Rights in Russia

Pictured: Masha Slonim 28 May 2026 Welcome to the 42nd edition of the Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas I’m one of thousands of Facebook followers of Russian-British journalist Masha Slonim. Masha and I met forty years ago when we were colleagues at the BBC Russian Service. Scrolling through Facebook a couple of weeks ago, I unexpectedly discovered that Masha’s cousin...

8 May 2026 by Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the 41st edition of the Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas. 

This month Mary Page’s guests to discuss Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and in particular the issue of prosecuting for war crimes and other human rights abuses committed by Russia in Ukraine, are both from the UK: the academic and human rights lawyer Bill Bowring (pictured left) and Steve Crawshaw, journalist, author and human rights activist (pictured right). Mary’s Guests Emeritus Profess...

Welcome to the 39th edition of the Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas. Among the first guests on the podcast was Dmitry Oreshkin, the well-known political scientist. At that time we talked with him about the significance for Russia of that fateful day – 24 February – when Putin launched his war of aggression against the sovereign state of Ukraine. Today, on...

3 October 2025 Welcome to the 35th edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas Our guest today is actor and theatre director Alexander Molochnikov. Alexander Molochnikov (personal archive) In this podcast we are making a break from our usual Russian-language format. This is because our guest has chosen not to speak in his mother tongue. At t...

18 July 2025 by  Teresa Cherfas Welcome to the 33rd edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas On 15 July 2009, Chechen human rights activist and member of the management committee of the human rights organization “Memorial,” Natalia Estemirova, was murdered. She was abducted near her home in Grozny and taken by car across the bor...

Welcome to the 31st edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now .  Our latest guest is Marina Sapritsky-Nahum, a social anthropologist and author of the book   Jewish Odesa , published in 2024 by Indiana University Press. The book explores issues of identity and tradition in the Jewish community in modern Odesa. Marina is currently a   visiting fellow &nbs...

Welcome to the twenty-eighth edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas. My guest today is Natalia Soprunova, a mathematician, teacher and mother of four children. Her story is so inspiring that it is immediately obvious how much Putin’s Russia has lost as a result of the wave of emigration that followed the start of the invasion of Ukraine. Very soo...

Welcome to the twenty-sixth edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas. In this episode, you can hear the second part of my interview with Irina Shcherbakova, one of the founders of “Memorial”. I first spoke to her in October of this year [you can listen to podcast #24 on our website  here , where you can also find links to our YouTube channel a...

Welcome to the twenty-fifth edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas.  My guest today is human rights activist and founder of the European LGBT human rights organization   Equal – PostOST , Evelina Chaika. A  year ago, the non-existent “international LGBT movement” was designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia. This w...

Welcome to the twenty-fourth edition n of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas. There is a well-known saying from the late Soviet period: “Russia is a country with an unpredictable past”. It resonates anew, this time in Putin’s Russia. My guest today is Irina Shcherbakova, a historian, who has been associated with the Russian grass-roots or...

Welcome to the twenty-third edition of our Russian-language podcast  Then & Now  with me, Teresa Cherfas. My guest today is the Russian artist  Slava Ptrk . The Crypt Gallery  in central London recently hosted a multimedia exhibition called  The Brainwashing Machine , about the uses of propaganda.  The exhibition, which first opened in Madrid, showed works by arti...

Hello and welcome to the Then and Now podcast with me, Teresa Cherfas.  Our guest today is Nadezhda Skochilenko.  On November 16, 2023, the Vasileostrovsky court sentenced her daughter, Aleksandra Skochilenko, to seven years in a general regime penal colony. Sasha Skochilenko’s ‘crime’ was committed about a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and consisted in the substit...

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 hav...