Anne Garrels' reports from Putin Country

A popular desire for authoritarian rule in the face of a changing and sometimes shaky economy. A overheated sense of nationalism, to cover up uncertainty about the future. Scapegoating and military adventurism as a salve for a lack of purpose and policy, a dislike of outsiders and a desire to crackdown on journalists to cover up anger about the changing nature of employment. Sounds like a certain candidate running for President of the US. In fact, it is a picture of the rise of Vladimir Putin and Russia, as Russia still comes to grips with the change heralded by the Soviet collapse.

But to fully understand Putin and Russia, it's important to look beyond Moscow, just as it’s necessary to look past Manhattan or San Francisco to try and understand America.

Long time NPR foreign correspondent Anne Garrels has spent decades exploring the Russia that’s far from Moscow, in what some might call the Russian heartland.

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russiais her story of twenty plus years of reporting from a town on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains. She reveals a Russia that today embraces a unique combination of Western goods, inherent corruption, and authoritarian rule

My conversation with Anne Garrels:

Just how dangerous is Vladimir Putin? Ask Bill Browder!

We often throw terms around in our political and geopolitical debates like capitalist, and communist, and oligarch, and class divide. But very few who use these hot button terms truly understand the deep essence of what they really mean.

One of those that does understand is Bill Browder. He rebelled against communism as a teenager, became of capitalist and then made millions in Putin’s Russia. What he didn’t know was just what kind of price he would pay for getting involved in the ever entangling web of Putin, oligarchs and a system 180 degrees from our own, a system of men and not of laws.

The result was the brutal death of Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky and Browder’s still ongoing quest for justice.

The story is all told in his new book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice.

My conversation with Bill Browder:

The Repression of Putin and The Passion of Pussy Riot

In just days the Winter Olympics begin in Russia. In some respects the world comes to a nation that may be even more repressive than the Moscow of the 1980 Summer Olympics.

While President Putin has released some political prisoners, including two members of the group Pussy Riot, the release itself was a kind of de facto acknowledgement of the corruption and repressiveness of its political and justice system.

Masha Gessen has been a long time activist journalist in Russia and recently moved to the US in light of Russia’s ongoing crackdown on the LGBT community. In  Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, she gives us an up close view of what’s really going on inside Russia.

My conversation with Masha Gessen: