Soviet Investigation of Nazi War Crimes

About two years ago, I was brought on to a podcast project started by the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The initial pitch was to produce a student-led podcast featuring two threatened artists that are part of the Pittsburgh Network for Threatened Scholars (PiNTS). I’m proud to feature the end result, The Art of War. It features two artists, the Yemeni street artist, Haifa Subay, and the Ukrainian poet, filmmaker, and musician, Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko, about exile, art, war, and adjusting to life in Pittsburgh. I hope Eurasian Knot listeners enjoy it because I’m really proud of having been a part of it. And especially, seeing how our students, Jojo Ellis, Kyla Parker, and Lily Acharya proved to be naturals in the audio craft.Art of WarProduced by Lily Acharya, Jojo Ellis, Kyla Parker, David Greene, Shannon Reed, and Sean Guillory.Editing and sound design: Sean GuilloryMixed and mastered; Daniel Cooper, Podcuts EditingMusic: Blue Dot Sessions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is peat? We had no idea until the Eurasian Knot spoke to Katja Bruisch about how this coal-like soil was an energy source in Russia and the Soviet Union. Found in wetlands, peat is the extracted top soil that is dried and burned for fuel. It was a marginal, but important, energy source in industrialization. Peat was also used as a localized source to produce electricity for Lenin’s Electrification campaign. Because, as the old man put it, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” But, Bruisch tells us, extracting peat was labor intensive, and into the Soviet period, increasingly done by women. Peat harvesting created communities and culture. It also significantly altered local ecologies. How crucial was peat in modernization? Why was it used instead of other energy sources? And can it serve as a present-day alternative? The Eurasian Knot posed these questions and more to Katja Bruisch about her book, Burning Swaps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy published by Cambridge University Press.Guest:Katja Bruisch is an environmental historian at Trinity College Dublin interested in energy, resource extraction and land-use in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Her new book is Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy published by Cambridge University Press.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audience. This was quite a change for me since I used to hold such work in contempt (or was it jealousy) when I was a snot-nosed, snobby grad student. So I jumped at the chance to interview Merridale and talk about the historical craft and its relationship to detective fiction in her first novel, Moscow Underground. As she explains, there’s some liberation in fiction. You can freely develop characters. Imbibe the story with emotions, the sites, the sounds, the smells. And craft a compelling and entertaining story. But creative license has its limits. Historical fiction requires you to stick to the historical record. You have to make sure the history you set your story in is believable, as Merridale does, in her crafting of Moscow of 1934. What challenges does writing fiction present to a professional historian? How does fiction and history intersect? And why a novel at all, let alone a detective novel? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Catherine Merridale about her hero, Anton Markovich Belkin, an investigator for the Procuracy, and the murder investigation that takes him into Moscow’s two undergrounds–the metro and the underbelly of crime, poverty, and politics in her first novel, Moscow Underground.  Guest:Catherine Merridale is an acclaimed historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her work includes pioneering oral history as well as archival research on topics as varied as death, the Kremlin, and Lenin's train ride of 1917. With Russia now off-limits for political reasons, she now turns to fiction. Moscow Underground is her first novel, set primarily in 1934.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Prussian city of Konigsberg is well-known as the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. But in many ways it’s also a microcosm for the twentieth century. Founded in the 13th century by Teutonic knights, the city served as a key trading center for the Prussian Empire until the Polish corridor severed it from Germany after WWI. It is then that the history of Konigsberg takes an even more dramatic turn. Its “Germanness” became an object of debate and political exploitation. By the early 1930s, it had one of the highest votes for the Nazis in Germany. But then–WWII. Destroyed and depopulated by 1944, it became the first city to satisfy the Red Army appetite for revenge rape and pillaging. It became a Soviet possession after WWII and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, was sovietized into Kaliningrad. And even though the USSR is no more, it remains a part of the Russian Federation.The history of Konigsberg/Kaliningrad begs so many questions. Why Nazism? What was life there during the war? The Red Army violence but also its reconstruction into Kaliningrad? How did the Soviets handle their mortal German enemies after a war of annihilation? And how is this legacy seared into the city? The Eurasian Knot wanted to know more and turned to Nicole Eaton to learn more about her book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad.Guest:Nicole Eaton is Associate Professor of History at Boston College where she teaches courses on the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, modern Europe, authoritarianism, and mass violence. She’s the author of German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad published by Cornell University Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I’ve been thinking about the use of “they” in our political rhetoric. In some respects, this third-person plural pronoun is indicative of politics. The “they” in politics often refers specifically to an entity–political party, a group of politicians, etc. But what if the “they” refers to another nebulous entity? For example, here’s a clip from a recent NYT Daily episode on Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “They also had a goal of gaining control of the media and Hollywood so they could change the culture in America. They kill and terrorize their opponents, hoping to silence them.”Who is this “they”? This reminded me of an interview I did with Paul Hanebrink from 2019 about his book A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Hanebrink gives a good history of one “they” that is at the center of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth–a conspiracy that I think is the foundation of most conspiracy thinking–a shadowy “they” that is behind all social ills. How has the Judeo-Bolshevik myth shaped the 20th century? How did it change over time? And what resonance does it have today? To get some insight, give this interview with Paul Hanebrink another go.Guest:Paul Hanebrink is a Professor of History at Rutgers University specializing in modern East Central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary, nationalism and antisemitism as modern political ideologies, and the place of religion in the modern nation-state. He’s the author of In Defense of Christian Hungary. His most recent book is A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism published by Harvard University Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s a paradox at the center of Elana Resnick’s book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. EU policies of environmental sustainability in Bulgaria require the racialization of Romani into a permanent low-skilled and impoverished workforce. Waste management required teams of Romani streetsweepers and trash collectors to sort trash into waste, recyclables and compost, and bring them for processing and reuse. This labor was historically filled by Bulgaria’s Romani citizens, to the point where white Bulgarians equated them with waste. And in turn, Roma’s racial otherness allowed white Bulgarians to enter a pan-European concept of whiteness. Since race is a favorite subject on the Eurasian Knot, Sean spoke to Elana about Sofia’s Romani women as waste workers, the powerful solidarity and collective action that emerges from their labor, and the implications for Romani rights struggle in Bulgaria.Guest:Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also leads the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. She’s the author of several articles and the book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, published by Stanford University Press.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are many stereotypes about Russia. But perhaps one of the strangest is that Russians prefer a strong hand, are politically passive, even apolitical, and rebellion just isn’t in their DNA. This belief requires a hefty dose of historical amnesia. Many of Russia’s most memorable historical figures–Stenka Razin, Pugachev, the Decembrists, the People’s Will, Lenin, Sakharov, Alexei Navalny, to name a few, were rebels. Not to mention, Russia has experienced three revolutions over the last century–1905, 1917, and 1991. Rebellion, in fact, is an integral part of Russia’s history, and the rebel often leads the dance with the Tsar. What is rebellion? Who are these rebels? What makes them? And how do they shape the Russian political system? These are questions that resonate in Russia and beyond. So the Eurasian Knot invited Anna Arutunyan on the pod to discuss the figure of the rebel in her new book, Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny published by Polity.Guest:Anna Arutunyan is a Russian-American journalist, analyst, and author. She served as senior Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group before leaving Russia in 2022 and is the author of five books about the country, its politics, society and wars. Her new book is Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny published by Polity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After 1917, San Francisco’s small Russian community exploded with new arrivals. Over the next decade, thousands quit Soviet Russia, often via the Far East or China, to escape revolution and civil war. Arrival in America, however, was only the beginning of new trials. In the 1920s and 1930s, American nativists saw Slavic people as low in the racial hierarchy–people who were visually white, but culturally not quite. The Russian community in San Francisco was faced with a contradictory choice: to preserve their culture, a culture that they saw was being destroyed in Soviet Russia or shed their Russianess and become more “American” i.e. more “white.” How did this first wave of Russian emigres meet the challenge of otherness and assimilation? And what about the second wave of Russians who came after WWII? How did they navigate the Red Scare where Russian was equated with communist and the notions of Americanness had become more polarized? The Eurasian Knot spoke to the historian Nina Bogdan about her new book, Before We Disappear into Oblivion: San Francisco’s Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War, to get some insight.Guest:Nina Bogdan is a historian and cultural preservationist. She recently authored the “Russian American Historic Context Statement” for the San Francisco City Planning Department as part of the Citywide Cultural Resources Survey. She’s the author of Before We Disappear into Oblivion: San Francisco’s Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.The article Rusana mentions on the history of Berkeley's Institute of Slavic Studies is here. However, the piece is about the historian Robert J. Kerner, not Nicholas Raisanovsky. Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What power do jokes have in authoritarian societies? I’ve been thinking about this recently as Trump further consolidates power. Turn on any American late night show and it’s one joke about Trump after another. It’s easy for comedians. The Trump jokes write themselves. Soviet Russia didn’t have late night, and openly poking fun at the authorities was highly circumscribed. This continues to a large extent in today’s Russia. But people still tell biting, insulting jokes in daily life. Laughing at power can’t be totally contained. But do they matter? What power do they have? In what ways are they criticism of the powers that be, a way to cope with the absurdity of everyday life, and or merely self-delusional exercises in political agency? All three? In 2018, the Eurasian Knot took on these questions about jokes in a conversation with Jon Waterlow about his book, Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. We decided to rerun the interview for what it can tell us about our present conjecture.Guest:Jon Waterlow received his PhD in History at Oxford. He’s the author of It's Only A Joke, Comrade! Humor, Trust, And Everyday Life Under Stalin, 1929-1941. Jon is also host of the podcast Voices in the Dark. Look for it on your favorite podcast feed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.Send us your sounds! PatreonKnotty News Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.