If major events and cultural shifts are what elevate music, now is an excellent time to take stock of what’s happening in Russia, more than 600 days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the imposition of militarized censorship, and the spread of wartime social norms. To learn about Russia’s contemporary music scene and how the invasion influences popular trends, Meduza spoke to music journalists Denis Boyarinov and Lev Gankin. For an insider’s perspective, The Naked Pravda also sat down wit...
Oct 21, 2023•58 min
In August, a wave of police raids sent a chill through Russia’s migrant communities. By all appearances, the authorities were trying to track down draft-age men from Central Asia who had recently acquired Russian citizenship but failed to complete their mandatory military registration. Officers in multiple cities handed out military summonses on the spot and dragged migrant workers off to enlistment offices by force. There, they ran the risk of ending up like the hundreds of other Central Asians...
Oct 13, 2023•34 min
Have you given much thought to the economic war that rages behind the scenes of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine? You’ve likely read plenty about sanctions. Maybe you know that the likes of McDonald’s and Starbucks have left Russia, and you’ve probably seen some headlines about Europe struggling to break its energy dependence on Russia. But unless you work in this field, it’s easy to underappreciate how crucial the economic war between Russia and the West is to the broader conflict that has d...
Oct 07, 2023•42 min
Following an “anti-terrorist” operation by the Azerbaijani military in Nagorno-Karabakh, what was a blockade has transformed into an exodus of the region’s Armenian population, raising allegations of ethnic cleansing as tens of thousands of people flee to Armenia. As this tragedy has unfolded, roughly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers have stood by and done virtually nothing. On September 20, a day after Azerbaijani troops forced the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh’s capitulation, thousands of people ...
Sep 30, 2023•35 min
Vladimir Putin has made a slew of anti-Semitic comments in the last few months, from saying Ukraine’s President Zelensky is “not Jewish but a disgrace to the Jewish people” to responding to reports of a former advisor moving to Israel by calling him “some sort of Moisha Israelievich.” In one interview with a Russian propagandist, Putin said that Zelensky’s “Western handlers put an ethnic Jew in charge of Ukraine” to mask the country’s “anti-human nature.” One of the main narratives Moscow uses t...
Sep 22, 2023•28 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 murd...
Sep 16, 2023•49 min
This week’s show tackles Russia’s 2023 regional elections, scheduled for Sunday, September 10, though several regions will keep polling stations open all weekend. “Up for grabs” in contests with mostly predetermined outcomes are 26 gubernatorial offices and seats in 20 regional parliaments. There’s also a whole mess of municipal and local races. Occupying forces in four regions of Ukraine are staging votes, too. Foreign Policy Research Institute Eurasia Program Fellow András Tóth-Czifra joined t...
Sep 09, 2023•45 min
How complicit are ordinary Russians in the invasion of Ukraine? That’s a question at the core of Russia’s War , a book published this May, where author Jade McGlynn explores what she calls “the grievances, lies, and half-truths that pervade the Russian worldview,” arguing that too many people in Russia have “invested too deeply in the Kremlin’s alternative narratives” to see the war in Ukraine as the brutal assault it is. Dr. McGlynn specializes in Russian media, memory, and foreign policy at th...
Sep 01, 2023•28 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)...
Aug 19, 2023•43 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” ...
Aug 11, 2023•27 min
Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny famously returned to Moscow in January 2021, where he was promptly arrested at the airport for supposed parole violations. A month later, his suspended sentence was replaced with a 2.5-year prison sentence. Roughly a year later, in March 2022, a judge added another nine years to his prison term, convicting him in a kangaroo court of embezzlement and contempt of court. So, Navalny has at least another decade of imprisonment ahead of him, but it will li...
Aug 03, 2023•30 min
In the final week before the State Duma’s summer recess, Russian lawmakers have been ramming through some curious legislation , including several initiatives the authorities would apparently like to roll out now before Putin’s re-election campaign presumably kicks off in the fall. Notably, one last-minute amendment empowers the president to charge governors with the creation of “special militarized formations” during periods of mobilization, wartime, and martial law. These new armed groups, cont...
Jul 28, 2023•23 min
Since the early aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many major Western companies have been in various stages of divesting from Russia. Nearly a year and a half into the war, we’ve entered a new phase of business relations, as the Kremlin has started nationalizing foreign companies’ Russian assets. The latest watershed moment occurred on April 25, when Putin issued an executive order allowing the Russian authorities to place the Russian assets of companies from “unfriendly nations” u...
Jul 22, 2023•23 min
How many Russians have been killed in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? If you visited Meduza’s website this week, you’ll know that we ran the numbers and estimate the total death toll among Russian combatants to be 47,000 men. That’s three times more than all the Soviet troops who died over 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, and it’s nine times more than how many Russian soldiers were killed in the first Russian-Chechen War in the mid-1990s. To discuss the methodology, insights, and obstacl...
Jul 15, 2023•21 min
Moscow and Kyiv have traded allegations that the other side is planning a disastrous attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant that they warn could cause a major radiological event. Last week, Ukrainian President Zelensky warned that Russian occupation forces have placed “objects resembling explosives” on some rooftops at the power station, “perhaps to simulate an attack on the plant.” Officials in Moscow, on the other hand, have their own allegations, claiming that Ukraine plans to frame R...
Jul 11, 2023•27 min
Yevgeny Prigozhin is now (in)famous around the world for mounting a failed mutiny against the Russian military in a last-ditch attempt to avoid being absorbed into it, as the Kremlin reclaims its monopoly on violence and ends an experiment with outsourcing bits of the Ukraine invasion to mercenaries. The Naked Pravda has focused numerous times before on Wagner Group, and it’s now time to write the private military company’s obituary. Or is it? How did Prigozhin manage to convince his men to emba...
Jul 01, 2023•41 min
On June 14, the Russian State Duma passed the first reading of a new bill that would essentially ban every aspect of gender transitions, from changing your gender marker in official documents to health care like hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgeries. The only exceptions would be for people with “congenital physiological anomalies,” meaning intersex people, and even then it would only be possible in state hospitals after review by a medical panel. Russia has never been a safe...
Jun 23, 2023•18 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 foundation...
Jun 16, 2023•32 min
Ten years ago this week, a curious thing happened: during the intermission of a ballet performance at the State Kremlin Palace, Vladimir Putin and his wife of thirty years gave an interview to a TV news crew where they revealed that they were no longer married. It was a brief exchange, but it’s also one of the rare moments in his long presidency when Putin spoke openly about his family life. Back in June 2013, there was already wide speculation about Vladimir Putin’s secret love life, which focu...
Jun 09, 2023•35 min
Last week, on May 25, the digital-rights group Access Now broke a story revealing that Pegasus spyware was used to hack civil-society figures in Armenia. Notably, these infiltrations took place against the backdrop of the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh — making this investigation’s findings the first documented evidence of Pegasus spyware being used in the context of an international war. Never heard of Pegasus? Well, buckle up. Developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, this frigh...
Jun 02, 2023•34 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,...
May 27, 2023•30 min
Russia is notorious for its political prisoners, and the authorities have only added to this population by adopting numerous laws since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that outlaw most forms of anti-war self-expression. Figures like journalist Ivan Safronov and opposition politician Alexey Navalny were already locked up before the full-scale invasion, and now they’re joined by politicians like Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. As relatively unknown activists are dragged into court for m...
May 20, 2023•44 min
Bloggers and news outlets in Russia are abuzz with speculation about what could be the start of Ukraine’s long-awaited spring counteroffensive. Experts have had months to speculate about what shape the counteroffensive might take and what its chances of success are, but recent attacks in Moscow, Crimea, and border regions raise other questions about how the Russian authorities are guarding territories that are, from Kyiv’s perspective, behind enemy lines. To learn more about how Russia defends a...
May 12, 2023•32 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 wou...
May 06, 2023•29 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 A...
Apr 21, 2023•28 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 toda...
Apr 08, 2023•38 min
A new investigative report published jointly by Meduza and The Bell looks closely at Rostec, one of Russia’s key state corporations, and its campaign to exert control over the public discourse on Telegram about Rostec’s operations and executives. Rostec is responsible for developing, manufacturing, and exporting high-tech products in aviation, mechanical engineering, radio electronics, medical technology, and a lot more. This is the Kremlin’s arms conglomerate, controlling outfits like the Kalas...
Apr 01, 2023•28 min
In a new investigative report , journalists at Mediazona counted 536 service-related felony cases filed in Russian garrison courts against soldiers since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started last year. Most of these charges involve AWOL offenses, often resulting in probation sentences that allow offenders to return to combat. More serious crimes include refusal to obey orders, striking a commanding officer, and outright desertion. Citing national-security grounds (and orders from Russia’s ...
Mar 25, 2023•32 min
Show host Kevin Rothrock revisits noteworthy news stories in Russia from mid-March 2023 and celebrates 99 episodes of The Naked Pravda by reading some listener feedback. Timestamps for this episode: (0:01) Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group paramilitary cartel starts recruiting on Pornhub (2:26) Russia knocks an American UAV into the Black Sea (3:52) The Russian Orthodox deacon who turned to Afro-Brazilian mysticism and invented a wife to cohost his anti-Ukrainian hate blog (5:44) How Kirill Butyli...
Mar 17, 2023•19 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 S...
Mar 11, 2023•35 min
