The Eurasian Knot

The history of Chechens, or Nokhchi, is defined by war, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. Yet despite these repeated traumas, the Nokhchi have persisted, resisted and survived. But how? Chechens comprise such a relatively small population, almost 2 million today. This is the question Marat Iliyasov asked himself as he entered adulthood. Given this history of violence, and uncertain future, what has inspired Chechens to continue getting married and raising families? Marat set out to find answers, which eventually became a book, Reproducing Resistance: Chechen Demography in Times of War. Chechen survival, he argues, was the result of the collective identities born from their traumatic history. Knowing little about Chechnya, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Marat about his book, how he dealt with questions of marriage, family and sex, and Nokhchi identity in Chechnya and in the Chechen diaspora.

Guest:

Marat Iliyasov is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross. He’s the author of Reproducing Resistance: Chechen Demography in Times of War published by Bloomsbury.

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Maya, the heroine of Svetlana Satchkova’s The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, is an aspiring Russian filmmaker. And after fits and starts she finally gets a break when the producer Belov greenlights her project. Maya’s film is an art-house horror flick about a resurrected Lenin who seeks to take control of Moscow with an army of zombies at his back. Maya has no political intent with the movie. To her, it’s just a horror film. She’s also naive to what Russia has become. All art is politically infused. The artist’s intent is meaningless. Maya is eventually denounced to the authorities, who, in turn, see zombie Lenin as a political satire of Putin’s Russia. To her shock and distress, Maya’s life is quickly turned upside down. The plot of The Undeadunfortunately has a long tradition. Think of Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna or Milan Kundera's The Joke. It’s when ordinary, innocent people get sucked into the oppressive machine of the state. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Satchkova about The Undead, her English debut, and how Maya’s fate speaks not just to the realities of artists and art in Russia, but also, to art in other authoritarian states past and present. It’s a tale of shifting political sands, the meaning of collaboration, and how the system grinds up even the most unassuming people.

Guest:

Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist. She’s the author of three novels in Russian. Her latest novel is The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, her English-language debut, published by Melville House.

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World War II casts a long, dark shadow over eastern Europe. Especially in those nations caught between the Wehrmacht and Red Army. Some locals joined the Nazis, others served in the Red Army, and some others fought against both. Many more simply fled or hunkered down hoping just to survive. Regardless, the memory of the war doesn’t tolerate nuance. If you fought, you were either on the Nazi or Soviet side, even if the goal was to liberate yourself. Reality was much more complicated, says Harry Merritt in Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service. Both Soviet and Nazis created special Latvian regiments to fight for their side. Why? What did it mean to Latvian in the service of the occupiers? And how does the experience of these Latvian soldiers complicate the war, its meaning, and memory then and now? The Eurasian Knot hasn’t given the Baltics its due, so we jumped at the opportunity to talk to Harry Merritt to learn more about this complex and controversial aspect of war on the eastern front.

Guest:

Harry C. Merritt teaches in the Department of History at Rhode Island College. He’s the author of Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service published by Oxford University Press.

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An overlooked destination for thousands immigrating out of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union was Mexico. The reasons were many. Jews fled anti-semitic violence. Religious groups like the Molokans left because of persecution. Many more left in the wake of war, revolution, famine, and political repression. Regardless, Mexico was a viable alternative with the US borders closed to immigration in the interwar period. Collectively known as Los Rusos, these “Russians” built new lives, integrated into Mexican society, or eventually ended up in Los Angeles with the help of some dubious “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.” Who were the Los Rusos? What was their immigrant experience like? How did the weather during the years of anti-communist hysteria, spy mania, and xenophobia? And why has Mexico eluded our attention as a destination for refugees from the Russian empire? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Andrew Jenks about his new book, Los Rusos: The Russian Departure to Mexico and Southern California, 1900-1965, to learn more.

Guest:

Andrew Jenks is a professor of history at California State University Long Beach. He has published books on the history of space exploration, folk art, the environment, and migration. He’s the author of Los Rusos: The Russian Departure to Mexico and Southern California, 1900–1965 published by Cornell University Press.

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When did Putin decide to invade Ukraine? Was it shortly after 2012 when he returned as President? In 2014, after the seizure of Crimea and clashes in the Donbas? Or was it when Russian forces began massing at the Ukraine-Russia-Belarus borders for a full-scale assault? The answer to when, Michael Kimmage says, is important because that would tell us what drove Putin and what might be necessary to bring a diplomatic solution. The Ukraine War has been raging longer than WWI and WWII with no end in sight. And Kimmage argues that the global context and ramifications need analysis. The Ukraine War is the most documented war in history and we might not have all the information to answer “why?” for years, maybe decades. Kimmage recently gave a talk at the University of Michigan's Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies on the origins of the Ukraine War, and Rusana, the Eurasian Knot’s Midwest correspondent, sat down with him for a wide ranging interview.

In the interview, Rusana and Michael discussed the Kennan Institute’s project on the origins of the Ukraine war. You can watch the available videos here. Also, check out the Kennan’s Dispatchesfor reports from Ukraine.

Guest:

Michael Kimmage is the Director of Kennan Institute. He’s also a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. He publishes widely on international affairs and on U.S. policy toward Russia. His latest book is Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability published by Oxford University Press.

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The fact that the USSR executed its citizens with little jurisprudence is well known. The word “troika” is synonymous with Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. What is less known is that the Soviet Union’s death penalty regime changed significantly in the postwar period. After a brief moratorium adopted by Stalin(!) in 1947, Khrushchev revived capital punishment in 1954 as part of his war on crime. Homicide became a capital offense. The application of the death penalty became professionalized with lawyers, forensics, psychologists, and an appeals process. The narrative of appeals for clemency also changed. Whereas those from the prewar generation often cited a convict’s service to the Soviet state, supplicants after the 1960s portrayed themselves as abandoned by the welfare state. In Fate in My Hands, Yana Skorobogatov looked at about a hundred of these death penalty cases and clemency appeals from 1954-1991 to understand this new regime. What were the circumstances of the crimes and their adjudication? How did those on death row make their appeals? And how did the Soviet system correspond with the death penalty in, say, the United States? Knowing nothing about the Soviet death penalty, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Skorobogatov about her book, Fate in My Hand: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union, and what it means for the postwar USSR and for us as the death penalty once again appears on the political agenda.

Guest:

Yana Skorobogatov is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Assistant Professor of Russian and Soviet History in the Department of History at Columbia University. She’s the author of Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union published by the University of Chicago Press.

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We tend to think of the 1990s when it comes to Protestantism in Russia. It was then that evangelicals descended on Russia to shine Jesus’ light into the post-Soviet void. Yet, the Soviet Union, despite its best efforts, was a multiconfessional state. And though officially atheist, religious belief persisted, including among the Union’s small pockets of Protestants. Like with other faiths, the state’s relations with Protestants vacillated between repression, accommodation, and control. As Miriam Dobson says in her new book, The Unorthodox, things shifted after Stalin’s death. By the 1960s, regulating religious life fell under the purview of the Council of Religious Affairs. Sure, the state still emphasized atheism, closed churches, and prosecuted Protestants. But its methods were more surgical and the Council relied more on policing the margins over mass repression. So what was life like for the USSR’s Protestant minority? How did they practice their faith and maintain community despite pressures of family, society, and the state? And how did all of this connect to the larger Cold War context where the USSR’s archenemy was a Protestant majority country? The Eurasian Knot talked to Miriam about The Unorthodoxto learn more about Protestant faith and community during the Cold War. 

Guest:

Miriam Dobson is a Reader in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin and The Unorthodox: Soviet Protestants in Cold-War Ukraine and Russiapublished by Cornell University Press.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Olga immigrated to the United States from Moscow, Russia in 1990 as a child. She’s a high school teacher and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Yelena immigrated to the United States in 1979 as part of the wave of Soviet Jewish emigration. She’s a retired engineer and lives in Reading, Pennsylvania.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Julia Alekseyeva immigrated to United States from Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1992. She’s Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s the author of Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution and Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s and Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States published by NYU Press.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

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.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

David Roediger is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs published by Basic Books.

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Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Tara Zahra is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. She’s the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World published by W. W. Norton & Company.

Thresholds was edited and produced by Jojo Ellis and Sean Guillory.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Theme song: "Immigration Rose" by James Doherty, 1924.

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The Georgian Democratic Republic lasted a mere three years, from 1918-1921. And though it was viewed as an oddity at the time, many European social democrats marveled at its possibilities. Here was a state committed to social democracy in a mostly backward peasant and multiethnic country. What promises did it hold for the future? Unfortunately, the world never learned because the Bolsheviks crushed it in 1921 and proceeded to sovietize Georgia. The republic was denounced as counter revolutionary and its memory faded as its founders died in exile. So what was this brief experiment in social democracy in the south Caucasus? What were its political positions and aspirations? What does it say about the history of the Russian Revolution? How and why did it fall after only three years? Stephen Jones has been researching these questions for over 40 years, and that has culminated in his opus The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918-1921.The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jones about his highly anticipated book to learn more about this historical “oddity” and how it might speak to us today.

Guest:

Stephen Jones is Professor of Georgian Modern History at Ilia State University in Georgia. His books include Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917 and Georgia: A Political History Since Independence. His latest book is The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918-1921 published by Harvard University Press.

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Everyone has an opinion about the late Russian historian Richard Pipes. Some loved him. Many hated him. He was a conservative and anti-communist. A hardliner on American policy toward the Soviet Union. Some would even say he was a Russophobe and cultural essentialist. But Pipes was a far more complicated figure. A Polish Jew whose family fled before the Nazis arrived, Pipes possessed a strong moral center that stood at the heart of his rejection of the USSR. He eventually applied his vision to his work as a Russian historian at Harvard. Pipes was also at the ground floor of a new academic discipline. He studied under Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies in the US, and was part of a grad cohort that included Russian history Brahmins Leopold Haimson, Marc Raeff, Martian Malia, and Nicholas Raisonovsky. All these men would staff history departments at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia, and train a generation of scholars. Pipes knew his stuff, and eventually applied his knowledge in public debate and advice to the Reagan Administration. Pipes was a man of the 20th century, and in my opinion, one of the last serious intellectual conservatives. So who was he? How did he “know” Russia? And in what ways does his historical analysis of Russia, which spanned centuries, echo today? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jonathan Daly, a former Pipes student, about his new biography of Pipes, The Man Who Knew Russia, and what drove this self-identified perennial outsider. 

Also, check out my article “Richard Pipes, the Historian as Essentialist” published in Jacobinin 2018.

Guest:

Jonathan Daly teaches Russian, European, and world history at the University of Illinois Chicago. He’s the author of several books, most recently he edited Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff and wrote The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior published by Stanford University Press.

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Marc Bennets has been reporting from Russia for over two decades. He’s covered Putin’s rise and consolidation of power, assassinations of oppositionists, mass protests, daily life, and even Russian football. It’s a storied career filled with zipping back and forth between Moscow and its regions. Marc also planted roots. He got married and became a dad. But then everything changed in February 2022 with Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. Should he stay and keep reporting and risk arrest or worse? Or should he pick up his life and family and leave like so many of his colleagues? Marc finally settled on the latter when word came he might be arrested. Now he focuses most of his reporting on the war and Ukraine. How did this all happen? How did Russia descend into madness? Marc’s new book looks to answer that question with personal fire and passion. Is Russia really saturated with Putin? Is there any way back? It’s been a decade since the Eurasian Knot spoke with Marc. So, we caught up and discussed his new book, The Descent: Witnessing Russia's Spiral Into Madness Under Putin,and how the war has irrevocably changed his life, profession, and Russia itself.

Guest:

Marc Bennetts spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent for The Times and The Sunday Times in Russia. He left in May 2022, after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has since made over a dozen reporting trips to Ukraine. He’s the author of The Descent: Witnessing Russia's Spiral Into Madness Under Putin published by Bloomsbury.

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On the night of 27 February 2015, assassins gunned down Boris Nemtsov as he crossed the Bolshoi Moskvoretskii Bridge. Shock quickly spread throughout Russia, particularly among its political opposition. Not because Nemtsov was so brazenly gunned down. Such are the risks of being politically active in Putin’s Russia. Nemtsov had been a fixture in the movement since its earliest days, and in many ways one of its founders. That such an internationally well-connected figure could be wiped out in central Moscow signaled a grim turning point. Hindsight has proven this correct. A decade later, Russia is a very different place. But it always wasn’t like that. In the 1990s, Nemtsov was a young liberal darling, the charismatic hope to succeed Boris Yeltsin. That didn’t happen, as we all know. And another, totally different figure became President. As Mikhail Fishman writes in his political biography, The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia, Nemtsov’s life and death had a profound influence on the political consciousness of his generation and nascent Russian liberalism. Who was Boris Nemtsov? How did he rise so quickly to political prominence in the 1990s only to be politically marginalized in the 2000s? Why was he murdered and who murdered him? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Fishman about Nemtsov, his life, and how it reflected Russia’s post-Soviet political development.

Guest:

Mikhail Fishman is one of Russia’s leading independent journalists, liberal thinkers, and political commentators. He’s the author of The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia published by Penguin.

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I met the graphic artist, Victoria Lomasko, about 10 years ago when she was a resident at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. I emceed an event with her back then. So I was happy when Victoria recently returned to the city to give a few talks at the University of Pittsburgh. Of course, the Eurasian Knotdragged her into a studio for an interview. A lot has changed for Victoria over the decade. Her graphic novel, Other Russias, represented the marginals of Russian society, and she won a Pushkin prize for the work. She got invited to speak, to show her art, and teach. She then went to Belarus to chronicle the mass protests. More art. More shows. But then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The invites dried up as everything Russia became toxic. And political art forced her into exile in Germany. These experiences have caused her to question the efficacy of political art, and even her graphic style. Today, she’s embraced symbolic art that speaks to her political disillusion and difficulty in representing our current conjecture. Where does Lomasko stand today when it comes to art and politics? Tune in and find out.   

Guest

Victoria Lomasko is a graphic artist and has lectured and written widely on graphic reportage. She lived in Moscow until March 2022 and now lives in exile. She is the author of Other Russias which received the Pushkin House Best Book in Translation award. Her latest book is The Last Soviet Artist published by N+1 Books

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When I opened Facebook this morning, as I do every morning, I learned that Alexander Rabinowitch died at 91 years old. Rabinowitch was arguably one of the most important historians of the Russian Revolution. It's hard to state how much Rabinowitch's work influence our understanding of 1917. Before him, it was assumed that the Bolsheviks were a highly disciplined, unpopular political party that came to power through a coup. What Rabinowitch repeatedly showed in his four books on Revolution, the Bolsheviks had popular support, most importantly in factories in Petrograd and in other large cities and at the front. Lenin's slogans, particularly, "Peace, Land, Bread!" had mass support, and by October 1917, successfully rode a wave of revolution into power.

And now that Alexander Rabinowitch has left us, I figured I’d dig out my old interview with him from 2017, clean it up, and re-release it to commemorate the life and work of this scholarly giant.

Guest:

Alexander Rabinowitch was a Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, where he taught from 1968 until 1999. He’s the author of four books on the Russian Revolution: Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising; The Bolsheviks Come To Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd; The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd; and finally his fourth and last book which was just published in April, The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919 published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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How Stalin personally ran the Soviet Union has rightly received much attention. Less discussed is the small group of men that served as his top lieutenants. They  carried out his orders, and after his death, were instrumental in establishing the post-Stalin order. This week, the Eurasian Knot features a discussion with Pietro Shakarian about his new book Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev's Kremlin. We mostly know Mikoyan as a statesman and political survivor who successfully navigated Stalin’s Kremlin. But who was Anastas Mikoyan beyond that? What did he believe? What was his role as Stalin’s henchman? How did he push for de-Stalinization after the leader’s death in 1953, particularly on Soviet nationality policy. Shakarian tells us that in the end, Mikoyan was more than a survivor. He was a critical player in shaping the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.   

Guest:

Pietro A. Shakarian is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and a lecturer at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan. He’s the author of Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev's Kremlin published by Indiana University Press.

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It has long been assumed that there was no Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union. Official Soviet ideology lumped the 1.5 million Soviet Jews exterminated by the Nazis into the 26 million Soviet war deaths. So, the little Holocaust memory that existed was hidden away in families and communities. Recent scholarship, however, has painted a more complicated picture. Yes, official Holocaust memory was circumscribed. And, true, many privately commemorated its memory. But, as a new collection of Soviet Holocaust fiction, translated by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, shows that there was published Holocaust literature in the Soviet Union. Especially in the Yiddish language journal, Sovetish Heymland. How did Soviet authors treat the Holocaust? How did it differ from work elsewhere? And what are some of the challenges translating these works into English? To find out more, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Sasha and Harriet about their recent collection, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, published by Stanford University Press.

Guests:

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made. 

Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent book is As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine.

They are the translators of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, published by Stanford University Press.

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Many studies focus on how Russia doesn’t work and why. There’s a laundry list of reasons. Corruption. Autocracy. Imperialism. Exceptionalism. But, how, then, does Russia work? Because there are people, a state, and society. What greases the wheels? Alena Ledeneva has made this question the focus of her career. For her, it’s the informal networks and practices that allow the system, with all its deficiencies, to function. Her new book, Russian Pendulum, is a synthesis of her three books on informality. But instead of focusing on post-Soviet Russia, she examines the long duree of informality through the concept of paradox. For example, the Soviet paradox, “Shops are empty, but fridges are full.” Ledeneva says that this paradox contains a hidden informal relation that ameliorates shortage. She also takes a novel approach to this subject using sculpture and music to represent the paradoxes and practices of Russian everyday life. We at the Eurasian Knot wanted to know more. So we put the question to Ledeneva–How does Russia work? And what does that say about Russia’s historical development over the last few centuries?  

Russian Pendulum has a soundtrack: “The System Made Me Do It,” available on Spotify and elsewhere.

Guest:

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the University College London and a founder of the Global Informality Project. She’s the author of the trilogy: Russia's Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), Can Russia Modernize? (2013), Her new book isThe Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns published by UCL Press.

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I went through my Kurt Vonnegut phase in my late teens. I read Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, I think, Deadeye Dick, and of course, Slaughterhouse Five. I can’t say I remember much from those novels. Nor can I recall why Vonnegut connected with me. Perhaps now is a good time to revisit them. Little did I know that Vonnegut had a large readership in the Soviet Union. His books were translated by Rita Rait-Kovaleva and published in hundreds of thousands of copies. And in late Soviet fashion they were also passed around by hand to those who couldn’t secure copies. What did Soviet readers see in Kurt Vonnegut? How did the authorities regard this so-called “Anti-American American”? And what did Vonnegut think about his Soviet fans? Sarah Phillips wondered too after she participated in a project on Vonnegut. The result is her book, Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR. Sarah reached out to us, so we booked an interview. It turns out that Vonnegut has transcultural appeal. There’s even a revival in Ukraine. But what does Vonnegut’s popularity among Soviet youth say about really existing state socialism? Tune in to find out.

Guest:

Sarah Phillips is professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Bloomington. She’s the author of Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine and Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine, both published by Indiana University Press. Her new book is Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR published by Bloomsbury.

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The Eurasian Knot hasn’t featured many philosophers. So, when Ukrainian political philosopher, Mikhail Minakov, came to the University of Pittsburgh to give a talk, I eagerly pulled him into a studio. The result was a wide-ranging conversation on the collapse of communism, the post-Soviet human, Kantian philosophy, our current global political conjecture, and the crisis of liberalism. What is a post-Soviet human and how does s/he differ from their Soviet counterpart? What are the seeds and expressions of our political discontent? And to what extent does liberalism need a revival to meet the political creativity of the global illiberal right? Minakov has some fascinating insights. He gave me so much to chew on. I have no doubt you will too after listening to this conversation.

Guest:

Mikhail Minakov is a political philosopher residing in Kyiv and Milan. His primary philosophical inquiries focus on human experience, social knowledge, political systems, historical consciousness, and multiple modernities. His most recent book is The Post-Soviet Human: Philosophical Reflections on Social History after the End of Communism published by ibidem Press.

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On April 12, 2026, Hungarians overwhelmingly voted Peter Magyar into office ending the sixteen-year rule of Viktor Orban. It was a stunning victory that sent voters into the streets to celebrate. Now, observers are looking to see whether Magyar will roll back Orban’s illiberal system and even prosecute Orban and his clients for corruption. Commentators will also watch now how the strongman’s defeat will reverberate in the region and what it might mean for rightwing authoritarianism throughout the world. What led to Orban’s rise and fall? Was his regime an anomaly or consistent with Hungarian political history? And who is Peter Magyar? What does he stand for? And does he have enough political will and capital to set Hungary’s ailing economy and scarred democracy right? The Eurasian Knot turned to Stefano Bottoni to make sense of what Hungary’s past and future might foretell. Is the fall of Orban akin to regime change as Bottoni suggests? Tune in and find out.

Guest: 

Stefano Bottoni is Associate Professor at the University of Florence. He is the author of several books. He’s the author of The Orbán Enigma forthcoming from Hurst Publishers.

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In August 1924, a group of rebels organized by the anti-Bolshevik Committee for the Independence of Georgia and led by the Georgian Social Democratic Party, rose up against Soviet forces in the mining town of Chiatura. The Bolshevik reaction was swift and harsh. The fear of another "Kronstadt” still haunted the Bolsheviks, especially since their control over Georgia was tenuous. The uprising failed. Thousands were killed. Its ringleaders either fled into exile or were executed by the Georgian Cheka, then led by Levrenti Beria. The uprising was the culmination of Georgian opposition to Bolshevik rule after the fall of the Menshevik-led Republic in 1921. This small but significant story about Georgian resistance and a social-democratic alternative to Bolshevism has remained in obscurity. That is, until Eric Lee came along. Eric is a passionate partisan for Georgia. Not just for the place and its people. But for the promise that early Republic and its Menshevik leaders represented for the history of social democracy. What were the roots of this uprising? What was Bolshevik rule in Georgia? And how does the Social Democratic Republic and the August Uprising fit into today’s memory politics in Georgia? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Lee to get a fuller story behind this almost forgotten moment in the history of Georgian resistance to Russian rule.

Guest:

Eric Lee is an author, journalist and historian. He’s the author of several books. The most recent is The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism published by McFarland Publishers.

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Spoiler alert. This episode has nothing to do with the Eurasian Knot’s usual fare. Dave Zirin was speaking at the University of Pittsburgh. Zirin is one of the few sports journalists on the political left. I’ve been a long-time fan. I’m also a sports fan, especially basketball. So, when I was offered an interview, I grabbed my digital recorder. And Dave, though exhausted, was gracious enough to talk. The result is a wide ranging discussion of key issues in the sports world–politics, labor, race, gambling, transgender athletes, this summer’s World Cup in the shadow of Trump’s ICE, and Dave’s forthcoming biography of Howard Zinn. Give it a listen even if you aren’t into sports. As Dave emphasizes, sports cannot be separated from the political, social, and economic issues of our times. 

Guest:

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation, the author of eleven books on the politics of sports and host of The Edge of Sports podcast. His most recent book is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World published by New Press. His next book, The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, will be published in August 2026.

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What do Russians reallythink? 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 Navalnypublished 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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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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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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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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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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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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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, 1913–1931published 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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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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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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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, theEurasian 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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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 Biopoliticspublished 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 ofWomen’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 Biopoliticsis published by Vanderbilt University Press.

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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, theEurasian 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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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:

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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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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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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 territoryis 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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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 Knotwanted 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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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 halfof 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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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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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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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 Ukraineto 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 Ukrainepublished by Oxford University Press.

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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:

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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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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.

Listen to more tracks from Die Blutleuchte's RUS.

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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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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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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 ofRed Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War published by Routledge.

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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 isThe Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice published by Simon and Shuster.

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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 Shramyhere.

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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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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:

Reports cited in the episode:

Jingle: Natallia Kunitskaya alias Mustelide

Sound editing & mixing: Angelo Tripkovsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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