The Eurasian Knot
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The Eurasian Knot
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 and informative interviews on Eurasia’s complex past, present, and future. New episodes drop weekly...
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Murder Mystery in Moscow
I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audienc...
How Konigsberg Became Kaliningrad
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. Fo...
The Judeo-Bolshevik Myth
I’ve been thinking about the use of “they” in our political rhetoric. In some respects, this third-person plural pronoun is indicative of politics. Th...
Romani, Waste, and Race in Bulgaria
There’s a paradox at the center of Elana Resnick’s book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. EU policies of envir...
Rebel Russia
There are many stereotypes about Russia. But perhaps one of the strangest is that Russians prefer a strong hand, are politically passive, even apoliti...
Russians in San Francisco
After 1917, San Francisco’s small Russian community exploded with new arrivals. Over the next decade, thousands quit Soviet Russia, often via the Far...
Soviet Jokes Under Stalin
What power do jokes have in authoritarian societies? I’ve been thinking about this recently as Trump further consolidates power. Turn on any American...
Video Games of Eastern Europe
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 g...
The Deforestation of Eastern Ukraine
This week we check-in with frequent EK guest Brian Milakovsky to learn about the destruction of forests in Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine...
From Great Fear to the Great Terror
As frequent listeners know, my advisor and friend Arch Getty passed away from cancer a few months ago. I was recently in Los Angeles to attend his mem...
Communists and NY's Hotel Workers Union
In 1912, a strike of 18,000 restaurant and hotel workers in New York City birthed the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, a union representi...
City Symphonies
What does it mean for the city to be a symphony? True, city symphonies are a silent film genre best represented by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. T...
Russia's 1993 Constitutional Crisis
In early October 1993, tanks pummeled the Russian Duma in central Moscow. It was a dark mirror of just two years prior when Boris Yeltsin definitely c...
Anthropology of Oil
Yale anthropologist Doug Rogers visited Pitt back in April. The Eurasian Knot couldn’t resist pulling him into the studio. Doug was one of the earlies...
Green Cities in the USSR and Brazil
What makes a happy city? That is, what makes a city livable and responsive to humans’ physical, emotional and cultural needs? Over the last century, c...
Abortion (Bio)politics in Russia
In the waning decades of the Soviet Union, abortion was the main form of birth control. For example, official statistics from the late 1970s report th...
Romanian Presidential Elections
On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was th...
Remembering J. Arch Getty
Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an intervi...
Muslim Refugees in the Ottoman Empire
Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russia...
Migration and Climate Change
Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to...
Birobidzhan
Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there wer...
Cold War Pen Pals
During WWII, the Soviet Women’s Antifascist Committee started an experiment–a pen pal campaign with American women to promote the friendship between t...
Ukraine in the Global Food System
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 o...
Orthodoxy's Social Gospel
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,...
Kicking the Hydrocarbon Habit
One daunting challenge to addressing climate change is to kick our addiction to hydrocarbons. But this is easier said than done. Hydrocarbons remain t...
Seizing the Donbas
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 Donba...
Soviet Modernity
Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Unio...
Terror and Democracy in the Soviet Union
Wendy Goldman has researched and written about the Soviet Union for almost 40 years. And her topics have been wide ranging– women, feminism, revolutio...
Withering Water in Central Asia and East Africa
Water is life. A cliché and undeniable reality. So, what happens when climate change imperils water access? This episode, the second in our Eurasian E...
Climate Change and Authoritarianism
Debates about climate change and what to do about it occur a perilous political climate. It’s a problem that requires international cooperation. But e...
Recording Georgians in WWI POW Camps
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...
Intellectual Roots of Neoliberalism
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...
Saving Seeds During the Siege of Leningrad
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...
Russian Antifa vs Neo-Nazis
Vladimir Kozlov’s new book Shramy (Scars) explores street battles between anti-fascists and neo-Nazi skinheads in Moscow during the late 2000s. Kozlov...
Romani Music and NGOs
Who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today? This is the question that drives Adriana Helbig’s investigation into the relationship bet...
Introducing: The Eurasian Climate Brief
The 2024 UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) ended in late November in Baku. Two weeks of intense climate negotiations unveiled deep divides—particul...
The Russia and China Brain Trusts
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-ta...
A Tale of Two Nationalisms
Nationalists are not born. They are made. But how? That journey is far trickier. Fabian Baumann’s award-winning book, Dynasty Divided: A Family Histor...
Adapting Master and Margarita
In 2020, Russian-American filmmaker Michael Lockshin and his co-writer, Roman Kantor, were offered an impossible task: to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov’s Mas...
Georgia in Crisis
Guest: Bryan Gigantino, co-host of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia, on the context and causes for the current political crisis in Georgia.