1. Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa's digital sweatshops

Nairobi-based photographer Natalia Jidovanu shadowed social media content moderators who are fighting back against Big Tech companies like Meta Kenyan courts. Rulings in these cases could jeopardize the outsourcing model upon which tech giants have built their global empire.

2. Russian performance art in the time of Putin

What does exile mean for artists who have fled Russia? Reporter Nadia Beard met a new generation of Russian painters, performers and musicians now working outside the country, and learned about how their work is different from previous generations of exiled Russian artists. The story features photography from Elene Shengelia in Tbilisi and Lorenzo Meloni of Magnum Photos in Paris.

3. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Frankie Mills captured the vast, mountainous landscape of the Swedish Arctic, where Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported on the clash of ideologies and motivations underlying Europe’s bid to transition to green energy.

4. Watching the streets of Medellín

"I’ve never been to a place where I felt so constantly under observation," said Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael after he travelled to Medellín to investigate the city’s complex ecosystem of police and drug trade surveillance. “I watched them all watching each other, and became a part of this circle of surveillance.”

5. The Albanian town that TikTok emptied

Louiza Vradi’s photos transported readers to Kukes, Albania, a city that has lost about half of its population since the fall of communism in 1991. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs. Together with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell, Vradi examined the driving forces behind recent waves of migration from Albania to western Europe.

6. In Africa’s first ‘safe city,’ surveillance reigns

Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa took readers to downtown Nairobi, where 2,000 Chinese-made Huawei surveillance cameras send real-time data to police. The cameras are there to prevent terrorism and crime, but is Nairobi’s surveillance net actually making people safer? As writer and poet Njeri Wangari found, so far the answer is no. 

7. India and China draw a line in the snow

What is it like to live on the front lines of a decades-old border dispute between China and India, as the two countries vie for the spotlight on the geopolitical stage? Working alongside Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta, photographer Ishan Tankha captured cultural and economic contrasts across India’s jagged Himalayan borderlands.

8. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. But Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language. Romanian photographer Andreea Campeanu accompanied reporter Amanda Coakley to western Ukraine where Romanian ethnic communities say their language and culture are suffering collateral damage in wartime.

9. How surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras

Photographer Seth Berry gave us a window into the world of Hery Flores, one of an untold number of Hondurans caught up in the state’s complex surveillance web. Originally deployed as a weapon in the region’s ongoing drug war, police surveillance technology has been turned against opposition figures like Flores, all while the drug trade continues to thrive. The story by Anna-Catherine Brigida was shortlisted for the 2023 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category of contribution to civil rights.

10. How 19th-century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy

Rachel Woolf brought readers to southern Colorado’s historic mining heartland where the U.S. is hoping it can find the silver reserves that will be essential for the green transition. The resurgence of U.S. mining is happening in the shadows of decaying infrastructure of the past.

The post Year in review: From Nairobi to Medellín, our best photography appeared first on Coda Story.

Over the past year, Coda journalists have reported from over 13 countries on how history, identity and memory are being instrumentalized by politicians, tech companies and even angry parents. The resulting stories explored the ways in which the past is being used to serve present-day political agendas, influencing voters and drumming up popularity.

No doubt these trends will continue in 2024, a year that is slated to see major elections held in India, Russia and the U.S. Narratives around historic victimhood and belonging are already at the center of national campaigns and will be topics that our reporting team continues to watch closely.

But before we leave this year behind, take a look at our top stories from our history coverage in 2023:

1. Over the past year, reporter Erica Hellerstain closely followed educators in the U.S. as they found themselves caught up in the ongoing clash of ideologies over history, racism and LGBTQ rights. In Arizona, an “empower hotline” for parents to report “inappropriate” teaching dialed up pressure on already overstretched public school teachers. In Missouri, librarians feared prosecution under a new law criminalizing some books in school library circulation. New restrictions on college education in Florida copy-catted bans already in place in Hungary and Poland.

2. To try and justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials have turned to high school textbooks, revising the curriculum to teach students about why it was necessary to wage war on the neighboring country. Starting this fall, the government cut its selection of approved textbooks down to a single, rewritten volume for 11th graders, with a similar narrowing of state history curriculum into a unified textbook planned for next year across lower grades. The new textbooks quote President Vladimir Putin’s claim about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine and argue that the country should not exist. This level of direct political influence in Russian education hasn’t been seen since Russia was part of the Soviet Union.

3. In Australia, a decades-long, state-sponsored campaign is reinventing the history of the country's involvement in the First World War. As mulitculturalism has grown and calls to reckon with Australia's history of colonial violence have increased, the government has put large sums of money towards WWI memorialization programs as a way to assert a militarized vision of a strong Australia proud of its ties to imperial Britain.

4. In Turkey, guardians of historical memory clashed with Disney over a TV series about the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In August, officials opened an investigation into the streaming company for pulling out of the much-hyped series planned for the 100th anniversary of the founding of Turkey. The controversy underscored the challenges facing U.S. giants such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney when tapping into the global entertainment market.

5. The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. However, Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language, and some minority groups in the western part of the country have become collateral damage. Members of Ukraine’s historical Romanian-speaking community feel that despite their support of the Ukrainian state in its war against Russia, they are being edged out of public life. As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind?

6. Germany’s ban on most protests in support of Palestinians has sparked a national crisis, raising questions about what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history. The crackdown has fueled a passionate discussion about how Germany’s culture of taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust is coming into conflict with basic democratic rights of assembly and expression.

The post Year in review: How memory wars have shaped global headlines appeared first on Coda Story.

“Everything is now going underground,” said Alexander Belik, who works for the LGBTQ advocacy group Sphere. “It’s not clear whether this will affect all members of the LGBT community, whether your sexual orientation simply counts as membership in this ‘extremist organization.’” 

The November 30 ruling means that “the international LGBT public movement” will be added to a national list of banned groups, including the Islamic State group, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, since October 2022, Facebook owner Meta. Supporting an extremist group can be punished by up to 10 years in jail, but it’s unclear how the ruling might be enforced, since the LGBTQ movement isn’t a formal, recognized group. Belik, who uses they/them pronouns, believes that the ambiguity of the law, and its absurdity, is the end goal.

“The point here is to create total uncertainty in the LGBT community and to intimidate everyone,” they said. “It will definitely be used against activists, people who publicly say they defend the rights of the LGBT community. But, it could just as likely be used against any LGBT person living in Russia or their allies.”

When first filing the case to court earlier last month, the Ministry of Justice said that the international movement exhibited “various signs and manifestations of an extremist orientation, including incitement of social and religious hatred.”

Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian government has increasingly targeted LGBTQ communities for political ends. In 2012, the government stoked a moral panic to try to shift attention away from corruption scandals that had driven a wave of huge protests. When the protest group Pussy Riot staged its infamous Punk Prayer protest in a Moscow cathedral, the government was able to capitalize on a backlash from middle-class Russians and portray itself as a defender of religious and traditional values. The following year, the Russian Duma passed a law outlawing the promotion of “gay propaganda” to minors.

Lawmakers have focused on framing anti-LGBTQ measures as a way to protect the country against a “Western export” that poses a major threat to Russia’s falling birth rate. Since 2014, discussion of Russia’s war and occupation of Ukraine has often been intertwined with the anti-LGBTQ campaign. On state television, broadcasters have railed against the threat of “Gayropa” encroaching on the Russian world as Ukraine pushes for European integration. After the full-scale invasion began last year, the Russian government imposed a series of increasingly severe anti-LGBTQ measures. This summer, Russia banned all gender-affirming care for transgender people and in November 2022 prohibited any activities discussing or promoting LGBTQ relationships.

Last September, Putin carved out time from the televised ceremony where he annexed four Ukrainian territories to speak out against transgenderism and gay parenting. "Do we really want, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of 'mom' and 'dad', to have 'parent No. 1', 'parent No. 2', 'No. 3'? Have they gone completely insane?” Putin said. “We have a different future, our own future."

That future has found favor abroad in countries such as India, Uganda and Turkey, where prominent anti-LGBTQ figures have been invited to speak at “family values” protests. Russia’s gay propaganda law has inspired lawmakers in Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania and elsewhere to propose similar measures.

At Coda, we’ve tracked the weaponization of homophobia in Russia since our publication launched with a pilot reporting project on LGBTQ disinformation campaigns across Eastern Europe. Here is a rundown of how we’ve been tracking this story:

1. The LGBTQ rights debate is testing Ukraine’s commitment to Europe. Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has taken steps towards recognizing and protecting its LGBTQ population. Especially with the growing visibility of LGBTQ soldiers, legislative protections for LGBTQ people in Ukraine are now being cast as a cultural rebuke of Putin’s — and by extension, Russia’s — worldview. 

2. Russia’s new scapegoats. With the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, we trace the roots of the anti-gay movement and shows how President Vladimir Putin uses this agenda to quash political dissent, exert influence on neighboring nations and bash the West.

3. On the run in LA from Russia’s anti-LGBTQ campaign. While Russian authorities only charged a handful of people with the controversial LGBTQ propaganda law, the legislation proved to be a powerful censorship tool for removing online discussion of LGBTQ issues from Google and other platforms

4. Russian investigators single out gay fathers in latest crackdown on LGBTQ rights. Our reporter looks at how child trafficking laws have been weaponized to jail gay men who fathered children with surrogate mothers.

The post In Russia, the anti-LGBTQ campaign marches on appeared first on Coda Story.

Yet, nearly two years later, Memorial has not closed down. Its staff, led by mostly aging, bookish historians, have not just forestalled their demise but steered the organization to the razor’s edge of Russian political dissent.

It has no headquarters and no legal status in Russia. Its bank accounts are frozen and its programming has been pushed to the Moscow sidewalks. Yet, at a time when nearly all independent Russian media are operating in exile and Kremlin critics have been jailed, silenced or left the country, Memorial, in many ways, is roaring: publishing books, monitoring the ongoing trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, offering free consulting to the relatives of people who disappeared during Soviet times on how to search archives for information, advocating for the growing list of political prisoners in Russia, and expanding its offices outside the country.

None of this is happening in the shadows. Memorial organizes regular “Topography of Terror” tours in Moscow, with one route going right up to the doorstep of Butyrka, one of Russia’s most notorious prisons during the Soviet era. The excursion ends with participants sitting down to write letters to the new generation of Russians imprisoned on politically motivated charges and awaiting trial inside the 250-year-old facility. Tickets sell out almost immediately.

“Our work could not stop for a single day,” historian and Memorial founding member Irina Scherbakova said.

Its annual “Returning the Names,” when people line up to read aloud the people killed by the Soviet regime, took place online on October 29 in cities across the world. Set up by the group in 2007, the event used to be held in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, lasting twelve emotional hours but for the last few years, Moscow authorities have denied the group a permit.

While Memorial has worked under Kremlin intimidation for years, the war in Ukraine created an entirely new reality for an organization pursuing a mission to investigate Soviet-era crimes and expose present-day political abuses. In one of the most horrific recent cases highlighted by Memorial, Russian poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was raped with a dumbbell by law enforcement officers in September 2022 during a raid on his home after he posted a video online reciting an anti-war poem.

Memorial has withstood dismantling attempts thanks to a survival strategy put in place by its founders. Memorial is not a single organization, as its members like to remind the public, but a movement. Since its founding in 1987, the group has grown into a sprawling, decentralized network of organizations and individuals resilient against the Kremlin’s targeting.

There are more than 200 Memorial members and volunteers working globally, with just under a hundred left in Russia. With each local branch registered independently, it would take 25 separate court cases to entirely shut down the network inside the country. There are satellite offices in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. Earlier this year, two shuttered Russia-based Memorial organizations re-registered outside the country under new names in Switzerland and France.

“From the very beginning we knew we didn’t want a hierarchy,” explained Scherbakova. “We always knew that this was a grassroots story. If there had been a hierarchy, Russia would have destroyed us a long time ago.”

Memorial’s affiliate offices abroad have long been largely made up of local historians studying the Soviet period, but now many branches are absorbing staff that fled Russia.

The Prague office has become in the past 18 months a new headquarters of sorts. Today, the staff is a mix of Czechs and Russians. At the age of 70, the director of Memorial’s library, Boris Belenkin, fled Moscow for Prague last year. Belenkin calls the space a new “place for life” where Memorial workers can once again hold seminars, organize research fellowships and host visiting scholars.

From the Prague office, Memorial is also re-launching one of its most beloved programs: an essay-writing contest in which students in Russia were asked to delve into 20th century history. The contest had been run since 1999 in participating schools across 12 time zones before being called off in 2021. Finalists were flown out to Moscow to present their work at Memorial headquarters. For many students from far-flung regions, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see their country’s capital. Over the years, schools dropped the program, caving to pressure from local officials and concerned, “patriotic-minded” parents.

Within Russia, pressure on staff continues to escalate. The director of Memorial’s branch in the Siberian city of Perm was arrested in May for “hooliganism” and has been in pre-trial detention ever since. Offices in Yekaterinburg and other cities face routine harassment and arbitrary fines from local authorities, pushing some to the verge of closing. A prominent Memorial historian, Yuri Dmitriev, is currently serving a 15-year sentence at a prison in what Memorial says is a politically motivated case. Both men are currently being held in facilities that were once part of the Soviet Gulag camp system.

In Moscow, nine Memorial members including Alexandra Polivanova, a programming director who leads the Butyrka prison tour, have become the targets of an ongoing criminal investigation. In May, authorities charged Memorial board member Oleg Orlov with “discrediting” the Russian military, a new crime in Russia that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. In court in September, Orlov was asked to defend his denouncement of the war in Ukraine as well as his career documenting human rights abuses for Memorial in Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine. On October 11, the court found Orlov guilty and fined him. The government prosecutor requested that Orlov undergo a mental health evaluation, citing his "heightened sense of justice, lack of self-preservation instincts, and posturing before citizens."

Memorial believes the criminal cases against Moscow staff are motivated by their ongoing advocacy for political prisoners in Russia. Memorial Center, which is the organization’s human rights branch, runs a database of people imprisoned under politically motivated charges and is often cited by international organizations. It also publishes regular updates on the prisoners and their cases, features interviews with their family members and organizes letter writing campaigns. Today, there are 609 people on Memorial’s list — a number that has tripled in the past five years.

Scherbakova, Memorial’s director and a historian of the Soviet Union, says this number is higher than during the late stages of the Soviet Union.

“In my opinion, today’s situation is much scarier and crueler,” said Scherbakova.

Memorial has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs since it condemned Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and other territories in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The government’s most powerful legal tool is the Foreign Agents Act, legislation designed to pressure groups and individuals who receive funding from outside the country. Passed in 2012 and expanded in 2020, the law imposes up to five years of imprisonment for failing to comply with an exhaustive system of tedious financial reporting and bureaucracy.

Russian authorities have also used the foreign agents law to target  individuals. In mid-October, Russian police detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist at Radio Free Europe with dual Russian-American citizenship, for failing to register as a foreign agent when she traveled to Russia for a family emergency. If convicted, Kurmasheva faces up to five years in prison.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have since adopted similar legislation to quash dissent at home.

“Today, being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, a Trotskiest, all of that has been folded into the term ‘foreign agent,’” said Belenkin, the Memorial library director and a founding member of Memorial who was added to the Kremlin's foreign agents list in 2022.

In 2021, the government brought Memorial before the Supreme Court, alleging that it had violated the law by failing to label a handful of social media posts with boilerplate text disclosing that Memorial is classed as a foreign agent. But by the closing argument, prosecutors dropped any pretense of holding Memorial accountable for a few unlabeled social media posts. Instead, the general prosecutor, Alexei Zhafyarov, took to the floor to dramatically rail against the group.

“Memorial speculates on the topic of political repression, distorts historical memory, including about World War II, and creates a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state,” said Zhafyarov, mocking Memorial for “claiming to be the conscience of the nation.”

“Why, instead of being proud of our country, are we being told we must repent for our past?” Zhafyarov asked the courtroom.

Russia’s Supreme Court is led by Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, who began his career sending anti-Soviet dissidents to Gulag camps in the 1980s and managed to stay in power following the collapse of the USSR — one of many Soviet officials who survived the transition to democracy.

Grigory Vaypan, part of Memorial’s defense team, said that ultimately this was an opportunity to expose the government’s real motivation for bringing the group to court and state for the historical record what Memorial’s closing was really about. “Zhafyarov rose, and instead of telling us about those posts on Twitter and Instagram, he said, ‘We should close Memorial because Memorial is pursuing a narrative that is not in the interest of the state,’” said Vaypan. “They needed to close Memorial because Memorial messed with the government’s narrative that ‘we, the Russian state, the state that won the Second World War, are unaccountable to the world.’”

“Re-reading the closing argument now makes much more sense to me than it did back then,” said Vaypan. “What the prosecutor said was a prologue to the war.”

Memorial lost an appeal in the Supreme Court in March 2022 as Russian troops marched to Kyiv. The war has left members asking themselves the same question that is echoing across Russian civil society: How did things go so wrong?

At Memorial, an initiative dedicated to preventing the return of totalitarianism to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has led to a difficult, at times contentious, internal re-examination of its own legacy.

“We’re trying to understand what wasn’t right in our work over the past 35 years: How we didn’t build up cooperation with Russian society, how we failed to see different, more complex forms of discrimination and oppression,” Polivanova, the programming director, said. “We had blind spots in our work to the point where, in a sense, we all allowed this terrible war to happen.”

There was a mixed global reaction last year when the Nobel committee announced that the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared among Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate from Belarus. The director of the Ukrainian organization Oleksandra Matviichuk praised Memorial’s work but refused to be interviewed alongside Yan Raczynski, who accepted the award for Memorial in Oslo. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany called the shared recognition “truly devastating” in the context of the ongoing war, launched by Russia in part from Belarusian territory.

Not everyone at Memorial thinks the group should be judged through the lens of Russia’s war and hard turn towards authoritarianism.

“Without question, a medium-sized organization, with limited resources, and even with our network, could not change anything,” said Belenkin, director of Memorial’s library, in regards to the war. “Memorial is not relevant here.”

But Polivanova, who operates the tours and is a generation younger than much of Memorial’s leadership, believes that Memorial must re-examine its own legacy in connection to the war. The ongoing discussion among Memorial members on this topic has been “very difficult,” she said. She has reworked her tour lineup, with one of the new Moscow excursions dedicated to the Ukrainian human rights activist Petro Grigorenko.

Born in a small village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region in what was then the Russian empire, Grigorenko rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become a World War II hero and a major general. At the height of his career in 1968, Grigorenko broke with the Soviet Army by speaking out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. Punishment came swiftly: He was arrested in Moscow, diagnosed as criminally insane and underwent punitive psychiatric treatment, a practice that has re-emerged under President Vladimir Putin. Somehow, Grigorenko managed to continue speaking out for the cause of long-persecuted Crimean Tatars, dared to criticize the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, and founded the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups before being exiled.

“In the past, we didn’t consider this story to be so important,” Polivanova said. “This historical perspective was not stressed at Memorial.”

The updated tour lineup that includes Grigorenko’s life in Moscow has had a surge in popularity since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past year and a half, Polivanova has had to triple the number of weekly walking tours and still isn’t able to keep up with demand. Registration fills up almost immediately after dates are announced.

The tours are one of the rare public forums available to Russians to discuss the war. “People are really engaging,” Polivanova said. In September 2022, she added readings of Ukrainian poetry written by authors killed during Stalin’s purges to a tour of a mass grave site in Russia’s northeast. On many excursions, participants start to take over, she said, drawing direct comparisons between the cruelty of Soviet repression and news of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and other frontlines in Ukraine.

The tours have also attracted a different kind of participant. “Patriotic” activists crashed the organized outings for weeks at a time last fall, threatening those in attendance and publicly denouncing members of Memorial as “traitors.” Since then, Memorial started to require that participants provide links to their social media accounts when registering for a tour.

As people line up for Memorial’s tours, the government’s attempts to reverse many of Memorial’s decades-long efforts to seek accountability for crimes committed under communism remain relentless.

In September, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service debuted in front of their offices a looming statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the infamous Soviet political police apparatus. The statue was almost an exact copy of a Dzerzhinsky monument that stood for decades in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency. In 1991, Russians who had gathered to protest for an end to totalitarian Soviet rule and a transition to democracy tore it down. Today, the spymaster, ally of Lenin and Stalin, architect of the Red Terror, stands again in Moscow.

The post Surviving Russia’s control appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s the kind of direct political interference in education not seen in Russia since it was part of the Soviet Union. For nearly 30 years, teachers have been able to choose from a selection of approved textbooks to use in their classrooms. This year, Russian authorities have issued a single Russian history textbook nationwide for the 11th grade, and they plan to do the same across lower grades next year.

The revised textbook emphasizes continuity between the fight against Nazism in World War II and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The textbook quotes Vladimir Putin speaking about the “revival of Nazism” in Ukraine, and arguing that the country should not exist.

With an estimated number of Russian casualties exceeding 50,000, the Kremlin has continued to characterize the ongoing war as existential for Russia. The high school lesson plans — authored by Kremlin insiders — provide a window into the Kremlin’s thinking on the war and suggest that the Kremlin believes its own propaganda.

“On one hand history is being used as propaganda,” said Alexey Makarov, a member of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. “On the other, the people using history as propaganda — the Russian authorities — actually believe in what they’re saying.”

The newest chapters for students in the 11th grade, which is the final year of high school in Russia, include a section dedicated to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Ukraine is referred to as a “ultranationalist state,” the U.S. is said to be “prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian standing,” and a positive spin is put on global sanctions against Russia, calling them an “opportunity” for investment. The book’s front cover is dominated by a full-page photo of the bridge built by Russia in 2018 connecting annexed Crimea to mainland Russia.

“Ukraine, history, politics — they are inseparable,” said Jade McGlynn, the author of “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Russia.” “It’s a memory war becoming a real war.”

The lead author of the textbooks is Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has represented Moscow in negotiations with Kyiv. Over the years, Medinsky has held various roles in government and served as a close aide to Putin, advising on history and the humanities. His career started in advertising, said McGlynn. During the 1990s, he co-founded a Moscow advertising firm best known for creating ads for MMM, a Russian company that ran one of the world’s largest-ever Ponzi schemes.

“That’s where he honed his skills in terms of selling narratives to people, playing on their hopes, their needs and sometimes their desperation,” said McGlynn. “He is ultimately an advertiser who aims to manipulate people.”

In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities already began distributing pamphlets to high school teachers across the country with instructions on how to talk about the invasion of Ukraine with students. The pamphlets followed a question-and-answer format:

Q: Why is the war happening?

A: NATO enlargement and its approach to Russia’s borders is a threat to all of us. There are the sad cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria. What’s more, Ukraine could create nuclear weapons. Considering the current regime in that country, it’s a direct threat to Russia.

Alexey Makarov, from Memorial, is a social studies teacher in Moscow and said he was devastated to read through the pages of the new textbook, soon to be taught at his high school.

“This is the same rhetoric that was used in the 1930s ahead of the invasion of Poland, exactly the same,” said Makarov, drawing a comparison between the textbook’s justification for Russian forces occupying Ukraine and the Soviet Union’s stated rationale for invading Poland at the start of World War II.

There has been a progression in the government’s campaign to rewrite history, starting with the reframing of Russian imperial expansion and the rehabilitation of figures like Ivan the Terrible. While history has long been an important focus for Putin, patriotic education became a top government priority in 2012, which the government declared to be the “year of history.”

“We know how the distortion of national, historical and moral consciousness leads to catastrophe for entire governments. It weakens them, leading to collapse, to the loss of sovereignty and fratricidal war,” Putin said in a meeting in 2012 on the importance of patriotic education in Russian schools.

In the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin tightened its grip on institutions involved in documenting the country’s past. As Russian troops marched on Kyiv, the Russian Supreme Court struck down an appeal from Memorial to stay open. For three decades the nonprofit, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been documenting crimes committed under Soviet rule.

Russia is far from the only country where the government has intervened to revise high school history textbooks. The Arab Spring has been distorted in Egyptian textbooks, Indian officials have excised mentions of the 2002 Gujarat riots from national textbooks, and new curriculum standards in Hungary assign the writing of a war criminal and Nazi sympathizer to students. Most recently, officials in the U.S. state of Florida approved classroom material that instructs students that “climate activists are like Nazis.”

The new Russian history textbooks will most likely cross the border into occupied Ukrainian territory. Last August, reports surfaced of Ukrainian teachers being pressured to switch over to a Russia-approved curriculum. Scores of teachers fled, some went into hiding, and others were sent to Crimea or Russia to “re-train” under new teaching standards. In occupied cities like Melitopol, Russian authorities ceremoniously delivered tens of thousands of Russian textbooks. Parents who tried to keep their children at home were threatened with having their kids taken away.

The post The Kremlin revises a textbook to dictate future understanding of Russian history appeared first on Coda Story.

Only if you’re lucky, will you catch a glimpse of him. He swoops in and then disappears, now giving his blessing to newlyweds at a sunrise shaman wedding, next whispering in the ear of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s loyal allies. Moments later, he reappears on horseback, trotting by in a procession of horsemen in medieval garb — Hungarian flag in hand, his long black hair tied in a low ponytail, — to greet high profile guests from Turkey, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

Andras Biro is the master of ceremonies for a biennial gathering, in Hungary, of 27 Turkic-speaking tribes called Kurultaj. It is where the right-wing government is promoting a policy of redefining itself as part of the Eastern world. Wrapped in a heavily embroidered silk robe, Biro is the leading ideologue of Hungary’s spin on ethno-nationalism: it asserts that the nation’s true roots are not in a Christian Europe but with Turkey and among the Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia, the descendants of the Huns.

Once banned under communism and pushed to the margins of the far right, this alternative history — known as Turanism — is being revived by the Hungarian government at the highest levels. Some of the central claims of Turanism have already made their way into Hungary’s national school curriculum, presenting an alternative Hungarian origin story. For Orban, Turanism has provided a convenient ideological basis for turning away from the EU and promoting closer ties with authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and with Turkey. In November, he said that “Hungarians are the only Eastern people left in Europe.”

The Kurultaj gathering is a mecca for this anti-establishment movement. The festival is financed by the government and designed for a family-friendly weekend. Kurultaj draws pilgrims from across the political spectrum to a scorching semi-desert in Hungary’s south. Right-wing historians, LARPers, horse-lovers, uniformed members of the banned Hungarian Guard, eco-activists, committed neo-Nazis, yogis and families from the suburbs mill around a vast, dusty field with hundreds of delegates from Central Asia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

The centerpiece is an irrigated, verdant pitch where skilled riders re-enact Byzantine battles and compete in ethnosport. An actor playing Attila the Hun makes regular dashes across the field on horseback to cheers from the crowd in between speeches from a range of special guests — among them youngest son of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with the former prime minister of Turkey, speaker of Hungary’s parliament Laszlo Kover and the president of the Organization of Turkic States. The sounds from the field are a constant echo across the festival grounds: heavy metal and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, the boom of speakers’ voices intoning the moral corruption of the West and its “woke” culture and the ever-present percussion of horse hooves.

Largely dismissed by Hungary’s liberal elite, Turanism proponents — like Biro — have reinvigorated an ideology that was popular nearly 100 years ago. The idea first appeared in Hungary in the late 19th century, during a time of political collapse, when a circle of Budapest intellectuals began to question Hungary’s fixation with catching up with the West.

Historian Balazs Ablonczy traces the emergence of the word “Turan” in Hungarian to the 1800s, to describe the territory that is divided between modern-day Iran and Central Asian states. Turanism reemerged during the 2008 economic crisis from the margins of Hungary’s ultra-right wing. Over the last decade, Turanism has evolved into an amalgam of ideas bringing together disparate and at times contradictory beliefs. 

In their weaponization of nostalgia, Orban and his political party Fidesz have shown just how well they understand what is often lost on Hungary’s, and Europe’s, left wing: the power of a good story.

“The left wing has left history to Fidesz,” said Adam Kolozsi, a Budapest-based journalist who has been attending Kurultaj for years. Since the first gathering in 2008, event organizers — who refer to themselves as “tradition keepers” — have been fusing together right-wing politics with history, entertainment and horses. 

Turanic messaging expresses a yearning for a lost national greatness and a connection to a much larger role in the world, which a pan-Turkic identity offers. “Even if we’re small at the moment, we are a great nation,” one festival attendee, Mate Herzsenath, told me while drinking a beer. Herzsenath lives in Germany, where he says he can make more money, and was one of many Hungarians I met living outside of the country who returned home for Kurultaj.

“The entire 19th century was all about westernizing Hungary — inventing Hungarians as civilized, liberal, western, constitutional individuals,” said Gergely Romsics, a senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Many proponents of Turanism view those efforts as criminally wrongheaded and consider the Hungarian defeat in World War I, which brought the loss of 75% of its territory, as proof.

Hungary is not alone in its turn east. Turanism is in step with a similar movement called Eurasianism in Russia, a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that argues that Russia is the heir apparent of the Mongol empire, destined to keep expanding its borders. In promoting kinship with the East and fostering a yearning for a greater past, both Putin and Orban stoke a popular mandate for embracing authoritarianism. The Huns, after all, didn’t conquer the world with democracy.

Since 2008, the crowds at Kurultaj have multiplied, and an entire academic and political apparatus has sprouted around the idea of a Turkic brotherhood.

Hungary's pride

The day before marching out onto the main pitch at the festival in his knee-high leather boots and sparkling silver and turquoise jewelry, Biro spoke before Hungary’s parliament, in a suit, about the importance of preserving traditions. 

For the next three days in the sweltering mid-August heat, I chased the tails of Biro’s floor-length, blue-and-silver robes, hoping he could explain how he managed to bring 200,000 visitors (according to the official event count, though it appeared to be fewer than half this number to me) to a festival celebrating the genetic ties between white European Hungarians and Asian, Turkish and Middle Eastern nations. After all, this year’s Kurultaj festival followed remarks from Orban in which he asserted that Hungarians are not “a mixed race” and that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle are “no longer nations.” It made no sense.

I caught sight of Biro as he prepared the seating arrangements in the VIP section along the main parade pitch. He adjusted the angle of chairs and name tags, giving out directions to an assistant. The biggest names this year were prominent speakers from Turkey and Central Asian countries. But many festival attendees seemed wary of the politicians. The men — all of the invited speakers were men — were easy to spot as they sweated through their crumpling business suits and moved through the festival grounds with entourages and security details.

Many attendees, on the other hand, wore colorful native clothing from various continents. One couple I met had borrowed their elaborate costumes from the local theater where they worked. “It’s difficult to live in modernity,” Balazs Lengyel told me. “It’s gray and empty.” He and his wife Erika Lengyelne attend Kurultaj every year to be reborn at the gathering. Balazs seemed lost in thought as he spoke to me of his longing for a link to a shared past. Erika was more direct: “We are opposed to the EU. We have nothing to do with the West. It’s all a lie made up during communism. Fifty years of communism took away our pride.”

Katrin Kremmler has studied Kurultaj since 2014. She is now finishing her PhD on the subject at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University. Kremmler and I met up in Budapest where she had traveled from Berlin to attend the festival with a Hungarian friend. Before driving over to Kurultaj, she warned the friend to tear off a LGBTQ bumper sticker, worried about the car being vandalized while parked.

As a seasoned Kurultaj attendee, Kremmler had a few other pre-Kurultaj tips. I had asked her about fitting in at the festival, and she kindly sent over a couple addresses for Kurultaj lifestyle shopping in Budapest. 

In one shop in central Budapest I found head-to-toe traditional Hungarian costumes for sale, along with the legendary Hungarian sudar: a bull whip up to eight feet in length. The end of the whip makes a sonic boom as it reaches the speed of sound. Hungarians claim that it’s the first human-made tool to cross the sound barrier, and it’s a staple at Kurultaj for both the professional horse riders and drunk attendees taking a crack.

There were also more modern clothing options: black t-shirts with a Christian cross stenciled next to “HETERÓ,” shirts with the slogan “Europe Belongs to Me” and multiple apparel options showing maps of “greater Hungary.” Orban has been spotted in a scarf that shows a map of Hungary with its imperial territories intact, which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine, Romania, Austria, Serbia and other countries. At another Turanism shop, this time on the Buda side of the city, I looked through a collection of anti-Covid lockdown buttons next to more anti-LGBTQ slogans and adverts for a children’s summer camp.

“Everyone finds something that they like and tunes out what they don’t identify with,” said Kremmler, trying to explain the mish-mashing of ideologies brought together by Kurultaj and Turanism. Her PhD focuses on the contradictions within the right wing’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and its embrace of Eurasia. She noted that Bugac, the village where the festival takes place, is about an hour’s drive from Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, a major corridor for migrants from the Middle East attempting to enter the EU. Men dressed in the all-black uniforms of the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary group outlawed in 2009, patrolled the festival grounds.

Kremmler believes that for years Hungary’s liberal elite failed to understand Turanism. Today, the festival is able to attract top researchers from the Hungarian National Museum and other academic institutions. This is also the first year she’s managed to convince any of her Budapest friends or colleagues to join her at Kurultaj.

“It’s parallel realities,” said Kremmler. “Urban liberal elites think they can ignore these developments because they consider it pseudoscience. But it’s not fringe. It’s the new mainstream because the government is working hard to make this the new popular mainstream.”

Some of the claims of the Turanism movement have now entered Hungary’s schools. Curriculum updates in 2020 included an intense focus on medieval history and introduced alternatives to Hungary’s accepted consensus on its national origins. Hungarians had learned that their language is most closely related to the languages spoken by the Finno-Ugric people found in Finland and Estonia and by indigenous tribes living in Russia. 

When this was first discovered by scholars in the 18th century, it came as a bit of a shock. Surrounded by German, Slavic and Romanian speakers, some people found it “degrading,” said Gabor Egry, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political History in Budapest. It also encouraged a sense of ethnic uniqueness. 

The new school curriculum introduces the idea that the origin of the Hungarian language is up for debate and that Hungarians may in fact be closer relatives of the Turkic-speaking tribes originating in Kazakhstan. 

Archaeogenetics, a field of research championed by Biro, is supercharging the argument that Hungarians came from Central Asia. Archaeogenetics relies on gathering a set of historic DNA samples — sometimes centuries old — that the researchers evaluate as representative of an entire population. The research requires expensive equipment that the government has helped to fund, to look at DNA samples from the 9th and 10th centuries. The field often faces criticism on how the results are interpreted. 

“It fits this broader rewriting of history: a more nationalistic, more triumphalist narrative which must emphasize Hungarian victories and greatness,” Egry said. ”Emphasizing these Eastern origins could imply that Hungary belongs to this emerging world and not the declining one.”

The new history was played on repeat at Kurultaj.

“Everything they were teaching at school is not true,” said Malinda Kovacs, who described herself as a proud Hungarian, a mother and a homemaker, is captivated by Native American traditions and had a full-back tattoo showing the busts of several Native American men.

Hungary’s school curriculum changes also included replacing the works of writer Imre Kertsz — a Hungarian Jew who is the country’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature — with the assigned reading of Jozsef Nyiro, an admirer of Joseph Goebels, and Albert Wass, a convicted war criminal. Some teachers have protested online under the hashtag #noNAT, as part of a wider movement of ongoing teacher unrest in the country. 

Memory warfare

Kremmler, the Berlin academic, has studied 21st-century Turanism and its leader, Andras Biro, who has a PhD and is affiliated with the Hungarian Museum of Natural Sciences.

"When Biro started his whole genetics project I guess this could have been contested if someone from the genetics field, in Hungary or internationally, had actually taken the time or energy to review his research,” she told me over lunch in Budapest. Instead, critics of his work came almost exclusively from among scholars in the humanities who didn’t engage with the genetic research he was touting.

“This is about a new construct of ethnicity that the government is producing,” Kremmler said. 

Kremmler, whose mother is Hungarian, first came to Hungary in the 1990s to learn the language and join the academic community. She remembers it as an exciting time, a period of critical research burgeoning in the wake of communism. She’s now watching the pendulum swing the other way.

“It’s all really fascinating, unless it’s happening in your own country,” said Margit Feischmidt, laughing when we met at the Research Center for Social Sciences in Budapest, where she is the head of sociology and anthropology. I told her about some of my Kurultaj-themed shopping earlier that day. “It’s fascinating, and at the same time catastrophic,” said Feischmidt. Over three decades, she has watched an exodus of researchers from Hungary who leave out of an unwillingness to collaborate with the government.

When I finally caught up with Biro at Kurultaj, it was in the large yurt at the festival where the guest speakers convened for meetings. He has just finished a closed session with some of the guests from Turkey and Central Asia, among them President Erdogan’s youngest son.

“There has already been cooperation in the field of science or sport and now it’s on a political level,” Biro said, smiling with his white teeth flashing.

“From several thousands kilometers away, a Kazakh or an Uzbek comes over here and they do everything as we do, they understand everything: the common legends, the names, the ceremonies, the food,” Biro said. “Besides, legends don’t come from nowhere.”

The post In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue appeared first on Coda Story.

Many Poles wrestle with 80 years of myths about the legacy of Nazi occupation, believing the country’s “good name” has been betrayed by hostile historians

While the conservative government promotes Polish virtue during World War II and sidelines Jewish victims, some Poles want to see Poland finally reckon with the realities of its 20th century history

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic archives of the secret police and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the "IPN law" within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the deportation site on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

“It is vital that such a description and the narrative of the events of German occupation in Nowy Sącz includes an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators of the crime, so that it does not allow for false and inconsistent interpretations.

These expectations are not exaggerated and unfounded, as we, Poles, have been facing attempts to shift the responsibility for German crimes onto the Polish people. Such attempts are particularly disgusting and unjust, taking into account our tragic war and occupation experience in the period of 1939-1945.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” in 2012, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial. 

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S. 

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 military officers and Polish elite by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. 

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemorated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

"The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country," read a statement from Polish parliament on the opening of the Markowa museum.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Nine urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law. 

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: "I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group. 

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic. 

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down. 

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration. 

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.

[CORRECTION 08/02/2023 10:00 AM EDT]: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed former President Barack Obama's statement about "Polish death camps" to a 2012 visit to Warsaw. The comments were made in Washington, D.C. in 2012 at a ceremony posthumously honoring Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.]

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The post Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust appeared first on Coda Story.

A recent documentary follows the trek of these massive trees as they are uprooted and transported across Georgia and replanted in the private seaside park. But most Georgians may never see it on the big screen.

Salome Jashi’s 90-minute film “Taming the Garden” premiered across Europe last spring, and has finally come home to Tbilisi. But after the film’s premiere last week, the Georgian Film Academy abruptly canceled all other screenings of the film.

In a late message to the film’s creator, the Academy said the film would “divide public opinion.” Jashi said she took this as a clear message that Ivanishvili did not want the film distributed in Georgia. It was a shock, she said, even after spending four years documenting the absurd extremes Ivanishvili will go to satisfy his wishes.

Having made his money in Russia in the 1990s in extractive industries, banking and real estate, Ivanishvili today is the country’s richest man and the founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party. His fortune — an estimated $5.77 billion — is about a third of Georgia’s GDP. In 2021 Ivanishvili announced he was leaving politics and returning to a private life, but his opponents say he is still exerting his power over the country from behind the scenes.

While several cafes and non-profits have offered to host showings of “Taming the Garden,” no major cinema will take Jashi’s documentary, which is set to premiere in U.S. theaters this summer. The censored screenings come amid a tumultuous political moment in Georgia, where 20% of national territory is occupied by Russia. In 2008, Georgia fought its own war with its northern neighbor. The war in Ukraine has put Georgians on high alert, as Georgian authorities have opposed sanctioning Russia and Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party has gone so far as to sue the country’s president Salome Zourabichvili for speaking out in support of Ukraine. The war also has become a stress test for the government’s commitment to EU integration. Opposition politicians and protestors at the country’s frequent anti-government rallies have long said that this commitment is only skin-deep. 

Katia Patin spoke to Salome Jashi about her film in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the film getting pulled from screens last week on April 28. Can you explain what happened and why it’s a big deal?

The film started its life in Sundance, then the Berlinale, it was nominated for the European Film Awards, which are like the European Oscars, it was released in Germany, Switzerland, U.K. and it will go to the United States. However in Georgia, it cannot go to the cinemas. There is no cinema that can show the film.

The president of the Georgian Film Academy academy decided that the film is too political and should not be shown. And by “too political,” he said, this is a film that “divides people according to their political beliefs.” This has never happened in independent Georgia, never.

What did their decision and their explanation tell you about Georgia in 2022?

I think this confirms how the system works. The system works according to subordination and subordinates who try to guess what their superior might think. In this case the superior of the Film Academy is the Minister of Culture. Her superior is either the prime minister or Bidzina [Ivanishvili] himself.

This is the system that has been created under the rule of Ivanishvili. This is the system of self-censorship, trying not to upset the boss, not to have political or business trouble.

Our country has the ambition to become part of the EU. It is something very, very important to me and the people around me. But certain parts of the government — the Ministry of Culture — do not comply with EU values. Openly we are going towards the EU but clearly what the government is doing, it complies more towards Russia. It is a tightening of screws and the marginalization of free institutions and free expression.

Ivanishvili is absent from the film — his name is only mentioned a few times — but by following his project the viewer gets to know him in a way. Did making the film change how you think about him?

I was much more critical of him before. It doesn’t mean that I’m not critical now. But I realized what I learned through making the film is that it’s not only him. Power is not taken by one person. It’s a whole system. There are other people involved in it starting from his personal assistant and ending with a person in the village. It’s not just him to blame, it’s also each and every one of us. 

I think this is what changed in my relationship with him. Of course when someone has a lot of money and power he can control much more but it is up to each one of us to resist it. 

That sounds especially relevant to many of the conversations happening now around a collective guilt that many ordinary Russians bear for the war in Ukraine.

It’s not just about guilt. In the case of Russians it is important to understand this collective guilt because something bad has already happened. I think it’s more correct for us to talk about responsibility, being responsible to freedom and to independence.

During filming I observed that there are individuals who are responsible to people in power but ultimately every person is responsible to be free and independent. Here in Georgia it is a problem. People are afraid not to lose their job, their reputation. We know where this will go, this will go towards Russian authoritarian rule. And then we will complain that we live in an authoritarian country but in fact we contributed to it ourselves.

Bidzina’s park was covered extensively by Georgian and international media. However you chose a different, very specific style for your film and this story. What were you hoping to accomplish?

Information is one thing and it’s less of what I’m interested in. I’m interested in creating an inner experience, a space where this story can be experienced and a person can make their own conclusions. We did not want to offer consultations. That’s what TV does, at least in Georgia. And to create not just an experience for the brain but for the heart. This sensual experience is important because some things are not concrete but very abstract. They cannot be named or identified. They can only be felt.

I think the film does not show one dimension of what happened. The film shows multiple opinions, it shows people who praise him and people who are upset about what is happening. It is open to interception. I thought that he would like the film.

There’s very little dialogue in your film. Instead you take the viewer through long shots of how the trees are uprooted, the way the trees move when they’re floating across the sea, the sound of branches breaking as a tree rides on a truck. Why did you choose a more abstract approach to tell this story?

I tried to give symbolic meaning and metaphorical meaning to things. I tried to present the tree, which is the main protagonist, as not just a tree, but as something else. Same with Ivanishvili, he’s not just Ivanishvili but rather he represents a man, an “X” man with power. I wanted to show this local story to a wider audience and have them relate to it.

The feedback I get is that the film creates a kind of fairytale where Ivanishvili is a mythical figure. He does not belong here and now. 

I had this fear that we were depicting a certain thing happening in time. And I had this fear that after a couple years it won’t be relevant. But I think this film is still very relevant. One because Ivanishvili is still — unofficially — in power. And second, because his rule is becoming more powerful. The political institutions that they supervise are becoming more controlling of the country and of people and the media. It’s all more obvious now. People see it more obviously now.

The post ‘It’s too political’: Authorities censor documentary on Georgian oligarch’s Black Sea pleasure park appeared first on Coda Story.

A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive. The stakes, say internet archivists, include how the war and contemporary Ukraine are remembered.

A team of over 1,300 volunteers at a newly launched global initiative called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online are racing to preserve hundreds of thousands of websites. Archivists from the National Electronic Archive of Ukraine, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress are trying to save copies of news publications, digital archives of museums, local government pages, exhibitions and more. 

Archivists are able to save copies of websites through capturing a website’s code with a number of what are called “crawling” tools.

“As far as we can tell, no one has done web archiving at this scale in a war before,” says Quinn Dombrowski, a project administrator at Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online and a technology specialist at Stanford University’s Library. “Our goal is not to create an archive that people will study somewhere safely in the West. Our goal is to repatriate this data back to the Ukrainains.”

The war between Russia and Ukraine has opened the door to the wide scale destruction of their internets — for very different reasons. Ukraine's digital record faces annihilation from military invasion; Russia's internet destruction has been ordered from within. But people in both countries are now grappling with a shocking reality: their online records can disappear. The reality is now dawning that that their nation’s internet is fragile and impermanent

Websites are going offline in Ukraine for a number of reasons, from power outages, to local servers being destroyed by shelling, to hosting bills going unpaid. “When you get right down to it, it’s cables, it’s hardware, it’s things that exist in the physical world even though we think of the internet as a different sphere,” said Dombrowski.

Dombrowski’s archiving initiative has set up a list of websites for volunteers to archive, prioritizing websites for organizations located in cities under siege or with active air raid warnings.

Their efforts point to one of the internet’s best kept secrets: the fragility of the internet.

Christopher Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science says he often encounters misconceptions about the internet’s durability. “What happens is people get shocked on both ends of the spectrum. Things that you thought would be persistent, go away. And things that feel like they should be ephemeral, stick around. Both of those things are true.” What lives on is determined by “power and resources,” he says, with a lot of what we think of as “junk” data, such as our browsing history and other user behavior information, actively maintained by governments or companies using it for revenue.

The archiving of websites and databases for the most part has not been incorporated into disaster or military preparedness. In the U.S., emergency digital archiving initiatives have sprung up after events like Ferguson in 2014, Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the election of President Donald Trump. After these events, volunteers captured websites, social media posts and federal databases before they were lost or they were taken down by government officials.

There is a growing awareness among the public for the importance of web archiving, according to Abigail Grotke, assistant head of the digital content management section at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Grotke joined the Library when it first began web archiving in the early 2000s. Today, the Library’s digital archive is one of the largest of any government body. By the end of 2021, over 100 web archive specialists have captured 21.7 billion digital documents or 2.827 petabytes.

The Library of Congress is in the process of switching their operations to a digital first approach. “In the past if something was available in both print and digital, we would prefer the print. But we’re switching focus now where digital is preferred,” said Angela Cannon, a reference specialist at the Library. Last summer the Library had to freeze its social media archiving work due to persistent barriers enacted by tech companies and the technological challenges in archiving content from private profiles and accounts.

“It’s been frustrating but it’s not just our problem,” said Grotke, pointing out that it’s something archivists around the world are trying to solve.

Cannon, the reference specialist at the Library, says this becomes especially important in regions around the world where public figures and politicians almost exclusively use social media for messaging.

“Increasingly politicians are not bothering with websites,” Cannon said. “If you’re not talking to traditional newspapers, and you’re not going on television, it is most definitely going to matter in the future. That’s a gap in our collecting, so how do we document that for our researchers?”

When Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began, Grotke and Cannon say their team’s first step was to increase the frequency of “crawls” for Ukrainian government sites and selected Russian sites.

While many governments, including Ukraine’s, have dedicated national digital archives, Russia is one of the few that does not. Instead, Russia has Ivan Begtin, a transparency advocate in Moscow who for over a decade has led a small team of archivists. Their work has new urgency as the Kremlin erases swatches of the Russian-language web.

“In the next month and a half many publications and cultural websites can disappear entirely,” said Begtin.

Since the war, dozens of independent Russian media sites have been blocked by the Kremlin for violating censorship laws banning the use of the word “war” in coverage of Ukraine. More quietly, hundreds of smaller publications, Russian cultural websites and online projects have gone offline as many western hosting services stopped accepting payments from Russia.

The list of websites archived by Begtin and his team of three in the past few weeks gives a snapshot of the current shattered state of freedom of expression in Russia. He prioritizes content that “forms our contemporary history, what people are going to use to write books and textbooks one day.”

The National Digital Archives, Begtin’s self-funded project, has captured content from independent news publications such as the Insider, Colta, Tjournal, Paper — all now blocked in Russia — along with websites like the “Forum of Kostroma Jedi,” a chapter of Star Wars enthusiasts that was recently listed as an “undesirable” organization by federal authorities; and dozens of historical memory projects from Memorial, Russia’s oldest civil rights group shuttered in December 2021 by court order.

The work is grueling and dangerous. “How much longer I can keep this up for, I’m not so sure,” said Begtin.

For years Russia’s internet existed as an unregulated bastion of free speech, pirated films, music and software. Its transformation into one of the most censored corners of the internet in the world has gone hand in hand with the transformation of Russian politics, said Begtin.

“This is a story of the erosion of your sense of freedom, the erosion of democracy, the erosion of people’s faith in themselves. Because many thinking people in Russia today speak in these words: there is nothing I can do to change what is happening.”

Begtin’s one-man crawl of the Russian web is a far cry from the wave of initiatives backing up Ukraine’s digital records. Dombrowski, the technology specialist at Stanford, says there is a much broader international conversation that has to happen around digital archiving, cultural heritage, and conflict.

“It’s inspiring when everyone comes together to do something to support this effort,” she said. “On the other hand, it represents a fundamental failure of infrastructure. It should never come to random people archiving Ukrainian websites on their laptops.”

Of all the work Dombrowski, who studied medieval East Slavic languages, managed to preserve in the past few weeks, one site was especially vivid: the website of a small museum in the Ukrainian city Novhorod-Siverskyi dedicated entirely to the medieval epic poem, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, famously translated into English by Vladimir Nabokov. The poem’s original manuscript was destroyed in 1812 when Moscow burned to the ground during the Napoleonic wars.

“I studied the poem in grad school and when I saw what this museum was about, my heart just stopped,” Dombrowski remembers. “Our automatic processes had failed so I manually went through each page on their website. There were 83 pages. I clicked on every image. I downloaded everything I could and saved the file. The thought of this beautiful museum being under attack, I immediately burst into tears.”

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The post The race to save everything as war threatens the internet in Ukraine and Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

As Russian forces maneuver to encircle Ukraine’s capital, Sennik continues posting her ethno-photography for her 43,500 followers but with a new format: a jarring juxtaposition of her pre-war archive alongside the images of war such as bombed out homes and civilian evacuation. “The world I show through my art is being destroyed right now,” Sennik wrote the morning of February 24, the start of the Russian invasion. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Sennik explained what she is trying to convey today with her photography.

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Can you first tell us about the situation where you are now?

In Kyiv, nearly all the roads have been blocked from the west, the south, partially from the north, but as of today, the city is still not fully surrounded by Russian forces. The only way for Russians to get at us is the open sky. The city is getting hit directly by rocket attacks, apartment buildings are being bombed left and right, residential and private buildings, shopping malls, the city center, the outskirts, all over.

I joined the Territorial Defense on the first day. I was at the enlistment office by lunchtime picking out firearms. The Territorial Defense group is all made up of volunteers. There are other women within our battalion, but I’m the only one in our division. For me this was a logical step because it’s my second military experience. The first time, in 2014, I was part of a volunteer battalion. After this I worked in photography and thought that phase of my life was over. But when you’re woken up in the morning from being bombed you’re left with only one choice. And that’s why I’m here again.

How has the war changed your photography?

Originally it was a way to present Ukrainian culture to the world but now my job is to explain what is happening here. I publish my archival images mixed in with photos that I’ve taken now or photos other eyewitnesses sent to me. I really wanted to use this contrast because I can’t shake off the feeling of having my life stolen from me. When I look back, I realize that I had a wonderful life. I had the chance to do my favorite kind of work that was tied to culture and beauty.

And now I’ve lost all of that. Right now someone is trying to physically destroy that life. Even museums are being bombed. Several of my friends have died already. The world where I used to live is being destroyed around me. I wanted to show that contrast. The peace in Ukraine that was in my photos and what is happening to that peace now.

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One of your most popular recent posts was a series of posed WWII-era images you took of couples in 2013 mixed in with photos taken in recent days of real Ukrainian couples being forced to say goodbye to each other. Why did you share this?

These photos were part of a photo shoot from the spring 2013, so even before the revolution. I was later reminded of them almost a year later when the first volunteer battalions were heading to the east of Ukraine. Young women would come to say goodbye to the men in the same way. 

In 2013, these seemed like scenes from the past, from a history that cannot be repeated. How can there be a war again? How can these kinds of farewells be said again?

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So much of Russia’s propaganda and Putin’s remarks have fixated on denying the existence of distinct Ukrainian identity and culture. Do you feel like your work counteracts that false narrative?

I worked for a long time in political communications but my art was never meant for propaganda messaging. I do it just because I love it.

The fact that it can have this effect, that’s not because of me. Beauty is the only language everyone can understand because it can touch all of us. Beauty and this contrast that I’m presenting has allowed me to reach lots of people.

Who are you now trying to reach with your photography?

Ukrainians are already motivated. I don’t think we can possibly get any more motivated than we are today. Ukraine must be the most united country in the world right now. But this war has gone on for three weeks and the world’s attention is already waning. I want to show foreigners what is happening, to show them who we are, what kind of beautiful people we have and how we are saving that. But to also show people what is being done to us: videos of people being killed, of children who have been killed. 

Sometimes people write to me and they say they support me but it’s really difficult to look at the images I am sharing. And I understand them completely. Not a single psychologically normal person should feel ok looking at this. But this is our reality and I’m obliged to share it.

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There is a massive flow of information, videos, and photography from Ukraine. How do you decide what to publish?

What’s the point in publishing photos of dead Russian soldiers when you can instead show the kind of destruction they have caused: ruined homes, civilians evacuating while being shot at, bombings. My role here is to record this and to create an Instagram account of war crimes. 

I don’t try to overstate what I’m doing, I think it is a drop in the ocean, but if it helps tell a few hundred more people about what is happening then that’s great.

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What do people misunderstand about this war?

I think generally people outside Ukraine believe that this war with Russia is a problem just for Ukraine. But that’s not true. Aggressive governments with dysfunctional presidents are problems not just for neighboring countries but for the whole world. 

TV hosts on propaganda channels across Russia are already drawing up maps of what the Baltic states would look like if Russia grabs more territory. We can laugh it off, but half a year ago those maps were of Ukraine and look at what’s happening around us today.

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After the war, how do you think this period in your life will affect your photography?

I don’t think I’ll be photographing war themes in the future. Probably the opposite. I’ve had enough. Instead I’ll focus on things that are absolutely peaceful and beautiful. Because we will all get our fill of war now.

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The post A photographer of Ukrainian beauty turns her lens on war to create heartbreaking juxtaposition appeared first on Coda Story.

“It is this feeling that we Uyghurs cannot escape China wherever we go,” said Buzainuer Wubuli (Zeynure Obul). “Uyghurs in our homeland are being disappeared in prisons and camps. Outside the country, Uyghurs are not allowed to live in peace anywhere.”

For the past 10 years Wubuli’’s husband has faced constant harassment and detention by Turkish authorities — further evidence of China’s reach in Turkey, according to Wubuli — pushing him to finally leave the country with a plan for his family to follow. He was unaware that China had issued a red notice for him and was arrested in July 2021 while in transit in Casablanca. Today Idris Hasan is being held in a Moroccan prison.

Following international outcry, Interpol canceled the red notice for Hasan. However, Moroccan authorities decided to follow through with Hasan’s deportation in light of a recently signed extradition treaty with China. Hasan would be the first Chinese national extradited under the treaty that was signed in early 2021. The UN Committee Against Torture has pressured Moroccan authorities to pause the extradition while it reviews Hasan’s case, a process that could take weeks, months, even years.

This has left Hasan’s wife and children living in limbo. However, Wubuli has launched her own campaign of resistance for her husband’s release.

This is her story.

The post China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it appeared first on Coda Story.

“For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”

Steps away from Istanbul University, the Uyghur Genocide Museum is a student-led exhibition organized in the quiet courtyard of the East Turkistan Foundation. The Uyghur student group created the series of “simulation” rooms according to testimony from last summer’s Uyghur Tribunal in London and other first-hand accounts gathered by the group.

The students behind the Genocide Museum, nearly all of whom have relatives or parents detained in Xinjiang camps, are well aware of the challenges of creating such a space.

An exhibition is visual by nature, yet since 2017 Xinjiang is effectively a black box to the outside world with Uyghurs living abroad losing contact with family members and foreigners or journalists largely barred from traveling to the region. Today images from Xinjiang, and its network of re-education camps, are largely gathered from space via satellites.

“My father and mother tried to come to my graduation ceremony in 2017,” said Ayas. “But at the beginning of 2017, all the borders were closed. Their passports were confiscated. After September 2017, I lost contact with my family members.”

On several occasions, Omar said the group gave visitors checklists from “48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp.”

“They would check off if they prayed, or grew a beard, if they’ve been out of the country, if they use WhatsApp. 99% of the people found that they have all the criteria that qualifies them to get into one of these concentration camps.”

The student group spent their summer vacation planning the project, opening the space last fall. So far they say feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of visitors made up of Turkish students and international tourists.

“We knew the Olympics were coming and we thought it was a good opportunity to educate people about our cause so they can start acting while the world is directing their attention to China,” Omar said.

“There is a lot of disinformation about Uyghurs, especially in Turkey,” said Ayas. “Others said, I know there is a genocide happening there, but after I touched the Tiger Chair, I felt how horrible this is.

“It’s a shocking truth for visitors to actually accept it.”

The exhibition is ongoing, open every day (call ahead for the simulation rooms to be opened) and has no end date. Starting in March, the students plan to update the exhibition and add new items to the museum.

“We named it the Uyghur Genocide Museum, but it’s not a museum,” Ayas said. “It’s not a history, it’s an ongoing genocide happening in our hometown.”

China's repression of journalists

China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it

Katia Patin

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide appeared first on Coda Story.

With over 60,000 subscribers on Telegram and close to 20,000 on Instagram, Narikbi Maksut was used to a constant flurry of notifications. When his phone went silent, he knew something had gone wrong. 

“At first I thought they had just blocked the internet, but they had literally turned it off,” said Maksut, an IT specialist in the Netherlands. “That’s when I started to panic.”

Demonstrations over a hike in fuel prices in early January started to spread across Kazakhstan, where Maksut is from. He had been live streaming on Instagram with friends at the demonstrations, staying in touch with relatives and keeping close watch as events unraveled into some of the worst bloodshed in the country’s 30 years of independence.

Then Kazakhstan hit the kill switch. Over five straight days, the government shut down the internet. Although an unprecedented move by Kazakhstan authorities, the government is a dictatorship, and its monopolistic control over telecommunications is enshrined by law. While some regions across the huge country — the size of western Europe — were able to stay partially online, residents in the largest city, Almaty, were plunged into a total blackout: both wired and mobile internet turned off, and sometimes landline telephone service, too.

What Maksut and a group of his friends did next, however, is a valuable case study on how to survive an internet blackout — an increasingly go-to tactic for authoritarians worldwide. The success of these programmers to set up close to 40 proxy servers over a few days on a shoestring budget speaks to the dilemma facing old-school authoritarian regimes like Kazakhstan: a growing tech-savvy middle class with the know-how to overcome the digital tools of authoritarianism. Based on user traffic provided by Telegram, Maksut estimates the group got between 300,000 to 500,000 people online on the message app during the five-day shutdown.

Like Belarus, where censorship and shutdowns are also favored tools for squashing dissent, Kazakhstan has a flourishing IT sector with experts employed at leading global tech companies. Maksut, a programmer at Booking.com in Amsterdam, sent out a call on his Telegram channel when he saw Kazakhstan had gone offline. About 20 expat Kazakhs answered. They work at offices such as Meta in London, Amazon in Luxemburg, Google in Zurich, all trying to reach their family members in Kazakhstan.

Over the next few days, the loosely organized group set up dozens of proxy servers — first for Telegram and later even for internet browsers like Firefox. Maksut admits their user estimates aren't exact; not all of them had a chance to collect data. But more recently, on January 19, Zharaskhan Aman, a software engineer at Facebook in London, rounded up some of the numbers he had from Telegram analytics showing that the 9 servers he raised alone had 155,762 users from Kazakhstan between January 4 and 11. “I didn’t expect such a flow of people, some of them didn’t even know what a proxy was,” said Aman.

When they realized that there was a way through Kazakhstan’s internet blackout, they formed an ambitious plan. “I realized at that moment that we can scale this up,” Maksut said. “Scale it up to get an entire city, all of Almaty, back online on Telegram.”

To be sure, experts on internet connectivity and those monitoring internet blackouts say what the programmers accomplished is not scalable and is out of reach for the millions of low-tech, everyday internet users knocked offline during blackouts. Data from NetBlocks, a London-based global internet monitor, shows just how effective this particular blackout was, with internet traffic plummeting from 100% connectivity to 2% on January 5.

The graph below does show that traffic slowly rose over the next few days, with authorities restoring connections at select times before lifting the blackout on January 11.

“Of course you can’t say that they supplied all of Kazakhstan with a connection. For the ordinary user, it wasn’t just complicated, it was super complicated,” said Mikhail Klimarev, director of the Society for the Defense of the Internet. “I’m not saying anything against them, they are great guys and did things exactly the way they should: people have to do research like this. And if the shutdown had continued, it’s possible what they made would be in demand.”

Nevertheless, the frequency of global shutdowns is growing exponentially and Coda spoke to four of the programmers to understand how it worked.

A senior software engineer at LinkedIn in Toronto, Maksat Kadyrov jumped into action when he lost touch with his brother in Almaty. He went live on Instagram, looking to crowdsource a way to reach his family. Surprisingly, a few IT specialists in Kazakhstan were able to connect and report that four or five of their VPNs were still working inside the country. “If the internet is blocked, this shouldn’t be working,” Kadyrov remembers thinking. “This violates the entire logic of an internet blackout.”

Already in touch with Maksut, Kadyrov and a handful of other specialists realized this must mean there were cracks in the blackout that could be exploited, a backdoor still open to internet traffic. Said Kadyrov: “It was as if the internet hadn’t been turned off after all, but a curtain had been draped over, with a few bits of light still shining through.”

Kadyrov went hunting for any ports that were still working, rallying with others as he worked. Ports in computer networking act almost as mail sorting tubes, directing data to where it should go. He live streamed on Instagram for hours as they scanned some of the more than 65,000 existing ports. During the live stream, they found five open ports, tested them and were able to establish a connection. They later learned that it was a bug in outdated Cisco equipment, used widely by Kazakh telecom operators, which had accidentally kept these ports open. Kadyrov, Maksut and the others used these open ports to support their operation, crowdsourcing funds or footing the cloud computing bill themselves from service providers like Digital Ocean and Amazon.

Sharing connection instructions by Telegram, email and text, members of the group said they were overwhelmed with demand. Within 24 hours Kadyrov said he had more than 2,000 requests for access to his servers, which he had been sending out one-by-one. Maksut was also overwhelmed with requests for access: “They went like hotcakes.”

For those outside the country, the totality of the blackout was unnerving. Just as reports of chaos, gunfire and an unfolding terrorist attack broke in international headlines, messages stopped delivering. Calls simply didn’t go through. For the nearly 19 million people living in Kazakhstan, the chaos was far more immediate. Loudspeakers in city centers, leftover remnants of the Soviet past, were used to broadcast ominous messages for residents to stay indoors and away from windows, no further context given. Television stations and even radio broadcasts stuck to entertainment programming or were simply not working.

Over the following five days, internet connections were restored periodically, in some cases tied to certain government announcements. People were able to place calls again. The government’s official messaging has been that a mass terrorist attack, largely led by foreigners, was underway across the country. Authorities have presented scant evidence to back up their claims, while scores of activists and supporters of the protest have been detained, some reporting beating and torture in prisons.

In response to the government’s pronouncements, opinions within the VPN group had split on what to do next. Kadyrov shut down his VPNs. “My position was that it was important to stand with the government against these terrorists. Then I saw people were starting to use my VPNs for Torrent and for mining bitcoin. I said, ‘Thanks everyone, I’m out.’”

Others, like Maksut, kept their VPNs going, reasoning that if there really was a sophisticated terrorist attack underway, they weren’t waiting around to use his VPN connection to communicate, especially as periodic throttling during protests have been common practice for years in Kazakhstan. The priority was to keep people informed.

“People died because they didn’t have information or a connection,” said Aman, the engineer in London. In the following weeks dozens of stories emerged of life in an information void where many carried on unaware of the violence. A 12-year-old boy was reportedly killed by a stray bullet while walking to buy bread with his mother; a four-year-old girl was shot dead when her father drove into the city center with his three children, straight into a shootout.

“There is really no benefit to a shutdown,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now. “It doesn’t help governments maintain security, it doesn’t help them maintain order, it doesn’t help misinformation from spreading, it’s actually the opposite: shutdowns are usually associated with more violence. People are left with whatever pieces of rumors they can find.”

Supported by the Russian-Language News Exchange

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The post Kazakhstan shut down its internet. These programmers opened a backdoor appeared first on Coda Story.

Now known across Russia as the “Grandson from Tomsk,” Samborsky, 27, had gone to Moscow to knock on the doors of federal authorities to file complaints of gross medical negligence. When it became clear that instead of considering his complaints, authorities intended to arrest him, Samborsky fled to neighboring Georgia.

Sambosky told me his story when we met in Tbilisi, where he says Russian-speaking men have approached him, telling him it’s time to return to Russia. For that reason, he doesn’t share his future plans.

This text is derived from an interview with Sergey Samborsky conducted by Katia Patin. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Читайте эту статью на русском.

My grandmother’s name was Yulia Fedorovna. She taught Russian language, literature and history and inspired a lot of bright minds. Many of them are now scientists in our city, have masters degrees, doctorates in language. She is the brightest, most decent person I’ve ever known.

She taught me how to play the piano. She raised me from childhood and was really strict, so that I would become a good person. And here I am, not completely normal, but good enough. My wife, my other relatives, I have never loved them the way I loved my grandmother. I would go through hell and highwater for her. And I have.

In Tomsk I worked as a welder. I had a quiet, normal, calm life and didn’t have any problems. I can’t say I have a lot of friends, but the ones I have are true friends. I lived with my wife, my brother and my grandmother.

Tomsk is a really beautiful city. It’s a university town. They call it the Athens of Siberia because we’re the smartest city in Russia with the largest number of students. I am a patriot of my city and the region where I was born. I know every stream, every part of the forest in a 100 kilometer radius of my village in the Tomsk region. The people there are kind, but the problems begin with the authorities.

People are dying in our hospitals. They are being treated with medications that the WHO does not recommend for treating coronavirus, for example arbidol, gripferon. If you break your leg, or have some other injury, and your temperature is higher than 37 [98.6 F], you are automatically admitted to the Covid ward, even if you’re completely healthy otherwise, and left there. When you call an ambulance and tell them you have Covid symptoms, they will show up at your house in six days. My friend had Covid and called an ambulance. They showed up a month later.

My grandmother was 84 years old and had Alzheimer’s. I took care of her at home. She was partially paralyzed, she had nearly full muscle atrophy. I would change her diapers, feed her, wash her. On October 21, around 5 p.m. in the evening, I was preparing food for her when she started gurgling. I turned around and she had foam coming from her mouth, her eyes had rolled back and her lips were blue. I called the ambulance.

When I got to the hospital, my grandmother had already been taken away for a CT scan. I walked up to registration, asked where she was and they directed me down the corridor where about 50 people were sitting and coughing. All with Covid. I walked by an elderly woman sitting on a stretcher practically naked with a mask underneath her chin. She was shaking from the cold. I asked a doctor for help and it took 15 minutes for him to find a nurse to get a blanket.

Then I went to find my grandmother. She was in a room with five beds, all Covid patients. The doctor said that she needed oxygen. I took down the phone number of the woman in the bed next to her and left after about an hour. The next day, I called the woman. She said no one had been in to see my grandmother. No one had fed her, washed her or changed her diapers. They had tied her to the bed.

This was really a shock to me. I’m an impulsive person. I got up and went straight away to the hospital. I watched nurses coming in and out of the hospital without even taking off their protective clothing. They would go for a smoke and then walk back in with their dirty shoe covers.

So I walked up to a parked ambulance and bought some protective gear off of the drivers. They aren’t allowed to do that but they sold it to me for double the cost. This is Russia. I walked to the back of the building where there is a small forest and changed. I had a protective suit, a mask and goggles. There was no security, the door was wide open. I started filming, walked in and no one looked at me twice.

When I got to my grandmother, I was horrified. I don’t know why they had tied her to the bed, her entire arm was covered in bruises from the restraints. I checked my grandmother’s diaper, it was filthy. She had her oxygen mask up on her forehead. She has three bed sores, one on her knee, two on her hips. They had changed the bandage on the right side, but on the left hadn’t even touched it.

How to explain this? It’s apathy and laziness. This is not some exceptional case. This is happening across Russia’s hospitals. I’ve had hundreds of people write to me with their own stories since I published my videos.

I spent eight or nine hours a day in the ICU. I would come in and out but for the most part was hiding, not to draw more attention to myself. Some of the other patients would ask me for water or to help with their bedding. I took out the trash.

Sunday, October 25 was the last day I was in the hospital before they discovered what I was doing. I sat down next to my grandmother on the bed and she looked up at me. She said, “Seryozha I love you.” She recognized me for a few seconds. She hadn’t recognized me in over three years. For that, it was all worth it. 

I gave my footage to the local channel TV2. TV2 is an exception in Russia. It’s the best regional channel in the country, they are always covering people’s real problems and telling the truth no matter how many times they’ve been threatened. Within two or three days, my story was all across Russia. At first, I stayed anonymous and was called the “grandson from Tomsk.” After TV2 published my story, the police confiscated their footage and called in their editor Aleksandr Sakalov for questioning.

Next, I thought that Moscow could help me. Moscow doesn’t know what is happening in the regions. Or maybe they know but just don’t acknowledge it publicly. There is this rap group called 25/17 from the city Omsk and they have this lyric: “My Moscow is the capital of your country.” Moscow really is a separate country. There are different people there, different laws. I thought Moscow was my last hope.

So I left Tomsk for Moscow for the first time. I went to the main office of the investigative committee. I offered to show my videos to the person I was directed to. “What’s the point in that?” He was completely unmoved. He said, “You’re welcome to file a complaint but if you get a response, it will take at least a month.”

I went to the federal prosecutor’s office and the office of the presidential administration. From all these places I got the runaround. The investigative committee told me to write to the regional office. The prosecutor's office recommended that I also go to the regional office. I got the same from the office of the president.

When I was in Moscow, the story became national news. A media campaign started against me across the pro-government channels. REN-TV was the worst. It’s a disgusting channel. We had agreed that they won’t publish my full name and will blur out my face, my grandmother’s face and the sensitive footage of her. But they showed everything. I told the truth about medical care in Tomsk and in Russia, the truth about our government. And now all the state channels were trying to drown me.

I’ve been accused of doing all of this for my grandmother’s retirement payments. That I beat her, had her chained to a radiator, starved her, kept her as a prisoner.

In Russia you hardly need to give people a reason to devour you. My story was forcing people to wonder whether their loved one had died from a disease or because of indifference from the system.

When I flew back to Tomsk, I was called in that evening to the local investigative office for questioning. They told me to hand over my phone and said they suspected that the video was fake, that I had edited the footage and made up the whole thing. They threatened to arrest me on the spot and search my home. I refused to hand over my phone.

On October 30, my grandmother died. The official cause of death was pneumonia. Not a single word about coronavirus. I always imagined my grandmother would die peacefully at home, the way we all should. It was her dream to pass in her sleep. But in the end, she died in despicable conditions.

I have a relationship with someone working in the police. He told me, “They are discussing opening a criminal case against you and you have to leave.”

I buried my grandmother, left Tomsk and Russia.

Now I’m in Georgia but I don’t feel safe here. I’m Russian. I still can’t get used to the fact that the police are okay here. I’ll be walking and hear a police siren and get all tense. The aftershocks of living in Russia.

Today is my birthday. We were celebrating last night. At midnight we opened a bottle of wine, had some food, and three people came up to me. They said, “Sergey Samborsky, it’s time to go back to the homeland.” These people aren’t my friends, they aren’t my relatives. My real friends wouldn’t tell me to come back home now. These were people somehow connected to the government.

It’s my 27th birthday today, I hope it’s not my last.

The post I disguised myself as a Covid ICU doctor to care for my grandmother. Now, the Russian government is after me appeared first on Coda Story.

Pakistan has been celebrated internationally for its wide-ranging centralized digital identification system. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) issues ID cards which control nearly all aspects of life in the country, including school enrollment, employment, bank accounts and phone plans. But millions, like the Imkaan gymnasts and their families, have fallen through the program’s cracks.

Now the team is fighting back, appealing to the Interior Ministry to grant them citizenship on the basis of birthright. If they win, their case will set a precedent for more than three million stateless people in the country.

This is their story.

Special Report: Biometric belonging in Pakistan

Marooned: Karachi’s stateless fishermen

Alizeh Kohari

Life in Pakistan without a digital ID

Alizeh Kohari

Pakistan’s biometric ID scheme is stripping citizenship from thousands of people

Alizeh Kohari

The post ‘These ID cards have so much power.’ Meet the teen gymnasts fighting for an official identity appeared first on Coda Story.

Ostensibly a photobook on the small Macedonian town of Veles, which made international headlines in 2016 as the unlikely factory of pro-Trump fake news, The Book of Veles created a furore after Bendiksen revealed that the project’s images were synthetically generated using 3D software and the book’s text was written entirely by artificial intelligence. 

Fascinated with the story of Veles as well as with developments in synthetic imagery, Bendiksen set out to see just how “real” he could make his images. Although he left breadcrumbs throughout the text, to his surprise the book was published in April 2021 to “nice, positive echo-chamber feedback,” said Bendiksen. No one questioned the authenticity of the images or text. He stepped up the game by then submitting his manipulated photographs to the world’s most prestigious photojournalism festival Visa pour l'image which screened his images in September.

“I thought, what could be a higher threshold for fooling someone with junk, synthetic images than this crowd?,” said Bendiksen. “I gave it 24 hours for someone to come with some questions about the work. It didn’t happen.” The photographer’s final attempt to out himself involved buying a squadron of Facebook and Twitter bots to attack him online. The bots posted dozens of messages claiming that his work was fraudulent, only to have Bendiksen’s colleagues and supporters rush to his defense.

Bendiksen finally came clean in an interview on September 17 with Magnum Photos. We spoke with Bendiksen about what he’s come away with from the experience and how the project has continued to take unexpected turns even after his revelation last month.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What were the main goals that you set out with?

I wanted to create some discussion and awareness around this technology but I didn’t go into this project wanting it to be just a technical demonstration of something. I get into my projects because it’s a good story to tell. If it hadn’t been for all these exciting layers of Veles and mythology I wouldn’t have done this. All of these parts of the puzzle fell miraculously into place.

Yes, tell us more about how the puzzle fell into place, there are so many bizarre layers to this project.

One was the discovery of the historical layers to the story. The town Veles is named after this pre-Christian Slavic god who was a kind of sneaky guy, a shapeshifter who turns into a bear, a god of chaos and deception and magic. I thought he would probably be super happy about all this deception going on in Veles.

The introduction written by AI is still a bit clumsy. Some of your images, especially the one of a bear stomping through town, feel like they should have set off some alarm bells. Yet it was all “real” enough that no one questioned it.

That was also something that frightened me. The technology in the field has developed a lot even from when I started using it to when the project was done. It’s clear to me that within a few years 95% or more of people will have a hard time decoding whether an article was written by a New York Times journalist or a bot. I wanted this to be a look into what I think is the near future of our information landscape.

How are our current concerns about automation or AI different from all the previous technology scares?

In photography at every step when there is a new technology people say it’s the collapse of truth. Whether that was when digital cameras came or when Photoshop showed up. People always cried wolf like that. Maybe I’m the same and this is a bunch of wolf crying and this will sort itself out nicely.

But I think the difference is: automation and synthetics. We will always have good journalism but I think it will be mixed in with so much synthetic junk or half synthetic junk that it will just be very, very chaotic and difficult to navigate. The difference is that the automation of it gives it such a bigger potential for spread and makes it so difficult to contain.

You’ve repeatedly compared your work to a penetration test that hackers run searching for vulnerabilities in their code. These tests then allow companies to better fortify their software and find solutions for loopholes in the code. What did your stress test reveal and what solutions did it reveal to you?

I’m not trying to pretend I have all the answers but I think there are many levels to it. I think the content verification business will be an industry unto itself. This is also a call out to social media platforms who I believe have failed us in many ways on this front thus far to step up the game. This is a call out to our education system. As a father of four, I’m wondering how my children are going to handle this. To be a functional citizen in the next 50 years, navigating the information space should be at least as important a subject as mathematics in schools.

This story continues to go in unexpected directions. Tell us about the latest.

A junk information site pretending to be a newspaper in Texas called Texas News Today came out from a very similar story that was stolen from Wired about my project. I think it’s automated: they suck stuff into their system, rewrite it and then it gets blasted out again on all these websites which look very similar to what the fake news websites out of Veles were doing. It’s the same business model. I looked into it and it turns out these people at Texas News Today are a junk news site based in Pune, India running a bunch of sites from this location in different languages.

Now, these fake news sites are stealing stories about my fake news project. And there are people quoting the fake writer who supposedly wrote the piece as some credible source. It’s full circle. There you can see the whole mechanism of the chaos.

The post A photographer and artist walk into a fake news factory appeared first on Coda Story.

The U.S.-funded news outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is just one recent example of how the law targets foreign-funded media. BBC Russia has reported that, in April, RFE/RL offered some of its staff the opportunity to leave the country, as it faces crippling fines. Russia has, so far, imposed penalties of nearly $1 million on the organization. The legislation could also lead to website closures and prison time for RFE/RL’s employees.'

Under the expanded legislation, individuals, not just organizations, can now be forced to register as foreign agents. Darya Apakhonchich, a Russian-language teacher from St. Petersburg, was one of the first individuals affected. Watch her story:

Darya's story is being repeated across the world as authoritarian leaders and anti-democratic regimes have adopted some of the same tactics.

Here, we look at five notable examples from around the world.

Nicaragua

By Erica Hellerstein

The closures came swiftly. In early February, the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, a press freedom organization founded by and named for the former Nicaraguan president, announced that it was shutting down. A day earlier, the Nicaraguan chapter of the global writers’ association PEN International released a statement that it was indefinitely suspending its activities in the country.

The two announcements came three-and-a-half months after Nicaragua’s Congress passed a controversial law requiring any organization that receives international funding to register as a foreign agent with the Interior Ministry and provide the government with detailed monthly reports about its expenditure. It also prevents any individual registered as a foreign agent from running for public office. 

The law passed easily in Nicaragua’s Congress, in which President Daniel Ortega’s party, the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front, holds a majority. Ortega was previously president of Nicaragua in the 1980s, after the Sandinista revolution ousted the former dictator Anastasio Somoza. He has been in power again since 2007, during which time he has orchestrated a dramatic crackdown on dissidents, journalists and political opponents.

Nicaragua’s foreign agent legislation was part of a package of restrictive laws introduced in the fall of 2020, including a cybercrime bill criminalizing a wide range of digital expression. Since then, the nation’s government has moved to revoke the legal statuses of 24 nonprofit organizations for violating the regulations, including medical associations critical of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“These laws have created this bureaucratic machinery that has made it really hard for NGOs to renew their charters or to meet all the requirements," says Enrique Gasteazoro, general manager of the independent investigative newsroom Confidencial. “​​At the same time, it’s important to note that the recipe of repression that the Ortega government doles out is not lacking variety, so you do have people in jail, organizations that are being de-facto closed, but you have this other slow, bureaucratic initiative to continue closing civic space."

Both PEN Nicaragua and the Chamorro Foundation said they were ceasing operations in direct response to the legislation. The law also came under fire from the U.S. State Department, which said it is driving the country “toward dictatorship,” and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 

Critics say the law is part of a broader campaign by the Ortega administration to clamp down on civil society and political opposition, which is ratcheting up as the country heads into a presidential election in November. In 2018, the state response to anti-government protests over social security reforms left more than 320 people dead and thousands injured, “making it the worst wave of political violence in Latin America in three decades,” the New York Times reported. According to the United Nations, by 2020, more than 100,000 people had fled the country and sought asylum abroad.

Belarus

By Alexandra Tyan

In 2011, the government of Belarus, led by President Alexander Lukashenko, passed a series of amendments that established liability for local NGOs receiving foreign grants or donations if they did so in what it described as “violation of the Belarusian legislation,” and prohibited them from keeping funds in foreign banks. 

Any violation is potentially punishable with fines up to the amount of foreign funds received. 

That same year, an amendment to the criminal code, expanded the definition of treason to define any form of “assistance to a foreign state, foreign organization or their representatives in carrying out activities to the detriment of the national security of Belarus,” further increasing the possibility of NGOs and civil society groups being targeted by the authorities.

In the years since, Lukashenko has tightened his grip on civil society groups. New decrees in 2015 and 2020 introduced stricter requirements for the reporting of foreign donations and limited the permitted purposes of aid, prohibiting its use in development of the arts, scientific research and the prevention of human rights violations. Additionally, the nation’s Department for Humanitarian Affairs was given authority to oversee the use of foreign funding and allowed to give preferential treatment of state-approved projects.

And now, Belarus plans on taking these measures even further. In February, MP and chairman of the nation’s Liberal Democratic party Oleg Gaidukevich said that the government was working on a foreign agent law based on the Russian example. 

“No one can influence politics in a country, because any party, any politician, any organization that receives money for political activities works only in the interests of the country that gives the money.” he said in an interview. Gaidukevich then justified the plan by asserting that foreign funding is incompatible with democracy. 

According to experts, Lukashenko’s regime already has de facto power to limit the work of NGOs and civil society groups. “Everything is so bad that this law would not change so much. All of us are already foreign agents if our government decides it”, said Vadim Mojeiko, an analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent think tank based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“For the Belarusian government, civil society is already one big foreign agent. That's why, if, formally, they call us foreign agents, it's not going to change the system.”

Poland

By Mary Steffenhagen

In Poland, a bill drafted in May seeks to require NGOs to disclose all of their sources of funding, raising concerns about the potential victimization of voices critical of the government.

The bill states that NGOs with a yearly income of over $250,000 should file information about their financing and activities to a public database. It is a revision of legislation proposed in 2020, which, at the time, drew direct comparisons to Russia's 2012 law and prompted international criticism. While the earlier draft was not passed into law, it would have required NGOs to detail the origin of their income if more than 10% of their funding came from foreign sources.

Filip Pazderski, a senior policy analyst at the independent Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs, sees the May 2021 bill as a backdoor way of discrediting NGOs in the eyes of the public.

“Precisely what is being said is that they're hostile to national values and traditions, what they do is not in line with Polish identity,” he said. “Meaning that they are working for foreign interests, not our Polish national interests that are represented by our government.”

The government of Poland has, for years, actively undermined the credibility of human rights and pro-democracy NGOs that receive foreign financial backing. It has squeezed funding to organizations that do not share its conservative values and raided the offices of independent civil society groups protesting the country's restrictive abortion laws.

However, Pazderski believes that Poland’s ruling nationalist coalition is wary of attracting criticism from the European Union. “I believe that our government now is quite reluctant to be seen as a bad guy in the EU,’” he said. “But, on the other hand, there are these possibilities of getting all the information about the activities of NGOs in one place that can be used against them.”

Egypt 

By Masho Lomashvili

Soon after President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi seized power in 2014, Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on dissent. In the ensuing years, thousands of members of opposition groups, non-governmental organizations and activists have been jailed and tortured — some have even been executed. However, it took three years before it became nearly impossible for civil society organizations to operate. 

Justified by officials as protecting national security and guarding against interference from foreign-funded charities, a 2017 law enabled the nation’s government to surveil and control nearly every aspect of human rights monitoring, advocacy and reporting by NGOs in the country.

The legislation requires NGOs to seek permission to operate in Egypt from a “competent administrative entity” that determines whether the group’s work is in line with government objectives. Organizations are also required to detail their funding, activities and programs to the authorities. Non-compliance with the law can result in prosecution, including a maximum of five years’ imprisonment for NGO and civil society group workers and a fine of up to $55,000.

Activists decried the regulations as an attempt to block humanitarian work. The law’s passing also contributed to a 2017 decision by the Trump administration to freeze millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Egypt for nearly a year.

In 2019, following significant international and domestic pressure, Egypt’s parliament removed jail penalties from the law and replaced them with fines of up to $60,350.

According to Amr Magdi, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Egypt’s NGO legislation bears all the hallmarks of Russia’s foreign agent law. “On government-controlled press channels, you see constant admiration for Russian laws and their government system which has kept Putin in power indefinitely,” he said.

Hungary 

By Mariam Kiparoidze

In 2017 Hungary’s parliament, headed by the right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, passed a law that imposed strict regulations on non-governmental organizations receiving foreign funding.

According to the legislation, NGOs in receipt of more than $24,200 annually from foreign sources must register as "organizations supported from abroad," or risk closure.

The government has said that the law, titled LexNGO, is intended to increase transparency and fight money laundering and terrorism funding. However, it is widely condemned by domestic and international rights groups as a means to stifle civil society organizations and individuals critical of the government. Orban has accused foreign-funded NGOs — in particular those supported by the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros — of domestic interference.

Human rights observers say the law was passed to intimidate NGO workers. “I don't think that the original intent of the government was to initiate any legal procedures,” said Demeter Aron, program director at Amnesty International in Hungary. “Some people resigned, some donors were turned away. There was a lot of time and money wasted on legal battles in front of the Constitutional Court,” he added.

Aron also compares Hungary’s law to Russia’s “foreign agent” legislation in both intent and context. 

“I think both laws have the aim to stigmatize independent civil society organizations and basically create an environment where the people that these organizations serve would not dare to turn to them,” he said. “It's pretty much a copycat of the Russian version.”

Last summer, the European Court of Justice ruled that LexNGO failed to comply with EU laws and was in breach of fundamental rights, including on personal data protection and freedom of association. In February, the EU commission sent a letter of formal notice to the Hungarian government, giving it two months to change the law. While Hungary repealed LexNGO in April, the government quickly brought in similar legislation, allowing the monitoring and selective auditing of NGOs whose assets exceed $66,480, on the grounds that they are "capable of influencing public life.”

Created with the support of Russian Language News Exchange

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There’s no single narrative for why QAnon has made such deep inroads into American life, with recent polls showing that the conspiracy cult is now as popular as some major religions in the U.S. Emerging from the bowels of the internet, the ever-evolving theory claims that a cabal of pedophiles controls the U.S. government and that Trump is uniquely equipped to save the state from their clutches.

In collaboration with Newsy, Coda brings you stories of couples in Utah, Colorado and Ohio whose lives and homes have been torn apart by QAnon.

The post QAnon destroyed my marriage: a documentary by Coda Story & Newsy appeared first on Coda Story.

The government’s powerful internet watchdog Roskomnadzor, which has expansive jurisdiction in investigating and punishing nearly any internet user, platform or organization online in Russia, is leading the campaign to quash Navalny’s anti-corruption investigations and network of regional offices around the country. 

Moscow’s chief prosecutor is seeking to designate Navalny’s foundation as an “extremist group” which would effectively shut down the organization in Russia. This looming designation has spread fear among supporters who could potentially be charged with supporting an extremist organization for posting pro-Navalny messages on social media.

A Moscow court will rule on the extremism charge on April 26. Two close associates of Navalny, Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov, have told team members they are certain the decision will not go in their favor and to prepare to shut down operations and some social media accounts.

The prosecutor’s investigation comes on the heels of a leak of hundreds of thousands of email addresses that have subscribed to a Navalny office newsletter, spurring fears that the addresses are already in the possession of authorities. The internet regulator is holding Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation responsible for violating laws on personal data security in relation to the leak. Anonymous hackers behind the data breach sent messages to the email addresses that read “this will help you remember the moment when you put your data in the hands of losers.”

Roskomnadzor is taking several preemptive measures to clamp down on the planned April 21 protests in support of Navalny. On YouTube, where Navalny’s channel has well over a billion views, the agency filed a takedown request for a video urging people to join protests. In a message to Navalny’s channel, YouTube wrote that it had received notice from Roskomnadzor that the video violated Russian law and if the video wasn’t removed, “Google may be required to block the content.” Google, YouTube’s parent company, has a history of bowing to Russian pressure but the relationship is complicated. This summer, YouTube blocked a number of pro-government channels as part of its campaign to fight fake news and hate speech, leading the Russian government to threaten to block the site altogether.

There are also cases underway against Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Telegram.

Why it matters: “I’ve already started getting calls from people who are concerned that because they are subscribers on Navalny’s site or have made donations, they could now be called in for financing extremist activity,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, founder of the Moscow-based Digital Rights Center, “The level of fear is high.”

Darbinyan says that the leaked emails essentially handed the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs a working list that can easily be combined with other data leaks to identify people by name. In the past, Russians photographed or identified as attending pro-Navalny demonstrations have faced arrest and have been fired from their jobs.

The big picture: Over the years the government has tried a number of methods to silence Navalny supporters, from mass arrests at protests to even using the military draft to snatch up close allies of Navalny. But in recent weeks, its propaganda tactics across pro-government media channels have shifted and Roskomnadzor, the internet censorship agency, is acting more boldly than ever before. Once an obscure oversight agency, Roskomnadzor has evolved into Russia’s chief cyberspace censor and one of the government’s most powerful tools of control.

The post The Kremlin’s digital campaign against Alexey Navalny is cranking up pressure appeared first on Coda Story.

But now, with Navalny in failing health as he serves a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for parole violations related to a 2014 fraud charge, pro-government voices have surged across traditional and social media channels.

“The government’s strategy has changed,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter turned political analyst in Moscow. “In the past, they just ignored him, but now they’ve gone to war with him.”

On April 1, the pro-Kremlin channels RT and NTV sent camera crews to Penal Colony Number 2, where Navalny is held, about 100 miles east of Moscow. Maria Butina, a Russian agent who was jailed and later deported from the United States in 2019, was the first person permitted to visit the jailed opposition leader. The report centered around allegations made by Navalny of forced sleep deprivation and other abuses at the penal colony posted on his social media accounts. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote on March 25 on Instagram that “these bastards” were even denying him painkillers for the severe back pain he’s had since his trial. The pain had escalated and he was losing sensation in his legs. On March 31, Navalny went on a hunger strike in protest of being denied basic medical care. 

During the broadcast, Butina described the conditions in which Navalny is being held as “exemplary.” She glossed over Navalny’s more serious accusation and instead asked him why he refused to tidy up his personal space, an accusation leveled against him by a cellmate earlier on camera. Navalny responded by calling Butina a “sad parasite.”

On April 7, Navalny’s lawyers reported that the numbness he was experiencing in his legs had now spread to his hands and that he had dropped nearly 30 pounds in weight since arriving at the colony. The day before his personal doctor Anastasia Vasilyeva had been detained by police at a demonstration outside the prison gates demanding that Navalny be given medical treatment. A CNN reporter was also held. Earlier that week Navalny wrote in a social media post — sent on his behalf by members of his team — that three of his fellow inmates were hospitalized with tuberculosis and that he was displaying symptoms.

Amnesty International's Secretary-General Agnes Callamard addressed a letter to President Vladimir Putin on April 5 calling for Navalny to be released immediately. “There is a real prospect that Russia is subjecting him to a slow death,” read an Amnesty Twitter post. 

The details of Navalny’s imprisonment are now obsessively discussed nearly each evening on pro-government TV channels. During press briefings, government spokespeople have berated him for being a “hysterical sissy” about prison conditions.

This shift follows a rapid increase of awareness of Navalny’s work, even among those who support Putin. In the fall, following his recovery in a German hospital from an allegedly state-organized poisoning carried out in August, Navalny teamed up with the investigative journalism website Bellingcat, CNN and other international news outlets. His efforts went as far as calling up and duping a Russian agent into describing how Novichok nerve agent had been planted in his underwear. 

In January, when he returned to Moscow, Navalny was immediately arrested and put on trial. Two days later, his team published an investigation on YouTube into Putin’s personal wealth, which has now been viewed 115 million times. 

Vasily Gatov, a former senior executive at the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, describes the media’s latest approach to Navalny as total “character assassination.”

“They hit somewhat of a dead end by allowing Navalny to develop on his own for such a long time,” he said. “In general, there are few figures that Russians trust, so the new frame here is distrust, that Navalny is not ‘for Russia’ and is a person of dubious character.”

The most high-level example of the shift is Putin breaking a historical, near-total silence on his most prominent critic. In October, Navalny had accused the Russian president of personally ordering the Novichok attack. During an annual press conference in December, Putin described the allegations as pure “falsification.”

“Who needs to poison him?” he said. “If they’d wanted to, they probably would have finished the job.”

With Navalny sick, in jail and under attack across Russian media channels, the ruling United Russia party has begun to co-opt some of his campaign strategies.

Navalny was never considered a serious threat to Putin as a candidate, but his political activism through a “Smart Voting” strategy upset the Kremlin’s power balance. First deployed during Moscow city elections in 2019, then again in nationwide regional elections in 2020, the highly organized voting campaign set out to unseat candidates from the ruling United Russia party in contested electoral districts.

Next up are parliamentary elections this September. But with Navalny behind bars, United Russia has launched its own “Smart Voice” strategy. Leaked campaign documents show that the party is deploying a bot army across social platforms to confuse voters into casting their ballots for the ruling party. At the same time, dozens of Navalny allies involved in Smart Voting have been jailed, with police even targeting the relatives of activists.

“You can say Navalny brought the fight to enemy territory,” Gallyamov said. “The entire government propaganda system is now working and Navalny is the enemy of that system.”

In recent days, Putin has further tightened his grip on power, passing a law on April 5 that allows him to stay in office until 2036.

The post Russian media launches a new line of attack against Alexey Navalny appeared first on Coda Story.

Speculation about Magfuli’s health had escalated over the 18 days that Magufuli, 61, had uncharacteristically disappeared from public view. Conflicting reports claimed the president was seeking care in India. The Legal and Constitutional Affairs Minister Mwigulu Nchemba threatened to arrest anyone “blathering, spreading misinformation” about Magufuli. Police charged at least four people for spreading false information about the sickness of political leaders.

The crackdown is consistent with Magufuli’s authoritarianism. In power since 2015, Magufuli shuttered independent media outlets and pressured social media platforms like Twitter to silence activist voices.

But it was for his anti-science pandemic response that Magufuli, a former chemistry teacher, gained international notoriety. An initial science-led approach by the president in the early days of the pandemic was rapidly abandoned in favor of coronavirus scepticism.

In the past year, Magufuli:

• questioned the safety of masks, coronavirus tests and vaccines
• promoted conspiracy theories claiming vaccines were a Western plot against Africans
• sent papaya and goat meat samples to labs for Covid-19 testing, using the results to justify the denial of the virus
• refused to procure any coronavirus vaccine until national experts had reviewed them

Magufuli’s vice president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, was sworn in on March 19, The country’s first female president, Hassan must decide whether to procure Covid-19 vaccines. The country has not released the number of Covid infections in the country since May, 2020, when it reported just 509 cases.

Political opponents of the former president have called on the government to provide transparency into this death. "Magufuli died of corona," said Tundu, the opposition leader. The head of the ACT-Wazalendo opposition party, Zitto Kabwe, said, “It is important for the government to inform the public about the president’s health to reduce ongoing fear.”

The post Tanzania’s president, a leader in spreading Covid misinformation, dies of Covid appeared first on Coda Story.

Instead of getting vaccinated, some Russians are turning to the messaging app Telegram where they can purchase a counterfeit vaccine certificate for about $25. Anonymous sellers on the app promise their fake documents will allow Russians to board international flights and side-step mandatory vaccination for students or medical workers, and other professionals.

Telegram channels informally operate as online supermalls for black market products. From synthetic drugs to personal data lifted from Facebook, Telegram users deploy the app’s bot service to make illegal and untraceable sales. Russian users particularly excel with dozens of channels now offering not just fake Sputnik V vaccination documents but also counterfeit antibody and Covid-19 test results, or a doctor’s note excusing a patient from vaccination.

Channels viewed by Coda Story showed messages from administrators warning users they could be punished for refusing to be vaccinated. “Rumor has it that the vaccine will soon become mandatory, and a refusal will get you punished with termination at work, up to an administrative or even capital offense,” warned one admin on the channel “Vaccination.No.” The channel sells three separate types of documents and shares enthusiastic reviews from satisfied customers. 

“You’re the best,” said one beaming customer in a selfie video posted to the channel. “Soon we’re flying out for our vacation!”

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment about the illegal sales on its platform.

Why it matters: The demand for fake vaccination certificates shows how deep distrust runs for the vaccine which is administered in two shots. The irony is the heavy-handed propaganda that accompanied the rollout of Sputnik V may have backfired and actually fueled distrust of the shot. Unlike the U.S. or most of Europe where rollout prioritizes the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, getting a Sputnik shot has been accessible for anyone in Russia since January. Across Moscow, inoculation centers are pitched up across shopping malls and food courts.

However, the current vaccination rate — just 3.5% for at least one shot — lags far behind countries who began vaccinating months after Russia: 18% in the U.S. and over 33% in the U.K. Although some Russian regions have yet to receive the vaccine due to winter conditions or supply limits, the government has set an ambitious goal of vaccinating 60% of the population by the summer.

“There is no shortage of vaccines, but one cannot say that there is a rush,” admitted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov during a recent press briefing.

One Russian who has yet to get vaccinated is President Vladimir Putin, who while extolling the efficacy of Sputnik V says he’ll hold off until late summer or early fall before getting a shot.

The big picture: Even abroad, Sputnik V is a bigger hit than on its home turf. In Europe, Hungary and Slovakia have both approved the vaccine for use ahead of a decision from the European Union, joining more than 40 countries around the world to sign on to Sputnik. The British medical journal The Lancet recently published a peer-reviewed study showing that Sputnik is 91.6% effective and has no severe side effects.

But with over four million cases of coronavirus recorded in Russia — ranking fourth in the world — Sputnik V pitch is failing to land at home.

The post Fake Covid-19 vaccination certificates for sale on Russian Telegram appeared first on Coda Story.

Accusations of misogynistic comments, threats of rape, revenge porn and doxxing spread to other social media platforms, not just the ones centered on gaming. From YouTube to Twitter and Reddit, big-name content creators — almost exclusively male — were getting away with creating online worlds that amplified the harassment women have fought for decades to eradicate from their workplace.

That online platforms function as workplaces for content creators and that harassment and abuse threaten their livelihoods is rarely addressed in discussions on platform regulation and the industry’s self-policing policies. Many of the users involved are financially dependent on ad revenue from their online streams or posts, making these platforms essentially their place of business.

“In a normal workplace if your employees are getting harassed this way, you would do something,” said Karen Skardzius, who researches Twitch streamers and platform regulation at York University in Toronto. “If this was a store and you had someone come in and scream all these expletives and hateful language at one of your employees, you would chuck them out of the store. But instead, here, that’s engagement with the platform.”

Over several days in June 2020, there were dozens, and later hundreds of posts ranging from accusations of inappropriate comments during gaming streams and rape at industry conferences. One New York-based streamer, Jessica Richey, started collecting the posts in a Google spreadsheet. By July 3, it listed over 400 accusations of harassment, manipulation and sexual assault.

Platforms and gaming executives responded with promises to rid their spaces of bad behavior. “I’ve heard your voices,” tweeted Twitch CEO Emmett Shear on June 23. He promised to extinguish “systemic sexism, racism and abuse” in the gaming industry. Nearly six months later, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, announced a new hateful conduct and harassment policy, which went into effect on January 22. 

The updated policy eschewed any major upheaval on the company’s gaming network. It now promises a “much lower tolerance for objectifying or harassing behavior” and a ban on sending unsolicited nude images and videos, an issue many users flagged in June 2020. Users can now report other gamers for making repeated comments on perceived attractiveness.

“Our recent policy updates take a clearer and more consistent stance against hate and harassment, and enable us to enforce our guidelines more consistently,” said a Twitch spokesperson in an email. They added that the policy was just one of “a number of projects underway to address hate and harassment.”

The upgraded policy puts Twitch a step ahead of other platforms, such as YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, where female and non-binary content creators say harassment is also pervasive.

For YouTuber Pieke Roelofs, the threats haven’t stopped coming. After accusing professional YouTuber Alexander McKechnie of raping her in 2016, Roelofs has faced a stream of death threats and hateful messages from his fans, who number in the millions. McKechnie’s videos about science and the future have been collectively viewed over 145 million times on his channel. Roelofs says this dedicated fan base has been waging a relentless campaign against her. 

YouTube, Twitter, Reddit — name the platform and Roelofs has been harassed, doxed and threatened by other users. After a court case in the Netherlands, where Roelofs lives, opened a criminal investigation in 2018, the abuse only intensified. Today she is left fending off online hate from McKechnie’s fans with the limited toolkit provided by the platforms where she makes her living.

Roelofs’ income took a big hit. Searching her name online pulls up pages of tweets, subreddits and comment threads calling her a liar and worse. With limited options for reporting and removing the content, she says she’s left with a choice: putting up with the stream of online hate or leaving her professional field entirely. Since the abuse began she’s turned off comments on her videos, resulting in YouTube’s algorithm downgrading her content.

“People are taken hostage by these companies and their rules, people feel they can’t leave,” Roelofs said. “I want them to start taking responsibility for these huge worlds they have created online.”

McKechnie, known by his username Exurb1a, has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Google-owned YouTube has faced several high-profile calls for greater accountability for harboring harassment and hate speech since Roelofs first reported McKechnie’s channel in 2017.

In June 2019, YouTube came under scrutiny for allowing Steven Crowder, a right-wing video blogger, who at the time had 3.8 million subscribers, to stay on the platform. Crowder had been sending homophobic and racist messages to journalist Carlos Maza. A public outcry followed, with YouTube responding with updates to its anti-harassment policy. The platform also demonetized Crowder’s account, temporarily stripping him of the ability to generate ad revenue on his videos, but still keeping him on YouTube. The actions made Crowder a hero on the right and he gained 1.4 million subscribers since his temporary ban.

Accusations that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media giants over-regulate content to discriminate against conservative voices are in stark contrast to the voices who say platforms are toothless when it comes to content moderation.

Moments of reckoning come and go, say many women and non-binary content creators, marked by initial optimism, strongly worded statements from industry CEOs and an ensuing lack of meaningful change. 

In some cases, as with Crowder, a platform’s actions — such as demonetizing an account or a temporary ban from the website — backfire, ultimately fueling increased popularity for the person targeted by a platform for punitive measures. 

New moderation policies unveiled by platforms with much fanfare are often framed as “updates” or “clarifications” to pre-existing language.

Skardzius says she often sees women resorting to posting their own detailed harassment policies on their channels, outlining what will get another user banned or reported. As for male streamers, “their profiles don’t have that,” she said. “When they do have rules it’s something like ‘no politics and no religion.’ They’re just not targeted by this kind of stuff.”

Other streamers rely on customized bots to filter out hateful content on their accounts. Natalie Casanova — known as ZombiUnicorn on Twitch, where they were named streamer of the year in 2020 — protects their profile with bots that screen out messages from other users for words like “whore” and “rape.”

Casanova has especially relied on these filters since last June, when they accused British YouTuber Tom Cassell, known online as Syndicate, of rape. Cassel still streams on Twitch to three million followers nearly every day. He has almost 10 million subscribers on YouTube.

Cassell did not respond to a request to comment for this piece.

Hate-filled messages continue to find Casanova, despite the bots and the complaint they have submitted to YouTube and Twitch. YouTube never responded to Casanova’s allegations against Cassell. Twitch sent Casanova a confirmation email on July 8, 2020 saying it had received the message and asking for more information. Casanova attached the police report they filed concerning the alleged rape, contact information for the police detective examining the case and dozens of witness statements. Casanova has not heard from the platform since.

“Nothing has literally ever happened,” Casanova said. “I think at least getting an email from this alleged investigation team saying, ‘Hey, sorry it's been like eight months, but we came to a decision and we couldn't do anything’ … that would at least be a first step.”

The women and non-binary gamers and streamers interviewed for this piece did offer their own ideas for reporting tools they wish were on the negotiating table. Such as bans based on IP addresses, rather than usernames, which could slow down how quickly harassers are able to re-join platforms after being banned, said Casanova.

Skardzius says many of the women she spoke to for her dissertation demanded more reliable channels for contacting actual people, not anonymous chat bots, working at these companies about complaints.

In the meantime, the abuse across the platforms carries on for creators like Roelofs and Casanova. Roelofs' most recent death threat came via a direct message on Twitter on January 31, accompanied by photographs of dead bodies. Casanova is messaged by the same troll every day from an anonymous account on Twitter. Every time they block the account, the user messages again from a new one.

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In the lead up to protests in over 100 cities on Saturday, influencers with up to four million subscribers on the video sharing platform told their followers they could end up in jail for taking part in the demonstrations.

“I don’t think anyone wants to end up in jail so guys, take care of yourselves and your health and think about the consequences,” warned @_Vira__ in a video posted to her more than four million followers on TikTok. 

In another post, user xlazhii reminded his 188,000 followers that Navalny’s own children go to university outside of Russia. “So why should Russia’s youth be coming out for that, what is the point?” 

Both users have since deleted the clips.

Many of the influencers revealed a coordinated and sometimes clumsy attempt to harness TikTok’s immense popularity in Russia against the opposition figure. A number of influencers and marketing managers said that anonymous social media accounts were soliciting paid, anti-Navalny videos.

Boris Kantorovich, deputy commercial director at the influencer marketing firm Author’s Media in Moscow, wrote about a coordinated effort by TikTokers who tried to dissuade people from attending the protests. Kantorovich attached screenshots for an advertising call posted on popular marketing forums on January 24 and noted that “all of them repeat the same message.” The call outlined a script which can be heard in the dozens of videos posted across TikTok the same day. The ad promised users with over 20,000 subscribers about $25 for each post.

Russian authorities took a number of measures online to limit attendance. The state censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, forced social networks like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to remove event pages and posts about the protests. 

While posts were largely meant to target younger Russians, a group where Navalny enjoys his highest approval numbers, it’s not clear how much of a dent the paid videos made against the flood of support for the opposition leader.

Tens of thousands of Russians protested over the weekend from Moscow to remote regions like Yakutsk, where Navalny supporters rallied in minus-60 Fahrenheit weather. The mass gatherings followed Navalny’s return to Russia on January 17, when he was arrested on arrival for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from 2014. The leader had been undergoing treatment in Berlin since last August after he was exposed to the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent. Western officials have described his poisoning as an assassination attempt by the Russian state, a charge denied by the Kremlin.

Over 3,800 people were arrested in Saturday’s protests, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that monitors political arrests.

Following media reports about the paid posts, dozens of pro-Navalny TikTokers rallied around the politician, instructing their followers to unsubscribe from accounts which had posted warnings about the protests.

“Do you know how much you cost? 2,000 rubles, yea...You can find out who all these paid-for bloggers are by checking out this hashtag,” said user @ideniza, pointing to #norevolution to her 88,500 followers. 

TikTok, which has over 20 million subscribers in Russia, had been largely left untouched by authorities, in sharp contrast to other online spaces which are both heavily censored and subject to paid, pro-government campaigns. Authorities have been slow to adapt to the new platform, which launched in Russia in 2018 and has become a safe haven for activists and outspoken young people. 

That began to change in August last year when a criminal case was opened against an underage TikTok user in Chita in Siberia for “offending the feelings of believers.” The teenager had posted a video of himself lighting a cigarette with a church candle.

The post TikTok sees a surge in anti-protest disinformation in Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

Shirtless and wearing a buffalo-horned fur hat, Jacob Chansley — also known as Jake Angeli and the QAnon Shaman — perfectly embodied the chaos of the January 6 insurrection. Examination of Chansley’s social media activity appears to indicate his involvement with a set of hardline right-wing environmentalist beliefs known as eco-fascism. Meanwhile, photographs of rioters affiliated with the Proud Boys and the paramilitary hate group The Base, which have both embraced aspects of this school of thought, show that they also played a central role in the unrest.

Having existed on the fringes of the far-right for decades, the ideologies of green nationalism and eco-fascism are on the rise around the world, spurred on by the intensifying climate crisis and the ongoing rise of populist and authoritarian political movements. Instead of deploying the usual anti-immigration rhetoric, certain elements of the extreme right are now attracting new recruits and pushing their broader agendas while promoting a very specific brand of reactionary environmental activism.

The adoption of these positions is not just a cynical ploy, either. Far-right environmentalism is based on beliefs of racial purity and homeland that form the very foundations of white nationalist thinking. As such, it should not be viewed as mere political opportunism.

“We should take what they say seriously,” said Bernhard Forchtner, author of the academic book “The Far-right and the Environment.” “If we simply say, it’s opportunistic, well it might be, but that robs us of a better understanding of what drives these actors.”

Far-right involvement in the environmental movement is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the term “ecology” was first coined in the mid-1800s by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a social Darwinist and dedicated racist whose writings went on to inspire Hitler’s National Socialist movement.

By the early 20th century, racist environmentalists in the U.S. had developed strong ties with European fascists. In 1916 the prominent eugenicist Madison Grant — who helped to found the Bronx Zoo and the Denali, Olympic, Everglades and Glacier National Parks — published a book titled “The Passing of the Great Race,” which Hitler later referred to as “my Bible.” 

According to Cassidy Thomas, who researches eco-fascism at Syracuse University, contemporary far-right discourse has “revitalized rhetoric that was very prominent in the early 1900s.” By way of example, Thomas points to the writings of alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, which praise the national park system and highlight the importance of wilderness preservation from a white nationalist perspective.

“It’s hard to really get at fascism without understanding the ecological connections,” said Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State University's Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right. 

In the mid-2010s, Ross belonged to some of Oregon’s more radical, left-wing environmental circles. After seeing far-right elements creeping into green activist groups, he began to study the ideological roots and spread of fascist environmentalism. 

“I was trying to make sense of some of these entry points where fascists actually join and bind in these movements,” he explained. 

As part of this work, he now monitors Telegram, a messaging app popular with right-wing extremists in the U.S. According to Ross, groups such as the Proud Boys began to promote eco-fascist ideas in earnest last year, using a network of far-right channels known by their users as Terrorgram. Following the Capitol riots, these channels have experienced a surge in new subscribers, some growing by as much as 80% in a matter of days.

Radical right-wing environmentalist ideologies are rooted in a broader framework of racist anti-humanism that foregrounds ideas such as ethnopluralism — the belief that different ethnic groups should remain distinct, separate and restricted to their supposedly native lands — and the perceived perils of overpopulation. However, groups and individuals promoting these positions ignore a number of basic facts.

“Their shared emphasis on population growth directs blame onto the non-white global south while ignoring the outsized consumption of the more static northern populations,” explained Blair Taylor, director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont.

Historically, influential far-right environmentalists such as the Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola and the American white nationalist Garrett Hardin have sought to justify extreme anti-democratic measures, up to and including genocide. For instance, Linkola, who died in 2020, advocated for a complete halt to immigration, the reversion to a technology-free way of life and strict controls on birthrates. Dictatorships, he wrote, were better suited to limiting population growth and rolling back the environmental destruction of the industrial era.

Radical-right environmentalism may have been around for a while, but its existence came to widespread public attention in 2019, following the mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. Both gunmen had written manifestos in which they described themselves as eco-fascists. According to Ross, they are now revered by the broader far-right community “literally as saints.”

On a grassroots level, white nationalist organic farmers recently made headlines in the U.S. by showing up at local markets in cities such as Bloomington, Indiana. Meanwhile, in the U.K., former members of the far-right youth movement Generation Identity have been exposed as the organizers of a group promoting local food production and green issues.

Far-right environmentalist ideas are also seeping into electoral politics. In France, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally party has ditched its denial of human-driven climate change in favor of a carefully branded “patriotic ecology.” 

In Serbia, the far-right environmentalist group Levijatan regularly courts controversy by “patrolling” migrant camps and advocating for the protection of the environment from “unwelcome” foreigners. In May 2020, Filip Radovanovic  — a prominent member of both Levijatan and the ruling populist Serbian Progressive Party — deliberately drove a car into a refugee reception center on the outskirts of Belgrade. Party members then joined him outside to protest against what they referred to as illegal immigration.

Placing emphasis on environmental issues is likely to make the far-right’s reactionary views palatable to a much wider constituency than they otherwise would be. That is why some campaign groups are taking decisive steps to spot and block right-wing incursions into the green cause. 

For the past year, the German chapter of the international organization Nature Friends has been running weekly government-financed seminars on far-right infiltration of the green movement. The meetings examine both the historical and contemporary links between environmentalist thought and extreme right-wing ideologies.

Some are more obvious than others. During a recent Zoom gathering, a group of activists discussed the forgotten origins of nudism. Richard Ungewitter, the early 20th-century pioneer of the movement, argued that German women who were exposed to naked Aryan male bodies would become uninterested in other “exotic” races, which would, in turn, allow white people to flourish and their bloodline to remain undiluted.

However, more contemporary issues tend to take precedence. One example is the far-right party Alternative for Germany’s recent focus on animal rights as a means to attack Muslim and Jewish communities over traditional methods of slaughter used in food production. The people behind Nature Friends recognize that such issues are ripe for exploitation by those seeking to create racial and religious divisions and are determined not to fall prey to such efforts. 

As program director Yannick Passeick explained, “There is a need to teach people how to be for the environment and not against human beings.”

Additional reporting by Oleksandr Ignatenko

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On January 6, with a single vote, Pence found himself at the center of a whirlwind of conspiracy theories that has only grown in intensity since that day’s breach of the Capitol by an armed mob of Trump supporters. Many of the narratives circulating online have cast him as the New Testament’s most infamous figure.

“He is Judas now,” said Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. 

Ross has been monitoring far-right disinformation on 4chan and other online channels following the unprecedented scenes in Washington, D.C. He pointed to a 4chan post about Pence that read, “Before the Last Supper, Judas went to the chief priests and agreed to hand over Jesus in exchange for 30 silver coins.”

It is just one of hundreds of similarly worded messages posted over the past 72 hours, obsessing over an image of Pence being handed what appears to be a coin after his speech. Trump supporters have referred to it as “Masonic” and claimed that the exchange was a symbolic payment for Pence’s actions.

“What's so hard to understand? Pence sold out America, Trump and Jesus and they gave him a neat little token in return,” wrote one user on a 4chan thread dedicated to “Mike Thirty Pieces of Silver Pence.”

Pence may have considered his role as vice-president to be “a divine appointment,” but some White House observers have long prophesized an uncomfortable end to his time in office.

Back in 2018, Kate Andersen Brower published a prescient profile in Vanity Fair. It included the lines, “Such is the agony and the ecstasy of Mike Pence, Trump’s most faithful servant, and the man who many in Washington D.C, suspect could one day become his Judas.” 

The conspiracy theories now surrounding Pence accuse his security detail of shooting Ashli Babbitt, the air force veteran and QAnon supporter killed inside the Capitol. Pence has been labeled a ringleader of a revolution against Trump. His newly declared enemies have also dug up a 2017 Twitter warning from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Trump, claiming that Pence was at the center of a White House takeover plot with Hillary Clinton.

According to Ross, “Everything is folded into the current moment. Trump put the target on his back. You have an authoritarian leader singling out his right-hand man to the mob. Then you have the grassroots echo chamber reverberating around. Everything and anything can be blamed on Pence.”

The chaos and volatility that led to the January 6 incursion continues to rage online, particularly among QAnon supporters. They are aggrieved because they previously believed that Pence would override the election, despite that scenario being legally impossible, and kick off a civil war. Now, they are casting the devout Christian VP at the heart of Q’s Satanic child abuse narrative.

“I’m critical of everything that I hear, but, from a lot of sources, I’ve heard that,” said Trump supporter Tom Groves to NBC, stating his belief that Pence is a pedophile and a member of the “deep state.”

Then there’s Pence the communist. In a post on the right-wing social media platform Parler, the prominent QAnon-supporting attorney L. Lin Wood told his 1.1 million-strong following, “Good Afternoon!!! I am hearing rumors that Pence & leaders of the coup are planning to arrest & execute President Trump & his followers. Typical move by Communist tyrants.”

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The following day, Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent host on the state-owned TV channel Russia-1, welcomed her back, saying: “Psaki is a professional woman with a sense of humor, who, however, did not always understand that she was joking.”

As a career Democrat communications officer who has spent a considerable amount of time in Russia, Psaki has been a punching bag for Russia’s media for years, which painted her as a mouthpiece of American propaganda and a symbol of the Obama administration’s hardline approach to Moscow. After a few public gaffes — including mistakenly saying that Russia imports natural gas from Western Europe to Russia — a new phrase was coined: “The Great Psakiing,” meaning the egregious confusion of facts.

Despite Psaki’s awkward relationship with Russia, right-wing media outlets in the U.S. are now painting her as a communist-sympathizing, Kremlin-colluding pawn. 

The recent string of attacks started with a photograph of Psaki in a pink fur hat, taken in 2014. At the time, she was the State Department spokesperson. In the picture, she is flanked by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then Secretary of State John Kerry. The hat, a gift from Lavrov, was adorned with the red star emblem of the Soviet Union.

It’s the kind of souvenir sold at virtually any tourist kiosk in Moscow, alongside nesting dolls and Putin T-shirts. But that didn’t stop Matt Wolking, deputy communications director of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, posting the image on Twitter:

Fox News, Breitbart and right-wing news site The Daily Caller joined the fray — the latter offering a helpful history lesson, pointing out that the Soviet Union “caused the deaths of tens of millions of people in the 20th century.”

“Nice commie hat,” tweeted conservative radio host Andrew Wilkow.

According to Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the goal is to portray Psaki and, by extension, Biden and the Democratic Party as being in thrall to Russia, thus shifting the narrative of collusion that has plagued the Trump administration.

“It doesn’t require evidence to be used against someone,” said Jamieson in a telephone interview. “The claim is going to be made as long as the charge sits there in Republican circles that Putin elected Donald Trump.” 

Psaki is a veteran Democrat staffer, but it was as White House communications director during the final years of the Obama administration that she really grabbed Russia’s attention.

The comedy TV segment “Psaki at Night” was the epitome of that obsession.  

“There’re a lot of things in the world that trigger the same reaction as appearances by Jen Psaki, the U.S. State Department’s representative: confusion, laughter and of course, a lot of questions,” said the show’s host Mikhail Gendelev, during a broadcast on Russia’s NTV channel in February 2015.

There were viral blooper reels from her briefings, memes and even the ironic hashtag #SavePsaki, after rumors that she had been fired. However, much of the coverage went beyond humor. Psaki became an easy target for Russian media, with much of its attention fixed on her gender.

“The fact that Psaki is a woman is an important element of why Russian state-aligned media has spent so much time trying to discredit her,” explained Vasily Gatov, the former head of development at the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

On one TV broadcast in 2015, head of Russia Today Dmitry Kiselyov joked that Psaki had announced that she was pregnant and fielded a question about the paternity of her child. “She lowered her head, said, ‘Hmm, I can’t say for sure. Let me get back to my office and look around,’” he said.

“They took her as a placeholder for their disgust with Hillary and generally the Obama administration, and just made a lot of nasty jokes about her and her performance,” said Gatov, during a telephone interview. “It was anti-Americanism, but it was personalized in the direction of Jen Psaki.”

Now that Psaki is poised to take on a new high-level role in the Biden administration, these old narratives are being recycled. Conservative media in the U.S. is following a similarly misogynistic line. While some praised the Biden administration’s all-female press team, pundits like Ben Shapiro have criticized the decision, saying that it is “not the most diverse team in history because there are no men.”

For now, Psaki is better-known in Russia than she is at home, but if such commentators have their way she will soon be a household name — for all the wrong reasons.

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The new partnership was announced via the official Facebook page of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection on October 16. “We are ready to work closely with Huawei to ensure and improve cyber defense and cybersecurity in Ukraine,” said Yuriy Schyhol, head of the state communications service, in a separate statement on the agency’s website. “I am convinced that our interaction will strengthen the state's defense against cyber threats.”

Soon after, any mention of the partnership was inexplicably scrubbed from the agency’s website and social media accounts, but not before hundreds of Ukrainains commented on the announcement. Huawei’s post about the partnership, however, is still public on its Ukrainian Facebook page.

The public reaction: “Thank you for reminding everyone of what is wrong with your office,” wrote one user, named Taras Yemchura, on Facebook. Another poster asked “Who made this decision? 11th graders?” The negative feedback continues to pour in on news pieces about the deal and on social media.

The expert view: Andrei Baranovich, a member of the activist group Cyber Alliance, said that his first concern is how Ukraine plans to partner with Huaewei while working with the U.S. government and military on its information security. 

“Allowing a company suspected of working for the Chinese state to come near the government is just unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t see a logical explanation for why, out of all the available vendors in secure telecommunications, they sign a deal with Huawei.”

Why this matters: As the world’s largest manufacturer of cellular technology, Huawei’s close ties with China’s government and military have raised concerns in a number of countries over security risks posed by its equipment. In August, the United States, one of Ukraine’s closest allies, dealt the company what many experts referred to as a “lethal blow” by blocking the use of any American-made components in its products.

The bigger picture: With the U.S. banning the sale of its technology to Huawei, the company now has to rework its rollout of 5G. The European Union has decided, in light of the U.S. sanctions, that it is just too risky to rely on Huawei for the setting up of 5G networks on the continent. The Finnish company Nokia and Sweden-based Ericsson have now stepped in. The U.K. government will also phase out all Huawei 5G technology by 2027.

Additional reporting by Oleksandr Ignatenko

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Minsk’s central district court ruled on October 20 that both Nexta’s channel and its logo are “extremist,” ordering the information ministry to restrict access to its content on the Belarusian internet.

The decision to act against the Telegram channel is unprecedented even for Belarus, where authorities have at times shut down the country’s internet to prevent people organizing protests and blocked access to independent online media sites. The channel is effectively the country’s main news source about the protests, with nearly two million people subscribed, a staggering number for a country of about nine and half million. The channel has lost about 10,000 subscribers since the court case was announced.

Coda has previously reported on the crucial role of Telegram channels sidestepping censorship from Belarusian authorities. Legal experts say they do not know how this ruling will affect subscribers or how the Nexta team operates in neighboring Poland.

“I want to understand whether we all need to delete this channel from our smartphones now, whether we can still repost content from the channel, and what we need to do next if we’ve previously reposted content from the channel,” Siarhej Zikratski, a lawyer based in Minsk, told Euroradio.

Tatiana Ravinskaya, a lawyer who spoke to EuroRadio, said that in the past the state has not prosecuted people for simply viewing material which is deemed extremist by authorities: “The law does not hold people liable if they view a link that is published in the country’s list of extremist material.”

A number of channels on Telegram have been targeted by authorities this year, with over a dozen administrators jailed. As the largest channel in the country, Nexta was an obvious target, especially as weekly nationwide protests have continued more than two months after the vote.

“Nexta is not just an important channel, it is the number one channel in the country that is organizing the protests themselves,” said Barys Hartetsky, deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, in a phone interview back in August when post-election protests began.

Nexta-Live announced in a statement that they are now working on a new name and logo for their channel.

Additional reporting provided by Euroradio, our partner in Belarus. Euroradio, as with scores of online news outlets, has been blocked in Belarus since election day on August 9.

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“Many of them responded that they were also experiencing headaches and that the pain would come in these waves,” she said.

Some of 42-year-old Chernikhovskaya’s followers then urged her to read about the side effects of radiation from cell phone masts. This was her introduction to the global anti-5G conspiracy movement. Reading hundreds of blog and social media posts from the U.S., U.K. and Europe, she quickly became convinced that there was a connection between the way she felt and what many identified as the catastrophic threat posed by developments in cellular technology.

While often cited as a leading source of global disinformation, Russia has proven fertile ground for this Western-born conspiracy theory. Against a backdrop of uncertainty and fear over the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s social media has over the past 12 months experienced a boom in anti-5G content.

Russia’s anti-5G movement is “first and foremost fed by international conspiracy theories in English,” explained Sarkis Darbinyan, founder of the Moscow-based Digital Rights Center during a telephone conversation.

Internationally, the theory’s adherents more or less agree that radiation emitted from cellphone masts leads to an array of health issues including headaches, insomnia, increased heart rate and the death of large numbers of otherwise healthy birds. Some followers also think that 5G towers are being erected as part of a covert scheme to subdue populations or to spread the coronavirus.

For many, including those in Russia, anti-mask narratives and coronavirus denialism go hand in hand with their beliefs. The most universal and foundational position, though, is that state authorities simply cannot be trusted. In many of her YouTube videos, Chernikhovskaya wears a homemade T-shirt bearing a graphic of a medical mask and the slogan “Covid-1984.” 

Soon after she began investigating the movement, Chernikhovskaya — who works as a translator and is fluent in English — found an online prophet. 

David Icke, a British former sports broadcaster, is a superstar of the conspiracy theory world. As the author of more than 20 controversial books, his personal appearances draw large crowds everywhere from the U.S. to Albania. His online videos alone have racked up more than 30 million views. The discovery of his anti-5G material came as a revelation to Chernikhovskaya. 

One strand of the anti-5G movement proposes that Covid-19 lockdown measures were imposed around the world so authorities could install 5G masts without attracting widespread attention. In line with this idea, Chernikhovskaya believed she had identified a pattern between lockdown announcements in the U.K. and Russia and the rollout of the technology.  

“I was really interested in all of this because in Russia we would hear the exact same lockdown announcements as in the U.K., just two days later,” she explained.

Anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova and her colleagues at Russian State University for the Humanities have collected and analyzed more than two million anti-5G messages posted on social media since January. Their goal was to examine the intersection between Covid-19 denialist movements and anti-5G activism. 

Arkhipova believes that Russia’s anti-5G movement is largely composed of individuals who have lost jobs during the pandemic. This summer, Russia reported unemployment numbers not seen since 2012 and that the average family income has fallen to a level not seen in the past two decades.

Arkhipova also explained that latching onto the anti-5G movement can be almost “therapeutic” for people dealing with the fallout of the coronavirus, as it creates a “language” for them to speak out against what they see as wider failings of governments to protect society.

In light of what they view as state negligence regarding 5G, some activists have taken matters into their own hands. Dozens of social media groups, largely hosted in the Russian platform VK, now feature instructions as to how to dismantle 5G towers. They clearly reference as examples cases in which activists set fire to masts in Germany and the U.K. In the U.K. alone, more than 70 such structures have been attacked. So far just one has been burned down in Russia. The incident took place in May, in the North Ossetian town of Nogir.

“You look at England and Europe and you see birds falling and dying,” said Anatoli Shatunov, an anti-5G proponent from Shakhti, a city on Russia’s border with Ukraine. “It’s the same thing happening here, it’s radiation.”

In May, activists in the nearby port city of Rostov-on-Don made headlines by linking arms around a newly installed cell tower, refusing to allow technicians to hook it up, for fear that it would spread the coronavirus.

That same month, a woman in Dagestan called for a cellphone mast to be burned down, referring to it as a “second Chernobyl” in an Instagram video that attracted a total of more than 40,000 views. No one took up her cause and she faced no legal consequences for her words. This year, the region has reported a surge in fatalities attributed to pneumonia. Meanwhile authorities have at times reported just two or three coronavirus deaths, stoking doubts over the government’s handling of the pandemic. 

Also prominent in Russian anti-5G circles is the Soviet Patriot movement. Members of this group live in an alternate reality, in which communism never fell. They are regularly arrested by authorities for refusing to pay taxes to the Russian Federation and some still carry Soviet passports as their only form of government ID. The involvement of this tendency follows a well-established pattern of disenfranchised individuals with a deep distrust of the state being particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which Soviet Patriots consider the ruling body of their fictitious state, issued a recent resolution denouncing 5G technology. It explains that “it is paramount to prohibit the installation and use of all mobile cellular technology of the fifth generation, or 5G, across the entire territory of the USSR.” 

While the Soviet Patriots may be nostalgic for the authoritarianism of the past, they reject the legitimacy of the Russian Federation and deeply distrust government initiatives, especially when it comes to technology. Some members believe that Moscow’s coronavirus lockdown in the spring was a ruse to keep people off the streets as government officials ran “radiation tests.”

However, Russia’s most popular anti-5G activist is Nikolai Mishustin, a 47-year-old, Moscow-based father of six children. Mishustin is a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and regularly posts lengthy video addresses on a range of topics to his 27,000 VK subscribers. He saves his most vitriolic proclamations for Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who is no relation. The Prime Minister has championed nationwide digital reform as well as Moscow’s smart city program. 

“The digital swindlers are using our president like a marionette doll,” Mishustin says in one of his videos. “The government is abjectly and cynically forcing this digital apocalypse upon us.”

In August, Chernikhovskaya demanded that city technicians check out the antenna in her courtyard. Most Russian municipalities provide residents with a service to check radiation levels near their homes. Outside Chernikhovskaya’s building, radiation proved to be well below average levels, immediately debunking her theories.

“I literally stood right there with them, walked up to the antenna and measured the levels in my apartment,” Chernikhovskaya said. 

The technicians also informed her that there is only one 5G mast in the whole of Russia, located on Moscow’s central Tverskaya Street. It is also not yet operational. The city plans to roll out 5G no earlier than 2022, and there is, as yet, no plan in place for nationwide coverage. 

While Chernikhovskaya is still suspicious about the health implications of 5G, the focus of her YouTube channel has shifted back to coronavirus skepticism. When she posted footage of the radiation inspection, she said she was surprised that the videos got fewer views than her anti-5G videos.

Those who did watch, weren’t happy and made their feelings clear in their comments. 

“I received a flood of criticism, accusing me of being a turncoat, asking me why I was believing these people,” she said.

This reporting was supported by the Russian Language News Exchange.

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