Are your ears doing okay right now?

Do you know? I don’t. I’m wearing noise-canceling headphones, blocking out the din of traffic passing by so that instead Spotify’s Deep Focus playlist can let me do what it promises. 

It’s awesome … but I can’t help but wonder: Is this damaging my hearing?

Our increasingly urban world is increasingly loud, and it’s making us sick. 

You can safely listen to sounds at 85 decibels — something like the whir of a food processor or the ambient noise of a plane in flight — for up to eight hours. But because of the way hearing damage works, that time drops precipitously with small increases in volume from there. “If the sound goes up to 88 decibels, it is safe to listen to those same sounds for four hours,” according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. “And if the sound goes up to 91 decibels, you’re safe listening time is down to two hours.” As Wirecutter notes, “a rock concert that registers at 110 decibels could damage your hearing in just two minutes.” Yikes.

Rock concerts are one thing — it might be irresponsible, but I’m willing to suffer some minor damage to hear my favorite New York band live in all their glory. But I can only afford live music every now and then; I’m more worried about what I do every day. And while some hearing damage might be slight enough for your body to heal, if the sounds are too loud, or last too long, it can cause permanent irreparable damage. My colleague Edward Vega on the video team was concerned too. 

“This [worry] led to a full-on spiral,” he says in Vox’s latest video, “where I learned the horrifying statistic that over a billion young adults are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss.” 

We wear our headphones all the time — is that part of the problem? Are they destroying our hearing?

Quick pause: How your hearing can be damaged

Not to go too Science 101, but loud noises and sounds damage your hearing because sound waves are pressure waves — it’s vibrating the air. And in your ear, those vibrations hit your eardrum and reverberate it, the bones around it, and the inner ear.

Past your eardrum, in your inner ear, you have hair cells that absorb that energy and convert it into information to convey to your brain — letting you translate that energy into the sounds you hear. 

“When your hair cells are healthy, they stand up kind of like a field of wheat,” Dr. Amy Sarow, a clinical audiologist, told Vega. And when a sound wave that’s too strong, too loud, comes through, “it looks like a tornado has come through and they’re all twisted up. If you’re lucky, they’re able to sort of rebuild themselves back straight up, nice and tall, within 48 hours or so afterward. But if you do that often enough, or if the sound is loud enough, the damage is permanent.”

And here’s what scared me: 

“In graduate school we would actually have students come into our clinic and we would have them bring their favorite headphones, and play their favorite song on their phone,” she said. And then the research team would measure the sound levels that had been playing — “a lot of times it was 110 decibels or it was over 100 decibels.”

Who among us hasn’t turned the volume up for our favorite song — especially if you’re trying to overpower a loud environment around you?

Do noise-canceling headphones actually help?

Here was my Luddite fear: that somehow, when I was in those loud environments, my noise-canceling headphones weren’t really canceling noise, it was just drowning it out in a different way. One that could cause different — or even more — damage.

For once, I’m happy to admit I was wrong. 

Active noise cancelation — the kind where microphones on the headphones listen to the sound of the environment and work to mitigate it, like in Apple AirPods or Bose’s QuietComfort headphones — protects your ears, too. They generate sound waves that are the exact opposite of what the ambient environment is producing, and the two actually cancel each other out.

“It doesn’t amplify the stuff hitting your ear. It actually reduces it,” Brent Butterworth, who’s spent eight years researching headphones as part of his job at Wirecutter, told Vega.

To really understand this, check out the video; its visuals really helped me. And for more on how to responsibly use that noise cancelation tech, and why it won’t work as well to protect you at, say, those rock concerts, check out Butterworth’s article here.

But one last thing Ed told me I found super interesting about this: With the most powerful noise-canceling headphones, some people can get something that Butterworth coined “the eardrum suck problem.” 

Vega experienced this when he bought his first pair of noise-canceling headphones in 2017. Within an hour of trying them out, “my throat started to hurt,” he said, “and I felt a lot of pressure in my ears.” 

The noise cancellation was perhaps too strong. This, apparently, is a real thing — or at least it feels real to your body. It’s psychosomatic.

Basically, “we’re so used to experiencing sound a certain way, it’s disorienting for your head,” Vega summed up. Noise canceling mostly affects the low frequencies, but high frequencies are still getting through. “So your brain thinks that there’s something wrong, and so it’s sending all these signals that are making you feel like there’s pressure but actually there’s no pressure.” 

There is maybe too much of a good thing? Just kidding — protect your ears. If you have or can afford to buy noise-canceling headphones (even cheap ones work relatively well!), use them to mitigate loud environments. And go check out Vega’s video!

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

The biggest movie released so far this year is admittedly a little confusing. Or maybe not confusing, but it sure has a lot of lore. 

I’m talking, of course, about Dune: Part Two. 

Denis Villeneuve’s second installment adapting Frank Herbert’s 1960s sci-fi series of books enters theaters this week. Given it’s been over two years since the first film, and given the complexity of what’s happening in the Dune universe, I figured some of you might have a few questions. 

Like, what’s up with Timothée Chalamet’s psychic boy king? Who are those dour-looking nuns? And what the hell is going on with the giant worms everywhere? 

I love sci-fi — catch me any day with a copy of Gideon the Ninth or The Dispossessed — but I’ve never read Dune, so I can’t help you.  

Patrick Reis, Vox’s senior politics editor and longtime Dune fan, can. Patrick and Alex Abad-Santos, a Vox senior correspondent and self-described Dune newbie, went deep on the new movie here. Below is a slice of their conversation, with additional questions from me, for today’s edition of the newsletter. — Caroline Houck, senior news editor

Light spoilers ahead about the series’ overall narrative arc.

So who’s this Paul Atreides guy that Timothée Chalamet is playing? I’m supposed to like him, right?

At the start of Villeneuve’s previous movie, Paul is the only child of House Atreides, son of Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), a Bene Gesserit (more on them soon).

Paul’s family has been coerced into leaving their home planet to move to Arrakis (also known as Dune), where they’re charged with overseeing the production of spice, the universe’s most precious resource. 

At the end of the first film, Paul has hidden away with the Arrakis-native Fremen and allied with them against House Harkonnen — the despots who once again rule Arrakis after murdering Paul’s father and almost everyone he loved. (He also meets Chani (Zendaya), a Fremen who becomes his lover.) Over the course of Dune: Part Two, he makes his way up the Fremen ranks to become a messianic figure.

This leads to a fairly complicated moral arc over the rest of the series.

Right, see, here’s my question: Is he a good messianic figure … or actually evil? I’m suspicious of this hero worship. And there’s also some weird white savior vibes here, right?

Is he “evil”? No in the short term; sort of yes in the medium term; and then mostly no in the extremely, extremely long term — events occurring decades, centuries, and even millennia later with the help of Paul’s descendants.

Dune Two is set in that short-term “no” part of the saga, where he’s helping the Fremen free themselves from the cruelty of House Harkonnen.

But to the other part of your question — yeah. Dune is fundamentally a white savior story in which the bulk of the agency is exercised by outsiders coming to a nomadic culture.

It’s also a pretty clear allegory to the Middle East: Spice is a rare substance that sustains modern life and facilitates empire-wide commerce and travel, so that’s pretty clearly oil. And so much about the Fremen seems to be designed to evoke desert nomads — and some of the most simplistic stereotypes about Arabs. At its worst, it’s Dances With Worms. All of this should, and in many cases does, make fans uncomfortable.

I think the movie makes some steps in the right direction. Zendaya’s Chani has much more agency in the movie than the book’s Chani does, which puts some of the power back in the hands of the Fremen.

But without basically setting aside a huge chunk of the book’s plot, I’m not sure there’s a way around the white savior trope. Someone tried making a Dune movie without sticking closely to the book, and it’s a hilarious mess.

Who are the Bene Gesserit, and more importantly, why aren’t they in charge?

To the naked eye, the Bene Gesserit look like a bunch of superpowered nuns — although they’re not exactly nuns — as Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is part of the sisterhood. 

But let’s back up a bit to understand why they’re so important and what exactly they’re trying to do. 

Long before the events of the films, humanity had a purge of all “thinking machines.” And so for centuries (and maybe longer), the main advances in technology have not been better machines, but re-engineering humans themselves.

That’s the big project the Bene Gesserit are working on: breeding the superbeing.

Paul was supposed to be the second-to-last step before that superbeing. Lady Jessica was to have a female — Bene Gesserit can determine their offspring’s gender because of course they can — to mate with the heir to House Harkonnen. But out of love for Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto (RIP), she granted his wish for a male heir. That brought the superbeing into the universe a generation early, upending the Bene Gesserit plan.

So to get back to your question: The Bene Gesserit seem content to let the men fight the relatively small-stakes conflicts over the imperial throne and control of the spice. But behind the scenes, they are fighting a bigger fight: to produce a superbeing whom they can control.

Unfortunately for them, they only get halfway there — as Paul is certainly not interested in being under anyone’s control.

Okay, but most importantly, talk to me about these giant worms. They’re pretty important to the plot — and super cool to look at — but they don’t seem to make sense.

We learned in the first film that the Fremen and desert dwellers seem to know how to avoid getting eaten by the worms, so … just what are the worms feeding on to get so big? And, more importantly, what do they have to do with this all-powerful and precious spice?

Reading between the lines, I think they actually feed on something in the desert sand, rather than on the creatures of it. Rather than the apex predator of the ecosystem, they’re better likened to, you know, our regular old earthworms here on Earth. They tunnel through the desert and enrich it — possibly even by aiding in the production of spice. 

So I think they’re being territorial, rather than predatory, when they swallow spice harvesting machines or Harkonnen corpses or anything else that doesn’t adequately disguise its movements when walking across the sands. I would be happy to discuss sandworm ecology with you for approximately 10 more hours, but I’ve probably said enough here. Enjoy the film!

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Queen Elizabeth II’s death last week has prompted both an outpouring of grief and complicated reactions across the globe — in large part because during her 70 years on the throne, she ruled over the twilight of the British Empire.

At the height of that empire after the First World War, the United Kingdom had colonies on every continent save Antarctica, ruling one out of every five people in the world. Over the centuries, Britain extracted wealth from those colonized lands — by one estimate, $45 trillion in today’s dollars from India alone.

“All empires were violent,” said Caroline Elkins, whose second book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, came out earlier this year. “And the British Empire was no exception to that.”

And decoupling the monarchy from that legacy is in some ways impossible.

“The monarchy very much wraps itself up into the empire — deploying its symbols, its images, its familial language,” Elkins said. “There’s no question that serious, systemic violence and crimes happened in her name, during her period of reign.”

At the same time, there’s “absolutely no extant documentary evidence directly linking [Queen Elizabeth II] to knowledge of systematic violence and cover-up in the empire,” Elkins said, and what little evidence does exist indicates that some of Britain’s highest-ranking officials lied to the queen to cover up atrocities, “just as they did with the public and Parliament.” And yet, she acknowledged, for some it might seem implausible that a monarch “renowned for her incredible knowledge about foreign affairs … really was completely in the dark.”

Vox spoke to Elkins, a professor of history and African American studies at Harvard University, to dig into those questions about the legacy of British colonialism and the role of the monarchy — then and now.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The queen’s death has sparked a lot of really disparate reactions, some of them resurfacing grievances about colonialism and the way it continues to affect the world, that are probably not discussed often enough. So let’s get into that. The British Empire isn’t ancient history; it was still a huge power in the 20th century. Can you give us a sense of what that empire was like?

The British Empire was the largest in history. And in that period, after World War I, it was at its height. To give a sense of size and scope, about a quarter of the world’s landmass was part of the empire. Nearly one in five people around the world were British subjects.

And I think it’s very important also to bear in mind at this period of time, Britain was the superpower in the world. So Britain is ruling the world, and its empire has a formidable role considering that otherwise, as George Orwell would say, it’s sort of a craggy rock where people were cooking potatoes and herring.

It was a massive, massive empire. How was it maintained?

It’s important for us to take a big-picture stepback and say: All empires were violent. And the British Empire was no exception to that.

There is a myth, as we think about it as historians, of “British exceptionalism” [from that rule]. And I have spent pretty much the last 30 years of my career really excavating the historical record to demonstrate the degree to which violence or the threat of violence was a major component in how Britain was able to maintain this massively large empire.

One of your books actually gets into that, and specifically gets into the case of Kenya. Do you want to explain what happened in Kenya?

So Kenya — particularly after the loss of India in 1947 — becomes one of the jewels in the imperial crown, along with Malaya, in part because it is a major source of cash crop production in the form of tea and coffee. It also has a bit of a romantic affinity with many people in the colonial world — it’s a white settler colony. Because of the settler presence, there was large-scale land alienation from Black Africans, who were overnight turned into sort of landless individuals or populated into very overcrowded reserves, much like we would think of Native American reserves in the United States, and then exploited for their labor on these different plantations.

After World War II, there’s a movement called Mau Mau, which is effectively an anti-colonial movement, as well as a civil war. It’s a civil war because there were Africans on the ground who were also working within the colonial administration, called loyalists. And this war was waged against both what were seen as the white and Black faces of colonial rule. And there was approximately 1.5 million people who had taken an oath … for their land and freedom. And what ends up happening is it descends into a brutal, bloody battle, and it was largely waged against the civilian population. About 20,000 Mau Mau guerrillas or fighters fought the British military in the forest, and it’s kind of a jungle war.

But a disproportionate amount of the time was spent detaining the entire Kikuyu population who had taken this oath, about 1.5 million people, in detention without trial. And a large number were detained in a detention camp system. And then, for the most part, women and children are detained in a process called “villagization,” where they are put into barbed-wire villages, which are detention camps in all but name. And it’s in these systems of detention where draconian, systematized violence and brutality and torture were instrumented in horrific ways. There was also forced labor and starvation policies. And these were done in order to force this rebellious population to submit to British colonial rule, to reject their Mau Mau movement and to come back into the fold of British colonial control.

That’s really horrific. I think one of the questions that raises is: How high up in the British government are these decisions being made? How representative is this of how the UK government more broadly treated people in its colonies?

My [second book] demonstrated two things to your question. The first of which is that Kenya was not an exception. It was part of a much longer system, stretching all the way back into the late 19th/early 20th century, of the movement of ideas and people, practices, legal regimes, that created sort of this web of violence and the laws enabling them and the actors executing them across the British Empire. The British government oversaw the movement of both these people and practices from one hot spot to the next every time there was a rebellious population.

The second of which is: Who knew what? And what did knowing mean, right? And what is very clear from my research is that ministers all the way up to the prime minister knew this in successive governments. So Winston Churchill would be one. And certainly, Churchill was actually quite instrumental, prior to his ascending to the premiership, in crafting some of these policies — for example, “air control” in the Middle East, what we would call today weapons testing — from his role in executing, in various ministries within the government, policies that were meant to both conquer and reconquer colonized populations. And, of course, he wasn’t the only one.

And I think what’s very important to bear in mind is that this transcended party. Some of the most draconian policies were implemented and enacted under the Labour government. In the postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee, Malaya becomes a site of the first real use of detention without trial on a massive wide scale (after it was used, of course, early in the 20th century in the South African or the Boer War). But in Malaya, it’s policy: illegal deportations; villagization, the putting of these colonized populations into villages; the degree to which black spots are used for interrogation and torture — this all happens under the Labour government, and the knowledge of that goes all the way up to the top. And I think that was what was so stunning in some of my research: the degree to which people knew this was going on at the time.

And then the extraordinary effort that was made to cover it up in the moment. So the lying to Parliament, the lying to the media, the explaining away whenever instances are brought to light, that “these were unfortunate one-offs that are the result of minor officials, bad apples,” such that they really sidestepped any accusation of systemic violence and brutality in the empire. But make no mistake, those allegations were being made, over and again, at the time, and, you know, they were quite successful in deflecting those allegations.

So different governments came and went, and this violence of the empire continued to persist. But one of the things that remained the same was the monarchy, and specifically Queen Elizabeth II as a symbol of the empire. So there’s that symbolic power of her. But there’s also the question of, to what extent was the monarchy involved in this maintenance of empire?

It’s important how you frame that question. Because there’s two elements of the empire that I think are important for our discussion and how they intersect. One is that the monarchy very much wraps itself up into the empire — deploying its symbols, its images, its familial language (the queen and her predecessors refer to themselves as the matriarch or patriarch of empire). The purpose of the British, as they call it, their “civilizing mission,” their kind of benevolent, liberal imperialism, was always wrapped in this language of kinship. And so therefore, they’re seen as the imperial family, and the monarchy really beckoned the colonial subjects to revere it, and [some of them] did. There’s no question about that, from much of my own research.

And yet at the same time, you know, 50 years later, when my work became the basis for the first time the British government was sued by a colonized population for systematic violence, these same said detainees, several of them that were claimants to the case, appealed to the queen. They were going to her for justice. That shows the ways in which that reverence has been internalized.

So insofar as she’s complicit, if you will, it’s that the image of the monarchy really, in this sense of imperial benevolence, which flows from this matriarch, in the case of Queen Elizabeth II, it could be argued that this is obscuring the fact that the empire itself was intensely violent.

That then brings us to the question, which I raised before: How much did she know about what was going on?

Let’s cut right to the heart of it. And this is where I think there really are some misplaced observations that have been going on in the wake of her death. The first of which is: there is absolutely no extant documentary evidence directly linking her to knowledge of systematic violence and cover-up in the empire that I’m aware of, and I’ve been studying this for 30 years. I could be proven wrong. The second of which is that there were not records kept of her weekly meetings with prime ministers. So we don’t know what was said during those weekly meetings.

Gotcha. So she might have known more.

Could have been.

But what does exist of the records of those weekly meetings — so, for example, diaries kept by prime ministers, which when they retire, they publish several volumes of their diaries. We’ll take Harold Macmillan [who served as prime minister from 1957 to 1963] … the only time there was sort of a public reckoning around violence in Kenya’s detention camps was in 1959, when 11 detainees were beaten to death in a detention camp in Kenya, and the British government got caught, and they couldn’t explain it away. A showdown happens in Parliament, and McMillan is worried that this is going to potentially bring his government down.

And he writes in his diary that afterward he spoke with the queen, and explained to her that this was basically the result of minor officials and not the fault of the colonial secretary at the time, Alan Lennox-Boyd. So what we know from his entry in his diary is that he lied to the queen, because we know Alan Lennox-Boyd was right in the middle of it, that this was not the result of quite minor officials. And that Macmillan himself also knew about this systematic violence and the cover-up that was going on.

So what we do know from the official record is that — just as they did with the public and parliament — this particular prime minister, on this particular very public reckoning, lied to the queen.

Now, of course, over three decades, serious, repeated accusations of systematic crime committed in her name abounded, including right in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, which actually reached the European Commission on Human Rights. And so I think this is what is going to be debated going forward — that question of what did she know? Because I think for some it may feel implausible that for this monarch, who was renowned for her incredible knowledge about foreign affairs, that she was known for being assiduously prepared for her meetings with the prime ministers, where she was known for offering very wise and sage advice, is it plausible to believe that she really was completely in the dark? That’s a question I think that the public will debate around her legacy. And I think that’s what we need to focus on.

I also think the other area to focus on is looking forward, insofar as there’s no question that serious, systemic violence and crimes happened in her name, during her period of reign.

And how do you address and account for that?

What we do know is that with King Charles III, there can’t be any question about plausible deniability. Because given the demands for a broader sort of imperial reckoning across the empire, based upon abundant numbers of protests and petitions from formerly colonized people, as well as the abundance of evidence that folks like myself have produced, he cannot sidestep this. So the question becomes: Will he break with tradition, with the legacy of his mother kind of gatekeeping a unique history of exceptionalism of the British Empire?

If we even step away from the “did she know, did she not know,” what we do know is that these crimes were committed in her name — Her Majesty’s government. And so therefore, the question is: How does he now address this in a way that acknowledges the past while also looking to a different kind of present and future?

Over the weekend, a car exploded along a Moscow highway. Inside was Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultranationalist ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Dugina, though lower profile than her father Aleksandr Dugin, espoused many similar nationalist and pro-war beliefs and had been sanctioned by the United States for running a disinformation website. Russia is blaming Ukraine for Dugina’s death, and it’s already prompting recriminations between the two countries — and fears of escalation.

“Our hearts yearn for more than just revenge or retribution,” Dugin said in a statement Monday that added to those fears. “It’s too small, not the Russian style. We only need our Victory.”

Russia’s security agency, the FSB, says its two-day investigation found that “Ukrainian intelligence agencies” planned the attack, and a Ukrainian woman who entered and then fled through Estonia carried it out. Ukraine denies involvement and points the finger back at Moscow; a Ukrainian official on Monday called the attack part of an “intraspecies” fight among Russian elites. Meanwhile, a new supposed anti-Putin underground group tried to claim responsibility Monday.

It’s far too early to know who’s behind the attack, said Brian Taylor, a political science professor at Syracuse University and an expert in Russian politics. In fact, we may never know. With other recent assassinations in Russia with high political stakes, including opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015, “the investigation usually ends up only going so far.”

Right now, “a lot of the speculation is simply that: It’s speculation trying to figure out, ‘Well, who might have had a motive to do that, and what that motive might have been,’” Taylor said.

Vox spoke to Taylor to dig into what we know about Dugina’s murder, the plausible explanations, and why the fallout might be felt most in Russian society rather than in the war in Ukraine.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Caroline Houck

So before we get into the actual attack and what we do or don’t know about it, I wondered if you could explain who Darya Dugina was. Obviously, any car bombing would make headlines, but why has her death in particular been so shocking, both domestically and internationally?

Brian Taylor

I think Dugina’s death has caused so much tension more because of who her father was than who she was. She was relatively new as a media personality and did not have the level of visibility that her father did. 

And the thing about her dad is that there’s a lot of different opinions out there about Dugin and how important he was in Russian internal politics. My sense of Dugin himself was that a lot of times in the West, his influence in Russian domestic politics was vastly overinflated, and that it’s not accurate to refer to him as someone being close to Putin, or “Putin’s brain,” or “Putin’s Rasputin,” or whatever label that you want to put on it. He at a couple of times was useful to the regime, especially in 2013-2014, but he was always a bit too out there to be incorporated into the media mainstream. He is appealing to a certain segment of right-wing Christian Russian nationalists, with very authoritarian, very militaristic kind of viewpoints. 

And his daughter was in a similar vein, occasionally appearing on some of the television talk shows and talking a similar line about the need to wipe out Ukraine and that kind of thing. But she was not one of the big media personalities that was a leading voice with close ties to the Kremlin. So, in that sense, it’s sort of hard to explain why this is such a big deal, other than because of who her father was. And because Russia is at war right now, and because this happened in Moscow, in a place close to where members of the Russian elite live. So in that sense, the reverberation from it is almost incidental to who she herself was, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. 

I think we have to say that the impact isn’t so much about her but about the timing, the location, and who her father was.

Caroline Houck

That for me raises the question of, well, who would want to kill her? I mean, there’s obviously a lot of theories out there right now: Russia is saying Ukraine did it; Ukraine is saying Russia did it. And there’s this supposed anti-Putin group that is coming out of the woodwork trying to claim credit. Do any of these theories seem credible to you?

Brian Taylor

Honestly, I think it’s super hard to know this early what the correct explanation is. We don’t even know if they were trying to kill her or if they were trying to kill her father. So that’s probably the first starting point: Who were they trying to kill (whoever “they” is)?

Caroline Houck

Right. Just to interject, because Dugina and her father were at an event together earlier that evening. 

Brian Taylor

Yeah, they were at an event together. And at least some of the initial reports suggested he was supposed to be traveling in that car, and then at the last minute went in a different car. So, yeah, it’s not obvious who the target was. 

In terms of the theories, the thing I would emphasize is: We probably aren’t going to know any time soon definitively who was behind it. And so a lot of the speculation is simply that. It’s speculation trying to figure out, well, who might have had a motive to do that, and what that motive might have been.

Having said that, I think we can divide the types of explanations up a bit. So the one that the Russian government, in terms of the FSB, is promoting is that Ukraine is behind this attack. And if we think about why would this be in Ukraine’s interest, I’m having a hard time seeing that story. If the Ukrainian secret services are capable of carrying out assassinations near Moscow, it’s not obvious to me why either Dugina or Dugin would be who they would go after. And the evidence that’s been put forward — such as it is — by the FSB doesn’t look particularly convincing at this point. 

So I think it’s more likely there’s some kind of internal Russian explanation for the murder. But even then, there are a whole range of possible candidates with a whole range of possible motives. Sometimes these things in Russian politics are political; sometimes they’re economic; sometimes it’s a combination of the two. The explanations in terms of politics go from false flag effort by the government to opponent of the government. So you’ve got a whole constellation of different possible explanations and motives. And as far as I can tell, so far this early, we just don’t have enough evidence to say which of those seems most credible.

Caroline Houck

So it’s going to take some time to get to know what happened, if we ever do. Historically, with other assassinations in Russia, what have we been able to learn, and what should we expect in terms of getting to the bottom of this?

Brian Taylor

I think we could look at both, you know, political murders in Russia — in and around Moscow — and also perhaps ones in the Donbas.

There have been various warlords and political figures killed [in the Donbas] since Russia started the war there in 2014. And always very murky kind of what was behind it, who the actual perpetrator was, with some people blaming it on Ukraine in those circumstances and other people saying it’s some kind of either legal or political or economic thing going on, like turf struggles for control of economic flows and that kind of thing. 

In the Moscow cases, it’s often opponents of the regime. And, you know, the most famous ones are the attempt to kill Navalny, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, [and] the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist.

The Nemtsov one is sort of a good illustration of how these things often happen, where there are different theories put out there about who’s behind it. There’s clearly high political stakes involved in it. And the investigation usually ends up only going so far, right? So, someone gets put in jail for being the trigger person. But you never find out who was actually the person who ordered the thing to take place.

And in the case of Nemtsov, the threads went to Chechnya. And then the question was, how close did they go to [Ramzan] Kadyrov, the warlord/governor of Chechnya? And if they go to Kadyrov, do they go beyond that? Do they go higher in the Russian state? So the thread always runs cold, once you get past the functionaries. So it seems surprising that the FSB would have cracked the case in less than 48 hours in this case.

Caroline Houck

So how should we think through what people continue to say, what different sources continue to say — what the FSB says, what Putin says — going forward? 

One of the things that people are worried about is that this could be used as a pretext for an escalation in the war on Ukraine. Whether you think it was a false flag by the government itself or not, it could always be used as a pretext anyway. So what should we look for in Russian domestic politics in the next 48 hours, next week or so, on how this murder is talked about?

Brian Taylor

Yeah, I think a lot of the conversation has already moved to what are the implications of this, regardless of who did it. How will it be used by various actors and by the Russian state? 

So clearly, we see a lot of this sort of strident regime propagandist types arguing for hitting harder at Ukraine because of this, without any real hesitation about thinking through whether it even makes sense that there’s a Ukrainian trace to this. So it could be used for that reason.

But then, the question is what does it even mean to talk about escalation in a Ukrainian context. Russia has been bombing the crap out of Ukraine for the last six months and has displaced literally millions of people and killed tens of thousands of people. [It] has hit civilian targets again and again and again, whether it’s hospitals or schools or apartment buildings or malls or whatever. So what does it mean to say they’re going to “escalate,” especially at a time when, as far as the military analysts can tell, they’re having trouble putting forces in the field, they’re having trouble finding soldiers, they’re having trouble with equipment losses, and that sort of thing.

The other question then is: How is it used in terms of Russian internal politics? I think what a lot of people are worried about is that this will be used — even if this was not the origins of it — as an excuse to go even harder against any internal opponents of the war. The question is, if they’re going to tighten the screws further internally, where do they go next? Because they’ve already, you know, banned all opposition media, chased many opposition politicians out of the country, there are people awaiting trial. So there are other people that could arrest but it would have nothing to do with this bombing. So would it just be the atmosphere? You know, a “make the public more alarmed” kind of thing. But I guess I don’t really see [that]. Unless they want to use it as an excuse to go after a certain group that isn’t clear yet. So I think we’re going to have to watch and see whether there is more done internally to try and go after opponents of the war.

The other thing I would say that we should be paying attention to, maybe not in the coming days but in the coming weeks, is if this is an indication of some kind of inter-regime power struggle or fight, and the murder was just some sort of side-shoot of that. 

So then we’d be in the murky world of the various courts of agencies inside the state that sometimes clash with each other, and quasi-state organizations like the Wagner group. We’d be getting into what Russian politics people often refer to as “clan battles” that are going to be escalating because of this. So that would be another possible angle, not the false flag angle so much but the angle that this is evidence of the state and sort of state-affiliated actors starting to split and fall apart over the course of the war. And there’s some kind of power struggle going on inside those circles that we simply don’t know what they are. But maybe in the coming weeks, it’ll become more clear if that’s the reason behind the murder.

Caroline Houck

When it comes to those kinds of struggles, those internecine struggles, would they be ideological, about pursuing each faction’s own interests, trying to grapple for power? Are there specific impetuses for it, or is it a general thing of, now we’re six months into the war and any unity is going to start getting taxed?

Brian Taylor

There’s potential ideological [divides], potential struggles for power and influence and infighting about, you know, who screwed things up or who’s going to be taking the lead going forward. I would not rule out overlapping political and economic motives because a lot of times these structures are not only, you know, part of the executive branch or quasi-attached to the executive branch, but they’re also entangled informally with various economic schemes to try and profit either off some subset of the agency or some actors within any particular agency or grouping.

This, I should say, is something that we’ve seen over the decades. So it’s just more dramatic now because it’s in the context of this massive war. And in the context of a real potential crisis moment for the Russian state and the Russian regime, where they launched this massive war, they thought it was going to be easy, it’s turned out to be very, very hard and costly. And so there could be recriminations.

Caroline Houck

So we might be being teed up for a more unstable period in Russian domestic politics. 

Brian Taylor

I think that’s certainly one possibility. I think it’s possible that this is just going to be an episode that comes and goes, and then in a few weeks, everything has moved on and nothing much has changed. The more dramatic possibility is this is the start of a much bigger story and a bigger period of instability and infighting inside the Russian elite and inside the Russian state. I don’t have any strong priors at this point which of those it might be. But I think that’s what we would want to look for in the coming weeks. Is there some kind of evidence of this leading to subsequent events, that all have a common thread that we can’t see at this point?

Caroline Houck

Is there anything people should think about as they seek and follow news developments in this?

Brian Taylor

The only thing I would add is: Lots of things happen in Russian politics where we want to understand what was going on there. And I’ll remind us of Churchill’s quote about [Kremlin political intrigues resembling] bulldogs fighting under a carpet: “An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.”

The idea is there’s this fight going on, and we shouldn’t necessarily expect that we’re going to know what was behind it until quite a bit later. And maybe that’s not satisfying. But I would counsel patience and skepticism about what comes out.