Making the Soviet Jew
Guest: Sasha Senderovich on How the Soviet Jew Was Made published by Harvard University Press.
December 1, 2023
Publishers
Defection and the Cold War
Guest: Erik Scott on defection, the Cold War, and the regulation of borders and movement in a globalizing world.
November 17, 2023
Useable Pasts? Shamans, Spirituality and Resistance
Guest: Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer on the evolution of indigeneity and religion across the Soviet and post-Soviet divide.
October 13, 2023
Lived Religion in Ukraine
Guest: Catherine Wanner on lived religion in Ukraine, belief, belonging and community, and the impact of the war on religion.
August 4, 2023
The Nivkhi of Sakhalin
Guest: Bruce Grant revisits his book, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas, on the Nivkhi of Sakhalin, their Soviet experience, and the complexities of indigeneity.
July 17, 2023
Red Whaling
The Soviet Union was a latecomer to the whaling industry. But after a bumbling start, by the 1960s, Soviet whalers were slaughtering over 20,000 whales a year. The decimation of the world’s whales in the 20th century, a genocide in which the Soviets played no small part, has had catastrophic results on the world’s ocean environments. Ryan Tucker Jones tells us about the Soviet whaling industry, the lives of Soviet whalers, their attitudes toward their craft, and the lasting trauma of the hunt the ocean’s majestic creatures.
June 8, 2023
May 5, 2023
Conquering Nature in Sakhalin and the Arctic
Guests: Paul Josephson and Sharyl Corrado on conquering nature, settlement, and Russian expansion in the Arctic and Sakhalin.
April 21, 2023
The Far East
Ed Pulford and Soren Urbansky on the cross-cultural and diverse past and present of the Russian Far East.
April 15, 2023
Working Through Stalinism
Guests: Polly Jones and Zuzanna Bogumil on memory, politics, and trauma of Stalinism.
October 26, 2022
