Trash in (post-)Communist Eastern Europe
Guests: Elana Resnick and Viktor Pal on waste, recycling, reuse, and race in (post-)Communist Eastern Europe.
Guests: Elana Resnick and Viktor Pal on waste, recycling, reuse, and race in (post-)Communist Eastern Europe.
Guests: Ilya Budraitskis, Svetlana Erpyleva, and Greg Yudin on Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition, and the prospects of political pluralism in Russian society.
Guest: Karl Qualls on Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-51 published by the University of Toronto Press.
Guests: Tracy McDonald and Marianna Szczygielska on zoos, non-humans, and Animal Studies in Eastern Europe and Russia
Guest: David France on his film Welcome To Chechnya.
Guests: Ilya Budraitskis, Svetlana Erpyleva, and Greg Yudin on Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition, and the prospects of political pluralism in Russian society.
Two short audio pieces from the Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia. “The Great Russian Trash Crisis” by Seth Farkas and “An Empty Pedestal: Ukraine after Leninopad” by Sabrina Beaver.
Guest: Mark Steinberg on the experience of the Russian Revolution.
Friends of the show Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev on the latest news from Russia.
For the past few weeks, protests for fair elections in upcoming municipal polls have become weekly in Moscow and St. Petersburg as thousands have defied authorities to attend unsanctioned rallies. The police crackdown has been particularly harsh in Moscow. Protests on July 27 and August 3 resulted in over 2000 detentions. Images of police in riot gear wrestling citizens to the ground and beating peaceful protesters were reminiscent of the mass protests against election fraud in 2011-2012.
Members of the Russian Socialist Movement, a small Marxist, anti-Stalinist organization active in the Russian left, have been participants in local electoral campaigns and in the protests. Two RSM activists, Valeria Kovelishina and Ilya Budraitskis talk about the Russian Socialist Movement, their electoral work, the protests for democracy in Russia and what they might mean for the future.
Guest: Julia Mickenberg on American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream published by the University of Chicago Press.
Guest: Olena Nikolayenko on Youth Movements and Elections in Eastern Europe published by Cambridge University Press.
I wrote an article with Rafael Khachaturian on the American Left for the Russian journal Социология власти (Sociology of Power). You can download it here.