Eastern Radar #31
Taxi drivers and the migrant crisis in Belarus, full crematoriums in Ukraine, European climate policies in post-Soviet countries and more
Radio Chatter
RFE/RL’s Majlis podcast looks at the impact of climate change in Central Asia.
The latest episode of Sean Guillory’s SRB podcast is all about Soviet hippies.
Beeps
🚪 Two Belarusians living in the city of Grodno, near the Polish border, told local outlet Grodno.in they discovered the flat they’d been renting to 4 people was actually used by 8 migrants preparing to cross the border into the European Union.
🇱🇻 Nights spent in tourist accommodation increased in almost all countries of the European Union in July-August 2021 compared to 2020, except for Latvia (-16%).
👮 The head of the Siberian city of Barnaul announced the creation of a special police unit dedicated to “anticovid raids” — checking that shops and companies abide by the sanitary restrictions.
🛑 Anti-vaxxers from the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk were prevented from taking part in a protest against sanitary restrictions on November 2 in Kyiv because they did not have vaccine certificates.
Under the Radar
In the city of Grodno, taxi drivers profit from the migrant crisis [RU]
Unknown | s13.ru | November 11 | 471 words
Warning: I cannot vouch for the reliability of this local news blog and advise you to take these anonymous testimonies with a pinch of salt.
Coming back to Grodno, Mikhail saw refugees and says he tried to show them a video of the situation at the border to convince them not to go there. “Many were adamant, repeated “go Poland” in English. Someone said “in Iran or in your forest, we don't care where we die,” said they had sold everything they had for this trip and had nowhere to return to.” Another taxi driver said he had set up a price of fifty dollars for a trip to the border. But several taxi drivers say many companies now refuse such trips. Someone said a specific smell would linger in the car after carrying migrants, someone else that he had called the border committee and been “advised not to transport people of middle-eastern appearance who seem to be migrants”.
“We aren’t against vaccines”: in Russia’s Far-East, medics oppose mandatory vaccination [RU]
Dmitrii Ermakov | RFE/RL Sibir Reali | November 6 | 2,000 words
Why it’s interesting: the Kremlin is moving to introduce mandatory nationwide QR codes amid a pandemic that already claimed more than 700,000 lives in the country. But widespread opposition to sanitary restrictions means the decision represents a challenge to the government and Vladimir Putin that might be on par with the wildly unpopular pension reform.
On November 4, the 19 employees of the ambulance station in Obluchye — a small town of about 8 thousand people in the Jewish Autonomous region — rebelled against the authorities' order to vaccinate and walked out. They were soon followed by doctors from the nearby village of Pashkovo, triggering feverish negotiations with local officials who feared that the medics' resignation would lead to the collapse of the area's fragile healthcare network. “Personally, I do not trust the official vaccines, especially “Sputnik”” said Ivan Krasnoslobodtsev, one of the first employees at the ambulance station to protest. “We've been having doubts about its effectiveness - all month we've been transporting old people out of a nursing home who had all been vaccinated, and yet there was an outbreak there.”
Coronavirus in Ukraine: not enough coffins, and a wait of up to three weeks for cremation [RU]
Anastasia Tovt, Polina Pronina | Strana | November 9 | 1,300 words
In Kharkiv and other cities of Ukraine, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see off those who died from the coronavirus. “The worst situation is in Kharkiv, Kherson and Dnipro” according to Mikhail Lymar, the director of a funeral home in Kharkiv. “For example, Dnipro cremated about 30-40% of the bodies in Kharkiv. That’s not possible anymore - neither Odessa nor Kharkiv accepts people who aren’t locals. People are forced to look for alternative solutions. There are a lot of calls from people who do not understand why you can not bury the body. This whole situation is a shock for them.” In Odessa, one has to wait 10 to 12 days to cremate a body. Some representatives of funeral services in the Black sea city claim that the wait for cremation isn’t more than 3-5 days however — because people who died from covid and doesn’t who didn’t are cremated separately.
Research & Culture
New book: Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change
Karina Shyrokykha | Problems of Post-Communism | October 15
The European Union (EU) has positioned itself as a global climate leader, and its external climate governance is most visible in the six post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe. This article asks what drives the EU’s engagement with climate governance in the region. To answer this question, I distinguish between three logics of external climate action: self-interest, functional, and civilizing. The EU’s self-interest is apparent in its cooperation with countries that are key to EU energy security. Bilateral climate cooperation with Azerbaijan and Ukraine is tightly connected to cooperation on energy imports and transit.
Does State Repression Spark Protests? Evidence from Secret Police Surveillance in Communist Poland 🔓
Anselm Hager, Krzysztof Krakowski | American Political Science Review | September 14
Does physical surveillance hinder or foster antiregime resistance? A common view holds that surveillance prevents resistance by providing regimes with high-quality intelligence on dissident networks and by instilling fear in citizens. We contrast this view using formerly classified data from Communist Poland. We find that communities exposed to secret police officers were more likely to organize protests but also engaged in less sabotage. To ensure that the relationship is causal, we use an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits the exogenous assignment of Catholic “spy priests” to local communities. To trace the underlying mechanisms, we draw on qualitative interviews and archival sources. We document that Poland’s comprehensive use of surveillance created widespread anger as well as an incentive for citizens to reveal their true loyalties, thus facilitating antiregime collective action. Once on the streets, protesters refrained from sabotage to signal their political motivation to bystanders and authorities alike.
Soviet Central Asia in 100 Objects
Edmund Herzig, Botakoz Kassymbekova, Alexander Morrison | University of Oxford, Liverpool John Moores University
The History of Soviet Central Asia in 100 Objects is an online museum exhibition project that aims to convey histories of Soviet Central Asia through material objects. Inspired by Neil Macgregor's A History of the World in 100 objects, the exhibition aims to open up the field of Soviet Central Asian studies to the general public, but also enrich the historical narrative of the Soviet past in Central Asia through material objects and their "biographies." The online exhibition will present 100 material objects, which are presented as a lens to tell stories of a particular period, idea, experience or event. The objects will be arranged chronologically so that they cover the whole Soviet period, highlighting the specificity of each historical and geographic context. Each object will be commented by a historian from the field of Soviet Central Asian studies. The accompanying commentary will draw upon personal, family, regional and all-Soviet histories, in some cases exploring the literary resonances or artistic inspiration for a particular object, whilst also explaining how it was produced, used and preserved.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Reuters: 'No going back': Migrants tell of being trapped on Belarus-Poland border
The Diplomat: Uzbekistan Still Contemplating Eurasian Economic Union Membership
The New York Times: What’s in a Name? For the Koreans of Sakhalin, an Anguished History
The Moscow Times: In Russia’s South, the Remains of a Greek City Hint at Cosmopolitan Past