Lucy Ash - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church From Pagans to Putin

Sean Wiswesser - Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War

Sean Wiswesser, a retired CIA senior operations officer, discusses his book on Russian intelligence tactics from the Cold War to the 21st century.

Lucy Ash - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church From Pagans to Putin

Award-winning journalist and broadcaster Lucy Ash discusses her book The Baton and The Cross, which combines history and reportage to tell the story of church-state relations in Russia from ancient times to the war in Ukraine.

Marc Bennetts - The Descent: Witnessing Russia's Spiral Into Madness Under Putin

Marc Bennetts, a correspondent for the Times and Sunday Times, was forced to leave Russia in 2022, after living in the country for 25 years. His new book The Descent is a visceral memoir of his journalistic experiences and the cruel consequences of Kremlin propaganda

Pavel Otdelnov - Estates: Fragile Utopia

Pavel Otdelnov is a Russian artist who moved to London from Moscow in 2022. He works in various media and is best known for his projects about his hometown--the industrial city of Dzerzhinsk--and for his powerful visual metaphors for Soviet history and life in contemporary Russia. His latest exhibition, Estates: Fragile Utopia, is about postwar social housing projects in Britain, and their resonances with Soviet urban landscapes. It is on display at Lewisham Art House until April 20th, 2026

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan - Our Dear Friends in Moscow

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are investigative journalists who focus on on the Russian intelligence agencies. They are the co-founders of agentura.ru [http://agentura.ru] and are now senior fellows at the Centre for European Policy Analysis and visiting staff at the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence. They moved to London in 2020 following an apparent threat to Andrei’s life. In this interview, they discuss their book, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, which is about how a group of their journalistic colleagues became pro-Kremlin propagandists.