Contributors
Katharina Bluhm
is professor of sociology with a focus on Eastern Europe and Russia at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published widely on the transition from communism to the market economy in a comparative perspective. In her recent research she deals with the emergence of a new illiberal conservatism in the region, its socioeconomic concepts, and the ways that it translates into practice. She coedited Business Elites and New Varieties of Capitalism in Post-Communist Europe (London: 2014) and New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe (London: 2019, together with Mihai Varga).
Per-Arne Bodin
is professor emeritus at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stockholm University. He has written extensively on Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian literatures. One of his special interests is the relationship between Russian culture and Russian Orthodox tradition. His most recent books are Eternity and Time: Studies in Russian Literature and the Orthodox Tradition (Stockholm: 2007) and Language, Canonization, and Holy Foolishness: Studies in Post-Soviet Russian Culture and the Orthodox Tradition (Stockholm: 2009). He has written several collections of essays in Swedish on Russian culture, literature, and church history. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities and doctor honoris causa at Uppsala University.
Alicja Curanović
is assistant professor at the Institute of International Relations at the University of Warsaw. She holds a PhD in political science (her PhD thesis is titled “The Religious Factor in the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation”). Her main research interests are international relations in the post-Soviet area; Russian foreign policy; religious factors in international relations; and perception, identity, image, and status in politics. She has conducted research at Columbia University, Stanford University, the Russian State University for Humanistic Studies, and MGIMO, inter alia. Her articles have appeared in renowned academic journals, for example, Politics and Religion, Nationalities Papers, and Religion, State and Society. She has also authored a monograph, The Religious Factor in Russia’s Foreign Policy (London: 2012).
Ekaterina Grishaeva
is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Ural Federal University. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Ural Federal University. She was a junior fellow at the Institute for Human Science (Vienna, Austria), and a postdoctoral fellow at Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). During 2015–2016 Dr. Grishaeva worked on the project “Traditional Religions and Religious Identity in Post-Secular Society,” aimed at investigating how Orthodox believers invent their identities in post-Soviet conservative society.
Caroline Hill
is a researcher with the Postsecular Conflicts Project at Universität Innsbruck. She studied political science at Uppsala University, international relations at the University of Amsterdam, and Russian language at Saint Petersburg State University. Her research interests include morality policy debates in the former Soviet states and Southeastern Europe, and the role of the Orthodox Church and evangelical Christian groups in the mediatization of religion in Eastern Europe and the West.
Irina Karlsohn
is a senior lecturer of Russian, the Head of Subject in Russian at Dalarna University, and research fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University. In her ongoing research, she examines different aspects of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s conception of history. Other research interests include 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature and Russian intellectual history. She has published articles on these subjects, and her book V poiskakh Rusi nevidimoi: Kitezhskaia legenda v russkoi kulture 1843–1940 (Seeking invisible Russia: The legend of Kitezh in Russian culture, 1843–1940) appeared in 2011 (Gothenburg).
Marlene Laruelle
is professor of International Affairs and associate director at The George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) in Washington, DC. Dr. Laruelle is also codirector of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia). Dr. Laruelle received her PhD in history from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO) and her “habilitation” at Sciences Po in Paris. Dr. Laruelle has authored Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, DC: 2008); In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (New York: 2009); Russia’s Strategies in the Arctic and the Future of the Far North (Armonk, NY: 2013); and Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields (London: 2018). She has also edited Entangled Far Rights: A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the 20th Century (Pittsburgh, PA: 2018) and Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Russia-Europe Relationship (Lanham, MD: 2015).
Mikhail N. Loukianov
is a doctor of history (Saint Petersburg Institute of History, RAS, 2004) and a professor at the Department of Modern Russian History at Perm State National Research University. His books include (with I. Kiryanov) Parlament samoderzhavnoi Rossii: Gosudarstvennaia Duma i ee deputaty, 1906–1917 (Perm: 1995); Rossiiskii konservatizm v kontse XVII–pervoi polovine XX veka: Sbornik dokumentov (Perm: 2010). His articles have appeared in the Slavic Review, Russian History, Kritika, Otechestvennaia istoriia, and in a number of edited volumes.
Kåre Johan Mjør
is a researcher in Russian philosophy and Russian intellectual history at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. He is the author of Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers (Leiden: 2011), Russiske imperium (Oslo: 2017), and several articles on Russian thought from the 18th century to the present, including contributions to journals such as Slavonic and East European Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Ab Imperio, and Studies in East European Thought. His current project, which is funded for a three-year period by the Swedish Research Council, explores the concept of “creativity” (tvorchestvo) in Russian thought.
Alexander Pavlov
is chair of the Department of Social Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, and associate professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He is one of the leading Russian specialists on the history of social and political philosophy and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on contemporary culture and ideology, as well as the editor and author of introductions to Russian translations of leading political theorists and social philosophers, including Hannah Arendt, Slavoj Žižek, Philip Pettit, Corey Robin, and Paul E. Gottfried.
Susanna Rabow-Edling
is associate professor in political science and senior research fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. Her main research interests are Russian political thought in the long 19th century, especially nationalism, liberalism, and imperialism; Russian America; and women’s history. Her most important publications include Liberalism in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: State, Nation, Empire (Abingdon: 2018), Married to the Empire: Three Governors’ Wives in Russian America 1829–1864 (Fairbanks: 2015), and Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: 2006).
Andrey Shishkov
is the director of the Research Center for Studies on Contemporary Ecclesiological Issues of Eastern Orthodoxy, a senior lecturer in external church relations and social sciences at Ss. Cyril and Methodius Postgraduate Institute (Moscow), and a secretary of the Synodal Biblical and Theological Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church. He reads courses on ecclesiology, political theory, and political theology at the master’s program of the Postgraduate Institute. Shishkov has been coleader of two projects on science and religion in Russia supported by the John Templeton Foundation. His research interests include ecclesiology, political theology, sociology of religion, post secular theory, political philosophy, and the dialogue of religion and science.
Victor Shnirelman
is a doctor in history, and senior researcher in the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. His scholarly field is cultural anthropology. Research interests include nationalism, racism, ethnic conflicts, neo-paganism, cultural memory, the politics of the past in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, eschatology, and theories of conspiracy. His most recent books are Ariiskii mif v sovremennom mire (The Aryan myth in the contemporary world) in two volumes (Moscow: 2015); Koleno Danovo: Eskhatologiia i antisemitizm v sovremennoi Rossii (The tribe of Dan: Eschatology and anti-Semitism in contemporary Russia) (Moscow: 2017); The Myth of the Khazars: Intellectual Antisemitism in Russia, 1970s–1990s (Jerusalem: 2002); and The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia (Osaka: 2001).
Mikhail Suslov
is assistant professor of Russian history and politics at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on Russian intellectual history; conservative, right-wing, and religiously motivated political ideas; geopolitical ideologies; and sociopolitical utopias. His most recent papers dealing with (geo)political imagination include “The ‘Russian World’ Concept: ‘Spheres of Influence’ in the Post-Soviet Geopolitical Ideology,” Geopolitics 23, no. 2 (2018): 330–53, and “The Production of ‘Novorossiya’: A Territorial Brand in Public Debates,” Europe-Asia Studies 69, no. 2 (2017): 202–21. Recently he edited Digital Orthodoxy in the Post-Soviet World: The Russian Orthodox Church and Web 2.0 (Stuttgart: 2016), coedited (with Mark Bassin) Eurasia 2.0: Post-Soviet Geopolitics in the Age of New Media (Lanham, MD: 2016), and (with Per-Arne Bodin) The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia (London: 2019).
Dmitry Uzlaner
holds a PhD in philosophy and religious studies (M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University). He is a research fellow at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES) and at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov v Rossii i za rubezhom. In 2016 Dr. Uzlaner became part of the five-year international research project “Postsecular Conflicts” (2016–21) at the University of Innsbruck (Austria).