The recent successes of Russian film director Andrei Zvyagintsev is a reminder of how artists are pigeon-holed into national frames — and how Russian culture has become all-too parochial.
For years, ‘liberal’ has been a dirty word in Russia, a shorthand for everything undesirable. Yet state propaganda is having an unexpected side-effect: the rehabilitation of liberalism.
Federal television in Russia has long been suspected of propaganda. Four Russian TV producers share their stories of life behind the lens.
Russian NGOs, large and small, are facing closure after the blacklisting of their foreign funders. Colta.ru speaks to some of the organisations affected.
In his own words, a Russian volunteer who signed up to fight in the Novorossiya militia in Eastern Ukraine. на русском языке
The uncompromising sentences passed down today to Aleksey Navalny and co-defendant Petr Ofitserov demonstrate that the Putin regime has crossed over to the twilight phase. The only thing it can offer Russia now is fear, and that is not much of a programme, says Kirill Rogov
Valery Sidorenko and Sergei Ostapchuk, both tractor drivers, live together happily in a remote village in the Grodinsky region of Belarus. Alyona Soiko travelled there to meet them and hear their story.
Is it possible to challenge censors without losing your livelihood? Polina Bykhovskaya interviews the men and women who wanted to change the world but ended up in the business of job preservation (their's and Putin's)
Once inside the wheels of the Russian legal system, the odds are stacked against you and a guilty verdict is inevitable. What keeps the wheels turning is conformism with villainy: the ability of normal people to adapt themselves to any, even the most monstrous of systems. Andrei Loshak presents a
Desensitised to terror, Russians will not take long to get over the latest attack. Russian writer and openDemocracy contributor Elena Fanailova passed through Domodedovo Airport just thirty minutes before Monday’s bomb struck.
Journalist Oleg Kashin was recently brutally beaten up. To ram the message home, the fingers on his writing hand were broken, as well as his jaw and shins. He had been active in protesting the building of a highway through the Khimki forest nature reserve. Now he reflects on the authorities’ handl
Russia’s summer of the wildfires brought about a change in society, says Andrei Loshak. Previously the only possible options for those disenchanted with the system were to take the streets or pack our bags and leave. Now we have another: self-help and self- organisation, much in the spirit of the
