Audio / I talk to three experts and a novelist about the public protests that erupted all over Russia in March 2017, and the evolving state of U.S.-Russia relations.
On March 2, 2017, Russian anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny released a report and video accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of massive corruption, and calling Russians to the streets on March 26. The Russian authorities, who remained silent about the accusations, did not issue permits for the protests, but tens of thousands of people took to the streets all over Russia anyway, leading to the largest protests the country has seen since 2012. Why did so many people turn out, why did so few see it coming, and what will happen next?
In the inaugural episode of Expert Opinions, a podcast I started at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and Eurasianet.org, I sit down with three experts and a novelist to discuss the public protests that erupted all over Russia in late March, the aftermath, and the evolving state of U.S.-Russia relations.
Guests: Maria Snegovaya, a doctoral candidate in Columbia’s Department of Political Science and a columnist for the Russian business daily Vedomosti, is a frequent political commentator on TV and radio, and a contributor to media outlets such as the New Republic and the Washington Post. Yana Gorokhovskaia is a postdoctoral research scholar in Russian Politics at the Harriman Institute. Her scholarship has appeared in Post-Soviet Affairs, among others. She recently published a piece on the Russian protests at IPI’s Global Observatory. Maria Lipman, a Russian political analyst and commentator, currently Visiting Distinguished Fellow of Russian Studies at Indiana University, is the founding editor of the Counterpoint journal published by the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University). She was the editor-in-chief of the Pro et Contra journal published by the Carnegie Moscow Center, and an expert of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Society and Regions Program. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker, among others. Sana Krasikov is the award-winning author of the novel The Patriots (2017) and the short story collection One More Year (2008). In April 2017, she was one of the twenty-one U.S. novelists included in Granta’s decennial Best of Young American Novelists list.
Listen on Eurasianet.