Eastern Radar #13
A 23-year-old murder in the Yaroslav region, torture at a police precinct in Ulan-Ude, how Ukraine's oligarchy survived the 2014 revolution and more
Beeps
Greetings everyone, welcome to March, and welcome to this 13th issue of Eastern Radar! No time to lose, let’s kick this off with a few things you (probably) missed:
🤕 While the European Union as a whole registers a significant gender difference in the accident death rates for people under 65 (22.26 male deaths per 100,000 people, 5.38 female deaths), the difference is especially stark in Eastern Europe.
🇦🇲 “There was no attempted military coup, but the unprecedented and unconstitutional engagement of the military in domestic politics:” a valuable Twitter thread on the latest events in Armenia.
🧠 Russian social network Vkontakte announced it launched a neural network that will filter “hostile comments” in groups and public pages.
☢️ Three locations in separatist-controlled Donbass should be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to a spokesperson for Ukraine’s delegation to the negotiation group in Minsk: the Yunkom mine, which was used as a Soviet underground nuclear test site back in 1979, a medical facility in Luhansk as well as “some kind of research complex in Donetsk” that still stores radioactive materials.
🤥 Saint Petersburg’s Investigative Committee closed on February 22 the very first case opened about “public spreading of fake information” related to the coronavirus pandemic. The case was first opened on April 3.
Under the Radar
“I’d do it again. And I will.” The story of a murder and new victims, 23 years later [RU]
Olesya Gerasimenko | BBC Russian | February 17
The crime that led Rumyantsev to smash Smirnov's head against the table and tell him to go out the window happened 23 years ago, in that same city. The old Tutaev wasn't so different from other cities, poor and overrun with crime after the collapse of the USSR. But Tutaev was small, about 45,000 people, barely 5,000 more than today, and as soon as a robbery or a fight broke out, everyone knew about it. Locals say the teenagers were particularly aggressive. “Stabbing was a pretty regular occurrence,” says local resident Vasily Kurglov. He recalls the pools of blood he saw on his way to school on Monday. He also remembers the fights between dozens of high school students, the outright battles at nightclubs. “Maybe five people came to dance. The rest were there to fight and beat each other up.” Kruglov says you could hear the sirens of police cars and ambulances howling every day.
Pensioner-thieves: what do old people steal, and why [RU]
Olga Kuznetsova | Sobesednik | March 1
Nadezhda Shokurova, a pensioner from the village of Fedorishche in the Ivanovo region, became famous in 2016 after getting caught stealing food from a neighbor’s house. The first time, she took a bottle of ketchup and 300 grams of sugar. The second time, she stole two cans of stew, a package of dumplings, mayonnaise, tea bags, a roll of toilet paper and half a bottle of shampoo, for a total of 634 rubles ($9 at today’s rate). The neighbor worked as a guard in Moscow and had left her the keys to look after the house, but ended up filing a police complaint. “I really, really wanted to eat,” Shokurova explained to journalists. With her husband, she had taken a microloan for a refrigerator and lived on a thousand rubles ($14) a month.
The former cop who tried to save Ulan-Ude from torture [RU]
Paul Halpern | Batyenka | February 15
For six years now, human rights activist Yevgeny Khasoev has been helping people from Buryatia who suffered from torture. He is ready to quit his job, sue the Interior ministry and isn’t afraid of criminal cases. He isn’t just trying to get cases to trial and the guilty to jail, however. His main goal is to disband the most brutal and cruel police precinct in Ulan-Ude, a place involved in the abuse of detainees where he himself worked for years. Aleksey Sinyakov spent several days with Khasoev and explains how the former cop became a victim of police brutality, and why he decided to help the detainees.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
If you’re in need of some really nerdy content: the Lund university's “State-Making and the Origins of Global Order in the Long Nineteeth Centuy and Beyond” program (phew) just released a data set about the background and reasons for leaving office of more than a thousand Foreign ministers of 13 countries — including Russia — starting from 1789.
If you’re in the mood for some culinary history, why not read about that time in the 1760s a Russian spy was sent to the Netherlands to “determine the secret of the superior quality of the Dutch herring,” or about a great British canned meat scandal in 1844 that was traced back to a canning factory in Moldavia (thanks to Yan Matusevich and Yuliya Komska for linking to these articles).
Addressing Historic Injustice in Russia: The Case of Child Victims of Political Repression 🔓
Marina Belykh, Jane Henderson | State Crime Journal | February 2021
Russia is still dealing with the legacy of widespread Soviet oppression. An important Rehabilitation Law adopted in 1991 established a compensation system for victims of state repression, including a right to housing in their families' pre-exile place of residence. However, the practical realization of these rights has been problematic, particularly following amendment to the 1991 Law in 2004. There is a cohort of elderly victims who as children were exiled with their parents. Three of these unsuccessfully brought claims for their promised housing and eventually appealed to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. In December 2019, the Court issued a landmark ruling supporting the claimants. Here we explain the historical context and contemporary significance of this important constitutional case.
How did the Ukrainian oligarchy keep going after Euromaidan?
David Dalton | Vox Ukraine | February 22
...The data appears to indicate a third stage of “reintegration” into formal politics of both the old oligarchs and their networks, as well as the remains of the Yanukovych-era elite—and so the full recreation of the oligarchy as a transactional relation between successful politicians, state officials and big business—following the brief phase of the rhetoric of “de-oligarchisation” in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan victory. A question raised by this development is: What did the oligarchs get in return for increased backing of the Hroisman government? In particular, this seems to coincide with the “rehabilitation” of Rinat Akhmetov, the leading Donbas oligarch, who had been a key backer, and beneficiary, of the Yanukovych presidency.
“The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River” by Janet M Hartley
Farah Abdessamad | Asian Review of Books | February 21
The Volga then, and as Hartley frames it, is a borderland, in both a geographical and symbolic sense—a hinge between East and West. It’s a delight to discover in the book the origins of the Don and Volga Cossacks who were central to manning frontier outputs. Besides violence, looting, and piracy (which has been arguably dominating the common narrative of a lawless region), Hartley explores the regular life of the villagers and town dwellers, as the river was an artery for trade, but also saw arts and other occupations flourish.