Far-right activists once again turn up for annual reading of Great Terror victims’ names
The annual Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Great Terror is taking place in the Sandarmokh forest tract. Among those in attendance are nationalists from the so-called Russian Community (Russkaya Obshchina) and Cossacks. One of the far-right activists, his face covered by a mask, is brandishing a Russian flag, according to our correspondent.
For the most part, the provocateurs are being ignored, and they have not played any music.
“So far, no one has been aggressive,” our correspondent reported.
Journalists from pro-government TV channels 78 and Channel One also turned up for the reading.
A monument to the Jews murdered in the area had been toppled but was later restored to its original location.
What you need to know
In 1937–1938, Sandarmokh was the site of mass executions and burials during Stalin’s Great Terror. The site was discovered by members of the Petersburg and Karelian branches of Memorial in 1997.
Every year on August 5, official memorial ceremonies are held in Sandarmokh to honor the victims.
Last year, far-right extremists also attended the ceremony: they splashed water on those who had come to the memorial event and sang “Katyusha.” The year before last, they tried to drown out the reading of the names by playing military songs over loudspeakers.
The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Great Terror is annually held on August 5 in Sandarmokh, [a] forest area in Karelia. Thousands of people killed by Stalin’s NKVD are buried in the area.
This year’s commemoration did not proceed without trouble.
A significant number of people had traveled to the memorial site to pay their respect[s]. Among them were representatives of the Finnish Embassy in Moscow, including Ambassador Marja Liivala.
They were met by militant activists from the ultraright group Russkaya Obshchina (Russian Community).
Many of the militants had their faces covered by balaclavas. They verbally attacked the foreign diplomats, accusing them of being ‘fascists.’
The provocateurs also told the guests at the commemoration that they were ‘collaborators’ and that they should “go to Donbass.”
At one point, several of the militants began to chant the patriotic song “Katyusha.”
The Barents Observer has gotten access to photo and video footage from the event.
The provocations were carefully planned by Russkaya Obshchina and its partners. The extremist group has close links to powerful people in the Putin regime. Lately, it has become more active and visible in the Russian public space, including in north Russian regions like Murmansk.
Representatives of the Finnish Embassy in Moscow, along with diplomats from the other Nordic countries, regularly attend commemoration events like the one in Sandarmokh.
The day before the commemoration event in Sandarmokh, a memorial event for victims of political repression took place at the Krasny Bor memorial cemetery near Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia. Activists read out the names of the terror victims. An 80-year-old veteran of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Tatyana Savinkina, who had been involved in the rehabilitation of the repressed for many years, attended the event, reported SOTAvision. In December 2024, Savinkina was convicted for “discrediting the army.”
Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Sandarmokh has repeatedly become a site for provocations. In 2022, pro-government activists stuck the symbol of the Russian invasion – the letter Z – on the cars of people who came to the site, placed leaflets with insults directed at the Ukrainian president, and attempted to distribute books by the well-known Karelian Stalinist Alexander Stepanov. In 2024, a group of Cossacks and unknown individuals arrived at the site, hiding their faces under balaclavas. They set up speakers between the pines, from which military songs played. Ukrainians holding a memorial service at their cross of sorrow were shouted at with “Glory to Russia,” and near the Holocaust monument, provocateurs shouted “Jews sponsored Hitler.”
On 25 July [2026], the Russian Cultural Heritage Festival [sic] took place at Fort Ross[State] Historic Park in California for the first time in six years, with the involvement of [Nina Abramian], cultural attaché from the Russian Embassy, whom the U.S. State Department had authorized to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco for the occasion.
This revived unique celebration, designed to keep alive the historical memory of Russian America, brought together our compatriots and concerned Americans from across the United States, as well as members of Indigenous tribes.
Ninety-nine-year-old Otis Parrish, chief [sic] of the [Kashia Band of Pomo Indians], was invited as guest of honor to the celebration, which featured performances of folk songs, Russian cuisine tasting, displays of arts and crafts, and a round dance set to the music of traditional instruments.
Guests immersed themselves in an atmosphere of unity and a sense of connection to Russian history. The legendary settlement on the coast of Northern California, 140 kilometers north of San Francisco, and founded on 11 September 1812 by the Russian-American Company for fur hunting and trade, was a part of this history.
Ivan Kuskov, an explorer, merchant, and government official, was appointed commandant of the colony. Under his command were twenty-five Russian colonists and eighty Aleuts who had arrived from Russia’s colonies in Alaska. Construction, however, was only possible after Kuskov obtained permission from the indigenous people, the Kashaya Pomo tribe, to use the land for the settlement.
Despite the passage of time and the ocean winds, the fort’s original structures—the administrator’s house, outbuildings, and defensive towers—have survived to this day. In its time, Fort Ross was a hub of innovation: California’s first windmills and shipyards were built there.
These historic sites were at the heart of the plot of Alexey Rybnikov’s renowned [rock] opera Juno and Avos, and they inspired future generations to create works of art, including the famous portrait of Conchita Argüello by the Russian painter Anatoly Sokoloff, which the artist’s family donated to the State Historical Museum in Moscow in September 2001.
As Fort Ross approaches its 215th anniversary, which will be celebrated in September 2027, it remains in operation. It attracts tourists, scholars, historians, and politicians, serving as a reminder of Russia and America’s shared historical and cultural heritage and the significant contribution of our fellow countrymen to the conquest of America, while remaining a vivid example of the intersection and peaceful, harmonious coexistence of diverse cultures, beliefs, and traditions.
We are grateful to everyone who sincerely contributes to the preservation of this unique architectural landmark. Preserving the memory of the shared milestones in the history of Russia and the United States is an important element in restoring an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding between our nations and peoples.
6 July 2017, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo by the Russian Reader
[…]
And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.
Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.
Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.
Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.
Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.
In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.
Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”
He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”
On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.
Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”
Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.
Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.
When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”
And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.
Russia has prepared a new edition of its official history textbook for 11th graders. The Russian business news outlet RBC reviewed the new version and found that the section dealing with the United States had been significantly revised. Among the changes: the textbook now credits the Trump administration with playing a “positive role” in settling the war in Ukraine. Meduza summarizes what else has changed.
Russia’s unified history textbook for 11th graders has been updated and published on the “Moya Shkola” (“My School”) digital platform. The textbook, co-authored by Vladimir Medinsky — an aide to the Russian president and chairman of the Russian Military Historical Society — and Anatoly Torkunov, rector of Moscow State Institute of International Relations, has now reached its third edition.
The Russian business news outlet RBC compared the new edition with last year’s and found that the most heavily rewritten section is the one titled “Russia Today. Special Military Operation (SVO)).”
The passages dealing with the United States were substantially altered. The subsection formerly titled “U.S. Pressure on Russia” has been renamed simply “Pressure on Russia.”
The previous edition stated that Europe’s energy independence “did not suit the United States” — in the new version, the authors replaced “the United States” with “the collective West.” Also cut is the claim that “in the name of their corporations’ profits, the United States constantly resorted to military and terrorist methods — as it did in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and in many other parts of the world.” Similar edits were made to the section on the war in South Ossetia.
The new edition also drops a line about the United States’ determination to “fight to the last Ukrainian.” In its place, the textbook now credits President Donald Trump’s administration with playing a “positive role” in peace negotiations, and notes that Trump has repeatedly stated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine would not have happened had he been president in 2022. A reference to the meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents in Anchorage in August 2025 has also been added.
The section on the war in Syria has been revised as well. The previous edition stated that the Western coalition had tried to “overthrow the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” The new version says the United States and NATO, using opposition forces and Islamic State terrorists, launched military operations against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The line “hundreds of thousands of civilians fell victim to the Islamists, and millions of refugees fled Syria” has been removed.
Assad’s government was toppled in December 2024, and Islamists led by Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power in Syria. Assad and many of his associates fled to Russia.
Other additions include a mention of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, headed by Anna Tsivileva, Putin’s cousin’s daughter, and information about a personnel program for combat veterans called “Time of Heroes.”
The new edition also references the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue and “the breakthrough of elite Ukrainian Armed Forces units toward the Kursk nuclear power plant.” Added as well are accounts of the killing of Alexander Dugin’s daughter Darya Dugina and the “war correspondent” Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, and the assassination attempt on writer Zakhar Prilepin.
RBC also noted that Apti Alaudinov, commander of the Akhmat battalion, has been dropped from the textbook’s list of “heroes of the SVO,” along with the line “fighters of the celebrated Chechen special unit ‘Akhmat’ strike terror into the Nazis.”
Vladislav Kononov, a staff member of the presidential administration’s department for state policy in the humanitarian sphere, described the new edition as “routine editing during a reprint — so-called topical revision,” in which the text is updated to reflect events that occurred after the previous edition was released. “There are no hidden meanings here,” he said.
The history textbook for 11th graders by Medinsky and Torkunov was first presented in 2023. In 2026, its third edition was released.
In recent years, “ideological diversity” has become one of the principal demands made upon American academia, not only by the yahoo right but also by many moderate conservatives and centrists. The former rarely manages to rise above crude insults of the “all professors are communists” variety, as it applauds the Trump administration’s brutal assaults on academic institutions. Unfortunately, while the latter are much more thoughtful, they often make a very misguided case. There is an argument to be made for ideological diversity—a surprisingly simple, and also limited one. But it involves giving more credence to the academic left than most critics are prepared to do.
A classic example of the case wrongly made is the report recently released by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington Universities and written by a distinguished group of academics (including two Princeton colleagues). It is nuanced and careful, takes a mostly moderate tone, and certainly doesn’t deserve the label “diabolical” that some have attached to it. But it also falls into some predictable traps.
Its basic arguments are as follows. Positions in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences today are held overwhelmingly by academics on the left. These academics, especially those who define themselves as “scholar activists,” too often let political goals drive their work, thereby betraying the core mission of academia, which is disinterested inquiry. They discriminate against people who do not share these political goals. And this politicization is both inspired and justified by “relativist” post-structuralist theories that deny the very idea of objective truth.
Let’s take these points one by one. First, yes, the report is obviously correct to state that academics lean very strongly to the left. But this fact by itself says nothing about how left-leaning scholars actually function in the academy or the work they produce.
The second point is much more complicated. What does it mean for scholarship itself to be “political,” or “politicized”? You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Foucauldian to acknowledge that the production of knowledge is always, in some senses, implicitly political. Scholars, like everyone, exist within structures of power whose operations influence their conduct in ways seen and unseen. Feminist scholars did more than simply expand the scope of scholarly inquiry by bringing new attention to women, gender and sexuality. They showed how earlier generations of scholars, by not treating these subjects as even worthy of attention, participated in largely unspoken practices of exclusion. This point should not be terribly controversial. Nor should it be controversial that many past schools of scholarship that presented themselves as disinterested and objective were clearly driven by strong political motives. Just think of the “Dunning School” of American history that celebrated the southern “Lost Cause” and sought to discredit Reconstruction.
Acknowledging these points in no way means erasing the distinction between scholarship and propaganda—and contrary to widespread views on the right, this erasure has not taken place. One can accept that scholarship is implicitly political while also insisting that its production properly requires adhering to rules of evidence, and to making logical and well-supported arguments. I have been a professor for thirty-five years and have taken part in a very (!) large number of hiring decisions, promotion and tenure decisions, editorial decisions for journals and presses, personnel decisions for scholarly societies, and the like. I have occasionally seen these decisions made badly, because of personal animus, or incompetence. For what it is worth, I have never seen them made on an explicitly political basis, and very rarely even on an implicitly political one. In almost all cases, the principal criteria invoked have been classic scholarly ones: the strength of evidence, the strength of argument, the innovative and engaging qualities of the work as a whole.
Do academic fields discriminate against conservatives? It is certainly true that conservatives will not feel welcome in many fields of the humanities and social sciences. This is particularly the case for fields born out of the liberation movements of the 1960’s, such as Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or African-American Studies, where many scholars still define themselves in relation to the goals of these movements and proudly call themselves “scholar activists.” An opponent of abortion or affirmative action will not find these fields congenial places. But in my experience, at least, the absence of conservatives in them is almost entirely the result of self-selection, not discrimination. That element of self-selection may itself be problematic, but it does not call for the same sort of response that active discrimination would.
And it is simply a mistake to attribute the “politicization” to poststructuralist philosophy and relativism. To the extent that the alleged politicization began in the 1960’s, it began well before the heyday of poststructuralism in American humanities departments, and it has continued long afterwards. Whole generations of literary scholars have now gone through the PhD to jobs and tenure without ever reading Jacques Derrida, let alone becoming his adepts (for that matter, Derrida’s work can in no way be described as a simple denial of the idea of truth). The overwhelming majority of works derided as “woke”—at least the ones I have read—do not say that one group’s claims on truth is as good as another’s. To the contrary, they say that the claims made by a “subaltern” group are stronger and more convincing than ones generated from within an oppressive structure of power. That argument might be wrong, but it is not relativist. Jonathan Kramnick made some of these points at length in an excellent rebuttal to the Vanderbilt Report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In sum, whatever the massive overrepresentation of the left in academia, and despite some undoubted excesses, this overrepresentation has not resulted in an illegitimate distortion of the academic enterprise, the suppression of free inquiry, or large-scale violations of academic freedom. It would be a violation of academic freedom, on the other hand, to censor or dismiss academics for such alleged infractions. The Vanderbilt report does not call for any such disciplinary actions, although one could imagine unscrupulous university overseers citing it as justification for them.
But there is one set of academic decisions where politics does often dictate the outcome in a much more straightforward sense than in the cases just discussed: decisions on which fields to hire in. Professors do not normally make these decisions. Deans and other high-level administrators do. They do so in consultation with professors and normally take into consideration academic judgments as to which fields of inquiry look strongest and most promising. But, of necessity, they also take into consideration finances, student interest, the likely availability of expertise—and politics. To take the most prominent recent example, after the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests in 2020, more than half of the jobs advertised in North American history the next year were specifically for specialists in African-American history and related fields such as the history of slavery. A very high proportion of jobs advertised in French were for specialists in “Francophone” literature—i.e. literature produced outside of France, mostly in colonies and former colonies. These decisions were justifiable on academic grounds, for the fields in question are vibrant ones. But they were obviously made for political reasons, above all to address concerns about the underrepresentation of people of color in university faculties. Were these concerns themselves valid? Absolutely. It can also be argued that addressing this underrepresentation brings previously neglected points of view into academic conversations. But this doesn’t change the fact that the decisions were political ones—a response to an immediate political crisis, and to political pressure.
Again, to be clear: there was nothing illegitimate about university administrators bringing political considerations to bear. Decisions on what fields to hire in are central to a university’s identity, to the sort of community it is. Politics is inescapably part of this picture.
But if there was an argument for using hiring decisions to address racial inequalities, there is an argument for using them to address ideological imbalance as well. Even if there is nothing illegitimate about the strong leftward tilt of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, it does create a large gulf between the professors and much of the American population whom they are serving. Even if there is nothing illegitimate about certain fields being dominated by self-proclaimed “scholar activists,” it discourages students who don’t share the activists’ agendas from studying those fields. A heavy concentration of academic resources in certain areas of research leaves other areas neglected, including ones that university leaders may see as central to undergraduate education. And the heavier the emphasis on shared political goals, the easier it is to generate groupthink and stifle the sort of originality universities should be placing a premium on.
Actual hiring decisions should always be made by the specialists themselves. They are the ones with the requisite expertise. Dictating whom to hire would be a violation of their academic freedom. But that freedom does not extend to faculty themselves dictating which areas to hire in.
It would not be such a bad idea if humanities and social science departments themselves took more initiatives in this direction. In recent years, much of the hiring done for reasons of ideological diversity has taken place in new academic units such as Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Attempts to create positions within existing departments, going back to the Bass Family’s attempt to endow a “Western Civilization” program at Yale in the 1990s, have sometimes ended in messy failure. But placing the new faculty in separate units leaves the original fields dangerously exposed to damaging cuts, either for brute ideological reasons, or because they do not have enough of a constituency to protest when the budget axe swings for financial ones. It should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the “Western tradition” that neither the thinkers in question, nor current specialists on them, are anything like homogenously conservative—hiring in the field does not mean hiring the next Harvey Mansfield. But would it be such a bad thing to hire a few more scholars who dissent from the prevailing politics of their fields? Robust political debate is generally preferable to groupthink, after all.
Smoke and flames rise from the roof of the Dormition Cathedral at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in the early hours of Monday, 15 June 2026, after a Russian strike on Kyiv. Image: Bishop Avraamij/Facebook)
On June 15, a Russian strike set Kyiv’s thousand-year-old monastery ablaze. The act was charged to a country, Russia, and to no one in particular. This is an attempt to reconstruct how such a decision gets made, and by whom.
My feed is on fire, and for once the metaphor is indecent, because the fire is literal. On the night of June 15, the roof of the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra burned against the dark while rescuers climbed toward it. The monastery was founded in 1051, at the dawn of monasticism in Kievan Rus’. The cathedral that burned is a reconstruction; the original was blown up in November 1941, after German troops took Kyiv, and whether the Nazis or the retreating Soviets set the charge has never been settled.
The human cost first. In a barrage of seventy missiles and more than six hundred drones, at least eleven people were killed across Ukraine and more than fifty wounded, Ukrainian officials said. In Kyiv, the dead numbered five and the wounded thirty-five, among them a pregnant woman and two children. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s emergency service said, a second missile struck a rescue site still crowded with the crews working the first, killing four of them for the crime of arriving. The evening before, a one-month-old girl had been among five people wounded when a drone hit the Kharkiv Art Museum.
And the buildings are their own kind of casualty list. The reposts come faster than anyone can read them. The Lavra. The Mystetsky Arsenal, the vaulted hall where the Book Arsenal festival had closed two weeks before. The Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio, where a single strike destroyed what the culture minister called Ukraine’s oldest and largest costume archive: a hundred thousand costumes, three million items of clothing, the wardrobe of a national cinema turned to ash before morning. The House of Organ and Chamber Music in Dnipro. Karpenko-Kary, where Ukraine trains its filmmakers and its actors. A single day reached all of it.
The films made on those lots are what I study, so let me say plainly what burned. A studio’s wardrobe is the material memory of a national cinema, the actual cloth worn in the films through which a country learned to see itself: the embroidered shirts, the uniforms it had to wear on screen and then subvert, the furs and the partisan coats. A costume archive is the primary source by which a culture studies itself. You cannot reshoot the twentieth century. Some of the garments that burned were older than the younger states now debating how to respond.
Russia says none of this happened, or that something else did. The Defense Ministry called the night a strike with high-precision weapons against the defense-industrial complex, and denied hitting the Lavra at all: the cathedral, it claimed without evidence, was struck by a Ukrainian-operated Patriot interceptor. The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the reports “fakes”. By that account, the cathedral fire was a Ukrainian misfire, the dead rescuers were the fog of war, and the second strike on the Arsenal, launched while firefighters stood exposed at the Lavra, was a coincidence of timing.
Two things are happening at once, and they do not quite match. The grief is public and signed: thousands of people, in a dozen languages, share the same photograph and the same verdict. A Russian strike. Russian barbarism. The attribution is loud, and it is also the easiest one available. It names a culprit and, somehow, no person at all.
What is more, the argument about Russia usually collapses into sentiment. We have learned, rightly, to separate Vladimir Putin from the people we call “ordinary Russians,” many of whom, it is said, do not want this war. But this separation dissolves into the same anonymity that lets a cathedral burn with no hand on the match.
Drone studies calls the drone less a weapon than a chain, an act of violence dispersed across factories, suppliers, programmers, and launch crews until no single hand can be said to hold it, by design. The Shahed, the Iranian-designed drone behind most of that overnight barrage, pushes that logic to its industrial extreme. The burning of the Lavra happened in many places at once, and over many months. In July of last year, a Swiss plant made the microcontroller that would steer the drone. American and German firms, Texas Instruments and Infineon, made the chips that investigators keep pulling from the wreckage. Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner counts more than two million imported components in a single year. Trading offices in Hong Kong and free ports in the Emirates rerouted those parts around the sanctions meant to stop them. In Tatarstan, the Alabuga plant assembled the drone with schoolchildren recruited out of the ninth grade and women brought from Africa through a foreign outreach scheme. And before it ever left the ground, a crew set its route.
And there the trail goes cold. The closest anyone has come to naming the drone operators was for a different weapon entirely. In 2022, Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel identified a unit of military engineers inside the General Staff’s Main Computation Centre who program the flight paths of Russia’s cruise missiles, the Kalibrs and the Kh-101s, plotting each trajectory by hand, far from any front. Most are young, many of them former software or game developers. Their commander was an avid coin collector; his phone records show him trading online about an hour before one such salvo hit Kyiv and killed dozens. When reporters reached the engineers, they denied everything, even when shown photographs of themselves in uniform. One said he was a plumber. One said she was a florist. One offered to explain how to butcher a pig. The metadata says these are the people who aim the missiles.
It is worth sitting with how little even that gave us. The Bellingcat investigation is now nearly four years old, and it named the people behind Russia’s cruise missiles, not its drones. The revelation was that a missile had not simply appeared over a city, the way weather appears. It had passed through offices, phones, maps, databases, commanders, and people who could be found, called, photographed, embarrassed, and named. But the war that followed, the Shahed war at industrial scale, has been harder to personify. As the drones multiplied into hundreds a night, the crews who prepare them, program them, and release them into the dark have remained mostly faceless.
The Russian drone operator has become one of the defining figures of the war. He is a technician of distance, converting coordinates, batteries, antennas, video feeds, maps, and orders into impact. Some work near the front, guiding FPV drones and reconnaissance quadcopters by hand. Others belong to more formal formations, including the elite Rubicon drone center, described by Radio Svoboda’s Russian-language investigation as a drone special-forces structure based in the Patriot Park complex, and by the Kyiv Independent as a central feature of Russia’s scaling drone war. But the long-range Shahed crews who send drones toward Ukrainian cities remain almost entirely unnamed. We can follow a microcontroller across three continents and still not put a name to the person who helped send it toward Kyiv. Component-tracing survives because it can be done at a distance. Naming people requires sources, time, physical danger, and the expensive human labor that has been gutted on both sides of the line: criminalized inside Russia, where reporters are exiled or imprisoned, and starved in the West, where the foreign desks that once did this work have been cut to the bone.
If everyone is responsible, it is tempting to conclude that no one is. That conclusion is what the system is built to produce. But responsibility accrues at every link, and it is uneven. It is heaviest where knowledge and choice are greatest, with the engineer who plots the path and the official who signs the order. It is lighter, though never absent, for the smuggled chip and for the schoolchild recruited into what was sold as a college and turned out to be a drone line. The Russia scholar Jade McGlynn, who has argued that this is Russia’s War and not only Putin’s, makes the necessary distinction: not collective guilt, which belongs to individuals tried for their own acts, but collective responsibility, held in different measure by everyone who takes part.
I have no verdict, only a refusal to let “Russia” be the last word. An engineer designed the chip. A broker moved it through Dubai. An official licensed the airframe. A commander signed the order. And a man with a name and a rank plotted the route into a thousand-year-old monastery. The last time it burned, in 1941, the question of whose hand lit it was left to die in the fog of another war. This time it does not have to. The ones who knew what they were doing are not the people we are asked to forgive in advance. So who burns the Lavra? People do, in different measures, with different degrees of knowledge and choice. Naming them scales the act back down from a country to a person and keeps the names where they belong: in the record, and one day, perhaps, in court.
“I don’t want to get used to the war” was the message painted on a fence outside the former Stables Department building in Petersburg in February 2025. Photo: Bumaga
Author of graffiti “I don’t want to get used to the war” released after sentencing
The Petrograd District Court sentenced activist Alexander Arseniev to twenty months in prison on criminal charges of vandalism and “discrediting” the [Russian] army, his lawyer, Alexei Pryanishnikov, reported on his Telegram channel.
Arseniev was released in the courtroom after his stay in a pretrial detention center was counted as time served. According to Arseniev’s case file on the court’s website, the final hearing in the case took place today. As this article went to press, the court’s decision had not yet been entered into the file.
Arseniev wrote “I don’t want to get used to the war” on a fence near the Stables Department and at Gazprom Arena in February 2025. The graffiti outside the stadium was repainted overnight.
Last March, Arseniev was detained in Moscow and extradited to Petersburg, where he was remanded in the pretrial detention center. Spray paint cans and an acrylic marker were found police searched his flat.
Repression in today’s Russia is not on par with the mass repression of the country’s past. Nevertheless, it fulfills the same function by intimidating society and changing the behavior of millions.
Many people also feel that this repression is intensifying. But human rights data show the opposite: for a year now, the number of new politically motivated cases has remained at the same level — around 500 per quarter.
In the “Repression Barometer” report for the first three months of 2026, researchers from Memorial’s project in support of political prisoners made clear that Russian authorities appear to regard the current level of politically motivated arrests — which plateaued at 500 per quarter — as optimal.
Out of a population of around 140 million, that is not very many cases. By comparison, around four times as many murder cases are opened over the same time frame. Repression does not affect the majority. In 1937–1938, for example, more than 1.37 million people out of the U.S.S.R.’s population of 162 million were arrested in cases involving “counter-revolutionary crimes” and around half of them were shot.
But modern repression performs the same role as the mass repressions of the 1930s by creating a sense of an all-powerful, punitive hand of the state that effectively changes the behavior of millions.
But why is it so powerful when only a small number of people are punished? Political cases become a weapon for intimidating the population not through scale, but through unpredictability.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people make online comments that could be classified as “fake news,” “discrediting” the Armed Forces or “justifying terrorism.”
But criminal cases are opened against only a few — and it is precisely this selectiveness that makes the system so effective. It is impossible to predict where the boundaries of permissibility lie and at what point the state will decide to impose a punishment.
The same logic applies in cases involving “extremist” symbols, a category that today includes many things from the logos associated with Alexei Navalny’s activities to pentagrams and rainbow flags. In reality, such images can be found on many social media pages, but criminal cases are opened only in isolated instances.
Each such case sends a signal. Formally, rules exist. But in practice, they are applied selectively — and no one can be certain they will not be next.
The state cannot currently imprison millions. But it does not need to. Imprisoning hundreds unpredictably is more than enough to create the impression that anyone could end up behind bars.
The wording of the relevant laws also plays into this. They are extremely vague and even lawyers cannot always calculate the risk of simple actions. For most people, doing nothing is the best way to make sure they remain on the right side of the law.
A good example is cases involving “foreign agents,” where the law does not forbid private users from reposting or quoting their content without a disclaimer. But because of the chilling effect of a growing number of restrictive laws, people are afraid to quote or repost material from such branded outlets. The problem is compounded by the existence of other statuses like “undesirable” and “extremist,” for which legal consequences for sharing their material do exist. But many people, fearful of crossing the line, prefer to keep away.
Fear takes hold first and foremost among the most informed and engaged people who read independent news and follow human rights organizations. Aware of the risks, they begin to express themselves more vaguely, participate less often in public discussions and withdraw from active involvement.
The victims of unpredictable repression, meanwhile, are increasingly ordinary people who write comments or publish posts on VKontakte without realizing the risks they are taking.
Despite covering barely a quarter of the total number of incidents, the media — both pro-government and independent — plays a major role in creating the impression of widespread repression. Absurd and plainly unjust cases receive such wide coverage — like the story of the hookah on an Easter kulich — that their very absurdity intensifies the fear of the unpredictability of repression.
Within this logic, criminal cases against public figures who have left the country — writers, actors, bloggers, politicians and television presenters — look like a separate area of work for the security services. There is no practical point to these repressions: hardly any of these people will be extradited from Europe, where they have settled. But such cases receive widespread public attention, which further helps create an atmosphere of fear. Celebrities are not spared, so what can ordinary mortals expect?
Thus, contemporary Russian repression does not need to become mass repression at all. Its effectiveness rests on a combination of unpredictability and public signaling: most cases remain almost invisible, but individual stories become a signal to everyone else.
If human rights defenders are right and the authorities really do regard the current level of repression as “optimal,” then perhaps they believe nothing more is required. There is no need to imprison millions to frighten millions more. It is enough to maintain a constant stream of cases and, from time to time, show society that anyone could be next.
May 21st marks Circassian Remembrance Day, or the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Russo-Caucasian War. This war, spanning from 1763 to 1864, resulted in the loss of independence for the North Caucasus region and, for the Circassians (one of the region’s indigenous peoples), in genocide and mass exile from their historical homeland.
In the 1990s, Circassian activists, public figures, politicians, and scholars successfully secured official recognition for this date as a day of mourning. Since then, two official narratives have coexisted in the North Caucasus, particularly in Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and the Krasnodar Krai: one asserting the voluntary integration of North Caucasians into Russia, and the other describing a colonial war, genocide, and expulsion.
The state actively supports the first narrative in every way possible, while the second is methodically squeezed out of the public discourse.
Every year on May 21st, a mourning procession, comprising both walkers and horsemen, winds its way through Nalchik. They proceed along the central thoroughfare, passing the monument to Maria Temryukovna, the Circassian wife of Ivan the Terrible, which bears the inscription “Forever with Russia,” before continuing on to another monument: Psezhig (The Tree of Life), created in memory of the Circassian victims of the Russo-Caucasian War.
Since 2016, Ored Recordings has been releasing projects timed to coincide with this somber date. The liner notes for these albums remains unchanged: again and again, we speak of trauma, and of the immense difficulty in discussing it, as the state systematically closes off any space for dialogue. While in the early years we opted for highly neutral phrasing, since 2022, officials have begun banning commemorative events; consequently, finding the right words has become increasingly challenging. We are permitted to remember, mourn, or reflect only within strictly prescribed forms. Thus, cultural projects and musical releases serve as an insufficient, yet absolutely necessary, form of resistance against assimilation and suppression.
This year, we decided to shift our focus away from the trauma itself or the specific subject of the Russo-Caucasian War, choosing instead to present a cross-section of new Circassian music — music that is not merely being preserved, but is actively evolving.
Shyshagh (ЩIыщIагъ, meaning “underground” in Adyghe) offers a snapshot of an imagined Circassian underground scene, as curated by Ored Recordings.
Three artists have contributed their distinct visions of independent Circassian music to this compilation.
For this release, Cherim (Maykop born, Tbilisi based) has departed from his signature industrial hip-hop and hauntological ambient styles, recording two indie-folk ballads featuring lyrics that are at once simple and deeply poignant. The tracks contain echoes of both Soviet-era pop music and the lo-fi underground tradition exemplified by acts such as Low or Rivulets.
Temir (from Nalchik, based in Paris) is an electronic producer, collagist, and vocalist who translates Circassian aesthetics into the realms of deconstructed club, ethereal pop, and other forms of emotive avant-garde music. Ethnographic archives from the last century, along with rehearsal raw recordings from Jrpjej, served as the foundation for these qafe without dancing.
Two additional tracks come courtesy of duos featuring Timur Kodzoko (originaly from Nalchik, Göttingen based), a co-founder of Ored. From our archives, we unearthed an old rehearsal recording by Zafaq, a dormant Circassian Black Metal project. It is raw, instrumental bm-rooted in traditional melodies, yet one that explicitly rejects the aesthetics of folk metal. In 2020, the drums were handled by Amar Abazov, founder of the Zhest records.
The second track comes from Shkhafit (meaning “free” in Adyghe), a drone-folk project by Timur and his son, Astemir Kodzoko. It is a semi-improvised acoustic ambient piece performed on the shichepshin (Circassian fiddle), as well as various other string and wind instruments. It evokes the ghosts of an unfulfilled future and the spirit of new pshynatles-sagas. It is a soundscape where Mark Fisher visits Murdin Tesh.
Shyshagh stands as Ored Recordings’ most ironic and chaotic release to date. As yet another May 21st passes, we see no immediate light at the end, yet we remain ready to unite and carry on!
Cherim – recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2026. All music by Cherim Tsei. Production for the song “Pari (Nothing)” by Temir.
temir – recorded in Paris, France, in 2026. All music by temir. “Duguj” based on Jrpjej rehearsal recordings. “Zechir” based on archival Circassian recordings.
Zafaq – recorded at the House of Radio, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, in 2020. Timur Kodzoko – guitar Amar Abazov – drums
Shkhafit – recorded in Göttingen, Germany, in 2026. Timur Kodzoko – strings, bowed instruments, and effects Astemir Kodzoko – physharmonium and wind instruments
Cover photo: Tulip tree in the village of Golovinka, Lazarevsky District, Krasnodar Krai/Shapsugia. Photo by Lilit Matevosyan Cover design: Milana Khalilova Text: Bulat Khalilov (English translation by Bella Mirzoeva)
Source: Ored Recordings (Bandcamp). I have included the entire album here for your listening pleasure, but I would urge to download it from Bandcamp, paying what you can to Ored Recordings to support their fine mission. That’s what I just did. \\\\\ trr
I’ve spent most of the last 48 hours doomscrolling through people’s reactions to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The people I follow most regularly have split into predictable camps. There are people like me and Adam Serwer who are trying to put the court’s decision into the larger context of the long-standing white hostility to Black voting rights and Black political power. There are the folks like Ian Millhiser who have tried to explain the immediate legal effects of the court’s unconscionable decision. The activist set is taking some time to digest what has happened and plan for next steps, with some vowing to “fight” and ultimately “win” in some fashion.
Predictable, too, has been the reaction from the right. White supremacists and, to the extent there’s a difference, Republicans have been giddy. I read one particularly risible piece of trash in National Review crowing about how the Supreme Court’s decision will allow Republicans to gerrymander away Black political power while stopping Democrats from restoring that power. I think that legal analysis is wrong. But what struck me was not the stupidity of the argument but how happy they were to make it.
That happiness, from whites, is something that most of the articles and analyses, including mine, have failed to capture sufficiently. It is as distressing to me as the actual decision and the terrible results that will result from it.
The Voting Rights Act was once considered a pillar of American democracy—so much so that it was extended and expanded in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan. It was reauthorized in 2006 by President George W. Bush, and that reauthorization passed the Senate 98–0. In just 20 years, the VRA has gone from being such a mainstay of the democratic project that even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives didn’t dare vote against it to something that barely hooded mouthbreathers at National Review are happy to trash.
I don’t really know how to process that information. It’s not just that we’re going back to a Jim Crow state of affairs—it’s that white people are happy about it. As if the 60 years of post-apartheid America that were ushered in by the VRA were just an unfortunate detour, and now white people can get back to their preferred route.
Republicans always want you to believe that they’re not racist “in their hearts,” that they just happen to prefer a set of policies that coincidentally result in inequality, oppression, and less opportunity for non-white Americans. But this reaction to the death of the VRA proves they’re lying. They hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all.
And now, they’re happy to finally be able to take that political power away.
Is there even one series with a cover like this (you know what I mean) that actually has good ratings? Why on earth are they making THIS????
Source: Ororo.tv. Racist comment translated by the Russian Reader, who has unfortunately read and heard thousands of such comments in Russian during his thirty-plus years on the Russia desk. ||||| trr
John Watson and Sherlock Holmes’ fates intertwined one last time in the Season 2 finale of Watson, which serves as a series finale as the CBS medical drama has been canceled.
In the closer, as Watson (Morris Chestnut) traveled with Mary (Rochelle Aytes) to Baltimore to get surgery for the glioblastoma that had been causing his Sherlock visions all season, a disoriented Holmes — in the flesh — was admitted to the Holmes Clinic in Pittsburgh. When Watson got word, he abandoned his surgery plans and returned to treat his friend. He deducted the cause of Sherlock’s illness but the delay of his own life-saving surgery cost him, and Watson suffered a debilitating seizure.
He eventually woke up and professed his love to Mary who reciprocated. With his surgeon coming to Pittsburgh, the finale ended with Watson in the OR and a vision of him and Mary living at 221B Baker Street in London, the future he had laid out for them in their heart-to-heart hours earlier. (In the Sherlock Holmes lore, the brilliant detective shared his apartment at the famous address with Watson.)
Speaking to Deadline, Watson creator/executive producer Craig Sweeny addressed how he approached the finale and its ending and provided one explanation for the Baker Street flashforward.
“The season finale was tricky to write in that, even while we were filming it, we didn’t know if the show was coming back or not,” he said.
CBS’ cancellation decision came after Watson had wrapped production on Season 2.
“We opted to treat it mostly as a season finale, with a coda appended that nods to a possible future for Watson and Mary,” Sweeny added. “The coda, set at Baker Street, has several possible interpretations — among other things, it could be a fantasia Watson is seeing as he’s on the operating table in what may be his dying moments. I have my own interpretation but prefer not to comment on it beyond what’s on the screen so audiences can make up their own minds.”
At the time of the Watson January 2025 series premiere, Sweeny told Deadline that he had built the show on the presumption that Sherlock is dead. “I don’t want to be held to that if there’s some great story that presents itself, but I don’t believe that we’re ever going to feature Sherlock as an ongoing character in the show Watson at this time,” Sweeny said back then.
Following the Season 2 finale, Sweeny explained to Deadline how the idea of bringing Sherlock onto the show started and evolved — from a hallucination stemming from Watson’s brain tumor to a real person — and what the Season 3 plan for the Watson/Sherlock storyline was.
“In Season 3, Watson would also have been Sherlock’s doctor treating ongoing complications from the ailment that plagued Holmes at the end of Season 2,” Sweeny said. “We originally conceived the Watson/Holmes storyline to have Holmes exist only as a delusion in Watson’s head as a means for Watson to learn about his glioblastoma, but quickly revised those plans after we saw what Robert Carlyle brought to the role of Sherlock Holmes. Watson’s Holmes and Watson were fun to write and watch, and so we devised a way for Sherlock to be present in the real world.”
The Season 2 finale of Watson left storylines open-ended for the young doctors too, including the ongoing investigation into Beck’s death, the search for Sasha’s birth mother and Sasha (Inga Schlingmann) breaking up with Stephens (Peter Mark Kendall). Season 3 would’ve wrapped their fellowship arcs.
“The heart of Watson was the cases, so if we had come back we would have continued to hunt the strange and amazing scientific outliers that made up our strongest episodes,” Sweeny said. “Of course, medical fellowships last three years, so a major theme of season three would have been exploring what would have happened to Ingrid, Stephens, Adam, and Sasha at the end of their Fellowships and how many new doctors would be worked into the mix.”
Sweeny took the opportunity of the Watson finale to reflect on the series’ two-season run.
“We had a lot more to say with the show, so of course it’s sad we won’t be making any more,” he said. “But I’m grateful that we got to write and produce 33 episodes. I love to write procedurals with cases that are set at the edge of what humans know, and Watson gave me and our team the chance to do that every week.”
Sweeny previously spent five years on CBS’ Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson procedural Elementary, most of them as executive producer. He went on to acknowledge Watson executive producer Dr. Shäron Moalem, who “shared insights from decades working in genetics and was singularly important in crafting cases set on the vanguard of what’s possible.”
Sweeny also praised the work environment on Watson and its No.1 on the Call Sheet.
“Making Watson for two seasons was a rewarding experience for the producers, cast, and crew. We had tight-knit communities in Los Angeles and Vancouver,” he said of the series, which was written in Los Angeles and filmed in Vancouver. “I’ve been blessed to have career highlights and happy experiences on shows, but I’ve never known anything quite like the warm and collegial vibe that prevailed on Watson. I’m especially grateful to Morris Chestnut for his role in making that happen. When Morris was considering the role, we met for coffee and talked about the environment we both hoped to foster. His tireless leadership and example helped make the Watson set a happy experience for everyone who worked there.”
As he closes (prematurely) the chapter on Watson, Sweeny chooses to focus on the positive.
While thanking the “special group of people” who worked on the series, his producing partners, the cast, the writing staff, the casting and post departments, he said, “Naturally, all of us mourn the loss of the show and the community around it while also being grateful for the opportunity to make as much Watson as we did.”
IN A WORLD OF MIKE JOHNSONS — BE A MARSHAWN An angry Louisianan, known only as Marshawn [sic], gave an impassioned speech in a state Senate hearing this week in the lead-up to the vote to eliminate a majority Black district that — until last week — was protected by the VRA.
If you watch ONE THING today — let it be this
“I have no doubt in my mind that the map’s gonna pass,” Marshawn said. “If y’all can give us less than zero seats, you would do it. Y’all do this under the orders of somebody that said the Civil Rights Act was harmful to white people, that it caused reverse racism.”
“You showed us what you want to do. And I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party. Y’all are in a death spiral. That’s why y’all have to redistribute. That’s why y’all have to cheat. That’s why Trump got to go to Texas and say he was entitled the five more seats. It’s because y’all know what y’all doing is abhorrent.”
“So I’m positive y’all gonna be okay with the maps. But the beautiful thing is, the children that y’all have made and the people that’s younger than y’all don’t support none of this racism that y’all want. The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy. And I’ll be happy to see millennials and Gen Z bury y’all. There will be no more of your party. The midterms gonna come, y’all gonna get wiped out. Trump gonna get dragged out of the White House and I’m gonna love every second.”
“Because y’all loved every second of the suffering that he caused to everybody in this country and worldwide. We starvin’ Cuba. We bomb Nigeria. We holding Zimbabwe and Zambia hostage for the minerals. We don’t want to give them AIDS support. The pro-lifers that say all life is special, y’all letting kids die of AIDS. What part of your Bible say that?”
“Point out the scripture. I think everybody would love to see it. And we would love to see y’all in the midterms.”
In September 2022, Zambian officials were notified that one of their citizens had been killed in action, in Ukraine. Lemekhani Nyirenda’s death has sparked interest in Russia’s continued presence in Africa and how Africans are treated within Russia’s borders. Nyirenda’s death is one recent example of how Russia — and, before it, the Soviet Union — used and abused Africans to create their reputations as anti-imperialist and anti-racist states. There is a growing amount of literature being written on Soviet-African relations, particularly on Soviet interests and engagement on the African continent as a foreign policy concern. Yet less attention is being paid to the African experience within the Soviet Union. The experiences of African citizens reveal the paradoxical nature of Soviet anti-racist ideology and praxis. While the USSR recruited and welcomed thousands of African students to study technological and scientific disciplines to fight the legacies of imperialism in their home countries, Soviet citizens often treated the Africans in their midst with disdain and hostility.
This December will mark the 60th anniversary of the death of an African student in Moscow. The Ghanaian citizen Edmund Assare-Addo, who was studying medicine in Moscow, was found dead on a country road on the outskirts of the Soviet capital in 1963. As the historian Julie Hessler has shown, the contested death of Assare-Addo marked a watershed for Soviet-African race relations. It sparked one of the USSR’s largest protests since the 1920s, with some 500 African students marching through Moscow. Many of them arrived from St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) and other Soviet cities to participate. Wearing traditional Russian fur caps with ear-covering flaps, they gathered by the Kremlin’s gates, holding up signs saying, “Stop Killing Africans” and “Moscow, a second Alabama.”
While the Soviet media was relatively silent about the unrest, Western media covered the African student protests widely. Students interviewed by the New York Times on Dec. 19, 1963, complained of regular harassment by Soviet citizens and physical assaults. There was a discrepancy between the ideal of an anti-racist, multinational Soviet society and the existence of Black Africans within its borders.
Race relations between Black residents and students in the Soviet Union and their white (Slavic-presenting) counterparts are difficult to trace. As the USSR did not use race to categorize or organize society, it is hard to know how many African students studied there. Soviet citizens, however, were categorized within the ethno-federal state by “nationality,” with categories like “Jewish” or “Tatar.” Yet there was a clear ideological rejection of race and racism.
What we do know is that thousands of Africans moved to the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1950s, to gain access to Soviet higher education and military training. Generally, 1957 is seen as a turning point in the Soviet approach toward Africa and Africans.
In the 1920s and ’30s, African Americans were a focal point for Soviet anti-racist ideological practice. Dozens of African Americans moved to the Soviet Union for better economic opportunities and the chance to experience life in a country that officially condemned racism. The writer and poet Langston Hughes was the most famous of these visitors. His early writing on his experience reflected the hope that African American visitors to the USSR held for a society that actively struggled against racism. Other African American visitors, such as Homer Smith and Paul Robeson, lived in the Soviet Union for years, where they enjoyed special privileges as representatives of the “oppressed class of workers and an oppressed race,” according to the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928. The combination of foreignness (Americanness) and Blackness worked to the advantage of Black Americans. I would argue that, because African Americans were Americans, they were not only representatives of some of the most oppressed workers, but also of a pantheon of modern industrial developments — the United States.
There were considerably fewer Africans present in the Soviet Union during the early Stalinist era, yet those who were there did notice the difference between how the USSR talked about imperialist oppression and how it depicted Africans. The historian Woodford McClellan’s study of Black students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), a training academy in Moscow during the 1920s and ’30s, includes an example of Black African students taking issue with the depictions of Africans and Black people in Soviet public media and discourse. For example, some objected to the portrayal of Blacks through Blackface in plays, while others complained of being called “monkey” and the prevalent juxtaposition of Black Africans with apes and monkeys in theaters. My research on early Soviet children’s books up through the late 1930s reveals that, even in one of the most experimental periods in Soviet artistic production, Black people — specifically Africans — were often depicted as wild, animalistic figures far removed from modernity.
It was following the 1957 International Youth Festival in the Soviet Union that one could see the impacts of these depictions in Soviet children’s and popular culture. There were visible tensions between Soviet citizens and the Africans in their midst. African students recruited to study in the USSR received benefits and opportunities unavailable to Soviet people. They received stipends from the government, had more freedom of movement around and outside the Soviet Union, and could shop at foreign stores that were off-limits to most Soviets. Coupled with these privileges was the fact that foreign students from the global south often had different curricula from their Soviet counterparts, focusing on transferable skills they could implement when they returned to their home countries. Return was key in the eyes of Soviet officials. African students were not allowed to remain in the USSR for extended periods after completing their studies. In her essay describing her 1976 trip to the Soviet Union, the African American writer and feminist Audre Lorde noted the difference between her lodgings in a first-rate hotel and a shabby hostel where some African and Asian participants in a conference were housed.
So how did the Soviet Union get to the situation in December 1963 in which African students accused their Soviet hosts of racism and, worse, of killing one of their own? In accounts from the 1960s to the Soviet collapse in 1991, African students described carrying knives to protect themselves and being called racial slurs by their Soviet classmates. When Assare-Addo died, rumors swirled. African students alleged he was killed because of his interracial romance with a white Soviet woman. Such relationships were not unusual for the time. As Harold D. Weaver has written when detailing his experiences as a Black American in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, there were numerous sexual escapades between African men and Soviet women. This was one of the touchstones of racial strife between Soviets and Africans, particularly between men: the assumption that African men were taking white Soviet women (and most African students and residents in the Soviet Union were men). Clearly, anti-racist ideology reached its limits when it replicated long-standing Western stereotypes of Black men as violators of white women.
Interracial relationships and, worse, interracial sex, were stigmatized throughout and after the Soviet era. Research by the sociologist Charles Quist-Adade on mixed-race, Afro-Russian children in the late 1980s and early 1990s highlights the racist undertones of Soviet views of interracial romances between Soviet women and African men. His respondents and their white, Soviet mothers describe regular public and private hostility toward them. Soviet women who had romantic engagements with African men were called prostitutes and shamed by their families and communities.
Worse was the treatment of Soviet women who became pregnant with mixed-race children. Women reported being pressured to end their pregnancies or give up their children for adoption to make their lives easier. Soviet women generally were not allowed to follow their African partners to their homes on the African continent, so those who chose not to terminate their pregnancies were often forced to raise their children alone, with little social support.
Some heartbreaking testimonies include childhood ostracization in school, name-calling and feelings of rejection throughout their school years. Yelena Khanga, an Afro-Russian television presenter and producer, is known for her work on the early 2000s daily talk show “The Domino Effect.” In an interview with NPR, she shared her feelings of isolation and loneliness among her Soviet classmates. Her Russian boyfriend even referred to her as his “little monkey” as a racialized term of endearment.
Compounding these feelings of isolation were the continued depictions of Africans as wild and Africa as a dangerous place. A popular Soviet children’s cartoon from 1970, “Katorok,” features a song, “Chunga Changa,” which depicts Africans as jet-black, barely human figures who commune with wild animals while dancing. Worse, the song’s lyrics include a recitation of the stanza “chew coconuts and eat bananas.” What kind of feelings could these depictions engender toward Africans? Moreover, as waiting lines for basic consumer goods grew longer and few had access to foreign goods, the privileges of African students and visitors aggravated public hostilities against them. Ultimately, a general attitude of “how can these people come here and live better than we do, on our dime, when they are so underdeveloped and behind?” flourished.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 represented a nadir for Africans living in the newly formed Russian Federation. Suddenly, they found themselves the unwanted guests of a government that no longer existed. They began to bear the brunt of anger about the Soviet system. Beatings, verbal assaults and murders of Africans, among other visible minorities, exploded. The 2010s were a harrowing period for any visible minority in Russia, as stabbings and physical assaults became commonplace in the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. [Actually, the peak of this “harrowing period,” in St. Petersburg at least, was the late 2000s — trr.] Quist-Adade’s respondents described being harassed in the street and told they had AIDS because they were mixed-race (or had a mixed-race child).
Most recently, Africans and Afro-Russians have decried the racism and discrimination they face daily. From racial slurs to discrimination in housing, Black people struggle for equality in the Russian Federation. Lemekhani Nyirenda’s odyssey of studying in Russia, only to be accused of drug trafficking and sentenced to 9 1/2 years in a Russian prison, is the latest example of Black people’s hardships in Russia. That Nyirenda’s death occurred in Russia’s brutal campaign in Ukraine while Russia is courting additional African support is the culmination of the decades-long tension between ideology and praxis in the Soviet Union and Russia toward Africa and Africans.
The conception of Africans as representatives of “backward” countries needing Russian material aid has continued and flourished in the latter years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. Nyirenda’s death, allegedly as a member of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, is ironic because it is this same group that has boots on the ground across the African continent, extracting precious minerals and resources at the expense of Africans.
The experiences of Africans and African Americans in the Soviet Union are often flattened into a single “Black” experience. However, African Americans were treated better than people from Africa and were respected by their Soviet counterparts as representatives of the United States, the USSR’s most significant competitor and a model of industrial modernity. Moreover, Africans were representatives of countries that were seen as the little brothers of the Soviet Union in the quest to decolonize and liberate the Third World. Africans were in the USSR to learn skills to improve their home countries, which were often depicted as wild and backward. Unfortunately, these assumptions about Black Africans led to Afro-Russians’ ostracization in the late Soviet era and beyond. From throwing bananas at Black soccer players to wearing Blackface in ballet performances, some of the worst stereotypes of Blackness continue to thrive in the Russian Federation. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not end one form of internationalism in which the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, participated — which is that of global anti-Blackness.
Excerpt from “Tashkent: The End of An Era” (Mark Weil, 1996). A full, subtitled copy of the film can been seen here.
Recent trends in world politics have led several analysts to emphasize the idea of the retreat or recession of Russian power abroad. Yet few have commented on a key aspect of this retreat, namely the growing movement across Central Asia to unseat the Russian language from its position, often enshrined in law, as an official language on a par with the native tongue. Trends across the region demonstrate state action to diminish the role of the Russian language, growing political discussion of the issue, or socio-economic trends working to reduce the hegemony of the Russian language. These trends also display both Russia’s mounting anxiety about such trends and its increasingly visible inability to reverse or stop them.
BACKGROUND
Russia’s recent reversals in Syria, Venezuela, the Caucasus and potentially Iran have triggered a flood of articles proclaiming the retreat of Russian power. However, none of these writings noticed the parallel ongoing dethronement of the Russian language from its previous eminence in Central Asia. Nevertheless, this epochal development, like Russia’s aforementioned geostrategic defeats, possesses profound political as well as cultural significance. Given the importance of linguistic policies in the Tsarist, Soviet, and now post-Soviet regimes, the retreat of the Russian language from a position of linguistic-political primacy in Central Asia signifies major political and cultural transformations.
Specifically, Kazakhstan’s new constitution subtly but overtly downgrades the status of Russian as an official language. Article 9 of the new constitution establishes Kazakh as the dominant language of the country, relegating Russian to the status of an official language used by the government “alongside” Kazakh. This new constitution obtained massive public support although much of it was probably engineered from above, forcing Putin to congratulate President Tokayev on its ratification. However, those congratulatory remarks, as Tokayev and his team well know, probably came through clenched teeth and were preceded by much Russian public criticism of Kazakhstan’s language policies.
An analysis of Russian press perspectives on the return of Kazakhstan’s Latin alphabet, originally introduced in the 1920’s, from the Cyrillicization of the alphabet during the height of Stalinism, displays a politicized perspective where this process is seen as a repudiation of a Russian orientation in favor of a Turkic-Western one. Insofar as Turkey and Western powers like the EU and the U.S. have stepped up their presence and interest in Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a whole, this politicized perspective sees language and alphabet policies as manifestations of the growing regional presence of those parties at Moscow’s expense. Thus, Russian press coverage warns Central Asian audiences against alleged foreign plots of an imperialist nature.
Russian media also minimize or deny the agency of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states in formulating and then executing their own alphabet and language policies while implicitly and often overtly extolling the superior, imperial role of Russia’s language and culture as a vehicle for connecting Central Asia with modern civilization and culture. In other words, much of this literature reflects an imperial echo with deep roots in late Tsarist and then Soviet imperial policies that Russian elites seek to preserve.
IMPLICATIONS
Kazakhstan’s assertion of its linguistic sovereignty challenges the Russian dream of maintaining its cultural-political hegemony over Central Asia because it is losing the means to enforce that claim on Kazakhstan and because Astana’s example is being replicated across Central Asia, e.g. in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Uzbekistan, as a 2024 paper makes clear, Russian must coexist if not compete with Uzbek and Tajik while English, a global lingua franca, is rapidly gaining on it as well. In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan’s example has simultaneously stimulated debates on emulating its language policy.
Predictably the Russian government, sensing another threat to its receding hegemonic pretensions, has reacted strongly. On March 19, its embassy in Bishkek forcefully demanded that Kyrgyzstan’s government suppress “provocative statements of certain public figures” about the place of Russian in Kyrgyz society. The statement also complains about “language patrols” where vigilantes purportedly try to intimidate people to stop speaking Russian and speak only Kyrgyz. The embassy deemed such calls incitement to ethnic hatred and a threat to Russo-Kyrgyz strategic partnership and, in a conscious echo of Soviet propaganda, “deep alliance between our fraternal peoples and countries – Russia and Kyrgyzstan.”
This atavistic employment of Soviet tropes is no accident. Whereas Lenin’s language policies, likely inspired by his father’s work in teaching Orthodoxy to Muslims, wagered that teaching socialism would lead Soviet Muslims to socialism; Stalin decisively imposed Russification by giving the Russian language primacy and Cyrillicizing Central Asian alphabets. Putin’s consistent attacks on Lenin’s nationality policies, many of which stemmed from an appreciation of socio-political realities during the early Soviet period, reflect his clear preference for the centralizing, Stalinist, and more openly imperialist policies of Stalin and his successors.
Nevertheless, a generation after independence and having devoted much effort to fostering large-scale national identification among their populations, Central Asian leaders are openly moving to assert not just their foreign policy sovereignty, but also their linguistic nationalism. The use of Russian across Central Asia will likely remain pervasive because of the benefits it offers in economic relations with Russian and possibly Central Asian entities. However, Russian will not be the only regional lingua franca or the language of Russian imperial hegemony either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia. Since we can readily imagine a similar outcome in Ukraine due to Russia’s war against the country, which underlies many of the causes for the retreat of Russian hegemony, the trends discernible in Central Asia go far beyond its borders.
CONCLUSIONS
Even as the Russian government is currently discussing legislation allowing it to intervene anywhere abroad on behalf of its citizens, Central Asian developments presage the ongoing erosion of Russian cultural and thus political power. The whole idea of the “Russkii Mir” (Russian World) based on speakers of the Russian language that furnishes a pretext for interventions abroad is rapidly falling to pieces. From Tsarist and Soviet times, Russian authorities consistently regarded Russian as the sole “civilized” and therefore hegemonic language of the empire and often sought to enforce that hegemony by coercion. Those days are visibly ending as Central Asian governments are, with increasing confidence, asserting their own native tongues while also opening up to greater economic-cultural interaction with other countries. While Russian will not disappear in Central Asia; it is being decentered and increasingly deprived of its superior legal-political standing.
This process is clearly linked to the global recession of Russian power even as Russia fights to retain its erstwhile imperial and global great power status. For its rulers, expression of that status through all the forms of cultural power, e.g. alphabets and languages, was a critical component of empire. Yet what we see today, despite Moscow’s threats or even forceful efforts to arrest or reverse that decline, is an imperial sunset that evidently cannot be stopped either in culture or in hard power.
AUTHOR’S BIO
Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, www.fpri.org.
When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults.
McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube.
McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.
What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching ten children’s videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The findings show YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.
“Kyrgyz children are algorithmically constructed as audiences for Russian content,” Nel Escher, a coauthor who is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”
McDermott recalls one frustrated Kyrgyzstani mother in 2023 explaining that she paid the internet bill a day late each month to regularly have one day without internet and, thus, YouTube at home.
YouTube, which has “committed to amplifying indigenous voices,” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The researchers are attempting to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the potential for language filters, according to Escher.
The researchers say their work is the latest to show how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, people in Kyrgyzstan had to learn Russian to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in both Russian and Kyrgyz, with Russian remaining important for commerce. Kids are required to learn at least some Kyrgyz in school. But many spend several hours a day online, and watching YouTube is the leading activity, McDermott says. Quoting from Russian language videos is common, whether creators’ refrains like “Let’s do a challenge,” adaptations of American words such as “cringe,” or parroting accents and syntax.
In one of the researchers’ experiments, they searched for several subjects which are spelled the same in Russian and Kyrgyz, including Harry Potter and Minecraft. The results were predominantly Russian. Overall, just 2.7 percent of the videos the research team analyzed appeared to even include ethnically Kyrgyz people.
YouTube “socializes youth to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” the researchers wrote in a self-published paper accepted to a social computing conference scheduled for October.
The researchers say there is ample Kyrgyz-language children’s content for YouTube to promote. In 2024, the 35th-most viewed channel on YouTube across the world was D Billions, a Kyrgyzstan-based children-focused content studio with a dedicated Kyrgyz-language channel that has nearly 1 million subscribers.
Azamat Duishenov, head of the program management office for D Billions, tells WIRED that their team believes Kyrgyz content helps promote the language. Duishenov suspects YouTube may find it worthwhile to err toward recommending content in Russian because Russian speakers outnumber Kyrgyz ones.
The researchers suggest potential remedies to parents such as creating playlists of Kyrgyz-language content or sharing devices with their children. When the researchers simulated adult users watching non-kid’s content in Kyrgyz, they received predominantly Kyrgyz-language recommendations. Then, when kids later used the same device, they experienced a moderate uptick in exposure to Kyrgyz-language videos, despite younger users gravitating toward Russian content during their sessions.
The Hidden Face of the Confessional Empire: Islamophobia in Russia | A book talk by Paolo Sartori
Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 12:00 PM — 1:15 PM CT
Online
Please join the East Asia Research Forum as they host a Zoom talk with Paolo Sartori.
Description:
In May 1854, the Russian imperial authorities arrested Ishan Muhammad Sharif Mansurov on suspicion of conspiratorial activities. The investigation, which lasted about nine years, sparked a media frenzy and rumors of possible mass unrest in the Kazakh steppe on religious grounds, and drew public attention, including from ruling circles. Why was the figure of the Sufi Mansurov of such interest to the colonial administration, and what danger did he pose? What knowledge did government officials possess regarding Sufism in the Kazakh steppe at that time? By analysing the documentary traces left by the Mansurov case, I offer a set of reflections on the relationship between the Russian confessional state and Islamophobia.
Speaker Bio:
Paolo Sartori (PhD 2006) is Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he presides over the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia. He is the author of A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan (1943-1991) and, more recently he has guest-edited a theme issue on Russian Colonialism for the Slavic Review.
My guest today was born in 1991, the same year as the independent states of Central Asia. A few years ago, he set out to explore what’s happened in the former Soviet republics since the collapse of the USSR, and whether they have flourished over the last 35 years without the “big brother” Russia.
His book, Farewell to Russia: A journey through the former USSR, has just been published in the UK and the US. His name is Joe Luc Barnes, and you might also recognise his voice from our audio documentaries. In this episode, we talk about his book, travelling and living in Central Asia, and the (often problematic) craft of travel writing.
Mark Weil, who has died aged 55 after being stabbed on his way home from a rehearsal, was the founder and director of the first independent theatre in the Soviet Union – the Ilkhom, in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. To this day, the Ilkhom remains the only venue for original, uncensored drama in a country where freedom of expression is severely limited. An extraordinary man, he created an artistic space in which people could ask questions and explore their experience.
Born in Tashkent, Mark was not an Uzbek but a Russian Jew, part of the world of central Asian Russians that is now disappearing. Russian-speaking, but with much of the style and gentleness of Asia, these people were insiders, but often with the outsider’s powers of perception. Russian traders had first come south to central Asia during the Arab empires (a cross-cultural theme that Mark loved) but the Russian presence really took off in the Soviet era. An intellectual, nonconformist scene began to grow. Solzhenitsyn’s time in Tashkent (in 1953) became Cancer Ward. Mikhail Bulgakov’s widow managed to hide the manuscript of The Master and Margarita until it was safe to publish.
This eclectic, offbeat world was Mark’s heritage. He studied drama in Moscow and St Petersburg in the early 1970s, but returned to take his MA in history and artistic theory in Tashkent in 1974. In 1976, he opened the Russian-speaking Ilkhom – the word means “inspiration” in Uzbek – with a piece of improvisation that came straight from central Asian street culture, called Makharaboz-76 (Clown 76). Throughout the Brezhnev era, he staged the debuts of young playwrights at the Ilkhom, the only theatre in the Soviet Union that had no state funding.
After the collapse of the USSR and birth of the new country of Uzbekistan, Mark made contacts with foreign theatre groups, thrilled to meet experimental, thoughtful people from all over the world. The Ilkhom company took its shows to France, Germany and Italy. In 1988, he visited Seattle and held workshops at US universities. But along with new freedoms came disappointments. President Islam Karimov’s rule became ever more authoritarian.
Most Russian-speaking intellectuals queued for Russian passports and got out. Mark did not. “This is my city, I was born here, and I will never leave,” he often said. But he never courted collision with the authorities. He simply got on with his work.
In the 1990s, Mark set about a huge project close to his heart, a documentary history of Tashkent. He hunted down and restored lost archive of the city, and added his own footage. Laughing wryly, he told me how he went out to film part of the medieval quarter that was being ripped down and built over with flats. “I was just standing quietly, filming, when the foreman saw me. With no warning, the shovel swivelled round and tipped its load over my camera and tripod, and broke it.”
With the government denouncing “foreign” entertainment, the Ilkhom produced Brecht (a constant in the repertoire) and Gozzi (1992). It put on a musical version of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1996). It staged Edward Albee’s Zoo Stories (2005). It examined the forbidden theme of homosexuality through the short stories of the Uzbek writer Abdullah Kadiri. Mark relied heavily on foreign partnerships, including the British Council, to fund these ventures, but money was extremely tight. The actors worked for almost nothing.
Disaster struck Uzbekistan in May 2005, when thousands gathered to call for jobs and a better life in the ancient eastern city of Andijan. The army moved in and shot dead about 500 people, almost all of them unarmed. The government denied this account – it said it had scotched an Islamic uprising – but refused an international inquiry. It then closed down many foreign agencies, while others left in protest. For the Ilkhom, its vital sources of funding were reduced still further.
Mark was attacked on his way home from the dress rehearsal of Aeschylus’s tragedy, the Oresteia. It was to have been a triumphal start of a new season, in the bleakest times, and he was thrilled by the production and its exploration of revenge and the rule of law. He is survived by his wife Tatyana and daughters, Julia and Aleksandra. His death has not been reported in Uzbekistan.
· Mark Yakovlevich Weil, theatre director, born January 25 1952; died September 7 2007
This presentation introduces a book project on the first decades of Russian colonization in Eastern Siberia, present-day Yakutia. Rather than framing colonization solely as a process of conquest and political alliance-building, the project foregrounds intimate and gendered entanglements between Russian newcomers and Indigenous communities. Russian fur traders, trappers, and military servitors typically arrived in the region without families and encountered Yakut, Tungus, Yukaghir, and Even populations. The resulting gender imbalance among settlers quickly made the trade in Indigenous women a profitable enterprise. At the same time, commercial transactions sometimes culminated in Orthodox marriages, blurring the boundaries between coercion, commerce, and social integration. By examining these practices, the study explores how racial, cultural, and religious boundaries were negotiated in everyday interactions between Russian colonizers and Indigenous societies in seventeenth-century Eastern Siberia.
There were three ways to acquire women in Eastern Siberia. The first was as the outcome of military expeditions, sometimes referred to as ‘pogroms’ in the documents. When Russian troops attacked local settlements or nomadic camps and emerged victorious, they would seize women, children, and cattle as spoils of war. Enslavement of women during times of conflict had deep roots in Siberian history. Historical documents provide numerous accounts of inter-ethnic military clashes that resulted in the plundering of the defeated, particularly involving the capture of women, children, and cattle.
A petition from 1642 for the baptism of a Yakut woman named Katok includes Katok’s explanation of why she desired to convert to Orthodoxy where she shares her life story. She recounts that she could not recall her father’s name as she was taken by Russians during a ‘pogrom’ when she was only a child. She further explained that she had previously lived ‘among Russians,’ but that she now has nothing to eat or drink and was starving to death. In short, Katok was forcibly captured from her community as a child, likely being one of those taken as trophies from the defeated local community.
Another form of enslavement in Siberia involved trafficking, where local people would sell their relatives to Russians. Sometimes the locals would sell their women to combat poverty. Gurvich mentioned that the Yukaghirs of Yana River sold their maidens and children to Russians because of hunger in 1659. However, the women sold to Russians were not always orphans or from poor families. There are documented cases where individuals of higher social status willingly sold their daughters. For instance, local prince Orgui sold his daughter Mychak to a Russian serviceman for a cow.
Russians did not necessarily purchase or capture local women in battle; sometimes they acquired them without any effort or payment. One such case is preserved in historical documents. It tells the story of Ladchka, a Yakut woman who was abandoned by her husband and left with no means of support. She sought refuge in the Russian camp and resided there for two years before eventually being brought to Yakutsk with her child in 1643. During her interrogation, Ladchka revealed that she had been a slave (‘yasyr’) of the fur trader Oderka Martemyanov. She had a child with him and expressed her desire to be baptised. It appears that Martemyanov acquired this woman without any cost, lived with her for a period, and then seemingly cast her aside.
An exhibit at the Cooper Molera Adobe museum in Monterey, California. Photo: The Russian Reader
Cooper Molera Adobe is now pursuing the interpretation of Ohlone/Esselen/Costonoan Native Indian slaves at our historic site. This includes evaluating our history, beyond gaining simple historical information and respectfully work with descendants to then forge a richer, more diverse narrative and legacy.
Three pillars of multi-disciplinary research, relationship building, and interpretation as major benchmarks will guide our methodology as we move forward with this project. Cooper Molera Adobe has partnered with Woodlawn Pope Leighey and Shadows on the Teche as a working group in a large network of sites the National Trust has to move toward this collective goal.
Failing to tell the truth about race and slavery results in widely-held fears of engaging with people who look, speak, act or think differently than oneself. It is lived out in anger and despair in feeling marginalized, erased, and invisible due to demographics or identity.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and our website to see more of our updates in the future for this project.
On April 27, 1863, nearly five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, California abolished its system of forced apprenticeship for American Indians. Under the apprenticeship provisions of the state’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, several thousand California Indians, mostly children, had suffered kidnapping, sale and involuntary servitude for over a decade.
Newly elected California Republicans, eager to bring California in line with the national march toward emancipation, agitated for two years in the early 1860s to repeal Indian apprenticeship. And yet those Republicans’ limited vision of Indian freedom — one in which Indians would be free to reap the fruits of their labor, but not free from the duty to labor altogether — made for an incomplete Indian Emancipation Proclamation. Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.
The Republican campaign to abolish Indian servitude ran up against nearly a century of coerced Indian labor in California. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, thousands of California Indians worked on missions and ranches, bound to their employment through a combination of economic necessity, captivity, physical compulsion and debt.
With the United States’ conquest of California in 1847, the discovery of gold in 1848 and the formation of a state government in 1849, new American lawmakers expanded and formalized Indian servitude to meet growing demands for labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians authorized whites to hold Indian children as wards until they reached adulthood. Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or other crimes could be forced to work for whites who paid their bail.
Skyrocketing demand for farmworkers and domestic servants, combined with violence between Indians and invading whites in the northwestern part of the state, left Democrats in war-torn counties clamoring for the expansion of the 1850 Indian act. A “general system of peonage or apprenticeship” was the only way to quell Indian wars, one Democrat argued. A stint of involuntary labor would civilize Indians, establish them in “permanent and comfortable homes,” and provide white settlers with “profitable and convenient servants.” In 1860, Democrats proposed new amendments to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that allowed whites to bind Indian children as apprentices until they reached their mid-20s. Indian adults accused of being vagrants without steady employment, or taken as captives of war, could be apprenticed for 10-year terms. The amendments passed with little debate.
As the nation hurtled toward a war over slavery, Californians watched as their own state became a battleground over the future of human bondage. Apprenticeship laws aimed at “civilizing” the state’s Indians encouraged a robust and horrific slave trade in the northwestern counties. Frontier whites eagerly paid from $50 to $100 for Indian children to apprentice. Groups of kidnappers, dubbed “baby hunters” in the California press, supplied this market by attacking isolated Indian villages and snatching up children in the chaos of battle. Some assailants murdered Indian parents who refused to give up their children.
Once deposited in white homes, captive apprentices often suffered abuse and neglect. The death of Rosa, a 10-year-old apprentice from either the Yuki or Pomo tribes, provides a grim case in point. Just two weeks before the repeal of Indian apprenticeship, the Mendocino County coroner found the dead girl “nearly naked, lying in a box out of doors” next to the home of her mistress, a Mrs. Bassett of Ukiah. Neighbors testified that the child was sick and restless and that Basset shut her out of the house in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Huge bruises on Rosa’s abdomen suggested that Bassett had mercilessly beaten the ill child before tossing her out into the blizzard. Mendocino officials never brought charges in the case.
The horrors of kidnapping and apprenticeship filled the state’s newspapers just as antislavery California Republicans swept into power in 1861–2. Republicans assailed the apprentice system and blamed Democrats for the “abominable system of Indian apprenticeship, which has been used as a means of introducing actual slavery into our free State.” George Hanson, an Illinois Republican whose close relationship with Abraham Lincoln earned him an appointment as Northern California’s superintendent of Indian affairs, vowed to eliminate the state’s “unholy traffic in human blood and souls.” He tracked down and prosecuted kidnappers in the northwestern counties (with mixed success) and petitioned the State Legislature to abolish the apprenticeship system.
In 1862, Republican legislators proposed two new measures to overturn the 1860 apprenticeship amendments. Democrats blocked these bills and insisted that apprenticeship “embodied one of the most important measures” for Indians’ “improvement and civilization.” Indian servitude lived on.
By the time the legislature met again in the spring of 1863, however, all signs pointed to the destruction of the apprenticeship system. Republicans won firm majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, and in January California became the first state to endorse Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans again proposed to repeal the apprenticeship amendments, and this time they achieved their goal with no debate or dissent. Involuntary labor for American Indians died quietly.
Or did it? Republicans had eliminated all the 1860 amendments authorizing the forced apprenticeship of American Indians. But they had left intact sections of the original 1850 act that mandated the forcible binding out of Indian convicts and vagrants. Moreover, repeal only prevented future apprenticeships; Republican legislation did not liberate Indians already legally apprenticed. After repeal, as many as 6,000 Indian children remained servants in white homes.
The incomplete nature of Indian emancipation in California reflected Republicans’ own ambivalence toward Indian freedom. Most Republicans opposed the kidnapping and enslavement of Indians. They believed that Indians, like former African-American slaves, should be entitled to reap the economic rewards of their own work. On the other hand, they asserted that the key to “civilizing” Indians was to force them to participate in the California labor market. They could not be free to support themselves through traditional mobile hunting and gathering practices that removed their labor from white supervision and tied up valuable natural resources. Such a lifestyle was, in Republicans’ minds, little more than idle vagrancy. Just as their Republican colleagues on the East Coast argued that ex-slaves should be schooled to labor by being bound to plantation wage work through long-term contracts, California Republicans began to advocate compulsory labor as the only way to cure Indian vagrancy.
The Republican vision for Indian freedom quickly took shape after the Civil War. Republican appointees who oversaw California’s Indian reservations compelled all able-bodied Indians to work on the reservation farms. Those who refused, or who pursued native food-gathering practices, forfeited the meager federal rations allotted to reservation Indians. By 1867, one Republican agent declared that “the hoe and the broadaxe will sooner civilize and Christianize than the spelling book and the Bible.” He advocated forcing Indians to work until they had been “humanized by systematic labor.” These policies persisted long after the war. At Round Valley Reservation, one critic observed in 1874 that “compulsion is used to keep the Indians and to drive them to work.” Indian workers received no payment for “labor and no opportunity to accumulate individual property.”
The ambiguous postwar liberty of California Indians reveals that the Civil War was a transcontinental conflict that reached west to the Pacific. The freedoms won in wartime, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, encompassed not only black and white, free and slave, but also American Indian peoples who suffered from distinctly Western systems of unfree labor. The Civil War and Reconstruction are best understood as truly national struggles over the meaning and limits of freedom, north, south and west.
Confusion about how sex trafficking works and who qualifies as a victim has compounded the problem. The government’s 2019 indictment charged Epstein with trafficking minors between 2002 and 2005, the period covered by his earlier Florida plea deal. The adult women Epstein entrapped after his 2008 conviction weren’t included in the indictment.
In 2019, prosecutors brought charges using the minimum number of victims needed to apprehend Epstein in order to keep the case secret and avoid him fleeing, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors continued interviewing victims after his July 2019 arrest and had planned to expand the indictment, including potentially to adult women, had Epstein not died the following month, according to these people and a 2019 Justice Department memo released in the files.
For sex-trafficking cases involving adults, prosecutors must prove the victim was compelled into sexual exploitation through force, fraud or coercion. Fraud typically involves false promises of employment or a better life; coercion can be psychological and take the form of threats of deportation, blackmail or debt bondage, lawyers said.
Federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted cases of adult sex trafficking. In 2019, the Nxivm group founder Keith Raniere was convicted for his exploitation of adult women and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Most recently, the Alexander brothers were convicted in a case in which adult women testified that they had been lured to exclusiveparties and trips, then drugged and assaulted. Lawyers for the Alexander brothers said they planned to appeal.
Pyramid scheme
After his 2008 plea deal, Epstein shifted his focus to adult women who looked like teenagers—many of them fashion models from Europe and Russia. He dangled fake jobs linked to his famous connections, promising work at places like Victoria’s Secret. He rarely delivered.
Once inside his orbit, the women said they were coerced into performing massages that escalated into sexual demands. Several have said he required at least one such encounter a day, and when no other women were available, he turned to his “assistants.”
An angry Louisianan, known only as Marshawn [sic], gave an impassioned speech in a state Senate hearing this week in the lead-up to the vote to eliminate a majority Black district that — until last week — was protected by the VRA.
