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Russia, BRICS, and the Disruption of Global Order
Rachel S. Salzman
Georgetown University Press, 2019

Russia's leadership in establishing the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is emblematic of its desire to end US hegemony and rewrite the rules of the international system. Rachel S. Salzman tells the story of why Russia broke with the West, how BRICS came together, why the group is emblematic of Russia's challenge to the existing global order, and how BRICS has changed since its debut. The BRICS group of non-Western states with emerging economies is held together by a shared commitment to revising global economic governance and strict noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. BRICS is not exclusively a Russian story, but understanding the role of BRICS in Russian foreign policy is critical to understanding the group’s mission. In a time of alienation from the Euro-Atlantic world, BRICS provides Russia with much needed political support and legitimacy. While the longterm cohesion of the group is uncertain, BRICS stands as one of Vladimir Putin's signature international accomplishments. This book is essential reading for scholars and policymakers interested in Russian foreign policy, the BRICS group, and global governance.

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The Russia That We Have Lost
Pavel Khazanov
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows, after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project.

Khazanov’s careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class. Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a “lost Russia,” Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladamir Putin) successfully steered Russia into oligarchy and increasing autocracy. The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition.
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Russia
The Story of War
Gregory Carleton
Harvard University Press, 2017

No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war.

While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride.

War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.

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Russian Citizenship
From Empire to Soviet Union
Eric Lohr
Harvard University Press, 2012

Russian Citizenship is the first book to trace the Russian state’s citizenship policy throughout its history. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the consolidation of Stalin’s power in the 1930s, Eric Lohr considers whom the state counted among its citizens and whom it took pains to exclude. His research reveals that the Russian attitude toward citizenship was less xenophobic and isolationist and more similar to European attitudes than has been previously thought—until the drive toward autarky after 1914 eventually sealed the state off and set it apart.

Drawing on untapped sources in the Russian police and foreign affairs archives, Lohr’s research is grounded in case studies of immigration, emigration, naturalization, and loss of citizenship among individuals and groups, including Jews, Muslims, Germans, and other minority populations. Lohr explores how reform of citizenship laws in the 1860s encouraged foreigners to immigrate and conduct business in Russia. For the next half century, citizenship policy was driven by attempts to modernize Russia through intensifying its interaction with the outside world. But growing suspicion toward non-Russian minorities, particularly Jews, led to a reversal of this openness during the First World War and to a Soviet regime that deprived whole categories of inhabitants of their citizenship rights.

Lohr sees these Soviet policies as dramatically divergent from longstanding Russian traditions and suggests that in order to understand the citizenship dilemmas Russia faces today—including how to manage an influx of Chinese laborers in Siberia—we must return to pre-Stalin history.

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Russian Cyber Operations
Coding the Boundaries of Conflict
Scott Jasper
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Russia has deployed cyber operations to interfere in foreign elections, launch disinformation campaigns, and cripple neighboring states—all while maintaining a thin veneer of deniability and avoiding strikes that cross the line into acts of war. How should a targeted nation respond? In Russian Cyber Operations, Scott Jasper dives into the legal and technical maneuvers of Russian cyber strategies, proposing that nations develop solutions for resilience to withstand future attacks.

Jasper examines the place of cyber operations within Russia’s asymmetric arsenal and its use of hybrid and information warfare, considering examples from French and US presidential elections and the 2017 NotPetya mock ransomware attack, among others. A new preface to the paperback edition puts events since 2020 into context. Jasper shows that the international effort to counter these operations through sanctions and indictments has done little to alter Moscow’s behavior. Jasper instead proposes that nations use data correlation technologies in an integrated security platform to establish a more resilient defense.

Russian Cyber Operations provides a critical framework for determining whether Russian cyber campaigns and incidents rise to the level of armed conflict or operate at a lower level as a component of competition. Jasper’s work offers the national security community a robust plan of action critical to effectively mounting a durable defense against Russian cyber campaigns.

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Russian Grand Strategy
Rhetoric and Reality
Samuel Charap
RAND Corporation, 2021
Understanding Russia’s grand strategy can help U.S. decisionmakers assess the depth and nature of potential conflicts between Russia and the United States and avoid strategic surprise by better-anticipating Moscow’s actions and reactions. The authors of this report review Russia’s declared grand strategy, evaluate the extent to which Russian behavior is consistent with stated strategy, and outline implications for the United States.
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The Russian Origins of the First World War
Sean McMeekin
Harvard University Press, 2011

The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg.

It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

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Russian Style
Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism
Julie A. Cassiday
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
In the two decades after the turn of the millennium, Vladimir Putin’s control over Russian politics and society grew at a steady pace. As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender, Putin’s Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie A. Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership.

However, while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin’s neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state’s mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin’s Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin’s regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin’s first two decades in power. 
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The Russian Understanding of War
Blurring the Lines between War and Peace
Oscar Jonsson
Georgetown University Press, 2019

This book analyzes the evolution of Russian military thought and how Russia's current thinking about war is reflected in recent crises. While other books describe current Russian practice, Oscar Jonsson provides the long view to show how Russian military strategic thinking has developed from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. He closely examines Russian primary sources including security doctrines and the writings and statements of Russian military theorists and political elites. What Jonsson reveals is that Russia's conception of the very nature of war is now changing, as Russian elites see information warfare and political subversion as the most important ways to conduct contemporary war. Since information warfare and political subversion are below the traditional threshold of armed violence, this has blurred the boundaries between war and peace. Jonsson also finds that Russian leaders have, particularly since 2011/12, considered themselves to be at war with the United States and its allies, albeit with non-violent means. This book provides much needed context and analysis to be able to understand recent Russian interventions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, how to deter Russia on the eastern borders of NATO, and how the West must also learn to avoid inadvertent escalation.

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Russian Views of the International Order
Andrew Radin, Andrew
RAND Corporation, 2017
In this report, RAND researchers analyze Russian core interests and views of the international order. The authors find that Russia sees the current international order as dominated by the United States and as a threat to some of Russia’s interests. For several areas, U.S. and Russian interests overlap and cooperation is feasible. In other areas, U.S. and Russian interests conflict, and this report offers options for U.S. policy going forward.
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Russian-American Dialogue on the History of U.S. Political Parties
Edited by Joel H. Silbey
University of Missouri Press, 2000

Russian-American Dialogue on the History of U.S. Political Parties is the fourth volume in the Russian-American Dialogues series—a series that brings together scholars in the former Soviet Union and the United States who share an interest in the study of America's heritage and its importance to contemporary Russia.

In this valuable work, Russian scholars such as N. V. Sivachev, Alexander S. Manykin, and Vladimir V. Sogrin examine the history of American political parties and the role they played across two centuries. The Russians draw their own conclusions about the durability of the two-party system, giving careful consideration to historical crises—the secessionist movement and the Civil War, the reform era of the Populists and Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century, the Great Depression and the New Deal—in which the two-party structure was tested. Russian perspectives are also applied in analyzing the evolution of particular parties, from the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century Whigs to the shifting balance between twentieth-century Democrats and Republicans. The dialogue is then developed through commentaries by American historians such as Allan G. Bogue and Theodore J. Lowi and through counter-responses, often strongly expressed, by the Russian authors.

This lively exchange of ideas helps advance an understanding of key aspects of American party history and offers thought-provoking discussions of comparative international studies and historiography. Because the book provides unique perspectives on the American partisan experience by non-American specialists, it will be welcomed by all historians, as well as by anyone with an interest in the American-Russian connection.

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Russian-Ottoman Borderlands
The Eastern Question Reconsidered
Edited by Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
During the nineteenth century—as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires—European and Russian diplomats debated the “Eastern Question,” or, “What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?” Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today.
            The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.
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Russia's Military Interventions
Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts
Samuel Charap
RAND Corporation, 2021
Despite Russia’s relatively small global economic footprint, it has engaged in more interventions than any other U.S. competitor since the end of the Cold War. In this report, the authors assess when, where, and why Russia conducts military interventions by analyzing the 25 interventions that Russia has undertaken since 1991, including detailed case studies of the 2008 Russia-Georgia War and Moscow’s involvement in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
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Rus–Ukraine–Russia
Scenes from the Cultural History of Russian Religiosity
Martin C. Putna
Karolinum Press, 2018
An outspoken opponent of pro-Russian, authoritarian, and far-right streams in contemporary Czech society, Martin C. Putna received a great deal of media attention when he ironically dedicated the Czech edition of Rus–Ukraine–Russia to Miloš Zeman—the pro-Russian president of the Czech Republic. This sense of irony, combined with an extraordinary breadth of scholarly knowledge, infuses Putna’s book.

Examining key points in Russian cultural and spiritual history, Rus–Ukraine–Russia is essential reading for those wishing to understand the current state of Russia and Ukraine—the so-called heir to an “alternative Russia.” Putna uses literary and artistic works to offer a rich analysis of Russia as a cultural and religious phenomenon: tracing its development from the arrival of the Greeks in prehistoric Crimea to its invasion by “little green men” in 2014; explaining the cultural importance in Russ of the Vikings as well as Pussy Riot; exploring central Russian figures from St. Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin.

Unique in its postcolonial perspective, this is not merely a history of Russia or of Russian religion. This book presents Russia as a complex mesh of national, religious, and cultural (especially countercultural) traditions—with strong German, Mongol, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, and Lithuanian influences—a force responsible for creating what we identify as Eastern Europe.
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Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
Alain Destexhe
Pluto Press, 1995


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