Episodes
June 2, 2025
Romanian Presidential Elections
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 dem...
May 26, 2025
Remembering J. Arch Getty
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...
May 19, 2025
Muslim Refugees in the Ottoman Empire
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 v...
May 12, 2025
Migration and Climate Change
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 ...
May 5, 2025
Birobidzhan
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”...
April 28, 2025
Cold War Pen Pals
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 e...
April 21, 2025
Ukraine in the Global Food System
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 agricultura...
April 14, 2025
Orthodoxy's Social Gospel
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....
April 7, 2025
Kicking the Hydrocarbon Habit
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...
March 31, 2025
Seizing the Donbas
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,...
March 24, 2025
Soviet Modernity
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 an...
March 17, 2025
Terror and Democracy in the Soviet Union
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 through...
March 10, 2025
Withering Water in Central Asia and East Africa
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 Wangu...
Feb. 17, 2025
Climate Change and Authoritarianism
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 agreement...
Feb. 10, 2025
Recording Georgians in WWI POW Camps
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 ...
Feb. 3, 2025
Intellectual Roots of Neoliberalism
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...
Jan. 27, 2025
Saving Seeds During the Siege of Leningrad
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 a...
Jan. 20, 2025
Russian Antifa vs Neo-Nazis
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 pu...
Jan. 13, 2025
Romani Music and NGOs
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 ....
Jan. 3, 2025
Introducing: The Eurasian Climate Brief
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 contentiou...
Dec. 23, 2024
The Russia and China Brain Trusts
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 ...
Dec. 16, 2024
A Tale of Two Nationalisms
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-cent...
Nov. 25, 2024
Adapting Master and Margarita
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 suc...
Nov. 18, 2024
Georgia in Crisis
Guest: Bryan Gigantino, co-host of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia, on the context and causes for the current political crisis in Georgia.