Pushkin House is partnering with Zima Club to organise an event for the Russian-speaking community.
We bring together Owen Matthews, the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine, and political journalist Masha Slonim. They will discuss the current state of the global conflict, the events that preceded it and the mood among Russian elites, as well as the issues of potential further escalation and the possibility of negotiations.
This event is held in Russian and has been organised in collaboration with Zima.
Overreach, which is being published this month by Mudlark, investigates the story behind the Russian war in Ukraine and presents the first concise history of the first six months of direct military confrontation, relying on testimonies from Kremlin insiders as well as years of on-the-ground reporting from Russia and Ukraine. The author tries to answer the question of why Putin decided to invade and why there was nobody around him to prevent it.
Owen Matthews was born in London in 1971. He studied Modern History at Oxford University before beginning his career as a freelance journalist in Bosnia. His stories have appeared in a number of publications including The Spectator, Harper's & Queen, Private Eye, The Times and The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mail and The Times Literary Supplement. From 1995 to 1997 he worked at The Moscow Times, a daily English-language newspaper in Moscow, with forays into Lebanon and Afghanistan.
In 1997 Owen became a correspondent for Newsweek magazine, covering the second Chechen war as well as Russian politics and society. From 2001 to 2006 he was based in Istanbul, covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2006 he has combined the jobs of Newsweek's Moscow bureau chief and Istanbul correspondent. Owen is the author of Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War, published by Bloomsbury in June 2008, which was shortlisted for that year's Guardian First Books Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and listed among the Books of the Year by The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. Stalin's Children has been translated into 32 languages, and the French edition (Les Enfants de Staline, Belfond, 2009) was shortlisted for the Prix Medicis Etranger 2009.
Masha Slonim is a Russian and British journalist, radio host and educator. She studied at the Philology Department of Moscow State University before emigrating to the UK. Slonim took an active part in the Soviet dissident movement and passed A Chronicle of Current Events and other samizdat materials over to international journalists. In the US, she worked at Ardis Publishers. In the UK, she hosted programs for the BBC Russian Service and produced a number of films and TV programmes for BBC. In Russia, she was the presenter for a political programme. Slonim also taught at the Internews School of journalism.
Image courtesy of Zima Magazine.