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The Naked Pravda

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Meduza’s English-language podcast, The Naked Pravda highlights how our top reporting intersects with the wider research and expertise that exists about Russia. The broader context of Meduza’s in-depth, original journalism isn’t always clear, which is where this show comes in. Here you’ll hear from the world’s community of Russia experts, activists, and reporters about issues that are at the heart of Meduza’s stories and crucial to major events in and around Russia.

Avsnitt

Pulitzer-winner Benjamin Nathans on the Soviet dissident movement’s ‘many lives’

23 juni 2025 | 54 min

Everyday politics in Russia with Jeremy Morris

28 maj 2025 | 76 min

Jill Dougherty’s Russia

29 april 2025 | 47 min

The banking scandal that broke Russia’s anti-Kremlin opposition

9 november 2024 | 34 min

Moldova’s knife-edge election and E.U. referendum

2 november 2024 | 37 min

How Russian propaganda and ordinary Americans build ‘bespoke realities’

26 oktober 2024 | 42 min

Earlier this week, journalists at WIRED and The Washington Post reported that a “Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos” appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote false sexual misconduct allegations against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

At WIRED, David Gilbert wrote that researchers have linked a group they’re calling “Storm-1516” to the campaign against Walz. “Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West,” Gilbert explained. A few days earlier, NBC News also reported on Storm-1516, citing its work as demonstrative of Russian propaganda’s growing utilization of artificial intelligence and more sophisticated bot networks.

Two days after the WIRED report, Washington Post journalist and Russia expert Catherine Belton reported on another bad actor implicated in spreading the allegations against Walz: John Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop with a long and winding record that includes internal affairs investigations, early discharge from the Marines, and a penchant for posting confidential data about thousands of police officers, federal agents, and judges on his blog, which led to 21 state charges of extortion and wiretapping. To escape that indictment, Dougan fled to Moscow, where he soon put his conspiratorial blogging skills to work, effectively enlisting in the Russian intelligence community’s “Internet war” against America.

Records show and disinformation researchers argue that Dougan is responsible for content on dozens of fake news sites with deliberately misleading names like DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle, and Atlanta Observer. Lately, he’s reportedly started using a GRU-facilitated server and AI generator to create phony videos like the deepfake video showing one of Walz’s former students accusing him of sexual abuse.

With a little more than a week until the U.S. presidential election, Meduza spoke to Renée DiResta — the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality and an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy — about Russian propaganda, how it’s evolved over the years, and how American social networks are responding (and not responding) ahead of the November 2024 vote.

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:00) The Role of Social Networks in Identifying Fake Accounts
(9:35) Government and Platform Collaboration on Inauthentic Behavior
(16:46) A Case Study: Maxim Shugaley and Russian Influence in Libya
(21:45) Twitter’s Public Data Dilemma
(24:25) Bespoke Realities and Content Moderation
(25:57) The Tenet Media Case
(27:28) The Role of Influencers in Propaganda
(35:26) Marketing and Propaganda: A Historical Perspective
(38:27) The Democratization of Propaganda
(39:36) Name Your Poison: Tyranny or Chaos

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

North Korea's role in the Ukraine War

19 oktober 2024 | 29 min

In the past few days, both the Zelensky administration in Kyiv and South Korea’s national spy agency have said that they believe North Korea has decided to send more than ten thousand troops to support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. On October 18, following an emergency security meeting called by South Korea’s president, the country’s National Intelligence Service released an assessment claiming that the North is sending four brigades of 12,000 soldiers, including special forces, to Ukraine, which would be an unprecedented move, if true.

Diplomats in Russia and North Korea say these reports are false.

Meanwhile, American officials have warned repeatedly of the growing military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, saying that Washington has observed signs of increased material support to Moscow, including both artillery shells and missiles, such as KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles that have been recovered from wreckage in Ukraine. According to British journalists, North Korea supplies Russia with about half of the approximately three million artillery shells that Russian forces use annually in the war against Ukraine.

However, Western officials have expressed skepticism about the claims that North Korea is sending large numbers of soldiers, apart from smaller groups of engineers and observers. For example, just the other day, NATO’s general secretary spoke at a press conference right alongside Zelensky and directly contradicted him, saying there is no evidence that North Korean soldiers are involved in the fight.

For a crash course in Russian-North Korean relations and a hard look at recent claims from the Ukrainian and South Korean governments of thousands of North Korean soldiers flooding the battlefield in Ukraine, The Naked Pravda welcomed Dr. Fyodor Tertitskiy, a lecturer at Korea University and a leading researcher on North Korean politics.

Timestamps for this episode:

(3:15) The historical context of North Korea’s military strategy
(5:41) South Korean diplomacy
(7:45) Potential military aid and consequences
(9:38) North Korean diplomatic tactics
(12:06) China’s role in the Russian-North Korean alliance
(14:46) Russia’s weapon purchases from North Korea
(19:12) The historical context of Soviet/Russian-North Korean relations
(25:04) Symbolic gestures for Vladimir Putin

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Breaking down Russia's 2025 war budget

5 oktober 2024 | 28 min

The North Caucasian clan warfare behind a deadly dispute at Wildberries, ‘Russia’s Amazon’

29 september 2024 | 26 min

Wildberries founder and CEO Tatyana Kim (who recently restored her maiden name) has been having a hell of a time shaking loose her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, but their very public divorce is just the tip of the iceberg in what’s become a battle between some of the most powerful political groups in Russia’s North Caucasus.

On September 18: Vladislav Bakalchuk tried to storm the company’s office in the Romanov Dvor business center — just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin itself. Bakalchuk has very publicly opposed the Wildberries-RussGroup merger and recently met with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to plead his case, winning the dictator’s support. At the Moscow office, Bakalchuk’s entourage had two former senior executives, but — more importantly — he was accompanied by former and current Chechen police officers and National Guardsmen, as well as trained martial artists from Chechnya, including former world and European taekwondo champion Umar Chichaev. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, Chichaev fired his service weapon, though his status in the National Guard is a bit fuzzy.

On the other side of the conflict, defending the Wildberries office was another team of police and police-adjacent men with ties to Ingushetia. According to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Wildberries had recently hired a private security company with ties to Ingush State Duma deputy Bekkhan Barakhoev, who, until three years ago, worked as a vice president of a subsidiary of Russ Outdoor — the smaller company now merging with Wildberries. The most important shadow figure at Russ Outdoor, meanwhile, is Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire senator from Dagestan.

The office shootout left two Ingush men dead and more than two dozen suspects in police custody, though Vladislav Bakalchuk miraculously escaped charges as a mere witness. He claims he merely showed up for a planned business meeting, but Tatyana Kim calls the incident a failed attempt at a hostile takeover. To learn more about this story and its broader political context, The Naked Pravda spoke to Ilya Shumanov, the general director of Transparency International-Russia in exile.

Timestamps for this episode:

(3:08) The power struggle between Kim and Bakalchuk
(4:55) Suleiman Kerimov: Dagestan’s “shadow governor”
(7:20) The Wildberries-RussGroup merger and its implications
(9:47) Clan battles and regional tensions
(21:44) The future of corporate raiding in Russia

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

America's expanding crackdown on RT and Moscow's covert influence operations

18 september 2024 | 45 min

Last month, the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri Simes, a former think tank executive and an adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In late August, The New York Times reported that these searches were part of the U.S. Justice Department’s “broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks.”

In the past two weeks, U.S. officials have taken numerous measures against Russia Today and its affiliates and accelerated police actions against Russia-based individuals and entities accused of covert influence operations, including money laundering, sanctions violations, and unregistered foreign agent work. For example, the Justice Department announced the seizure of 32 Internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns (colloquially referred to as “Doppelganger”), alleging that Russian companies used online domains to impersonate legitimate news entities and unique media brands to spread Russian government propaganda covertly, violating U.S. laws against money laundering and trademarks.

That same day, the Justice Department indicted two Russia-based employees of RT for conspiring to commit money laundering and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act in a $10-million scheme to fund and direct a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate information “with hidden Russian-government messaging.” A day later, officials charged Dmitri Simes and his wife with participating in a plot to violate U.S. sanctions and launder money obtained from Russian state television.

About a week later, the U.S. State Department issued a special “alert to the world,” declaring that new information obtained over the past year reveals that Russia Today has “moved beyond being simply a media outlet” and has become “an entity with cyber capabilities” that’s “also engaged in information operations, covert influence, and military procurement.” Washington claims that the Russian government embedded within RT in Spring 2023 an entity “with cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence.” Based on these allegations, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — soon announced that it had banned Russia Today and its affiliates from all its platforms.

A day before that big announcement from the State Department, a jury in Tampa, Florida, convicted four American citizens of conspiracy to act as agents of the Russian government. Case evidence first reported by RFE/RL shows that the activists on trial secretly coordinated their activities and received funding from “Anti-Globalization Movement” head Alexander Ionov, who acted on orders from Russia’s Federal Security Service.

To discuss this recent explosion of American police and diplomatic activity targeting RT and Russian covert influence operations in the U.S., The Naked Pravda spoke to RFE/RL journalist Mike Eckel, who coauthored the September 6 report on how Ionov and his FSB handlers “chatted and plotted to sow discord in the United States.”

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:54) The U.S. government’s coordinated campaign against Russian covert influence operations
(7:18) Legal strategies when prosecuting Moscow’s malign activities
(8:37) Alexander Ionov and the FSB
(15:11) American activists and Russian covert operations
(18:52) “Foreign agency” in the U.S. vs. in Russia
(32:12) Dmitri Simes and Channel One
(36:18) Scott Ritter and Russia Today

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Iranian ballistic missiles have entered the Ukraine War chat

13 september 2024 | 23 min

The science of Russian Internet censorship and surveillance

24 augusti 2024 | 35 min

Russian conscripts and Ukraine's Kursk offensive

17 augusti 2024 | 37 min

The long-term economic effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine

15 juni 2024 | 40 min

How can Ukraine hold the line against Russia?

8 juni 2024 | 31 min

Kazakhstan's landmark murder trial

31 maj 2024 | 46 min

‘The American faith’: Why Russia targets evangelicals in Ukraine

25 maj 2024 | 38 min

Historically, Ukraine has been home to people of a variety of faiths and religious denominations, and it’s been exceptionally “open to receiving a wide spectrum of religious communities” in the years since the collapse of the U.S.S.R, according to expert Catherine Wanner.

This laissez-faire approach to religion stands in stark contrast to Russian state policy, which claims to embrace religious pluralism while systematically repressing religious liberty. In Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, experts have documented at least 76 incidents of religious persecution since the full-scale war began in February 2022, including forced conversion, abduction, and murder.

This persecution, which some experts say may constitute a “systematic” campaign, has affected Ukrainians of a number of faiths, including Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims. But members of one group have been especially likely to face repressions: Protestants, despite making up between two and four percent of Ukraine’s population, were the victims of 34 percent of cases of religious persecution, as writer Peter Pomerantsev noted in his article “Russia’s War Against Evangelicals,” published in Time last month. This includes evangelical Baptists, who were the most likely denomination to face persecution after Ukrainian Orthodox believers.

Russia’s disproportionate targeting of evangelical Christians in Ukraine is no coincidence. One Ukrainian pastor quoted in Pomerantsev’s article summed up the occupation authorities’ mindset like this: “You are the American faith, the Americans are our enemies, [and] the enemies must be destroyed.”

To learn more about Russia’s violent campaign against Ukrainian evangelicals and one organization’s efforts to raise awareness about it in the United States, Meduza senior news editor Sam Breazeale spoke to Steven Moore and Anna Shvetsova from the humanitarian aid organization the Ukraine Freedom Project, and Catherine Wanner, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University who studies religious life in Ukraine.

Timestamps for this episode:

(2:30) Exploring Ukraine’s religious landscape since 1991
(9:31) The persecution of Protestants in occupied Ukraine
(26:14) The Role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the conflict
(27:24) Navigating political disinformation and support for Ukraine in the U.S.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Corruption and co-optation in Russia’s autocracy

18 maj 2024 | 29 min

How Russian disinformation really threatens the USA

10 maj 2024 | 31 min

Returning to the talks that could have ended the war in Ukraine

3 maj 2024 | 33 min

How Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov dies

27 april 2024 | 26 min

Migration and discrimination in Putin’s Russia

19 april 2024 | 47 min

It’s no secret that the economies of Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan rely heavily on labor migration to stay afloat. In 2022, according to the International Organization for Migration, remittances from Russia accounted for just over half of Tajikistan’s GDP, and made up more than 20 percent of the GDPs of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Many of the workers sending these remittances are their families’ sole breadwinner — and given the lack of employment opportunities at home, working in Russia is often their best option, even if means dealing with a maze of bureaucracy and relentless discrimination.

The aftermath of last month’s terrorist attack in Moscow has brought the xenophobia that Central Asian migrants face in Russia back into the spotlight, with media outlets reporting on a surge in blatant discrimination and, in some cases, targeted violence. Meanwhile, the Russian authorities have launched a renewed crackdown on migrant workers. This is despite the fact that Russia, with its shrinking population and labor shortage made worse by the war, needs migrants to keep its economy functioning.

To learn about Russia’s migration policy under Vladimir Putin and how the xenophobic backlash to last month’s attack has affected ethnic and religious minorities, The Naked Pravda spoke to Moscow Times special correspondent Leyla Latypova; Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center fellow Temur Umarov; and political scientist Caress Schenk, an associate professor at Nazarbayev University.

And be sure to check out Temur Umarov’s previous appearance on The Naked Pravda: How Russia pressures Central Asian migrants into military service.

Timestamps for this episode:

(2:35) Xenophobia in the wake of the Crocus City Hall attack
(16:55) Russia’s dependence on migrant labor
(27:35) How Russia uses migration policy for political aims
(31:25) The migration-extremism fallacy
(39:13) The long-term effects of Russia’s current migration crackdown

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The evolution of the Russian FSB

12 april 2024 | 44 min

Look at almost any recent major news story from Russia, and you’ll find the Federal Security Service, better known as the FSB. Having failed to prevent the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in Moscow last month, the agency has played a major role in arresting and apparently torturing the suspected perpetrators. It was FSB agents who arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges just over a year ago. And the FSB has been heavily involved in enforcing Russia’s crackdowns on dissent and LGBTQ+ rights.

At the same time, the FSB is inextricably linked to Moscow’s war against Ukraine. After years of carrying out subversive activities there, it provided Putin with key (though apparently misleading) intel that led him to launch his full-scale invasion in 2022. Since then, its agents have facilitated the deportation of Ukrainian children, tortured an untold number of Ukrainian civilians in so-called “torture chambers,” and tried to plant former ISIS members in Ukrainian battalions.

And let’s not forget that Putin himself was shaped by his career in the FSB’s predecessor agency, the Soviet-era KGB. Putin’s rise to power was defined by his image as a strong man who could ensure security and stability. Since assuming the presidency, he’s given himself direct authority over the FSB and steadily expanded its ability to surveil and repress Russian citizens.

To learn about the Russian FSB’s evolution over the last three decades, its operations in Russia and beyond, and its possible future after Putin, Meduza in English senior news editor Sam Breazeale spoke to Dr. Kevin Riehle, an expert in foreign intelligence services and the author of The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service.

Timestamps for this episode:

(3:13) Decoding the FSB: Structure, mission, and operations
(5:58) The evolution of Russian national security: From KGB to FSB
(14:36) Corruption and ideology: The FSB’s internal struggle
(23:31) The FSB’s foreign reach and domestic repression
(38:49) The agency’s post-Putin future

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Daniel Roher and Julia Ioffe remember the Navalnys

6 april 2024 | 49 min

It’s been seven weeks since a local branch of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service published a brief news post about the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. “He went for a walk, felt sick, collapsed unconscious, and couldn’t be resuscitated.” Russian officials would later insist that Navalny died of natural causes — his mother was told that he succumbed to “sudden death syndrome.” In mid-March, while celebrating his claim on a fifth presidential term, Vladimir Putin finally uttered Navalny’s name in public but only to dance on his grave, claiming that he was ready to trade him off to the West, provided he never came back. “But unfortunately, what happened happened. What can you do? That’s life,” said Putin.

This week, The Naked Pravda looks back at Navalny’s career in politics and ahead to the political future of his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, by speaking to two of the people most responsible for educating the English-speaking world about his work: filmmaker Daniel Roher, whose documentary on Navalny won an Oscar last year, and journalist Julia Ioffe, who was one of the first Western reporters to write about Navalny and who’s tracked him and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, in numerous articles for more a decade, profiling them in stories for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Ioffe is also the author of the forthcoming book “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy,” now available for preorder.

Timestamps for this episode:

(1:55) How Daniel Roher started filming Team Navalny
(10:15) Roher’s goals when making the “Navalny” documentary
(11:51) Choosing a literary trope for the Navalny story
(15:02) Did anyone try to talk Navalny out of returning to Moscow?
(19:39) Filming Navalny’s nationalism
(22:37) Rethinking the film after Navalny’s death
(24:21) Julia Ioffe remembers meeting Alexey Navalny for the first time
(29:47) Ioffe reviews Navalny’s views on nationalism and Ukraine
(36:15) Looking ahead to Yulia Navalnaya and back at past revolutionary women

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

How terrorism’s geopolitics brought tragedy to Moscow

31 mars 2024 | 48 min

It’s been a little more than a week since a group of armed men walked into a concert hall just outside Moscow and gunned down dozens of defenseless people. A branch of the Islamic State active in South-Central Asia known as Islamic State – Khorasan, or IS-K, claimed responsibility for the Moscow attack in a statement through an affiliated media channel. That same channel later published body-cam footage recorded by the terrorists in the concert hall during the attack. Western intelligence officials say they have corroborated IS-K’s responsibility claim.

Though IS-K says the concert hall killings are its work, Russian national security officials — including President Putin in several public statements — have argued that Moscow’s enemies in Kyiv, Washington, and London are the attack’s true masterminds.

The Russian authorities have arrested four Tajikistani nationals they say acted as the gunmen, and several more people are now in custody on suspicion of aiding and abetting the killings. Before the four main suspects were arraigned in court, videos circulated online showing Russian security forces torturing them after their capture. Despite this treatment then and presumably in the days since, so far, only two of the four defendants have pleaded guilty to all charges.

To learn more about the perpetrators of this heinous attack, the fluid geopolitics that drives such terrorism, and the road ahead for Russia as the Kremlin tries to utilize the tragedy for its own aims, Meduza spoke to Dr. Jean-François Ratelle, an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, and Dr. Domitilla Sagramoso, a senior lecturer in conflict and security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:49) The Role of Tajikistan and Central Asia in the Attack
(28:07) Russia’s Response and the Blame Game
(29:30) Debunking Narratives: The Truth Behind the Accusations
(44:09) The Impact of the Ukraine Conflict on Russia’s Security Landscape

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

How Russia targets its critics abroad in wartime

5 februari 2024 | 41 min

How doomed presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin rallied antiwar Russians

29 januari 2024 | 30 min

Boris Nadezhdin’s surname has its root in the Russian word for “hope,” and he’s inspired just that in tens of thousands of voters as the politician with an antiwar message who’s come the furthest in the country’s byzantine bureaucracy for presidential candidacy. Nadezhdin’s campaign says it’s collected roughly 200,000 signatures, which is twice what it technically needs for the Central Election Commission to add his name to the ballot in March. While the commission’s approval remains unlikely, the Nadezhdin campaign has been a major news event for antiwar Russians, especially in the ever-growing diaspora, where thousands of people have lined up in cities across Europe and the Caucasus to offer their signatures.

Nadezhdhin’s allies have no illusions about his prospects, but showing their support for an antiwar challenger to Vladimir Putin has quickly become the opposition’s first visible civic movement in some time. To understand how this happened, who Nadezhdin is as a politician, and how opposition politics has worked throughout Russia’s Putin era, The Naked Pravda welcomes back Dr. Маrgarita Zavadskaya, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

***

No country can be free without independent media. In January 2023, the Russian authorities outlawed Meduza, banning our work in the country our colleagues call home. Just supporting Meduza carries the risk of criminal prosecution for Russian nationals, which is why we’re turning to our international audience for help. Your assistance makes it possible for thousands of people in Russia to read Meduza and stay informed. Consider a small but recurring contribution to provide the most effective support. Please donate here.

***

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:43) Nadezhdin’s Political Career and Ideology
(9:58) Understanding the Nature of Russian Liberal Politicians
(19:26) The Role of Elections in Authoritarian Regimes
(26:04) A Hopeful Note: The Power of Collective Action

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Growing up German in Soviet Kazakhstan, with Lena Wolf

22 december 2023 | 37 min

Answering the question “Where are you from?” has never come easily for Lena Wolf. As the descendents of 18th-century German settlers living in Soviet Kazakhstan, she and her family “didn’t exist as a group” in the history books or on TV. As a result, many of their neighbors equated them with the soldiers from Nazi Germany who had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 — even though their ancestors had arrived in the Russian Empire more than a hundred years earlier.

To complicate matters further, the lives of Lena’s parents and grandparents were shaped by the brutal repressions of the Stalin regime — a history that her father still believes is “better forgotten.” When Lena’s family finally moved to Germany on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, her parents were eager to assimilate into German society and leave the past behind. But Lena quickly discovered that they were “not like other Germans.”

After years of feeling like a person without a history, Lena finally decided to embrace her identity as a “Kazakh German” and record her family’s story in a form that would make it accessible to a new generation. And so, with the help of crowdfunding and a team of artists, she’s now working on a two-part graphic novel.

The Wolf family’s story was the subject of a recent feature published by Meduza’s weekly long-reads newsletter, The Beet. To learn what it was like to delve into her family’s difficult past and find new meaning in her parents’ and grandparents’ memories, The Beet editor Eilish Hart and Meduza in English senior news editor Sam Breazeale interviewed Lena Wolf for The Naked Pravda.

Timestamps for this episode:

(2:45) Who is Lena Wolf?
(4:23) The history of German settlers in the Russian Empire
(6:40) How Joseph Stalin’s deportations shaped the Wolf family
(11:54) Lena’s childhood and the making of her graphic novel
(22:10) Finding community and connection through difficult history
(34:40) How Lena’s father inspired the title of her book

A note from Meduza’s founders:

We love making wishes for the New Year and are not ashamed to dream big. At Meduza, we believe the impossible is possible. Why do we keep at this, despite all the signs that the world is heading into an abyss? Well, for starters, Meduza keeps going because we’ve got you.

As the year comes to a close, we’ve decided to share our wishlist for 2024 — an inventory of our wildest hopes and dreams. You can take a look here.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russia’s ban on the ‘LGBT movement’

8 december 2023 | 49 min

Spotlight on Georgia

2 december 2023 | 48 min

Why is anti-Semitic violence spreading in Russia’s North Caucasus?

5 november 2023 | 29 min

On the evening of October 29, a crowd of rioters stormed the Makhachkala airport and then flooded the tarmac after a flight landed from Tel Aviv. The angry men had assembled amid reports circulating on the social network Telegram about Israeli refugees allegedly coming to resettle in Dagestan, supposedly with a diabolical plan to oust the native population. Rioters waved Palestinian flags and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.

A day before the airport violence, locals in the city of Khasavyurt assembled outside a hotel amid rumors circulating online that it was accommodating Israeli refugees. When hotel guests refused to come to their windows to prove (somehow) that they weren’t Jews, people in the crowd started throwing rocks at the building. The mob didn’t disperse until the police showed up and allowed several demonstrators to enter the hotel to verify that it wasn’t “full of Jews.”

That same day, unpermitted anti-Israeli rallies took place in Makhachkala’s Lenin Square and in Cherkessk, the capital of Karachay-Cherkessia. Demonstrators demanded that “Israeli refugees not be allowed to enter the region” and that ethnic Jews be expelled from the area. The following morning, on October 29, unknown individuals set fire to a Jewish cultural center in Nalchik that was still under construction. The assailants threw burning tires onto the property and wrote the phrase “death to Jews” on the wall.

In the days after the Makhachkala Airport riot, Moscow settled on the explanation that foreign intelligence operatives — in Ukraine, orchestrated by the Americans, of course — are to blame for manipulating Dagestanis’ understandable outrage about Israel’s attack on civilians in Gaza.

For a better grasp of what has fomented anti-Semitism in the North Caucasus, The Naked Pravda spoke to political and security analyst Harold Chambers and RFE/RL Caucasus Realities senior editor Zakir Magomedov.

Timestamps for this episode:

02:51 Anti-Semitic Incidents in Russia's North Caucasus
03:46 Putin’s Response
04:34 The Supposed Role of ‘Foreign Intelligence’
07:59 Incitements on Telegram
11:20 The Israel-Palestine Conflict
19:35 Protests Against Putin's Mobilization Orders
23:24 The Aftermath: Arrests and Support from Athletes

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

How Russia pressures Central Asian migrants into military service

13 oktober 2023 | 34 min

‘Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West’

7 oktober 2023 | 42 min

The Pegasus spyware attack on Meduza

16 september 2023 | 49 min

On June 23, 2023, hours before Yevgeny Prigozhin would shock the world by staging a mutiny against the Russian military, Meduza co-founder and CEO Galina Timchenko learned that her iPhone had been infected months earlier with “Pegasus.” The spyware’s Israeli designers market the product as a crimefighting super-tool against “terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles,” but states around the world have abused Pegasus to track critics and political adversaries who sometimes end up arrested or even murdered. Access to Pegasus isn’t cheap: Researchers believe the service costs tens of millions of dollars, meaning that somebody — some government agency out there — paid maybe a million bucks to hijack Timchenko’s smartphone. Why would somebody do that? How would somebody do that? And who could have done it?

For answers, The Naked Pravda turned to two experts: Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for Access Now, a nonprofit organization committed to “defending and extending” the digital civil rights of people worldwide, and John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto that investigates digital espionage against civil society.

Timestamps for this episode:

(3:39) Galina Timchenko’s hacked iPhone is the first confirmed case of a Pegasus infection against a Russian journalist
(6:16) NSO Group’s different contract tiers for Pegasus users
(9:59) How aware is NSO Group of Pegasus’s rampant misuse?
(12:29) Why hasn’t Europe done more to restrict the use of such spyware?
(15:50) Russian allies using Pegasus
(17:58) E.U. members using Pegasus
(21:37) Training required to use Pegasus and the spyware’s technical side
(27:38) The forensics needed to detect a Pegasus infection
(35:46) Is Pegasus built more to find criminals or members of civil society?
(40:10) Imagining a global moratorium on military-grade spyware
(43:22) “A German solution”
(45:14) Where the West goes from here

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The Kremlin’s new history textbook

19 augusti 2023 | 43 min

A new Russian history textbook for 11th graders announced earlier this summer, “The History of Russia, 1945 to the Start of the 21st Century,” has almost 30 pages devoted directly to explaining and especially to justifying the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The whole textbook is 448 pages: There are 264 pages covering the post-war Soviet period, 48 pages about Russia in the 1990s, and 94 pages about the Putin era. Vladimir Putin’s name appears on about 40 different pages (sometimes more than once), while Stalin and Stalinism show up on nearly 60 pages.

The Special Military Operation chapter concludes with this whopper of a paragraph:

“But one this is clear: That Russia has always had, has, and will have the valor, dignity, honor, and loyalty to oath of our soldiers and volunteer fighters, doctors, teachers, builders, and aid workers. They are the true, not invented, heroes of our time. They’re around us and among us. They are an example of honor, courage, and faith in the righteousness of our cause. Their names and their daily feats join the thousand-year annals of Russian history with the deeds of millions of their heroic forebearers. It has always been so in the history of our Motherland. And so it will be. Always.”

To learn about why this textbook was written, what it says about contemporary events, and how the Putin regime intends to use it, Meduza spoke to three experts: historian Artem Efimov, who serves the editor-in-chief of Meduza’s Signal newsletter, College of West Anglia historian James Pearce (author of “The Use of History in Putin’s Russia”), and University of Oxford Professor Polly Jones, who’s currently completing a book titled “Gulag Fiction.”

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:45) The textbook’s authors: Vladimir Medinsky, Anatoly Torkunov, and Alexander Chubaryan
(11:40) Long-standing trends in how Russian history is taught in grade schools
(15:19) Guessing at Putin’s thought process on a unified history textbook
(23:00) Whitewashing Stalinism?
(25:50) The Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring
(31:57) Teaching history to teenagers

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Goodbye, Eastern Europe’ with Jacob Mikanowski

11 augusti 2023 | 27 min

“This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there.”

These are the opening lines of Goodbye, Eastern Europe, a new book by writer and historian Jacob Mikanowski that offers a sweeping history of a region that he argues is disappearing. Not in the literal sense, of course; the lands historically considered “Eastern Europe” are very much still there. But the term itself (much like “post-Soviet” and “former Soviet republics”) has fallen out of fashion. And the entangled diversity that was once the hallmark of Eastern European societies was swept away by the violence of the 20th century — so much so that Mikanowski considers it a “lost world.”

Recounting centuries of history in just a few hundred pages, Mikanowski’s book takes readers on a journey across the region stretching between present-day Germany and Russia, going as far north as the Baltic countries and as far south as the Balkans. And while the empires that once ruled there and the nation-states that succeeded them are part of the picture, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is far from your standard political history. Instead, Mikanowski weaves together years of research and travel experience with his own family’s past, opening a window into the complexities and absurdities of everyday life.

“A lot of histories of Eastern Europe [...] are very much like a battle between superpowers,” Mikanowski tells Eilish Hart, editor of Meduza’s weekly newsletter The Beet, on this week’s show. “I want to tell the story of what’s happening in between. Because to me, that’s the Eastern European experience — especially in the 20th century. Finding agency amid a world that’s constantly robbing you of it.”

Timestamps for this episode:

(2:12) What — and where — is Eastern Europe? And in what sense is it disappearing?
(4:37) Blending academic research with travel experience and family history
(11:07) Why there’s more to Eastern European history than “Hitler versus Stalin”
(13:56) Eastern Europe as a “lost world” of interwoven diversity
(16:50) What’s missed when history is written from imperial capitals?
(19:21) The politics of history in Eastern Europe today

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Why Alexey Navalny matters

3 augusti 2023 | 30 min

Loyalty and competence in Russia's armed forces

28 juli 2023 | 23 min

The new era of Russian business politics

22 juli 2023 | 23 min

The danger at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant

11 juli 2023 | 27 min

Deteriorating trans rights in Russia

23 juni 2023 | 18 min

Russia’s troubled ‘green future’

16 juni 2023 | 32 min

About a month ago, the Russian authorities outlawed Greenpeace, giving it the same treatment as Meduza, slapping the organization with an “undesirability” label that makes its operations illegal. Greenpeace International “poses a danger to the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order and security,” declared the Prosecutor General’s Office. Its work “actively promotes a political agenda and attempts to interfere in the state’s internal affairs, with an aim to undermine its economic foundations.”

Greenpeace itself says the crackdown — which forced it to dissolve its Russian branch — was retaliation for its opposition to proposed changes to the Russian environmental law that would lift the ban on logging around Lake Baikal, a protected ecosystem in Siberia and the world’s deepest freshwater lake.

A couple of months earlier, Russia’s Justice Ministry designated the World Wildlife Fund as a “foreign agent” for allegedly “trying to influence the decisions of the executive and legislative branches of the Russian Federation, and to hinder the completion of industrial and infrastructural projects” — “under the guise of protecting nature and the environment.”

To understand the short-term and long-term consequences of these designations and the fallout of Russia’s wartime environmental policies, Meduza spoke to environmental journalist Angelina Davydova, who recently coauthored an article with Eugene Simonov, titled “Does Russia Have a ‘Green’ Future?” that explores where Russia is headed environmentally in light of the war effort against Ukraine and all the Western sanctions imposed as a result.

Timestamps for this episode:

(6:56) Russian environmentalism after the crackdown on Greenpeace and the WWF
(10:31) Declining professionalism and corruption in environmental science
(16:25) Russia’s historical approach to nature reserves
(19:18) Opportunities for ‘great green power’
(25:36) The chances of environmental cooperation with the Putin regime at war

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Putin's private life and off-the-books family

9 juni 2023 | 35 min

Pegasus spyware in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict

2 juni 2023 | 34 min

The Russian Internet at war

27 maj 2023 | 30 min

After February 24, 2022, when many Western Internet companies withdrew from Russia, and the Russian state itself outlawed other online platforms, the RuNet’s future seemed uncertain. How would Russia’s Internet market develop? Where would the authorities turn for the technology needed to pursue “digital sovereignty” and more advanced censorship tools?

More than a year later, the RuNet hasn’t collapsed, Russia’s biggest Internet tech company Yandex posted almost $136 million in profits last year, and Russia’s means of policing of online speech are more hidden from the public than ever. At the same time, Yandex is carving itself up, selling off assets and moving entire divisions abroad to stay competitive internationally. And networks like YouTube and Telegram, which host a lot of content the Kremlin hardly welcomes, are still available in Russia.

To get a sense of the current state of the Russian Internet and online free speech in Russia today, The Naked Pravda turns to Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars, a CORE fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki and the coauthor of the recent article “Digital Authoritarianism and Russia’s War Against Ukraine.” Meduza also spoke to Sarkis Darbinyan, the senior legal expert at RosKomSvoboda, an Internet watchdog that’s monitored the RuNet since the early days of the Kremlin’s coordinated online censorship.

Timestamps for this episode:

(4:41) The Russian state’s ongoing efforts to court prominent bloggers
(10:43) Facebook and Instagram in Russia today
(12:28) The story behind RosKomSvoboda
(14:26) How Russia’s Internet censors are getting smarter
(16:58) Roles for artificial intelligence in Internet censorship
(18:35) What Russia might block next
(21:03) How Russian law enforcement find, flag, and prosecute illegal online speech
(24:16) Global trends in Internet censorship

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russian prisons today

20 maj 2023 | 44 min

How the Putin regime uses the memory of WWII

6 maj 2023 | 29 min

Victory in the Second World War, in Europe anyway, came a day later to the Soviet Union. That’s a technicality, of course. Germany’s definitive surrender was signed late in the evening on May 8, and it was already May 9 to the east in Moscow. This month marks the 78th anniversary of that victory, and though the West has enjoyed one more calendar day in this post-war world than Moscow, the defeat of the Nazis has remained central to Russian national identity and political culture in ways that would probably make your head spin if you’re from Europe or North America.

On this week’s episode, Meduza looks at the role of Victory Day in modern Russia, focusing on memory politics and how the Putin regime uses the holiday and the legacy of the Second World War generally to achieve its own ends during Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. At the time of this release, May 9 is just a few days away, and the holiday is unusual this year because numerous cities across Russia have actually canceled their public parades and moved festivities back to the virtual spaces they inhabited at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The war in Ukraine has forced some changes in one of Russia’s holiest of holidays.

This week’s guest is Dr. Allyson Edwards, a lecturer in global histories and politics at Bath Spa University in England. Her research specializes on the topics of Russian militarism, youth militarization, and the use of history and commemoration.

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:41) How did the Russian state’s modern-day WWII mythology come to be?
(11:49) What might today’s Russian militarism look like without the Great Patriotic War?
(13:39) What happened to the anti-militarism side of Victory Day?
(16:33) Is this Putin’s militarism or Russia’s militarism?
(18:24) What role does “humiliation” play in all this?
(20:59) The Immortal Regiment
(23:06) This year’s parade cancelations

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

What human rights activism is still possible in Russia?

21 april 2023 | 28 min

Formal treason charges and denied bail for journalist Evan Gershkovich, a rejected appeal from opposition politician Ilya Yashin (who’s serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for spreading supposed “disinformation” about Russian war atrocities in Ukraine), reportedly new felony charges against jailed anti-corruption icon Alexey Navalny, and 25 years behind bars for Vladimir Kara-Murza, the anti-Kremlin politician who helped lobby into existence the Magnitsky Act, which authorizes the American government to sanction foreign government officials around the world (especially in Russia) that are human rights offenders, freezing their assets and banning them from entering the U.S.

These courtroom news headlines are all from just the past few days.

And this doesn’t even touch on the thousands of cases against less prominent, sometimes nearly invisible activists and even apolitical types who find themselves caught in the teeth of Russia’s increasingly brutal prosecution of political disloyalty.

As political persecution in Russia escalates to something resembling moments from the Stalinist period, supporting the legal system’s victims and simply understanding its intricacies become matters of life and death. And that is at the center of work by the journalists, lawyers, and activists who make up a project called OVD-Info. To explain the organization’s operations, The Naked Pravda spoke to journalist and activist Dan Storyev, who serves as the managing editor of OVD-Info’s English-language edition and the author of The Dissident Digest, a weekly newsletter summarizing and explaining major events in Russia’s domestic political repressions.

Timestamps for this episode:

(4:57) What is OVD-Info?
(8:32) Who qualifies for assistance from OVD-Info?
(9:59) What assistance can OVD-Info offer to victims of political repression?
(14:19) What factors determine whom the Putin regime actually prosecutes?
(17:02) What legal statutes are most common in political prosecutions?
(20:43) The ruling against Vladimir Kara-Murza
(23:39) Prison life in Russia today

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russia's history of terrorism

8 april 2023 | 38 min

Throughout its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has repeatedly and regularly carried out attacks where it’s either tolerated civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage or even embraced indiscriminate tactics deliberately. Considered alongside what’s happening domestically in Russia, where political repressions underway for years already suddenly escalated to something approaching martial law, it’s fair to say that state terrorism is a key component in the Kremlin’s war policy today.

But the Putin regime doesn’t have a monopoly on terrorist violence, as two prominent assassinations have demonstrated in the past several months. Last August, pro-invasion propagandist Daria Dugina, who’s also the daughter of Eurasianist philosopher and ideologue Alexander Dugin, died behind the wheel of a car after a bomb under the driver’s seat exploded as she drove home from a festival outside Moscow. More recently, on April 2 of this year, a pro-invasion blogger named Maxim Fomin, better known as Vladlen Tatarsky, perished at a café in St. Petersburg when a bomb hidden inside a gift exploded in his face at a speaking event.

The ideological targeting here recalls attacks in late 19th- and early 20th-century Russia, but what’s the history of terrorism as a phenomenon, as a concept, and as a word in Russia? For answers, The Naked Pravda turned to two scholars: Dr. Lynn Ellen Patyk, an associate professor at Dartmouth College and the author of Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861–1881, and Dr. Iain Lauchlan, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh, where he focuses particularly on the Russian Revolution and the Stalin era, and the history of intelligence, conspiracy, and espionage.

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:07) The origins of revolutionary terrorism in Russia
(11:03) Assassination campaigns and escalating violence into the 20th century
(19:14) Domestic terrorism vs. foreign terrorism
(20:55) Two waves of terrorism
(23:51) Studying terrorism from a literary perspective
(29:52) The role of women then and now in terrorist attacks

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russian youth culture and subcultures

11 mars 2023 | 35 min

Late last month, there was a sudden and brief explosion of news reports in Russia and Ukraine about an ascendant youth movement of violence supposedly built around the subculture of anime fans. According to vague stories in the media, fistfights were breaking out at shopping malls and other public places as part of a transnational campaign by something called “PMC Ryodan.”

After a large fight in St. Petersburg led to dozens of arrests of Ryodan and anti-Ryodan youths, a federal lawmaker in the State Duma even appealed publicly to Russia’s Interior Ministry, demanding a ban on all content associated with “PMC Ryodan.” There was mass police action in Ukraine, too, where officials called PMC Ryodan an instrument of “Russian propagandists” leading an “informational-psychological operation” to “destabilize the internal situation in Ukraine.”

It turns out that the hysteria surrounding this youth subculture almost completely misunderstood the sporadic violence. Semantically, the first thing to grasp is that “PMC,” or private military company, is used facetiously when describing the Ryodan group. Members of this anime fan community are actually more likely to be the targets — not the instigators — of the brawls breaking out at youth hangouts. In fact, it seems the group got its “PMC” nickname after its followers started fighting back against the jocks who like to bully them.

The PMC Ryodan scare was especially perplexing abroad, where casual observers typically view Russian youth culture through the lens of a pro-Kremlin/anti-Kremlin dichotomy. But most young people in Russia, just like most people anywhere, don’t live and breathe polemics at every moment of the day with every fiber of their being. So, what can we say about Russia’s youth culture beyond the familiar Kremlin-based divide? The Naked Pravda asked two scholars for answers.

Timestamps for this episode:

(6:41) Dr. Kristiina Silvan, a postdoctoral fellow in the Russia, EU’s Eastern Neighborhood, and Eurasia research program at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, describes the differences between contemporary Western sociological methodologies and research approaches from the USSR.
(10:06) Dr. Felix Krawatzek, a senior researcher at the Center for East European and International Studies in Berlin, compares survey studies and fieldwork.
(13:04) The political vs. apolitical
(22:34) Russian-language culture and subcultures spreading internationally online
(25:31) The significance of so-called “soccer hooligans” and gopniki
(32:13) The 1990s as a reference point

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Russian Volunteer Corps and its neo-Nazi leader

3 mars 2023 | 38 min

What the hell is Russia’s Wagner Group?

23 februari 2023 | 43 min

Amid an escalating public conflict between Russia’s Defense Ministry and Evgeny Prigozhin, The Naked Pravda builds on last year’s episode about the warlord-tycoon, looking more closely at the paramilitary cartel he fronts. To understand how Wagner Group should be defined, why its brutality is so valuable to Moscow, and how its recruitment of prisoners has played out, Meduza spoke to three experts.

Timestamps for this episode:

(3:55) Candace Rondeaux (a professor of practice and fellow at the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University, and the director of Future Frontlines at New America) explains how Wagner Group is best defined.
(5:50) Andreas Heinemann-Grüder (who teaches Political Science at the University of Bonn in Germany and is a senior researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies) break down how Russia’s mercenaries practice “exterminatory warfare.”
(7:38) Bellingcat training-and-research director Aric Toler talks about Wagner Group’s promises of pardons and burials with honors.
(10:07) Andreas Heinemann-Grüder says Wagner’s recruitment of prisoners undermined the group’s internal cohesion and “didn’t work out” in the end.
(14:21) Why does Moscow need Wagner Group at all in the middle of an invasion openly waged by Russia’s official military?
(17:41) Candace Rondeaux explains the difference between designations for organized crime and terrorism, from a foreign policy perspective.
(22:27) Wagner Group as a front for Russian state corporations’ interests abroad.
(24:21) Aric Toler examines what funerals for three 1990s-era crime bosses recruited by Wagner say about the group’s dubious promises to inmates.
(28:14) Candace Rondeaux highlights the ways in which Wagner Group is a social movement too.
(31:50) How to read Prigozhin-linked channels online and Russia’s Z-blogosphere more broadly.
(37:10) Why ending the war demands a resolution to Wagner Group’s fate.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russian influence in Hungary

17 februari 2023 | 38 min

In early February 2022, as Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán traveled to Moscow on what he described as a “peace mission.” Standing alongside Vladimir Putin at a press conference, Orbán urged other Western countries to adopt a “Hungarian model” of relations with Russia — one supposedly based on “mutual respect.” Just a few weeks later, the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Hungary’s neighbor, Ukraine.

For Orbán and his government, the invasion came as a shock. And for a brief moment, it seemed as though Budapest would finally reverse its longstanding pro-Kremlin stance. But instead, Hungarian officials have opted to walk the line, supporting round after round of EU sanctions against Russia and welcoming more than 2.1 million Ukrainian refugees, while also blocking the passage of weapons through Hungarian territory to Ukraine, brandishing their EU veto power, and refusing to forsake Russian energy imports.

To find out more about Russian influence in Hungary and its impact on the Orbán government’s response to the war in Ukraine, The Naked Pravda sat down with three expert guests.

Timestamps for this episode:

(1:36) Journalist Szabolcs Panyi from the Budapest-based investigative outlet Direkt36 on the money trail coming from Moscow and uncovering Russian espionage in Hungary.
(10:44) Andras Tóth-Czifra, a non-resident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), on Hungary’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
(14:14) Zsuzsanna Vegh, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a lecturer and researcher at European University Viadrina, on how the Orbán government’s business-as-usual Russia policy puts Hungary at odds with its European partners.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russia’s wartime emigration sparks a ‘reckoning’ in Central Asia

10 februari 2023 | 59 min

In the initial months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people left Russia. Some were fleeing the war’s economic repercussions or the country’s accelerated descent into authoritarianism, while others saw emigration as a moral necessity. Then, in September, Putin’s mobilization announcement set off a new wave of panic, causing another 700,000 or so to leave Russia in a span of just two weeks (though some have since returned).

A huge number of these wartime emigrants ended up in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, sparking what some have termed a “Russian migrant crisis.” The result on the ground in these countries has been an unprecedented reversal of a decades-old status quo that had Central Asian migrants moving to Russia to perform manual labor for relatively high wages, often while being subjected to racism and mistreatment from locals.

To learn about how this reckoning has played out on a human level, The Naked Pravda spoke to migration researcher and journalist Yan Matusevich, who’s spent the last five months conducting interviews with Russians newly arrived in Central Asia.

Timestamps for this episode:

(5:16) Who are the people who have moved from Russia to Central Asia? What makes this a ‘monumental’ moment?
(19:41) How have people in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan reacted to the influx of Russians? What difficult conversations has this migration forced people to have?
(28:54) Who gets overlooked in the discussion about wartime migrants to Central Asia?
(35:40) How do these migrants from Russia fit into traditional migration categories? Are they refugees? Asylum seekers? None of the above?
(45:01) Why did Kazakhstan recently make its visa laws slightly less friendly to Russian citizens? How will this affect Russian emigrants there?
(52:51) Why do some Russians in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan fear being deported to Russia? Is this likely to happen?

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Who the hell is Evgeny Prigozhin?

23 november 2022 | 59 min

What if Russia uses a dirty bomb in Ukraine?

4 november 2022 | 44 min

On October 23, following a report in Russia’s state news, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu started calling his counterparts in France, Turkey, the UK, and the United States, warning that Moscow has collected intelligence suggesting that the Ukrainian government is preparing a “provocation” involving the use of a dirty bomb. A day later, Russia’s Foreign Ministry claimed that Kyiv plans to “camouflage” an explosion of “the radioactive substances derived from the spent nuclear fuel storages of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant” as the effects of a “low-power Russian nuclear warhead that contains highly enriched uranium in its charge,” supposedly framing Moscow for using tactical nukes.

At Kyiv’s own request, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog has already begun inspections to investigate Russia’s claims, but the Kremlin has pressed on, undeterred. On October 27, Vladimir Putin said again that the Ukrainian government is “preparing an incident with a so-called dirty bomb” with plans to accuse Russia of using a nuclear weapon.

To understand what radiological weapons actually are and what their use would mean in Ukraine, The Naked Pravda turned to three experts.

Timestamps for this episode:

(3:39) Dr. Andrey Baklitskiy, a senior researcher in the Weapons of Mass Destruction and other Strategic Weapons Program at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, compares Moscow’s “dirty bomb” allegations to past claims about U.S. bioweapons on Ukrainian soil.
(15:08) Dr. Nicole Grajewski, a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School, describes how Russian warnings about Ukrainian radiological weaponry mimic past accusations against the White Helmets in Syria.
(25:21) Sarah Bidgood, the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, explains the rise and demise of state-level radiological weapons programs.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Would Russians be able to rationalize the war against Ukraine without gendered rhetoric?

21 oktober 2022 | 32 min

Will U.S. partisan politics undermine American support for Ukraine?

15 oktober 2022 | 37 min

What if Russia uses nuclear weapons?

1 oktober 2022 | 44 min

What if Vladimir Putin dies tomorrow?

23 september 2022 | 42 min

As acting president, elected president, prime minister, and then president again, Vladimir Putin has now ruled Russia for almost 23 years. And it doesn’t look like he plans to retire any time soon. Following amendments to the Russian constitution in 2020, Putin is now able to run in two more presidential elections. This means he could potentially remain in power until 2036, at which point he’ll be turning 83.

Putin is indeed getting old, and ever since he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, there's been a lot of speculation about his future. With his seventieth birthday coming up on October 7, reports and rumors about the state of Putin’s health abound. But death by old age is probably years (if not decades) away for a man whose physical survival is one of Russia’s greatest national security priorities.

Of course, no one lives forever, and just like Mikhail Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth II, Vladimir Putin will one day pass away. But what if he dies suddenly, while still in office? What happens then? The Naked Pravda turns to three experts for insights into the potential domestic and global consequences of Putin’s death.

Timestamps for this episode:

(6:08) Fabian Burkhardt, a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, on how Putin’s death would impact Russia’s domestic politics — and political elites — in the short term.
(16:04) Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, on the death of Stalin and the Soviet Union’s transfer of power problem.
(25:06) Domitilla Sagramoso, Senior Lecturer in Security and Development in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, on Putin’s foreign policy legacy and what it means for the future trajectory of Russia’s relations with the wider world.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Kadri Liik explains ‘Putin’s archaic war’ and the Russia we lost

9 juli 2022 | 28 min

How sanctions against Russia reshape the world

3 juni 2022 | 27 min

Genocide in Ukraine

22 maj 2022 | 101 min

Through speeches by political leaders and in television broadcasts that have blanketed the country (as well as new territories recently seized by force), the Kremlin has argued breathlessly that Ukrainian statehood is a historical accident weaponized by Russia’s enemies. This rhetoric, which essentially denies the existence of an independent Ukranian identity, has reached not only millions of civilians but also the Russian troops now in Ukraine, where journalists, the local authorities, and international observers have been documenting and cataloging these soldiers’ acts of violence against noncombatants.

As the world learns more about the atrocities committed against the Ukrainian people, Ukrainian law enforcement and officials throughout the West have begun the process of investigating, designating, and prosecuting these acts.

For a better understanding of this work and its challenges, The Naked Pravda spoke to four experts about war atrocities in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, focusing particularly on genocide as it’s understood both legally and in terms of history and politics. The scholars who joined this discussion:

Erin Farrell Rosenberg, an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law, and an attorney specializing in international criminal law and reparations
Eugene Finkel, an associate professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of “Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust”
Dirk Moses, a professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the author of “The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression,” and the senior editor of the “Journal of Genocide Research”
Maria Varaki, a lecturer in international law at the War Studies Department at King’s College London, and the co-director of the War Crimes Research Group

Timestamps for the main sections of this episode:

(4:15) The legal terms used to designate mass violence and crimes in warfare, and genocide’s special legacy
(36:11) How war crimes and genocide are prosecuted, establishing genocidal intent, and upholding justice
(1:04:21) The politics of genocide allegations, and the consequences of taking them seriously

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Resist and rebuild: Civilian life in wartime Ukraine

30 april 2022 | 40 min

Telegram and the future of Russian Internet freedom

20 mars 2022 | 38 min

We’re now more than three weeks deep into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and many are asking the question: What information is still reaching Russians? Unless you’re using a VPN to tunnel beneath the state’s censorship, Instagram is blocked, Facebook is blocked, Twitter is blocked, and YouTube is probably next. The independent news media is in tatters, and it looks like the main social networks left standing will be domestic services like Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte, which enforce the Kremlin’s political censorship — and then there’s Telegram.

For a better understanding of what this means for Russia’s information space — focusing particularly on Russians’ increased reliance on Telegram — The Naked Pravda welcomes back Dr. Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications at Dublin City University in Ireland, and Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars, an assistant professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The two scholars recently coauthored an article published in the journal Post-Soviet Affairs, titled, “Is Telegram a ‘Harbinger of Freedom’? The Performance, Practices, and Perception of Platforms as Political Actors in Authoritarian States.”

Timestamps for this episode:

(4:02) Is Telegram a “harbinger of freedom”?
(5:05) How does Telegram’s lack of moderation potentially endanger vulnerable groups?
(8:10) How vulnerable are Telegram users to government snooping?
(11:06) Why do users stick with Telegram if there are serious security concerns about the service?
(13:16) On Telegram head Pavel Durov’s mixed messages in Ukraine
(17:30) Are the U.S. social media giants any better?
(20:32) Revisiting Telegram during the 2020–2021 Belarusian protests
(21:11) What content is available on Telegram during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
(26:36) That year between 2018 and 2019 when Russia “blocked” Telegram
(31:10) What’s next for the RuNet?

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russia's peacekeeping mission in Kazakhstan and security demands in Europe

14 januari 2022 | 44 min

Human rights law in Russia

12 december 2021 | 25 min

Russia’s ASAT missile test

19 november 2021 | 33 min

Earlier this week, events in space flirted with a real-life adaptation of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 motion picture “Gravity” when the Russian military blew up an inoperative Soviet satellite that had been orbiting the Earth since the early 1980s. Moscow insists that the debris didn’t get within 40 kilometers (25 miles) of the International Space Station, but NASA says the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard ISS were awakened early and ordered to retreat to their docked spacecraft in case an impact prompted an evacuation. U.S. officials say they’ve tracked 1,500 pieces of orbital debris caused by the Soviet satellite’s destruction, but there are likely “hundreds of thousands” more smaller pieces that also endanger anything or anyone in their path. According to NASA, this trash will circle the Earth for decades, posing a constant threat to the operations of all spacefaring nations. Russia says the Americans are a bunch of hypocrites.

To shed some light on Russia’s weapons test, independent analyst and disarmament expert Pavel Podvig to returns to The Naked Pravda.

Timestamps for this week’s episode:

(6:09) Standup comedy in Russia: reviewing Denis Chuzhoi’s new special, and Vera Kotelnikova weighs the usefulness of speaking up for persecuted colleagues
(10:17) Corruption news: Crimea arrests its potty-mouthed culture minister, Mediazona investigates two possibly wrongfully jailed police officers outside Rostov, and Novaya Gazeta unearths an honest judge in Chelyabinsk
(13:47) Pavel Podvig joins the show

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometimes Fridays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

What’s treason in Ukraine today? The case against Viktor Medvedchuk

15 maj 2021 | 27 min

On May 13, a Ukrainian court placed pro-Kremlin oligarch and lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk under round-the-clock house arrest pending trial for high treason. The country’s Prosecutor General had signed off on the charges two days earlier, indicting not only Medvedchuk, but also his closest ally and fellow lawmaker, Taras Kozak, in connection with three episodes of illegal activity.

Both politicians belong to Opposition Platform — For Life, a pro-Russian opposition party that holds 44 seats in the Ukrainian parliament. But Medvedchuk is perhaps best known for his murky business dealings and personal ties to Vladimir Putin (the Russian president is said to be the godfather of Medvedchuk’s youngest daughter).

The treason charges came a few months after the Ukrainian authorities imposed sanctions on Kozak and Medvedchuk for allegedly financing terrorism. As part of these sanctions, Kozak’s three pro-Russian television channels were taken off the air. The Ukrainian authorities also sanctioned Medvedchuk’s wife and froze the couples’ assets for three years.

Medvedchuk has denied all of the allegations, claiming that the charges are politically motivated. That said, prosecuting Medvedchuk coincides with other steps the Ukrainian government is taking to combat corruption and oligarchic influence. Moreover, this is happening at a time when President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to be changing his stance on Russia and his approach to resolving the conflict with Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s east.

To discuss Viktor Medvedchuk’s Kremlin ties and his place in the Ukrainian political landscape, as well as what the Zelensky government is doing to combat oligarchic influence in Ukraine, “The Naked Pravda” turned to independent journalist and disinformation researcher Olga Tokariuk, a freelance correspondent in Kyiv for the Spanish EFE news agency.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometimes Fridays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Spies, student journalists, and life behind bars: A blowup in Moscow’s relations with Prague, the felony case against ‘Doxa,’ and conditions in Russian prisons

24 april 2021 | 37 min

‘Sweeping new authority’: What it means to sanction Russia’s sovereign debt

17 april 2021 | 24 min

Putin the Killer: What Joe Biden’s pronouncement means in U.S.-Russian diplomatic history

20 mars 2021 | 23 min

Xenophobes and xenomorphs: A look back at Cold War science fiction

5 mars 2021 | 35 min

Under pressure: The evolving Belarusian opposition movement versus Lukashenko’s embattled regime

26 februari 2021 | 43 min

Belarus has seen ongoing protests since August 2020, when election officials declared that Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka) had won his sixth consecutive presidential term. The mass demonstrations were met with a violent police crackdown, and several members of the opposition were thrown in prison.

Pressure and threats from the authorities drove other opposition figures to flee the country, including Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanousakaya), who emerged as Lukashenko’s main political rival during the 2020 campaign season. Tikhanovskaya is now living in exile and leading the unified opposition from Lithuania, and her role both Belarusian and international politics has changed significantly in the last six months.

Back in Belarus, the authorities have been carrying out widespread repressions, targeting independent media and civil society organizations. At the same time, police brutality and the onset of winter has led opposition protesters to adopt new tactics for expressing their discontent. And although some analysts maintain that the opposition movement has stalled, others are predicting the return of large-scale demonstrations in the spring.

To find out more about how the opposition movement in Belarus has evolved and how Lukashenko’s regime has managed to withstand six months of protests, “The Naked Pravda” talked to Belarusian journalist Hanna Liubakova, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, and Maryia Rohava, a doctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, whose research focuses on symbolic politics and identity in post-Soviet autocracies.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometimes Fridays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Fighting the ‘crooks and thieves’: Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption politics

6 februari 2021 | 40 min

Maia Sandu’s win and what it means for Moldova

28 november 2020 | 48 min

On November 15, Moldovan citizens at home and abroad came out in record-breaking numbers to cast their ballots in the run-off vote of the country’s 2020 presidential elections. In the end, former Prime Minister Maia Sandu defeated incumbent President Igor Dodon, becoming Moldova’s very first woman president-elect.

Taking place amid the coronavirus pandemic, the campaign season was plagued by divisive political rhetoric and fake news. Meanwhile, international media framed the race as a battle between a pro-EU, anti-corruption candidate (Sandu) and a corrupt, pro-Russian incumbent (Dodon). But was this election really about the country’s geo-political direction?

To fill in the backstory and find out what we can expect from Maia Sandu during her presidency, “The Naked Pravda” talks to four experts on Moldova about the country’s socio-political landscape, the 2020 vote, and the future of Chisinau’s foreign policy.

Gina S. Lentine, Senior Program Officer for Europe and Eurasia at Freedom House, on how the pandemic impacted the Moldovan elections.
Journalist Alina Radu, CEO and co-founder of the independent, investigative weekly Ziarul de Garda, reflects on investigative reporting under lockdown and the fight against fake news.
Ana Indoitu, Director of the Chisinau-based non-profit INVENTO, discusses the main candidates’ attitudes towards young people and civil society.
Assistant Professor Ellie Knott from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) argues that geopolitics is often a veil for transnational corruption.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Is it Putin or is it Russia? The causes of today’s bad vibes between Moscow and the West.

21 november 2020 | 40 min

The Nagorno-Karabakh truce: What to expect in the years that follow a bloody six-week war

14 november 2020 | 28 min

A six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh has ended disastrously for Armenia. Judging by the map, the situation on the ground will revert mostly to the conditions in place before Yerevan’s 1991 war with Baku, leaving Azerbaijani artillery perched just outside the breakaway republic’s capital city and the 50,000 souls who call it home. The big difference this time around is the presence of Russian peacekeepers — about 2,000 of them — who will be there to monitor a Kremlin-brokered truce. Not formally part of the trilateral settlement but still very much involved in the conflict is Turkey, which is expected to field its own monitors in Azerbaijan, albeit outside the Karabakh region.

For a better understanding of the violence that took place in this area since late September, and to explore what it means to have won or lost in this war, “The Naked Pravda” turned to three experts:

(3:15) Neil Hauer, a Canadian journalist based in the Caucasus who's reported extensively on conflicts in Georgia, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh, describes the mood now in Armenia and Yerevan’s plans for Karabakh’s future.
(8:31) Richard Giragosian, the director of the Regional Studies Center (an independent think tank based in Armenia), argues that everyone involved in the six-week war has emerged a loser, in at least some respects.
(16:31) Rob Lee, a former Marine engineer officer and a current doctoral student at King’s College London, explains how drones made all the difference in the latest clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometimes Fridays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Keeping Up With Kyrgyzstan

31 oktober 2020 | 47 min

On October 5, thousands of opposition demonstrators took to the streets of Bishkek to protest the official results of Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections. About a dozen different opposition parties had failed to overcome the seven percent threshold needed to get into parliament and two pro-government parties had won nearly half the seats. The protesters demanded a repeat vote and on October 6 elections officials relented and invalidated the results.

Since then, Kyrgyzstan’s population has seen a lot more turmoil than the opposition protesters bargained for: parliament appointed a new prime minister, the president stepped down, and election officials scheduled a repeat parliamentary vote only to see it postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, lawmakers have been pushing through legislation on changing the constitution and the country is planning to hold presidential elections in January.

So how did all of this happen in such a short period of time? “The Naked Pravda” invited three experts on the show to speak about the lead up to the vote, the ensuing political crisis, and whether or not Russia has anything to do with it:

(2:35) Bektour Iskender, journalist and co-founder of Kloop — an independent media organization based in Kyrgyzstan, recalls how the post-election protests escalated into an unexpected political crisis.
(5:36) Dr. Erica Marat — an associate professor at the National Defense University’s College of International Affairs in Washington D.C., whose research focuses on violence, mobilization, and security institutions in Eurasia — explains why Sadyr Japarov’s lightning-fast rise to power can be considered a coup.
(15:30) Colleen Wood — a doctoral candidate in political science at Columbia University, who researches civil society and identity in Central Asia — discusses what social media reveals about social and political cleavages in Kyrgyzstan.
(39:02) All three guests share their take on the Kremlin’s response to Kyrgyzstan’s political upheaval.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

From Russia With Junk: Why the U.S. Trashed the Ventilators Shipped From Moscow

24 oktober 2020 | 20 min

The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

10 oktober 2020 | 39 min

Armenia and Azerbaijan reached a fragile ceasefire agreement in Moscow on October 10 after nearly a dozen hours in negotiations. The two sides will suspend hostilities so bodies and prisoners of war can be exchanged, while diplomats from Yerevan and Baku debate a more lasting resolution.

Since the late 1980s, the fight for the Nagorno-Karabakh region has killed roughly 20,000 people and made refugees of hundreds of thousands more. Since the most recent escalation that began on September 27, 2020 (already the second resumption of hostilities this year), several hundred soldiers have reportedly died in combat, along with several dozen civilians.

“The Naked Pravda” asked four experts to explain what fuels the longest-running war on former Soviet soil:

(3:50) Thomas de Waal — a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, the author of “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War” (2003), and more recently the coauthor of “Beyond Frozen Conflict“ (2020) — explains why the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is more dangerous than many people realize.
(8:19) Jeffrey Mankoff, a distinguished research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at U.S. National Defense University, discusses what’s happened on the ground Nagorno-Karabakh this September.
(12:05) Journalist Arzu Geybulla describes growing up in Azerbaijan and falling out of favor with the government.
(23:07) Kevork Oskanian, an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham and the co-author of “Fear, Weakness, and Power in the Post-Soviet South Caucasus” (2013), breaks down the local political pressures in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Belarusian propaganda: From courting the West to taking Russia’s cues

19 september 2020 | 21 min

For Russian eyes only: U.S. voter data, hackers, and the story that wasn’t

4 september 2020 | 22 min

On September 1, 2020, the Russian newspaper Kommersant ran a story that looked like a real bombshell before it fizzled out. The report, titled “Hackers Appeal to the U.S. State Department: American Voter Data Appears on Russian Darknet,” credits a Russian hacker platform with posting millions of American voters’ personal data (mainly voters in the swing state of Michigan, but also in Connecticut, Florida, and North Carolina) and then profiting off a U.S. government project to pay foreigners for tips about election interference. Kommersant also quoted experts who warned that the publication of the voter data could be a “provocation” ahead of this year’s presidential election in the U.S.

But the voter data in question wasn’t hacked or leaked — it’s all publicly available — and the U.S. State Department says it’s yet to pay anyone for intelligence about election interference. Kommersant’s report isn’t entirely false, however. Russian hackers are sharing the personal information of millions of American voters, and that’s not all. To understand why this is happening and what may have motivated Kommersant’s reporting, “The Naked Pravda” turns to three analysts working on cyber-threats, digital diplomacy, and Russian politics.

(5:28) Ian Litschko, a cyber-threat intelligence analyst, explains why Russian hackers traffic open-source U.S. voter data.
(11:33) Oleg Shakirov, a consultant at the PIR Center in Moscow and an expert in European security and digital diplomacy, discusses the novelty of a “Russiagate” story that broke in Russia, not in the West.
(17:03) Yana Gorokhovskaia, an independent researcher on Russian politics, describes the intended audience for Kommersant’s report and why it matters.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russia’s coronavirus vaccine: Assessing the risks and research behind ‘Sputnik V’

30 augusti 2020 | 30 min

If you’ve read anything about Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, “Sputnik V,” you know that it’s rolling out to the public in October, just as Phase III trials begin — meaning that researchers still have no idea how effective the product actually is. So far, the scientists developing Sputnik V say they’ve combined Phase I and Phase II testing and confirmed its safety and immunogenicity, but they’ve yet to compare it to a placebo and the handful of patients already injected were all relatively young and healthy.

The Gamaleya Research Institute, which developed Sputnik V, says it hopes to manufacture 3-5 million doses annually, once production is up and running. A handful of other Russian biotech companies will be manufacturing the vaccine, as well. Russia says it’s already received orders for a billion doses around the world.

Suspiciously and unlike most foreign researchers working on a coronavirus vaccine, the Gamaleya Research Institute has yet to publish any trial results in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Despite promises from the Russian team, they haven’t shared any details about their vaccine tests with the global expert community.

To learn more about Russia’s coronavirus vaccine and explore the risks and research behind this product, The Naked Pravda turns to two social scientists: Judyth Twigg, a political science professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University, who studies healthcare in Russia and Eurasia, and Cynthia Buckley, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who works on global health and social demography in Eurasia.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes weekends). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Belarusian Election: Three experts explain what to expect from the presidential vote and the real political battle that follows

8 augusti 2020 | 25 min

The Sino-Russian Propaganda Pact: How Moscow and Beijing bungled a media partnership meant to promote each other

31 juli 2020 | 30 min

The FSO on the QT: The state of sociological work and opinion polling in Russia today

25 juli 2020 | 24 min

In reporting and analysis about Russian politics, the question is ubiquitous: How does Vladimir Putin see things? While there’s no shortage of efforts to read the Russian president’s mind, a more grounded approach would be to examine the intelligence that shapes Putin’s policymaking. One of the Kremlin’s best-trusted sources of information about popular moods is the sociological work conducted by the country’s Secret Service, the Federal Protective Service (FSO).

Most Russians are unaware that the FSO, in addition to guarding top state officials, is responsible for conducting sociological surveys and monitoring popular opinion and the country’s political situation. The agency’s findings are never published, but these data inform some of President Putin’s biggest decisions. For example, fairly recently, FSO polls showing rising national discontent reportedly influenced the Putin administration’s decision to expedite the reopening of Moscow and the rollback of its coronavirus quarantine measures.

To learn more about this kind of polling and the state of sociological research generally in Russia, “The Naked Pravda” turned to two sociologists who work on Russia:

(4:41) Denis Volkov, the deputy director at the Levada Center, explains how Russia’s elites interpret and utilize polling.
(7:34) Маrgarita Zavadskaya, a researcher at the University of Helsinki and the European University in St. Petersburg, discusses problems with big data and selling state officials on sociology.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Treason and Military Journalism in Russia: The arrest and prosecution of Ivan Safronov

11 juli 2020 | 24 min

On the morning of July 7, federal agents arrested Ivan Safronov, a longtime journalist who recently took a job as a communications adviser to Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin. Safronov is being charged with treason and faces up to 20 years in prison.

His lawyers have been granted limited access to the case file compiled by the Federal Security Service, which indicates that Safronov is suspected of selling secret information to Czech intelligence agents about Russian military cooperation with an unnamed African Middle Eastern country. The Czechs supposedly recruited him in 2012 and he allegedly sent them the data over the Internet five years later in 2017.

Outside the FSB’s headquarters in Lubyanka Square, during Safronov’s arraignment hearing on July 7, dozens of journalists picketed, each taking turns holding up signs in his defense, and police officers arrested them, one by one, for an unlawful assembly.

To understand more about trends in policing journalists and reporting on national security in Russia, “The Naked Pravda” turns to two guests on today’s show:

(6:46) Rachel Denber, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division, looks back at how Russian journalists have been treated for the past 15 years.
(14:49) Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist in the Strategic Studies division of CNA and an associate at the Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (as well as the author of the Russian Military Reform blog), explains why work like Ivan Safronov’s military reporting is essential.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Seventh Studio Case: What Kirill Serebrennikov means to Russia’s art world

27 juni 2020 | 24 min

Nationalism and the Alt-Right: Another look at ‘Russian Lives Matter’

13 juni 2020 | 52 min

This week’s show looks at Russian nationalism, activism in Russia against police brutality, and the American alt-right. We also return specifically to remarks by Mikhail Svetov from last week’s show about an initiative he’s calling “Russian Lives Matter.”

The Black Lives Matter movement in the United States has occasioned a global conversation about racism and institutionalized prejudice. These themes resonate everywhere, even in countries without America’s legacy of slavery and segregation. In Russia, some right-wing groups have sought to adapt and appropriate BLM’s terminology, both cynically for publicity and deliberately in order to diminish what they’ve described as a divisive leftist upheaval.

In this episode:

(4:27) Meduza features editor Hilah Kohen dissects Mikhail Svetov’s motivations for the “Russian Lives Matter” initiative.
(5:33) Marlene Laruelle — an associate director and research professor at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University and the co-director of PONARS — breaks down what Russian nationalism actually is.
(21:56) Investigative journalist Casey Michel explains America’s alt-right.
(30:25) “Pussy Riot” activist and Mediazona publisher Peter Verzilov talks about sustained activism in Russia against brutality in the justice system.
(40:31) Poet, musician, and socialist activist Kirill Medvedev argues that “Russian Lives Matter” is how nationalists “wink” at each other while pretending to be inclusive.
(44:53) Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a history instructor at San Jacinto College, responds to Mikhail Svetov’s interpretation of the American Civil Rights Movement.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Russian Lives Matter: How America’s new civil rights movement reverberates in Russia

6 juni 2020 | 64 min

On today’s episode, we’ll hear from five guests about race and injustice in Russia and the Soviet Union, including from the activist behind a new initiative against police brutality in Russia built around the slogan “Russian Lives Matter.” As you may have guessed, this adapts the better known phrase “Black Lives Matter,” which is the rallying cry for an enormous social movement that is sweeping the United States. Both of these slogans are ostensibly about opposition to police brutality, but they embody very different perspectives on injustice.

Black Lives Matter, or BLM, has dominated the news cycle in the U.S., largely supplanting coronavirus as the nation’s leading story. The movement has attracted attention in Russia, as well, where the state media has geopolitical reasons to highlight how the United States is a racist and failed democracy, and where many anti-Kremlin, typically Western-leaning oppositionists look to places like the United States as an example for better governance and civil society. In other words, they’re watching the U.S. from Russia, and Black Lives Matter is now front and center.

In this episode:

(5:56) Libertarian Party member and “Civil Society” movement head Mikhail Svetov explains the “Russian Lives Matter” initiative.
(17:24) Meduza features editor Hilah Kohen argues that BLM is wrongly portrayed as riots and divisiveness.
(22:59) Rogers Sure, a Kenyan man who studies engineering in Yekaterinburg, describes what it’s like to be African in Russia.
(30:54) Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a history instructor at San Jacinto College, summarizes her fieldwork and research into African Americans living in the USSR and minority scholars in Slavic studies.
(44:53) Meredith Clark, an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, breaks down the fundamentals of Black Lives Matter, about which you can learn more here.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays (or sometimes Saturdays). Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

F**k the Pulitzer: A Russian investigative journalist says his team deserves recognition for breaking one of the stories that won ‘The New York Times’ its latest reporting award

8 maj 2020 | 22 min

On May 4, 2020, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced the latest winners of the most coveted award in journalism. The staff of The New York Times won prizes in three different categories: international reporting, investigative reporting, and commentary. The first honor was awarded for “a set of enthralling stories, reported at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime.” The winning work includes six articles and two videos. Not one of the stories is actually set inside Russia: the reports are about wars in Libya and Syria, elections in Madagascar and the Central African Republic, and murders in Bulgaria and Ukraine.

The Russian authorities naturally condemned the prize selection, but criticism of The New York Times's award-winning journalism also came from several Russian investigative reporters, including Roman Badanin, who says his news outlet, Proekt, broke the story at the heart of at least one of the winning works that earned this years' international reporting Pulitzer: an article by Michael Schwirtz, released in November 2019, titled “How Russia Meddles Abroad for Profit: Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader,” which appeared eight months after Proekt’s “Master and Chef: How Evgeny Prigozhin Led the Russian Offensive in Africa” and repeats many of the same findings, chronicling similar events and describing many of the same circumstances and characters.

To understand the dispute better, “The Naked Pravda” spoke to Roman Badanin and Meduza corresponded with a representative from The New York Times.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Pandemic Justice: How COVID-19 and coronavirus containment measures have exacerbated problems in Russia's courts and prisons

17 april 2020 | 32 min

‘Queer Science Fiction in Russian’: What space epics and tech dystopias tell us about post-Soviet minority activism

27 mars 2020 | 32 min

LGBTQ activists in the Russophone world face obstacles that many in the Anglophone world do not, but that means they also find ways to survive that defy the imagination. One way queer Russian speakers have found to work through those life-and-death decisions is writing science fiction. Through stories about augmented reality, lesbian seduction in space, sentient plants, and more, activists have offered political commentary on post-Soviet oppression that’s impossible to find in the mainstream opposition.

To understand how Russophone writers are using sci-fi to map out the region’s political future, “The Naked Pravda” reached out to scholars in Japan, Kyrgyzstan, and Sweden. They walked us through the broader Russian sci-fi scene and reflected on how speculative writing has changed their own scholarship and activism.

In this episode:

(6:33) Mikhail Suslov, an assistant professor of Russian History and Politics at the University of Copenhagen currently sheltering in Sweden, explains why the vast majority of Russian sci-fi published today has ties to the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church.
(14:29) Georgy Mamedov, an academic who chairs the board for the LGBTQ organization Labrys in Kyrgyzstan, asks why so much queer Russophone science fiction fantasizes about complete separation from the rest of the world even as the people who write it get more and more determined to engage with the homophobes around them.
(16:19) Syinat Sultanalieva, a prominent activist and a PhD candidate in international studies at the University of Tsukuba, breaks down the geopolitical undertones of her short story “Element 174.”

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Constitutional Gymnastics’: Russia's strange initiative to keep Vladimir Putin in office for years to come

13 mars 2020 | 26 min

We’ve known it was coming since January when Vladimir Putin warned the nation, but now it’s moving at full throttle and threatens to inflict untold damage. No, it’s not the coronavirus — it's the other calamity currently unfolding in Russia: a massive campaign to rewrite the Constitution so that Vladimir Putin’s presidency might continue until 2036.

When this episode was recorded, all that stood between major constitutional reforms and enactment were a ruling from Russia’s Constitutional Court and a nationwide vote that draws the support of at least half the Russians who bother to vote. Federal and regional legislators have moved with lightning speed in the past week, all under a cloud of dubious legality. To find out more about what laws are being bent or trampled in the campaign to allow Vladimir Putin another two presidential terms, “The Naked Pravda” turned to three scholars in Russia and the UK.

In this episode:

(3:24) Ben Noble, an assistant professor in Russian politics at the University College London, explains that Russian lawmakers moved so quickly with the Kremlin's constitutional amendments because this was a top personal priority for Vladimir Putin.
(7:15) Ella Paneyakh, a sociologist at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, argues that legislators waited until the last minute to move forward with many amendments, polluting the legislation with a lot of “bad law.”
(14:30) Jane Henderson, an academic lawyer at King's College London and an expert in Russia's legal system, breaks down the ways to revise Russia's Constitution and the pitfalls of the theoretical checks and balances put in place.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Starting WWII’: Today's war of words between Russia and Poland over the history of the late 1930s

21 februari 2020 | 35 min

Earlier this month, Meduza published an article by Andrey Pertsev about President Vladimir Putin's shifting rhetoric when discussing the 1939 Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact, as well as his growing criticism of Polish foreign policy in the year before the USSR cut a deal with Adolf Hitler. Despite being many decades old, these events remain hotly debated in Eastern Europe for obvious reasons: millions died in the conflict, which ended with Poland in the Soviet bloc for more than 40 years, and questions about blame and who only did “what was necessary” are still issues that offend and excite. That is undoubtedly why political elites today in both Russia and Poland often talk about the war, defending their own country's legacy against allegations from abroad.

On this episode of “The Naked Pravda,” however, we turn not to political elites, but four historians. Can scholarly work establish blame? Is this something that drives academic work? What is whitewashed in the debate playing out in speeches and news headlines right now? Listen to the show and find out.

In this episode:

(4:26) Geoffrey Roberts, a professor of history at the University College Cork in Ireland, explains how Vladimir Putin apparently sees the history of the late 1930s.
(7:33) Tom Junes, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow and a historian at the European University Institute in Florence, says the only country we can rationally blame for starting WWII is Nazi Germany.
(13:10) Arch Getty, a distinguished research professor of history at UCLA, says Putin gets more right about the history of the late 1930s than he gets wrong.
(21:48) Ivan Kurilla, a professor of history and international relations at European University at St. Petersburg, discusses the challenges now facing historians of the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Academic Freedom’: The fight over political activism inside Moscow's Higher School of Economics

14 februari 2020 | 39 min

In mid-January, administrators at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE, perhaps the best university in Russia, shared a proposal to impose greater restrictions on political activism within the university that would have prohibited individuals affiliated with HSE from mentioning this connection when discussing political issues or taking part in what school officials described as “socially divisive” activities. The university also announced that HSE is stripping all student media groups of their official status, apparently in response to the actions of a single student outlet called Doxa.

About a week later, on January 24, HSE’s Academic Council held a 10-hour meeting. Among many issues, the council discussed the proposed amendments to the school’s internal rules, ultimately watering down many of the most draconian suggestions. To find out more about this situation and understand how it compares to political freedoms on U.S. campuses, “The Naked Pravda” spoke to a handful of scholars in Russia and America.

In this episode:

(1:53) Greg Yudin, a senior research fellow and associate professor of sociology at the Higher School of Economics, says HSE's administration listened to students and reached a reasonable compromise.
(4:28) Armen Aramyan, an editor at Doxa and a graduate student at the Higher School of Economics, says the amended rules adopted by HSE's Academic Council are still too vague and restrictive.
(7:42) Andrey Lavrov, HSE’s public relations director, addresses the compromise reached between the administration and disgruntled students.
(22:15) Kris Olds and Mark Johnson, two scholars at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, describe restrictions on political activism on U.S. college campuses.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘RuNet Sovereignty’: How Russia is trying to isolate its Internet segment from the rest of the world, maybe

7 februari 2020 | 27 min

The “Agora” human rights group and digital activists at Roskomsvoboda recently released a report on Russian Internet freedom in 2019, where they argue that the state authorities have settled on an Internet policy vector focused on “control, censorship, and isolation.” Late last year, Meduza published a story about how a Federal Protective Service veteran and the descendant of one of Russia’s most celebrated families of missile engineers has been appointed to serve as the director of a powerful new monitoring center inside Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state censor, which is responsible for enforcing legislation that took effect in November 2019 that is ostensibly intended “to ensure the integrity, continuity, stability, resilience, and security of the functioning of the Internet’s Russian national segment.”

The law, which charges a new division of Roskomnadzor with ensuring the RuNet’s stable operation and defense from external threats, is convoluted and potentially unenforceable. To find out more about Russia's push for Internet isolation and its feasibility, “The Naked Pravda” turns to three experts.

In this episode:

(4:35) Tanya Lokot, an assistant professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University, looks at the strategic thinking in Moscow.
(9:28) Alena Epifanova, a program officer at the German Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Deciphering Russia’s ‘Sovereign Internet Law,” explains deep packet inspection.
(14:23) Marielle Wijermars, an assistant professor in cyber-security and politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki, asks why Russian regulators don't enforce all the Internet regulations on the books.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Conspiracy theories’: What Americans and Russians reveal about themselves in the stories they tell about each other

24 januari 2020 | 37 min

In recent years, we've witnessed a strange convergence of Russian and American conspiratorial thinking. They're talking about each other again in Moscow and Washington, often spinning stories that aren't exactly rooted in facts. Whether it's Russiagate in the United States or color revolution in Russia and countries across the former Soviet Union, diabolical plots are afoot.

To find out what drives popular conspiracy theories in Russia and the U.S., “The Naked Pravda” turned to a handful of scholars who study the subject. Today's show also takes a broader look at how Russians and Americans see themselves and each other.

How did we get on this subject? Last month, Meduza investigative correspondent Liliya Yapparova, whose work we’ve discussed before on this podcast, wrote an article about a curious college course taught by Vitaly Grigorev, a military veteran and former instructor at the KGB Higher School. This winter term, Grigorev’s students in “national systems of information security” at the MIREA Russian Technological University — one of Russia's biggest technological schools — are learning about many strange concepts, including popular conspiracy theories, like the “Dulles Plan” (which claims that former CIA chief Allen Dulles plotted to destroy the USSR by corrupting its “cultural heritage” and “moral values”).

In this episode:

(2:15) Liliya Yapparova tells the story behind her story.
(6:02) Scott Radnitz explains the political science of studying conspiracy theories.
(8:48) Ilya Yablokov, author of “Fortress Russia,” distinguishes between grassroots and elite conspiracy theories.
(16:29) Eliot Borenstein, author of “Plots Against Russia,” says American unreflexivity is the stuff of Russian culture's dreams.
(29:46) Sean Guillory, host of the “SRB Podcast,” recalls America's Red Scare during the race riots of the early 20th century.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Executive power in Russia’: How we know what we know about Kremlin politics and what to expect from Putin's new Constitutional shakeup

17 januari 2020 | 32 min

Most weeks, it's fair to say that you could probably roll your eyes at a 30-minute podcast about the inner workings of executive power in Russia. But the issue is suddenly urgent. Two days ago, Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state-of-the-nation speech, where he surprised the country by calling for Constitutional amendments that would radically redistribute power in the Russian state, possibly weakening the presidential administration. And then his entire cabinet resigned, and long-time Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was moved (some would say demoted) to a new number-two spot on Russia’s Security Council.

While you never really need an excuse in Russia to talk about Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin, the inspiration for this episode of “The Naked Pravda” was Andrey Pertsev’s October 2019 story about Sergey Kiriyenko, Putin’s current first deputy chief of staff and the supposed manager of Russia’s domestic politics. But the article is more than a Kiriyenko profile. It offers a broader look at his office in the Kremlin and at the Putin presidential administration itself, which remains enormously hard to comprehend, even two decades after Putin first took office.

To understand the mechanics of Kremlin analysis, or Kremlinology, host Kevin Rothrock turned to some of the brightest political experts around.

In this episode:

(3:51) Maria Lipman on Kremlinology's shortcomings
(5:42) Konstantin Gaaze says Russia's state ideology was designed accidentally as a “life hack”
(8:10) Brian Taylor on the presidential administration's relationship with Russia's Constitution
(22:28) Yana Gorokhovskaia says the proposed reforms will weaken Russia's super-presidential system
(24:14) Sam Greene highlights the newfound importance of the State Council
(25:58) Mark Galeotti explains Dmitry Medvedev's new home: the Security Council

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Tabloids and an inferiority complex’: The business and political strategy behind the media's biased Russia coverage

20 december 2019 | 26 min

According to a report by the news agency “Rossiya Segodnya,” almost half of the articles in the foreign press about Russia are “negative.” This recent study leans heavily on the British media (which makes up more than a third of the entire sample), where nearly 40 percent of the selected coverage is supposedly biased against Russia. Meduza learned that hundreds of the articles Rossiya Segodnya examined in the British press share the same author: a man who’s worked in Russia since 1992 and now simply rewrites blurbs he finds in Russian tabloids, selected for him by Russian staff working at his news agency.

To find out more about this peculiar individual and learn why the Russian authorities devote resources to studies like the one released this fall, “The Naked Pravda” spoke to Meduza's head of investigative reporting, Alexey Kovalev, who profiled Stewart’s bizarre career in journalism in an article this October, and to media scholars Sarah Oates and Vasily Gatov.

In this episode:

(2:47) Alexey Kovalev explains how he found out about Will Stewart, a prolific British reporter in Moscow who turned to tabloids after years of serious journalism.
(9:46) Sarah Oates argues that officials in Moscow shouldn't be surprised by the Western media's Russia coverage, and it's the trivialization of Russia that's really vexing.
(16:09) Vasily Gatov describes the “symbiosis” of security functionaries and public relations spin doctors who guide state decision making in Russia.
(24:28) Concluding remarks by your host, Kevin Rothrock.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘The Information Nation’: Kremlin researchers and forensic journalists intersect at Russia’s black market for leaked personal data

6 december 2019 | 34 min

The Russian Presidential Affairs Department’s Scientific Research Computing Center (GRCC) develops systems to monitor and deanonymize social-media users, and it sells these systems to government and private clients alike. Using the company’s services, insurance companies can root out dishonest employees, and security-guard companies can recruit new staff. Other GRCC programs allow the police to hunt down “extremists” online. In a special report published in late September, Meduza learned that these computing systems collect information on Russians not just from open sources, but also from leaked databases that are sold illegally on the black market.

To find out more about Russia’s database black market and how this information is being used, “The Naked Pravda” spoke to Meduza special correspondent Liliya Yapparova and Christo Grozev and Aric Toler, two top researchers at the investigative journalism website Bellingcat.

In this episode:

(2:01) Liliya Yapparova explains how she first learned about GRCC and its controversial products.
(5:46) Kevin and Liliya discuss the ethics of using illegal databases to hunt down criminals, and the tradeoffs tech consumers accept when embracing news services.
(9:15) Christo Grozev reviews Bellingcat’s history and how he came to the group.
(11:39) Aric Toler describes “digital stalking” and talks about Bellingcat’s mid-October report about one of the alleged Skripal poisoners attending the family wedding of a Russian military intelligence commander.
(21:31) Aric explains why Bellingcat isn’t like Wikileaks.
(23:56) Christo talks about when Bellingcat thinks it’s okay to use leaked databases.
(30:29) Liliya and Christo argue that Russia’s data-leak problem can’t be fixed anytime soon.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

‘Instead of her face, I saw a pizza’: How women in Russia are fighting back against sexual assault

29 november 2019 | 33 min

In life and in news reporting, violence against women is a sadly “evergreen” topic, but the issue has taken on new and growing momentum in Russia, where there’s a rising number of high-profile cases involving rape and self-defense. Meduza has reported extensively on these investigations, and, in this first episode of “The Naked Pravda,” managing editor Kevin Rothrock speaks to a handful of activists and journalists who are working to shed more light on these cases and the social movement that hopes to transform how Russia handles women’s safety.

In this episode:

(1:20) In mid-October, after weeks of hesitation, a journalist in Veliky Novgorod publicly accused a colleague from another local news outlet of raping her. (Read Meduza’s report here.) Why was she reluctant to speak openly about the assault?
(5:22) Marina Pisklakova-Parker, the founder and chair of the board of the women’s rights group “Center ANNA,” recalls how women’s rights advocacy in Russia has evolved since the 1990s, and discusses the impact of being designated as a “foreign agent” by the Justice Ministry.
(8:18) Hilah Kohen, Meduza’s English-language news editor, argues that ethical storytelling in cases of sexual violence focuses on survivors and frames allegations in a broader social context.
(14:40) Elena Kalinina, a managing partner at the advertising agency “Room485,” explains how her team created an interactive game designed to raise awareness about domestic violence and abusive partners.
(17:45) Anna Romashchenko, region coordinator for the advocacy group “Nasiliu.net” (No to Violence), talks about creating safe spaces for women in Russia and the unexpected demographics of views about women’s rights.
(20:18) Ola Cichowlas, AFP’s Moscow correspondent, recounts her story about a woman in Moscow who was prosecuted for defending herself against an abusive partner.
(23:26) Nastya Krasilnikova, who writes on Telegram about representations of women in the Russian media, argues that many news outlets actively “hate women,” but there is more willingness now than before to talk about sexual assault.

If you or someone you know is in an unsafe relationship, there are resources available, like the National Domestic Violence Hotline in the U.S. and the National Domestic Violence Helpline in the UK. In Russia, you can contact Nasiliu.net, Center ANNA, and other groups.

“The Naked Pravda” comes out on Fridays. Catch every new episode by subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or other platforms. If you have a question or comment about the show, please write to Kevin Rothrock at kevin@meduza.io with the subject line: “The Naked Pravda.”

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Podcasten The Naked Pravda är skapad av Медуза / Meduza. Podcastens innehåll och bilderna på den här sidan hämtas med hjälp av det offentliga podcastflödet (RSS).

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