Eastern Radar #17
New Books Network’s best podcasts, Russia’s quest to get a luxury brand, from selling 3D printers to leading Ukraine’s space agency, and more
Beeps
The New Books Network recently announced it would release its 10,000th podcast this month. With this incredible figure in mind, here are a few particularly interesting podcasts they have released over the years:
Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (2016)
An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (2014)
City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia's Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (2011)
The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (2016)
Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (2019)
Also, just as a heads up, there are two stories in this week’s “Under the Radar” section that are somewhat old: the Raketa piece is from October of last year, the interview about the Russian penal colony system is from October of the year before. I came across both these stories only this week however and thought it’d be worthwhile to include them — the first because it’s a cool piece, the second because it’s become even more relevant amid reports of Alexei Navalny’s treatment in prison.
Under the Radar
What’s going on in Russia’s prisons? An interview with Igor Kalyapin [RU]
Evgeny Senshin | Znak | October 2019 | 2,700 words
“In all these years of reform, the saddest thing that hasn’t changed at all is the subculture among the prisons’ administrators. Everyone knows about the prison subculture of convicts, but few realize that the overseers have their own subculture. I think it’s almost impossible to fight this subculture, nearly all employees of the penitentiary system are affected by it. All those penal colonies share the heritage of the Soviet system, located in the middle of nowhere, scattered among forests, far from civilization. Employees are often representatives of dynasties, meaning that subculture is passed from generation to generation, among families of jailers. This creates a closed system, with all the employees living in their own little world.”
A Quest to Give Russia a Luxury Brand
Penelope Colston | The New York Times | October 2020 | 1,700 words
At its peak, in the 1970s, Raketa employed 8,000 workers and produced five million watches annually that it exported to 38 countries. Its downward spiral began in the early 1990s, when post-Soviet Russia started its shaky transition to a capitalist-style economy. Kept afloat by a devoted group of former employees who produced cheap windup watches to sell to tourists, Raketa was on its last legs when Mr. Henderson-Stewart first visited in 2009. ”In this gigantic factory, there were approximately 12 elderly people working in terrible conditions,” he said. “But when you find a diamond on the ground, you have to pick it up and polish it. That was very much the feeling I had.”
'Do not expect any justice in Zhanatas'
Yuna Korosteleva, Alina Zhartieva | Open Democracy, Vlast | March 17 | 3,200 words
You can get to Zhanatas, Kazakhstan, in several ways – by bus from Taraz (daily at 6pm), by train (once a week) or by car. The road from Taraz, the nearest regional centre 145 kilometres away, usually takes no more than two hours, though twice that in winter, due to weather conditions. When we arrived in town, residents in one neighborhood were holding a protest. The authorities had conducted an emergency shutdown of the heating system, though the next day, officials said that the town’s boilers had been restarted and all buildings were receiving heat. (There was no heating in the hotel where we were staying until the evening of 11 February.)
He built a career selling 3D printers. Then he was tapped to lead Ukraine’s space agency
Matthew Halliday | Rest of World | March 22 | 2,500 words
Usov’s extremely brief tenure may well end up illustrating both the optimism found in modern-day Ukraine and how easy it is for an optimist to become frustrated. “It was just gruesome,” said Illia Ponomarenko, a reporter at The Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper in Ukraine with a liberal bent, referring to Usov, whose dramatic story he had closely covered over the past 12 months. “It simply ends up the same thing as before, bureaucratic monsters from the past, no transparency, no liability … but that’s what we get in this godforsaken country.”
Research & General Nerdistry
Dataviz enthusiast Roman Bunin recently put together this interactive map showing every single of Russia’s 132,480 localities (Населённый пункт), along with a ranking of the 25 most popular settlement names.
From the atomic bomb to the Perestroika, a history of the Soviet programmer [RU]
Roman Abramov | Arzamas | March 24
In the 1960s, computing machines began to floor into the scientific, industrial, and defense sectors, while the recently-opened faculties had not had enough time to cope with the demand of programmers. This meant that, initially, a programmer, a cyberneticist and more generally, anyone in the business of taking care of computers, was considered a valuable resource and an interesting profession. Not just interesting, mind you — it was a profession that was supposed to bring humanity closer to a wonderful tomorrow, a crucial component of which being space flights. The importance of the space theme was reflected, for example, in the design of the technical manual for the universal automatic digital computer “Ural-4.”
Jeremy Morris, Masha Garibyan | Europe-Asia Studies | March 2021
Framing the ‘conservative turn’ in Russia as a ‘culture war’ casts ordinary Russians as an amorphous reactionary mass, willingly following political entrepreneurs’ cues of intolerance. This essay rejects that interpretation and seeks to restore agency to ordinary Russians. Based on ethnographic encounters discussing homophobia and heteronormative gender and family attitudes, the essay argues that vernacular social conservatism re-appropriates official discourses to express Russians’ feelings towards their own state. Intolerance is less fuelled by elite cues but rather reflects domestic resentment towards, and fear of, the punitive power of the state, along with nostalgia for an idealised version of moral socialisation under socialism.
The migrant’s car: investment, status, prestige [RU]
Sergey Abashin | Gorky | March 2021
Planning to buy a car is not limited to an economic calculation, although it is always present, even if it is not specifically mentioned. The reasoning of migrants in thinking about the possible purchase of a car is constantly building up as a balance between the economic logic of calculating profit-loss, and moral obligations to their loved ones. These two references are constantly alternating and mixing, reinforcing each other or closing gaps, where, for example, in a rational calculation, uncertainty and risk arise, to the point where an additional argumentation is required. The possible economic loss, in this case, is justified in part by the fulfillment of a moral duty.