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About Sean Guillory

NBN Episodes hosted by Sean:

Russian and Eurasian Studies May 27, 2013

Fragile Empire

How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin

Ben Judah

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Debates about the nature of Putin's rule abound. Is Putin a hard fisted authoritarian? Is he the master of the power vertical? An arbiter of competing clans? Or something else …
Russian and Eurasian Studies April 10, 2013

Breaking the Ties that Bound

The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia

Barbara Engel

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Divorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual impotence, or exile. Marriage …
Russian and Eurasian Studies December 21, 2012

Opposing Jim Crow

African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937

Meredith Roman

Hosted by Sean Guillory
In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier "tore off on a whole long …
Russian and Eurasian Studies October 27, 2012

Former People

The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

Douglas Smith

Hosted by Sean Guillory
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian nobility numbered about 1.9 million people, or 1.5 percent of the population. The 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War would …
Russian and Eurasian Studies September 18, 2012

St. Petersburg

Fin de Siecle

Mark Steinberg

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Public discourse in the final decade of Imperial Russia was dominated by images of darkness and dread. Discussions of "these times" and "times of trouble" captured the sense that Russians …
Russian and Eurasian Studies July 18, 2012

The Kirov Murder and Soviet History

Matthew Lenoe

Hosted by Sean Guillory
On 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled Bolshevik Party member, shot Sergei Kirov in the back of the head as the Leningrad Party boss approached his office in Smolny …
Russian and Eurasian Studies June 20, 2012

Post-Soviet Social

Neoliberalism, Modernity, Biopolitics

Stephen Collier

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Pipes matter. That's right: pipes. Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows that the hulkish cylinders that snake throughout its cities are the lifeblood of urban space, linking apartment …
Russian and Eurasian Studies May 17, 2012

The Crisis of Russian Democracy

The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession

Richard Sakwa

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Richard Sakwa's new book, The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, 2011), comes at a moment in Russian political history when …
Russian and Eurasian Studies April 20, 2012

The Great War in Russian Memory

Karen Petrone

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Historical studies on the European memory of World War I are, to put it mildly, voluminous. There are too many monographs to count on a myriad of subjects addressing the …
Russian and Eurasian Studies April 9, 2012

Understanding Russian Politics

Stephen White

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Stephen White's Understanding Russian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011) begins simply enough: "Russia is no longer the Soviet Union." While this is a well-known fact, the details of Russia's postcommunist …
Russian and Eurasian Studies March 22, 2012

The Stalin Cult

A Study in the Alchemy of Power

Jan Plamper

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Jan Plamper begins in his book, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale University Press, 2012), with two illuminating anecdotes that demonstrate the power and scope …
Russian and Eurasian Studies January 16, 2012

A Long Goodbye

The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Artemy Kalinovsky

Hosted by Sean Guillory
It's been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors--stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization …
Russian and Eurasian Studies December 2, 2011

Tales of Imperial Russia

The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915

Frank Wcislo

Hosted by Sean Guillory
When it comes to Russia's great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some …
Russian and Eurasian Studies September 23, 2011

Death and Redemption

The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society

Steven Barnes

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Most Westerners know about the Gulag (aka "Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies") thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the publication of that book in …
Russian and Eurasian Studies August 22, 2011

Odessa

Genius and Death in the City of Dreams

Charles King

Hosted by Sean Guillory
"Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America," wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a …
Russian and Eurasian Studies July 22, 2011

Cars for Comrades

The Life of the Soviet Automobile

Lewis Siegelbaum

Hosted by Sean Guillory
A recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow "the car is king." Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership …
Russian and Eurasian Studies July 5, 2011

The Return

Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev

Daniel Treisman

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, journalists, academics, and policymakers have sought to make sense of post-Soviet Russia. Is Russia an emerging or retrograde democracy? A free-market or crony …
Russian and Eurasian Studies June 3, 2011

Miss Gulag

Maria Yatskova

Hosted by Sean Guillory
In this episode of NBRES, we're doing something a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of interviewing an author about his or her new book, we are going to talk …
Russian and Eurasian Studies May 17, 2011

The Old Faith and the Russian Land

A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals

Doug Rogers

Hosted by Sean Guillory
What are ethics? What are morals? How are they constituted, practiced, and regulated? How do they change over time? My own research is informed by these question; so is Douglas …
Russian and Eurasian Studies April 24, 2011

Holy Fathers, Secular Sons

Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia

Laurie Manchester

Hosted by Sean Guillory
The lives, let alone the fates, of Imperial Russia's priesthood have garnered little attention among historians. I think the reason is partially because the research of most Russian historians has …
Russian and Eurasian Studies April 8, 2011

Brezhnev's Folly

The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism

Christopher Ward

Hosted by Sean Guillory
At the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress in 1974, Leonid Brezhnev announced the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, or BAM. This "Path to the Future" would prove to be the Soviet …
Russian and Eurasian Studies March 25, 2011

The Caucasus

An Introduction

Thomas de Waal

Hosted by Sean Guillory
On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and …
Russian and Eurasian Studies March 15, 2011

Khruschev's Cold Summer

Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

Miriam Dobson

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Examinations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag's construction, management, memory, and legacy. Few …
Russian and Eurasian Studies March 3, 2011

The Odd Man Karakozov

Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism

Claudia Verhoeven

Hosted by Sean Guillory
Scan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you'll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote. After all, Karakozov was no great theorist. He …