Eastern Radar #30
The economics of surviving in Russian prisons, Kharkiv's mayoral election, the untold story of the Tsar Bomba, pornography in the Russian empire and more
Radio Chatter
BBC Monitoring journalist Francis Scarr reports from Yekaterinburg on how the Soviet war in Afghanistan is remembered today (at the 06:25 mark).
Analyst Mark Galeotti went to Tula and brought back some impressions about Russian provincial life and politics, Governor Dyumin, and busses.
Beeps
⚔️ The latest iteration of the popular “Age of Empires” strategy video game franchise asks you to destroy the city of Kyiv in its single-player campaign, a revisiting of the 1240 siege of Kyiv by the Mongol empire.
🏘️ The son of Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov just bought himself two residences in Geneva for about $104 million.
☢️ Rosatom's scientists say they have developed a new, highly accurate digital model of the public impacts of radiation releases.
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan’s president signed a law to get his flag and badge. It’s apparently pretty common in Central Asia.
🛑 Russian news agency Regnum has reportedly been blocked in Belarus.
Under the Radar
Your wallet or your life: the cost of surviving in the prisons of the Rostov region [RU]
Irina Babicheva | 161.ru | October 26 | 3,500 words
Extortion has been flourishing in the Rostov penal colonies for a long time, according to human rights activist Elena Eliseeva. She regularly receives letters from mothers who say they’re forced to send money to “thieves” in order to protect their sons. The inmates collect money for the common pot. In theory, anyone can chip in, and the money should go to tea, cigarettes, medicines, and the various needs of the penal colony. But each prison has its own price list. In Shakhty’s IK-9, a quiet life is worth about a thousand rubles cash a month. Things look very different in Bataysk’s IK-15, one prisoner told a 161.ru correspondent. We talk by phone, although our interlocutor has been sentenced to a strict regime. Nothing unusual — many prisoners use phones. Some convicts hear their children’s first words, see their first steps by video, and help them do their homework.
All this, of course, requires money. “It’s all in plain sight, and every administration makes money from this” the prisoner says. It cost 3,000 rubles a month ($45) just to not be touched. If you don’t give it up, they’ll beat you until you pay. The system is fairly simple: the penal colony is divided into several sections, each its own, fenced-in prison inside the prison — IK-15 has five of those. And each section is divided into several detachments. “There’s a specific amount that each detachment has to send to the common pot each month” the prisoner explains. “150,000 rubles ($2,100) minimum. There are about 80 people in each detachment. The detachment supervisor transfers the money to the guy looking over the common pot, and that guy sends the money to the “Kremlin”, where the “blatkomitet” [group of leading gangsters] lives. And the Kremlin’s thieves give some of it to the prison’s head of operational department, he organizes the whole thing with us and decides most issues.”
Concerts, festivals and full hospitals: how Kharkiv is preparing for the mayoral elections [UKR/RU]
Anton Semizhenko | Babel | October 29 | 2,900 words
Physician Kateryna Tkachenko came to install an oxygen concentrator for a patient infected with the coronavirus. We go up to the tenth floor. Little seems to have changed in the apartment over the last 30 years. In some places the walls in the kitchen are decorated with colorful stickers, the table is covered with oilcloth. Sitting behind is Jeanne, an overweight, 65-year-old woman. She cannot get up, and a neighbor opens the door for us. Jeanne did not believe in Covid until recently. Even now, after a positive PCR test, she still simply calls it “a disease”. “It happened by chance, I was sitting on the divan and just fell” she explains in a weak voice. “Yeah they found her on the floor” says Katya while rubbing the patient’s finger — she’s preparing to measure the level of oxygen in her blood. “How long did you stay there, two days?” “Three. I just couldn’t get up.”
Research & Culture
New book: “Global Finance, Local Control - Corruption and Wealth in Contemporary Russia”
An unearthly spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb
Alex Wellerstein | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | October 29 | 9,800 words
The 100-megaton bomb would be known internally as Project 602. The speed of its development is beyond impressive in retrospect: In a mere four months, the team would have to develop an entirely new weapon design for a totally untested yield range; build the device and fabricate the fissionable and fusionable material into the correct shapes; and devise a plan to safely test it. Sakharov would manage the whole project, with Trutnev and Babaev doing much of the design work, along with the young physicists Victor Adamski and Yuri Smirnov. Little has been released about the details of the design, but a few years ago two longtime participants in the Soviet and Russian nuclear programs revealed that it was what they called a “bifilar” design: There was a “main” thermonuclear unit in the center, with two “primaries” imploding it from either side (with a time difference between the two detonations of no more than 0.1 microseconds).
An Erotic Revolution? Pornography in the Russian Empire, 1905–1914 🔒
Siobhán Hearne | Journal of the History of Sexuality | May 2021
This article examines the history of pornography in the Russian Empire between 1905 and 1914 with a particular focus on distributors, publishers, and the imperial police. The article has two principal arguments. First, I will demonstrate that reactions to pornography signaled unease with the empire's accelerated path toward "modernity," broadly defined as a period of industrialization, urbanization, consumerism, and the development of mass communication. In the Russian Empire, as elsewhere, pornography traders responded to the expansion of consumer culture and took advantage of new networks of transport and communication, which allowed for the advertisement of cheap pamphlets, postcards, and photographs in mass-circulation newspapers, customer postal orders, and the movement of goods across imperial and national borders. A second focus of this article will be to tease out the distinctiveness of the Russian case, paying particular attention to the impact of the 1905 revolution and the decentralized and disjointed nature of Russian imperial governance.
Duma and Regional Elections 2021
Center for Security Studies - ETH Zurich | October 4
Grigorii V. Golosov discusses the use of tools to allow United Russia to retain its two-thirds majority in the Duma; Tatiana Tkacheva aims to show that the level of authoritarian manipulations of the election is unprecedented; Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet, and Ben Noble describe the basic design of the tactical voting strategy of Team Navalny’s “Smart Voting” project; Tatiana Golova analyzes the case of the Khabarovsk region to show how elections are discussed on Russian-language social media; Leah Silinsky outlines the various protests that have taken place in response to inadequate waste management.
Photographer Uncovers the Soviet Underworld Below Tbilisi, Georgia
Amos Chapple | PetaPixel | October 28
Beneath the streets of Tbilisi lies a network of tunnels, bomb shelters, and Soviet-era chambers that many locals know nothing about. Over the past several months, photographer David Tabagari has been exploring this silent underworld with extraordinary results. Beginning in the spring of 2021, the professional photographer began venturing into the entranceways most pedestrians pass by without noticing. Many of those unremarkable entrances lead to an underworld with a mysterious and sinister past. Little information exists about the construction of Tbilisi’s underworld. According to local journalist and academic Emil Avdaliani, much of the underground network was built by Lavrenty Beria, the notorious chief of the Soviet secret police. Passageways under Tbilisi that reportedly lead from a former secret police headquarters to the city’s train station have led to speculation some tunnels were used to transport prisoners or bodies during the murderous “purges” carried out under Stalin and Beria. In the summer of 2021, Tabagari read a rumor on online forums about a subterranean prison under central Tbilisi. After searching online and on foot, he eventually found the remains of prisoner cells beneath a former secret police station.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
The Washington Post: Three decades after the Soviet era, this Moscow street echoes what was.
Foreign Policy: Belarus Boots U.S. Diplomatic Staff, Mimicking Putin
The New York Times: A Ukrainian Town Succeeds With Vaccine Experiment
The Diplomat: China’s Security Infrastructure Continues to Grow in Tajikistan