Soviet WWII Mythologies
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.
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.
Guest: Olga Petri on Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg published by Cornell University Press.
Guest: Timothy Blauvelt on Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba published by Routledge.
Guest: Fabrizio Fenghi on It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia published by University of Wisconsin Press.
Guest: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz on Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia published by Fordham University Press.
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?
Guest: Ilya Budraitskis on Russia’s war in Ukraine, fascism, and his essay collection, Dissidents among Dissidents. Ideology, politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia published by Verso.
Guest: Gulnaz Sharafutdinova on The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity published by Oxford University Press.
Guest: Brian Milakovsky on everyday life in the Donbas and the effort to evacuate civilians.
Episode One of the six-part audio series, Teddy Goes to the USSR.