Eastern Radar #34
Education and propaganda in Ukraine's separatist republics, the Volga river turned machine, producing hip-hop in Bishkek and more
This will be the last issue of 2021, and a great opportunity for me to thank all of you who read, shared or simply enjoyed this newsletter. I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep it going throughout the year and your support has meant a lot. As for next year, I was planning to publish, in addition to the usual programming, a series of special issues focused on Ukraine, the Donbass conflict and the Minsk agreements, drawing on my experience as a former correspondent based in Kyiv to give my take on what brought us to today’s situation.
Whether or not I actually do it in the format I envisioned will, frankly, very much depend on what happens in Ukraine in the coming weeks. Here’s to a peaceful Christmas, New Year, and 2022.
One of the stories highlighted this week in our newsletter looks at the way children in the separatist, unrecognized “Luhansk People’s Republic” in Eastern Ukraine are being taught history. Russian outlet Spektr actually published a similar story not long ago but this time focused on the (still separatist, still unrecognized) “Donetsk People’s Republic”, and looking more broadly at youth education.
The piece mentions in particular one history manual developed by the separatist authorities specifically for schoolchildren, and that can be found fairly easily online. Most interesting to me was what the manual would say about the period of independent Ukraine. Not a whole lot, as it turns out: in a book 230 pages long, the entire period between the fall of the Soviet Union and 2014 is exactly three paragraphs long. So short that I actually took the liberty of translating and publishing it down below as it represents, I feel, a fascinating distillation of the narrative pushed by the Moscow-backed separatist authorities. Worth a read, I’d say.
The 1990s were a very difficult time for the Donetsk region: mines and factories closed, workers did not receive their salaries, prices kept rising — by as much as 100 times in 1993. In March 1994, Donbas residents held a referendum demanding that the region be given autonomy and the right to use the Russian language.
But the president and parliament (Verkhovna Rada) of Ukraine weren’t interested in the opinion of nearly 7 million of its residents, and the 1996 Constitution declared Ukraine a unitary state with Ukrainian as its sole state language. Instead of mending relations with the people of Donbas, President Yushchenko tried to “tame” Donbas. The rallying cry of “Ukraine for Ukrainians” began to be felt in the Donbass region, where the majority of residents considered themselves Russian and spoke Russian. Russian language was studied as a foreign language, or not at all. The gradual rejection of Russian culture intensified, it was forbidden to show Russian-language movies in cinemas, heroes alien to Russian and Soviet history were glorified, and the development of an Agreement on the Union of Ukraine with the European Union (sic, “Соглашения о союзе Украины с Европейским союзом”) began, an agreement that finally tore off Ukraine from Russia.
Hope for change arose among the population of Donbas in 2010, when Viktor Yanukovych, a native of the region, won the presidential elections. In November 2013, he refused to sign an agreement between Ukraine and the European Union. In response, a massive, months-long protest action called “Euromaidan” began in Kyiv. In February 2014, the peaceful protest turned into a fierce and bloody battle, which led to a coup and the final split of Ukraine into opponents and supporters of Russia and all things Russian — language, culture, history.
Beeps
👮 The trial of a former Russian police officer accused of selling data from a law enforcement database began in the Samara region. Kirill Chuprov’s arrest in December last year quickly followed the publication of an investigation by the Bellingcat group on the murder attempt against Alexey Navalny — and Russian law enforcement believes the data sold by Chuprov was used by Bellingcat to identify the FSB officers who were following Navalny hours before the poisoning of the opposition figure.
🚀 Russian newspaper MK published a “long and strikingly critical article” about the state of the Russian space program, U.S outlet Ars Technica writes in a piece that includes a partial translation of the article.
💸 11% of people living in Ukraine’s southern regions have been offered a bribe in exchange for their vote, according to a poll by the OPORA election monitoring NGO.
🙅🏻♂️ Russia’s Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug became the first region in the country to ban migrants from driving taxis or buses, making food for children, selling alcohol or tobacco and working in the education sector.
💉 The natural population change (birth rate minus death rate) in Russia’s Kaliningrad region reached -4,300 people in the first nine months of 2021, a decline twice as important as the previous year, mostly because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Under the Radar
The Soviets turned the Volga River into a machine. Then the machine broke.
Olga Dobrovidova | MIT Technological Review | December 15 | 3,500 words
The history of the Big Volga project is, in a sense, the history of Soviet industrialization. It is also a history of rivalry with the US, which for decades raced the Soviets to build bigger, more impressive dams. But today, the Volga has become polluted, silted up, and overwhelmed by invasive species. Water flows at a tenth of the speed it did before the dams were constructed, according to estimates by researchers at the Institute of Ecology of the Volga River Basin, in the central Russian port city of Togliatti. Widespread toxic algal blooms are now common. As global temperatures rise, the Volga basin is getting less and less rainfall in the spring and summer, and more snow in the winter.
What they teach children in the separatist “Luhansk People’s Republic” [RU]
Realnaya Gazeta | December 17 | 2,600 words
In the schools of occupied Luhansk, there is no “History of Ukraine” taught as a separate subject. But children aren’t being taught a history of Russia the way it’s done in Russian schools either. Instead, they study a so-called “history of the Fatherland” — a surrogate for the history of the Luhansk region and the history of Russia. In grades 5 and 6 (children aged 11 and 12), the history programs for children in Ukrainian schools and in the parts of the Luhansk region not under government control are similar. They both study the migration and way of life of the early Eastern Slavs and the formation of the first state — a state called “Kievan Rus’” or “Rus’-Ukraine” in the Ukrainian program, but simply “Rus’” in the separatist republic (LPR). In ninth grade, students on both sides of the frontline start learning about the history of Ukrainian lands within the Russian empire. In the LPR however, there is no mention of the current Ukrainian territories that were back then part of the Austrian empire. The differences only widen in grade 10 — everything that happens in Ukraine after 1917 is considered by the Ukrainian programs to be an occupation by totalitarian regimes, while the LPR omits any mention of “Ukrainian revolution” or “struggle for Ukrainian independence”.
“You liked or commented on Navalny’s posts” — how police major Yulia Suvorova was fired [RU]
Yulia Faller | TV2 | December 13 | 2,500 words
Yulia’s life was ruined in just one day, on November 25. She was coming back from a sick leave she took to take care of her child, and was immediately called to an office in the personnel department. Five people were waiting for her, she recalls — three higher-ups, a psychologist and a lawyer. One by one, they began to berate her. “Yulia, remember. We have information that you criticized the authorities online. Maybe you followed the “Police ombudsman” page? Did you write comments of an extremist nature, about the roads and the government, about elections and changes to the Constitution? Did you like and comment on Navalny's posts? If you do not write a letter of resignation now, you’ll be fired tomorrow, whether you are on sick leave or not, no matter if your arm or your leg is broken. The OSB (internal security department) will be involved, and a criminal case under the articles related to extremism will be launched. You know where you work, they’ll always find something to prosecute a police officer.”
Research and Culture
Mapping folklore: mythical creatures of the Baltics and beyond
Will Mawhood, Giedrė Beconytė | Deep Baltic | December 7
The Lithuanian fairy laumė is dangerous specifically to men, though often kind to women and children – especially those who are poor and kind, abused or lost. They are seen doing “feminine” works – weaving, spinning, washing clothes. If men are mean, their revenge is immediate and often disproportionately cruel. Devils in most countries are not mythical creatures by our definition – they are spirits that religious people believe in. In Lithuania we have a tradition of wood carving, and since Lithuania became Catholic, many religious motifs are reflected in those carvings, including the Devil, but the Devil as an evil spirit. But also we have a much longer tradition of devils in our folk tales, in our folklore, and they are a different kind of thing.
The future has to wait: 5G in Russia and the lack of elite consensus 🔓
Janis Kluge | Post-Soviet Affairs | August 2021
Although the rollout of 5G in Russia has been much anticipated by both businesses and the government, progress in the introduction of the new standard came to a standstill by 2021. Key elite groups in business, the federal bureaucracy, and the security apparatus (the siloviki) have failed to agree on the rules for 5G. Major sticking points in the debate are the distribution of radio spectrum, the operators’ business model, and the degree of import substitution for 5G equipment. This article examines the bargaining among different elite actors over the new mobile communications standard. The foundering introduction of 5G illustrates a more general lack of agreement among Russia’s elites about the future direction of Russia’s economy. Negotiations are complicated by shrinking resources, the relative strengthening of the siloviki, and unrealistic aspirations to economic sovereignty in the digital sphere.
The Belt and Road Initiative in China's Western frontier and Central Asia
Zenel Garcia | 9DASHLINE | December 20
Beijing believes it will benefit from the development of the Central Asian Republics (CARs), and that this will have a direct impact on Xinjiang itself. Growing trade between Xinjiang and its neighbors promotes economic growth which the CCP sees as the primary mechanism to mitigating social instability and ensuring security. Importantly, development in the CARs facilitates the emergence of sustainable supply chains and a market for Chinese products, many of them developed or carried through Xinjiang. Furthermore, the need for continued Chinese investment and market access ensures that Central Asian leaders will continue to relegate the question of Uyghur diasporas or the treatment of other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to the periphery. This allows the CCP to exercise more effective control over the province since there is little possibility for interference across the border. In essence, the BRI, having built and expanded on previous phases represents the most recent effort in this intricate dynamic of development and security.
Dreams of ‘shooting out’: hip-hop music production in Bishkek in the age of streaming 🔓
Florian Coppenrath | Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient | December 2021
Digitalised music production and the rise of music streaming platforms shape music markets worldwide. Whereas in Western Europe and North America, the age of streaming has also been criticised for a casualisation of musical labour, in peripheral music economies like Kyrgyzstan it participates in structuring a market for music makers. At the same time, digitalisation also tends to reproduce global inequalities. Based on the case of hiphop music production in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the present working paper examines how the ‘age of streaming’ affects the musical production and the dreams and ambitions of music workers.
ICYMI
Stories from well-known outlets you might nevertheless have missed.
Foreign Affairs: Why the Stalemate in Eastern Ukraine Will Likely Hold
Financial Times: Floating nuclear power plant fuels Russia’s Arctic ambitions
The Diplomat: Kazakhstan: What Happened in Zhanaozen?
New York Times: How the Kremlin is Militarizing Russian Society
New Lines Mag: The Fallen Mercenaries in Russia’s Dark Army