The Intellectual

A new youth subculture emerged in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s–the Stiliagi. Roughly translated as “the stylish,” these youths, the majority of whom were men, wore flashy hairstyles and bright colored clothes, danced to jazz, and were obsessed with Western aesthetics. And of course, this style broke Soviet conventions, challenged social norms, and expanded gender performance. Though the exact origin of the Stiliagi is murky, it arose alongside other Western youth subcultures–the beatniks, the mods, the rockers–of the immediate post-WWII libertinism. The Stiliagi put the Soviet Union squarely within the history of a more globalized youth culture. But, what did it mean to be a “stiliagi”? Who were they? How did the style offer alternative forms of Soviet masculinity? How did the Soviet authorities react to these youths? And how did this subculture differ from its Western counterparts? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Alla Myzelev about her new book on the subculture, Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities, 1945–2010: Fashion as Dissent, to get some answers.

Guest:

Alla Myzelev is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies at SUNY Geneseo. She is currently editing a book titled Challenging Imperial Narratives Through Visual Art and Material Culture in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Her new book, Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities, 1945–2010: Fashion as Dissent, is published by Manchester University Press.

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As always there are spoilers ahead!

We've discussed Czech scifi before with Karel Zeman's gorgeous steam punk offering from 1958 Invention for Destruction (dubbed into the English language The Fabulous World of Jules Verne) and we've also covered Communists in Space with 1960s The Silent Star (AKA First Spaceship on Venus).

The Czech Ikarie XB-1 (1963) has connections to both of those films but also offers an aesthetic that seems to directly inspire Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The year is 2163, communism has won, and a crew of 40 are sent to find life on the white planet in Alpha Centauri with a journey fraught with sociological, psychological and physical challenges.

I have two amazing academics to help give insight into the film.

Evan Torner is an Associate Professor of German Studies and Niehoff Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Simon Spiegel is a lecturer of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. He has written extensively about Science Fiction and Utopia and has just released the book The Fear of Knowing about spoilers in film and media.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:11 Stanislaw Lem's The Magellanic Cloud

04:28 Czechoslovakian New Wave and film industry

09:49 The striking introductory scenes and Kubrick's 2001

13:05 Cabin fever in spaaace!

15:13 Music by Zdeněk Liška

16:57 Communist utopia in spaaace!

20:57 The draw of sociological stories

26:19 A utopian party and a red alert

28:15 The capitalist ship and the 20th century

32:47 Putting science into sci-fi

39:30 Evan's Dark Matter Shenanigans

42:21 Post Stalin faith

43:41 The ending

45:39 The US edit

47:27 Legacy

52:18 Recommendations

NEXT EPISODE!

I will be taking a detour next episode to talk about Afrofuturism which I've been wanting to discuss since the very early days of research before I launched the podcast. Almost two years late but I hope you enjoy it. After that we will be discussing Dr Strangelove and I would recommend you also watch Fail Safe (also 1964) if you have time.

The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is renowned for her large-scale sculptural pieces which have featured in galleries across the world. She has used materials such as fabric, plastic and even tampons to construct her works. In June 2018 her exhibition I’m Your Mirror opened at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. For this Joana made a series of new sculptures, including an enormous Venetian-style mask, made of overlapping mirrors. The construction of the huge mask was a process full of challenges as the enormous structure took shape in Joana’s Lisbon studio. In this programme Anna McNamee follows Joana through the process of working with the mirrors and explores how the piece is designed, shaped and packed up ready to begin its journey to Bilbao.

The biggest disappointment is that democracies do not reduce social and economic inequality.

Adam Przeworski

In this episode, host Justin Kempf talks with political scientist Adam Przeworski about what truly defines democracy today. Przeworski explains why he sees no global democratic crisis, defends a minimalist view centered on free and fair elections, and reflects on why democracies struggle to reduce inequality. He also discusses why citizens sometimes tolerate democratic erosion and how modern autocracies maintain support, offering a clear and concise perspective on democracy’s strengths and limits. Alejandro González Ruiz, cohost of the Kellogg Institute's Global Stage podcast, joins to help introduce the episode.

The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. 

Read the full transcript here.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• Minimal Democracy and Democratic Crisis - 9:44
• Economic Inequality and Democracy - 22:37
• Autocracy and Popular Support - 31:42
• Democratic Backsliding - 36:09

Links

Learn more about Adam Przeworski.

Learn more about his book Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Learn more about Alejandro González Ruiz.

Learn more about the Kellogg Institute.

Apes of the State created all Music

Support the show

Dana El Kurd speaks with professor, author, historian, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies Sherene Seikaly. They discuss the importance of producing knowledge and learning about Palestine, the intersectionality of the Palestinian cause, and how to combat a system trying to make you stupid.

Sources:

Journal of Palestine Studies – https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/jps/about

Donate to the Journal of Palestine Studies – https://palestine-studies.networkforgood.com/projects/18346-donate-to-support-palestinian-knowledge-production

Mahmoud Darwish interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrvzKOYeQZY&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Feliaayoub.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE

AAUP & MESA report on Title 6 investigations - https://www.aaup.org/news/new-aaup-report-analyzes-weaponization-title-vi-doe-investigations

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What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? Two authors discuss their books on Indigenous media: Karrmen Crey, whose Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada considers the political and cultural conditions that enabled the proliferation of Indigenous media across Canada in the early 1990s. The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, William Lempert’s Dreaming Down the Track delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. Crey and Lempert are joined in conversation here about the process of preserving community stories and enacting sovereign futures. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/952dd9d3

Karrmen Crey is associate professor of Aboriginal communication and media studies in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Crey is author of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and coeditor (with Joanna Hearne) of By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America.

William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema.

REFERENCES/MEDIA:

Donna’s Story (film)

Indians + Aliens (reality television series)

The Visit (animated documentary short)

Tjawa Tjawa (film)

Rutherford Falls (sitcom)

REFERENCES/PEOPLE:

Mark Moora

Faye Ginsburg

Jesse Wente

Doug Cuthand

Donna Gamble

Lisa Jackson

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Jeff Barnaby

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Cynthia Lickers-Sage

Taiko Waititi

Foucault

Coulthard

Audra Simpson

REFERENCES/OTHER

Mark Rifkin / Beyond Settler Time

ImagiNATIVE Australia

Karrmen Crey’s Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America (a collection co-edited with Joanna Hearne) are available from University of Minnesota Press. Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema by William Lempert is available from University of Minnesota Press, and has an open-access edition through Manifold. 

In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years in her new book The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject, the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Surrealisms series. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, Cheng offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture. Here, Cheng is joined in conversation with Surrealisms series editor Jonathan Eburne. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/383eeead

Joyce Cheng is associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject.

Jonathan Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry.    

REFERENCES:

Michael Stone-Richards

James Clifford / The Predicament of Culture

Natalya Lusty

Effie Rentzou

James Leo Cahill / Zoological Surrealism

Georges Bataille / Documents

Vincent Debaene / Far Afield

Severed hand collages

Marcel Mauss

Hannah Arendt

Johannes Fabian / Time and the Other

Malkam Ayyahou

The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Suechun Cheng is available from University of Minnesota Press and is the first book in its Surrealisms series. The University of Minnesota Press is also publisher of the International Journal of Surrealism.

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty.

This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout.

Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.

Alice Lovejoy is author of the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. A former editor at Film Comment, she is Professor of film and media studies at the University of Minnesota.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Adam is attending the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. He and Cameron discuss the history of the fair and the broader economics of the publishing industry.

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Dr.José Miguel Palacios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. His work explores the relations between transnational histories of radical cinemas and questions of migration, solidarity, networks of cinematic exchange, and archival practices He has published in journals like Film Quarterly, Screen, The Moving Image, Jump Cut, and [in] Transition. In today’s conversation, we discuss his book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film & Video after 1973 (UC Press, 2025) where he offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity. 

He is currently working on a second book devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, which was awarded a Project Development Grant by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 2025.