The Jordan Center Blog

A space for news and opinion, sponsored by The Jordan Center

Letter in Support of Eugenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriichuk

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On 4 May 2023, Russian theater director Eugenia (Zhenya) Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk were detained in Moscow as suspects in a criminal case on “justifying terrorism” for their feminist play, “Finist the Brave Falcon.” Faced with this new act of intimidation of the artistic community in Russia, committed in violation of the constitutional principle of freedom of speech, we ask the international community for their support.

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Exodus: Russian Repression and Social “Movement”

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In past research, we identified several broad trends in Russian civil society prior to the war, which we labeled enduring, evaporating, and adapting forms of activism. These terms captured, respectively, organizational types that had persisted since the 1990s, those unable to survive, and those that adapted to Russia’s increasingly repressive environment. Here we examine a new trend in Russian civil society: escaping.

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The Path to “Healthy Conservatism”: Values-Based Regime Legitimation in Putin’s Russia

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As the Kremlin’s definition of conservatism evolved, it moved from privileging stability, to emphasizing control, to, finally, understanding conservatism as traditionalism. These shifts were both gradual and reactive, responding to changing domestic and external circumstances. The “healthy conservatism” of 2021, where our study culminates, provides a useful ideological platform for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine only months later. However, this outcome diverges sharply from the original premise of conservatism in Putin’s discourse—stability.

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Employee of the State, Enemy of the State: Teaching English in Moscow

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I taught English as a Foreign Language in Moscow between 2019 and 2022, through mass student protests, increasing restrictions on freedom of speech, and, finally, a total break with Western institutions after February of last year. I taught a chilling set of classes only hours after Russia began bombing Kyiv. And as the government cracked down on connections with perceived enemies of the state, banned Facebook, Instagram, and the BBC, my students did not know how they should relate to me—the “enemy”—nor I them.

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