The Economic War

Guests: Ben Aris and Ilya Matveev on the Russian economy during wartime.

Mixed Marriages in the USSR

September 20, 2022

Guest: Adrienne Edgar on Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia published by Cornell University Press.

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Rebroadcast of my 2016 interview with the recently departed Anne Garrels, author of Putin’s Country: A Journey into the Real Russia.

Soviet Aid to West Africa

September 6, 2022

Guests: Alessandro Iandolo and Natalia Telepneva on Soviet engagement with West Africa during the Cold War.

Rebroadcast: The Life and Times of Mikhail Gorbachev

September 1, 2022

Guest: William Taubman on Gorbachev: His Life and Times.

Soviet WWII Mythologies

August 9, 2022

Guest: Jonathan Brunstedt on The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR published by Cambridge University Press.

Queer Spaces in Imperial St. Petersburg

August 2, 2022

Guest: Olga Petri on Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg published by Cornell University Press.

Clientelism in Soviet Abkhazia

July 26, 2022

Guest: Timothy Blauvelt on Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba published by Routledge.

Limonov and the National Bolsheviks

July 14, 2022

Guest: Fabrizio Fenghi on It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia published by University of Wisconsin Press.

Russian Orthodox Converts in Appalachia

July 6, 2022

Guest: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz on Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia published by Fordham University Press.

Ep 4: Teddy Talks about Race

June 28, 2022

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?