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Dear Listener-Reader!
Sean here.
Welcome to Knotty News, a monthly newsletter from The Eurasian Knot podcast.
In this first issue we bring you some news about re-branding, our recent episodes, and team updates.
Some of you are probably wondering what these are. And I wouldn’t blame you since I’ve dropped it into your inbox out of nowhere.
If you’re a regular listener of The Eurasian Knot, you probably know that the SRB Podcast is no more. After much hesitation and procrastination, I decided to rebrand the SRB Podcast. It was a long time coming. I’ve never been too comfortable with the name SRB, as it stood for Sean’s Russia Blog. I obviously didn’t put too much thought into the name. But I didn’t anticipate it lasting so long. Let alone becoming a successful podcast.
But let’s be honest—SRB was a lame name. So lame. And this lameness was so intimately attached to my name. The cringe factor became too much.
If you’ve tuned into The Eurasian Knot, you’ve likely noticed a change in format. My audio production skills have evolved considerably over the last few years. And since producing Teddy Goes to the USSR, I’ve become more interested in doing narrative audio. That’s audio that focuses more on storytelling. Straight interviews are all well and good. But they don’t allow for much creativity. Just cut and assemble. No writing. No music. No archival sounds. No fun. And while interviews will always be the backbone to The Eurasian Knot, we’re diversifying the format. So sometimes we’ll have straight interviews. Sometimes we’ll have narrative stories. Other times we’ll have non-narrated stories. Hopefully, you’ll still enjoy the podcast all the same. Maybe even more.
Please take a few minutes to complete the SRB Podcast/Eurasian Knot Survey. We greatly appreciate your feedback, as it helps us improve our content.
So, enter The Eurasian Knot.
Knotty News flows right out of The Eurasian Knot. I’ve tried to get a newsletter off the ground before. To no avail.
But try and try again. We hope the Knotty News will help us communicate with all you listeners. Tell you what we’ve done. What we’re doing. And what we plan to do.
And what makes this time different is that I’m no longer alone. I have two people on staff. Rusana Novikova and Dasha Prokhorova.
Rusana is working on the production side as producer and co-host. I highly recommend listening to her first narrative piece, “Ainu Fever.”
Dasha will be working behind the scenes doing social media and fundraising. She’s a much-welcomed edition since she’s focusing on two areas I’ve sorely neglected.
And speaking of fundraising. Rusana and Dasha are good reasons for YOU to become a monthly patron of The Eurasian Knot. They’re both hungry, over-worked and underpaid grad students. Their wages are paltry and one way to remedy that is for more of you to kick in. And though their labor on the podcast is welcomed—sooo welcomed—this is also an opportunity for them to learn new skills as they develop their academic careers.
Many of you know what it was like to be a grad student. You know the trials, the tribulations and the traumas it can entail.
You need to remember this as you listen. As you assign the podcast to your students. This podcast IS NOT free to make. And it takes a lot of work to produce episodes. So Dasha and Rusana deserve to get paid fair wages for their time and expertise.
So become a patron. Help us out.
Recent Episodes:
Red Whaling
The Soviet Union was a latecomer to the whaling industry. But after a bumbling start, by the 1960s, Soviet whalers were slaughtering over 20,000 whales a year. The decimation of the world’s whales in the 20th century, a genocide in which the Soviets played no small part, has had catastrophic results on the world’s ocean environments. Ryan Tucker Jones tells us about the Soviet whaling industry, the lives of Soviet whalers, their attitudes toward their craft, and the lasting trauma of the hunt the ocean’s majestic creatures.
Ainu Fever
Roma Shatrov is the founder of the Silent Cape Nature Park in Sakhalin. Irina Grudova is Ainu, the indigenous inhabitants of Sakhalin. Roma is obsessed with Ainu history and culture and has dedicated the Silent Cape to revitalizing their tradition. Irina is a local Ainu activist and is skeptical of such outsiders looking to exploit her heritage. Yet Roma and Irina instantly hit it off and formed a strong bond over their mutual love of the Ainu. Rusana Novikova brings us a story about the romanticism and self-discovery at the heart of Irina and Roma’s complicated friendship, and its potential promise for Ainu and Russian relations.
Harbin
Dr. Roger Budberg was a Baltic German physician who moved to the Russian colony of Harbin in 1905. He quickly fell in love with all things Chinese, to the point he wanted to become Chinese. Mark Gamsa takes us through Budberg’s life in Harbin as the city passed from Russian to Chinese control and the fate of one of Russia’s most complex diaspora communities.
The Far East
The Russian Far East sits at a crossroads between Russia, China, Korea, and Japan. And thanks to this bricolage, the future of the Far East has become a hotly debated subject. Anthropologist Ed Pulford and historian Soren Urbansky take us through the cross-cultural and diverse past and present of the Russian Far East.
A Gift for Stalin
Part One: Dear Comrade Stalin
Part Two: The Accursed Share
It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know who mails a letter from the outskirts of Moscow. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.” It arrives a few days later. And when Comrade Sentaretskya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin’s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.
Meet Team Knot:
Dasha Prokhorova is currently a Ph.D. student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Languages and Literatures program. Before returning to graduate studies, she worked for JSTOR, supporting the onboarding process for new publishers and libraries. She's excited to join The Eurasian Knot team and learn more about the world of podcasting!
Rusana Novikova is a socio-cultural anthropologist with interests in (post)socialism, land use, human-environment relations, indigeneity, future and imagination, Arctic, Siberia and the Far East. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation, co-hosting the Eurasian Knot, and taking care of her son Nikolai.
Sean Guillory is the producer and host of the Eurasian Knot. He also wrote, edited, and produced the Ambies nominated Teddy Goes to the USSR, his first audio documentary. He's a historian of Russia/Soviet Union and a podcaster. In 2015, he started the SRB Podcast, a weekly interview show on Eurasian politics, culture, and history. He has since embraced the art of audio narrative. Sean works in the University of Pittsburgh's Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Center where he holds the undistinguished title of Digital Scholarship Curator. He's a Los Angeleno at heart and misses three things about the City of Angels: the Lakers, In-N-Out Burger, and the weather. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for reasons he's still trying to figure out.