Episodes

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

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

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

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

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

Roma Shatrov is the founder of the Silent Cape Nature Park in Sakhalin. Irina Grudova is Ainu, the indigenous inhabitants of Sakhalin. Roma is obsessed with Ainu history and culture and has dedicated the Silent Cape to revitalizing their tradition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Soviet Union was a latecomer to the whaling industry. But after a bumbling start, by the 1960s, Soviet whalers were slaughtering over 20,000 whales a year. The decimation of the world’s whales in the 20th century,

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

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

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

It all started with a letter to Stalin in 1935. And when a Kremlin clerk opened it, there was a piece of shit inside. - Was the turd an insult? A way of saying to Stalin, “You’re a shit. Here’s some shit”? - Perhaps. -

It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know who mails a letter from the outskirts of Moscow. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.” It arrives a few days later. And when Comrade Sentaretskya,