A fantastic collection of articles in this issue!

The science says that White House is unlikely to benefit from a rally-around-the-flag effect, nor is this likely to work as a diversionary war. And, as we all know, the Trump administration is all about the science. oxfordre.com/politics/dis...

No immediate threat to national security. No congressional authorization. No constitution.

The Trump administration has become the greatest force for the spread of nuclear weapons. Near threshold adversaries now must get them to prevent an attack a la North Korea. America's "allies" need them since the nuclear umbrella is now in tatters.l

A process begun already in 2014 with the state takeover of the Perm-36 gulag museum and its conversion into a museum honoring the prison guards. I interviewed the original directors of Perm-36 as well as the advisor for its replacement and wrote about it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happening tomorrow! Still time to register.

Well that was fun. Bluesky is pretty much X now with a coat of paint.

As a citizen, I’m all for this. As a comparativist, name one time that telling authoritarian incumbents you’ll throw them in prison has worked out. If you thought J6 was bad…

The truth is that no AI company wants you to run a local AI, most consumers and enterprise will keep paying for subs, and the niche group of AI developers need hardware with gobs of memory not useless NPUs. There is no actual market for "AI PCs."

An appropriate way to start the new year!

Teaching graduate-level "Russian Domestic Politics" for the first time since... (checks notes) 2019?! Yikes. Time to start a new syllabus from scratch. Topics and readings attached for the morbidly curious.

Took some time off for the holidays, returned to my inbox to find another senior scholar throwing a tantrum because I desk rejected their screed. To be clear, by saying that I'm "obsessed with theory," this author was referring to my suggestion that, you now, they should have one.

Today I had the honor and privilege of talking to students of Invisible University for Ukraine about everyday nationalism. Many thanks to Viktoriya Sereda for the kind invitation and to her fantastic students who raised some fascinating questions.

Getting ready for another morning making the rounds on CBC radio to talk Ukraine-US-Russia: Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Quebec City, Cornerbrook/Gander, Moncton, Saskatoon, Whitehorse, Winnipeg, Yellowknife, Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver.

Go home, Wiley. You're drunk.

Going back on CBC Radio's Just Asking this afternoon together with Robert English to talk about Russia and Ukraine: www.cbc.ca/radio/justas...

Waiting for the inevitable picture of Trump standing in a wheatfield.

Personally, I kinda think it looks more like the FIFA Zombie Apocalypse Prize.

Great to see this issue is finally online. We're getting a lot of excellent research so we tried to cram as many articles as we could into the last issue before the holidays. Check it out: online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/issue/5...

Making the rounds on CBC radio this morning to talk about Witkoff, Russia, Ukraine, and back channel diplomacy. Three interviews down, eleven to go!

Find me on the ASEEES conference program or shoot me a note if you’d like to chat!

Free to access for one week: Russian Business and the Authoritarian Welfare State: Corporate Social Programs as Legitimation for Companies and the State by Ulla Pape 👉 doi.org/10.1525/cpcs... #Russia #authoritarianism #welfare #legitimation

13 years ago, shortly after announcing that he would run for a 3rd term as president, Putin was booed live on national television. The booing was edited out of re-broadcasts, but censors couldn't edit out the nervous glances of the people on the stage with him. youtu.be/nS48UuVXbjQ?...

New in Advance Articles: Melting Points: Furnace Technology at the Crossroads of Socialist and Georgian Imaginaries by Tamar Qeburia 👉 doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

As a professor, the most common advice to grad students is to identify a gap in the existing scholarship for your research. Not once did I ever think the gap was "the role of fungi and, specifically, the entheogenic mukhomor," and now I'm insanely jealous. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Free to access for one week: Witnessing the Crisis: The Political and Ethical Challenges of Migration Regime Activist Research at the Polish-Belarusian Border by Justyna Straczuk From the new issue's themed section Emergency Response Research and Documentation. doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

I'm guessing Harvard alumni in the GOP view this as a genius move to increase the perceived value of their degrees by leveraging scarcity. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Free to access for one week: Multiple Positionalities of a Researcher: The Case of Polish Researchers Interviewing Ukrainian War Refugees in Poland by Elżbieta Kwiecińska & Małgorzata Łukianow From the themed section on Emergency Response Research and Documentation. doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

Oh I remember this. Gorby was surrounded by profs who wanted him to sign their books (Alex Pravda had a stack of them). Gorby finally lost patience and burst out, "Where are the young people?!" And so our lowly MPhil cohort was allowed to come forward and meet him. www.sant.ox.ac.uk/anniversary/...

Still time to register for tomorrow's workshop!

Free for one week! The next article in Emergency Response Research and Documentation in Comparative Perspective: Ukrainian Researchers in a War Documentation Project: Intertwined Experiences and Methodologies by Natalia Otrishchenko, Artem Kharchenko, Valentyna Shevchenko doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

ICYMI: join us next Friday! The workshop schedule and speakers are now on the registration page.

All in the name of objective rankings for the sake of rankings, apparently.

Free to access for one week: Introduction to the Special Section on "Emergency Response Research and Documentation in a Comparative Perspective" by Natalia Otrishchenko & Anna Wylegała 👉 doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

For those of you in Ottawa on October 10th, save the date! "Disinformation, Propaganda, and Russia's War on Ukraine," sponsored by SSHRC and the McMillan Chair in Russian Studies. The workshop will be open to the public, registration required. Details 👇 carleton.ca/eurus/cu-eve...

Immigrants to the UK also pay an "immigration healthcare surcharge". For a skilled worker, that's £1,035/yr plus visa fees (£769-£1,519 per person), and you still pay tax for NHS. ...Of course, that's a bargain compared to $100k for an H1-B visa in the US (and you're on your own for healthcare).

Important section of the latest CPCS, dedicated to the challenges of “emergency response research” by Ukrainian and Polish researchers following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Looking forward to today's presentations in this conference. I'll be talking about research agendas and methods in Russian studies since 2022 and will be sharing the findings a bit later. The first panel will be live streamed, for any interested parties: harriman.columbia.edu/event/harrim...

The first award will be made in 2026 for articles published this year!

America is having its Kukly moment.

New in Advance Articles (Open Access): Proxy Games and Freezing Conflict: Trilateral Identifications, Fear, and Agency in Russia-Georgia Relations Post-Crimea by Julie Wilhelmsen & Salome Minesashvili online.ucpress.edu/cpcs/article...

I’ve been researching the impact of the war on Russian studies, looking at everything published in key journals since 2022. I’ll share the findings later, but this much I can say for certain: the last thing we need is yet another IR think piece with no data or method. You’re not helping.

Submissions for the 2025 CAS Undergraduate and Graduate Student Essay Contests are open! See our website for further details: slavists.ca/association/...

New in Advance Articles: Media Literacy and the Interpretation of the War—A Study of Uzbekistani Youth’s Perceptions on the Russia-Ukraine War by Mukhammadsodik Donaev doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

Clearing the brush from my bookshelf, I find myself throwing out a lot of work from late-90s/early-00s on institutional choice, Duma committees, and federalism. All things that ultimately mattered for just a short period in Putin’s Russia.

Before the re-launch of @cpcs.bsky.social in 2020, it was on life support with a backlog of 200 unprocessed articles and decision times of 18-24 months! Today, we get 180+ submissions per year, decision times are at 63 days, and the Impact Factor has nearly doubled since 2021.

The CPCS Editor's Report 2025 is now available for download: drive.google.com/file/d/1qo-S... A short highlight thread: 🔸2024 Impact Factor ↗️ 1.3 🔸2024 Immediacy Index ↗️ 1.1 🔸2024 Scopus CiteScore ↗️ 2.4 (1/9)

Glad to have the chance to talk about Putin, Trump, and Ukraine today, alongside Peter Schturyn. Our segment starts at about 37:00. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/w...