Episodes

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 w...

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 legacie...

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 a...

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 ...

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....

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 Union Michael 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 b...

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 h...

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 disru...

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. ...

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. Wh...

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 t...

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 archive...

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 fasci...

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 area...

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. Joinin...

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,” a...

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 ch...

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, partic...

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

Guest: Benjamin Nathans on To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement published by Princeton University Press.

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

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

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

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