Award-winning Guzel Yakhina’s latest novel is a fictionalised life of the great (and infamous) Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (or Eisen as he was familiarly known). Readers’ knowledge of Eisenstein may extend only to his 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin and the famous scene of the baby carriage careening down the long Odessa Steps. I was…
Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it…
In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia’s Sakha Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth’s coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, he continued on his journey, meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way. Yet his…
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know each other well. Since 2013, when Xi completed his ascent to the top of the People’s Republic of China, they have met more than 40 times. Perhaps no other two heads of state currently in office have conferred as often. This, the pair maintains, has fostered an unusually close…
When Ivan the Terrible received the English ambassador Jerome Edward Horsey in 1580, he showed him the Kremlin’s treasury room, full of gifts and tribute from sultans, beys and khans: scimitars, saddles, bridles and quivers, all covered in jewels and nielloed steel. Horsey could imagine he had been transported to Cathay, Tabriz, or Lahore. Viewing…
Walking through Siberia in the dead of winter may not, on the face of it, sound like a very good idea, yet that is what Charlie Walker intended to do in February 2022. Yakutsk is built on the banks of the Lena River and I would ski-trek northwards along the water’s frozen surface for 1,000…
The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage to learn more about their neighbor—with various degrees of success. Sometimes, it failed miserably, like Russia’s early attempts to make contact with pre-Meiji Japan, or the debacle during…
China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations.
Russia came late to Japan, but devoted considerable energies to grappling with one of the world’s great intelligence challenges and penetrating the insular Asian nation once the Japanese shifted in the latter half of the 19th century from a policy of restricted contact with the outside world to one of imperial competition with Moscow and…
If you only read one book by the prolific and (now) venerable John Man, it should perhaps be this one, literally so for it “revises and condenses” several chapters in his other books Genghis Khan, The Terracotta Army, Barbarians at the Wall, The Great Wall and Xanadu. It is, as one might expect from Man,…
At a time when much of what passes for international commentary has the depth and nuance of a tweet, Geoff Raby’s Great Game On is something of a relief. The former Australian Ambassador to China keeps his politics largely to himself, but doesn’t have much time for mainstream Western (read “American” for the most part)…
Alexander Grigorenko’s previous book Mebet, set among the Nenets people of the Siberian taiga, was such an unique literary experience that one could be forgiven for opening Ilget, the next book in the trilogy (a rather loose trilogy, it would appear), with some trepidation, anxious that it repeat or at least not surprise in same…
Those of a geographical, or perhaps geopolitical, frame of mind might find it fitting that Elisa Shua Dusapin’s, after novellas set in Korea (Winter in Sokcho) and Japan (The Pachinko Parlour), has placed her third in Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East. Other writers (Paul Yoon comes to mind) have also set their work in this…
It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian…
On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria, Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found…