The Eurasian Knot

Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet UnionMichael David-Fox began writing Soviet history in a dynamic period. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, archives were flung wide open, and scholars began exploring new ways to conceptualize the Soviet century. And you can read this in David-Fox’s work–a bricolage of historiography, history of knowledge, cross-cultural exchange, politics, power, and the nature of the modern age. As one of founds of Kritika, he’s made his mark on the field. The Eurasian Knot talked to David-Fox about his career, his driving concepts and methods, and the particularities of Soviet modernity. 

Guest:

Wendy Goldman has researched and written about the Soviet Union for almost 40 years. And her topics have been wide ranging– women, feminism, revolution, labor, political violence, war and survival. But if there is one throughline in her work, it is social history. Goldman is primarily concerned with the experience of working people. Their life worlds. Their trials and tribulations. Their agency in the construction of the Soviet system. Warts and all. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Wendy Goldman in her office at Carnegie Mellon University to hear about her experience as a historian, a woman, and a social historian and how this has shaped her understanding of Soviet socialism, politics, and history.

Guest:

Wendy Goldman is Wendy Goldman, Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of History, is a social and political historian of Russia. She’s the author of several books on Soviet history. Her most recent work (with Donald Filtzer) is Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front during World War II published by Oxford University Press.

Books discussed in this episode:

Women, State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936.

Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia. 

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression.

Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia.

Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front during World War II.

Water is life. A cliché and undeniable reality. So, what happens when climate change imperils water access? This episode, the second in our Eurasian Environments series, features a discussion with Sarah Cameron and Enda Wangui on water in two far flung regions—the Aral Sea and East Africa. How does the increasing scarcity of water impact these two arid climates? Cameron and Wangui address the environmental challenges in Central Asia and East Africa. They shed light on how colonial legacies disrupted traditional land access and ownership and climate change’s profound social and ecological impact on water politics, tradition, gender relations and migration patterns.

Guests:

Sarah Cameron is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan published by Cornell University Press. At present, she is at work on a new book, Aral: Life and Death of a Sea, about the causes and consequences of the demise of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. 

Edna Wangui is currently the chair of the Geography Department at Ohio University. Her research examines the impacts of climate change, rural development, contemporary agriculture and rural land on gender roles and relations among pastoralists and other marginalized communities in East Africa. She has published several articles on these issues as book chapters and peer-reviewed journals.