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The Eurasian Knot

The Eurasian Knot

To many, Russia, and the wider Eurasia, is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But it doesn’t have to be. The Eurasian Knot dispels the stereotypes and myths about the region with lively and informative interviews on Eurasia’s complex past, present, and future. New episodes drop weekly with an eclectic mix of topics from punk rock to Putin, and everything in-between. Subscribe on your favorite podcasts app, grab your headphones, hit play, and tune in. Eurasia will never appear the

history

All Episodes

50:17

How Peat Electrified the USSR

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/10/27

What is peat? We had no idea until the Eurasian Knot spoke to Katja Bruisch about how this coal-like soil was an energy source in Russia and the Soviet Union. Found in wetlands, peat is the extracted top soil that is dried and burned for fuel. It was a marginal, but important, energy source in industrialization. Peat was also used as a localized source to produce electricity for Lenin’s Electrification campaign. Because, as the old man put it, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of

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1:03:41

Murder Mystery in Moscow

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/10/20

I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audience. This was quite a change for me since I used to hold such work in contempt (or was it jealousy) when I was a snot-nosed, snobby grad student. So I jumped at the chance to interview Merridale and talk about the historical craft and its relationship to detective fiction in her first novel, Moscow Underground. As she explains, there’s some liberation in

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1:05:49

How Konigsberg Became Kaliningrad

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/10/13

The Prussian city of Konigsberg is well-known as the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. But in many ways it’s also a microcosm for the twentieth century. Founded in the 13th century by Teutonic knights, the city served as a key trading center for the Prussian Empire until the Polish corridor severed it from Germany after WWI. It is then that the history of Konigsberg takes an even more dramatic turn. Its “Germanness” became an object of debate and political exploitation. By the early 1930s, it had one of

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53:29

Romani, Waste, and Race in Bulgaria

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/09/29

There’s a paradox at the center of Elana Resnick’s book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. EU policies of environmental sustainability in Bulgaria require the racialization of Romani into a permanent low-skilled and impoverished workforce. Waste management required teams of Romani streetsweepers and trash collectors to sort trash into waste, recyclables and compost, and bring them for processing and reuse. This labor was historically filled by Bulgaria’s Romani

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53:35

Rebel Russia

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/09/22

There are many stereotypes about Russia. But perhaps one of the strangest is that Russians prefer a strong hand, are politically passive, even apolitical, and rebellion just isn’t in their DNA. This belief requires a hefty dose of historical amnesia. Many of Russia’s most memorable historical figures–Stenka Razin, Pugachev, the Decembrists, the People’s Will, Lenin, Sakharov, Alexei Navalny, to name a few, were rebels. Not to mention, Russia has experienced three revolutions over the last

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1:00:20

Russians in San Francisco

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/09/15

After 1917, San Francisco’s small Russian community exploded with new arrivals. Over the next decade, thousands quit Soviet Russia, often via the Far East or China, to escape revolution and civil war. Arrival in America, however, was only the beginning of new trials. In the 1920s and 1930s, American nativists saw Slavic people as low in the racial hierarchy–people who were visually white, but culturally not quite. The Russian community in San Francisco was faced with a contradictory choice: to

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52:26

Video Games of Eastern Europe

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/09/02

Games have a long history. Several are centuries old. But a new crop of games has emerged over the last century. Elaborate board games, role playing games, and of course, video games. Today, video games are one of the most consumed forms of media entertainment. They inspire communities, live-action role playing, movies and other media. All of these have fostered new identities and ethics. And Eastern Europe has played an outsized role in this culture. Enter Daniil Leiderman, the new Slavicist at the

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47:55

The Deforestation of Eastern Ukraine

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/08/26

This week we check-in with frequent EK guest Brian Milakovsky to learn about the destruction of forests in Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and its full-scale assault in 2022, war has destroyed much of the forests of the Seversky Donets Basin. These trees serve as a place of leisure, pride, identity, and economy for nearby residents. But Russian artillery, mines, and other ordnance have repeatedly ignited forest fires. The ecology of the region has been transformed, likely

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47:12

From Great Fear to the Great Terror

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/08/19

As frequent listeners know, my advisor and friend Arch Getty passed away from cancer a few months ago. I was recently in Los Angeles to attend his memorial. I got to catch up with fellow grad students and friends. One was James Harris, a close friend and collaborator with Arch. James is also one of the best Soviet historians around. After chatting with James, I was reminded that I interviewed him way back in 2016–about a year after I started the SRB Podcast. I decided to re-edit and release James’

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48:57

Communists and NY's Hotel Workers Union

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/08/12

In 1912, a strike of 18,000 restaurant and hotel workers in New York City birthed the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, a union representing tens of thousands of Manhattan’s service workers. The union still exists today as Local 6 of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO and remains one of the NYC strongest unions. But why is the Eurasian Knot featuring a story about an American trade union? Because the history of the American labor movement in the early 20th century cannot be

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53:24

City Symphonies

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/08/04

What does it mean for the city to be a symphony? True, city symphonies are a silent film genre best represented by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. These early silent films tried to capture the “sound” of the city by editing images symphonically–to give the viewer a sense of the urban soundscape. But, as Daniel Schwartz explains, early 20th century avant-garde artists broadened the city symphony beyond the “silent” and into a full-fledged multimedia experiment. Some, like Luigi Russolo, pushed the

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58:25

Russia's 1993 Constitutional Crisis

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/07/22

In early October 1993, tanks pummeled the Russian Duma in central Moscow. It was a dark mirror of just two years prior when Boris Yeltsin definitely climbed atop a tank and made history. Now, tanks were again Yeltsin’s historical instrument. Only this time, they were his. The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis was a turning point in the country’s post-Soviet transformation. The popular narrative was Russian Democrats repelling Russian nationalists and communists. The future vs. the past. And the

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49:25

Anthropology of Oil

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/07/08

Yale anthropologist Doug Rogers visited Pitt back in April. The Eurasian Knot couldn’t resist pulling him into the studio. Doug was one of the earliest guests on the show. So it was about time to reconnect and have a wide ranging conversation about his work on oil and corporations in Russia. Now he’s looking into experiments with hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria–germs that eat oil. We survey Doug’s career. The pull of anthropology and the nexus of oil, corporations, and civil society in Russia. And how

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1:09:28

Green Cities in the USSR and Brazil

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/07/01

What makes a happy city? That is, what makes a city livable and responsive to humans’ physical, emotional and cultural needs? Over the last century, city planners have turned to the maintenance of green spaces within urban jungles to address these issues. In this final event for Pitt REEES’ Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot paired Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho to discuss green cities from two different contexts. Taylor researches mid-20th century efforts to green Soviet

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1:13:16

Abortion (Bio)politics in Russia

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/06/16

In the waning decades of the Soviet Union, abortion was the main form of birth control. For example, official statistics from the late 1970s report that there were 250-270 abortions per 100 live births. It’s an astounding number. It points to a key paradox of state socialism and reproductive health: Abortion in the USSR was widely available, but mainly because the state couldn’t provide basic contraceptives.But the collapse of the Soviet system didn’t produce many remedies–Women now had access to

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55:30

Romanian Presidential Elections

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/06/02

On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was the latest in a string of contests that stoked fears for European liberal democracy, the rise of right-wing populism, and Russian meddling. Media inside and outside Romania leaned into the danger a Simion victory posed, and with Dan’s victory, how Romania can serve as the latest European democracy refusing to slide backward. But does this narrative

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1:02:59

Remembering J. Arch Getty

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/05/26

Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship.Guest:J. Arch Getty was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.Books discussed in this interview:Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938, Cambridge University PressThe Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction

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1:12:03

Muslim Refugees in the Ottoman Empire

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/05/19

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russian perpetrated genocide. Others, like Chechens, Dagestanis, and others the violence of Russian colonization. Obligated by faith to take these refugees, the Ottoman Empire scattered them throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, in many cases to balance against its Christian subjects. Most of these villages still exist today, including

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1:14:01

Migration and Climate Change

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/05/12

Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to the World Bank, extreme weather, rising sea levels, violence, and resource scarcity will drive 216 million people to seek refuge by 2050. There’s even a buzzword for it: “climigration.” How and why do people move? To what extent is “migration” a business? And how do we accept and integrate migrants into bodily politics rife with ideological

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1:02:02

Birobidzhan

The Eurasian Knot ·

2025/05/05

Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there were also a people without a national territory. The lack of Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Union posed a theoretical problem as well. As Stalin declared, “a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation.” How then can Jews be a nation without a territory? Well, you create one. Enter Birobidzhan–an bold experiment to create a Jewish

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