Podcasts about great soviet

Because of the US's war with Iran, people around the world are experiencing food and price shocks. On today's show, guest host Patty Peltekos is in conversation with environmental historian Kate Brown, author of the new book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, to talk about how people living in cities can contribute to their own food sovereignty.  Modern zoning laws too often prevent people from creating gardens in cities. Brown talks about how it once was: people farming the commons using what we would now call regenerative agriculture. That was before the invention of private property, consumer culture, and the enclosure movement in Europe that transformed land and labor. But people are pursuing tiny gardens as an antidote to industrial agriculture. From Washington, DC to Berlin, Brown profiles the ingenious ways people are growing tomatoes instead of turf grass, defying unjust laws, and sharing their bounty with neighbors. And states as different as Maine and Florida are creating legislation to make it easier for people to create their own tiny gardens.  If you want to start gardening, Brown says the first thing to do is find a friend to garden with. They also talk about migrant labor in the US, how Brown decolonized her research, and how industrial equipment, fertilizers, and insecticides are waging war on the environment. Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004). Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton/Penguin Lane, 2019), translated into eight languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History, plus the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. Brown was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, a Carnegie Fellow and winner of the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2016. Her latest book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past and Present of Urban Self-Provisioning was published by Norton in February 2026. Brown's work on Tiny Gardens has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has published a short segments from this work in the New Yorker, Mother Jones and Lithub. Featured image of the cover of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City. Did you enjoy this story? Your funding makes great, local journalism like this possible. Donate hereThe post What If Urban Gardeners Could Feed Us? appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

Prit Buttar, historian and author of Bagration 1944: The Great Soviet Offensive, joins the show to discuss the immense Russian campaign that broke the German Army on the Eastern Front.     ▪️ Times     •      01:48 Introduction     •      02:50 A war unto itself     •      08:02 Flanders             •      15:20 Maskirovka     •      24:35 Soviet intelligence              •      28:27 Bolshevism             •      30:22 Lebensraum          •      31:40 Bagration             •      36:14 Cracking the line            •      39:00 Warsaw Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today's episode on our School of War Substack

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. Butby 1944 it had a leadership that was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a slow process of decline after the invasion of the Soviet Union.Hitler became increasingly unwilling to delegate decision-making to commanders in the field, which had been crucial to earlier success. The long years of fighting had also taken a heavy toll. Thousands of irreplaceable junior officers and NCOs were dead, wounded or prisoners.Renowned Eastern Front expert Prit Buttar expertly brings these contrasting fortunes to life, trends which culminated in the huge battles of Bagration. As this masterful study conclusively shows, in 1944 the Red Army finally puttogether a campaign that utterly destroyed the German Army Group Centre. The Wehrmacht suffered the loss of over 300,000 men killed, wounded or taken prisoner and the Red Army rolled forward across Belarus to the outskirts ofWarsaw. The end of the war was still many months away, and the Germans managed to reconstruct their line on the Eastern Front, but final victory for the Soviet Union was now only a matter of time as a direct consequence of Bagration. About the Author:Prit Buttar studied medicine at Oxford and Londonbefore joining the British Army as a doctor. After leaving the army, he worked as a general practitioner. An established expert on the Eastern Front in 20th-century military history, his most recent titles include the critically acclaimed new history of the siege of Leningrad: To Besiege A City:Leningrad 1941–42 and Hero City: Leningrad 1943–44. He lives in Kirkcudbright, Scotland.

«New nuclear security» of Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kate Brown and Professor at the NTU «Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute» Olha Martynyuk. Kate and Olha will discuss nuclear security issues as they have unfolded in Ukraine in the last four weeks. Kate Brown is the author of several prize-winning histories, including «Plutopia: Nuclear Families», «Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters» (Oxford 2013). Her latest book, «Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future» (Norton 2019), translated into nine languages, won the silver medal for the Laura Shannon Prize, and the Reginald Zelnik and Marshall D. Shulman Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Olha Martynyuk is also a scholar-at-risk fellow at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She defended her dissertation on the history of Russian Nationalism in early XX century Ukraine. She assisted Professor Kate Brown on her project «Manual for Survival: Chornobyl's Guide to the Future» and translated the book into Ukrainian. KSE Public lectures with top world intellectuals serve to demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine and enhance Ukrainian intellectual sovereignty. More information about project: https://kse.ua/lektsi-na-pidtrimku-ukrayini/ The KSE launched a humanitarian aid campaign for Ukraine. The campaign's objective is to purchase necessary supplies, first aid, and protective kits for the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Paramedic Association, and the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. No matter how small, every donation can help deliver essential aid and supplies. DONATE: https://kse.ua/support/donation Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyivSchool https://twitter.com/brik_t

Lauren W. will be co-hosting this non-fiction quarter of Reading Envy Russia. We share books we have already read and freely recommend, and also chat about the piles and shelves of books we are considering. Let us know your recommendations and where you hope to start in the comments, or join the conversation in Goodreads.Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 244: 2nd Quarter - Russian Non-Fiction Subscribe to the podcast via this link: FeedburnerOr subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: SubscribeOr listen through TuneIn Or listen on Google Play Or listen via StitcherOr listen through Spotify Or listen through Google Podcasts Books we can recommend: Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi by TeffiSecondhand Timeby Svetlana AlexievichThe Unwomanly Face of Warby Svetlana AlexievichLast Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Pevear & VolokhonskyZinky Boysby Svetlana AlexievichVoices of Chernobyl (also titled Chernobyl Prayer) by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith GessenOther Russias by Victoria Lomasko, translated by Thomas CampbellThe Future is History by Masha Gessen Never Rememberby Masha Gessen, photography by Misha FriedmanWhere the Jews Aren't by Masha Gessen Pushkin's Children by Tatyana Tolstaya The Slynx by Tatyana TolstayaImperium by Ryszard Kapucinski, translated by Klara GlowczewskaA Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy DronfieldPutin Country by Anne GarrelsLetters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke Sovietistan by Erika Fatland The Commissar Vanishes by David King Gulag by Anne Applebaum The Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum The Magical Chorus by Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonina Bouis  Shostaskovich and Stalin by Solomon Volkov The Tiger by John Vaillant Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen Books we are considering: All Lara's Wars by Wojchiech Jagielski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-JonesGulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Eric Ericson (there is a unabridged 1800+ pg, and an author approved abridged version, 400-some pages) Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, translated by Paul Stevenson, Max Hayward Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov, translated by John GladRiot Days by Maria AlyokhinaSpeak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov The Life Written by Himself by Avvakum Petrov My Childhood by Maxim Gorky Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter by Edythe Haber Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, tr. Max Hayward The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Eugene Yelchin Putin's Russia: life in a failing democracy by Anna Politkovskaya ; translated by Arch Tait. A Russian diary: a journalist's final account of life, corruption, and death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya Notes on Russian Literature by F.M. DostoevskyThe Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin BirminghamLess than One: Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky Tolstoy Together by Yiyun Li The Border by Erika Fatland Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M.T. Anderson Red Plenty by Francis Spufford Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder The Last Empire: Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii PlokhyThe Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii PlokhyChernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii PlokhyNuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii PlokhyMan with the Poison Gun: a Cold War Spy Story by Serhii PlokhyBabi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov, tr. David Floyd Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster by Kate Brown Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate BrownA Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland by Kate BrownOctober: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Mieville Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Across the Ussuri Kray by Vladimir Arsenyev, translated by Slaght An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily GrossmanThe Road by Vasily GrossmanStalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and Depraved of Chernobyl by Markiyan Kamysh Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia by David Greene Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & beyond by Olia HerculesRed Sands by Caroline EdenBlack Sea by Caroline Eden Tasting Georgia by Carla Capalbo  Other mentions:PEN list of writers against PutinNew Yorker article about Gessen siblings Thanksgivukkah 2013  League of Kitchens - Uzbek lessonLeague of Kitchens - Russian lessonMasha Gessen on Ezra Klein podcast, March 2022Related episodes:Episode 067 - Rain and Readability with Ruth(iella) Episode 084 - A Worthy Tangent with Bryan Alexander Episode 138 - Shared Landscape with Lauren Weinhold Episode 237 - Reading Goals 2022Episode 243 - Russian Novel Speed Date Stalk us online:Reading Envy Readers on Goodreads (home of Reading Envy Russia)Lauren at GoodreadsLauren is @end.notes on InstagramJenny at GoodreadsJenny on TwitterJenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy All links to books are through Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. I wanted more money to go to the actual publishers and authors. You can see the full collection for Reading Envy Russia 2022 on Bookshop.org.

What better way to analyze what went wrong at this infamous power plant than by making fun of this infamous nuclear power plant? We get into what caused the meltdown and how the next few days went. Plot twist: poorly.

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy's most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl's reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown's research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown's view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl's wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl's worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy's most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl's reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown's research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown's view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl's wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl's worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we go from the discovery of nuclear fission up to the most recent state getting a nuclear weapon, and in between we talk about the Manhattan Project, Soviet spies, Hiroshima, US nuclear testing, and the DPRK having a nuke. This episode has some of the darkest moments we've had on the podcast and also some incredible silliness. Enjoy! Suggested Reading/Viewing -  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists, Alexei B. Kojevnikov Before The Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima, Diana Preston Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History, Kai Bird & Lawrence Lifschultz The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race, Priscilla Johnson McMillan Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, Kate Brown Hiroshima, John Hersey Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos, Judy Pasternak Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Controversy, Joseph Albright & Marcia Kunstel https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/1366164/Israel-reveals-secrets-of-how-it-gained-bomb.html A Bomb in the Basement: Israel's Nuclear Option   Outro music: Gang of Four - "I Found That Essence Rare"

What lessons can be drawn from the 1917 Russian Revolution and the seven decades of Soviet rule that followed it? Listen to a very special episode of Pocket Economics with the EBRD’s very own Sergei Guriev.

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites' hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people's willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown's Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer's alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites' hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people's willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown's Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer's alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites' hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people's willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown's Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer's alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation.

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Brown‘s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a tale of two atomic cities–one in the US (Richland, Washington) and one in the Soviet Union (Ozersk, Russia)–united by their production of plutonium. Seeking the security they believed could come only from settlements of middle class, nuclear families, the governments of the US and the USSR created plutopias: highly-subsidized communities in hard-to-reach places that provided workers excellent salaries and handsome benefits, like first-class health care and great schools. But a dark bargain was struck in Plutopia. These sites’ hermetic isolation was part of a unique social geography that divided the areas in which the plants were situated into nuclear and non-nuclear zones. Outside the healthy confines of Plutopia, plant officials freely polluted, dumping radioactive waste into local rivers and dispersing it into the air. Over a period of four decades, the Hanford and Maiak plutonium plants released an amount of radiation equivalent to four Chernobyls. This is not only a story of plutonium production and the creation of sleek “cities of the future.” It is also a history of intelligence and nuclear security; the environment and public health; and of risk distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, and gender. It is a story about people’s willingness to forgo aspects of freedom, like private property or local governance, for a state-sponsored and highly insular form of paternalism, and also about their readiness to trade some kinds of rights–civil and biological–for consumer plenty. It is also a story of how “corporate contractors … privatized … tremendous profits from nuclear weapons production while socializing the risks to health and environment.” Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the product of serious archival spadework, oral interviews, and an ethnographer’s alertness to the telling or ironic detail. It is equally rich in insight and indignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices