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 with Kirill Ivanov, the leader of the band Самое Большое Простое Число (The Largest Prime Number).

Timestamps for this episode:

• (3:42) Rating the level of freedom for musicians in Russia today
• (6:48) DDT and rock culture
• (9:22) Face and rap music
• (11:51) Censorship
• (16:14) The Safe Internet League
• (28:27) Kirill Ivanov, frontman of the band The Largest Prime Number
• (43:16) Ultra-patriotic musicians
• (54:07) “Recommended” Z-music listening

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

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 recruited to fight alongside Russian soldiers and work in occupied regions of Ukraine. 

These police raids were at the center of a recent story published by Meduza’s weekly long-reads newsletter, The Beet. For more on Russia’s covert efforts to conscript newly naturalized citizens and migrant workers from Central Asia, The Beet editor Eilish Hart spoke to the story’s author, freelance journalist Sher Khashimov, and researcher Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. 

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:25) What do we know about the recent police raids targeting migrant workers from Central Asia?
• (6:00) What Russian officials are saying about naturalized citizens
• (8:54) How do migrant workers view the recent police raids and shifts in official rhetoric?
• (11:33) Why is Russia such a popular destination for migrant workers from Central Asia, even in wartime?
• (19:19) Why might acquiring Russian citizenship appeal to migrant workers?
• (28:36) Are Russia’s recruitment efforts damaging ties with Central Asian countries?

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

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 destroyed the post-Cold War peace with Moscow.

So, for this week’s show, Meduza spoke with Maximilian Hess, the founder of Enmetena Advisory and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, about his new book tackling how the West uses its clout and privileged position with international markets to deter and penalize the Kremlin for its aggression against Ukraine. The book, published by Hurst, is called “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West,” and you can find it wherever books are sold.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:50) How does Putin understand Western advantages so well but still continuously miscalculate?
• (7:50) Western imperviousness and vulnerabilities
• (16:10) Balancing U.S. gains and responsibilities with European interests
• (21:20) How Western sanctions will hit Russia over the long term
• (25:27) A battle of the wills
• (33:23) How realistic are hopes that Russia will pay Ukraine reparations someday?
• (37:06) Securing peace on the ground in Ukraine by winning the economic war

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

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 crowded the Russian peacekeeping base at the now-defunct Stepanakert airport, hoping to catch an evacuation that didn’t really begin for another four days. So many people showed up that a lot of them ended up sleeping in tents or cars.

In November 2020, a Moscow-brokered ceasefire agreement gave hope that today’s tragedy might be avoided or at least delayed another five years. To discuss that deal and Russia’s track record when it comes to peacekeeping in the region, The Naked Pravda turned to Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the South Caucasus.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:52) The parameters of Russia’s peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh
• (5:04) Who actually cares about Nagorno-Karabakh?
• (8:37) Russia’s reputation as a partner in the region
• (12:44) Bad blood between Yerevan and Moscow
• (16:53) When Russian peacekeepers come under fire
• (23:03) Taking “Russian peacekeeping” seriously
• (27:52) Who failed in Nagorno-Karabakh?

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

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 to justify its war, the idea that Ukraine is run by a “Nazi regime,” is undermined by the fact that Ukrainians freely elected a Jewish president, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Putin and his team have tried to square the circle by invoking anti-Semitic tropes. Still, while Russia’s history is full of discrimination and violence against Jewish people, this is the first time in his reign that Putin has made so many public anti-Semitic statements in such quick succession.

For insight into anti-Jewish sentiment in today’s Russia, how Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitism may have influenced Putin’s views of Jewish people, and why Putin is taking this approach at this moment in the war, The Naked Pravda spoke to historian Artem Efimov, the editor-in-chief of Meduza’s Signal newsletter.

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

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 murdered. Access to Pegasus isn’t cheap: Researchers believe the service costs tens of millions of dollars, meaning that somebody — some government agency out there — paid maybe a million bucks to hijack Timchenko’s smartphone. Why would somebody do that? How would somebody do that? And who could have done it?

For answers, The Naked Pravda turned to two experts: Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for Access Now, a nonprofit organization committed to “defending and extending” the digital civil rights of people worldwide, and John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto that investigates digital espionage against civil society.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (3:39) Galina Timchenko’s hacked iPhone is the first confirmed case of a Pegasus infection against a Russian journalist
• (6:16) NSO Group’s different contract tiers for Pegasus users
• (9:59) How aware is NSO Group of Pegasus’s rampant misuse?
• (12:29) Why hasn’t Europe done more to restrict the use of such spyware?
• (15:50) Russian allies using Pegasus
• (17:58) E.U. members using Pegasus
• (21:37) Training required to use Pegasus and the spyware’s technical side
• (27:38) The forensics needed to detect a Pegasus infection
• (35:46) Is Pegasus built more to find criminals or members of civil society?
• (40:10) Imagining a global moratorium on military-grade spyware
• (43:22) “A German solution”
• (45:14) Where the West goes from here

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

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 the podcast to explain what’s at stake, how Russian voting has evolved over the years, and why some pockets of competitive politics persist. To learn about the challenges of monitoring Russian elections today and the remaining opportunities for “protest voting,” The Naked Pravda spoke to University of Bonn social scientist Dr. Galina Selivanova.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:20) What’s at stake in this weekend’s voting
• (7:54) Pockets of competition
• (16:12) “Golos” election monitors
• (28:51) How election fraud works in Russia
• (32:35) Apathetic voters and protest potential at the polls

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

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 the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Follow her here on 𝕏 (formerly known as Twitter). You can find Russia’s War on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:13) What’s so special about PIR Center director Vladimir Orlov?
• (8:03) Russians’ moral culpability in the war
• (13:30) Zelensky’s role and the war’s heroes and villains
• (15:43) Analyzing Russian Telegram channels during the war
• (19:11) Russia’s anti-Kremlin opposition during the war
• (22:30) Changing Russians’ minds from abroad

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

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), while Stalin and Stalinism show up on nearly 60 pages.

The Special Military Operation chapter concludes with this whopper of a paragraph:

“But one this is clear: That Russia has always had, has, and will have the valor, dignity, honor, and loyalty to oath of our soldiers and volunteer fighters, doctors, teachers, builders, and aid workers. They are the true, not invented, heroes of our time. They’re around us and among us. They are an example of honor, courage, and faith in the righteousness of our cause. Their names and their daily feats join the thousand-year annals of Russian history with the deeds of millions of their heroic forebearers. It has always been so in the history of our Motherland. And so it will be. Always.”

To learn about why this textbook was written, what it says about contemporary events, and how the Putin regime intends to use it, Meduza spoke to three experts: historian Artem Efimov, who serves the editor-in-chief of Meduza’s Signal newsletter, College of West Anglia historian James Pearce (author of “The Use of History in Putin’s Russia”), and University of Oxford Professor Polly Jones, who’s currently completing a book titled “Gulag Fiction.”

Timestamps for this episode:

• (5:45) The textbook’s authors: Vladimir Medinsky, Anatoly Torkunov, and Alexander Chubaryan
• (11:40) Long-standing trends in how Russian history is taught in grade schools
• (15:19) Guessing at Putin’s thought process on a unified history textbook
• (23:00) Whitewashing Stalinism?
• (25:50) The Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring
• (31:57) Teaching history to teenagers

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

“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”) has fallen out of fashion. And the entangled diversity that was once the hallmark of Eastern European societies was swept away by the violence of the 20th century — so much so that Mikanowski considers it a “lost world.”

Recounting centuries of history in just a few hundred pages, Mikanowski’s book takes readers on a journey across the region stretching between present-day Germany and Russia, going as far north as the Baltic countries and as far south as the Balkans. And while the empires that once ruled there and the nation-states that succeeded them are part of the picture, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is far from your standard political history. Instead, Mikanowski weaves together years of research and travel experience with his own family’s past, opening a window into the complexities and absurdities of everyday life. 

“A lot of histories of Eastern Europe [...] are very much like a battle between superpowers,” Mikanowski tells Eilish Hart, editor of Meduza’s weekly newsletter The Beet, on this week’s show. “I want to tell the story of what’s happening in between. Because to me, that’s the Eastern European experience — especially in the 20th century. Finding agency amid a world that’s constantly robbing you of it.”

Timestamps for this episode:

• (2:12) What — and where — is Eastern Europe? And in what sense is it disappearing?
• (4:37) Blending academic research with travel experience and family history
• (11:07) Why there’s more to Eastern European history than “Hitler versus Stalin” 
• (13:56) Eastern Europe as a “lost world” of interwoven diversity
• (16:50) What’s missed when history is written from imperial capitals?
• (19:21) The politics of history in Eastern Europe today

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