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Unfortunately, peace will only happen when one side admits defeat...

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CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of literal torture and domestic violence, and metaphorical sexual violence. No graphic description of either, but discussion of both.


I had promised a podcast transcript which I thought I would post last Friday, but it was long and I could not finish it off then. Then as I was transcribing it I started to sour on it. This is an interview done by Volodymyr Yermolenko, who is a Ukrainian philosopher and host of this Explaining Ukraine podcast, of Marci Shore, who is an associate professor at Yale where she is teaching modern European intellectual history. Shore is Timothy Snyder's wife, the Yale history prof who teaches about the Holocaust and Modern East European history. I have just finished listening to his Ukrainian history course's lectures. His whole teaching is wrapped around imperialism though it's not particularly Marxist, but it's really good. I'll make a post about that series later. I've also listened to Shore on a number of podcasts and she's always giving the same interview, which is a summary of her 2014 book Ukrainian Night. It's about how she fell in love with the partly failed Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2013, where both times Ukrainians managed to push back against Viktor Yanukovych and Russian influence, but not against oligarchs and corruption. (She also guest-lectured in her husband's course where she taught the same course/interview.)

So here Shore gives more of her back story of how she, an American bougie suburban Jewish woman became an East European scholar. I enjoyed it but I don't particularly recommend that you listen to this hour-long interview. However there was this striking conclusion which kind of blew my mind, and then later on made me really annoyed. She thinks it's a great feminist gotcha that Belarusians discuss President Lukashenko as a metaphorical perpetrator of sexual violence on the population through his authoritarian reign. There is a liberalism to her that really gets under my skin, it's hard to put a finger on it but it's more salient here. Amusingly though unintentionally, the host debunks this, saying that this politics as sexual violence discourse is routine in Eastern Europe. Maybe I missed the point. But anyway I still thought it was interesting, though more about authoritarianism in Russia, and I'm still struggling to figure out how and why she made the transition from authoritarianism to torture and domestic violence, but it's intense. She is big on Hannah Arendt, who I haven't read, so maybe that makes sense to other people. I've slightly edited this to eliminate repetitions and remove some of the "hum" type sentences of spoken word.

( The Interview )

This interview: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/150292985

Shore's lecture on the Maidan: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/149147534

Another interview where she expands on the same discussion as this post, in case it grabs you: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/145505577

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