Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchColleen M. Moore, "The Peasants' War: Russia's Home Front in the First World War and the End of the Autocracy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)
Episode 991
During the First World War, Russia relied on the mass mobilization of its peasant population. In the summer of 1914, approximately four million peasa…
7 months ago
Ann Komaromi, "Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Episode 235
Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomeno…
7 months, 1 week ago
Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)
Episode 988
When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderle…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Andrew Monaghan, "Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War" (Manchester UP, 2025)
Episode 989
A cutting-edge investigation of how Russia makes war.
Russian strategy in the twenty-first century has been described in terms of 'hybrid' warfare, a…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Mark Harrison, "Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Episode 240
The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secr…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
All You Need to Know about Russian Politics Today
Episode 986
Host Licia Cianetti talks to two Russian experts, Vladislav Gorin and Alexandra Prokopenko, about the state of Russian domestic politics today. As Ru…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)
Episode 221
In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordin…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Douglas Greene, "In Stalin's Shadow: Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials" (Resistance Books, 2025)
Episode 984
Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we’d…
8 months ago
Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Episode 227
Clare Griffin's book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) introduces the reader to the dynamic a…
8 months, 1 week ago
Bruce Berglund, "The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Power" (Triumph Books, 2026)
Episode 304
An eye-opening account of how Russia's leaders have used sports as a political tool to solidify their global power
"Victories in sport do more to cem…
8 months, 1 week ago