Nancy Ries is Emerita Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. Her specialty is contemporary Russia, with an emphasis on state violence and corruption. She is fluent in Russian and has carried out extensive field research in Moscow and other cities since the 1980s. Among other works, she is the author of the book Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika, published in 1997, the article “Potato Ontology: Surviving Post-Socialism in Russia” which won the Cultural Anthropology Horizons Prize, “Cruel Speech: Russia’s Atrocity Rhetoric during its War on Ukraine,” published in 2023, and “Thugocracy: Bandit Regimes and State Capture” focusing on the organized criminal networks that facilitate oligarchic takeovers.