A lot of interesting people pass through the University of Pittsburgh. And though I can’t catch them all, there are a few that I won’t to let go. The infamous Russian poet Dmitrii Bykov is one. Bykov visited Pittsburgh recently, and I didn’t hesitate to finagle a way to pull him into the studio. In this wide ranging conversation, Bykov spoke about the War in Ukraine, the role of art in politics, satire, his poisoning in 2019, protest, love and family. Bykov was quite an enjoyable...

Baku is an oil town. In the early 20th century, it attracted workers, foreign investors, criminals, and revolutionaries. Some key Bolsheviks cut their revolutionary teeth in Baku, Stalin among them. And after the Revolution, Soviet control of the South Caucasus came with a special prize: oil. In the 1920s, Baku oil was integral to Bolshevik control and state building. And to get that oil industry back up and churning, Moscow had to walk a fine line between national interests, local elites,...

 What did “socialist property” mean in the Soviet Union? It’s a vexing question. “Property” in the capitalist sense did not exist. Individual Soviet citizens could not buy or sell, invest or profit from property. At the same time, “socialist property” came with use access. A person didn’t own their apartment but could use and even transfer its use to family. Use rights could also pertain to the commons of socialist property–that is the practice gleaning excess material for individual or...

 In 1908, a powerful explosion roared above the remote Tunguska territory in Siberia, Russia. The blast leveled an area the size of London and powerful enough to decimate Manhattan. What caused it? An asteroid, aliens, some kind of secret experiment? The force of the blast vaporized all evidence. What became known as the “Tunguska Event” became a mystery, inspiring thousands to travel to the region, investigate and speculate. So what was the Tunguska Event and what lore, theories,...

 When Natasha Lance Rogoff arrived in Russia in 1993, she was faced with a particular challenge. This wasn’t her first trip to the former USSR. She had produced documentaries on rock music and youth culture, Perestroika, Russian nationalism and the capitalist transition, to name a few. But now her job was to adapt the American children’s program Sesame Street for a Russian audience. And to do so when chaos swirled all around her: crime, assassination, political and economic instability, and...

In 1942, as the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht out of the USSR, the Soviet government established the “Extraordinary State Commission.” Under the Commission’s direction, Soviet officials, aided by an estimated 7 million locals, documented incidents of war crimes, property damage, and the names of victims and survivor testimonies of Nazi atrocities. Compiled reports served as evidentiary material in the Nuremberg trials. The Commission’s documentary record is one of the largest depositories of...

 Karl Schlogel writes a different style of history of the Soviet Union. He makes no attempt at a grand narrative. Nor does he try to reconcile the USSR’s many contradictions. He eschews high politics, big events, and social and economic processes. Instead, he paints history as fragments. And many of them have to do with the minutiae of Soviet everyday life: shopping lines, perfume, wrapping paper, badges, staircases, buildings, and parks. In many ways, Schlogel is an anthropologist and...

 The bitter cold winters in the industrial town of Krasnoyarsk, Russia come with an added bonus–a phenomenon known by locals as “black sky.” This suffocating, chemically saturated smog emerges from the Yenisei River and blankets the city. Sometimes up to three months a year. Black sky is recent–since around 2012. But its causes reach back to the industrialization of the region in the 1950s and 1960s. The Yenisei hydroelectric dam and massive aluminum plant have irrevocably altered the...

 The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nargono-Karabakh has been simmering since the collapse of the USSR. Since, Nagorno-Karabkah has stood for the quintessential “frozen conflict” in the region. But Azerbaijan made a decisive move in December 2022—it blocked the Lachin Corridor, the main conduit for supplying the disputed area. Then, last September, Azeri forces moved in and ethnically cleansed the Armenian population, roughly 100,000 people, and dismantled local governance....

 Natalia Krylova is many things rolled into one. She’s an interpreter. A Russian language instructor. A scholar in the Soviet avant-garde. And, most recently, the Assistant Director for Academic Affairs for the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. This latter title is just a long-winded way of saying she’s the academic advisor to students studying the region. This wearer of many hats has an interesting life story as a result. She grew up in...

 This episode opens with the following statement on the murder of Alexey Navalny: They finally killed Alexey Navalny. The relatively quick, agonizing death by poison failed. So, the slow, drawn-out horror of Russian prison did the job instead. No one was ever under the illusion that it wouldn’t come to this. And perhaps its inevitability is what makes it so hard to muster any outrage. That, and the fact that we are surrounded by so many horrors. We are living in dark times, indeed. Make...

 News from Ukraine is increasingly grim. Reports of shortages in ammunition and manpower. Political sniping in Kyiv and a reset of its military command. Uncertainty about continued American support. And reports of Russian forces massing for a push. This, of course, doesn’t address the instability of Ukraine’s economy, its fragile safety net, and its reliance on EU grants and loans to keep afloat. To get a fuller look at the state of the war, The Eurasian Knot turned to Brian Milakovsky for...

 A century ago, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, died. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to argue against Lenin’s profound impact on the 20th century. In many ways the 20th century was Lenin’s century–he shaped it. Everyone else was just responding. But Lenin’s influence has significantly waned in the last 30 years. His life and thought barely registers in 21st century revolutions, radical movements, anti-imperialist struggles or even radical ethics and aesthetics. His...

 In 2015, Maria Lotsmanova embarked on a search taken by millions: information about her family history. But genealogy in Russia has a particular character. Often it’s not just about identifying one’s family tree. It is also about learning about the fate of relatives, particularly if they were repressed during the Soviet period. And Maria’s goal was quite specific–information about her great-grandfather, Jacob Jansen, a German Mennonite living in Crimea. Jansen was dekulakized, exiled,...

 In 1899, Frederick Bruce Thomas arrived in the Russian Empire after five years of working in some of Europe’s poshest restaurants and clubs. Thomas quickly found success in Moscow, where he became a nightclub owner and went on to bring some of the most popular jazz and vaudeville acts of the time. It was a new life. He was very successful and well-connected. He even took on a Russian name Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, and became a subject of the Russian empire. Thomas became Russian, and an...

 Nineteenth Century Russian intellectuals seemed to possess a singular obsession with “the people.” Who were the “people”? What was to be learned from their “voices” and their “silences”? It was as if the masses held some closely guarded secret, some essence of Russia itself. You can hear it if only you listened close enough. So what did these intellectuals hear? What did they record? We turned to Gabriella Safran to discuss her book Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth...

 What is the “Soviet Jew”? Is there anything distinctively “Soviet” about them? Jewish? These are just some of the questions Sasha Senderovich looks to answer in his new book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made. I got the chance to talk to Sasha during his recent visit to the University of Pittsburgh. He says that the “Soviet Jew” is a kind of recipe that combines elements of trauma, transformation, mobility, nationalism, Yiddish culture, among others. And you can see Jewish Soviet cultural...

I’m a Cold War kid. So, I remember defector films as entertainment-propaganda. One that sticks in my memory is White Nights (1985) starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. The plot is heavy with Cold War themes–two defector dancers–Hines to the USSR, Baryshnikov to the West. Circumstances put them together in Leningrad, and after some initial friction, the dancers become buds. The duo eventually join forces to get the pregnant wife of Baryshnikov’s character out of the USSR. The film’s...

 Roma Shatrov is the founder of the Silent Cape Nature Park in Sakhalin. Irina Grudova is Ainu, the indigenous inhabitants of Sakhalin. Roma is obsessed with Ainu history and culture and has dedicated the Silent Cape to revitalizing their tradition. Irina is a local Ainu activist and is skeptical of such outsiders looking to exploit her heritage. Yet Roma and Irina instantly hit it off and formed a strong bond over their mutual love of the Ainu. Rusana Novikova brings us a story about the...

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” These 14-words have been attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky, and quoted hundreds, if not thousands of times. The only problem is that the great Russian writer never wrote them. Never. Yet you can find this quote in articles, books, lectures, and even government committees. And all of them point to Dostoevsky as the origin. How does such a fake persist to the point that it’s blindly accepted? And what does our...

Guest: Rafael Khachaturian is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate. His trip to Armenia was funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Richard Antaramian is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California.  Together they wrote, “Azerbaijan’s Ethnic Cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh Is Fueled by Regional...

 Shami-Damulla, a reformist Islamic scholar from Syria, settled in Tashkent before the 1917 Revolution. Initially, the Bolsheviks saw him as a modernist, and a supporter of “Islamic socialism.” Yet, by 1932, the NKVD arrested him for fundamentalism. Shami-Damulla’ students nonetheless continued his work and he remained an important figure in the development of Islamic fundamentalism in Soviet Central Asia. To what extent was Shami-Damulla’s religious thinking, and Islamic thought generally,...

In 2021, Alexander Gabyshev, a Yakut shaman, embarked on an 8000 km trek from the republic of Sakha in far eastern Russia to Moscow to ‘exorcize’ the demon Putin. Gabyshev made this journey, not one, but three times until Russian authorities arrested him for “extremism.” A court eventually condemned Gabyshev to indefinite compulsory psychiatric treatment—a Soviet practice against dissidents dating to Brezhnev. Was Shaman Alexander’s spiritual and political activity typical for post-Soviet...

 In Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov describes the “destruction of the human being by the state” in the Soviet labor camps. Everyday brutality, grueling work, and starvation ground down the inmate’s individual “I” into usable “human material” for the gulag economy. The gulag’s scars are both physical and spiritual. And the experience certainly caused a spiritual crisis among some former “zeks”—How to comprehend God after the gulag? Yet, there isn’t a comparable reflection on “God and/in/after...

 In early April 2023, a plane touched down in Dallas, Texas. For the arriving 63 members of the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church, or Mayflower Church, it was an end to a four-year ordeal. The group fled China in 2019 to escape escalating harassment by Chinese authorities for their religious beliefs. They first fled to Jeju Island in South Korea, But the South Korean government refused them asylum. Then the Mayflower went to Thailand only to be arrested for visa violations. The worshipers...