Current reading (an excellent article): Preter, V., & Lerner, J. (2024). Class rivalry in ethno-national migration: Soviet intelligentsia vs. the Russian middle class in Israel. Social Identities, 30(3), 156–175.

This was an outstanding essay and well worth the subscription price of NLR alone.

Good excuse to endorse Tatiana Linkhoeva's Revolution goes East, which I'm nearly finished reading.

My roundup of what I blog-posted - and didn't post - in 2025. Be prepared for monsters. From Ukrainian working classes, methodological clashes, fieldwork reflections, to discussion about blogging platforms for academics. Usual snark and awkwardness guaranteed or your money back.

A real nice Christmas present to be the author of one of the five books that Meduza recommends here.

In parallel to Mapping the Planetary, we also have a podcast called 'Planetary Choices' via the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance, Aarhus University. Episode One: The New Order of Planetary Governance - A Conversation with Nils Gilman cpg.buzzsprout.com/2543607/epis...

I told you about my Danish auntie who started foaming at the mouth parroting the statsminister: 'we're at waaaaarrrrrrrr' after this happened? Turns out it was all down to her sister Bodil from Tarm who had too much homemade julebryg and saw a plane coming in to land at Legoland.

Doing a mass book clear-out. Here's some random snippets of books going to the pulper: Connor 1972 Deviance in Soviet Society. Margin note is not by me but is funny nevertheless. Also tells you nothing ever changes with gullible and stupid foreigners writing about Russia.

Russia Unfiltered #8: What have Ozempic production, the rising cost of Yandex taxi-rides and significant wage-arrears in the Russian economy got in common? Find out in our eighth podcast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bcl...

"Bluntly, even in 2022 we only supported Ukrainians because they fought like heroes from Norse myth and got results. We didn’t support them because it was the morally right thing to do." @drjademcglynn.bsky.social smalldeedsbigwar.substack.com/p/circus

New blogpost - the merits of attending to YouTube russophone political commentary. In short, it's a lot more informative than Twitter or Bsky, that's for sure. Kagarlitsky, Schulmann, and Zubarevich. Five hours of interviews condensed into a single post. Link in the next post:

Peak Russian émigré posting in the other place: 'I don't travel [to Russia] but I can tell you how the country is changing' then a long prose-poem linking to a paid pseudoscience therapy in Istanbul. Symptomatic of those who 'woke up' in Feb 22. You had no interest before?

So at what time does crypto's slide become a run as everyone realizes they've got to bail before they're the one holding the bag?

Ticking time-bomb 💣 Russian companies are spending 40% of their profits paying just the interest on their debt, according to a Kremlin think tank. Source: @themoscowtimes.com www.moscowtimes.ru/2025/11/17/r...

Strikes on refineries have been the only tariffs Russia hasn't been able to wriggle out of (at least some extent). The West's leadership has shown itself to be overall weak, compromised and effete - a message not only Russia & co has noted, but also voters. #econsky

The academic world has done an extremely bad job at making even the most basic things about how academics works publicly understood.

What's unfortunate about this kind of coverage is that it interprets Russian reality in precisely the way the Kremlin would like its population to. While in reality this story has almost zero purchase on what's going on with Russian youth. (you can tell that from whom is quoted and not quoted).

Did a short blog on audience questions when I do a talk. "access to information in Russia is not the problem, nor is censorship: the real problem is that people with doubts or moral objections are made to feel isolated and in the minority, when that’s not the case at all." Link in the next post:

Save the date! www.zois-berlin.de/en/events/ta... 16 January 2026, Berlin, we're organising our second conference : "Taking Stock: Russia and the Russians Four Years After the Full-Scale Invasion" This time, we teamed with @zois.bsky.social to build this exciting programme with 4 panels.

Another excellent blog post from @jeremymorris.bsky.social about the perils of positivism and the grave insult / misunderstanding inherent in dismissing ethnography as "anecdotal." Also, the article features a half naked lady. Something for everyone. postsocialism.org/2025/11/01/e...

"When I present my work, it often meets incredulity or hostility, even among fellow social scientists. I can’t tell you how many times my work has been downgraded to ‘that’s just an anecdote’". Link to a rant in the next post.

As the grim darkness descends on Europe (minus Russia) with its insistence on an observing an archaic October clock-ritual, why not brighten your evening with these three blokes talking about which Ru-adjacent journalists and pundits they despise the most. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvGP...

90% of publications now fit this description tbf

Reupping: "Russia has moved towards a much more rigid ideological structure and has an official ideology, but at least to this reader, the book, with its repetition of the terms 'repertoires' and 'plasticity', seems to argue for something different"

New post - a mammoth, though partial, review of Marlene Laruelle's new book on Putinism as ideology. I find a lot to like in her 400 page meticulous treatment, but also a bit of a gap between her final thesis and her evidence. Link in the next post.

Re-uping

terrifying myself by imagining that, somewhere out there, someone with more security clearance than brain cells is planning covert operations using chat gpt

So we decided to do a YouTube. Three guys talking about Russia. Clickbait: James: 'We won't call them [Americans going to Russia to live] white nationalists or anything' Jonny: 'I think you just have' Join us for what will hopefully be a recurring chat. Link in the next post

In our new issue, @jeremymorris.bsky.social explains how the Kremlin manufactures and enforces consent for a war that benefits few Russians.

The loneliness of the long-distance war supporter in Russia. New Blogpost postsocialism.org/2025/10/03/t...

Ukrainian nationalists - aren't you going to run out of 'bad' Soviet Ukrainians soon? photo-lviv.in.ua/u-lvovi-demo... "activist Oleg Radik... scrupulously researched the biography and work of the director, claiming that her activities were fully integrated into the Soviet cultural context"

Current Reading: Maria Gunko, "Nothing there. A small Armenian town between disappearance and endurance"

Current reading: Crypto in Russia: "Well, not to say anything out loud, let’s call it some kind of intensification of relations between different states. They can make it so that at some point I will be left without the main source of income. Then I will have to do it [invest in cryptocurrency]"

Our annual Russia and Eurasia issue is out! Featuring @jeremymorris.bsky.social on Russia’s compliant war society, Olena Strelnyk on Ukraine’s wartime gender equality turn, @nelbek.bsky.social on Belarus’s post-2020 transformations, Florian Mühlfried on mistrust and protest in Georgia…

Re-Reading Conrad and always struck by his eternally contemporary relevance: the British are 'a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like to be rude to it.'

We did an author meet and book exchange yesterday in salubrious surroundings. Bonus was the cosplay Peaky Blinders bloke. From some angles he looked like Lenin.

Well overdue article: "The elephant in the lecture hall: Russian intelligence and Western academia" by Sanshiro Hosaka

The dangers of pundits and self-congratulatory analysis.(Yes, this is an Ian Bremmer subtweet). In reality, imports of Russian fuels to EU are only 1% less in volume from 2023, and in 2024 surpassed the Eur19bn of aid sent to Ukraine. Total earnings from fuels since 2022 is close 1 trillion Euros.

Re-upping because the algo punishes links. Saturday coffee/other beverage reading about how postmodern authoritarianism is not about hard coercion or regime ideology but far more insidious.

Comfort is maintained by a neocolonial service class. But it’s also about the ‘doxa’: the naturalized and inevitable order: everyone has their labour price, and if yours is low, it’s the Red and White for you. postsocialism.org/2025/09/19/s...

The responses to this on the 'other site', whether critical or responsive are pretty poor. Is mass, public housing near to jobs and transit better than a world of intentional scarcity and financialized private housing? Yes, even if it's a bit shitty. Funny that these aren't even bad examples here.

Did a post - on how values-based or ideological approaches to regime legitimacy in Russia have a big blind spot postsocialism.org/2025/09/12/c...

"the sanctions regime looks like it has been outsourced to an intern with no language skills or subject-matter expertise, who spends their days surfing Twitter, looking for outrage du jour. Even as symbolic effort, Chechnya and Ukraine deserve better." newsletter.threatologist.com/posts/the-in...

Colleagues often criticise my argument that the most salient discourse in Russia is Social Darwinism. But even people from exile do it 'automatically'. Like this for the Telegraph. Link in next post. [and I'm presenting on this Saturday for anyone in Sofia BG]

A great sociological genre. Russian upper-middle class woman goes to live in Argentina without knowing anything about it. Kholod does an almost sublimely unreflexive piece. 'imports are not established there'.

Journo: 'Are there signs of the beginning of genuine elite infighting now in Russia (S. Markov saga) like in the 30s #Stalinism?' Shulman: 'Signs of the beginning is putting it mildly to describe the historical moment we're entering. There's highranking intraelite repression'... 🧵

Found an ad for a dream job. Looked at the salary. Went, 'hmmmm'. Looked at living costs. Closed the tab. SAD!

Reading a revisionist account of Ukrainianization in Soviet Ukraine, against the standard narratives of Russification in 70s-80s. This was published in 2002. I'm thinking about the reception this approach would get today on indigenisation. (link in next post).

95% of the clips of this gaffe on Twitter are sourced from Russian media (all expressing outrage, many from dodgy accounts). Makes you think that the EU Commission's media office is just not fit for purpose in an age of immediate weaponization, regardless of what you think of Kallas.

Russian Academy of Sciences sociology centre just published polling which shows highest concern about cost of living since..... 1993. Bonus (because I don't have a better graphic): statistically significant rise over time in people saying end of USSR a 'self own' (47%)