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@russianreader
On This Day
Six snapshots of what the Russian Reader was reading on May 27 in years past. 2024 “It’s Showtime”: Open Space Moscow vs. SERB. Open Space is a project that supports grassroots activists. It has two sites, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with co-working spaces, a human rights center, and a psychological center. The Moscow site is at odds with the pro-government movement SERB, known for its…
Something I Learned Today: Somewhere Far Away
Kurara, “Somewhere Far Away” (2024) Even Lunacharsky Street is so transparentBicycles and horses race homeOn these streets, my love, I honed my styleI touched the air with my handEven Lunacharsky Street can be so gloomy and wicked at timesAnd a cloud with a pointy beard delivers a delicious joltAnd it groans languidly There is nothing beyond the black skyAnd nothing will be firstPerhaps the…
"I Don't Want to Get Used to the War"
“I don’t want to get used to the war” was the message painted on a fence outside the former Stables Department building in Petersburg in February 2025. Photo: Bumaga Author of graffiti “I don’t want to get used to the war” released after sentencing The Petrograd District Court sentenced activist Alexander Arseniev to twenty months in prison on criminal charges of vandalism and “discrediting”…
Shyshagh: Imaginary Circassian Underground (Circassian Remembrance Day)
May 21st marks Circassian Remembrance Day, or the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Russo-Caucasian War. This war, spanning from 1763 to 1864, resulted in the loss of independence for the North Caucasus region and, for the Circassians (one of the region’s indigenous peoples), in genocide and mass exile from their historical homeland. In the 1990s, Circassian activists, public figures,…
Inner Emigrants
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants examines what people in Russia think about the war with Ukraine. Deutsche Welle spoke with the filmmaker about making the picture and the conclusions we can draw from it. One of the psychologists featured in the film “Inner Emigrants” on the job. Still courtesy of Karbe Film GmbH Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants (Innere Emigranten) is…
Russians and Republicans Hate Black People
I’ve spent most of the last 48 hours doomscrolling through people’s reactions to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The people I follow most regularly have split into predictable camps. There are people like me and Adam Serwer who are trying to put the court’s decision into the larger context of the long-standing white hostility to Black voting rights and Black…
Outcasts in Their Own Land: Russia's Political Prisoners
Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sentences in order to crush dissent. Yevgeny Zateyev and Anna Arkhipova attend a court hearing in the case against the Vesna movement, one of the leading voices of antiwar protest in Russia. A court in…
The Cards
Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been a paranoid man. We know, for example, that he has long eschewed the use of a personal cellphone, all too aware of how easily they can be tracked. Yet a Kremlin document recently leaked to the press by a European intelligence service lays bare a whole new level of suspicion. Visitors can only approach him after they’ve gone through two layers of…
Vestochka (A Way to Write Letters to Russian Political Prisoners)
Hello and welcome back to the Digest! In this newsletter we will share how much support of political prisoners really matters. Darya Kozyreva, a 20-year-old activist from St. Petersburg (and a former defendant of OVD-Info), was set free from prison this spring. Her story became an example of how publicity can bring attention and support from all around the world. Darya Kozyreva in court 18…
He Left Russia with Steinbeck in His Rucksack
Gregory Kunis. Photo: Bumaga via Mr. Kunis’s Facebook page Gregory Kunis, cofounder of iGooods and former owner of the newspaper Moy Rayon (“My District”), has left Russia following the prosecution’s appeal against the verdict in the Anti-Corruption Foundation donations case, he announced on his Facebook page last night. Kunis writes that on 12 December, the prosecution lodged an appeal against…
Important Stories
The following two stories turned up next to each other in my inbox several mornings ago. The first story (about the hidden costs of common areas in Petersburg’s new estates) was promoted as its “Article of the Week” by the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, whose chronicles of post-Soviet capitalism on the march in my favorite city I have been reading and sharing here for two decades, usually…
A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck: The Disaster in Tuapse
Russia is readying for Victory Day — a major state holiday that the Kremlin has elevated into something of a sacred ritual — in far-from-perfect condition. For several weeks, Ukraine has been systematically and successfully attacking oil infrastructure across the country, with ecological consequences that local authorities are struggling to contain. The aftermath of the strikes, largely…
Try Me for Treason: The Film
TRY ME FOR TREASON is a 50-minute film, in English, featuring speeches made by anti-war protesters in Russian courts. It has been made by a group of actors to draw English-speaking audiences’ attention to the stand taken by Ukrainians, and Russians, against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The YouTube premiere of the film will be broadcast on Sunday 17 May at 20.00 UK time. To participate, go to…
Central Asia and Russia(n): Is It Farewell?
Excerpt from “Tashkent: The End of An Era” (Mark Weil, 1996). A full, subtitled copy of the film can been seen here. Recent trends in world politics have led several analysts to emphasize the idea of the retreat or recession of Russian power abroad. Yet few have commented on a key aspect of this retreat, namely the growing movement across Central Asia to unseat the Russian language from its…
A "Turgenev Girl" and Her Cats: The Case of Siberian War Resister Arina Ivanova
Arina Ivanova. Image courtesy of Sotavision In the autumn of 2024, Arina Ivanova packed a tracksuit, socks, a change of underwear, soap, a toothbrush, and a few dishes into a bag. Once she was ready, she made her way to a friend’s place and waited. In August 2025, Ivanova was sentenced to five years in a penal colony for disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army. In January, she was…
Russia's Pride
“Russia’s Pride! Captain Sergei Korniyenko. RealHeroes.rf,” Moscow, 2026. Photo: Igor Stomakhin KYIV, Ukraine — In the early 2000s, I was still a kid. Every summer, my grandma and I would travel to visit her relatives in Tuapse, a city in southern Russia on the Black Sea’s coast. We took the ‘platzkart,’ the cheapest sleeper train where strangers shared one open space with no compartments, and…
Russian Colonizers and Indigenous Siberian Women
Two Yukaghir girls, Siberia, 1894-1909, American Museum of Natural History GLC@Lunch: “Trade in Women, Concubinage, and Marriage: Relations Between Russian Colonizers and Indigenous Women in 17th-Century Eastern Siberia” Rosenkranz Hall • 115 Prospect Street, New Haven CT, 06511 • Room 241 Register for this event Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 12:30—1:45pm | Hybrid In person at Yale University,…