How did Russia arrive at its present political reality? This panel brings together shortlisted authors Mikhail Fishman and Andrei Kolesnikov, whose books offer two distinct perspectives on the forces that have shaped contemporary Russia, and Ekaterina Schulmann, renowned Russian political scientist and public intellectual. Drawing on their deep understanding of the inner workings of Russian politics, they will explore the turning points that transformed the country over the past three decades. The panel will be moderated by Laurie Bristow, former Ambassador to Russia and the chair of this year’s Book Prize judging panel.

In The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia, Mikhail Fishman tells the story of post-Soviet Russia through the life, and fate, of Boris Nemtsov. He examines the hopes of the 1990s, the consolidation of power and control under Putin, and the choices that led Russia away from democratic reform.

In The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin's Ideology Took The Nation Hostage, Andrei Kolesnikov explores the ideological transformation of Russia under Putin. He argues that propaganda, memory politics and an obsession with Russian exceptionalism reshaped Russian society and politics, paving the way for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Together, these two perspectives offer a compelling account of how Russia's political trajectory was shaped – and what it reveals about the country's present and future.

This event is part of the Pushkin House Book Prize Festival. Festival Passes are now on sale, which offer priority access to all events in the festival programme.

Sir Laurie Bristow KCMG is President of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. He served as Ambassador to Afghanistan in 2021 and as Ambassador to Russia from 2016 to 2020, and senior roles in London included COP26 Regional Ambassador for China, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. His book Kabul: Final Call (2024) is a first hand account of the events leading up to the Taliban's overthrow of the Afghan government and the subsequent evacuation.

Mikhail Fishman is one of Russia's leading political journalists. Since the late 1990s, he has chronicled Russia's political life as editor-in-chief of Russian Newsweek and The Moscow Times, and as the host of the flagship weekly news programme on TV Rain, Russia's leading independent television channel. In 2017, he co-directed The Man Who Was Too Free, an award-winning documentary on Boris Nemtsov, which inspired his bestselling book Преемник. История Бориса Немцова и страны, в которой он не стал президентом (2022). Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Fishman left Russia and now lives and works in Amsterdam. The English translation of his book, The Successor, was published by Pushkin Press in January 2026.

Andrei Kolesnikov is a Russian political analyst, journalist, and columnist specialising in Russian domestic politics, political culture, and the evolution of the Putin regime. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center (2015–2024). A graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow State University, he has written extensively on Russian politics and society for both Russian and international media, including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Le Monde, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He was awarded the 2021 Yegor Gaidar Prize for Outstanding Contribution to the Study of History.

Ekaterina Schulmann is a leading Russian political scientist, Pushkin House trustee and book lover whose research focuses on legislative institutions, bureaucracy, and policy-making in modern autocratic systems, particularly in Russia. Since relocating to Berlin in 2022, she has held a non-resident fellowship at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and lectures in political science at Freie Universität Berlin's Osteuropa Institut. Schulmann is the author of several political science publications in Russian and a co-author of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (Brookings Institution Press, 2018). 

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