Red Nostalgia: Post-Soviet Europe & Arguments For Economic Independence / Kristen Ghodsee

Kristen Ghodsee, professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, joins me to discuss her work and lived experience researching the collapse of the Soviet Union and state socialism in Eastern Europe, the immediate and long-term impacts this event had on those that previously lived under those regimes, and how the rapid privatization and the imposition of capitalism impacted their lives in the decades thereafter.

Prof. Ghodsee, as documented in her 2018 book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, discusses how state socialism, with all of its glaring issues, provided a certain measure of economic independence—positively impacting the interpersonal and intimate relationships for those that lived under it. She compares how this contrasts with life under capitalism contemporarily, both in Eastern Europe and in the West. After elaborating on the details of that subject, I asked her to discuss why, even with all the information pointing to the positive impacts social welfare programs have in societies that have adopted them, the anti-communist ideology continues to thrive in the United States and abroad to this day.

Video Segment:

Bio:

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the author of eight books on gender, socialism, and postsocialism, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that continue to haunt the former Eastern Bloc to this day. Most recently, she is the author of ‘Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence’ and the soon-to-be-published ‘Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions’ co-authored with Mitchell Orenstein. She is a lover of basset hounds, an avid collector of manual typewriters, and the host of the podcast A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai.

Episode Notes:

Learn more about Prof. Ghodsee’s work

Read her article Anti-anti-communism at Aeon

Listen and subscribe to her podcast A.K. 47

The song featured is Always Bangy (feat. Ignabu & Malik Abdul) by P.U.D.G.E. from the album M O V E S