The Eurasian Knot

I went through my Kurt Vonnegut phase in my late teens. I read Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, I think, Deadeye Dick, and of course, Slaughterhouse Five. I can’t say I remember much from those novels. Nor can I recall why Vonnegut connected with me. Perhaps now is a good time to revisit them. Little did I know that Vonnegut had a large readership in the Soviet Union. His books were translated by Rita Rait-Kovaleva and published in hundreds of thousands of copies. And in late Soviet fashion they were also passed around by hand to those who couldn’t secure copies. What did Soviet readers see in Kurt Vonnegut? How did the authorities regard this so-called “Anti-American American”? And what did Vonnegut think about his Soviet fans? Sarah Phillips wondered too after she participated in a project on Vonnegut. The result is her book, Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR. Sarah reached out to us, so we booked an interview. It turns out that Vonnegut has transcultural appeal. There’s even a revival in Ukraine. But what does Vonnegut’s popularity among Soviet youth say about really existing state socialism? Tune in to find out.Guest:Sarah Phillips is professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Bloomington. She’s the author of Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine and Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine, both published by Indiana University Press. Her new book is Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR published by Bloomsbury.

The Eurasian Knot hasn’t featured many philosophers. So, when Ukrainian political philosopher, Mikhail Minakov, came to the University of Pittsburgh to give a talk, I eagerly pulled him into a studio. The result was a wide-ranging conversation on the collapse of communism, the post-Soviet human, Kantian philosophy, our current global political conjecture, and the crisis of liberalism. What is a post-Soviet human and how does s/he differ from their Soviet counterpart? What are the seeds and expressions of our political discontent? And to what extent does liberalism need a revival to meet the political creativity of the global illiberal right? Minakov has some fascinating insights. He gave me so much to chew on. I have no doubt you will too after listening to this conversation.Guest:Mikhail Minakov is a political philosopher residing in Kyiv and Milan. His primary philosophical inquiries focus on human experience, social knowledge, political systems, historical consciousness, and multiple modernities. His most recent book is The Post-Soviet Human: Philosophical Reflections on Social History after the End of Communism published by ibidem Press.

On April 12, 2026, Hungarians overwhelmingly voted Peter Magyar into office ending the sixteen-year rule of Viktor Orban. It was a stunning victory that sent voters into the streets to celebrate. Now, observers are looking to see whether Magyar will roll back Orban’s illiberal system and even prosecute Orban and his clients for corruption. Commentators will also watch now how the strongman’s defeat will reverberate in the region and what it might mean for rightwing authoritarianism throughout the world. What led to Orban’s rise and fall? Was his regime an anomaly or consistent with Hungarian political history? And who is Peter Magyar? What does he stand for? And does he have enough political will and capital to set Hungary’s ailing economy and scarred democracy right? The Eurasian Knot turned to Stefano Bottoni to make sense of what Hungary’s past and future might foretell. Is the fall of Orban akin to regime change as Bottoni suggests? Tune in and find out.Guest: Stefano Bottoni is Associate Professor at the University of Florence. He is the author of several books. He’s the author of The Orbán Enigma forthcoming from Hurst Publishers.

In August 1924, a group of rebels organized by the anti-Bolshevik Committee for the Independence of Georgia and led by the Georgian Social Democratic Party, rose up against Soviet forces in the mining town of Chiatura. The Bolshevik reaction was swift and harsh. The fear of another "Kronstadt” still haunted the Bolsheviks, especially since their control over Georgia was tenuous. The uprising failed. Thousands were killed. Its ringleaders either fled into exile or were executed by the Georgian Cheka, then led by Levrenti Beria. The uprising was the culmination of Georgian opposition to Bolshevik rule after the fall of the Menshevik-led Republic in 1921. This small but significant story about Georgian resistance and a social-democratic alternative to Bolshevism has remained in obscurity. That is, until Eric Lee came along. Eric is a passionate partisan for Georgia. Not just for the place and its people. But for the promise that early Republic and its Menshevik leaders represented for the history of social democracy. What were the roots of this uprising? What was Bolshevik rule in Georgia? And how does the Social Democratic Republic and the August Uprising fit into today’s memory politics in Georgia? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Lee to get a fuller story behind this almost forgotten moment in the history of Georgian resistance to Russian rule.Guest:Eric Lee is an author, journalist and historian. He’s the author of several books. The most recent is The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism published by McFarland Publishers.

Spoiler alert. This episode has nothing to do with the Eurasian Knot’s usual fare. Dave Zirin was speaking at the University of Pittsburgh. Zirin is one of the few sports journalists on the political left. I’ve been a long-time fan. I’m also a sports fan, especially basketball. So, when I was offered an interview, I grabbed my digital recorder. And Dave, though exhausted, was gracious enough to talk. The result is a wide ranging discussion of key issues in the sports world–politics, labor, race, gambling, transgender athletes, this summer’s World Cup in the shadow of Trump’s ICE, and Dave’s forthcoming biography of Howard Zinn. Give it a listen even if you aren’t into sports. As Dave emphasizes, sports cannot be separated from the political, social, and economic issues of our times. Guest:Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation, the author of eleven books on the politics of sports and host of The Edge of Sports podcast. His most recent book is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World published by New Press. His next book, The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, will be published in August 2026.

About eight years ago, I interviewed Steven Sabol about his book, The Touch of Civilization. It was the first book I was aware of that compared the US’ and Russia’s efforts to civilize its colonized people, specifically the Sioux and Kazakhs. Here were two continental empires with two vastly different political systems that spread across a vast landmass to encounter, subjugate, remove, or outright kill indigenous populations along the way. Longtime listeners know that the overlapping trajectories of the United States and Russia have been of particular interest to the Eurasian Knot. How did a republic and an autocracy approach its indigenous subjects? How did Sioux and Kazakhs resist and accommodate colonization? And what does it all say about the American and Russian imperialism at the heart of each’s historical DNA? Given current events, we figured it was a good time to revisit our conversation with Steven.Guest:Steven Sabol is a Professor of History at North Carolina University in Charlotte. He’s the author of “The Touch of Civilization” Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization published by University Press of Colorado.

What do Russians really think? The question is old and elusive. It is also somewhat of a tell–to pose it is to suggest there’s a coherent answer, and more so, that Russians’ collective opinions matter. For the most part, scholars have turned to history, media, opinion polls, and assumptions to untie this knot. Jeremy Morris is no different in this regard, except that he approaches his subjects with ethnography–long, multi-year conversations of residents of provincial Russia to gauge their engagement with politics locally and nationally. A kind of political biography that records the ebbs and flows of Russian provincial life. How have Russians responded to their government’s invasion of Ukraine? How do they regard the past, present, and possible future of Russia? What issues concern and motivate them to political action? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jeremy about his new book, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance to get an on-the-ground view of Russian political life.Guest:Jeremy Morris is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He’s the author of Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance published by Bloomsbury Academic.

In the winter of 2013-14, protests erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine. Their goal was to oppose President Viktor Yanukovich’s rejection of the EU Association Agreement. Many protesters saw the Agreement as a meaningful step for Ukraine to enter the European orbit. And the protests might have fizzled. But the massacre of over 120 people by police snipers on 20 February, 2014, inspired hundreds of thousands more to enter the streets, seize government buildings, and occupy city centers. The protests quickly spread throughout Ukraine. The Euromaidan proved a historical turning point. The Yanukovich regime fell, Russia seized Crimea, and pro-Russian forces seized Donbas city centers. What were the short and long term causes of this revolution? Was it a revolution? What were its participants' aspirations? And how did the euphoric desire for a democratic, European Ukraine devolve into a mad spiral short of civil war? Longtime friend of the pod, William Risch was in Kyiv in those initial days. Now he’s combined his experiences with research to produce a new critical history of the Euromaidan. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Bill about the maidan, the chaos of those days, and its legacies in Ukraine and the region at large.Guest:William Jay Risch is Professor of History at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. He’s the author of The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. His new book is Ukraine's Euromaidan: From Revolutionary Euphoria to the Madness of War published by Bloomsbury Academic.

One of the most salacious and storied methods of KGB spycraft during the Cold War was the honey trap. Agents would get an informant to seduce a target, usually a Westerner deemed important. Then use that encounter as blackmail. We’re all aware of this thanks to movies and television. What we know nothing about are same-sex honey traps. The KGB’s use of homosexual men to seduce other men, whether said men were gay or not. Officials, academics, businessmen and other power positions were targets. How do we know about these operations? Well, because of the intrepid research of historian Irina Roldugina. Roldugina got access to KGB files related to same-sex operations and found more information in, of all things, declassified US government documents related to the Kennedy Assassination. How did these operations work? Who did the KGB tap for same-sex seduction? What do these documents tell us? And what did the KGB think of homosexuality in general? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Irina about her recent article, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus” published in the Fall 2025 issue of Journal of Cold War Studies. Guest:Irina Roldugina is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. She’s the author of several articles on queer history in the Soviet Union. Her most recent is “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus” published in the Fall 2025 issue of Journal of Cold War Studies.