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

This week’s show spotlights the experiences of two comedians, “Dan the Stranger” (Denis Chuzhoi) and Sasha Dolgopolov, who emigrated last year after their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine made it unsafe to continue their careers in Russia. Despite the challenges of creating and performing comedy in a foreign language, they continue to ply their craft in Europe.

Dan and Sasha told Meduza about the incidents and brushes with the police that drove them to leave their homeland, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The conversation touches on the adjustments needed to perform in English, the similarities of the comedy scene in Europe and the United States, and their commitment to expressing their individual experiences even when playing with Western stereotypes about Russians.

Resources to follow these two performers:

Dan the Stranger: website / upcoming shows in Munchen, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisboa, Brussels, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, and Berlin

Sasha Dolgopolov: website / upcoming show in Riga, Latvia, on November 24, 2023

Timestamps for this episode:

• 02:46 The Decision to Leave Russia
• 03:46 Controversy Surrounding Religious Jokes
• 06:54 The Impact of the War on Comedians' Freedom of Expression
• 07:19 The Journey to Berlin and the Start of a New Life
• 11:42 Challenges Performing Comedy in a Foreign Language
• 20:02 The Process of Building a Comedy Routine in English
• 33:26 The Influence of Russian Stereotypes on Comedy

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

This week, Meduza spoke to Dr. Sergey Radchenko about his next book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024), which explores the era’s diplomatic history, focusing on how narratives of legitimacy offer crucial insights for interpreting Moscow’s motivations and foreign policy.

The conversation covers telling anecdotes about prominent world leaders like Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev, their psychology, and how individual quirks shaped world events. Dr. Radchenko explains how resentment and the need for legitimacy and recognition drove Soviet decision-making in ways that past literature about communist ideology and imperialism fails to capture.

Timestamps for this episode:

• 06:22 The Role of recognition and legitimacy in Soviet foreign policy
• 08:56 Raskolnikov on the global stage
• 12:24 The strange pursuit of greatness and global leadership
• 14:52 Soviet ambitions and Soviet means
• 17:02 Moscow's persistent resentment
• 21:34 The Berlin Crisis
• 28:30 The paradox of the USSR as a great power
• 31:08 China's role in Soviet self-perceptions
• 34:13 Autocrats and peace promotion

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

On the evening of October 29, a crowd of rioters stormed the Makhachkala airport and then flooded the tarmac after a flight landed from Tel Aviv. The angry men had assembled amid reports circulating on the social network Telegram about Israeli refugees allegedly coming to resettle in Dagestan, supposedly with a diabolical plan to oust the native population. Rioters waved Palestinian flags and chanted anti-Semitic slogans. 

A day before the airport violence, locals in the city of Khasavyurt assembled outside a hotel amid rumors circulating online that it was accommodating Israeli refugees. When hotel guests refused to come to their windows to prove (somehow) that they weren’t Jews, people in the crowd started throwing rocks at the building. The mob didn’t disperse until the police showed up and allowed several demonstrators to enter the hotel to verify that it wasn’t “full of Jews.”

That same day, unpermitted anti-Israeli rallies took place in Makhachkala’s Lenin Square and in Cherkessk, the capital of Karachay-Cherkessia. Demonstrators demanded that “Israeli refugees not be allowed to enter the region” and that ethnic Jews be expelled from the area. The following morning, on October 29, unknown individuals set fire to a Jewish cultural center in Nalchik that was still under construction. The assailants threw burning tires onto the property and wrote the phrase “death to Jews” on the wall.

In the days after the Makhachkala Airport riot, Moscow settled on the explanation that foreign intelligence operatives — in Ukraine, orchestrated by the Americans, of course — are to blame for manipulating Dagestanis’ understandable outrage about Israel’s attack on civilians in Gaza.

For a better grasp of what has fomented anti-Semitism in the North Caucasus, The Naked Pravda spoke to political and security analyst Harold Chambers and RFE/RL Caucasus Realities senior editor Zakir Magomedov.

Timestamps for this episode:

• 02:51 Anti-Semitic Incidents in Russia's North Caucasus
• 03:46 Putin’s Response
• 04:34 The Supposed Role of ‘Foreign Intelligence’
• 07:59 Incitements on Telegram
• 11:20 The Israel-Palestine Conflict
• 19:35 Protests Against Putin's Mobilization Orders
• 23:24 The Aftermath: Arrests and Support from Athletes

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

A new investigation from journalists at iStories and researchers at the Conflict Intelligence Team accuses the Russian military of using so-called “torture pits” against unruly, often drunk soldiers. Journalists and researchers think they found two sites, one outside Volgograd and the other outside Orenburg. iStories collected testimony from soldiers at two training grounds in these areas and identified satellite images that appear to show the pits those soldiers described.

iStories spoke to a soldier who trained at this facility this summer (the journalists gave him the pseudonym “Viktor”), who described a chaotic breakdown in military discipline. According to Viktor, roughly 80 percent of the soldiers undergoing training were prisoner recruits who were often drunk or high. In his comments to journalists, Viktor said repeatedly that these soldiers were only there for the money, signaling potentially severe problems with morale in Russia’s armed forces.

The Naked Pravda spoke to the author of the iStories report, Sonya Savina, to learn more about the story.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (0:04) The plight of billionaire Mikhail Fridman
• (1:53) Soviet basketball history
• (2:22) Hamas and Iran send delegations to Moscow
• (4:22) The hidden crimes and growing needs of Russia’s combat veterans
• (6:16) News from Russia’s neighbors
• (8:33) This week’s main story: The Russian military’s torture pits
• (16:00) Halloween epilogue: A tale of forbidden sweets

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