On February 21, Vladimir Putin delivered a nearly hour-long televised lecture on Soviet history, describing what he clearly believes are the flimsy foundations of Ukrainian statehood and arguing that the government in Kyiv owes its territory today to the supposed generosity of the Bolsheviks, particularly Vladimir Lenin. To assess this presentation of Ukrainian and Soviet history, Meduza spoke to Dr. Faith Hillis , a professor of Russian history at the University of Chicago, where she specialize...
Feb 26, 2022•24 min
Meduza spoke to the two hosts of a special project organized by the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. In roughly 16 hours of interviews, “ The Ambassadorial Series ” features in-depth conversations with eight of the living former U.S. ambassadors to Russia and the Soviet Union, each featuring personal reflections and recollections on high-stakes negotiations, as well as discussions about a range of geopolitical issues that still dog toda...
Feb 12, 2022•28 min
Three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Eastern European breakaway states of Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia exist in a sort of geopolitical limbo. Born out of wars that ended in deadlocks in the early 1990s, these self-governing regions remain unrecognized by most of the world and dependent on Russia’s backing. This isolation presents a unique set of challenges for cultural creatives living and working in these regions, as well as for journalists trying to help them ...
Feb 05, 2022•29 min
January 2022 kicked off with a flurry of tense diplomatic talks between Russian and Western officials. Moscow is seeking wide-ranging security guarantees in Europe, while simultaneously massing upwards of 100,000 troops along its Western border. The buildup has provoked international concern that Russia plans to escalate the long-simmering conflict in the Donbas into a full-fledged war, leaving the United States and NATO scrambling to deter a potential re-invasion of Ukraine. With both Russia an...
Jan 22, 2022•40 min
In the past two weeks, Russia has demonstrated its capacity to project military power at different corners of its periphery, sending troops to Kazakhstan for a small but symbolic peacekeeping operation and pressing sweeping security demands in Europe, where the West has accused the Kremlin of plotting a war of aggression against Ukraine. The Naked Pravda reviews three essays by political analysts in Russia about the nation’s evolving geopolitics and speaks to two experts about the events in Kaza...
Jan 14, 2022•44 min
On this week’s show, The Naked Pravda looks back at some of the journalism and scholarly work in 2021 that made significant contributions to our knowledge about Russia. These nine articles feature incredible fieldwork, insights into how power works in Russia, and compelling stories that you might have missed over the year. Meduza spoke to the authors of three of these articles — Julia Ioffe, Pjotr Sauer, and Maria Danilova — and we asked historian Sean Guillory of The SRB Podcast for his five fa...
Dec 29, 2021•1 hr 26 min
The lawyers and journalists who worked with the Team 29 project specialized in Russia’s most hopeless political prosecutions — the treason case against journalist Ivan Safronov, the extremism charges against Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption movement, and dozens more indictments all but doomed to convictions. Earlier this year, the project was forced to disband after Russia’s federal censor started blocking its website. In November 2021, the Justice Ministry designated Team 29’s former members as...
Dec 12, 2021•25 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 prom...
Nov 19, 2021•33 min
Our main story this week is Russia’s place in Europe’s energy crisis. Political risk analyst Nick Trickett , the author of the OGs and OFZs newsletter , joins the podcast to explain what consumers want from Moscow, why being a “swing producer” is inherently political, and how inflation endangers ordinary Russians. Timestamps for this week’s episode: (3:28) Law enforcement news: Hooded thugs disrupt a film screening at Memorial, and police arrest a prominent university administrator (9:46) Cultur...
Oct 16, 2021•29 min
Our main story this week is the treason case against Ilya Sachkov, the 35-year-old CEO of the cybersecurity firm Group-IB. On Wednesday morning, September 29, hours after officials raided the company’s Moscow office, a local court jailed Sachkov for the next two months, pending trial. That will likely be extended several times, as the authorities collect more evidence. The Naked Pravda explores why Sachkov may have been arrested and asks what his case means for Russia’s cybersecurity industry an...
Oct 02, 2021•31 min
Earlier this month, Moscow was one of just a few regions in Russia to offer electronic voting in three-day parliamentary elections. In the capital, multiple opposition candidates led in-person voting but ultimately lost when electronic votes were added late to the final tallies. In the week since the voting ended, the campaign teams for several losing candidates have compiled and presented evidence that they say proves voter fraud in the online ballots. The Naked Pravda returns for its second se...
Sep 25, 2021•38 min
Khalimat Taramova is only 22 years old, but she’s been through a lot, especially in the past two weeks. Kept under lock and key at home in Chechnya, her family beats her and even forced her to undergo so-called “conversion therapy.” Taramova identifies as bisexual. Last month, she reached out to a prominent LGBT rights group begging them to help her reach safety. On June 6, when she got to a women’s shelter in Dagestan, a couple of hours outside Chechnya, it seemed like she was finally safe. She...
Jun 18, 2021•22 min
Last week, investigative journalists at Meduza and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty revealed that a Russian marketing firm recently tried to recruit European bloggers in a secret media campaign to smear Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. To find out more about these solicitations and to learn how this fits into Russian politics, The Naked Pravda spoke to Meduza investigations head Alexey Kovalev and RFE/RL journalists Mark Krutov and Carl Schreck . “The Naked Pravda” comes out on Saturdays (or sometim...
Jun 04, 2021•23 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 U...
May 15, 2021•27 min
As you may have learned from the crowdfunding banners now adorning this website, the Russian authorities designated Meduza as a “foreign agent” on April 23. Our new status in Russia has chased away advertisers and deprived us of revenue, endangering Meduza ’s continued existence. That’s the sad truth of our situation right now, but what does it mean to be a “foreign agent” in Russia? How does it change life and daily business for individuals, NGOs, and media outlets? Russian lawmakers argue that...
May 08, 2021•36 min
A lot has happened this month. On the world stage, Russia’s relations with the Czech Republic started unraveling on April 17, when officials in Prague accused Russian military intelligence agents of destroying ammunition depots seven years ago in explosions that killed two people. Three days before that bombshell dropped, police officers in Moscow raided the newsroom of the student journal Doxa , as well as the homes of four editors, who are now under house arrest, pending felony charges that co...
Apr 24, 2021•37 min
This week, the Biden administration rolled out the latest round of U.S. sanctions against Russia, slapping Moscow (yet again) with a series of targeted measures to punish the Kremlin for alleged election meddling, hacking, and military aggression. The U.S. Treasury Department identified a few dozen persons and entities, freezing any of their assets in the United States and banning Americans from doing business with them. Russia soon followed suit with its own set of countersanctions, while simul...
Apr 17, 2021•24 min
Last month, the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences decided to withhold public access to new research on atmospheric and soil pollution in cities throughout the region. The discussion about burying the “alarmist” report was streamed on YouTube, however, and the academy’s effort to purge the footage from the Internet only drew the public’s attention. To try to understand why a group of prestigious scientists would question open-source data about pollution levels in Siberia, Meduza ...
Apr 10, 2021•22 min
When it comes to carrying out repressions, the Russian government’s reach isn’t limited by its own borders. The Kremlin is known for going after perceived enemies abroad — especially former “insiders” and members of the political opposition. In recent years, high-profile assassinations linked to Russian agents have made headlines around the world, and Moscow has developed a reputation for abusing the Interpol notice system. At the same time, those who flee Russia’s Chechen Republic are particula...
Mar 27, 2021•34 min
In an interview published on March 17, U.S. President Joe Biden said he considers Vladimir Putin to be a “killer,” prompting the Russian president to respond a day later with a schoolyard retort that translates loosely to the phrase: “Look who’s talking!” In what sounded more like a threat than a salutation, Putin also wished his American counterpart good health. Pretty strong language for the leaders of the two greatest nuclear powers on Earth! But how does this rhetoric compare to recent and C...
Mar 20, 2021•23 min
Russia and Twitter haven’t really gotten along for years now. In fact, since 2017, federal censors at Roskomnadzor (RKN) have filed more than 28,000 takedown requests with the social network, and the agency complains that Twitter still grants Russian users access to 3,168 of these materials containing supposedly illegal information. In retaliation against this insubordination, RKN started throttling local Twitter traffic on March 10, 2021, leveraging the country’s growing arsenal of deep-packet-...
Mar 13, 2021•26 min
In a time when intergalactic superheroes dominate global box offices and capture the imaginations of millions of people around the world, what do we see when we look back at the science fiction of the Cold War? What is gained and what is obscured by comparing the films and literature created by the two superpowers of the early Space Age? And what did it feel like to watch those movies and read those books back then? What’s the legacy of these remarkable creations? To explore this subject and att...
Mar 05, 2021•35 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...
Feb 26, 2021•43 min
Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden recently had their first presidential phone call — a conversation that paved the way for a renewal of the New START Treaty (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty reached in April 2010 between presidents Obama and Medvedev). But most other arms control agreements between Moscow and Washington have expired or collapsed in years past, so what’s the future of these diplomatic efforts going forward? For answers, “The Naked Pravda” turns to two experts in this field: Olga Ol...
Feb 13, 2021•27 min
For the last six months, Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has been making headlines both in Russia and abroad. His near-fatal poisoning in August 2020 provoked international outcry and his immediate arrest upon returning to Russia after spending months recovering in Germany sparked a wave of protests that brought people to the streets countrywide. With Navalny in jail, his supporters and associates sprang into action. The day after his arrest, his Anti-Corruption Foundation published...
Feb 06, 2021•40 min
In December 2010, a St. Petersburg businessman named Sergey Kolesnikov penned a nifty four-page open letter to then-President Dmitry Medvedev, outlining how a glorious palace built for Vladimir Putin came to be. The details of this seemingly ancient document are now familiar again thanks to a massive investigative report released this week by the opposition figure Alexey Navalny, who survived an attempted assassination last year only to be jailed last weekend after returning home to Moscow. As M...
Jan 23, 2021•38 min
Thanks to Russia’s recent constitutional amendments, local self-government has effectively lost its independence. State officials at all levels are now accountable, one way or another, to the president. Dramatic as these changes seem on paper, the reforms, in fact, formally recognize what has long been true in reality: appointed “city managers” have largely replaced the country’s elected mayors. But Russia’s “power vertical” relies on more than just political appointments. To learn about the oth...
Jan 01, 2021•27 min
There have been major breakthroughs in the investigative reporting surrounding the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, whom the Federal Security Service allegedly tried to assassinate in August 2020. As Meduza has reported previously, Navalny’s case is part of a long, grim trend in Russia. In recent weeks, thanks to investigative work by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalists Mike Eckel and Carl Schreck, there is also new information available involving another apparent p...
Dec 25, 2020•24 min
Even if you follow news in Russia regularly, you might be unaware or only vaguely aware that Russia’s Central Bank printed an enormous sum of money over the past decade in a sweeping campaign to restructure the country’s major banks and liquidate smaller failing financial institutions. In a recent joint investigative report , Meduza and its media partners spoke to sources and obtained testimony from witnesses who described major abuses of authority by banking executives and senior regulatory off...
Dec 12, 2020•26 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 be...
Nov 28, 2020•48 min
