Born and raised in Moscow and educated in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Gavriel Shapiro is Professor Emeritus of Comparative and Russian Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993), Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” (1998), The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009), The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (2014), Thanksgiving All Year Round: A Memoir (2016), and Exploring Vladimir Nabokov’s Creative Universe: Themes and Devices (2026), and the editor of Nabokov at Cornell (2003). He has also contributed numerous articles to various scholarly periodicals and critical collections, most of which focus on Nabokov and his literary legacy.

Editors:

Claudia Jensen is co-author, with Stepan Shamin, Ingrid Maier, and Daniel Waugh, of Russia’s Theatrical Past: Court Entertainment in the Seventeenth Century (2021), and author of Musical Cultures in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2009). She co-edited Nikolai Findeizen’s History of Music in Russia (2008). Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently an affiliate at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington.

Russell E. Martin is Distinguished Professor of History at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495–1745 (2021) and has published two other monographs and five collected volumes. His articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Russian History, The Sixteenth-Century Journal, Manuscripta, and elsewhere.

Stepan Shamin is a senior researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Kuranty XVII stoletiia (Kuranty in the 17th century, 2011) and co-author (with Claudia Jensen, Ingrid Maier, and Daniel Waugh) of Russia’s Theatrical Past: Court Entertainment in the Seventeenth Century (2021). He has also published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and collected volumes.

Muhammad Imran is an independent researcher and author from Hyderabad, Pakistan, specializing in international relations, great power competition, and European foreign policy. His previous book, The Competing Strategic Interests of China, Russia, the US, and the EU, provided a comprehensive analysis of the geopolitical strategies shaping the contemporary global order. His overall research bridges realist, liberal, and constructivist perspectives in international relations theory.

John A. Gentry is Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics, in Washington, DC, and an adjunct instructor with the School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. He served for 12 years as an intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and is a retired U.S. Army Reserve officer, with most assignments in special operations and intelligence arenas. Gentry has written extensively on intelligence topics book. His most recent book is Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence (Academica Press, 2025). He received his Ph.D. in political science from The George Washington University.

Akhmed Zakaev is the Prime Minister in Exile of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (CRI). He was born in 1959 into a family deported, along with the rest of the Chechen population, by Stalin’s regime in 1944. Zakaev graduated from acting and choreography schools in Grozny. In 1977, he was admitted to Voronezh State Academy of Arts and subsequently worked at the Chechen National Theatre. In 1994 he became Minister of Culture of the independent Chechen government of Djohar Dudaev and Commander of the Western Group for the Defense of Ichkeria. Zakaev played a crucial role in negotiations with Moscow, which led to the Russo-Chechen peace treaty of 1997, which Russia later violated. He opposed the rise of radical Islam in Chechnya, alleging a link between Islamist extremism and Russia’s covert global pro-terrorism policy. In 2002, Russia accused Zakaev, by then in exile, of involvement in a series of crimes, including the hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre in 2002 which ended in a catastrophic loss of life. In 2003, a British court declared the accusations groundless and politically motivated. On February 25, 2022, the second day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zakaev issued a statement at a rally in defense of Ukraine before the European Parliament in Brussels. Zakaev has spoken in the European Parliament and the legislatures of Italy, Lithuania, Romania, and other countries. He is the author of Subjugate or Exterminate! (Academica Press, 2018) and Russia, Chechnya, and the West (Academica Press, 2022).

Translator: Arch Tait learned Russian in London and at Moscow State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the University of Cambridge and from 1993 was UK editor of the Glas New Russian Writing translation series. He has translated more than forty books by leading Russian authors of fiction and non-fiction, including Alexei Navalny’s Patriot, which was voted Book of the Year at the 2025 British Book Awards and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in the United States. He has translated books by Nobel Prize winners Mikhail Gorbachev and Svetlana Alexiyevich, as well as the first two volumes of the memoirs of Akhmed Zakaev.

Gavriel Shapiro is Professor Emeritus of Comparative and Russian Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993), Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” (1998), The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009), The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (2014), and Thanksgiving All Year Round: A Memoir (2016), and the editor of Nabokov at Cornell (2003). He has also contributed numerous articles and chapters to various scholarly periodicals and critical collections, most of which are devoted to Nabokov and his literary legacy.

Kakhaber Kalichava received his Ph.D. from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in 2019, with a focus on recent conflicts in Georgia and their broader international implications. Dr. Kalichava completed an MA thesis examining the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, “The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 in Georgian and English-Language Scholarship: A Survey of Historical, Ethnical, Political, and Legal Aspects of the Conflict,” which was published in 2016. Since 2013, Dr. Kalichava has been a contributing member of the editorial team of the popular Georgian historical magazine Istoriani. He also lectures at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, where he teaches graduate courses, and teaches history and global politics at New School International School of Georgia. A past research scholar of the Erasmus Mundus program in Poland, he has also developed an English-language course designed for the program’s exchange students. Dr. Kalichava also serves as an international examiner for history, global politics, and the extended essay components of the international baccalaureate curriculum.

Gaël-Georges Moullec is a specialist in Russian History and the history of the international communist movement. Having served as a staff officer at NATO Headquarters, he is currently lecturer at the University of Paris XIII and the Polytechnic University of Valenciennes, and Associate Researcher and Chair of Geopolitics at Rennes School of Business. He is the author of eight books including Moscou – 1917: Les rapports d’Albert Remes, consul du Royaume de Belgique and Trois instants de printemps, le renseignement diplomatique soviétique dans la France gaulliste.

The Synodal School of Liturgical Music was founded in 1992 to train choir conductors, singers, and church readers in the liturgical music tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, focusing primarily on the parishes of the Russian diaspora. The school offers courses in music theory, sight-singing, Church Slavonic, church music history, liturgics, liturgical performance practice, voice, and choral methods. It is based at the Holy Dormition Convent in Nanuet, New York.

Father Andrei Papkov is a Russian Orthodox Archpriest and Founder and President of the Synodal School of Liturgical Music of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). He holds a master’s degree in vocal performance from New England Conservatory and is the chairman of the Synodal Liturgical Music Commission (ROCOR).