Eastern Radar #11
Ukrainian nurses abused in Germany, Soviet-era crop dusters in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Georgian cartographers accused of treason and more
Beeps
Hello everyone and welcome to this 11th issue of Eastern Radar, with a particular welcome extended to those of you who have joined us since the last issue. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay!
If you’re looking for some cool history, the 99% Invisible podcast tells the amazing story of the Soviet expedition that brought a bust of Lenin to the “Point Of Inaccessibility,” right in the middle of Antarctica.
And if you’re more in the mood for some news:
🐮 Ever seen a herd of bisons roam through the snowy, Belarusian countryside? Well, now you have.
🔫 It took half a century, but we finally know what the infamous Almaz space cannon — a gun mounted on the eponymous space station by the Soviets back in 1975 — looks like.
🏭 An offer to buy a metallurgical factory in Serov, a town nearly 2,000 km East of Moscow, appeared this week on the e-commerce website Avito. For just 180 million rubles (about $2,4 million), you could get your hand on 25,000m2 of industrial space where 120 people still work. The listing was quickly removed from the website however.
🚢 Russia’s first LK-60 icebreaker — the most powerful icebreaker in the world — has been sitting idle in Atomflot, the nuclear icebreaker base in Murmansk, for several weeks now, barely sailing in thick Arctic sea-ice since it was delivered in September.
Under the Radar
When Svetlana passed out [GER]
Lukasz Grajewski, Carina Huppertz and Jonas Seufert | Süddeutsche Zeitung | January 29
More and more Ukrainian nurses work doing "24-hour care" for elderly people in Germany. They always have to be on duty, earn less than their colleagues from EU countries and can hardly defend themselves because they often work illegally. Polish companies act as intermediaries, recruiting women from Ukraine and other Eastern European countries and sending them to Germany. Süddeutsche Zeitung worked on this story with Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny and German investigative program Fakt.
Not for Navalny, but against poverty [RU]
Olga Balyuk | Znak | February 10
The Sverdlovsk region has approximately equal groups of supporters (36%) and opponents (38%) of the protests called by Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. When it comes to the reason for taking to the streets, only 1% of respondents consider outrage at the arrest of Navalny to be the main reason: 37% explain the demonstrations mainly as a reaction to “low standards of living and rising prices,” with similar shares explaining it by a desire to “express dissatisfaction with the current political authorities (13%), “protect freedom and human rights” (13%), “have fun and break stuff” (11%), “protest against corruption” (9%) or because they believe the protesters were paid (7%).
The next frontier in drone warfare? A Soviet-era crop duster
Benjamin Fogel, Andro Mathewson | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | February 10
In September 2020, on the second day of the six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, the Armenian defense forces published a video of one of their units deploying a surface-to-air missile system to target a low-flying, slow-moving object—a drone. But what the soldiers shot down was no cutting-edge autonomous weapon: They had destroyed a propeller-driven, single-engine biplane first produced in the 1940s by the former Soviet Union for agricultural monitoring and management—a crop duster.
Georgian cartographers accused of “selling” a slice of the homeland
Giorgi Lomsadze | Eurasianet | February 12
Iveri Melashvili never expected to be famous. Nearing retirement after a modest government career in cartography, the 62-year-old’s name has suddenly made national headlines and led TV broadcasts – vilified as a traitor or honored as a political martyr. He stands accused of literally selling out his homeland, 14 square kilometers of it. In the authorities’ telling, he deliberately gave bad cartographic advice to the government that all but resulted in the handover of a little bit of the country’s territory to Azerbaijan. They have charged him with treason. “This is like a bad dream,” Melashvili told Eurasianet while sitting at his desk, maps strewn in front of him. “Everything is so absurd and terrible that I don’t even know where to start.”
Research & General Nerdistry
Andrew Wilson | Europe-Asia Studies | February 8
This article examines competing Crimean Tatar, Russian and Ukrainian views of Crimean Tatar history as they have developed since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, via an examination of popular history and publistika. Crimean Tatar writing insists on the core principle of indigenous rights. In order to marginalise this discourse, Russian historiography adopts a neocolonial settler framing and a mythology of ‘ancient Russian’ Crimea, much of it derived from earlier Tsarist (late nineteenth century) and Soviet (1950s) historiography. Ukraine generally rather neglected the Crimean Tatar issue before 2014, but a new historiography of Crimean Tatar–Cossack cooperation and parallel state-building has emerged.
Cuckoos in the nest: the co-option of state-owned enterprises in Putin’s Russia 🔒
Nikita Makarchev, Piotr Wieprzowski | Post-Soviet Affairs | January 29
Over recent years, Russia’s government has been expanding its presence in domestic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and instituting numerous regulatory revisions. This paper argues, using the NOC (national oil company) mid-management recruitment and selection case, that SOEs are being re-oriented into centers of active regime support. Accordingly, the Russian government is prioritizing the placement of loyal clients, into NOC structures, who advance the SOEs’ growing political obligations. It is also rewarding them, in a performance-curbing manner, through tolerating their inadequate economic competence and heightened engagement in corporate corruption. At the same time, non-clients, including top international talent, are experiencing diminishing recruitment numbers and opportunities.