Eastern Radar #9
Creating a labor union in Russia, Ukraine’s sole icebreaker, fan fiction based on classical Russian literature and more
Beeps
Hello everyone and welcome to this 9th issue of Eastern Radar! Two quick things I wanted to point you towards before we really get started: on YouTube, the “Map Men” duo has a cool video on Soviet maps of Great Britain, looking at the impressive details but also the quirks and even mistakes of Soviet cartographers. And if you’re in the mood for something more contemporary, check out the latest Carnegie Russia podcast on the Navalny protests and whether they pose a threat to the Kremlin.
Now for some news:
🍸 Alcohol sales in Belarus rose 2.1% in 2020 compared to the year before, with vodka making up 45.8% of the amount of pure alcohol sold in the year (second but far away are liqueurs, 6.5% of the total amount of pure alcohol sold).
⛰️ A long-lost Alaskan stronghold known as Sapling Fort has finally been located — more than two centuries after the Indigenous Tlingit people at the fort repelled Russian invaders.
📚 Copies of eight books — including George Orwell’s “1984” and Peter Ustinov’s “My Russia” — that were only available to members of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee of the Communist Party sold for 700,000 rubles ($9,200) last week.
🛩️ Chinese company Huawei offered a model of the Soviet Il-2 “Sturmovik” ground-attack aircraft to its employees to commemorate one year under U.S sanctions. The gift is a throwback to Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei likening his company to the famously sturdy warplane which, he said, “was quite like us – we are riddled with bullets from the US.”
🎣 North Korean fishing boats in Russian waters fell by 95% last year, with the coronavirus pandemic and economic sanctions suggested as the main factors behind the dramatic drop.
Under the Radar
As food delivery booms in Russia, couriers try a Soviet-era tactic: a union
Fred Weir | Christian Science Monitor | January 26
Since the pandemic hit, the food delivery business has exploded in Russia, becoming a lifeline for struggling restaurants and customers isolated in their homes. There are no reliable figures, but some estimates say food deliveries have grown at least threefold. But the couriers are completely outside Russia’s official system of labor law. No official employment contract means no security, no benefits, and no means to redress grievances. So ironically in a country that spent 70 years under Communist Party rule, the couriers are having to reinvent combative trade unionism culture in Russia from the ground up to better their conditions.
Kolomna: The Russian town built by apple sweets
Sheila Sim | BBC Travel | January 26
The story of the town’s revival goes back to 2008, when Kolomna hosted the European Speed Skating Championships. Tasked by the town council with creating a souvenir gift for visitors and competitors, council project manager Natalia Nikitina looked into the town’s history to come up with a gift specific to Kolomna. For inspiration, she turned to the 18th-Century works of Ivan Lazhechnikov, the son of a rich Kolomna merchant. Reading his historical novel, The Ice Palace, Nikitina was intrigued when she found a reference to a sweet treat called pastila. The Russian State Library turned up several recipes from its archives, all of them involving oven-baked apples, beaten egg whites and honey or sugar. But they were too vague to be useful.
An icebreaker without ice: what is the Arctic ship “Captain Belorusov” doing in Ukraine [UKR/RU]
Evgeny Rudenko, Eldar Sarakhman | Ukrainska Pravda | January 29
For the past six years, 66-year-old Mariupol resident Vasyl Tchaikovsky has commanded the “Captain Belousov,” Ukraine’s sole icebreaker. First launched in 1953, the ship sailed the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic circle for 20 years, before being sent to the Azov sea. There as well, it went to work every winter, opening safe passage to other ships in the world’s shallowest sea. But climate change now means Tchaikovsky and his crew are finding it harder and harder to be of use.
Research & Culture
The AFP published a nice piece about new research shedding light on the “Dyatlov Pass Mystery,” when nine people hiking through the Ural mountains in 1959 died in unclear circumstances. The story does a good job of explaining the case, but here’s the (decidedly drier) academic paper if you’re interested: “Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959.” Nature also released a 9 minutes video on the topic recapping the findings.
Elif Batuman | n+1 | Winter 2005
(I usually try to showcase stories and works that are recent. This piece is a significant exception, for no other reason than the fact I only came across it this week and found it fantastic.)
Who really killed Isaac Babel, and why? No literary scholar can resist a whodunit, and many competing theories are in circulation. Babel was all along someone you would expect to be killed. He was not a favorite with Stalin. Many people formulate the question differently: why hadn’t Stalin removed him sooner, during the Great Purges of 1934–38? One explanation is that Babel couldn’t be touched so long as his protector, Maxim Gorky, was living; but Gorky died in 1936, and Babel wasn’t taken until 1939, when World War II was just around the corner and Stalin had bigger fish to fry. The logical time for Babel to be eliminated had come and gone. What tipped the scale?
Bolkonskii Won't Die: Fan Fiction Based on Russian Classical Literature 🔒
Ksenia R.Romanenko | Russian Literature | December 2020
This article is devoted to the phenomenon of fan fiction in its interaction with Russian classical literature. In Russia and the Russian-speaking world, where “great Russian literature” has sacred status and the classics are obligatory reading at secondary school, fan fiction based on classical texts is an especially exotic and shocking phenomenon. In this work I list the key characteristics of Russian-classics fan fiction, outline fan fiction writers’ most popular Russian classical texts – Eugene Onegin, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Woe from Wit – and describe recurring narratives of fanfics: “crossovers”, “slash” stories, and alternative endings. I also reveal a unique subgenre of fan fiction specific to Russian classical literature, which puts the original work’s author and his characters together into the same literary space.
Blogging the Virtual: New Geographies of Domination and Resistance In and Beyond Russia 🔒
Sven Daniel Wolfe | Antipode | January 2021
Russia’s accelerating authoritarian turn has not ignored the internet, and in recent years, the Russian state has clamped down on internet activities that diverge from the statist line, employing a variety of strategies to dominate online spaces. Nevertheless, oppositional voices flourish on the Russian internet, taking shape in independent blogs and videos. This paper explores three political bloggers through surveillant and resistance assemblages. Encompassing the blurriness between digital and corporeal spaces, the paper contributes by revealing new geographies of contestation against state strategies to dominate the Russian internet. Overlapping with but not corresponding to Russian territorial boundaries, these dynamics highlight shifting spaces of power and resistance in the increasingly illiberal world.
Ivan Sablin, Jargal Badagarov, and Irina Sodnomova | Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia: Nation, Identity, and Culture | January 2021
The political system of early socialist-era Mongolia, established by the first Constitution in 1924, can be interpreted as a vernacular version of the Soviet system, in which the formally supreme representative body, the State Great Khural (“assembly”), was sidelined by the standing Presidium of the Small Khural and the Cabinet and eclipsed by the extraconstitutional party authorities. The establishment of this sham and nominal parliamentary system was a consequence of the Bolshevik new imperialism, the inclusion of the Mongolian People’s Republic into the informal Soviet empire, which occurred through both military control and structural adjustments under the supervision of the Communist International. The 1924 Mongolian Constitution, however, was not a mere copy of its Soviet 1918 and 1924 counterparts but a transimperial document. In its text and especially in the history of its making, it reflected the entangled imperial transformations of the Russian and Qing empires and featured both indigenous (Khalkha and Buryad-Mongol) agency and vernacular political discourses.