The Eurasian Knot

04/12/2025

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24/11/2025

Soviet ideology called for the emancipation of women. Soviet women would be active participants in public life, unburdened by the home, children, and husbands, and serve equally in the building and defense of the Soviet state. Reality, however, was different, especially during WWII. Soviet women did serve in the Red Army and partisans. But life at war was more than the heroic tales we know today. Soviet women were often abused by their commanders and fellow soldiers or viewed as suspicious, weak, and even dangerous. Life under occupation was even worse. Many women turned to “survival prostitution” and fraternized with German soldiers to escape abuse, forced labor, and death. What strategies did Soviet women adopt to survive the war? How were they looked upon by the enemy, their neighbors, and compatriots? And what happened after the war to those who formed s*xual relations with German soldiers? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Regina Kazyulina about gender, s*x, and survival to get a window into this contentious and understudied chapter of WWII in the Soviet Union.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/fraternization-144312034?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

20/11/2025

About two years ago, I was brought on to a podcast project started by the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The initial pitch was to produce a student-led podcast featuring two threatened artists that are part of the Pittsburgh Network for Threatened Scholars (PiNTS). I’m proud to feature the end result, The Art of War. It features two artists, the Yemeni street artist, Haifa Subay, and the Ukrainian poet, filmmaker, and musician, Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko, about exile, art, war, and adjusting to life in Pittsburgh. I hope Eurasian Knot listeners enjoy it because I’m really proud of having been a part of it. And especially, seeing how our students, Jojo Ellis, Kyla Parker, and Lily Acharya proved to be naturals in the audio craft.
patreon.com/posts/art-of-war-143779050

07/11/2025

- 1917: The October Revolution, or Bolshevik revolution, commences, starting the country's Civil War and changing the fabric of Russia forever.

The painting "Bolshevik" (1920) by Boris Kustodiev depicts the massive political, intellectual, and physical scale of the event.

04/11/2025

No new episode this week!
Take a breather and look back at some EKP classics- from Soviet sound postcards to DIY folk museums to "Putin's Chef," we've got it all!
patreon.com/posts/sound-of-part-3-111743178
patreon.com/posts/rise-and-fall-of-107257315
patreon.com/posts/soviet-diy-folk-114880048

01/11/2025

Congratulations to former guest, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, on winning the 2025 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize!
For more on "Empire of Refugees," make sure to revisit our episode featuring Vladimir at the link below!
patreon.com/posts/muslim-refugees-129348271
aseees.org/citation/troyansky-jelavich/

29/10/2025

Katja Bruisch is an environmental historian at Trinity College Dublin interested in energy, resource extraction and land-use in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Her new book is Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy published by Cambridge University Press.
cambridge.org/core/books/burning-swamps/CD46DB0B87D3ED364A86EC1A9C300FC0

28/10/2025

What is peat? We had no idea until the Eurasian Knot spoke to Katja Bruisch about how this coal-like soil was an energy source in Russia and the Soviet Union. Found in wetlands, peat is the extracted top soil that is dried and burned for fuel. It was a marginal, but important, energy source in industrialization. Peat was also used as a localized source to produce electricity for Lenin’s Electrification campaign. Because, as the old man put it, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” But, Bruisch tells us, extracting peat was labor intensive, and into the Soviet period, increasingly done by women. Peat harvesting created communities and culture. It also significantly altered local ecologies. How crucial was peat in modernization? Why was it used instead of other energy sources? And can it serve as a present-day alternative? The Eurasian Knot posed these questions and more to Katja Bruisch about her book, Burning Swaps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy published by Cambridge University Press.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-peat-ussr-142174549

21/10/2025

An award winning historical fiction author, Catherine Merridale's writing draws upon over 20 years of field work in Russia and Ukraine, as well as cutting-edge archival work. Read more about Catherine's writing on her website ⬇️
http://catherinemerridale.com/Fiction.html

20/10/2025

I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audience. This was quite a change for me since I used to hold such work in contempt (or was it jealousy) when I was a snot-nosed, snobby grad student. So I jumped at the chance to interview Merridale and talk about the historical craft and its relationship to detective fiction in her first novel, Moscow Underground. As she explains, there’s some liberation in fiction. You can freely develop characters. Imbibe the story with emotions, the sites, the sounds, the smells. And craft a compelling and entertaining story. But creative license has its limits. Historical fiction requires you to stick to the historical record. You have to make sure the history you set your story in is believable, as Merridale does, in her crafting of Moscow of 1934. What challenges does writing fiction present to a professional historian? How does fiction and history intersect? And why a novel at all, let alone a detective novel? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Catherine Merridale about her hero, Anton Markovich Belkin, an investigator for the Procuracy, and the murder investigation that takes him into Moscow’s two undergrounds–the metro and the underbelly of crime, poverty, and politics in her first novel, Moscow Underground.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/murder-mystery-141643913?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

14/10/2025

Nicole Eaton is Associate Professor of History at Boston College where she teaches courses on the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, modern Europe, authoritarianism, and mass violence. Check out her first book, the subject of this week's episode, at the link below ⬇️
cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501767364/german-blood-slavic-soil/

13/10/2025

The Prussian city of Konigsberg is well-known as the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. But in many ways, it’s also a microcosm for the twentieth century. Founded in the 13th century by Teutonic knights, the city served as a key trading center for the Prussian Empire until the Polish corridor severed it from Germany after WWI. It is then that the history of Konigsberg takes an even more dramatic turn. Its “Germanness” became an object of debate and political exploitation. By the early 1930s, it had one of the highest votes for the N***s in Germany. But then–WWII. Destroyed and depopulated by 1944, it became the first city to satisfy the Red Army appetite for revenge r**e and pillaging. It became a Soviet possession after WWII and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, was sovietized into Kaliningrad. And even though the USSR is no more, it remains a part of the Russian Federation.

The history of Konigsberg/Kaliningrad begs so many questions. Why N***sm? What was life there during the war? The Red Army violence but also its reconstruction into Kaliningrad? How did the Soviets handle their mortal German enemies after a war of annihilation? And how is this legacy seared into the city? The Eurasian Knot wanted to know more and turned to Nicole Eaton to learn more about her book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How N**i Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-konigsberg-141130456?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link