Zuleikha p.2 by Yakhina

Show Notes:

This week, Matt and Cameron take on the second half of Zuleika by Guzel Yakhina, wherein our eponymous heroine fully sheds her old identity as the “pitiful hen,” and—deep in the woods of Siberia—becomes a hunter, mother, cook, medical assistant, lover, and everything you might have imagined to be impossible in such exile. As with the first half, Zuleikha continues to be an absolute joy to read and talk about so get your 100-proof vodka and enjoy!

Major themes: Call your mom, Bad man as interesting characters, Russian phonetics.

07:23 - 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”.

10:40 - “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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