The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union unleashed an unprecedented mortality crisis. In the years following, the region endured upwards of 7.5 million excess (and thus preventable) deaths. This post-socialist mortality crisis was not only the result of the economic devastation and social fracturing caused by socialism's end, but was exacerbated by the political-economic commitment to market orthodoxy and austerity of post-socialist elites, leading to wide spread...

One of Georgia's most exciting contemporary filmmakers is Levan Koguashvili. His films are as comedic as they are tragic, focusing on the intricacies (both beautiful and heartbreaking) of the day to day struggles Georgians live through today. In this discussion, we explore Levan's approach to filmmaking, stories behind the scripts, and the way his films reflect economic and social realities both in Georgia and of those Georgians who have emigrated abroad. Levan is a film director from...

On today's episode we discuss the emergence of the Georgian tea industry and how its development interacted with processes of economic, political and national consolidation in the first decades of the Georgian SSR. Our guest is Camille Neufville. Camille is a PhD student at Strasbourg university, France. She is interested in the entangled histories of exotic commodities, their production and consumption in northern Eurasia. She's currently writing her PhD on tea consumption and tea...

On today's episode we sit down with political economist Ia Eradze to discuss how extreme rates of dollarization in Georgia emerged after the Soviet Union's demise, why dollarization persists, as well as how the dominance of neoliberal economic policies and exclusion of socio-economic issues from the public and political discourse in post-Soviet Georgia came to be. Below is a description of Eradze's 2023 book Unraveling Dollarization Persistence: The Case of Georgia followed by a link to...

On today's episode we sit down with journalist and author Vincent Bevins to discuss his recent book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. This wide reaching conversation reviews the main themes and topics of his book, and the broader political lessons and reflections that the global social movements between 2010-2020, with an emphasis on those outside of the global North, can provide today. Here's a description of If We Burn "From 2010 to 2020, more people...

On today's episode we sit down with historian Diane P. Koenker to discuss the history, development and role of vacations, sanatoria and leisure in the Soviet Union. Koenker is the author of the 2013 study on the topic, Club Red: Vacation, Travel and the Soviet Dream

On today's episode we sit down with historian Yiannis Kokosalakis to discuss his new book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System 1921-1941 Book description: "By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Building Socialism presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists made up of...

On today's episode we put the specific yet shared experiences of healthcare systems in Socialist Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic and the Georgian SSR into conversation. Through the discussion we bring to light both the similarities and differences in three distinct forms of socialism, as well as how the transition to capitalism dramatically changed health and healthcare in each society. Our guests are: Ana Vračar is a Zagreb based researcher and activist with the People's...

In the 1920s and 1930s, Bolshevik historians actively took part in building Soviet socialism. As militant scholars, one of their main tasks was (broadly speaking) to reconceptualize and rearticulate the history of the political entity they had just overthrown - the Russian Empire. The multinational Bolsheviks were not only committed to building a socialist state, but believed this must be done through the dismantling of what Lenin called the Russian "prison house of nations". Writing...

The history of Marxism in the 20th century, both as a means to interpret the world and as the basis of a politics to transform it, is marked by a profound intellectual and political diversity. Some of this can be attributed to individuals and their specific readings of Marx's thought. Yet other forms of Marxism - such as that which emerged in the global South during the era of decolonization - can trace their origins to particular applications of Marx's ideas and Marxist predecessors (such as...

On this episode we discuss the ins and outs of decolonization - as a set of historical revolutionary politics, intellectual tradition, contemporary framework of analysis as well the limitations and misuses of "decolonization" in the context of Ukraine and Russia today. To do this we have invited two distinct yet complimentary thinkers to put their ideas into conversation with one another. Geo Maher is a teacher, political theorist and author of Anti-Colonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris...

In terms of post-Soviet memory politics, arguably no figure is more controversial than interwar Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, his memory along with that of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists have been mobilized by both far right nationalists and the Ukrainian state - to varying degrees of success - to create a counter-memory to that of both the Soviet past and the current memory regime of the Russian Federation....

The Democratic Republic of Georgia - also known as the First Republic - existed between 1918-1921. Under the control of veterans of the decades long social democratic movement both in the South Caucasus and the Russian Empire at large, these Georgian social democrats led by Noe Jordania were allied with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. While the Georgian social democrats had for years shared a lot in common with Bolsheviks ideologically and in terms of...

For decades, historian Lewis Siegelbaum has taught and written on the Soviet Union. While many historians of labor and the working class in the USSR narrowly focused on moments of resistance, Siegelbaum investigated other aspects of working class existence such as the meaning of Soviet working class identity, the labor process, factory life and consumption practices. Siegelbaum spent years studying and writing on Donbas miners both during the late Soviet period and through the collapse of the...

In this episode we discuss the histories, complexities and legacies of socialist Yugoslavia and non-alignment with contributor Gal Kirn and editor Paul Stubbs of the recently released book Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political and Economic Imaginaries. This discussion is a fascinating deep-dive into socialist Yugoslavia's system of self-management, its unique relationship with the Third World, nationhood, post-communist memory politics and more!

How the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, after its nearly seventy year existence, is a process and event still mired in controversy and debate. Historians, politicians, citizens of the post-Soviet world and beyond understand this epochal event in drastically different ways -  was it the result of internal contradictions of the Soviet system? Did pressure from the capitalist world force the USSR into an arms race that led to economic ruin? Was the Soviet Union consciously dismembered by...

In this engaging and insightful conversation with Claire Kaiser, we discuss her new book Georgian and Soviet: Entitled Nationhood & the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus. Here's a description of the book: Georgian and Soviet investigates the constitutive capacity of Soviet nationhood and empire. The Soviet republic of Georgia, located in the mountainous Caucasus region, received the same nation-building template as other national republics of the USSR. Yet Stalin's Georgian heritage,...

This episode explores how, through the process of developing a model of socialism applicable in the Third World, local actors interacted with the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact countries, China and the West. These political and economic interactions shaped not only the trajectory of these specific countries but of socialism globally. Our guest is Jeremy Friedman to discuss all of this and more with his new and excellent book Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (2022). 

Highly lauded and acclaimed architect Vladimir (Lado) Alexi-Meskhishvili  (1915-1978) worked on the designs of some of Soviet Georgia's most iconic buildings. A partial list includes: Sanatorium “Imereti”, Tskaltubo (1957),   Tbilisi Sports Palace, Tbilisi (1961),  Restaurant “Iori”, Tbilisi (1962),  Lower floor of Freedom Square metro station, (then “Lenin Square”), Tbilisi, (1967) Agricultural Institute of Georgia, Tbilisi (1970) The Victory Memorial of Vake-Park, Tbilisi...

On this episode we have a wide ranging conversation with the illustrious historian Candan Badem who his an expert on the South Caucasus and in particular the borderlands between the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries prior to the Russian Revolution. He has written on The Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War of the 1850s, Russian imperial administration in the city of Kars (present day Turkey) and much more. We discuss Candan's scholarship, the complex...

Coming MAY 30th is a new six part audio documentary by Sean Guillory a friend and comrade of the show, and host of the SRB Podcast "Americans believed the Soviet Union was cut off from the West. Nothing went in. And very little came out. Yet, tens of thousands of Americans visited their Cold War rival annually. What did they find behind the Iron Curtain? Teddy Goes to the USSR, a new six-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police...

Anastas Mikoyan was an incredible figure. An Armenian old Bolshevik whose career spanned decades all the way from active involvement in the Baku Commune of 1918 to playing a central role in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Mikoyan's role as First Deputy Premier under Khrushchev and architect of de-Stalinization and thaw-era nationality policies meant his career of policy making influenced the trajectory of the entire Soviet Union. He also maintained close political and personal ties to the...

On today's episode we welcome Samuel Moyn, professor of Law and History at Yale, to discuss the political history of human rights and in particular how this relates to the Cold War, Soviet collapse, and neoliberalism as a politics in the post-Cold War era. Here's an article by Samuel Moyn based on his book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/human-rights-are-not-enough/ And here is a description of his book Not Enough : The age of human...

On this episode, we have a discussion with political geographer Dr. Gerard Toal about the 2008 August War that embroiled Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia in conflict, along with the contingencies and background that led to the fighting and what this event can tell us or not tell us about Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Dr. Toal wrote a book in 2016 entitled "Near Abroad: Putin, The West and the Contest Over Ukraine and The Caucasus" - here's a description of the book below: "Before...