The Real Russia. Today. New discoveries in Kyiv's KGB archives, a mad dash for Russian citizenship in Luhansk, and World Cup ‘FAN ID’ refugees

Friday, May 24, 2019 (Meduza's newsletter will return on Tuesday, May 28. Happy Memorial Day, Americans!)

This day in history: 78 years ago, on May 24, 1940, poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad. He left the USSR in 1972 and later settled in the United States. Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, and appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in 1991. He died in New York City in January 1996 at the age of 55.

• New discoveries in KGB archives show a Kyiv agent sold documents to North Korean spies for money, cameras, and ginseng
• ‘A surreal country’: The mad dash for Russian citizenship in separatist Luhansk
• Thousands of refugees came to the 2018 World Cup through FIFA's FAN ID system. Now, they’re fighting to find a way to stay in Russia.
• Opinion: Sociologist Ella Paneyakh says national news coverage is the special ingredient that's frightened Yekaterinburg local officials
• Opinion: Political analyst Alexey Makarkin thinks the Yekaterinburg protests demonstrate the public's growing impatience with the Russian Orthodox Church
• Opinion: Reporter Dmitry Steshin believes HBO's ‘Chernobyl’ is American propaganda designed to undercut public support for Rosatom's far superior product
• Former advisor to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, sentenced to 10 years in prison in absentia after 15-year-long case
• Sergey Skripal's niece turns over purported recording of former spy’s voice message to Russia's Investigative Committee
• Russian youth activists strike for climate action despite government resistance

Recruited by the North Koreans 🕵️

The U.S-government-funded Russian-language television channel Current Time released a special feature on May 23 describing the unusual career of Stanislav Pushkar. Pushkar, an engineer from Kyiv, was recruited by North Korean agents while working in a government factory in the 1970s. Recently declassified documents in the Ukrainian KGB’s archives show that Pushkar sold secret documents and appliances to the agents before being arrested and imprisoned ten years later.

Read Meduza's report: “New discoveries in KGB archives show a Kyiv agent sold documents to North Korean spies for money, cameras, and ginseng”

‘A surreal country’ 🛂

Since April 24, residents of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics have been able to receive Russian citizenship through a simplified process. On May 1, this option was made available to all Ukrainian citizens with Russian residence permits. A center for issuing Russian passports to DNR and LNR residents has already opened in Russia’s Rostov region. Since early May, people have flocked to these offices, hoping to lay their hands on a Russian passport, even though the process laid out by Moscow requires them to submit their paperwork where they live. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova travelled to Luhansk and the Rostov region to learn more about this dash for Russian citizenship and why people in Ukraine’s Donbas want it so badly.

Read Meduza's report: “The mad dash for Russian citizenship in separatist Luhansk”

Nowhere to turn ⚽

More than three million international tourists visited Russia during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, but not all of them were there for the soccer. Some hoped to apply for refugee status in the country because they faced life-threatening dangers back home. The Russian government rejected their applications for asylum: after the tournament ended, several thousand people were deported. However, even now, a year after the World Cup, some people are still trying to defend their right to live in Russia. Some of them escaped war, others escaped terrorist groups, and still others escaped religious persecution. In Russia, they encountered new hardships: trouble finding work, trouble finding housing, and trouble with the law. Meduza spoke with three refugees about why they came to Russia and how they have survived the last year.

Read the refugees' stories: “Thousands of refugees came to the 2018 World Cup through FIFA's FAN ID system. Now, they’re fighting to find a way to stay in Russia.”

Opinion and analysis

📹 Paneyakh: Thanks to national news coverage, local officials in Yekaterinburg are afraid of blowing it

In an op-ed for Vedomosti, sociologist Ella Paneyakh says local authorities in Russia are lost when confronted by a combination of public solidarity and national news media coverage, which intersect in the movement against St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Yekaterinburg. Paneyakh argues that the Russian Orthodox Church’s construction projects generally encounter the strongest opposition when they encroach on spaces that already belong symbolically to an urban community, but these conditions alone aren’t enough to produce the concessions granted to protesters in Yekaterinburg.

The course of events in Yekaterinburg (mixed messaging about polling, referendums, and alternative sites) demonstrates the lack of coordination between the different levels of local government, Paneyakh says. Even Patriarch Kirill and the financiers for St. Catherine’s Cathedral are now backpedaling, not waiting for the results of the political games underway.

Officials in Yekaterinburg have hesitated so often and conceded so much because they don’t want to be held responsible for further bad news coverage. The local and regional authorities know they’ll be blamed for whatever happens, Paneyakh says, even though it’s Moscow that wields the real power (the National Guard, the court system, and the state media). Local officials are trusted to harass the professional activists and disperse small pickets, but nobody can count on Moscow’s support for anything bigger.

☦️ Makarkin: Anticlericalism is making a comeback

In an op-ed for RBC and Politcom.ru, political analyst Alexey Makarkin says Sverdlovsk regional officials’ reluctance to push ahead with plans to build St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Yekaterinburg’s October Square Park indicates both the authorities’ fears of popular unrest and the Russian political elite’s mixed feelings about the Russian Orthodox Church.

Makarkin says the Russian Orthodox Church has been riding public sympathy for the tragedies it suffered in the 20th century. This “immunity” is eroding, however, and the Pussy Riot case helped revive Russian anticlericalism. Recent protests against new churches have been based on local concerns about public spaces and noise pollution, Makarkin says, but these “paternalists” often turn to leaders and “communicators” with overt anticlerical views. The Russian Orthodox Church, meanwhile, has grown accustomed to its new status and fears it might lose this position, if it backs down anywhere it’s staked a claim.

Clerics aren’t alone in this fight. There is a group of Orthodox state officials and businessmen who actively promote their projects (for example: Konstantin Malofeev, Vasily Boiko-Veliky, and Igor Altushkin, the copper magnate who’s bankrolling St. Catherine’s Cathedral), but the Russian political elite’s overall relationship with the church is just as dubious as the ties between the church and society.

Makarkin says many in the establishment see the church as just another political player, and state officials aren’t always inclined to let it get its way in every dispute. The authorities have also pushed back against the church’s efforts to expand its influence in education and censorship, which explains the elite’s partial support for avant-garde theater director Kirill Serebrennikov, Makarkin says.

Russian state officials are eager to defuse “non-political conflicts” that unify oppositionists and “loyalists,” and they’ll often try to appease demonstrators before their grievances incite a bonafide political movement. These resolutions don’t address the structural reasons for popular unrest, however, which means the problems might return.

⚛️ Steshin: HBO's ‘Chernobyl’ is a global conspiracy against Rosatom

In an editorial for Komsomolskaya Pravda, special correspondent Dmitry Steshin says HBO’s new miniseries “Chernobyl” is a vast conspiracy to undermine global public support for Russian nuclear power.

Steshin starts by making it clear that he doesn’t like the show because he believes it misrepresents history. He says he knows the disaster personally, having visited Pripyat in 2006 as a reporter, when he interviewed former power plant staff and “liquidators,” ate locally sourced food (it’s harmless, he implies), and read survivors’ memoirs. Based on what Steshin actually says about the miniseries, it seems he’s only watched the first episode, which he faults for exaggerating how long it took the plant’s management to realize that the reactor exploded. He also mocks responders’ search for higher-powered dosimeters and radiometers, and ridicules the idea of a supervisor threatening his subordinate with execution (he’s apparently referring to assistant chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov threatening to “make things worse” for shift supervisor Alexander Akimov, when Akimov hesitates to obey his orders).

Ignoring the positive reviews “Chernobyl” has received in Russia, Steshin says the show’s “inaccuracies” and “lies” are obvious to Russian viewers, but he believes the intended audience is everyone else.

Steshin thinks HBO is trying to weaken global confidence in Russian nuclear power — specifically Rosatom. Why now? Steshin credits Western sanctions against Russia with forcing the U.S., France, Great Britain, and China to fight over access to deposits in “Namibia, Niger, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Brazil,” while Rosatom has utilized its “full autonomy.” Steshin points out that Rosatom has grown rapidly and cornered more than half the world nuclear plant construction market (though he omits that fact that the company still has just 17 percent of the global nuclear fuel market). “According to analysts,” Steshin says, the European Union will be the next epicenter of “competition between the nuclear giants.” The stakes of HBO’s show, he warns, are a “very profitable business on a global scale.”

News briefs

• ⚖️ A Moscow court has sentenced attorney Pavel Ivlev to 10 years in prison in absentia. Ivlev, who advised Mikhail Khodorkovsky when the anti-Putin businessman led the YUKOS oil company, was charged in a case alleging that the company’s leadership stole more than a trillion rubles ($15.5 billion) in oil. Ivlev has lived in the United States since 2004. He denies any wrongdoing and has said the case is politically motivated. Read more about the latest move against MBK here.
• 📞 Viktoria Skripal, whose uncle Sergey and cousin Yulia were poisoned in Great Britain last year, told TASS that she has released the audio of a voice message from her uncle to Russia’s Investigative Committee. Read more about the world's greatest niece here.
• 💚 In at least five Russian cities, young activists joined a worldwide strike to push for action on the global climate crisis. The international environmental advocacy organization Greenpeace tweeted photographs of the demonstrations as part of a day-long action that gave youth organizers in various countries access to the Greenpeace account. Check out the activists' Twitter pics here.