Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchNana Osei-Opare, "Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana's Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Episode 166
Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of …
5 months, 3 weeks ago
The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of Sholem Aleichem
Episode 1001
Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
The Jews in Poland-Lithuania and Russia: 1350 to the Present Day
Episode 999
For centuries, Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world. Until World War II, this area was home to over forty percent of world Jewr…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Timothy Manion, "Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War" (Helion, 2026)
Episode 998
Why did Operation Barbarossa fail? For more than eight decades, historians have offered one dominant answer: Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Un…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
Gudrun Persson, "Russian Military Thought: The Evolution of Strategy Since the Crimean War" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
Episode 997
The development of the Russian military's strategic thought is an understudied and thus misunderstood subject in the West. Strategy in Russia encompa…
6 months ago
Jonathan Sherry, "Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
Episode 996
Stalinism on Trial: Communism and Republican Justice in the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool University Press, 2025) is a history of Communism and anti-C…
6 months ago
Aaron Donaghy, "The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Episode 995
Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into…
6 months, 2 weeks ago
Jeremy Black, "The Short History of Russia: Returning to Another Country" (Amberley, 2026)
Episode 994
The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began a new episode in history and was surrounded by a miscellany of historical claims. The Short History of Russia: …
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Denys Gorbach, "The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
Episode 993
Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with…
7 months ago
Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Episode 992
Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how gr…
7 months ago