Sunrise Outlawed: Stories from Russia

Gregory and Dina
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Sunrise Outlawed: Stories from Russia is a podcast hosted by Gregory and Dina—brought to life with AI-generated voices. We dig into the myths, surprises, and humor of Russian life beyond the headlines. Each episode unravels one idea at a time, with stories and research you’ll want to revisit. Explore more https://sunriseoutlawed.com/

  1. 1d ago

    The Blank Line on the Certificate

    In 2003, two Moscow economists signed a death certificate for the US dollar. Mikhail Khazin and Andrey Kobyakov's The Decline of the Dollar Empire and the End of Pax Americana predicted a world depression on the scale of 1929, a dollar worth a fraction of itself, and Russia carved up between foreign currency zones. Its fans say it called 2008, five years early. Almost none of it happened, and the book keeps coming back into print. This is the sixth episode of our patron-only series on the books that shaped how post-Soviet Russia argues with itself. We read the book itself: the GKO pyramid of 1998 recast as a dress rehearsal for America, the "broken ruler" theory of the dollar, and a forecast whose date has been rubbed out and rewritten for twenty-three years. This is the free half. The full episode — Roosevelt's machine, the gold conspiracies, the elite that "knew the main pahan sits in Washington," and what readers were really buying — is on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "The Blank Line on the Certificate").A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the checking of every number the book got wrong — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) A death certificate for the dollar(01:27) The book that "called 2008"(03:10) Khazin, Kobyakov and the 1998 legend(06:28) Moscow 1998 as America in miniature(11:50) The broken rulerPreview ends — full episode on Patreon

  2. Oct 14

    Coffin Money

    Dmitry Glukhovsky's new novel, Registration, is about what a wounded Russian contract soldier is worth to the women around him, and how fast everyone does the math. Ulyana is thirty and works the front desk of a basement spa in Vologda. She's pregnant. The father signed an army contract, went silent near Chasiv Yar, and has just called from a military hospital outside Moscow: alive, badly wounded. Her mother's first question isn't how he is. It's what Ulyana is to him on paper. A girlfriend gets nothing. A wife with a child gets a share of the money if he dies. In 2002, Glukhovsky gave away Metro 2033 on his own website, and more than two million people read it online before it ever reached print. Twenty-four years later he has done the same with Registration, this time for readers in a country whose courts have sentenced him in absentia to eight years in a penal colony. The Russian émigré press has argued about little else since. We go through the money (a recruitment poster promising five and a half million rubles for the first year), the little lawyer every character keeps in their head, the Moscow bookseller who boxes up his own banned books before anyone asks him to, and the critics who say a man who left had no right to write it. Dina thinks the book is harder on women. Gregory doesn't. Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "Coffin Money").A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the forty-second negotiations with our own consciences — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) What are you to him right now?(01:18) A novel the whole emigration read(02:50) Glukhovsky: from Metro to exile(06:27) The story, no spoilers(08:49) Deathonomics(12:49) The lawyer in everyone's head(16:09) Our Patreon: Krylov's Behavior(16:53) Maxim and the fig underground(21:50) Is the book unfair to women?(25:44) The critics and the right to write(29:22) The white coat and Mitya in Israel(33:03) What Registration registers

  3. Sep 29

    Hard to Live, Comfortable to Die

    Why do Russian men die so early? A Russian man can expect to live almost eleven years less than a Russian woman, one of the widest gaps anywhere — and in March 2025 Rosstat stopped publishing life expectancy broken down by sex. We start with Sudno, the Molchat Doma track that went around the world on TikTok. Its title means a hospital bedpan, the thing you're handed when you can't get up. Then the numbers. Russia has two official suicide rates, nearly a factor of two apart. Men were 83% of suicides in 1994, and 83% in 2019. A whole category of deaths gets filed as "undetermined intent." Then what the "it's their own fault" story leaves out: the real-man script, the male company that disappeared with the factories, the broken social elevators, the skuf and Dvach, a Duma deputy calling volunteer soldiers "surplus people." And a state that cuts alcohol sales in one region to two hours a day while putting the male mortality data out of sight. Sources and links to everything we mention in the episode, including the further reading at the end, are in the essay "Hard to Live, Comfortable to Die" on Substack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedA note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the reconciling of statistics that refuse to agree with each other — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) A song about a bedpan(02:41) Eleven years: the life expectancy gap(06:00) Suicide: two numbers, one country(12:19) "It's their own fault"(15:02) Be a real man(19:15) Family, divorce and the frustration(22:20) Broken elevators, Dvach and the skuf(24:58) Surplus people(26:43) Does the state want men to live?(27:23) Vologda: two hours a day to buy alcohol(30:21) Back to the bedpan(31:38) Further reading(33:00) On Patreon: Krylov's "Behavior"

  4. Sep 21

    How Decent People Do Terrible Things with a Clear Conscience

    Why do decent people commit mass evil with a clear conscience? In 1997 a Russian programmer-turned-philosopher named Konstantin Krylov answered that question in a thin treatise called Behavior, and his answer is a card trick: take the golden rule, delete two words, and an ethic a civilization can run on becomes a rule for a mob. Nobody notices, because the sentence still sounds the same. This is the fifth episode of our patron-only series on the books that shaped how post-Soviet Russia argues with itself. Krylov wrote science fiction under one name and comic verse under another, converted to Zoroastrianism, grew up around a KGB-attached institute where his mother ran a laboratory, and derived the whole of human ethics from two columns and a minus sign. We keep four of his ideas — behavior as what you know how to do, power as owning the thing you belong to, trust as predictability rather than warmth, culture as a machine for not doing things — and then follow the system he built on them, up to the point where he poses the question the book exists to answer. This is the free half. What the full episode adds: the two deleted words, the old Russian word for what remains, the diagnosis of Russia (borrowed virtues, original defects), the 12-year cycles that put the end of Russian democracy at 2025, the intelligentsia as a brawler in a queue, and the pages where the author breaks his own rule without noticing. It's on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "How Decent People Do Terrible Things with a Clear Conscience").A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the fortnight spent with a 200-page treatise that has never been translated — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) Cold open: two edits to the golden rule(02:19) Konstantin Krylov and Behavior, 1997(03:29) Biography: KGB institute, two degrees(06:33) The book: lecture notes, no bibliography(07:03) Four ideas worth keeping(10:36) Five values, and why justice is empty(13:14) Four ethical systems on a compass(18:39) The zero case and who counts as evil(22:41) The question: decent people, mass evilPreview ends — full episode on Patreon.

  5. Sep 14

    Raising Putin's Children

    Russia now starts on its citizens in the maternity ward. In 2025 a hospital sent newborns home in pilot hats for Victory Day; a kindergarten called the School of Patriots has five-year-olds taking a model rifle apart; every schoolchild in the country sits through a weekly class called Conversations About Important Things; there is one history textbook for every classroom and a social-studies textbook edited by Dmitry Medvedev; and as of this September, military training is a school subject of its own for the first time since the Soviet era. Drones are on the syllabus. How did it get here? In the 1990s patriotic education in Russia simply stopped. The Kremlin's first attempts to restart it — Walking Together, Nashi, a lingerie calendar for Putin's birthday, pro-Putin superhero comics — bought a generation's attendance but not its belief, and in the winter of 2011–12 the whole youth machine failed to stop the protests. The state's conclusion was to give up on adults and start with children. Hence the Movement of the First, 13 million members with Putin as chair; Yunarmia, 1.8 million, proud that 12,000 of its alumni have gone to the front; convicted criminals giving "lessons of courage"; a music video in which schoolchildren promise to follow Uncle Vova into the last battle; and universities that have removed 86 students and 92 teachers for politics. Half of it is absurd, half of it is dangerous, and all of it is one pipeline. The episode we mention on Igor Shafarevich, "From Samizdat to State Doctrine," is on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "Raising Putin's Children").A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the reading of an entire state history textbook cover to cover so you don't have to — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) Cold open: the cancelled ceremony(03:04) Intro: from void to pipeline(03:52) Walking Together and Nashi(09:10) Calendars, comics, glamour fascism(12:44) 2011–12: the machine stalls, the pivot(14:12) Maternity ward and kindergarten(18:48) Conversations About Important Things(20:55) One textbook, one story(23:00) Military training returns to school(26:32) Movement of the First and Yunarmia(29:30) Convicts and Uncle Vova(32:21) Universities: silenced, not neutral(34:53) Patriotism vs indoctrination(38:30) Further reading and outro

  6. Aug 31

    The Grammar of Doubt

    Since March 2022 it has been a criminal offence in Russia to say the war is going badly. So Russians mention, very casually, that there's been a bit of a hlopok — a pop — downtown, and everyone in earshot understands exactly what they mean. This episode is about the vocabulary that doubt built. Almost none of these words were coined by opponents of the war. Nearly every one was minted in total earnest by a governor's press office, a defence ministry spokesman, or the president himself, then captured and handed straight back as a joke. A governor said hlopok so often that journalists renamed him Mr Pop. Konashenkov called the flight from Snake Island a step of goodwill and the Kharkiv collapse a regrouping. Putin said, on camera, that Russians get bored without a bit of dvizhuha — party slang for a good night out — and every burning refinery since has been the dvizhuha he asked for. An actor revived goida, a 16th-century shout made by Ivan the Terrible's executioners, on Red Square; within two weeks Jack Nicholson was screaming it in edited clips of The Shining. Along the way: ikhtamnyet, deep concern, red lines, dogovornyak — the fixed match everyone assumes this war will end in — and the drones that soldiers call little birdies. Victor Klemperer, keeping his diary in Dresden, described the language of a dictatorship as tiny doses of arsenic. What Russia is running now is that mechanism backwards. Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "The Grammar of Doubt").A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the tracing of every one of these words back to the mouth it first came out of — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) How to call a state a liar(02:19) Klemperer and the arsenic doses(04:56) Hlopok: the pop that was a blast(07:42) Goodwill gestures and regroupings(10:34) Dvizhuha: Putin writes the joke(13:52) Goida: an executioner's shout(22:31) A word from our Patreon(23:52) We can do it again, until we can't(25:46) They're not there(27:08) Deep concern and red lines(29:52) Dogovornyak: the fixed match(35:09) Birdies and Baba Yaga(37:34) What the grammar adds up to

  7. Aug 24

    Igor Shafarevich's Russophobia

    Russia now argues at the UN Security Council that the world suffers from Russophobia. The word was revived by Igor Shafarevich — a first-rank Soviet mathematician, founder of the Moscow school of algebraic geometry, and from 1971 a member of Sakharov's human rights committee. He wrote the essay in the late 1970s for a few dozen readers in typescript. A nationalist journal printed it in 1989 and it reached millions. This is the fourth episode of our patron-only series on the books that shaped how post-Soviet Russia argues with itself. We follow the word rather than the man. It was Western before it was Russian: British pamphleteers used it in the 1830s about their own government's fear of Russia, and when the poet Tyutchev reached for it in 1867 he aimed it at his own countrymen. This is the free half. It stops where Shafarevich goes looking for a name for his enemy. The rest of the book, and the ending that locks it so no stranger can check it, is on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "Igor Shafarevich's Russophobia").A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the reading of a book that has never had a proper English edition — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) The letter SHA(01:10) The mathematician(03:15) From maths to dissent(07:00) Samizdat, then millions(08:04) Where the word came from(09:45) The half that lands punches(13:00) Plans for Russia(14:51) Preview ends — full on Patreon

  8. Aug 15

    The Republic in White Stone

    The most inventive medieval architecture in Russia wasn't built by tsars or princes. It was built by neighbourhood committees in Pskov — a frontier republic on the Estonian border that ran its own town-hall assembly, put up around forty churches in the fifteenth century alone, and paid for all of it with local limestone and not enough money. What makes those buildings strange is that they don't pretend. Look at a Pskov bell wall and the piers holding it up are different thicknesses, each one sized to the weight of its bell. The churches grew sideways rather than up, because sideways was cheaper. The bell towers sit off-centre. The doors don't line up. Ten of them made the UNESCO list in 2019. The tradition died in 1510. Nothing burned. Moscow annexed the republic, took the veche bell down off the belfry, and within weeks had deported three hundred leading families and moved in settlers of its own. The buildings survived. The conditions that produced them did not. The rest is echoes. Two hundred Pskov masons conscripted east in 1554 to build the stone city of Kazan. Yuri Spegalsky, the restorer who pulled down eighteenth-century bell towers to recover a medieval silhouette, and left behind a city that looks older than it is. Alexei Shchusev, who was remixing Pskov churches before he designed Lenin's mausoleum, and who put one on the Adriatic in Bari. And a Russian Orthodox parish in Reykjavik that has been waiting since 2011 for the most Pskovian church of this century, and still hasn't broken ground. No Kremlin, no Red Square, not one golden dome. Just beauty, politics, destruction, and a half-built church in Iceland. Sources at https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawed (essay "The Republic in White Stone") — the photographs live there too, and this is an episode that badly wants them.A note on the voices: they're AI. Everything else — the research, the writing, the counting of the piers — is stubbornly human. Sunrise Outlawed is a social-art project. Say hello: hello@sunriseoutlawed.comFree guide — Russian Chthonic: ten dark songs in ten videos, mapping the emotional geology of Russian music from the 1990s to now → https://sunriseoutlawed.com/#feel-russiaSite: https://sunriseoutlawed.comSubstack: https://substack.com/@sunriseoutlawedPatreon: https://patreon.com/SunriseOutlawed Chapters(00:00) Piers that tell the truth(01:52) Why Pskov, not Moscow(03:05) Two fortresses on the Velikaya(04:45) The Battle on the Ice monument(06:26) Two visits, thirty years apart(08:41) The white churches and UNESCO(10:28) A republic that built by committee(11:57) Form follows budget(14:46) Inside: a whisper, not a shout(18:17) Spegalsky and selective authenticity(22:25) Bonus episode: Shafarevich(25:26) 1510: Moscow takes the bell(28:00) Two hundred masons sent to Kazan(29:20) Shchusev's one-man revival(33:33) The unfinished church in Reykjavik(36:40) Where to go from here

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Sunrise Outlawed: Stories from Russia is a podcast hosted by Gregory and Dina—brought to life with AI-generated voices. We dig into the myths, surprises, and humor of Russian life beyond the headlines. Each episode unravels one idea at a time, with stories and research you’ll want to revisit. Explore more https://sunriseoutlawed.com/

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