4 December 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the twelth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Natalya Zyagina, head of the Moscow branch of Amnesty International, which was shut down by the Russian authorities in 2022. Natalya Zvyagina has a long record as a Russian human rights activist. She is originally from the city of Voronezh, where she worked for many years in the Interregional Human Rights Group. Natalya has also worked at the Institute for Law and Public Policy, a non-profit organization based in Moscow ..read more

29 September 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the eleventh edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guests today are two Parisians, Aleksandra Ilkhovskaya and Svetlana Dokudovskaya: Aleksandra [known to everyone as “Sanya]” has lived in Paris since she was six years old – her mother emigrated from Russia in 1991. She is married with two daughters. She is a primary school teacher with 10 years’ experience. Svetlana has lived with her French husband and their 13-year-old daughter in Paris for the past 17 years. She works as a cel ..read more

17 August 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the tenth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is the writer Maksim Osipov, a writer who has followed the old Russian tradition, after Chekhov and Bulgakov, of combining the professions of doctor and author. For his writings – primarily short stories that are sharp and witty commentaries on modern life in the Russian provinces – Maksim Osipov has won a number of prizes, and his plays have been staged and broadcast on the radio in Russia. Osipov’s works have been translat ..read more

25 July 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the ninth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is Tetyana Sokolova, a professional midwife of 40 years at Mariupol Maternity Hospital No. 2, on the left bank of Mariupol near Azovstal, the industrial plant that became a centre of resistance against the Russian invaders.  On 9 March, the city’s Maternity Hospital No. 3 was bombed by Russian aircraft and the whole world watched with horror p ..read more

27 June 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the eighth edition of our Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.  As a rule,  guests on our podcast are individuals for whom 24th February 2022 was a turning-point in their life; today we are talking about an organisation that came into being as a result of that fateful date. The Reckoning Project was created in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the aim of gathering evidence of war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. To this end, The Reckoning Project has brought together a team of inte ..read more

5 June 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the seventh episode of our new Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.   In recent weeks, politically motivated trials and lengthy prison terms in Putin’s Russia reached a new peak. Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for treason and Evgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriichuk have been remanded in custody awaiting trial for “justifying terrorism” in connection with the staging of a play. Some say these developments signify a return to the USSR of the 1970s, others that it is reminiscen ..read more

15 May 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the sixth episode of our new Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.   Whilst our podcast is mostly about people for whom February 24th 2022 was a turning-point in their lives, the subject of today’s conversation is the country, whose leadership caused that date to be so significant in all our lives. We are talking, of course, about Russia. To lead us to an understanding of just how fateful a date 24th February 2022 may be for Russia itself, we talked to Dmitry Oreshkin, someone who has devoted many years t ..read more

20 April 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the fifth episode of our new Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.   With me today is Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian journalist who shocked the world with her anti-war protest on 14 March 2022, which went live on Russian State TV’s prime time news programme “Vremya”. Since that moment, she has been through such a rollercoaster of adventures –  fleeing Russia with her daughter, work as a journalist in Germany, and now her recent relocation to Paris. Her book Between Good and Evil recentl ..read more

16 March 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the fourth episode of our new Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.   Our latest guest is the Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov. Andrei Kurkov became widely known to readers around the world in 2001 when his novel Smert’ postoronnego [Смерть Постороннего] was published in English translation as Death and the Penguin. Other novels followed and, in their wake, worldwide recognition and success at prominent international literary awards.   His latest novel, Grey Bees, tells the story of an elde ..read more

17 March 2023 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the third episode of our new Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas.   After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 everything, everywhere, suddenly looked different. That day was a watershed. Guests on the Then & Now podcast are people for whom February 24 became a defining moment, dividing their lives into before and after the war. Today’s guest is Lev Gudkov, a sociologist and research director of the analytical Levada Centre, Russia’s leading independent polling organi ..read more