As the sun rises on 21 May, marking the Day of Remembrance for the Circassian Genocide, we invite you to listen beyond the silence that often surrounds the wounds of colonialism. In the following article, Bulat Khalilov, co-founder of Ored Recordings – a label dedicated to traditional and post-traditional music from the North Caucasus – reflects on a paradox within Circassian music today: how a culture with rich vocal traditions has, in a sense, sidelined its most distinctive feature, the polyphonic vocal technique of zhiu?
In conjunction with today’s commemorations, Ored Recordings is releasing a compilation, Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu, which highlights the vocal tradition of zhiu as both a form of remembrance and a possibility.
21 May is the Day of Remembrance for Circassians – or, more directly, the Day of the Circassian Genocide.
In 1864, the Russian Empire marked this day as the official end of the Russo-Caucasian War, which had begun over a century earlier in 1763. What Russia celebrated as victory, most Circassians – and many other peoples of the North Caucasus – remember as loss: a brutal war for independence that ended in exile, devastation and what many now call genocide.
That view isn’t fringe. It’s shared by most Circassian historians and civil society voices. To date, only Georgia and Ukraine have officially recognised this as genocide. But across the Circassian diaspora – from Türkiye and Syria to Jordan, the EU and the US – 21 May is marked with acts of remembrance. And yes, those memories echo back home, too – in Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia.
However, most Circassians in the North Caucasus are suspicious of these gestures, considering them to be opportunistic and insincere. Their refusal to embrace recognition from other states usually stems from a desire to avoid becoming a pawn in a larger geopolitical game.
Officially, the Russian state doesn’t like to talk about any of this. The war itself is treated as taboo, its memory reframed as a tool of Western propaganda or a threat to national unity. And yet, every year, people still gather. From moderates to patriots, from Nalchik to Cherkessk to Maykop, Circassians take to the streets – sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly.
At Ored Recordings, we return to this trauma again and again – not to dwell, but to listen. To ask how this wound still shapes the way we live, create and imagine. Every year on 21 May, we release a concept album. One year, it’s heroic songs from the war. Another, it’s diaspora voices from Türkiye. Or wartime songs of the 20th century. Each time, we try to trace how our people processed a colonial wound through music, or indeed failed to do so.
This year, we chose to focus on traditional vocal techniques in Circassian music. At first glance, this may seem unrelated. But in truth, every serious conversation about the state of Circassian culture circles back – if not to 1864 itself, then certainly to the long shadow it cast.
This release is a compilation of mostly unpublished recordings. Think of it as a teaser – a warm-up – for future albums. In those upcoming releases, we’ll dive deeper into each performer’s story and the recording context.
This essay – and this release – emerged from a simple question: what’s really going on in Circassian music today?
A big part of the tradition is group singing. Usually it’s men (sometimes women, sometimes mixed groups), gathering to sing. The lead voice carries the main melody, while the others hold a choral drone or a call-and-response. This choral technique is called zhiu or yezhiu.
Like in many cultures, group singing wasn’t just about music – it was a way to be together, to make a space for cultural and social connection.
Most Circassians today learned about this from the elders. From people who sang at weddings and late-night gatherings. Or from those who, as kids, would secretly listen to adults sing into the night. But our main source are still the archives – dusty tapes recorded by Soviet folklorists. Interestingly, the folklorists’ archives have ended up becoming tradition-bearers in their own right.
Academic work on Circassian vocal music – papers, dissertations, theoretical frameworks – has had almost no impact on today’s performers. Music theory and actual practice in Adyghe communities have mostly run on parallel tracks, rarely intersecting.
But the sound itself – those dusty Soviet-era recordings collected by ethnomusicologists – found a way through. Once digitised, they slipped into public circulation (sometimes semi-legally) and became a strange kind of bridge: not from scholar to scholar, but from singer to singer, across generations.
Those old recordings remind us that the song and its lyrics are guardians of language, poetic style and cultural memory. And yezhiu? That’s the secret ingredient. The thing that gives it punch. Soviet musicologists put it nicely: yezhiu helps the song “reach the hearts of the people”.
There’s even a sharp old proverb: “Ежьур уэрэдым и щIопщ” – yezhiu is the whip for the song. It keeps the rhythm. Holds the structure together. Gives the song its shape.
And yet – despite this deep knowledge and respect for vocal technique – modern Circassian music mostly revolves around instruments. Not voices.
So we asked ourselves: how did a whole new wave of Circassian music appear – something unthinkable even ten years ago – and why does almost all of it seem to avoid yezhiu, the central tool of our tradition?
In the wee hours of Sunday, 4 May, Russian security forces raided concerts in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, at which, among other things, they asked attendees about their attitude to the war, local media have reported.
In Yekaterinburg, law enforcement officers interrupted a concert at the club Syndrome. As the musicians were performing, people in uniform came on stage, halted the concert, and asked the concert organizers to turn on the lights, concertgoers told the Telegram channel Svet. Ekaterinburg.
“People were ordered to stand facing the walls and told that there would be a document check. [The police] checked everyone’s documents, tattoos, and elbows, asked about their attitudes to left-wing radical movements and to the SMO (the war in Ukraine—ed.), and they checked the messenger apps on their phones. After the check, people were taken outside and ordered to scram,” said one of the guests.
Another clubgoers told the news website E1.RU that police locked him in a paddy wagon, confiscated his phone, and checked his contents. Police insulted the detainee and refused to explain the reasons for the check. According to eyewitnesses, police and Russian National Guard officers took part in the raid. Those agencies declined to comment on this report.
Regular raids by law enforcers in Russia
In St. Petersburg, law enforcers raided a rave party at the [underground] club Kontrkult. A source close to the police told Ren TV that the reason for the raid was that the event had not been “sanctioned.” According to the news website 78.ru, partygoers had their documents checked and were searched for banned substances. The publication adds that the event’s organizers were detained. This has not been officially confirmed.
Footage of the raid on Kontrkult, as posted on the Telegram channel SHOT
Similar raids on various establishments have happened regularly in Russia in recent months. Law enforcers have carried out several raids on fitness centers, in which people were issued military conscription board summonses. Similar raids have been carried out against migrant workers, who also had their documents checked and summonses handed to them, along with members of the LGBT community, who have been declared “extremists” in Russia.
💬 Student from Nizhny Tagil fined 120,000₽ in criminal “defaming” case
In Nizhny Tagil, 21-year-old student Yekaterina Sergeyenko has been sentenced for “defaming” [the Russian army]: she was fined 120,000 roubles [approx. 1,280 euros]. According to the news agency Mezhdu Strok (“Between the Lines”), criminal charges were filed over the young woman’s comments in the “Incident Nizhny Tagil” group on the social network VKontakte.
Vechernye Vedomosti reports that at the time she posted the comments, Sergeyenko had a prior administrative conviction for painting sixteen pacifist slogans on buildings in the city. This fact influenced the decision to file criminal rather than administrative charges against her.
Judge Oksana Belkina of the Tagilstroy District Court found Sergeyenko guilty. Although the verdict has not yet entered into legal force, the fine, according to Mezhdu Strok, has already been paid.
On 22 April 2025, Voronezh police raided the homes of activists believed by Center “E” [Russia’s “anti-extremism” police] to be connected to the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh. The searches also involved severe beatings and threats, and some of the activists were forced to record videos supporting Putin and the war in Ukraine. Almost all the activists had previously been prosecuted on political charges, but now they feel so intimidated that they are afraid to file a torture complaint against the police.
A 38-minute video was posted on the Free People of Voronezh channel on 16 April 2025. The video itself was viewed by less than three hundred people. In the video, four activists—Grigory Severin, Nadezhda Belova, Yuri Avsenyev, and Alexander Zheltukhin—discuss the news before jogging along an embankment of the Voronezh River. The genre is the “coffee klatch”: using the news as a springboard, the friends talk about the problem of alcoholism, apathy in society, increasing drug use, and the overall sense of doom and gloom.
Activists of the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh: Grigory Severin, Alexander Zheltukhin, Yuri Avsenyev, and Nadezhda Belova
Nadezhda Belova sums up the video’s content at the very beginning.
“To cut it short, everything is bad, but it will get worse. To put it in a nutshell, the situation in this place is at the terminal stage,” she says.
She argues that Russia is inevitably moving in the direction “North Korea”—toward a mothballed, rotten dictatorship, because Russians “somehow still support it and want to live in it.” Belova has reason to be pessimistic: even before the war, the state had charged her with “condoning terrorism” for comments she had made on social media in the wake of Mikhail Zhlobitsky‘s [suicide] bombing of the Arkhangelsk FSB. in 2020, a military court sentenced Belova to pay a fine of 400,000 rubles. She was on Rosfinmonitoring’s list of “terrorists and extremists” for several years, and her family had to leave their home village and rent a flat in Voronezh, as their fellow villagers did not support Belova in her fight against the unjust charges.
The video posted on the Telegram channel Free People of Voronezh on 16 April 2025
“Again, the whole of Voronezh is covered with drug adverts. The law enforcement agencies run protection for [the illegal drug trade], and if they didn’t run protection for it, there wouldn’t be these adverts. At my neighborhood Pyaterka [convenience store], right at the entrance, there is a graffito painted in color on the doorstep: ‘Buying a stash is like going out for bread,'” says Alexander Zheltukhin. In previous years, Zheltukhin was fined for picketing against Belova’s persecution and arrested for protesting in support of Navalny. “And if it was not protected, I would argue, by the selfsame FSB, who probably take a percentage from it—”
“Watch out! You are discrediting the FSB,” Belova says, interrupting him. “I don’t agree! It cannot be!”
Caveats and omissions run through the entire conversation. The activists know that any free speech is potentially dangerous in today’s Russia, and they try to cover their bases whenever possible. (Spoiler: it didn’t work).
“They say it’s impossible not to confess”
A few days later, on 22 April, police raided the homes of all four people involved in the run, as well as those of other Voronezh activists. Searches were done at eight locations, allegedly connected with Free People of Voronezh. In most cases, the law enforcers acted extremely harshly. They used handcuffs and stun guns, beat people, intimidated the activists and their families, and emotionally abused them.
A photo posted by Nadezhda Belova
All the members of Belova’s family were shot with a stun gun. Belova later posted photos of her own bruises and the bloody marks on the bodies of her husband and son on Facebook. The police confiscated all their electronic devices and turned upside down their rented flat, which the landlady demanded that the Belovs vacate immediately after the search. The police threatened to send the son, a university student, to the war, and after the search, a policeman recorded a repentant video featuring Belova.
“Off camera, the [policeman beating Belova’s husband] says, ‘Do you support the [special military operation]?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Do you support Putin?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ It’s light fare, but disgusting, especially when I saw a stun gun pressed against my son’s leg,” Belova told Okno.
The police recorded similar video “confessions” by several other people [caught up in the raids].
After the searches, Zheltukhin ended up in hospital with five broken ribs and several damaged vertebrae. He told OVD Info that he had tried to escape from the “punitive operation” and fell from the roof of a village house: “I broke my ribs when I fell, apparently, and they hit me [on those ribs]: it hurts a lot.” The police put a bag over his head and shocked him with a stun gun. His friends later photographed Zheltukin at hospital: his face was covered with bruises.
Fyodor Orlov, 36, was also beaten; after the experience, he says that he “did it all to himself.” He inflicted all the bruises and abrasions on himself, blindfolded himself with a scarf and sat like that for two hours, and fell into a briar bush on his own; there are photos of his back, entirely covered with flecks of blood. “Then someone—that is, I—drew a sex organ on my bald head just for fun,” he told OVD Info. The law enforcers also threatened to cut off one of his fingers, leaving behind telltale scratches.
Fyodor Orlov’s finger
“It was quite rough. As rough as possible, to the point that they say that now they understand why people confess to crimes they did not commit. Because, they say, it’s impossible not to confess. Orlov has several hundred stun gun marks [on his body]. Several hundred! They drove him into the woods. He thought they were taking him there to kill him,’” says Pavel Sychev, 38.
Sychev is a Voronezh activist and political consultant. He knows the administrators of the Free People of Voronezh channel from his past work as an activist: they crossed paths at pickets, but do not keep in close contact. Sychev’s home was also searched on 22 April, but there was no violence.
“[The police] search my home, as a rule, without breaking the law, and they never use force against me or my family. They have been coming to my home every year since 2022. These are just routine searches. I have always been searched as a witness in criminal cases to which I don’t even have an indirect connection,” says Sychev. “There is a federal case [for example, the case against Grigory Melkonyants and other activists of the Golos movement—Okno], and they do a series of searches all over the country, and they come and search my house for good measure.”
“Evil loves silence”
It is unlikely that the new series of searches was occasioned by the latest video posted on the Telegram channel. Our sources suggest, rather, that the reason for the raids was that Free People of Voronezh constantly writes and speaks about people convicted on charges of high treason and terrorism (for sabotaging railroad switch boxes, cell towers, etc.). The channel admins treat these people as anti-war resisters. For law enforcers, on the contrary, they are criminals convicted of violent crimes.
The formal pretext for the series of searches on 22 April was the criminal case, on charges of repeated discrediting of the army, brought against Grigory Severin. As follows from the indictment, while serving his sentence in a penal colony [he had been sentenced to two and half years in prison for “publicly calling for extremism”; he served his time and was released last autumn—Okno], Severin discredited the Russian armed forces. After the search, he was detained and placed under arrest.
Sychev believes that this criminal case was “canned.”
“You see, in Russia we have the practice of ‘desk drawer cases.’ Meaning you already have a criminal case against you: the entire case file is ready in advance, and it is lying in a desk drawer, waiting for its day to come. In the case of Severin, his first case was also ‘in a desk drawer.’ When he was arrested, it transpired that the entire case file had been readied a year earlier.”
It is not known what prompted the police to pull the case file from the drawer right now. But the fact that Severin faces prosecution does not surprise Sychev in itself.
“Everyone who knows Grigory, even in passing, realizes that he is a man who will not stay quiet. If anyone asks him directly how he feels about this or that situation, he will answer directly, even if the answer risks criminal charges. He is a man who will always try to prove to everyone the viewpoint which he espouses and defends. As far as I know, the first ‘discrediting of the armed forces’ case against him came from his explaining his philosophy of life to traffic police officers who had pulled him over. The second charge came from telling his cellmates about his stance. This in the order of things for him: he does not keep silent; he speaks openly, directly. So it was a matter of time. When a person speaks openly about a very dangerous and sensitive topic—and in our country the ‘special military operation’ is a sensitive topic—there are many chances that sooner or later they will be prosecuted.”
On the same day, a criminal case was opened against 65-year-old activist Yury Avsenyev, another person involved in the run along the Voronezh River embankment. His home was also searched on 22 April, but he was released on his own recognizance. Avsenyev is suspected of “publicly calling for extremism.”
Yuri Avsenyev
The Voronezh activists who fell victim to the police brutality have not yet worked up the courage to file complaints, and they fear excessive publicity.
“They are really spooked,” says Pavel Sychev. “The information I have now is that they will not file torture complaints, but I don’t know, maybe someone will persuade them to do it. They are very much afraid that if they do it, the law enforcers won’t be reprimanded in any way, but will just come and take revenge on them. They are all convinced that they will be killed. I told them that evil loves silence, and if you don’t react now, there is a greater chance of a repeat than if you do. But they said it’s very easy to judge from the outside when you haven’t been tortured. ‘We are afraid that they might do something to us,’ [they say].”
Our sources note that such official lawlessness had not previously occurred in Voronezh. Usually, searches at the homes of political activists and arrests were carried out by the book, without violence. The only widely known case of official lawlessness ended in criminal charges against the police officers involved and monetary compensation for the victims. In May 2018, criminal investigators Sergei Kosyanenko and Oleg Sokolovsky tortured university students Maxim Grebenyuk and Sergei Troyansky, hoping to force them to confess that they had stolen a mobile phone. The students were held at Police Station No. 4 in Voronezh’s Comintern District for six hours in handcuffs and strangled with a plastic bag. They refused to incriminate themselves, and afterwards they documented their injuries and filed a torture complaint with the Investigative Committee. In 2021, Grebenyuk was awarded one million rubles, and Troyansky, 500,000 rubles, in compensation for their suffering.
The Voronezh police’s current brutality may be due to the proximity of the front, suggests a source who requested anonymity. The fact is that, since the start of the full-scale invasion, Voronezh law enforcers have regularly been seconded to the so-called new territories, the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“There are quite big problems with the law in those ‘new territories.’ And the practices that are used there are inhuman, I think. When they come back here, to their native land, they simply do not reconfigure themselves,” says our source, who is not connected with the Free People of Voronezh Telegram channel. “They consider themselves above the law. They think that they are involved in a good cause, and they can torture bad people for the sake of the good cause. When a person has tried their hand at it once, when they realize that they can get away with it absolutely scot-free, then it is quite difficult to put the brakes on, and it will grow.”
The 45-year-old resident of the Tatarstan capital with the exotic first name and surname and the patronymic Petrovich has four prior criminal convictions
Holy Week has kicked off for a Kazan defendant with a quite uncommon name: Jesus Christ. The 45-year-old Kazan resident has been charged with falsely registering forty-five migrant workers at his address. Jesus Petrovich has prior repeat convictions for burglary and robbery, and in 2014 he underwent preventive care for substance abuse. Business Online reports on Christ’s failure to appear at his court hearing, and the “way of the cross” he has blazed through Kazan’s district courts.
This photo by Business Online reporter Eva Malinovskaya appears in her original article, but it is impossible to say whether it was taken at Jesus Petrovich Christ’s abortive court hearing in Kazan on Good Friday 2025.
Jesus Petrovich’s “Good Friday”
The biography of Kazan’s latest criminal defendant would not be too different from the average person’s — the divorced and unemployed high school graduate will turn forty-six on the tenth of May — were it not for one catch. His name is Jesus Christ: that is the name listed in his [internal] passport.
The story of how he got the name remains a mystery: neither the court staff nor the state prosecutor know what Christ’s name at birth was. All that the people involved in the criminal proceedings know is that the defendant was “obsessed” with numerology, and this led, allegedly, to his decision to change his name and surname several years ago. He kept only his real patronymic: Petrovich.
Christ was scheduled to appear before the Moscow District Court (the Kizichevsky Vvedensky Monastery is situated right next door to the court building on Justice Street ). The current case against Jesus Petrovich is an anniversary of sorts: he has four prior criminal convictions, having blazed a trail through the city’s district courts on his own “way of the cross.”
Jesus was first convicted in 1994 by the Lenin District Court (now the Aviastroitelny District Court) of robbery, per Article 145.2 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. He was given a two-year suspended sentence. Since his next conviction, for theft, per Article 144.2 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, was handed down by the Novo-Savinovsky District Court, he was given the standard sentence: two and a half years in a medium-security correctional labor colony and confiscation of his property.
After serving his sentence, Christ did not enjoy his freedom for long. In 1999, he appeared before the Volga Regional Court, where he was sentenced to nine years in prison per Article 162.3.g of the Russian Federal Criminal Code, for “robbery committed by a person previously convicted two or more times of theft or extortion.” The convict was sent to a maximum security penal colony and was released in 2007. A little more than a year passed before Christ again came before the Lenin District Court, which by then had been redubbed the Aviastroitelny District Court. He was sentenced to another three years in prison per Article 158.3.a of the Russian Federal Criminal Code, for “theft involving home invasion.”
In addition to his criminal record, Christ had a penchant for illegal substances. From 2014, he was registered with a substance abuse therapist, but not for long, according to his personal file, as submitted to the court. In 2015, a forensic psychiatric expert commission found that Jesus had an organic personality disorder, and he was removed from the substance abuse registry. His mental illness had been triggered by a severe head trauma received in 2010. At the time, Christ did not complete his treatment, leaving the hospital on his own. He was also diagnosed with brain malfunction due to multiple organ dysfunction syndrome and was thus registered as a class III disabled person.
During his last clinical examination, psychiatrists noted the patient’s irritability, brashness, inflated self-esteem, pretentiousness, egotism, and mood swings. Although Jesus’ truculent personality was palpable, it was not significant enough to warrant hospitalization, so his diagnosis was not a factor in the criminal investigation.
The charges
What is Christ accused of this time round? According to police, whose account has been corroborated by the prosecutor’s office, between April and December 2024, Christ registered forty-five foreign nationals as residing in his 31.9-square-meter flat. With the consent of the foreigners, Jesus filled out foreign national residential arrival notices in which he identified himself as their host and provided the address of his flat. He then submitted arrival notices to the Moscow District office of the Tatarstan Multifunctional Public Services Center.
The prosecution is certain that the foreigners did not reside at their registered address. The false information about the arrival of forty-five individuals, as received by the migration department of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Kazan office, was registered and entered into the federal migration registration database. Christ faces up to five years in prison.
“The case is quite ordinary. [Police officers] examine the Multifunctional Public Services Center’s identification numbers and files and identify violators,” said assistant prosecutor Nadezhda Moshkova in a conversation with Business Online before the court hearing.
Common practice in such cases
Such cases are not uncommon. There were several such cases in a row in February alone. Six Tatarstan residents and a foreigner were charged with organizing the illegal immigration and falsified registration of more than three thousand foreigners. Later in the month, three more cases of unlawful employment agreements, involving two thousand migrant workers, were uncovered, and on February 26 it transpired that another resident of Kazan had aided almost three thousand immigrants in registering illegally. So the list of Christ’s “apostles” is not that long compared to those of others.
“Has Jesus Christ stopped by?” the assistant judge asked hopefully over the phone exactly one minute before the start of the trial.
“No, he hasn’t,” the bailiff replied with a grin.
The mood of the people in the courtroom was upbeat, despite the fact that the “appearance” of Christ before the Moscow District Court did not take place. Moshkova assured the court that the defendant had been notified in every possible way, but she herself, even before the hearing, had not actually believed that he would show up. “He’s a curious chap,” the assistant prosecutor said, adding that defendants themselves do not like to appear at such hearings, and jokingly condoned Christ by saying that Easter had not yet arrived.
The accused himself, as it turned out, had no clue about the hearing.“What case? And wait, if a court hearing has been scheduled, why the fuck was a notification and a summons not sent?!” said a perplexed Christ, whom Business Online was able to reach by telephone. After voicing his indignation, our source asked us to leave him alone. “I have done twenty years in prison. You’ve got the wrong number, good luck,” concluded Jesus.
Nevertheless, court-appointed defense lawyer Ksenia Matveeva told us that the defendant fully admits his guilt. He had even requested expedited consideration of the case, but because of his failure to appear, the process had to be postponed to the end of May.
“I order that the defendant be forcibly delivered to the next court hearing,” the presiding judge, Nikolai Zakharov said as he concluded the proceedings. “No one has ever walked away from the court yet,” he said, shrugging.
A 45-year-old Russian national named Jesus Petrovich Christ has gone on trial in Kazan for fictitiously registering foreigners in his apartment. Information on the upcoming court hearing was posted on the website of the city’s Moscow District Court.
The defendant fictitiously registered forty-four illegal immigrants in his one-room apartment, in violation of Article 322.3 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. In fact, [none of the immigrants] lived in the apartment. Christ did not appear in court, so the hearing of his case did not take place.
According to law enforcers, Jesus Petrovich Christ has four previous convictions — for robbery, armed robbery, and theft.
According to local media, the defendant was given a different name at birth, but he changed his first name and surname after becoming interested in numerology. The man’s patronymic is real.
A Russian citizen named Jesus Petrovich Christ is being tried in Kazan on charges of fictitiously registering immigrants. A notice of the upcoming court hearing appeared on the website of Kazan’s Moscow District Court.
A screenshot of Jesus Petrovich Christ’s court hearing record on the website of Kazan’s Moscow District Court, courtesy of Sergey Abashin
Jesus Christ is suspected of fictitiously registering forty-five illegal immigrants in his one-room apartment, in violation of Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 322.3. Despite receiving a summons to appear in court, the 45-year-old Russian national did not show up for the proceedings, and therefore the hearing of the case did not take place.
It is also known that the man was previously convicted several times — in 1994 and 1996, for robbery; in 1999, for armed robbery; and in 2007, for theft.
The statements about the war made by Muscovite political exiles cause public indignation because what they say is at odds with the horror of the situation. Instead of taking to European podiums and demanding decisive action to defend Ukraine, they ask [European officials] to lift sanctions against Russians and mumble helplessly about “one nation.”
It is obvious that, for the fourth year running, Russia has been waging not just a war against Ukraine on the front lines, but a bloody, boundless campaign of terror. Nearly every day Russian missiles kill [Ukrainian] civilians, including children. Ukrainian soldiers who surrender unarmed are executed on the spot by the Russians, or are even ritually beheaded. But you continue to talk about Russia’s “democratic future,” ignoring the fact that the entire country, including schoolchildren, has been slaving away at destroying the Ukrainians.
I am not a politician, just a microblogger who cares about current events. But even I remember InformNapalm’s OSINT investigation which showed that the Russian fighter planes bombing Ukraine are still equipped with French avionics. Without this unique equipment, Russia’s Su-30SM fighter planes are blind and cannot fly. Russia obtains this equipment through Kazakhstan, thus bypassing sanctions. The report came out a year ago. I don’t know what the situation is like now, but warplanes are still taking off from Russian airfields.
Why couldn’t you have talked about that in the French Senate? Especially since, a week earlier, a Russian missile fired from a fighter plane and packed with shrapnel killed twenty people, including nine children, in Krivyi Rih. The photo of a young [boy] in a coffin, whose face had been riddled by the tiny metal shards, is impossible to forget.
The coffins of 15-year-old Nikita Perekrest and his cousin, 16-year-old Kostiantyn Novik. Nikita’s father serves in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and his mother took Kostiantyn in after his parents were killed. The two boys were outside in the yard when the Russian army struck Kryvyi Rih. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/Scanpix/LETA, via Meduza
I realize that none of Moscow’s so-called opposition activists have the courage of political prisoner [Vladimir] Bukovsky and demand that Ukraine be given missiles to target Lubyanka. But you could launch investigations into the schemes by which Russia circumvents sanctions and obtains not only components for its fighter planes but also foreign chips for its missiles. You could demand that the Bosphorus be closed to Russia’s shadow fleet, which brings Putin the revenue to produce new missiles. Finally, you could show solidarity with Ukraine at least in word [if not in deed] and stop embarrassing yourself by repeating the impersonal and irrelevant slogan “No War.” You could do a lot of things in your safe havens. But instead you just wait for Putin to die and are not even ashamed to say so. Meanwhile, it is not so much the Ukrainians or the decolonizers who are waiting for you to act as it is your own fellow Russian citizens, who have not yet lost their minds and are basically living under occupation in Russia.
///
As for the ridiculous claim that it is easier for non-Russians to go to war and that is why they make up the majority [of soldiers] in the [Russian] army, according to the analytical resource buryatmemorial.org, a total of 2,425 people from Buryatia have been killed in the “special military operation” as of March 2025. And you’ll pardon me, but hardly half of them are ethnic Buryats (as you can see from the photos). This is due to the fact that ethnic Buryats constitute no more than 31% of the republic’s entire population. According to Ukrainian figures, Russian losses have already lost 933,000 men in the war. Even if we multiplied the figures for Buryatia by ten, its war dead would still roughly amount to two and a half percent of the total. I emphasize that the Buryats are an ethnic minority in their own land.
A screenshot of the website buryatmemorial.org, showing the names and faces of Buryatia’s war dead
According to Caucasian Knot, as of March 2025, 233 men from Chechnya, 121 from Ingushetia, 104 from Karachay-Cherkessia, and 112 from Kalmykia have been killed in the special military operation. Again, we can multiply this figure by ten for the sake of statistical rigor, but we still get hundredths of a percent of the total losses.
To put an end to the topic of Vladimir Kara-Murza’s ridiculous misinformation drop, yes, I saw yesterday’s post by the activist Anastasia Shevchenko, from which it follows that she was the mysterious “colleague” who shared with Kara-Murza the “observation” that it may be easier for non-Russians to go to war, while Russians find it psychologically difficult to kill Ukrainians due to their cultural affinity. Anastasia writes that the source of this hypothesis was not even her, but a third party who voiced this conjecture in a private conversation. Do you realize what has happened? This was not a scientific observation; no studies or surveys of Russian POWs were done that would indicate such a trend. This “information” came from the bush telegraph and was repeated by a [Russian] opposition politician in the French Senate, where decisions are made on the basis of the words people utter. And even after the ruckus that this delusional phrase caused among the public, no apology or explanation has been forthcoming from the politician.
Again, I am just a mom with three kids who left Russia to avoid supporting the war. In exile, I wash floors and clean other people’s houses so that I can send at least thirty dollars [a month] to the Ukrainians so they can buy drones. At night I write social media posts and read decolonial literature. I try to do anything I can to stop my former country from murdering innocent people. In my opinion, I have the right to demand that those who call themselves politicians, who have the bully pulpits and the opportunities, do something meaningful to ensure that Russia can no longer wage war.
As a Kyrgyz woman born in the last years of the Soviet Union, I never thought twice about whether my usage of the Russian language was problematic or not — until recently when I reached out to my Ukrainian friend in Russian, and she responded to me in Ukrainian.
I have been thinking about the political aspects of language since then.
Last week I was invited to a podcast to talk about de-colonial feminism in Central Asia by a research group that does memory studies in Kyrgyzstan. There we sat in a warmly lit Bishkek studio in comfortable canary-yellow armchairs — two women of clearly Central Asian descent, with names that mean ‘honey’ and ‘worship’ in our native language, discussing whether the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, and how a more than 100-years history of Russian presence in the region has disrupted and affected the lives of peoples of Central Asia. I am making smart jokes and incisive observations, we laugh, we debate, we lament — all in Russian.
Although this language was not the main subject of our discussion, we comment in passing on it — noting how intangible colonial legacies can sometimes have a constructive element to them.
It is, of course, possible for all of us to drop the language of the colonizer, whether it’s English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese — and speak our own languages, but the ease and comfort of using these when trying to communicate with people outside our cultures is just so tempting! And so then the question is whether to take offense towards the language because it happens to have been “originated” by the ‘big bad’ or to ignore that and make it our own?
Russian was the language of books that took me on journeys across galaxies, of Soviet-era films that fanned the fire of idealism in me, of finding community with other post-Soviet teenagers that, like me, had traveled to the United States as exchange students. We spent the year yell-singing Kino’s songs, making the olivier salad for a New Year’s celebration, and rooting for Evgeni Plushenko in the 2001 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.
It was the language of the early science fiction stories I wrote when I was twelve, of expressing my first heartbreak in broken poetry form, and of clumsily flirting, building alliances, or of standing up to bullies.
It is also the language of differentiation — a tool of categorizing people into social strata, both inside Russia and in the non-Russian republics during Soviet times. My own mother had been ridiculed for not speaking Russian well, considered ‘dark’ and uneducated, uncultured. To this day she gets offended when my Russian-schooled siblings sometimes laugh at the little mistakes she makes when attempting to speak it because it reminds her of how she was treated when she was younger.
Not to worry though — this is a very rare occurrence, because our mom is so strong-minded that she’s bent everyone to her will, forcing everyone to speak Kyrgyz if they wanted to be understood by her. Even our dad, who was a Russian speaker with a beautifully reverberating voice, had mastered the Kyrgyz language for our mother’s sake. My siblings too, although their attempts at translating their jokes and anecdotes from Russian into Kyrgyz for our mom sometimes backfire because they do not take into account the semantic nuances of the two languages. And despite her lack of Russian, she made a successful career in the 90s as a kommersantka — just like thousands of other women who picked up the baton when the system that was oppressing them fell — traveling by bus and train to Moscow, Minsk, Tallinn, and later by plane to Meshhed, ensuring we were never hungry or dependent on anyone.
Maybe that’s a good example of how language does not have to be a cornerstone of someone’s lived experience. Some people choose to speak the oppressor’s language, some people choose not to. As long as there’s a way of making each other understood, even by mixing words or even using gestures, it’s all good.
My Ukrainian friend was so kind and gracious when I apologized for using Russian when I reached out to her, and she sent me a beautiful voice message back in Russian. I could hear she struggled a little speaking it because, as she explained, she had not spoken it in a while. She said she didn’t mind using it to communicate with me, and that she was sorry she hadn’t learned some Kyrgyz by now because she has other Kyrgyz friends too. And I was sorry I hadn’t learned Ukrainian by now. But eventually it was Russian we exchanged these lamentations in, and the question remains open to me — whose language is it anyway?
Syinat Sultanalieva is a human rights activist and researcher from Kyrgyzstan, who writes science fiction on the side when she’s not busy dissecting power structures and dynamics in the region and the world.
Lӓysӓn Ensemble of Yafarovo Village Let’s Get Together Tonight: Mishar Tatar Songs from Orenburg Region
The Mishars are an ethnic subgroup of Tatars. They have their own dialect and their own culture. The main part of the Mishars live in the Middle Volga region and the Urals.
Yafarovo is a Mishar village located in the Aleksandrovsky district of the Orenburg region.
Izhevsk long ago nabbed Tula’s de facto title as Russia’s arms manufacturing capital: the Kalashnikov Concern is headquartered there, producing shells, assembling drones, and making rifles. But in a seemingly parallel reality amid the rumble of the factories, young Izhevskers have opened an independent bookstore, and they have also been translating the Udmurt avant-garde of the twenties into Russian and publishing literary magazines. Who are these young people? And how was all of it possible?
“We’ll be having a children’s New Year’s party in there”
Five years ago, Albert Razin, an Udmurt activist and patriot, set himself on fire in the capital of Udmurtia, on the square outside the republic’s State Council building. Razin held a placard featuring a quotation from Rasul Gamzatov: “And if tomorrow my language disappears, I am willing to die today.”
In late 2024, I lived in Izhevsk a stone’s throw away from the spot where Razin had burned on behalf of the Udmurt language. It is the very heart of the city: the Eternal Flame, the republic’s government house, the opera house, a Rostic’s fast-food restaurant, the residence of the head of Udmurtia, and the Kuzebay Gerd National Museum are nearby.
Gerd (a pseudonym meaning “knot” in Udmurt; Gerd’s birth name was Kuzma Chaynikov) was a poet, folklorist, and probably the most important Udmurt of the twentieth century. In 1932, he was arrested along with other prominent members of Soviet Finno-Ugric ethnic groups as part of the fabricated SOFIN Case. [SOFIN was the acronym of the fictitious “Union for the Liberation of Finnish Peoples” — TRR.] The poet was accused of plotting to get Udmurtia and other autonomies to secede from the Soviet Union and establish a Finno-Ugric federation under the protectorate of Finland. Kuzebay was shot in 1937 at Sandarmokh in Karelia. He was exonerated in 1958.
The Gerd Museum’s website advertises a separate exhibition dedicated to the Udmurt national poet. The museum is located in the building of the former arsenal. The entrance to the main exhibit is on Kuzebay Gerd Square, where twenty years ago a monument to the poet was erected. Perched on a rock, a quite youthful Gerd gazes thoughtfully at the former military warehouse. He is writing a poem, apparently.
I am all alone at first, but schoolchildren wearing blue ties later come running into the museum. A museum worker, dressed in a traditional costume adorned with a monisto necklace, greets the children in Udmurt — Chyrtkemesi! — but she immediately switches to Russian and talks about the pre-Petrine history of Udmurtia, that is, before Izhevsksy Zavod (the name of the settlement which preceded city) arose in these parts. Count Peter Shuvalov built an ironworks there with the permission of the Empress Elizabeth. A little later, Izhevsk became the Russian Empire’s virtual arms capital (no offense to Tula).
The rooms I have visited recount this history as well as a little bit of Soviet history (artisanal carpets are intermingled with IZh motorcycles and cars — a total delight!), but I cannot go any further.
“But where is the Kuzebay Gerd section?” I wonder aloud.
“Ah, you wanted to see it?” responds the docent. “Unfortunately, it is impossible at the moment. It was in the room next to the ticket office, but it has been temporarily moved to the warehouse. We’ll be having a children’s New Year’s party in there.”
“Nobody the whole day”
Kuzebay Gerd is to Udmurtia what Pushkin is to Russia. One of the creators of the modern Udmurt language, Gerd also lived a very short life, thirty-nine years (five of them in Stalin’s camps). But over those years he wrote hundreds of articles, poems, plays, and prose works which became the foundation of the living Udmurt language.
The writer gained genuine recognition only during perestroika, and it is only recently that streets and museums have been named in Gerd’s honor and his legacy has been studied anew.
Sonya, a clerk at Kuzebay Bookstore, puts up an event flyer.
Kuzebay’s cheerful face can now be seen on posters, lapel pins, and even as an emoji on Telegram. The only independent bookstore in Izhevsk, and maybe in the whole of Udmurtia, bears his name — Kuzebay Bookstore.
Like its spiritual forebear, Kuzebay Bookstore thrives in spite of its circumstances. Today, it is an absolutely metropolitan store that is no shabbier than Vse Svobodny in Petersburg or Falanster in Moscow: Kuzebay stocks the same books on its shelves, and it has the same friendly vibe. But Kuzebay opened a year before the quarantine. Back then, it occupied a small corner at the Center for Contemporary Dramaturgy and Directing. Les Partisans Theater, in which the store’s co-founders, German and Ksenia Suslov acted, was also based there. Kuzebay achieve relative stability in early 2022, after moving to its current location.
The Kuzebay Gerd Museum in the village of Bolshaya Gurez-Pudga, Udmurtia. The museum is located in a hut next door to the local school.
“We were a quite small operation during the covid, so we didn’t give a shit whether we shut down or not,” recounts German Suslov. “We were open for deliveries. Back then, the state still paid me twelve thousand [rubles a month] for the fact that I was my own sole employee. I was like, Great, money’s coming in, cool beans. Things have somehow been growing ever since.”
German even now regularly works as a salesclerk and is awfully good at cleverly persuading people who stop by for the latest detective novel by Darya Dontsova to buy family sagas from House of Stories publishers. But the first person I meet in the store is Gosha, a tall thin salesclerk who looks like a Viking sporting a tiny cap. He sits in a cozy swing chair, playing chess on his phone. He is the only soul in the store.
German Suslov, co-owner of Kuzebay Bookstore and editor-in-chief of Luch magazine, at work.
“Is it so empty often?” I ask as I peruse Mushroom Kingdom, a wacky book by local artist Andrei Kostylev, better known as Bi-jo.
“Not nowadays, but it used to happen,” says Gosha. “This one [female salesclerk] and I even had a competition to see who had fewer people stop by the store in a day. It was a draw: zero.”
“No one at all for an entire day?”
“Yeah, it was winter, so not a single person came in. But there are always people coming in now. And even if there are no sales at the store, there are sales on Ozon almost every day.”
“The worst thing is poetry readings”
German shows up at Kuzebay about half an hour late for our interview. He is in a terrible rush, as always. The Moscow Non/Fiction Book Fair is coming up: Kuzebay is supposed to represent the publishing house and the store, and we have to send the books out in time. We pull a few boxes out of the car together, while Gosha sits down to check the books and put stickers on them. Like the many-armed Shiva, German simultaneously supervises the process, does the interview, eats a flatbread from the Tatar bazaar, pours tea for everyone, and chats with the customers who do come in.
German Suslov and Andrei Gogolev in the storage room of Kuzebay Bookstore
German has always been an energetic multi-tasker. Although he is not yet thirty, he has been a prominent figure in Izhevsk’s cultural scene for nearly ten years. He used to be an actor at the local independent theater Les Partisans, which exists to this day. But his restless nature needed something else besides theater and the history program at Udmurt State University.
“And so, I thought: the craving for theater, music, cinema was instilled in me by older comrades,” says German simply. “But what were my interests before the theater? I wrote poetry. So, I had to get into the business of poetry. And I quickly realized that no one here was doing poetry seriously.”
According to German, the literary scene in Izhevsk was rather fragmented ten years ago. There were no decent places for young people to publish and perform their work. After graduating from college, many people left for the big cities.
In St. Petersburg, a whole generation of young poets from Izhevsk emerged all at once in the early twenty-teens, including Tatiana Repina, Pyotr Bersh, Ilya Voznyakov, and Grigory Starovoitov, all of whom I know personally. Most of the members of that scene gave up writing poetry a long time ago, although Tanya Repina has achieved some fame, and my friend Petya Bersh continues to write and perform.
“When I left in the early teens, nothing was happening in Izhevsk at all. There were no prospects,” Petya, who returned to his homeland in 2022, told me. “Everything has changed now, of course, and Kuzebay has played no small role in that.”
There was no Kuzebay Bookstore at first, though. In 2016, five actors from Les Partisans dreamed up the PoetUP Contemporary Poetry HQ to consolidate Udmurtia’s most interesting poets, give them a venue, and relaunch the literary scene in Izhevsk.
“The worst thing you can imagine is an open mic poetry reading. It’s hell on earth,” says German, laughing. “And even worse is an open mic poetry reading in Izhevsk with no prescreening at all. So, what did we do in 2016? We started selecting and inviting people. Yes, we would have embarrassing events too, but far fewer. What mattered was what we were striving for. We did not want it to happen that one person would read and all his friends would get up and leave when he finished.”
[…]
Excerpted from: Ilya Semyonov (text) and Natalya Madilyan (photos), “Why does a star gurgle?” Takie Dela, 23 January 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader. I would like to finish translating this fascinating long article (this is the first quarter of it) and publish it in its entirety on this website, but that would take a lot of time and hard work. In the real world, where I have worked as professional freelance translator for nearly thirty years, I would charge 600 to 850 euros to translate this article if someone commissioned me to do it. If you would like to support my work in general and read this article in full, please donate to me via PayPal (avvakum@gmail.com) or Venmo (@avvakum). If you cannot afford to donate money right now, you can help my cause by sharing my work on social media and with friends. Thank you!
Riot police disperse protesters in Baymak, Bashkortostan, on 17 January 2024. Photo: Anya Marchenkova/AFP via Getty Images via Foreign Policy
On Wednesday, a local court in the Orenburg region handed out prison sentences to four participants of peaceful rallies in support of Indigenous activist Fayil Alsynov.
Up to 5,000 people gathered in Bashkortostan’s southeastern Baymak district in January last year to protest the imprisonment of Alsynov, a prominent Indigenous rights and environmental campaigner. The protests were followed by sweeping arrests.
Aydar Yusupov, Ilnaz Makhmutov, Zaki Ilyasov and Vallyam Mutallapov, who will spend from three to four years in a penal colony, are among more than 80 men and women facing criminal prosecution in the “Baymak case,” the largest political trial in Russia’s history.
To mark the first anniversary of the Baymak events, Kremlin-installed authorities in Bashkortostan released a propaganda film “The Anatomy of Bashkir Nationalism. The Baymak Tragedy” produced by state-aligned journalist Timur Valitov.
In her piece for From the Republics, Bashkort social researcher Iliuza Mukhamedianova considers why regional authorities invested in the film and aired it during prime time, as well as how carefully crafted smear campaign against the protesters could impact Bashkortostan’s civil society.
Kremlin-Funded Propaganda Fuels Destabilization in Bashkortostan
By Iliuza Mukhamedianova
25 minutes. That’s how much time the creators of “The Anatomy of Bashkir Nationalism” dedicate to speaking about the local national organization “Bashqort.” This is almost a third of the entire movie.
But why pay such close attention to an organization dismantled back in 2020, long before the protests in Baymak?
Perhaps, that’s the easiest way to construct an image of an almighty enemy.
In the film, “Bashqort” — an organization that aimed to reinstate Bashkortostan’s sovereignty and preserve the Bashkort language and culture — is portrayed as the ultimate evil. The filmmakers place sole responsibility for the Baymak protests on “Bashqort” members, accusing them of “extremism” and collaboration with “foreign enemy states.”
Demonizing an organization that no longer exists helps to absolve Bashkortostan’s authorities of responsibility, legitimizes their actions, and justifies their brutal response to the protests.
The film also glances over the fact that protests in Baymak were not organized by a single group like “Bashqort” or one individual but were instead a grassroots action, an organic reaction to the sentencing of activist Fayil Alsynov.
Neither does the film mention who killed protester Rifat Dautov or who tortured the many Baymak detainees. And that’s truly a shame because these are the questions we, the people of Baymak, would like to have answered.
The Baymak protests would not have gained momentum without extensive media coverage — the authorities understand this well.
On 15 December 2024, two oil tankers — Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239 — were involved in an accident in the Kerch Strait during a storm, and three thousand tons of oil was spilled into the waters of the strait. A day later, the oil washed up on the shores of Krasnodar Territory. Dozens of kilometers of the Black Sea coast were contaminated with mazut (fuel oil), and fish, birds and dolphins were poisoned and died. Environmentalists have already pronounced the incident a major catastrophe. Local residents, without waiting for marching orders from the authorities, started cleaning up the fuel oil and saving birds and animals from day one. Thousands of people have been going out daily to clean the coastline. Every one of them has their own motivations and their own story connected with the sea.
“We have to do something!”: Marina, Nastya, and the Captain on Jamaica Beach
“It’s really black now! Our poor sea! What have they done to you?!”
Marina leans over a huge jellyfish stuck in an island of oil, and from the way her shoulders are shaking, I can guess that she is crying. Then she pulls back her mask and inhales a breath of the oil vapor-infused cloud. She wipes her tears away and says that she and her husband moved here from Belgorod a few years ago for a quiet life on the warm coast. Before the accident, her heart ached only for her relatives living back home amid the shelling. What is happening here now makes her heart ache as well.
“A friend from Tuapse wrote, ‘Will you put me up? Can I come there to help you too?'” Marina smiles sadly. “They’ve been coming from all over Russia, and many people are hosting the volunteers for free. Many people are feeding them. This is normal.”
A volunteer going out on a mission.
The sun sinking into the sea at her back, Marina looks like the heroine of an apocalypse movie — alone, in a protective suit, on a islet of sand surrounded by huge black stains.
They’re black oil slicks. It’s best not to step in them: they will ruin any kind of footwear. But it is impossible not to step into them, because although earlier, when the weather was colder, the fuel oil froze, now, with the temperature at +12 ℃, it has begun to flow. People armed with shovels are trying to dispose of these spreading stains by bagging them as soon as possible. As will transpire later, plastic bags cannot be used for this job: the fuel oil eats through the plastic and leaks back out. You need special bags — and you need special clothes, respirators, and goggles. They are clumsy to work in, so many people can’t stand it and clean the shore in their street clothes. They regret it later: by the evening their head starts to ache, and when they exhale, it smells like they have a petrol station inside them.
Petersburg police have arrested a 24-year-old freight handler who threw a Molotov cocktail at a military recruitment office (voenkomat). He had been hoodwinked by scammers whom he had contacted himself.
The Petrograd District Court remanded Daniil Pavlov in custody to a pretrial detention center, Rotunda’s correspondent reports. Pavlov faces ten to twenty years’ imprisonment on charges of “terrorism” (per Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code). The pretrial restrictions hearing took place in closed chambers.
Baza writes that in early December Pavlov had been unable to log onto the Gosuslugi (municipal and state services) app, and instead of the number for customer support he found the scammers’ number on the internet. They asked him to move the conversation to Telegram and told him that they had hacked the young man’s account. According to RIA Novosti, Pavlov then wired 800,000 rubles [approx. 7,400 euros] to these persons unknown.
“Customer service” told Pavlov that he had to throw a Molotov cocktail at the military recruitment office on Tchaikovsky Street* [in Petersburg’s Liteiny District]. He thus intended to assist in the apprehension of certain “bad guys,” journalists explain.
RIA Novosti writes that he was promised a payment of two million rubles [approx. 18,500 euros] for the job. As soon as the young man threw the flammable mixture, he was detained by police.
📌 Daniil Pavlov lived in [the Petersburg suburb of] Sestroretsk and was employed as a freight handler. Judging by his subscriptions on VKontakte, the young man enjoyed anime and computer games. His girlfriend told Rotunda that they had been planning to get married.
* Tchaikovsky Street in Petersburg is named after the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Tchaikovsky, not the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
🍍🍍🍍🍍 WOW News: the number of pineapples needed to enter prize drawings has dropped! Hurry up and hunt for pineapples and get closer to winning! You still have time to take part in drawings for a flat in Moscow, cars and tours abroad.
√ Search for pineapples on the product pages in the Ozon app.* The products marked with pineapples change daily. You can also get pineapples for purchases of 500 rubles or more. Pineapples are awarded for redeemed items.
√ Double your pineapples when paying for purchases outside Ozon with the Ozon Bank card (more details in the terms and conditions of the promotion).
*The promotion is available only in app versions 17.40 and up.
Source: Email flyer from news@news.ozon.ru, 18 December 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
Alleged video footage of the arson attack in Bolshoi Kamen, Maritime Territory, Russia
A resident of Bolshoy Kamen (Maritime Territory) attempted to torch a building after he fell prey to scammers, writes the Telegram channel Mash.
After the 23-year-old male was detained, he told police that telephone scammers from Ukraine had persuaded him to take out a bank loan. He later realized he had been conned.
Sometime later the con men again telephoned the local resident. Identifying themselves as members of the secret services, they asked the young man to torch town hall and a bank branch, saying these actions would allegedly repay the detained man’s [sic] debt.
“They sent him instructions on how to assemble a Molotov cocktail and gave him subsequent orders over the telephone,” Mash writes.
Heeding these recommendations [sic], the young man broke a window in the bank branch and set fire to it. According to Telegram channels, he also attempted to torch town hall. The flames also engulfed fire department vehicles.
The fire in the first building was extinguished quickly, but what happened at the other two locations [lokatsii] is not reported.
Earlier in Blagoveshchensk, four people attempted to torch a military recruitment office and were handed prison sentences of up to seventeen years.
Dankhaiaa Khovalyg. Photo: Rinchinaaa/Baikal People
‘I was made from Russian anyway,’ 28-year-old Dankhaiaa Khovalyg writes in her story ‘Ayalga,’ published in early 2022. Its female protagonist tells a psychologist how she feels like a stranger in her own country. When Dankhaiaa was a teenager, she deliberately detached herself from her native culture. She was proud to speak Russian without an accent, and dreamt of leaving Kyzyl ‘to be with her own people’ in Moscow.
During her eight years in Moscow, Dankhaiaa was involved in decolonial activism, researched her own painful background, and launched a project about indigenous people from Russia’s six ethnic Asian regions —the podcast re.public_speaking.
Alina Golovina, a Baikal People correspondent based in Buryatia, spoke with Khovalyg about why it is important to talk about trauma, where decolonization begins, and whether Russia’s ethnic republics can unite for their own benefit. At Danhkaiaa’s suggestion, they spoke to each other using the informal second-person pronoun ty.
‘As soon as I would lеave home, the world would crash down on me with all its xenophobia‘
— Tell me about yourself, Dankhaiaa.
— I was born and raised in Kyzyl. After graduating from school, I went to study in Moscow and lived there for eight years. I worked as a client manager in an IT company and was involved in feminist activism. In 2021, I quit my job and realized my childhood dream: I enrolled in literature classes and took up writing. Since March 2022, I have been living in Berlin and doing podcasts and anti-war activism.
— You told me that up to ninety percent of the indigenous people in Tuva speak Tuvan and consider it their native tongue. Why have you prioritized Russian? Is it a problem?
— I’m a city girl: I grew up in Kyzyl. I was sent to a Russian-language kindergarten and, later, to a Russian-language class at school. That was how my mother showed that she cared about me: Russian-speaking classes were considered tonier. I was a bookworm and was engrossed in Russian literature. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to a large amount of foreign literature at school, and at that moment, eighty percent of me certainly consisted of this great and beautiful Russian literature by the so-called Tolstoyevskys. I read all of that stuff and would dream of going to Moscow. I was a little proud that I spoke such beautiful Russian. Basically, I went through all that internalized colonial chauvinist crap that life was better there, that I was going to get out because I was more like them.
— Did it save you from ethnic discrimination? If not, when did you first encounter it?
— My experience of discrimination actually began long before I moved to Moscow. My mother found opportunities using travel vouchers to send me to summer camps in Krasnodar Territory, Khakassia, and other regions. I was eleven and twelve years old at the time. It didn’t matter whether I traveled five hundred kilometers from home or several thousand, because everywhere I went I encountered phenomenal bullying. I was labeled ‘China girl’ and ‘black.’ No one asked me to dance at dance parties. I was either totally ignored or talked to condescendingly and peppered with passive-aggressive insults. I had lived in my native Tuva in a groovy, comfortable bubble: most people spoke Tuvan, and we didn’t encounter any racism there. But as soon as I would leave home, the world would crash down on me with all its xenophobia. Whereas in Tuva I was considered pretty, smart, and cool, everything and everyone at those camps made it clear to me that I was second-rate.
— How did this affect you?
— These contrasts generated very unhealthy takeaways in my head: that Tuva’s overall level [of development] was much lower than the rest of Russia’s. This absolutely perverted assumption made me, as a teenager, condescend to Tuvan culture and my Tuvan side. It is quite painful for me to remember the instances when relatives addressed me in Tuvan, but I would reply in Russian, saying that I didn’t understand them, although that was a lie. Those memories now make me feel bitter. I feel sorry for that teenage girl.
— What happened later in life? How did Moscow welcome you?
— I often encountered micro-aggressions in public places. For example, I would be standing in the queue at a store, and a huge Russian guy would push me aside and go in front of me. There was no explicit verbal indication that this was because I was non-Russian, but I think this wouldn’t hae happened if I had been of Slavic appearance. I repeatedly had big problems finding a place to live because of my name and my appearance. Or, for example, I would be climbing the stairs to my floor, and neighbors descending the stairs would say, ‘The churkas have come and taken over the place’ when they would see me. They would not say it to my face, but under their breath as it were, and when they were already a flight below me, so I couldn’t even shout back at them as it happened. I would just stand there for a while, frozen on the steps. You always deal with this alone because when you are with your husband or a group of people, those very same neighbors keep their mouths shut. Every such episode of chauvinism really demoralized me, although I didn’t express it outwardly. Because no matter who I would tell, they would say, ‘Oh, don’t pay attention! Rise above it! We don’t stoop to their level.’ I swear that there has never been an instance when someone just shared my indignation for a second.
— Have you experienced physical violence? Have you been attacked?
— I didn’t encounter any actual boneheads (far-right skinheads): I moved to Moscow in 2013, by which time the most ardent supporters of that ideology had been jailed. The cases of physical violence that happened to me are difficult to categorize. The first time it happened was when I was in my first year at university. I was traveling from my part-time job in an empty train carriage to my dormitory. I had leaned my head against the window and fallen asleep with my legs stretched out. I woke up to an old man kicking me and saying, ‘Move your damn feet.’ I did and asked him what was the matter, and he said he wanted to sit down. I suggested he sit down in one of the other free seats, upon which he started kicking me again, saying that I was a churka and if I gave him any guff, he would beat the shit out of me. It was so horrible, because the old man spoke softly and looked like a harmless creature. I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to look weak. He stared at me point-blank the whole way and commented that I behaved very freely in Russia. It was forty minutes of violence.
The second incident happened on Leninsky Prospekt near the Oktyabrskaya subway station. It was summer, I was walking with headphones on in a crowd of people, listening to music. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a man was walking in my direction and looking at me intently. Over the years, you develop something like a muscle that reacts to unwanted attention and makes you tense up and pull yourself together as if you’re getting ready to react. When the man walked by, he hit me over the head with a bottle. I fell down. He walked on. So there I was, lying propped up on my elbows, looking at the man walking away, and all the other people just passed me by. I thought at the time that it could have been a scene from a film, because only in a film can you get hit and nobody comes up and asks how you’re doing or tries to help you. And there were a lot of little situations — elbowing, pushing, kicking. Several times when I was putting away my dirty tray at a food court, I was told, ‘Hey, clean this up.’
