x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

The Naked Pravda

Медуза / Meduza

Meduza’s English-language podcast, The Naked Pravda highlights how our top reporting intersects with the wider research and expertise that exists about Russia. The broader context of Meduza’s in-depth, original journalism isn’t always clear, which is where this show comes in. Here you’ll hear from the world’s community of Russia experts, activists, and reporters about issues that are at the heart of Meduza’s stories and crucial to major events in and around Russia.

news & politics

All Episodes

00:49:23

Russia’s ban on the ‘LGBT movement’

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/12/08

On November 30, the Russian Supreme Court outlawed an organization that doesn’t exist: the so-called “international LGBT movement.” The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Ministry, which claimed the “international LGBT movement’s” activities showed signs of “extremism” and incited “social and religious discord.” The new ban won’t officially come into force until January 10, 2024, but its chilling effect was almost immediate. The day after the ruling, Russian police

en

00:47:34

Spotlight on Georgia

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/12/02

On November 8, 2023, the E.U. recommended that Georgia be granted candidate status, which it applied for in March 2022, just after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The E.U. had previously only given Georgia what’s called a European Perspective, recognizing it as a potential candidate but stopping short of granting it candidate status, as it had for Ukraine and Moldova in June 2022. In recent years, the E.U. had criticized the ruling Georgian Dream party for its increasing

en

00:44:14

How Russian comedians find the humor in exile

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/11/20

This week’s show spotlights the experiences of two comedians, “Dan the Stranger” (Denis Chuzhoi) and Sasha Dolgopolov, who emigrated last year after their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine made it unsafe to continue their careers in Russia. Despite the challenges of creating and performing comedy in a foreign language, they continue to ply their craft in Europe. Dan and Sasha told Meduza about the incidents and brushes with the police that drove them to leave their homeland, particularly in

en

00:43:41

How the USSR tried to run the world

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/11/10

This week, Meduza spoke to Dr. Sergey Radchenko about his next book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024), which explores the era’s diplomatic history, focusing on how narratives of legitimacy offer crucial insights for interpreting Moscow’s motivations and foreign policy. The conversation covers telling anecdotes about prominent world leaders like Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev, their psychology, and

en

00:28:44

Why is anti-Semitic violence spreading in Russia’s...

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/11/05

On the evening of October 29, a crowd of rioters stormed the Makhachkala airport and then flooded the tarmac after a flight landed from Tel Aviv. The angry men had assembled amid reports circulating on the social network Telegram about Israeli refugees allegedly coming to resettle in Dagestan, supposedly with a diabolical plan to oust the native population. Rioters waved Palestinian flags and chanted anti-Semitic slogans. A day before the airport violence, locals in the city of Khasavyurt

en

00:19:09

The Russian military’s ‘torture pits’

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/10/28

A new investigation from journalists at iStories and researchers at the Conflict Intelligence Team accuses the Russian military of using so-called “torture pits” against unruly, often drunk soldiers. Journalists and researchers think they found two sites, one outside Volgograd and the other outside Orenburg. iStories collected testimony from soldiers at two training grounds in these areas and identified satellite images that appear to show the pits those soldiers described. iStories spoke to a

en

00:57:35

Russian music at war

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/10/21

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

en

00:34:07

How Russia pressures Central Asian migrants into...

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/10/13

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

en

00:42:22

‘Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict...

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/10/07

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

en

00:34:46

Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/09/30

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

en

00:27:33

What’s behind Putin’s recent spate of anti-Semitic...

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/09/22

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

en

00:48:48

The Pegasus spyware attack on Meduza

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/09/16

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

en

00:45:24

Russian elections after an eternity under Putin

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/09/09

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

en

00:28:24

Jade McGlynn’s ‘Russia’s War’

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/09/01

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

en

00:43:03

The Kremlin’s new history textbook

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/08/19

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),

en

00:27:27

‘Goodbye, Eastern Europe’ with Jacob Mikanowski

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/08/11

“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”)

en

00:30:27

Why Alexey Navalny matters

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/08/03

Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny famously returned to Moscow in January 2021, where he was promptly arrested at the airport for supposed parole violations. A month later, his suspended sentence was replaced with a 2.5-year prison sentence. Roughly a year later, in March 2022, a judge added another nine years to his prison term, convicting him in a kangaroo court of embezzlement and contempt of court. So, Navalny has at least another decade of imprisonment ahead of him, but it will likely

en

00:22:32

Loyalty and competence in Russia's armed forces

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/07/28

In the final week before the State Duma’s summer recess, Russian lawmakers have been ramming through some curious legislation, including several initiatives the authorities would apparently like to roll out now before Putin’s re-election campaign presumably kicks off in the fall. Notably, one last-minute amendment empowers the president to charge governors with the creation of “special militarized formations” during periods of mobilization, wartime, and martial law. These new armed groups,

en

00:22:52

The new era of Russian business politics

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/07/22

Since the early aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many major Western companies have been in various stages of divesting from Russia. Nearly a year and a half into the war, we’ve entered a new phase of business relations, as the Kremlin has started nationalizing foreign companies’ Russian assets. The latest watershed moment occurred on April 25, when Putin issued an executive order allowing the Russian authorities to place the Russian assets of companies from “unfriendly nations” under

en

00:21:16

Counting Russia’s 47,000 killed combatants

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/07/15

How many Russians have been killed in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? If you visited Meduza’s website this week, you’ll know that we ran the numbers and estimate the total death toll among Russian combatants to be 47,000 men. That’s three times more than all the Soviet troops who died over 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, and it’s nine times more than how many Russian soldiers were killed in the first Russian-Chechen War in the mid-1990s. To discuss the methodology, insights, and obstacles

en

175 results

Similar Podcasts

Что случилось

Медуза / Meduza

The BradCast w/ Brad Friedman

Brad Friedman

The Naked Pravda

Медуза / Meduza

Green News Report w/ Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen

Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen

Politics Uncensored

Fubar Radio