Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchDiana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
Episode 1022
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Diana Cucuz about her book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (…
2 months, 1 week ago
Molly Crabapple, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund" (Random House, 2026)
Episode 1020
Molly Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Count…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Dmytro Soloviov, "Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine" (Fuel, 2025)
Episode 1019
Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, the…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Andy Byford, "Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Episode 1018
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, …
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Kirill Shamiev, "Imperfect Equilibrium: Civil-Military Relations in Russian Defense Policymaking" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Episode 1017
Why has Russia's military struggled to adapt to the challenges of contemporary warfare? Despite years of attempts to improve its military capabilitie…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Jonathan Daly, "The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Episode 1016
He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will fo…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Alena Ledeneva, "Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns" (UCL Press, 2026)
Episode 1015
Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the University College London and a founder of the Global Informality Project. Her research…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
David Leupold, "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives" (Routledge, 2026)
Episode 1014
What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the qu…
3 months ago
Ida Kinalska-Pietruska and Isabella Skrypczak, "A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile" (Disruption Books, 2026)
Episode 1013
A memoir of a child’s forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin’s Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face of extraor…
3 months ago
Yiddish Ethnography and An-ski
Episode 1012
Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer wh…
3 months, 3 weeks ago