Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchCassio de Oliveira, "Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
Episode 277
Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Sovie…
2 years, 1 month ago
Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism" (Princeton UP, 2018)
Episode 80
The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism mean…
2 years, 1 month ago
Maria Taroutina and Allison Leigh, "Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Episode 276
Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740-1940 (Manchester UP, 2023) features new research on Russia's …
2 years, 1 month ago
Barbara Emerson, "The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century" (Hurst, 2024)
Episode 1467
Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into …
2 years, 1 month ago
David L. Hoffmann, "The Stalinist Era" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Episode 81
In his new book The Stalinist Era(Cambridge University Press, 2018), David L. Hoffmann focuses on the myriad ways in which Stalinist practices had th…
2 years, 1 month ago
Alexandra Popoff, "Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success" (Yale UP, 2024)
Episode 257
Ayn Rand is a provocative and polarizing figure. Strongly pro-capitalist and anti-communist, Rand was a dogmatic preacher of her moral philosophy. Ba…
2 years, 1 month ago
The Dragonbear in the Geopolitics of the 21st Century
Episode 225
What is the “dragonbear”? It is a metophor of an emerging strategic alliance between Russia and China. In this episdoe, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to ge…
2 years, 1 month ago
Petra Goedde, "The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Episode 539
Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in th…
2 years, 1 month ago
Elena Borisova, "Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life" (UCL Press, 2024)
Episode 37
Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration…
2 years, 1 month ago
Benjamin Nathans, "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Episode 275
A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR--and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's Russia.
B…
2 years, 1 month ago