Skip to main content

Russia

Article

Russian Culture in Light of Refugees from Mariupol

In this nuanced literary essay, Putin opponent Dmitry Kuzmin tries to answer the question of whether all Russian culture is evil. He is a Ukrainian-to-Russian translator and editor-in-chief of the...

Text: Dmitry Kuzmin January 17 2023
Article

A Pandemic of Mutual Mistrust

How does one handle an epidemic when conspiration theories are given space in national television and when politicians and doctors alike deny the existence of the virus? Liza Aleksandrova Zorina...

Text: Liza Alexandrova-Zorina June 23 2020
Editorial

Who is Dancing in the Shadow of Corona?

Who is Dancing in the Shadow of Corona? Perhaps I have never been so thoroughly reminded of my privileges as I have been...

Text: Casia Bromberg June 10 2020
Article

Fear and laughter

“In conditions of shrinking freedom and fewer independent media, the internet became filled with jokes, anecdotes and lampoons,” says the Russian author and human rights activist Liza Aleksandrova...

Text: Liza Aleksandrova-Zorina January 13 2020
Article

The Worst Days of Our Lives

Award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter Anton Yarush on anti-gay propaganda and the alarming situation for LGBT-people in today's Russia.

Text: Anton Yarush December 18 2017
Fiction

The Hybrid War and the Poetics of Resistance

In Russia it is not merely the war that has a hybrid nature—similar contradictory and elusive characteristics may also describe the state of justice, freedom, and censorship within the country. In his...

Text: Lev Rubinstein September 17 2016
Article

“My city, which is not mine”

The situation for an increasing number of Russian intellectuals became impossible following the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down in Moscow on February 27, 2015. This...

Text: Anzhelina Polonskaya March 10 2016
Fiction

Who can I turn to, my friends?

Putin’s brutal reprisals against dissidents has had a devastating effect on opposition journalists and authors in the country – today, the democratic resistance movement is weak and fragmented, and...

Text: Arkady Babchenko October 13 2015
Article

Living on the rim of a volcano

LGBT-persons are increasingly being cast as “enemies of society” in contemporary Russia. But as the activist Svetlana Zakharova writes, the new law prohibiting “propaganda of homosexuality” has also...

Text: Svetlana Zakharova December 16 2014
Article

In search of an “outsider”

The Russian law criminalizing “Propaganda of homosexuality” isn’t just targeting minorities. The law, and homophobia in general, tends to make real problems invisible, as well as covering the real...

Text: Natalya Afanasyeva December 16 2014
Article

The fifth column, dissidents and a shrinking internet

The Russian president Vladimir Putin recently stated that internet was actually created by the CIA and that Russia needed to build its own internet. It is obvious that the battle for freedom of speech...

Text: Oksana Chelysheva May 06 2014
Article

Gulag is alive and well in Mordovia

Everyone knows who the members of Pussy Riot are, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s letter from the prison camp IK-14 was published worldwide. However, the Stalinist legacy in Russian prisons is still a...

Text: Pyotr Verzilov December 19 2013
Editorial

PEN/Opp explores russia

The headlines in the Swedish newspapers are at the time of writing dominated by the news that Swedish Neo-Nazis have...

Text: Ola Larsmo December 19 2013

Search