In Russia(n), there's not even a fine line between farsh, farce, forcemeat, and cannon fodder.

Since most Russian middle-class emigres are to the right of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir when it comes to Israel-Palestine and Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, exiled Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko's review of the documentary film "NAZA" and her experience of seeing it in New York is a rare act of insight and civic courage in that reactionary milieu.

Simon Pirani: "What, really, have socialists learned from the Russian war on Ukraine? Has it changed our understanding of the way that imperialism works? Tell us we were right all along? [...] Of what does the 'right to resist the invasion' consist, if not of the right to ask for weapons, be it from western governments, Ukrainians abroad, or anyone else? This is not just about politics, but about socialist morality."

Illuminating insights into the realities of Russia's brutal war against Ukraine and Europe from independent war journalist Dylan Burns, Branislav Slantchev's Ukrainian students, and international affairs journalist Michael Weiss.

Ivan Astashin, Giuliano Vivaldi, and Simon Pirani team up to report and analyze the new "high treason" charges against Russian-Italian anti-war resistance hero Ruslan Siddiqi, already serving 29 years behind bars for sabotaging a Russian munitions train bound for the Ukrainian front.

Whether you’re heading into a national park or settling in with deep-dive Western journalism, we’ve assembled the ultimate prize package for the curious traveler. Five winners will receive an America ...

This weekend, Russians are voting in parliamentary elections for the first time since their country invaded Ukraine. Days before the vote, Russian human rights organization OVD-Info (now deemed "extremist" by the Putin regime) issued a "first aid kit" on "how to vote safely," and the Russian Reader's fabulous friend the Fabulous AM has englished the whole darn thing for your reading pleasure. Who knows, the kit might come in handy for Americans when they go to their own troubled polls on November 3.... Meanwhile, Ukrainians in the occupied territories are being coerced by their Russian overlords to vote in these selfsame elections, reports the AP.

You can judge a man (and a regime) by the company he keeps.

In the fifth year of the Petersburg mafia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, "going underground" has come to mean very different things for Kyivans and Petersburgers. While the former go underground literally to escape Russians missiles and drones and get some sleep, the latter "go underground" just to escape, as most of them have been doing determinedly for the last two and a half decades.

Industrial climber Georgy Pirogov disappeared from Uzbekistan two years ago, later resurfacing in Moscow and facing charges of high treason. In July, he was convicted as charged and sentenced to 23 years in prison. His case is exemplary of a recent "epidemic" of such cases in wartime Russia, as documented by human rights group Department One (aka First Department).

The Moscow Times, Alexander Podrabinek, Natalia Vvedenskaya, and Meduza with news and commentary on the Lida Moniava case: "I always thought she was exactly what a Christian should be like."

When does translation cross a line and turn into erasure?

Zakhar Prilepin: "If you take your knowledge beyond the borders of this country, beyond the bounds of our national science, you will betray all those who stand beside you. I hope there is no one here like this, but some of you might secretly be thinking, 'I was born so intelligent, I am so wonderful and gorgeous, and basically I’m entitled to everything, that I’ll just pack my bags and go off somewhere where they’ll pay me more for my brains.' Please understand that this is a treachery against those people who have conquered and cultivated this vast expanse.”

People in Bashmakovo, a town in Russia's Penza Region, have banded together to fight press gangs that have been abducting the town's men and sending them to the war in Ukraine.

The late great art critic Peter Schjeldahl, writing in June 1991 on a trip to Helsinki and Leningrad via occupied Viipuri and the occupied Kannas: "Last week on a bus to Leningrad, as a bottle was passed around, I got angry for Finland. The Finns aboard found this very funny. For three hours we jolted on atrocious roads through [the] Karelia[n Isthmus], former Finnish heartland gobbled by Stalin in the Winter War of 1939, then regained and lost again during the Second World War. Amid forests of birch and pine, I glimpsed a long disaster...."

Alexander Podrabinek: "The hope that Ukraine will emerge victorious from the war is quite popular among Russian political exiles. This is partly because there is nothing else they can do to liberate Russia. Well, almost nothing. Donating to the Ukrainian Armed Forces is easy, and it washes away all their sins as exiles. It's like going to church, lighting a candle, making a small offering, and assuming you've earned your place in heaven. As gestalt therapy it will do the trick, but it is quite dubious politically."

Punk's not dead, not even in Russia, but the fascist authorities there would like to kill it, judging by their recent multi-law enforcement agency raid on a punk festival in the woods near Vyborg.

Just as Russia's fascist police arrest Igor Zaitsev, a Petersburg university lecturer, on criminal felony charges of "financing extremism" (that is, donating tiny amounts of money to the murdered Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation), the Finnish authorities are preparing to deport Valentin Sergienko, a Petersburger whose now-rejected asylum claim in Finland was based on his donations to Navalny's group and other banned grassroots civic organizations in Russia.

Yesterday, 10 August 2026, the Russian Supreme Court disqualified the opposition Yabloko party from September's parliamentary elections, presumably for their (mild) antiwar stance. More remarkably, given the times, several hundred mostly young Muscovites showed up to support Yabloko. Deutsche Welle rounded up the reaction of talking heads to yesterday's events, while the ceaselessly amazing photographer Igor Stomakhin went to the Supreme Court to take pictures of the brave kids.

The Russian far-right (and their backers in the Kremlin) have a problem with Russians who want to talk in public about Stalin's Great Terror, including at the NKVD's killing fields in the Sandarmokh forest in Karelia, where every year on August fifth the names of the victims are read aloud.

In 2023, Oleg Belousov was the first person in Petersburg to be convicted of "disseminating fake news about the Russian army." Today, his son Daniil was sentenced to 7 years in prison for "condoning terrorism." Both Oleg and Daniil are disabled people, a fact that made no difference to their criminal judges.

The cinematography department of the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) posted an ad on its VKontakte page about "a special group" being recruited for director and cinematographer Mikhail Agranovich's class. Prospective students are offered free tuition starting in the 2027 academic year, provided they sign a one-year contract with the Russian Defense Ministry for service in UAV (drone) units. The students are also promised free dormitory accommodation, combat veteran status (along with associated benefits), and "expanded technical and financial resources for student film projects." Contract service will be equated to conscription service, the ad states. "If you dream of studying at the world's first film school, the renowned VGIK, now's your chance. Places in the group are limited," the ad reads.

Roskom who? / We'll do the job ourselves / A little Stalin sits inside each of us / He sits there inside / And says to you: / 'Delete that tweet' / 'Don’t do that—take back that like / Or the investigator will be at your door' / That’s how sweet it’s become to stay mum / A little Stalin lives inside each of us

1) Tokayev reads Putin the riot act. 2) "[E]very other person is ready to kill him."

Business daily Delovoi Peterburg's dry-as-dust and officialese-laden account of the Ukrainian drone attacks on Wildberries warehouses in the Petersburg area segues into a photo essay about a walk through one of the targeted neighborhoods eleven years ago and an oddly much more compassionate account of the effects of the attacks on rank-and-file e-retailers in the Gray Lady. Look where the day takes you!

Western "Russophilia" has a long and wildly ignominious history. As Russia shows no signs of ending its genocidal war against Ukraine, however, it takes a special kind of useful idiot to insist now on Russia's greatness and enthusiastically cultivate ties with the transparently fascist gangsters who are trying to destroy Ukraine and run Russia into the ground at the same time. Here are a few quick sketches of prominent Americans afflicted by Russian greatness derangement syndrome who have caught the media’s eye in the past week.

There has been no contact with political prisoner Andrei Trofimov since April. He has not responded to letters and has not been brought out to meet with a lawyer. The situation was reported by journalist Vladimir [Raevskiy], who has been corresponding with Andrei. ‘We have tried every possible avenue, but we are told that “he does not want to maintain contact with anyone” — which is nonsense, he is one of the most outgoing people I know — and that “he already has a lawyer”, which is untrue. On one occasion, a lawyer we had hired even travelled to Petrozavodsk at our request, but Andrei Trofimov was not brought out to see him,’ Vladimir [Raevskiy] wrote.

The "communist menace" just ain't what it used to be.

Featuring dispatches from Human Rights Watch, Deutsche Welle, the Lancet, Parni Plus, and the Moscow Times, this end-of-Pride-month survey of the dismal state of LGBTQ+ rights in Russia is not easy reading, but it will fill you with admiration for the Russian activists continuing the fight at home and abroad.

Despite (or maybe even because of) my own leftist sympathies, I'm a proud subscriber and reader of the Bulwark, an online publication anchored by "recanted" (?) neocons like Bill Kristol. The younger me would have wondered how such an unbelievable thing could have come to pass, but I would explain to him that we need a united front against fascism right now, and the Bulwarkers, Kristol included, are quite explicitly, vocally, and usefully part of that front.

"Hey, Barry, you ever heard of the word 'muzjik'?"

Who is responsible for Monday's heavy missile and drone barrage on Ukraine, which set ablaze one of the holiest sites in Eastern Orthodoxy, destroyed Ukraine's oldest and largest costume archive, killed eleven people, and wounded fifty others? asks Sasha Razor in a provocative essay.

Hanging out with Robin Jeffers in downtown Monterey.

"Somalis who work instead of living off welfare are not a horror story, but a fantasy!"

The Russian Reader ("where the news arrives already wearing its funeral clothes") plunges into the red-hot, psychotic abyss of AI with help from its new glib podcast robots Axel and Mara, as well as Dmitrii Volkov, Elizaveta Osetinskaya, Palisade Research, Daniel Kokotajlo, Radio 4, Robert Edward Grant, the Architect, Geoffrey Hill, and Thom Gunn.

One must have a mind of winter (and lot of warm clothes) to survive in Yakutsk and a dying Siberian village.

"For centuries, cannabis has been harvested in Central Asia by horsemen who would ride naked through wild cannabis patches and then scrape the resin from their skin and the hair of their horses": on cannabis, corruption, crime, and cozying up to Russia in Kyrgyzstan.

Making America great again, fifty-two deranged social media posts at a time: what does it say about America's alleged greatness that seventy-seven million Americans voted for this exercise of "executive time"?

Six snapshots of what the Russian Reader was reading on this day in years past.

The second issue of "Something I Learned Today" is a series of dispatches, daydreams and nightmares about "somewhere from away" from Yekaterinburg, Shiraz, Hawaii, Karachi, Utah and elsewhere. Featuring the Yekaterinburg rock band Kurara, Statista, BBC Radio 4, the U.S. Census Bureau, and Rafia Zakaria.

In Petersburg, Alexander Arseniev, who spray-painted the message "I don't want to get used to the war" on two fences last year, is sentenced to 20 months' time served in pretrial detention and released in the courtroom, underscoring human rights activist and former political prisoner Ivan Astashin's argument, recently made in the Moscow Times, that Russia's wartime repressive apparatus is marked not by its massiveness but by its unpredictability: "[C]ontemporary Russian repression does not need to become mass repression at all. Its effectiveness rests on a combination of unpredictability and public signaling: most cases remain almost invisible, but individual stories become a signal to everyone else."

Ored Recordings mark today's Circassian Remembrance Day by releasing a snapshot of new Circassian music that conjures up "a soundscape where Mark Fisher visits Murdin Tesh." Give it a listen here, and then download and pay for it on Bandcamp if you like what you hear.

Documentary filmmaker Lena Karbe spent nearly four years traveling undercover to Moscow to chronicle the experiences of three psychologists maintaining an anonymous crisis hotline at the start of the Ukraine war, while at the same time struggling to reconcile their totalitarian regime’s strict demands with their own beliefs. Karbe wanted to explore why Russia’s silent majority was staying silent as the war on Ukraine took hold. “Are they complicit, or — as many Russians say — ‘neutral’?” asks Karbe. She says that her film, “Inner Emigrants,” is “a cautionary tale.”

One thing that unites many Russians and U.S. Republicans is their fierce anti-Black racism: reflections on the matter by Elie Mystal, Nika, Dr. John Watson, Marshawn, and Kimberly St. Juliian-Varnon.

On the eve of the launch event for the film "Try Me for Treason," Simon Pirani examines the plight of Russians imprisoned for opposing their country's war against Ukraine, and of Ukrainians imprisoned by Russia for opposing its occupation of their country.

Who holds the cards now? "Putin treats negotiations not as a path to peace, but as a weapon of war" and "Time is not on Russia’s side in this war" are not necessarily contradictory observations as Russia celebrates 81 years of "victory" by unleashing a ferocious missile and drone assault on Ukraine.

Russian human rights defenders OVD Info run Vestochka, an online service for writing and sending letters to Russia's political prisoners. And you don't need to know Russian to write a letter because OVD Info's volunteers translate your messages.

Focusing on the Petersburg newspaper publisher and businessman Gregory Kunis, who fled Russia in December 2025, Russian Reader No. 2825 plunges into the ongoing, nationwide persecution of hundreds of Russians who made donations, however tiny, to the late Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.

The following two stories turned up next to each other in my inbox several mornings ago. The first story (about the hidden costs of common areas in new residential buildings) was promoted as its "Article of the Week" by the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, whose chronicles of post-Soviet capitalism on the march in my favorite city I have been reading and sharing here for two decades, usually against the grain. The second story (about how the authorities in Kaliningrad hushed up the recent death by self-immolation of an antiwar protester at the city's main WWII memorial) was published by the exiled investigative journalism website Important Stories aka IStories, which is celebrating its sixth birthday. Seemingly written on different planets in different languages, they give an accurate sounding of the bewildered, muted condition of the "Russian soul" (i.e., Russian society) after four-plus years of a vicious, genocidal war unleashed by a thoroughly corrupt "post-fascist" dictatorship.

"This catastrophe is part of the broader consequences of the senseless and bloody war Putin unleashed more than four years ago. He isn’t bothered by the hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian military deaths for which he bears direct responsibility, so it’s naive to expect him to care about burning oil tanks and poisoned seas. And things will only get worse": Vladimir Slivyak, The Bell, and 7x7 report on the terrifying war-caused environmental disaster unfolding in Russia's Black Sea port and resort town of Tuapse.