What power do jokes have in authoritarian societies? I’ve been thinking about this recently as Trump further consolidates power. Turn on any American late night show and it’s one joke about Trump after another. It’s easy for comedians. The Trump jokes write themselves. Soviet Russia didn’t have late night, and openly poking fun at the authorities was highly circumscribed. This continues to a large extent in today’s Russia. But people still tell biting, insulting jokes in daily life. Laughing at power can’t be totally contained. But do they matter? What power do they have? In what ways are they criticism of the powers that be, a way to cope with the absurdity of everyday life, and or merely self-delusional exercises in political agency? All three? In 2018, the Eurasian Knot took on these questions about jokes in a conversation with Jon Waterlow about his book, Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. We decided to rerun the interview for what it can tell us about our present conjecture.

Guest:

Jon Waterlow received his PhD in History at Oxford. He’s the author of It's Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. Jon is also host of the podcast Voices in the Dark. Look for it on your favorite podcast feed.

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Games have a long history. Several are centuries old. But a new crop of games has emerged over the last century. Elaborate board games, role playing games, and of course, video games. Today, video games are one of the most consumed forms of media entertainment. They inspire communities, live-action role playing, movies and other media. All of these have fostered new identities and ethics. And Eastern Europe has played an outsized role in this culture. Enter Daniil Leiderman, the new Slavicist at the University of Pittsburgh. He says that games are a portal to a whole bunch of issues–identity, moral responsibility, agency, and cultural critique. The Eurasian Knot greeted Daniil with a conversation about gaming and Eastern Europe. How do games give players agency in crafting alternative histories? What role do Soviet and post-Soviet landscapes play? And what are the wider effects do games have on our lives outside the magic circle? 

Guest:

Daniil Leiderman is an art historian. He taught art history and game studies at Texas A&M University before joining University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Languages and Literatures Department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025. As a scholar, Daniil’s research focuses on underground and protest art and culture and video games.

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This week we check-in with frequent EK guest Brian Milakovsky to learn about the destruction of forests in Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and its full-scale assault in 2022, war has destroyed much of the forests of the Seversky Donets Basin. These trees serve as a place of leisure, pride, identity, and economy for nearby residents. But Russian artillery, mines, and other ordnance have repeatedly ignited forest fires. The ecology of the region has been transformed, likely forever. How has the war accelerated the destruction of eastern Ukraine’s ecology? And what does this mean for the future? We also get an update on how Brian sees the war at the present moment, when at the time of recording, Putin and Trump were meeting in Alaska. It’s a dark time. And an even darker horizon approaches us.

Guest:

Brian Milakovsky is a forester who worked on conservation and development programs in Ukraine and Russia from 2009 to 2024. He presently resides in Bath, Maine and works for the New England Forestry Foundation. He is also an associate researcher with the Regional East European Fire Management Center in Kyiv, Ukraine.

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As frequent listeners know, my advisor and friend Arch Getty passed away from cancer a few months ago. I was recently in Los Angeles to attend his memorial. I got to catch up with fellow grad students and friends. One was James Harris, a close friend and collaborator with Arch. James is also one of the best Soviet historians around. After chatting with James, I was reminded that I interviewed him way back in 2016–about a year after I started the SRB Podcast. I decided to re-edit and release James’ interview about his book, The Great Fear. The book looks at how Soviet leaders were constantly afraid of invasion, uprisings, and dissent. James argues that this fear was an important driver of the regime’s use of violence and ultimately the Great Terror of 1937-38. So, in honor of seeing James and in memory of Arch, here’s another listen to the Great Fear.

Guest:

James Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Leeds University where he specializes in the history of Stalinism. James has published several books and articles on the Stalin period. He’s the author of The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s published by Oxford University Press.

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In 1912, a strike of 18,000 restaurant and hotel workers in New York City birthed the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, a union representing tens of thousands of Manhattan’s service workers. The union still exists today as Local 6 of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO and remains one of the NYC strongest unions. But why is the Eurasian Knot featuring a story about an American trade union? Because the history of the American labor movement in the early 20th century cannot be told without the Communist Party. That means the Soviet Union via the Communist International played an important role in shaping Local 6 in the 1920s and 1930s. How did the Russian Revolution reverberate through American labor? How did the Hotel and Restaurant Union navigate the various ideological and political shifts, to say nothing of the Red Scare? And what about the American communists like William Z. Foster? And what does Local 6 have to teach us today? The Eurasian Knot talked to one of Sean’s old Socialist Party comrades, Shaun Richman, about his book, We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953, for some answers.

Guest:

Shaun Richman teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University. He's an historian of U.S. labor and American Communism, with a particular focus on union organizing, the service sector and the American Federation of Labor. He teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University"He’s the author of We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953 published by University of Illinois Press.

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What does it mean for the city to be a symphony? True, city symphonies are a silent film genre best represented by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. These early silent films tried to capture the “sound” of the city by editing images symphonically–to give the viewer a sense of the urban soundscape. But, as Daniel Schwartz explains, early 20th century avant-garde artists broadened the city symphony beyond the “silent” and into a full-fledged multimedia experiment. Some, like Luigi Russolo, pushed the boundaries between music and noise by incorporating new technology into music performance. Others, like Arseny Avraamov, reimagined the city as a giant living orchestra where its inhabitants were both producers and consumers of sound. While others, like Vertov, valorized the city into the natural habitat of a New Soviet Person and their labor. But what did a city symphony sound like? Especially when its composers left so few written instructions for conductors to recreate them? How does the city symphony speak to modernity itself? Intrigued, the Eurasian Knot talked to Daniel Schwartz about his book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931 published by McGill University Press.

Guest:

Daniel Schwartz is an associate professor in Russian and German Cinemas at McGill University. He’s the author of City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931 published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. 

Featured clips in order of appearance:

Luigi Russolo, “Reesveyo di una cheetà,” 1913.

Arseny Avraamov,  “Symphony of Sirens,”1922.

Walter Ruttmann, “Weekend,” 1930.

Vziga Vertov, “Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas,” 1931.

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In early October 1993, tanks pummeled the Russian Duma in central Moscow. It was a dark mirror of just two years prior when Boris Yeltsin definitely climbed atop a tank and made history. Now, tanks were again Yeltsin’s historical instrument. Only this time, they were his. The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis was a turning point in the country’s post-Soviet transformation. The popular narrative was Russian Democrats repelling Russian nationalists and communists. The future vs. the past. And the future prevailed! It was a tight, clean story fit for the utopianism of the 1990s. In retrospect, however, it was the past that really won. Yeltsin’s constitutional power grab through the gun barrel set the first stones of Putinism. How should we understand this turning point? What was really going on? And how have these baby steps of Russian authoritarianism become a full-blown sprint? The Eurasian Knot turns to Jeff Hawn for some answers.

Guest:

Jeff Hawn is a graduate of American University School of International Service and is completing his PhD at London School of Economics. His dissertation addresses the history and consequences of the 1993 Constitutional Crisis and the emergence of modern Russia.

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Yale anthropologist Doug Rogers visited Pitt back in April. The Eurasian Knot couldn’t resist pulling him into the studio. Doug was one of the earliest guests on the show. So it was about time to reconnect and have a wide ranging conversation about his work on oil and corporations in Russia. Now he’s looking into experiments with hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria–germs that eat oil. We survey Doug’s career. The pull of anthropology and the nexus of oil, corporations, and civil society in Russia. And how he went from there to the history of petroleum microbiology. 

Guests:

Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He’s the author of two award-winning books: The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals and The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture After Socialism both published by Cornell University Press.

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What makes a happy city? That is, what makes a city livable and responsive to humans’ physical, emotional and cultural needs? Over the last century, city planners have turned to the maintenance of green spaces within urban jungles to address these issues. In this final event for Pitt REEES’ Eurasian Environments series, the Eurasian Knot paired Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho to discuss green cities from two different contexts. Taylor researches mid-20th century efforts to green Soviet cities in response to rapid urbanization. De Carvalho studies the relationship between urbanization and environment in the Brazilian Amazon. How did city planners in the USSR and Brazil use green spaces to make cities more livable? What obstacles did they encounter? And how do these disparate contexts help us understand the global problem that pits people, city, and ecology against each other? Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho give us a trough of mental cud to crew on.

Guests:

Maria C. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the history and theory of landscape, architecture, and urban planning, particularly in the Soviet Union. 

Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research interests embrace urbanization as a worldwide process and tries to understand how it unfolds at the local scale.

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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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