This conversation with Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson, both of the Wall Street Journal, focuses on their book, Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War, a book that sheds considerable light on the geopolitics of the moment by telling the story of a dramatic prisoners' exchange in 2024. This book helps to explain the practice of keeping and exchanging hostages in Vladimir Putin's Russia.

This conversation with Liana Fix, of the Council on Foreign Relations, focuses on her recent book, Germany Rearmed: The Return of War and the End of Illusions, with an emphasis on Germany foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, the structure of European geopolitics both before and after February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and concluding with an assessment of the risks and opportunities posed by a Germany remared.

This conversation with Howard Amos, a journalist, addresses his book, Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire, a book that with a focus on the city of Pskov explores questions of center and periphery, of borderlands and of the historical transitions in Russia in recent years.

A conversation with Antonia Senior, a journalist, on her recent book, Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire, with a focus on the question of espionage and of loyalties divided and reconfigured in the 1930s and then again in the early Cold War.

A conversation with Juliane Fuerst, a historian at Central European University, focusing on her 2021 book, Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland, with an emphasis on culture and counter-culture in the Soviet Union, on youth culture in the Soviet Union and on larger patterns of conformity and non-conformity.

This conversation with Jonathan Daly, a historian at the University of Illinois Chicago, will focus on his recent book, The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior, concentrating on questions about he writing of imperial Russian and Soviet history in the twentieth century and about the relationship of academic work to policy formation in the Cold War.

This conversation with Sabine Fischer, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, will address her book, The Chauvinist Threat: Russia's War and the West's Response, examining questions of authoritarianism, militarism and gender, not as three distinct and separate topics but as an interconnected set of themes.