How does the idea of Eurasianism influence modern Russia? We will be joined by a panel, including Charles Clover author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, to explore this theory of Russian national identity based on ethnicity and geography.

From the annexation of Crimea, to Russia’s intervention in Syria and the rise of anti-Western paranoia and imperialist rhetoric, we will examine the history of Eurasianism, how it factors into the thinking of the Kremlin and its impact on Russian society.

Chaired by foreign correspondent for BBC Newsnight, Gabriel Gatehouse.

The panel:

Charles Clover, is an American journalist, currently the Financial Times‘s China correspondent and former Moscow bureau chief. He is author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism.

Rodric Braithwaite is a former British diplomat and author. From 1988 to 1992 he served as British ambassador in Moscow. He is the author of Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War and Afgantsy.

Andrei Sidelnikov, human rights activist and leader of Speak Up! – an international campaign group.

Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington, and a special correspondent in China and many parts of Europe. She is a member of the Valdai Group, invited since 2004 to meet Russian leaders each autumn.

Both writers encounter people who are longing for a strong leader to bring back security and pride. They will be joining us to discuss whether, following the challenges to democratic structures in Russia, Hungary, and most recently Poland, eastern Europe’s new democracies are at risk.

Chaired by author and journalist Oliver Bullough, who lived and worked in Russia from 1999 – 2006. He is author of two books about Russian history and politics: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great.

With:

Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing is True and Nothing is Possible, Adventures in Modern Russia. He is a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, where he runs a project on contemporary propaganda and how to deal with it.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is the author of two collections of short stories, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day. At present he is working on a book about the Jewish world of Eastern Europe and its destruction, as witnessed by its writers.

This event is organised by

The Frontline Club and Theatre Royal Plymouth in association with Sputnik Theatre present four nights of new Russian drama. Featuring exciting and topical plays by British theatre directors and cast – translated into English by Sputnik’s artistic director Noah Birksted-Breen. Each evening will touch upon various aspects of life in Russia covering an array of issues, from the clampdown on theatre and freedom of speech to growing social tensions and immigration.

Doctor by Elena Isaeva

Running time: 55 mins

A surprising, sometimes shocking, often funny and moving play about contemporary medicine in rural Russia. Based on a real-life testimony taken from a Russian doctor, it is also a touching personal portrait of an individual coping as best they can in difficult circumstances.

Doctor is one of the longest running productions of Teatr.doc, the renowned studio theatre in Moscow which was supported by Tom Stoppard amongst other prominent British voices when facing closure in 2014.

This reading will be followed by a post-show discussion with artistic director of Teatr.doc, Elena Gremina, in conversation with senior international correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding.

The talk will be interpreted for Elena Gremina (Russian<>English) by Alice Terekhova, an independent theatre practitioner and a professional interpreter working across a variety of arts: opera, theatre, new writing, performance art, independent film and education. Terekhova assisted some of the most inspirational directors including: Tom Stoppard, Mark Ravenhill, Natalya Vorozhbit, Dmitry Krymov and many others.

On the eighth floor of an ordinary-looking building in an otherwise residential district of southwest Moscow, in a room occupied by the Federal Security Service (FSB), is a box the size of a VHS player marked SORM. The Russian government’s front line in the battle for the future of the Internet, SORM is the world’s most intrusive listening device – monitoring e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, and all social networks.

In a new book The Red Web, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan peel back the history of advanced surveillance systems in Russia. They will be joining us to discuss what they found and to reveal how a free global exchange can be coerced into becoming a tool of repression and geopolitical warfare.

Having conducted interviews with numerous prominent officials in the Ministry of Communications and web-savvy activists challenging the state, the picture they paint sees dissidents, oligarchs, and some of the world’s most dangerous hackers collide in the uniquely Russian virtual world.

This event will be moderated by the BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent, Daniel Sandford. Sandford was the BBC’s Moscow Correspondent from 2010-2014, and covered the annexation of Crimea, the war in Eastern Ukraine, the downing of MH17, the anti-Putin protests, and the detention of Pussy Riot.

The panel:

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are cofounders of Agentura.Ru and authors of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. Soldatov worked for Novaya Gazeta from 2006 to 2008. Agentura.Ru and its reporting have been featured in The New York Times, Moscow Times, Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, Le Monde, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, Federation of American Scientists, and the BBC.

Edin Omanovic is a Researcher at Privacy International, a London based NGO which investigates state surveillance and the industry which enables it. Omanovic advocates for greater transparency and accountability over the trade and use of surveillance technology, and has published several investigative reports and policy analyses on limiting the trade in surveillance technologies and protecting human rights from unlawful surveillance practices. Omanovic led research on Privacy International’s recent report on the use of Israeli, Russian, and European surveillance technology in Central Asia, Private Interests: Monitoring Central Asia, and was previously a Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute where he focused on the arms trade and illicit trafficking.

Tonia Samsonova is foreign correspondent for Echo Moskvy. She is also founder of TheQuestion.ru – a popular service that aims to connect people who have questions with those who are able to find answers, and through that interaction create and spread the culture of consciousness.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

October will mark the tenth year that Mikhail Khodorkovsky has spent behind bars. Once Russia’s richest and most successful businessman, he was arrested and imprisoned a decade ago, on charges that many regard as politically motivated. Since then he has faced new charges extending his sentence and although he is due for release in August 2014, doubts remain about whether this will take place.

We will be examining the Khodorkovsky case and, following the charges against Alexei Navalny, we will be looking at the wider issue of imprisonment of opposition figures in Russia. Will the ramping up of protests and support for Alexei Navalny force a change in the conduct of Russian politics?

A selection of Khodorkovsky’s writing will be adapted for an exclusive performance on the night, directed by Noah Birksted-Breen, the artistic director of the Sputnik Theatre Company. Birksted-Breen has previously directed a production of Elena Gremina’s play One Hour and Eighteen Minutes, dealing with the death of renowned Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. More information on Birksted-Breen and the Sputnik Theatre Company can be found here: sputniktheatre.co.uk. It will be performed by Jonathan McGuinness, who is currently appearing in The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas at the Royal Court Theatre.

Chaired by Edward Lucas, the international editor of The Economist and author of Deception: Spies, Lies and how Russia Dupes the West. He has covered Russia and Central and Eastern Europe for more than 20 years.

The panel:

Sir Tony Brenton is a former British Diplomat, he served as Ambassador to Russia from 2004-2008. In 2009 He became a Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge and is currently writing a book on Russian history.

Ben Judah reported for Reuters in Moscow before joining the European Council on Foreign Relations in London as a Russia analyst. He is currently a visiting fellow at the European Stability Initiative and is author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin.

Tonia Samsonova is a foreign correspondent working for Russian radio station Echo Moskvy, she is also a host on TVRain, an independent online TV channel. In 2013 she moved to London to investigate Russian corruption.

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/russias-surveillance-state

The surveillance culture in Russia is well documented. In the digital age as we see more protests on the streets of Moscow and elsewhere the FSB (the successor to the KGB) are developing new surveillance technologies.

Towards the end of last year as debate about the draft Communications Data Bill was raging in the UK, in Russia advanced internet-censorship and monitoring technologies were introduced. In reaction to this Privacy International, Agentura.Ru, the Russian secret services watchdog, and Citizen Lab have joined forces to launch a new project entitled Russia’s Surveillance State.

We will be joined by those involved in this new project and other experts to discuss the surveillance practices in Russia and how they are developing.

Chaired by Misha Glenny, an investigative journalist, author and broadcaster. He is one of the world’s leading experts on cybercrime and on global mafia networks. He is author of McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime and DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia.

With:

Edward Lucas is international editor of The Economist and author of Deception: Spies, Lies and how Russia Dupes the West. He has covered Russia and Central and Eastern Europe for more than 20 years.

Andrei Soldatov is an investigative journalist and editor and co-founder of Agentura.Ru, an information hub on intelligence agencies. Soldatov regularly makes comments on terrorism and intelligence issues for Vedomosti, Radio Free Europe and the BBC. He authored a chapter on Russia’s secret services in the PSI Handbook of Global Security and Intelligence: National Approaches and is co-author of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.

Irina Borogan is an investigative journalist and deputy editor and co-founder of Agentura.Ru. She covered the NATO bombings in Serbia, and the Lebanon War and tensions in West Bank and Gaza Strip for Novaya Gazeta. In 2009 she started a series of articles investigating the Kremlin’s campaign to gain control of civil society and strengthen the government’s police services under pretext of fighting extremism, the series was published in Ezhednevny Journal and on Agentura.Ru.

American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum has held many posts including Warsaw correspondent for The Economist, foreign editor and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine and political editor of the Evening Standard. She now writes a column for The Washington Post and is author of Gulag: A History and most recently Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56.

In Iron Curtain Applebaum documents a brutal period in European history and reflects on how fragile free societies are. Exploring how, in the decade after the end of the Second World War, Communism was imposed on previously free societies; how political parties, the church, the media – the institutions of civil society on every level – were all quickly destroyed.

Anne Applebaum will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with author, journalist and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm to talk about the journey taken in her new book and the lessons that can be learned from that brutal period in history.

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Vladimir Putin is back in presidential office for a third term after four years as Russia’s Prime Minister. We will be asking what the people of Russia think of the man who has dominated the country’s politics for more than 12 years and will now be President for a new extended term of six years?

Convinced the parliamentary polls were rigged in December last year, Russians took to the streets in protest. They have now turned their focus to preventing Putin from returning to the Kremlin.

Tens of thousands of Muscovites have taken part in protests to demand free and fair elections. But how deep and how far does the disaffectedness go? Join us to discuss the outcome of the presidential elections in Russia and what they mean for the future of the people of Russia and its development on the world stage.

Chaired by Edward Lucas, Central and Eastern European correspondent for The Economist and deputy editor of the international section, who has been covering Central and Eastern Europe since 1986. He is author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West and most recently Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West.

Masha Gessen: Born in Moscow in 1967, Gessen emigrated to the United States aged fourteen. In 1991 she returned to the Soviet Union as an American reporter, and witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union. Now based permanently in Russia she has reported on all the key events in Russian politics for leading Russian publications as well as for Vanity Fair, New Republic, New Statesman and others. She was the first journalist to be black-listed by the Putin administration in 2000 and is author of several books, most recently The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

William Browder, the Founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. He is a leading global shareholder rights activist and has been an outspoken voice for better corporate governance in Russia. He was the largest foreign investor in Russia until November 2005, when he was suddenly denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security” by the Russian government for exposing corruption at large Russian companies.

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In 2007 Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for The Guardian. Not long after, mysterious agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, broke into his flat. He was followed, bugged, and even summoned to Lefortovo, the FSB’s notorious prison.

The break-in was the beginning of a psychological war against the journalist and his family that burst into the open in 2011 when he was expelled from Moscow for reporting allegations that under Vladimir Putin the country had become a “virtual mafia state”.

The first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War, Luke Harding has written about his run-in with the new Russia in his recently published book, Mafia State. It includes unpublished material from confidential US diplomatic cables, published by WikiLeaks last year, that described Russia as a “virtual mafia state”.

Luke Harding will be joined by a panel at the Frontline Club to discuss his experiences as The Guardian‘s Moscow correspondent and what they tell us about Russia today.

Chaired by James Meek, writer and reporter. He has reported for the Guardian since 1985, between 1991 and 1999 from the former USSR. In 2004 his reporting from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay won a number of awards, including Britain’s Foreign Reporter of the Year award. He is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, most recently We Are Now Beginning Our Descent.

With:

Luke Harding, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. He was previously the Guardian’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and has reported for the paper from Afghanistan and Iraq. Author of Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia and the co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy.

Angus Roxburgh, author and renowned journalist, he was the Sunday Times Moscow correspondent in the mid-1980s and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. He is the author of The Second Russian Revolution, Pravda: Inside the Soviet Press Machine and most recently The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia.

Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder of the secret services watchdog website Agentura.ru and co-author of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.

Susan Richards, a non-executive director and founder of Open Democracy and a specialist on Russian affairs. She is the author of two books; Epics of Everyday Life, about the lives of ordinary Russians in the transition from communism and Lost & Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland, which covers the period 1992-2008.

David E. Hoffman, who worked for 27 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, will be at the Frontline Club to discuss the relationship between US president Ronald Reagan and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the dying days of the Cold War.

Author of The Dead Hand, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative history of this era, David E. Hoffman covered the White House during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was Moscow bureau chief from 1995 to 2001.

From the discovery of a Soviet biological warfare machine to the refusal of Gorbachev in 1985 to compete in Reagan’s massive “Star Wars” weaponry programme, Hoffman tells the inside story of this fascinating era, including the little-known story of the Soviet semi-automatic retaliatory system known as the Dead Hand, a Doomsday Device that would leave the fate of Earth in the hands of three surviving duty officers buried deep underground in a concrete, globe-shaped bunker.

Hoffman will be in conversation with investigative journalist, university lecturer and author of Spyflights of the Cold War and co author of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, Paul Lashmar.

Join us for what should be a fascinating evening looking back at the Reagan/Gorbachev era.