The Eurasian Knot bids goodbye 2023. Says hello to 2024.

The year didn't totally suck. But it still kinda sucked.

Hey, Knotty News readers.

Sean here.

Another year has come and gone.

Goodbye 2023. Hello 2024.

Thanks to all you listeners, followers, and most of all, patrons for another year. Your support and engagement mean more than you know.

It’s been a rocky year, to be honest. It started full of plans and promises. It ended with delays and distractions.

This newsletter, which I intended to be monthly, is a case in point.

But this end of year missive is not meant to be a downer. We did accomplish a lot at the Eurasian Knot. It wasn’t as much as we hoped. But we’re proud of what we did.

The year started out with rebranding the SRB Podcast as the Eurasian Knot. New logos. New social media handles. New url. It was a long time coming.

As I said a year ago, the fact that the podcast was named Sean’s Russia Blog Podcast (SRB Podcast) was dumb. I never liked having my name associated with the show. And I’m not good with long term planning. Let alone thinking my site and show would “take off” as it were. Yet, the podcast kind of developed a “brand” over the years. People associated the blog/podcast with me and me with the blog/podcast. Still, the name kept feeling like an embarrassment. I don’t imagine myself as an egotist and narcissist. The uncomfortableness started becoming too much. Especially at moments of burn out.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. And what was dumb also became outdated. Especially as I saw friends and colleagues in the “field” increasingly discussing “decolonization,” Russian imperialism, and de-centering Russia/Moscow. Those discussions are ongoing. I don’t know if they’ll stick. Or what new perspectives will come of them. Academia moves painfully slow. We won’t see results for 2-3 years.

Nevertheless, these moves were a long time overdue. And so was a rebranding.

Still, I had put this transition off for a long time fearing it would be disruptive. It wasn’t. It went pretty smooth all things considered.

We set up this newsletter (The Knotty News), a merch store (The Knot’s Nest), and new Patreon tiers.

And we did some new things with the show. First and foremost, the release of my two-part story, A Gift for Stalin. It was a fun narrative project and a quirky story. A vanity work more than anything. I wanted to do history in audio form. And have fun with it. I’m incredibly proud of how it came out.

My co-host Rusana and I also wanted to dabble in new formats and veer away a bit from the standard interview show. Our six-episode series on the Russian Far East included a non-narrated piece with Ryan Tucker Jones inspired by his Red Leviathan: The Soviet Union and the Secret Destruction of the World’s Whales. We did a mixed format—some narration, some interview—with Mark Gamsa on his Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography.

Then there was the highlight of the series: Rusana’s excellent narrative story, Ainu Fever. Her first foray into the genre. I can’t praise Rusana’s work enough. Not just as a co-host. But for producing such a wonderful story. Give it a listen if you haven’t. Or give it another go.

Things looked like they were starting to hum by summer. We added Dasha Prokhorova, a graduate student at Pitt in Slavic Languages and Literature to handle social media and fundraising. Both had fallen to the wayside as the podcast demanded time in other areas. Dasha was an exciting addition to the team.

We also had seven episodes in the series Religion in (Post-)Socialist Societies on deck. I recorded it for REEES in the Spring in partnership with Zuzanna Bogumil from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Zuzanna served as a kind of interim co-host while Rusana returned to field work in the Russian Far East for the summer.

I learned so much from this series. I’ve never had a deep interest in religion. I’m not a believer myself. But I recognize its incredible power in society. I knew little about Catholicism in Poland, religious believers in secret police archives, and Islam. I knew nothing about Christianity in China and shamanic practices among indigenous people in the Russian Federation.

That’s one of the many benefits of making this podcast—I’m exposed to knowledge I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. I hope it’s why you listen as well. I also hope this is why you’d consider becoming a patron if you haven’t already.

And that is the overall mission of this show—to expose listeners to topics and issues they might not know about. Or just enhance or give a different perspective on what they already know. And in a more accessible format to boot.

Things were finally rolling along after fits and starts.

Then Dasha left.

We thought Dasha’s time with us would be longer. At least until the end of 2023. But she was scheduled to teach in the Fall, and university rules cap graduate student work hours. Though I doubt she would’ve been able to handle teaching, the podcast, and her own coursework. I’ve been there. It’s a lot.

I could have gotten another Pitt graduate student to fill the role. But it takes 2-3 months to train and fully integrate someone into the show. Even if they are working “off mic.” This is exactly where Dasha was when she had moved on. It was quite demoralizing, and I feared that we’d be right back in the same place after three months if I found a replacement.

So, our grand plans quickly fizzled. Social media returned to a trickle. Fundraising efforts died on arrival. Knotty News and the Knot’s Nest were stillborn.

Many of our ambitions to mix up the format stalled as well. Narrative formats take a lot of time. If you listen to the credits of most podcasts, they have a team of 4-5 full time people. We have one and a half (I’m full and Rusana is half). And most of the work is on me because I can’t afford to pay Rusana more. Even if she could commit the time.

We returned to interview-only episodes in the interim. The reasoning was the usual. A dearth of time. A shortage of labor. A shallow pool of resources. Also, Rusana was busy wrapping up fieldwork in Russia and plotting her return to Berkeley. I began focusing on my long-overdue audio documentary, The Reddest of the Blacks.

But this too got bogged down. I was hoping to release The Reddest sometime in early 2024. But all kinds of things—and I won’t mention them here—got in the way or popped up as roadblocks.

I hope to share more information about the progress of the documentary on a more consistent basis. But I ask for patience.

Lastly, I need to make a pitch for support. I don’t like doing it. Nor do I think I’m very good at it. I’ve involved myself in several projects over the decades—zines, a zine mailorder, blogs, podcasts, and now audio narrative. But they’ve always been in the DIY spirit. All or most were done by myself and with little funding. Fundraising never entered the picture. And I’ll be honest—asking for money is fucking uncomfortable.

Things are now different. Listener support helps us pay for things. Mostly, Rusana’s wages and to have Daniel Cooper at Pudcuts to professionally mix and master the show.

It takes a lot of work to put this show together—scheduling, interview prep, interviewing, writing, sound design, editing, mixing, mastering, promotion, and fundraising. I’m sure I could list more if I took a few minutes to lay it all out. But you get the picture. And like I said above, most successful podcasts have at least 4-5 people working on them. We don’t.

This February will be nine years since I started this show. That’s right—nine years. And it has been a wonderful experience for the most part. But I won’t lie and say there aren’t periods of frustration. That there aren’t moments when I want to pack it all up. That it gets a bit rote.

It’s knowing people listen that keeps us going. They share it with friends and family. They use it in their classrooms. Or just enjoy the knowledge we bring them. That listeners believe and support the mission. Download numbers and other metrics give us a sense of success. But they are limited, easily overinterpreted, and often fetishized.

I hate to say it, but it’s paid contributions that tell us listeners value what we do. That the Eurasian Knot is an important part of listeners’ lives. That listeners are willing to invest in it. I abhor the fact that I must put it in the neoliberal language of “value,” “investment,” and “return.” But this is the world we live in.

A few dollars go a long way to say, “Hey! We like what you do! And here’s a few bucks to show the love.”

So, if you have $5 to spare a month, please become a patron. All we are asking for is what you’d spend on a coffee or some other preferred beverage. And if you can spare more—we’ll feel even more of your love.

For those who are already generous patrons, we thank you. We really do.

Rusana and I will be meeting soon to plot out the first part of the year on the Eurasian Knot. I’ll be sure to give an update of what we have planned.

Until then, we hope that you’ll stick around and listen.

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