The Near Eastern Crisis of 1875-78

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 167-169:
Beginning with a peasant uprising in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the troubles spread in 1876 to Bulgaria and the Danubian provinces and ended with an invasion by the Russian army the following year. The Treaty of San Stefano, which Russia imposed on [...]

Watershed Face-off: 1979 vs. 1989

While Europeans and Americans are remembering the major transformation of international relations in 1989, economic historian Niall Ferguson argues that 1979 marked a much greater watershed.
The real question about Russian policy today is not whether Russia will invade Ukraine, but whether Gazprom’s strategy of investing in new pipelines and gas fields will pay off. Should [...]

A Eurasian Crossroads Now in China

The latest issue (a year late!) of China Review International (Project MUSE subscription required) contains a review by Thomas Barfield of a book that sounds interesting: James A. Millward’s Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Here are a few excerpts from the review.
As befits a key link in the [...]

Russian Pacific Colony of Atuvai, Nigau, Ovagu, Mauvi?

Here’s a surprising passage from volume 7 (1973) of the Hawaiian Journal of History, whose back volumes are now online at the Oceania Digital Library Project hosted by the University of Hawai‘i Library’s digital repository.
On 21 May (2 June) 1816 G. A. Schäffer apparently achieved the improbable. In a solemn atmosphere Kaumualii—”King of the Sandwich [...]

Kakania or Russia as “Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs”

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 13-15:
Czechs in particular chafed at their second-class status in Bohemia, and were able to give more forthright political expression to their grievances after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. But schemes for [...]

Mosquitoes to Mars?

A few weeks ago, RIA Novosti reported on a type of mosquito that seems preadapted to the possibility of suspended animation during long space flights.
Cosmonauts who might fly to the Red Planet are learning how to survive in a forest outside Moscow. Scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medical and Biological Problems [...]

Policing the Pirates of Puntland

The India-oriented blog, The Acorn, recently noted that the Indian navy is proposing to join the multinational effort to police the pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa, many of them operating out of Somalia’s “self-governing” region known as Puntland.
Among the tasks assigned to the Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150)—an international naval task force comprising, [...]

Finland vs. Estonia vis-à-vis Russia

Finland’s President Tarja Halonen recently accused Estonia of being “hypersensitive” to Russia and thereby provoking it. David McDuff, a writer and translator who blogs at A Step At a Time, provides some interesting background on Finland’s history of severe compromise in its relations with Russia, relations that defined the neologism ‘Finlandization‘.
I began to visit Finland [...]

Russians and Georgians in South Bend

The current issue of the NEH journal Humanities has an article about a chain of immigrants from Georgia and Russia, who have formed a vibrant and musically gifted community in South Bend, Indiana. The article is excerpted from a new book, From Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth Century War and Revolution Transformed the [...]

End of the Americo-Liberian Aristocracy, 1980

From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 545-548:
In his book Journey Without Maps, an account of his travels in Liberia in the 1930s, the English writer Graham Greene recorded that ‘Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice’. It was a [...]