The Integrative Learning Center at UMass Amherst is a long way, in every sense, from the Moscow newsrooms and detention rooms where Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev learned the vocabulary they now teach. On October 20, 2026, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m., the two exiled dissidents will appear at the ILC at 650 N Pleasant Street to talk about their new book, "How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America." The event is free and open to the public.
The premise is simple and a little strange: Americans worried about creeping authoritarianism do not need to invent a language for what they are seeing. Russians already built one, over generations of living with it. Kuznetsova and Storyev have gathered one hundred idioms and turns of phrase, from "apparatchik" to "samizdat," and arranged them as a kind of field guide. Some entries name structures of power directly, like "power vertical," the term for a hyper-centralized state. Others are jokes that double as survival tools, like mnogohodovochka, or "master plan," the deadpan label Russians attach to bizarre and misguided state measures.
The book, published by Liveright in September 2026, grew out of an essay the pair wrote for the New York Times opinion section in June 2025, titled "Here's What's Happening in America, in Six (Mostly) Russian Words." In that piece and in the book, they argue that recognizing a slide into authoritarianism is hardest from the inside. As they put it in an excerpt published by Foreign Policy in September 2026, today's dictators do not necessarily wear military uniforms; in public speeches they talk about freedom and democracy, and their subjects often have access to world-class technology, visa-free travel, and middle-class comforts. Growing up in early-2000s Russia, they wrote, they watched a stillborn democracy trampled by riot police in faceless helmets, sleek media operatives, greasy oligarchs, and a cabal of supporting characters who helped Vladimir Putin centralize power and smother civic life.
Both authors know that world professionally. Kuznetsova was a human rights defender in Russia, including as a spokesperson for OVD-Info, one of the country's largest human rights organizations. OVD-Info was set up in 2011; it monitors human rights in Russia, and Kuznetsova has described it as playing a role in Russian society similar to the ACLU's in America. She is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and a fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center there. She now lives between London and San Francisco.
Storyev grew up between Russia and the United States and worked as a conflict correspondent and human rights defender, reporting from Myanmar, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine, among other places. He led the English-language department at OVD-Info and is now its English managing editor; the organization describes his views as his own and not the organization's position. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins and an MPhil from Oxford, where he is based, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Foreign Policy, and the Financial Times. His beat, as he describes it, is authoritarianism and societal collapse.
The pairing matters. One author watched the machinery from inside a Russian human rights organization; the other has covered wars and upheavals from Washington to Kharkiv. Together they make the case that the language of double-speak is not merely descriptive but tactical. A vernacular that let ordinary Russians talk about authoritarianism, and subvert it, with a healthy dose of humor and irony is also a set of handles for grabbing hold of something slippery. Naming a thing, the book suggests, is the first step toward refusing it.
The UMass talk is part of a fall 2026 tour that has taken the pair to Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law on October 5, and to Berkeley's Institute of International Studies, where they appeared in its Authoritarianism in Focus speaker series. At Stanford the discussion was framed around the mechanics of authoritarian consolidation and the strategies available for resisting it, drawing comparisons between the Russian experience and current U.S. politics. The Amherst event, hosted at the Integrative Learning Center, follows the same arc: a glossary that is also an argument, and a warning delivered with a punchline.
For anyone who has ever wondered what an apparatchik actually is, or why a "master plan" is a Russian punchline rather than a compliment, the hour and a half at the ILC promises to be less a lecture than a language lesson, and a timely one. The event runs from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at 650 N Pleasant Street in Amherst.