With the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Putin regime criminalized any expression of public opposition. Ilya Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis’ critical assessment of the regime and its war in public speeches, publications and podcasts, as well as their participation in organized protests, put them at risk of persecution. They left the country in 2022 and have since joined the Critical Theory Program at the University of California, Berkeley as visiting scholars. Matveev and Budraitskis have long collaborated on a number of projects, and since 2019 have co-hosted the popular Russian-language podcast Political Diary, which analyzes various aspects of the political system in Russia, the former Soviet Union, other authoritarian regimes around the world, as well as global opposition to authoritarianism. Matveev and Budraitskis are currently finalizing a manuscript for Stanford University Press entitled “The New Russian Imperialism: Capital and Ideology.”

As part of the Global Democratic Commons, Ilya Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis will collaborate with two Berkeley professors, Dylan Riley (sociology) and Alexei Yurchak (anthropology), and several graduate students from the departments of Anthropology, Sociology, History and Slavic Studies, to create an online platform called “Faultlines: War and Peace in the 21st century.” A key element of Faultlines will be the English-language version of the podcast “Political Diary”, which Budraitskis and Mateev have so far conducted in Russian. In addition to creating English-language episodes, the podcast will be expanded with new formats, including guest interviews, guest host participation, and expanded topics to discuss authoritarian trends in other regions of the world, from Brazil, China, India, and Turkey to the United States, Western Europe, and Africa. The Faultlines platform will also include visual and textual materials – articles written by participants and guests, recordings and transcriptions of seminars and conferences they hold, recordings and live conversations with invited speakers and scholars from other universities, etc.