#141 The Last Czars, Chernobyl, and the Pros & Cons of Dramatizing History w/ Philippa Hetherington & Jon Waterlow

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2019

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Netflix series The Last Czars and HBO's Chernobyl have (in very different ways) brought Russian & Soviet history to televisions across the world. In this episode, Ben sits down with fellow Russian historians Philippa Hetherington and Jonathan Waterlow to discuss their opinions on the two series, what they think they got right, and ways that producers and scholars might benefit most from collaboration on future projects. Philippa, who is a featured scholar in The Last Czars, shares her experience being interviewed, her impression of the show after seeing it, and her work to correct historical errors that viewers identified after release.

Dr. Philippa Hetherington is a Lecturer in Modern Eurasian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Her research focuses on the legal history of imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union in global and transnational context. You can follow Philippa on twitter at @philippahether.

Dr. Jonathan Waterlow is the author of It's Only a Joke Comrade! Humor, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin, and cohost of the Voices in the Dark podcast. He received his Doctorate in History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Anthony's College (Oxford) and the University of Toronto. For more on It's Only a Joke Comrade!, check out RTN #107 Laughing at Stalin: The Politics of Humor w/ Jon Waterlow or pick up a copy by clicking here. You can follow Jon on twitter at @JonWaterlow.

The Road to Now is part of The Osiris Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Siders.
0:01.0	Hello!
0:02.0	I'm Gary.
0:04.0	I'm Sean.
0:05.0	And I'm Brad, and together we cast a pod known as
0:12.0	Which is Better?
0:13.0	You guys ever wonder which is better?
0:15.0	Well, wonder no more.
0:16.0	Join us as we tackle the topics.
0:18.0	We seek understanding.
0:19.0	And we settle the debate on all the subjects you care about. D.C. versus Marvel. Prince versus Michael Jackson. Liberals versus conservatives. King Kong versus Godzilla. Bruce Lee versus Jackie Chan. Science versus religion. And many more. That's us. Which is better? Which is better? I'm Ben Sawyer.
0:49.1	This is the road to now.
0:51.8	Today's episode was a lot of fun to record. I had all started a couple months ago when my
0:57.3	friend Mary J. Berger, who's a comic in Nashville, sent me a text and asked me if I had seen
1:02.0	the last czars, a new Netflix series. I said I hadn't, but I cut it on and had it playing in the
1:07.7	background. And the first thing I noticed called my attention was
1:12.2	there was my friend, Philippa Hetherington, an outstanding scholar being interviewed. And I thought
1:17.2	this must be a really great series. Here's Philippa. And I didn't watch much more. I saw other
1:22.5	reviews come out. I then watched more of it. And it was clear to me that it was not your standard historical documentary.
1:31.7	If you've seen it, you know it's very dramatized.
1:34.8	So I thought that between that series and Chernobyl, it might be great to have a discussion about Russian and Soviet history being played out on
1:45.7	television screens through these subscription services, what they get right, what they get wrong.
	...

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