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Romanian Presidential Elections

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June 2, 2025

Romanian Presidential Elections

On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was the latest in a string of contests that stoked fears for European liberal dem...

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May 26, 2025

Remembering J. Arch Getty

Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship. Guest: J. Arch...

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May 19, 2025

Muslim Refugees in the Ottoman Empire

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russian perpetrated genocide. Others, like Chechens, Dagestanis, and others the v...

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May 12, 2025

Migration and Climate Change

Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to the World Bank, extreme weather, rising sea levels, violence, and resource ...

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May 5, 2025

Birobidzhan

Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there were also a people without a national territory. The lack of Jewish “homeland”...

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April 28, 2025

Cold War Pen Pals

During WWII, the Soviet Women’s Antifascist Committee started an experiment–a pen pal campaign with American women to promote the friendship between the United States and the USSR. The program began with fits and starts but e...

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April 21, 2025

Ukraine in the Global Food System

Did you know that Ukraine is the fourth largest corn exporter globally? This is not the beginning of a Soviet joke. . . Ukraine plays a crucial role on the world food market. About sixty percent of its exports are agricultura...

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April 14, 2025

Orthodoxy's Social Gospel

In his memoir of life as a parish Orthodox priest in the 19th century, I. S. Belliustin wrote that the clergy was “humiliated, oppressed, downtrodden, they themselves have already lost consciousness of their own significance....

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April 7, 2025

Kicking the Hydrocarbon Habit

One daunting challenge to addressing climate change is to kick our addiction to hydrocarbons. But this is easier said than done. Hydrocarbons remain the fuel of modernity. And a transition to renewable energy requires massive...

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March 31, 2025

Seizing the Donbas

In 2014, in the wake of the Maidan in Kyiv and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, small groups of Russian-backed militias began seizing towns in the Donbas. The militias quickly declared the creation of two independent republics,...

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March 24, 2025

Soviet Modernity

Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia an...

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March 17, 2025

Terror and Democracy in the Soviet Union

Wendy Goldman has researched and written about the Soviet Union for almost 40 years. And her topics have been wide ranging– women, feminism, revolution, labor, political violence, war and survival. But if there is one through...

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About the Hosts

Sean Guillory Profile Photo

Sean Guillory

Host and Producer

Sean Guillory is the founder and host of the Eurasian Knot. He's a historian of Russia/Soviet Union and a podcaster. But has since embraced the art of audio narrative. Sean works in the University of Pittsburgh's Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Center where he holds the undistinguished title of Digital Scholarship Curator. He's a Los Angeleno at heart and misses three things about the City of Angels: the Lakers, In-N-Out Burger, and the weather. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for reasons he's still trying to figure out.

Rusana Novikov Profile Photo

Rusana Novikov

Co-Host

Rusana Novikova is the co-host of The Eurasian Knot. She is currently completing her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley. She writes about the intersections of environmental change, colonial history, and land development in Siberia and the Russian Far East. She also experiments with sensory ethnography, using the power of film and sound to immerse audiences in the lived experiences of her interlocutors. Listen to Ainu Fever, her first audio documentary.