Please note that this event is not suitable for our English speaking only audiences, as no translation from Russian will be provided on this occasion. As part of our efforts to cater for our varied audiences and bring in a diversity of voices, some of our events now take an intimate chamber format and are conducted in Russian only.

In this talk, Dutch historian Gijs Kessler will discuss his acclaimed book Russia – The Country That Wants to Be Different. Twenty-five years from close-up (Россия: страна которая хочет быть другой. Двадцать пять лет – взгляд изнутри), a lucid and deep account of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation. The book was published in Dutch (the original title: Rusland – land dat anders wil zijn) and is now available in Russian translation.

Drawing on many years of living and working in post-Soviet Russia, Kessler will reflect on the hopes, contradictions, and disappointments that shaped the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and on how those experiences help explain Russia’s trajectory today. Rather than offering a purely political or sociological analysis, the discussion will focus on lived experience: the promise of freedom in the 1990s, the uncertainty and social trauma of economic reform, the stabilisation of the 2000s, and the gradual hollowing-out of democratic expectations.

Gijs Kessler is a historian and writer, based in the Netherlands. He is a specialist on the social and economic history of Russia and the Soviet Union and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. From 2002 to 2016 he worked and lived in Moscow, where he taught, next to his work for IISH, at the prestigious BA programme of the New Economic School. His research interests include the history of the family, migration, labour, and the peasant economy. He is a co-founder of the Electronic Repository of Russian Historical Statistics, an online repository of data on the social and economic development of Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century.

In 2012-2015 Gijs curated an exhibition on the family in Russia in the twentieth century, Together and Apart, which was on show in the Netherlands, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Vladivostok. At the occasion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution he co-produced a film on the life and work of Dutch architect Han van Loghem in Soviet Kemerovo in the late 1920s – Строители будущего (2018).

Olga Bychkova is a prominent journalist, radio and television presenter best known for her long tenure at the influential radio station Echo of Moscow (1999–2022). She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Ural State University and built her career across major Russian media, including Moskovsky Komsomolets, Moskovskiye Novosti, Radio Liberty, NTV and TV Center. Olga has been recognised for her coverage of key political events in post-Soviet Russia. Her reporting and interviews have played a significant role in shaping public debate in post-Soviet Russia. 

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