Eastern Radar #7
Language discrimination in Ukraine, Russia’s stateless people, beard taxation in imperial Russia and more
A Ukrainian law making it mandatory for service workers to address customers in Ukrainian came into force last week, reigniting a debate I can’t help but find fascinating and so very tiring at the same time.
One aspect of this debate revolves around victimization, with activists of the Ukrainian and Russian language alike tending to portray their preferred language (most Ukrainians being fluent in both) as under threat and discriminated against.
But here’s my provocative hot take: the language facing the most discrimination in Ukraine isn’t Ukrainian, and it isn’t Russian. It’s Surzhyk, this mix of Russian and Ukrainian spoken mostly in central and southern Ukraine, but derided everywhere. Speakers of Surzhyk face a discrimination that is social rather than legal, as the dialect/language is often taken as a mark of low social status and limited education — similar to regional accents in many European countries. I have almost never heard Ukrainians (or foreigners) having a positive or just neutral opinion of Surzhyk: speakers of both the Ukrainian and Russian languages often agree to portray it as ugly and “impure.”
This contempt is so commonplace that it has, in my experience at least, been internalized by many Ukrainians: reporting last year from a village a few kilometers away from the Donbass frontline, a lovely old woman invited me into her house for tea — but not before apologizing for speaking to me in Surzhyk. It’s not the only time this happened to me, and it’s always particularly embarrassing considering I come to them speaking an atrocious Russian.
Beeps
Hello everyone and welcome to this new issue of Eastern Radar!
Two podcasts caught my eye this week: Meduza editor Kevin Rothrock talks to Polina Ivanova, the Reuters reporter who wrote the incredible story of how the coronavirus pandemic spread through Russia’s Star City cosmonaut training town; and British researcher Mark Galeotti explains why Putin’s bodyguards are more than bodyguards.
Also, two recent threads on Twitter worth checking out, on what focus groups can tell us about the way Russians see their future (5 tweets), and an academic reading list about Alexey Navalny and his movement (11 tweets). And if you found my short text on language in Ukraine interesting, read this thread from 2019 about the then recently-voted language law (8 tweets).
In other news:
👮 I featured last week a story about Ukrainians escaping jail. Well, two convicts in the region of Nikolaev briefly managed to flee from the correctional colony 93 last week, apparently taking advantage of strong snowfalls. They were caught just a day later.
🦻 The Russian sports TV channel “Match TV” banned a series of English words that made their way into the Russian language, including “лайкать” (“to like” a post on social media), “лузер” (“loser”), “перформанс” (“performance”) and “ноунейм” (“no name”). The channel’s sport commentators now won’t be allowed to use them.
🇬🇪 Lithuania decided to change the name of the country of Georgia in its official documents: it will now be called Sakartvelo.
♻️ Speaking of Lithuania, 69% of plastic packaging thrown away in the country is recycled, the highest rate in the European Union.
🚀 Russia may fine citizens who use SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service.
Under the Radar
Russia’s stateless people [RU]
Katya Arenina | iStories | January 14
Thirty years after the fall of the USSR, the issue of Russians with Soviet passports — and nothing else — lingers on. There could be up to 500,000 of them, human rights activists say, facing a legislation that allows stateless people to be placed in prison conditions for two years pending expulsion, even if there is nowhere to expel that person to.
The defenders of monumentalism: how activists save unique mosaics in Chernihiv [UKR]
Natalia Naidyuk | Ukrainska Pravda | January 17
There is no exact listing of monumental works in Chernihiv. Some have already disappeared, such as the brick pixel art on the building of the Academy of the State Penitentiary Service of Ukraine. “Motherhood,” a mosaic on the wall of Chernihiv’s maternity hospital, was dismantled in 2019 and transferred to a local museum. Others are indoors, for example, in the Chernihiv Correctional Colony №44. All in all, activists counted about 30 Soviet-era murals scattered throughout the city.
Why did China stop taking Russian fish [RU]
Ivan Zuenko | Profile.ru | January 14
On December 22, authorities in the Chinese port city of Dalian announced they would refuse the entry to all frozen products of foreign origin, a decision that followed the discovery of 20 coronavirus cases in the city. The ban is framed as temporary and doesn’t target only fish, but hit Russian fishermen — who usually export almost all of their catch and do not have their own warehouses — most of all. Korean ports, which are also theoretically ready to receive Russian fish, are now overloaded. Other Chinese ports often cannot take such large volumes of frozen fish. One way or another, without consumers in western Russia and China/Korea, fish production in the Far East is automatically on the brink of disaster, because only about 10% of the catch can be processed locally. Thus, just three cases of coronavirus among Chinese port workers threaten Russian fishing companies with multimillion-dollar losses.
Research & General Nerdistry
The Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs, a non-profit organization focused on scholarship in Central Asia, just released its “Scholars of Central Asia Article Database,” a great initiative aiming to highlight scientific work produced by local scholars.
Personal is Not Political? The Sexual Self in Russian Talk Shows of the 1990s 🔓
Yulia Gradskova | Sexuality & Culture | April 2020
The changes in the public discourse on sex and the sexual self in post-Soviet Russia are usually referred to as a “sexual revolution”. However, the fast rejection of freedoms with respect to sexual identities, same-sex relationships and withering of the public discussions about intimacies and sex-education already in the early 2000s requires closer look at discourses of the “sexual revolution” of the 1990s in Russia in order to understand better the character of this rapid change. In this paper I am particularly interested in the discursive dimension and historical implications of the new sexual selves as expressed in the public space in a form of TV-show. The article is analyzing discourses around sexuality and intimacy with focus on two talk-shows broadcasted by the Russian television in the 1990s (“Ya sama” and “Pro eto”) and dealing with gender identities, sexualities and intimacies.
Evgenii Akelev | Cahiers du monde russe | December 2020
This article is the first in existing scholarship to examine Peter the Great’s famous decree on the taxation of beards from an economic perspective. Through an analysis of the decree in conjunction with other aspects of Russian state financial policy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it argues that Peter had counted on this tax to replenish the Treasury at a critical moment when state resources were on the brink of complete exhaustion as a result of the gruelling Northern War with Sweden combined with a twofold drop in the value of the rouble. Based on new archival evidence, the study demonstrates the untenability of this policy, on the one hand due to Peter and his advisors’ over-optimistic assumptions about the prosperity of their Russian subjects (the beard tax was unreasonably high), and on the other, because the government overestimated their administrative capacity to implement the decree throughout the realm without provoking resistance.
Transcending Illegality in Kyrgyzstan: The Case of a Squatter Settlement in Bishkek 🔒
Eliza Isabaeva | Europe-Asia Studies | January 2021
Governments are reluctant to acknowledge illegal settlements such as Ak Jar, on the outskirts of Bishkek. If the settlement were formally legalised, its residents would receive property documents as well as recognition and inclusion. They have thus developed strategies to achieve the legalisation of Ak Jar. Although the settlement is technically illegal, by behaving ‘legally’ (that is, following legal norms and practices), the residents and community leaders generate the appearance and even some of the effects of legality (such as, legitimate power supply, recognition by politicians). This creates a halfway space between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ that moves the settlement away from ‘full’ illegality and closer to legalisation.