M. Gessen is the author of twelve books, including most recently Surviving Autocracy, the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen lived in Russia from 1992 until 2013. An Opinion columnist for the New York Times and the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, Gessen is a distinguished professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a visiting writer at Bard College.

Anna Nemzer is a journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker studying the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She is a presenter on TV Dozhd (aka TV-Rain – formerly the only independent TV channel in Russia, now working in exile); a scholar at Bard College (United States); a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) dedicated to the preservation of all Russian independent media as important evidence of the era. 

Ilia Venyavkin is a historian and journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook, Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He is a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a scholar at Bard College, and is writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.

Dr. Ivan Grek is the Director of the Russia Program at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. Trained in political science and history, Ivan specializes in studies of illiberal grassroot movements and ideology in Russia. Ivan’s research was published in peer-reviewed political science journals, as well as US and Russian media outlets such as the Washington Post and Kommersant.