2 September 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the twenty-second edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is documentary filmmaker Askold Kurov, whose latest film, […] The post Podcast Then & Now #22 – Teresa Cherfas in conversation with Askold Kurov appeared first on Rights in Russia ..read more

29 July 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the twenty-first edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Nadezhda Skochilenko. On 16 November 2023, Vasileostrovsky […] The post Podcast Then & Now #21 – Teresa Cherfas in conversation with Nadezhda Skochilenko appeared first on Rights in Russia ..read more

20 June 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the twentieth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Olga Sadovskaya, a lawyer from the civil society group, Team Against Torture. The project’s members have been investigating complaints by Russians about torture for over two decades. Thanks to their work, hundreds of cases of torture by law enforcement officers have reached the courts and compensation from the state has been awarded to their victims. Olga Sadovskaya lives and works in her native city of Nizhny Novgorod ..read more

4 June 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the nineteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Iryna Khalip, a Belarusian journalist and participant in the 2010 protests against election fraud in the presidential elections in Belarus. Her husband is the politician Andrei Sannikov who ran as an opposition presidential candidate in those very elections. Since 2006, Iryna has been working as Belarus correspondent for Novaya gazeta, now Novaya gazeta – Evropа. Before that, Iryna worked in local opposition me ..read more

30 April 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the eighteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Leyla Latypova, a journalist who works as a special correspondent for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times. An ethnic Tatar from the republic of Bashkortostan, Leyla writes about politics and civil society in Russia’s regions and national republics.  In her work, she promotes and defends the rights of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation. She now lives in Amsterdam. In ..read more

28 March 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the seventeenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  Our guest today is Zoia Svetova, renowned journalist and human rights activist. She continues to live and work in Moscow.  She is the author of several books, including Priznat’ nevinovnogo vinovnym [To Find the Innocent Guilty]. Her voice is perhaps one of the few authoritative oppositionist voices still heard in Russia today.   This podcast was recorded on 26 March 2024. You can also listen to the podcast here: Y ..read more

25 February 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the sixteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  We are still in shock at the news of the murder of Aleksei Navalny in a high-security penal colony in the settlement of Kharp.  Aleksei Navalny’s political star rose as a leader of the opposition to the Putin regime in 2011.  That year, 2011, played a significant part in the  political coming of age of  today’s guest – Anastasia Burakova, a Russian human rights lawyer and activist for democratic change in Russia ..read more

12 February 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the fifteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Anna Karetnikova. Until recently, Anna Karetnikova lived and worked in Moscow.  In 2016, she was appointed lead analyst to the Federal Penitentiary Service – FSIN. Prior to that, she served for eight years as a member of the Public Oversight Commission (POC) in Moscow and worked closely with the human rights organisation “Memorial”. Anna Karetnikova exemplified that rare combination in Russia of someone who was ..read more

9 January 2024 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the fourteenth of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  Aleksandr Pichugin & Mamuka Kuparadze My guests today are Mamuka Kuparadze, founder of Studio Re in Tbilisi, which works to promote ‘grassroots diplomacy’ through documentary film, and Aleksandr Pichugin, a Russian journalist, originally from Nizhny Novgorod, who left Russia with his family to start a new life in Tbilisi immediately after the announcement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, th ..read more

24 December 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the thirteenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Lev Aleksandrovich Ponomarev. Lev Ponomarev trained and worked as a physicist in the USSR before devoting more time and energy to issues of human rights in the Soviet Union and subsequently in the Russian Federation. He was one of the founders of  « Memorial » in 1988, and soon became one of the foremost figures  in human rights in Russia. In the dying days of perestroika, Lev Ponomarev went into politics ..read more