Rights in Russia

Welcome to the 44th edition of the Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas. Our guest today is Anna Nemzer – a journalist at TV Rain, an archivist and one of the protagonists of Julia Lokteva’s documentary My Undesirable Friends, the second part of which was recently screened at the London Film Festival. Anna Nemzer currently lives and works in London.

Today our guest is the poet, writer, artist and activist Linor Goralik. Linor was born into a Jewish family in 1975 in Dnipropetrovsk. In 1989 her family emigrated to Israel. From 2000 to 2014, Linor lived and worked in Moscow. After that, she divided her time between Israel and Russia until November 2021. In March 2022, just two weeks after the start of the so-called ‘Special Military Operation’, Linor Goralik travelled to Tbilisi, Yerevan and Istanbul before returning to Israel – to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem – documenting the mass exodus of people from Russia triggered by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She subsequently presented these people’s testimonies in a bilingual publication by the Tamizdat Project entitled Exodus-22. The book was published last year.

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, Nina Litvinova, had died. It was May 13. The next day, May 14, Masha posted again: “Today, RIA Novosti reported, citing law enforcement sources, that our sister Nina Litvinova had taken her own life. In other words, the cops leaked this information. They also wrote that Nina had left a handwritten suicide note.” Masha then published excerpts from Nina’s suicide note, explaining: “Of course, no one—neither RIA nor Gazeta.ru, which reported this—will publish the note…’ The note speaks of a feeling of helplessness, of the number of people in prison for not supporting the war against Ukraine, of how life had become unbearable. Of her shame that she had given up, surrendered. on the evening of 12 May 2026, at the age of 80, Nina, a human rights activist and academic, was found unconscious beneath the windows of her apartment building on 3rd Frunzenskaya Street in Moscow. Clearly, Nina had thrown herself out of the window. I found the story haunting, and not just because I could imagine where and how it happened—I had lived on 3rd Frunzenskaya Street when I worked in Moscow in 1998. I wanted to understand why Nina Litvinova’s act had had such an effect not only on me, but on so many others—both those who knew her and those who didn’t—in Putin’s Russia and beyond. I asked Masha to talk about her sister and the significance of her decision to take her own life.

Welcome to the 41st edition of the Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas. Ksenia Luchenko is the author of the book Благими Намерениями – Русская Церковь и Власть от Горбачева до Путина [‘With Good Intentions: The Russian Church and State from Gorbachev to Putin’] for which she received the ‘Prosvetitel’ award (Enlightener Prize) in 2025. That same year, her name was added to the list of ‘foreign agents’ and, in March this year, she was sentenced in absentia in the Russian Federation to eight years’ imprisonment under the ‘military fakes’ law. Ksenia left Russia in April 2022. Prior to this, she had worked extensively as a journalist and scholar in the field of church affairs and media.

Welcome to the second part of the 40th edition of the Russian-language podcast Then & Now with me, Teresa Cherfas. Today, we continue Tanya’s story from Mariupol. In the first part, we left her with her granddaughter in Krasnodar. Many moves lay ahead before they finally found a more permanent refuge in England.