The Real Russia. Today. Photos of an abandoned Soviet biological weapons lab, a suicide bomber targets the FSB, and Vkontakte faces a lawsuit

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

This day in history. On October 31, 1985, the Russian heavy metal band “Aria” finished working on its first album, “Megalomania.” You can listen to it in its entirety here on YouTube.

• Meduza publishes Elyor Nematov’s photos of the ruins of Aralsk-7, the site of a long-abandoned top-secret Soviet biological weapons lab
• Terrorist attack rocks Federal Security Service branch in Arkhangelsk
• Police officer in Dagestan shoots himself in head to win drunken bet. (He lost.)
• Russian activist files first-ever lawsuit against Vkontakte for sharing user data with the police
• Dozens of religious groups affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church win presidential grants
• Center for Strategic and International Studies launches new tool that charts all the U.S. sanctions now imposed on Russia and Russian citizens

The ruins of Aralsk-7 📸

Until the 1940s, the only thing on Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea was a small fish processing plant. That changed when the Soviet government decided to open a top-secret biological weapons research and test site, transforming the quiet town of Kantubek into the closed military city Aralsk-7. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, the island was home to roughly 1,500 people — mostly scientists working at the laboratory, testing different viruses and bacteria on animals. In 1992, Moscow decided to relocate the entire “Barkhan” complex to Kirov, inside the new Russian Federation. Since then, Kantubek has been a ghost town, and the shrinking Aral Sea (once the fourth-largest lake in the world, drained by Soviet irrigation projects) has receded so dramatically that Vozrozhdeniya Island is now a peninsula connected to modern-day Uzbekistan. Meduza presents photographs by Elyor Nematov from the ruins of Aralsk-7.

See all the photos here.

The Arkhangelsk anarchist suicide bomber 💥

There was an explosion at the Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Arkhangelsk on the morning of October 31. According to Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee, the bomb detonated inside the building’s entrance at 8:52 a.m. A man entered the building removed an unidentified object from his bag, and sometime later the object exploded, killing the perpetrator and inflicting injuries of varying severity on three FSB officers.

The strength and composition of the bomb are still unknown. Photos from the blast site show that the building’s lobby sustained serious damage (the explosion ripped paneling off the wall and splattered blood).

The suspect’s identity has been established. Police say the bomber was a local 17-year-old, though they haven’t released his name to the public. The website Znak.com reported that the young man studied at a nearby polytechnic school, and published a photograph of his student identification card. The website also published a still from surveillance camera footage, showing the bomber enter the FSB building in Arkhangelsk.

Federal investigators have opened two criminal cases: a terrorism case and an illegal ammunition storage case. The Investigative Committee’s central office will handle both cases. The agency’s head, Alexander Bastrykin, has ordered investigators to determine the bomber’s motives, relationships, circle of friends, and family environment.

A few minutes before the bombing, a warning appeared in a local anarchist chat community. At 8:48 a.m., in the public Telegram chat channel Rech Buntovshchika (“Rebel Talk”), a user named “Valeryan Panov” claimed responsibility for a future terrorist attack. Declaring that “the reasons should be perfectly obvious to you,” the Telegram user noted that the FSB “fabricates [criminal] cases and tortures people.” The teenager also wrote, “Most likely, I’ll die in this explosion, since this device is triggered directly by me pressing the button attached to bomb cover. That’s why I’m asking you to spread info about this terrorist attack, about who carried it out and why.”

Thickheaded 👮

Police officers, have you ever run into the street while off duty and drunkenly fired your handgun into the air? After doing that, have you ever sprinted back to your friends and claimed that you emptied your weapon, only to be told that there might still be one bullet jammed in the chamber? And after this warning, did you then insist that the gun was empty, and — just to prove it — you put the pistol to your temple and pulled the trigger, firing that last round into your head?

If so, you have a lot in common with a police officer in the Dagestani city of Khasavyurt, who did everything described above and somehow survived. According to local Interior Ministry officials, the officer in question was already inebriated when he fired his Stechkin automatic pistol into the air on October 25. After claiming to his drinking buddies that he’d emptied the entire clip, he proceeded to demonstrate the gun’s emptiness by pulling the trigger with the muzzle pointed at his head. There was still a bullet in the gun, however, and it promptly flew into the officer’s skull. He didn’t die, however, and he remains hospitalized in serious condition, according to the news agency TASS.

On October 30, a spokesman for Dagestan’s Interior Ministry announced that the officer who wounded himself will be dismissed and his immediate supervisors will face disciplinary actions.

A spiritual experience 💰

At least 47 organizations (monasteries, parishes, and so on) affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church won federal money in the second contest of the year held by the Presidential Grants Foundation, according to the newspaper Vedomosti. The groups received a total of 55.3 million rubles ($840,000) for dozens of different small projects. The foundation’s general director told reporters that the religious groups’ success is no mystery, given their experience in the “Orthodox Initiative” competition.

In 2018, the foundation awarded grants to 2,022 nonprofit organizations, paying out a total of 4.7 billion rubles ($71.4 million). As in 2017, some of the grant winners have been labeled “foreign agents” by Russia’s Justice Ministry.

Fighting City Hall... ‘s favorite social network ⚖️

Liliya Chanysheva, an activist who works at Alexey Navalny’s headquarters in St. Petersburg is suing the social network Vkontakte for disclosing users’ personal information to Russian law enforcement. According to Chanysheva’s lawyer, police have tried to justify the information collection by citing two federal laws, though both these laws limit law enforcement’s information-gathering powers to “exclusively within the scope of their authorities, or in relation to misdemeanor or felony investigations.”

In recent months, Vkontakte has weathered bad publicity for sharing user data with the police and helping the authorities identify “Internet criminals” in controversial, often politicized trials.

The sanctions tracker 🔎

Was he already sanctioned? Is that industrial sector targeted by Washington? The Center for Strategic and International Studies has launched a convenient new tool that charts all the U.S. sanctions now imposed on Russia and Russian citizens, “allowing users to filter and search by executive order or public law number, source, date, target, or sector.” Track all of Uncle Sam’s sanctions against Russia here. CSIS is calling the tool the “Russia Sanctions Tracker.”