Poet Maria Stepanova. Plus: Inside the FT newsroom
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, guest host Marc Filippino discusses the FT's war coverage in Ukraine with our Editor, Roula Khalaf. How does a news organisation make decisions during wartime? Then Marc talks with Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize last year. Maria tells us why so many intellectuals are leaving Russia and what it’s like to be Russian and against the war.
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Want to say hi? We love hearing from you. Email us at [email protected]. We’re on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and Lilah is on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap.
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The first US FT Weekend Festival is on Saturday, May 7 in Washington, DC. To attend virtually or in person, buy tickets at http://ft.weekendfestival.com – use the discount code FTFriends2022 for 10% off.
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Links and mentions from the episode:
–Key coverage of the war in Ukraine is free to read: https://www.ft.com/content/77ab8dcf-cb02-4e57-aff0-85c8a84f5a1f
-In late March the FT published an exchange on NATO’s red lines between our Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolf and Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator Gideon Rachman: https://www.ft.com/content/7640ea89-cc1f-4e41-a64f-95e88de19454
–Maria Stepanova, ‘The War of Putin’s Imagination’: https://www.ft.com/content/c2797437-5d3f-466a-bc63-2a1725aa57a5
–Maria’s International Booker Prize shortlisted novel is called ‘In Memory of Memory.’ Here’s a quick review we ran when it first appeared in English: https://www.ft.com/content/bad0513d-f67c-4e0e-9b2d-962040fa6422
–This weekend’s FT Magazine cover story, ‘21 days in Ukraine: a diary’: https://www.ft.com/content/391232c8-b05c-480f-a189-4e9e21d1bd4a#comments-anchor
–You can also keep up with FT coverage by following @financialtimes on Instagram and Twitter.
–Marc Fillipino is on Twitter at @mfilippino and hosts the FT News Briefing. You can listen at the following link, or by searching for ‘FT News Briefing’ wherever you get your podcasts: https://www.ft.com/ft-news-briefing
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Garrett Tiedemann.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When Russia's war on Ukraine started at 5 a.m. Moscow time on Thursday, February 24th, the F.T.'s |
| 0:06.7 | editor-in-chief Rula Haloff was on vacation. For months, Putin had been amassing troops along |
| 0:12.6 | Ukraine's border, though he was also saying that they weren't intended for Ukraine. |
| 0:18.6 | And as the head of the Financial Times, Rula and her team were ready, all of them. |
| 0:24.0 | The editors, the journalists on the ground, they had been thinking about how to plan for a war |
| 0:29.1 | that wasn't supposed to start but could arrive at any moment. |
| 0:33.4 | I remember very clearly it was on Christmas Eve that we had our first meeting on Ukraine, |
| 0:40.7 | literally Christmas Eve. |
| 0:42.0 | I called various editors. |
| 0:44.4 | We had a hangout, and we started planning for what may come. |
| 0:49.1 | And I had been at the Munich Security Conference just a few days before the war. And I'd had a lot of |
| 0:55.7 | briefings about how intelligence agencies expected the war to unfold. And so on Wednesday, |
| 1:04.0 | I was, I was mentally prepared and I was actually away on holiday. So I watched CNN for hours and hours and feeling very frustrated that I'm not actually in |
| 1:18.3 | London and in the newsroom at that time. |
| 1:21.2 | But we weren't really, by that time, we weren't actually surprised. |
| 1:27.3 | We were expecting it. |
| 1:30.7 | Hey there. I'm Mark Filipino. I'm filling in for Lila today. Normally, I host the daily news |
| 1:36.9 | podcast at the FT. It's called the FT News Briefing. If you haven't already, you should check it out. |
| 1:43.2 | On the news briefing, and just about everywhere |
| 1:45.8 | else at the FT, Ukraine has dominated our coverage over the past few weeks. And Rula plays a |
| 1:52.2 | primary role in shaping that coverage. She's led the FT since January 2020. She started about |
| 1:59.3 | two months before the pandemic hit the Western world. |
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