Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Greg Afinogenov
In the Grip of Politics | Greg Afinogenov
Richard Earlom after Johann Zoffany, The Royal Academy of Arts, 1773. If you're in academia, you've probably already heard about the report. In April 2026, a panel of academics from different fields, some relatively well-known and some not, issued a Report on the State of Scholarship in Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.
Greg Afinogenov · Slavdom: What Russians Want
Across Europe , military leaders are dreaming of war with Russia. Nato’s defence chief, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, has called for a pre-emptive, ‘defensive’ strike (whatever that means); the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said in the autumn that it might have been ‘the last summer of peace for Europeans’.
Thank God for Dynamite
‘Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.’ In this line from the memoirs of Victor Serge – revolutionary, exile, implacable opponent of capitalism, critic and sometimes accomplice of Bolshevik terror – there is an entire worldview that is now as foreign to Serge’s admirers as to his enemies. Its animating question is about the relationship between an individual and the time in which he lives.
Forerunners • Protean Magazine
Two years ago I found a tattered, century-old piece of paper in a box in my grandmother’s Moscow apartment. I struggled to read the faded typescript, but when I had puzzled out the contents, I was astonished. It turned out to be a document issued by the Soviet Union’s Archive of the Revolution, certifying that Antonina Vasilievna Fessalonitskaia, my grandmother’s grandmother, was arrested in St. Petersburg in 1901 as part of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.
Greg Afinogenov · Frost-tempered: Russia in Central Asia
It’s a crowded field, but the most unsubtle of all 19th-century Russian paintings might be Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1871 canvas The Apotheosis of War. In an arid landscape, a towering pyramid of human skulls is being picked over by crows, with ruined Islamicate architecture in the background. This heavy-metal album cover avant la lettre was dedicated ‘to all great conquerors, past, present and future’. But to which conquerors was Vereshchagin alluding?
An Outrage Sacred to the Gods - The American Scholar
Today we visited a field of graves— slaves’ or Indians’ graves, you said— sunk, unmarked, green edges of hammered granite sharp as a shoulder blade. God break me out of this stiff life I’ve made. —Jean Valentine, “Forces” 1. My father died suddenly in August 2021 on his 56th birthday, the victim of an addiction to alcohol that had ravaged him for some 20 years.
Prigozhin’s March On Moscow
In late May, the pro-Kremlin political PR hack Konstantin Dolgov published a startling interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner private military company.
Nostalgias imperiales
El levantamiento contra Moscú puso en primera plana, aunque articuladas por un oportunista, críticas extendidas a la conducción rusa de la guerra. Lejos de un deseo de paz, se trata de los tópicos de una derecha nacionalista ascendente. Miembros del grupo Wagner hacen guardia en las calles de Rostov del Don, Rusia, el 24 de junio.
Prigozhin’s March on Moscow
In late May, the pro-Kremlin political PR hack Konstantin Dolgov published a startling interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner private military company.
What should the action be?
In summer 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation. Two years earlier, however, he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of a revolutionary secret society.
Kids Those Days | Online Only | n+1 | Greg Afinogenov
Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 31, 2022 at the age of 91. He was by far the longest-lived Soviet leader: none of the others even made it to 80. The irony is that youth was once Gorbachev’s chief attribute. When he came to power as a fresh-faced 54-year-old in 1985, he was supposed to bring rejuvenating energy to the Soviet system, freeing it from the shackles of the legendary Politburo gerontocracy.
Strelkov’s Posts | Greg Afinogenov
One: Two: It would be easy to imagine these comments as dueling entries in an interminable argument between opponents and supporters of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. In fact they come from adjacent Telegram posts by a single person—and not just any person, but a man who can credibly claim to be, next to Vladimir Putin himself, the single individual most responsible for the outlines of the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
An Art Historian’s Magisterial Late Phase
At nearly 80, the great art historian T.J. Clark has entered a magisterial late phase. Beginning with his 1999 book on modernism, Farewell to an Idea (which contains my favorite sentence on modernism ever written: “Modernism is our antiquity, the only one we have”) and continuing through The Sight of Death (2008) and Heaven on Earth (2018), leave-takings and last things are on his mind.
Shrinking Graduate Cohorts Is a Bad Idea
As everyone knows by now, academia, and especially the humanities, is facing a systemic crisis. Tenure-track job postings have cratered, leaving many new Ph.D.s to face the poor working conditions and insecurity of casualized teaching jobs. Tenured faculty have finally begun to reckon with the true scale of the problem. That’s progress compared with a decade ago — when they appeared to be in total denial.
For Soviet Filmmakers, There Was No Glory in War
On New Year’s Eve 1940, my great-grandfather Aleksandr Afinogenov held a dinner party at his Moscow apartment. At one point the guests, probably writers and other literary intellectuals, played a game: writing on sheets of paper, they tried to predict what the coming year would be like. Some of them thought they’d change their hair colour; others thought they’d get married or divorced. But what about the bigger question: would the Soviet Union get involved in World War II?
A Year in Reading: Greg Afinogenov
The twin peaks of my reading this year was a pair outstanding novels written by colleagues of mine here at The Millions. Edan Lepucki’s debut, California, reached #3 on The New York Times bestseller list, while Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, Station Eleven, was named a finalist for the National Book Award.
Everything Could Be Free
Photograph by Oliver Hernandez I decided to join the protests after spending days watching videos of demonstrations in Minneapolis and elsewhere: first the joyous ones of the precinct burning and then the bleak ones, cops shooting people in the face with supposedly nonlethal weapons, gassing trapped crowds, beating the helpless and elderly. In the glass of my phone screen American protest culture seemed to be undergoing a distinct and visible shift.
A new book looks at the complexity of political pressure in contemporary Russia
A new book looks at the complexity of political pressure in contemporary Russia Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia BY Joshua Yaffa. New York: Tim Duggan Books. 368 pages. $28. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon Vladimir Putin’s Russia lends itself to being seen in Manichaean terms. Commentators at home and abroad like to picture a desperate struggle between the centralized state and a righteous but comparatively powerless coalition of prodemocratic forces.
Tenure Is Not Worth Fighting For
By Greg Afinogenov By Greg Afinogenov At least not in its current form.
Three Museum Exhibitions about Migration Focus on Trauma but Obscure its Causes
When museums become sites of political struggle, it is usually because they have been criticized from outside. Lately, activists and artists have cast these institutions as storehouses of capital and monuments to colonial power, challenging them on everything from the looting of Indigenous artifacts to the influence of opioid profiteers. But the global far-right resurgence over the last few years has also given museums an opportunity to act politically in ways they rarely imagined.
The Jewish Case for Open Borders
This essay appears in our Summer 2019 issue, out now! Subscribe to receive a copy of this issue in your mailbox. IMMIGRATION HAS BECOME so central to US politics today that it’s hard to remember how rarely it flickered into the national spotlight before 2016. Prior to Donald Trump’s election, both parties agreed on the need for border enforcement, with the GOP routinely accusing Democrats of being soft on “illegals” and the Democrats responding with vigorous deportation campaigns.
The Jewish Case for Open Borders
IMMIGRATION HAS BECOME so central to US politics today that it’s hard to remember how rarely it flickered into the national spotlight before 2016. Prior to Donald Trump’s election, both parties agreed on the need for border enforcement, with the GOP routinely accusing Democrats of being soft on “illegals” and the Democrats responding with vigorous deportation campaigns.
On the secret enemies we wish we had
FEATURE Ronald Reagan rose to power by exploiting fears of Communist subversion and infiltration. The Americans takes this fantasy literally. Its protagonists, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, are Soviet spies infiltrated into the United States under false identities to pose as the typical white suburban family of the 1980s. (“Couple kids. American dream.
How To Think Clearly About Anti-Semitism Controversies In The Labour Party
On February 3, 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reported having enjoyed a phone conversation with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The backlash came quickly in the form of condemnations of Corbyn as an anti-Semite from the likes of pundit Bret Stephens and writer Elad Nehorai, who parlayed the accusation into a personal meeting with Ocasio-Cortez.
Greg Afinogenov: The Voyage of the ‘Pobeda’
Desperate crossings – Lenin’s sealed train, Luding Bridge, Granma – were at the heart of several 20th-century revolutions, but the one that killed my great-grandmother seemed to be a perfectly average late-summer voyage. According to the official account, on 1 September 1948, the steamer Pobeda (‘Victory’), bound from New York to Odessa, was in the Black Sea, nearing its destination.
Decision Engines
Scenario One. A self-driving car with four passengers is approaching a two-lane crosswalk. In the left lane of the crosswalk, a homeless man is pushing a baby in a stroller. A concrete barrier blocks the entire right lane of the crosswalk. The self-driving car, driving in the left lane, experiences brake failure. If the car continues straight, it will kill the homeless man and baby. If it swerves into the right lane, it will crash into the concrete barrier killing all four passengers.
Orthodoxxed!
This week, three self-described liberal scholars (Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian) went public with an account of a hoax against a range of scholarly journals, from obscure paper mills to field-leading publications.
Job Opening: Production Manager
n+1 is looking for a sharp, enthusiastic, and meticulous Production Manager to work full time in our Brooklyn office. Health benefits are included and salary is commensurate with experience. UPDATE: Please apply by 11:59 PM on October 10, 2018.
Issue 32
Four billion years ago, amino acid molecules set loose by a dying star gathered into macromolecules, matter having a tendency to become more complex. Who asked it to? During the next half billion years, macromolecules evolved into living cells, first without nuclei, then into cells that could reproduce. One minute you’re matter and the next, poof, you’re alive! Has that ever happened to you?
Sick Puppy
For several months at the start of the 1990s, when she was not quite out of her teens, Anna Offenbach failed to see the point of getting out of bed. Her father had died, her classes didn’t interest her; neither did eating. Anna soon dropped out of college and moved to New York. In the back pages of the Village Voice, she found a studio sublet in an ugly brick building on First Avenue for five hundred bucks a month.
Society as Checkpoint
The horror at the US-Mexico border has provided us with the defining images of the Trump presidency — at least so far. The pictures — of children torn from their parents, sleeping on concrete covered in Mylar blankets; of young men and women standing in shackles and handcuffs in mass trials — have gone as global as the Abu Ghraib prisoner photos did in 2004. As the war in Iraq defined the George W.
Homecomings
The liver took the longest to burn. That’s where the disease had likely lodged itself, the maid’s 6-year-old grandson explained. I was carrying my father’s remains. The boy walked beside me, already a veteran of the funeral pyre. Only hours earlier, he had ridden his rickety bicycle to the front door of my ancestral house, which was an act forbidden in normal times. Sweat dripped from his palms; his face and ears looked hot. It was not yet time to return, he said, his voice almost out of range.
The Party Had Been Perfectly Correct on Every Issue
February 14, Valentine’s Day, found Jacob Zuma in denial about his perilous position on the brink of a parliamentary no-confidence vote brought by his own party. The police and prosecution service had already shifted their allegiances to his successor Cyril Ramaphosa, which gave the crisis the feeling of a regime change. The president’s co-conspirators in the Gupta family were on the run. The company offices through which they had looted billions or tens of billions of dollars were abandoned.
Ice Age
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the defining institution of the Trump era. ICE, like Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has long been a corrupt, white supremacist-ridden stronghold of arbitrary state power. But under the new administration, both agencies have reached new heights of brazenness. So many stories—first shocking, then numbing—have appeared that it would be pointless to try for representative instances; the day’s roundup can be sampled by searching Twitter for #abolishICE.
It Moves!
An activist and writer barely known outside his family of unorthodox British Trotskyists, David Widgery (1947–1992) has been restored for a new generation by the second ever collection of his essays, the only one now in print. Tenderly, the project is curated by three of Widgery’s longstanding friends and comrades and comes to us from a small independent publisher in Scotland, whose previous output has all been fiction and poetry.
Until They Inevitably Find and Kill Each Other
In Hidden My Game By Mom!, a free smartphone game by lone wolf Japanese indie developer hap Inc., you play a boy whose disapproving mother has squirreled away his handheld video game console. Each stage requires you to solve puzzles to find it. In the first few stages, the console is hidden on shelves and under couches, as you’d expect; in Stage 4, it sits in the jaws of an alligator. The solutions get sillier.
Remote Diagnoses
George W. Bush at the US Yongsan army base in South Korea, August 2008 On Tuesday, yet another Trumpian foreign policy crisis produced widespread panic on Twitter. Speaking at his New Jersey golf club, the President menaced North Korea with “fire and fury” if it continued to make threats against the United States; the DPRK leadership responded by announcing that it was “seriously considering” a strike against the island of Guam.
On the Wilson Quarterly
The subject line worried me. “The Wilson Quarterly’s Final Happy Hour,” it said. Even the rosiest interpretation—that they’d decided, say, to discontinue their occasional get-togethers—was troubling. A link to an online invitation appeared below. The editors had completed the winter 2014 issue, a best-of collection drawn from “four decades of classic essays.” A few particulars followed and then the bad news, withheld for a bit, the way people do: “This will be our final quarterly issue,” they said.
A Monument, A World of His Own
Berger’s closeness to the material led again and again to revelation: the only way to get to the universal was through the material. Somewhere in the galaxy of his work—in the thousands of pages of novels and short stories and essays, in the dozens of hours of film and television—John Berger relates a story I’ve never forgotten. That’s it, in its entirety—that is, as nearly as I can remember. I can’t find it anywhere, not in my books or in the library or on the internet.
Desperation Time
Our great cities are characterized by “horrifying inequality.” Ordinary people are “constantly at risk of being wiped out by [an] innumerable profusion of cars, which carry in total comfort men worth infinitely less than those they splash and threaten to destroy.” Thousands are “forced to breathe the poisoned air” of our neighborhoods.
In the Booth | Online Only | n+1
The signing of “Protection Of The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States,” Donald Trump’s executive order banning US entry and re-entry by people from seven Muslim-majority countries, is another reminder that the line between unthinkable and real can be crossed in a matter of minutes.
Primal Forces | Online Only | n+1
There’s a great photo of Jane Jacobs at a demonstration in Toronto, taken as she sidles up to the fencing surrounding a stretch of condemned row houses. The diminutive Jacobs, scarf wrapped close, cigarette dangling from her mouth, is moving in to grab hold of a fence panel and heft it out of the way. She’s one among a cluster of protestors gathered to turn back the bulldozers on that cold spring morning in 1973.
Why Hack? | Online Only | n+1
The most common refrain on the left about the DNC hacks is that there is not enough evidence to attribute them to Russia. This peculiar epistemology applies to Russia, and only to Russia. In recent years critics of the mainstream liberal line have expressed skepticism about the Russian government’s role in everything from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 to the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine last year.
Soviet sci-fi: The future that never came
In a house that eerily recalls the aesthetic of Her—modernist on the outside, studiedly rustic and artisanal on the inside—a young woman agonizes over whether she is human or a machine. She is a clone, retrieved from a mysteriously abandoned orbital outpost by a space patrol ship and returned to the bucolic paradise of Earth for study and observation.
Breaking Muscovy’s Silence
In late February, when the news of Boris Nemtsov’s murder had just emerged, my friend Tom Hooker observed that “who you think killed Nemtsov is a nearly one-to-one reflection of how you think Russia works”—an indication, in other words, of whether you think of Russia as a dictatorial one-man show or a tangle of shadowy power blocs, a land of cops or a land of robbers.
What Kind of Target Are You?
“Fascism” is a word that’s getting thrown around a lot in the postcommunist world these days. Moscow accuses the Maidan protesters of being fascists, and many of them certainly are. Tim Snyder accuses Moscow of being fascist, and in many ways it certainly looks that way. Fascists are on Russian YouTube torturing gay people and in the Hungarian government defending the Nazis.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Greg
Contact Greg, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack