What, exactly, constitutes an orphan?

Who, exactly, are the "Russians," and whose children qualify as "theirs"?

If there's one thing I hate in Russian scholarly writing, it's the coy avoidance of a conclusion with the phrase "Instead of a Conclusion." 

Is Russia always Russia?

This crisis in naming has long been political, in that Russia's leadership and media apparatus have abrogated for themselves the power over naming conventions throughout the former Soviet space.

Their home is no address or street--thier home is the Soviet Union

The appeal of a more capacious word is quite clear

"Global Russians" was a concerted attempt to define an identity for the globe-trotting, border-crossing Russian that was based on positive, cosmopolitan traits,

Soviet and pre-Soviet emigration was never about simply moving from one place to another

The current discourse in and on Russia can be roughly divided into two broad camps:  the "state reconstructionist" and the "centrifugal/diasporic."

Bringing Potemkin's bones back to the Russian Federation was, to put it mildly, an interesting choice

Currently, this book is projected to have five chapters, though I reserve the right to change their titles, contents, and number at any time

Russia did not so much inherit the Soviet Union as inherit the Soviet Union's loss

Russia need not be a land of melancholics for the prevailing discourse to be melancholic through and through

Russia's imaginary collective body is haunted by memories and fear of dismemberment

We personalize geopolitical entities all the time, especially when they are an object of strong emotional attachment.

In order to render the scale of nation, empire, and international conflict legible, these metaphors recast geopolitics in terms of the body

This is not Mother Russia, calling her sons to action, but Father Russia,  trapped in a humiliating, compromising position