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.

Guest: Rósa Magnúsdóttir on Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 published by Oxford University Press.

Guest: David Brandenberger on Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course published by Yale University Press.

Guest: Anna Krakus on the stories Polish police files tell us.

Guest: Paul Hanebrink on A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism published by Harvard University Press.

For the past several months, I’ve been researching the life of Lovett Fort-Whiteman. Here’s a short film I made about his eventual arrest and death in Stalinist Russia.

Guest: Tony Wood on Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War published by Verso.

Guest: Jared McBride on the Holocaust, Soviet Secret Police Archives and Local Perpetrators in Western Ukraine.