isabel de Madariaga, put it wisely in her twelve-page assessment: “It is a tribute to its challenging quality that this book arouses a critical as well as an admiring response in the reader.”2 Accompanied by the second
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallThe Making of Scenarios of Power2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Making of Scenarios of Power2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®908262026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Little Places” in Russia’s History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990490
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In the effort to decolonize Russian studies, scholars have mostly emphasized the autonomous histories of Ukraine and Central Asia. Other non-Russian parts of the vast empire, especially those in Siberia and the Far East, have received far less attention.1 They now stand in danger of slipping even further behind the new form of iron curtain surrounding the Russian state. These two books, written shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, show the value of keeping an interest in those out-of-theway places that are easily lost from historical view.Robert Kindler and Andy Bruno share an interest in some of the Russian Empire’s remotest and smallest corners—what might be called Russia’s “little
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallLittle Places” in Russia’s History2026-05-15text/htmlen-USLittle Places” in Russia’s History2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®273422026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Soviet State and Its (Non)human Others
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990491
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Historians’ interest in religiosity throughout the Soviet period is hardly surprising. Examining the religious lives of Soviet citizens adds both depth and complexity to our understanding of the epoch. These studies depict the Soviet project as a shaping force in religious lives, producing specific relations of power and new forms of subjectivity; as people navigate the pressures of social transformation in a state with an openly antireligious ideology, they adapt, resist, collaborate, or retreat into secrecy. Exploring these strategies—often carrying tragic consequences for the believers—allows historians to engage with the very texture of social life, in which the presence of “nonhuman agents” is an ever-present
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallThe Soviet State and Its (Non)human Others2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Soviet State and Its (Non)human Others2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®393522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Continuity and Change: Introducing the History and Memory of the Gulag
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990492
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Jeffrey Hardy concludes his short introduction to the history and memory of the Gulag anecdotally, underscoring a point made in all three pieces. That is, the Gulag’s legacy is very much alive and under contestation in the post-Soviet world. Hardy hints that the legacy lives on within memoirs, books, TV shows, movies, monuments, songs, tattoos, and museums but contends that tangible reminders of past repression and mass incarceration are visible in the administration of post-Soviet Russian prisons by the Federal Penitentiary Services of Russia, or FSIN. This, of course, is not a new suggestion. The comparison between the Stalinist Gulag and the contemporary penal administration in Russia is an apt one, which has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallContinuity and Change: Introducing the History and Memory of the Gulag2026-05-15text/htmlen-USContinuity and Change: Introducing the History and Memory of the Gulag2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®754342026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Contributors to This Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990493
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Victoria Frede is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Author of Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (2011), she is currently completing a study of the history of friendship among the political elites of the Russian Empire from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. She first met Richard Wortman as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, in 2002–3.Rebecca Adeline Johnston is a historian whose research spans late Soviet cultural policy, ideology, and governance to the Russian government’s instrumentalization of culture today. Her current book project examines changing conceptions and utilizations of culture in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/108/image/coversmallContributors to This Issue2026-05-15text/htmlen-USContributors to This Issue2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®63582026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15