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1. Were you aware that Sasha was going to replace the price labels in the supermarket? Or did you find out about it later?
2. Did it surprise you? How did you react?
3 I remember seeing pictures of these new price labels by Sasha on Facebook, and being amazed by the subtlety of the idea and its execution – you had to look pretty closely to realize that the labels had completely different texts from the usual ones. The font, the format, the size – everything had been carefully copied but with added facts about the victims of the Special Military Operation. Did she imagine then what consequences it could lead to? And did you realize the danger of what she was doing?
4. Tell us about Sasha – what kind of person is she and what was she like as a child? I understand that she’s a talented musician and artist. How did you bring her up?
5. You now live in France. Had you previously thought of leaving Russia, or was it because of Sasha’s arrest?
6. Sasha was kept in prison for more than 19 months before her trial. What were conditions like for her and how did she cope? Did it affect her health?
7. Seven years in prison for such a ‘crime’ – at the time this seemed unimaginably severe.. Was it a surprise to Sasha? And to you?
8. What can you do to help her from outside Russia?
9. Various organizations, including Rights in Russia, encourage people to write letters to political prisoners in Russia. Does Sasha receive such letters? What do they mean to her?
10. Where possible, do you try to disseminate information in the West about other political prisoners in Russia? Do you think the West does enough to support them and intercede on their behalf?
11. Does the fact that both Amnesty International and Memorial have recognized Sasha as a prisoner of conscience and a political prisoner, and demand her immediate and unconditional release, have any impact on her fate?
12. How do you see the future for Sasha? And for yourself?
Welcome to the twentieth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas. My guest today is Olga Sadovskaya, a lawyer from the civil society group, Team Against Torture. The project’s members have been investigating complaints by Russians about torture for over two decades. Thanks to their work, hundreds of cases of torture by law enforcement officers have reached the courts and compensation from the state has been awarded to their victims. Olga Sadovskaya lives and works in her native city of Nizhny Novgorod. She graduated from Lobachevsky State University with a degree in Public International Law, defending the first thesis in Russia on the prohibition of torture and the practice of the European Court of Human Rights on this issue. She has been taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights for over 20 years. This podcast was recorded on 20 June 2024.
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Our guest today is Iryna Khalip, a Belarusian journalist and participant in the 2010 protests against election fraud in the presidential elections in Belarus. Her husband is the politician Andrei Sannikov who ran as an opposition presidential candidate in those very elections. Since 2006, Iryna has been working as Belarus correspondent for Novaya gazeta, now Novaya gazeta – Evropа. Before that, Iryna worked in local opposition media, was an activist, was sent to prison, subjected to threats from the Belarusian special services and was a victim of psychological threats from the authorities. Today we will talk to Iryna about herself, the war in Ukraine, and the relationship between Lukashenka and Putin, between Russia and Belarus.
This podcast was recorded on 30 May 2024.
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Our guest today is Zoia Svetova, renowned journalist and human rights activist. She continues to live and work in Moscow. She is the author of several books, including Priznat’ nevinovnogo vinovnym [To Find the Innocent Guilty]. Her voice is perhaps one of the few authoritative oppositionist voices still heard in Russia today.
This podcast was recorded on 26 March 2024.
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My guest today is Anastasia Burakova, a human rights lawyer and democratic activist from Russia.
We are still in shock at the news of the murder of Aleksei Navalny in a high-security penal colony in the settlement of Kharp.
Aleksei Navalny’s political star rose as a leader of the opposition to the Putin regime in 2011. That year, 2011, played a significant part in the political coming of age of today’s guest - Anastasia Burakova, a Russian human rights lawyer and activist for democratic change in Russia - and influenced the trajectory of her professional life.
However, ten years later, in November 2021, Anastasia was forced to leave Russia. She moved to Georgia after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where she founded the Ark Project (‘Kovcheg’). Initially, set up to offer help to exiled Russians because of their opposition to the war, over time, Ark’s activities have broadened.
This podcast was recorded on 22 February 2024.
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Welcome to the fifteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.
My guest today is Anna Karetnikova. Until recently, Anna Karetnikova lived and worked in Moscow. In 2016, she was appointed lead analyst to the Federal Penitentiary Service – FSIN. Prior to that, she served for eight years as a member of the Public Oversight Commission (POC) in Moscow and worked closely with the human rights organisation “Memorial”.
Anna Karetnikova exemplified that rare combination in Russia of someone who was both a human rights activist and a government-appointed official working for the FSIN. For several years she pulled this off brilliantly. But just over a year ago, she was forced to leave Russia. The events that led to this decision and how she feels about life in exile are among the topics we will be talking about.
This podcast was recorded on 8 February 2024.
ou can also listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, Podcasts.com, Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and YouTube.
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My guests today are Mamuka Kuparadze, the founder of Studio Re in Tbilisi, which works to advance ‘people’s diplomacy’ through documentary film, and Aleksandr Pichugin, a Russian journalist, originally from Nizhny Novgorod, who left Russia with his family immediately after the announcement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and started a new life in Tbilisi.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the flow of Russian citizens fleeing the war to Georgia has reached an unprecedented 100,000. That’s the size of two small Georgian cities such as Gori, for example.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, relations between Georgia and Russia have not been easy. There have been wars of secession, first in South Ossetia, then in Abkhazia, and their de facto removal from Georgian government control. And the culmination of these wars, we can say, took place 15 years later, in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia and won a five-day war after which Russia “officially” recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (both are still considered by the international community as legitimate parts of Georgia. Georgia itself calls them Russian-occupied territories).
In this edition of ‘Then and Now’, we take a look at how Georgian society and government perceives these immigrants from Russia and how Russian immigrants live there.
The recording was made on 4 January 2024.
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Welcome to the thirteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.
My guest today is Lev Aleksandrovich Ponomarev. Lev Ponomarev trained and worked as a physicist in the USSR before devoting more time and energy to issues of human rights in the Soviet Union and subsequently in the Russian Federation. He was one of the founders of « Memorial » in 1988, and soon became one of the foremost figures in human rights in Russia. In the dying days of perestroika, Lev Ponomarev went into politics and in 1990 co-founded the opposition movement « Democratic Russia ». He was a People’s Deputy at the end of the Soviet era and a deputy of the first convocation of the State Duma in the new Russia after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In 1997 he founded the not-for-profit « For Human Rights » and in 2007 he set up the « Foundation in Defence of Prisoners’ Rights ». He was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group from 1996 until its closure last year. In 2019 his organisation « For Human Rights » was shut down by the authorities. On December 28, 2020, Lev Ponomarev’s name was in the first list of individuals designated as ‘media foreign agents’ by the Russian Justice Ministry.
The recording was made on 22 December 2023.
You can also listen to the podcast on our website, or on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Anchor and YouTube.
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The podcast currently has 148 episodes available.