My name is Jacob Steere-Williams, I am a Historian of Epidemic Disease and Public Health at the College of Charleston. I’ll be guest hosting a series of episodes for this special program, but you can catch most of them with the regular host and founder of COVID-Calls, Scott Knowles.
This is Part 2 of a two-part episode exploring the entanglement of the COVID-19 pandemic and the War in Ukraine. Last hour I spoke with Ukrainian health expert Pavlo Kovtoniuk and historian Dora Vargha. On February 24th, 2022, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Putin had “launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Russian attacks began that Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin approved in a televised address “a special military operation” in Ukraine. Russian missiles began to attack cities and civilians all across Ukraine. Three weeks later the war in Ukraine rages on. 2 to 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more displaced internally within the country, creating a tremendous humanitarian crisis, and what is undoubtedly the largest European military conflict since WWII. Casualty statistics have been difficult to come by- the UN reported yesterday more than 500 civilian Ukrainian deaths, and US military estimates are between 2,000 and 4,000 deaths in the Ukrainian armed forces, and 5,000 to 6,000 deaths of Russian soldiers.
Dr. Trish Starks is a historian of Russian and former Soviet medicine and public health, and a professor of history at the University of Arkansas. She has written extensively on Soviet hygienic reforms in the 1920s in her 2008 book The Body Soviet: Hygiene Propaganda, and the Revolutionary State,  smoking in the Soviet Union in the 2018 book Smoking Under the Tsars, and her newly published book Cigarettes and Soviets: Tobacco in the USSR. She is currently working on gendered anxieties of the body and vigor in Russian contexts.
My second guest, Dr. Paula Michaels, is an Associate Professor of History at Monash University. She is an expert on the history of medicine and gender Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Dr. Michaels is a leading expert in the field of trauma studies, publishing numerous articles about childbirth, and maternity care and trauma in Eastern European history. Her 2014 book, Lamaze: An International History, was the winner of the 2015 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. In 2021 she published Gender and Trauma Since 1900 with Christina Twomey, and is currently working on a  book project, Soviet Medical Internationalism and the Global Cold War