In this podcast segment, Stepan Serdiukov, PhD candidate at Indiana University's Department of History, talks to Ivan Kurilla, a Professor at the Political Sciences Department of the European University at Saint Petersburg and a trained historian of the United States, about the disruption COVID-19 brought to the academic exchange and diplomatic relations between Russia and the US, Prof. Kurilla's attempts to incorporate the events of the pandemic into his teaching, the meaning that Black Lives Matter protests in the US are taking on for ordinary and not-so-ordinary Russians today, and the generational split evident in their reactions.