This week’s podcast is the fifth and final event for Nature’s Revenge: Ecology, Animals, and Waste in Eurasia, the Spring 2021 Speakers’ Series at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. If you want to hear the entire series, go to https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees/

Like elsewhere, there’s a growing environmental movement in Russia. Activists are not only concerned about the larger issues like climate change, but local ones—the preservation and development of ecologically sustainable urban and rural space, industrial waste and carbon pollution, and the human footprint on nature. And like other political movements in Russia, activists risk arrest, repression, and marginalization. To get a picture of environmental activism its focus, goals, tactics and strategies, I talked to Konstantin Fokin and Angelina Davydova.

Guests:

Angelina Davydova is an expert on international and Russian climate and environmental policies, civil society movements and media. She is a director of an St. Petersburg based NGO "Office of Environmental Information', based in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is also an environmental and climate journalist, and regularly contributes to Russian and international media. Davydova has served an observer with the UN climate negotiations (UNFCCC) since 2008, and is a member of Global Reference Group and World Future Council.

Konstantin Fokin is an entrepreneur, the CEO of the Russian National Business Angels Association, and a climate and environmental activist with Extinction Rebellion. Since 2016, he’s led or carried out more than 150 street actions, four hunger strikes, and has been arrested nineteen times that has resulted in seven jail sentences totally 81 days. 

Environmental Activism in Russia

Guest:

Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a specific focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture. His first book is It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia published by University of Wisconsin Press.

Limonov and the National Bolsheviks

Georgia recently held parliamentary elections. The ruling party Georgian Dream eked out a majority, adding to its over decade long rule. The elections, however, were not without controversy. The opposition has claimed vote rigging, its supporters hit the streets, and some Western governments have cried foul. Georgia now is in crisis.  What is the context for this political crisis? How does it relate to Georgia’s post-Soviet transformation, economic liberalism, and the current geopolitical conjecture? Is Georgia gravitating toward the EU or Russia? Or is trying to avoid Ukraine’s fate by maintaining a balance between both? To get some insight, the Eurasian Knot turned to Bryan Gigantino, the co-host of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia. He recently published an article, “In Georgia, a National Election Is a Geopolitical Struggle” (https://jacobin.com/2024/10/georgia-elections-geopolitics-gd-eu) in Jacobin that put these complex issues that are shaping Georgia’s social, political, and economic fate. 

Guest:
Bryan Gigantino is a historian and researcher focused on Georgia, the South Caucasus, and Eurasia in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. He is the co-creator of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia and his writing has appeared in Jacobin, LeftEast, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He is a lecturer at Georgian-American University in Tbilisi, Georgia and is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Georgia in Crisis

Claude Mckay, "If We Must Die."

Guest:

Joy Gleason Carew, Associate professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. She is author of Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise and most recently of “Black in the USSR: African Diasporan Pilgrims, Expatriates and Students in Russia, From the 1920s to the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century” in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Black Sojourners to the Soviet Union

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.

Video Games of Eastern Europe

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: https://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/publictn/acta/15/kotokin/kotokin.html. However, the piece is about the historian Robert J. Kerner, not Nicholas Raisanovsky.


Russians in San Francisco

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.

Rebel Russia

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.

Romani, Waste, and Race in Bulgaria

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.

How Konigsberg Became Kaliningrad

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.



Murder Mystery in Moscow

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.

How Peat Electrified the USSR

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

The Art of War

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.

Fraternization and Survival during WWII

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.



The Stiliagi

This podcast is a talk I gave titled “Russophobia in America: A Genealogy” at Kennan Institute on April 11, 2017. It’s been re-purposed here with the kind permission of the Kennan.

Russophobia in America: A Genealogy

Guest:

Nancy Kollmann is the William H. Bonsall Professor of History at Stanford University specializing in early modern Russia. She’s the author of several books including Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia; By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia; and Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547. Her most recent book is The Russian Empire, 1450-1801 published by Oxford University Press.

The Early Modern Russian Empire

Emily Channell-Justice is a postdoctoral fellow in the Havighurst Center for Russian and post-Soviet Studies at Miami University. Her research focuses on leftwing and student activism in Ukraine particularly during the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014. Her most recent article is “We’re Not Just Sandwiches”: Europe, Nation, and Feminist (Im)Possibilities on Ukraine’s Maidan” published in the Spring 2017 issue of Signs.

Feminists in the Maidan

Guest:

Maxim Trudolubov is a Senior Fellow at the Kennan Institute and the Editor-at-Large of Vedomosti, one of Russia’s most important dailies. He was the editorial page editor of Vedomosti between 2003 and 2015 and has been a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times since the fall of 2013. Maxim also writes The Russia File blog for the Kennan Institute. Maxim is the co-author of the Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine. His new book The Tragedy of Property: Private Life, Ownership and the Russian State will be out soon.

The Politics of Russia's Apartment Demolition

Guest:

Jessica Mason is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and Federal Policy Analyst at the National Partnership for Women & Families and Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and policy work address vulnerable social groups seeking greater legal protections and social recognition, particularly in relation to gender, sexuality, and national belonging in Russia and the United States. She’s the author of “Wake up, Russia! Political Activism and the Reanimation of Agency,” published in the October 2016 issue of Anthropology Today.

Russian LGBTQ and New Left Activism

Guest:

Seth Bernstein is an Assistant professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow where he specializes in the history of Soviet politics, culture and society. He’s the author of Raised Under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism published by Cornell University Press and the English translator of Alexander Vatlin’s Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Young Communists Under Stalin

Guest:

Ivan Kurilla is a Professor of History and International Relations at the European University at St. Petersburg. He specializes in the history of the US–Russian relations, especially during American antebellum and Civil War period. He’s the author of many articles and books. He’s the author of Zaokeanskie partnery: Amerika i Rossiya v 1830-1850-e gody (Partners across the Ocean: The United States and Russia, 1830s–1850s). His scholarship in English includes “Abolition of Serfdom in Russia and American Newspaper and Journal Opinion” in New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations, edited by Norman Saul and Russian/Soviet Studies in the United States, Amerikanistika in Russia: Mutual Representations in Academic Projects, edited with Victoria Zhuraleva and published by Lexington Books.

American History Through Russian Eyes

Guest:

Grace Kennan Warnecke has had a lifelong personal and professional association with Russia. She’s served on the boards of the National Advisory Council, Harriman Institute, at Columbia University, as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute. She served as country director for Winrock International in Kyiv, Ukraine, from 1999 to 2013. The former president of SOVUS Business Consultants, she was also the founder and project supervisor of the Volkhov International Small Business Incubator in Russia and executive vice president of the Alliance of American and Russian Women among many more initiatives and projects. She currently serves as Chairman of the Board of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

If that wasn’t enough Grace is also the daughter of George F. Kennan, perhaps the most influential American diplomat of the 20th century. Grace’s memoir, Daughter of the Cold War, will be published by Pittsburgh University Press in Spring 2018.

Daughter of the Cold War

Guest:

Michael Kofman is Research Scientist at CNA Corporation and Fellow at the Kennan Institute where he specializes in security and defense in Eurasia. He comments widely on Russian military affairs and foreign policy. He also blogs on the Russian military at his site Russian Military Analysis. You can also find a list of his many recent publications there as well.

You can listen to my previous interview with Michael Kofman on hybrid warfare here: http://seansrussiablog.org/2015/05/14/questioning-russias-hybrid-war-in-ukraine/

Assessing the Russian Military

Guest:

Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at UC Berkeley and the author of many influential works on Russian and Soviet history. His books include Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North and The Jewish Century. His most recent book is The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution published by Princeton University Press.

The Epic of the House of Government

Guest:

Claire Shaw is an Associate Professor of History at Warwick University specializing in the history of the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in the formation of Soviet identity and the history of marginal groups. She’s the author of Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 published by Cornell University Press.

Deaf in the Soviet Union

Guest:
Natalia Roudakova is a cultural anthropologist working in the field of political communication and comparative media studies, with a broad interest in moral philosophy and political and cultural theory. She has worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, University of California in San Diego, and is now a visiting scholar in the Media and Communication Department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She’s the author of Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia published by Cambridge University Press.

The Ethics of Soviet Journalism

Guest:

Eric Lee is a journalist, historian, and trade union and political activist in the US and UK. He’s the author of Saigon to Jerusalem: Conversations with Israel's Vietnam Veterans and Operation Basalt: The British Raid on Sark and Hitler's Commando Order. His most recent book is The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 published by Zed Books.

The Georgian Democratic Republic

Guest:

Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her article “Personal and Political: A Microhistory of the “Red Column” Collective Farm, 1935-36," was published 2016 in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies. She is currently working on a book examining daily life on the collective farms and the day-to-day relationships between collective farmers and local officials. Her new book Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution published by Routledge.

The Stalin Constitution

Guest:

Andy Willimott is Lecturer in Modern Russian & Soviet History at the University of Reading specializing in the social and cultural history of revolutionary Russia and the early Soviet state, with a particular interest in the formation and experience of radical ideology. He is the co-editor with Matthias Neumann of Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide. His new book is Living the Revolution: Urban Communes & Soviet Socialism, 1917-1931 published Oxford University Press and winner of the BASEES Alexander Nove Book Prize for 2018.

Early Soviet Urban Communes

Guest:

Michael Idov is an award winning journalist, novelist and screenwriter. From 2006 to 2012 he was a contributing editor at New York magazine where he won three National Magazine Awards for his journalism. From 2012 to 2014 he edited GQ Russia. He’s the author of Ground Up published in 2002. His new book is Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

A Memoir of Misadventures in Moscow

Guest:

Bryon MacWilliams is a journalist, essayist, poet and translator. His writings have appeared in publications big and small, including: The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, The Literary Review, and B O D Y. His book, The Girl in a Haystack, a true-life Holocaust story from Ukraine, is forthcoming in the fall of 2018 from Serving House Books. He is seeking a publisher for his translation of the memoirs of Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky. His memoir With Light Steam: A Personal Journey through the Russian Baths was published by Northern Illinois University Press.

The Banya is Everything

Guest:

Victoria Smolkin is an Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan University where she specializes in atheism and religion in the Soviet Union, religious politics and secularism, and the Soviet space program. She’s the author of A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism published by Princeton University Press.

Soviet Atheism

Me on the Dig Podcast.

Russia: the more your average American thinks about it, the less they seem to know. National security-state enthused liberals blame Putin and for creating what is an obviously-if-incomprehensibly made-in-America monster. Trump, in turn, cannot seem to contain his giddy enthusiasm for Putin's brand of hyper-masculine authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Russia, an actual country where roughly 144 million people live, has become mostly invisible to Americans—because it has been replaced by a caricature. Sean Guillory, the host of the SRB podcast and author of seansrussiablog.org, explains it all.

SRB on the Dig Podcast

Guest:

Elisabeth Schimpfossl is a Lecturer in Sociology and Policy as Aston University where specializes in the sociology of elites, power and social inequality and comparative media and journalism in post-communist Europe. She’s the author of Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie published by Oxford University Press.

Rich Russians

Guest:

Artemy Kalinovsky is a Senior Lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam where he specializes in the history of modern Russia, Central Asia and the Cold War. He’s the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan published by Harvard University Press. His most recent book is The Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan published by Cornell University Press.

Listen to my interview with Artemy on his book A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan:
https://newbooksnetwork.com/httpfiles-newbooksnetwork-comrussia016russiakalinovsky-mp3/

Decolonization and Development in Soviet Tajikistan

Guest:

Sarah Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Russia and Soviet Union history at the University of Maryland. She’s the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.

You can read a partial transcript of this interview here: https://seansrussiablog.org/2019/02/21/transcript-the-kazakh-famine/

The Kazakh Famine

Guest:

Paula Michaels is an Associate Professor of History at Monash University, Australia. Her work bridges the histories of Eastern and Western Europe, integrating the USSR into a pan-European and global narrative through the study of social and cultural history. She is the author of Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Soviet Central Asia published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and Lamaze: An International History published by Oxford University Press.

Partial Transcript: https://seansrussiablog.org/2019/03/18/transcript-the-soviet-origins-of-lamaze/

The Soviet Origins of Lamaze

This week’s episode is the first of seven events Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: The US and Russia, the Fall 2020 Speakers Series at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. If you want to see the entire schedule go to REEES’ website https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/crees

It was inspired by a letter Walt Whitman wrote in 1881 to his Russian translator of his poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Whitman wrote that, while the United States and Russia were “so distant, so unlike at first glance,” they nevertheless “so [resemble] each other” in their “historic and divine mission.” Whitman’s words would astonish many Americans and Russians today, since the living memory of relations between the two nations is one of conflict and animosity rather than concord and similitude. 

Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies seeks to examine US-Russian relations in the context of concurrent historical developments from their beginnings in the early 19th century. The goal is to provide a set of alternative narratives to the tendency to only view US-Russian relations through a Cold War lens. Hopefully these discussions will allow audiences to become more historically cognizant of the commonalities, just as much as the differences, between the two nations.

One commonality between the United States and Russia is both had systems of human bondage. Russia-serfdom. The United States-slavery. Though both systems differed in origins, practice, and logics, they were systems where human beings were property to be bought, sold, exploited and abused.

Also, in a twist of historical irony, serfdom was abolished in autocratic Russia in 1861, a mere four years before the abolition of slavery in the republican US. Both systems, however, were undone in radically different ways. In Russia, it was a "revolution from above," a long, but peaceful, legal process managed by Tsar. The US was torn apart by civil war, and enslaved people freed themselves by fleeing their owners for the Union army.

So, what to make of these two system of bondage shared by two unlikely states? How did it shape their future? And how did serfdom and chattel slavery fit within a wider international practice of human bondage? 

Guests:

Amanda Brickell Bellows is a Lecturer in History at The New School in New York City. A 2016 PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is the author of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination published by University of North Carolina Press.

Alessandro Stanziani is a Professor of Global History at EHESS in France and Research director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Current director of the Institute of Global Studies, PSL University, Paris. He’s the author of many books and articles including Labor in the Fringes of Empire: Voice, Exit and the Law and Bondage, Labor and Rights in Eurasia, 17th-20th Centuries published by Berghahm.

Russian Serfdom and American Slavery

Imperial expansion is as much about conquering nature as it is about subjugating people. The Russian state’s expansion to the edges of the Eurasian continent exemplifies the challenge of turning frozen and inhospitable land into livable space or converting lush landscapes into profit and prosperity. To get a better understanding of this process in some of the far reaches of Russia, I turned to two people Sharyl Corrado and Paul Josephson to talk about Sakhalin and the Arctic respectively and relationship between Russian imperial expansion and nature, and how environment was imagined and shaped in the process.



Guests:



Paul Josephson, the author of 13 books, is professor of history at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, and visiting, part-time professor at Tomsk State University.  A historian of big science and technology, he conducted archival research in Arctic regions while working on his monograph, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic.  His most recent book, with Polity Press, is called Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory.  He is working now on a global nuclear environmental history.



Sharyl Corrado is Associate Professor of History and History Program Director at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.  She has published articles on the environmental history and historical geography of the imperial Russian Far East in a variety of academic journals in English and Russian. She is also known within Russian Baptist circles for her research on Russian Baptist and Evangelical history, including a monograph published in Russian and an edited volume on East European Baptist History.  She is currently working on an annotated collection of letters written by a Red Cross sister serving in the Sakhalin Penal colony.

Conquering Nature in Sakhalin and the Arctic

To many, Russia, and the wider Eurasia, is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But it doesn’t have to be. The Eurasian Knot dispels the stereotypes and myths about the region with lively stories and informative interviews on Eurasia’s complex past, present, and future. New episodes drop weekly with an eclectic mix of topics from punk rock to Putin, and everything in-between. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app, grab your headphones, hit play, and tune in. Eurasia will never appear the same.

The Eurasian Knot

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