A conversation with Lana Estemirova, journalist, human rights activist, and author of the memoir Please Live: The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me. This new book provides readers an intimate glimpse into Ms. Estemirova's childhood, lived amidst the brutality of the Chechen Wars and made remarkable by the work of her mother, legendary Memorial human rights activst Natalia Estemirova. The discussion will explore the implications of the events of the 1990s and 2000s on Chechnya's political trajectory and the essential role citizens can play when they take up the call of activism.

A conversation with Serhii Plokhy, of Harvard University, and Oxana Shevel, of Tufts University, on the state of Ukrainian studies today, exploring questions of sources and archives as well as new directions in research.

A converastion with the historian Jochen Hellbeck on his recent book, World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the Fate of the Jews. This major new history transforms our understanding of World War II — tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility toward Soviet Russia. Hellbeck plumbs newly declassified archives and previously undiscovered sources—testimonies, diaries, and dispatches from soldiers and civilians, Soviet and German—to offer a unique history that takes account of both sides. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis’ most fervid rallying cry, and documents their annihilatory ambitions on the battlegrounds in the East.

A conversation with literary scholar Sophie Pinkham at Cornell University on her recent book, The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires.

A conversation with historian Alissa Klots, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, on her book Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor.

In this edition of The Long View, we are joined by historian Susan Grunewald to discuss her new book, From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union. The conversation explores the experiences of German prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union, from captivity through repatriation, and examines how their treatment shaped postwar memory, state policy, and international relations.

S. Frederick Starr, the founding director of the Kennan Institute and a distinguished scholar, discusses his recently published memoir, Blue Skies: My Life in Many Worlds, exploring the world of Soviet studies in the 1970s and 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath and the long history of the Kennan Institute itself.

A conversation about The Dark Side of the Earth: How the Soviet Union Collapsed but Remained, a new book by Mikhail Zygar exploring late Soviet history, agency (and destiny) in this period and the rise of Putin’s Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.

In this Long View conversation, Maria Lipman and Michael Kimmage interview Benjamin Nathans, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, a recipient of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The conversation explores the post-World War II history of the Soviet Union and the ways in which dissident activity arose from and conflicted with the evolution of Soviet culture and society.

In this Long View discussion, Linda Kinstler and Michael Kimmage interview Michael Thumann, Moscow bureau chief for Die Zeit and author of two books, Revanche (which is available in English) and Eisiges Schweigen flussabwaerts: eine Reise von Moskau nach Berlin. The conversation addresses the challenges non-Russian journalists face covering Russia, the political transitions in Russia of the past ten years and the many borders and barriers being erected between Russia and the West, as a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In this Long View discussion, Maria Lipman and Michael Kimmage interviewed Celeste Marcus, the managing editor of Liberties magazine and the author of Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art. This conversation explored Soutine’s biography, his journey from the East to the West of Europe and the geography of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this Long View conversation, Maria Lipman and Michael Kimmage interview the authors of two related books, Perfect Storm by Thane Gustafson, of Georgetown University, and Zero Sum by Charles Hecker, an expert on business and geopolitics. Both books are histories of Western business in post-Soviet Russia; both are histories of Russia in the 1990s; and both books help to explain Russia’s arc of development from a country importing a new economic model to the country Russian President Vladimir Putin rules today.