Eastern Radar #4
Running scams from a Russian prison, dying and blooming Ukrainian villages, looking for fish owls in Siberia, the “Jewish NKVD” and more
Hi everyone! No little opening story this week I’m afraid, preparations to leave Ukraine for the winter holidays have been quite hectic. It’ll come back of course (as I love writing these) but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this fourth issue of Eastern Radar! As usual, there are many great stories featured this week but if you can only read one, I really recommend you check out Jonathan Slaght’s retelling of his attempt to record the song of the fish owl in the Siberian wilderness.
Beeps
🇸🇩 A planned Russian naval base and an under-the-radar Israeli visit are exacerbating a dispute within Sudan’s power-sharing government, risking the country’s democratic transition.
🐮 Europe’s biggest land mammal, the European bison, is beginning to recover in numbers thanks to conservation efforts [...] By 2003 there were 1,800 in the wild, and by last year the number had more than tripled to a population of more than 6,200 in 47 free-ranging herds in Poland, Belarus and Russia.
🛩️ The U.S. Marine Corps is looking to buy a Soviet-era AN-2 biplane, a model first produced in 1948.
☢️ Ukraine’s uranium mines — the only uranium mines in Europe — have stopped working since December 7 due to a “lack of funds.”
🇨🇳 Russian war movie “T-34” is out in China this week, with models of the legendary tank displayed at shopping malls in Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenzhen and Hangzhou to promote the release.
😷 1% of the population in the Verkhneuslonsky district of Russia’s Tatarstan region is infected with coronavirus. Russia’s statistics agency also reported mortality in the Tatarstan region rose 46.9% YoY in October.
Under the Radar
Igor Pushkarev | Znak | December 4
Sitting in a penal colony in the Adygea region and then in a pre-trial detention center in Moscow, Ishvay Davydov terrorized photo and recording studios throughout Western Russia and the Urals by stealing expensive equipment from them. Aleksey Fedyarov, head of the “Russia Behind Bars” NGO, believes that this is just one of many examples of shadow business in which corrupt employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia are directly involved. Davydov reportedly created a real “call center” in the IK-1 penal colony, negotiating from the prison the lease of equipment, finding accomplices who transported it, and buyers for the stolen goods.
“They spat on us and crushed us.” How do people live in villages with — and without — large agricultural holdings [UKR/RU]
Zhanna Bezpyatchuk | BBC Ukraine | December 5
Some Ukrainian villages successfully survived cataclysms while others are disappearing. Some have private harvesters, tractors, street lights, a water supply system, while others only have ruins and a closed school. BBC Ukraine visited villages in the Poltava region to compare how farmers, from small peasants to the largest agricultural holdings, interact with local communities.
Irkutsk — the Russian capital of Bandy [RU]
Vitaly Barsukov | Nezavisimaya Gazeta | December 10
Bandy is considered a truly national game — it’s not for nothing that it’s also called “Russian hockey” — but is particularly popular in Siberia and the Urals, where stands are almost always full (the situation is a bit different this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic). One such epicenter is Irkutsk, where the local club “Baikal-Energy” looks poised to dominate the championship. The club enjoys a major advantage: while almost all teams are financed by regional budgets, “Baikal-Energy” is the only team with a private sponsor, the Anglo-Russian energy company “En+ Group.”
How Natalya Kochanova went from Vodokanal dispatcher to Lukashenko’s right-hand woman [RU]
Irina Gorbach | The Village Belarus | December 9
“There were times when tears came to my eyes, because I felt the sincerity of this person,” Kochanova said about one of Lukashenko's speeches at the All-Belarusian Assembly. For the last six years, Natalya Kochanova has been part of Lukashenko’s close circle, working in positions no women in Belarus had held before. In that time, she became the person Lukashenko would refer to as a “ready-made president” and trusts to speak on his behalf, as well as one of the most widely publicized officials and a target of popular memes.
Research, Culture & General Nerdistry
East of Siberia: A Duet of Fish Owls
Jonathan C. Slaght | Scientific American | December 10
After weeks of delays, I’d finally reached the wild. I was in the Samarga River basin, a mountainous, roadless corner of the Russian Far East inhabited by indigenous Udege hunters, Amur tigers and—most importantly for me—Blakiston’s fish owls. These were the largest owls in the world; endangered giants that hunt for salmon in rivers and nest in enormous trees. Joined by Sergey Avdeyuk, an experienced woodsman, I was dipping my toe into my first year of fish owl fieldwork, the first of many. We were here to find fish owls to better understand their habitat needs so we could develop a conservation plan to protect them.
Soviet Entrepreneurs in the Late Socialist Shadow Economy: The Case of the Kyrgyz Affair 🔒
James Heinzen | Slavic Review | November 18
Supported by new archival material, this article delves deeply into one landmark criminal case to explore key aspects of the social, economic, and cultural history of illegal production and markets in the Soviet 1950s–60s. [...] The so-called Kyrgyz Affair, a famous and expansive shadow economy operation centered in clothing factories in Frunze (Bishkek), Kyrgyz Republic, is at the center of the article. I argue that the scope, sophistication, ambition, and success of this and similar operations helps us understand a significant reason why Nikita Khrushchev decided to introduce the death penalty for aggravated cases of theft of state property and bribery in 1961–62.
The Outsider: Russia in the Race for Artificial Intelligence
Julien Nocetti | Ifri | December 9
When analyzing the global state of play around artificial intelligence (AI), Russia so far looks like an “outsider” compared to the two technological leaders, the United States and China. Yet, like the European Union, Russia exhibits two apparently contradictory but fundamental trends: it is trying to reap the benefits of technological interdependence—digital, scientific, financial etc.—while also protecting its internal market and thereby achieving the “technological sovereignty” it so ardently desires. Russia’s state-led approach is compounded by the same problems that afflict Russia in the conventional digital sector: lack of investment, weak integration into international scientific and normative networks, political pressure on private companies, dependence on global technological value chains and brain drain. Might these factors lead us to underestimate Moscow’s potential in AI?
Antisemitism in the “Jewish NKVD” in Soviet Ukraine on the Eve of World War II 🔒
Lynne Viola | Holocaust and Genocide Studies | December 4
Following the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, murderous violence against local Jews broke out in many localities of the territories it had occupied in the wake of the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. In particular, organizers demanded revenge for the recent Stalinist repressions and deportations. Participants claimed that the “Jewish Soviet state,” the “Jewish NKVD,” or local Jews had been responsible for those crimes. Even now, the legend of prewar Jewish responsibility figures in the dubious “double genocide” thesis animating nationalistic historiographies in Eastern Europe and its international diasporas. The following study counters that mythology, addressing the story of actual Jews in the NKVD at the end of the 1930s. It draws on the archives of the Ukrainian security services, especially records that document Stalin’s effort to divert blame for the recent Great Terror onto senior and mid-level officials. These sources suggest that antisemitism was in fact a potent force within the NKVD in Ukraine and elsewhere.