All posts tagged: Yuri

Why ‘The West’?: An Exchange | John Connelly, Maria Sonevytsky, Yuri Slezkine

Why ‘The West’?: An Exchange | John Connelly, Maria Sonevytsky, Yuri Slezkine

Published by Jenni Sidey

To the Editors: In his review of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West [NYR, December 18, 2025], Yuri Slezkine makes assertions that should unsettle anyone concerned about the fate of liberal democracy. Most troubling are these: that historic Russia is a largely passive entity against which “the West” defines itself; that Ukraine—a country fighting for its existence as a free society—is a “radical ethnocracy” whose leaders are busy homogenizing a multicultural, multireligious country according to the slogan “Army, Language, Faith”; and, finally, that it’s “bogus” to claim that Russia threatens people beyond its borders. A long-term historical view quickly reveals the first proposition as wrong. However we understand “the West,” Russia was just one of many factors against which it was defined. Fundamental are events that precede Varouxakis’s analysis, above all the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Only after that did “the West” arise as an idea uniting peoples and states. This basic variant has never disappeared; witness the “pro-Western” anti-Islamic rhetoric of Europe’s far right—this is “the West” of which Russia is an integral part. In …

Why Yuri Gagarin wasn’t the first in space – and who beat him to it

Why Yuri Gagarin wasn’t the first in space – and who beat him to it

Published by skeptic

Were these the first people to reach space? Heritage Image Partnership Ltd /Alamy If you were to take off from Earth on a clear day – the kind you want for a launch – you’d see the sky change colours before your eyes. It would shine a bright blue outside your window, becoming deeper as you climbed into the thinning air of the upper atmosphere. At some point, the blue would disappear entirely, and the black of outer space would surround your capsule. None of this seems controversial today. Everyone knows that the blue day sky is an optical effect caused by sunlight’s interaction with the atmosphere. Astronauts have gone up to see for themselves, returning with descriptions of the darkness of space. But this wasn’t always the case. So, who was the first person to experience this? You might instinctively say Yuri Gagarin, as he is often known as the first man in space. But was he? The first thing we have to consider is where space starts. And that really depends on what …

Yuri Dmitriev, the Russian historian imprisoned for denouncing Kremlin attempts to rewrite history

Yuri Dmitriev, the Russian historian imprisoned for denouncing Kremlin attempts to rewrite history

Published by Sam Flores

The Russian authorities did everything they could to break him, but, at 70 years old, Yuri Dmitriev has not given in. Since May 2022, Dmitriev, a historian specialized in the Soviet-era gulags, has lived the life of a convict in the heart of Mordovia, a stark region located 500 kilometers east of Moscow, dotted with lakes, rivers and prison camps that date back to the Soviet era. Imprisoned since 2016, he is one of the oldest detainees in Russia’s prisons. For 30 years, Dmitriev worked to locate mass graves that prove the Soviet regime’s Stalin-era crimes, horrors that the Kremlin is determined to cover up at all costs. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the KGB’s successors, is suspected of having fabricated a child sexual abuse case against him, both to silence him and to intimidate anyone else who does not conform to the regime’s official historical narrative. According to human rights advocates, he was the victim of a “shameful trial,” and the charges against him were actually a case of kompromat, an …

Investing in the Wrong Securities | Yuri Slezkine, Prudence Crowther

Investing in the Wrong Securities | Yuri Slezkine, Prudence Crowther

Published by José Betancourt

In our December 18 issue the historian Yuri Slezkine reviews Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea—“the first comprehensive history” of its kind, he says, and, “for the foreseeable future, the best.” Slezkine is perhaps most known for his book The Jewish Century, from 2004, which was the subject of academic symposia in the US, France, Germany, Russia, and Israel, and for The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, from 2017—a labor of twenty years and immersion in seventeen archives. As Benjamin Nathans characterized it in his review in our pages, it “offers a virtuosic weaving of novelistic storytelling, social anthropology, intellectual history, and literary criticism.” I wrote to Slezkine in Latvia, where he lives “in the best Chekhovian dacha imitation I can afford,” to ask him about his family history, his favorite prose stylists, the “insoluble pancake” (to quote one of them) of civilizational anxieties, and his new book. Prudence Crowther: Your paternal grandfather was a writer too. Of what? Yuri Slezkine: He kept up with the times, moving …