Eastern Radar #22
Saint Petersburg against anime, how road repairs are used to embezzle money in Ukraine, the small World War of Nagorno Karabagh and more
Beeps
War on the Rocks released a podcast about the recent clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
In other news:
🕴️ The head of Russia’s Federal Protective Service — an agency that provides security for the country’s top officials, including president Vladimir Poutine — officially earned almost 13 million rubles ($175,000) in 2020.
📞 Vladimir Putin made 175 phone calls last year, the highest figure since the beginning of his presidency in 2000.
🚎 Kryvyi Rih became the first city in Ukraine to make access to its public transport network entirely free.
Under the Radar
Saint Petersburg against anime: how and why the Russian city fights against Japanese animation [RU]
Evgueni Antonov | Bumaga | May 7 | 2,800 words
Petersburg might have become the Russian capital when it comes to banning internet websites broadcasting anime but things really kicked off in the city of Tula, back in October 2020, when a local prosecutor moved to block the streaming of the “ID : Invaded” anime. Just two months later, Petersburg had followed suit and requested the blocking of 49 websites broadcasting anime. Local media had started reporting on several cases of suicide attempts by teenagers and some outlets claimed, without quoting any sources, that the attempts were linked to anime. This provided a pretext for local prosecutors to ban the websites.
How to steal using roadworks in Ukraine: methods and examples [UKR]
Olga Prokopyshyna | Nashi Groshi | May 4 | 1,100 words
Diving into court decisions, the Ukrainian organization Nashi Groshi (“Our Money”) identified some of the most popular ways to embezzle money in the highly corrupt business of road repairs. These include getting payment on a $130,000 contract and simply not repairing the road, using low-quality asphalte or laying just 3 centimeters instead of the required 5 centimeters, getting cheaper sand from an illegal quarry (while still charging market price) or building the road one meter narrower than specified in the contract. All real examples from all over Ukraine.
What’s going on at Belaruskali, Lukashenko’s biggest provider of foreign currency? [RU]
Alina Isachenko | BBC Russian service | May 6 | 2,200 words
Back in December, the president of the Norwegian chemical company Yara came to Belarus to discuss a new contract with Belaruskali, the world’s largest producer of potash fertilizers and Belarus’ biggest taxpayer. “The contract with Yara means more money for the regime, and Belaruskali working at full capacity is enough money for the regime to fund its entire security apparatus,” said Valerii, a former member of Belaruskali’s strike committee who had to flee the country because of the repression that followed the protests against the results of the August 2020 presidential election. In December, Yara itself issued a statement in which they voiced their concern about “numerous reports of dismissals of workers who have expressed their democratic rights in a peaceful manner.” But others see Yara’s departure as a potential net loss for the company’s workers: “there are people who understand that the strike failed, and that it’s time to go back to work,” Maksym Poznyakov, head of the Belarus Independent Trade Union, said.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
Visualizing History: The Polish System
The Public Domain Review | May 5 | 800 words
For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid — or at least it was for the purposes of remembering it. The so-called “Polish System” originated in the 1820s and was later brought to public attention in the 1830s and 1840s by General Józef Bem, a military engineer with a penchant for mnemonics. As Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg catalogue in their Cartographies of Time, the nineteenth century brimmed with new methods and technologies for committing historical information to memory — and Jażwiński’s contribution (and its later adaptations) proved one of the most popular.
Georgi Derluguian | New Left Review | April 2021
Turkey, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China: at play in the 2020 battle for Nagorno Karabagh were the latter-day avatars of once-formidable Eurasian agrarian empires. To grasp what is going on in the Caucasus today, it helps to consider their back stories. At the start of the sixteenth century, contributors to a geo-political roundtable—commenting in Arabic, Chinese and maybe Church Latin—might have pointed to the gunpowder revolutions that helped seal the end of the dreadful medieval epoch and characterized the new era. Guns battered the walls of fortified cities and subdued the scourge of nomadic invasions.
Disrupted democracy in Ukraine? Protest, performance and contention in the Verkhovna Rada 🔓
Sarah Whitmore | Europe-Asia Studies | November 2019 (but just published in open access)
Protest performances inside parliament during 2012–2016 articulated claims to uphold democracy that contributed to the maintenance of pluralism in Ukraine during attempted authoritarian consolidation. Simultaneously, such protests were para-institutional instruments in the ongoing power struggle engendered by a patronal system where formal institutions and norms weakly constrained actors. A diverse repertoire of protest, including rostrum-blocking, visual protest, withdrawal, auditory disruption, somatic protest and spectacle, was used frequently and adapted in response to changes in the political opportunity structure. Innovations to the repertoire drew on and modified performative methods used by social movements.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Euronews: How war is making water a scarce resource in eastern Ukraine
Wall Street Journal: Russian Forces Near Ukraine Are Still a Threat, U.S. Says
Agence France Presse: In Russia, conscription is a weapon for silencing dissent
The New York Times: Ukraine’s Burial Mounds Offer Meaning in a Heap of History
The Diplomat: Kyrgyzstan’s Worrying New Limits on Dissent
Murmansk in 1953, picture by Martin Manhoff. Serving as assistant army attaché at the U.S. Embassy, major Martin Manhoff took hundreds of color pictures of Moscow and the USSR before accusations of espionage forced him to leave the country in 1954.