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.

This conversation with Kirill Shamiev, of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and a non-resident fellow at the Kennan Institute, focuses on his recent book, Imperfect Equilibrium: Civil-Military Relations in Russian Defense Policymaking. It explores the question of civil-military relations past and present in Russia and their effect on Russian foreign policy and strategic thinking.

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.

This conversation with Gergory Carleton, a historian at Tufts University, focuses on his book, Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare, examining both the history of the Crimean War and the significance of Crimea as a place - geographically and in people's imaginations.

This conversation with Michael Dobbs, a journalist, addresses his book, The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia and the Race to Automate Armageddon, looking at the military tensions that dominated the 1980s, crises that led both to the ratcheting up of tension but also to renewed efforts at diplomacy and arms control.

This conversation with Yana Sokobogatov, a historian at Columbia University, focuses on her book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union, examining questions of law, criminality and state-society relations in Soviet history.

This conversation with Stephan Rindlisbacher, a scholar at Viadrina University in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, focuses on his book, Borders in Red: Managing Diversity in the early Soviet Union, concentrating on questions of state formation, of ethnicity and of nationalism in the creation of the early Soviet Union.

This conversation with Cassio de Oliveira, a literary scholar at Portland State University, focuses on his book, Our Best Friend in America: The Soviet Afterlife of Mark Twain, tracing the curious course of American letters in the Soviet Union, the image of the United States that literature helped to build in the Soviet Union and the particular place of Mark Twain in Soviet culture and society.

This conversation with Candace Rondaux, of Frontline Atlas and the author of Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos, and Christopher Faulkner, of the Naval War College and Moscow's Mercenaries: The Rise and Fall of the Wagner Group, on curious career of the Wager Group and on the role of mercenaries in general within the Russian military and in Russian foreign policy.