The Eurasian Knot

By The Eurasian KnotSociety & Culture History

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Typical duration
48 min
per episode

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The Eurasian Knot episodes

April 14, 2019 Lenin’s Government
Guest: Lara Douds on Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State published by Bloomsbury.
The post Lenin’s Government appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.
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1 hr 1 min
April 05, 2019 Soviet Intelligence and African National Liberation
Guest: Natalia Telepneva on Soviet and Warsaw Pact intelligence services and African anti-colonial movements.

The post Soviet Intelligence and African National Liberation appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.
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50 min
March 27, 2019 Photography and Russian Literature
Guest: Katherine Reischl on Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors published by Cornell University Press.
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48 min
March 20, 2019 The Soviet Origins of Lamaze
Guest: Paula Michaels on Lamaze: An International History published by Oxford University Press.
The post The Soviet Origins of Lamaze appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.
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1 hr 4 min
March 10, 2019 Russian Nationalism
Guest: Marlene Laruelle on Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields, published by Routledge, and her edited collection Entangled Far Rights: A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the 20th Century, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
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53 min
March 01, 2019 The Gulag at War
Guest: Wilson Bell on Stalin’s Gulag at War: Forced Labor, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War published by the University of Toronto Press.
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1 hr 10 min
March 01, 2019 The Gulag at War

Guest:
Wilson Bell is an Assistant Professor of History at Thompson Rivers University where he specializes on the Gulag prison camps in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He’s the author of Stalin’s Gulag at War: Forced Labor, Mass Death, and Soviet Victory in the Second World War published by the University of Toronto Press.
Partial transcript
Music:
System of a Down, “Prison Song,” Toxicity, 2001.
1 hr 10 min
February 22, 2019 The Kazakh Famine
Guest: Sarah Cameron on The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.
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57 min
February 22, 2019 The Kazakh Famine

Guest:

Sarah Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Russia and Soviet Union history at the University of Maryland. She’s the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.

You can read a partial transcript of this interview here.

Music:

The Beastie Boys, “Sure Shot,” Ill Communication, 1994.
59 min
February 21, 2019 Transcript: The Kazakh Famine

In anticipation to releasing my interview with Sarah
Cameron on the 1930-33 famine in Kazakhstan, I decided to make a partial
transcript of the interview to pique everyone’s interest.

I hope to provide these partial transcripts more often
since complete transcripts of 50-minute interviews are costly to transcribe and
time consuming to edit. But partial transcriptions of some of the key parts of
the conversation are much more manageable. If you do want to see more, then
support them by becoming a patron
of the SRB Podcast.

This abridged version of the interview has been edited for
clarity. Look out for the full audio version soon.

Sarah Cameron is an Assistant Professor of Russia and Soviet Union history at the University of Maryland. She’s the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press.

Your new book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, is one of the few studies on the famine in Kazakhstan. Why has the Kazakh famine been so marginalized in the history of Stalinism?

It’s something I’ve thought a
lot about as I worked on the project. How could such a big event, in which a
million and a half people died, just get lost from our understanding of Soviet
history? I think it boils down to a couple of reasons. First is, we tend to
think, at least in the US and the West, of Soviet history as European history. To
a large extent, Soviet history and the history of Stalinism has yet to
incorporate the Soviet Union’s Asian half. And I think the Kazakh famine is
just one illustration of how we’ve neglected the eastern half of the Soviet
Union. If we look at the history of the Soviet East, I think we can find
examples of other events that are really missing that might challenge our
understanding of what Soviet history and what Stalinism was.

I think another reason is
that in the West, famine and collectivization has become closely associated
with the Ukrainian famine, in which roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians died. This
has happened, in large part, due to the efforts of the Ukrainian diaspora. There
has been a very long-running and polemical debate surrounding the Ukrainian
famine over the question of whether Stalin specifically used famine to target
Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Because of the very polemical nature of this
debate in the West, the famine that occurred in the Soviet Union during
collectivization has come to be seen as an exclusively Ukrainian event.

Famine, of course, afflicted
Kazakhstan and other parts of the Russian heartland, where many Russian
peasants died. I also think what’s happened is that some Ukrainians have sought
to marginalize the fact that famine occurred in other parts of the Soviet Union
in part to bolster their claims that this was an event directed specifically
against Ukrainians. Therefore, the broader story, in a sense, has been lost.

The third reason is a broader
world historical one. And that is the way that the stories of nomadic peoples
have been marginalized. The Kazakhs were pastoral nomads prior to the famine. It’s,
of course, much more difficult to tell the stories of nomadic peoples. They
leave fewer stories in the written record, and the stories that we do have
59 min

About The Eurasian Knot

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