There are many stereotypes about Russia. But perhaps one of the strangest is that Russians prefer a strong hand, are politically passive, even apolitical, and rebellion just isn’t in their DNA. This belief requires a hefty dose of historical amnesia. Many of Russia’s most memorable historical figures–Stenka Razin, Pugachev, the Decembrists, the People’s Will, Lenin, Sakharov, Alexei Navalny, to name a few, were rebels. Not to mention, Russia has experienced three revolutions over the last century–1905, 1917, and 1991. Rebellion, in fact, is an integral part of Russia’s history, and the rebel often leads the dance with the Tsar. What is rebellion? Who are these rebels? What makes them? And how do they shape the Russian political system? These are questions that resonate in Russia and beyond. So the Eurasian Knot invited Anna Arutunyan on the pod to discuss the figure of the rebel in her new book, Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny published by Polity.Guest:Anna Arutunyan is a Russian-American journalist, analyst, and author. She served as senior Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group before leaving Russia in 2022 and is the author of five books about the country, its politics, society and wars. Her new book is Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny published by Polity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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. Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What power do jokes have in authoritarian societies? I’ve been thinking about this recently as Trump further consolidates power. Turn on any American late night show and it’s one joke about Trump after another. It’s easy for comedians. The Trump jokes write themselves. Soviet Russia didn’t have late night, and openly poking fun at the authorities was highly circumscribed. This continues to a large extent in today’s Russia. But people still tell biting, insulting jokes in daily life. Laughing at power can’t be totally contained. But do they matter? What power do they have? In what ways are they criticism of the powers that be, a way to cope with the absurdity of everyday life, and or merely self-delusional exercises in political agency? All three? In 2018, the Eurasian Knot took on these questions about jokes in a conversation with Jon Waterlow about his book, Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. We decided to rerun the interview for what it can tell us about our present conjecture.Guest:Jon Waterlow received his PhD in History at Oxford. He’s the author of It's Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. Jon is also host of the podcast Voices in the Dark. Look for it on your favorite podcast feed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What does it mean for the city to be a symphony? True, city symphonies are a silent film genre best represented by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. These early silent films tried to capture the “sound” of the city by editing images symphonically–to give the viewer a sense of the urban soundscape. But, as Daniel Schwartz explains, early 20th century avant-garde artists broadened the city symphony beyond the “silent” and into a full-fledged multimedia experiment. Some, like Luigi Russolo, pushed the boundaries between music and noise by incorporating new technology into music performance. Others, like Arseny Avraamov, reimagined the city as a giant living orchestra where its inhabitants were both producers and consumers of sound. While others, like Vertov, valorized the city into the natural habitat of a New Soviet Person and their labor. But what did a city symphony sound like? Especially when its composers left so few written instructions for conductors to recreate them? How does the city symphony speak to modernity itself? Intrigued, the Eurasian Knot talked to Daniel Schwartz about his book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931 published by McGill University Press.Guest:Daniel Schwartz is an associate professor in Russian and German Cinemas at McGill University. He’s the author of City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931 published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Featured clips in order of appearance:Luigi Russolo, “Reesveyo di una cheetà,” 1913.Arseny Avraamov, “Symphony of Sirens,”1922.Walter Ruttmann, “Weekend,” 1930.Vziga Vertov, “Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas,” 1931. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What makes a happy city? That is, what makes a city livable and responsive to humans’ physical, emotional and cultural needs? Over the last century, city planners have turned to the maintenance of green spaces within urban jungles to address these issues. In this final event for Pitt REEES’ Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot paired Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho to discuss green cities from two different contexts. Taylor researches mid-20th century efforts to green Soviet cities in response to rapid urbanization. De Carvalho studies the relationship between urbanization and environment in the Brazilian Amazon. How did city planners in the USSR and Brazil use green spaces to make cities more livable? What obstacles did they encounter? And how do these disparate contexts help us understand the global problem that pits people, city, and ecology against each other? Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho give us a trough of mental cud to crew on.Guests:Maria C. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the history and theory of landscape, architecture, and urban planning, particularly in the Soviet Union. Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research interests embrace urbanization as a worldwide process and tries to understand how it unfolds at the local scale. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the waning decades of the Soviet Union, abortion was the main form of birth control. For example, official statistics from the late 1970s report that there were 250-270 abortions per 100 live births. It’s an astounding number. It points to a key paradox of state socialism and reproductive health: Abortion in the USSR was widely available, but mainly because the state couldn’t provide basic contraceptives. But the collapse of the Soviet system didn’t produce many remedies–Women now had access to contraception, but the economic ravages of the 1990s led many families to postpone childbearing. Abortion numbers remained high to begin lowering in the last two decades. How has the Russian government and civil society addressed abortion, contraception, family planning and women’s reproductive rights and health? What role has Western feminism and the debate over abortion played in Russia? And where do the increasing restrictions of abortion in Russia fit within the worldwide struggle for women’s reproductive freedom? The Eurasian Knot posed these questions and more to Michele Rivkin-Fish in this timely and crucial issue in her new book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics published by Vanderbilt University Press.Guest:Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research examines reproductive politics in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She’s the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Her most recent book is Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics is published by Vanderbilt University Press.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was the latest in a string of contests that stoked fears for European liberal democracy, the rise of right-wing populism, and Russian meddling. Media inside and outside Romania leaned into the danger a Simion victory posed, and with Dan’s victory, how Romania can serve as the latest European democracy refusing to slide backward. But does this narrative really capture Romania’s political atmosphere? What were Simion’s and Dan’s base of support? And does Simion’s defeat signal the death knell of the far right in Romania or merely a brief setback? And where does Viktor Orban and Donald Trump figure in all this? To get some clarity, the Eurasian Knot turned to Stefano Bottoni and Tamás Kiss for their insight and analysis of the Romanian political field before and after this consequential vote.Special Co-Host:Zsuzsánna Magdó is Associate Director at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies where she manages regional studies programs to support interdisciplinary scholarship and public education on the world regions of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Eurasia.Guests:Stefano Bottoni is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, and Performing Arts at the University of Florence. He is the author of several books. His most recent book, Orbán: A European Despot, is forthcoming in English and German.Tamás Kiss is Senior Researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. He is the author of several books on ethnic relations in Romania and Hungary. He’s the editor of Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights: Hungarians in Transylvania published by Palgrave.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship.Guest:J. Arch Getty was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Books discussed in this interview:Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938, Cambridge University PressThe Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press.Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's 'Iron Fist', Yale University Press.Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks and the Persistence of Tradition, Yale University Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there were also a people without a national territory. The lack of Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Union posed a theoretical problem as well. As Stalin declared, “a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation.” How then can Jews be a nation without a territory? Well, you create one. Enter Birobidzhan–an bold experiment to create a Jewish nation out of whole cloth in Siberia. But why in Siberia? Why did Jews settle there? What did they find? Birobidzhan was a failure by many measures. So what is its place in Jewish history? To get answers, the Eurasian Knot turned to Gennady Estraikh to talk about his short history of this unique chapter in Jewish history. Guest:Gennady Estraikh is an Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He has written and edited numerous books, including most recently Jews in the Soviet Union: After Stalin, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia and Yiddish Literature under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine published by Lexington Books.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
During WWII, the Soviet Women’s Antifascist Committee started an experiment–a pen pal campaign with American women to promote the friendship between the United States and the USSR. The program began with fits and starts but eventually gained traction. So much so it continued into the early Cold War even as relations between the two countries quickly soured. Authorities on both sides considered the contact between women fairly safe. American and Soviet women corresponded about the legacy of the war, marriage, family, career, as well as more Cold War topics. Some of these pen pals even lasted several years. What were these intimate exchanges like? What did Soviet and American women counsel each other on? And what did they learn about each other and themselves? The Eurasian Knot wanted to learn more about this fascinating moment in Soviet-American relations and its meaning within the larger Cold War. So, we turned to Alexis Peri to talk about her fascinating new book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.Guest:Alexis Peri is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. Her first book, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, won the Pushkin House Book Prize and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best books on the Soviet home front. Her new book is Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Did you know that Ukraine is the fourth largest corn exporter globally? This is not the beginning of a Soviet joke. . . Ukraine plays a crucial role on the world food market. About sixty percent of its exports are agricultural products with destinations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Ukraine also accounts for around one-sixth of the world wheat and barley markets and a staggering half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. But Ukrainian agribusiness is under stress. Soviet and post-Soviet legacies abound. Climate change and depleted soil pose long term obstacles. And Russia’s invasion has only increased the calamity thanks to destruction, theft, and environmental damage. How do things look at the moment? In the fourth event in our Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Susanne Wengle and Natalia Mamonova about Ukraine’s past and present place in the global food system, the impact of the war, and the prospects of renewal and recovery. Guests:Susanne Wengle is professor of Russian and Eurasian studies at Uppsala University and associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food published by the University of Wisconsin Press.Natalia Mamonova is a senior researcher at RURALIS - Institute for Rural and Regional Research, Norway. Her current research at RURALIS mainly focuses on the impact of the war in Ukraine on the Ukrainian and global food systems.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Alexander
Awkward
Sebastian Dingle
Excellent program
Alexander Kondrashev
good