The Russia Guy

Today’s guest is Patrick Reevell, the Moscow bureau reporter for ABC News who co-authored the June 26 report about American Gaylen Grandstaff’s “two-year odyssey” in a Moscow remand prison. Patrick was kind enough to come on the podcast and explain how this report came together. He and Kevin talked about how he discovered the story, what this banned “gamma-butyrolactone” substance really is, and h...

Today's guest is Maxim Trudolyubov, the editor-in-chief of the Kennan Institute’s “The Russia File,” a blog that offers insights on current events in Russia, U.S.-Russian relations, and other critical issues of the day. He’s been a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times since 2013, he writes regularly in Russian for the website Republic, and his latest book is called...

Today's guest is RFE/RL journalist Carl Schreck, talking about the June 17 investigative report he cowrote with Sergei Khazov-Cassia, titled “His Name Was Andrei,” about the apparent murder of Andrei Kobyshev, a middle-age masseur who disappeared in Grozny in March 2017. The new article details how Kobyshev moved to Chechnya and likely got swept up in the republic’s so-called “gay purges.” Th...

Today’s guest is Kate Brown, a professor of science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of a new book called “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future,” as well as the books “Dispatches from Dystopia” (2015), “Plutopia” (2013), and “A Biography of No Place” (2004). She spoke to Kevin about her research into the April 1986 Chernobyl d...

On today’s show, Kevin reads the full text of his translation of Meduza investigative journalist Ivan Golunov’s August 2018 report on corruption in Russia’s funeral industry. This is the journalism (plus a forthcoming part two) that got him arrested over the weekend and turned the country upside-down. Read the text at Meduza:https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/06/12/coffins-graveyards-and-billions-o...

No interview today. Instead, Kevin reviews the following five op-eds/essays (timestamps below):(2:19)Oleg Kashin in Republic: Why hasn’t GRU veteran Nikita Belyankin’s murder sparked ethnic riots in Russia?https://republic.ru/posts/93868 (7:25)Vladimir Frolov in Republic: The U.S.-Israel-Russia summit is a chance for Moscow to find out what it's worth to Trump in Iranhttps://republic.ru/posts...

Today we’re talking about human-rights promotion in Moldova with guest Gina Lentine, a senior program officer at Freedom House, who works primarily on advancing freedom of expression in Moldova and Ukraine. In many ways, her career mirrors the work Kevin has discussed with Paul Massaro and Rachel Bauman at the U.S. Helsinki Commission, and Nina Jankowicz at the Kennan Institute (episodes 63 and 18...

Today's guest is Casey Michel, an investigative reporter at ThinkProgress, a member of the Advisory Council for the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative, and a senior investigative fellow with the Human Rights Foundation. Casey has written about and followed Maria Butina’s case closely since she was arrested last July, and he kindly joined The Russia Guy to talk about her sentence a...

Kevin's guest today is well known in Russia to Echo of Moscow listeners and readers, and English speakers might know her as a contributing writer at The American Interest, where some of her latest articles address Russia’s captured Ukrainian sailors, the arrest of American investor Michael Calvey in Moscow, and a whole lot more. Please welcome to The Russia Guy Karina Orlova. In this intervie...

Kevin's guest this week is Maria Baronova, a former opposition activist who now works for the state media network “Russia Today.” On this episode, Masha talks about her new job at “RT,” leaving the Russian opposition, and visiting the United States in the summer of 2018.Follow Baronova on Twitter here:https://twitter.com/ponny1Support this very podcast here:www.patreon.com/kevinrothrockMusic:...

Today’s show features an interview with Olga Zeveleva, a sociologist who recently earned her doctorate at the University of Cambridge. Olga works on mobility, migration, media, and political transformation. Her dissertation is titled “The State and the Journalist: Regional Crimean Media Professionals Adapting to Change, 2013-2017,” and she’s now doing fieldwork in Tatarstan as an Oxford Russia Fel...

Today’s show looks at a controversial new op-ed that appeared in The New York Times on Friday, March 29, 2019, titled “Russians Always Knew There Was No Collusion.” The subheader reads, “The Kremlin’s allies and its opponents alike have been baffled by America’s Russia obsession. Can we ever look at the U.S. the same way again?” Kevin speaks to the author of the text, Alexey Kovalev, the new inves...

On today’s show, Kevin spoke to Mike Eckel, one of the co-authors of an investigative report published earlier today by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. The report is based on a 149-page file released exclusively to RFE/RL that offers what is described as “the most precise scientific description to date” about how Mikhail Lesin, the former Russian press minister, turned up dead in a Washington,...

Today's guest on The Russia Guy is human rights activist Polina Nemirovskaya, a project coordinator at the Open Russia movement. Polina discusses how her organization operates, what hurdles it faces from police and lawmakers, and what it takes to devote your life to those fighting political repression. Follow Polina on Twitter here:https://twitter.com/polinanemLearn more about Open Russia her...

Today's guest is Seva Gunitsky, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He researches how international forces like war and globalization shape democracy and domestic reforms. In this episode of The Russia Guy, we talked about growing up in the U.S. as a Russia immigrant, navigating American biases in Russia analysis, understanding the mafia as an economic re...

This episode's guest is Aaron Schwartzbaum, the founder of BMB Russia, an indispensable daily newsletter about Russian political economy. We discussed two recent scandals in Russian political economy: (1) Rosstat's claim that Russia's GDP growth in 2018 was the biggest in the past six years, and (2) the arrest of American investment manager Michael Calvey, who was jailed on Saturday...

This episode features an interview with Roman Dobrokhotov, the editor in chief of The Insider, a Russian investigative news outlet that's collaborated on key projects with Bellingcat, breaking major news stories related to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury, England, and more. He talks about the evolution of Russian journalism in the Internet age...

Today, we’re welcoming back Alexey Kovalev, the managing editor of Coda Story’s Russian-language edition and the brains behind the propaganda-busting website Noodle Remover. Alexey recently got back from a whirlwind tour of the United States, as a 2018 World Press Institute fellow. Kevin desperately wanted to know what he thought of his homeland, and Alexey was kind enough to come on the podcast a...

On this episode of The Russia Guy, Kevin talks to freelance writer and Russia watcher Dustin Giebel, who was recently the target of a defamatory blog post by a #resistance freedom fighter named Jay McKenzie. The screed was posted on Medium and promoted by information-warfare darlings like lobbyist Molly McKew and former CIA agent John Sipher — two public figures Giebel has criticized in the past....

Kevin reads the full text of a new investigative report by Meduza’s Daniil Turovsky about how Russia’s war in Georgia sparked Moscow’s modern-day recruitment of criminal hackers. The story is timely not just because we’re currently marking the 10-year anniversary of the Russo-Georgian war, but also because we’re still living in a world dominated by news about Russian election interference, cyber-t...

On today’s show, Kevin talks to to Anastasia Karimova, a former activist and journalist in Russia. Today, she’s a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States. Anastasia’s personal history is fascinating in its own right, but it's especially interesting now, in the aftermath of the arrest of Maria Butina. Kevin asked Anastasia about fin...

Today Kevin will look at the criminal charges against Maria Butina, announced on July 16 by the Justice Department. What are the charges? What kind of dirt does the FBI have on this woman? What's Butina’s history in Russia? Why is she a foreign agent and not a “spy”?Read Meduza's deep dive on Butina: “Meet Maria Butina, the FBI’s Russian gun nut undeclared foreign agent”https://meduza.io...

On the evening of July 4, 2018, Russian Internet users realized that the search engine Yandex had been indexing a surprising array of information stored on Google Docs, including files containing passwords, credit card numbers, and corporate documents. Yandex’s press service says the company’s actions were perfectly legitimate, but within hours of Wednesday’s discovery the search engine stopped pr...

Today’s show addresses the recent events surrounding the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, better known as “Shaninka,” which just lost its state accreditation, following an inspection by Russia’s Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency (Rosobrnadzor). Inspectors claim that the school is in violation of several state education standards. The agency’s report says Shaninka’s und...

On today’s show, Kevin reviews the pension reform proposal slipped into Russia’s news agenda last week, just as the country’s attention turned to a certain soccer tournament. After summarizing the proposed reforms, Kevin gets some feedback about the plan from a very special guest, his eight-year-old daughter. So what are you going to learn about on today’s show? The Russian government wants to rai...