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.