Georgia recently held parliamentary elections. The ruling party Georgian Dream eked out a majority, adding to its over decade long rule. The elections, however, were not without controversy. The opposition has claimed vote rigging, its supporters hit the streets, and some Western governments have cried foul. Georgia now is in crisis.  What is the context for this political crisis? How does it relate to Georgia’s post-Soviet transformation, economic liberalism, and the current geopolitical...

Soviet dissidents have long been objects of fascination. Who were they? What made them dissent? What did they believe? And what did they endure at the hands of a repressive Soviet state? We now have a clearer picture thanks to Benjamin Nathans’ new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Soviet dissidents, or as they preferred to be called “rights defenders,” navigated a complicated choreography between the movement, the police, and its...

 Kabardino-Balkaria is a small republic within Russia’s North Caucasus region. It’s an ethnically diverse area, home to Kabardians (a Circassian Muslim people), Balkars (a Turkic Muslim group), Russians, among others. The republic also has an incredibly fraught history—Tsarist conquest, the decimation of the local population in the 19th century, the Soviet-era ethnic deportations, and the ethnic and religious politics of today. Yet, unlike other parts of the North Caucasus,...

 In the 1960s, Soviet intellectuals began creating do-it-yourself museums to preserve national folk cultures. They scoured village attics, abandoned churches, and rural homes to gather artifacts. In a recent article in the Russian Review, Erin Hutchinson tells the story of three of them–the Russian writer Vladimir Soloukhin’s efforts to collect religious icons, the Ukrainian artist Ivan Honchar’s mission to hunt down folk art, and the Gagauz poet Dmitri Kara Coban’s efforts to preserve...

 In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of mid-level office workers served in the Communist International, or Comintern. And while we know a lot about famous communists, historians have mostly overlooked the personal experiences of these minor radicals. A good place to begin uncovering those lives is to look into Hotel Lux, the dormitory for foreign communists in Moscow. Because it is in the Lux, Maurine Casey says, where you can better understand the motivations, social networks and intimate...

 From 1929 to 1958, hundreds of thousands of prisoners from across the Soviet Union were sent to the Komi Republic in Russia’s Far North. After their release, many left the region. But many also stayed in Komi and rebuilt their life under the shadow of the prison camp. And by the late 1980s, many of these former prisoners began writing memoirs, collecting and preserving documents, and building organizations to work through, publicize and house these materials. The result was the Komi branch...

 A curious thing occurred after Stalin died in 1953–the emergence of Imperial Russia in Soviet culture. Sure, there was some of this before–the rehabilitation of Imperial figures, events and symbols during the patriotic fervor of WWII. But now, the imperial past returned as a lament, a Russia that was lost, among Soviet Union’s liberal intellectuals and conservatives to discredit the socialist project. Interestingly, this Imperial revival survived the collapse of the Soviet system. And the...

 In August 2021, Marc Fogel landed in Sheremetyevo to begin his tenth-year teaching at the Anglo-American School of Moscow. He didn’t make it past customs. Security searched his bags to find 17 g of medical marijuana. Fogel suffers from chronic back pain and pot is the only thing that gives him relief. He was arrested, given a hasty trial, and sentenced to fourteen years in a Russian prison, an outrageous penalty. Marc still sits in a Russian prison today as a hostage, despite recent prison...

 In college, I took Russian history classes–Early Modern, Imperial, Soviet. And all the specialty topics within those frameworks were Russia-centric, and especially Moscow-centric. And the narrative, more or less, told the story of the Russian state. This schema has become scrutinized since the collapse of the Soviet system, and increasingly since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine. But while there is much talk of decentering, decolonizing, and deconstructing, there has been little by...

 There’s a fascinating sound object from the People’s Republic of Poland: the “sound postcard.” These flimsy, colorful, plastic rectangles could be mailed to loved-ones and friends just like any other postcard. Except they came with a bonus. Etched on the card was a poor quality recording of a popular song, and even sometimes with a personalized vocal greeting. These were produced by the state. But overtime, they were also manufactured in people’s apartments and sold hand-to-hand at markets...

 Gender equality was one of the many promises of the Soviet Union fell way short of realizing. In more ways that can be recounted here. But interestingly, women played an important role in municipal governance. Women sat on soviets and did most of the mundane and humdrum administrative work. Most of these women who occupied these unpaid, and often thankless positions, were pillars in their community–doctors, principals, and others with local authority and stature. This trend continues in...

 Over the last 50 years, civil society has become synonymous with the Eastern European transition from communism to liberal democracy. It was civil society that brought down communist governments. And its civil society that struggles to preserve the democratic gains since 1989. But what happens to civil society organizations and activists in illiberal regimes? How do they resolve the tensions between grassroots activism and politicians, the local and national? These questions are urgent in...

 What is noise? And how should we approach it as scholars, critics, and sound artists? These are questions Matthew Kendall treats in his contribution to the forum “Socialist Sound Worlds.” He says that noise, particularly the scratchy, staticky, distorted noise found in many sound recordings, can tell us a lot. It gives us place, context, personality and even alternative narratives. In the second part of our series on sound and socialism, the Eurasian Knot talked with Matthew about his...

 What are the sounds of socialism? And does socialism sound different from capitalism? This question came up after reading the forum “Socialist Sound Worlds” in the Winter 2023 Slavic Review. But whether socialism sounded different was hard to know from the forum. Though its articles dealt with sound, ironically, no sounds accompanied them. Listeners know that the Eurasian Knot has featured listener submitted sounds from the region on our episodes. And given our interest in sound, we...

 The Bolsheviks’ geographical imagination of revolution did not just include the “West” but also the “East.” And the “East” in two senses. The internal east of the former Russian empire, primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus.  And the external east of the colonized world–what we today call the Global South. Through the Communist International, the Soviet Union facilitated the creation of an Eastern International–a vast network of students, communists, and activists both Easts. These...

 What drove Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War? Scholars have argued over this question during and after the end of the superpower staredown between the United States and the Soviet Union. Was it ideology? A desire to dominate the world? Spread revolution? All? None? Now, enters Sergey Radchenko with To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, a new, psychological interpretation of Kremlin decision making. Soviet leaders, Radchenko says, were driven by a desire for...

 It’s been a year since Yevgeny Prigozhin shocked the world with his ill-fated march on Moscow. Soon, it will be a year since Prigozhin was killed in a mysterious plane crash. But before all that, Prigozhin was “Putin’s chef,” and one of many violent entrepreneurs at the beck and call of the Boss in the Kremlin. A good boyar, the Chef, with the help of generous state contacts, supplied food to the Russian military. He reinvested those profits into troll farms to spread disinformation. Then...

 Since the end of the USSR in 1991, Latvia’s Russian speakers have been living under what Kevin Platt calls, “border conditions.” That is, a life in the liminal space between Latvia and the Russian Federation, the West and the East, a liberal present and a communist past. And all under the darkened shadow of a more revanchist Russia at war in Ukraine. And how do Russophone Latvians navigate this contradictory life? This week on the Eurasian Knot, Sean and Rusana talk with Kevin Platt about...

 In 1935, two Soviet funny men, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, set off to America. They didn’t emigrate. Or go to make an official state visit. Their mission, interestingly, was a particularly American one–to take a 10,000 mile road trip from New York to Hollywood and back. Armed with a used car, a map, and a Russian Jewish immigrant and his wife as translator and guide, the dynamic duo passed through cities big and small, the Midwest and the deep South, up and down the West and East coasts,...

 When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they ignored one crucial issue: Islam. And not just in terms of faith, but Islam as a mobilizing force in Afghan society. It’s strange when you consider the long relationship the Soviets had with its own Muslim population. Yet they consistently saw Islam as having short roots or as a mere instrument of the US, Iran and Pakistan against Moscow. How to explain this blindness? And how did the Soviet Union’s reckoning with Islam prove to be...

 Convergence between the United States and Russia is most often expressed in socio-economic terms. Very rarely in regard to ideology. The political culture and history of the two nations are just too different. But the ideological convergence that was unthinkable decades ago is now not so easily dismissed when it comes to the far right. As Alexandar Mikahilovic explains in Illiberal Vanguard, rightists like Alexander Dugin and Kevin McDonald politically intersect. Steve Bannon keeps Lenin...

 The Soviet economy used a lot of wood. For fuel, construction, consumer products, even in military weaponry. Wood could be shaped and transformed. But wood was also finite–and trying to balance the demand with the supply in forests was a delicate dance. The Soviet forestry industry understood this, and developed a unique form of industrial ecology—a practical approach toward natural resources for the economy and society to extract wood in a sustainable way. This ecological sustainability...

 When Greta Uehling set out to do her fieldwork, she noticed that ordinary Ukrainians in the war torn region of Donbas practiced an “ethics of care.” These are the everyday acts often overlooked in a conflict–civilians engaging in mutual aid, volunteers collecting bodies, aid workers smuggling medicine across the line, and neighbors helping each other navigate the horrors of violence, loss, and deprivation. But not every act is one of solidarity. She was also attentive to how the war has...

 Communist Albania is often portrayed as a backwater, paranoid state with an eccentric dictator, Enver Hoxha. Basically, it was a joke, signified by the 750,000 bunkers littering the country. Of course, everyday life in Albania didn’t fit the stereotypes. Like many communist regimes, the Albanian Communist Party carried out a massive modernization campaign, a process that turned small agricultural communities into sites of industrial production. This is the story of Artan Hoxha’s...