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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The Russian government and state-affiliated private mercenary companies are forcing international students to fight in Ukraine.

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Paradoxically, Kadyrov’s leveraging of the war in Ukraine to catapult himself to success in Russian federal politics is jeopardizing his authority in Chechnya.

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As much as a quarter of Russian forces in Ukraine are estimated to come from paramilitary organizations. Should elite infighting break out into the open, or Russia palpably lose the “Special Military Operation,” this mass paramilitarization could have enormous ramifications.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, fifteen percent of Russia’s professional writers were women. If we are now rethinking the canon, a major step is to restore them to their rightful place.

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Analogies between post-colonialism and post-socialism should not be drawn too hastily; doing so requires, at the very least, examining the region’s active participation in policing Europe’s physical and symbolic borders.

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Like its vampiric subjects, the beleaguered film adaptation of Victor Pelevin’s novel “Empire V” can perhaps best be described as neither fully dead nor fully alive. A year after the postponement of its premiere due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the film remains trapped in a kind of cultural netherworld.

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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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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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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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