What do Russians really think? The question is old and elusive. It is also somewhat of a tell–to pose it is to suggest there’s a coherent answer, and more so, that Russians’ collective opinions matter. For the most part, scholars have turned to history, media, opinion polls, and assumptions to untie this knot. Jeremy Morris is no different in this regard, except that he approaches his subjects with ethnography–long, multi-year conversations of residents of provincial Russia to gauge their engagement with politics locally and nationally. A kind of political biography that records the ebbs and flows of Russian provincial life. How have Russians responded to their government’s invasion of Ukraine? How do they regard the past, present, and possible future of Russia? What issues concern and motivate them to political action? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Jeremy about his new book, Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance to get an on-the-ground view of Russian political life.

Guest:

Jeremy Morris is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He’s the author of Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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In the winter of 2013-14, protests erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine. Their goal was to oppose President Viktor Yanukovich’s rejection of the EU Association Agreement. Many protesters saw the Agreement as a meaningful step for Ukraine to enter the European orbit. And the protests might have fizzled. But the massacre of over 120 people by police snipers on 20 February, 2014, inspired hundreds of thousands more to enter the streets, seize government buildings, and occupy city centers. The protests quickly spread throughout Ukraine. The Euromaidan proved a historical turning point. The Yanukovich regime fell, Russia seized Crimea, and pro-Russian forces seized Donbas city centers. What were the short and long term causes of this revolution? Was it a revolution? What were its participants' aspirations? And how did the euphoric desire for a democratic, European Ukraine devolve into a mad spiral short of civil war? Longtime friend of the pod, William Risch was in Kyiv in those initial days. Now he’s combined his experiences with research to produce a new critical history of the Euromaidan. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Bill about the maidan, the chaos of those days, and its legacies in Ukraine and the region at large.

Guest:

William Jay Risch is Professor of History at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. He’s the author of The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. His new book is Ukraine's Euromaidan: From Revolutionary Euphoria to the Madness of War published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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One of the most salacious and storied methods of KGB spycraft during the Cold War was the honey trap. Agents would get an informant to seduce a target, usually a Westerner deemed important. Then use that encounter as blackmail. We’re all aware of this thanks to movies and television. What we know nothing about are same-sex honey traps. The KGB’s use of homosexual men to seduce other men, whether said men were gay or not. Officials, academics, businessmen and other power positions were targets. How do we know about these operations? Well, because of the intrepid research of historian Irina Roldugina. Roldugina got access to KGB files related to same-sex operations and found more information in, of all things, declassified US government documents related to the Kennedy Assassination. How did these operations work? Who did the KGB tap for same-sex seduction? What do these documents tell us? And what did the KGB think of homosexuality in general? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Irina about her recent article, “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus” published in the Fall 2025 issue of Journal of Cold War Studies.

Guest:

Irina Roldugina is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. She’s the author of several articles on queer history in the Soviet Union. Her most recent is “The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus” published in the Fall 2025 issue of Journal of Cold War Studies.

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