In Moscow's Shadows

The fastest way to lose your grip on Russia is to reach for the word “war” every time a scary headline lands. The incentives are everywhere: politicians who want public backing for big defence spending, media outlets that live on attention, and all of us who share first and think later. 

I look at two particular examples: the current fascination in the British press with the idea that Russia may launch an attack using long-range missiles, and a truly insane essay by Konstantin Malofeyev in his Tsargrad media outlet  fantasising about a tactical nuclear strike to end the Ukraine war. 

The British article is here, the Russian one here.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

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Power doesn’t just seize territory. It seizes the story. I’m using a selection of 6 excellent new books to follow the narrative battlegrounds where modern Russia tries to control what people see as true, normal, and inevitable, and where society still finds ways to push back even when formal protest is risky, whether in framing Harry Potter, or surviving in the occupied Donbas.

The books in question are:

• Alexis Lerner, Post-Soviet Graffiti. Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) - see also her Eurasian Knot podcast interview here.
• Michael Gorham, Networking Putinism. The rhetoric of power in the digital age (Cornell University Press, 2026)
• Eliot Borenstein,The Politics of Fantasy. Magic, Children’s Literature and Fandom in Putin's Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). 
• Greta Lynn Uehling, Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine  (Cornell University Press, 2023)
• David Lewis, Occupation. Russian Rule in Southeastern Ukraine (Hurst, 2025) 
• Martin Laryš, Rebel Militias in Eastern Ukraine, from leaderless groups to proxy armies (Routledge, 2025). 

Details of the Times event on 7 May I mentioned are here.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

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Putin reportedly gathered top oligarchs behind closed doors and asked them to chip in to help fill the budget, with the war in Ukraine sitting unmistakably in the background. The idea seems to have been initiated by Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s gravel-voiced boss and one of the most polarising figures in Putin’s circle. After keeping a low profile since 2022, why is he coming back into the news? Because of the 'Prigozhin Syndrome': if you are a crony, not a friend, if you want something from the boss, you also need to demonstrate your utility.

That early podcast from 2022, by the way, In Moscow's Shadows 2: Mishustin, Sechin, Institutional vs Personal Power, is here.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

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A handful of memes and an online storm can look like nothing, right up until they start steering the news cycle. Efforts to talk up a secessionist Russian-speaking Estonian “Narva People’s Republic” look like a Kremlin disruption operation: manufacturing attention, stoking anxiety, and forcing journalists and officials into a no-win choice between silence and amplification. 

Rather more significant is the case of St Petersburg lawyer and Kremlin-friendly smear merchant, Ilya Remeslo, who has abruptly posted “Five Reasons Why I Stopped Supporting Vladimir Putin”, and then reportedly ended up in a psychiatric ward. A genuine conversion, a breakdown, a trap to catch dissidents, a pretext to shut down Telegram amid internet restrictions, or a very old-fashioned quest for money and status?

Maybe the regime really is under a kind of threat, not from a coup, but a slower, messier dissolution: elite resource fights, regional pushback over internet outages, war weariness, nationalist critiques from different directions. Russian political life is not dead, merely defrosting. 

Details of the event at the University of Chester on 16 April are here.

You can find details of my books, in English and translation, at my In Moscow's Shadows blog page, here.

Tom Adshead's New Kremlinology substack is here.

And if you want to know more about Russians With Attitude, look here.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

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Or, 'Team Russia and the Undead Ideology Project' 

Can you create an ideology that is custom-engineered, poll-driven, focus grouped, workshopped and marketed? The Presidential Administration's Alexander Kharichev is certainly trying, suggesting the Kremlin's concerns about the future.

I also discuss Marlene Laruelle's excellent book Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime (Stanford UP 2025), and the link to Jeremy Morris's comments on it is here.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

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How does the Iran war look to Russia, at once a potential morass for the USA (and Europe) and a case study, many in policy circles feel, on why not to trust Washington. It's also a laboratory for what one Russian military theorist called "non-contact war," and may help shape Moscow's notions of the future of conflict.

Then it’s home to Moscow’s underworld, where a fragile peace holds between Shakro Molodoi and Badri Kutaissky, while younger “thieves‑in‑law” turn old grudges into proxy fights. One death, one arrest, or a shock from Chechnya could snap the stalemate and pull the state into an ugly arbitration it can neither control nor ignore. 

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

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First, as the USA, Israel and Iran trade drone and missile strikes, how the war  may play out for Russia: my sense is that on balance it will give Moscow more opportunities than headaches. 

Then, from bangers to Mish: decoding Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s annual report to the State Duma. Think of a head butler in a grand house: no say in the party upstairs, every burden downstairs. The technocrats may plan to edge Russia from “gas station” to “supermarket,” but is this viable?

The Sunday Times article I mention is here, Ben Aris's BNE Intellinews piece here, and the signup page for Thursday's crisis exercise here.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

Support the show

A frozen river swallows cannons in 1550; a traffic jam of armour stalls outside Kyiv in 2022. Different centuries, same lesson: wars are won by planning, logistics, and the courage to listen to people who know what they’re doing. Ivan the Terrible took Kazan in 1552, learning crucial lessons of warfare and statecraft that Putin the Not So Great neglected when invading Ukraine in 2022.

Spinning off my new book, Siege of Kazan 1552: Ivan the Terrible breaks the Kazan khanate (Osprey), I look at how that campaign showed the power of five disciplines: promote competence, raise the right army for the fight, plan supply first, empower specialists, and build morale on a story that endures contact with reality. And how the Ukraine was has shown the cost of neglecting them. The war will change Russia—its economy, its veterans, its ties to Europe—just as Kazan changed Muscovy. The only open question is whether leaders choose the lessons that build a state, or the myths that break one.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

Support the show

In the first half, I look at the latest news about Navalny's death, what a change in the composition of the Russian negotiation team in Geneva may mean, and why looking for a dubious Russian connection in the Epstein case risks missing the real scandal: how powerful people and institutions tolerated what they knew.

Then, to answer the larger question—what kind of country is Russia?—I spin off two books: a long view of survey data that charts a hybrid regime’s rise and fracture after 2014, and a cultural study that sees Russia as fluid, formed by global flows rather than failing toward someone else’s model. Putin’s project tries to bank the gains of global capitalism while fencing off its social and political shocks. That balancing act is faltering. Deglobalising Russia has become both strategy and trap.

But arguably Russia isn’t an aberration; it’s an early case of how globalisation scrambles identity, power, and legitimacy. From Brexit to big tech, we’re all negotiating the same tides—just with different weather. 

The books are Paul Chaisty & Stephen Whitefield’s How Russians Understand the New Russia (Princeton UP, 2025), and Vera Michlin-Shapir’s Fluid Russia: between the global and the national in the post-Soviet era (Cornell UP, 2021).

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

Support the show

A mini-episode that paying Patrons heard as part of their Twelve Days of Shadowy Christmas bonuses. Forget the cliché that Russians accept power without protest, I sit down with author and analyst Anna Arutunyan to unpack a more complicated truth from her book Rebel Russia: Russia’s past is full of uprisings and dissent, yet weak social solidarity keeps those bursts of courage from becoming lasting institutions. When no stable forums exist for bargaining between citizens and the state, pressure builds, revolutions erupt, and the reset button gets slammed—often wiping out the very spaces needed for democracy to grow.

The book, Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny, was published last year by Polity Press, in both hardback and e-book formats.

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 

Support the show