June Break: Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina

The Slavic Literature Pod

Shownotes:

Note: This is a re-run of Zuleikha (parts 1 and 2) by Guzel Yakhina.

It’s week 1 of Matt and Cameron’s June break. So this week, we’re looking back at one of our favorite books from this podcast, originally put out in April of 2021.

Major themes: Forest spirits, Vestigial pagan folklore, and Dekulakization.

03:51 - Here’s a link to the article that I heavily cited in this episode: Fear and Belief in the USSR’s “Great Terror”: Response to Arrest, 1935-1939.

51:20 - Much of the information in this section is pulled from Lynne Viola’s paper “The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class, Winter 1929-1930: A Reevaluation of the Legislation”.

53:30 - “The Soviet War Against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case Against Chechnya, 1942-4” by Jeffrey Burds. See especially the section “Germany and Japan: Intelligence and Sabotage Networks, 1935-41.”

13:20 - Again pulled from Burds’s article, these are the characteristics of “bandit nations”:

1. borderland elements, with close kinship or ethnic ties to foreign-based emigration
2. Foreign use of those elements for espionage and other seditious acts within the USSR
3. strong religious traditions
4. sustained by ‘heroic’ historical movement of insurrectionary elements
5. operates on hostile terrain that facilitates concealment

The music used in this episode was “soviet march,” by Toasted Tomatoes. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube.

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