The Eurasian Knot
Detalls del Canal
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...
Episodis Recents
362 episodis
Remembering Alexander Rabinowitch
When I opened Facebook this morning, as I do every morning, I learned that Alexander Rabinowitch died at 91 years old. Rabinowitch was arguably one of...
Anastas Mikoyan
How Stalin personally ran the Soviet Union has rightly received much attention. Less discussed is the small group of men that served as his top lieute...
Soviet Holocaust Literature
It has long been assumed that there was no Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union. Official Soviet ideology lumped the 1.5 million Soviet Jews extermina...
The Russian Paradox
Many studies focus on how Russia doesn’t work and why. There’s a laundry list of reasons. Corruption. Autocracy. Imperialism. Exceptionalism. But, how...
Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR
I went through my Kurt Vonnegut phase in my late teens. I read Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, I think, Deadeye Dick, and of course, Slaughterhouse Five....
The Post-Soviet Human Condition
The Eurasian Knot hasn’t featured many philosophers. So, when Ukrainian political philosopher, Mikhail Minakov, came to the University of Pittsburgh t...
Bye, Bye Orban
On April 12, 2026, Hungarians overwhelmingly voted Peter Magyar into office ending the sixteen-year rule of Viktor Orban. It was a stunning victory th...
The Georgian August 1924 Uprising
In August 1924, a group of rebels organized by the anti-Bolshevik Committee for the Independence of Georgia and led by the Georgian Social Democratic...
The Edge of Sports
Spoiler alert. This episode has nothing to do with the Eurasian Knot’s usual fare. Dave Zirin was speaking at the University of Pittsburgh. Zirin is o...
Russian and American Internal Colonization
About eight years ago, I interviewed Steven Sabol about his book, The Touch of Civilization. It was the first book I was aware of that compared the US...
Everyday Politics in Russia
What do Russians really think? The question is old and elusive. It is also somewhat of a tell–to pose it is to suggest there’s a coherent answer, and...
Ukraine's Euromaidan
In the winter of 2013-14, protests erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine. Their goal was to oppose President Viktor Yanukovich’s rejection of the EU Association Ag...
KGB Same-Sex Honey Traps
One of the most salacious and storied methods of KGB spycraft during the Cold War was the honey trap. Agents would get an informant to seduce a target...
The Bolshevik Rank and File
In 1917, the Bolshevik Party had roughly 24,000 members. A decade later, it boasted about 1.2 million. Recruitment came in waves and so did the purges...
Stalin's Last Days
Joseph Stalin died today, March 5, seventy-three years ago. So, I thought it would be a good idea to dig out, re-edit and remaster, the interview I di...
Searching for Belief during the Soviet End Times
When societies are in crisis, people tend to seek alternative belief systems to give them comfort, explain a complex world, or fill a space left vacan...
Moscow's Hunt for Olympic Gold
As a Cold War kid, I remember the intense rivalry between the United States and USSR during the Olympics. Of course, we remember the US’ boycott in 19...
The Long History of American-Russian Relations
A quick scan of the hundreds of books on US-Russia relations gives the impression that the two countries only met in the 20th century. But relations g...
REEES Faculty Spotlight: Gregor Thum
The history of borders and nations in Eastern Europe is fraught. What we even call the region is a site of contestation. Is it “Eastern Europe,” “Cent...
Russia Starts Here
What is Russia? There’s no easy answer. Travelers, scholars, philosophers, and journalists have pondered the question for centuries. And though answer...
The Further Adventures of the Black Russian
A decade ago, Vladimir Alexandrov published an excellent biography, The Black Russian, about an unknown historical figure–Fredrick Bruce Thomas. Thoma...
The Great Reforms
Alexander II’s Great Reforms were sweeping. They freed over 22 million serfs, overhauled the judicial, university, and municipal systems, and loosened...
Post-Soviet Graffiti
I love street art. And I don’t care in what form. Beautifully crafted murals. Spraypainted gang tags. Scrawls on bathroom stalls. Even guerilla sticke...
The Stiliagi
A new youth subculture emerged in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s–the Stiliagi. Roughly translated as “the stylish,” these youths,...
Fraternization and Survival During WWII
Soviet ideology called for the emancipation of women. Soviet women would be active participants in public life, unburdened by the home, children, and...
The Art of War
About two years ago, I was brought on to a podcast project started by the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The initial pitch was...
How Peat Electrified the USSR
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 Sovie...
Murder Mystery in Moscow
I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audienc...
How Konigsberg Became Kaliningrad
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. Fo...
The Judeo-Bolshevik Myth
I’ve been thinking about the use of “they” in our political rhetoric. In some respects, this third-person plural pronoun is indicative of politics. Th...
Romani, Waste, and Race in Bulgaria
There’s a paradox at the center of Elana Resnick’s book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. EU policies of envir...
Rebel Russia
There are many stereotypes about Russia. But perhaps one of the strangest is that Russians prefer a strong hand, are politically passive, even apoliti...
Russians in San Francisco
After 1917, San Francisco’s small Russian community exploded with new arrivals. Over the next decade, thousands quit Soviet Russia, often via the Far...
Soviet Jokes Under Stalin
What power do jokes have in authoritarian societies? I’ve been thinking about this recently as Trump further consolidates power. Turn on any American...
Video Games of Eastern Europe
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 g...
The Deforestation of Eastern Ukraine
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...
From Great Fear to the Great Terror
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 mem...
Communists and NY's Hotel Workers Union
In 1912, a strike of 18,000 restaurant and hotel workers in New York City birthed the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, a union representi...
City Symphonies
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. T...
Russia's 1993 Constitutional Crisis
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 c...