Matthew Luxmoore is a writer based in Moscow. He is the Moscow Correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, New Republic, Foreign Policy and Politico.
He was a 2018 recipient of New York University's Reporting Award, which funds projects on under-covered topics, and a 2015 winner of the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Journalism Award. His 2015 series of dispatches for Al Jazeera America on Russian influence across the former Soviet Union was nominated for the Overseas Press Club of America’s Bob Considine Award. He is interested especially in the role of historical politics and mythmaking in the rise of populism and nationalism.
Matthew grew up in Poland and holds a master’s degree from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. For his thesis, he conducted interviews in Moscow, Crimea and Ukraine with the leaders and ideologues of pro-Kremlin “counter-revolutionary” groups, about the use of WWII symbolism and discourse in their campaign to rally support for the state at times of upheaval. A version of this thesis, which has been presented at conferences in Princeton, Columbia and Harvard, is forthcoming in the September 2019 issue of the journal Nationalities Papers.