Native Tongues

The percentage of schoolchildren in the Russian Federation studying in native tongues other than Russian halved between 2016 and 2023. Instruction in thirty-eight languages ceased altogether. Experts argue that this situation was caused by a whole slew of problems, including a downturn in interest in native languages, a decrease in the number of lessons taught in them, a shortage of teachers, and an estrangement from foreign partners due to sanctions.

**Pupils at a rural school during a Yakut literature lesson. Photo: Alexander Ryumin/TASS**

According to the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, there are 155 living languages in the Russian Federation, thirty-seven of which have the status of official languages in the republics, meaning that they should be used in those regions on an equal footing with Russian. In Russia’s comprehensive education system, native languages are studied in three forms: as separate subjects, as electives, or as complete substitutes for Russian in all classes.

Based on data from the Ministry of Education, Takie Dela has calculated that between 2016 and 2023, the percentage of schoolchildren who study entirely in their native languages fell from 1.98 to 0.96 — the lowest figure for this period. The number of such pupils fell from 292,000 to 173,500, although the number of children in school increased by 3.2 million over those same seven years.

The share of those who studied native languages at clubs decreased from 0.7 to 0.4 percent. During the same period, the share of pupils who were taught their native languages as a separate subject increased from 10.41 to 10.56 percent. But the overall engagement of children in learning their native tongues decreased from 13.08 to 11.92 percent.

During the same period, instruction in thirty-eight languages, including Altai, Buryat, and Ingush, ceased completely. In 2016, there were still children in Russia who studied general subjects in those languages. There were no more such pupils left by 2023.

“Where the language is spoken at home, it provides an opportunity to master the written norms. This is vital to preserving people’s identity, to making them feel comfortable in society,” says sociolinguist Vlada Baranova.

According to the law, learning a native language in Russia is voluntary, so it is up to parents to decide how exactly it will be taught to their children and whether it will be taught at all.

Margarita Kilik, chair of the Association of Teachers of Native Languages of Kamchatka, argues that the decrease in the number of pupils studying their own languages is due to the desire of parents. “Fewer and fewer people are staying in the region,” she says. “They are leaving to study in the big cities, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So there is simply no need for mother tongues.”

Which languages Russian schoolchildren studied as mother tongues in 2023. Drag your cursor arrow over each circle to see the total number of children who were studying that particular language as a native language. By clicking the “cog” icon in the lower righthand corner, you can access two sets of toggles that alter the map: 1) Форма изучение (“Form of instruction”), which shows whether a language was taught as a separate subject (pink) or used as a language of instruction (powder blue); and 2) Сколько детей узучают язык (“How many children study the language”), which alters the map to visualize the relative weight of the numbers and percentages of children who studied languages other than Russian in 2023. Source: Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation/Takie Dela.

And yet, interest in mother languages persists and often awakens with age, when it is more difficult to learn them, Kilik concedes. Natalia Antonova, editor-in-chief of the Karelian-language newspaper Vedlozero Windows, agrees with her. “It is difficult to get schoolchildren interested in something, especially studying minority languages. Often people who have already matured, whose parents have passed away, have regrets that they have been left without a linguistic thread linking them,” she says.

According to census data cited by the To Be Accurate project, the number of speakers of all of the Russian Federation’s official languages except Russian, Chechen, Tatar, and Tuvan declined between 2002 and 2020. But many textbooks of minority languages are designed for children who can speak them, even though the textbooks themselves have not been updated for a long time.

“Children who don’t know their native languages enter school. There are good textbooks structured to teach [these] languages as foreign languages, but these are more exceptions,” says Baranova.

In the Russian Federation, native languages are studied mainly in elementary and middle schools, while in grades 10 and 11 most teenagers switch to Russian, according to statistics from the Ministry of Education. “Graduates need to sit for the Unified State Exam, and general subjects taught in native languages won’t help them much,” says Vladislav Savelyev, a former Yakutia Education Ministry official.

Initiatives by the regions to produce a Unified State Exam in their native languages were never adopted. Meanwhile, the number of hours allocated for studying native languages at school has been reduced, activists have pointed out. “These issues are regulated by the federal educational standards, and, of course, the number of hours for teaching Yakut has been reduced in favor of priority subjects, such as mathematics,” says Savelyev.

Instruction in native languages in the Russian Federation. The numbers of children who studied in 2016–2023 in their native languages is indicated by the lavender bars, while their percentage within the overall school population is shown by the pink line and dots. Source: Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation/Takie Dela.

Savelyev also notes that schools are switching to a five-day school week and “optional” subjects like mother tongues are the first to have their hours cut from school schedules.

Another reason why the languages of Russia’s peoples may eventually disappear is the shortage of teachers specializing in them. According to data from the Institute for Statistical Research and Knowledge Economics at the Higher School of Economics, the number of native language teachers in Russian schools fell from 22,000 in 2009 to 15,500 in 2023. There are even fewer who can teach mathematics and history in languages other than Russian. “Seventy percent of the school teachers in the Koryak Autonomous District are from other regions. How can they know our languages? The situation is the same in many other regions,” Kilik points out.

The circumstances surrounding the teaching the official languages of the republics and the languages of minority Indigenous peoples differ greatly, however.

“We have several such languages in the Kamchatka Territory, and some of them even belong to different [linguistic] groups. A significant number of the teachers of these languages, as well as the speakers, are at least fifty-five to sixty years old. Who will teach the languages when they retire?” wonders Kilik.

Some languages, such as Aleut, have disappeared altogether in Kamchatka: Russia’s last speaker of the language, Gennady Yakovlev, died in 2022. Russian Aleuts used to cooperate with American Aleuts in preserving their language and culture, but this has now become impossible. “There are obstacles on both sides: our side says that America is an enemy country, while their side imposes sanctions on Russia,” says Kilik.

The situation is similar in Karelia, the only republic in the Russian Federation where the language of the titular nation does not have official language status. This is due to the fact that the Karelian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, while official languages in Russia must be written in the Cyrillic script alone.

According to official statistics, less than 500 children study the Karelian language at school, while 340 children study Vepsian. Instruction in these languages has been preserved only at specialized university departments and partly in kindergartens, says Antonova. “There are a couple of dozen kindergartens where the native language is learnt. But it’s more about the showy aspect of the language used in songs, costumes, and festivals,” she adds.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian Karelians have been assisted by Finnish Karelians in studying and preserving the Karelian language: textbooks have been published jointly, and language courses have been held jointly. “The break with Finnish organizations will certainly affect the opportunities for learning the Karelian language. Although it is not so noticeable yet, because little time has passed,” Antonova explains.

According to Antonova, Karelian is currently studied in clubs and courses at libraries, language centers and NGOs. Some of these organizations even receive state support, she adds.

Russian law obliges the state to preserve the languages of the peoples living in the Russian Federation and to promote their study.

‘This is a very divergent movement, and the situation depends very much on the region. In some places the authorities support languages, while in other places, on the contrary, they see their widespread use as going hand in glove with ethno-nationalism. But the policy is generally more aimed at Russification and reducing the use of minority languages,” explains Baranova.

Baranova notes that there is a downside to the fact that studying mother tongues is voluntary, as stipulated by law. In villages inhabited by speakers of endangered languages it is often possible to muster only one first grade class, and it will always be a Russian-speaking class.

“Because there will always be parents who want their child to be taught in Russian, and this is also their free choice. You can, of course, try to defend your position and demand that the school provide for another first grade class in the other language, but you’ll come across as suspicious and dangerous,” says Baranova.

Antonova also says that it has become more difficult to assert one’s linguistic rights.

“If campaigning for language revival was a common trend in the nineties, nowadays you can be accused of extremism and separatism, and the authorities will regard you with suspicion.”

Despite all this, there are ways to study native languages in Russia, says Baranova.

“Other forms and grassroots initiatives that get children and adults involved in using the language in different areas are also effective. They turn out to be a good way to keep the language alive.”

Source: “’Suspicious and dangerous’: schoolchildren in Russia now half as likely to study in their native languages,” Takie Dela, 9 September 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

DINARA RASULEVA & TATSIANA ZAMIROVSKAYA
“Lost Tongues, Found Voices, Decolonizing Languages: A Multilingual Reading and Conversation”
Wednesday, October 2, 6:30 pm
Hunter College CUNY
Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East Bldg)
Free and open to the public

Join Belarusian writer Tatsiana Zamirovskaya and Tatar poet_ess Dinara Rasuleva for a discussion on the loss and revival of languages. Dinara will talk about why languages of indigenous peoples colonized by Russia fade and how they are being brought back, sharing her translingual poems from the Lostlingual research series. Tatsiana will talk about why some Belarusian writers write in Russian, while still remaining Belarusian-identified authors, about her experience writing in a mix of Russian and Belarusian, and the challenges of translating colonized voices accurately. Both writers will reflect on the intersections of language and identity in their lives and works.

Dinara Rasuleva (she/they) is a poet_ess based in Berlin and born in Kazan, Tatarstan. She writes in Tatar, Russian, English and German — the languages she uses everyday. Dinara’s poetry was described and analyzed as decolonial and feminist writing, as expressionist poetry and performance poetry. In 2020 Dinara started a feminist writing laboratory for russian-speaking immigrant FLINTA community. In 2022 their first book of poems Su was published by Babel publishing house. Since 2022 Dinara started the Lostlingual Project, an investigation of the loss of her native Tatar language through translingual abstract poetry. In 2023, in collaboration with Berlin library Totschka, Dinara started TEL:L laboratories: writing in native forgotten or stolen languages.

Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a Belarusian author who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical sci-fi about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities and borders between empires and languages. She is the author of three collections of short stories and a novel Deadnet, published in Moscow in 2021, receiving great critical acclaim and shortlisted for several Russophone literary awards. She is a recipient of fellowships from Macdowell, Djerassi and VCCA. Currently Tatsiana is finishing her new collection of short stories about women going through unbearable events and how these events influence language and perception. She currently writes in belarusified Russian, russified Belarusian and broken English.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles.

Follow Tamizdat Project on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram! To learn more about us, download our brochure.

Tamizdat Project is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with a tax-exempt status: donations and gifts are deductible to the extent allowable by the IRS. You can donate online, via Venmo (@Tamizdat-Project), PayPal or Zelle using our email tamizdatproject@gmail.com, or by check. Please don’t hesitate to contact us, and thank you for your support!

Source: Tamizdat Project newsletter, 21 September 2024

Fun with Dictionaries

Рабство – система общественных взаимоотношений, при которой допускается нахождение человека (раба) в собственности у другого человека (господина, рабовладельца, хозяина) или государства.

Примеры:

1. Но сторонники отмены рабства, яростные аболюционисты, охваченные пуританским пылом, не желали замечать этих очевидных перемен.

2. Понадобилось сорок лет, чтобы из людей, вышедших из египетского рабства, естественным образом ушло поколение тех, чьи руки были запачканы пролитием крови.

Источник: Андрей Кузнецов, Тематический словарь по русскому языку. Издание для иностранных студентов, “Издательские решения”, 2019, с. 146

Slavery: a system of social relations in which a person (a slave) can be owned by another person (master, slave owner, proprietor) or by the state.

Examples:

But gripped by puritan fervor, the proponents of abolishing slavery, the rabid abolitionists, were unwilling to see this obvious change.
It took forty years for the generation of those whose hands had been stained by the shedding of blood to naturally pass away amongst the people who had emerged from Egyptian slavery.

Source: Andrei Kuznetsov, Thematic Dictionary of the Russian Language: Edition for Foreign Students (Publishing Solutions, 2019), p. 146

Source: Multitran

“Free lecture: ‘How to become a bukkiper [i.e., bookkeeper] from scratch in the US'”

Source: screenshot of an ad on social media

“Bookkeeper” is “bukhgalter” or (more rarely) “schetovod” in Russian, NOT “bukkiper,” as erroneously suggested by the “free lecture” ad, above. Source: Yandex Translate

About the Author

Photo by the Russian Reader of the back cover of a book found in a Little Free Library on Sinex Avenue in Pacific Grove, California, 21 January 2024

Definition of слесарь (*slesar*) on DeepL

Henry Slesar was born in Brooklyn, New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, and he had two sisters named Doris and Lillian. After graduating from the School of Industrial Art, he found he had a talent for ad copy and design, which launched his twenty-year career as a copywriter at the age of 17. He was hired right out of school to work for the prominent advertising agency Young & Rubicam.

It has been claimed that the term “coffee break” was coined by Slesar and that he was also the person behind McGraw-Hill’s massively popular “The Man in the Chair” advertising campaign.

Source: “Henry Slesar” (Wikipedia)

NUMB3RS (Wages of War)

Illustration by Danny Berkovskii for *Mediazona*. Source: *New Tab*

Aided by a team of volunteers, journalists at Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service have identified 41,731 Russian soldiers killed in the war in Ukraine using open sources. This number includes employees of the Wagner mercenary group, but it does not include those who fought on Russia’s side in military units fielded by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” the BBC noted in an article published on Friday, 12 January.

According to the article, more than 1,100 Russian military personnel killed in the war were under 20 years of age. Since the State Duma approved amendments to the relevant laws, in April 2023, thus permitting 18-year-old high school graduates to sign military service contracts, 48 Russians born in 2004 and five born in 2005 (who were thus “barely 18 years old” when they enlisted) have perished in the war.

As of 11 January, 2,377 airborne troops, 913 marines, 537 members of the Russian National Guard’s special forces, 450 members of the GRU’s special forces, 206 military pilots, and 77 FSB and FSO officers have been killed in combat operations.

The BBC points out that the number of casualties among those who voluntarily signed a contract to serve in the Russian armed forces has increased in recent months. Thus, volunteers, prisoners, and private mercenary company “recruits” now account for 37 percent of all confirmed losses 0n the Russian side. Another 12 percent of the identified casualties were draftees (of whom 5,005 died in Ukraine and 62 in Russia).

Source: Yevgeny Zhukov, “Journalists have confirmed the deaths of 41,700 Russian soldiers in Ukraine,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 13 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

According to Ukrainian intelligence, the Russian forces in Ukraine currently consist of 462,000 military and 35,000 National Guard troops, responsible for the functioning of the occupation regime. This number of troops allows the Russians to carry out rotation — to withdraw units and subdivisions and bring them to the front line.

Source: Monique Camarra, “Jan 13: E-Stories,” EuroFile, 12 January 2024

When looking for a new advertising/PR agency in Ukraine in autumn 2023, PepsiCo made it a condition for a potential partner to exclude any mention of the war, or support for Ukraine and its army in future communications, according to a brief seen by B4Ukraine.

“NO: mention of war, hostilities, aggression, military personnel (from Brand side), Armed Forces of Ukraine. NO: support Ukraine and the army. NO: negative connotation, creating a feeling of ‘unsafe,’” states the “Pepsi restrictions” section of the brief.

The B4Ukraine Coalition contacted Pepsi offices in Ukraine and the US to ask for comment on this article but at the time of publication had not received any response.

In the meantime, the October 17 message on PepsiCo’s Instagram page announced that “PepsiCo volunteers distributed food kits to 1,200 families in the city of Borodyanka, whose homes were destroyed.” The message does not specify who exactly brutally destroyed the homes of these people.

Perhaps because PepsiCo’s Russia net profit increased by 333% to $525 million last year and the company paid about $115 million in taxes to the Kremlin? Treating such contributions as support for the economy of the aggressor state, Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) in September included PepsiCo in the list of international sponsors of war.

PepsiCo produces soft drinks, juices, chips, snacks, dairy products and other food products under the main brands Chester’s, Chipsy, Lay’s, Mirinda, Pasta Roni, Pepsi, Propel, Sandora, 7Up, Simba, Snack a Jacks, Sonric’s, Tropicana, etc.

The company has 19 factories, about 20,000 employees, 40,000 agricultural workers, and 600 open vacancies in Russia, according to the NACP.

The company announced the cessation of advertising activities and the production of some beverages in Russia in March 2022, while still allowing other products, such as infant formula and baby food to be sold, in order, as PepsiCo put it, “stay true to the humanitarian aspect of its business.” Yet in fact, the company continues the production and distribution of chips, snacks, and soft drinks. According to Bloomberg, PepsiCo’s revenue rose 16% in Russia and profits quadrupled, and the soda maker said operations in Russia accounted for 5% of consolidated net revenue for 2022, up from 4% a year earlier.

Now the iconic Pepsi cola is sold under the Evervess-Cola brand, although regular Pepsi Cola is still easy easily purchasable in Russian supermarkets due to the so-called parallel imports, when goods are imported without the manufacturer’s permission.

At the beginning of September last year, PepsiCo came under fire over its Russian business when the firm’s products were dropped by the Finnish parliament and Scandinavian Airlines’ operator SAS, and already on September 21, ironically, [a] Russian missile damaged a PepsiCo plant near Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.

A global [c]oalition of civil society organizations, B4Ukraine, is calling on PepsiCo to exit Russia ASAP and for the US government to issue a business advisory, warning US businesses of the growing legal, reputational, and financial risks of doing business under military control in Russia.

Source: “‘No support for Ukraine and its army’: PepsiCo restricts mentions of war in its PR,” B4Ukraine. Thanks to Monique Camarra (EuroFile) for the heads-up.

The war has markedly changed the Russian economy. Moscow has had to adjust its policy to fund its armed conflict against Kyiv, maintaining its military apparatus and police force, and integrating the territories it has annexed from Ukraine. These priorities have necessitated significant spending commitments that collectively threaten Russia’s economic stability. The Kremlin will spend six percent of GDP (more than eight percent when combined with spending on national security) on the war in 2024. This is more than the 3.8 percent of GDP that the United States spent during the Iraq war, although it falls short of the prodigious sums the Soviet Union allocated during the years of stagnation and its invasion of Afghanistan (18 percent of GDP).

Military spending has even eclipsed social spending—currently less than five percent of GDP—for the first time in Russia’s post-Soviet history. This pivot toward a militarized economy threatens social and developmental needs. The four annexed regions of Ukraine have already received the equivalent of $18 billion, and in 2024 almost $5 billion is expected to be transferred from the federal budget to regional budgets. No other regions in Russia receive this level of investment, which only increases interregional inequality. Rather than restore dilapidated housing in Russia, the Kremlin prefers to spend money on building houses and roads in annexed territories, to replace the houses and roads that Russian troops destroyed during their brutal invasion.

Russian industry has been transformed, with defense sectors now overshadowing civilian industries. The defense sector’s enterprises are now operating at a fever pitch and, as a consequence, any surge in demand is likely to force prices to rise because of the sector’s inability to increase supply. The military sector is receiving a disproportionately high amount of government spending, and it is also siphoning off labor from the civilian workforce, leading to an abnormally low unemployment rate of 2.9 percent. Before the war, Russia’s unemployment rate typically stood at around four to five percent. The military and public sectors now employ 850,000 more people than in late 2022–23. The invasion of Ukraine also prompted about 500,000 Russians to emigrate in 2022, driving shortages of qualified specialists and blue-collar workers.

Meanwhile, living standards have risen across Russia, and the percentage of Russians living below the poverty line has dropped to 9.8 percent, the lowest since 1992. Naturally, there are regional variations, and areas that have sent a significant number of their men to fight in Ukraine—including Altai Krai, the Altai Republic, Buryatia, Chechnya, and Dagestan—have witnessed the fastest income growth in low-income groups. This relative increase in prosperity can be expected to continue as Moscow disburses funds to the families of the deceased and wounded.

Overall, the Kremlin wishes to maintain an illusion of normality and even increasing prosperity for its citizens. The distortions in the labor market have pushed up salaries in military industry, as well as in civilian manufacturing, because of the need to compete to attract workers from well-paying military plants. Moscow is, meanwhile, making high payments to soldiers and people mobilized to fight in Ukraine, which are driving consumption. At the same time, thanks to a supply of cheap credit, the government is handing out subsidized mortgages, that are, for the moment, shielding families from economic reality.

Source: Alexandra Prokopenko, “Putin’s Unsustainable Spending Spree: How the War in Ukraine Will Overheat the Russian Economy,” Foreign Affairs, 8 January 2024

Elsewhere there are signs that the invasion of Ukraine may have disrupted the Russian economy more severely than the frothy party scene suggests. The Olivier salad, a mayonnaise-drenched confection of root vegetables, sausage and boiled eggs, is a staple at every table during the holidays. This winter the price of eggs suddenly rocketed (no one is quite sure why, but it may have been because farms were short of labour since so many workers have been conscripted or left the country). In some regions people cannot afford a box of six eggs and have to buy them individually. One pensioner even raised this with Putin during the president’s annual end-of-year call-in with the public. Putin promised to look into it.

Source: Kate de Pury, “Gucci is cheap and eggs are pricey in Russia’s surreal economy: War spending has Russians partying like it’s 2021. But some are also stockpiling dollars,” 1843 Magazine (The Economist), 10 January 2024

In the two years that have passed since the start of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, residents of Ukraine have become less likely to use the Russian language, according to a press release on the outcome of research done by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in cooperation with the University of Bath and the Technical University of Munich, which was published on Wednesday, 10 January.

Language plays a leading role in the identity of post-Soviet Ukraine, the authors of the study say. Many Ukrainians are fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. And yet, only a few years ago, 50 to 60 percent of the country’s residents called Ukrainian their principal language of communication. After the Maidan protests in late 2013, sparked by then-Ukrainian President [Viktor] Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU, and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea in 2014, more Ukrainians abandoned Russian.

[…]

The researchers explore this trend in a study published in the journal Communications Psychology. Using artificial intelligence and statistical analysis, they examined more than four million messages posted by 63,000 Ukrainian users on the social network X (formerly Twitter) between January 2020 and October 2022.

According to the study’s authors, users began switching from Russian to Ukrainian even before the large-scale Russian invasion, but this trend increased dramatically after the war began. In their opinion, this change in user behavior was a political reaction to events. Users wanted to distance themselves from both support for the war and Russia as such, so they started using Ukrainian en masse.

Source: Sergei Gushcha, “Ukrainians use Russian less since war began,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 10 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

The full-scale war in Ukraine, which began almost two years ago, has led to increased violence in Russia itself. Military personnel with PTSD and criminals recruited into combat return from the front and maim and kill people in civilian life. Sometimes conversations about the war even end in violence. Mediazona and New Tab have uncovered over thirty criminal convictions for assaults and murders that occurred during quarrels about the “special military operation.” (The courts use the official wording for the war as mandated by the authorities.)

In Berdsk, Novosibirsk Region, draftee Khuler Mongush stabbed Nikolai Berezutsky, a passerby. The latter had asked Mongush why he was going to Ukraine. Saying that he was going there “to defend the Motherland,” the mobilized man attacked Berezutsky. Mongush was sentenced to eight years in prison for murder.

In the Irkutsk Region, farmer Maxim Khalapkhanov was drinking with an acquaintance, who began ridiculing the state of the Russian army during the war. Khalapkhanov eventually got angry and killed the acquaintance with a knife, whose handle was decorated in the colors of the Russian flag, and drew the letter Z on his stomach with a fireplace poker. Khalapkhanov was sentenced to seven years in a high-security penal colony.

Anton Rakov, a resident of Orenburg, was drinking with a new acquaintance. They began arguing about the war. Rakov did not like what his interlocutor was saying and killed him. While his victim breathed his final breaths, Rakov recorded a video with the dying man in the background, shouting, “This is what will happen to anyone who disagrees with me!”

Viktor Konnov of Zlatoust beat up a friend who said something nice about Ukraine, while Ivanovo resident Mikhail Vitruk received two and a half years in a penal colony for beating up his girlfriend, who allegedly called him a “Nazi” while they were watching the news.

In 2020, Mikhail Taskin attempted to shoot three people over a parking space and was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony, whence he was freed by the Wagner Group. Taskin spent several months in combat, where he lost a leg, eventually returning to his native village of Nerchinskiy Zavod in the Transbaikal Territory. In August 2023, he got into a fight at a local cafe. Taskin mocked the waitresses and promised to “hump all of them.” The incident ended in a brawl, and the police detained five people, but not Taskin was not among them. His sister and the local authorities argued that the disabled man had been assaulted by “opponents of the war.” But the news website Regnum discovered that two of the detainees were certainly not against the war because they had been involved in patriotic campaigns in the region.

It is not only drinking buddies and casual acquaintances who quarrel and fight over the war. Mediazona and New Tab turned up no less than seven court rulings in cases where the defendants and the victims were members of the same family. Vladimir Tofel from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky killed his nephew during an argument about the war. Yuri Makarkin stabbed his son, while Anna Cheremnova, a resident of the Altai Territory, stabbed her husband.

The experts asked for comment by Mediazona and New Tab argue that these are signs of a deep split within society, and the policy of the authorities does not help society to overcome this fissure. On the contrary, the hysterical rhetoric of propaganda only heightens the degree of intolerance, and people are increasingly willing to maim and kill each other.

Source: WTF (Mediazona) newsletter, 10 January 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

All the Tabs Open in Chrome

https://raspad.network

Yekaterina Duntsova, who wants to run for president, said the Kremlin should end the conflict in Ukraine, free political prisoners and undertake major reform to halt the slide towards a new era of “barbed wire” division between Russia and the West.

Nearly 32 years since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union stoked hopes that Russia would blossom into an open democracy, Duntsova, 40, said she was afraid as she spoke to Reuters in Moscow.

Source

In opinion polls, Russians voice support for the Putin regime’s action in Ukraine. And yet, many Russia would like the war to end, and the dynamics of recruiting “contract” soldiers does not demonstrate that a large number of people are ready to rise up “to fight the West in Ukraine.” What are the real sentiments of Russians? What do they think about the war and how do they justify it?

Lev Gudkov, deputy director, research director, Levada Center, “The war and collective identity,” (online)
Andrei Kolesnikov, senior researcher at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, “A semi-mobilized society in a hybrid totalitarian regime” (online)
Svetlana Erpyleva, Humboldt Fellow, Research Center for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen; researcher, Public Sociology Lab and the Centre for Independent Sociological Research, “Accepting the inevitable: how Russians justify the war in Ukraine”

Source. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

Viktor Filinkov, convicted in the Petersburg portion of the high-profile Network Case, turned twenty-nine in early November. It was his third birthday in the penal colony, and for the first time he was not given any special “gift” there. Previously, surprises had been waiting for him that were even hard to imagine—for example, a new uniform with a piece of razor inside it. Filinkov has been imprisoned for six years total. During this time, he has seen a lot, including being threatened with dispatch to a war zone, but he quickly put a stop to such “jokes.” Now he is housed in the high-security wing along with other “repeat offenders.” And he constantly files suits against the penal colony. We talked to his girlfriend and public defender Yevgenia Kulakova, who loves him with all her heart and helps defend his rights behind bars.

Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader, who looks forward to the day when he can see his friend and heroine Jenya Kulakova again and meet his hero Viktor Filinkov in person.

Putin noted that visitors from Tajikistan can stay in Russia for an extended period—fifteen days—without registering with the immigration authorities. They can also apply for a work permit that is valid for up to three years.

In addition, Putin announced the expansion of the quota for university students and postgraduates from Tajikistan—from 900 to 1,000 individuals.

The head of the Russian Federation added that the state would allocate 200 million rubles annually from this year for purchasing textbooks for Russian-speaking schools in Tajikistan.

Various regions of Russia have recently imposed restrictions on migrant labor. There have also been proposals to introduce such bans everywhere for visitors from countries where the Russian language is not recognized at the state level. In Tajikistan, Russian is enshrined in the constitution as the language of interethnic communication.

Due to the unstable financial situation, migrant workers have been leaving Russia. Up to a third of Tajik and Uzbek nationals may leave the country.

Source. Translated by the Russian Reader

As of February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the beginning of what he dubbed the “special military operation” and the Russian Armed Forces invaded Ukrainian territory. What the Russian authorities assumed would be a swift operation soon became a drawn-out, full-fledged war. Many events occurred over the course of the first year of war, keeping Russians in suspense, forcing them to detach themselves from the situation, giving them hope, and then driving them to despair. When we conducted our first interviews in spring 2022, many thought the war would not last long.

Since then, it has become clear that the war will be with us for a while. The daily life of Russian citizens has been invaded time and again by dramatic events. The Russian retreat from the occupied territories, the annexation of new regions, the bombing of Kiev, the first Crimean Bridge explosion, and the “partial mobilization”— to name just a few. Have these events changed the average Russian’s view of the war, and if so, how? How did residents of the Russian Federation perceive the “special military operation” more than half a year later? These questions are the focus of the report you see before you.

There are several research teams monitoring changes in Russian perceptions of the war through opinion polls (for example, Russian Field and Chronicles). The work they are doing is very important. However, like any research method, surveys have their drawbacks—there are some things they simply will not show. For example, surveys do not always allow us to understand a respondent’s attitude towards sensitive or hot-button topics, as sometimes people have a tendency to hide their true views. But more importantly, for Russians largely removed from the political process, perceptions of such politically-charged issues as the “special military operation,” war, and military conflict do not fit neatly into the standardized set of coherent positions that a survey is capable of capturing. These perceptions may be complex and contradictory, and in this case, in-depth interviews and long conversations with people allow us to better understand the idiosyncrasies of each viewpoint. To our knowledge, we are the only team that systematically monitors Russian perceptions of the war using qualitative (interview) rather than quantitative (survey) methods.

We released our first analytical report in September 2022. You can read it here (in Russian) and here (in English). In it, we presented the results of our qualitative study through interviews conducted over several months after the start of the war, in March, April, and May 2022. Our interviewees held a variety of opinions on the military conflict—there were those who supported the hostilities in one way or another (war supporters), those who condemned military aggression (war opposers), and those who tried to avoid giving any explicit assessment of the situation (undecided). We compared these three groups of respondents with each other: how they perceive the armed conflict, what emotions they associate with it, and how they consume information, assess the victims of the conflict, discuss the situation with loved ones, reflect on the consequences of the war, and so on. We have also published the results of this research in analytical media outlets, a few examples of which can be found here, here, and here, as well as in scientific journals, such as those found here (in Russian) and here.

The paper you are currently reading is the second analytical report we have published and a continuation of this research. It is based on qualitative sociological interviews with Russian citizens conducted in fall 2022, from 7 to 9 months after the outbreak of the war. We wanted to determine how Russian perceptions of the war had changed during this period. This time, we excluded subjects who consistently opposed the war from the sample and decided to focus our study on the specifics of perceptions held by Russian citizens who did not have an unambiguous anti-war stance.

Source

In audio intercepts from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian soldiers speak in shorthand of 200s to mean dead, 300s to mean wounded. The urge to flee has become common enough that they also talk of 500s — people who refuse to fight.

As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want out, as suggested in secret recordings obtained by The Associated Press of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.

The calls offer a rare glimpse of the war as it looked through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom makes its way into Western media, largely because Russia has made it a crime to speak honestly about the conflict in Ukraine. They also show clearly how the war has progressed, from the professional soldiers who initially powered Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion to men from all walks of life compelled to serve in grueling conditions.

“There’s no f—— ‘dying the death of the brave’ here,” one soldier told his brother from the front in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. “You just die like a f—— earthworm.”

The prospect of another wave of mobilization lingers, even as Moscow has been trying to lure people into signing contracts with the military. Russia’s annual autumn conscription draft kicked off in October, pulling in some 130,000 fresh young men. Though Moscow says conscripts won’t be sent to Ukraine, after a year of service they automatically become reservists — prime candidates for mobilization.

Source

Twenty months ago, after Vladimir Putin had launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many high-ranking Russians believed that the end was near. The economy faced disaster, as they saw it, and the Putin regime was on the brink of collapse.

Today, the mood has changed dramatically. Business leaders, officials and ordinary people tell me that the economy has stabilized, defying the Western sanctions that were once expected to have a devastating effect. Putin’s regime, they say, looks more stable than at any other time in the past two years.

Restaurants in Moscow are packed. “The restaurant market is growing, not only in Moscow, but throughout Russia, facilitated by the development of domestic tourism,” said a top Russian restaurateur. “And the quality of food is also changing for the better. Sure, panic struck the industry in early 2022, but it quickly passed.”

Source

Due to Helsinki’s decision to temporarily close the border with Russia, Finnish resident Yevgeny doesn’t know when he will be able to see his father again. He and other Russian-speaking residents of Finland are trying to get through to the authorities to convince them to open at least one border crossing.

Source. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

Unprecedented dragnets for conscripts have been taking place in Moscow. The capital’s military enlistment offices have launched a large-scale “single-day” conscription campaign, dispatching people with serious illnesses and visitors from other regions to the army. The Russian conscripts have not yet been sent to Ukraine for full-scaled combat. But the number of lawsuits against draft commissions has tripled compared to 2022 and is approaching a thousand cases. The BBC tells how conscription is taking place in the Russian capital, which lawyers describe as lawlessness.

Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader

Maria Andreeva, whose husband has been fighting in Ukraine for more than a year, is also waging a battle in Moscow: to get him home.

She is not alone.

A growing movement of Russian women is demanding the return from the front of their husbands, sons and brothers who were mobilised after a decree by President Vladimir Putin in September last year.

Initially, the movement pledged loyalty to what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” (SVO) but what they regard as the perfunctory response they have received is hardening some of their opinions.

Source

The Udege language is so phonetically rich that linguists have devised several Cyrillic-based alphabets for it in an attempt to capture this wealth. Udege has both an inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronoun (“we”), and the terms describing spatial relationships have parallel meanings in the home and beyond its confines. The language of the Udege people reflects their idea of the equality of time and space, and the starting point for the speaker is either a river or a hearth. Linguist Elena Perekhvalskaya acquaints us with the Udege language.

Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader, who was told the other day by a prominent Udege civil rights activist that the number of native speakers of Udege is now eleven.

In reality, as the testimony of numerous witnesses shows, the armed conflicts between the Russian state and the subjugated peoples of Siberia demonstrate that Russian colonization differs little from European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The only apparent difference was how the colonizers treated the people they conquered. While the Spanish Conquistadors committed large-scale massacres in their pursuit of gold, the Siberian Cossacks were more interested in extracting lucrative tributes from locals. These tributes, paid in the form of furs collected by the legendary hunters of the conquered peoples, became a major source of wealth for the tsars. The legend that indigenous peoples were such expert hunters they could “shoot a squirrel in the eye” persists to this day.

Source

Irina Gurskaya, a human rights activist and volunteer, arrived in Cologne from Penza a year ago. More precisely, she did not come willingly but fled to Germany on a humanitarian visa. At the age of sixty, the pensioner had to leave her home, fearing for her life. The reason for Irina’s intimidation and harassment by the security forces in Penza was that she had helped Mariupol residents taken to Penza to return to their homeland or leave for safe countries.

Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader

We don’t know whether there will be a stalemate on the battlefield moving into 2024, or more dramatic changes in the frontline like we saw in May and November 2022. It remains to be seen whether a more ambitious mobilization campaign will be attempted after the presidential elections in March 2024. It would face the same problems as those I have described here. Utter lack of capacity and resources among the commissariat, informal institutionalized ways of avoiding or undoing the will of the centre to recruit. Massive labour shortages which make industry hostile. A counter-productive administrative system of coercive command. Active and passive agency of the vast majority to avoid the draft. There are various indirect signs that the authorities collectively fear the results of having to implement further mobilization.

The botched first mobilization created an atmosphere of bitterness, fear and hostility to the state’s conduct regarding the war. It would be a mistake to say that mobilization in 2022 broke the social contract between state and people, because there was none to begin with. If the war continues, Russian society will become ‘insurgent’. Not literally, but figuratively, people will become more actively resistant to recruitment to the meatgrinder. No monetary offers, nor spreadsheet autocracy will be effective.

Source

Despite decades under Putin’s rule, it is too simplistic to assert that authoritarianism in Russia has eliminated activism, especially in relation to everyday life. Instead, we must build an awareness of diverse efforts to mobilize citizens to better understand how activism is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the regime.

Varieties of Russian Activism focuses on a broad range of collective actions addressing issues from labor organizing to housing renovation, religion, electoral politics, minority language rights, and urban planning. Contributors draw attention to significant forms of grassroots politics that have not received sufficient attention in scholarship or that deserve fresh examination. The volume shows that Russians find novel ways to redress everyday problems and demand new services. Together, these essays interrogate what kinds of practices can be defined as activism in a fast-changing, politically volatile society.

An engaging collection, Varieties of Russian Activism unites leading scholars in the common aim of approaching the embeddedness of civic activism in the conditions of everyday life, connectedness, and rising society-state expectations.

Source

The Bolshoy Kinel River flows among the forests of the Orenburg Region. Its name derives from the Bulgar word kin, meaning “wide.” When the ancient Bulgars first encountered it, they saw a wide, full-flowing river and decided to settle there. But nowadays the river is gradually disappearing: the banks have shoaled, the bottom is silted up, and the springs that feed it are clogged. And yet, the Bolshoy Kinel is only source of water for several towns. Its tributaries are also drying up. In 2021, the Turkhanovka River, which flows through the entire length of the city of Buguruslan, completely disappeared. It was a tragedy for the townspeople. The local residents joined together and together cleared the river of debris—and the water returned. It transpired that there are many people living in the town who feel a great love for their land. I spoke with them. And, as I gathered their stories, I saw how everyone’s small deeds, like rivulets, combine into one big, important cause—just as the Turkhanovka River flows into the Bolshoy Kinel, the Bolshoy Kinel into the Samara, the Samara into the Volga, and the Volga into the Caspian Sea.

Source. Excerpt translated by the Russian Reader. Photo by Darya Aslanyan for Takie Dela

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Source

Both sides of the author’s family were remarkable. His maternal grandfather, Alfred Wiener, was a prominent German Jew who created the most extensive archives documenting the Holocaust; Alfred’s wife and daughters were deported to a concentration camp. The author’s paternal grandmother was transported to a gulag in Siberia. A tale of survival, eloquently told.

Source

A lyrical excavation of trauma and healing in the midst of early motherhood – the debut work of an endlessly inventive poet whose work ‘fizzes with energy, physicality, and the levitating openness of song’.

Source

It was snowing heavily when Yulia walked across the only open border between Ukraine and Russia last month, carrying her two cats and dragging a large suitcase behind her.

She had left her village on the edge of Russian-occupied Melitopol, a city in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, more than 24 hours earlier, paying a Russian ‘carrier’ with a minivan around $250 (nearly £200) to take her to the border-crossing in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region.

Walking across the two-kilometre no-man’s land was the final step in a long journey that is not without risk. Just two weeks earlier, a Russian volunteer who was transporting Ukrainians to the Sumy checkpoint was detained and tortured by Russian security personnel.

It was Yulia’s second attempt at the crossing. The first time, in early autumn, she was turned back at the border because she did not have a Russian passport and her name was flagged in a Russian state database as she had been questioned by the security services twice: once for tearing down Russian propaganda posters and then for arguing with a neighbour about life during the Soviet Union.

Source

If you’d like to see any of the Russian-language articles excerpted here translated in full and published on this website, make a donation in any amount to me via PayPal, indicating which article you’d like me to translate, and I’ll make it happen. ||| TRR

Together

While the emergence and flowering of Spanglish in the US is no surprise, the fact that Rusglish has taken root in Russia itself should give us pause for thought. The affliction is particularly fierce among the country’s creatives and journalists.

“Запускать свой бизнес в ритейле — задача не из лёгких. Особенно если нет релевантного опыта. Отличным решением может стать развитие бизнеса в партнёрстве с более опытным игроком по модели франчайзинга“.

“Launching your business in retail is not an easy task. Especially if there is no relevant experience. A great solution could be to develop a business in partnership with a more experienced player on the franchise model.”

Source: Emailed invitation to a “business breakfast” from the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, 23 October 2023. All the bolded words are in Rusglish in the original.

Sixteen years ago today, I launched this website by translating and posting the artist and writer Pavel Pepperstein’s reflections on “post-socialism” as “ecosocialism.” They are cheeky and provocative and non-intuitive and thus, in retrospect, emblematic of the stories and viewpoints from today’s Russia that I knew were roundly ignored in English-language media and that I wanted badly to make available to the wider world.

I had no idea, then, that this adventure would last sixteen years or that, as of today, this blog would balloon to 2,500 entries. I did, however, have more than a presentiment that things were going badly in the Motherland and would probably get much, much worse. While I have never tried to avoid staring into this burgeoning (and, now, almost total) political darkness, I also have always been determined to focus on the anti-Putinist, non-Putinist, and “a-Putinist” side of public opinion, cultural production, and politics.

What this has meant, practically speaking, is that even sixteen years later and amidst a terrible war that has, seemingly, riveted the world’s attention to the Russian regime and its enemies, I am often the only English-language media outlet to cover certain stories from the deep Russian grassroots in the so-called provinces, especially stories involving non-violent and direct action anti-regime and anti-war protests. I have commented many times in the past why such stories are ignored.

Whatever the case, though, my focus on extraordinary “ordinary” Russian battlers from the back of beyond, that is, on people who are remote from the Moscow-Petersburg opposition elites (even when they might even live in one of the two capitals) has meant that, sixteen years later, I’m still struggling to get over the million-views hump, and my admittedly modest attempts at fundraising have mostly fallen flat. There is not much place for people like me and my Russian heroes in a profoundly anti-democratic and celebrity-mad world like ours.

This is not a preface to a tearful farewell. Although changes in my paid-work life mean that, for the immediate future, I won’t be posting here as often as I’d like, the value of the Russian Reader as an archive of a Russia that, perhaps, will never come to be, is still enough that I plan to keep it here and available to you all for as long as I’m able.

But it has become increasingly hard for me to report stories like the one below about Olga Nazarenko, an incredibly fierce anti-war protester from Ivanovo who died under extremely murky circumstances two weeks ago. What is hardest of all is the now almost overwhelming sense I have that these stories matter to almost no one, neither inside Russia nor outside of it. ||| TRR

A Russian anti-war protester who became a symbol of resistance to the Kremlin has died following a mysterious fall.

Local media said Olga Nazarenko died in hospital after a “fall from a height” two weeks ago that was described as an accident.

Several Kremlin opponents have been killed in falls and an anti-war activist in Rostov, southern Russia, also died this year in police custody from alleged torture.

On Facebook, tributes blamed Ms Nazarenko’s enemies for her death.

“Cursed are the cannibals who devour our finest,” one person wrote. Another said: “Our unbending Olga. Did they kill you?”

Friends also speculated she had fallen from a tree.

Ms Nazarenko was well-known for her stubborn anti-war protests and had featured in several opposition media reports and videos.

She had staged weekly one-person protests, despite being regularly detained by the police. She had also been attacked in the street and had lost her job as an associate professor at a local medical university because of her protests.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled since the Kremlin banned anti-war protests but Ms Nazarenko, who was married with an adult daughter and a young son, told the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that she felt it was her duty to stay.

Source: James Kilner, “Kremlin gets blame as anti-war activist Olga Nazarenko dies after mystery fall,” Irish Independent (msn.com), 22 October 2023

Discourse

“My supervisors would prefer the text to be British English. Is that possible?”

What makes the Expanding Circle Englishes real rather than abstract varieties? This article highlights that it is culture that makes the specifics of an English variety whereas linguistic features might be shared by a number of other varieties Russian English as a linguistic entity is based on the specifics of Russian culture and mentality revealed on all language levels, lexical and phonetic levels being the most noticeable. The negative attitude towards the concept of Russian English can be accounted for by a) the theoretical confusion of the variety with its only one lectal subtype (taking the basilect for the variety), while any variety is a complex and a continuum of several lects; b) scholars’ understanding of a dynamic and functional variety characteristic of a speech community as an interlanguage of an individual with a fossilized level of language competence, and c) ignoring the fact that any variety expresses the cultural mentality in real life discourse. Change in the attitude in the speech community occurs with the gradual overcoming of these misunderstandings, which takes a fairly long time.

“We would prefer to use British English vs. American if possible.”

Make (Blank) Great Again

This ad for a “big stadium concert” by the Russian nationalist pop singer Shaman, scheduled for 7 p.m., September 9, at Petersburg’s Gazprom Arena, showed up this morning (for the second or third time in the last mont) in the weekly email newsletter I get from Bileter.ru, a Russian online retail ticket vendor. The aesthetic here is both strikingly fascistic/nationalistic and pointedly un-Russian. I would say it’s almost American in its inspiration, if I didn’t know better. ||| TRR

This showed up in my mailbox today too:

За последние две недели в редакции произошли изменения. У нас теперь новый руководитель редакции, а потому скоро вы ощутите изменения, которые make Inc. great again.

Here’s my translation:

There have been changes to [our] editorial board over the past two weeks. We have a new editorial director now, and so you will soon feel the changes that [will?] make Inc. great again.

These days, all “progressive” Russians are fluent in English, supposedly, and this is often how they signal their “progressive” values to each other: by shouting out their true reactionary colors in Rusglish.

In this case, the progressive reactionaries hale from Inc. Russia, “a magazine for entrepreneurs [that] focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, advanced technologies, and the people behind it all.” Founded in the US in 1979, the Russian edition has been in existence since 2016.

The passage that I quoted and translated, above, led off Inc. Russia‘s weekly email newsletter.

Immediately after Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Inc.ers were openly dismayed by the sudden turn of events in their otherwise entrepreneurially progressive country—without, however, ever going so far as to oppose the war explicitly. This dismay and confusion gradually and visibly diminished as the war continued. Now, apparently, Inc. Russia has come full circle: they are determined to show that they and their readers live in nearly the best of all possible entrepreneurial worlds. They’ve definitively stopped paying any mind to their country’s breakneck plunge into fascism, much less to the war itself.

And yet the new realities occasionally puncture Russian Inc.‘s otherwise now-placid surface, as in this news item published on their website earlier today:

English to become optional in the subway

It may become option to duplicate information in subways in English. The Transport Ministry has published a law bill addressing the matter. The Moscow subway stopped duplicating [station] names back in 2021, while Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan do not plan to give up English until instructions are received.

As reported by Kommersant, the Transport Ministry has published a draft law on amendments to the orders regulating the “standard rules” for the use of subways, monorails, funiculars, and suspended cable cars.

Carriers are currently required to duplicate all information on diagrams, signs, inscriptions, and station announcements in English. The Transport Ministry proposes doing away with this obligation, leaving the decision to the regions.

The proposal was prompted by “numerous appeals from citizens and [regional governments], due to the considerable informational burden on passengers and taking into account the socio-political situation.”

Moscow’s Metro, Central Circle, and Monorail stopped announcing stations in English back in 2021, after a drop in the number of tourists due to the pandemic and “passenger complaints about additional information.”

Oleg Yaushev, director of the Nizhny Novgorod Metro, said that none of the city’s residents had complained about the English dubbing in the city’s subway, so the company does not plan to remove it.

“We installed this information system relatively recently and spent a lot of money on it. Why remove it now? Tourists who are native English speakers travel to the city. The language is widely spoken, and we welcome them. Of course, if there is a directive to remove everything and leave it only in Russian, we will comply. But it’s not worth freaking out about it,” he said.

Kazan’s Metroelectrotrans also expressed its willingness to execute the order, “if it is issued.” However, local residents there have also not petitioned the company to cancel the dubbing of station names in English.

Source: Inc. (Russia), 14 August 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Russian streaming service Amediateka (thanks to the good offices of sanctions busters HBO) keeps its viewers comfortably ensconced in an alternate reality dominated by the Great Satan’s pop culture:

The second season of the sports series “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” recounts the period between 1980 and 1984. It deals with the rivalry with the Boston Celtics, as well as with the personal lives of the players, which prove no less emotional and striking than their play on the court. Jerry Buss wants to get his sons involved in working with the Lakers, Magic Johnson learns to be a good father, and Larry Bird plunges into family squabbles. Won’t this prevent the lads from becoming NBA champions?

Source: Amediateka email newsletter, 14 August 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Finally, here is yet another reflection of the Russian petite bourgeoisie’s (and, hence, Russian officialdom’s) peculiar love-hate, cargo-cultish relationship with the “collective west” (i.e., the United States) and the English language.

This past weekend, reports Bumaga, local sporting enthusiasts took part in the Bubble Baba Challenge — 2023 [sic, in English], “an event held in the rapids of [the] Vuoksi River whereby contestants race in the water using sex dolls as flotation devices.” The event took place in Kiviniemi, aka Losevo, in the occupied Karelian Isthmus, approximately 60 miles north of Petersburg.

Photos by Pavel Daisi for Bumaga (@paperpaper_ru)

Explainer

Source: Ukraine DAO Updates (Telegram), 5 August 2023. Thanks to Monique Camarra (EuroFile) for the heads-up.

Intensified air attacks on the Ukrainian capital following a drone strike on the Kremlin that Russia blamed on Kyiv forced Iryna, Svitlana, and Olya to spend their Ukrainian-language transition class in a cafeteria opposite the National Opera instead of the usual venue nearby, which was closed once the air alert went off.

The three women, hailing from Sevastopol, Enerhodar, and Donetsk — cities in Ukraine’s south and east occupied in various stages of Russia’s aggression — spent 90 minutes together with more than a dozen students, most of them women and also displaced, trying to elevate their Ukrainian and, as some said, to “break free” from their Russian.

Iryna has a son in the Ukrainian Army. She left her native Crimea, she said, because she “couldn’t live next to the Black Sea fleet firing missiles at our country.” She wants to switch to Ukrainian to “relieve herself of a sense of guilt.”

Svitlana came to Kyiv just two months ago. Her husband stays in Enerhodar, where he works at the Zaporizhzhya power station, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, captured by Russians at the beginning of their invasion. She is learning Ukrainian to “forget the months of occupation.”

Olya left Donetsk in 2014, the year a separatist war fomented by Moscow broke out in that region and neighboring Luhansk, hoping to return within several months. Now, after eight years away from her home in the Donbas, she is switching to Ukrainian because she decided to “focus on the future.”

Millions of similar stories make up the most rapid shift away from using the Russian language in Ukraine’s recent history. The number of Ukrainians who use Ukrainian exclusively or most of the time in their everyday life increased from 49 percent in 2017 to 58 percent in 2022, and the corresponding number for Russian dropped from 26 percent to 15 percent, according to a study conducted in December 2022 by prominent Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Kulyk and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

The trend is even stronger in the public sphere, with 68 percent opting for Ukrainian and only 11 percent for Russian at work and during education. The transition is most significant in the south and east of the country, traditionally more Russian-speaking than western and central Ukraine, where switching to Ukrainian became the widespread sign of resistance to the occupiers.

The reality behind these numbers is more complex due to the nature of Ukrainian bilingualism, with almost everyone passively knowing both Ukrainian and Russian and many speaking their mixture, Surzhyk, minority languages such as Crimean-Tatar or Hungarian, and new trends, most notably the five-million-strong population of refugees who are developing new language practices abroad. But while many Ukrainians continue to use both languages in everyday life despite the anger at Russia that the invasion has ignited, the rapid shift from Russian to Ukrainian is apparent everywhere in Ukraine: in the streets, social media, bookstores, and, perhaps most significantly, private spaces.

Many in Ukraine celebrate the ongoing language shift, but the process, accelerated by Russia’s renewed attempts to erase Ukrainian culture and sow divisions in the country it is attacking, is far from painless.

[…]

Source: Aleksander Palikot, “‘It Will Perish When I’m Gone’: Russian Language Usage Plunges In Wartime Ukraine,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 20 May 2023

Max Glebov, Guardians of Chaos: Invasion Armada

Mark Rich went from being a street kid in the ruins of a megalopolis on a fringe planet to being the commander of a joint squadron of two races, but the enemy has not been standing still all this time either. It looks as if the Swarm will be the first to build a ship the likes of which no one in the galaxy has seen for almost seventy years, and its newest battleship will serve as. the flagship of a revived Invasion armada.

Source: LitRes. Translated, from the Russian, by the Russian Reader. Thanks to today’s LitRes email flyer for the heads-up.

“Russia Isn’t a Fascist State, Because a Fascist State is Totalitarian, While Russia Is Democratic” (At the Sasha Skochilenko Trial)

Sasha Skochilenko, facing ten years in prison for anti-war price tags. Vasileoostrovsky District Court, St. Petersburg, 18 July 2023

Today’s hearing lasted almost nine hours!

It was finally possible to resume the cross-examination of Olga Safonova, on whose linguistic analysis of the price tags the prosecution’s case is largely based. At the last hearing it transpired that Safonova is actually a political science specialist who is brought in to provide linguistic (!) expertise on “political” issues. Moreover, she has already admitted that she cannot judge whether the information on price tags was “knowingly false,” although she wrote just the opposite in her expert analysis.

The cross-examination of Safonova took up most of the hearing, and it involved the lawyers, the independent expert Svetlana Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya, Sasha [Skochilenko] herself, and Prosecutor Gladyshev. (The defense requested that Gladyshev be recused for a number of reasons—including because he distorted the facts about Sasha’s income—but the motion was denied.) Safonova had a visibly hard time answering questions about the content of individual price tags and the linguistic terms she employs, and how she was able to identify motives of “political enmity” in the texts she analyzed. In fact, experts cannot assess an author’s motives, but Safonova refused to confirm this outright. “Just stay that this is not within your competence,” the lawyer Novolodsky asked her. “I won’t,” she replied.

Olga Safonova, expert witness for the prosecution. Vasileoostrovsky District Court, St. Petersburg, 18 July 2023

This was not the only occasion for laughter at today’s hearing. During a discussion of the texts on the price tags, Safonova also claimed that Russia is not a fascist state, since “a fascist state is totalitarian, while Russia is democratic.” She also asked that the defense not “examine every word [said or written] by expert witnesses with a magnifying glass, for crying out loud!” (She said this, I would like to remind you, at a criminal trial that could send Sasha to prison for ten years.)

As always, we want to say a huge thank-you to the journalists who have been covering Sasha’s case, and to everyone who came out to support Sasha! The next hearing will be held on September 14, after the judge’s vacation. Safonova will be summoned to court again. In addition, the court ordered the linguist Grishanina, the co-author of the expert analysis, forcibly delivered to the hearing.

P.S. We will have more to say about today’s hearing, so stay with us!

Photos courtesy of Andrei Bok and others

#freesashaskochilenko

Source: Sasha Skochilenko (Facebook), 18 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader