Eastern Radar #18
Inventing witnesses in Russia, the disappearing countryside of Ukraine, women and cartography in late imperial Russia, and more
Beeps
Two podcasts worth your time this week: Novaya Gazeta looks back on how Crimea was annexed (in Russian), and BBC Radio explains the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5.
In other news:
🤸♂️ The newly-appointed governor of Russia’s Tula region is called Vladislav Tovarishtayovich Khovalyg. “Tovarishtayovich” is quite the unusual patronymic, derived from the very Soviet tovarish (comrade).
🛩️ An OSCE long-range drone failed to take off on April 6 in Eastern Ukraine due to “dual GPS signal interference assessed as caused by jamming.” According to the OSCE, “this is the first time such interference has prevented a take-off since the Mission launched long-range UAV operations in October 2014.”
🤐 In a very unscientific poll, Russian daily Kommersant asked its readers what they believe cannot be joked about: 47% of the 22,940 respondents said it was possible to joke about everything, 24% said one should not joke about religion, and 15% about war.
⛔ A French court of appeal confirmed on March 29 the dissolution of an association that portrayed itself as the local embassy of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russia-backed separatist entity in Eastern Ukraine.
Under the Radar
Without a garden, or a home: why do villages keep disappearing in Ukraine [UKR/RU]
Anna Belovolchenko | Zaborona | April 2
In early March, the village of Bleshnya disappeared when the last inhabitant died. It wasn’t the first or the last village in Ukraine to be emptied: since 1991, more than 500 villages have disappeared in the country. Almost five thousand are now on the verge of extinction. The worst situation is in Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv oblasts, where places with less than 50 people make up a third of all villages.
The expandables of the “stick system”: how the Russian police make up witnesses [RU]
Alesya Marokhovskaya, Irina Dolinina | iStories Media | March 31
In October 2020, a trial kicked off in Samara, with six former police officers from a drug task force accused of torture, planting drugs, fraud and falsification of criminal cases during two years, from 2015 to 2017. Along with the former policemen, 15 local residents were among the defendants. They helped falsify cases by acting as dummy witnesses - so-called witnesses and drug buyers in police operations. Almost all the victims in the "Samara case" detained by these police officers are still serving prison terms. Now they are trying to prove that they gave confessions under threat, and that the cases against them were fabricated by law enforcement. But iStories’ investigation shows that this story is just a small part of a large-scale scheme to falsify drug cases in the region: we found 86 fake witnesses involved in 269 cases.
In Usolye-Sibirskoye, an investigator, falsified evidence, and a trial [RU]
Olga Mutovina | People of the Baikal | March 16
For more than five years, Marina Ruzaeva has been demanding punishment against law enforcement, first against the police officers who tortured her, then against the investigator who falsified the evidence. On the second of January 2016, police officers came to her, looking for help in a murder case that had happened in a house nearby. She followed them to the precinct, where they put a bag on her head, handcuffed her to a bench and beat her for at least five hours, demanding she tells them “everything you know.”
10 million kilometers in challenging conditions
Yandex Self-Driving Team | Yandex Self-Driving Group | March 18
This past winter, our team hit a major milestone. Our driverless vehicles surpassed 10 million kilometers (more than 6 million miles) in autonomous mode. The majority of these kilometers were driven in Moscow, one of the most challenging cities in the world with many kinds of bad weather throughout the year. Snow immediately brings one issue to mind — impaired visibility. As some of the lidar laser beams reflect off the snow, they are prevented from reaching their target. Fortunately, our driverless vehicles generate over a million beams per second, guaranteeing that a significant number reach their intended objects, even if some are reflected. We enhance the lidar performance in the snow by implementing neural networks to filter snow from the lidar point cloud which enhances the visibility of objects and obstacles around the vehicle.
Research & General Nerdistry
Throttling of Twitter in Russia
Diwen Xue, Reethika Ramesh, ValdikSS, Leonid Evdokimov, Andrey Viktorov, Arham Jain, Eric Wustrow, Simone Basso, Roya Ensafi | Censored Planet | April 6
Contrary to blocking where access to the content is blocked, throttling aims to degrade the quality of service, making it nearly impossible for users to distinguish imposed/intentional throttling from nuanced reasons such as high server load or a network congestion. With the prevalence of “dual-use” technologies such as Deep Packet Inspection devices (DPIs), throttling is straightforward for authorities to implement, yet hard for users to attribute or circumvent. Censorship communities have feared throttling can be used by the government to restrict Internet freedom, but unfortunately current censorship detection platforms focus on blocking and aren’t equipped to monitor throttling. This incident of Russia throttling Twitter serves as a wakeup call to censorship researchers, and we hope to encourage future work in detecting and circumventing this emerging censorship technique.
Anastasiia Fedorova, Alexey Lapin, Maria Muzdybaeva | Calvert Journal | April 1
Alexey Lapin has been immersed in the world of Russian skateboarding for more than 20 years — 15 of which he has spent with a camera documenting its own unique subculture. During the summer of 2020, together with a crew supported by the Skateboarding Federation of Russia, he headed to Altai — a Russian republic in southern Siberia, which encompasses the Altai Mountains and surrounding tundra, alpine meadows, and lakes. Altai is renowned for its nature reserves and the ancient spirituality of its numerous native cultures. But away from the tourist hotspots, the crew hoped to explore the region’s urban environment with the help of their skateboards.
Patriotic disunity: limits to popular support for militaristic policy in Russia 🔒
Håvard Bækken | Post-Soviet Affairs | March 29
This article considers the pervasiveness of military themes in the state’s framing of Russianness, and explores the strengths and weaknesses of militaristic means to enhance social consensus. Based on existing research and new survey data, it emphasizes the stratification of support for militaristic policy in the Russian population. The author argues that militarism cannot alleviate the growing dissatisfaction with the Putin regime in major cities or among youth. It also fails to unify Moscow with the countryside. Women are more sceptical than men, and higher education seems to undermine supportive attitudes. In consideration of this stratification of support, militaristic policies may in fact underscore important social and ideological cleavages in Russian society, rather than bridging them.
Mapmaking in the home and printing house: women and cartography in late imperial Russia 🔒
Catherine Gibson | Journal of Historical Geography | January 2020
The history of cartography in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire has been dominated by accounts of the military, academic establishments and elite male intellectuals. This article seeks to provide a corrective to this tendency by highlighting the involvement of women in cartography in the home and print workshops. The article traces the role of women in the process of making the Ethnological-Geographical Atlas of Present and Prehistoric Latvia (1892). The article builds on recent research on women and cartography to argue that mapmaking was a far more widespread socioeconomic activity in imperial Russia than previously thought and permeated family and working lives.