Eastern Radar #12
Protesters making forced apologies in Russia, sugar theft in the Urals, Belarusian prosecutors, the history of a Holocaust picture and more
If you follow Russia-related news on Twitter, you may have seen this bizarre video released by the country’s Investigative Committee congratulating Russians who just turned 14 and warning them of the crimes — including murder, rape, terrorism or hostage-taking — they can now be held responsible for. So far, so weird.
Another video by that same Investigative Committee caught my eyes a few weeks ago. Titled “Behind the scenes of the protest,” the 17-minute film tries to convince young people involved in the protests that they’re being manipulated by political forces financed by the West and bent on destroying Russia. Addressing Dima, Tolya and Tanya, the affectionate nicknames for Dmitri, Anatoliy and Tatiana, the narrator warns that, should they be involved in mass disorder, they will be held personally responsible and won’t be able to hide in the crowd. “Some guys,” the voice-over continues, “have already understood that.” The video then cuts to footage of protesters in police stations admitting to violating public order and apologizing to the police officers.
It’s uncomfortable, and it’s very hard to imagine these people freely consented to the shooting of these videos. It’s also not a one-off, isolated tactic: I was able to find examples of near-identical videos — all involving people arrested during or in connexion with the Navalny protests — from Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk and at least five cases in Moscow.
In Tolyatti, the local branch of the Investigative Committee published a 17-second video in which a 21 years-old confesses to attacking a cop during the January 23rd protest. “I won’t do that again and ask the forgiveness of all police officers,” the man can be heard saying while nervously wringing his hands. In Nizhny Novgorod, a Telegram channel close to law enforcement released a video in which Roman Trebugov, the head of the local Navalny office, not only called on people not to attend the protest but announced his resignation from the organization. His lawyer confirmed Trebugov had been pressured into shooting the video — he had just received a five-day jail sentence for organizing the January 31 protest.
Finally, in Murmansk, a similar video published by the Interior Ministry gathered more than 100,000 views. Andrey Butrin, the 22 years-old local seen in the footage, told Novaya Gazeta a “X-man” shot the video on the stairs of the police station, after threatening him. “Do you understand what awaits you?,” the man reportedly told Butrin about his participation in the protest. “The university will be told about it, you will have a black mark, you won’t get any decent jobs. You've ruined your whole life.”
Beeps
Hello everyone and my apologies for bringing you this issue a day late — it’s been a busy last few days. I won’t linger on for too long and simply recommend two videos, though I’ll warn both of them feature some disturbing content.
The first might be the highest quality footage I’ve seen of the Chechen war, a harrowing documentary upscaled to 60 frames per second covering two days of January 1995 at a hospital near Grozny, controlled by the Russian military but under mortar fire. The second is this much more recent footage of the August 2020 clashes in Minsk, Belarus, shot from the ranks of the OMON riot troops and released by opposition group Nexta.
Under the Radar
When theft makes sugar more expensive [RU]
Anton Shchipachev | Nezavisimaya Gazeta | February 10
For a year, police in the Urals refused to launch an investigation into the theft of 3.3 thousand tons of granulated sugar. That’s 165 large trucks filled to capacity. You can’t hide such a massive volume of sugar but, for some reason, the Ural detectives just aren’t in a hurry to solve the case. In September 2019, the Svoboda sugar plant, located in the Krasnodar Territory, supplied 5 thousand tons of sugar to Yekaterinburg. The naive Kuban people trusted Gelios LLC, located in Yekaterinburg, with the contract stating that it was prohibited to move the goods without their consent. But six months later, the Kuban people discovered that the lion's share of their sugar had disappeared without a trace.
Aleksandra Arkhipova, Boris Peygin | Doxa Journal | February 19
A new genre of academic rhetoric emerged in early 2021: we’ll call it “warnings”. Some “warnings” contain insults and rudeness: “Please warn socially hyperactive students, if there are any, so that they do not participate in unauthorized actions” (Dean's office of the Faculty of Psychology, Tomsk university). Other versions of a similar text feature bribery. And some authors of "warnings" do not refrain from blackmail and direct threats: "... if someone was to say that third-year students of the law academy were at the protest - you will very much regret it!" (North Caucasus Institute, Makhachkala, Dagestan).
Aleksandr Lychavko | The Village Belarus | February 23
Strange trials continue in Belarus. And if last year sentences often amounted to a few days, then this year, people are often jailed for years. Belarusians are angry with the judges and already thinking of lustration. But prosecutors also play a major role in these, as the judges often follow their recommendations. The Village Belarus took a look at who has distinguished itself especially recently.
Research & General Nerdistry
To Catch a Killer: Uncovering the Massacre of a Jewish Family in Nazi Europe
Wendy Lower | Lithub | February 16
Although the documentary and photographic record of the Holocaust is greater than that of any other genocide, incriminating photographs like this that catch the killers in the act are rare. In fact, there are so few that I can list them here: an SS officer aiming his rifle at a Jewish family fleeing in the fields of Ivanograd, Ukraine; naked Jewish men and boys being forced to lie facedown in a pit (the “sardine method”) as they are being shot in Ponary, Lithuania; Jewish women and children, at the moment of death, falling into the sand dunes of Liepāja, Latvia; an execution squad firing in Tiraspol, Moldova; naked Jewish women and girls being finished off by Ukrainian militia in Mizoch; one photograph from Ukraine with the caption “last living seconds of Jews in Dubno,” showing men being shot execution-style against a brick wall; another, also from Ukraine, captioned “the last Jew in Vinnytsia,” showing a man kneeling before a pit with a pistol to the back of his head; Jews in Kovno (Kaunas) being bludgeoned to death by Lithuanian pogromists; and a few more without captions, apparently taken in the Baltic states or Belarus and depicting the Holocaust by bullets.
Irina Grigor, Mervi Pantti | Russian Journal of Communications | February 15
This article explores and compares the visual images used by Channel One (Ch1), Russia’s biggest state-aligned television broadcaster, to justify Russia’s intervention in two major geopolitical conflicts in recent history: the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and Syria’s civil war. The data reveal that while Ch1’s projection of Ukrainian conflict is anchored in compassion to the Eastern Ukraine population speaking the Russian language, the Syrian war is framed to fuel the feeling of national pride by focusing on the Russian greatness as a political and military superpower.
Russia’s law ‘On news aggregators’: Control the news feed, control the news? 🔓
Mariëlle Wijermars | Journalism | February 15
On 1 January 2017, a Russian federal law (№ 208-FZ) came into force that holds news aggregators liable for spreading fake news. Links to news items that originate from registered media outlets – a state-regulated category – are, however, exempt from liability. As a result, news aggregators, such as Yandex News, have revised their algorithms to avoid legal claims. This article argues that the law has created a mechanism of indirect media control enabling the Russian state to influence online news dissemination through existing media regulation structures. It conceptualises five ways in which this mechanism can affect media pluralism in Russia’s online news environment, given news aggregators’ function as algorithmic gatekeepers directing traffic to news websites. The article argues that the law ‘On news aggregators’ exemplifies the diversification of Russian regulation of online news from controlling content and targeting content producers towards governing the algorithmic infrastructures that shape news dissemination.