Vera Tolz presented a paper entitled “The End of the Cold War and Radio Liberty Research Beyond Moscow” at the 57th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held in Washington, D.C., on 20-23 November 2025. Her paper addressed three interrelated questions: why Radio Liberty cultivated such wide-ranging research expertise on the non-Russian republics and nationalities of the USSR; how Radio Liberty’s research staff perceived the USSR as an empire during Gorbachev’s perestroika and at the time of the Soviet collapse; and the role adversarial media communication played in the context of Cold War politics. In addition, Vera served as a discussant on the conference panel “Framing War and Peace: Russian Rhetoric and Media in the Ukraine Conflict.”