Category: soviet

Telepathy and the Russian Internet

On September 5, 1982, a music festival in San Bernardino, California, organized by Apple’s Steve Wozniak, bore witness to the first-ever public television link between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two large screens on either side of the stage broadcast performances by singer-songwriter Alla Pugacheva and rock band Voskreseniye, while Soviet citizens gathered at a Moscow radio station rocked out to the American lineup—that is, until Grateful Dead promoter Bill Graham, “convinced the whole thing was a KGB trick,” as Jeffrey Kripal wrote in his 2007 book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, “literally pulled the plug halfway through the concert.”

This so-called US-Soviet Space Bridge (the first of several, including one co-hosted by television host Phil Donahue) often features in books about the cultural history of the Cold War. But what many of these books don’t tell you is that a large number of the people who organized these events also hoped to lift the Iron Curtain through another method: telepathy. In her new book Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, journalist and “media archeologist” Natalia Konradova reveals how the story of the early Soviet internet—and the role it played during the collapse of the USSR in 1991—can be traced back to early- and mid-twentieth-century dreams of instantaneous and unmediated mass communication.

Telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover.

Though recognized today as a pseudoscientific fantasy, telepathy was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a real possibility—one whose secrets modern science could and would eventually discover. In the Soviet Union, scientific interest in telepathy stemmed not only from a sense of general techno-optimism shared by many countries both before and after the two world wars, but also from beliefs and aspirations particular to communist society. Like cosmism (a philosophical movement that aimed at nothing less than the colonization of space, the attainment of immortality, and the resurrection of every person who ever lived), research into “parapsychology” was expected to help usher in a utopian future.

Of course, what this future looked like depended on who you asked. Some scientists and science fiction authors envisioned a world in which doctors could diagnose patients remotely and one person could beam their skills and talents directly into the bodies of others. The CIA worried that Soviet officials would be able to steal sensitive government information and control “machines on the moon or in the ocean” with their thoughts, according to a 1973 report. Meanwhile, Iosif Goldin—a parapsychology enthusiast and principal organizer of the Soviet side of the first Space Bridge—imagined mass communication as a cure for geopolitical conflict. He once wrote that if “one realizes the observation of the sunrise simultaneously on all continents of the Earth and does it regularly, turning it into a form of bringing people together, there may be no nuclear catastrophe.”

Although the internet itself did not directly contribute to the USSR’s demise, it should come as no surprise that the appearance of one closely coincided with the disappearance of the other. Described by Konradova as a “perfected version of samizdat,” or self-published dissident literature, the rise of the internet and online communities made censorship and the suppression of information virtually impossible—at least for a time. Hacking the Iron Curtain concludes with a brief though warranted reflection on how, amid digital restrictions under Vladimir Putin, the Russian internet ecosystem—Runet—has become increasingly cut off from the rest of the World Wide Web, aiding the country’s return to autocracy.

How did you become interested in parapsychology?

I have worked on many different subjects as an anthropologist and media theorist. But I have always been particularly interested in phenomena or systems that are either created by users or shaped through their efforts and self-organization. It does not really matter whether I’m studying war memorials in small villages, which were one of the subjects I researched in the early 2000s, or internet literature—a phenomenon of the early Russian internet, when users had for the first time the opportunity to publish their literary works without them having to pass through any editorial process.

That was how my research into the Russian-speaking internet began. In the mid-2000s, colleagues in Germany invited me to join their project, where I studied internet forums. At that point, though, neither cybernetics nor parapsychology was anywhere on my research horizon. They emerged only during the research process.

What did you feel was missing from existing treatments of this subject (like Alaina Lemon’s book) that you wanted to explore with Hacking the Iron Curtain?

Because my research is interdisciplinary, I read literature from a wide range of research fields: the history of the internet and digital culture, Cold War studies, studies of utopias and technological imaginaries, “parascience,” and so on. These fields have been studied for a long time, and each has produced fascinating work. What I felt was missing was precisely the connection between them.

Alaina Lemon’s book was an important discovery for me, not only because it was the only work I encountered that placed Soviet parapsychology within the context of the Cold War, but also because she shows just how powerful the mutual desire for communication was among people in both the USSR and the US. That said, Lemon’s approach was grounded more in theatrical practices, and she was not interested in the history of technology. When Soviet parapsychology is discussed elsewhere, it is typically situated within the history of supernatural beliefs and esoteric practices, as in The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, a substantial volume edited by Birgit Menzel.

What interested me was a phenomenon identified in the 1960s by Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander, authors of the classic Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain: for a considerable period in the USSR, parapsychology was treated as a science. Researchers used scientific methods in their experiments and attempted to identify patterns in telepathy, telekinesis, and other phenomena. Yes, this no longer fits within our contemporary scientific understanding of the world, but I am talking about events that took place sixty years ago, when faith in the power of science was virtually limitless. As far as I know, before my work, no one had considered research into telepathy as one scientific field among others—regarded today as a dead end, but one that at the time could be seen as almost equivalent in status to computer science.

At what stage in your research did it become clear to you that there was a connection between parapsychology—telepathy in particular—and the early Russian internet?

I originally set out to study the history of the Russian internet. I interviewed figures from the Runet of the 1990s and worked with online archives. In those archives, I discovered that one of Russia’s first internet providers had actually been founded in the 1980s. This simply did not fit with my understanding that the internet could only have appeared after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Once I delved into the history of the first network connections from Soviet territory, I found myself dealing with an entirely new set of questions and, for me, an entirely new research field. Media archaeology is exactly the kind of (proto) discipline that is interested in dead ends, unrealized projects, and strange coincidences. It is still not particularly well known in the US, but I live in Germany, the birthplace of media archaeology.

To what extent was parapsychology research responsible for the rise of the Russian internet?

I distinguish between several levels of this connection. One is relatively simple and straightforward. The first contact between American and Soviet users on Usenet became possible thanks to American entrepreneur Joel Schatz, who came to the USSR in the mid-1980s. He did so because of his connections to the Esalen Institute in California, a well-known center of “alternative research,” now better known as a popular retreat destination for California tech people.

Esalen, in turn, had those connections because people associated with the institute had begun traveling to the USSR in the early 1970s hoping to establish contacts with Soviet parapsychologists (and they did). Later, they established a Soviet-American exchange program and joined the citizen-diplomacy movement, but initially it was the parapsychologists—with their desire for grassroots communication and their refusal to accept conventional boundaries of what was possible—who proved capable of connecting people from two countries on opposing sides of the Cold War.

How the archetype of the quirky, brilliant tech entrepreneur whose ideas could change the world migrated from high-tech hacker culture to Wall Street.

While studying this phenomenon, I also arrived at another, conceptual level of connection. In a sense, the internet is telepathy, except that a digital signal plays the role of the brain waves that science has never succeeded in discovering. In the 1960s, an era of techno-optimism and great hopes that human reason would triumph over war, disease, and death, computer science and the development of computer networks advanced alongside research into other possible forms of communication—forms that do not exist in nature but that, theoretically, could exist.

You mention on multiple occasions that telepathy was researched more extensively in the USSR than elsewhere. Why was this?

I think the USSR, as a project intended to realize a socialist utopia—and I am not discussing here how successful that project ultimately proved to be—had much stronger investments in radical scientific discoveries expected to fundamentally transform human life. Some of these ambitions were realized, such as spaceflight. Scientists today are still working on others, such as immortality. Others, such as telepathy, have disappeared from the scientific agenda.

One could probably add that the USSR had an obvious overproduction of specialists in the natural sciences, which was connected to the military-industrial complex. At some point, the Soviet Ministry of Defense also began investing in this new field because it seemed potentially useful for defense purposes. As a result, Soviet laboratories could often find room for experiments involving new and uncertain phenomena.

Still, I think all of this was more a consequence of the first factor: an exceptionally strong belief in scientific progress. Both American and Soviet societies were modern societies, if by modernity we mean above all a reliance on rational knowledge and technology. But in the USSR, this modernity was particularly radical and allowed virtually no alternative: it lay at the very foundation of the state as the only possible form of its existence.

You mention that Soviet scientists like Vladimir Bekhterev continued to research telepathy even after failing to find proof of its existence. Why did this interest persist, including among the CIA and US politicians?

In general, I have the impression that, from the 1920s through the end of the 1980s, scientists around the world were reluctant to abandon the subject completely. I do not know enough about Bekhterev’s activities to speculate confidently about his motives, but I do know that he was aware of the research his former student Vasiliev was conducting at his institute. I interpret this as an attempt not to burn any bridges—simply to keep the possibility open, “just in case.” What if the experiments ultimately did produce results, and you found yourself among those accused of suppressing something new and progressive? But of course, that is only my theory.

As for the CIA and politicians, that belongs to a different period. Judging from documents in the declassified CIA archives, they were deeply impressed by reports of Soviet achievements in this field and wrote alarmed assessments suggesting that the USSR might soon learn to guide missiles with the power of thought, kill people with a glance, and so on. Their primary objective, therefore, was to ensure the United States did not fall behind in this area.

Beyond parapsychology, to what extent did the Soviet internet become possible thanks to perestroika, and to what extent did perestroika become possible thanks to the Soviet internet?

I do not think I would subscribe to either proposition, because for me the causal relationship lies outside both perestroika and the Soviet internet. Rather, a second modernity—or postmodernity—arrived: a period in which users gained real possibilities to influence events. In the USSR, perestroika began, and contacts with the US intensified. In the United States, the internet became available to a critical mass of users. The mythology of the Cold War was ceasing to work on both sides: people understood that official authorities were lying and wanted to escape their control. All of this was happening simultaneously.

Of course, before perestroika, it would have been impossible for an American to walk into a closed Soviet scientific institute and ask to be connected to a classified network—which is exactly what happened when the internet provider SovAm Teleport was founded in the mid-1980s. But perestroika itself would not have happened if a significant portion of Soviet society had not already been ready for it.

You note that, at various points in twentieth-century Soviet history, techno-utopian dreams often gave way to practical and commercial applications. Between the two, which ultimately plays a larger role in this story?

Once connecting to the internet from the USSR became technically possible, there was much less room for fantasy. Why take risks and invest in uncertainty—which any grand vision requires—when a concrete technical solution already exists, and all you need is the money to implement it? More broadly, the USSR was shifting from overregulated socialism to unregulated capitalism, which would reveal itself in full force in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, pragmatism and commerce alone did not define the character of the early Russian internet. Because early users saw the network primarily as a hobby, they enthusiastically invested their time and energy in games, poetry, and all kinds of impractical inventions. Until the end of the 1990s, when the first major commercial projects emerged, the network was primarily a space for entertainment and free communication.

Can you talk about the role Russian Usenet played during and after the unsuccessful 1991 coup attempt to prevent the USSR from collapsing? Could events have played out differently if Russians had not had this window to the outside world?

This was an important moment. Information about the Moscow coup of 1991 reached American media and politicians largely through Usenet users at the Kurchatov Institute, in Moscow. They, in turn, collected information through their internal network, translated it into English, and posted it to newsgroups.

I would say the absence of the internet probably would not have changed the fundamental course of events, because the victory of the democratic forces during the coup depended much more on resistance on the ground than on support from other countries. The absence of access to Usenet might, however, have affected more specific aspects of what happened: how quickly information circulated, how much pressure came from outside the Soviet Union, and so on.

Some people think that if the Soviet internet had developed sooner, it could have ensured the survival of the USSR. Do you share this belief?

The idea that the development of the internet might have saved the USSR comes from the author of an alternate-history novel in which technologies are transported into the Soviet Union from the future. I don’t believe in this idea, because creating the internet required not only high-quality materials, which were in short supply, but also international cooperation, from which the USSR was cut off after World War II. It also required the internet itself—if, by the internet, we mean a system of communication and community formation.

I think this last factor matters most. Soviet society, and even more so the Soviet leadership, had absolutely no need for people to communicate freely with one another beyond institutional control. At the same time, Soviet engineers were already connecting computers into networks before work on ARPANET had even begun. In other words, the technical possibility existed, but neither the social demand nor the political will did. Even telephone services remained unavailable in many Soviet cities until the 1990s. To stay in touch, people exchanged letters, postcards, and telegrams.

Cybernetics, however, did produce a powerful vision that extended far beyond computers and even beyond communication itself. But because cybernetics was a product of Soviet culture as a whole, that vision faded when Soviet culture entered into crisis. The desire to imagine radically different futures was replaced by a desire to “live like people in the West,” particularly in terms of everyday life and living standards.

In the conclusion, you draw parallels between the futurism of Silicon Valley (specifically the quest for immortality) and the techno-utopianism of Soviet cyberneticians. Could you also speak to any meaningful differences between these visions?

To be honest, there are surprisingly few substantial differences, and that amazes me. Eternal life is hardly a new idea, of course, but one might still expect to see signs that these people lived in different periods and in very different cultures.

One possible distinction is that the American version of this techno-utopia is somewhat less closely tied to the public good and more oriented toward individual benefit, whereas Soviet cyberneticians had in mind, first and foremost, a new society, and only then a new human being as a member of that society. But we also have to remember that Soviet cyberneticians wrote articles and gave interviews under conditions of censorship. With that in mind, this difference may be less substantial than it initially appears.

In your conclusion, you write that the “historical connection between the attempts to rebuild the power lost during the collapse of the USSR and the current reality cannot be ignored.” To what extent did the Russian internet contribute to Russian world ideology and its consequences, including the war in Ukraine?

The figures of the early Russian internet did not make the decision to launch a military attack on Ukraine, and they should not be held responsible for it. The concept of the “Russian World” emerged from the political technologies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although political technologists participated in the development of the Russian internet, they were not the ones who made the decision to launch Russia’s most recent military aggression.

Nevertheless, I do see—and describe in the book—a conceptual connection between the expansive space of Russian-language verbal culture, which became the first meaningful content of the Russian-speaking internet, and the “Russian World.” The fact that this connection is conceptual is important.

Until very recently, the expression “Russian internet” was something of an oxymoron, because the internet is, by definition, a global network. Yes, you can write in any language you like, but technically you are still writing on a common, international internet that does not recognize state borders. This is no longer entirely the case. In Russia, a “sovereign Runet” whose borders increasingly coincide with the state’s borders has, by now, almost become a reality.

In other words, Russians first entered the American internet; then they developed the concept of the “Runet,” which technically remained part of the global network but was culturally understood as a unique and independent phenomenon; and decades later, they physically carved out a segment of the global network in which international conventions no longer operate in the same way and where an antiwar post can result in a prison sentence. I am not sure I would call this a “Sonderweg,” but it is a remarkable development. One can only hope that the rest of the world will not follow the same path, although there are reasons for concern.

Resources

Soviet Power Plus the Digitalization of the Entire Country
By: Natalia Konradova
Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, pp. 11-36
University of Wisconsin Press
 
Natalia Konradova
By: Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet
Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet, pp. 37-57
University of Wisconsin Press
 
Reviewed Work: ESALEN: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal
By: Sara M. Patterson
Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Winter 2007-2008), pp. 430-432
Historical Society of Southern California
 
Review: The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions
By: Alexander Agadjanian
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Feb., 2014), pp. 136-138
University of Pennsylvania Press

SOURCE: Tim Brinkhof, “How Telepathy Helped Build the Russian Internet,” JSTOR Daily, 28 October 2026. Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press

Path to Open Books on JSTOR

Hacking the Iron Curtain: A Media Archaeology of the Russian Internet is part of JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative, which helps nonprofit university presses meet the challenges of open access publishing. Books in the program become open access three years after publication. JSTOR Daily is making the first and second chapters available for free now to drive awareness of the program.

Where Apocalypse Is Now

Utkina Dacha, St. Petersburg, 17 June 2012. Photos by the Russian Reader

Last week on a bus to Leningrad, as a bottle was passed around, I got angry for Finland. The Finns aboard found this very funny. For three hours we jolted on atrocious roads through [the] Karelia[n Isthmus], former Finnish heartland gobbled by Stalin in the Winter War of 1939, then regained and lost again during the Second World War. Amid forests of birch and pine, I glimpsed a long disaster. This was my first time in the USSR (my fourth in Finland). I was unprepared for the brokenness of every human thing, the old Finnish farmhouses and lakeside villas collapsing or collapsed, the travesties of farming apart from neat kitchen gardens. The once famously cosmopolitan Baltic port of Vyborg (Viipuri in Finnish), which could be the prettiest small city in the world, felt post-nuclear, its citizens (non-Finns, with whose forebears Stalin replaced the native population) listlessly wandering. Some gaped as our fancy tour bus wallowed by. The single purposeful activity I saw in [the] Karelia[n Isthmus] was that of a man painting an ornamental fence around a roadside ammunition bunker. The contrast to Finland’s grace and bustle was unbearable.

“Vyborg,” I said to the Helsinki art critic Markku Valkonen, who has Karelian roots. “You want it back.”

“Sure, I would like it back,” he said softly, “but I do not want to spoil my life with bitterness.”

[…]

I thought of it again in Leningrad, where apocalypse is now. The city is huge and grand beyond anything I expected. Its nineteenth-century buildings by C. L. Engel, who also worked in Finland, gave me a first impression of an imperial Helsinki, with aspects of Paris and Amsterdam thrown in. But the beauty is a patch that unravels within a block of the Winter Palace, exposing uniform squalor. The tour went to the Hermitage. There I was overwhelmed by the Rembrandts and by a room of Matisses that nearly forced me to my knees. Like other lovely things in Leningrad, the staggering holdings end abruptly in 1914. Meanwhile, in a separate building of the Hermitage, there was a show of—get ready—Peter Max. I wish I could find that amusing. But the evidence of near-term Soviet vulnerability to Western hustlers is too awful. With its stupid Revolution finished, the USSR may be in for a flood of imported stupidities.

Source: Peter Schjeldahl, “Baltic Views” (Village Voice, 11 June 1991), in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988–2018 (Abrams Press, 2019)

Central Asia and Russia(n): Is It Farewell?

Excerpt from “Tashkent: The End of An Era” (Mark Weil, 1996). A full, subtitled copy of the film can been seen here.

Recent trends in world politics have led several analysts to emphasize the idea of the retreat or recession of Russian power abroad. Yet few have commented on a key aspect of this retreat, namely the growing movement across Central Asia to unseat the Russian language from its position, often enshrined in law, as an official language on a par with the native tongue. Trends across the region demonstrate state action to diminish the role of the Russian language, growing political discussion of the issue, or socio-economic trends working to reduce the hegemony of the Russian language. These trends also display both Russia’s mounting anxiety about such trends and its increasingly visible inability to reverse or stop them.

BACKGROUND

Russia’s recent reversals in Syria, Venezuela, the Caucasus and potentially Iran have triggered a flood of articles proclaiming the retreat of Russian power. However, none of these writings noticed the parallel ongoing dethronement of the Russian language from its previous eminence in Central Asia. Nevertheless, this epochal development, like Russia’s aforementioned geostrategic defeats, possesses profound political as well as cultural significance.  Given the importance of linguistic policies in the Tsarist, Soviet, and now post-Soviet regimes, the retreat of the Russian language from a position of linguistic-political primacy in Central Asia signifies major political and cultural transformations.

Specifically, Kazakhstan’s new constitution subtly but overtly downgrades the status of Russian as an official language. Article 9 of the new constitution establishes Kazakh as the dominant language of the country, relegating Russian to the status of an official language used by the government “alongside” Kazakh. This new constitution obtained massive public support although much of it was probably engineered from above, forcing Putin to congratulate President Tokayev on its ratification.  However, those congratulatory remarks, as Tokayev and his team well know, probably came through clenched teeth and were preceded by much Russian public criticism of Kazakhstan’s language policies.

An analysis of Russian press perspectives on the return of Kazakhstan’s Latin alphabet, originally introduced in the 1920’s, from the Cyrillicization of the alphabet during the height of Stalinism, displays a politicized perspective where this process is seen as a repudiation of a Russian orientation in favor of a Turkic-Western one. Insofar as Turkey and Western powers like the EU and the U.S. have stepped up their presence and interest in Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a whole, this politicized perspective sees language and alphabet policies as manifestations of the growing regional presence of those parties at Moscow’s expense. Thus, Russian press coverage warns Central Asian audiences against alleged foreign plots of an imperialist nature.

Russian media also minimize or deny the agency of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states in formulating and then executing their own alphabet and language policies while implicitly and often overtly extolling the superior, imperial role of Russia’s language and culture as a vehicle for connecting Central Asia with modern civilization and culture. In other words, much of this literature reflects an imperial echo with deep roots in late Tsarist and then Soviet imperial policies that Russian elites seek to preserve.

IMPLICATIONS

Kazakhstan’s assertion of its linguistic sovereignty challenges the Russian dream of maintaining its cultural-political hegemony over Central Asia because it is losing the means to enforce that claim on Kazakhstan and because Astana’s example is being replicated across Central Asia, e.g. in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Uzbekistan, as a 2024 paper makes clear, Russian must coexist if not compete with Uzbek and Tajik while English, a global lingua franca, is rapidly gaining on it as well. In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan’s example has simultaneously stimulated debates on emulating its language policy.

Predictably the Russian government, sensing another threat to its receding hegemonic pretensions, has reacted strongly. On March 19, its embassy in Bishkek forcefully demanded that Kyrgyzstan’s government suppress “provocative statements of certain public figures” about the place of Russian in Kyrgyz society. The statement also complains about “language patrols” where vigilantes purportedly try to intimidate people to stop speaking Russian and speak only Kyrgyz. The embassy deemed such calls incitement to ethnic hatred and a threat to Russo-Kyrgyz strategic partnership and, in a conscious echo of Soviet propaganda, “deep alliance between our fraternal peoples and countries – Russia and Kyrgyzstan.”

This atavistic employment of Soviet tropes is no accident. Whereas Lenin’s language policies, likely inspired by his father’s work in teaching Orthodoxy to Muslims, wagered that teaching socialism would lead Soviet Muslims to socialism; Stalin decisively imposed Russification by giving the Russian language primacy and Cyrillicizing Central Asian alphabets. Putin’s consistent attacks on Lenin’s nationality policies, many of which stemmed from an appreciation of socio-political realities during the early Soviet period, reflect his clear preference for the centralizing, Stalinist, and more openly imperialist policies of Stalin and his successors.

Nevertheless, a generation after independence and having devoted much effort to fostering large-scale national identification among their populations, Central Asian leaders are openly moving to assert not just their foreign policy sovereignty, but also their linguistic nationalism. The use of Russian across Central Asia will likely remain pervasive because of the benefits it offers in economic relations with Russian and possibly Central Asian entities. However, Russian will not be the only regional lingua franca or the language of Russian imperial hegemony either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia. Since we can readily imagine a similar outcome in Ukraine due to Russia’s war against the country, which underlies many of the causes for the retreat of Russian hegemony, the trends discernible in Central Asia go far beyond its borders.

CONCLUSIONS

Even as the Russian government is currently discussing legislation allowing it to intervene anywhere abroad on behalf of its citizens, Central Asian developments presage the ongoing erosion of Russian cultural and thus political power. The whole idea of the “Russkii Mir” (Russian World) based on speakers of the Russian language that furnishes a pretext for interventions abroad is rapidly falling to pieces. From Tsarist and Soviet times, Russian authorities consistently regarded Russian as the sole “civilized” and therefore hegemonic language of the empire and often sought to enforce that hegemony by coercion. Those days are visibly ending as Central Asian governments are, with increasing confidence, asserting their own native tongues while also opening up to greater economic-cultural interaction with other countries. While Russian will not disappear in Central Asia; it is being decentered and increasingly deprived of its superior legal-political standing.

This process is clearly linked to the global recession of Russian power even as Russia fights to retain its erstwhile imperial and global great power status. For its rulers, expression of that status through all the forms of cultural power, e.g. alphabets and languages, was a critical component of empire. Yet what we see today, despite Moscow’s threats or even forceful efforts to arrest or reverse that decline, is an imperial sunset that evidently cannot be stopped either in culture or in hard power.

AUTHOR’S BIO

Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, www.fpri.org.

Source: Stephen Blank, “The Retreat of the Russian Language from Central Asia,” Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 23 April 2026

When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults.

McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube.

McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.

What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching ten children’s videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The findings show YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.

“Kyrgyz children are algorithmically constructed as audiences for Russian content,” Nel Escher, a coauthor who is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”

McDermott recalls one frustrated Kyrgyzstani mother in 2023 explaining that she paid the internet bill a day late each month to regularly have one day without internet and, thus, YouTube at home.

YouTube, which has “committed to amplifying indigenous voices,” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The researchers are attempting to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the potential for language filters, according to Escher.

The researchers say their work is the latest to show how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, people in Kyrgyzstan had to learn Russian to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in both Russian and Kyrgyz, with Russian remaining important for commerce. Kids are required to learn at least some Kyrgyz in school. But many spend several hours a day online, and watching YouTube is the leading activity, McDermott says. Quoting from Russian language videos is common, whether creators’ refrains like “Let’s do a challenge,” adaptations of American words such as “cringe,” or parroting accents and syntax.

In one of the researchers’ experiments, they searched for several subjects which are spelled the same in Russian and Kyrgyz, including Harry Potter and Minecraft. The results were predominantly Russian. Overall, just 2.7 percent of the videos the research team analyzed appeared to even include ethnically Kyrgyz people.

YouTube “socializes youth to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” the researchers wrote in a self-published paper accepted to a social computing conference scheduled for October.

The researchers say there is ample Kyrgyz-language children’s content for YouTube to promote. In 2024, the 35th-most viewed channel on YouTube across the world was D Billions, a Kyrgyzstan-based children-focused content studio with a dedicated Kyrgyz-language channel that has nearly 1 million subscribers.

Azamat Duishenov, head of the program management office for D Billions, tells WIRED that their team believes Kyrgyz content helps promote the language. Duishenov suspects YouTube may find it worthwhile to err toward recommending content in Russian because Russian speakers outnumber Kyrgyz ones.

The researchers suggest potential remedies to parents such as creating playlists of Kyrgyz-language content or sharing devices with their children. When the researchers simulated adult users watching non-kid’s content in Kyrgyz, they received predominantly Kyrgyz-language recommendations. Then, when kids later used the same device, they experienced a moderate uptick in exposure to Kyrgyz-language videos, despite younger users gravitating toward Russian content during their sessions.

Source: Paresh Dave, “This Indigenous Language Survived Russian Occupation. Can It Survive YouTube?” Wired, 1 May 2026

The Hidden Face of the Confessional Empire: Islamophobia in Russia | A book talk by Paolo Sartori

Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 12:00 PM — 1:15 PM CT

Online

Please join the East Asia Research Forum as they host a Zoom talk with Paolo Sartori.

Description:

In May 1854, the Russian imperial authorities arrested Ishan Muhammad Sharif Mansurov on suspicion of conspiratorial activities. The investigation, which lasted about nine years, sparked a media frenzy and rumors of possible mass unrest in the Kazakh steppe on religious grounds, and drew public attention, including from ruling circles. Why was the figure of the Sufi Mansurov of such interest to the colonial administration, and what danger did he pose? What knowledge did government officials possess regarding Sufism in the Kazakh steppe at that time? By analysing the documentary traces left by the Mansurov case, I offer a set of reflections on the relationship between the Russian confessional state and Islamophobia.

Speaker Bio:

Paolo Sartori (PhD 2006) is Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he presides over the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia. He is the author of A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan (1943-1991) and, more recently he has guest-edited a theme issue on Russian Colonialism for the Slavic Review.

Please register for this online event.

Source: PlanIt Purple Events Calendar (Northwestern University)

My guest today was born in 1991, the same year as the independent states of Central Asia. A few years ago, he set out to explore what’s happened in the former Soviet republics since the collapse of the USSR, and whether they have flourished over the last 35 years without the “big brother” Russia.

His book, Farewell to Russia: A journey through the former USSR, has just been published in the UK and the US. His name is Joe Luc Barnes, and you might also recognise his voice from our audio documentaries. In this episode, we talk about his book, travelling and living in Central Asia, and the (often problematic) craft of travel writing.

Source: Agnieszka Pikulicka, “Episode 33: Lessons on independence from the former Soviet republics,” Turan Tales, 18 March 2026

Mark Weil, who has died aged 55 after being stabbed on his way home from a rehearsal, was the founder and director of the first independent theatre in the Soviet Union – the Ilkhom, in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. To this day, the Ilkhom remains the only venue for original, uncensored drama in a country where freedom of expression is severely limited. An extraordinary man, he created an artistic space in which people could ask questions and explore their experience.

Born in Tashkent, Mark was not an Uzbek but a Russian Jew, part of the world of central Asian Russians that is now disappearing. Russian-speaking, but with much of the style and gentleness of Asia, these people were insiders, but often with the outsider’s powers of perception. Russian traders had first come south to central Asia during the Arab empires (a cross-cultural theme that Mark loved) but the Russian presence really took off in the Soviet era. An intellectual, nonconformist scene began to grow. Solzhenitsyn’s time in Tashkent (in 1953) became Cancer Ward. Mikhail Bulgakov’s widow managed to hide the manuscript of The Master and Margarita until it was safe to publish.

This eclectic, offbeat world was Mark’s heritage. He studied drama in Moscow and St Petersburg in the early 1970s, but returned to take his MA in history and artistic theory in Tashkent in 1974. In 1976, he opened the Russian-speaking Ilkhom – the word means “inspiration” in Uzbek – with a piece of improvisation that came straight from central Asian street culture, called Makharaboz-76 (Clown 76). Throughout the Brezhnev era, he staged the debuts of young playwrights at the Ilkhom, the only theatre in the Soviet Union that had no state funding.

After the collapse of the USSR and birth of the new country of Uzbekistan, Mark made contacts with foreign theatre groups, thrilled to meet experimental, thoughtful people from all over the world. The Ilkhom company took its shows to France, Germany and Italy. In 1988, he visited Seattle and held workshops at US universities. But along with new freedoms came disappointments. President Islam Karimov’s rule became ever more authoritarian.

Most Russian-speaking intellectuals queued for Russian passports and got out. Mark did not. “This is my city, I was born here, and I will never leave,” he often said. But he never courted collision with the authorities. He simply got on with his work.

In the 1990s, Mark set about a huge project close to his heart, a documentary history of Tashkent. He hunted down and restored lost archive of the city, and added his own footage. Laughing wryly, he told me how he went out to film part of the medieval quarter that was being ripped down and built over with flats. “I was just standing quietly, filming, when the foreman saw me. With no warning, the shovel swivelled round and tipped its load over my camera and tripod, and broke it.”

With the government denouncing “foreign” entertainment, the Ilkhom produced Brecht (a constant in the repertoire) and Gozzi (1992). It put on a musical version of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1996). It staged Edward Albee’s Zoo Stories (2005). It examined the forbidden theme of homosexuality through the short stories of the Uzbek writer Abdullah Kadiri. Mark relied heavily on foreign partnerships, including the British Council, to fund these ventures, but money was extremely tight. The actors worked for almost nothing.

Disaster struck Uzbekistan in May 2005, when thousands gathered to call for jobs and a better life in the ancient eastern city of Andijan. The army moved in and shot dead about 500 people, almost all of them unarmed. The government denied this account – it said it had scotched an Islamic uprising – but refused an international inquiry. It then closed down many foreign agencies, while others left in protest. For the Ilkhom, its vital sources of funding were reduced still further.

Mark was attacked on his way home from the dress rehearsal of Aeschylus’s tragedy, the Oresteia. It was to have been a triumphal start of a new season, in the bleakest times, and he was thrilled by the production and its exploration of revenge and the rule of law. He is survived by his wife Tatyana and daughters, Julia and Aleksandra. His death has not been reported in Uzbekistan.

· Mark Yakovlevich Weil, theatre director, born January 25 1952; died September 7 2007

Source: Monica Whitlock, “Mark Weil,” Guardian, 10 October 2007

Russia’s Pride

“Russia’s Pride! Captain Sergei Korniyenko. RealHeroes.rf,” Moscow, 2026. Photo: Igor Stomakhin

KYIV, Ukraine — In the early 2000s, I was still a kid. Every summer, my grandma and I would travel to visit her relatives in Tuapse, a city in southern Russia on the Black Sea’s coast.

We took the ‘platzkart,’ the cheapest sleeper train where strangers shared one open space with no compartments, and always brought our own bed linen because it cost us less that way. The train stopped at what felt like every small town along the way. With a border crossing, the journey stretched well past twenty-four hours.

My grandma Lilia looked forward to every summer, as the children had a holiday from school. She skimped on everything just to save up for this trip. Soon, she would see her sister, and they would spend the whole summer together, just like they used to when they were kids.

I had no idea that twenty years later, I would watch that same city burn and feel nothing but satisfaction.

Today I woke up to news that Ukrainian long-range drones had attacked Russian oil refineries in Tuapse for the third time in the past two weeks — the latest in a campaign that has shut down the plant, destroyed the majority of its storage tanks, and left Russia’s only Black Sea refinery incapacitated with no signs of recovering

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already said that Ukraine’s partners asked him to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries during the war in the Middle East. In their view, these strikes could further drive up the prices of oil and other energy resources, which have already reached record highs in recent months. The Ukrainian side, however, believes the impact on prices is limited because Russia still has restricted capacity to export its oil. So it will continue striking Russian oil, as this is one of the most effective ways to put pressure on Moscow.

At first glance, mockery and gloating over destruction deep inside Russia may seem cruel to many. But for me, it is the logical conclusion of a shattered identity — and a story about how war destroys not only homes but the very possibility of remembering anything good about the enemy.

Until my teenage years, I would spend the entire summer in a village called Nebug in Russia. It was just 17 kilometers from Tuapse, where our relatives owned a huge plot of land with several small houses, some of which they rented out to vacationers. From there, we often made trips to Tuapse, wandering between the nearby towns and soaking up every bit of the coast.

My relatives’ property in Nebug was massive. The house was located at the foot of a mountain, and if you headed down the stone steps, you would find yourself right by the river, which led you straight to the Black Sea. My distant cousin and I would come back inside at lunchtime to eat and then head right back to the water. Sunburned, skinny, and exhausted.

The best part was escaping to the wild beach to snorkel and explore the underwater world. When you’re ten, there’s nothing more captivating than that. Or we’d tie bits of sausage to a stick to bait crabs. The kittens living under the bridge got a share of that sausage, too. We had to smuggle it out in our mouths at breakfast so the grandmas wouldn’t scold us.

I still remember when Putin was elected president for the first time in 2000.

My relatives were overjoyed, and my grandma celebrated along with them. I was still too young to understand much, but from their conversations, I gathered that Russia was a “better” country than Ukraine. For the first time in my life, I felt ashamed of where I was from.

I was still holding on to those memories. They were my happy place. But in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the last thread connecting me to my grandmother was gone, and communication with our relatives dwindled to almost nothing.

In 2022, they called and told us not to worry, promising that “Russia will save you very soon.” They were sincerely convinced that we were trapped in the clutches of ‘Ukro-Nazis.’

We’ve never picked up the phone since then.

Over the past two weeks, black smoke has stretched for dozens of kilometers from Tuapse. The city has seen ‘oil rains,’ coating it in black soot and ash. Russian authorities asked residents not to leave their homes and even announced an evacuation on several streets near oil refineries.

Ukraine has struck this facility multiple times. The recent strikes were the most devastating — waves of drones, fires that burned for days, 28 out of 47 storage tanks destroyed or seriously damaged. The port stopped functioning.

The consequences are felt across Russia. Production cuts, refineries shutting down one after another, gasoline prices up over 20 percent. Russia is losing around $100 million every single day, which means $100 million that will not be spent on shells, missiles, or soldiers killing Ukrainians.

The Tuapse refinery is the region’s main oil export hub. When it functioned properly, it processed 240,000 barrels a day, most of it shipped to China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Turkey. With Middle Eastern oil supplies disrupted, major buyers like China and India dramatically increased their imports from Russia, thereby massively boosting Russia’s fossil fuel revenues. In the first quarter of 2026, 90 percent of Russia’s crude exports went to China and India alone.

Russia found its window of opportunity in the chaos of the Hormuz crisis — oil prices up, buyers desperate, and sanctions suddenly weakened. But Ukraine is closing that window.

When I saw the news about Tuapse burning, I felt nothing for the people there. No grief, no worry about my relatives there. Just satisfaction.

I found a term — ‘schadenfreude.’ It’s a German word made up of two parts: Schaden — ‘damage’ and Freude — ‘joy.’ Literally, pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. Researchers at Emory University identify three forms of this emotion. Aggression-based is the satisfaction of seeing someone you actively hate suffer. Rivalry-based is the pleasure of watching a competitor fail. And justice-based, where a person feels that someone’s misfortune is a deserved consequence of their own actions.

What I feel is the third one.

Living in circumstances you can’t control, like war, people often feel a deep sense of powerlessness. But when Ukrainians see Russians also facing the consequences of their country’s actions, it creates a sense of reclaiming at least some control over the situation. It feels well-deserved, like finally, Russians are experiencing at least a fraction of what Ukrainians go through every day.

For twelve years — since the occupation of Crimea — my relatives chose not to notice the war in Ukraine, posting Russiaʼs propaganda on their social media. Not the war in Donbas, not the missile strikes, not the mass graves.

They went to the beach. They drank beer. They posed for photos in occupied Crimea.

The environmental disaster unfolding in Tuapse, with water, soil, and air polluted, seems to go unnoticed by Russian officials. Neither Putin nor other high-ranking officials have reacted to the catastrophe.

The only ones I pity are the animals. They have no part in this war. They are being widely contaminated by fuel oil from the ‘oil rains.’ Water from puddles or troughs, where stray cats and dogs might drink, can be dangerous for animals.

So, do I have the right to feel joy when my family i[n] Russia suffers? I think I do. Not because I hate them for who they are. But because for twelve years they chose not to see.

I can remember the smell of the sea in my childhood, and still know exactly what is on fire: the war machine that kills my people.

Source: Kateryna Antonenko, “Why I am happy when oil prices rise,” The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, 28 April 2026. I subscribe to The Counteroffensive and am happy to depaywall their articles for my purposes here, but I would suggest you subscribe to them too. ||| TRR

In this week’s bulletin: Ukraine defence update/ Ukraine and Palestine/ Russia “Spring” trial/ Try Me For Treason: the film/ Russia fails to silence Crimean Tatars/ Could Belarus join war?/ Kherson torture diary/

News from the territories occupied by Russia:  

Russia banned the voice of the Crimean Tatars — the Mejlis — 10 years ago, but failed to silence it (Crimea Platform, April 26th)

Russian FSB tortured Kherson men and fabricated “terrorism” case against them (Meduza, 24 April)

26-year-old Ukrainian sentenced to 22 years for alleged ‘plan to kill’ a Russian occupation prison chief (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 24th)

Russian occupation court sentences 66-year-old doctor to 14 years for supporting Ukraine through war bonds (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 24th)

Mission Discusses the Situation of Women’s Rights in Temporarily Occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, April 24th)

EU Imposes Sanctions on Individuals Involved in Illegal Excavations in Crimea and the Militarisation of Ukrainian Children (Crimea Platform, April 24th)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Tatar Activist Seyran Murtaza (Crimea Platform, April 24th)

From hell: the secret diary of a Ukrainian imprisoned and tortured by the FSB in Kherson (Mediazona, 23 April)

Russia stages fourth ‘trial’ of 67-year-old Crimean political prisoner to ensure he dies in captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 23rd)

Russia abducts Crimean Tatar trying to see dying aunt and accuses her of ‘treason’ for donations to Ukrainian Army (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 22nd)

Birthday of illegally imprisoned Andrii Kuliievych (Crimea Platform, April 22nd)

Weekly Update on the Situation In Occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, April 21st)

Ukrainian ex-military man sentenced to 18 years in Russian-occupied Crimea on surreal ‘treason’ charges (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, April 21st)

Russia’s war for demographic control (Engelsberg Ideas, April 14th)

News from Ukraine:

How Ukraine solved the hardest problem in defence (Exponential View, April 24th)

Miners’ union new organisation near the front line (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, 8 April)

War-related news from Russia:

Required Reading: Russia’s new mandatory history textbook offers a glimpse of the present (The Insider, April 28th)

Russian losses in the war updated (Mediazona, 24 April)

Toxic smoke and ‘oil’ pours from fire at Russian oil terminal (Meduza, 24 April)

Censorship is reshaping Russia’s publishing industry (The Insider, 24 April)

Putin restores Soviet secret police founder Dzerzhinsky’s name to FSB Academy (Ukrainska Pravda, April 22nd)

The Verdict on Spring: The Vesna Case  (Russian Reader, April 21st)

Security forces raid Russia’s largest publisher and detain its CEO in ‘LGBT propaganda’ case (Novaya Gazeta, April 21st)

Analysis and comment:

Russian ministry spokeswoman in lying attack on Latvian “Nazism” (The Insider, 25 April)

Zelensky claims danger: Might Belarus join Russia in the war? (iStories, 22 April)

Some facts: Ukraine, Russia, Palestine and Israel (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 21 April)

Research of human rights abuses:

Growing up waiting for their fathers: photo exhibition on children of Crimean Tatar political prisoners opens in Berlin  (Zmina, April 20th)

How to prevent torture in places of detention: ZMINA held a specialised training (Zmina, April 21st)

ZMINA joined the presentation of the Crimea Global outcomes and the discussion of plans for 2026  (Zmina, April 17th)

Upcoming events:

Sunday 17 May: premiere of Try Me For Treason, the film. In-person premiere in London: 6.30pm, Upstairs room, the Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8QY (arrive for drinks from 6.0pm). Youtube premiere at 8.0pm. Information at trymefortreason.org.  

==

This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com. To stop the bulletin, reply with the word “STOP” in the subject field. More information at https://ukraine-solidarity.org/. We are also on Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook and Substack, and the bulletin is stored online here.

Source: News from Ukraine Bulletin 193 (27 April 2026)

The Finnish Defence Forces will construct permanent combat positions in the Kymenlaakso region, which borders Russia.

The combat posts will be erected during May exercises of the Finnish Coast Guard, the Finnish Navy’s press office announced on Wednesday, 29 April.

“The fortifications built will remain in place after the exercises. Due to the construction work and the exercises, construction equipment will be present in and around the port of Klamila, checkpoints will be set up, and public access will be restricted,” the statement said.

The exercises will take place across a vast area of the Finnish coastline, including Kotka, Hamina, and Virolahhti.

The “vast” area in question can be traveled by car in 45 minutes. Snapshot of Google Maps by the Russian Reader

The exact locations of the combat positions have not been disclosed.

It is understood that they will be constructed from reinforced concrete modules, and some of the fortifications will consist of underground bunkers.

Finland has been building a fence along its border with Russia and plans to complete the bulk of the work by early autumn this year.

Estonia is fortifying its border with Russia with bunkers. The country’s Ministry of Defense has announced plans to construct 600 concrete structures by the end of 2027. They are modular structures that are buried underground.

In April, the Estonians began digging a twenty-kilometer-long anti-tank trench in Setomaa Parish, which borders the Pskov Region’s Pechora District.

Source: “Finnish Army setting up combat positions near border with Russia,” Delovoi Peterburg, 29 April 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Blood Type

Contemporary listeners of Kino’s hit album Blood Type (1988) would have had no trouble identifying the war alluded to in the title track: the Soviet-Afghan War was still ongoing. The war was one of the causes of the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse in 1991. Unless it is stopped in short order, the Trump regime’s just-as-needless war against U.S. cities will lead to the collapse of the United States. ||||| TRR

Kino, “Blood Type” (1988), English Translation

Source: TK Stuff (YouTube), 26 December 2021

The Soviet–Afghan War took place in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Marking the beginning of the 47-year-long Afghan conflict, it saw the Soviet Union and the Afghan military fight against the rebelling Afghan mujahideen, aided by Pakistan. While they were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of the mujahideen’s support came from Pakistan, the United States (as part of Operation Cyclone), the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, in addition to a large influx of foreign fighters known as the Afghan Arabs. American and British involvement on the side of the mujahideen escalated the Cold War, ending a short period of relaxed Soviet Union–United States relations.

Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside, as most of the country’s cities remained under Soviet control. The conflict resulted in the deaths of one to three million Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Between 6.5 and 11.5% of Afghanistan’s population of 13.5 million people (per the 1979 census) is estimated to have been killed over the course of the Soviet–Afghan War. The decade-long confrontation between the mujahideen and the Soviet and Afghan militaries inflicted grave destruction throughout Afghanistan, and has been cited by scholars as a significant factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is for this reason that the conflict is sometimes referred to as “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam”.

Source: Wikipedia. The emphasis, in the last paragraph, is mine. ||||| TRR

[…]

The pretext for this war, of course, has always been a bogus premise. Yet federal agents treat it with the dogma of settled fact. But I keep wondering: How does the average CBP or ICE agent convince themselves of this? Even now, I can’t help shake the absurdity of anyone—Trump, Gregory Bovino, whomever—hoping to convince a thinking person, even themselves, to believe that places like Minneapolis have ever required an armed occupation. It’s against this genuine perplexity that I keep coming back to how these officers look and what mirrors might reflect back to them when they dress up for war.

“Anybody who’s had a fun evening on Halloween can understand what happens when somebody fully dresses up in paramilitary gear with flash-bang grenades hanging off of them,” said Peter Kraska, a justice studies professor at Eastern Kentucky University. “They’re going to walk out in public and say to themselves, ‘I am different from all these people.’ They become the enforcer. And when they look out and see the other, they see an enemy. The [paramilitary gear] gets them to react differently and think differently than they normally would.”

The role of military-style uniforms in helping the Trump administration create a theater of war where none exists cannot be overstated. It marks a stark evolution from the early days of Trump’s mass deportation plans, when plainclothed agents looked a lot like your best friend’s worst boyfriend—the guy who moved to rural Pennsylvania and discovered the basement levels of gun culture. Now, agents march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.

Consider the camouflage now ubiquitous across the cities ICE occupies. At first, the pattern’s technical science might seem like a natural extension of the Trump administration’s increasingly illegal efforts to shield the identities of the men carrying out its vision of cruelty. But the theory breaks down when you look at the urban landscapes where ICE hunts down immigrants. Simply put, wearing camo in places like Lake Street or Hyde Park defies its central aim. If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection, ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility. They want to show they are soldiers. And they want to do so to make it seem reasonable, if only to themselves, to act like an invading army.

When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the use of military gear among ICE agents, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin responded with her own question: “Why do ICE agents wear tactical gear when they are facing rampant assaults and vehicular attacks? Is that the question you’re asking?” No, not really. But the snark with which McLaughlin replied was enough to grasp that questioning why DHS employs camo when lush woodlands do not exist in the cities its agents invade was irrelevant. They are dressing for the war they want.

What other way was there to interpret the coat of the former envoy of terror, Bovino? The commentariat spent much time deliberating its lineage, whether or not Bovino’s hulking olive garb was in fact true Nazi wear. (It turns out it was not.) But in roaming around Minneapolis in the fashions of Hugo Boss circa 1933, Bovino, who reportedly travels with his own film crew, succeeded in pushing the optics of war where it does not exist.

“What you’re seeing is the functionality of gear for legitimate, militarized purposes versus a type of postmodern, performative imagery,” Kraska said. “It makes them feel a particular way, to tap into those warrior fantasies and masculine drive of, ‘I’m a real man, I’m a real badass.’”

Federal agents stand outside the Whipple Federal Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 8 January 2026. Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty/Mother Jones

The same holds for the men under Bovino. These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood-type patches, despite little evidence that they would ever be needed. After all, they are in Minneapolis, an American city with American hospitals, where doctors provide blood transfusions without the help of uniform instructions, the way a soldier on a remote battlefield might actually need. Furthermore, ICE’s own data strongly undercuts the notion that the job of an ICE officer is even uniquely dangerous work. In the absence of peril, federal agents turn to costume to legitimize their presence.

[…]

Source: Inae Oh, “ICE’s Theater of War,” Mother Jones, 29 January 2026. The emphasis, in the last paragraph, is mine. ||||| TRR

Persons of No Interest

“Pegasus over the whole world.” What’s wrong with this picture? A still from S1E1 of “Ponies”

Despite its equestrian-themed title, misfit-spies motif and occasional reference to “Moscow rules,” Peacock’s new espionage thriller “Ponies” has little in common with Apple TV+‘s “Slow Horses.” Set in Cold War Moscow, “Ponies” falls, intriguingly and occasionally uneasily, somewhere between FX’s “The Americans” and underappreciated female-empowerment comedy film “The Spy Who Dumped Me.”

Which is not surprising since it was created by Susanna Fogel and David Iserson, co-writers of “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” which the former directed and the latter executive produced.

Opening with an attempt to extract a CIA asset from the clutches of the KGB, the series centers on Moscow’s American Embassy circa 1977 (with a soundtrack and brief glimpses of a young George H.W. Bush and, later, Elton John, to prove it).

As the American operatives engage in the obligatory shoot-‘em-up car chase, two women meet in a market. Though they are each less than thrilled with their almost nonexistent lives as wives of envoys to the associate of the U.S. ambassador (i.e. the spies from the opening sequence), their contrasting attitudes and sparky, odd-couple chemistry is immediately, and a bit ham-handedly, established.

Polite, rule-following and Russian-fluent Bea (Emilia Clarke) believes her husband, Chris (Louis Boyer), when he lovingly assures her that this posting will be over in a few years and soon she will be putting her unidentified Wellesley degree to better use. (Note to whoever wrote the Peacock press notes: A Wellesley degree does not make a woman “overeducated.”)

Tough-talking, streetwise Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) is not so deferential or deluded; she pushes Bea to face down an unscrupulous Russian egg merchant with profanity-laden elan. Unsurprisingly, her marriage to Tom (John Macmillan) is more than a little rocky.

Still, when their husbands die, ostensibly in a plane crash, Bea and Twila are grief-stricken — they have lost not only their husbands but their careers as foreign service wives.

Back in the U.S., Bea is bucked up by her Russian, Holocaust-surviving grandmother (the always welcome Harriet Walter), while Twila realizes she fled her hardscrabble Indiana background for good reason.

Determined to find out what really happened to their husbands, the two return to Moscow and confront station head Dane Walter (Adrian Lester), convincing him that their status as wives — the ultimate Persons of No Interest, or “PONI” in spy parlance — offers the perfect cover.

Ignoring the historical fact that both countries have long had female undercover operatives, Dane decides (and convinces then-outgoing CIA head Bush, played by Patrick Fabian) that Russia would never consider two women (including, you know, one fluent in Russian) a threat and, by the middle of the first episode, we’re off.

Reinstalled as secretaries, Bea’s mission is to get close to new asset Ray (Nicholas Podany), Twila’s to … be a secretary. She, of course, decides to become more involved, enlisting the aid of Ivanna (Lili Walters), an equally tough market merchant.

Everything gets immediately more complicated, and dangerous, when Bea catches the eye of Andrei (Artjom Gilz), a murderous KGB leader who may be able to lead the CIA to the surveillance facility that Chris and Tom were trying to find when they died.

Clarke, returning to TV for her biggest role since her career-making turn as Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones,” is the obvious headliner. And in early episodes she does, in fact, carry the series, evoking, with as much realism as the relatively light tone of the writing will allow, a woman whose self-knowledge and self-confidence have eroded after she was sidelined into the role of wife.

Richardson, who many will remember as Portia, long-suffering assistant to Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” is given the opposite task. Twila is, in Hollywood parlance, a “firecracker” — you know, the tough-talking dame who inevitably nurses a wounded heart. While drafting Bea as a spy makes a certain amount of sense, Twila’s skill set, as she is told, is being “fearless.” Her real talent, however, turns out to be standing up for “ordinary women,” including a string of prostitutes, murdered and forgotten.

Since neither woman receives the kind of training even most fictionally drafted civilian spies get in these kinds of stories, Bea and Twila are forced to rely on their wits, and the yin-yang balance of their good girl/tough girl relationship.

This makes for some great banter and fish-out-of-water moments, but it muddies the tone — are they being taken seriously as spies or not? — and requires significant suspension of belief (as does the Moscow setting created by Budapest; everyone keeps talking about how cold it is, but it never seems that cold). Fortunately, compared with their professional counterparts in most espionage dramas, the career agents on both sides appear, at least initially, to be quite limited in their spy craft as well.

An emerging plotline involving sex tapes and blackmail adds all sorts of tensions, as well as historical accuracy, and, as things get rolling, the spies become sharper and the notion of surveillance grows increasingly complicated and tantalizing.

Still, “Ponies” is obviously less interested in the granular ins and outs of gadgets, codes and dead drops than it is in the personal motivations of those involved and the moral morass that is the Cold War. “You came to Moscow to find truth?” an asset scoffs.

The cast is uniformly strong, the performances solid and engaging (Walter’s Russian grandma reappears midway through to show everyone how it’s done). If “Ponies” takes almost half of its eight-episode season to equal the sum of its parts, Fogel, who also co-wrote “Booksmart,” is a master spinner of female friendship, and Clarke and Richardson make it impossible not to instantly recognize, and connect with, Bea and Twila.

Their chemistry, and the absurdity of their situation, propels the story over any early “wait, what?” bumps and confusing tonal shifts into an increasingly propulsive and cohesive spy drama, with plenty of “trust no one” twists and turns, and the kind of period detail that would make “Mad Men” proud. (OK, yes, I am old enough to have tried the shampoo “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific.”)

Fortunately, even as it moves with increasing assurance into “Tinker, Tailor” territory, “Ponies” remains a story of love. Which, as spies know only too well, can exist only when you accept, and share, the real truth about yourself. With a cliff-hanging ending, “Ponies” is betting that Bea and Twila will get another season to find their truths, even in Moscow.

Source: Mary McNamara, “‘Ponies’ elevates a Cold War spy story with emotional depth and female friendship,” Los Angeles Times, 15 January 2026

“The Shot Glass Beer Bar.” And what’s wrong with this picture? Another still from S1E1 of “Ponies”

The ryumochnaya is a purely Soviet phenomenon. It is a special snack bar in a Spartan format. It specialized in strong alcoholic drinks, with sandwiches served as appetizers or snacks. At some point, these “snack bars” turned out to be a form of “cultural recreation” available to most Soviet people.

“Men who usually drank port by their building entrances, like revolutionaries who gathered for a meeting in the basement or under a painted wooden mushroom figure on a children’s playground, could now go to a proper establishment, knock back a shot and intelligently [sic] have a bite of sandwich as a snack. Such a thing was not even dreamt of at that time,”  journalist Leonid Repin wrote in ‘Stories about Moscow & Muscovites throughout time’.

The first USSR shot bars opened in Moscow in 1954. According to Moscow historian Alexander Vaskin, this was a political move by the new head of state, first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev. He had to quickly win the people’s love and authority. 

“The idea to open shot bars in Moscow was not just good — it was fantastic! By creating a network of shot stores, the Party and the government showed great care for the health of the people and their cultural leisure,” Leonid Repin wrote.

They were designed to make lovers of liquor and vodka products more “cultured”, so that they did not drink in public places. But, some places became a refuge for citizens who could not find a place for themselves in the post-war USSR.

“At the corner of Mayakovskaya and Nekrasova streets [in Leningrad – ed.], there was a terrible drinking parlor full of legless invalids. It smelled of damp sheepskin, misery, shouting, fighting… it was a terrible post-war shot bar. There was a feeling that the people were deliberately made drunk there – all those ‘stumps’, ‘crutches’, former officers, soldiers, sergeants. They couldn’t find a way to keep these people warm and busy and this was one of the ways out,” writer Valery Popov speculated.

Cheap and cheerful

They poured vodka, port wine, liqueurs, wine and cognac in shot bars. Each shot was served with a modest snack – a sandwich with sausage, cheese, eggs, herring or sprat. There were four sprats on a sandwich, which was supposed to go with a 100 ml shot.

“There was only one inconvenience: after one drink, I wanted to drink some more and I had already had more than enough sandwiches. In general, it all happened like this: men stood there, knocking over shot after shot while making the ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa’ out of piles of sandwiches,”  recalled Repin. 

There were no tables or waiters in shot bars. Visitors lined up, received simple orders from the barmaid and then went to the bar tables.

Soviet writer and publicist Daniil Granin described a shot bar: “This is a glorious place – the smell of vodka, cigarettes, only men and without the forced drunkenness of bars, without molestation, sticky lingering conversations. Drank a shot, ate a sandwich, quickly and delicately.” 

Simplicity implied low prices, so almost any citizen could afford to go to a shot bar. Prices and sandwich varieties were the same throughout the Soviet Union, recalls Alexander Vaskin. 

“Prices were just kopecks. Everything happened in silence, with a sense of dignity. You drink up and then move on home or to see somebody or to the Philharmonic,” St. Petersburg historian Lev Lurie describes the advantages of a shot bar.

Overheard over a shot of vodka

In general, the visitors of such places were mostly decent.

“A factory worker and a journalist, an engineer and a plumber could all get together in a shot bar. It was not only a men’s club of interest, but also a place that attracted different people. It was possible to conduct sociological surveys and study the structure of society in them,” says Alexander Vaskin. 

And the state did study it. As Lev Lurie notes, in the 1950s, almost half of political cases were initiated because of freethinking at shot bars.

“The ryumochnaya remained a haven for skilled, intelligent workers, who determined the social appearance of the city: serious, hardworking men who go  fishing, watch soccer, take vacations in their factory’s preventorium or at the dacha. These establishments for visitors who had finished their work shift played the same role as pubs did in England,” he writes.

Shot bars today

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, initiated an anti-alcohol campaign. Its active phase lasted for two years, with the country reducing the production and sale of strong alcohol.

The measures also affected the shot bars. 

The next blow to them was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The formation of the restaurant market in the country and the emergence of new formats of catering reduced the shot bars to the role of “nostalgic” establishments, frequented by an aging, but loyal audience.

“Rumochnayas were never rebuilt nor did they disappear anywhere. They remained, like the Rostral Columns, Zenith and ‘White Nights’, without changing their function. <…> The average age of visitors now is close to the retirement age: almost all of these people were brought up, knowing the simple and raw nature of a shot shop from childhood. All those who drank a lot, died, having failed to survive the 1990s. Only tough veterans now remain, who know their limit and are used to ‘cultured’ drinking,” Lev Lurie characterizes the situation in St. Petersburg. 

A newfangled, post-Soviet ryumochnaya. Photo: Alexey Kudenko/Sputnik via Gateway to Russia

He emphasizes that it is in the Northern Capital that the shot bars have retained their popularity: according to Lurie, there are more of them than in Moscow, yet it is difficult for old places to attract a new audience.

“Shot shops don’t lend themselves to stylization. There have been several attempts to create something in this genre for a younger and better-off audience. They’ve all failed. Young people drink much less than their fathers and grandfathers and they are not hooked on vodka. Local hipsters prefer to have a ‘shot’ in a trendy bar somewhere on Dumskaya or Fontanka. But, real connoisseurs of the genre have not rushed to the new establishments – it is expensive. The shot bars are still alive, but they are slowly dying out along with their customers, like thick table magazines or a game of dominoes in the yard,” concludes Lurie, a St. Petersburg resident.

In Moscow, St. Petersburg or any other city in Russia, it is not a problem to find a shot bar: establishments in this format continue to open. Nevertheless, not all owners adhere to the principles of “old-school” shot bars; namely, simple, cheap and democratic. And any Soviet-styled “neryumochnaya” (non-shot bars) will still correspond to modern restaurant realities in terms of its interior and menu. 

In the meantime, the genuine Soviet “ryumochnaya heritage” is hidden under inconspicuous signboards, in basements, visited by “their own” kind. It is cheap and cheerful, not fashionable at all, but authentic. The only difference is they have normal tables and chairs now.

Source: Yulia Khakimova, “The ‘ryumochnaya’: A bar of purely Soviet invention,” Gateway to Russia, 11 August 2023. Some of the claims and “factual” assertions, made above, should be taken with a grain of salt, although the overall picture painted is true to life. ||||| TRR

Wine, Hot Tubs and Skating Rinks: Three Russian(esque) Stories from California

A longstanding San Francisco wine competition accidentally accepted Russian wines, which are illegal to import to the U.S., leading to an outcry from the Bay Area’s pro-Ukrainian community.

The San Francisco International Wine Competition apologized for the mistake and removed the Russian wines before judging took place in early December, president Amanda Blue said, adding that the competition “takes full responsibility for the oversight.”

Since March 2022, the U.S. has banned Russian alcohol along with other products such as caviar, seafood and diamonds as part of its sanctions against the country for its invasion of Ukraine. But 15 Russian wineries went to apparently great lengths to smuggle their wines in for the San Francisco International Wine Competition.

The San Francisco International Wine Competition is run by a group called the Tasting Alliance, which was founded in 1980 and organizes a range of alcohol contests, including the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and the Asia World Spirits Competition. Alcohol makers submit their products to the competition, which convenes a group of expert judges to evaluate them blind and issue awards. (It has no affiliation with the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, sponsored by this newspaper.)

Although awards from competitions like these tend not to be as influential as scores from wine critics, many wineries heavily feature their accolades — especially if they’ve won double gold, the San Francisco International Wine Competition’s highest honor — in their marketing materials.

“They were openly bragging about doing this,” said Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine’s consul general in San Francisco. His team learned about the smuggling operation from private Telegram channels that the consulate monitors. An article in the Russian publication Kommersant further explained the elaborate scheme that Pavel Mayorov, an executive with the Association of Winegrowers and Winemakers of Russia, deployed to sneak the wines into the U.S. He said that entering Russian wineries in international competitions was a priority for his organization in 2026, and that Russian customers like seeing international recognition for their country’s wines.

Pavel told Kommersant that he considered bringing the wine across the Mexican border using a “coyote,” and also weighed using a camper van to cross the Canadian border. Ultimately he used a passport that he possesses from another country (he did not say which one) to transport the wine as personal luggage, flying with the wine-stuffed suitcases through Tblisi and Doha before reaching San Francisco.

He told customs officers that the wines were “a collection assembled at the request of Californian winemakers,” according to Kommersant.

In total, 95 bottles of Russian wine from 15 wineries were submitted to the competition, Blue confirmed. The competition received roughly 2,000 entries.

Although the error was corrected, “we think it’s important for the public to know,” Kushneruk said. He noted the strong support that the Bay Area has shown for Ukraine throughout the war. Ukraine’s own wine industry has suffered significantly during the Russian invasion, he said: Some vineyards have been contaminated with the remnants of explosive materials, and bottles have burned, including at a large wine storage facility near Kiev that he said Russian soldiers destroyed.

Some Bay Area residents were outraged when they learned of the Russian submissions. Russia “has destroyed so much of Ukraine, displaced so many Ukrainians and also destroyed Ukrainian vineyards and wineries,” said Andy Starr, who, with his wife Deb Alter-Starr, runs Napa Valley to Ukraine, a nonprofit that raises funds for aid to Ukraine and its refugees.

“For them to potentially get awards at the same time as they’re destroying other wine regions, that doesn’t sit with me,” Starr continued. “That shouldn’t sit with anyone.”

Kushneruk’s office got in touch with the competition’s organizers once it learned about the submissions. He also contacted Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, whose staff reached out directly to the competition to ensure that the Russian wines would not be included in the judging.

“Sanctions are a critical tool in holding Russia accountable for its brutal war against Ukraine,” Thompson wrote in an email to the Chronicle. “I was proud to join the California wine community to raise these concerns and I commend this decision ensuring that our industry does not provide a stage for Russian businesses while Ukrainians are under attack.”

After “consulting with legal counsel and executive leadership,” Blue said in a statement, the competition “concluded that these wineries are not eligible to participate due to U.S. sanctions imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” The entries were not judged, and the wineries’ entry fees would be refunded, she said.

To Kushneruk’s knowledge, no Ukrainian wineries submitted bottles to the San Francisco International Wine Competition. “But next year we’ll definitely make sure our wine will be sent here,” he said. “Our idea is not only to make sure that the sanctions work, but that Ukrainian wine also has a chance to be evaluated by such a great competition as the San Francisco International Wine Competition.”

Source: Esther Mobley, “How a Russian winery group illegally smuggled its bottles into a longstanding San Francisco wine competition,” San Francisco Chronicle, 19 December 2025

Joseph Goldin Esalens Hot TubDownload

Source: Internet Archive. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up.

As a social activity, ice skating became the thing in the mid-19th century, popularized by Empress Eugene of France. For young women of her era, it became a way to present their slim ankles and effortless grace of their body in movement, not to mention an opportunity to fall into their partners’ arms without causing much scandal. In other words, ice skating provided freedom and romance, as documented in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – in which Levin sees Kitty Scherbatsky, whirling like a fairy and promptly falls in love. But Saint Petersburg has nothing on Monterey. Skating by the Bay’s seasonal ice skating rink is open daily until Jan. 4 for you to practice your body balance or maybe even start a little romance-on-ice. 

Source: Monterey County NOW, 18 December 2025. The emphasis is mine.

Monterey’s tiny and extremely short-lived seasonal skating rink looks like this. Photo: The Russian Reader.
Unsurprisingly, Petersburg has an advantage over Monterey when it comes to size and number of skating rinks. Photo: Tripster

Victory Day 2025

Sergei Podgorkov, Outside the Obukhov Factory (St. Petersburg), 9 May 2025

Source: Sergei Podgorkov (Facebook), 9 May 2025

On Friday, May ninth, Treptow Park was perhaps the most heavily guarded place in Berlin. Hundreds of police officers kept the peace at Germany’s most famous memorial to Soviet soldiers on the day Russia marked the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet tradition. Because Russia has employed symbols of that earlier war in its current war against Ukraine, visitors were banned from displaying or wearing Soviet and Russian flags, military uniforms, and St George’s ribbons at the Berlin memorial this year. An exception was made for veterans and diplomats.

Soviet May ninth traditions and German pacifists

At about half past ten in the morning, a wreath was laid at the monument to the Soviet soldier by Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev. The day before, when Germany remembered the Wehrmacht’s surrender and the end of the war, Nechayev and the Belarusian ambassador were not invited to the memorial event at the Bundestag. In his speech, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier thanked the Allies for liberating his country and recalled the Red Army’s sacrifices, but harshly criticized Russian attempts to justify the war in Ukraine in terms of the fight against the Nazis in the Second World War.

The flood of people in Treptow Park seemed endless: hundreds were there at any one time, and thousands came and went over the course of the day. Many brought scarlet carnations, while some bore wreaths. Russian and German were heard. Most of the visitors were elderly—immigrants from the former USSR living in Germany and Germans. There were also many leftist and ultra-leftist German political activists brandishing placards opposing NATO and calling for “peace with Russia.”

German ultra-leftists rally for “peace with Russia” and Germany’s exit from NATO, 9 May 2025.
Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

Against this backdrop, the scene resembled a mixture of a traditional Russian May ninth celebration and a political protest by German pacifists, many of whom had clearly lived most of their lives in the GDR.

“I was a policeman in the GDR,” said a man in his sixties who held a placard that read “Thank you” in Russian. The policemen asked him to doff his Soviet cap, which sported a red star and a St. George’s ribbon.

“All people want peace, so the politicians should don their own military uniforms and crawl into the trenches,’ the man said.

Soviet wartime songs sounded from loudspeakers and were played live. One man, aged forty-five, climbed atop a mound to get a better view, but a policeman asked him to get off the lawn, explaining, “This is a grave.” The man cursed in Russian but climbed off the mound.

Another man played played “Arise, Great Country” on his clarinet. When he began quietly playing the melody of the Soviet and Russian national anthem, the police literally took him aside, after which he returned to the group of people who had gathered. They were outraged at the restrictions that had been adopted. From time to time, someone chanted “Russia, Russia!” and many other people would join in.

An ex-East German police office (holding a sign that says “Thanks!” in Russian): “All people want peace.”
Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

Bikers in Treptow Park

Your correspondent saw men and a woman in leather jackets who looked like bikers from the Russian motorcycle gang Night Wolves. They were in small groups and were escorted by a large number of police officers. They posed for pictures in front of the wreaths and left. They could have been someone from a local “support group.” The Berlin press had written that only a small group of bikers made the trip to Berlin to visit the Soviet memorials this year. No incidents had been reported as this article went to press.

Treptow Park, 9 May 2025. The crimson and gold banners at the back of the crowd are inscribed with the names of the various “fronts” in the Red Army’s campaign against the Wehrmacht. Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

For the first half of the day, at least, things seemed relatively calm. Your correspondent had the impression that most people had come to Treptow Park not for political reasons, but to commemorate the war. And yet the atmosphere was tense. To the right and left of the monument to the Soviet warrior stood a dozen and a half activists holding placards and the flags of Ukraine and NATO.

Activists with placards and Ukrainian flags at the monument to Soviet soldiers in Treptow Park, 9 May 2025.
Photo: Roman Goncharenko/Deutsche Welle

They said they wanted to draw attention to the Ukrainian Red Army soldiers who had perished in the Second World War, as well as to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“I am here to prevent this event from being turned into a Russian propaganda stunt,” said a woman, aged thirty-five. According to her, insults had been hurled at her and the pro-Ukrainian activists.

“Some people regard our presence here as a provocation,” said the woman. “We are not here to change anyone’s mind, but to make Ukraine visible.”

One of their posters read: “Russia has usurped the memory of May eighth and ninth. But it was not Russia who liberated us from the yoke of National Socialism eighty years ago in Berlin. It was the Red Army, in whose ranks many Ukrainians served.”

The poster tells the story of Ukrainian soldier Fyodor Karpenko, who left his name on the walls of the destroyed Reichstag building in May 1945.

Source: Roman Goncharenko, “May Ninth in Berlin’s Treptow Park: A War of Words,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 9 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Since the Maidan uprising and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainian leaders as Nazis or fascists. Russia also accused the Ukrainian authorities of “genocide” of the population of Donbass. On 24 February 2022, while announcing the full-scale invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine was presented as the primary goal of the war, which is itself portrayed merely as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: a conflict embedded in a cyclical conception of time in which Russia, eternally under threat from a Western enemy, fights for its very survival — on Ukrainian soil.

On the ground, there is no evidence to support Moscow’s accusations: nobody has ever documented a “genocide” against ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. As for the Ukrainian far-right, its political influence remains minimal: in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the main ultra-nationalist parties, running together on a joint list, received just over 2% of the vote, well below the threshold required to enter Parliament. In short, the image of a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv is based on a glaring mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

So why do the Russian authorities repeatedly invoke references to the Second World War — or, in Russian parlance, the “Great Patriotic War” — when speaking about Ukraine? Understanding this memory dynamic is essential to grasp the power of a rhetoric that, despite lacking any factual basis, continues to shape the official Russian worldview.

The Soviet and Russian insistence on using the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer exclusively to the period from 1941 to 1945 erases the twenty-one months that preceded Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR. Between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, and Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies: they engaged in extensive economic cooperation, diplomatic coordination, jointly invaded and partitioned Poland in September 1939, and the Soviet Union proceeded to annex the Baltic countries and wage war against Finland. By reducing the war to the period 1941–1945, the USSR and Russia could deny any responsibility in the outbreak of the Second World War and present itself solely as the victim of Nazi aggression and the primary liberator of Europe.

The Great Patriotic War — and especially the victory in 1945 — became the founding event of Soviet history and the cornerstone of collective memory. Yet this memory, often portrayed as monolithic and universally shared, is anything but uniform. A Ukrainian from the west, who endured two successive occupations between 1939 and 1944, remembers a war very different from that of an eastern Ukrainian, whose experience was shaped primarily by Nazi destruction. The memory of a Russian bears little resemblance to that of a Crimean Tatar, who was deported along with his entire community and denied the right of return for decades. As for Soviet Jews, whose families and communities were annihilated in the Holocaust, they were long forced to remain silent — official narratives left no room for the specificity of their suffering.

The collective experience of the war and the official discourse surrounding it deeply reshaped the Soviet population’s understanding of “fascism” and “antifascism.” Rather than referring to a specific political doctrine of the inter-war period, the term “fascism” had become a catch-all label for the ultimate enemy. Trotsky or the British Conservatives could just as easily be branded as “fascists,” as well as domestic and international opponents after 1945 — including even the Chinese Communists. The word “Nazi” itself was rarely used. In everyday life, calling someone a “fascist” served more as the gravest possible insult rather than as a statement of ideological substance.

Under Vladimir Putin, the cult of the Great Patriotic War has been revived. Following the pro-democracy protests of 2011 and Putin’s bid for a third presidential term in 2012, the regime instituted a deliberate policy of historical narrative construction, aimed at grounding its legitimacy in a vision of the nation as under siege. The glorification of the 1945 victory also allowed the regime to purge collective memory of its specifically socialist elements: by retaining only the narrative of national triumph, the Soviet period could be seamlessly integrated into a continuous national history without any revolutionary rupture. At the same time, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin as a legitimate victor served to validate autocracy. The mass repressions and genocidal policies that claimed millions of lives were reframed as a tragic but necessary step: they had made the USSR a global superpower, capable of defending civilization against the “brown plague.”

The Kremlin has multiplied its legal instruments to enforce this narrative. Since 2020, the Russian Constitution mandates “respect for the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” and prohibits “diminishing the importance of the heroism” of the Soviet people. In April 2021, Putin signed a law increasing penalties for “insults” or “false claims” about the Second World War and its veterans. In December 2019, Putin himself gathered some leaders of post-Soviet states around a pile of archival documents that he said proved historical truths long ignored in the West — selectively quoting them to justify, in retrospect, the USSR’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states. In this way, Putin has weaponized history, which has become inseparable from national interest. To challenge his interpretation is tantamount to treason.

Every year on May 9, Russians march in the Immortal Regiment carrying portraits of relatives who fought between 1941 and 1945. Increasingly, the faces of those who fought — or died — in the war against Ukraine are added to these ranks, as though both wars were part of a single, endless struggle. Past and present warfare are merged, and the victory of 1945 becomes the lens through which all events — past, present, and future — are interpreted in a continuous historical timeline. This symbolic fusion also explains the surreal images of Russian occupation forces who, in recent weeks, have placed propaganda banners in destroyed Ukrainian cities. An uninhabitable Bakhmut was transformed into a stage for celebrating the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” 

The cult of victory is not only a central element of the Putinist imaginary — it functions as an operating system for both domestic governance and external aggression, with all of Russia’s actions on the international stage framed as part of an eternal war against fascism. A telling example of this is the installation of a giant screen on the Estonian border, broadcasting Victory Day celebrations in a loop — an attempt to remind Estonians, as well as Latvians and Lithuanians, that the Soviet victory represents an unassailable moral superiority. In the Russian collective imagination, the word “fascism” has lost all connection with a specific political ideology and now refers only to an abstract, absolute threat: the desire to destroy Russia. It has become synonymous with “enemy” or “Russophobe,” always denoting the Other, never a historically defined movement. This separation between word and meaning allows the regime to simultaneously glorify the antifascist victory and openly promote xenophobic, homophobic, or ultraconservative rhetoric, without any perceived contradiction.

The word “denazification,” used by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, to justify the invasion, initially puzzled many Russians, most of whom were unfamiliar with the term in this context. Shortly afterwards, the state news agency RIA Novosti published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev — “What Russia Should Do with Ukraine” — aimed at clarifying its meaning: “denazification” was described as a “total cleansing,” targeting not only alleged Nazi leaders but also “the popular masses who are passive Nazis,” deemed guilty of having supported the “Nazi government.” According to Sergeytsev, modern Ukraine is able to hide its Nazism behind aspirations for “independence” and “European development.” To destroy this Nazism, he argues, is to “de-Europeanise” Ukraine. In this logic, denazification becomes synonymous with eliminating all Western influence from Ukraine and dismantling the country’s existence as a nation-state and a distinct society. Incubated on official state platforms, this narrative reveals the true scope of “denazification”: a large-scale project aimed at erasing any trace of Ukrainian singularity, a blueprint for the genocide.

The article recently published on the official website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), entitled “Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington,” strikingly illustrates the expansion of the “denazification” discourse far beyond Ukraine. The accompanying image depicts a grotesque hybrid monster: its body is shaped like a black swastika with the EU’s circle of stars in the centre, while its head is a caricature of Ursula von der Leyen. The creature, with its blood-stained claws outstretched, is caught between two bayonets — one American, the other Russian/Soviet. This grotesque image is not merely a provocation: it reflects a narrative deeply entrenched in Russian state propaganda, where “Eurofascism” becomes an operational concept encompassing all European societies.

“Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington.” Screenshot courtesy of Meduza

The 2022 tipping point revealed these discourses for what they truly are: the ideological foundation of a large-scale invasion, long prepared within the informational sphere. Today, part of European society — particularly elements of the pacifist left — is falling into the same trap: underestimating or ignoring the ongoing propaganda dynamic. But the machine is already in motion. The language of fascism is being broadened daily to include new designated enemies, and the ideological war is shifting: it is no longer stopping at Ukraine — it is now targeting all of Europe. In the face of this brutal reconfiguration of the official Russian narrative, complacency or passivity have themselves become forms of strategic blindness.

Source: Hanna Perekhoda, “From Kyiv to Brussels: The Great Patriotic War as Putin’s Propaganda,” in “Victory Day: Three Interventions from the Left,” Posle, 7 May 2025. Ms. Perekhoda is a Ukrainian historian, researcher, and activist.

Russia’s consolidated military registration registry website, Reestrpovestok.rf, is fully operational. On Friday, 9 May 2025, the human rights project Get Lost, which helps Russians avoid conscription into the army, reported that the notifications that it was operating in test mode had disappeared from the website, and the online resource appeared to have been fully launched.

Upon arrival on the website, users can log in to their personal accounts, check summonses, and obtain copies of records. Earlier, the website indicated that it was functioning in beta mode only in three regions—Sakhalin, Ryazan, and the Republic of Mari El. This notification has now disappeared.

“So far no one who has received a summons through this site or faced automatic restrictions has contacted us,” the human rights activists added. The registry’s launch has not been officially announced.

Recipients of summonses to face restrictions if they fail to report to military recruitment center

The law establishing a consolidated registry of persons subject to conscription and introducing electronic summonses was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2023. The text of the document, in particular, states that conscripts who do not report to a military enlistment office within twenty days of receiving a summons may be prohibited from registering as an individual entrepreneur, registering vehicles and real estate, driving a vehicle, and getting a bank loan. In addition, they will not be able to leave Russia until they report to a military enlistment office.

A screenshot of the military enlistment summons website, outlining the penalties imposed on Russians who fail to respond.

The full-fledged launch of the electronic summonses registry was planned for last autumn, but was subsequently postponed.

The registry contains data on all Russian nationals who are already registered and are subject to military registration, as well as those who are not yet registered but are obliged to do so. Lawyers stress that the law and the decree apply to the delivery of any summonses, both for compulsory service and to clarify military registration status, and as part of the wartime mobilization, which Putin has not yet signed a decree to end.

This data will be collected from military enlistment offices. The decree digitizing their databases was signed by Putin back in November 2022. As Defense Ministry officials told the Federation Council, various databases are used for this purpose, including those of the Interior Ministry, the Federal Tax Service, civil registries, and pension funds.

Source: Daniil Sotnikov, “Electronic summonses registry fully operational in Russia,” Deutsche Welle Russian Service, 9 May 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Yevgeny Zhumabekov: Returning the Names

“Yevgeny Zhumabekov, 96 kilograms” is how he introduces himself. Yevgeny is the person who came up with the idea of replacing Last Address plaques that had been torn down with homemade copies and who did this work incognito for almost a year. Now he can identify himself.

Bumaga has detailed the struggle that erupted over the plaques in December 2023. They began to disappear en masse, but copies subsequently appeared in place of the ones that had been torn down. These copies were also removed, after which a plaque appeared on the 14th Line on Vasilyevsky Island bearing the following message: “Plaques [memorializing] people who had been politically repressed in this place were repressed eight times.”

Here you can read Yevgeny’s own account of how the [Stalinist] crackdowns touched his family, what shaped his views, how his wife and children got involved in the fight for historical justice, why the Zhumabekovs had to leave the country, and who continues to install the plaques in their wake.

How the repressions touched Yevgeny’s family

I was born in the Sverdlovsk Region, in the town of Kushva, which has gradually been turning into a village. It’s a depressing place. Two of the industrial enterprises that supported the town have shut down. People have been leaving, while the old people are dying off.

It so happened that my history teacher at school was a good friend of my grandfather’s. He would come to my grandfather’s house, and they would drink hard alcohol together, play chess, and talk a lot. I often visited my grandmother and grandfather and heard these conversations. That’s how I learned that my grandfather came from a family of a person who had been politically repressed.

His parents had come from the Perm Region. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather were completely ordinary peasants. It was forbidden in their house to drink alcohol, [and because they were teetotalers] they harvested large crops. In 1931 or 1932, they were dekulakized and exiled far beyond the Arctic Circle, while their children were sent to orphanages. After a while great-grandmother and great-grandfather managed to escape, but great-grandmother had fallen ill in exile and died soon after returning home, while great-grandfather had to hide out in remote villages all the rest of his life.

I know that my grandfather also had a hard time as a member of a politically repressed family, but he never told me about it, although I tried to find out. It was such a profound trauma for him that he could discuss it only when he got drunk with his sole friend.

How the FSB visited Yevgeny’s workplace

In 2006, I moved to St. Petersburg, where I worked for a time in the car business. I held various positions: sales manager, head of the customer engagement department, manager of a car showroom. Then, before the war, I transferred to a construction company, where I sold real estate.

In 2021, I went to a rally in support of Alexei Navalny after he had returned from Germany. Then there was the protest action with flashlights and others. Not only did I attend these events but I also talked about them with my colleagues at work. I was just sharing my pain, not encouraging them to do anything.

Zhumabekov protesting next to the Bronze Horseman in downtown Petersburg, date unknown.
Photo courtesy of Mr. Zhumabekov (via Bumaga)
Continue reading “Yevgeny Zhumabekov: Returning the Names” →

Gennady Shpalikov: The Soviet Guy Debord

Alexander Ivanov, “Gennady Shpalikov: Being Restless” (in Russian, with no subtitles)

Gennady Shpalikov and Guy Debord were nearly the same age, and their popularity peaked at the same time. But is this the only thing that unites the French philosopher and the Russian writer? Alexander Ivanov, founder of the publishing house Ad Marginem, will show that these two figures were connected not only by the time in which they worked but also by the very spirit of the time, which they saw, felt and were able to convey to others.

Debord’s adage “Love is possible only on the eve of a revolution” could well have been endorsed by Shpalikov.

Debord was the founder of Situationism.

An amazing poet, screenwriter, and director, Shpalikov was the Soviet Guy Debord. Like Debord, Shpalikov had an explicitly spatial mind: he understood space not as a receptacle for bodies but as a way of assembling the soul in the gaps, intervals, and flashes of aimless, unprogrammed, slippery movements around the urban environment. Debord called this mode of movement détournement — a deviation, an illegitimate, reverse appropriation in which the spaces and cultural signs captured by other people’s meanings are reappropriated by turning them inside out semantically or simple shifting their meaning. This was exactly how Shpalikov dealt with the anonymous, official space of the Soviet city: by romanticizing its most banal corners and nooks. Both of these artists conjured the mood of an entire epoch in the late 50s and early 60s.

0:00 Teaser

0:18 Why Gennady Shpalikov is the Russian Guy Debord, and what Soviet existentialism has to do with it

3:32 Guy Debord as the founder of Situationism: “Never work”

6:34 Henri Murger, Guy Debord and Gennady Shpalikov’s characters as bohemians

8:32 Guy Debord’s psychogeography: the drift as a practice for discovering a city’s atmosphere

9:55 Debord’s Paris and Shpalikov’s Moscow

10:50 Alexandria as the capital of memories

12:32 Shpalikov’s poetics and Debord’s Paris: between the real world and the imaginary world

14:07 Sartre’s nothingness as the key to understanding Shpalikov’s poetics

16:20 Sartre’s being-in-itself and being-for-itself, or predetermination and consciousness

18:38 The philosophy of existentialism: existing in a situation as in the fabric of life, which is not defined by personal qualities

20:25 Non-narrative shots from Shpalikov’s films: scenes from I Walk Around Moscow

21:56 Situationist form as a link between Shpalikov’s poetics and the philosophy of existentialism

25:52 Existentialism in cinema: the atmosphere of the movie Breathless

27:08 Shpalikov’s psychogeography for Moscow

30:45 How to reprise Shpalikov’s existential know-how in today’s Moscow

31:45 Détournement: reverse appropriation and distortion of meaning for reclaiming the poetry of urban space

33:28 How Shpalikov rejects Soviet Moscow and appropriates the space of the city in the movie I Walk Around Moscow

37:03 The transformation of Shpalikov’s natural charm into poetry

38:45 The poetic eternity of Nikita Mikhalkov’s character in the movie I Walk Around Moscow

40:42 The dream of an imaginary West as the driver of Soviet existentialism

Source: Peredelkino Dom Tvorchestva (YouTube), 10 October 2024

November 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Gennady Shpalikov, the screenwriter, filmmaker, and poet, one of the symbols of the Thaw era, an extremely popular writer and yet one whose work has been poorly read. Igor Gulin explains how Shpalikov looked for an answer to the question of where good people end up, and how the drama of his characters reprised his own.

Gennady Shpalikov on the set of the film I Am Twenty. Photo: Gorky Film Studio

Screenwriting was an honorable profession in the Soviet Union. Screenwriters were not considered to be craftsmen consigned to the sidelines, but serious writers, and so the screenwriter’s name was listed first in the credits, before the director’s. Nevertheless, not even the best of them were stars. Gennady Shpalikov was an exception. From his very first efforts in cinema, his name was a symbol of the new art of the Thaw — first among his fellow filmmakers, then for a relatively wide swath of the intelligentsia. His death in 1974 was a token of the sixties generation’s demise.

The cinematic Thaw was already in full swing by the time Shpalikov joined the profession. Marlen Khutsiev and Felix Mironer’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), Mikhail Schweitzer’s The Tight Knot (1957), Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier (1959) had been released, but these beautiful pictures still lacked something that would instill a sense of decisive reform and renewal. Shpalikov carried out a tiny revolution in Soviet cinema — not alone, of course, but he was its leader. He contributed an open sense of form, showing that a movie could be something other than an itinerary from point A to point B. It could be a stroll, a stroll with no clear goals, from one impression to another, from one funny and touching incident to another.

Almost all of Shpalikov’s scripts from the 1960s are just such cinematic walkabouts: A Streetcar to Other Cities (1962), directed by his friend Yuli Fait (1962); The Star on the Buckle (1962) and I’m from Childhood (1966), written for Viktor Turov; I Walk Around Moscow (1963) directed by Georgiy Daneliya; The Wharf and Summer Holiday, which were never made into films; A Long Happy Life (1966), of course; and Ilyich’s Gate (1962–1964) to a great extent. This film was more complicated, however. Khutsiev’s lofty idealism counterbalanced Shpalikov’s nimble gifts, and it was their confrontation and, at times, conflict that gave birth to a masterpiece. This later worked with Larisa Shepitko, when she and Shpalikov agonizingly co-wrote You and I (1971). To produce something truly significant, Shpalikov needed a co-writer-slash-director — a collaborator and an opponent, not a faithful executor of his ideas.

The stroll was the genre not only of Shpalikov’s creative work but also of his life. He existed in the same way, charming everyone he met, traipsing from one crowd to another, from one idea to another. He wrote the same way: on telegram blanks and napkins, not bothering with punctuation and spelling, and often not worrying whether the text was coherent, paying mind to its intonation and pacing, rather than to the idea and the logic of form. His scripts and songs, poems and prose experiments often seem sloppy to a sober eye. But their sloppiness never irritates: it comes across as organic, as a hallmark of authenticity.

Dozens of memoirs have been written about Shpalikov. Their authors constantly wonder aloud how it happened that this carefree, lively man took to drinking heavily and eventually committed suicide. They often blame the era. There is some truth to this, but it is a little different than is commonly thought. The Stagnation was not only a time of disillusionment after the upswing of the Thaw. It was also a time of complication. The members of the Sixties generation who continued to create and grow learned to resist better. It required them to mobilize their inner strength, making them more reflective and deeper. Shpalikov was a genius of splendid superficiality, of drifting and gliding. He understood this perfectly well. The drama of his art kicked off long before the frosts of the Brezhnev era set in.

Gennady Shpalikov, 1965. Photo: Georgy Ter-Ovanesov/RIA Novosti

The same disturbing intuition — sometimes well concealed, sometimes voiced as directly as possible — was evident in everything Shpalikov wrote. Surprisingly, this anxiety was hardly detected by his contemporaries, who remained under the hypnosis of the myth they had created themselves. It concerns the central figure of Shpalikov’s entire oeuvre. What to do with the fact that the “good man,” about whom he always wrote, so easily goes to the bad? What to do with the fact that charming frivolity quickly turns into grim irresponsibility, moral freedom into immorality, the freewheeling life of the tumbleweed into pathetic escapism, and nonstop wittiness into nauseating clownishness? Committed to the utmost sincerity, Shpalikov had an absolute ear for falsity and from the very beginning heard the rudiments of falsity in himself. Perhaps that is why he seemed doomed (and suicidal notes appear in his texts very early on). Drunkenness, however, made it easier for him to accept his fate.

This intuition is almost nonexistent in Ilyich’s Gate, in which the romantics and the bastards are delineated from each other. But it is already present (for the time being, as a quite vague hint) in I Walk Around Moscow (the young Nikita Mikhalkov’s ambiguous charisma works perfectly in this regard). It is also palpable in The Wharf, Shpalikov’s first major feature. (Its director, Vladimir Kitaysky, committed suicide while working on the picture, and the movie was never completed.) The script of The Wharf is an enchanting, airy text centered on a rather savage deed. Coming to Moscow for a single evening, the main character, a barge captain, decides to kidnap his son from his mother, wanders around nighttime Moscow with the boy for a long while, and when he falls asleep on a bench, simply runs away to his barge. A good guy’s transformation into a scoundrel is amped up to wholly Dostoevskyean cruelty in Summer Holiday and A Charming Man’s Day (another script that was never produced). This trajectory devolves into total despair in You and I, in which a Thawnik’s romantic flight to the Far North is played out as an egoistic escape from his own worthless life, frittered-away talent, ruined romance, and lost friendship.

Shpalikov never judges his characters: their meannesses and downfalls just happen. There is no reflection at all in his art. There is only movement, and this movement has its own laws. At the beginning of the trajectory there is a good, harmonious man, but once chosen, the freewheeling life gradually whittles him down to the ugly figure of a cynic, a vulgarian, a scoundrel. Shpalikov has a very frank poem about this:

Аh the streets, the only refuge
Not for the homeless, but for those who live in the city.
The streets pester and haunt me,
They are my comrades and my adversaries.

I don’t feel as if I am walking them,
I obey them, I move my feet,
And the streets guide me, they lead me
Through a sequence set once upon a time,

A sequence of cherished back alleys,
A sequence of jaunty notions and good intentions.

The same thing happens in Shpalikov’s only directorial work. A Long Happy Life is usually remembered as a light, lyrical picture, but actually it is chockablock with contempt for oneself and one’s kind. It is a movie about how a typical man of the 1960s, a charming unshaven geologist, runs off into nowhere and away from a beautiful woman, and at the same time from any future, from that selfsame long happy life, simply because he cannot help but run. A lighter note is generated by the finale: the famous five-minute scene of a barge on a river is Shpalikov’s homage to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his favorite film.

This is Shpalikov’s main gimmick. As intoxication relieves a hangover, so the shame of escape is relieved by yet another escape. And if the body can no longer escape, there remain flights of fantasy. Distracted from the protagonist’s mediocre fate, the gaze follows the barge and loses itself in this marvelous tracking shot. All of Shpalikov’s best poems are about the same thing: not about the joy of life, but about the desire to escape from it to a place that is obviously impossible, somewhere “where mother is young and father is alive.” To leave, but not by sinking into drunkenness, illness, and rows, but to disappear gently, to be weathered away from the world. “My head is vacant, / Like a deserted place. / I’m flying off somewhere, / Like a tree from a leaf.”

Source: Igor Gulin, “Elusive simplicity: how Gennady Shpalikov found no place for himself in the Stagnation,” Kommersant Weekend, 1 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

I Walk Around Moscow (1964). In Russian, with English subtitles

Source: Mosfilm (YouTube)