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In 2016, news of Boris Meerson’s alleged abuse was broadcast on Russian state television. But the scandal would traumatize the alleged victims all over again.
Visit our website for photos and other materials referenced in the story: https://adultsintheroom.libolibo.me/
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Feedback email: adultsintheroom@libolibo.me
Creators & Guests
What is The Adults in the Room?
Nastya Krasilnikova is an investigative journalist who covers sexual violence against women and children. A year and a half ago, former students associated with one of Russia’s most prestigious schools approached her with allegations of serial abuse by teachers. Her investigation has uncovered a network of harm and complicity in a tight-knit circle of Russian intelligentsia.
The story spans many years and multiple countries. It asks what happens when a community refuses to atone for the violence of its leaders. As Russia wages a senseless war in Ukraine, that question couldn’t be more pressing.
For additional materials visit our website: https://adultsintheroom.libolibo.me/
For feedback: adultsintheroom@libolibo.me
This is a podcast by Libo/Libo
On August 29th 2016, Russian State Television broadcast a story about a scandal at one of Moscow's most prestigious schools. The news report cited a Facebook post from a well known journalist and alumna of the school, Ekaterina Kronhaus. She wrote: For more than 16 years, we knew that the history teacher was having affairs with his students. Quite a handsome guy. Smart, ironic, charming.
Nastya:No wonder we fell in love. We were small, but thought we were big. And then the years passed. We became bigger, and his lovers changed and remained small. At some point, I decided to write about this, but the children of my colleagues were studying in the school, and somehow, they asked me not to write.
Nastya:And then, even later, I already started writing and even talked to a girl several years younger than me. But in our editorial office, there were also people whose children studied there. Despite their ardent civic engagement, they also somehow asked me not to write. And now, finally, these people have found the strength to collect evidence, and he doesn't work at the school anymore. And that's good, even though he was a good teacher to everyone who didn't have an affair with him.
Nastya:Because it's not good to sleep with schoolgirls if you are their favorite adult teacher, and it's good that this won't happen at the school anymore. In her post, Ekaterina Kronhaus didn't mention the school or teacher's name, but her social circles on Facebook knew exactly where and who she meant. And very quickly, the story was everywhere. After 26 years of teaching at School 57 , allegations against Boris Meerson had become public. From Libo Libo, this is The Adults in the Room.
Nastya:My name is Nastya Krasilnikova. This is Episode 5: The Storm Begins. To understand what led to this post on Facebook, we need to rewind a little. Revekka Gershovich had graduated from School 57 earlier that year at the start of the summer.
Revekka:I graduated, and then I went to work for... not work, like volunteer, but I was, like, really there all the time in the center for refugee children. It's a part of civic assistance committee. I was having a lot of panic attacks. And I asked my parents, like, if I could go to a psychologist.
Nastya:Soon, Revekka found a psychologist and started attending sessions every week.
Revekka:It was really helpful. It was like something was I don't know. Like, I started realizing what happened, and I started realizing that I'm that, like, Meerson is not the best person in the world and, like, all those things that are happening to my psyche are actually connected to him.
Nastya:As for Boris Meerson himself.
Revekka:He wasn't actually keen on continuing the with this whole relationship. And I think he realized at some point that I was, like, getting out of his control and becoming sort of, like, dangerous to him. And at some point, I confronted him about what he did, but, like, in some mild manner. And he yelled at me and told me to just drop it. And I just decided that I need to do something about it.
Revekka:And then we started talking. Yegor Osipov and I, what we can do with him. And we were like the first thing we obviously thought about was, like, hey, let's contact the journalists we know. And then we were like, but that will be so awful if we contact journalists and it's gonna get into public and everybody is gonna discuss it, it's gonna be awful for the school and for us. And that was actually a big thing for the school.
Revekka:You know, Meerson was telling me that all the time that, 'hey, you can't tell anybody because we're all very progressive and stuff, but people won't understand it. It will be very bad for the school', and I would keep my mouth shut because of that argument.
Nastya:So Yegor and Revekka didn't go to journalists. Instead, Revekka told everything that happened to her at the school, to her boss at the Centre for the Refugee Children, Olga Nikolaenko. Olga was also a graduate of School 57, and she was shocked by what she had heard.
Revekka:And she started gathering evidence from all those people, and it was strictly anonymous, and nobody was supposed to know about it.
Nastya:Olga began gathering evidence with the help of Nadezhda Shapiro, who was and still is a literature teacher at School 57. Here is Yegor.
Yegor:Olya started collecting evidence. And she recorded 14 people who suffered abuse by Boris. And so then on July on July 28th, I think, 2016, Olya Nikolaenko and Nadezhda Shapiro went to the school board to demand that they fire Boris. The school board was composed of Sergey Mendelevich who was the principal, Ekaterina Vishnevetskya, who was his wife, deputy principal, and also my literature teacher, and Boris Davidovich, who was another deputy principal. So Olya and, Nadezhda come there, and they say, 'well, we have this evidence.
Yegor:Fire the guy'. To which Sergey says, 'this is impossible. He's my best friend'. And then Ekaterina says, 'well, we always thought that Boris had favorites among college student assistants. But then if they they accompanied him on class trips, we could be rest assured that nothing inappropriate would happen with the high school students'.
Yegor:I mean, it's impossible to wrap your hand around this. You are a principal of a school. Someone comes to you and says, look, a teacher had was abusing children. We have evidence of 14 people. And the first thing you say is not 'oh, no.
Yegor:What a disaster'. Not 'how I'm sorry'. You're not announcing an investigation. You're not interested in search for the truth. You're not interested in taking care of the victims.
Yegor:Not interested in protecting the current students. You say 'it's impossible. He's my best friend'.
Nastya:But eventually, Olya Nikolaenko and Nadezhda Shapiro managed to persuade the school's board to fire Boris Meerson.
Yegor:So eventually, they fired him because something switched in Sergey's mind, and he understood that if he sees the evidence, he will have a different role if this ever comes to to criminal prosecution. So he will have seen the evidence and not have acted upon it. So he fired Boris.
Nastya:Meerson was asked to resign and never came back to Russia.
Revekka:And he was in Israel at that point, and he just didn't come back. And he had citizenship for a while. So he stayed there, and he got fired. And we thought, okay, that's it.
Nastya:A month had passed since Boris quietly quit his job as a teacher. And then, word got out among the School 57 community, which led to that post from Ekaterina Kronhaus on Facebook. Suddenly, a story that was meant to be hidden was very, very public. By that time, Revekka had moved to the United States where she'd enrolled at the University of California, San Diego.
Revekka:I had my first, like, summer session at the university and it was very exciting. And then Katya Kronhaus wrote on Facebook that without you know, everybody knows that part, like, without mentioning the school. Blah blah blah. And then there was, like, a ton of people writing about it. And I have no idea how she learned about it.
Revekka:I'm pretty sure somebody might have told her. And I was actually very, very pissed about it because I wasn't ready to do it. And some, like, random third party decided to expose it for some reason, like, without ever asking any of the people who were victims of this. And I was just reading everything that was going on, and I was just, like, swearing.
Nastya:While the scandal played out on Facebook, it was also playing out in the school itself.
Yegor:And so what happens then is that there is a teacher's meeting at the end of August where Nadezhda Shapiro stands up and says, well, this happened in our school throughout the summer, which is that Boris was fired. And then the reaction, is disproportionate to this. Right? The colleagues, they do not believe that. They think that, the school board came to to blackmail.
Yegor:They're also not interested in truth, not interested in investigation, not interested in anything that proper and decent people would be interested in.
Nastya:I've asked 7 of the school's teachers from that time for an interview. Almost all of them ignored me. And Nadezhda Shapiro told me she didn't want to go on record. But there was one teacher who agreed to talk to me. Her name is Natalia Soprunova.
Nastya:She is also a graduate of School 57. And by 2016, she had been a mathematics teacher in the school for 16 years.
Natalia:That time was incredibly traumatic for me, even though I wasn't a victim or a participant. In fact, I wasn't even involved in the investigation. All that information and horror hit me like a ton of bricks, and my body started reacting. I was scared. I felt repulsed.
Natalia:I stopped missing my School 57 childhood. It was gone. I have the exact same thing with Russia now. The parallel is incredibly clear. And at the first school staff meeting at the end of August, Nadezhda Shapiro made a statement saying that this had happened and that there was all this evidence.
Natalia:And she said it in front of all the teachers. It was very powerful.
Nastya:And then 4 days later, there was another staff meeting at the school.
Natalia:And then on September 2nd, we had that insane staff meeting, during which 4 of us got up and left, and we handed in our resignations. And then another person joined us. That's 5 people. I'd really only known everything for 4 days before I left the school. The worst part was the way the school reacted.
Natalia:That was truly a nightmare, truly horrifying. This attitude of, well, a good girl wouldn't be sleeping with Meerson. There's something wrong with her. It's just that the kid is shitty. That's a direct quote if you can believe it.
Nastya:I asked Natalia, why was it so difficult for school officials to admit that all this was happening and to acknowledge how horrible it was?
Natalia:One aspect of it was, this was the headmaster's closest friend. Both Meerson and his wife were very close to him. They went on vacations together, spent holidays together. Their families were close. And this closeness, it must have interfered somehow.
Natalia:Because at the staff meeting, things were being said along the lines of, this is my friend. I won't let him down. I will never accept this. So, yeah, those things were said. So that must have been one of the reasons.
Natalia:The second reason is more complicated and was discussed at length afterwards. Again, similar to what's happening with Russia right now. 'Yes. It's bad. Why did he do it?
Natalia:But why should the whole school go down because of this? It's a good school after all. What now? These things happen. Let's shut this down.
Natalia:Let's not drag the school's good name through the mud again. Let's not ruin its reputation, its prestige. Let's not subject it to this'. This narrative was a constant for several years afterward. New headmasters came and went, but this narrative stayed.
Natalia:And they tried not to talk about it if they could help it. I was surprised to have you reach out to me after 7 years. Because in general, well, it wasn't that it was completely swept under the rug, but in general, it was sort of kept under wraps. There was never any acknowledgment given that the school was responsible and that the school was at fault. Never.
Natalia:And that is awful. It'll lead to this happening again. And the same can be said about Russia. I'm sorry I keep drawing this parallel. It's just a through line in my mind.
Nastya:Natalia is making parallels between the reaction of the school to the scandal and Russian's reaction to the full scale invasion of Ukraine. That's something I've thought about a lot. For some people and some countries, it is very difficult to admit their complicity in something so horrible and violent. So they look for explanations. Russian authorities say that the war in Ukraine is some kind of defense against imaginary threats from the west.
Nastya:Similarly, authorities at School 57 seem to view the allegations only as threats to the school's reputation, ignoring the suffering of the survivors. Back to Yegor.
Yegor:So the teachers, the few teachers, 5, I think, who say that this is inappropriate and we must investigate this and we must safeguard the existing children somehow, they are being forced to resign, long story short. There are other teachers are insulting them. They're saying, well, you know, are you are you saints? What do you think of yourself, etcetera, etcetera. And this is all, of course, with active support and participation of the board.
Yegor:The board does the same. Right? They they want to force those teachers out. Around on that very same day, Revekka and I write Facebook posts saying that we are actually the children who were abused in the school. So we write those posts not out of free will, but because the public discussion of what's going on has taken on massive proportions.
Yegor:And so by September 1st, the public discussion, if you can call it that way, is already not about the abuse and not about dozens of children who were fucked at the school, but it is about who is guilty in this whole unraveling. Is it the pedosexual who fucked dozens of children and the school board that covered him up, or is it Katya Kronhaus who brought that to light? And supposedly smart people are seriously discussing this. They are seriously doing that, day after day. And these are among them are the wary people I thought I would seek help from.
Yegor:This was really unbelievable. The logic of there, of course, was that, okay, there is a pedosexual, but there are many wonderful teachers, and there's such a lovely board, and it's a brilliant institution.
Nastya:The decision makers in the school at the time were the principal, Sergey Mendelevich, and his wife and deputy, Ekaterina Vishnevetskya. I repeatedly reached out to them for a comment on this story, but both of them ignored me. But I've talked about their reaction to the accusations with many people. One was Konstantin Sonin, who'd left the school by this time but was watching closely. You might remember that Sonin is a well known economist who attended the school and later sent his kids there.
Konstantin:My role was initially just confined to whatever public support I could provide for those who spoke about these things. I participated in different discussions with school officials about the school making a statement, but no statement was ever made.
Nastya:Can you please tell me more about the reaction of, school administration?
Konstantin:I came to School 57 in 1986. It was 2 months before Sergey Mendelevich, came to the school. I also know Ekaterina Vishnevetskya for many, many years. And no question they badly failed as school administrators. They failed the kids, they failed the parents,
Konstantin:The thing is that for many years, School 57 has come under all kind of pressure. The Soviet authorities tried to close the school, then, when the school has become popular, there were hundreds of people every year who would try to put their kids into school. So they would send armed, armed bandits. They would send people from the attorney general office.
Konstantin:They would send FSB and police officers to talk to the director to get their kids into the school. So I think in his 30 years in School 57, Sergey Mendelevich, developed an extremely, extremely thick skin. So, basically, when he was resisting a pressure from parents or girls who they thought might have been abused, I think that one part of his thinking was just that I'm not letting go for any pressure. He was resisting basically any pressure. So another circumstance is that Sergey Mendelevich was undergoing a very heavy treatment for cancer at the time for 3 years already.
Konstantin:I think this is a very peculiar thing about the way Russian organizations operate. That, like, I cannot imagine a western organization operating for years under a who is undergoing a heavy chemotherapy. I'm a cancer survivor myself. I had a chemotherapy experience. And, of course, you cannot be reasonably responsible for what you do.
Nastya:Yeah. And you Ekaterina Vishnevetskya herself, as you told me before, she was referring to her own experience of having a romance with a teacher when she was a school girl. Is that right?
Konstantin:I heard about this at the time. There were a couple of consequential meetings. And in one of these meetings, like, the most important one, Vishnevetskya told a story, what I heard about her romance with Lev Sobolev, who was her history teacher, and basically this was a part of the Meersons defense, which was at the time, these girls, they are grown ups. We treat them with as grown ups. They know what they're doing.
Konstantin:They are making their choices. So I think from what I heard that Ekaterina Vishnevetskya was making this case, 'okay, maybe it was my bad choice, but I was doing this and I survived'.
Nastya:I was so struck by this detail about Ekaterina Vishnevetskya referring to her experience of having a relationship with her own teacher that I went digging. And several people who were present at that staff meeting have confirmed that she said it. There is a popular saying in Russian 'я же вырос, и ничего', which can be translated as, look at me, I grew up and I'm okay. People might use it when they talk about being beaten by their parents as a child. And it's often used against survivors who speak out about their difficult experiences.
Nastya:It's like they're saying, I also suffered, and look at me now. I'm successful. If you can't get over your childhood, you're weak and immature. I suppose this was the point Ekaterina Vishnevetskya was trying to make. But we will get back to her story later.
Nastya:For now, let's get back to the survivors who were posting online. Here is Revekka.
Revekka:And I was reading, like, all of the stuff that people were writing, and people were accusing us of, lying. And then some of the teachers who were supporting us were fired, and everybody was screaming, where are those victims? Where are those victims? And I decided just, like, at some point. It was, like, right the day before my first ever final in the university to write on Facebook that, 'hello, here I am'.
Revekka:And I wrote a post. And then it, like, just started going downhill from there because everything just devolved. There were articles, articles about how everybody in the school are Jews, how, or, like, with Western views, etcetera. Because it also coincides with, like, this whole propaganda against the, elite and the oppositional elite especially. And we are clearly that.
Revekka:People were, like, finding my most innocent pictures and then posting them with, like, 'don't you see she's clearly a whore?' People whom I knew from my childhood who are, like, friends of my sister or, like, friends of my parents would be, like, 'I don't think we should believe her. She's clearly a lying attention seeking little slut'. And, like, people started sending me letters of, like, hate from all over the country. And at the same time, I was having a Stockholm Syndrome and I was having, like, a lot of, like, unprocessed trauma.
Revekka:And the trauma was coming up at the same time as the, like, me being like, 'Oh no! Did I do the wrong thing coming up?' And at the same time, people telling you that you are a worthless being and including people whom you know. Like, for instance, I had a brief, romance in my gap year after my 11th grade and before I got into the university in the US. And it was just like a nice kind of little thing.
Revekka:And I told him everything about both Mark and Meerson, and he was from also the Sambation crowd. And the guy wrote about me that I should, like, basically a message in poem, in, like, poetic form that I should fucking die, and that I am a liar and stuff. And I remember that it hurt. It was really hurtful.
Yegor:So the crisis showed that, it it explained to a degree why Boris was able to do what he was doing because he knew no one in sane mind would report him to police because we live in an authoritarian state which oppresses journalists, human rights activists, etcetera. So you don't go to your enemy even to report such a serious crime as abuse. Right? Abuse is as serious as manslaughter, battery, murder. It is an extremely grave criminal offence, which people often forget, I guess, about.
Yegor:And as a survivor, you torture yourself with all sorts of thoughts about the abuse. You come back to it on and on. You act upon them also in, you know, self damaging ways. So abuse plants the seed of self destruction in you. And then you decide to speak up.
Yegor:You want to get rid of it. You know the abuser is an abhorrent person, and you know that the board was covering him for years, but you hope that the public, including its core of supposedly well educated people, will be on the right side.
Yegor:But you face something else. A lot of people did believe us, and I'm eternally grateful to them. But unfortunately, even more wanted to protect the school. And there were, I would say, 2 groups, 2 types of protectors. The first group were just deniers, liars, bullies, you know, friends and relatives of the board, people with completely lacking moral compass, like my classmate who wrote with quite some followers. Right? He wrote a post which basically meant that if I was abused, I deserved it because I caused it by myself. There were relatives of the board members walking around Facebook, being cynical about everything.
Yegor:But the second group of the so called 'Let's Save the School Protectors', I think left more scars on me. So those were the people of often with significant social standing in the intelligence who formally acknowledged that abusing children is wrong, but focused mostly on protecting the school. And there were many forms of doing that, you know, from expressing direct support to expressing disgust with the scandal instead of expressing disgust with the abuse. So, unfortunately, I remember way too many posts and way too many remarks. And this you know, the intelligentsia's reaction to this story is probably enough for another podcast.
Nastya:But we'll get there in this one.
Yegor:But just to give an example, there was a woman named, Victoria Ivleva, an otherwise very famous Russian human rights defender photographer and very distant person with great civic courage. We were not close friends, but I knew her. She helped me get my 1st journalistic internship as a photographer at Novaya Gazeta. I helped her move apartments once. I was at her house several times, so we knew each other.
Yegor:She wrote a post about what wonderful things were happening in the school besides the affairs between teachers and students and expressed her support for Sergey Mendelevich and promise, you know, to come to the school the next day, which was the day of when the classes begin. And then already after my and Rivka's testimony... well, my and Rivka's revelation, she wrote another post in which she publicly called us traitors. And for us, I assume for Rivka too, but for me for sure, it triggered all the damaging impulses we were hoped to get rid of. We were sort of told, well, you want to get away from this, you can't. And the justification for it is that, well, we live in a small society, unrestricted political regime.
Yegor:You do favors to each other all the time. You build your careers using connections and not skills. And if you want to retain these benefits, you have to share the burdens as well. And the burden of self destruction is part of Russia's historical DNA of the last century and more. Right?
Yegor:It is a society that was killing and hurting itself in civil war, to the Laderian experiments, World War II, gulag, widespread violence in armed forces and internal troops in poverty, but probably, you know, above all, in daily disregard for human life and human dignity. And this goes for the whole society. Right? So facing the damage that was done to others means acknowledging the the damage that was done to you, and this can be unbearable. And if a society is such that large chunks of its intelligence, say, half, in order to simply keep going on emotionally, have to look the other way when dealing with abuse and rape of children, then it is unfortunately only natural that the majority of such society will easily look the other way when Russia is firing hundreds of rockets onto Ukrainian cities and sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to kill, occupy, and torture.
Yegor:To be very clear, you know, I've been to the the territories that Ukraine liberated in 2022. I've seen the ungraspable destruction. I am not comparing the damage. But these modes of thinking are not unrelated.
Nastya:What would you say to all the adults that failed to protect you from the abuse and failed to accept the consequences when you told them about what happened?
Yegor:Well, at different stages of the last years, I would say different things. Right? Immediately when the crisis was unraveling, I would say 'I don't blame them for the wrong reason'. I would honestly also think that, you know, the situation is exceptional. We are in such social circumstances that I understand why they don't want to cause more harm by reporting people.
Yegor:Then for many years, I would tell them, well, 'you suck because how on earth can you, adult human beings, say that things are complicated when you're dealing with the rape of children? Are you out of your mind?' It is a crime of comparable with manslaughter and murder, not robbery, not theft. It's very serious.
Yegor:It's one of the most serious crimes that exists on the penal code. Now I probably feel honestly sorry for them. I do hope that what we did actually helped some of them to also come to to terms with the violence that they themselves lived through. I don't have anything to tell them now.
Revekka:I have never felt so objectified in my whole life as I did during the scandal. A man cat calling you on the street and checking out your butt is nothing compared to what did with their is a word in Russian словоблудие. And I think literally it translates to word whoring. And that precisely describes what Russian was doing. I felt like I was enrolled in a highly unethical study the design of which included the rape of a semi random subset of school aged children.
Revekka:During the scandal, the brightest minds of Russian were discussing the impact such an event might have had on young and immature minds. While they were winning their prices in, I don't know, magniloquence and sophistication and God knows what else. I was completely stripped of humanity. No one ever asked me how I felt. No one ever asked me what I believe could have prevented it.
Revekka:No one ever asked me what how I thought or felt about it. What actually happened in more details And what saddens me the most is that even those people who said they're gonna be reforming the school, even they never asked me. And those people now either still teach in Russia or they teach abroad, and they think that this is how you do shit. I will not pretend that moral bankruptcy of people I once respected was not painful. It hurt. It hurt and it hurts now and it will probably hurt me in the future. I think it's just something about deep disappointment that stays on.
Revekka:But I'm also grateful because it allowed me to separate the good from the bad. To separate the people that I respect from people I do not wish to respect, to recognize people, Russian intelligence, snobbishness, narrow mindedness, vanity, lack of morality, self serving grandiloquence, I don't know, something like that. And it allowed me to start weeding it out of myself because I was taught all of this since childhood and I believe that I became a better person for that. I'm not proud of many that I made when those people were my role models, and I'm glad I could break free and not grow up into them. I probably should feel sorry for you, adults who failed me, because in order to justify pedophilia, in order to blame and objectify the victims and refuse to accept responsibility, you must be very sad and insecure and pathetic.
Revekka:But I do not feel any empathy. I think that empathy is a very limited resource, and in a world where people are currently people, animals, dogs, cats, humans are dying under bombs and where the whole cities are destroyed, I just don't have enough of it to spare for you. And because of that, I guess my main message is 'I wish you to burn in hell'.
Nastya:Sergey Mendelevich resigned from his position as a week after the accusations went public. And at the same time, the most unusual thing happened. Federal investigators in Russia began looking into the allegations described in the posts. Why do I call it unusual? Because, as I explained in the first episode, Russian authorities don't tend to take sexual violence cases seriously.
Nastya:But this was different. This was a well known school attended by the kids of intelligentsia. Within a few weeks, investigators opened a criminal case against Boris Meerson and Masha Nemzer, the young school chaperone we heard about in the last episode. And that was also a surprise to me because usually a preliminary investigation lasts for months or even years before a criminal case is opened. But not in this case, apparently.
Yegor:So on September 1st, the Russian investigative committee announced a preliminary investigation into this, and they reached out to me. By that time, there was immense public pressure to reveal more truth. Mine and Rivka's posts were not seen as sufficient, and people kept saying, well, you know, this is not enough. And the real whatever they meant by this, the real way to proceed is through the investigation, which is cynical because none of those people would do that themselves. They all were from the circles.
Yegor:So it was basically a way to silence us yet again. I take full responsibility for my actions. I am not ashamed of them, but they were done in this context. So I decided to speak to the investigative office. I did not take any active steps on that way.
Yegor:I responded to their invitation, and I gave the testimony sometime in September via Skype, and on the other. And the fact that I did respond to an invitation of a Russian investigative office ostracized me even more. There were there were quite some people who told me, you went to Gestapo when we live in a ghetto. You did the impossible thing. How on earth did you dare to do this?
Yegor:Well, I can only say, look at the information shit storm that you've created. And then Boris was placed on the federal wanted list in January 2017. And I think 5 days later in January 2017, on January 24th, he was ordered to be placed on international wanted list specifically in Israel and all other states that are parties to the Interpol.
Nastya:But, Boris escaped justice?
Yegor:Yes. Boris escaped justice.
Nastya:More on the next episode. The Adults in the Room is produced by Libo Libo Studio. All episodes are out now, so you can play the next one right away. This podcast has a website where you can find additional visual materials collected throughout our investigation and feedback contacts. The link is in the description box.
Nastya:This show is hosted, reported, and written by me, Nastya Krasilnikova. A huge thank you to my colleagues, researcher and fact checker, Vica Lobanova. Producers and editors, Nastya Medvedeva, Sam Colbert, and Dasha Cherkudinova. Composer and sound designer, Ildar Fattakhov, and the head of Libo Livo, Lika Kremer. Legal support provided by Michael Sfard and Alon Sapir from the Michael Sfard Law Office, and Sergey Markov, managing partner of the law firm Markov and Madaminov.
Nastya:Thank you for listening.