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Trailer: A Gift for Stalin

It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know, who mails a letter. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.”

Now, there was nothing odd about people writing Stalin. They wrote to him a lot.
So, when Comrade Sentaretskaya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin’s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.

Just what was in this letter?

Find out March 31 when The Eurasian Knot debuts with A Gift to Stalin, two episodes about a letter mailed to the Soviet dictator and what it might have meant in the Soviet Union. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Previous Episodes

The Soviet Rock Scene


Guest: Artemy Troitsky reflecting on his life in the Soviet and Russian rock scenes.

The Economic War

Guests: Ben Aris and Ilya Matveev on the Russian economy during wartime.

Mixed Marriages in the USSR


Guest: Adrienne Edgar on Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples:  Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia published by Cornell University Press.

Soviet Aid to West Africa


Guests: Alessandro Iandolo and Natalia Telepneva on Soviet engagement with West Africa during the Cold War.

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