Around Moscow, there’s a whole industry of so-called “black creditors” — microfinance institutions (or MFOs) that swindle and seize debtors’ homes. Ivan Golunov’s investigation for Meduza has discovered that almost 500 apartments have been seized from their owners over the past five years without so much as a court order. In fact, this scheme involves more than simply “squeezing” people from their homes. It is possibly part of a wider, international money-laundering system. Here’s Meduza special correspondent Ivan Golunov on the ins and outs of this industry.
Guest: Laurence Bogoslaw on Russians on Trump: Press Coverage and Commentary published by Eastview.
Manduhai Buyandelger’s keynote address “Self-Polishing and Electoral Selves: Elections and the New Economies of Democratization in Postsocialist Mongolia” given at the 2019 Annual Soyuz Symposium.
Guest: Tobie Mathew on Greetings From The Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia published by Four Corners Books.
Guest: Joan Neuberger on This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia published by Cornell University Press.
Two weeks ago, Suzi Weissman, who has a weekly program called Beneath the Surface on the local Pacifica station (KPFK) here in Los Angeles, interviewed Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine on his outstanding book, The Jewish Century. I wrote a review of it months ago. You can read it here. I recommend the interview for more insight into this amazing and path breaking work.
