Guest: Anne Lounsbery on Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 published by Cornell University Press.

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: 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.

Faculty Spotlight on the University of Pittsburgh’s historian of Russia and Central Asia–James Pickett.