The Eurasian Knot

Everyday Politics in Russia

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:50:29 GMT

What do Russians really think? The question is old and elusive. It is also somewhat of a tell–to pose it is to suggest there’s a coherent answer, and more so, that Russians’ collective opinions matter. For the most part, scholars have turned to history, media, opinion polls, and assumptions to untie this knot. Jeremy Morris is no different in this regard, except that he approaches his subjects with ethnography–long, multi-year conversations of residents of provincial Russia to gauge their engagement with politics locally and nationally. A kind of political biography that records the ebbs and flows of Russian provincial life. How have Russians responded to their government’s invasion of Ukraine? How do they regard the past, present, and possible future of Russia? What issues concern and motivate them to political action? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jeremy about his new book, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance to get an on-the-ground view of Russian political life.

Guest:

Jeremy Morris is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He’s the author of Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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Ukraine's Euromaidan

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:51:06 GMT

In the winter of 2013-14, protests erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine. Their goal was to oppose President Viktor Yanukovich’s rejection of the EU Association Agreement. Many protesters saw the Agreement as a meaningful step for Ukraine to enter the European orbit. And the protests might have fizzled. But the massacre of over 120 people by police snipers on 20 February, 2014, inspired hundreds of thousands more to enter the streets, seize government buildings, and occupy city centers. The protests quickly spread throughout Ukraine. The Euromaidan proved a historical turning point. The Yanukovich regime fell, Russia seized Crimea, and pro-Russian forces seized Donbas city centers. What were the short and long term causes of this revolution? Was it a revolution? What were its participants' aspirations? And how did the euphoric desire for a democratic, European Ukraine devolve into a mad spiral short of civil war? Longtime friend of the pod, William Risch was in Kyiv in those initial days. Now he’s combined his experiences with research to produce a new critical history of the Euromaidan. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Bill about the maidan, the chaos of those days, and its legacies in Ukraine and the region at large.

Guest:

William Jay Risch is Professor of History at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. He’s the author of The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. His new book is Ukraine's Euromaidan: From Revolutionary Euphoria to the Madness of War published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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KGB Same-Sex Honey Traps

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:34:43 GMT

One of the most salacious and storied methods of KGB spycraft during the Cold War was the honey trap. Agents would get an informant to seduce a target, usually a Westerner deemed important. Then use that encounter as blackmail. We’re all aware of this thanks to movies and television. What we know nothing about are same-sex honey traps. The KGB’s use of homosexual men to seduce other men, whether said men were gay or not. Officials, academics, businessmen and other power positions were targets. How do we know about these operations? Well, because of the intrepid research of historian Irina Roldugina. Roldugina got access to KGB files related to same-sex operations and found more information in, of all things, declassified US government documents related to the Kennedy Assassination. How did these operations work? Who did the KGB tap for same-sex seduction? What do these documents tell us? And what did the KGB think of homosexuality in general? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Irina about her recent article, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus” published in the Fall 2025 issue of Journal of Cold War Studies.

Guest:

Irina Roldugina is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. She’s the author of several articles on queer history in the Soviet Union. Her most recent is “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus” published in the Fall 2025 issue of Journal of Cold War Studies.

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The Bolshevik Rank and File

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:53:51 GMT

In 1917, the Bolshevik Party had roughly 24,000 members. A decade later, it boasted about 1.2 million. Recruitment came in waves and so did the purges. Still, Party members were found at the top and bottom of the system. In the Kremlin and in the factories. The Party rank and file were vital to the establishment of the Soviet system, its day-to-day functioning, and the human material for campaigns whether they be for literary, industrialization, collectivization or terror. But who were these people? How engaged were they in politics? Were they a constituency for Party leaders to appeal to or was the rank and file mere material to be mobilized and directed without its own agency? There are few studies looking at the Party at the shop floor and its place in shaping Soviet socialism. Yiannis Kokosalakis’ book Building Socialism does just that. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Kokosalakis to learn more about the role of the Bolshevik rank and file in the early Soviet system.

Guest:

Yiannis Kokosalakis is a visiting researcher at Bielefeld University. He’s the author of Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921-1941 published by Cambridge University Press.

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Stalin's Last Days

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:14:14 GMT

Joseph Stalin died today, March 5, seventy-three years ago. So, I thought it would be a good idea to dig out, re-edit and remaster, the interview I did with Joshua Rubenstein back in 2018 about the dictator’s final days. What did Stalin focus on in the final years of his life? How did Soviet leadership react to his death? Soviet society? And internationally? Let’s revisit what Rubenstein had to tell us from his book, The Last Days of Stalin.

Guest:

Joshua Rubenstein is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He’s the author of several books on Soviet history. His most recent is The Last Days of Stalin published by Yale University Press.

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Searching for Belief during the Soviet End Times

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:45:41 GMT

When societies are in crisis, people tend to seek alternative belief systems to give them comfort, explain a complex world, or fill a space left vacant by discredited ideologies and faiths. Like the embrace of spiritualism after the mass death during the American Civil War. The growth of millenarian movements and cults for fear of the end times. Or even the embrace of conspiracy theories to explain the unimaginable. The Soviet Union was no exception. As the system broke apart and Marxism-Leninism was tossed aside, a questioning of dominant narratives took root. Soviet citizens began to seek new belief systems–astrology, gurus, alternative medicines, sects and cults, and fantastical historical narratives. Joseph Kellner was struck by this explosion of belief seeking and wanted to understand it. Why did Russian citizens gravitate to new forms of belief? What was lost with the collapse of the Soviet system and what opportunities did a new society offer? And what does this all say about the need for humans to believe in, well, something? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Joseph about his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, to get a sense of this urge to embrace new beliefs and how they shaped experience during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Guest:

Joseph Kellner teaches Russian and Soviet history at the University of Georgia. He’s the author of The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse published by Cornell University Press.

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Moscow's Hunt for Olympic Gold

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:12:19 GMT

As a Cold War kid, I remember the intense rivalry between the United States and USSR during the Olympics. Of course, we remember the US’ boycott in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And the Soviet boycott in 1984 in response to the American boycott. Who bested who was not just about national pride. It was a testament as to who had the better system: communism or capitalism. What I didn’t know then was that for Moscow, winning was everything. Losing came with consequences. Why was it so important for the Russians to win? So much so, as we saw a few years ago, at the risk of being banned for a state-run doping operation? These are just a few questions the Eurasian Knot posed to Bruce Berglund, author of The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold. I’ve never been much of an Olympic watcher (my sport is the NBA), but now I better understand why that hunt for gold is such a Kremlin obsession.

Guest:

Bruce Berglund is a historian of Europe, Russia, and world sports and teaches at Charles University in Prague. He’s written several books on sports, including The Fastest Game in the World, a global history of hockey. His new book is The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold published by Triumph Books.

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The Long History of American-Russian Relations

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:13:49 GMT

A quick scan of the hundreds of books on US-Russia relations gives the impression that the two countries only met in the 20th century. But relations go back to the early days of the American republic. And, surprisingly, throughout most of the 19th century, the United States and Russia were amicable powers joined in their mutual suspicion of Britain. Relations only began to deteriorate as the US increasingly entered global politics beyond the western hemisphere. What was the historical nature of American and Russian encounters? How did the relationship ebb and slow between distant friends and initiate enemies? And how did this dynamic shape self and bilateral perceptions? The Eurasian Knot turned to three of the best historians on the subject, Victoria Zhuraleva, Ivan Kurilla, and David Foglesong to talk about their new book, Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American–Russian Relations about long history of the US-Russia dance.

Guest:

David Foglesong is a professor of history at Rutgers University.

Ivan Kurilla is a visiting professor at Ohio State University. In 2024, he left Russia after being dismissed from the European University at St. Petersburg for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Victoria Zhuravleva is Professor of American History and International Relations and Chair of the Department of American Studies at Russian State University for the Humanities.

Together they are the authors of Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American–Russian Relations published by Cambridge University Press.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Gregor Thum

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:06:17 GMT

The history of borders and nations in Eastern Europe is fraught. What we even call the region is a site of contestation. Is it “Eastern Europe,” “Central Europe,” or “East Central Europe”? For Pitt historian Gregor Thum, space and how it’s delineated matters. This is especially the case for Germany and its eastern borderlands and people. Empire, war, ethnic cleansing, and shifting borders have left their marks on regional identity and memory. To the point, as Thum explains, a simple photograph he took in Poland can be interpreted with suspicion. How did the German empire regard its east? How do its shifting borders continue to live with us today? And how do we wrestle with the fractured memories that inhabit the national bricolage of Eastern Europe? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Gregor Thum to highlight his scholarship for a Pitt REEES Faculty Spotlight.

Guest:

Gregor Thum is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in the history of empire, forced migration and memory in Central Eastern Europe. He’s the author of Uprooted: How Breslau became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions published by Princeton University Press.

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Russia Starts Here

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:40:47 GMT

What is Russia? There’s no easy answer. Travelers, scholars, philosophers, and journalists have pondered the question for centuries. And though answers vary, there is one point of consensus–whatever Russia is, you won’t find it in large cities. “Russia” exists out there, deep in the countryside, in the small towns and villages. For journalist Howard Amos, Russia begins in the provincial city of Pskov. “Russia Starts Here” is its slogan, and Amos uses it to pry open the lives of the region's citizens in his first book, Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire. Amos conducted over 30 interviews during his decade stint in Russia until he left after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There’s the elderly couple who are the last of their village. The shattered young family whose’ father was killed in Ukraine. The oppositionist politician that risks it all to push back against Putin. And the priest, Father Tikhon Shevkunov, Putin’s supposed “spiritual father.” The Eurasian Knot spoke to Amos about his reporting and being a reporter in Russia, what people told him about daily life, the war in Ukraine, and where the country’s been and where it's going. Did Amos find Russia? Maybe just a snapshot. The country is just too big and too complex for anything more.

Guest:

Howard Amos is a writer and journalist who spent a decade as a correspondent in Moscow. He left Russia in the days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and, based out of Armenia, did a year-long stint as editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times in exile. His first book is Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire published by Bloomsbury Continuum.

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The Further Adventures of the Black Russian

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:44:50 GMT

A decade ago, Vladimir Alexandrov published an excellent biography, The Black Russian, about an unknown historical figure–Fredrick Bruce Thomas. Thomas was a Black Mississippian who moved to Imperial Russia and became a successful Moscow nightclub owner until Revolution forced him to flee. Thomas’ life is a window into post-emancipation Black American aspiration, struggle and cosmopolitanism. Alexandrov found Thomas such an intriguing character, he couldn’t let him go. So now, Thomas is the principle in a suspense novel set in Russia’s Silver Age. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Alexandrov about Thomas’ new adventure, the challenges of writing a novel, and where can we expect Fredrick Bruce Thomas to go from here.

Guest:

Vladimir Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus in the Slavic Department at Yale, is the author most recently of The Black Russian, and To Break Russia's Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks. He is currently completing a history of Russian involvement in the American Civil War, and the second novel in The Black Russian series. His first novel is The Black Russian and the Serpents Sting published by NIMCA Press.

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The Great Reforms

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:44:03 GMT

Alexander II’s Great Reforms were sweeping. They freed over 22 million serfs, overhauled the judicial, university, and municipal systems, and loosened censorship, among others. It was one of those pivot points in Russian history. If successful, Russia would have charted a more liberal path or stay on the autocratic road if a failure. Most historians have ruled them a failure. But what were the reforms trying to accomplish? What kind of Empire did it seek to create? Could they turn subjects of an autocracy into citizens of a nation? To discuss such a “big topic,” the Eurasian Knot spoke to Tatiana Borisova about her research into Alexander’s judicial reforms and their historical consequences. Can Russia’s attempt at reform in the mid-19th century provide some hope for a different Russia in the future?

Guest:

Tatiana Borisova is an Associate Professor of History at the Higher School of Economics St. Petersburg. Her most recent articles in English include: “Imperial legality through ‘Exception’: Gun control in the Russian Empire” and, with Jane Burbank, “Russia’s Legal Trajectories.” She co-edited, The Legal Dimension in Cold-War Interactions: Some Notes from the Field. Her newest book, in Russian, is Когда велит совесть: Культурные истоки Судебной реформы 1864 года в России published by Новое литературное обозрение.

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Post-Soviet Graffiti

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:21:13 GMT

I love street art. And I don’t care in what form. Beautifully crafted murals. Spraypainted gang tags. Scrawls on bathroom stalls. Even guerilla sticker mosaics on streetlights. I especially like how street art alters the narrative of a space. So, I was excited when I received a copy of Alexis Lerner’s book, Post-Soviet Graffiti. Post-Soviet street art has gotten little scholarly attention making the topic ripe for exploration and discussion. Post-Soviet graffiti shares a lot with its global counterparts–similar aesthetics, themes, culture, and political edginess. It also shares attempts at its co-optation by governments and corporations. But what makes political street art different in authoritarian countries like Russia? Is its power to circumvent media censorship and political control? What is street art, anyway? Who are the artists? And does graffiti have a political impact? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Alexis to get her thoughts and discuss the content and form of some of the graffiti she’s encountered over the last decade.

Guest:

Alexis Lerner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy. She’s the author of Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States, published by University of Toronto Press. You can see the Alexis’ gallery of graffiti at https://postsovietgraffiti.com/

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The Stiliagi

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:31:47 GMT

A new youth subculture emerged in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s–the Stiliagi. Roughly translated as “the stylish,” these youths, the majority of whom were men, wore flashy hairstyles and bright colored clothes, danced to jazz, and were obsessed with Western aesthetics. And of course, this style broke Soviet conventions, challenged social norms, and expanded gender performance. Though the exact origin of the Stiliagi is murky, it arose alongside other Western youth subcultures–the beatniks, the mods, the rockers–of the immediate post-WWII libertinism. The Stiliagi put the Soviet Union squarely within the history of a more globalized youth culture. But, what did it mean to be a “stiliagi”? Who were they? How did the style offer alternative forms of Soviet masculinity? How did the Soviet authorities react to these youths? And how did this subculture differ from its Western counterparts? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Alla Myzelev about her new book on the subculture, Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities, 1945–2010: Fashion as Dissent, to get some answers.

Guest:

Alla Myzelev is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies at SUNY Geneseo. She is currently editing a book titled Challenging Imperial Narratives Through Visual Art and Material Culture in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Her new book, Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities, 1945–2010: Fashion as Dissent, is published by Manchester University Press.

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Fraternization and Survival During WWII

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:31:13 GMT

Soviet ideology called for the emancipation of women. Soviet women would be active participants in public life, unburdened by the home, children, and husbands, and serve equally in the building and defense of the Soviet state. Reality, however, was different, especially during WWII. Soviet women did serve in the Red Army and partisans. But life at war was more than the heroic tales we know today. Soviet women were often abused by their commanders and fellow soldiers or viewed as suspicious, weak, and even dangerous. Life under occupation was even worse. Many women turned to “survival prostitution” and fraternized with German soldiers to escape abuse, forced labor, and death. What strategies did Soviet women adopt to survive the war? How were they looked upon by the enemy, their neighbors, and compatriots? And what happened after the war to those who formed sexual relations with German soldiers? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Regina Kazyulina about gender, sex, and survival to get a window into this contentious and understudied chapter of WWII in the Soviet Union.

Guest:

Regina Kazyulina is a visiting assistant professor of history and the assistant director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Salem State University. Her book, Women Under Suspicion: Fraternization, Espionage, and Punishment in the Soviet Union During World War II published by University of Wisconsin Press.

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The Art of War

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:46:23 GMT

About two years ago, I was brought on to a podcast project started by the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The initial pitch was to produce a student-led podcast featuring two threatened artists that are part of the Pittsburgh Network for Threatened Scholars (PiNTS). I’m proud to feature the end result, The Art of War. It features two artists, the Yemeni street artist, Haifa Subay, and the Ukrainian poet, filmmaker, and musician, Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko, about exile, art, war, and adjusting to life in Pittsburgh. I hope Eurasian Knot listeners enjoy it because I’m really proud of having been a part of it. And especially, seeing how our students, Jojo Ellis, Kyla Parker, and Lily Acharya proved to be naturals in the audio craft.

Art of War

Produced by Lily Acharya, Jojo Ellis, Kyla Parker, David Greene, Shannon Reed, and Sean Guillory.

Editing and sound design: Sean Guillory

Mixed and mastered; Daniel Cooper, Podcuts Editing

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

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How Peat Electrified the USSR

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:59:50 GMT

What is peat? We had no idea until the Eurasian Knot spoke to Katja Bruisch about how this coal-like soil was an energy source in Russia and the Soviet Union. Found in wetlands, peat is the extracted top soil that is dried and burned for fuel. It was a marginal, but important, energy source in industrialization. Peat was also used as a localized source to produce electricity for Lenin’s Electrification campaign. Because, as the old man put it, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” But, Bruisch tells us, extracting peat was labor intensive, and into the Soviet period, increasingly done by women. Peat harvesting created communities and culture. It also significantly altered local ecologies. How crucial was peat in modernization? Why was it used instead of other energy sources? And can it serve as a present-day alternative? The Eurasian Knot posed these questions and more to Katja Bruisch about her book, Burning Swaps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy published by Cambridge University Press.

Guest:

Katja Bruisch is an environmental historian at Trinity College Dublin interested in energy, resource extraction and land-use in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Her new book is Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy published by Cambridge University Press.

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Murder Mystery in Moscow

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:18:01 GMT

I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audience. This was quite a change for me since I used to hold such work in contempt (or was it jealousy) when I was a snot-nosed, snobby grad student. So I jumped at the chance to interview Merridale and talk about the historical craft and its relationship to detective fiction in her first novel, Moscow Underground. As she explains, there’s some liberation in fiction. You can freely develop characters. Imbibe the story with emotions, the sites, the sounds, the smells. And craft a compelling and entertaining story. But creative license has its limits. Historical fiction requires you to stick to the historical record. You have to make sure the history you set your story in is believable, as Merridale does, in her crafting of Moscow of 1934. What challenges does writing fiction present to a professional historian? How does fiction and history intersect? And why a novel at all, let alone a detective novel? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Catherine Merridale about her hero, Anton Markovich Belkin, an investigator for the Procuracy, and the murder investigation that takes him into Moscow’s two undergrounds–the metro and the underbelly of crime, poverty, and politics in her first novel, Moscow Underground.

Guest:

Catherine Merridale is an acclaimed historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her work includes pioneering oral history as well as archival research on topics as varied as death, the Kremlin, and Lenin's train ride of 1917. With Russia now off-limits for political reasons, she now turns to fiction. Moscow Underground is her first novel, set primarily in 1934.

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How Konigsberg Became Kaliningrad

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:34:53 GMT

The Prussian city of Konigsberg is well-known as the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. But in many ways it’s also a microcosm for the twentieth century. Founded in the 13th century by Teutonic knights, the city served as a key trading center for the Prussian Empire until the Polish corridor severed it from Germany after WWI. It is then that the history of Konigsberg takes an even more dramatic turn. Its “Germanness” became an object of debate and political exploitation. By the early 1930s, it had one of the highest votes for the Nazis in Germany. But then–WWII. Destroyed and depopulated by 1944, it became the first city to satisfy the Red Army appetite for revenge rape and pillaging. It became a Soviet possession after WWII and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, was sovietized into Kaliningrad. And even though the USSR is no more, it remains a part of the Russian Federation.

The history of Konigsberg/Kaliningrad begs so many questions. Why Nazism? What was life there during the war? The Red Army violence but also its reconstruction into Kaliningrad? How did the Soviets handle their mortal German enemies after a war of annihilation? And how is this legacy seared into the city? The Eurasian Knot wanted to know more and turned to Nicole Eaton to learn more about her book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad.

Guest:

Nicole Eaton is Associate Professor of History at Boston College where she teaches courses on the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, modern Europe, authoritarianism, and mass violence. She’s the author of German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad published by Cornell University Press.

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The Judeo-Bolshevik Myth

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:28:31 GMT

I’ve been thinking about the use of “they” in our political rhetoric. In some respects, this third-person plural pronoun is indicative of politics. The “they” in politics often refers specifically to an entity–political party, a group of politicians, etc. But what if the “they” refers to another nebulous entity? For example, here’s a clip from a recent NYT Daily episode on Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “They also had a goal of gaining control of the media and Hollywood so they could change the culture in America. They kill and terrorize their opponents, hoping to silence them.”

Who is this “they”? This reminded me of an interview I did with Paul Hanebrink from 2019 about his book A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Hanebrink gives a good history of one “they” that is at the center of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth–a conspiracy that I think is the foundation of most conspiracy thinking–a shadowy “they” that is behind all social ills. How has the Judeo-Bolshevik myth shaped the 20th century? How did it change over time? And what resonance does it have today? To get some insight, give this interview with Paul Hanebrink another go.

Guest:

Paul Hanebrink is a Professor of History at Rutgers University specializing in modern East Central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary, nationalism and antisemitism as modern political ideologies, and the place of religion in the modern nation-state. He’s the author of In Defense of Christian Hungary. His most recent book is A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism published by Harvard University Press.

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Romani, Waste, and Race in Bulgaria

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:59:45 GMT

There’s a paradox at the center of Elana Resnick’s book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. EU policies of environmental sustainability in Bulgaria require the racialization of Romani into a permanent low-skilled and impoverished workforce. Waste management required teams of Romani streetsweepers and trash collectors to sort trash into waste, recyclables and compost, and bring them for processing and reuse. This labor was historically filled by Bulgaria’s Romani citizens, to the point where white Bulgarians equated them with waste. And in turn, Roma’s racial otherness allowed white Bulgarians to enter a pan-European concept of whiteness. Since race is a favorite subject on the Eurasian Knot, Sean spoke to Elana about Sofia’s Romani women as waste workers, the powerful solidarity and collective action that emerges from their labor, and the implications for Romani rights struggle in Bulgaria.

Guest:

Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also leads the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. She’s the author of several articles and the book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, published by Stanford University Press.

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Rebel Russia

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:30:16 GMT

There are many stereotypes about Russia. But perhaps one of the strangest is that Russians prefer a strong hand, are politically passive, even apolitical, and rebellion just isn’t in their DNA. This belief requires a hefty dose of historical amnesia. Many of Russia’s most memorable historical figures–Stenka Razin, Pugachev, the Decembrists, the People’s Will, Lenin, Sakharov, Alexei Navalny, to name a few, were rebels. Not to mention, Russia has experienced three revolutions over the last century–1905, 1917, and 1991. Rebellion, in fact, is an integral part of Russia’s history, and the rebel often leads the dance with the Tsar. What is rebellion? Who are these rebels? What makes them? And how do they shape the Russian political system? These are questions that resonate in Russia and beyond. So the Eurasian Knot invited Anna Arutunyan on the pod to discuss the figure of the rebel in her new book, Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny published by Polity.

Guest:

Anna Arutunyan is a Russian-American journalist, analyst, and author. She served as senior Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group before leaving Russia in 2022 and is the author of five books about the country, its politics, society and wars. Her new book is Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny published by Polity.

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Russians in San Francisco

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:17:06 GMT

After 1917, San Francisco’s small Russian community exploded with new arrivals. Over the next decade, thousands quit Soviet Russia, often via the Far East or China, to escape revolution and civil war. Arrival in America, however, was only the beginning of new trials. In the 1920s and 1930s, American nativists saw Slavic people as low in the racial hierarchy–people who were visually white, but culturally not quite. The Russian community in San Francisco was faced with a contradictory choice: to preserve their culture, a culture that they saw was being destroyed in Soviet Russia or shed their Russianess and become more “American” i.e. more “white.” How did this first wave of Russian emigres meet the challenge of otherness and assimilation? And what about the second wave of Russians who came after WWII? How did they navigate the Red Scare where Russian was equated with communist and the notions of Americanness had become more polarized? The Eurasian Knot spoke to the historian Nina Bogdan about her new book, Before We Disappear into Oblivion: San Francisco’s Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War, to get some insight.

Guest:

Nina Bogdan is a historian and cultural preservationist. She recently authored the “Russian American Historic Context Statement” for the San Francisco City Planning Department as part of the Citywide Cultural Resources Survey. She’s the author of Before We Disappear into Oblivion: San Francisco’s Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

The article Rusana mentions on the history of Berkeley's Institute of Slavic Studies is here. However, the piece is about the historian Robert J. Kerner, not Nicholas Raisanovsky.

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Soviet Jokes Under Stalin

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:23:27 GMT

What power do jokes have in authoritarian societies? I’ve been thinking about this recently as Trump further consolidates power. Turn on any American late night show and it’s one joke about Trump after another. It’s easy for comedians. The Trump jokes write themselves. Soviet Russia didn’t have late night, and openly poking fun at the authorities was highly circumscribed. This continues to a large extent in today’s Russia. But people still tell biting, insulting jokes in daily life. Laughing at power can’t be totally contained. But do they matter? What power do they have? In what ways are they criticism of the powers that be, a way to cope with the absurdity of everyday life, and or merely self-delusional exercises in political agency? All three? In 2018, the Eurasian Knot took on these questions about jokes in a conversation with Jon Waterlow about his book, Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. We decided to rerun the interview for what it can tell us about our present conjecture.

Guest:

Jon Waterlow received his PhD in History at Oxford. He’s the author of It's Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. Jon is also host of the podcast Voices in the Dark. Look for it on your favorite podcast feed.

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Video Games of Eastern Europe

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:47:30 GMT

Games have a long history. Several are centuries old. But a new crop of games has emerged over the last century. Elaborate board games, role playing games, and of course, video games. Today, video games are one of the most consumed forms of media entertainment. They inspire communities, live-action role playing, movies and other media. All of these have fostered new identities and ethics. And Eastern Europe has played an outsized role in this culture. Enter Daniil Leiderman, the new Slavicist at the University of Pittsburgh. He says that games are a portal to a whole bunch of issues–identity, moral responsibility, agency, and cultural critique. The Eurasian Knot greeted Daniil with a conversation about gaming and Eastern Europe. How do games give players agency in crafting alternative histories? What role do Soviet and post-Soviet landscapes play? And what are the wider effects do games have on our lives outside the magic circle?

Guest:

Daniil Leiderman is an art historian. He taught art history and game studies at Texas A&M University before joining University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Languages and Literatures Department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025. As a scholar, Daniil’s research focuses on underground and protest art and culture and video games.

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The Deforestation of Eastern Ukraine

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 19:19:02 GMT

This week we check-in with frequent EK guest Brian Milakovsky to learn about the destruction of forests in Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and its full-scale assault in 2022, war has destroyed much of the forests of the Seversky Donets Basin. These trees serve as a place of leisure, pride, identity, and economy for nearby residents. But Russian artillery, mines, and other ordnance have repeatedly ignited forest fires. The ecology of the region has been transformed, likely forever. How has the war accelerated the destruction of eastern Ukraine’s ecology? And what does this mean for the future? We also get an update on how Brian sees the war at the present moment, when at the time of recording, Putin and Trump were meeting in Alaska. It’s a dark time. And an even darker horizon approaches us.

Guest:

Brian Milakovsky is a forester who worked on conservation and development programs in Ukraine and Russia from 2009 to 2024. He presently resides in Bath, Maine and works for the New England Forestry Foundation. He is also an associate researcher with the Regional East European Fire Management Center in Kyiv, Ukraine.

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From Great Fear to the Great Terror

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 13:19:45 GMT

As frequent listeners know, my advisor and friend Arch Getty passed away from cancer a few months ago. I was recently in Los Angeles to attend his memorial. I got to catch up with fellow grad students and friends. One was James Harris, a close friend and collaborator with Arch. James is also one of the best Soviet historians around. After chatting with James, I was reminded that I interviewed him way back in 2016–about a year after I started the SRB Podcast. I decided to re-edit and release James’ interview about his book, The Great Fear. The book looks at how Soviet leaders were constantly afraid of invasion, uprisings, and dissent. James argues that this fear was an important driver of the regime’s use of violence and ultimately the Great Terror of 1937-38. So, in honor of seeing James and in memory of Arch, here’s another listen to the Great Fear.

Guest:

James Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Leeds University where he specializes in the history of Stalinism. James has published several books and articles on the Stalin period. He’s the author of The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s published by Oxford University Press.

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Communists and NY's Hotel Workers Union

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 16:01:57 GMT

In 1912, a strike of 18,000 restaurant and hotel workers in New York City birthed the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, a union representing tens of thousands of Manhattan’s service workers. The union still exists today as Local 6 of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO and remains one of the NYC strongest unions. But why is the Eurasian Knot featuring a story about an American trade union? Because the history of the American labor movement in the early 20th century cannot be told without the Communist Party. That means the Soviet Union via the Communist International played an important role in shaping Local 6 in the 1920s and 1930s. How did the Russian Revolution reverberate through American labor? How did the Hotel and Restaurant Union navigate the various ideological and political shifts, to say nothing of the Red Scare? And what about the American communists like William Z. Foster? And what does Local 6 have to teach us today? The Eurasian Knot talked to one of Sean’s old Socialist Party comrades, Shaun Richman, about his book, We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953, for some answers.

Guest:

Shaun Richman teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University. He's an historian of U.S. labor and American Communism, with a particular focus on union organizing, the service sector and the American Federation of Labor. He teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University"He’s the author of We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953 published by University of Illinois Press.

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City Symphonies

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 20:20:15 GMT

What does it mean for the city to be a symphony? True, city symphonies are a silent film genre best represented by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. These early silent films tried to capture the “sound” of the city by editing images symphonically–to give the viewer a sense of the urban soundscape. But, as Daniel Schwartz explains, early 20th century avant-garde artists broadened the city symphony beyond the “silent” and into a full-fledged multimedia experiment. Some, like Luigi Russolo, pushed the boundaries between music and noise by incorporating new technology into music performance. Others, like Arseny Avraamov, reimagined the city as a giant living orchestra where its inhabitants were both producers and consumers of sound. While others, like Vertov, valorized the city into the natural habitat of a New Soviet Person and their labor. But what did a city symphony sound like? Especially when its composers left so few written instructions for conductors to recreate them? How does the city symphony speak to modernity itself? Intrigued, the Eurasian Knot talked to Daniel Schwartz about his book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931 published by McGill University Press.

Guest:

Daniel Schwartz is an associate professor in Russian and German Cinemas at McGill University. He’s the author of City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931 published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Featured clips in order of appearance:

Luigi Russolo, “Reesveyo di una cheetà,” 1913.

Arseny Avraamov, “Symphony of Sirens,”1922.

Walter Ruttmann, “Weekend,” 1930.

Vziga Vertov, “Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas,” 1931.

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Russia's 1993 Constitutional Crisis

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:26:21 GMT

In early October 1993, tanks pummeled the Russian Duma in central Moscow. It was a dark mirror of just two years prior when Boris Yeltsin definitely climbed atop a tank and made history. Now, tanks were again Yeltsin’s historical instrument. Only this time, they were his. The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis was a turning point in the country’s post-Soviet transformation. The popular narrative was Russian Democrats repelling Russian nationalists and communists. The future vs. the past. And the future prevailed! It was a tight, clean story fit for the utopianism of the 1990s. In retrospect, however, it was the past that really won. Yeltsin’s constitutional power grab through the gun barrel set the first stones of Putinism. How should we understand this turning point? What was really going on? And how have these baby steps of Russian authoritarianism become a full-blown sprint? The Eurasian Knot turns to Jeff Hawn for some answers.

Guest:

Jeff Hawn is a graduate of American University School of International Service and is completing his PhD at London School of Economics. His dissertation addresses the history and consequences of the 1993 Constitutional Crisis and the emergence of modern Russia.

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Anthropology of Oil

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 03:44:48 GMT

Yale anthropologist Doug Rogers visited Pitt back in April. The Eurasian Knot couldn’t resist pulling him into the studio. Doug was one of the earliest guests on the show. So it was about time to reconnect and have a wide ranging conversation about his work on oil and corporations in Russia. Now he’s looking into experiments with hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria–germs that eat oil. We survey Doug’s career. The pull of anthropology and the nexus of oil, corporations, and civil society in Russia. And how he went from there to the history of petroleum microbiology.

Guests:

Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He’s the author of two award-winning books: The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals and The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture After Socialism both published by Cornell University Press.

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Green Cities in the USSR and Brazil

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:54:09 GMT

What makes a happy city? That is, what makes a city livable and responsive to humans’ physical, emotional and cultural needs? Over the last century, city planners have turned to the maintenance of green spaces within urban jungles to address these issues. In this final event for Pitt REEES’ Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot paired Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho to discuss green cities from two different contexts. Taylor researches mid-20th century efforts to green Soviet cities in response to rapid urbanization. De Carvalho studies the relationship between urbanization and environment in the Brazilian Amazon. How did city planners in the USSR and Brazil use green spaces to make cities more livable? What obstacles did they encounter? And how do these disparate contexts help us understand the global problem that pits people, city, and ecology against each other? Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho give us a trough of mental cud to crew on.

Guests:

Maria C. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the history and theory of landscape, architecture, and urban planning, particularly in the Soviet Union.

Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research interests embrace urbanization as a worldwide process and tries to understand how it unfolds at the local scale.

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Abortion (Bio)politics in Russia

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:58:17 GMT

In the waning decades of the Soviet Union, abortion was the main form of birth control. For example, official statistics from the late 1970s report that there were 250-270 abortions per 100 live births. It’s an astounding number. It points to a key paradox of state socialism and reproductive health: Abortion in the USSR was widely available, but mainly because the state couldn’t provide basic contraceptives.

But the collapse of the Soviet system didn’t produce many remedies–Women now had access to contraception, but the economic ravages of the 1990s led many families to postpone childbearing. Abortion numbers remained high to begin lowering in the last two decades. How has the Russian government and civil society addressed abortion, contraception, family planning and women’s reproductive rights and health? What role has Western feminism and the debate over abortion played in Russia? And where do the increasing restrictions of abortion in Russia fit within the worldwide struggle for women’s reproductive freedom? The Eurasian Knot posed these questions and more to Michele Rivkin-Fish in this timely and crucial issue in her new book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics published by Vanderbilt University Press.

Guest:

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research examines reproductive politics in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She’s the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Her most recent book is Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics is published by Vanderbilt University Press.

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Romanian Presidential Elections

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:59:11 GMT

On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was the latest in a string of contests that stoked fears for European liberal democracy, the rise of right-wing populism, and Russian meddling. Media inside and outside Romania leaned into the danger a Simion victory posed, and with Dan’s victory, how Romania can serve as the latest European democracy refusing to slide backward. But does this narrative really capture Romania’s political atmosphere? What were Simion’s and Dan’s base of support? And does Simion’s defeat signal the death knell of the far right in Romania or merely a brief setback? And where does Viktor Orban and Donald Trump figure in all this? To get some clarity, the Eurasian Knot turned to Stefano Bottoni and Tamás Kiss for their insight and analysis of the Romanian political field before and after this consequential vote.

Special Co-Host:

Zsuzsánna Magdó is Associate Director at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies where she manages regional studies programs to support interdisciplinary scholarship and public education on the world regions of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Eurasia.

Guests:

Stefano Bottoni is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, and Performing Arts at the University of Florence. He is the author of several books. His most recent book, Orbán: A European Despot, is forthcoming in English and German.

Tamás Kiss is Senior Researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. He is the author of several books on ethnic relations in Romania and Hungary. He’s the editor of Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights: Hungarians in Transylvania published by Palgrave.

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Remembering J. Arch Getty

Mon, 26 May 2025 15:45:45 GMT

Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship.

Guest:

J. Arch Getty was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Books discussed in this interview:

Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938, Cambridge University Press
The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press.
Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's 'Iron Fist', Yale University Press.
Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks and the Persistence of Tradition, Yale University Press.

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Muslim Refugees in the Ottoman Empire

Mon, 19 May 2025 14:33:22 GMT

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russian perpetrated genocide. Others, like Chechens, Dagestanis, and others the violence of Russian colonization. Obligated by faith to take these refugees, the Ottoman Empire scattered them throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, in many cases to balance against its Christian subjects. Most of these villages still exist today, including the capital of Jordan, Amman. What was this experience like for these refugees before the international legal regime of refugeedom? Why did they flee the Russian Empire and what was life like with the Ottomans? How did the Ottoman empire manage this influx of Muslim Others? And how did refugees contribute to the end of the Empire? Knowing nothing of this fascinating history, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky about his new book Empire of Refugees North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State published by Stanford University Press.

Guest:

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State published by Stanford University Press.

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Migration and Climate Change

Mon, 12 May 2025 16:59:50 GMT

Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to the World Bank, extreme weather, rising sea levels, violence, and resource scarcity will drive 216 million people to seek refuge by 2050. There’s even a buzzword for it: “climigration.” How and why do people move? To what extent is “migration” a business? And how do we accept and integrate migrants into bodily politics rife with ideological polarization, xenophobia, and nationalism? In this fifth event in our series, Eurasian Environments, the Eurasian Knot joined up with Daniel Briggs and Michael Goodhardt to discuss migration and climate, and specifically the trials people go through to find a safer, more prosperous present and future.

Guests:

Daniel Briggs is a Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University. He is the author of several books. His most recent are The New Futures of Exclusion: Life in the Covid-19 Aftermath and Sheltering Strangers: Critical Memoirs of Hosting Ukrainian Refugees published by Policy Press.

Michael Goodhart is Professor of Political Science and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of many articles and books. His most recent book is Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World.

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Birobidzhan

Mon, 05 May 2025 14:01:21 GMT

Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there were also a people without a national territory. The lack of Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Union posed a theoretical problem as well. As Stalin declared, “a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation.” How then can Jews be a nation without a territory? Well, you create one. Enter Birobidzhan–an bold experiment to create a Jewish nation out of whole cloth in Siberia. But why in Siberia? Why did Jews settle there? What did they find? Birobidzhan was a failure by many measures. So what is its place in Jewish history? To get answers, the Eurasian Knot turned to Gennady Estraikh to talk about his short history of this unique chapter in Jewish history.

Guest:

Gennady Estraikh is an Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He has written and edited numerous books, including most recently Jews in the Soviet Union: After Stalin, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia and Yiddish Literature under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine published by Lexington Books.

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Cold War Pen Pals

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 17:46:10 GMT

During WWII, the Soviet Women’s Antifascist Committee started an experiment–a pen pal campaign with American women to promote the friendship between the United States and the USSR. The program began with fits and starts but eventually gained traction. So much so it continued into the early Cold War even as relations between the two countries quickly soured. Authorities on both sides considered the contact between women fairly safe. American and Soviet women corresponded about the legacy of the war, marriage, family, career, as well as more Cold War topics. Some of these pen pals even lasted several years. What were these intimate exchanges like? What did Soviet and American women counsel each other on? And what did they learn about each other and themselves? The Eurasian Knot wanted to learn more about this fascinating moment in Soviet-American relations and its meaning within the larger Cold War. So, we turned to Alexis Peri to talk about her fascinating new book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.

Guest:

Alexis Peri is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. Her first book, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, won the Pushkin House Book Prize and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best books on the Soviet home front. Her new book is Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.

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Ukraine in the Global Food System

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:43:31 GMT

Did you know that Ukraine is the fourth largest corn exporter globally? This is not the beginning of a Soviet joke. . . Ukraine plays a crucial role on the world food market. About sixty percent of its exports are agricultural products with destinations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Ukraine also accounts for around one-sixth of the world wheat and barley markets and a staggering half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. But Ukrainian agribusiness is under stress. Soviet and post-Soviet legacies abound. Climate change and depleted soil pose long term obstacles. And Russia’s invasion has only increased the calamity thanks to destruction, theft, and environmental damage. How do things look at the moment? In the fourth event in our Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Susanne Wengle and Natalia Mamonova about Ukraine’s past and present place in the global food system, the impact of the war, and the prospects of renewal and recovery.

Guests:

Susanne Wengle is professor of Russian and Eurasian studies at Uppsala University and associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Natalia Mamonova is a senior researcher at RURALIS - Institute for Rural and Regional Research, Norway. Her current research at RURALIS mainly focuses on the impact of the war in Ukraine on the Ukrainian and global food systems.

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Orthodoxy's Social Gospel

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:22:57 GMT

In his memoir of life as a parish Orthodox priest in the 19th century, I. S. Belliustin wrote that the clergy was “humiliated, oppressed, downtrodden, they themselves have already lost consciousness of their own significance.” This is just one of several damning portraits Belliustin paints of his fellow holymen and the flock they tended. It’s an image that stuck, even among historians. But Daniel Scarborough says there’s another, brighter side to the story. Many Russian Orthodox parish priests also preached the social gospel. They served as mediators and informants between the state and peasantry, carried out social relief, taught literacy, and addressed other social ills. The most famous being Father Gapon, the priest that sparked the 1905 Revolution. Who were these priests? What social work did they do? And how did their actions intersect with the growing revolutionary movement in Imperial Russia? The Eurasian Knot sat down with Daniel Scarborough during a recent trip to Pittsburgh to find out more.

Guest:

Daniel Scarborough is an Associate Professor of Russian history and religion at Nazarbayev University. His interests include the religious and intellectual history of late imperial Russia, the local history of Moscow and Tver, and Russia’s Silver Age. He’s the author of Russia’s Social Gospel: The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution published by University of Wisconsin Press.

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Kicking the Hydrocarbon Habit

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:08:52 GMT

One daunting challenge to addressing climate change is to kick our addiction to hydrocarbons. But this is easier said than done. Hydrocarbons remain the fuel of modernity. And a transition to renewable energy requires massive state intervention. How do we get from our carbon-based present to a green future? Especially in regions like Eastern Europe and Chin, that still rely heavily on oil, gas and coal. In this third event in our series, Eurasian Environments, the Eurasian Knot has paired Pawel Cyzyak, an expert on energy in Eastern Europe, and Zhaojin Zeng, an economic historian of China, to discuss the legacies of state socialist economies, the challenges of transitioning to renewables, their past and present reliance on Russia, the role of geopolitics, and how a turn to EVs presents different challenges, especially as electricity is still generated by coal.

Guests:

Zhaojin Zeng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Geography at Texas A&M University. His first book project is “Engineering Modern China: Industrial Factories and the Transformation of the Chinese Economy in the Long Twentieth Century.”

Pawel Czyzak is an economist, engineer, expert on climate and energy policy, and author of several dozen publications on energy transformation in Europe. He is currently associated with the global energy think-tank Ember. As a consultant he has advised, among others, the largest European energy companies and the World Bank. He’s also an aspiring farmer.

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Seizing the Donbas

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 18:44:22 GMT

In 2014, in the wake of the Maidan in Kyiv and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, small groups of Russian-backed militias began seizing towns in the Donbas. The militias quickly declared the creation of two independent republics, the Donbas People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR). How did this happen? And so quickly? Was it all the work of Russian agents? Or was there some local support? These are just a few of the questions Serhiy Kudelia has been asking for the last decade. Now he has answers. While there was grassroots support for separatism, it was quite thin and reliant on local officials nimbly choosing between opposition and collaboration. But first and foremost, the viability and survival of the DNR and LNR relied on Russia–for material and financial support. Russian agents worked to keep running or build new state structures, repel Ukrainian efforts to retake the region by force, and keep the population under control. The Eurasian Knot talked to Kudelia about his new book Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine to learn about the complexities behind Russia’s seizure of the Donbas and how it set the stage for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Guest:

Serhiy Kudelia is an associate professor of political science at Baylor University where he teaches and researches political violence, state-building and Eastern European politics. He also frequently comments on Ukrainian politics and US-Ukrainian relations in Ukrainian and Western media. His new book is Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine published by Oxford University Press.

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Soviet Modernity

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:31:29 GMT

Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet UnionMichael David-Fox began writing Soviet history in a dynamic period. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, archives were flung wide open, and scholars began exploring new ways to conceptualize the Soviet century. And you can read this in David-Fox’s work–a bricolage of historiography, history of knowledge, cross-cultural exchange, politics, power, and the nature of the modern age. As one of founds of Kritika, he’s made his mark on the field. The Eurasian Knot talked to David-Fox about his career, his driving concepts and methods, and the particularities of Soviet modernity.

Guest:

Michael David-Fox is the Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University and Professor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of History. He is founding and executive editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and author of several books on Soviet history. His most recent book is Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule published by Harvard University Press.

Books discussed in this episode:

Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929.
Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941.
Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule.

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Terror and Democracy in the Soviet Union

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 13:57:18 GMT

Wendy Goldman has researched and written about the Soviet Union for almost 40 years. And her topics have been wide ranging– women, feminism, revolution, labor, political violence, war and survival. But if there is one throughline in her work, it is social history. Goldman is primarily concerned with the experience of working people. Their life worlds. Their trials and tribulations. Their agency in the construction of the Soviet system. Warts and all. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Wendy Goldman in her office at Carnegie Mellon University to hear about her experience as a historian, a woman, and a social historian and how this has shaped her understanding of Soviet socialism, politics, and history.

Guest:

Wendy Goldman is Wendy Goldman, Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of History, is a social and political historian of Russia. She’s the author of several books on Soviet history. Her most recent work (with Donald Filtzer) is Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front during World War II published by Oxford University Press.

Books discussed in this episode:

Women, State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.

Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia.

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression.

Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia.

Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front during World War II.

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Withering Water in Central Asia and East Africa

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:10:30 GMT

Water is life. A cliché and undeniable reality. So, what happens when climate change imperils water access? This episode, the second in our Eurasian Environments series, features a discussion with Sarah Cameron and Enda Wangui on water in two far flung regions—the Aral Sea and East Africa. How does the increasing scarcity of water impact these two arid climates? Cameron and Wangui address the environmental challenges in Central Asia and East Africa. They shed light on how colonial legacies disrupted traditional land access and ownership and climate change’s profound social and ecological impact on water politics, tradition, gender relations and migration patterns.

Guests:

Sarah Cameron is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press. At present, she is at work on a new book, Aral: Life and Death of a Sea, about the causes and consequences of the demise of Central Asia’s Aral Sea.

Edna Wangui is currently the chair of the Geography Department at Ohio University. Her research examines the impacts of climate change, rural development, contemporary agriculture and rural land on gender roles and relations among pastoralists and other marginalized communities in East Africa. She has published several articles on these issues as book chapters and peer-reviewed journals.

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Climate Change and Authoritarianism

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 18:50:20 GMT

Debates about climate change and what to do about it occur a perilous political climate. It’s a problem that requires international cooperation. But elected politicians increasingly deny climate change, break global agreements, turn inward, and embrace authoritarianism. It’s a situation that both Eve Darian-Smith and Boris Schneider know well. Darian-Smith has written about the right-wing political responses to climate change, particularly to devastating fires, in the US, Brazil, and Australia. Schneider watches climate policy in Eurasia. What are some of the issues that intersect these regions? Are there shared ideological and policy actions? And what of resistance by climate groups hoping to stem the tide? These questions and more, are in this first episode of a six-part interview series “Eurasian Environments: Climate Justice and Sustainability in Global Context.” In each episode, experts on Eurasia are put in dialogue with those focusing on Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Guests:

Eve Darian-Smith is a Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Global Studies and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her latest award-winning book is Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis published by Stanford University Press.

Boris Schneider is a political economist. As co-host of The Eurasian Climate Brief podcast, he looks into underreported climate & energy stories in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In addition to that, he tracks Europe’s move to climate neutrality as European Programme Manager at Clean Energy Wire (CLEW).

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Recording Georgians in WWI POW Camps

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 17:41:51 GMT

In 1916, the German anthropologist Rudolf Pöch and musicologist Robert Lach set out to the Eger prisoner of war camp with a unique research agenda: to record the language and folk songs of Georgian prisoners from the Russian Empire. The recording equipment was clunky and its recordings scratchy and faint. Nevertheless, Pöch and Lach were doing some innovative recordings, not just in terms of their ethnographic research, but using multi-channel recording to capture Georgian polyphonic singing. What were these recordings for? How did they fit into theories of race science of the time? And just who was Lavrosi Mamaldze, the Georgian singer these recordings documented? The Eurasian Knot wanted to learn more and sat down with Brian Fairley to talk about his deep dive into early twentieth century audio recording in WWI POW camps.

Guest:

Brian Fairley is the UCIS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies song, sound, and media across historical and ethnographic settings. His manuscript, “Separating Sounds: A Media History of Georgian Polyphony,” excavates a series of experimental recordings of Georgian music from 1916 to today, showing how prominent scholars and scientists repeatedly tried to capture this elusive musical tradition on record.

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Intellectual Roots of Neoliberalism

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:11:52 GMT

Neoliberalism has so many meanings that some say it has no meaning. Nailing down a consensus is also hampered by the fact that no one calls themselves a “neoliberal.” There’s even calls to abandon the term altogether since it’s become more a slur than doctrine needing analysis. Enter Max Trecker. He took the debate over neoliberalism as an opportunity to investigate its intellectual origins in the 1920s and 1930s. What did it mean then? What was neoliberal thought a reaction to? And what would those neoliberals think today? Also, in this interview, Max talks about an additional project: How Ukraine has been imagined as an economic space. It’s an issue not only of historical import, but enormous relevance today as Ukraine plans its postwar future.

Guest:

Max Trecker is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh and an economic historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig, Germany. He’s the author of Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War published by Routledge.

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Saving Seeds During the Siege of Leningrad

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:02:54 GMT

In 1941, as Nazi forces laid siege to Leningrad, a group of Soviet botanists faced an unthinkable choice: eat their life’s work, a rare seed bank, or starve to death. This is the dilemma at the heart of Simon Parkin’s story about the world's first seed bank and its dedicated botanists. At the heart of this tale is Nikolai Vavilov, a brilliant botanist who traveled five continents collecting specimens before falling victim to Stalin's purges. Through meticulous research and newly accessed archives, Parkin reveals a vivid tale of the sacrifice of 19 scientists during the siege’s 900 days. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Parkin to learn more about Vavilov’s seed bank, the moral dimensions of choosing science over death, and how their legacy lives on in modern agriculture.

Guest:

Simon Parkin is a British author and journalist. He is contributing writer for the New Yorker, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the author of three narrative non-fiction books, including The Island of Extraordinary Captives, winner of The Wingate Literary Prize. His new book is The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice published by Simon and Shuster.

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Russian Antifa vs Neo-Nazis

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 17:47:09 GMT

Vladimir Kozlov’s new book Shramy (Scars) explores street battles between anti-fascists and neo-Nazi skinheads in Moscow during the late 2000s. Kozlov is no stranger to these subcultures. He’s long been involved in Russian punk. And though he never participated in these street battles himself, his failed attempt to make a documentary about Antifa for Russian television gave him an inside look at the scene. Now, almost two decades later, Kozlov uses Shramy to reflect on the roots of Russian fascism in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. How did elements of neo-Nazi subculture seep into the Russian mainstream? And how does the Putin regime manipulate “Nazism” and “anti-fascism” for its own domestic and geopolitical ends? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Kozlov about his punk past, how they shaped the writing of Shramy, and how violence, ideology, and the complexities of Russian society have led to public support for the war in Ukraine.

Guest:

Vladimir Kozlov is a writer and filmmaker born in Mogilev in the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic. He spent his youth in the suburbs of that city, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire and a bizarre mix of unbridled freedom, wild capitalism and rampant crime in the early 1990s. He lived in Moscow until he went into exile in 2022 following his condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kozlov is the author of more than a dozen books that have been published in translation in the United States, France, Serbia and Slovakia. His most recent book is Shramy. You can read an English excerpt of Shramy here.

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Romani Music and NGOs

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:26:21 GMT

Who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today? This is the question that drives Adriana Helbig’s investigation into the relationship between development aid and Romani musicians in her book, Resounding Poverty. Her findings are crucial as are provocative: NGOs unintentionally perpetuate narratives of Romani life that continue to marginalize the poorest among them. And while aid is crucial, it also fails to address issues of poverty, community, and health particularly in rural areas. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Helbig about the fraught and complicated presence of NGOs in postsocialist space, the tensions between aid and agency, the pressure Romani musicians face to perform "gypsiness" for non-Romani audiences, and her personal insights about conducting research in Ukraine and how her own family history intersects with her academic work. We even listen to some music by the Carpathian Ensemble, a University of Pittsburgh student group that Helbig directed. highlighting the challenges and rewards of representing Romani music in an academic context.

Guest:

Adriana N. Helbig is Associate Professor of Music and former Assistant Dean of Undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration. Her most recent book is ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid published by Oxford University Press.

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Introducing: The Eurasian Climate Brief

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:58:52 GMT

The 2024 UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) ended in late November in Baku. Two weeks of intense climate negotiations unveiled deep divides—particularly between the Global North and South over climate finance and contentious debates on the right wording of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

In this episode Angelina Davydova and Boris Schneider dissect the outcomes of the conference, offering insights into the broader implications for climate action, both globally and in Central Asia. Joining the conversation is Kyrgyz journalist Anastasia Bengard, who attended COP29 as a fellow of the Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) programme. She shares her firsthand observations from the conference, shedding light on the positions and statements of her home country and Central Asia at large, as detailed in her reporting for 24.kg.

Tune in as we delve into the complex narratives and challenges that will define the future of climate action across Central Asia - and beyond.

The Eurasian Climate Brief is a podcast dedicated to climate issues in the region stretching from Eastern Europe to Russia down to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

This episode is supported by n-ost & eurasianet and made by:

Angelina Davydova, environmental/climate journalist. Editor of the magazine "Environment and Rights", co-host of the podcast The Day After Tomorrow ("Posle Zavtra"). Environmental projects coordinator with the Dialogue for Understanding e. V (Berlin). Fellow with the Institute for Global Reconstitution (Berlin). Observer of the UN climate negotiations (UNFCCC) since 2008. Expert/editor of the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group.
Boris Schneider, political economist. European Programme Manager at Clean Energy Wire CLEW (Berlin). Has worked as a specialist on Eastern European climate and energy topics, amongst others for n-ost and the German Economic Team.

Reports cited in the episode:

Open Letter on COP reform
After a disappointing COP29, here’s how to design global climate talks that might actually work
We are not so naive anymore (Anastasia Bengard's interview with Edil Baisalov, Deputy Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers of Kyrgyzstan)

Jingle: Natallia Kunitskaya alias Mustelide

Sound editing & mixing: Angelo Tripkovsky

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The Russia and China Brain Trusts

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 13:48:22 GMT

Who are those “experts” who sit in Washington DC and come up with policy toward China and Russia? You know, those academics, journalists, and think-tankers who generate the knowledge US officials rely on? David McCourt’s new book, The End of Engagement, takes a stab by examining American foreign policy expertise on China and Russia since 1989. His main focus is on the divide within the Russia and China watching community. For Russia, it’s between "Russia we havers" versus "Russia we wanters,” and for China, the "engagement" against the "strategic competition" partisans. Curious to hear more, The Eurasian Knot spoke to McCourt to get a social profile of these expert communities, including how personal cliques, academic cred, and resumes influence how we understand Russia and China.

Guest:

David McCourt is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. His new book is The End of Engagement: America's China and Russia Experts and U.S. Strategy Since 1989 published by Oxford University Press.

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A Tale of Two Nationalisms

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:34:48 GMT

Nationalists are not born. They are made. But how? That journey is far trickier. Fabian Baumann’s award-winning book, Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, traces how one family in 19th-century Ukraine split into opposing branches–one embracing Ukrainian nationalism and the other Russian imperial nationalism. Shulgin/Shulhin family story shows how national identities form through the microcosms of family, private spaces, intellectual circles, and intentional choices rather than predetermined ethnicity. The Eurasian Knot asked Baumann to take us through the Shulgin/Shulhin family, their efforts to craft opposing nationalist identities, and how exile after the Russian Revolution led both branches to craft nationalist narratives of their experiences. The Shulgin/Shulhin story may be a century old. But their journey into Ukrainian and Russian nationalism has inescapable implications for us today.

Guest:

Fabian Baumann is a research associate at Heidelberg University working on the history of nationalism and empire in Ukraine, Russia, and East Central Europe. His award winning book is Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism published by Northern Illinois University Press.

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Adapting Master and Margarita

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 18:10:07 GMT

In 2020, Russian-American filmmaker Michael Lockshin and his co-writer, Roman Kantor, were offered an impossible task: to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita for the big screen. It was a daunting task to rewrite such a beloved novel, with its complicated and overlapping narratives. Lockshin and Kantor hoped to succeed where others failed. After a period of touch-and-go, the film was released in Russia in January 2024 to critical and viewer acclaim. It also received fierce scorn, particularly from Russian state propagandists. To date, the film remains unreleased internationally due to complex rights issues following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. How has Lockshin dealt with all this personally and professionally? What does he make of the controversy surrounding the movie essentially cosplaying its plot. Lockshin recently visited Pittsburgh to screen the film. The Eurasian Knot jumped at the opportunity to interview him about it and its fallout.

Guest:

Michael Lockshin grew up in Russia and the United States. He began working in film while studying for a Masters in psychology at Moscow State University. He moved to London after graduating and directed several award-winning commercials and his first Russian language feature film, Silver Skates in 2020. Most recently, he co-wrote and directed an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

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Georgia in Crisis

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:25:37 GMT

Guest: Bryan Gigantino, co-host of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia, on the context and causes for the current political crisis in Georgia.

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The World of Soviet Dissidents

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:59:17 GMT

Soviet dissidents have long been objects of fascination. Who were they? What made them dissent? What did they believe? And what did they endure at the hands of a repressive Soviet state? We now have a clearer picture thanks to Benjamin Nathans’ new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Soviet dissidents, or as they preferred to be called “rights defenders,” navigated a complicated choreography between the movement, the police, and its supporters abroad. Their approach was a strategy of “civil obedience,” that is pressuring the Soviet government to follow its own laws. Though amounting to around a thousand active participants, their influence grew, especially as they were lionized in the Western media. In this conversation with the Eurasian Knot, Nathans recounts this history, highlighting the often-overlooked role of women, dissidents’ complex relationship with Soviet society, and what their experience can teach us today.

Guest:

Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the multiple award-winning book, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. His latest book is To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement published by Princeton University Press.

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A Deep Dive into Kabardino-Balkaria

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:33:44 GMT

Guest: Ian Lanzillotti guides through the history of Kabardino-Balkaria in his book Land, Community, and the State in the Caucasus published by Bloomsbury.

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Soviet DIY Folk Museums

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:55:50 GMT

Guest: Erin Hutchinson on her award-winning article, “Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period” in the January 2023 issue of the Russian Review.

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Intimate Lives of International Communism

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 18:01:41 GMT

Guest: Maurice Casey on the “lost world” of international communism in his book, Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals published by Footnote Press.

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Gulag Memory in Russia’s Far North

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 18:10:01 GMT

Guest: Tyler Kirk on After the Gulag: A History of Memory in Russia's Far North published by Indiana University Press.

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The Russia That Was Lost

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 19:06:18 GMT

Guest: Pavel Khazanov on The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

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Free Marc Fogel!

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:14:23 GMT

Guest: Ambassador Eric Rubin on the efforts to free Marc Fogel, an American serving 14 years in the Russian prison for possessing 17 g of medical marijuana.

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A New History of Northern Eurasia

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 17:26:22 GMT

Guests: Marina Mogilner and Ilya Gerasimov on their new textbook, A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600–1700: From Russian to Global History published by Bloomsbury.

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The Sound of Socialism, Part 3

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 19:48:11 GMT

Guest: Andrea Bohlman on the curious history of the sound postcard in People's Republic of Poland.

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Women in Russian Politics

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 18:12:00 GMT

Guest: Valeria Umanets on women in municipal governance in the Soviet Union and under Putin.

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Illiberalism and Civil Society in Hungary

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 17:53:07 GMT

Guest: Daniel Mikecz on Civil Movements in an Illiberal Regime: Political Activism in Hungary published by Central European University Press.

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The Sound of Socialism, Part 2

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 18:14:59 GMT

Guest: Matthew Kendall on his article “Room for Noise in Soviet Sound Recording” in the Winter 2023 issue of the Slavic Review.

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The Sound of Socialism, Part 1

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:11:22 GMT

Guest: Gabrielle Cornish on the sound of Lenin's voice and other sounds of socialism.

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The Eastern International

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 18:48:12 GMT

Guest: Masha Kirasirova on The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire published by Oxford University Press.

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The Soviet Bid to Run the World

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 16:45:57 GMT

Guest: Sergey Radchenko on To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power published by Cambridge University Press.

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The Rise and Fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 16:32:22 GMT

Guests: Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti on their new book Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin, and the New Fight for the Future of Russia published by Penguin.

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Russians in Latvia

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 17:29:05 GMT

Guest: Kevin Platt on Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders published by Cornell University Press.

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Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 17:30:28 GMT

Guest: Lisa Kirschenbaum on Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip published by Cambridge University Press.

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Soviet Afghan War and Islam

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:36:34 GMT

Guest: Vassily Klimentov on A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam published by Cornell University Press.

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Populist Elitism in Russia and the US

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 14:49:02 GMT

Guest: Alexandar Mikhailovic on the unlikely convergence of the American and Russian far-right.

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Soviet Industrial Ecology

Mon, 20 May 2024 17:42:31 GMT

Guest: Elena Kochetkova on wood, forests and industrial ecology in the Soviet Union.

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Everyday War in Donbas

Mon, 13 May 2024 19:30:37 GMT

Guest: Greta Uehling on the ethics of care in Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine published by Cornell University Press.

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Sugarland

Mon, 06 May 2024 17:58:38 GMT

Guest: Artan Hoxha on his new book, Sugarland: The Transformation of the Countryside in Communist Albania published by Central European University Press.

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Citizen Poet

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 16:07:23 GMT

Guest: Russian poet Dmitrii Bykov on the War in Ukraine, the role of art in politics, satire, his poisoning in 2019, protest, love and family.

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Baku Oil and the Soviet State

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 17:55:32 GMT

Guest: Sara Brinegar on her book The Power and Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound, 1920-29 published by Bloomsbury.

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Gleaning for Communism

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:21:40 GMT

Guest: Xenia Cherkaev on her book Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice published by Cornell University Press.

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The Tunguska Mystery

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 13:55:49 GMT

Guest: Andy Bruno on his new book Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy published by Cambridge University Press.

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Sesame Street in Russia

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 14:22:44 GMT

Guest: Natasha Lance Rogoff on making Sesame Street in Russia in the turbulent 1990s.

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Soviet Investigation of Nazi War Crimes

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 17:00:18 GMT

Guest: Paula Chan on the Extraordinary State Commission and its investigations in the Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union.

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The Soviet Century

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:30:57 GMT

Guest: Karl Schlogel on the lost world of Soviet civilization.

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Black Skies Over Krasnoyarsk

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 14:19:49 GMT

Guest: Mariia Koskina on Siberian industrialization, the environment and the black skies over Krasnoyarsk.

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Revisiting Nagorno-Karabakh

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 17:29:33 GMT

Guests: Tigran Grigoryan (The Regional Center for Democracy and Security) and Kelsey Rice (Berry College) revisiting the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

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The Soviet Avant Garde

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 21:25:50 GMT

Guest: Natalia Krylova on life, love, language, and the Soviet Avant Garde.

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Russia’s Prison Knocking Language

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:51:41 GMT

How did generations of Russian revolutionaries communicate in prison? Especially under strict surveillance, censorship and enforced silence? One way was through the sound of tapping. Prisoners used purposeful “tuks, tuks, tuks” in a coded pattern to communicate through their cells' thick granite walls. This syntax of taps developed in the 1820s and continued well into the 20th century. How did this tapping language develop and spread? How did it help concretize a collective revolutionary identity? The Eurasian Knot talked to Nicholas Bujalski to learn more about his prize winning article “Tuk, tuk, tuk!” A History of Russia’s Prison Knocking Language” published in the July 2022 issue of the Russian Review.

Guest:

Nicholas Bujalski is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Oberlin College. His writing has appeared in The Russian Review, Modern Intellectual History, and the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, and his current book project is a cultural, intellectual, and spatial history of Russia’s revolutionary movement through the prison cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress. His article, “Tuk, tuk, tuk!” A History of Russia’s Prison Knocking Language” won best article in Russian Review in 2023.

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Ukraine’s Gloomy Winter

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 20:46:11 GMT

Guest: Brian Milakovsky with a grim update on Ukraine, the war, and the shrinking prospects of even a lousy peace.

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A Century Without Lenin

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 20:45:19 GMT

Guest: Christopher Read on Vladimir Lenin's legacy 100 years since his death.

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Genealogy in Russia

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:59:44 GMT

Guest: Maria Lotsmanova on her genealogical journey to find information about her repressed great-grandfather, Jacob Jansen.

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The Black Russian

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 22:35:25 GMT

Guest: Vladimir Alexandrov on The Black Russian published by Grove Press.

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Recording Russia

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 15:44:18 GMT

Guest: Gabriella Safran on Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century published by Cornell University Press.

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Making the Soviet Jew

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 18:48:17 GMT

Guest: Sasha Senderovich on How the Soviet Jew Was Made published by Harvard University Press.

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Defection and the Cold War

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:43:10 GMT

Guest: Erik Scott on defection, the Cold War, and the regulation of borders and movement in a globalizing world.

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Ainu Fever

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 21:00:17 GMT

Roma Shatrov is the founder of the Silent Cape Nature Park in Sakhalin. Irina Grudova is Ainu, the indigenous inhabitants of Sakhalin. Roma is obsessed with Ainu history and culture and has dedicated the Silent Cape to revitalizing their tradition. Irina is a local Ainu activist and is skeptical of such outsiders looking to exploit her heritage. Yet Roma and Irina instantly hit it off and formed a strong bond over their mutual love of the Ainu. Rusana Novikova brings us a story about the romanticism and self-discovery at the heart of Irina and Roma’s complicated friendship, and its potential promise for Ainu and Russian relations.

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Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 14:50:51 GMT

Guest: Ilya Vinitsky on the persistence of fakes, forgeries, and frauds in Russian literary culture.

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The Cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:24:04 GMT

Guests: Rafael Khachaturian and Richard Antaramian on Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh.

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Islam, Repression, and Memory

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 19:01:50 GMT

Guests: Elmira Muratova and Michael Kemper on Islam in the Soviet and Post-Soviet contexts.

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Useable Pasts? Shamans, Spirituality and Resistance

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 16:58:31 GMT

Guest: Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer on the evolution of indigeneity and religion across the Soviet and post-Soviet divide.

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Theology after Gulag

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 18:52:02 GMT

Guest: Katya Tolstaya on theology, belief, and the remaning spiritual scars after Gulag.

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Christianity in China

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 16:55:20 GMT

Guests: Fenggang Yang and Kung Lap Yan on Christianity, worship, and religious persecution in China.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Anna Kovalova

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 19:09:06 GMT

Guest: Anna Kovalova, Pitt's new Visiting Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, on her work on early Russian cinema.

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Catholicism in Poland

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 18:31:05 GMT

Guests: Geneviève Zubrzycki and Jose Casanova on the place of the Catholic Church in Polish politics and national identity.

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Secret Police Archives as Depositories of Faith

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 18:13:53 GMT

Guests: Anca Sincan and Tatiana Vagramenko discuss the how secret police files document religious belief and worship in communist Romania and Ukraine.

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Lived Religion in Ukraine

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 21:45:05 GMT

Guest: Catherine Wanner on lived religion in Ukraine, belief, belonging and community, and the impact of the war on religion.

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The Nivkhi of Sakhalin

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:31:41 GMT

Guest: Bruce Grant revisits his book, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas, on the Nivkhi of Sakhalin, their Soviet experience, and the complexities of indigeneity.

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Queer Under Communism

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 17:23:08 GMT

It’s Pride month! Misha Appeltova, Irina Roldugina, and Kate Davison join us to talk about their research on gender, sexuality and queer under state socialism.

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Red Whaling

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:34:54 GMT

The Soviet Union was a latecomer to the whaling industry. But after a bumbling start, by the 1960s, Soviet whalers were slaughtering over 20,000 whales a year. The decimation of the world’s whales in the 20^th century, a genocide in which the Soviets played no small part, has had catastrophic results on the world’s ocean environments. Ryan Tucker Jones tells us about the Soviet whaling industry, the lives of Soviet whalers, their attitudes toward their craft, and the lasting trauma of the hunt the ocean’s majestic creatures.

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Harbin

Fri, 05 May 2023 20:37:48 GMT

Guest: Mark Gamsa on Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography

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Conquering Nature in Sakhalin and the Arctic

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 21:00:13 GMT

Guests: Paul Josephson and Sharyl Corrado on conquering nature, settlement, and Russian expansion in the Arctic and Sakhalin.

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The Far East

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 14:12:49 GMT

Ed Pulford and Soren Urbansky on the cross-cultural and diverse past and present of the Russian Far East.

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A Gift for Stalin, Part Two: The Accursed Share

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:40:05 GMT

It all started with a letter to Stalin in 1935. And when a Kremlin clerk opened it, there was a piece of shit inside.

Was the turd an insult? A way of saying to Stalin, “You’re a shit. Here’s some shit”?

Perhaps.

But I ended Part One of a Gift for Stalin on a different note: that the turd addressed to Stalin was no slight at all. It was, in fact, a gift.

A little brown present for Comrade Stalin.

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A Gift for Stalin, Part One: Dear Comrade Stalin

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 15:37:11 GMT

It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know who mails a letter from the outskirts of Moscow. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.” It arrives a few days later. And when Comrade Sentaretskya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin’s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.

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Trailer: A Gift for Stalin

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 20:21:43 GMT

It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know, who mails a letter. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.”

Now, there was nothing odd about people writing Stalin. They wrote to him a lot.
So, when Comrade Sentaretskaya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin’s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.

Just what was in this letter?

Find out March 31 when The Eurasian Knot debuts with A Gift to Stalin, two episodes about a letter mailed to the Soviet dictator and what it might have meant in the Soviet Union. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ep 5 Teddy Meets The Soviet People

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:56:09 GMT

American tourists expected few chances to meet Soviet people. You’d only see what Soviet officials wanted to show you. Touring the USSR, many assumed, was nothing more than a front row seat at a big show. And real Soviet life was hidden under layers upon layers of propaganda. So, if you wanted to see the truth of Soviet life—avoid officials and seek out “regular people.” Teddy wanted to seek out “regular” Soviet people. And he had a few chances to visit people’s homes. What did Teddy discover about “regular Soviet life and people” as a result? And what did it say about the Soviet system as a lived experience?

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Ep 4: Teddy Talks about Race

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:47:35 GMT

Teddy had few “official” meetings in the USSR. A factory here. A collective farm there. Maybe a school or two. And there was one question Teddy’s hosts always asked: “Why are you still lynching Blacks?” American racism was a global issue during the Cold War. And pointing to it was a strike at America’s Achilles heel. Soviet media devoted a lot of time to the Civil Rights Movement. And Teddy arrived in the USSR just when Martin Luther King was assassinated. So, just what was this Soviet concern for American Blacks? Was it merely a whataboutism, a way to deflect American criticism of Soviet life? Or was there something more to it?

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Ep 3 Teddy Goes Shopping

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:43:44 GMT

Like many Americans, Teddy judged the USSR through a consumer lens. What could Soviets buy? How much? And what was up with those long lines and shortages? Teddy wasn’t very impressed. Yet, the “standard of living race” was a front in the Cold War like any other. And Soviet communism was losing. But things were never so simple. By the late 1960s, Soviet people were consuming more than ever. They were becoming consumers just like in the West. So, what was it like to shop in the USSR? And was buying stuff part of the Soviet dream?

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Ep 2 Teddy Meets The KGB

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:40:51 GMT

Teddy assumed the KGB would monitor his travels around the Soviet Union. In Kiev, Teddy discovers that someone went through his luggage. And half-century later he learns his suspicions were correct. The KGB wrote a report on him, complete with excerpts from his diary. What was in this report? What did the KGB hope to learn from Teddy? And what was this vast network for keeping tabs on tourists anyway?

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Ep 1: Teddy Greets the USSR

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:40:28 GMT

Teddy Roe took an extraordinary trip to the USSR in 1968. For three months, he travelled from one end of the USSR to the other. Most Americans at the time believed the USSR was their greatest enemy. Teddy was among tens of thousands who toured the Soviet Union. Why did Americans want to travel there? Why did the Soviets want them to come? What just what was the tourist experience like?

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Mental Health in Wartime Ukraine

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 20:52:14 GMT

Guests: Drs. Carmen Andreescu and Alex Dombrovski on their work on mental health in Ukraine though the Global Initiative on Psychiatry - USA.

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Kyivan Rus’

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 19:05:26 GMT

Guest: Christian Raffensperger on the place of Kyivan Rus' in the wider European medieval world.

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The Day of the Baptism of Rus

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:32:27 GMT

Guest: Sean Griffin on his prize winning article “Revolution, Raskol, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The 1,020th Anniversary of the Day of the Baptism of Rus” published in the Russian Review.

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Between Memory and History in Ukraine

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 22:29:03 GMT

Guests: Victoria Smolkina and Georgyi Kasianov on the complexities of memory, history, and politics in narrating Ukrainian history.

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The Soviet Rock Scene

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 19:31:29 GMT

Guest: Artemy Troitsky reflecting on his life in the Soviet and Russian rock scenes.

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Working Through Stalinism

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 17:47:25 GMT

Guests: Polly Jones and Zuzanna Bogumil on memory, politics, and trauma of Stalinism.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Zoltan Kelemen

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 14:05:52 GMT

REEES faculty profile on Zoltan Zelemen about his research on neo-medievalism in international relations, law, and democracy.

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The Economic War

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 20:18:30 GMT

Guests: Ben Aris and Ilya Matveev on the Russian economy during wartime.

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Mixed Marriages in the USSR

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 18:27:11 GMT

Guest: Adrienne Edgar on Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia published by Cornell University Press.

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Remembering Anne Garrels

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 17:45:12 GMT

Rebroadcast of my 2016 interview with the recently departed Anne Garrels, author of Putin’s Country: A Journey into the Real Russia.

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Soviet Aid to West Africa

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 19:28:46 GMT

Guests: Alessandro Iandolo and Natalia Telepneva on Soviet engagement with West Africa during the Cold War.

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Rebroadcast: The Life and Times of Mikhail Gorbachev

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 19:08:37 GMT

Guest: William Taubman on Gorbachev: His Life and Times.

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Soviet WWII Mythologies

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 16:36:42 GMT

Guest: Jonathan Brunstedt on The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR published by Cambridge University Press.

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Queer Spaces in Imperial St. Petersburg

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 17:50:39 GMT

Guest: Olga Petri on Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg published by Cornell University Press.

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Clientelism in Soviet Abkhazia

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 17:02:12 GMT

Guest: Timothy Blauvelt on Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba published by Routledge.

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Limonov and the National Bolsheviks

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 17:23:05 GMT

Guest: Fabrizio Fenghi on It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia published by University of Wisconsin Press.

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Russian Orthodox Converts in Appalachia

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 19:06:11 GMT

Guest: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz on Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia published by Fordham University Press.

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A Dissident Among Dissidents

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 19:54:22 GMT

Guest: Ilya Budraitskis on Russia's war in Ukraine, fascism, and his essay collection, Dissidents among Dissidents. Ideology, politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia published by Verso.

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Russia in the Red Mirror

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 15:51:17 GMT

Guest: Gulnaz Sharafutdinova on The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity published by Oxford University Press.

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Life and Death in the Donbas

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 19:49:53 GMT

Guest: Brian Milakovsky on everyday life in the Donbas and the effort to evacuate civilians.

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Central Asia Past and Present

Tue, 24 May 2022 19:54:20 GMT

Guest: Adeeb Khalid on Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present published by Princeton University Press.

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Everything Was Forever Until

Tue, 17 May 2022 17:47:18 GMT

Guest: Alexei Yurchak on perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the experiences of the last Soviet generation.

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Trailer 2: Teddy Goes to the USSR

Mon, 16 May 2022 14:58:02 GMT

Coming May 30!

Teddy Goes to the USSR, a new six-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police surveillance, consumerism, race, and everyday life through his extraordinary three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1968.

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Suffering and Survival in Leningrad

Tue, 10 May 2022 16:04:58 GMT

Guest: Jeffrey Hass on The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941-1944 published by Oxford University Press.

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Trailer: Teddy Goes to the USSR

Mon, 09 May 2022 17:50:40 GMT

Coming May 30! Teddy Goes to the USSR, a new six-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police surveillance, consumerism, race, and everyday life through his extraordinary three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1968.

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The Collapse of the Soviet Union

Tue, 03 May 2022 18:06:50 GMT

Guest: Vladislav Zubok on Collapse: The End of the Soviet Union published by Yale University Press.

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Stalinism, Memorial, and Perestroika

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 18:38:54 GMT

Guest: Nanci Adler on Memorial, Stalinist repression, and Russia's incomplete transitional justice.

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Perestroika in the Periphery: Tajikistan

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 15:12:22 GMT

Guest: Isaac Scarborough on perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet system in Tajikistan.

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Esperanto in Revolutionary Russia

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 16:23:37 GMT

Guest: Brigid O'Keeffe on Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia published by Bloomsbury.

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Soviet Pronatalism

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 18:23:23 GMT

Guest: Mie Nakachi on Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union published by Oxford University Press.

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Letters to Perestroika

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 16:11:48 GMT

Guest: Courtney Doucette on letter writing, Nina Andreeva, and perestroika "from below."

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Stalin and His Books

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 18:29:09 GMT

Guest: Geoffrey Roberts on Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books published by Yale University Press.

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Russia, Ukraine, and the West

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 18:35:15 GMT

This discussion was recorded on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, the morning before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Guests: Michael Kimmage, Marlene Laruelle, and Fyodor Lukyanov on the ongoing geopolitical crisis between Russia, Ukraine and the West.

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Russia’s Labor Dilemma

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 19:47:32 GMT

Stephen Crowley on Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation published by Cornell University Press.

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Ditching Communism in Poland

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 22:12:16 GMT

Guest: Tom Junes on Poland in the 1980s and its legacies.

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The Lenfilm Art House

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 18:42:46 GMT

Guest: Catriona Kelly on Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev published by Oxford University Press.

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The Things of Late Soviet Life

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 19:32:20 GMT

Guest: Alexey Golubev on The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia published by Cornell University Press.

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Soviet Flower Power

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 18:38:09 GMT

Juliane Furst on Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in the Soviet Hippieland and Beyond published by Oxford University Press.

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Russia Upside Down

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 21:56:35 GMT

Guest: The Americans creator Joe Weisberg on Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy from the Second Cold War published by Public Affairs.

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The Return of the Romanovs

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 18:00:01 GMT

Guest: Russell Martin on the recent wedding of George Romanov and Victoria Romanovna Bettarini.

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Cold War from the Margins

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 17:20:15 GMT

Guest: Theodora Dragostinova on The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene, was published by Cornell University Press.

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The Vampires of A. K. Tolstoy

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 16:42:54 GMT

Guest: Irina Erman on her article “Nation and Vampiric Narration in Aleksey Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak” published in the January 2020 issue of The Russian Review.

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Cuban-Soviet Scientific Exchanges

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 16:59:03 GMT

Guest: Clare Ibarra on scientific exchange between Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

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African Students in the USSR

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 17:55:56 GMT

Guest: Constantin Katsakioris on the experience of African students in the USSR during the Cold War.

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Unpacking Alexey Navalny

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 17:22:19 GMT

Guests: Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet, and Ben Noble on Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? published by Hurst Publishers.

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Revisiting the Russian Military

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 15:35:06 GMT

Guests: Michael Kofman and Dmitry Gorenburg give an update on the Russian military.

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Russian Conquest of Central Asia

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 17:41:21 GMT

Guest: Alexander Morrison on The Russian Conquest of Central Asia published by Cambridge University Press.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Ana Sekulic

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 18:58:14 GMT

REEES faculty profile on Ana Sekulic and her work on Catholic-Muslim relations in Bosnia under the Ottoman empire.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Attila Kenyeres

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 18:55:39 GMT

REEES faculty profile of Attila Kenyeres on his research into media manipulation and "fake news."

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Russian Revolutionaries in Exile

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 17:42:49 GMT

Guest: Faith Hillis on Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930 published by Oxford University Press.

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The Weak Strongman

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:59:54 GMT

Guest: Timothy Frye on Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia published by Princeton University Press.

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Weddings and Power in Early Modern Russia

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 21:12:28 GMT

Russell Martin on The Tsar's Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia's Rulers, 1495–1745 published by Cornell University Press.

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Wine and Cheese: Komsomol Etiquette and Emily Post

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 17:34:46 GMT

SRB interns Amelia Parlier and Felix Helbing dive into the weird world of advice columns. Two unlikely parings on the block—Komsomol decorum and the diva of dish, Emily Post. It’s wine and cheese!

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Rebroadcast: Smoking Under the Tsars

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 13:16:06 GMT

Guest: Tricia Starks on Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia published by Cornell University Press.

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Money and Prosperity in the USSR

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 17:56:15 GMT

Guest: Kristy Ironside on A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union published by Harvard University Press.

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Cold War Correspondents

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 19:05:39 GMT

Dina Fainberg on Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines published by John Hopkins University Press.

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Tolyatti’s Avtograd District

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 03:55:56 GMT

Guest: Guido Sechi on Tolyatti: Exploring Post-Soviet Spaces, co-authored with Michele Cera is published by the Velvet Cell and VAC Foundation.

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Masculinity in the Long Soviet Sixties

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 18:02:05 GMT

Guest: Marko Dumančić on Men out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties published by the University of Toronto Press.

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The US-Russia Rivalry

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 18:10:59 GMT

Guest: Andrei Tsygankov on the ongoing US-Russia rivalry.

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The US-Russia-China Triangle

Fri, 28 May 2021 20:53:31 GMT

Guest: Thomas Graham on the new "Cold War," the United States, Russia, and China.

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Gulag Criminal Subculture

Fri, 14 May 2021 18:49:17 GMT

Guest: Mark Vincent on Criminal Subculture in the Gulag: Prisoner Society in the Stalinist Labour Camps published by Bloomsbury.

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Prostitution in Late Imperial Russia

Fri, 07 May 2021 14:47:10 GMT

Guest: Siobhán Hearne on Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia published by Oxford University Press.

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Blind Activism in the Cold War

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 18:10:34 GMT

Guest: Cristina Galmarini on international blind activism from the communist bloc during the Cold War.

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Environmental Activism in Russia

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 17:38:40 GMT

Guests: Konstantin Fokin and Angelina Davydova on environmental activism in Russia.

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Gogol’s Town of N

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 16:15:16 GMT

Guest: Anne Lounsbery on Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 published by Cornell University Press.

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Trash in (post-)Communist Eastern Europe

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 14:43:53 GMT

Guests: Elana Resnick and Viktor Pal on waste, recycling, reuse, and race in (post-)Communist Eastern Europe.

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Navalny and Next

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 21:14:23 GMT

Guests: Ilya Budraitskis, Svetlana Erpyleva, and Greg Yudin on Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition, and the prospects of political pluralism in Russian society.

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Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the USSR

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:55:20 GMT

Guest: Karl Qualls on Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-51 published by the University of Toronto Press.

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Zoos and Animals in Eastern Europe and Russia

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 14:25:27 GMT

Guests: Tracy McDonald and Marianna Szczygielska on zoos, non-humans, and Animal Studies in Eastern Europe and Russia

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Welcome to Chechnya

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 19:58:26 GMT

Guest: David France on his film Welcome To Chechnya.

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Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 22:33:19 GMT

Guests: Valerie Kivelson and Christine Worobec on witches, magic, spells in their new sourcebook Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 published by Cornell University Press.

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From Soso to Stalin

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 14:54:38 GMT

Guest: Ronald Suny on Stalin: Passage to Revolution published by Princeton University Press.

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Watering the Soviet Lands

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 19:34:41 GMT

Guests: Maya Peterson and Christopher Ward on water and the environment in the Soviet Union.

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The Texel Uprising

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:59:06 GMT

Guest: Eric Lee on Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler’s Revenge – April-May 1945 published by Greenhill Books.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: James Pickett

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:11:28 GMT

Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh’s historian of Russia and Central Asia--James Pickett.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Iknur Lider

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:06:34 GMT

Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh's Turkish instructor Iknur Lider.

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The Soviet-Third World Cultural Nexus

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:52:28 GMT

Guest: Rossen Djagalov on From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

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Dmytro Dontsov and Ukrainian Nationalism

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 16:29:30 GMT

Guest: Trevor Erlacher on Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov published by Harvard University Press.

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Belarus Protests in Pittsburgh

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 15:06:44 GMT

I attended a Belarus solidarity rally in Pittsburgh. Here's what some of the protesters told me.

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Russian Other, American Other

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 21:46:53 GMT

Guests: Dina Fainberg and Victoria Zhuravleva on the history of Russian and American mutual perceptions.

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Putin Kitsch in America

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 20:56:09 GMT

Guest: Alison Rowley on Putin Kitsch in America published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

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The Wired Cold War

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 19:56:03 GMT

Guests: Ekaterina Babintseva and Slava Gerovitch on cybernetics in the United States and Soviet Union.

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Grand Duke Alexis Visits America

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:39:50 GMT

Guest: Lee Farrow on Alexis in America: A Russian Grand Duke's Tour, 1871-72 published by Louisiana State University Press.

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Black Radicalism and the USSR

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 21:53:16 GMT

Guests: Meredith Roman and Minkah Makalani on Black radicalism, the Comintern, and Soviet antiracism.

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American Tourism to the USSR

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 15:55:39 GMT

Guest: Andrew Jacobs on American tourism to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

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Pogroms and Race Riots

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 18:07:34 GMT

Guests: Steven Zipperstein and Michael Pfeifer on anti-Jewish and anti-Black violence in Russia and the United States.

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From Aliaska to Alaska

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 16:46:35 GMT

Guests: Bathsheba Demuth and Ilya Vinkoveysky on Russian and American colonialism and the environment in Alaska.

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American Famine Relief to Soviet Russia

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 16:26:53 GMT

Guest: Douglas Smith on The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Russian and American Empire

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 15:04:07 GMT

Guests: Daniel Immerwahr and Willard Sunderland on American and Russian Empire.

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Enter Dopeworld

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 15:38:16 GMT

Guest: Niko Vorobyov on the adventures in dopeworld.

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Russian Serfdom and American Slavery

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:50:05 GMT

Guests: Amanda Brickell Bellows and Alessandro Stanziani on Russian serfdom and American slavery.

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SRB Presents: Geopolitics on the Move

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 17:19:05 GMT

Presenting Geopolitics on the Move, a podcast series I recorded this summer with Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs.

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Protests in Belarus

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:45:59 GMT

Elena Gapova on the protests in Belarus.

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Biculturalism and the Apollo-Soyuz Mission

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 17:03:28 GMT

The final two short audio pieces from the Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia. “A Brief Conversation on Biculturalism” by Alexandra Diouk and “Remembering the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Mission: 45 years of US-Russian Space Cooperation” by Lisa Becker.

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Trash Protests and Leninopad

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 18:45:07 GMT

Two short audio pieces from the Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia. “The Great Russian Trash Crisis” by Seth Farkas and “An Empty Pedestal: Ukraine after Leninopad” by Sabrina Beaver.

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Soviet Military Masculinity

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 16:13:46 GMT

Guest: Erica Fraser on Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union published by the University of Toronto Press.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Olga Klimova

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 13:43:15 GMT

Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh's Olga Klimova.

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REEES Faculty Spotlight: Katie Manukyan

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 13:23:52 GMT

Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh's Katie Manukyan.

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Stories Along the Trans-Siberian

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 03:06:06 GMT

Guests: Marina Dmukhovskaya and Georg Wallner about their podcast project Mesto47.

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Rebroadcast: Experiencing the Russian Revolution

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 14:07:44 GMT

Guest: Mark Steinberg on the experience of the Russian Revolution.

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Rebroadcast: The Kazakh Famine

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 13:49:13 GMT

Guest: Sarah Cameron on The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.

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Russia’s Wily Man

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 15:05:55 GMT

Joshua Yaffa on Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia published by Penguin Random House.

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Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 18:55:38 GMT

Guest: Francine Hirsch on Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II published by Oxford University Press.

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Censorship in Late Stalinist Classical Music

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 20:20:00 GMT

Guest: Leah Goldman on censorship and collaboration in the production of Late Stalinist classical music.

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Pogroms and Blood Libel in the Soviet Union

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:28:02 GMT

Guest: Elissa Bemporad on Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets published by Oxford University Press.

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Plots Against Russia

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 20:27:14 GMT

Guest: Eliot Borenstein on Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism published by Cornell University Press.

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The Baltics In-Between

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:28:50 GMT

Guest: Aliide Naylor on The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front published by Bloomsbury.

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Rebroadcast: Black Sojourners to the Soviet Union

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 07:53:48 GMT

Guest: Joy Gleason Carew on Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise.

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Everyday Maoism in Revolutionary China

Fri, 29 May 2020 19:00:49 GMT

Guest: Aminda Smith on Maoism, consciousness, and the everyday.

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Soviet WWII Songs

Fri, 22 May 2020 15:28:34 GMT

Guest: Suzanne Ament on Sing to Victory! Song in Soviet Society during World War II published by Academic Studies Press.

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Hearing Communism: Part Two

Thu, 21 May 2020 18:26:09 GMT

Part two of Hearing Communism—five short audio pieces by students in my International Communism undergraduate research seminar at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Hearing Communism: Part One

Tue, 19 May 2020 15:57:36 GMT

Part one of Hearing Communism—five short audio pieces by students in my International Communism undergraduate research seminar at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Socialism for Realists

Fri, 15 May 2020 18:42:20 GMT

Guest: Sam Gindin on socialism for realists.

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China’s New Red Guards

Fri, 08 May 2020 15:40:56 GMT

Jude Blanchette on China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong published by Oxford University Press.

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Ideologies of Race in Russia

Fri, 01 May 2020 17:01:02 GMT

Guest: David Rainbow on Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Underground Entrepreneurs in the Soviet Union

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 14:42:53 GMT

Guest: James Heinzen on "underground entrepreneurs" and black markets in the Soviet 1950s to the 1980s.

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Russian Conservatism

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 18:10:24 GMT

Guest: Paul Robinson on Russian Conservatism published by Northern Illinois University Press.

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Cholera in Russia

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 19:36:42 GMT

John Davis on Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets published by Bloomsbury.

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Postcolonial Socialisms in Africa

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 14:14:34 GMT

Guest: Priya Lal on African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World published by Cambridge University Press.

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Immortalism and Transhumanism in Russia

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 19:25:22 GMT

Guest: Anya Bernstein on The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia published by Princeton University Press.

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Objects and Values of Labor in Socialist Hungary

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 19:24:06 GMT

Guest: Martha Lampland on the commodification of labor in Socialist Hungary.

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Political Diary from Russia

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 19:39:21 GMT

Friends of the show Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev on the latest news from Russia.

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Structurally Adjusting Socialism

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 17:19:06 GMT

Guest: Johanna Bockman on neoliberalism, socialist globalization, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

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The Nobility and the Russian Novel

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 21:33:47 GMT

Bella Grigoryan on Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762-1861 published by Northern Illinois University Press.

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After the Colored Revolution

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 22:54:37 GMT

Guest: Vasili Rukhadze on post-colored revolution regimes.

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Exposing Chernobyl

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 19:48:55 GMT

Guest: Kate Brown on Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future published by Norton.

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Women of the Gulag

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 19:40:26 GMT

Guest: Marianna Yarovskaya on her film Women of the Gulag.

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Nuclear Bombs and Bomb Shelters

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 03:26:24 GMT

Guest: Edward Geist on Armageddon Insurance: Civil Defense in the United States and Soviet Union, 1945-1991 published by University of North Carolina Press.

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Russia in Global Affairs

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 23:11:04 GMT

Guest: Fyodor Lukyanov on Russia in the Middle East: Viewpoints, Policies, Strategies published by East View.

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Ivan the Terrible

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 15:39:08 GMT

Guest: Charles Halperin on Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

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The Stuff of Red Army Soldiers

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 18:43:43 GMT

Guest: Brandon Schechter on The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects published by Cornell University Press.

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Russia, China and Inbetween

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 17:50:37 GMT

Guest: Ed Pulford on Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between published by Hurst.

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The Collective Farm

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 22:42:43 GMT

Guests: Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Kristy Ironside, and Samantha Lomb on the collective farm system in the USSR.

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Atoms and Aliens in Eurasian Science Fiction

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:19:01 GMT

Guest: Anindita Banerjee on the nuclear in Soviet and Post-Soviet Science Fiction.

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Russians Under Nazi Occupation

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 16:17:02 GMT

Guest: Johannes Due Enstad on Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II published by Cambridge University Press.

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The Radioactive Mutants of Semipalatinsk

Sun, 27 Oct 2019 20:49:23 GMT

Magdalena Stawkowski on the rural Kazakh communities in the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site.

The post The Radioactive Mutants of Semipalatinsk appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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The Jewish Revolution in Belarus

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 10:45:45 GMT

Guest: Andrew Sloin on The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power published by Indiana University Press.

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The Soviet Nuclear Industry

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 17:50:48 GMT

Guest: Sonja Schmid on Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry published by MIT Press.

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The Soviet Lives of Western Culture

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:58:54 GMT

Guest: Eleonor Gilburd on To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture published by Harvard University Press.

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Investigating Hitler’s Remains

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 02:28:03 GMT

Guest: Lana Parshina on The Death of Hitler: The Final Word published by Da Capo Press.

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The Politics of Immigration in Russia

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 20:14:13 GMT

Guest: Caress Schenk on Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia published by University of Toronto Press.

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Central Asian Migrants in the USSR

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 03:41:40 GMT

Guest: Jeff Sahadeo on Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow published by Cornell University Press.

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Domestic Service in the USSR

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 14:59:41 GMT

Alissa Klots on domestic service and aging in the USSR.

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A Russian Voyage of Empires

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 14:11:30 GMT

Guest: Edyta Bojanowska on A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada published by Harvard University Press.

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Russian Socialists in the Struggle for Democracy

Sat, 10 Aug 2019 13:21:57 GMT

For the past few weeks, protests for fair elections in upcoming municipal polls have become weekly in Moscow and St. Petersburg as thousands have defied authorities to attend unsanctioned rallies. The police crackdown has been particularly harsh in Moscow. Protests on July 27 and August 3 resulted in over 2000 detentions. Images of police in riot gear wrestling citizens to the ground and beating peaceful protesters were reminiscent of the mass protests against election fraud in 2011-2012.

Members of the Russian Socialist Movement, a small Marxist, anti-Stalinist organization active in the Russian left, have been participants in local electoral campaigns and in the protests. Two RSM activists, Valeria Kovelishina and Ilya Budraitskis talk about the Russian Socialist Movement, their electoral work, the protests for democracy in Russia and what they might mean for the future.

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Witnessing the Collapse of Communism

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 19:20:34 GMT

Roundtable discussion marking the 30th anniversary of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Participants include Timothy Garton Ash, Bridget Kendall, and Jens Reich.

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Rasputin, the Man and the Myth (Rebroadcast)

Sat, 27 Jul 2019 12:50:43 GMT

Guest: Doug Smith on Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs.

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The Evictors

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 18:33:32 GMT

Around Moscow, there’s a whole industry of so-called “black creditors” — microfinance institutions (or MFOs) that swindle and seize debtors’ homes. Ivan Golunov’s investigation for Meduza has discovered that almost 500 apartments have been seized from their owners over the past five years without so much as a court order. In fact, this scheme involves more than simply “squeezing” people from their homes. It is possibly part of a wider, international money-laundering system. Here’s Meduza special correspondent Ivan Golunov on the ins and outs of this industry.

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Russians on Trump (Rebroadcast)

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 11:19:59 GMT

Guest: Laurence Bogoslaw on Russians on Trump: Press Coverage and Commentary published by Eastview.

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Gender and Electoral Self-Polishing in Mongolia

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 18:20:01 GMT

Manduhai Buyandelger’s keynote address “Self-Polishing and Electoral Selves: Elections and the New Economies of Democratization in Postsocialist Mongolia” given at the 2019 Annual Soyuz Symposium.

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Russian Revolutionary Postcards

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 02:49:00 GMT

Guest: Tobie Mathew on Greetings From The Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia published by Four Corners Books.

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Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 16:41:07 GMT

Guest: Joan Neuberger on This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia published by Cornell University Press.

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Soviet Anti-Americanism

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 20:36:58 GMT

Guest: Rósa Magnúsdóttir on Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 published by Oxford University Press.

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Stalin’s Short Course

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 12:43:56 GMT

Guest: David Brandenberger on Stalin's Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course published by Yale University Press.

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The Stories Polish Secret Police Files Tell Us

Fri, 31 May 2019 15:01:03 GMT

Guest: Anna Krakus on the stories Polish police files tell us.

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“The Reddest of the Blacks”

Tue, 21 May 2019 13:45:37 GMT

For the past several months, I've been researching the life of Lovett Fort-Whiteman. Here's a short film I made about his eventual arrest and death in Stalinist Russia.

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Russia Without Putin

Fri, 17 May 2019 17:39:56 GMT

Guest: Tony Wood on Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War published by Verso.

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Local Perpetrators and the Holocaust in Ukraine

Wed, 08 May 2019 15:09:16 GMT

Guest: Jared McBride on the Holocaust, Soviet Secret Police Archives and Local Perpetrators in Western Ukraine.

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Peering Under the Rug: Sources of Information about Russia

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:55:37 GMT

Guests: Mark Galeotti, Kevin Rothrock, and Maxim Trudolyubov on making sense of Russia.

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Lenin’s Government

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 18:44:01 GMT

Guest: Lara Douds on Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State published by Bloomsbury.

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Soviet Intelligence and African National Liberation

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 16:21:43 GMT

Guest: Natalia Telepneva on Soviet and Warsaw Pact intelligence services and African anti-colonial movements.

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Photography and Russian Literature

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 15:08:45 GMT

Guest: Katherine Reischl on Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors published by Cornell University Press.

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The Soviet Origins of Lamaze

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 19:02:14 GMT

Guest: Paula Michaels on Lamaze: An International History published by Oxford University Press.

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Russian Nationalism

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 21:42:10 GMT

Guest: Marlene Laruelle on Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields, published by Routledge, and her edited collection Entangled Far Rights: A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the 20th Century, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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The Gulag at War

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 19:28:56 GMT

Guest: Wilson Bell on Stalin’s Gulag at War: Forced Labor, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War published by the University of Toronto Press.

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The Kazakh Famine

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 17:47:24 GMT

Guest: Sarah Cameron on The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.

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Lenders and Debtors in Imperial Russia

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 21:03:39 GMT

Guest: Sergei Antonov on Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy published by Harvard University Press.

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Conspiracy Theories in Russia

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 16:06:46 GMT

Guest: Ilya Yablokov on Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World published by Polity.

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The Politics of Russian Futurism

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 22:03:14 GMT

Guest: Iva Glisic on The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 published by Northern Illinois University Press.

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American Girls in Red Russia

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 19:23:30 GMT

Guest: Julia Mickenberg on American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Perestroika and Punk Rock

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 16:04:47 GMT

Guest: Vladimir Kozlov on punk rock, perestroika, his stories and films.

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Youth Movements in Eastern Europe

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 20:03:23 GMT

Guest: Olena Nikolayenko on Youth Movements and Elections in Eastern Europe published by Cambridge University Press.

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American Newsrooms through Russian Eyes

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 21:02:05 GMT

Guest: Alexey Kovalev on American and Russian journalism.

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Eurasianet on Eurasia

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 15:55:02 GMT

Guests: Eurasianet's Peter Leonard and Josh Kucera on Central Asia and the South Caucausus

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Soviet and American Children in the Cold War

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 10:29:26 GMT

Guest: Margaret Peacock on Soviet and American Children in the Cold War.

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The Map Men of East Central Europe

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 18:38:28 GMT

Guest: Steven Seegel on Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe published by University of Chicago Press.

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Communist Neverland at the Russian International Children’s Home

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 02:48:35 GMT

Guest: Elizabeth McGuire on “Communist Neverland: New Research on a Russian International Children's Home, 1933-1991.”

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Decolonization and Development in Soviet Tajikistan

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 22:10:46 GMT

Guest: Artemy Kalinovsky on The Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan published by Cornell University Press.

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Communism, Youth and Generation

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 02:52:09 GMT

Guest: Matthias Neumann on communism, youth, and generation.

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Rich Russians

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 03:50:40 GMT

Guest: Elisabeth Schimpfossl on Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie published by Oxford University Press.

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Kazakh Nomads Under Lenin and Stalin

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 18:11:13 GMT

Guest: Alun Thomas on Nomads a nd Soviet Rule: Central Asia from Lenin to Stalin published by I.B. Tauris.

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The Russian Monarchy’s Scenarios of Power

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 03:43:10 GMT

Guest: Richard Wortman on the Russian monarchy, symbolism, and ritual.

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Social-Economic Life in the Donbas

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 16:48:36 GMT

Guest: Brian Milakovsky on the social and economic situation in the Donbas.

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The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 18:44:55 GMT

Guest: Lesley Chamberlain on The Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution published by Reaktion Books.

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SRB on the Dig Podcast

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 15:25:09 GMT

Me, your host, on The Dig Podcast.

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Nation, Nationality, and Empire

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 18:16:13 GMT

Guest: Ronald Grigor Suny on nationality, nation, and empire in the Soviet Union.

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American-Russian Relations in the 19th Century

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 23:01:06 GMT

Guest: Norman Saul of US-Russian relations in the 19th Century

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Soviet Atheism

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 19:19:22 GMT

Guest: Victoria Smolkin on A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism published by Princeton University Press.

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The Russian Mafia

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 19:52:51 GMT

Guest: Mark Galeotti on The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia published by Yale University Press.

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Psychotherapy and Neoliberalism in Russia

Sat, 28 Jul 2018 21:13:27 GMT

Guest: Tomas Matza on Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia published by Duke University Press.

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Chinese Romance with the Russian Revolution

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 19:22:42 GMT

Guest: Elizabeth McGuire on Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution published by Oxford University Press.

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Collectivization and Stalinist Perpetrators

Fri, 13 Jul 2018 20:17:24 GMT

Guest: Lynne Viola on the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, resistance, and Stalinist perpetrators.

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The Banya is Everything

Fri, 06 Jul 2018 19:10:44 GMT

Guest: Bryon MacWilliams on With Light Steam: A Personal Journey through the Russian Baths was published by Northern Illinois University Press.

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Russia’s A Terrible Country

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 21:25:00 GMT

Guest: Keith Gessen on America's Russia Hands and his novel A Terrible Country published by Viking.

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Surveillance Valley

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 19:40:34 GMT

Guest: Yasha Levine on Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet published by Public Affairs Books.

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Russian Literature and Terrorism

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 19:42:15 GMT

Guest: Lynn Patyk on Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

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Russia, Israel, Iran and Syria

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 18:48:15 GMT

Guest: Maxim Suchkov, editor of Al-Monitor’s Russia-Mideast coverage, on Russia, Israel, Iran and Syria.

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A Memoir of Misadventures in Moscow

Fri, 18 May 2018 15:39:53 GMT

Guest: Michael Idov on Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

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Early Soviet Urban Communes

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 15:09:57 GMT

Guest: Andy Willimott on Living the Revolution: Urban Communes & Soviet Socialism, 1917-1931 published Oxford University Press.

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Putinomics

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 19:37:34 GMT

Guest: Chris Miller on Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia published by the University of North Carolina Press.

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The Stalin Constitution

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 14:40:37 GMT

Guest: Samantha Lomb on Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution published by Routledge.

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The Mitki Art Collective

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 02:27:27 GMT

Guest: Alexandar Mihailovic on The Mitki: The Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia published by University of Wisconsin Press.

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William C. Bullitt in the USSR

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 04:18:18 GMT

Guest: Alexander Etkind on Roads not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt published by Pittsburgh University Press.

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Russia’s Long Hangover

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 20:48:26 GMT

Guest: Shaun Walker on The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past published by Oxford University Press.

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Boris Savinkov and Russian Terrorism

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:06:20 GMT

Guest: Irina Meier on Boris Savinkov and Russian revolutionary terrorism.

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The Georgian Democratic Republic

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 17:33:00 GMT

Guest: Eric Lee on The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 published by Zed Books.

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Local Identity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Vladimir

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:27:59 GMT

Guest: Susan Smith-Peter on Imagining Russian Regions: Civil Society and Subnational Identity in Nineteenth-Century Russia published by Brill.

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The Stalinist Film Industry

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 04:52:16 GMT

Guest:
Guest: Maria Belodubrovskaya on Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin published by Cornell University Press.

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Life and Times of Vladimir Dzhunkovsky

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 16:59:41 GMT

Guest: Richard Robbins on Overtaken by the Night: One Russian’s Journey through Peace, War, Revolution, and Terror published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Old Age and Claustrophobia in Putin’s Russia

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 20:13:37 GMT

Evgenia Kovda on her film Podrugi (Girlfriends), a tale of old age and claustrophobia in Putin's Russia.

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The Ethics of Soviet Journalism

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 22:35:36 GMT

Guest: Natalia Roudakova on Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia published by Cambridge University Press.

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Deaf in the Soviet Union

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 20:03:25 GMT

Guest: Claire Shaw on Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991.

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The Russian Revolution as Utopian Leap in the Open Air of History

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 20:12:22 GMT

Mark Steinberg on the symbolism of angels, wings, and flight in the Russian Revolution.

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The Epic of the House of Government

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:38:45 GMT

Guest: Yuri Slezkine on The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution.

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Assessing the Russian Military

Sun, 19 Nov 2017 18:21:37 GMT

Guest: Michael Kofman on the Russian military.

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Daughter of the Cold War

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 17:20:08 GMT

Guest: Grace Kennan Warnecke on growing up in George F. Kennan's shadow.

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American History Through Russian Eyes

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 20:22:47 GMT

Guest: Ivan Kurilla on American studies in Russia.

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Young Communists Under Stalin

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 20:39:54 GMT

Guest: Seth Bernstein on Raised Under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism.

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Russian LGBTQ and New Left Activism

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 13:44:30 GMT

Guest: Jessica Mason on LGBTQ activism and the New Left in Russia.

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Russian and American Internal Colonization

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 16:14:39 GMT

Guest: Steve Sabol on “The Touch of Civilization” Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization.

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Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 20:54:14 GMT

Guest: Brendan McGeever on the Bolsheviks and antisemitism.

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The Politics of Russia’s Apartment Demolition

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 15:37:15 GMT

Guest: Maxim Trudolubov on Moscow's apartment demolition plans.

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Feminists in the Maidan

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 01:56:36 GMT

Guest: Emily Channell-Justice on feminist activism and the Maidan.

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The Early Modern Russian Empire

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 22:08:31 GMT

Guest: Nancy Kollmann on The Russian Empire, 1450-1801.

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Women, Resistance, and Revolution

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 20:14:50 GMT

Guest: Sheila Rowbotham on a lifetime of socialist feminist activism. [spp-player]

The post Women, Resistance, and Revolution appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Retrospective on Stalinism

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 18:23:28 GMT

Guest: Sheila Fitzpatrick on Stalinism.

The post Retrospective on Stalinism appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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SRB on This is Hell!

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 15:35:20 GMT

A This is Hell! interview with your humble host.

The post SRB on This is Hell! appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Stalin’s Last Days

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:46:38 GMT

Guest: Joshua Rubenstein on The Last Days of Stalin.

The post Stalin’s Last Days appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Russia and Its Near Abroad

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 13:41:58 GMT

Guest: Gerard Toal on Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest Over Ukraine and the Caucasus.

The post Russia and Its Near Abroad appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Protest in Putin’s Russia

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 19:44:23 GMT

Guest: Mischa Gabowitsch on Protest in Putin’s Russia.

The post Protest in Putin’s Russia appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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