Guest: Adam LeedsHosted and produced by Reinhard Schumacher

In this episode, Adam Leeds talks with Reinhard about his thesis “Spectral Liberalism: On the Subject of Political Economy in Moscow”, for which Adam won the 2018 “Joseph Dorfman Best Dissertation Prize” awarded by the History of Economics Society. We talk about the development of Soviet and Russian economics and its relationship with politics starting from the late tsarist era, the Soviet Union under first Lenin and Stalin, the post-Stalin era, Gorbachev’s reforms, ending with the development in the 1990s and early 2000s. The topics we discuss include Adam’s research approach of oral history, methodological issues about conducting interviews in Russia, and the relationship between anthropology and the history of economic thought.

Adam is an anthropologist (with an interest in the history of economics) and an assistant professor at Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University.