After a year and a half of negotiations, Yandex founder Arkady Volozh and the company’s foreign shareholders have reached a deal to part ways with Yandex’s Russian assets. The Russian IT giant’s Netherlands-based parent company announced Monday, February 5, that it will sell a large portion of its operations to a consortium of Russian investors before rebranding and continuing to develop its remaining international properties.

Yandex’s restructuring has been underway for more than a year. Meduza has reported together with the news outlet The Bell on the backroom negotiations that have been underway to ensure that Yandex’s core Russian assets pass to Kremlin-approved hands, and now we’re finally there. The Naked Pravda spoke to Meduza journalist Svetlana Reiter about the ins and outs of the deal.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:16) Review of recent news
• (5:38) Meet Yandex’s new owners
• (10:18) The future of Yandex
• (18:56) Yandex International

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Russian government has a message for its citizens living in exile: nowhere is safe for you. For years, it’s made this threat clear by subjecting its critics abroad to intimidation, forced repatriation, and assassination attempts. And just as the Kremlin has taken increasingly draconian measures to silence dissent at home since launching the full-scale war in Ukraine, it’s also devised new tactics for targeting activists, journalists, and politicians far beyond its borders. For insight into how Moscow’s approach to transnational repression has changed over the last two years, The Naked Pravda turned to journalist and activist Dan Storyev, who serves as the managing editor of OVD-Info’s English-language edition, and Yana Gorokhovskaia, the research director for strategy and design at Freedom House.

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No country can be free without independent media. In January 2023, the Russian authorities outlawed Meduza, banning our work in the country our colleagues call home. Just supporting Meduza carries the risk of criminal prosecution for Russian nationals, which is why we’re turning to our international audience for help. Your assistance makes it possible for thousands of people in Russia to read Meduza and stay informed. Consider a small but recurring contribution to provide the most effective support. Please donate here.

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Timestamps for this episode

• (10:22) Case study: An abduction in Kyrgyzstan
• (16:40) The goal of Moscow’s repressions abroad
• (20:10) How countries unwittingly “work hand-in-hand with the Kremlin”
• (23:41) How the Kremlin’s tactics have changed since 2022
• (28:29) How Russia takes advantage of the Interpol system to repatriate citizens
• (34:18) Transnational repression by Belarus

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Boris Nadezhdin’s surname has its root in the Russian word for “hope,” and he’s inspired just that in tens of thousands of voters as the politician with an antiwar message who’s come the furthest in the country’s byzantine bureaucracy for presidential candidacy. Nadezhdin’s campaign says it’s collected roughly 200,000 signatures, which is twice what it technically needs for the Central Election Commission to add his name to the ballot in March. While the commission’s approval remains unlikely, the Nadezhdin campaign has been a major news event for antiwar Russians, especially in the ever-growing diaspora, where thousands of people have lined up in cities across Europe and the Caucasus to offer their signatures.

Nadezhdhin’s allies have no illusions about his prospects, but showing their support for an antiwar challenger to Vladimir Putin has quickly become the opposition’s first visible civic movement in some time. To understand how this happened, who Nadezhdin is as a politician, and how opposition politics has worked throughout Russia’s Putin era, The Naked Pravda welcomes back Dr. Маrgarita Zavadskaya, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

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No country can be free without independent media. In January 2023, the Russian authorities outlawed Meduza, banning our work in the country our colleagues call home. Just supporting Meduza carries the risk of criminal prosecution for Russian nationals, which is why we’re turning to our international audience for help. Your assistance makes it possible for thousands of people in Russia to read Meduza and stay informed. Consider a small but recurring contribution to provide the most effective support. Please donate here.

***

Timestamps for this episode:

• (5:43) Nadezhdin’s Political Career and Ideology
• (9:58) Understanding the Nature of Russian Liberal Politicians
• (19:26) The Role of Elections in Authoritarian Regimes
• (26:04) A Hopeful Note: The Power of Collective Action

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The U.S. government is reportedly becoming more “assertive” about backing the confiscation of roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets to provide an alternative funding stream for Kyiv. The news comes amid faltering efforts in Europe and Washington to approve the budgetary allocations needed to sustain aid for Ukraine, which presumably makes it even more attractive to force Russia to foot the bill. Kyiv’s most ardent supporters in the West say the seizure of the immobilized Russian state assets is long overdue. In fact, that the seizure hasn’t happened already is both alarming and confounding to many people.

To understand what’s keeping the West from grabbing this Russian money and what it will take for the confiscation to go ahead, Meduza spoke to journalist, economist, and political analyst Alexander Kolyandr and welcomed back Maximilian Hess, the founder of Enmetena Advisory and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the author of “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West.”

Timestamps for this episode

• (4:33) What and where are these frozen Russian assets?
• (8:46) Confiscation’s potential impact on the world economy
• (12:41) Implications for Western countries
• (14:55) Understanding the resistance to confiscation
• (36:09) Barriers to asset confiscation

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

The Naked Pravda explores how Russia’s mobilization drive is pressuring society and capturing men for the invasion of Ukraine. This episode features Project “Get Lost” creator and director Grigory Sverdlin, whose human rights group helps Russians evade the draft and leave Russia (among other things). For a geopolitical perspective on Moscow’s mobilization, Meduza spoke to Dr. Stefan Wolff, a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham in England and the cofounder of Navigating the Vortex, a newsletter on the geopolitical and geoeconomic context of events and developments around the world.

Timestamps for this episode

• (3:27) Project “Get Lost”
• (5:10) The challenges of avoiding mobilization
• (9:15) Consequences for ignoring a military summons
• (12:24) Military recruiter tactics
• (15:46) Mobilization’s social and demographic impact in Russia
• (29:35) The future of mobilization in Russia and Ukraine

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

In a special holiday departure from The Naked Pravda’s usual coverage of Russian politics and news, Meduza in English’s social media editor Ned Garvey and senior news editor Sam Breazeale chat about their personal experiences living in Russia, what they found surprising there as Americans, and what still stands out today in their memories of the country.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (8:52) Encounters with seedy characters and police
• (12:58) Travels around the country
• (15:01) Surprises in daily life
• (18:00) Holiday memories
• (23:06) Friendships in Russia
• (26:45) Stereotypes: fact vs. fiction

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

Answering the question “Where are you from?” has never come easily for Lena Wolf. As the descendents of 18th-century German settlers living in Soviet Kazakhstan, she and her family “didn’t exist as a group” in the history books or on TV. As a result, many of their neighbors equated them with the soldiers from Nazi Germany who had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 — even though their ancestors had arrived in the Russian Empire more than a hundred years earlier.

To complicate matters further, the lives of Lena’s parents and grandparents were shaped by the brutal repressions of the Stalin regime — a history that her father still believes is “better forgotten.” When Lena’s family finally moved to Germany on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, her parents were eager to assimilate into German society and leave the past behind. But Lena quickly discovered that they were “not like other Germans.”

After years of feeling like a person without a history, Lena finally decided to embrace her identity as a “Kazakh German” and record her family’s story in a form that would make it accessible to a new generation. And so, with the help of crowdfunding and a team of artists, she’s now working on a two-part graphic novel.

The Wolf family’s story was the subject of a recent feature published by Meduza’s weekly long-reads newsletter, The Beet. To learn what it was like to delve into her family’s difficult past and find new meaning in her parents’ and grandparents’ memories, The Beet editor Eilish Hart and Meduza in English senior news editor Sam Breazeale interviewed Lena Wolf for The Naked Pravda.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:45) Who is Lena Wolf?
• (4:23) The history of German settlers in the Russian Empire 
• (6:40) How Joseph Stalin’s deportations shaped the Wolf family
• (11:54) Lena’s childhood and the making of her graphic novel
• (22:10) Finding community and connection through difficult history 
• (34:40) How Lena’s father inspired the title of her book

A note from Meduza’s founders:

We love making wishes for the New Year and are not ashamed to dream big. At Meduza, we believe the impossible is possible. Why do we keep at this, despite all the signs that the world is heading into an abyss? Well, for starters, Meduza keeps going because we’ve got you.

As the year comes to a close, we’ve decided to share our wishlist for 2024 — an inventory of our wildest hopes and dreams. You can take a look here.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

There’s a paradox in studying Russia today: the country has become “more prominent in the news agenda and simultaneously less transparent for observers,” thanks to the invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions, isolation, and the intensification of propaganda.

This week’s show is devoted to studying Russia in conditions of growing non-transparency, which is the subject of a paper published in October 2023 by scholars Dmitry Kokorin, Dmitriy Gorskiy, Elizaveta Zubiuk, and Tetiana Kotelnikova. For more about this work, The Naked Pravda spoke to Dmitriy Gorskiy, a researcher at the Ideas for Russia Program. Gorskiy and his coauthors write about “distortions” of knowledge production in Russia and knowledge production about Russia, and they explore how experts adapt to less reliable data and disruptions in international cooperation, among other challenges.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (5:30) The importance of studying Russia
• (6:57) Lessons from the Soviet Union
• (8:13) Distortions of knowledge production
• (13:28) Government data and reliability
• (15:40) Triangulation and leaked data
• (16:25) A media diet for Russia scholars
• (26:13) Rigorous social scientific work

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

On November 30, the Russian Supreme Court outlawed an organization that doesn’t exist: the so-called “international LGBT movement.” The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Ministry, which claimed the “international LGBT movement’s” activities showed signs of “extremism” and incited “social and religious discord.”

The new ban won’t officially come into force until January 10, 2024, but its chilling effect was almost immediate. The day after the ruling, Russian police reportedly raided multiple nightclubs that were hosting events for LGBTQ+ people. One of St. Petersburg’s oldest gay clubs has announced its closure, as has at least one LGBTQ+ rights organization. The mapping service 2GIS instructed employees to create a “registry” of LGBTQ+ establishments.

According to the Russian authorities, this human rights crackdown is necessary to protect Russia’s “traditional values” from outside threats. But the truth is that this type of conservative nationalism didn’t originate in Russia at all. To learn where it actually came from and what it means for LGBTQ+ life in Russia, Meduza senior news editor Sam Breazeale spoke to historian Dr. Dan Healey, sociologist Dr. Alexander Kondakov, and political scientist Dr. Leandra Bias.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (3:48) Dan Healey on LGBTQ+ rights in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s
• (9:28) Anti-gay repressions under Joseph Stalin
• (13:44) Alexander Kondakov on Putin’s “ideology”
• (25:05) The “innovation” of Russia’s “LGBT movement” ban
• (31:11) The future of LGBTQ+ rights organizations in Russia
• (33:55) Leandra Bias on the foreign roots of Russia’s “traditional values”
• (38:08) How Russia uses homophobia and transphobia to justify war

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно

On November 8, 2023, the E.U. recommended that Georgia be granted candidate status, which it applied for in March 2022, just after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The E.U. had previously only given Georgia what’s called a European Perspective, recognizing it as a potential candidate but stopping short of granting it candidate status, as it had for Ukraine and Moldova in June 2022. In recent years, the E.U. had criticized the ruling Georgian Dream party for its increasing restrictions on media freedom, crackdown on protests, and for developing closer relations with Moscow.

Improving relations with Russia has been received negatively in Georgia not only because of Russia actively waging a war in Ukraine, but also due to the 2008 war over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s two breakaway regions, which Moscow has since occupied. While the conflict is often described as “frozen,” people living along the so-called “separation line” between the breakaway regions and Georgia proper continue to experience the war’s lasting effects. At times, they have been deadly — in early November 2023, a Georgian man was killed by the Russian military when he was visiting a church located on the separation line.

For insight on what life is like for people living along this line and the prospects for peace, Meduza spoke to Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for the South Caucasus region. Meduza then turned to Mariam Nikuradze, the co-founder and executive director of OC Media, to learn more about the recent Foreign Agents Draft Bill, the Georgian government’s crackdown on protests, and the challenges journalists in Georgia continue to face.

Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно