Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine
Guests: Valerie Kivelson and Christine Worobec on witches, magic, spells in their new sourcebook Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 published by Cornell University Press.
Guests: Valerie Kivelson and Christine Worobec on witches, magic, spells in their new sourcebook Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900 published by Cornell University Press.
Guests: Paul Josephson and Sharyl Corrado on conquering nature, settlement, and Russian expansion in the Arctic and Sakhalin.
Guest: Ronald Suny on Stalin: Passage to Revolution published by Princeton University Press.
Guests: Maya Peterson and Christopher Ward on water and the environment in the Soviet Union.
Guest: Eric Lee on Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler’s Revenge – April-May 1945 published by Greenhill Books.
Guest: James Heinzen on “underground entrepreneurs” and black markets in the Soviet 1950s to the 1980s.
Around Moscow, there’s a whole industry of so-called “black creditors” — microfinance institutions (or MFOs) that swindle and seize debtors’ homes. Ivan Golunov’s investigation for Meduza has discovered that almost 500 apartments have been seized from their owners over the past five years without so much as a court order. In fact, this scheme involves more than simply “squeezing” people from their homes. It is possibly part of a wider, international money-laundering system. Here’s Meduza special correspondent Ivan Golunov on the ins and outs of this industry.
Guests: Mark Galeotti, Kevin Rothrock, and Maxim Trudolyubov on making sense of Russia.
Guest: Mark Galeotti on The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia published by Yale University Press.
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Guest: James Heinzen on The Art of the Bribe: Corruption under Stalin, 1943-1953.
Guest: Johan Engvall on The State as Investment Market: Kyrgyzstan in Comparative Perspective.
Guest: Erika Monahan on The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Russia.
Guest: Anne Garrels on Putin’s Country: A Journey into the Real Russia.
I was on Brian Whitmore’s Power Vertical podcast this week. In thinking over some of my comments, I realized that I was basically giving the
I wrote an article for OpenDemocracy on microloans and debt collector violence. I’ve been mulling the article since January when I read a gruesome story about