Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies Podcast

In Russian

In English, they call it Transnistria, the non-recognized state in Moldova. In Russian, it's Pridnistrovie. I call it my birthplace and my heritage. This episode is a personal project; my attempt as a first-generation immigrant to connect to a place I was born into but grew up never quite knowing. The story is told from the perspective of a native Transnistrian, Inna Kramarenko, who weaves together narratives of golden Soviet days and darker periods of conflict to explore her experience of living in one of the frozen conflict zones of the post-Soviet era: an existence within a state of non-existence.

This podcast project is a profile of the Russian city of Yaroslavl through the eyes of two students who studied abroad with Middlebury’s School in Russia.

In the late 2010s, a wave of protests swept across the greater Moscow region and other parts of western Russia. The cause of the protests was trash. In this podcast, we discuss why people took to the streets and what we can expect looking forward.

Having spent her whole life navigating her own bicultural Russian-American identity, Sasha Diouk decided to explore this important topic for her audio project. Through interviews with two other multicultural individuals, Sasha hopes to shed light on the experiences that shape bicultural identity and draw attention to both the benefits and the drawbacks of not fitting neatly into a singular cultural category.

July 17, 1975. On earth, the Cold War pitted the US and the USSR against each other in an escalating arms race; meanwhile, in orbit, a Soviet Soyuz capsule successfully docked with an American Apollo module. What seems inconceivable was proof that even in times of high tension, cooperation between the two great powers was possible. In this episode, you will dive into US-Soviet relations in space and hear from stellar speakers about how the Apollo-Soyuz test project came to fruition in the first place, the challenges that had to be overcome and the legacy of the joint mission. Prepare for launch in 3, 2, 1…

Experts (in order of appearance):

• Dr. Cathleen Lewis, curator of the Space Race exhibition at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
• Dr. Roald Sagdeev, former Director of the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences
• Dr. Louis Friedman, co-founder and Executive Director Emeritus of The Planetary Society

Archival excerpts:

• NASA documentary “The Mission of Apollo Soyuz” (1975)
• Apollo 1 mission audio log (27 January 1967)

Background music

• Dan Henig “Nebular Focus”
• The Whole Other “Familiar Things”
• Topher Mohr and Alex Elena “Space Coast”
• NoMBe “Interplanetary Alignment”
• Frank Sinatra “Fly Me to the Moon (Karaoke version)”

In this episode, Niels Ackermann and Sebastien Gobert discuss their project Looking for Lenin, a photojournalism book that documents the fate of Ukraine's fallen Lenin statues following the decommunization laws of 2015. As Gobert and Ackermann explain, their travels and research exposed the complexity of decommunization and the diversity of perceptions of identity in post-Maidan Ukraine.