Eastern Radar #29
A disappearance in Tyumen, tourism in Covid-stricken Saint-Petersburg, Poland's ambiguous democracy promotion in Ukraine and more
Radio Chatter
In the 19th episode of his investment podcast, Daniel Peris discusses with professor Kristy Ironside how Soviet bureaucrats in the 1950s tackled inflation, money supply, wage pressure and other common financial problems.
Political risk analyst Nick Trickett brings his expertise to Meduza and tries to untangle the current gas crisis between Russia and Europe. Do subscribe to his daily newsletter on Russia and Eurasia’s political economy if you haven’t already.
New Books Network’s Steven Seegel welcomes historian John-Paul Himka to discuss his latest book about the involvement of Ukrainian nationalist movements in the mass murder of the Jewish population living in Ukraine under German occupation in 1941-44.
The BBC tells the story of Mohamed Barud, a 31-year-old newlywed sentenced to life in prison in Somalia who managed to find renewed hope when a man on the other side of his cell devised a secret language and tapped out the Russian novel Anna Karenina through his cell wall.
Beeps
☢️ Declassified Cold-war era satellite pictures expose the catastrophic ecological damage done by a notorious Soviet plutonium-making facility in the Southern Urals.
🏰 A small French village is fighting to save its 12th-century neo-Gothic fortress, fearing it will be closed to the public after the castle became entangled in a money laundering case in Ukraine.
🚢 Ten naval vessels belonging to China and Russia passed through a narrow chokepoint in the north of Japan, the first time that Chinese and Russian ships passed the strait between Japan's main island of Honshu and the northern island of Hokkaido together.
🚬 Ukraine’s illicit tobacco market represents 15.9% of the country’s overall market, the biggest figure in a decade.
📦 The introduction of mandatory vaccination checks (using QR codes) in food establishments of Russia’s Tatarstan region led to a three-times rise in demand for delivery people almost overnight.
Under the Radar
A Key on a Yellow String: the story of Nastya Muravyeva and the disappearance that shook Tyumen [RU]
Olesya Ostapchuk | Holod | October 19 | 5,600 words
At the end of June 2021, eight-year-old Nastya Muravyova disappeared in Tyumen, triggering an intense search that lasted almost two months and involved the entire city. Reports in local and national media lead to Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrytykin to take charge of the case but also drew attention to the way disappearances of children in Siberia had not been investigated for years. “Holod” tells how the life Muravyova’s family changed after Nastya’s disappearance and why Tyumen residents still doubt the official version of the investigation.
Why students from Central Asia come to Russian universities [RU]
German Nechaev, Arina Gundyreva, Nikita Kuchinsky | Doxa Journal | October 18 | 1,900 words
The number of foreign students from Central Asia in Russia has only grown in the past few years. A major part — 1/4 of all foreign students in Russia — come from Kazakhstan (80% of Kazakh students who study abroad are in Russia). And yet, compared to Russia, it is cheap to study in Central Asia: the average cost of an education in a Russian university is $3,500 a year, several times higher than in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan and Turkmenistan. Though, according to students from Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, one would have to add to the total price of an education in their come countries the cost of bribes to enter the university and pass exams.
Galina Boyarkova | Fontanka | October 20 | 600 words
Autumn holidays are the high season for children's tourism. This year, 20 thousand schoolchildren were supposed to visit St. Petersburg, according to the local branch of the Russian Union of Tourism Industry. But the worsening pandemic has now led to the closure of museums, theaters, cinemas, and concert halls, forcing tour operators to look for alternatives. Walking tours of the city’s streets and parks are one option. “But it’s not the summer season anymore, and walking the streets in the cold season, you can get even more respiratory diseases and weaken your immune system,” says Ekaterina Shadskaya. Instead of the Hermitage or the Russian museum, “Petrotour” will take the children to the museums of the Leningrad Region, where there are no restrictions for children's groups. “We will show the beauty of Bogoslovka’s wooden churches and the “Road of Life” museum,” says the director of the tour operator. The trip to Tsarskoe Selo will be replaced by an excursion to Kronstadt, with a visit to the Naval Cathedral.
Research & General Nerdistry
Daniel Marcus from the Russian-German project “Dekoder” has put together an incredible database of more than 385,000 transcripts from speeches made in the State Duma between 1994 and 2021, which they used with Novaya Gazeta a visualization tool to check how much a specific word has been used since 1994.
On Methodology: Oral History and the Nazi Genocide
Anika Walke | Oxford Scholarship Online | 2015
After our first interview, Alevtina Kuprikhina commented, “Next time, when you speak better Russian, we can have a better conversation.” Questioning my ability to communicate with her in a foreign language, she clearly considered our conversation to be filled with misunderstandings and obscurity. Listening to the interview tape, I recognize that, though my Russian was intelligible, it was at times clumsy. My inability to formulate precise questions, and indeed my insecurity about this, resulted from my own confusion about a narration that was hard to track. Alevtina Kuprikhina transitioned between themes, time periods, and names quickly, making it difficult to follow her train of thought. Such seemingly disconnected narrations are common in interviews with survivors of genocide and other traumatic experiences.
Citizens and the state in authoritarian regimes: comparing China and Russia 🔒
Bo Petersson | Eurasian Geography and Economics | October 2021
A somewhat surprising conclusion reached by several of the authors represented in the volume is that, paradoxically, closed authoritarian China is more prone to seek institutionalized input from its citizens than is hybrid Russia, where the bounds of the permissible are far more arbitrary and ad hoc, and therefore fraught with uncertainty. Whereas the Putin regime relies heavily on patronage and personal ties to manage state-society relations, China's communist regime under Xi depends more on rules and institutions. There is certainly no rule of law in the Western sense of the word in China, rather there is rule by strict and forbidding law. In Russia, however, the situation is in many cases a rule without law and manipulation of ambiguity.
Democracy promotion under populist rule? The case of Poland’s democracy aid in Ukraine 🔒
Alexandra Monkos | Cambridge Review of International Affairs | October 2021
The credibility of democracy promotion provided by countries experiencing democratic backsliding has raised many doubts lately. The goal of this exploratory paper is to examine Poland’s efforts to promote democracy through foreign aid in Ukraine. I find that after winning the elections in 2015, the populist government in Poland started to transform democracy aid both at the level of development cooperation policy and in practice in Ukraine, one of the biggest beneficiaries of Polish aid. Rather than explicitly questioning or limiting aid as an instrument of democracy promotion, support for civil society and human rights has been reduced, and the involvement of Polish NGOs, especially those strongly committed to transferring democratic values abroad, declined.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Reuters: Russia's remote permafrost thaws, threatening homes and infrastructure
Politico: A Ukrainian Oligarch Bought a Midwestern Factory and Let it Rot. What Was Really Going On?
The Moscow Times: Siberia Sounds Electricity Alarm Over China’s Crypto Crackdown
RFE/RL: Ukraine, Russia Return To Arbitration Court Over Black Sea Ship Seizures
New York Times: On a Pacific Island, Russia Tests Its Battle Plan on Climate Change