Sunrise Outlawed: Stories from Russia

In Russia, older women outnumber older men almost two to one — and by their seventies and eighties, a whole country is quietly held together by them. This episode is about the babushka: not somebody's grandmother, but a social category, and one of the most powerful forces in Russian life that almost nobody bothers to name. We start with a number, then follow Eduard Limonov's idea that Russ...

Elon Musk is the most popular foreign figure in Russia's internet culture — the one Western billionaire Russians have claimed as their own, Kremlin officials and meme-makers alike. This episode traces how an American tech CEO became a Russian cultural phenomenon, and how fast the affection turned. In 2023, state TV called him "the last adequate mind in North America." By February 2026, after Starl...

Yuri Mamleev wrote what may be the most disturbing novel in Russian literature — and was, by every account, the warmest man in any room. This episode follows that gap: how the underground mystic of late-Soviet Moscow became the accidental metaphysician of Putin-era ideology, without ever quite meaning to. This is episode two in our closed series for patrons — Books That Built Russia's Ideology...

In all of Yeltsin's Russia, exactly two academics put "traditional values" in the title of a paper. After the invasion of Ukraine: five hundred and ninety-one. This episode traces how a phrase nobody can define — and everyone is now afraid to question — became the most effective political branding in modern Russia. We follow it from Putin's bone-dry 1999 manifesto, where "tr...

Russia produced some of the most consequential software on earth — Nginx, Telegram, Kotlin, ClickHouse — and then watched almost all of it leave the country. This episode is about the gap between that talent and the sector it never managed to become, and about what the state did with whatever stayed behind. We trace the whole arc: why every celebrated "Russian" success is really an escap...

Russia is an island. Not geographically — civilizationally. That's the argument Vadim Tsymbursky (1957–2009) spent his career building, and it's the single most influential framework in post-Soviet Russian thought that almost nobody outside Russia has read. His central essay was never translated into English. This is the first episode of our patron-only series on the books that shaped how post-Sov...

Russia is home to 49 million cats—nearly twice as many as dogs. Despite projecting a rugged, powerful image, the nation has quietly woven its identity around the enigmatic, independent cat. In this episode, we trace the cat’s journey through Russian history—from peasant cruelty and Soviet-era kitchen warmth, to modern-day consumer obsession, celebrity zoo cats, and the tragic story of military blo...

Meet your guides to the Russia you won't find in headlines. Deep dives into culture, politics, and stories too weird, too uncomfortable, or too Russian for textbooks. New episodes every two weeks. First one dropping soon.