The Real Russia. Today. HBO's ‘Chernobyl’ brings a surprise in the U.S., censorship at a student-run talk show, and guidelines for suicide (reporting)

Thursday, May 30, 2019

This day in history: 59 years ago, on May 30, 1960, Russian writer Boris Pasternak died at his dacha outside Moscow at the age of 70. Two years earlier, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the Soviet authorities forced him to decline the honor. As a novelist, Pasternak is known best as the author of “Doctor Zhivago.”

• A journalist in Baltimore shows HBO's ‘Chernobyl’ to his stepfather and discovers that he was part of the USSR's military cleanup
• At a Moscow university focused on openness to innovation, censorship accusations roil a student-run talk show
• ‘Anna Karenina accidentally fell under a train’: Russian regional censors give journalists guidelines on covering suicide
• Social media users ‘found’ Russia’s new quantum encryption telephone on Amazon for 2263 times less than the list price. What's the difference?
• Is ‘Putin is a thief’ a (potentially illegal) insult? Putin's press secretary thinks so.
• How to respond to a drop in Putin's approval rating? Russia's state pollsters simply changed their questions.
• Opinions: Kashin and Petrovskaya on the journalist attack in Khakassia, and Gleb Pavlovsky ponders Russia's post-modern spoilerism
• Moscow mayor announces plans to build one of the largest facial recognition systems in the world
• Russia's State Duma passes law introducing prison sentences of up to 15 years for drunk driving collisions
• Russian state-owned bank stops cryptocurrency work in light of unfavorable regulatory environment

‘I was there, and I don’t want to watch this anymore’

Slava Malamud is a journalist and math teacher with Moldovan roots who now lives in the United States. His tweets about the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” are enormously popular, attracting thousands of likes and reposts, including from Craig Mazin, the show’s creator. Malamud says he recently decided to show the miniseries to his stepfather, and was surprised to learn that the man worked as a liquidator at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant — something he’s never talked about before. To this day, it's an experience he still wants to forget.

Read Meduza's interview: “A journalist in Baltimore shows HBO's ‘Chernobyl’ to his stepfather and discovers that he was part of the USSR's military cleanup”

Talk show politics 🚫

Lyubov Sobol is an attorney for the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a Russian investigative organization run by opposition politician Alexey Navalny. On May 29, Sobol said she had been invited to an interview with To the Point! Persona, a talk show run by journalism students at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE), only to have the interview cancelled two days before it was set to air. The rector of the prestigious university, which was established after the collapse of the Soviet Union to train Russian students in previously suppressed social scientific disciplines, said the student show was suspended in March. He claimed that no one had invited Sobol to the program and went so far as to say that the interview would have gone against the university’s political neutrality policy because Sobol is running for a seat in the Moscow City Duma. Sobol herself, on the other hand, has argued that the whole controversy is a result of the rector’s own City Duma campaign.

Read Meduza's report: “At a Moscow university focused on openness to innovation, censorship accusations roil a student-run talk show”

‘Anna Karenina accidentally fell under a train’ 🤐

Kostroma Region’s division of Roskomnadzor, Russia’s censorship agency, held a “prophylactic seminar” for local journalists on covering sensitive issues like suicide, drugs, and “insulting the government.” The results, as Kostroma.today journalist Kirill Rubankov told Mediazona, were somewhat absurd.

Read Meduza's report: “Russian regional censors give journalists guidelines on covering suicide”

Amazonian wonders ☎️

On May 28, the technology company Infotecs and the Center for Quantum Technologies at Moscow State University presented a new telephone called the ViPNet QSS Phone, Russia’s first model to use quantum encryption technology. 700 million rubles ($10.8 million) in total were invested in the phone’s development, of which Russia’s Science and Education Ministry contributed 140 million rubles ($2.2 million). The basic equipment set for the device, which consists of one server and two telephones, will reportedly cost 30 million rubles ($461,400).

Read Meduza's report: “Social media users ‘found’ Russia’s new quantum encryption telephone on Amazon for 2263 times less than the list price. What's the difference?”

Illegal insults 🖕

Since a new law banning online insults against the Russian government went into effect on March 29, Russian prosecutors have been busy determining what is insulting and what is not. So far, they have found illegal insults not only in slurs against President Vladimir Putin but also in news stories about those slurs. Today, however, a case against an activist who hung a banner that read “Putin is a thief” was shut down on a technicality by the Supreme Court of Tatarstan. While the message was not posted online and was therefore investigated under a different law, it gave Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov a chance to comment on the banner’s message in an interview with Ekho Moskvy. That exchange is translated here.

Ekho Moskvy: We’ve received new information from Naberezhnye Chelny. The Supreme Court of Tatarstan has shut down an administrative case against a man who hung up a banner with a message about Vladimir Putin. Why are some messages considered insulting while others aren’t? Who decides which is which?

Dmitry Peskov: I don’t know. What did the banner say?

Ekho Moskvy: “Putin is a thief.” I’m sorry, that’s a quote.

Dmitry Peskov: I understand. What do you think of it?

Ekho Moskvy: I don’t know. And what does the president think — is that insulting or not?

Dmitry Peskov: Well, I think that absolutely is insulting. That’s my personal opinion.

How to respond to a drop in Putin's approval rating? Russia's state pollsters simply changed their questions. 📉

A May 25 survey by the state-owned polling agency VTsIOM showed that only 31.7 percent of respondents named Vladimir Putin when asked which politicians they trusted. That is the lowest figure since 2006, when the question first appeared in nationwide surveys. After Kremlin officials asked VTsIOM to clarify the survey’s results, its director, Valery Fyodorov, said the agency would soon publish results for a poll that simply asked whether or not respondents trusted Vladimir Putin. Fyodorov noted that “the president’s trust rating there is much, much higher.”

Opinions and analysis

🐍 Kashin: Journalism is a hydra monster

Columnist Oleg Kashin is thinking about Russian journalism again, following an attack this week by a local official in Khakassia against a reporter from the state TV news station Rossiya-24. Kashin begins his op-ed for Republic by reminding readers that Russia’s independent journalists are no strangers to violent interference in their investigative work, and state journalists are generally “sissies” by comparison. For example, it’s been more than three years since a group of men stopped a van of investigative journalists headed for Grozny, beat them up, and set fire to their vehicle. The perpetrators were never identified, let alone punished, while Rossiya-24’s Ivan Litomin enjoys the protection of the law and the promise of justice.

Kashin says state media professionals have nearly conquered Russia’s entire journalistic community, rendering the distinction between state and independent reporters almost meaningless. In other words, today’s “propagandists” will be all that remains of “journalists” in tomorrow’s Russia. Gloomy as that sounds, Kashin says this landscape will force state journalists to compete against each other, revealing distinctions within the field that highlight reporters like Ivan Litomin, who aren’t afraid to ask the occasional hardball question. Given enough time, this could escalate to problems for the Kremlin itself.

Journalism is like the serpentine water monster Hydra from Greek mythology, Kashin says. No matter how many outlets the Russian state shuts down or castrates, journalism always bounces back, because reporting inherently resists the authorities, he says.

🤬 Petrovskaya: Nasty nasty media people

In an op-ed for Novaya Gazeta, journalist Irina Petrovskaya also weighs in on the attack against Ivan Litomin. Petrovskaya’s text isn’t so much an argument as a list of nasty things about everyone involved in the story.

The people defending Litomin? Andrey Turchak, the secretary of United Russia's General Council, may have criticized the official who body-slammed Litomin and facilitated the official’s ouster from the party, but Turchak is also notoriously implicated in the nearly deadly assault of journalist Oleg Kashin in 2010. Petrovskaya even implies that Litomin’s television network, Rossiya-24, contributed to the knife attack against Ekho Moskvy reporter Tatyana Felgenhauer in October 2017, by reporting shortly beforehand that the radio station has ties to foreign NGOs. One of the outlet’s top pundits, Dmitry Kisleyov, even belittled Felgenhauer’s injuries, after she was included in Time’s Person of the year 2018.

And let’s not forget Litomin himself, who just a month ago filmed a news segment where he mocked several gay men who were beaten up at a nightclub. Petrovskaya also argues that Litomin barged into the Khakassia local official’s office and asked unprofessional questions and included misleading footage in his report.

For good measure, Petrovskaya also points out the double standards and general lousiness of “Mosfilm” head honcho Karen Shakhnazarov, and TV pundits Vladimir Soloviev, Olga Skabeeva, and Andrey Malakhov.

Petrovskaya seems to be implying that the media scandal surrounding the attack on Litomin demonstrates the news media’s double standards.

🌌 Pavlovsky: Russia is king of the wormholes

Do you enjoy metaphors about interstellar anomalies? How about neologisms like “multi-globality”? If so, political expert Gleb Pavlovsky has just the thing for you: a new 3,000-word essay at the Carnegie Moscow Center about Russia’s new role as a spoiler state in the world. This convoluted text is packed with analogies to wormholes, radioactivity, archipelagos, refugees, and parallel universes, all apparently describing Russia’s global significance today.

Russia is “radioactive,” Pavlovsky says, insofar as it’s a contagious source of international problems, not solutions. “Putin’s people” have also spread all over the world, operating thanks to mysterious financial networks and “creating influence from nothing.” What is Russian influence? Pavlovsky says it’s a mix of “excesses, special operations, and sudden penetrations into others’ affairs.” Russian meddling, he argues, is the “fruit of distortions of global metrics.”

What’s a “distorted global metric”? Pavlovsky says the end of the Cold War has upended the “paranoias” that once drove the world system. The focus has shifted from “fronts” to “flanks,” he says, which has left the West “lost as an archipelago in an ocean of peripheries.” When Pavlovsky talks about Western countries being surrounded and “lost,” he’s thinking largely about hackers and other “tricksters” who disrupt geopolitical balances with impunity. These actors rely on a “global information canopy” that expands the “scope of anomalous activity” today and allows them to hide in plain sight. Russian hackers, Pavlovsky points out, aren’t even hiding: they deliberately leave fingerprints, even when they succeed, seeking to return Russia to the West’s political agenda.

The new “multi-globality” has dealt “abnormally strong cards” to a weakened Russia, allowing Moscow to use global networks to “probe” the world order for “holes,” so it can “redistribute volatility.” If you didn’t like Pavlovsky’s talk of “fronts” and “flanks,” he also offers some light game theory, arguing that the Cold War was an “elimination game” between the two superpowers, and the conflict’s end has erased the fears that restrained countries like China, India, and Turkey, which are too strong and embedded in the world order to be “punished” or “removed from the board.”

Pavlovsky also says the new instant spread of information “inflames desires.” He’s not talking about pornography: he means that the intermingling of cultures has mobilized waves of refugees (they’re like “flank strategists,” Pavlovsky says), who “burrow” into the holes created by “weakened enforcement” in “target countries.” To complicate the metaphor further, he says Russia became a “global refugee” after the fall of the USSR, probing the entire world for “openings,” where concepts about globalization and progress diverge.

Pavlovsky says these openings in the new world order are the “globalization wormholes” through which revisionist forces exert their influence. In the U.S., he says, China has found wormholes that allow it to lobby and cultivate loyalty. In the Central African Republic, Russia has hijacked France’s wormhole. These interstellar machinations, by the way, aren’t limited to nation states: Pavlovsky says various international organizations operate like “parallel universes,” wielding sovereignty and accumulating funding from multi-millionaires who act as mediators, whether it’s the World Wide Fund for Nature or the “Wagner” private military company.

Pavlovsky says these “improvised areas” of geopolitics (he’s talking about wormholes again) typically attract “singular individuals.” These actors’ “anomalous craftiness,” he argues, is most important, because it’s why they target unexpected, unguarded places.

News briefs

• 😐 Before the end of 2019, the Moscow municipal government will hold a competition for a contract to install a facial recognition system that will encompass more than 200,000 cameras in the Russian capital. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced the competition, which will be held in conjunction with Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry. Read about Sobyanin getting up in people's faces here.
• 🥴 The State Duma has passed a law greatly intensifying the legal penalties Russians may face for driving a vehicle while intoxicated. If a driver in a collision is found to be intoxicated and the collision results in deaths or injuries, the driver could face up to 15 years in prison under the new law. Read about the new drunk-driving crackdown here.
• 💱 Russia’s Sberbank has decided to suspend its plans for doing business with cryptocurrencies. Andrey Shemetov, a vice president of the bank, explained, “We were waiting for legislative action that would allow us to deal in cryptocurrencies. Because, at the moment, regulators have a negative view, we decided to suspend this plan.” Read about the crypto-withdrawal here.