Eastern Radar #25
Kyrgyzstan's ultranationalists, a ghost town in Ukraine, tornadoes in Russia, Moscow's influence in Africa and more
Beeps
Check out “TL;DRussia,” a newsletter by director of the King’s College’s Russia Institute Sam Greene, who also sat last week with Kevin Rothrock to talk about the secrets of Russia-watching on the Russia Guy podcast. And speaking of podcasts, Fabian Burkhardt discussed with FPRI's Aaron Schwartzbaum the significance of Mikhail Mishustin for Russia’s governance.
Now for some news:
🏆 An investigation on femicides in Kyrgyzstan by local outlet Kloop was among the winners of the Sigma awards 2021 for data journalism. We featured Kloop’s investigation back in Eastern Radar #10.
📷 An unusual Russian Marine Rifle prototype camera once classified as “top secret” sold for about $170,90 at the 38th Leitz Photographica Auction. Supposedly created in 1943 and developed for the Soviet Baltic Fleet Navy, the FS-3 FotoSniper was designed for long-range reconnaissance missions and was equipped with a 600mm f/4.5 lens. According to the listing, no comparable camera is known to exist and it may be the only example ever made.
💽 Ukrainian law enforcement announced on June 16 the arrest of six suspects allegedly tied to the notorious Cl0p ransomware group. In collaboration with South Korean and US investigators, Ukrainian authorities searched 21 residences in and around Kyiv, seized computers, smartphones, and servers, and recovered the equivalent of $184,000, believed to be ransom money.
☕ McDonald’s sells a third of all coffees sold in Russian cities, according to the company’s Russia director Marc Carena.
Under the Radar
In Kyrgyzstan, an ultranationalist group thrives on rising anti-Chinese sentiment
Aizat Shailoobek kyzy | Global Voices | June 16 | 1,000 words
The Kyrgyz-Chorolor, or Forty Knights, takes its name from the traditional Kyrgyz epic of Manas, but their roughly 5,000 members include many middle-class professionals, such as physicians, professors, and lawyers. They also have acknowledged ties with Kyrgyzstan’s Interior Ministry, even as government corruption is a target of their attacks. Its activism draws on nationalist sentiment based primarily on discontent with what it deems as the government's betrayal of the ethnic Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz-Chorolor have staged high-profile demonstrations, raids on clubs frequented by Chinese, and attacks on Chinese businesses. Their critics allege that they have enjoyed tacit support from the Kyrgyzstani state in many of these actions.
Bogdan Karkachev | Novosti Donbassa | June 15 | 900 words
Last week, the leaders of the separatist republics in Eastern Ukraine announced a change of “investor” at the industrial companies managed by Vneshtorgservis [a holding built up to trade coal and metals from the separatist territory to Russia]. Prior to that, the holding had been linked to Ukrainian oligarch Sergei Kurchenko, who had fled to Russia. Now, Russian citizen and former deputy governor of the Voronezh region Yevgeny Yurchenko has been tasked to deal with the growing wage arrears that, in April, triggered strikes at two factories. According to the Eastern Human Rights Group, a Ukrainian NGO, the separatist groups’ security services accused in reports sent to Moscow Sergei Kurchenko of destabilizing the situation in the region by refusing to pay workers.
Chernobyl without the radiation: a report from the Ukrainian ghost town of Tsukrovarov [RU]
Yulia Korzun, Polina Pronina | Strana | June 13 | 1,300 words
In Ukraine's Kirovohrad's region, Tsukrovarov remains a city only in the locals' memory: it was "subordinated" to the neighboring village of Lipnyazhka a few years ago, meaning that Tsukrovarov officially doesn't exist anymore. And yet, 22 families, about 50 people, still live in the abandoned houses. The city took its name after the local sugar factory, and started dying after the plant’s closure in 2000. There have been no cultural events for a long time, the school was closed three years ago, and the kindergarten dismantled for parts long ago. Four-room apartments can be bought there for 5,000 hryvnias — around $180. The city’s last major event was the shooting of the 2019 movie “Ilovaisk 2014,” which portrays one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
Anton Semizhenko, Dmitry Raevsky | Babel | June 11 | 4,000 words
I told our guys they were about to be taken away. All the men [from the Gomel activists] left their houses in the following days. We were given “empty” sim-cards (belarusian sim-cards are usually linked to the passport, "empty" sim-cards in that case are linked to non-existent or dead people) and flat. It was in an excellent location, right behind the local police precinct that was looking for us. But soon we realized they were closing in on us, and that we had to separate. This was all before the election — we had just had a meeting with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya to discuss the transition period after the victory, we had no doubt we would “take” Gomel. But we had to be careful until the elections. I bought a tent at a sports store and everything I needed to survive, and went to the forest, near a river. My wife first went to another place, but a day later she asked to come back to me. So we started living in the forest.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
Russian IT giant Yandex released a lovely map of regional Russian words.
Tornadoes in Russia: a real threat? [RU]
Alexander Chernokulsky | Troitskiy variant | June 18 | 2,600 words
Smartphones with cameras and social networks have provided researchers with a sea of new information about tornadoes in densely populated areas. In forest areas, satellite data helps a lot: the paths of tornadoes are clearly visible from space in the form of narrow areas, inside which trees lie counterclockwise. According to the latest data, 100–300 tornadoes are formed in our country each year, of which 10–50 have a wind speed above 50 m/s, 1–3 above 70 m/s. There’s a particularly high number of tornadoes in the european territory of Russia. In the Moscow region, for example, about 7.5 tornadoes (1.9 tornadoes with a wind speed above 50 m/s) are formed every year on average. Tornadoes have also be known to go directly through populated areas, including regional centers: Moscow (1904), Nizhny Novgorod (1974), Ivanovo (1984), Vladivostok (1997), Blagoveshchensk (2011), Khanty-Mansiysk (2012).
“Reluctant” Decommunization? The Fate of Lenin Monuments in Kazakhstan
Aruzhan Meirkhanova | Oxus Society | June 7 | 900 words
The attempts to grapple with the haunting specter of the Soviet past were by no means unique to Ukraine. Kazakhstan also embarked on its own campaign. Yet the impetus for decommunization has been less robust and the pace rather gradual. With almost 160 monuments remaining (as of 2017), Kazakhstan ranks fourth after Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in the post-Soviet space in terms of the number of Lenins on its soil. Unsurprisingly, a substantial share of these monuments are in the northern part of the country, near the border with Russia. According to the latest available data, 341 Lenin statues have been demolished in Kazakhstan since 1991. Interestingly, apart from dismantling, Kazakhstani authorities have resorted to the strategy of “displacement and replacement.” By relocating Lenin monuments from their central locations to less visible areas, the authorities have deprived these art objects of their unique status while also carving out additional space for new monuments at minimal political cost.
Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities 🔒
Asif Siddiqi | Urban History | February 2021
This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.
Russia's African Toolkit: Digital Influence and Entrepreneurs of Influence 🔒
Kevin Limonier, Marlene Laruelle | Orbis | June 2021
Today, Russian influence on the African continent is still anecdotic compared to the People's Republic of China, the United States, and former colonial powers, such as France. Yet, Moscow has committed to reasserting itself as an alternative pole of influence to China and Western countries in the eyes of some African elites. This article analyzes two key components of Russia's African toolkit: its media outlets such as RT and Sputnik, which have managed to impose themselves on the African media landscape, and its entrepreneurs of influence, in charge of influence campaigns of different scopes. The article contends that Russia's media success relies more on the appropriation of its informational content by African actors with their own political agendas than on Moscow convincing African audiences of the legitimacy of its foreign policy or political model, and that entrepreneurs of influence may play a useful, but limited, role in testing new parameters of influence.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Financial Times: Vladislav Surkov: ‘An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state’
The New York Times: The Power of Money: How Autocrats Use London to Strike Foes Worldwide
Wired: Ugly or Beautiful? The Housing Blocks Communism Left Behind
The Hill: Energy relations are a sign of Russia's declining global standing