The Eurasian Knot

Guest: Sara Brinegar on her book The Power and Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound, 1920-29 published by Bloomsbury.

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Guest: Xenia Cherkaev on her book Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice published by Cornell University Press.

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Guest: Andy Bruno on his new book Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy published by Cambridge University Press.

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Guest: Natasha Lance Rogoff on making Sesame Street in Russia in the turbulent 1990s.

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Guest: Paula Chan on the Extraordinary State Commission and its investigations in the Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union.

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Guest: Karl Schlogel on the lost world of Soviet civilization.

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Guest: Mariia Koskina on Siberian industrialization, the environment and the black skies over Krasnoyarsk.

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Guests: Tigran Grigoryan (The Regional Center for Democracy and Security) and Kelsey Rice (Berry College) revisiting the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

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Guest: Natalia Krylova on life, love, language, and the Soviet Avant Garde.

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Guest: Nicholas Bujalski on his prize-winning Russian Review article, ?Tuk, tuk, tuk!? A History of Russia?s Prison Knocking Language.?

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Guest: Brian Milakovsky with a grim update on Ukraine, the war, and the shrinking prospects of even a lousy peace.

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Guest: Christopher Read on Vladimir Lenin's legacy 100 years since his death.

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

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

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

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

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

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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. Irina is a local Ainu activist and is skeptical of such outsiders looking to exploit her heritage. Yet Roma and Irina instantly hit it off and formed a strong bond over their mutual love of the Ainu. Rusana Novikova brings us a story about the romanticism and self-discovery at the heart of Irina and Roma?s complicated friendship, and its potential promise for Ainu and Russian relations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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, a genocide in which the Soviets played no small part, has had catastrophic results on the world?s ocean environments. Ryan Tucker Jones tells us about the Soviet whaling industry, the lives of Soviet whalers, their attitudes toward their craft, and the lasting trauma of the hunt the ocean?s majestic creatures.

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

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

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

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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.

But I ended Part One of a Gift for Stalin on a different note: that the turd addressed to Stalin was no slight at all. It was, in fact, a gift.

A little brown present for Comrade Stalin.

The post A Gift for Stalin, Part Two: The Accursed Share appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin?s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.

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It?s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don?t know, who mails a letter. It?s addressed: ?Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.?

Now, there was nothing odd about people writing Stalin. They wrote to him a lot.
So, when Comrade Sentaretskaya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin?s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.

Just what was in this letter?

Find out March 31 when The Eurasian Knot debuts with A Gift to Stalin, two episodes about a letter mailed to the Soviet dictator and what it might have meant in the Soviet Union. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Teddy Goes to the USSR explored American tourism, KGB surveillance, consumerism, race, and daily life through Teddy Roe?s trip to the USSR. And many of Teddy?s observations were inevitably informed by the Cold War and American tropes. So, what to make of Teddy?s journey and what it says about Soviet life? In this final episode, TGU host Sean Guillory and historian Leah Goldman highlight key moments in the series to tease out the contradictions and reflect on America?s and the Soviet Union?s entangled relationship.

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American tourists expected few chances to meet Soviet people. You?d only see what Soviet officials wanted to show you. Touring the USSR, many assumed, was nothing more than a front row seat at a big show. And real Soviet life was hidden under layers upon layers of propaganda. So, if you wanted to see the truth of Soviet life?avoid officials and seek out ?regular people.? Teddy wanted to seek out ?regular? Soviet people. And he had a few chances to visit people?s homes. What did Teddy discover about ?regular Soviet life and people? as a result? And what did it say about the Soviet system as a lived experience?

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Teddy had few ?official? meetings in the USSR. A factory here. A collective farm there. Maybe a school or two. And there was one question Teddy?s hosts always asked: ?Why are you still lynching Blacks?? American racism was a global issue during the Cold War. And pointing to it was a strike at America?s Achilles heel. Soviet media devoted a lot of time to the Civil Rights Movement. And Teddy arrived in the USSR just when Martin Luther King was assassinated. So, just what was this Soviet concern for American Blacks? Was it merely a whataboutism, a way to deflect American criticism of Soviet life? Or was there something more to it?

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Like many Americans, Teddy judged the USSR through a consumer lens. What could Soviets buy? How much? And what was up with those long lines and shortages? Teddy wasn?t very impressed. Yet, the ?standard of living race? was a front in the Cold War like any other. And Soviet communism was losing. But things were never so simple. By the late 1960s, Soviet people were consuming more than ever. They were becoming consumers just like in the West. So, what was it like to shop in the USSR? And was buying stuff part of the Soviet dream?

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Teddy assumed the KGB would monitor his travels around the Soviet Union. In Kiev, Teddy discovers that someone went through his luggage. And half-century later he learns his suspicions were correct. The KGB wrote a report on him, complete with excerpts from his diary. What was in this report? What did the KGB hope to learn from Teddy? And what was this vast network for keeping tabs on tourists anyway?

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Teddy Roe took an extraordinary trip to the USSR in 1968. For three months, he travelled from one end of the USSR to the other. Most Americans at the time believed the USSR was their greatest enemy. Teddy was among tens of thousands who toured the Soviet Union. Why did Americans want to travel there? Why did the Soviets want them to come? What just what was the tourist experience like?

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Guests: Drs. Carmen Andreescu and Alex Dombrovski on their work on mental health in Ukraine though the Global Initiative on Psychiatry - USA.

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Guest: Christian Raffensperger on the place of Kyivan Rus' in the wider European medieval world.

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Guest: Sean Griffin on his prize winning article ?Revolution, Raskol, and Rock ?n? Roll: The 1,020th Anniversary of the Day of the Baptism of Rus? published in the Russian Review.

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Guests: Victoria Smolkina and Georgyi Kasianov on the complexities of memory, history, and politics in narrating Ukrainian history.

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Guest: Artemy Troitsky reflecting on his life in the Soviet and Russian rock scenes.

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Guests: Polly Jones and Zuzanna Bogumil on memory, politics, and trauma of Stalinism.

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REEES faculty profile on Zoltan Zelemen about his research on neo-medievalism in international relations, law, and democracy.

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