Knotty News

Soviet Protestants

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:06:19 GMT

We tend to think of the 1990s when it comes to Protestantism in Russia. It was then that evangelicals descended on Russia to shine Jesus’ light into the post-Soviet void. Yet, the Soviet Union, despite its best efforts, was a multiconfessional state. And though officially atheist, religious belief persisted, including among the Union’s small pockets of Protestants. Like with other faiths, the state’s relations with Protestants vacillated between repression, accommodation, and control. As Miriam Dobson says in her new book, The Unorthodox, things shifted after Stalin’s death. By the 1960s, regulating religious life fell under the purview of the Council of Religious Affairs. Sure, the state still emphasized atheism, closed churches, and prosecuted Protestants. But its methods were more surgical and the Council relied more on policing the margins over mass repression. So what was life like for the USSR’s Protestant minority? How did they practice their faith and maintain community despite pressures of family, society, and the state? And how did all of this connect to the larger Cold War context where the USSR’s archenemy was a Protestant majority country? The Eurasian Knot talked to Miriam about The Unorthodox to learn more about Protestant faith and community during the Cold War.

Guest:

Miriam Dobson is a Reader in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin and The Unorthodox: Soviet Protestants in Cold-War Ukraine and Russia published by Cornell University Press.

Thresholds Part 7: Olga

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:42:05 GMT

Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Olga immigrated to the United States from Moscow, Russia in 1990 as a child. She’s a high school teacher and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Thresholds Part 6: Yelena

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:40:56 GMT

Guest:

Yelena immigrated to the United States in 1979 as part of the wave of Soviet Jewish emigration. She’s a retired engineer and lives in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Thresholds Part 5: Julia

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:39:35 GMT

Guest:

Julia Alekseyeva immigrated to United States from Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1992. She’s Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s the author of Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution and Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s and Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s.

Thresholds Part 4: New Immigrants

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:01:49 GMT

Guest:

Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States published by NYU Press.

Thresholds Part 3: Russians in San Francisco

The Eurasian Knot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:54:54 GMT

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.

Thresholds Part 2: Becoming White

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:02:55 GMT

Guest:

David Roediger is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs published by Basic Books.

Thresholds Part 1: Leaving the Old Country

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:17:33 GMT

Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that will grapple with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?

Guest:

Tara Zahra is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. She’s the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World published by W. W. Norton & Company.

Thresholds was edited and produced by Jojo Ellis and Sean Guillory.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Theme song: “Immigration Rose” by James Doherty, 1924.

The Rise and Fall of the Georgian Democratic Republic

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:00:30 GMT

The Georgian Democratic Republic lasted a mere three years, from 1918-1921. And though it was viewed as an oddity at the time, many European social democrats marveled at its possibilities. Here was a state committed to social democracy in a mostly backward peasant and multiethnic country. What promises did it hold for the future? Unfortunately, the world never learned because the Bolsheviks crushed it in 1921 and proceeded to sovietize Georgia. The republic was denounced as counter revolutionary and its memory faded as its founders died in exile. So, what was this brief experiment in social democracy in the south Caucasus? What were its political positions and aspirations? What does it say about the history of the Russian Revolution? How and why did it fall after only three years? Stephen Jones has been researching these questions for over 40 years, and that has culminated in his opus The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918-1921. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jones about his highly anticipated book to learn more about this historical “oddity” and how it might speak to us today.

Guest:

Stephen Jones is Professor of Georgian Modern History at Ilia State University in Georgia. His books include Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917 and Georgia: A Political History Since Independence. His latest book is The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918-1921 published by Harvard University Press.

Excesses Are Permitted

The Eurasian Knot — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:21:36 GMT

Photo: J. Arch Getty and Gabor Rittersporn in Boston in 1979.

My memorial essay on my friend and mentor, J. Arch Getty, just came out in Kritika. It was a hard one to write. But it also turned out to be a good and necessary experience.

Here’s the pdf.

And here’s an excerpt to wet your reading palette.

I met J. Arch Getty in the fall of 1997. His hair was darker then. And I still had some. I had enrolled in his Modern Russian History class at the University of California (UC), Riverside. It was one of those big lecture courses in a big lecture hall. I had become a “Marxist” in community college, so taking a class in Soviet history was a rite of passage.
Arch Getty changed my life. The Russia bug bit me because of him. Many of us in the academy have such people. I will forever regret never thanking him before he died of cancer in May 2025.
How do I commemorate this adviser, mentor, and friend? Arch played such a crucial, even parental role in my life. Should I tally his scholarly contributions? Summarize his findings? I could. But memorials are for the living. Before you is my way to process the loss.
Arch was a passionate hobbyist, and his hobbies often turned into obsessions. His love of tropical fish verged on a second doctorate. When Arch got into brewing beer, he spared no expense. The same when he started roasting coffee. He even created his own coffee brand, Augusta’s Excellent Coffee, complete with custom bags. He named it after his granddaughter. His Russian lacquer box collecting sent him on annual pilgrimages to Fedoskino, a town outside of Moscow renowned for the art. Arch curated each around his apartment with custom labels and lights highlighting them for the visitor. Having lost my own mother—a mere three weeks after Arch, in fact—I have incredible sympathy for his three children having to sift through his leftovers. But the results of Arch’s obsessions were indisputable. Some of the best beer and coffee I’ve ever had were made by Arch.
But Arch’s true obsession was Russia.
Arch became a Soviet historian by accident. He once said, “I’ve always suspected that I’m the only Russian historian to come out of Oklahoma. I’m reliably informed that that’s the case.” At first, the university was an escape route. “Like a lot of people who grow up in Oklahoma, the most important thing was to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.”¹
He ran far from Oklahoma to the University of Pennsylvania. He dabbled at first—in finance, sociology, and religious studies. But he always liked military history “like a lot of teenage boys.” So, he enrolled in Alfred Rieber’s Soviet political history class. Then he followed with Alexander Riasanovsky’s survey of early modern Russia. That’s when the wily Russia bug bit Arch. He found his calling. And he never looked back.
In 1972, Arch went to Boston College. Hardly a top place for a PhD in Russian history. Many of his peers went to Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. Boston gave him a full ride, which was key because his “Oklahoma father … wasn’t paying for any more useless history education.”² There he worked under Roberta Manning, who was just out of grad school herself. He met Bill Chase, his lifelong comrade, co-conspirator, and collaborator. Arch was a bit of an anomaly in Boston, Chase recalls. He wore cowboy boots in winter, which led to many slips and falls. “You know, he just had his own way.”³ Luckily, Arch had Manning. She instilled confidence that this shitkicker-clad Oklahoman might have needed to swim in academia’s deep waters. She pushed him to write well, to think well, and to think differently. “If I [had] something a little bit outside the box,” she told him, “to go ahead and say it and see what happens.”⁴
This is how Arch’s first book, the Origins of the Great Purges, was born. Origins was one of the first studies to challenge the prevailing wisdom about the Great Terror. To do so, Arch had to slay the field’s giants, principally, its reigning king, Robert Conquest.
Origins didn’t just revise Conquest’s The Great Terror. Arch took a wrecking ball to its foundation. Conquest’s reliance on memoirs, Arch charged, reduced history to hearsay, rumor, and gossip. Later, he would call this Russia’s folkloric history or oral tradition.⁵ Where Conquest saw a plot hatched by Stalin to eliminate all rivals, Arch saw zigs and zags, gaps and contradictions. And how could there be a plan? To Arch, the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party were dysfunctional. Stalin was an overwhelmed fire chief encircled by real and imagined fires. He could see the forest burning but not the trees that served as kindling. The Stalinist method was to douse the blaze with blood regardless of outcome or cost. The Great Man Stalin had a lot of power. His hand was firmly on the spigot. But his subordinates caught in the backdraft could nudge the direction of the retardants. And many got themselves incinerated while holding the hose.
1. “Stalin’s Great Terror: An Interview with Prof. J. Arch Getty,” YouTube, https://www.you-tube.com/watch?v=JsLPtEN62Fg, at 1:10–1:17.
2. “Stalin’s Great Terror,” at 02:00.
3. “Sean Guillory and Maya Haber interview with Bill Chase,” 15 January 2026.
4. “Stalin’s Great Terror,” at 04:13–04:18.
5. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40–41.

The Man Who Knew Russia

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:01:29 GMT

Everyone has an opinion about the late Russian historian Richard Pipes. Some loved him. Many hated him. He was a conservative and anti-communist. A hardliner on American policy toward the Soviet Union. Some would even say he was a Russophobe and cultural essentialist. But Pipes was a far more complicated figure. A Polish Jew whose family fled before the Nazis arrived, Pipes possessed a strong moral center that stood at the heart of his rejection of the USSR. He eventually applied his vision to his work as a Russian historian at Harvard. Pipes was also at the ground floor of a new academic discipline. He studied under Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies in the US, and was part of a grad cohort that included Russian history Brahmins Leopold Haimson, Marc Raeff, Martian Malia, and Nicholas Raisonovsky. All these men would staff history departments at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia, and train a generation of scholars. Pipes knew his stuff, and eventually applied his knowledge in public debate and advice to the Reagan Administration. Pipes was a man of the 20th century, and in my opinion, one of the last serious intellectual conservatives. So who was he? How did he “know” Russia? And in what ways does his historical analysis of Russia, which spanned centuries, echo today? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jonathan Daly, a former Pipes student, about his new biography of Pipes, The Man Who Knew Russia, and what drove this self-identified perennial outsider.

Also, check out my article “Richard Pipes, the Historian as Essentialist” published in Jacobin in 2018.

Guest:

Jonathan Daly teaches Russian, European, and world history at the University of Illinois Chicago. He’s the author of several books, most recently he edited Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff and wrote The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior published by Stanford University Press.

Reporting Russia's Descent

The Eurasian Knot — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:32:22 GMT

Marc Bennets has been reporting from Russia for over two decades. He’s covered Putin’s rise and consolidation of power, assassinations of oppositionists, mass protests, daily life, and even Russian football. It’s a storied career filled with zipping back and forth between Moscow and its regions. Marc also planted roots. He got married and became a dad. But then everything changed in February 2022 with Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. Should he stay and keep reporting and risk arrest or worse? Or should he pick up his life and family and leave like so many of his colleagues? Marc finally settled on the latter when word came he might be arrested. Now he focuses most of his reporting on the war and Ukraine. How did this all happen? How did Russia descend into madness? Marc’s new book looks to answer that question with personal fire and passion. Is Russia really saturated with Putin? Is there any way back? It’s been a decade since the Eurasian Knot spoke with Marc. So, we caught up and discussed his new book, The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral Into Madness Under Putin, and how the war has irrevocably changed his life, profession, and Russia itself.

Guest:

Marc Bennetts has been reporting from Russia since 2006. He’s worked for the Guardian, Newsweek, The Times and The Sunday Times. He left in May 2022, after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has since made over a dozen reporting trips to Ukraine. He’s the author of The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral Into Madness Under Putin published by Bloomsbury.

Boris Nemtsov

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:00:16 GMT

On the night of 27 February 2015, assassins gunned down Boris Nemtsov as he crossed the Bolshoi Moskvoretskii Bridge. Shock quickly spread throughout Russia, particularly among its political opposition. Not because Nemtsov was so brazenly gunned down. Such are the risks of being politically active in Putin’s Russia. Nemtsov had been a fixture in the movement since its earliest days, and in many ways one of its founders. That such an internationally well-connected figure could be wiped out in central Moscow signaled a grim turning point. Hindsight has proven this correct. A decade later, Russia is a very different place. But it always wasn’t like that. In the 1990s, Nemtsov was a young liberal darling, the charismatic hope to succeed Boris Yeltsin. That didn’t happen, as we all know. And another, totally different figure became President. As Mikhail Fishman writes in his political biography, The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia, Nemtsov’s life and death had a profound influence on the political consciousness of his generation and nascent Russian liberalism. Who was Boris Nemtsov? How did he rise so quickly to political prominence in the 1990s only to be politically marginalized in the 2000s? Why was he murdered and who murdered him? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Fishman about Nemtsov, his life, and how it reflected Russia’s post-Soviet political development.

Guest:

Mikhail Fishman is one of Russia’s leading independent journalists, liberal thinkers, and political commentators. He’s the author of The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia published by Penguin.

The Last Soviet Artist

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:01:23 GMT

I met the graphic artist, Victoria Lomasko, about 10 years ago when she was a resident at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. I emceed an event with her back then. So I was happy when Victoria recently returned to the city to give a few talks at the University of Pittsburgh. Of course, the Eurasian Knot dragged her into a studio for an interview. A lot has changed for Victoria over the decade. Her graphic novel, Other Russias, represented the marginals of Russian society, and she won a Pushkin prize for the work. She got invited to speak, to show her art, and teach. She then went to Belarus to chronicle the mass protests. More art. More shows. But then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The invites dried up as everything Russia became toxic. And political art forced her into exile in Germany. These experiences have caused her to question the efficacy of political art, and even her graphic style. Today, she’s embraced symbolic art that speaks to her political disillusion and difficulty in representing our current conjecture. Where does Lomasko stand today when it comes to art and politics? Tune in and find out.

Guest

Victoria Lomasko is a graphic artist and has lectured and written widely on graphic reportage. She lived in Moscow until March 2022 and now lives in exile. She is the author of Other Russias which received the Pushkin House Best Book in Translation award. Her latest book is The Last Soviet Artist published by N+1 Books

Remembering Alexander Rabinowitch

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:01:40 GMT

When I opened Facebook this morning, as I do every morning, I learned that Alexander Rabinowitch died at 91 years old. Rabinowitch was arguably one of the most important historians of the Russian Revolution. It’s hard to state how much Rabinowitch’s work influence our understanding of 1917. Before him, it was assumed that the Bolsheviks were a highly disciplined, unpopular political party that came to power through a coup. What Rabinowitch repeatedly showed in his four books on Revolution, the Bolsheviks had popular support, most importantly in factories in Petrograd and in other large cities and at the front. Lenin’s slogans, particularly, “Peace, Land, Bread!” had mass support, and by October 1917, successfully rode a wave of revolution into power.

And now that Alexander Rabinowitch has left us, I figured I’d dig out my old interview with him from 2017, clean it up, and re-release it to commemorate the life and work of this scholarly giant.

Guest:

Alexander Rabinowitch was a Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, where he taught from 1968 until 1999. He’s the author of four books on the Russian Revolution: Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising; The Bolsheviks Come To Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd; The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd; and finally his fourth and last book which was just published in April, The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919 published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Anastas Mikoyan

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:01:23 GMT

How Stalin personally ran the Soviet Union has rightly received much attention. Less discussed is the small group of men that served as his top lieutenants. They carried out his orders, and after his death, were instrumental in establishing the post-Stalin order. This week, the Eurasian Knot features a discussion with Pietro Shakarian about his new book Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin. We mostly know Mikoyan as a statesman and political survivor who successfully navigated Stalin’s Kremlin. But who was Anastas Mikoyan beyond that? What did he believe? What was his role as Stalin’s henchman? How did he push for de-Stalinization after the leader’s death in 1953, particularly on Soviet nationality policy. Shakarian tells us that in the end, Mikoyan was more than a survivor. He was a critical player in shaping the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.

Guest:

Pietro A. Shakarian is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and a lecturer at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan. He’s the author of Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin published by Indiana University Press.

Soviet Holocaust Literature

The Eurasian Knot — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:01:12 GMT

It has long been assumed that there was no Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union. Official Soviet ideology lumped the 1.5 million Soviet Jews exterminated by the Nazis into the 26 million Soviet war deaths. So, the little Holocaust memory that existed was hidden away in families and communities. Recent scholarship, however, has painted a more complicated picture. Yes, official Holocaust memory was circumscribed. And, true, many privately commemorated its memory. But, as a new collection of Soviet Holocaust fiction, translated by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, shows that there was published Holocaust literature in the Soviet Union. Especially in the Yiddish language journal, Sovetish Heymland. How did Soviet authors treat the Holocaust? How did it differ from work elsewhere? And what are some of the challenges translating these works into English? To find out more, the Eurasian Knot spoke to Sasha and Harriet about their recent collection, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, published by Stanford University Press.

Guests:

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made.

Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent book is As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine.

They are the translators of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, published by Stanford University Press.

The Russian Paradox

The Eurasian Knot — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:01:06 GMT

Many studies focus on how Russia doesn’t work and why. There’s a laundry list of reasons. Corruption. Autocracy. Imperialism. Exceptionalism. But, how, then, does Russia work? Because there are people, a state, and society. What greases the wheels? Alena Ledeneva has made this question the focus of her career. For her, it’s the informal networks and practices that allow the system, with all its deficiencies, to function. Her new book, Russian Pendulum, is a synthesis of her three books on informality. But instead of focusing on post-Soviet Russia, she examines the long duree of informality through the concept of paradox. For example, the Soviet paradox, “Shops are empty, but fridges are full.” Ledeneva says that this paradox contains a hidden informal relation that ameliorates shortage. She also takes a novel approach to this subject using sculpture and music to represent the paradoxes and practices of Russian everyday life. We at the Eurasian Knot wanted to know more. So we put the question to Ledeneva–How does Russia work? And what does that say about Russia’s historical development over the last few centuries?

Russian Pendulum has a soundtrack: “The System Made Me Do It,” available on Spotify and elsewhere.

Guest:

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the University College London and a founder of the Global Informality Project. She’s the author of the trilogy: Russia’s Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), Can Russia Modernize? (2013), Her new book is The Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns published by UCL Press.

Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR

The Eurasian Knot — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:22:20 GMT

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 Post-Soviet Human Condition

The Eurasian Knot — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:41:12 GMT

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.