The Naked Pravda - podcast cover

The Naked Pravda

Медуза / Meduza•meduza.io

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.

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Episodes

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

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 que...

Feb 21, 2020•35 min

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

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 the...

Feb 14, 2020•39 min

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

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 n...

Feb 07, 2020•27 min

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

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 scho...

Jan 24, 2020•37 min

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

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 Prim...

Jan 17, 2020•32 min

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

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 si...

Dec 20, 2019•26 min

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

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 th...

Dec 06, 2019•34 min

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

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 ho...

Nov 29, 2019•33 min

‘The Naked Pravda’ premiere trailer: Meduza’s new English-language podcast

“The Naked Pravda” highlights how Meduza’s top reporting intersects with the wider research and expertise that exists about Russia. Future episodes will look at the following issues: 💾 Leaked databases and how the black market for this information has become a key aspect of Russian law enforcement and investigative journalism in Russia 🗑️ Russian tabloid journalism and its reverberations in the Western news media ⚔️ Kremlin clan politics and the power of the presidential administration. ✊ The ...

Nov 27, 2019•1 min

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