For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to und...
May 05, 2025•48 min•Ep. 114
In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, and numerous regional projects vying for influence—we discuss what happens at the edges...
May 04, 2025•59 min•Ep. 13
Michael David Fox's Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard UP, 2025) provides a local, close-up look at the everyday workings of Nazi and Soviet power, in a particular region. It discusses such themes as the Soviet Terror of the late 1930's and the trauma of the collectivization of agriculture, earlier in the decade, as well as the further traumas of Nazi occupation. Especially interesting is its focus on life-trajectories of specific individuals who had daily to nav...
May 03, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 303
Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloombury, 2024) is a unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction sho...
Apr 26, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 301
Reconciliation between Europe's Protestants and Catholics led to a new era of Christian collaboration. Why did these erstwhile foes end their schism and begin to make peace? In this riveting study, Udi Greenberg shows that ecumenism grew out of a shared desire to protect against perceived threats to Christian life. The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s (Harvard UP, 2025) overturns conventional wisdom about this revolutionary chan...
Apr 25, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 235
In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozh...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 300
Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign oneself to obscurity, writing only for “the desk drawer” or “without permission.” Vasily Grossman challenged that binary choice, creating some of the most compelling and uncompromising fiction and journalism of the century, but also enduring heartbreaking censorship. Her excellent new biography, Vasily ...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 93
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 222
The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration. Politic...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 44
Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners’ household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada. Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina’s granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother’s story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical...
Apr 19, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 226
Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived...
Apr 18, 2025•46 min•Ep. 360
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is a native of Kyiv. In this conversation, we discuss two books. Our Enemies Will Vanish (Penguin Press, 2024), is a nonfiction narrative chronicling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine through the reporter Trofimov’s eyes. No Country for Love (Abacus Books, 2024), is his novel tracing the path of a young woman, the character based on his grandmother, on an arduous journey starting in 1930s Soviet Ukraine. Both books, as...
Apr 17, 2025•54 min•Ep. 16
How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions. In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative stu...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 298
In this episode, Hizer Mir and Chella Ward talked to Ðermana Kuric about Bosnia and Muslimness, focussing on the ways the history of Muslimness in Bosnia interacts with current identities and practices. Ðermana is a researcher whose work concerns hate crime and discrimination in relation to Muslims in Europe. This episode is one of our ‘Forgotten Ummah’ episodes where we consider Muslimness in places outside of those traditional considered to be Muslim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...
Apr 11, 2025•55 min•Ep. 98
In Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025), Eli Rubin provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted "rupture" in the infinite assertion of divinity. Centuries of theoretical disputations concerning ṣimṣum ultimately...
Apr 05, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 629
In this episode of the CEU Review of Books podcast host, Andrea Talabér (Managing Editor) is joined by three members of the the ERC-funded project Revenant - Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation project: Jeremy F. Walton, the PI; Kevin Kenjar, a post-doctoral researcher and Matea Magdić, a PhD Researcher on the project. Revenant examines how in Central Europe, the Balkans, and in the Middle East bygone imperial projects are increasingly inseparable from contemporary political, soc...
Apr 04, 2025•1 hr 5 min
The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies (Routledge, 2025) edited by Alexander Hill brings together historical and contemporary essays about Soviet and Russian military studies, to offer a comprehensive volume on the topic. Comprising essays written by acknowledged specialists, the handbook examines the development of the Russian and Soviet armed forces from the Napoleonic Wars all the way through to the course and conduct of the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. Divi...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 297
Not many people know that Bulgaria's forced prison camp was in operation throughout the communist regime from 1945 to 1989. In Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag (Cornell UP, 2025), University of Toronto history professor Lilia Topouzova traces the silences and testimonials of former victims, and explains why their fate no longer makes the front pages of newspapers in that country. Based on hundreds of conversations and encounters with former victims, prison guards, polit...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 6 min
In this episode, we sit down with Director and Producer Diana Nicolae and Editor and Camera Matt Jozwiakowski to discuss their documentary film, "Between Silence and Sin." The film explores the life and work of dissident Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, an artist whose voice was threatened, censored, and banned under the Communist dictatorship. In our conversation, we uncover the roots that inspired Diana’s desire to create this film, her personal experiences growing up in Romania, and the importanc...
Mar 26, 2025•51 min•Ep. 140
The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces reached the West. Who were they? Where were they located? What were they doing? How were they equipped? What were their intentions? NATO was lined up...
Mar 23, 2025•1 hr 51 min•Ep. 256
This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolution to Europe. Peter Whitewood shows that while the Red Army's rapid drive to the gates of Warsaw in summer 1920 raised great hopes for world revolut...
Mar 22, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 224
World War II as an Identity Project (Ibidem, 2022) explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival political movements also enter the picture insofar as their acitivities influenced Soviet policies. Methodologically, the study shifts attention from a limi...
Mar 22, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans. Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story. "When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be court...
Mar 21, 2025•44 min•Ep. 43
The untold history of Czechoslovakia's complex relations with Middle Eastern terrorists and revolutionaries during the closing decades of the Cold War In the 1970s and 1980s, Prague became a favorite destination for the world's most prominent terrorists and revolutionaries. They arrived here to seek refuge, enjoy recreation, or hold secret meetings aimed at securing training, arms, and other forms of support. While some were welcome with open arms, others were closely watched and were eventually...
Mar 18, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 123
In Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford UP, 2024), Ariel Evan Mayse faces up to an enduring question about the Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism: how did it manage to innovate in the realms of Jewish study and practice with such daring and yet at the same time produce communities ready and willing to subject themselves to the rigors of inherited Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Mayse tu...
Mar 16, 2025•53 min•Ep. 618
In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between the United States and Ukraine following a contentious meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky. Stoicescu critiques Trump's transactional diplomacy, emphasizing the critical role of alliances such as NATO in maintaining international peace and stability. He stresses Europe's need to strengthen its defense capabilities independently, warning that...
Mar 15, 2025•32 min•Ep. 163
Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (Ibidem Verlag, 2014) is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukraini...
Mar 13, 2025•59 min•Ep. 276
East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated. But with the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarity in Poland in the Summer of 1980...
Mar 09, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 223
On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short ter...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 222
Russia has a long history of publishers operating from abroad, producing books and periodicals for a Russian-speaking audience. One notable example is The Bell (Kolokol), published by Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer and thinker who emigrated in the mid-19th century. The waves of Russian emigration in the 20th century—beginning with those fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—led to the creation of numerous Russian-language publishing ventures, ranging from short-lived projects to long-stand...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 296
