The invasion of Ukraine has been a dramatic escalation of the authoritarian turn in postcommunist Russia. In this conversation, two leading scholars of contemporary Russia, Ilya Budraitskis (visiting researcher, University of California Berkeley) and Ilya Matveev (visiting researcher, University of California Berkeley), discuss the political, economic, and ideological changes in Russia over the past decade and the Putin regime’s current sources of stability. How has the war transformed Russian society? How does the Putin regime perceive Russia’s place in the world? What sources of resistance, if any, remain? And how does it bode for Russia’s economic and geopolitical future? Moderated by Rafael Khachaturian (Penn Critical Writing Program.)

Ilya Matveev is a researcher focusing on Russian and comparative political economy. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. His academic work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Labor and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, East European Politics and other journals. He has contributed to Jacobin, openDemocracy and other media outlets. He is a member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, a group of Russian social scientists studying post-Soviet societies from a critical perspective. Ilya is also an affiliate of the Alameda Institute, a new research network of left-wing intellectuals.

Ilya Budraitskis is a political and cultural theorist and activist. Currently he is a Visiting Scholar with the Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley. His articles on Russian politics, culture and intellectual history were published in academic journals such as Radical Philosophy, New Left Review, Slavic Review and South Atlantic Quarterly, and in the media outlets such as Jacobin, London Review of Books, E-Flux, Le Monde Diplomatique and OpenDemocracy. Budraitskis’s essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022. He is member of the editorial board of Russian socialist website Posle.media