Live podcast: Dissent Lab with Sergei Lebedev

Each episode features a modern-day Havel: The Vaclav Havel Center presents this unforgettable series.

Vaclav Havel was a writer, human rights activist, and eventual world leader whose political fight for freedom in what was once Czechoslovakia helped bring about the 1989 Velvet Revolution. As the 21st Century finds many governments tilting away from democracy and the protection of human rights, people across the world want to know how to move forward.

This podcast features conversations with contemporary dissidents who have faced imprisonment, torture, and exile. They all follow in the footsteps of Havel, fighting to free their people from oppression and bring democracy to their homelands. Each episode features a modern-day Havel, who has personally resisted authoritarians and authoritarianism — at great personal cost. These are lessons that can’t be learned in a history class.

The second discussion features Sergei Lebedev, an acclaimed Russian writer and journalist whose work explores the legacy of Soviet repression, historical memory, and the lasting impact of totalitarianism in contemporary Russia.

Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist, and journalist. His literary works—six of them translated into English by Antonina W. Bouis for New Vessel Press, have received great acclaim. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as “the best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” He has been awarded the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté and currently lives in Germany.

Copies of Sergei Lebedev’s books will be available for purchase at the event, followed by an opportunity to have them signed by the author.

Lebedev will be interviewed at the Bohemian National Hall screening room by U.S. journalist Peter Green, a former New York Times correspondent who covered the Velvet Revolution and the birth of the Czech Republic.