Lyuba’s Hope follows Lyubov Sobol, a Russian anti-war opposition politician and anti-corruption figure, who has endured repeated arrests, hunger strikes, aborted political campaigns, attempted poisoning, and exile in her pursuit of a democratic post-Putin Russia.

As head of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, Sobol advanced pathbreaking investigations, including that of “Putin’s cook,” Prigozhin. In 2026, she was among the fifteen Russian opposition figures admitted to the European Parliament PACE program.

Lyuba, who was a 2022 Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), will join us in person for the screening of Lyuba’s Hope, along with noted Russian-American director Marianna Yarovskaya and Paul Gregory, Hoover Research Fellow and producer. Discussion will be moderated by Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL and Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Gregory and Yarovskaya’s previous film collaboration, Women of the Gulag, was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2018.

This event is sponsored by the Hoover History Lab, in partnership with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Questions about the event? Please contact rsvp-weisfeld@stanford.edu.