Eastern Radar #3
Whitening Estonia, interpreting America at the Minsk book fair, religion in separatist Donbass and more
Here's a tiny mystery, one that slightly bothered me for years — but until this week, never enough to actually look into: why are so many local news websites across the East, from Lviv in Western Ukraine to the Sakhalin islands near Japan, from Vitebsk in Belarus to Oskemen in Kazakhstan sporting the exact same template? Turns out it’s no mystery at all: back in 2006, a Ukrainian company created a website for the city of Mariupol, also in Ukraine, and later managed to market that same template to cities all over the former Soviet Union, but mostly in Ukraine and Russia.
It was a different time, when the Russian and Ukrainian internet and media space were so closely intertwined that selling this kind of content to one was pretty much the same as selling to the other. It worked in national media too, as Russian outlets often published a Ukrainian version of their newspapers and websites. It's something you can still find echoes of: there is a Ukrainian news outlet called RBC UA, created in 2006 as the Ukrainian franchise of the Russian news website RBC. And in the early 2010s, Kommersant Ukraine was one of the country’s leading business outlets. Neither of these projects survived the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, which marked the beginning of the decoupling of the Russian and Ukrainian media space — Kommersant Ukraine disappeared, and RBC UA cut all ties with its Russian counterpart. Ties weren’t severed so neatly when it comes to the digital space, but... it’s not just the somewhat outdated designs that make these local news websites feel a bit like a thing of the past.
Hello and welcome! As usual, we’re kicking things off with a few interesting news, this week from Belarus to Kazakhstan and Russia:
🎻 It’s the 100th birthday of the theremin, one of the oldest electronic musical instruments in the world, invented by Soviet physicist Leon Theremin. The theremin doesn’t have any cords or keys — the player literally creates sounds out of thin air.
✈️ Because of the coronavirus pandemic as well as the political unrest shaking Belarus since this summer, just 22,621 foreign tourists visited the Belarusian city of Grodno from January to November of 2020, compared to at least 130,000 last year.
🛳️ Kazakhstan has opened a new sea ferry route that connects the Kazakh port of Kuryk with the Iranian Amirabad and the port of Anzali.
📖 Azerbaijan will rewrite its school textbooks following the country’s victory over Armenia in the Karabakh war.
📉 Locals in the Russian cities of Ekaterinburg and Yaroslav have one of the lowest trust in local authorities across the entire country — 30% and 24% respectively. In Ekaterinburg, the ousting of the popular local mayor Yevgeny Roizman triggered a sharp fall in the trust rating.
Under the Radar
Jihadists on vacation. Why Ukraine has become a haven for Islamic State militants
Pawel Pieniazek, Alyona Savchuk | Zaborona | December 2
““The SBU did not say much about Tokhosashvili, because it was a failure. He was in our territory for a long time without any supervision. If we had known about him and kept watch, then it would have been a success,” explains SBU Major General Viktor Yagun, former Deputy Chairman of the SBU in 2014-2015. The detention of such an important member of the Islamic State has led to a search for answers—how did it happen that Islamic State militants chose Ukraine as one of their “recreational bases”?”
Interpreting America at the Minsk Book Fair
Paul Halpern | LitHub | November 30
“...With Pompeo gone, I was now the USA’s most prominent, highly-promoted cultural emissary in Belarus. I took a seat in the corner booth of the only American diner in Minsk and poked the buttons of a jukebox on the table. It wouldn’t play, so instead I got my daughter’s toy bunny out of my backpack and posed it for some photos. My work of long-term diplomacy and international reporting had begun.”
Dmitry Durnev | Spektr | November 23
“In the Donetsk region, according to Igor Kozlovsky, this led to an explosion — from the collapse of the Soviet Union to 2014, the number of religious communities increased from 180 to 1780! At the same time, Kyiv and the Donetsk region were the only in Ukraine where the leading Orthodox Churches (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) were in the minority. Most of the rest held various Protestant denominations. This was also the case before, by the way — Donetsk region was the second in the Soviet Union after Moscow in terms of number of Baptists.”
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
The visual whitening of Estonians
Bart Pushaw | Eurozine | November 30
“Anthropological studies conducted during the Russian empire categorized Estonians as Asiatic. But with the rise of nationalism, colonialism and eugenics, Estonians came to be classified – and to self-classify – as Nordic and European. Photography and painting provide a record of this visual whitening.”
Living with socialism: Toward an archaeology of a post-soviet industrial town 🔒
Anatolijs Venovcevs | The Extractive Industries and Society | November 8
“While the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left a heavy legacy in the form of industrial towns, residential buildings, infrastructure networks, and ecological damage that extends the Soviet Union's effective history into the present day. This paper explores this legacy through the perspective of contemporary archaeology to better understand how material culture from the Soviet period is being reused in the present concerning the resource extractive industry. Research focuses on the nickel, copper, and cobalt-processing town of Monchegorsk, Murmansk Oblast in northwest Russia.”
Samuel Liu | Los Angeles Review of Books | November 28
“The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov is a prime example of an author who manages to make his sentences work twice. Set in bleak post–Civil War Soviet Russia, his work is not surrealist in the common sense. Yes, his stories are sometimes hard to believe, and magical; the political brain-washing and ideologically justified violence seem too awful to be real. But the strong joke of Platonov’s “surrealism” is that the things he describes actually occur. People were actually sent down rafts and “liquidated.” Whole villages did starve to death.”
Russia’s Arctic Strategy through 2035
Janis Kluge, Michael Paul | German Institute for International and Security Affairs | November
“Russia has adopted a development strategy for the Arctic for the period from October 2020 to 2035. Reflecting hopes and perceived threats associated with the successive warming of the Arctic, it aims to advance development of the region’s abundant resources, first and foremost oil and gas, and improve living conditions for the population. In the longer term, the Kremlin hopes to establish the Northern Sea Route as a new global shipping artery. Moscow also worries that an increasingly ice-free Arctic could create new territorial vulnerabilities in its Far North, and is responding by rebuilding its military presence there.”
I hope you enjoyed reading this issue as much as I enjoyed putting it together — if you did, feel free to share it on your social networks or to send it to your friends and colleagues (bit of a broken record, I’m aware, but it really does help). And I’m always very, very interested in finding new stories or ways to make this newsletter better, so if you have tips, comments, ideas, questions and/or unhinged rants, you’re more than welcome to send them my way. You can add a comment to this newsletter, send me a DM on Twitter or a mail to fabricedeprez1[at]gmail[.]com.