Please join the Harriman Institute for a presentation of the Russian Independent Media Archive by Anna Nemzer and Ilia Venyavkin. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in the Ukraine the scale of the media censorship in Russia has intensified manifold. Criminal and administrative cases were opened against dozens of journalists, dozens of media outlets were blocked, and many of the articles were manually deleted from the outlets’ archives. The Russian Independent Media Archive is a joint initiative by the Bard College and PEN America that aims to resist censorship pressure and preserve the legacy of Russian civil society and independent journalism. In a conversation with the co-founders of the project, we will discuss the challenges faced by Russian independent media, the features of the archival digital project and its prospects.

Anna Nemzer is a journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker studying the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She is a presenter on Dozhd (TV-Rain), the Russian independent TV channel, now working in exile; a scholar at Bard College (United States); and a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) dedicated to the preservation of all Russian independent media as important evidence of the era.

Ilia Veniavkin is a historian, civic engineer, and a journalist. For 15 years he has been studying Stalinist culture and subjectivity. He wrote an ebook, Master’s Inkwell. A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Purge and co-founded Prozhito.org, a collaborative online archive of Soviet diaries and ego-documents. He is a co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive; a scholar at Bard College (United States); and writing a book on the ideology of Putinism.