Eastern Radar #14
Hunting anarchists in Kyiv, the politics of waste management in Saratov, commercialization of shamans in the Tuva republic and more
Beeps
👋 New Russian government data suggests that 14,000 North Koreans left Russia last year while about 1,800 entered the country.
📫 The Russian “Armata” main battle tank is coming, promise: Russian outlet TJournal published a fun collage of headlines from 2014 to 2021 illustrating the delays that the program has suffered: “large-scale delivery to start in 2016,” “delivery will kick off in 2017-2018,” “delivery will start in 2020,” “delivery to start in 2022.”
🚚 Ever heard of Euro Truck Simulator? It’s a very popular video game that lets you drive trucks across Europe. Yes, that’s it. Anyway, the developers have announced their latest expansion, which will take players to the heart of Russia.
✉️ France’s Conseil d’Etat (the country’s supreme court for administrative justice) upheld a sanction against a special forces officer who, while visiting Moscow as a tourist, sent to two French intelligence officers postcards which included their full names, addresses, ranks and military units.
📚 Two employees from the Eastern Military District’s House of officers in Khabarovsk were handed a suspended jail sentence for the theft of seven rare books, including a volume of Mikhail Shcherbatov’s “History of Russia from the Earliest Times” published in 1791.
Under the Radar
Igor Burdyga | Graty | March 1
Over the past few years, radical anarchist groups claimed responsibility for more than a dozen arson attacks in Kyiv. Anarchists are mostly targeting police buildings, but law enforcement is struggling. They caught some anarchists —the wrong ones— while the arsons continue unabated.
21 years-old Mykhailo only understood why the police had come to his house in a quiet suburb of Lviv when they showed him the ruling from Kyiv’s Pechersk district court authorizing the search. The police were looking for a SIM card, the number of which had been used to access the Telegram channel “Anarchist Fighter.” Mykhailo did have the card in his room. But that’s because, for four years already, he’d been working for VirtualSim, a service leasing phone numbers so customers can register to various internet platforms. In other words, he wasn’t the one using the number.
Sergey Dolgopoly | FreeNews Volga | February 26
At the end of last year, "Waste management JSC" — one of Russia's largest garbage companies — agreed with the Saratov government to remove twigs, branches and other vegetable waste within the framework of the uniform tariff, despite categorically refusing to do so before. The company and local authorities had been arguing for more than a year already, with opponents of Waste management JSC pointing out that, before the country-wide waste reform, garbage companies removed all waste for a much smaller fee. The fee for garbage removal has now increased significantly, while the service’s quality barely moved.
Waste management JSC’s legal position was strong however, and the local government's threats to sue the company looked unlikely to bear fruit. The company’s sudden change of mind suggests that the issue of branches has become a bargaining chip to reach behind-the-scenes agreements with the authorities on some other issues.
According to a well-informed source, Nikolai Pankov, a State Duma deputy and secretary of United Russia’s regional branch, played a key role in convincing the company to change its tune. Considered one of the most influential people in Saratov, Pankov used his extensive lobbying, media and party resources to force Waste management JSC to make concessions. Considering that, in the upcoming Duma elections, Pankov could face the popular communist candidate Nikolai Bondarenko, United Russia’s efforts make sense: the story of a victory over a greedy garbage company can easily be used in an electoral campaign.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
An interesting-looking book coming out in May: “Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region”
Moscow’s Aerospace Theory of Victory: Western Assumptions and Russian Reality
Dmitry Adamsky | CNA | February 2021
This memo seeks to refute assumptions that are widespread among Western experts about the current Russian approach to aerospace operations and its strategic implications, and to offer alternative interpretations. First, this report argues that, contrary to the Western claim, the Russian theory and practice of aerospace defense have not been based on defense systems only, but have been a harmonic mixture of offensive (strike) and defensive activities. Second, this report claims that, in contrast to the Western misnomer “anti-access/area denial,” the proper professional term to describe the Russian theory of victory against an aerospace attack on the global and regional levels is Strategic Operation for Repelling Aerospace Aggression—an operational endeavor that encapsulates the above mentioned strike-defense dialectic. Finally, contrary to the assertion by many Western analysts that a fait accompli strategy is driving Russian operations, this report argues that there is apparently little space for the political-military leadership to consider this option.
How close, exactly, were Russia and China to nuclear war?
James Carter | SupChina | March 3
On the morning of March 2, 1969, 30 or so Chinese soldiers stepped onto a frozen Ussuri River and were confronted by Soviet border guards. The skirmish that followed, resulting in dozens of casualties, led to weeks of fighting on this China-Russia border. The consequences could have been much more devastating.
In terms of consequences, it is easy to say that they were few, because the conflict was resolved without full-scale war, but that is a superficial read. The secret Third Front Project, detailed for the first time in English in an important new book by Covell Meyskens, was an enormously costly endeavor, relocating Chinese heavy and military industries from coastal cities to a remote inland base. The Third Front was well underway by the time of the border clash, but the fighting only confirmed PRC fears of the Soviet Union and caused redoubled efforts to pour money into the project that, according to Meyskens, “dramatically altered the economic trajectory” of the PRC.
Kurs Molodogo Shamana (Shamanic Lessons for Beginners) 🔒
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer | Slavic Review | Winter 2020
This gorgeous quasi-ethnographic film set in the Tuva Republic (Russia) opens on a shamanic séance around a campfire, with sun rays filtering through Tibetan prayer flags. The viewer may initially perceive this as a harbinger of romanticized interpretations of shamanic revival, but that first impression would be wrong. Rather, the film is an attempt to show rather than explain some of the complexities, tensions, and commercialization of the shamanic revival in one of the key republics where shamans have proliferated with official republic support and amorphous spiritual searching.
And a lovely bonus to end this week’s issue: French artist Serge Gainsbourg singing a Russian song he learned from his mother, who fled Odessa in 1919 (h/t Anna Colin Lebedev)