“Comply or die” has always been my country’s operative motto, especially when “compliance” has been a priori impossible.

By all rights, Russian Reader No. 2765 should be about yesterday's events — the Trump regime's vicious murder of an innocent woman in my home state of Minnesota. Instead, it's about a little-known Russian antiwar protester, Alexander Krichevsky, who faces six years in prison for a comment posted on someone else's Telegram channel. Here's the thing, though. The Trump regime, only a year into office, is trying to outdo the nearly 27-year-old Putin regime in its viciousness and corruption and lawlessness, and so unless something is changed quickly, the U.S. will soon have its own crowd of Alexander Krichevskys behind bars for thought crimes. But don't let that stop you from reading Mr. Krichevsky's story and showing your solidarity with him and other Russian political prisoners. We are fighting the same enemy, as he argued in the social media comment that got him sent to jail.

Timofey Anufriev was the 22-year-old son of the legendary conceptual artist Sergei Anufriev, whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago in a different life. Today, the news came that Timofey had been killed on the front while fighting for Ukraine as part of the Russian Volunteer Corps. This memorial post contains a short film about Timofey that Russian news and investigative reporting website The Insider made in Kyiv in February 2025.

Russian Reader No. 2763 (the 120th and final dispatch of 2025) conveys what little is known about Russian political prisoner Gordey Nikitin, recently convicted of "high treason" for several antiwar comments on social media and sentenced to 17 years in a maximum security prison. We know this much only because former Russian political prisoner and political exile Ivan Astashin learned about his case and wrote to him in remand prison. Happy new year!

A little provincialism and chicanery go a long way: "If all 270 million Soviets and all 230 million Americans could sit together in a hot tub, the world would be in better shape."

This special holiday blog, featuring several versions of Wire's evergreen classic "Map Ref. 41°N 93°W," is dedicated to my old 1990s Russia comrade L.J., who lives a mere seventy or so miles from the map reference in question and once upon a (better) time invited me to screen the world's greatest mockumentary, First on the Moon, at the fab Mars Cafe in Des Moines.

Daria Egereva is a Selkup activist and co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC). On December 17, Russian security forces raided her home and the homes of 17 other Russian Indigenous leaders. Egereva was accused of "involvement in a terrorist organization" and remanded in custody for 2 months. Her fellow Russian Indigenous leader Valentina Sovkina and the IIPFCC are among those demanding her Egereva's immediate release.

If you missed the November London launch of "Voices Against Putin’s War," which featured readings of the court speeches made by four convicted antiwar protesters, you can watch a video of it here, as well as find out about another such upcoming event in London in February. But the best thing you can is buy and/or download our book and read it.

A 10-year-old boy from a Tajik family was stabbed to death by a neo-Nazi Russian teenager on December 16 at a school near Moscow, but the murder has prompted almost no sympathy or even comment among Russians at home or abroad. Meanwhile, BBC News Russian details the worsening plight of Central Asian migrant workers in Russia.

The terrifying story of Mikhail Loshchinin, a Belgian-Russian dual national who went to Russia to visit his ailing father but was detained at the border. He now faces charges of "high treason" for, allegedly, wiring money to a friend in Ukraine in 2022. According to his mother, Loshchinin is also in danger of going blind in prison due to an untreated eye condition. And yes, he was tortured in custody to make him more cooperative.

Filmmaker Sergey Erzhenkov has memorialized the late pianist, writer and antifascist Pavel Kushnir, who died in a Russian detention center in 2024. Erzhenkov's compelling film "Kushnir" features the pianist's friends and admirers, and it also has English subtitles, making it accessible to international audiences. I've posted it here along with a translation of Erzhenkov's Facebook ntro to his film and a 2024 BBC podcast about Kushnir.

The Russian opposition and antiwar movement in exile is in disarray again after Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kara-Murza have a mighty row over which members of this non-elected group are worthy of representing "Russian democratic forces" at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

"Social parasitism" was a criminal offense in the USSR from 1961 to 1991. People who were unemployed without a valid reason could be sentenced to corrective labor, exile, or imprisonment. Citizens engaged in shadow private business were often prosecuted on this charge. The poet Joseph Brodsky was also convicted of "social parasitism."

Since trans and LBTQ rights are under attack from Astana to Missouri, the defense of these rights is a transnational cause, as witnessed by these dispatches from the front lines by Yara Tychina, Peter Leonard, BBC Russian Service, Erin Reed, and Paisley Currah.

They want it all, but they can't have it. Or can they? Two reflections on (certain) Russians always getting what they want.

As Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine heads to the four-year mark with no signs of ever ending, Russia's crackdown against dissenters has expanded, as exemplified by the cases of Varvara Volkova, Felix Eliseev, Ilya Shakursky, OVD Info, and Yulia Lemeshchenko.

In October, a possible educational outing at the local cemetery, where Duke Serge von Leuchtenberg de Beauharnais is buried, unexpectedly sent me down an NTS rabbit hole, a journey that, a month later, has just as serendipitously expanded to new itineraries charted by Mitya Volchek, David Albanese, the FSB, and Gerald Frost, and surprise guest appearances by William Sloane Coffin and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Andy Borowitz, Fred Kaplan, Heather Cox Richardson, and Cathy Young on the Stable Genius's Kremlin-drafted "peace plan" for Russia and Ukraine.

Buy our book.

"Let's have you all over when the war ends": Bristol UP, "Charlemagne," ambicolonial theorists, News from Ukraine Bulletin, the L.A. Times, Sarah Hurst, Jennifer Szalai, and Quentin Peel go in search of the "good Russians."

Simon Pirani: "The powers on both sides of the geopolitical divide are frightened of similar things: the defiance and resilience of the opponents of Putin’s war, and the anger that has brought millions of people on to the streets of north American and European cities, in protest at the Gaza genocide. They are frightened of beliefs that are taking shape, in varying forms, that humanity can and should strive for a better, richer life than that offered by the warmongers and dictators. Some of these beliefs are expressed in the chapters of this book."

The 2005 murder by neo-Nazis of Petersburg musician, philosophy student, antifascist, and Food Not Bombs activist Timur Kacharava was a signal event in post-communist Russia's precipitous slide into full-blown fascism at home and bloody war in Ukraine. As they have every year since Timur's murder, Petersburgers gathered to remember him on 13 November 2025.

Black is beautiful if it moves units. Otherwise, it gives white the heebie-jeebies.

There can be no better way to mark this website's 18th birthday today than by promoting a new book in whose birth it played a part — Voices Against Putin's War: Protesters' Defiant Speeches in Russian Courts, edited by Simon Pirani and published by Resistance Books (London).

ICE has also been targeting Russian asylum seekers, as exemplified by the cases of Buryat activist Alexander Bolokhoev and Peterburg anti-electoral fraud activist "Dimitry." Their stories are told by Julia Khazagaeva, Buryadmongol, Sota News, and New York Magazine.