‘I was made from Russian anyway,’ 28-year-old Dankhaiaa Khovalyg writes in her story ‘Ayalga,’ published in early 2022. Its female protagonist tells a psychologist how she feels like a stranger in her own country. When Dankhaiaa was a teenager, she deliberately detached herself from her native culture. She was proud to speak Russian without an accent, and dreamt of leaving Kyzyl ‘to be with her own people’ in Moscow.
During her eight years in Moscow, Dankhaiaa was involved in decolonial activism, researched her own painful background, and launched a project about indigenous people from Russia’s six ethnic Asian regions —the podcast re.public_speaking.
Alina Golovina, a Baikal People correspondent based in Buryatia, spoke with Khovalyg about why it is important to talk about trauma, where decolonization begins, and whether Russia’s ethnic republics can unite for their own benefit. At Danhkaiaa’s suggestion, they spoke to each other using the informal second-person pronoun ty.
‘As soon as I would lеave home, the world would crash down on me with all its xenophobia‘
— Tell me about yourself, Dankhaiaa.
— I was born and raised in Kyzyl. After graduating from school, I went to study in Moscow and lived there for eight years. I worked as a client manager in an IT company and was involved in feminist activism. In 2021, I quit my job and realized my childhood dream: I enrolled in literature classes and took up writing. Since March 2022, I have been living in Berlin and doing podcasts and anti-war activism.
— You told me that up to ninety percent of the indigenous people in Tuva speak Tuvan and consider it their native tongue. Why have you prioritized Russian? Is it a problem?
— I’m a city girl: I grew up in Kyzyl. I was sent to a Russian-language kindergarten and, later, to a Russian-language class at school. That was how my mother showed that she cared about me: Russian-speaking classes were considered tonier. I was a bookworm and was engrossed in Russian literature. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to a large amount of foreign literature at school, and at that moment, eighty percent of me certainly consisted of this great and beautiful Russian literature by the so-called Tolstoyevskys. I read all of that stuff and would dream of going to Moscow. I was a little proud that I spoke such beautiful Russian. Basically, I went through all that internalized colonial chauvinist crap that life was better there, that I was going to get out because I was more like them.
— Did it save you from ethnic discrimination? If not, when did you first encounter it?
— My experience of discrimination actually began long before I moved to Moscow. My mother found opportunities using travel vouchers to send me to summer camps in Krasnodar Territory, Khakassia, and other regions. I was eleven and twelve years old at the time. It didn’t matter whether I traveled five hundred kilometers from home or several thousand, because everywhere I went I encountered phenomenal bullying. I was labeled ‘China girl’ and ‘black.’ No one asked me to dance at dance parties. I was either totally ignored or talked to condescendingly and peppered with passive-aggressive insults. I had lived in my native Tuva in a groovy, comfortable bubble: most people spoke Tuvan, and we didn’t encounter any racism there. But as soon as I would leave home, the world would crash down on me with all its xenophobia. Whereas in Tuva I was considered pretty, smart, and cool, everything and everyone at those camps made it clear to me that I was second-rate.
— How did this affect you?
— These contrasts generated very unhealthy takeaways in my head: that Tuva’s overall level [of development] was much lower than the rest of Russia’s. This absolutely perverted assumption made me, as a teenager, condescend to Tuvan culture and my Tuvan side. It is quite painful for me to remember the instances when relatives addressed me in Tuvan, but I would reply in Russian, saying that I didn’t understand them, although that was a lie. Those memories now make me feel bitter. I feel sorry for that teenage girl.
— What happened later in life? How did Moscow welcome you?
— I often encountered micro-aggressions in public places. For example, I would be standing in the queue at a store, and a huge Russian guy would push me aside and go in front of me. There was no explicit verbal indication that this was because I was non-Russian, but I think this wouldn’t hae happened if I had been of Slavic appearance. I repeatedly had big problems finding a place to live because of my name and my appearance. Or, for example, I would be climbing the stairs to my floor, and neighbors descending the stairs would say, ‘The churkas have come and taken over the place’ when they would see me. They would not say it to my face, but under their breath as it were, and when they were already a flight below me, so I couldn’t even shout back at them as it happened. I would just stand there for a while, frozen on the steps. You always deal with this alone because when you are with your husband or a group of people, those very same neighbors keep their mouths shut. Every such episode of chauvinism really demoralized me, although I didn’t express it outwardly. Because no matter who I would tell, they would say, ‘Oh, don’t pay attention! Rise above it! We don’t stoop to their level.’ I swear that there has never been an instance when someone just shared my indignation for a second.
— Have you experienced physical violence? Have you been attacked?
— I didn’t encounter any actual boneheads (far-right skinheads): I moved to Moscow in 2013, by which time the most ardent supporters of that ideology had been jailed. The cases of physical violence that happened to me are difficult to categorize. The first time it happened was when I was in my first year at university. I was traveling from my part-time job in an empty train carriage to my dormitory. I had leaned my head against the window and fallen asleep with my legs stretched out. I woke up to an old man kicking me and saying, ‘Move your damn feet.’ I did and asked him what was the matter, and he said he wanted to sit down. I suggested he sit down in one of the other free seats, upon which he started kicking me again, saying that I was a churka and if I gave him any guff, he would beat the shit out of me. It was so horrible, because the old man spoke softly and looked like a harmless creature. I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to look weak. He stared at me point-blank the whole way and commented that I behaved very freely in Russia. It was forty minutes of violence.
The second incident happened on Leninsky Prospekt near the Oktyabrskaya subway station. It was summer, I was walking with headphones on in a crowd of people, listening to music. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a man was walking in my direction and looking at me intently. Over the years, you develop something like a muscle that reacts to unwanted attention and makes you tense up and pull yourself together as if you’re getting ready to react. When the man walked by, he hit me over the head with a bottle. I fell down. He walked on. So there I was, lying propped up on my elbows, looking at the man walking away, and all the other people just passed me by. I thought at the time that it could have been a scene from a film, because only in a film can you get hit and nobody comes up and asks how you’re doing or tries to help you. And there were a lot of little situations — elbowing, pushing, kicking. Several times when I was putting away my dirty tray at a food court, I was told, ‘Hey, clean this up.’
— So, for eight years you were constantly tense, subconsciously expecting to be assaulted or insulted. When did you finally relax, or is the tension still there?
— I stopped being so tense after about six months in Berlin, when I moved here last year after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I felt the change when I was traveling on the subway and there was a man staring at me point-blank and I couldn’t understand why. Only after a minute did I remember the instances in the Moscow subway where someone was staring at me all the time. There I didn’t question it, because it was clear why I was attracting attention. I still sometimes get triggered when I hear Russian being spoken, I can’t get rid of that yet, I’m waiting for unpleasant comments to come my. At the same time, I have had a completely different experience in Berlin than I had in Moscow when interacting with Asians. In Moscow, I tried to distance myself from the community, to not go to the so-called Asia parties, because I thought that this way we were not integrating into society, but only diasporizing. This was a mistake, because it was with these people that I could share my experience of discrimination and be in a safe environment where I would not hear racist and nationalist remarks.
‘I looked down on my people’
— How did you cope with this trauma, with the fact that you dreamt of being part of the ‘Russian world,’ but it proved to be so cruel? When did you realize that it was not you or other Asians who were the wrong kind of people, but society itself that was sick with racism and nationalism?
— I now realize that I have always clearly had ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, I have a great love for Tuva, because everything that shaped me — my family, the natural environment — is bound up with it. You know this yourself: when you live in an ethnic republic, nature becomes an inseparable part of life, its background. There are the traditions and rituals, the huge number of people who have given me so much warmth and love. All this great love crashes into fact that in Moscow they call me a churka. That means that my father, my mother, and all my relatives are churkas. This contradiction had to explode at some point. I was in pain all the time both because of my inner contradictions and because of the contrast between the devastation and high prices in Tuva and the glitz and luxury in Moscow. I sensed this undercurrent of injustice: it couldn’t be that in Moscow everyone was talented and successful, while everyone in Tuva was lazy and stupid.
— Was this injustice the reason you became interested in decoloniality and went into activism?
— In mid-2021, when I left my job to go into writing, I went to a lecture on decoloniality by the writer Yegana Jabbarova. I asked her what it mean if I myself looked down on my own people. She explained in detail the internal colonialism with which most people are infected and its origins. Russian culture — its literature, cinema, and music — is extremely mono-ethnic. Hence my desire to dissociate myself from my non-Russianness, the idea that I was guilty of my ethnicity. The people around me only confirmed this, consciously or not. For example, they treated me with disdain or ignored me, or called me slant-eyed, newcomer, or сhink.
— Did you realize that it wasn’t your fault that you were Tuvan?
— It was as if someone hit me upside the head, and the pieces of the puzzle came together. I started to study the history of Tuva and learnt that most of the time it was chronicled in a one-sided way that favored Russia. It became much easier for me to understand what had been happening to me all that time, why I had been struggling so much with myself, why I felt so many heavy feelings when I thought about my homeland. The process of my inner decolonization was intense and easy: it fell on fertile ground. I had been a feminist activist for several years and had been coping with my internal misogyny and homophobia. So I had already had the know-how for squeezing out various xenophobias.
— Does everyone need to deal with internal nationalism, or are there people who are not taint by it?
— The Russophone space has been encoding xenophobic, imperial attitudes for centuries. So, any person who grew up in this space is a carrier of the virus, even non-Russians. Some of us also reproduce the same patterns of violence, but, for example, towards migrants, by calling them illegals. Generally speaking, being in the country illegally is a crime, and a whole bunch of people call other people criminals. I now notice how much rejection there is for any decolonial agenda that is popularized.
— Did you see it in the reaction to your post criticizing one of the songs Noize MC performed at his concert? (On 1 October 2023, Noize MC (aka Ivan Alexeyev) performed the satirical song ‘Skinhead Girl’ at a concert in Berlin. The female protagonist of the song, a member of the skinheads, is called Zulfiya [a Central Asian name]. Dankhaiaa was at the concert and criticized the singer for performing the song. In her opinion, the lyrics shift the focus away from the problem of the skinhead movement in Russia. Because the movement is condemned by ridiculing a person who is a primary target of its violence, it shift blames from the original, primary perpetrators of this violence.)
Yes, this song is like criticizing the patriarchy by ridiculing misogynistic women. Yes, there are women like that, but they’re the product of the patriarchy. It’s a swizzled cause-and-effect relationship. It’s not okay to perform a song like that in 2023. I’m not ashamed that I brought it up and there was a scandal. I was struck by the magnitude of the negative reaction to my opinion. But there were also a lot of supportive comments. People wrote that they were willing to hear out those who were directly affected, who were stigmatized even by a song. This scandal had a good outcome for us. Noize MC reacted to it, albeit negatively, which shows that the voices of decolonial activists have become more audible.
(Five days after the scandal, Alexeyev published on his Instagram page archival footage from an anti-fascist festival in Dubna at which he had performed. He recalled how after the concert he was returning to Moscow on a train with other musicians when fifteen people burst into the carriage shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’ and beat them up. He also noted that the song ‘Skinhead Girl’ ‘mocked the far-right in a way that was accessible to them.’ He did not directly respond to Dankhaiaa’s other arguments, however. He concluded by writing: ‘Good riddance to those who got it wrong again.’)
— Many people have been supportive of you in the comments, but it seems that even the liberal progressive segment of society who might cooperate with decolonial activists are annoyed with you? Do you get that sense?
— Yes, not everyone likes how decolonial activists are making more noise. It’s natural. I can roughly imagine what might have been going on during the first wave of suffragettes when they were fighting for women’s rights. There must have been a lot of women saying that the activists were bullshitters. And there will be many more and larger waves of hatred against people who pursue a decolonial agenda.
— Why?
— I have a hypothesis as to why people reject the decolonial agenda wholesale. They are people of privilege who realize that another person could have achieved what they’ve achieved if they enjoyed the same conditions. But most people don’t enjoy the same conditions as privileged people, so part of the reason they’ve been able to have this success is because they face less competition. If we extend this to the entire country, those people who generally are aware that a large part of the [federal] budget is based on siphoning resources from the regions realize that if they didn’t have the regions, things would be hard for them as well and their position would also be undermined. They are subconsciously afraid that if they consented to the decolonial agenda, all the regions would immediately pack their bags and leave Russia, and Russia would be impoverished. In reality, though, if they acknowledged that colonization was quite brutal, that there is racism in Russia, that you shouldn’t say churka, and that the regions have the right to self-determination under the Constitution, everyone would be better off.
— And yet, there is a feeling that indigenous people are more insular, that they are less willing to talk about painful topics like poverty, domestic violence, and so on.
— This sense is absolutely warranted and understandable to me as a Tuvan woman. It shows that the media mostly marginalizes, stigmatizes, and exoticizes us. This makes us reluctant to talk about ourselves, because if we speak out about something, there will be more reports in which everything is twisted again. Most of those who keep silent don’t want to mar the reputation of their own people, because their republics are already regarded as populated by murderers, savages, and barbarians. So why would you also talk about domestic violence and bury the last bit of a good reputation you have? This points to the pain we feel at not being represented as normal.
‘We have to discuss our past’
— What have you been doing Berlin since moving there?
— I have been volunteering for anti-war campaigns that assist people from the ethnic republics in terminating their combat service contracts [to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine] and returning home. We keep counts of the war dead. We do counseling, especially after the mobilization started. My main gig at the moment is the podcast. I’m also writing a novel about a young woman from Tuva who goes to Moscow. It’s not a biography, but it is based on my own experiences of course. It’s about a journey to find oneself, which I’ve also taken. One result is that I am no longer Dana, as I had been called for many years, but Dankhaiaa, which means that I accept my Tuvanness with love and gratitude and want to bear it without past complicated feelings, calmly and joyfully, even when it comes to my name.
— How did your podcast re.public_speaking come about?
— We studied the history of Tuva rather cursorily at school. We were stuffed with cliches about the ‘friendship of peoples,’ the ‘mutual positive influence of Russian and Tuvan cooperation,’ our ‘long-awaited acceptance into the family of Soviet peoples,’ and literally a couple of stingy sentences about ‘occasional overzealousness.’ I couldn’t find an impartial text about when the Russian colonization of Tuva began and how it took place. So, I gathered several dozen scholarly sources and wrote such a piece myself. There is no doubt that it was colonization. And yet, we are told from childhood about how the Russian state was established, about the origin of the Rusichs, the Vyatichs, and so on, but practically nothing about the highly developed civilizations we had ourselves, each of our nations, and how we emerged. For this reason I launched the podcast re.public_speaking. It deals with Russia’s six ethnic Asian republics: Kalmykia, Buryatia, Tuva, Sakha (Yakutia), Khakassia, and Altai. We talk about ourselves and our peoples so that indigenous people hear their own history and the histories of the other republics. It is also vital that people abroad know that Russia is heterogeneous and forget about the stories of violent non-Russian barbarians [fighting against Ukraine].
— This is a topic that comes with a lot of fears and concerns people have. Are guests afraid to come on the podcast because of this stigma of talking about alternative histories of the republics and hints that independence from Russia is possible and even desirable?
— I see more and more talk about the independence of Tuva and the other ethnic republics on the internet; they are the talk of the town, even among Tuvans who remain in the republic. I would be happy if they were raised more often, because for me they are conversations about the political imagination, which cannot be limited, and also about civic-mindedness, about taking on such responsibility. We also have to discuss our past, about which we don’t always know enough. For each episode in the first season I had to find experts and select personal stories. Often there were few or none. Sometimes people were found by miracle. Not everyone agreed to talk about national history; for example, it was very hard for me to find someone who would talk about the non-mainstream history of Tuva, especially about political crackdowns, about which the textbook has one sentence. There is a slight hysteria in Russia right now, and I understand the fear of getting involved in something that could backfire. Unfortunately, this already includes everything that concerns our ethnic identity. It’s crackpot that it’s dangerous to talk about history now. People agreed to participate in the podcast’s interim season much more readily because it’s just a conversation about the experience of emigration, minus ‘dangerous’ topics.
— Tell me about the podcast’s interim season. How does it differ from the first season that came out?
— The first season of re.public_speaking is educational and informational, and it seems logical to me that the introductory first season is followed by a more in-depth second season. I realized that gearing up for it would take a lot of time and effort. I was quite tired by the time the first season was over and realized I wanted to have a rest. So that there wouldn’t be long silence between these two points, I thought that I would do mumblecore: just call up a person, chat with them, and call it a day — no analyses, conclusions, or anything else. That’s why all these chats were released as part of the interim season. And yet, people are interested in listening to such conversations. I know from my circle of friends and acquaintances in Tuva that there is a lot of stigma and fear around emigration: people think that it is too difficult, too scary, requires a huge amount of money, and is not worth it. In short, there are a lot of different notions that illustrate the saying ‘fear sees danger everywhere.’ I thought, okay, let the guys from the ethnic republics who have already emigrated tell us a little about their experiences so as to rehumanize this topic too. Native people from Russia’s Asian republics face numerous obstacles and may be more afraid to change their lives. But today, amid the war, emigration may be the only way for some people to escape.
— I heard a cool thought in an episode from your first season that the most decolonised people in the ethnic republics are those who dwell in the countryside. I can confirm that this is often the case in Buryatia: both the language and the traditions have been preserved remarkably well there. Have you had the experience of explaining to these people the importance of what you are talking about? It’s as if they are not familiar with these problems.
I want the podcast to first of all arouse people’s interest and warm feelings. My grandmother telephoned me after the first episode, and I could hear her crying because she was amazed at what the Kalmyks had been through — she hadn’t known about it. Then she listened to the rest of the episodes to learn about the other peoples, because she realized she knew next to nothing about them. It’s cool because I don’t feel like I have to ‘sell’ the podcast to listeners. I have to ‘sell’ it to journalists and media outlets who don’t deal with the decolonial agenda. I really do have to explain to them why it is important and necessary. But people from the republics, as a rule, need no explanations. They just turn it on and listen. There was even a case when a relative of mine was listening to the podcast and kept telling me it was “super” and “interesting” although he is an ardent Putinist. When the last Altai episode came out, he called me and said, ‘Dankhaiaa, I had my doubts, but I still think I’m right. Is this an anti-Russian podcast?’ The podcast is certainly not anti-Russian. It’s not about Russia at all, but I was pleased that he only thought about it towards the end of the first season. I’m pleased that he listened to it and took it all in.
— Is it counter-propaganda to some extent? Because in the ethnic republics themselves (I am judging by my native Buryatia), the authorities always push the story of how poor we are, how dependent we are on [federal] subsidies, how the heads of the republics struggle to get funding for new schools and kindergartens from the Kremlin, and that we should be grateful to Moscow for what we get. It seems to me that cultivating helplessness is one of the most serious ways of preventing people from thinking about their identity and the richness of their land and culture, and decolonizing themselves.
— There is definitely such a narrative, and I have heard it many times myself: ‘Yes, we do not live well, but if we secede, we will die, because we have nothing. At least this way we have social benefits and maternity payments.’ This is a very sad thing, which seemingly shows that we have lost faith in ourselves, in our own strength. It is a bad trend. Local authorities promote it, but ‘ordinary’ people also talk about it.
— I’ll say a bit more about my own experiences. I have often heard even from indigenous people from the ethnic republics that Tuvans should be feared, that they carry knives and the like. When I was a university student, our Buryat lads believed that if a Buryat gal dated a Tuvan lad, she had to be ‘rescued.’ The girl would get a talking to and so on. Have you noticed this? Do you have the sense that Tuvans are the most marginalized of all Asians in Russia?
— It is good that you mention this, because many people tend to deny it and say that there is no such stigma. I hear such narratives that Tuvans are this and that from different peoples. I would like to say that anyone could have found themselves in the Tuvans’ shoes, but that isn’t what happened. We joined the USSR later than anyone else, and we among Russia’s Asian peoples have preserved the elements of our ethnic identity (language and culture) the most. What does this lead to? We have quite a few people in Tuva, although their percentage gets smaller every year, who do not speak Russian very well or at all. So the boys who have lived in Tuva all their lives read and write poetry in Tuvan, but after school, if they don’t get into university, they end up in the army. After growing up in a hothouse-like environment they find themselves on the front line of Russia’s xenophobic society. Our Tuvan boys most often speak Russian with an accent, and they can’t always defend themselves in a verbal altercation, because they can’t reply clearly and wittily enough in Russian to get people to back off. They just have no need for this lingo [at home in Tuva]. These situations often escalate into physical violence. What happens is that an already marginalized group is marginalized even further: Tuvans are seen as dogs who cannot talk back. So when people leave the. republic they have the attitude that they have to defend themselves at all costs out there in the outside world.
— But has some solidarity now been emerging between indigenous peoples, or do these divisions remain?
The solidarization has intensified: there is a social media-based group called Asians of Russia which aids in this. But the whole situation with the invasion of Ukraine seems to have clearly highlighted conversations that were not supported before. People’s complaints about racism and nationalism were always gaslighted, for example. After the war started, we all saw clearly whom the propaganda painted as the faces of this war: the ‘savage’ Asians, which, of course, is fundamentally inaccurate. It is important to talk about this. I would like to believe that my podcast works on behalf of solidarization, because we have much more in common than we think. And the things that are different about us could be useful to us. For example, after learning the history of the Kalmyks and Buryats, I realized that it is very easy to lose your language; it happens quickly, judging by the examples. What a great achievement that we have preserved the Tuvan language and still speak it. I don’t think we are even fully aware of the potential benefits of unification.
— You’re gearing up for the podcast’s second season. What will it be about?
— The format will change. While each episode in the first season dealt with a single republic, each episode in the second season will deal with a single topic, which will be covered in terms of all six republics. These topics are language, the environment, land, memory, politics, and the economy. I want to make episodes that would explain systemic things in the republics, show where they are, and point out the differences in these situations from region to region. These topics are considered complex, but they should become ordinary, everyday topics, things which people discuss at home and in public as safely as possible. This is also part of the decolonization of the mind, when you understand that life in your land depends primarily on you.
Source: Alina Golovina, “‘People are uncomfortable listening to your tribulations’: Dankhaiaa Khovalyg on the podcast re.public_speaking‘s new season, the violence she’s endured, and her own colonial view of her native Tuva,”* Baikal People, 30 November 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up.
* The republic’s constitution confers equal status on the names ‘Tuva’ and ‘Tyva.’ It is customary to write ‘Republic of Tyva’ in official documents, while it is more common to use ‘Tuva’ in conversation and the media. Dankhaiaa refers to ‘Tuva’ in this interview.
Hi, this is the fourth episode of the interim season of the podcast re.public_speaking.
In this episode we talk to Nyurgun and Frontina from the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Since last year they have been living in Almaty, where they and the Sakha diaspora organized a large-scale Yhyаkh celebration. We discuss what it was like to organize such an event, life in Kazakhstan in general, and many other interesting things.
In the interim season you will hear conversations with indigenous people from our republics with emigrant backgrounds, in which we will talk about simple and vital matters: relationships and friendship, hobbies and work, home and family, emigration, and all sorts of other mundane but important things.
The podcast re.public_speaking is the first audio project in Russia about the country’s ethnic Asian regions. Here you will hear the voices of people from the republics of Kalmykia, Buryatia, Tyva, Sakha, Khakassia, and Altai.
Source: Podcast re.public_speaking (YouTube), 27 November 2023. In Russian. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader
“We are being made the face of war in order to say later on that it was not [ethnic] Russians who murdered Ukrainians, but that [ethnic] Russians and Ukrainians were brothers.” Dankhaiaa Khovalyg is a writer, feminist, and anti-war and decolonial activist from the Republic of Tyva. She has been living in Berlin since March 2022, and prior to that she lived in Moscow for eight years. After the outbreak of the war, she began to volunteer with ethnic anti-war initiatives. She launched the podcast re.public_speaking, which reports on six ethnic republics in the Russian Federation – Kalmykia, Buryatia, Tyva, Sakha (Yakutia), Khakassia, and Altai. Dankhaiaa spoke to the Eyewitnesses project about xenophobia, propaganda narratives, the cult of [former Russian defense minister Sergei] Shoigu in Tyva, and decolonial activism.
0:21 Dankhaiaa Khovalyg talks about herself
0:53 What did you do after you moved?
4:05 Why did the narrative claiming that Tuvans are supremely wild and cruel emerge?
6:10 Why are the losses among Tuvans and citizens of other ethnic republics so high in the war?
8:56 What is the attitude towards Shoigu in the republic despite the high losses among Tuvans?
11:34 Do you remember February 24, 2022? How did it change your life?
12:43 Does protesting in Russia make sense today?
14:12 Who is to blame for this war?
15:00 Why do people fall so easily for propaganda?
16:00 Will the war last a long time?
16:42 What can everyone — the Russians who left, the Russians who stayed behind, and European politicians — do so that the war ends more quickly?
17:58 What is Russia’s future?
18:42 Will Russia lose territory and benefit from the loss?
20:04 What makes you afraid?
21:02 What will the novel you’ve started writing be about?
21:37 Have you found yourself?
Hi, this is season two, episode five of the podcast re.public_speaking.
‘Khakassia: A Land of People’ deals with what coal and gold mining companies have been doing to the indigenous peoples of the republic — the Khakas and the Shors — and their lands:
— How do subsurface mining companies operate in the republic?
— What are the consequences for the lands of indigenous peoples and people themselves?
— How did Khakassia’s neighbours, the Shors from the Kemerovo Region, defend their rights, and why are these stories interconnected?
— And much more.
The podcast’s new season deals with single theme that unites all the episodes: memory. In each episode we will explore and preserve the memory of one significant period or event in the life of a republic and a people.
You can support the podcast through our accounts on Friendly (for Russian bank cards) and Patreon (for foreign bank cards).
Creator and presenter: Dankhaiaa Khovalyg
Graphic design: Rinchina Azheyeva
Music: Bayaru Takshina
Email: republic.speaking@gmail.com
Instagram: @re.public_speaking
Source: Podcast re.public_speaking (YouTube), 31 October 2024. In Russian. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader
