The Real Russia. Today. The life and times of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Olga Kashin thinks Babchenko's fate is ‘instructive,’ and Dmitry Bykov is hospitalized

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

This day in history: 107 years ago today, on April 17, 1912, Imperial Russian Army soldiers fired on striking goldfield workers in northeast Siberia near the Lena River, killing more than 150 people. Future Provisional Government leader Alexander Kerensky became widely known in Russia because of the materials he published about the “Lena Massacre.”

• Meduza tells the story of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the comedian poised to become Ukraine's next president
• Kirill Serebrennikov, recently released after almost two years of house arrest, receives national theater awards
• BBC Russia looks back at three books challenging Moscow's claims of non-involvement in the Donbas
• MediaZona reports on an elderly disabled woman in Yaroslavl accused of attacking the police
• Columnist Oleg Kashin believes the ‘sad fate’ of pro-Ukrainian Russians is instructive
• Columnist Andrey Sinitsyn thinks Stalin's surging popularity could signal new demands from a ‘frustrated’ populace
• Political expert Lilia Shevtsova says pro-Kremlin pundits are doing Russia a professional disservice
• Anti-corruption activists say the family of Khabarovsk's long-time mayor owns six million dollars in U.S. real estate
• Russian municipal official reportedly threatens staff who won't unsubscribe from a critical social-media group
• Award-winning writer Dmitry Bykov hospitalized in critical condition
• The Internet now contributes to Russia's economy almost as much as Rosneft generates in tax revenue
• Police in St. Petersburg arrest 11 LGBTQ-rights activists at annual ‘Day of Silence’ protest

The life and times of Volodymyr Zelenskiy

In Ukraine’s current presidential elections, the first round of voting left actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy on top. In a sense, Zelenskiy has already held the Ukrainian government’s leading role — at least in Sluha Narodu (Servant of the People), a television series produced by his company, Studio Kvartal 95. Shortly before the election took place, Meduza correspondent Ilya Zhegulev visited Ukraine to find out how the enormously popular comedian decided to transfer his presidential image from a sitcom into the real world — and what Zelenskiy the politician has to offer besides his already evident skills in showmanship.

Read Meduza's full report here: “From Kryvyi Rih to Kyiv: Meduza tells the story of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the comedian poised to become Ukraine's next president”

Kirill's golden evening 🏆

Director Kirill Serebrennikov receives a Golden Mask award for his ballet “Nureyev” on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. “Nureyev” was named the best ballet of 2019. Serebrennikov also received the award for Best Director for his staging of “Little Tragedies.” Eight days before the Golden Mask awards ceremony, Serebrennikov was released after nearly two years under house arrest. He is the best-known defendant in the “Seventh Studio” embezzlement case, which his supporters say is politically motivated.

Three eyewitness books about Russia's military involvement in eastern Ukraine 📚

To mark the loose five-year anniversary of Russia’s armed intervention in eastern Ukraine, Ilya Barabanov of the BBC Russian Service looks back at three books by Russian writers that contradict the Kremlin’s countless claims that the Russian military has played no role in the Donbas.

Zakhar Prilepin’s “Not Everyone Goes to Hell”: Prilepin fought with separatists in Donetsk from 2016 to 2018, arriving just after the Second Minsk Accords, when major offensive operations ended, and leaving shortly before “DNR” leader Alexander Zakharchenko was assassinated. In his book, Prilepin says the real commander of the Donetsk separatists’ army was “a general from a neighboring northern country.” Prilepin also repeatedly mocks Moscow’s official claims that any Russian combatants in the Donbas are either retired or on leave, saying that supposed “pensioners” were regularly rotated into and out of Donetsk. At one point, he even mocks the quality of the “visiting” military experts, joking that Russia dumped its least wanted men on the DNR. Prilepin says Zakharchenko once complained that Russia had instructed him to surrender economic control over the region to Ukrainian oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko. The night before Zakharchenko was killed, Prilepin says Zakharchenko met with a delegation from a Russian security agency and defended Tax Minister Alexander Timofeyev, whom the delegates wanted him to fire.

Alexander Zhuchkovsky’s “85 Days of Slovyansk”: A Russian nationalist, Zhuchkovsky has been active in the Donbas since 2014, crowdfunding as much as $2 million for the “DNR/LNR” war effort. He says Igor Girkin initially enjoyed the support of Alexander Borodai and businessmen Konstantin Malofeev, who supposedly donated thousands of dollars to eastern Ukraine’s separatists (though Malofeev has always denied this). Just before Girkin led an offensive to seize the city of Slovyansk, Zhuchkovsky says Moscow tried to get Borodai to stop the campaign, but Girkin was inaccessible by then. Zhuchkovsky also says Russia’s regular army didn’t intervene in the siege, but it did send troops across the border in the summer of 2014, when Ukrainian government forces nearly cut off the “separatist republics” from the Russian border. Zhuchkovsky says Moscow used this border-zone to transfer heavy weapons to four different military formations in the DNR and LNR.

Igor Rotar’s “Wars of a Collapsed Empire”: A military correspondent, Rotar compares his experience in the Donbas to reporting from the Ossetian-Ingush and Georgian-Abkhazian conflicts, civil war in Tajikistan, two wars in Chechnya, and Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Albania. Rotar says the conflict in Transnistria bears the most similarities, however, arguing that both situations feature cultural wars, social anxieties, and Soviet nostalgia stoked by the Russian media. Transnistria was ultimately a “training ground” for Moscow’s actions in eastern Ukraine, Rotar says, adding that Putin adopted the same policy in the Donbas that Gorbachev and Yeltsin did in Transnistria.

Yaroslavl's elderly, disabled cop-destroyer 👮

In an article for MediaZona, Dima Shvets reviews the story of Irina Konkova, a 57-year-old disabled woman in Yaroslavl who either attacked or was attacked by police officers trying to search her brother’s apartment in September 2017. A few months later, Konkova had a second run-in with the police, once again ending up collapsed on the ground and complaining that she’d been attacked. In videos shared on Facebook this March, Konkova stutters and shakes. Last October, she was convicted of attacking a police officer in September 2017 and fined 20,000 rubles ($315). The officers who brought her in for questioning in December 2017, meanwhile, are now under investigation for abusing their authority. In other words, the Russian justice system currently regards Konkova as both a perpetrator and potential victim of police violence.

The peanut gallery

👹 Kashin: The Babchenko experiment is now a cautionary tale

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist Oleg Kashin says the looming election of Volodymyr Zelensky as president of Ukraine could force some prominent Russian citizens who moved to Kyiv during the Maidan Revolution back to Moscow. Kashin believes Russia’s anti-Putin community that initially embraced the Maidan revolutionaries has gradually grown more cynical. He says early anti-Kremin activists leapt at the Maidan Revolution because they needed a positive example of the change they want to see in Moscow, they needed friends abroad in their struggle, and many saw in Ukraine a path to emigration.

In light of Ukraine’s government corruption and right-wing political groups, however, pro-Kyiv sympathies among Russia’s oppositionists have declined, Kashin says, and the Muscovites still living in Ukraine have become diehard Poroshenko supporters, reproducing the same xenophobia against Russia that the Putin regime has deployed against the United States. Ironically, the “hypertrophied loyalism” of some Russian journalists living in Ukraine (like Arkady Babchenko, Aider Muzhdabaev, and Matvei Ganapolsky) turns out to have been loyalty to Petro Poroshenko personally, not Ukraine generally.

Kashin says the experience of figures like Babchenko is an important cautionary tale for similarly minded Russians: they went “through the looking glass” and found a political world that is similar, only worse. Why worse? Kashin thinks Ukraine’s current situation is structurally and ideologically similar to politics in Russia, but the rhetoric is more “hysterical and nervous.” The lesson, he argues, is that oppositionists can’t convert their disloyalty to one state into loyalty for another. Kashin also says Russia should do what it can to repatriate the likes of Babchenko and his colleagues, if Zelensky’s Ukraine proves inhospitable. They didn’t break any laws, after all, and even ISIS fighters have been allowed back home.

📈 Sinitsyn: Russia's modern-day Stalinists want more state paternalism, or maybe not

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist Andrey Sinitsyn riffs on new polling data from the Levada Center showing that Joseph Stalin’s popularity has spiked again among Russians. The latest numbers show that 70 percent of Russians believe the Soviet tyrant’s historical role was positive, and more than half of the country actually “respects” him. Sinitsyn guesses that Stalin retains his mass appeal because his legacy is so many-sided, offering a version of the leader (Stalin the Communist, Stalin the Imperialist, Stalin the Secret Russian Orthodox, etc.) for everyone. Thanks to the USSR’s victory in WWII, moreover, Stalin also remains one of Russia’s few “integrating symbols,” endowing him with lasting “psycho-therapeutic” power in post-Soviet Russia, where liberal reforms supposedly failed.

Why is Stalin’s popularity rising again? Sinitsyn blames it on an explosion of “social frustration” caused by pension reform, higher taxes, falling real income, and growing wealth inequality. Rising inequality and low interpersonal trust specifically fuel Russians’ demand for greater state paternalism, Sinitsyn argues.

What does this say about Russia’s future? Much of Sinitsyn’s text leads up to the claim that modern-day Stalinists support Putin because they’re itching for another strong-armed “breakthrough,” even though Putin looks more to Yuri Andropov than Stalin, in his own ruler’s philosophy. Increasingly frustrated, Russians might be less interested in a leader who “balances” or relies on “ambiguous” public rhetoric, like Putin. Or maybe Russians are actually ready for democracy and a new wave of transparency, Sinitsyn says, pointing to a recent focus-group study by sociologist Sergey Belanovsky. (The op-ed ends ambiguously.)

👅 Shevtsova: Today's Kremlin sycophants are weeds holding back the country

Political expert Lilia Shevtsova writes on Facebook that Russia’s expert community is complicit in the Kremlin’s formulation of its “own reality,” telling the authorities what they want to hear, when it comes to the decadent West and the international sanctions against Moscow. Shevtsova compares these sycophantic experts to propagandists, escort-service workers, and “weeds,” arguing that they failed to warn the Putin administration about the dangers inherent in many recent policies both at home and abroad. Sooner or later, a “purge” will be necessary, she warns.

News briefs

• 💰 The family of Alexander Sokolov, who served as mayor of Khabarovsk for a whopping 18 years, owns six homes in the United States worth more than $6 million, according to a new investigative report by Alexey Navalny’s researchers in Khabarovsk. Five of the homes are reportedly in California, and the sixth is apparently in Washington state. Navalny’s team says the real estate was purchased between 2004 and 2018 by Sokolov’s wife, Leonora, and their children Elena and Alexey, who now own the homes. Read the story here.
• ⛔ Natalia Shakhova, the chief of staff of the Tyumen region’s Golyshmanovsky Municipal District, has ordered her staff to leave a community on VKontakte where users criticize the local authorities, according to a letter allegedly bearing her signature that’s appeared online. “This group is anonymous and contains many fake posts, all of which lean heavily negative,” the letter states. Read the story here.
• 🚑 The award-winning writer and journalist Dmitry Bykov has been hospitalized in the Russian city of Ufa. Igor Molchanov, the lead anesthesiologist and emergency care physician for Russia’s Health Ministry, told the Moscow news agency that Bykov is in a medically induced coma. Read the story here.
• 📡 In 2018, the Internet contributed 3.9 trillion rubles ($61.1 billion) to the Russian economy — an 11-percent jump from just a year earlier, according to statistics released by the Russian Association of Electronic Communications. According to the website The Bell, the Internet's contribution to Russia's economy now almost matches the tax revenues generated by the state oil company Rosneft, which paid 4 trillion rubles ($62.6 billion) to the federal government last year, becoming the country’s biggest single taxpayer. Read the story here.
• 🏳️‍🌈 Police in St. Petersburg arrested 11 LGBTQ-rights demonstrators at the city’s annual “Day of Silence” protest. According to the website OVD-Info, the activists picketed the Great Gostiny Dvor department store plaza on Wednesday. After one arrest, the remaining demonstrators made their way toward the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, wearing red tape over their mouths. Police started arresting more people, as they marched, including some minors. Read the story here.