PROTEST & COUNTERCULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA

Kirill Medvedev is a poet, art activist, and member of the folk-protest band Arkady Kots who resides in Moscow. A labor activist and member of Russia’s socialist movement, Medvedev criticizes politicians as well as Russia’s liberal intelligentsia for its inaction. An English-language collection of his poems came out in 2012 under the title It's No Good. 

 

 

 

Anna Moiseenko is an award-winning documentary filmmaker residing in Moscow. She co-directed Winter, Go Away! (2012), which chronicles the 2011-12 winter protests against the biased presidential race and election.

 

 

 

Julia Bekman-Chadaga is an assistant professor of Russian at Macalester College, and has lectured on the topic of gender in Russian protest art. She has presented her research at national conferences and teaches a course on culture and politics in contemporary Russia.

 

Jordan Gans-Morse is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. His research focuses on the ongoing economic and legal reforms and government corruption in Russia.

 

Pavel Ivlev served as Russian legal counsel to Yukos Oil and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. After a district court in Moscow issued an arrest warrant for him in 2005 on charges of embezzlement and money laundering, identical to those of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, he fled to New York, where he now resides, under fear of unjust prosecution.

 

Ambassador Ian C. Kelly is Diplomat in Residence for the Midwest, based at UIC. From 2010-2013 he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna, Austria. His previous posts include Director of the Office of Russian Affairs in Washington, D.C., Public Affairs Advisor at the U.S. Mission to NATO, and Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer in Moscow.

 

Jonathan Brooks Platt is an assistant professor of Russian at the University of Pittsburgh. He recently organized the event “No Radical Art Actions are Going to Help Here: Political Violence and Militant Aesthetics after Socialism,” which was part of the highly publicized 2014 Manifesta 10 Contemporary Art Biennial in St. Petersburg, Russia.

 

Alexis Zimberg is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and Director of Political Analysis for Post-Soviet Graffiti, a website that investigates, amplifies, and advocates for free expression in the censored or authoritarian states of the post-Soviet region.