Episodes

  • Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2019)

    Kristen R. Ghodsee, "Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2019)
    Jul 14 2024
    Last week, I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and the behind-the-scene details of its making. Ghodsee is a professor in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of nine books and many more articles and essays. Second World, Second Sex addresses a telling gap in the historiography of women rights movements – the contributions of the Second World women rights activists. While careful not to idealize the socialist authoritarian regimes, Ghodsee reveals how deeply problematic and unfair it is to define feminism based on Western-inspired definitions of self-fulfillment or grassroot activism and to dismiss the achievements of women’s state organizations in the Eastern bloc as top-down policies and socialist propaganda. Aiming to retell the UN Decade for Women from a non-Western perspective, this book follows the participation of the Bulgarian and Zambian delegations in the international conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The author makes use of a painstaking multi-site archival research and compassionate oral histories, to reconstruct the conferences and their context of arduous preparations and ideological tensions. The book’s approach to the conferences is very factual but also offers a lot of context, which helps the reader to better understand the main points of conflict between the Western delegates and the delegates from the developing and non-aligning countries. Ironically, what was rebranded in the 1990’s as “intersectionality” was the main argument of the state socialist women activists much earlier, namely, that the discussions of women’s rights separately from other social injustices such as racism, imperialism and colonialism are ultimately futile. Curiously enough, Ghodsee’s comparative overview of the state of women’s rights before the UN Decade reveals that socialist states were forerunners of women’s rights with generous maternal leaves and state-run childcare among others. Moreover, the author reminds us, that the US government’s attention to women’s issues in the 1960s was actually a direct response to the threat coming from the USSR where women’s brains and forces were put into service of the rivalry with the West. Thus, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Ghodsee sees the current political and cultural hegemony of the West as rather disadvantageous in terms women’s rights. There is no rivalry to push governments to do better and women remaining in the periphery hardly benefit from having equal access to the free market in their crime-ridden and economically dependent from the West countries with dismantled welfare systems. Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE

    Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE
    Jul 14 2024
    Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organized around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term “animal style,” this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. In Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh UP, 2024) Art historian Petya Andreeva’s research shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbors to showcase worldliness and control over the nomadic “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Maryna Shevtsova, "Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices" (Lexington Books, 2024)

    Maryna Shevtsova, "Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices" (Lexington Books, 2024)
    Jun 30 2024
    Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices came out with Lexington Books at the two-year’s mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2024. This volume undertakes an exploration of how gender norms have been transgressed and cultural expectations of womanhood and manhood evolved within the context of the war in Ukraine, ongoing since 2014. Edited by Maryna Shevtsova, it gives voice to feminist scholars and practitioners from Ukraine and the wider Central and Eastern European region who share their perspectives on the complex interconnection between gender and warfare. Table of contents is available here. Maryna Shevtsova is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    46 mins
  • Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, "The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

    Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, "The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)
    Jun 28 2024
    Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity. The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire. Michoel Rotenfeld has translated Goldenshteyn’s autobiography into English and provided an extensive introduction and helpful notes throughout the text. Rotenfeld’s translation, The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea, was published in 2023 by Touro University Press. Michoel Rotenfeld is a historical researcher and the associate director of Touro University Libraries. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, "The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, "The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Jun 22 2024
    In The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market. Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    54 mins
  • Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)

    Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)
    Jun 19 2024
    Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience. Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr
  • Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

    Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
    Jun 15 2024
    Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using lessons. Here, what are denoted as borderline historical events, demonstrating both time-specific and time-transcending qualities, are suggested as useful materials. Scholarly works on the Holocaust and Soviet terror, from Raul Hilberg's and Robert Conquest's classic works of the 1960s to more recent books by Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, are analyzed to identify lessons of history, and their change during a full half-century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019)

    David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019)
    Jun 7 2024
    Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as the Wehrmacht's first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942 (FSG, 2019), David Stahel argues that it was in fact their first strategic success in the east. The mismanaged Soviet Counteroffensive became a phyrric victory as both sides struggled with strategic leadership and supply. German generals, caught between Stalin's hammer and Hitler's anvil, found loopholes in increasingly irrational orders to hold at all costs. Drawing on official war diaries, journals, memoirs, and correspondence, Stahel's latest installment in his reevaluation of the eastern front delivers a vivid account that challenges what you thought you knew about the war in the Soviet Union. David Stahel is the author of five previous books on Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union. He completed an MA in war studies at King's College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. His research primarily concentrates on the German military in World War II. Dr. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
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    1 hr and 15 mins