Ada Wordsworth Uzbek Uncertainties Uzbekistan is divided between nostalgia for the Soviet past and patriotic hope for an independent future. July 18, 2024
J. Hoberman Polish Compassion Green Border is the filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest confrontation with her country’s brutal history. June 20, 2024
Ludwika Włodek Waiting for a New Poland Five weeks after the opposition won Poland’s legislative elections, its supporters are looking ahead to the country’s future. November 24, 2023
Joshua Cohen The Imps of His Age In a harrowing, witty novel by Miroslav Krleža, written in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, a mediocre lawyer succumbs to the impetus to speak against all reason. June 6, 2023
Cristina Florea Ukraine’s Long Self-Determination Ukrainians have declared their independence five times—each time, defining their nation anew. December 7, 2022
Gal Beckerman Samizdat and the Moral Collapse of the USSR For all its sacrifices, Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s life is emblematic of what a network of poets, thinkers, and activists achieved by daring to defy a totalitarian state. February 13, 2022
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad Pakistan: Missing Piece in America’s Afghan Puzzle Even the post-mortems on the intervention in Afghanistan have replicated the US’s decades-long failure to reckon with its sometime strategic partner’s priorities. January 28, 2022
Anastasia Edel A Taste of Home Back in the USSR, pirozhki—the stuffed buns sold by street vendors all over Russia—were the quintessential comfort food in a world of paucity and mystery meat. November 24, 2021
Timothy Snyder The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz The Polish writer survived the camps yet died before he was thirty. The stories he left behind provide perhaps the most unflinching literary account we have of the Holocaust. September 12, 2021