I woke one day the spring of 2019 to a jammed inbox and the realization that I had become a character in my own history. I have not shied away from writing in the first person, but publishing Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future involved a heightened level of exposure that left me for a time wishing I could sink down under the earth's crust, the book with it.

One of the many achievements of Kate Brown's remarkable new book is to relocate the Chernobyl disaster and its official medicine internationally, but Manual for Survival also certainly illuminates the particularities of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. The Soviet Union had a penchant for secret medicine with regard to radiation. Brown's readers learn early of Angelina Gus΄kova, who was the first expert in Moscow to be called by the accident-stricken staff at the reactor, had treated more patients with radiation sickness than anyone else in the world, and had written the Soviet manual on the subject. Yet she did this having been forbidden to ask any patient directly about their exposure.

In the thirty years since the Chernobyl disaster we have learned a great deal about the causes of the accident, the human side of the story of those who worked at the station, the operators and their families in the now-abandoned nearby town of Pripyat, the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators,” and the millions of individuals affected by fallout, including some 300,000 who were evacuated from various exclusion zones and heavily affected rural areas, mostly to the north and east in (Soviet) Belarus, Ukraine, and small parts of Russia. What are the long term consequences of radioactive fallout to land and living things? How many people have and will die from exposure to radioactivity? In Manual for Survival, Kate Brown documents the efforts of scientists and doctors in Belarus and Ukraine to understand the short- and long-term impact of radiation exposure on Soviet and post-Soviet citizens, and the challenges even to simple data collection. Her conclusions stand in stark contrast to those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations (UN) Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation that estimated perhaps 5,000 total deaths. The numbers will be much higher, perhaps on the order of 10,000 or 50,000 excess cancers and premature deaths. But we shall never know with certainty owing to a variety of factors—including the challenges of conducting research in the former Soviet Union, the obfuscation of data in some quarters who appear to seek to minimize the impact, and scientific uncertainty itself.

What is the number of casualties from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Historian Kate Brown's important book grew out of apparent frustration with the controversy surrounding the accident. Brown was frustrated with the position of United Nations agencies—often repeated in the media—that only thirty-one to fifty-four died as the result of the accident, most of them emergency responders. The only recognized effect for the general population was an increase in nonfatal thyroid cancer in children. She was also frustrated with the assertions that we might never know the actual death toll.

I met Natalia Baranovska, a Ukrainian historian who is one of the characters in Kate Brown's book, last summer. I also read her work on the Chernobyl (in Ukrainian, Chornobyl) nuclear disaster, but I did not know her personal and academic story until I read the Manual for Survival. Baranovska began to study the Chernobyl catastrophe before any of her fellow historians in Kyiv considered it a legitimate topic for historical research. She made dozens, if not hundreds, of visits to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of documents on the disaster that she brought from the area. Natalia Baranovska is also a cancer survivor.

During the last years of the Second World War, some 30,000 Yugoslav refugees found shelter in the Egyptian desert from the German occupation of Dalmatia. In the camp El Shatt, the Partisan movement, the nascent UN, western aid groups, and the British Army worked together to take care of the refugees and also to negotiate future relations. The Communist Party, with victory in Yugoslavia in sight, sought to showcase its ability to organize and motivate its future citizens. Thus, the camps in Egypt became a testing ground for state-building back home. The article will explore the tensions that emerged between the self-confident Partisans, the suspicious British and UN officials, and the refugees, who experienced the end of the war in the Egyptian desert.

Meykhana is spoken word improvisation, verbal recitatives, and a kind of entertainment that in the last two decades has largely spread across Azerbaijan. Contemporary meykhana, although it retains its characteristic rhythm, increasingly resembles popular songs rather than classical Middle Eastern poetry, and is now often being sung, not read. Thus, in its form and function, it has become an element of mass popular culture. At the same time, meykhana is increasingly considered to be one of the national symbols on a par with other traditional musical genres such as mugham and ashig art. Meykhana's contemporary dual nature, which is understood differently by different constituencies within the Azerbaijani population, with their own politicized agenda, is inherently nationalist in nature. Using such aspects of nationalism as ethnicity, tradition, modernization, and folkloricization I analyze different levels of meykhana and the various actors involved in its implementation. This paper contributes a case study to the rich body of literature on nationalism in musical performances by analyzing the ways in which identities are constructed and mobilized.

In 2018, Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, was the most popular of all Russian historical figures of the twentieth century; the fame of White officers such as Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin was also on the rise. Obviously, broad sympathy for the last Romanov does not imply support for a potential restoration of the monarchy, yet the past few years have seen the activation of several monarchist lobbies, especially around the Russian Orthodox Church and in some well-connected Kremlin circles that seek the ideological hardening of the Putin regime. In this article, I use the case study of the monarchist idea to explore how the Kremlin manages the production of a large and diversified set of ideologies. I explore how the relationship between state authorities, ideological entrepreneurs, and some societal actors such as the Church is articulated along a continuum of permanent complementarity and competition in the production of ideologies.

Following the argument of urban geographers that “superstar” cities are the engines of economic growth in a globalized era, Kremlin advisor Aleksei Kudrin and others have argued that Russia should invest in a handful of major cities including Moscow and St. Petersburg. That advice has now become part of official government planning. In stark contrast to the developed world, however, Russia's population is not concentrated in a few urban centers, but in several hundred medium-sized cities and towns, many distributed across Russia's vast territory, often far from other metropolitan agglomerations. These include more than a hundred officially-designated “monotowns,” whose fate is dependent on a single industry, which the government ranks according to the severity of their “socio-economic conditions.” This paper will explore the dilemmas faced by monotowns in particular, and the challenge to authorities of balancing the need for new economic growth from urban metropolises against preventing social unrest in declining industrial communities.

This article examines the takeover of the Perm’-36 Gulag museum as emblematic of the dynamics of patriotic legitimation in Russia. The museum was dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of Soviet political repression and it grew in popularity into the 2000s, emerging as an opposition platform and target for self-styled patriots who accused it of distorting Soviet history. The regional government soon joined the battle, finally forcing the museum's takeover and transforming it into a site honoring the Gulag rather than its victims. Drawing on interviews conducted with the museum's former director and scientific directors in 2015 and extensive local press materials, this analysis of the struggle over Perm’-36 demonstrates the significance of patriotism in sustaining the regional government's attacks even in the absence of federal patronage. The findings thus challenge prevailing understandings of authoritarian regime politics as driven primarily by patronage and power-maximizing elites.