In the waning decades of the Soviet Union, abortion was the main form of birth control. For example, official statistics from the late 1970s report that there were 250-270 abortions per 100 live births. It’s an astounding number. It points to a key paradox of state socialism and reproductive health: Abortion in the USSR was widely available, but mainly because the state couldn’t provide basic contraceptives. 

But the collapse of the Soviet system didn’t produce many remedies–Women now had access to contraception, but the economic ravages of the 1990s led many families to postpone childbearing. Abortion numbers remained high to begin lowering in the last two decades. How has the Russian government and civil society addressed abortion, contraception, family planning and women’s reproductive rights and health? What role has Western feminism and the debate over abortion played in Russia? And where do the increasing restrictions of abortion in Russia fit within the worldwide struggle for women’s reproductive freedom? The Eurasian Knot posed these questions and more to Michele Rivkin-Fish in this timely and crucial issue in her new book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics published by Vanderbilt University Press.

Guest:

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research examines reproductive politics in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She’s the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Her most recent book is Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics is published by Vanderbilt University Press.

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On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was the latest in a string of contests that stoked fears for European liberal democracy, the rise of right-wing populism, and Russian meddling. Media inside and outside Romania leaned into the danger a Simion victory posed, and with Dan’s victory, how Romania can serve as the latest European democracy refusing to slide backward. But does this narrative really capture Romania’s political atmosphere? What were Simion’s and Dan’s base of support? And does Simion’s defeat signal the death knell of the far right in Romania or merely a brief setback? And where does Viktor Orban and Donald Trump figure in all this? To get some clarity, the Eurasian Knot turned to Stefano Bottoni and Tamás Kiss for their insight and analysis of the Romanian political field before and after this consequential vote.

Special Co-Host:

Zsuzsánna Magdó is Associate Director at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies where she manages regional studies programs to support interdisciplinary scholarship and public education on the world regions of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Eurasia.

Guests:

Stefano Bottoni is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, and Performing Arts at the University of Florence. He is the author of several books. His most recent book, Orbán: A European Despot, is forthcoming in English and German.

Tamás Kiss is Senior Researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. He is the author of several books on ethnic relations in Romania and Hungary. He’s the editor of Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights: Hungarians in Transylvania published by Palgrave.

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Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship.

Guest:

J. Arch Getty was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Books discussed in this interview:

• Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938, Cambridge University Press
• The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press.
• Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's 'Iron Fist', Yale University Press.
• Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks and the Persistence of Tradition, Yale University Press.

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Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russian perpetrated genocide. Others, like Chechens, Dagestanis, and others the violence of Russian colonization. Obligated by faith to take these refugees, the Ottoman Empire scattered them throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, in many cases to balance against its Christian subjects. Most of these villages still exist today, including the capital of Jordan, Amman. What was this experience like for these refugees before the international legal regime of refugeedom? Why did they flee the Russian Empire and what was life like with the Ottomans? How did the Ottoman empire manage this influx of Muslim Others? And how did refugees contribute to the end of the Empire? Knowing nothing of this fascinating history, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky about his new book Empire of Refugees North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State published by Stanford University Press.

Guest:

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State published by Stanford University Press.

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Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to the World Bank, extreme weather, rising sea levels, violence, and resource scarcity will drive 216 million people to seek refuge by 2050. There’s even a buzzword for it: “climigration.” How and why do people move? To what extent is “migration” a business? And how do we accept and integrate migrants into bodily politics rife with ideological polarization, xenophobia, and nationalism? In this fifth event in our series, Eurasian Environments, the Eurasian Knot joined up with Daniel Briggs and Michael Goodhardt to discuss migration and climate, and specifically the trials people go through to find a safer, more prosperous present and future. 

Guests:

Daniel Briggs is a Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University. He is the author of several books.  His most recent are The New Futures of Exclusion: Life in the Covid-19 Aftermath and Sheltering Strangers: Critical Memoirs of Hosting Ukrainian Refugees published by Policy Press.

Michael Goodhart is Professor of Political Science and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of many articles and books. His most recent book is Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World.

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Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there were also a people without a national territory. The lack of Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Union posed a theoretical problem as well. As Stalin declared, “a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation.” How then can Jews be a nation without a territory? Well, you create one. Enter Birobidzhan–an bold experiment to create a Jewish nation out of whole cloth in Siberia. But why in Siberia? Why did Jews settle there? What did they find? Birobidzhan was a failure by many measures. So what is its place in Jewish history? To get answers, the Eurasian Knot turned to Gennady Estraikh to talk about his short history of this unique chapter in Jewish history. 

Guest:

Gennady Estraikh is an Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He has written and edited numerous books, including most recently Jews in the Soviet Union: After Stalin, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia and Yiddish Literature under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine published by Lexington Books.

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During WWII, the Soviet Women’s Antifascist Committee started an experiment–a pen pal campaign with American women to promote the friendship between the United States and the USSR. The program began with fits and starts but eventually gained traction. So much so it continued into the early Cold War even as relations between the two countries quickly soured. Authorities on both sides considered the contact between women fairly safe. American and Soviet women corresponded about the legacy of the war, marriage, family, career, as well as more Cold War topics. Some of these pen pals even lasted several years. What were these intimate exchanges like? What did Soviet and American women counsel each other on? And what did they learn about each other and themselves? The Eurasian Knot wanted to learn more about this fascinating moment in Soviet-American relations and its meaning within the larger Cold War. So, we turned to Alexis Peri to talk about her fascinating new book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.

Guest:

Alexis Peri is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. Her first book, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, won the Pushkin House Book Prize and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best books on the Soviet home front. Her new book is Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.

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Did you know that Ukraine is the fourth largest corn exporter globally? This is not the beginning of a Soviet joke. . . Ukraine plays a crucial role on the world food market. About sixty percent of its exports are agricultural products with destinations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Ukraine also accounts for around one-sixth of the world wheat and barley markets and a staggering half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. But Ukrainian agribusiness is under stress. Soviet and post-Soviet legacies abound. Climate change and depleted soil pose long term obstacles. And Russia’s invasion has only increased the calamity thanks to destruction, theft, and environmental damage. How do things look at the moment? In the fourth event in our Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Susanne Wengle and Natalia Mamonova about Ukraine’s past and present place in the global food system, the impact of the war, and the prospects of renewal and recovery.    

Guests:

Susanne Wengle is professor of Russian and Eurasian studies at Uppsala University and associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Natalia Mamonova is a senior researcher at RURALIS - Institute for Rural and Regional Research, Norway. Her current research at RURALIS mainly focuses on the impact of the war in Ukraine on the Ukrainian and global food systems.

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In his memoir of life as a parish Orthodox priest in the 19th century, I. S. Belliustin wrote that the clergy was “humiliated, oppressed, downtrodden, they themselves have already lost consciousness of their own significance.” This is just one of several damning portraits Belliustin paints of his fellow holymen and the flock they tended. It’s an image that stuck, even among historians. But Daniel Scarborough says there’s another, brighter side to the story. Many Russian Orthodox parish priests also preached the social gospel. They served as mediators and informants between the state and peasantry, carried out social relief, taught literacy, and addressed other social ills. The most famous being Father Gapon, the priest that sparked the 1905 Revolution. Who were these priests? What social work did they do? And how did their actions intersect with the growing revolutionary movement in Imperial Russia? The Eurasian Knot sat down with Daniel Scarborough during a recent trip to Pittsburgh to find out more.

Guest:

Daniel Scarborough is an Associate Professor of Russian history and religion at Nazarbayev University. His interests include the religious and intellectual history of late imperial Russia, the local history of Moscow and Tver, and Russia’s Silver Age. He’s the author of Russia’s Social Gospel: The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution published by University of Wisconsin Press.

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One daunting challenge to addressing climate change is to kick our addiction to hydrocarbons. But this is easier said than done. Hydrocarbons remain the fuel of modernity. And a transition to renewable energy requires massive state intervention. How do we get from our carbon-based present to a green future? Especially in regions like Eastern Europe and Chin, that still rely heavily on oil, gas and coal. In this third event in our series, Eurasian Environments, the Eurasian Knot has paired Pawel Cyzyak, an expert on energy in Eastern Europe, and Zhaojin Zeng, an economic historian of China, to discuss the legacies of state socialist economies, the challenges of transitioning to renewables, their past and present reliance on Russia, the role of geopolitics, and how a turn to EVs presents different challenges, especially as electricity is still generated by coal. 

Guests:

Zhaojin Zeng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Geography at Texas A&M University. His first book project is “Engineering Modern China: Industrial Factories and the Transformation of the Chinese Economy in the Long Twentieth Century.”

Pawel Czyzak is an economist, engineer, expert on climate and energy policy, and author of several dozen publications on energy transformation in Europe. He is currently associated with the global energy think-tank Ember. As a consultant he has advised, among others, the largest European energy companies and the World Bank. He’s also an aspiring farmer.

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