…Today, nearly every historian of the Soviet twentieth century spends time at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for archival research. In the shadow of the university’s most distinctive landmark, the Hoover Tower, preeminent scholars scurry between buildings, chatting about projects on Civil War era Siberian despots, Boris Pasternak’s poetry, 1950’s Radio Free Europe, and perestroika’s political advisors. The main stacks of the Russia collection are housed in the first nine floors of the Tower itself, an obelisk dedicated to inquiry.

American movies, Russian comic books, public works projects in Skopje, urban beautification in Krasnoyarsk – what are the conceptual ties that bind these distinct topics?

Greta Starett is a first-year graduate student at the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies. Her photos of Georgia are stunning.

With the memory of the Charlie Hebdo shooting still raw, the BBC ran a story about a daring satirical magazine that ran from 1906 until 1931 in Azerbaijan. The next day, Soyuz Symposium attendees, UW students, faculty and community members, gathered in Kane Hall to hear New York University’s Anthropology Professor Bruce Grant talk about the 100-year-old publication, Molla Nasreddin, and its founder, Jalil Mammadguluzadeh.

After living in Russia for one year and visiting again prior to my trip this summer, I thought that I would be very prepared for my experiences in St. Petersburg and Sochi. To my surprise, neither city was anything like Moscow or the lovely village of Beloomut, on the outskirts of Moscow.

The link between the UW and Baltic singing traditions will be strengthened again this January as Guntis Šmidchens, head of the Baltic Studies Program, releases his new book, The Power of Song. The book explores the Baltic Singing Revolution of the 1980s and 1990s — a non-violent resistance movement to regain independence from the Soviet Union. Read

by Taylor Zajicek Tucked just west of the Urals, Bashkortostan occupies the easternmost edge of European Russia. Despite being acquired by Ivan IV nearly 500 years ago, the minority republic retains and boasts its Turkic roots. The state-directed history of the region deemphasizes this imperial acquisition in favor of a narrative of diversity and multiethnic

By Indra Ekmanis On July 7, 40 University of Washington choral students stood 5,000 miles from home surrounded by a 15,000 member choir singing patriotic songs in an obscure Baltic language. The UW delegation was one of only two non-Latvian choirs to participate in the Latvian cultural event of the decade, the XXV National Song

by Indra Ekmanis Cleveland native Nadia Tarnawsky can make your body vibrate with the sounds of East European folk song. Born to Ukrainian émigrés in Ohio, Tarnawsky’s first language was Ukrainian. Now a Seattleite, she shares her passion and profession with the community, leading workshops and performing around the city. This fall, Tarnawsky has performed