The Ideas Letter

Analyses of Russia’s brutal, unyielding war against Ukraine tend to have limited shelf lives. The pundits’ race for novel argumentation has attenuated as the war grinds on. Minds are made up about the war’s conduct and what it has meant for Russia. Solomon Petrov and Veronika Travina (pseudonyms of a writer and researcher who authored this issue’s lead piece) believe that we can do better. Through on-the-ground interviews with everyday Russians, they examine the shifting ideological commitments of the middle class and the ways in which the war refracts cultural production. Their essay offers unanticipated insights into the changes afoot in Russian society, an analysis with a much longer shelf life than your typical fare.  

From Russia to China: in our next essay, the journalist Li Jun assays the architecture of the Chinese media space. What we thought we knew about information in the Chinese context was likely only half right; Li Jun panoramically fills in the gap.   

And Daniel Bessner, part of an impressive new wave of twentieth-century historians of foreign policy, takes stock of two recent works in the field of Cold War studies by Sergei Radchenko and Anders Stephanson. Bessner deftly situates these important contributions within the wider historiography and finds that the field is returning attention to the two superpowers, with much more blame for the Cold War apportioned to the US than before. 

For our curated content, we lead with Richard M. Eaton’s cogent illumination of Hindutva’s gross distortions of its own Mughal past, which amounts to historical malpractice. We follow with an interview with Émile P Torres, who delivers a critical reading of the modish concepts of longtermism, transhumanism, extropianism, and cosmism, and how much their current usage has been buttressed by the right-wing techno-dystopian crowd.