Next Year in Moscow 9: Life and fate
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The Economist. I was sure he will be released. I knew a little bit about negotiation. I didn't know exactly what's going on, but I knew that there is some negotiations. Shimon Levin is a rabbi. If you listened to the last episode of our series, you may remember him. He only met Alexei Navalny in person once, in 2019, but the two had been corresponding regularly since Navalny's imprisonment.

In letters exchanged last year, the two of them started to imagine their next meeting. We agreed that after we'll be released, we asked Julia to find an apartment through Airbnb in the old city Jerusalem. And we agreed to meet there and to sit during the night on the roof of one building in the old city in Jerusalem to drink wine, to drink coffee, and to discuss about big questions of humankind.

And last time you wrote me about this and also asked please organize me trip to interesting places in Jerusalem. But we have about 20 to 30 years to organize it. Navalny was dreaming about this city on the hill from within the confines of a shizoh, a dark, cold and damp punishment cell.

three meters long and two meters wide, in which he spent 300 days of the three years during which he was incarcerated. But Alexei Navalny will not get to drink wine on a rooftop in Jerusalem, and he will never lead the wonderful Russia of the future that he and his followers imagined. Shimon was about to give a talk at a school in Germany when he saw the news. I said, please let me a few minutes and a glass of water.

Since Navalny's return to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt, many people half expected for this day to come. Shimon was not among them.

Till now, it's when I say Alexei was killed, it's in my brain, this world is not connected. I can say it, but I can't really feel it. Like, it's impossible. And I'm going now through the process to understand it and to reflect it. And I think Alexei was one of the best people who we met, who we saw in our history.

What gave you this inner confidence that he would be released, that he could not be killed? I really don't know. Maybe because he was killed already once, so it's enough. It's enough to die one time during someone's life. And he can be killed a second time. What does it tell you about evil, about death? We believe that evil doesn't really exist, that only good exists.

And when we see someone bad kill someone good, it's a big problem, especially for a religious person. For me, it's a big problem to see it. Because I want to see the good winning and not to be killed. But I think that they succeeded to kill Alexei's body, but they didn't succeed to kill his soul, to kill his ideas, to kill his power.

How do you find a sense of meaning when your beliefs have been challenged like this? Now we live in dark times. We have to understand it. We have to agree that it is dark times. And I think it's very important now not to say that, OK, it's dark times, so we don't have to believe in good. We don't have to wait for the better times. I think we have to wait for the better times and we have to do something to bring the better times.

Shimon also worked as a kind of a courier for Navalny, passing on letters to a former Soviet dissident called Natan Sharansky. Sharansky spent nine years in a Siberian gulag in the 1970s and 80s. He wrote an account of his struggle for the rights of Russian Jews to immigrate to Israel called Fear No Evil.

You know, I had some letters from Alexei to me. It's very interesting letters for me, but I think the letter to Natan Shiransky, it's really historical letters and it's the most important thing that I was connected to. We asked Shimon to read out some excerpts from an English translation of this letter from one prisoner to another. Dearest Natan, Alexei Navalny here. Hello from Vladimirskaya Oblast.

although I'm not sure if you have retained warm memories of it. I have just read your book while I was held in the PKT, the solitary confinement prisoners in PKT are kept within their cells in all times. It will be 128 days in total. I want to thank you for this book as it has helped me a lot and continues to help.

I understand that I'm not the first, but I really want to become the last, or at least one of the last of those who are forced to endure this. The most important thing is to arrive at the correct conclusions so that this state of lies and hypocrisy doesn't enter a new cycle. In the preface of the 1991 edition, you write that dissidents in prisons have kept the virus of freedom.

and it is important to prevent the KGB from inventing a vaccine against it. Alas, they have invented it. Nonetheless, the virus of freedom is far from being eradicated. It is no longer tens or hundreds as before, but tens and hundreds of thousands who are not scared to speak out for freedom and against the war, despite the threats.

Hundreds of them are in prisons, but I am confident that they will not be broken and they will not give up. And many of them draw strength and inspiration from your story and your legacy. I am definitely one of them. My thanks to you. Here I copied it to myself from the book "Leshana Haba'ah Be'erushalayim" Next year in Jerusalem. Yours, Alexei

I'm Arkady Ostrovsky from The Economist. This is Nexty in Moscow. Episode 9. Life and Fate. It's always a frightening moment when you come over from a detention center or a penal colony after spending several hours outside the big world, cut from the news, and you're always afraid to switch on your phone because you don't know what you will get there. Maria Eismant is a defense lawyer.

More than anyone else I know, her work gets to the essence of Putin's war, a war being fought both on the battlefields in Ukraine and against his own people within Russia. She defends victims on both fronts. When we last met Maria in episode 7, it was April 2023. Ten months on, she remains in Russia, and her caseload has gone up.

In the early afternoon of Friday the 16th of February, she was visiting Ilya Yashin, a political prisoner and one of her defendants, in a penal colony in Smolensk region. We were talking about something else, including Navalny, but as he was alive. And then when I left and I got back my phones and I switched them on, I got, I don't know how many messages back.

from everyone, like, say it's not true. And I didn't understand what people were asking me about. It took me some time to realize what happened. And again, some more time to realize that this is not fake. And the first thought was that Idia does not know yet. And it was Friday. And you don't visit prisoners on Saturday and Sunday. So you never know when and how they learn those news. And you can only imagine what they think when they learn those news.

And also Alexei was Ilya's friend. Ilya Yashin is a 40-year-old. He is a popular opposition politician, streetwise, optimistic, fun-loving, with the looks and charisma of a movie star. When he talks, the whole court listens. Yashin is serving eight and a half years for publicising reports about Russia's war crimes.

And this was not the first time he had lost a close friend and a comrade. In February 2015, months after Putin's first attack on Ukraine, the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered on a bridge near the Kremlin. After Navalny's death, Yashin wrote this in an open letter: "Now both my friends are dead. I feel a black emptiness inside, and of course I understand the risks I face.

Standing over Boris's body in February 2015, I swore to myself not to fear, not to give up, and not to run. Nine years later, as I mourn Alexei, I can only repeat that vow. Maria was not Alexei Navalny's lawyer. She barely even knew him. But his death affects everyone in Russia, and for her, it has also had a stark and immediate implication. With Navalny gone,

Yashin had been suddenly elevated to the top tier of Russian political prisoners. And so had another of Maria's defendants. There is no reason in my mind to expect a regime that tramples on the rights of its own citizens and that disregards its own constitution to for some reason respect the rights of its neighboring countries and to respect international law. Vladimir Karamurza is a writer, journalist and a politician.

If Ilya Yashin resembles a movie star, Karamurza is more like a 19th century intellectual or a Soviet dissident. He is a historian by background, with a degree from Cambridge, a high forehead and a studious manner. But he has no shortage of steely resolve either. He twice survived suspected Novichok poisoning attempts. He has long campaigned against Putin's regime. And he chose to leave the relative safety of a life abroad and return to Russia in full knowledge of what awaited him.

A return that was inspired in part by a chapter from the history books. He cites the example of eight Soviet citizens who went on the Red Square in 1968 following the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Being absolutely sure it was obvious they would be arrested and would get punished for that. We mentioned the eight Red Square protesters on this series before. They were swiftly arrested and locked up.

Their protests seemed at the time like a futile gesture, but their example has rippled outwards across the decades. It's in a way self-sacrifying, but for the cause that they also want the world to know that not all the Russians are okay with what's going on. Not everyone is afraid, or maybe they are afraid, but overcome their fear.

Karamurza arrived back in Moscow on the 5th of April 2022. New censorship laws were already in place, making it a crime to criticise the war. But that only increased his determination to speak out. This regime that is in power in our country today, it's not just corrupt, it's not just kleptocratic, it's not just authoritarian. It is a regime of murderers, and it is important to say it out loud. On the 11th of April, soon after these words were broadcast on CNN,

Karamurza was arrested. He was later charged with spreading fake news and then with treason. His advocacy for the Magnitsky Act, an American law that puts sanctions on people involved in corruption and human rights abuses, made him a traitor in the eyes of the Kremlin. He was ultimately given 25 years in prison. It is the longest term currently being served by a political prisoner in Russia. He is now in solitary confinement in one of the harshest penal colonies in Siberia.

I've had a lot of troubles in the last few days

Less than a week after Navalny's death, Karmurza addressed his followers from prison. He stood in a small holding cell, wearing a dark prison uniform, looking straight into a low-resolution camera. The video feed was piped into a Moscow courtroom. He never expressed fear. He never expressed depression. Maria was there in the courtroom, representing her defendant. He said that we must continue our fight.

for the normal, democratic, free and loving country, European country. And that's what Alexei wanted, that's what we need to continue. That's his message. What is in his heart and in his head, we can only imagine and only he knows that for sure. For me, it's quite hard to understand or to imagine what would feel like being twice poisoned, nearly to death before.

being put into custody for 25 years, knowing that another person whom you know personally, respect a lot, whose way you are repeating because both of them were put in the most harsh conditions, in total isolation. The word "way" that Maria uses here is the closest English translation of an important Russian concept - "путь". "Путь" means something different to "road" or "pathway". Instead,

It indicates both a path and a destiny. Once someone has chosen a path, there is only one direction of travel. Navalny and Karamurza had chosen the same path. And so I asked Maria how she thought her defendant was feeling now. It's always difficult to talk about other people's thoughts and feelings. I hate doing that because we never know what's inside a person's mind and heart until he or she tells us. And even then...

You may not be sure. You can only imagine. You've known him for a long time and you're also somebody who does have extraordinary empathy. Can you, how you understand it, not how he feels, but how you understand what he feels and what he's thinking? I see it as a struggle of two parts of one person.

One is a husband and the father of three children who has always been very close with his family and who feels that he's not with them and who understands that probably they will never see him again and who thinks that maybe he betrayed them in this way. And his other part is being a public figure, a politician, a journalist, a citizen of Russia who...

As he often says, but do you really understand that I could not do otherwise? That's the only way I could behave. So it's always this struggle of those two parts of him. In the wake of Navalny's death, people keep asking the same question. And it applies just as obviously to Ilya Yashin and to Vladimir Karamurza. Why choose to go to prison when you know the risks?

wouldn't it have been wiser, better, in every way more effective for this man to remain in safety, biding their time until they had a real chance of gaining power? But the put that Navalny, Karamurza and Yashin have all chosen is not concerned with pragmatic political decisions. And in Alexei Navalny, the people have lost not just an opposition politician, they are mourning the death of an epic hero. Like the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,

The appeal of Navalny's story is not really derived from its Russian-ness, but from what it tells us about human nature, in light and in darkness. Vladimir Putin, for his part, has also chosen a "путь" that takes him far away from the world of pragmatic political decisions. Alexei Navalny didn't pose any immediate political threat to Russia's president.

He was isolated in a prison within the Arctic Circle. His organization had been outlawed. His lawyers arrested. His channels of communications strangled. And Russia was in no mood for an uprising. But then, this was not just a political murder. How is the murder of the death of Navalny connected to the war? It is also sort of a victim of the war that lasts much longer than the one we talk about.

in Ukraine. This is the war of people in power against bright, free, brave and good people who want to prove that world is not ruled by fear and greed and lie, which is opposed to the way my country is ruled for the last couple of decades at least, or maybe longer, in using the worst in people. So that's the main clash.

In the early 1870s, the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky published his darkest and most prophetic novel, Biasy, translated in English as Demons, the Devils, or sometimes as the Possessed. It tells the story of a group of men who become intoxicated by a dangerous idea. The idea is that humans are essentially malleable.

Unfortunately, many people do not believe that somebody can act not according to his interest, not according to the aim to get something. That people can act just because they think it's right. So I think that Putin and those who surround him believe, honestly, that people cannot act driven by

by love and care and honesty and other feelings that they probably never felt themselves. In the novel, the group of men come to believe that such base and self-interested creatures need to be governed by a great and all-powerful tyrant using only violence and repression in the name of a great idea. One of them says, "We're going to make an upheaval that is going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before."

Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness. The earth will weep for its old gods. Their ideas take hold and before long, the town in which they live descends into chaos. Buildings are set on fire. People are murdered. In the 20th century, Dostoevsky's book was hailed as prophetic, predicting the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution. But in the 21st century, Putin has brought it into an even starker focus. Unlike his Soviet predecessors,

Russia's president is now unconstrained by ideology. He doesn't even pay lip service to the idea of a bright future in whose name sacrifices are made. His upheaval is of a different kind, something closer to the nihilism of the devils. Like the man in the novel, Putin has elevated vice and violence to the level of virtue. Mainly what's going on with the world is the main question is what will prevail and how people are acting.

Sometimes I see that, yeah, he's winning. Every time somebody's writing a comment like, all Ukrainians have to be destroyed or all Russians are slaves. Every time somebody say, let's deprive those group of people with some rights. He's winning. He's triumphing. He's saying, I told you how people are, what are they about. See, I was right.

In 1959, Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer and wartime correspondent, completed a novel called "Life and Fate". Grossman lived through Stalin's Great Terror, witnessed man-made famine in Ukraine, and was one of the first people to give an eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Treblinka. His novel contains a chapter on the nature of good and evil. I've thought of it ever since the war began.

"Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil," he wrote. "It's a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness." This could be the kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, or a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water flask, or a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner to his wife and mother.

because private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. And after all that he had seen, Grossman concluded: "If what's human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer." Maria also believes that as long as the kernel of humanity remains in people, even those prosecuting the war or persecuting political prisoners, in fact, especially in those people, there is still something to fight for.

And so she keeps her eyes open for signs of this colonel wherever she goes. The investigator was in the beginning, when we knew him, acting very harsh in a very aggressive way. He was shouting at us when he asked the guy for questioning. Since the end of 2022, Maria has taken on work defending Ukrainian prisoners of war, some of whom are being charged as terrorists by the Russian state.

This work often brings her into close contact with investigators from Russia's all-powerful and much-feared state security service, the FSB. He was shouting, I would you not to discuss politics, I prohibit you to talk about those things, etc. She told me about one such encounter in an interrogation room. To begin with, the FSB man was playing exactly to type.

And he behaved in a very aggressive way and he had an impression of being really very aggressive, very confident that he's dealing with enemies and quite aggressive. But then a piece of news entered the room. Some days previously, the three-year-old daughter of one of the Ukrainian men had become seriously ill. I think that maybe if that would happen in a town like Moscow, I think it was easy to save her.

What was happening in a small town on war on the territory and they brought her to hospital. They could not understand what's going with her, what's wrong. And finally, steadily, she lost all the capacities of the organs and went in coma and died. And we were sitting in this room with this interrogator from FSB. And I told him,

this one lost the child and the guy who was always arrogant and always very displeasant and very hostile towards us suddenly i saw tears in his eyes he said how come he said what how that happened why didn't he tell me why didn't he tell me in time we would organize something you can see how he cared about like any child he really loves children

And it didn't matter who's the father. He just learned that one little girl of three and a half years old was ill and could be saved but was not saved. And he felt bad that he was not aware about it in a time that probably he could do something. And he was so open and so sincere in his feelings. Believe me, I feel the difference when somebody is sincere or not.

Maria couldn't let this moment go unmarked. I later told him that I thought of you wrongly, and now I realise that I was wrong, that you are not what I thought you were. You are much better. Is it what you told him at the time? I think later. I told him that. You always tell people if you think about them good and better. If you are wrong about someone and you understand that you were wrong, I think it's very good to tell him.

This is not a story about man suddenly turning away from the regime he is serving and joining the resistance. And his sympathy here doesn't atone for his actions elsewhere. Instead, it's exactly what it appears to be. An FSB officer feeling sorry for a child. Nothing more and nothing less. What matters is how people behave in their own environment. And if you tell somebody that he's an orc,

or, um, who ever, Ukranazist, or any other dehumanized creature, that he's bad and he's doomed. You won't expect from this person anything good. But if you say to him, or if you see something where he's acting like a responsible, caring human being, and you say, wow, that's really great, thank you very much. You've done so much to this person, or to me, or to him, to her.

People like to feel themselves good. People need to feel themselves good. And they will later do the same, even with more enthusiasm. People want to be spoken to. People want to be good, to feel that they are good. Maria doesn't collect these stories for her own comfort. They are an act of resistance against the very conditions that make the war possible. My first Ukrainian, I've got him in September 2022.

He's a soldier from Militopol, around 35 years old, who was at home when the war started. Militopol is a town in the southeast of Ukraine. It was captured by Russian forces in the first week of the war. Igor had been separated from his unit and remained in the town. And he was later seized by the special forces, by special service, I think, the FSB people from Russia.

So he was put in the cellar, as many of them were, and he was severely tortured for at least, I think, two to three weeks every day. And finally, he tried to commit suicide because he found a nail in the wall and cut his neck. And when those guys found him in this condition, they brought him to the hospital and he was operated. And then he asked the doctors not to save his life.

He begged them not to save him. Ihor was brought from the hospital in Militopol to Moscow and finally to a prison in Rostov-on-Don, a Russian military hub and a place where many Ukrainian prisoners of war are held. What are the charges against him? Terrorism. Because he was taken with a weapon. He is accused of preparing International Terrorist Act together with the others, so there are five of them who are under this trial. In Russia, such crimes carry a sentence of up to 20 years.

And yet, Igor's spirits are higher than you might expect them to be. He doesn't want to take his life away no longer. He looks much better. He's smiling a lot. He's laughing. Just talk about your relationship. I mean, without disclosing, client, lawyer, privilege. I hate this word, client. Seriously. How did the relationship go? Very well. I have a very good relationship with all the people that I defend. They all become...

The majority of them become like, and I become a member of their families. That's how they describe it. We become close, of course, because you are the most close person to those who are under arrest in prison, especially if they're far away from their families. That's normal. That's not with me only. That happens with many lawyers. And I'm not the only one who is defending Ukrainian prisoners of war. We are at least a few dozens of lawyers who do that.

I mean, imagine you are in a hostile country, in a custody, with no links with your family, no food, no clothes. And then you have somebody who's coming and giving you, you know, food, clothes and letters from home. Wouldn't you like this person? Because they like me. That's okay. I like them as well. They're interesting. We get used to each other. We talk a lot.

As part of Igor's case, he and Maria had to prepare a testimony of the torture he had been subjected to. His cellmates watched him draft and redraft his account with growing interest. And then later he said, look, the guys from the cell, they've seen what I'm doing and they ask whether they can also write what happened to them. And I said, but they are not people I defend.

And then I thought maybe for them it's important to write to someone what happened to them. And I said, well, if they want, they can do it. I'll take those notes as well. And so many of them have wrote their stories. And that was stories about human cruelty. But then later when we were talking with some of them, I've learned about some other people that were helpful among those who captured them, among their enemies. And I asked them to write to me those stories as well. This was last winter.

The prisoners knew that Maria's birthday was coming up. And they've made a sort of like a book with this guy who learned how to paint. They've illustrated it and everyone wrote his story. And they knew that I have my birthday and it was a present from their cell, the book with all those stories about humans that they've made in the whole cruel surrounding when they were captured.

So I have this book. The book has a red binding and is about 40 pages long. Looking through it, you see that great care has been taken with every detail of its production. It contains nine stories written in beautiful cursive handwriting with chapter breaks drawn to look like strips of barbed wire. One of the stories recounts the time when a Ukrainian prisoner received a gift of a piece of flatbread

from a Russian soldier whom, months earlier, he had violently attempted to kill. Another is about a pair of investigators who allowed a prisoner to meet his eight-year-old son in a cafe and who gave him toys for the child. And one of them begins with a prisoner being dragged into an interrogation room by two guards. Exhausted after three days without food or water, his hands tied and taped to his head, which is covered with a bag, he is ordered to kneel on the floor.

Our producer, Pete, reads the translation from here. I took a risk and spoke. Please give me some water. It's been three days since I've had anything to drink or eat. I could faint. The usual response followed. Shut up. We don't give a fuck what you want or how you're feeling. I, of course, shut up and didn't ask again. While I was in there, I learned that one of them was called Dennis and the other Maxim. At one point, Dennis urgently needed to go somewhere and he left. And so I stayed with Maxim.

As soon as his partner left, Maxim let me sit on the floor and lean against the wall. I sat there and almost passed out, but then he started undoing the tape with which the bag on my head was secured. And he said to me, "Hush, don't be afraid." He lifted the bag away from my mouth and said, "Have some water." The guard gives the prisoner a slice of pizza, then another. I thanked him, but he didn't say anything and tied the bag back around my neck.

Why was it important to you to read those stories? I can see why it's important to them. Why was it important to you

I always like stories about people being human rather than unhuman. Because stories of the other kind we hear every day in big numbers. So I just ask for it and I got it. Usually I like to get what I ask for. When you got it, how did you feel? I mean, when you read it? I don't know. I cannot describe. I liked it. I liked my present. As you know...

Maria is somebody who doesn't like to talk about herself. Yes. She likes to talk about others. So you tell us about her. You travel with her. Describe, as a photographer, describe what you see. I see that she is such a small miniature woman, pretty woman, and she is a very big figure. She can speak with everyone.

When I asked Alexandra Astakhova to introduce herself, she listed four facts. She is a photographer, she lives in Russia, she is not going to leave, and she is against the war. She is close with Maria and often travels with her. It's something new for different people. Maybe she is the first person who asked him about them. And they want to speak about them, they want to explain themselves.

to her and they're changing that they speak with her the war has strained and broken many friendships but for these two women it has had the opposite effect we becomes friends in these two years first of all many her friends and my friends are not in russia now second i think we think nearly

I think we are both a little mad. And we are both strong, I think. And it's important to be with people who you can believe, who you can trust. It's important. And we like to find something nice in this awful reality. In a past life, Alexandra worked as the photo editor for one of Russia's business newspapers.

Now she travels the country taking photographs of both political prisoners and jailed Ukrainian soldiers like Igor. In a very real sense, this makes her a war photographer. It's all connected. This courts, our political prisoners and the war in Ukraine, it's all connected. And at this time, I understand that I have my mission, I should do this, I will do this and I will stay.

To Alexandra, the mission is clear: create a record of what's happening within Russia during this historic and traumatic time. And, like Maria, her work gives you an unusual perspective on the country in which she was born and where she has chosen to remain. What is it that you see as a camera person, as a photographer, that we can't see? What is it that you are observing that the outside world doesn't see in Russia?

When I make photos in the courts with political prisoners, I understand and I see this, that they are winners. It's really difficult to explain, but they are winners. Police in the court, they are in masks, you see. So we can see only their eyes.

And I understand that they look to Sasha Skocilenko, for example, or Ilya Yashin, and they think that they are real cool guys. I see it in their eyes, really, because I can't see all the things, only eyes. And

You see, I was a photo editor for a long time. And classic photo editing is to, if it's a news article about Vladimir Karamurza in all newspapers, photo editors try to illustrate this article with a very upset Vladimir. But the reality is absolutely another. He's smiling. This is what Alexandra sees in court.

And it's mirrored by what she sees outside of it. I think that people who think that war is good, much less than people who think that war is awful. I'm sure I speak with different people, with taxi drivers, sellers. It sounds bad, but ordinary people, yes, and they think that war is bad. A small group of men, possessed by a dangerous idea, have taken hold of her country. And not for the first time.

Our history explains that sometimes it's all the day worse, worse, worse, and then it stopped. You don't know when, why, where. And of course I'm waiting, but I'm not only waiting, I'm trying to absorb this, to photo what I can, to help anybody. For example, you know, real heroes like Lower Maria Eastman. I'm a happy woman, happy.

happy person because I have very many friends and they are heroes. Our interview with Alexandra was recorded at the end of January. On February 15th, Navalny appeared in court for the last time.

He was smiling and laughing. The next day, Alexander lost a friend.

She had known Alexei Navalny for years. Their mothers are friends. She hasn't felt able to speak with us again since then. We all believe in good tales, where heroes survive and win in the end. Life is not like that. But why do you think Navalny was killed? Because he could not be defeated. Because he was too free, too brave. No matter in how bad conditions he was put, he continued to smile. It must irritate him.

the evil, never begged for pity, never turned back, never regretted, always was strong and was an example and a hope for many. A lot of people said they would lost our hope. That's a very common reaction from the people I meet, that they've killed our hope, our future. Did he kill hope? For many people, yes. Do you have hope? Probably not. I'm not that strong. If you don't have hope, why are you carrying on doing what you're doing?

Because it's the right thing to do. This episode of Next Year in Moscow was produced by Pete Norton with help from Lika Kramer, Libor Libor Studios and Ksenia Barakovskaya. Our sound design is by Wei Dong Lin with original music by Darren Ng. Our executive producer is John Shields. I'm Arkady Ostrovsky. This is The Economist.

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