The Eurasian Knot

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.

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.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Party had roughly 24,000 members. A decade later, it boasted about 1.2 million. Recruitment came in waves and so did the purges. Still, Party members were found at the top and bottom of the system. In the Kremlin and in the factories. The Party rank and file were vital to the establishment of the Soviet system, its day-to-day functioning, and the human material for campaigns whether they be for literary, industrialization, collectivization or terror. But who were these people? How engaged were they in politics? Were they a constituency for Party leaders to appeal to or was the rank and file mere material to be mobilized and directed without its own agency? There are few studies looking at the Party at the shop floor and its place in shaping Soviet socialism. Yiannis Kokosalakis’ book Building Socialism does just that. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Kokosalakis to learn more about the role of the Bolshevik rank and file in the early Soviet system.Guest:Yiannis Kokosalakis is a visiting researcher at Bielefeld University. He’s the author of Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System, 1921-1941 published by Cambridge University Press.

Joseph Stalin died today, March 5, seventy-three years ago. So, I thought it would be a good idea to dig out, re-edit and remaster, the interview I did with Joshua Rubenstein back in 2018 about the dictator’s final days. What did Stalin focus on in the final years of his life? How did Soviet leadership react to his death? Soviet society? And internationally? Let’s revisit what Rubenstein had to tell us from his book, The Last Days of Stalin.Guest:Joshua Rubenstein is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He’s the author of several books on Soviet history. His most recent is The Last Days of Stalin published by Yale University Press.

When societies are in crisis, people tend to seek alternative belief systems to give them comfort, explain a complex world, or fill a space left vacant by discredited ideologies and faiths. Like the embrace of spiritualism after the mass death during the American Civil War. The growth of millenarian movements and cults for fear of the end times. Or even the embrace of conspiracy theories to explain the unimaginable. The Soviet Union was no exception. As the system broke apart and Marxism-Leninism was tossed aside, a questioning of dominant narratives took root. Soviet citizens began to seek new belief systems–astrology, gurus, alternative medicines, sects and cults, and fantastical historical narratives. Joseph Kellner was struck by this explosion of belief seeking and wanted to understand it. Why did Russian citizens gravitate to new forms of belief? What was lost with the collapse of the Soviet system and what opportunities did a new society offer? And what does this all say about the need for humans to believe in, well, something? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Joseph about his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, to get a sense of this urge to embrace new beliefs and how they shaped experience during the collapse of the Soviet Union.Guest:Joseph Kellner teaches Russian and Soviet history at the University of Georgia. He’s the author of The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse published by Cornell University Press.

As a Cold War kid, I remember the intense rivalry between the United States and USSR during the Olympics. Of course, we remember the US’ boycott in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And the Soviet boycott in 1984 in response to the American boycott. Who bested who was not just about national pride. It was a testament as to who had the better system: communism or capitalism. What I didn’t know then was that for Moscow, winning was everything. Losing came with consequences. Why was it so important for the Russians to win? So much so, as we saw a few years ago, at the risk of being banned for a state-run doping operation? These are just a few questions the Eurasian Knot posed to Bruce Berglund, author of The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold. I’ve never been much of an Olympic watcher (my sport is the NBA), but now I better understand why that hunt for gold is such a Kremlin obsession.Guest:Bruce Berglund is a historian of Europe, Russia, and world sports and teaches at Charles University in Prague. He’s written several books on sports, including The Fastest Game in the World, a global history of hockey. His new book is The Moscow Playbook: How Russia Used, Abused, and Transformed Sports in the Hunt for Gold published by Triumph Books.