Rights in Russia

This week our guest is Svetlana Alekseevna Gannushkina, human rights defender, chair of the Civic Assistance Committee, a member of the board and director of the Migration and Law Network of the Memorial Human Rights Centre. Until June 2012 (from 2002) Svetlana Alekseevna was a member of the Presidential Human Rights Council. The issues we discuss in our podcast include: when and why Svetlana Alek...

This week our guest is Marina Alekseevna Dubrovina. Marina Alekseevna is a human rights defender and lawyer from Novorossiisk. For many years Marina Alekseevna has worked with the Migration and Law network, which is part of the Memorial organisation. She has also worked with the Public Verdict Foundation. Marina Alekseevna has defended many individuals in prosecutions in Chechnya, including the hu...

This week our guest is  Nina Zakharkina-Berezner . Nina is a co-founder and director of the French NGO DestinationEst (D’EST) which aims to increase dialogue between Russian and French civil societies, as well as involving European politicians and opinion leaders. Her work focuses mainly on advocacy practices and exchange programmes dealing with various topics such as municipal policy, migrat...

This week our guest on the podcast is Dmitry Aleksandrovich Petrov. Dmitry Aleksandrovich is deputy chair of the council of municipal deputies of the Yakimanka district in Moscow. He is also a co-founder of an environmental project for the public monitoring of air pollution levels in his district and the city more widely. The issues we discuss in the podcast include: What is Yakimanka district? Wh...

This week, our guest is Sergei Markovich Lukashevsky. Human rights activist Sergei Markovich is director of the Sakharov Centre in Moscow, a post he took up in 2008. By education a historian, Sergei Markovich has worked for both of Russia’s most famous human rights organizations, Memorial and the Moscow Helsinki Group, and, before moving to work at the Sakharov Centre, together with Tatiana Lokshi...

In this podcast, Irina Flige, human rights activist and director of the Memorial Research and Information Centre in St Petersburg, talks about her work that focuses on historical memory, the role of the Memorial Research and Information Centre and the current human rights situation in Russia. Irina was to appear at  Pushkin House  in April this year as a joint event of the Pushkin Club a...

This week our guest is Aleksandr Vladimirovich Cherkasov, chairof the board of Memorial Human Rights Centre. Aleksandr Vladimirovich is an 'engineer physicist' by education. He has been an activist with Memorial since 1989, and since 1991 he has worked at the Memorial Human Rights Centre, investigating the state of human rights and humanitarian law in various "hot spots", including Chechnya. Aleks...

Our guest this week is Igor Viktorovich Kochetkov. Igor Viktorovich - one of the founders and current director of the Russian LGBT Network, an organisation founded in 2006 whose main office is located in St. Petersburg. The Russian LGBT Network is an interregional organisation created to provide public support for the elimination of all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gende...

Today on the podcast our guest is Andrei Anatolyevich Kovalev. During his distinguished career, he has been a member of the Institute of the US and Canada of the USSR Academy of Sciences and then of the Diplomatic Academy. He worked for the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was a member of the secretariat of the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, worked on the staff of the Security Council of the...

Our guest this week is Pavel Chikov. Pavel is a well-known lawyer, human rights activist and public figure who is head of Agora International Human Rights Group. He lives in Kazan. During the podcast we discuss strategic issues of court practice and what distinguishes successful court practice from unsuccessful; Agora's priorities in litigation; the degree of independence of Russian courts; the re...

This week our guest is Viktor Valentinovich Kogan-Yasny. Viktor Valentinovich is a commentator on public affairs, writer and philosopher. Since 1989 he has been actively involved in public life. He started as an activist of Moscow Tribune and Memorial and in 1990-91 he worked with the Voters' Club of the Academy of Sciences and the Interregional Group of Deputies of the First Congress of Soviet Pe...

This week our guest is Anna Sevortian, executive director of the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum, an NGO based in Berlin. Before joining the Forum, Anna worked as Russia Director at Human Rights Watch and has over 15 years of experience working on civil society and human rights issues. Anna has been a Galina Starovoitova Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and deputy director of the Centr...

This week our guest is Semyon Simonov, a human rights activist from Sochi in Krasnodar region. For many years, Semyon Simonov has been head of the regional human rights NGO, Southern Human Rights Centre, which provided free legal assistance on human rights violations, organized educational events and facilitated other civic initiatives in collaboration with other NGOs until it effectively ceased t...

Our guest this week is Elena Shakhova, chair of Citizens' Watch, one of the leading human rights organizations in St. Petersburg. Elena Shakhova joined Citizens' Watch in 1998 (the organization itself was founded in 1992) and became its chair in 2014 on the death of the group's founder and leader, Boris Pavlovich Pustyntsev. In the podcast, we discuss with Elena the achievements of Citizens' Watch...

This week our guest on the podcast is Igor Averkiev, civil society activist and human rights defender from Perm. Among the many themes we discuss are: how Igor became involved in civil society activity, the work of Perm Civic Chamber (1996-2020), what made Perm a centre of civil society activity in Russia, the difference between civil society activism and politics, the relationship between civil s...

This week our guest on the podcast is Aleksei Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defence Foundation since 1991. Aleksei Simonov is a Soviet and Russian film director, writer, translator, human rights activist, teacher, journalist and editor. He was a member of the Presidential Council for Promoting Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights until 2012. In this podcast, Alexei Kirillovich talks ab...

This week our guest on the podcast is Georgy Satarov, president of the INDEM Foundation. Under President Yeltsin, Georgy Satarov was a member of the Presidential Council and, in 1993, he took part in the constitutional assembly on drafting a new constitution. We asked him to comment on the new Russian constitution recently adopted in Russia. During the conversation, we talk about the new Constitut...

This short podcast presents another opportunity to hear Tatyana Voltskaya reading her poems, including a poem dedicated to Yury Dmitriev.    The podcast is in Russian. You can also hear these podcasts on SoundCloud, Spotify and iTunes. Music from "Elegy Stravinsky for Solo Viola" by Caroline Herrera.

This week our guest on the podcast is Tatyana Voltskaya, journalist and poet from St Petersburg, against whom a criminal case was opened in April for so-called "fake news". Among other things, Tatyana talks about this case, about the case of Svetlana Prokopyeva in Pskov, about freedom of speech in Russia, and reads her poems - including a poem about Yury Dmitriev. Sergei Nikitin writes: I don't re...

This week our guest in the podcast is Olga Sadovskaya from the Nizhny Novgorod human rights NGO, Committee against Torture. The Committee against Torture is headed by Igor Kaliypin. Olga Sadovskaya is the head of the department for international legal protection. Since its establishment in 2000, the Committee against Torture has undergone many changes but remains one of the leading human rights or...

This week our podcast is devoted to the historian and head of the branch of Memorial in Karelia, Yury Dmitriev. Dmitriev's name is especially closely connected to Sandarmokh. It was he who led the expedition there in 1997 that discovered the location of the mass burials of victims of Stalinist repression. Today Dmitriev remains in pre-trial detention as he awaits the outcome of his second trial on...

This week  our podcast is devoted to the journalist Yury Shchekochikhin, who was born on June 9, 1950. He would have turned 70 this year. Our guests are the executive director of the Moscow PEN Centre, Nadezhda Azhgikhina, director of the Media Rights Protection Center Galina Arapova and chair of the Yabloko party Nikolai Rybakov. Our podcast  consists of two parts. In the first part we...

This week Simon Cosgrove and Sergei Nikitin talk with Ashot Airapeyan, chair of the Moscow-based NGO the Centre for Intercultural and Interethnic Cooperation. Ashot relates how the organisation he had headed for 20 years since 1997, the Centre for Interethnic Cooperation, was closed down by the authorities in 2017. He also talks about the problems facing ethnic minorities in Russia and the work hi...

This week Simon Cosgrove and Sergei Nikitin talk with Valentina Cherevatenko (pictured), chair and coordinator of the NGO Women of the Don Union, and chair of the board of the Women of the Don Foundation for the Promotion of Civil Society and Human Rights. Valentina Cherevatenko has led the work of Women of the Don since the organisation was set up in 1993. The organisation is based in Novocherkas...