The Eurasian Knot The Eurasian Knot



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.

“Ainu Fever” was written, produced and edited by Rusana Novikova. Sean Guillory did additional editing.

Thanks to Roman Shatrov and Irina Grudova for participating.

CREDITS (in order of appearance)

Музыка неизвестного автора. Слова Леонида Петровича Радина. Исполняет хор артистов Московского государственного театра. Москва, 1917 год – «Смело, товарищи, в ногу!»

Олег Митяев – Сахалин

Эльдар Рязанов, Василий Катанян – Остров Сахалин (1954)

Oki Kano – Drum Song

Umeko Ando – Iyomante Upopo

Oki Kano – Kai Kai As To

Oki Kano – Live Performance in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan

Umeko Ando – Hutare Chui (Repeat the Mantra Remix)

Oki Dub Ainu Band – Sakhalin Rock

Guest:

Mark Gamsa is a professor in the History Department of East Asian Studies at Tel-Aviv University. He researches European-Asian contact, specifically Russian-Chinese relations and modern Russian and Chinese history and literature. He’s the author of Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography published by University of Toronto Press.

This episode was written, edited and produced by Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova.

Music:

Konstantin Sokol’skii, “Kogda druz’ya vstrechaiutsia.”

Nikolai Dontsov, “Liubov razboinika.”

Nikolai Markov, “Tango zhuravli.”

Harbin: a major Russian city in China

Imperial expansion is as much about conquering nature as it is about subjugating people. The Russian state’s expansion to the edges of the Eurasian continent exemplifies the challenge of turning frozen and inhospitable land into livable space or converting lush landscapes into profit and prosperity. To get a better understanding of this process in some of the far reaches of Russia, I turned to two people, Sharyl Corrado and Paul Josephson, to talk about Sakhalin and the Arctic respectively and relationship between Russian imperial expansion and nature, and how environment was imagined and shaped in the process.

Guests:

Paul Josephson, the author of 13 books, is professor of history at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, and visiting, part-time professor at Tomsk State University.  A historian of big science and technology, he conducted archival research in Arctic regions while working on his monograph, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic.  His most recent book, with Polity Press, is called Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory.  He is working now on a global nuclear environmental history.

Sharyl Corrado is Associate Professor of History and History Program Director at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.  She has published articles on the environmental history and historical geography of the imperial Russian Far East in a variety of academic journals in English and Russian. She is also known within Russian Baptist circles for her research on Russian Baptist and Evangelical history, including a monograph published in Russian and an edited volume on East European Baptist History.  She is currently working on an annotated collection of letters written by a Red Cross sister serving in the Sakhalin Penal colony.

Music:

Bauhaus, “Slice of Life,” Burning from the Inside.



Guests:

Ed Pulford is a linguist and anthropologist who has spent several years working, studying and traveling throughout China, the Russian Far East, the Koreas and Japan. He is currently a lecturer in Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. He’s also a regular host on the podcast New Books in East Asian Studies. He is the author of Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between published by Hurst.

Sören Urbansky is a historian of modern Russia and China. He is a global and transnational history research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and since 2021 the head of its Pacific Office at UC Berkeley. Sören has published three monographs, including Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border published by Princeton University Press.



It all started with a letter to Stalin in 1935. And when a Kremlin clerk opened it, there was a piece of shit inside.

Was the turd an insult? A way of saying to Stalin, “You’re a shit. Here’s some shit”?

Perhaps.

But I ended Part One of a Gift for Stalin on a different note: that the turd addressed to Stalin was no slight at all. It was, in fact, a gift.

A little brown present for Comrade Stalin.

Every society must deal with shit. Where to put it. What to do with it. It’s a problem unique to humans. One might even say that it defines us as human.

The average person excretes about a half a kilo of crap a day. And left untreated, shit is deadly. About 2.6 billion people live without basic sanitation. And as a result, excrement finds its way onto feet, fingers, food, and into water. Scientists estimate people lacking sanitation ingest about 10 grams of fecal a day. Shit-related illnesses account for about 2.2 million deaths a year. Mostly children from extreme diarrhea.

So shit happens. All the time. And dealing with it is a life-or-death situation.

But human waste has another history. A circular history. Where human excrement is put back into the cycle of production. And many societies have tried just that. They use human waste as fertilizer. Shit— that is, digested food—is returned to the earth to produce more food. Shit may be filth. It may be poison. But it can’t be denied. Waste is part of life.

A Gift for Stalin was written, edited, and produced by Sean Guillory.

Voiceovers by Maya Haber and Greg Weinstein.

Music by Alvaro Antin, Harry Edvino, Future Joust, Lugvig Moulin, Stationary Sign, and Semen Slepakov.

Thanks to Eliot Borenstein and Lina Zeldovich for participating and Maya Haber for her ears.

For a list of sources consulted for A Gift for Stalin, go to The Eurasian Knot at euraknot.org.



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.

There was nothing odd about people writing Stalin. They wrote to him a lot. To plead for help. To give advice. To complain. To denounce. And to threaten.

The letters could be incredibly personal. And also incredibly irate. So many letters poured into Soviet officials, one historian called letter writing “a national pastime.”

So, 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.

Credits:

A Gift for Stalin was written, edited, and produced by Sean Guillory.

Voiceovers by Maya Haber and Greg Weinstein.

Music by Harry Edvino, J. R. Productions, Lugvig Moulin, Stationary Sign, and Semen Slepakov.

Art by Nik Arnoldi.

Thanks to Arch Getty and Jon Waterlow for participating and Michelle Ransom, Alice Garner, and Rusana Novikova for their ears.

For a list of sources consulted for A Gift for Stalin, go to The Eurasian Knot at euraknot.org.