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Episode 20: The Collapse of the USSR by Davis Center

Anna Veduta of the independent media outlet Meduza discusses the challenges of journalism in Russia and the media landscape surrounding the recent Russian presidential election.

In this episode, we talk with Anne Applebaum about her new book, Red Famine. Applebaum argues that the 1932–1933 famine in the Soviet Union was part of a deliberate operation by Stalin to rid the USSR of Ukrainians who resisted the Bolsheviks and their policy of agricultural collectivization.

Mikhail Gorbachev, revered by many in the West for his commitment to “openness” and democratizing reforms, has a more mixed reputation in Russia, where he is associated with the fall of an empire. In this episode, Bill Taubman discusses his new biography of Gorbachev, emphasizing how the leader's personal history and character were reflected in his leadership, and how the policies of Vladimir Putin can be read as a response to Gorbachev’s contested legacy.

Politics increasingly pervades our everyday lives, including our entertainment and pop culture. The Eurovision Song Contest was created in 1956 as an opportunity to bring nations and people together in an expressly non-political fashion—through song. Now, 60 years later, Eurovision is often used as a specific political tool. James Evans and Yuval Weber discuss the history of the song contest and how it has been used as a political tool to reignite recent conflagration between Ukraine and Russia.

Two decades after immigrating from Kiev to Chicago, Julia Alekseyeva found her great-grandmother’s hidden memoirs of a life spanning the Soviet 20th century. With input from comics scholar Hillary Chute, she turned a lifetime of secrets into a work of art.

The vast majority of Russian-speaking Jews today live outside the former Soviet Union. We spoke with Zvi Gitelman about this population, their remarkable impact on the societies that send and receive them, and how traditional notions of "diaspora" and "homeland" have blurred in our globalized world.

In 1959, the KGB, determined to squash the movement for independence in Ukraine, sent Bogdan Stashinsky to assassinate Stepan Bandera using the most unusual of methods. Stashinsky was put on trial in what would become the most publicized assassination case of the Cold War. His story is rousingly depicted in Serhii Plokhii’s Man with the Poison Gun.

Not merely helpers but makers of the revolution: researcher Olena Nikolayenko on the steadfast women who put their lives on the line for Ukraine's future.

At this moment of great geopolitical change, Davis Center Director Rawi Abdelal looks at the fate of globalization through the lenses of great power transitions, national borders, and economic inequality. Rawi Abdelal is the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management at Harvard Business School and the Director of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. His work focuses on international political economy and the politics of globalization and political economy of Eurasia.

Archeologist Nat Erb-Satullo went to Georgia looking for evidence of how and why people of the ancient world put down their bronze objects and moved into the iron age. What he found sheds light on the social forces that spark innovation.

In 2014, British photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind and Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova were both in Ukraine, questioning how to represent the ongoing conflict. When they met, they developed a creative collaboration that allowed them to do just that.

Historian Timothy Nunan takes us to Cold War Afghanistan—where Soviet and European rivalry played out not through tanks and guns, but through opposing ideas about international development and humanitarian aid.

Decades after the theories of Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko were discredited, his name is back on the tongues of some Russian scientists. Historian of science Loren Graham explores Lysenko’s political legacy and the extent to which new developments in microbiology validate his controversial claims.

Stalin’s death in March 1953 took the world by surprise. In the United States, the Eisenhower administration was on edge at the prospect of an armed confrontation with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a campaign against Soviet Jewry prompted speculation and bewilderment from observers around the world. Stalin’s passing marked a major turning point, but did it lead to lasting change? In this episode of the Eurasian Enigma, Joshua Rubenstein discusses his latest book, The Last Days of Stalin.

How has the iconic image of standing in line shaped Russian identity? Literary scholar Jillian Porter examines how the queue has wound its way through narratives of revolution and continues to find expression in Russian political, social, and cultural life today.

From the Harlem Renaissance to Black Lives Matter to Pussy Riot, literary scholar Jennifer Wilson discusses intersections between critical race theory and Russian studies.

Is the Internet in Russia a tool of totalitarianism or of freedom? Investigative reporters Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan—authors of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries—say perhaps it is both.

Lives as well as words can be lost in translation. Three years after the Boston Marathon bombings, Masha Gessen, author of The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, discusses identity, immigration, and her own experience navigating translation and censorship in Russia and America.

What happens to the oil flowing across international borders as political relationships get chilly? What does the future hold for Russia and Turkey? Davis Center Director Rawi Abdelal, the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, discusses how state and commercial interests shape Russia’s current place on the world stage.