In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union took in about nearly 3,000 child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. These kids, aged roughly from 5 to 12 years old, were placed in boarding schools in Leningrad, Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR. Their stay in this strange new land was supposed to be temporary. But fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of WWII made them exiles for the foreseeable future. Now responsible to their rearing and education, Soviet officials and their Spanish minders transformed these children into hybrid Hispano-Soviets. They were steeped in patriotism for their two homelands and taught to emulate Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. How did these Spanish children fare in the Soviet Union and live through the multiple traumas of their childhood? What did it mean to Hispano-Soviet? What was their fate and memory of growing up as a refugee? Here’s Karl Qualls with this little known story.

Guest:

Karl Qualls is the John B. Parsons Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Dickinson College. He’s the author of From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II. His new book is Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-51 published by the University of Toronto Press.


Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the USSR

This week’s podcast is a recording of an event Navalny and Next: Possibilities, Prognosis and Perceptions in Russia I hosted a few weeks ago. This event was sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Russia Matters, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. 

After a botched attempt to murder Alexei Navalny in August 2020, the Kremlin has decided to sentence him to over two years in prison upon the oppositionist’s return to Russia in January. Navalny responded with a bombshell video about the corruption around “Putin’s Palace.” Unsanctioned, mass protests in the two capitals and tens of provincial cities followed. The protesters were met with mass, indiscriminate arrests, and police violence. The political ante in this back-and-forth has certainly risen but to what end? 

Russia has experienced the ebbs and flows of protest on the federal and local level for years. And while each eruption quickly elicits a sense that Russia is at a turning point, more cautious and sober assessments follow in the weeks and months after. So, is what we’re now seeing something new or more of the same? What do the protests suggest about Russian society, politics, and the state of Putin’s power? Especially, as Russia will hold parliamentary elections in September.  

Guests:

Ilya Budraitskis is political and cultural writer. He currently teaches in the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences and the School of Design at the High School of Economics. Budraitskis is currently a member of the editorial board of Moscow Art Magazine and host of the Russian language podcast Political Diary. His book Dissidents among Dissidents was awarded the Andrey Belyi prize in 2017. His most recent book We All Live in the World Huntington Invented (2020) treats modern Russian conservatism. 

Svetlana Erpyleva is a sociologist, a researcher with Public Sociology Laboratory, Center for Independent Social Research in Russia, and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research is focused on protest movements and collective action, political involvement, political socialization, youth and children’s political participation and cognition in Russia and abroad. She’s written for a number of academic journals and Russian and international media. 

Greg Yudin is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. His research focuses on the political theory of democracy with the special emphasis on public opinion polls as a technology of representation and governance in contemporary politics. His book Public Opinion: The Power of Numbers was published in Russian by European University Press in 2020. He is a regular contributor to several Russian media outlets.


Navalny and Next

stating some obvious things about the Prison Industrial Complex, the Military Industrial Complex and the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex

stating the obvious PIC MIC PHIC

RedKahina Interview #002

recorded at ernies / dec. 19
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https://rarelust.com/the-collector-1965/#more-23582

heavy material

secret collection

Sideways Knowing Glance is the debut single from London based experimental pop duo the mermaid café, out on the 10th of July 2020.

The track emerged from improvisation and experimentation using voices with loop pedals; through collaborative development, it’s grown into a 10 minute dream-pop cloud of honeyed vocals, rich and complex textures, glitchy synthesis, and intricate, intimate storytelling.

Whilst the song has been in gestation for a long time, this release was predominantly recorded and mixed whilst in lockdown in Newcastle. Whilst remaining honest to the mermaid cafe’s roots in DIY and intuitive music making, this single represents a turn towards pristine post-production shimmer in their sound.

This release is the culmination of two years of the mermaid café performing, writing, and improvising together, developing their songwriting practice. the mermaid café represents exciting, fresh collaborative thinking, bringing together many layers of artistic influence: both Ruari and Joanna do work ranging across songwriting, experimental and contemporary classical composition, multi-instrumental and vocal performance, research, activism, and visual art. Joanna is currently studying Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and Ruari is working as a freelance musician and writer.

This track was mastered by Jeremy Warmsley, and the group has worked with graphic designer Emily Tonkinson-Sharp to develop the cover art and merch for this release.

All music & mixing by the mermaid café
Lyrics by Ruari Paterson-Achenbach
Master by Jeremy Warmsley
Artwork by Emily Tonkinson-Sharp

Sideways Knowing Glance

An improvisation made in my studio in April 2020 on the modular synth. It is largely based on ethnographic cylinder recordings from the Kodaly archive, made in April 1914. These small fragments are sampled with oscillators controlling the grain, loop size and time points of the samples. Pitch and envelope followers on the samples in turn control these oscillators and other physically modelled sounds. Yannis Kyriakides, Amsterdam, April 2020.

A Ghost Of Spring

Part II of a conversation with Guy Zimmerman

PODCAST #22

Cath & Phil Tyler play Anglo-American folk music using guitar, banjo, voice and fiddle. Coming together musically through a shared love of traditional narrative song, full voiced sacred harp singing and sparse mountain banjo, they have performed on stages as diverse as the Royal Opera House in London and a dank tower in the old city walls of Newcastle. 

For this release they've kindly shared with us 5 new works written & recorded in the heat of the summer 2020 lock-down, taking in traditional tunes, workers songs and laments crafted with words from the past and present. The stripped-back selection offers an intimate portrait of the duo alone at home in the North of England, singing ghostly tales that echo from their bedroom through the empty pubs, folk clubs and spaces where people come together to listen, meet, drink and dance. A selection that pulls at the heart strings and offers some much needed respite in these trying times.

TR075 - Cath & Phil Tyler - 'Old Churchyard'

A conversation with Cory Morningstar, Hiroyuki Hamada, and John Steppling

PODCAST #25

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.

RedKahina Interview #002

Spencer Latu