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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

00:27:30

Yandex’s restructuring and the future of Kremlin tech...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/02/12

After a year and a half of negotiations, Yandex founder Arkady Volozh and the company’s foreign shareholders have reached a deal to part ways with Yandex’s Russian assets. The Russian IT giant’s Netherlands-based parent company announced Monday, February 5, that it will sell a large portion of its operations to a consortium of Russian investors before rebranding and continuing to develop its remaining international properties. Yandex’s restructuring has been underway for more than a year. Meduza

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00:41:20

How Russia targets its critics abroad in wartime

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/02/05

The Russian government has a message for its citizens living in exile: nowhere is safe for you. For years, it’s made this threat clear by subjecting its critics abroad to intimidation, forced repatriation, and assassination attempts. And just as the Kremlin has taken increasingly draconian measures to silence dissent at home since launching the full-scale war in Ukraine, it’s also devised new tactics for targeting activists, journalists, and politicians far beyond its borders. For insight into how

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00:29:46

How doomed presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/01/29

Boris Nadezhdin’s surname has its root in the Russian word for “hope,” and he’s inspired just that in tens of thousands of voters as the politician with an antiwar message who’s come the furthest in the country’s byzantine bureaucracy for presidential candidacy. Nadezhdin’s campaign says it’s collected roughly 200,000 signatures, which is twice what it technically needs for the Central Election Commission to add his name to the ballot in March. While the commission’s approval remains unlikely, the

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00:48:24

Why hasn’t the West seized Russia’s frozen sovereign...

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/01/21

The U.S. government is reportedly becoming more “assertive” about backing the confiscation of roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets to provide an alternative funding stream for Kyiv. The news comes amid faltering efforts in Europe and Washington to approve the budgetary allocations needed to sustain aid for Ukraine, which presumably makes it even more attractive to force Russia to foot the bill. Kyiv’s most ardent supporters in the West say the seizure of the immobilized Russian

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00:41:28

The evolution of Russia’s combat recruitment

The Naked Pravda ·

2024/01/13

The Naked Pravda explores how Russia’s mobilization drive is pressuring society and capturing men for the invasion of Ukraine. This episode features Project “Get Lost” creator and director Grigory Sverdlin, whose human rights group helps Russians evade the draft and leave Russia (among other things). For a geopolitical perspective on Moscow’s mobilization, Meduza spoke to Dr. Stefan Wolff, a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham in England and the cofounder of

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00:31:41

Memories of Russia

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/12/29

In a special holiday departure from The Naked Pravda’s usual coverage of Russian politics and news, Meduza in English’s social media editor Ned Garvey and senior news editor Sam Breazeale chat about their personal experiences living in Russia, what they found surprising there as Americans, and what still stands out today in their memories of the country. Timestamps for this episode: (8:52) Encounters with seedy characters and police(12:58) Travels around the country(15:01) Surprises in daily

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00:37:05

Growing up German in Soviet Kazakhstan, with Lena Wolf

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/12/22

Answering the question “Where are you from?” has never come easily for Lena Wolf. As the descendents of 18th-century German settlers living in Soviet Kazakhstan, she and her family “didn’t exist as a group” in the history books or on TV. As a result, many of their neighbors equated them with the soldiers from Nazi Germany who had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 — even though their ancestors had arrived in the Russian Empire more than a hundred years earlier. To complicate matters further, the

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00:31:07

How studying Russia became a paradox

The Naked Pravda ·

2023/12/15

There’s a paradox in studying Russia today: the country has become “more prominent in the news agenda and simultaneously less transparent for observers,” thanks to the invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions, isolation, and the intensification of propaganda. This week’s show is devoted to studying Russia in conditions of growing non-transparency, which is the subject of a paper published in October 2023 by scholars Dmitry Kokorin, Dmitriy Gorskiy, Elizaveta Zubiuk, and Tetiana Kotelnikova. For more

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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183 results

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