The Eurasian Knot

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The Eurasian Knot The Eurasian Knot treats your ears to stories about Eurasia’s complex past, present, and future. But it doesn’t have to be. Eurasia will never appear the same.

To many, Russia, and the wider Eurasia, is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The SRB Podcast dispels the stereotypes and myths about the region with lively and informative interviews on Eurasia’s complex past, present, and future. New episodes drop weekly with an eclectic mix of topics from punk rock to Putin, and everything in-between. Subscribe on your favorite podcasts app, grab your headphones, hit play, and tune in.

02/07/2025

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.

02/07/2025

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.

From the CPUSA archive.RGASPI, 515, 1, 2589, 1930.
02/07/2025

From the CPUSA archive.

RGASPI, 515, 1, 2589, 1930.

01/07/2025

What makes a city happy? 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 Mariah 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? Mariah Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho give us a trough of mental cud to crew on.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/green-cities-in-132999719?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

I was going through issues of the Negro Champion last night and found this ad directed at African Americans to visit the...
27/06/2025

I was going through issues of the Negro Champion last night and found this ad directed at African Americans to visit the USSR. Not surprised they pitched the trip as leaving Jim Crow behind. This is exactly what many African Americans were attracted to--how an ethnically diverse country like the USSR did things differently.

Also, I expected the ad would also offer a trip to Uzbekistan since it had already become a place of pilgrimage and fascination for many American Blacks.

For those unfamiliar, the "Negro tribes in the Caucasus" were the community of African descendants living in the Batumi region of Abkhazia. Allison Blakely wrote a bit about them in Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. One of the few sources on them is the ethnography by V. P. Vradii, Negry batumskoi oblasti, 1914.

About the Negro Champion. Lovett Fort-Whiteman was the founder of the newspaper in 1925, but it came out too infrequently and was financially underwater. It's not surprising. Whiteman basically published the paper alone. It was difficult to manage that, being constantly on speaking tours, and responsible for organizing the American Negro Labor Congress and its chapters. His inability to juggle all of this--with little CP leadership help--made it easy to criticism him and eventually fire him as the National Organizer of the ANLC.

The paper was put on a bit more stable footing in 1928 after the Comintern passed the much (in my view unfairly) maligned "Black Belt Thesis." Cyrill Briggs was made editor. Yes, that Cyrill Briggs of Crusader fame. Whiteman had requested Briggs to take this up in 1925 to no avail. Richard B. Moore became the dead of the ANLC. By this time, Whiteman was in Russia on a scholarship to study Ethnology at MGU. Sadly, much of the Negro Champion wasn't preserved, especially the early issues. It was renamed The Liberator in 1930 also under Briggs' editorship. This advertisement was published in the March 23, 1929 issue of the Negro Champion.

17/06/2025

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.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/abortion-bio-in-131601201?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

Some gallows humor for our dark times.
07/06/2025

Some gallows humor for our dark times.

04/06/2025

Tamás Kiss is a researcher of minority ethnic relations in Eastern Europe, and has authored several books on Romania and Hungary. He’s the editor of "Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights: Hungarians in Transylvania."
link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-78893-7

04/06/2025

Stefano Bottoni's research focuses on the sociopolitical history of Eastern Europe in the Soviet Bloc. His recent publication, "Orbán: A European Despot," analyzes Fidesz leadership in Hungary.
researchgate.net/publication/358382999_Stefano_Bottoni_Orban_Un_despota_in_Europa

02/06/2025

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.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/romanian-130540765?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

There was a man referred to as Stalin's "Iron Fist" during the regime, but who exactly was he?Follow Nikolai Yezhov’s ri...
30/05/2025

There was a man referred to as Stalin's "Iron Fist" during the regime, but who exactly was he?
Follow Nikolai Yezhov’s rise to the top of the ranks of Soviet society as he becomes Stalin's chief of police in J. Arch Getty's "Yezhov."
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300092059/yezhov/

J. Arch Getty's "The Road to Terror" condenses secret Soviet dossiers, police reports, private letters, and transcripts ...
29/05/2025

J. Arch Getty's "The Road to Terror" condenses secret Soviet dossiers, police reports, private letters, and transcripts to weave together a thrilling narrative of the Party's descent into inhumanity. Give it a read here ⬇️
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300104073/the-road-to-terror/

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