Today's guest is Dr. Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London and the co-author of the 2019 book “Putin V. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia."

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”
• Счастье вдруг (из х/ф Иван Васильевич меняет профессию)

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/kevinrothrock)

Matthew Luxmoore, a Moscow-based correspondent for RFE/RL, discusses his March 2021 article about an amateur researcher in Tomsk named Denis Karagodin who’s spent the better part of a decade compiling archival documents about the execution of his great-grandfather in 1938 by officers in the NKVD. Earlier this year, the local authorities reportedly started building a criminal case against Karagodin on defamation charges filed by the relatives of some of his grandfather’s supposed executioners.

Read the article at RFE/RL here and follow Matt on Twitter here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”
• Счастье вдруг (из х/ф Иван Васильевич меняет профессию)

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/kevinrothrock)

Today's guest is Sergei Khazov-Cassia, a correspondent in Moscow for RFE/RL's Russian Service. In this interview, Kevin asks Sergei about his recent investigative report on industrial-scale oil theft in Russia.

Read an English-language translation of the story, “The Great Russian Oil Heist,” right here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”

Today's guest is Mary Ilyushina, a Moscow-based journalist and producer at CNN who previously worked at RBC. She’s recently worked on stories like the Navalny trial and the protests in Russia, as well as in Belarus, and she was kind enough to come on this podcast to talk about her career, her upbringing, and just generally her life.

Follow Mary on Twitter here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”

Today's episode is a co-hosted news-in-review show with Canadian journalist Neil Hauer about political unrest in Yerevan (where Neil is based), Amnesty International's leaked internal decision to revoke Alexey Navalny's prisoner-of-conscience status, and Team Navalny's efforts to open a campaign office in Dagestan.

Follow Neil on Twitter here and support his journalism at Patreon here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”

This episode's guest is Anton Barbashin, the editorial director at Riddle, an online publication that focuses on Russian affairs and features some of the sharpest expert insights in the field, particularly from young specialists and scholars. From 2015 to 2018, Anton was a managing editor of Intersection, a Warsaw-based Russian affairs journal, and he's worked as an analyst at the Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding. His writings have also appeared at Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, openDemocracy Russia, Forbes Russia, and more.

Follow Anton Barbashin on Twitter here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”

Reuters special correspondent Polina Ivanova discusses her November 2020 article “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” about Star City (the secretive home of Russia's space program) and about the death of Natalya Lebedeva,  a doctor who found herself caught up in the confusion and panic of the pandemic’s early days. Incidentally, Longform.org selected the text as one of the best science long-reads of 2020.

Follow Polina on Twitter here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”

Today's guest is Samantha Berkhead, a news editor at The Moscow Times, where she’s reported on all manner of things over the past two years, including Internet memes, Tolstoy’s descendants living in the sticks, witchcraft, queer culture, kinky parties (more about this in the interview), feminism, and a lot, lot more.

Follow her on Twitter here and at The Moscow Times here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”
• Счастье вдруг (из х/ф Иван Васильевич меняет профессию)

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/kevinrothrock)

Today's guest is Dr. Leslie Root, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Demography at UC Berkeley. Dr. Root recently completed "Fertility in Transition in 21st-Century Russia," a dissertation on childbearing and fertility changes over the course of the Putin era in Russia.

Follow Leslie on Twitter here, and visit her website here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”
• Счастье вдруг (из х/ф Иван Васильевич меняет профессию)

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/kevinrothrock)

Today's guest is Alex Kliment, the creative director at GZERO Media, Eurasia Group's global-politics-oriented independent media spinoff, where he directs “Puppet Regime,” a political satire puppet series. Additionally, Alex is the senior editor of Eurasia Group’s global politics newsletter, “Signal.” Alex also composes film scores, and he’s put that musical talent to work for GZERO, as well.

Follow Alex on Twitter here and watch "Puppet Regime" on YouTube here.

Music and audio for "The Russia Guy":

• Олег Анофриев, Бременские музыканты, “Говорят, мы бяки-буки”
• Счастье вдруг (из х/ф Иван Васильевич меняет профессию)