Skip to main content
  • Share to or

The Real Russia. Today. Funny numbers, Russian-Belarusian integration, and another ‘protester’ goes to prison

Source: Meduza

Monday, September 16, 2019

This day in history: 20 years ago, on September 16, 1999, a truck bomb exploded outside a nine-story apartment building in Volgodonsk, killing 19 people. The incident was part of a series of bombings that month that killed more than 300 people and led to the Second Chechen War. The official culprits are Islamist warlords, while some historians and critics say the Russian authorities orchestrated the attacks to bring Vladimir Putin to power.
  • Possibly by accident, Moscow officials released the decryption key for the city's online votes. We put it to use and found some weird stuff.
  • Details leak about new economic unification of Russia and Belarus
  • From Bach to ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ here's the music Russia's government is using to inject the youths with ‘cultural literacy’
  • Russian actor sentenced to 3.5 years in prison, after National Guard officer dislocates shoulder while arresting him at protest
  • In YouTube video, National Guard officer in Buryatia calls on colleagues to ignore ‘criminal orders’ to arrest protesters
  • Opinion: Pavel Aptekar says the scandal surrounding Yuri Dud's Beslan documentary demonstrates Russia's loss of a trusted mass space

Technical difficulties 🗳️

In three of Moscow’s voting districts, the city’s September 8 legislative elections also served as a test for a new online voting system. In one of those districts, the online vote proved decisive: While independent candidate Roman Yuneman won the most paper ballots in District 30, he lost to pro-regime candidate Margarita Rusetskaya thanks to the latter’s electronic results. Moscow City Hall published the results of the city’s online voting but did not provide access to the raw voting data behind those results. We found the key to that data, decrypted all of Moscow’s online votes, and reconstructed the three races that used online voting down to the minute.

Dive into the rabbit hole of numbers here.

‘Tighter integration than the EU’ 🤝

The newspaper Kommersant has published the first details of a Russian-Belarusian economic integration agreement signed by the two countries’ prime ministers on September 6. Neither Moscow nor Minsk has yet published the document officially, but a source in the Russian government confirms that Kommersant obtained a copy of the text.

Read here what Kommersant has learned.

From Bach to ‘Dancing Queen’ 👨‍🎤

Russia’s Culture Ministry has issued a new set of recommendations for what it calls “The Schoolchild’s Cultural Standards.” This new educational project is intended to bolster “the spiritual, aesthetic, and artistic development of Russian schoolchildren and increase the cultural literacy of our rising generation.” The ministry’s list is divided into seven areas: literature, visual art, architecture, folk culture, music, theater, and film.

The music category reads like a baby boomer’s dream: From classics like Tchaikovsky and Mozart, it moves on to 20th-century rock hits like Queen, ABBA, Kino, and Akvarium. The new Cultural Standards program will be launched in full on October 1.

We compiled some of the program’s musical recommendations into a special playlist. If your spiritual and aesthetic development is feeling a bit sub-par today (or you just want to pretend it’s 1985), have a listen.

Chanting in absolute silence 👮

Moscow Tverskoy District Court Judge Alexey Krivoruchko has sentenced Pavel Ustinov, a young up-and-coming actor, to 3.5 years in prison for supposedly attacking a member of Russia’s National Guard at a protest on August 3. Prosecutors asked the court to incarcerate him for six years.

The victim in the case is Sergeant Alexander Lyagin (recently promoted to staff sergeant), who testified that his unit arrested Ustinov as an active participant in an unpermitted demonstration. “He was standing there with a phone in his hand, yes, but he was chanting insults at state officials. He was an active participate,” Lyagin told the court, according to the website Mediazona. Video footage of Ustinov’s arrest, however, shows that he was arrested in almost absolute silence, and he never shouted a word.

Find out here how this ruling was even possible.

Lend him your ears 👂

A National Guard officer in Buryatia has declared in a video shared on YouTube that police illegally arrested demonstrators in Ulan-Ude, where local residents have demanded the invalidation of September 9’s mayoral election results. In his video appeal, Viktor Khorzhiev also calls on colleagues in the National Guard not to obey “obviously criminal orders.”

Read more about this special appeal here.

Aptekar: The Dud controversy is a cultural battle in a fragmented society 📺

In an editorial for Vedomosti, columnist Pavel Aptekar says the traditional media’s recent backlash against YouTuber Yuri Dud’s documentary about the aftermath of the Beslan school siege is part of the authorities’ response to losing the public’s confidence. Citing polling from the Public Opinion Foundation, Aptekar says the rising distrust in television, radio, and newspapers has raised demand for new projects and new points of view. 

Worried about losing its “main instrument of indoctrination,” the Russian authorities have responded with a “massive intervention in electronic media” and the creation of resources for transmitting the “correct” point of view. Aptekar says this has only added to public skepticism, which further “fragments society,” preventing the creation of trusted mass spaces for “substantive discussions” about Russia’s socio-economic issues and past.

In a recent article for Republic, also about the state media’s attacks against Yuri Dud, Oleg Kashin says the YouTube star only turned to historical documentaries after the Kremlin refused to grant him an interview with Putin. Kashin believes Dud’s work on the Gulag and especially Beslan has enraged state media figures because it challenges their all-important monopoly on national memory. Instead of making Dud its enemy, however, the Kremlin could always invite him into the fold, Kashin says.

Yours, Meduza

  • Share to or