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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Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship.

Guest:

J. Arch Getty was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Books discussed in this interview:

• Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938, Cambridge University Press
• The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Yale University Press.
• Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's 'Iron Fist', Yale University Press.
• Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks and the Persistence of Tradition, Yale University Press.

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Guests: Drs. Carmen Andreescu and Alex Dombrovski on their work on mental health in Ukraine though the Global Initiative on Psychiatry - USA.

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Guest: Christian Raffensperger on the place of Kyivan Rus' in the wider European medieval world.

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Guest: Sean Griffin on his prize winning article “Revolution, Raskol, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The 1,020th Anniversary of the Day of the Baptism of Rus” published in the Russian Review.

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Guests: Victoria Smolkina and Georgyi Kasianov on the complexities of memory, history, and politics in narrating Ukrainian history.

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Guest: Artemy Troitsky reflecting on his life in the Soviet and Russian rock scenes.

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Guests: Polly Jones and Zuzanna Bogumil on memory, politics, and trauma of Stalinism.

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REEES faculty profile on Zoltan Zelemen about his research on neo-medievalism in international relations, law, and democracy.

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Guests: Ben Aris and Ilya Matveev on the Russian economy during wartime.

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Guest: Adrienne Edgar on Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples:  Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia published by Cornell University Press.

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Rebroadcast of my 2016 interview with the recently departed Anne Garrels, author of Putin’s Country: A Journey into the Real Russia.

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Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russian perpetrated genocide. Others, like Chechens, Dagestanis, and others the violence of Russian colonization. Obligated by faith to take these refugees, the Ottoman Empire scattered them throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, in many cases to balance against its Christian subjects. Most of these villages still exist today, including the capital of Jordan, Amman. What was this experience like for these refugees before the international legal regime of refugeedom? Why did they flee the Russian Empire and what was life like with the Ottomans? How did the Ottoman empire manage this influx of Muslim Others? And how did refugees contribute to the end of the Empire? Knowing nothing of this fascinating history, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky about his new book Empire of Refugees North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State published by Stanford University Press.

Guest:

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State published by Stanford University Press.

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Guests: Alessandro Iandolo and Natalia Telepneva on Soviet engagement with West Africa during the Cold War.

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Guest: William Taubman on Gorbachev: His Life and Times.

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Guest: Jonathan Brunstedt on The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR published by Cambridge University Press.

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Guest: Olga Petri on Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg published by Cornell University Press.

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Guest: Timothy Blauvelt on Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba published by Routledge.

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Guest: Fabrizio Fenghi on It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia published by University of Wisconsin Press.

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Guest: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz on Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia published by Fordham University Press.

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Guest: Ilya Budraitskis on Russia's war in Ukraine, fascism, and his essay collection, Dissidents among Dissidents. Ideology, politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia published by Verso.

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Guest: Gulnaz Sharafutdinova on The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity published by Oxford University Press.

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Guest: Brian Milakovsky on everyday life in the Donbas and the effort to evacuate civilians.

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Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to the World Bank, extreme weather, rising sea levels, violence, and resource scarcity will drive 216 million people to seek refuge by 2050. There’s even a buzzword for it: “climigration.” How and why do people move? To what extent is “migration” a business? And how do we accept and integrate migrants into bodily politics rife with ideological polarization, xenophobia, and nationalism? In this fifth event in our series, Eurasian Environments, the Eurasian Knot joined up with Daniel Briggs and Michael Goodhardt to discuss migration and climate, and specifically the trials people go through to find a safer, more prosperous present and future. 

Guests:

Daniel Briggs is a Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University. He is the author of several books.  His most recent are The New Futures of Exclusion: Life in the Covid-19 Aftermath and Sheltering Strangers: Critical Memoirs of Hosting Ukrainian Refugees published by Policy Press.

Michael Goodhart is Professor of Political Science and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of many articles and books. His most recent book is Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World.

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Guest: Adeeb Khalid on Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present published by Princeton University Press.

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Guest: Alexei Yurchak on perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the experiences of the last Soviet generation.

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Coming May 30!

Teddy Goes to the USSR, a new six-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police surveillance, consumerism, race, and everyday life through his extraordinary three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1968.

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Guest: Jeffrey Hass on The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941-1944 published by Oxford University Press.

The post Suffering and Survival in Leningrad appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Coming May 30! Teddy Goes to the USSR, a new six-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police surveillance, consumerism, race, and everyday life through his extraordinary three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1968.

The post Trailer: Teddy Goes to the USSR appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Guest: Vladislav Zubok on Collapse: The End of the Soviet Union published by Yale University Press.

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Guest: Nanci Adler on Memorial, Stalinist repression, and Russia's incomplete transitional justice.

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Guest: Isaac Scarborough on perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet system in Tajikistan.

The post Perestroika in the Periphery: Tajikistan appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Guest: Brigid O'Keeffe on Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia published by Bloomsbury.

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Guest: Mie Nakachi on Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union published by Oxford University Press.

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Jews presented a particular national problem in the Soviet Union. Though seen as one of the many oppressed minorities in the Russian Empire, there were also a people without a national territory. The lack of Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Union posed a theoretical problem as well. As Stalin declared, “a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation.” How then can Jews be a nation without a territory? Well, you create one. Enter Birobidzhan–an bold experiment to create a Jewish nation out of whole cloth in Siberia. But why in Siberia? Why did Jews settle there? What did they find? Birobidzhan was a failure by many measures. So what is its place in Jewish history? To get answers, the Eurasian Knot turned to Gennady Estraikh to talk about his short history of this unique chapter in Jewish history. 

Guest:

Gennady Estraikh is an Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He has written and edited numerous books, including most recently Jews in the Soviet Union: After Stalin, The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia and Yiddish Literature under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine published by Lexington Books.

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Guest: Courtney Doucette on letter writing, Nina Andreeva, and perestroika "from below."

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Guest: Geoffrey Roberts on Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books published by Yale University Press.

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This discussion was recorded on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, the morning before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Guests: Michael Kimmage, Marlene Laruelle, and Fyodor Lukyanov on the ongoing geopolitical crisis between Russia, Ukraine and the West.

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Stephen Crowley on Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation published by Cornell University Press.

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Guest: Tom Junes on Poland in the 1980s and its legacies.

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Guest: Catriona Kelly on Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev published by Oxford University Press.

The post The Lenfilm Art House appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Guest: Alexey Golubev on The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia published by Cornell University Press.

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Juliane Furst on Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in the Soviet Hippieland and Beyond published by Oxford University Press.

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Guest: The Americans creator Joe Weisberg on Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy from the Second Cold War published by Public Affairs.

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Guest: Russell Martin on the recent wedding of George Romanov and Victoria Romanovna Bettarini.

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During WWII, the Soviet Women’s Antifascist Committee started an experiment–a pen pal campaign with American women to promote the friendship between the United States and the USSR. The program began with fits and starts but eventually gained traction. So much so it continued into the early Cold War even as relations between the two countries quickly soured. Authorities on both sides considered the contact between women fairly safe. American and Soviet women corresponded about the legacy of the war, marriage, family, career, as well as more Cold War topics. Some of these pen pals even lasted several years. What were these intimate exchanges like? What did Soviet and American women counsel each other on? And what did they learn about each other and themselves? The Eurasian Knot wanted to learn more about this fascinating moment in Soviet-American relations and its meaning within the larger Cold War. So, we turned to Alexis Peri to talk about her fascinating new book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.

Guest:

Alexis Peri is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. Her first book, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, won the Pushkin House Book Prize and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best books on the Soviet home front. Her new book is Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women published by Harvard University Press.

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Guest: Theodora Dragostinova on The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene, was published by Cornell University Press.

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Guest: Irina Erman on her article “Nation and Vampiric Narration in Aleksey Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak” published in the January 2020 issue of The Russian Review. 

The post The Vampires of A. K. Tolstoy appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

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Guest: Clare Ibarra on scientific exchange between Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

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