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A New View into the Protests in Russia
I don’t know how many of you have experimented with the new Google Translate, but if you haven’t paid much attention to it, the way it works is fascinating, and the results are beyond belief. I was one of the people who confidently said of AI translation schemes, “Oh, come on, they’ll never work.” I was so wrong. Google Machine Neural Translation is an astonishing and historic achievement.
One of its consequences: I can now read Russian. So can you. Without learning so much as a letter of Cyrillic. A whole world that was once only visible to Americans who invested years of study is now transparent to us all. Russia is still a riddle inside in an enigma, but it’s no longer wrapped in a mystery.
You’ve heard by now, I’m sure, that there were massive protests yesterday all across Russia, and that opposition leader Aleksey Navalny was detained. So were between 500 and “at least 1,000” other protesters, depending on the source. An American journalist, Alec Luhn, was detained, but later released.
The biggest protests Russia has seen in five years were, in the phrasing Russia Today used repeatedly, “unsanctioned.” Nominally, people were protesting corruption, but to paraphrase Garry Kasparov, Putin is the system, which is corruption, so these were anti-Putin protests.
Navalny, a gadfly crusader whose fight against graft has resonated with many Russians, was detained as he emerged with supporters from a subway station March 26 in central Moscow.
On Twitter, Roman Rubanov, the director of Navalny’s nongovernmental foundation, posted videos of a crowd of supporters trying to prevent the van carrying Navalny from moving amid a heavy riot police presence. …
Navalny, who challenged Moscow’s mayor in 2013 elections and has announced his intention to run for the presidency in 2018, called on supporters to continue their protest without him.
More than 800 people were believed to be detained in Moscow alone, according to the the nongovernmental organization OVD-Info. City police did not immediately release any figures, but the state news agency TASS, citing an unnamed Moscow police source, said more than 500 people were arrested.
Navalny encouraged the protesters to continue after his arrest: “Guys, I’m fine. No need to fight to get me out. Walk along Tverskaya [Moscow main street]. Our topic of the day is the fight against corruption,” he tweeted.
What’s fascinating is that this is the first time in my life I can not only read the Russian-language media almost as if it were in English (albeit written with a thick Russian accent), but what Russians themselves say about it, in real time, on Twitter. I’ve been to Russia, both before and after the Soviet Union collapsed, but I was only there for a few weeks, and always under the supervision of wary official monitors. So I’ve always had to accept a version of the country mediated through the English-language media.
Here, for example, is the NGO OVD-info’s website. Western journalists seem to agree it’s “usually reliable.” It describes itself (as translated by Google),
[as an] independent human rights media project dedicated to political persecution in Russia. We are engaged in daily monitoring of persecution for political reasons and publish information about them in the form of express news and stories told by the victims. We believe that information releases, and protects, and collected data analysis will make a difference in the future.
The project was started in December 2011 in response to the mass arrests of protesters in Moscow. Fairly quickly we realized that it is impossible to cover only “political detention”, not paying attention to political persecution as a whole and the state institutions that implement them.
Today, information activity ATS-Info [OVD-info] develops in three areas – freedom of assembly , freedom of speech and Politpressing . In addition, we write about how to act in these three areas system .
Often, we also coordinate the primary legal aid to people who have been subjected to political persecution.
ATS-info is committed to fairness in gathering and submitting information, as well as to the neutral style of presentation. The project is not engaged in settling of someone’s political interests and does not seek to achieve any narrow political purposes.
The ATS-info is no censorship, but we try not to publish information that could have a negative impact on the fate of people who are being persecuted.
Until recently, their site would have been inaccessible to me, and I would have had to content myself with that single sentence in the RFE/RL report: “More than 800 people were believed to be detained in Moscow alone, according to the the nongovernmental organization OVD-Info.” Now I can easily read everything OVD-Info said, and put it in the context they intended. I can figure out who funds them. I can read their Twitter feed, too. (By the way, don’t use Twitter’s Bing translation. It’s worthless. Just put the URL of the feed into Google Translate. You can also set Google to translate Russian automatically without asking.)
So this is what OVD-Info is now saying on Twitter:
- More than 1,000 people were detained in Moscow: the latest data | ATS-Info
- In Volgograd, possibly, there will be a case about an attack on a policeman during the dispersal of a rally | ATS-Info:
- Detentions on “AntiDimon” in Moscow: ATS list | ATS-Info:
- The applicants of the anti-corruption action in Saratov were detained in a cafe
- A detained teenager suffering from asthma is transported to another ATS. Previously, not allowed to parents with a
- Employees of the UK are already conducting [under?] interrogation in the Mischansky police station, Gagarin ATS and Strogino police department, detained as witnesses
- Gormost cleared the memorial at the site of the murder of Boris Nemtsov. Employees tore Nemtsov’s portraits from the hands of activist
- Dear friends! As far as we know, in all the ATS, where it was possible, food and water were taken or taken. Thank you all very much!
- Nikolay Lyaskin is hospitalized from the Luzhniki OP | ATS-Info:
- A number of police department of Moscow expect employees of the Investigative Committee | ATS-Info:
- Detainees in Makhachkala still remain in ROVD | ATS-Info
- SC opened a criminal case on the attack on a policeman during a rally in Moscow | ATS-Info
- FBK office in Moscow is not allowed a lawyer | ATS-Info:
- At least 700 people were detained in Moscow. The Moscow City Hall declared: “The police showed themselves to be impeccable.”
- In St. Petersburg, about 34 detainees, the area of the uprising was empty. In Gatchina, about 20 people came to the rally, seven were detained by the police
- Retweeted Alexey Navalny Verified account @ Navalny14 hours ago All employees of the Anti-Corruption Fund were detained. This is the best estimate of their work. FBK does not give a quiet life to thieves.
I find it just astonishing to be able to see into Russia like this. It’s not perfect, obviously, but all of these details would have before been completely inscrutable to me before: It’s a language I don’t know, written in an alphabet I can’t read.
An oddity of being American is that the rest of the world knows us so much better than we know them. Because the British and then Americans created so much of the modern world, English is the world’s most common second-language. It’s spoken by the elite everywhere (a bit, usually, at least); and in pretty much every country where people have televisions, which is now close to everywhere, people will be at least slightly familiar with America and American culture. We’re an open society that noisily pumps out information about ourselves, non-stop. We blare to every corner of the world our entertainment, our punditry, our Internet sites, our video games, our technology, our criticism of ourselves, our news media. So we’re far better understood by most of the world than vice-versa, even if a good part of the world is a bit confused by what they see.
One lesson of the first Cold War, we thought, was that open societies (ours, in particular) were inherently stronger than closed societies (Russia’s, in particular). Many of us are now wondering if this is still true. Neil Barnett has an excellent piece in The American Interest this week about the way Russia’s KGB-trained security organs have learned to exploit the vulnerabilities of open societies far more effectively than they were able to do in the Soviet era:
[O]ne of the central doctrines of the Comintern [was] that rotten and decadent democracies like Yugoslavia would inevitably fall because they were so weak that they lacked the resolve to deal with their enemies efficiently. Their openness was an obvious weapon to use against them—a gift to their adversaries.
The irony is that in the century since the Russian Revolution, the “soft” democracies have endured, and it is the communist system that has collapsed. But the inheritors of the NKVD mantle—the KGB-trained Kremlin elite—believe that the game is not yet over. Their method once again is to use what they believe to be the West’s weakness—decadence and above all, openness—as a weapon against it. With smirking denials, the Russian state is waging a war of hacking, disinformation, subversion and espionage throughout Europe and North America.
So far, so obvious. But the world has changed since the 1930s in ways that exponentially increase the potency of these long-established tools. The Comintern objective of spreading distrust of elites in democracies was an uphill task using rumours and unreadable radical newspapers. With force multipliers such as the internet, viral “fake news”, and legitimate-seeming outlets like RT and Sputnik, it is less so today.
And some, like Timothy Snyder, believe we’ve already lost.
… what if the enemy’s will can be altered without the blood and treasure of military engagement? If that were true, then a country with a smaller military budget, like Russia, might beat one with a better army, like America.
That just happened, and we are still wiping our eyes in foggy denial.
In 2011, a Russian information war manual concluded that operations in what Russians like to call the “psychosphere” were more important than conventional military engagements. The chief of staff of the Russian armed forces concurred in 2013. The basic aim of war, he averred, was to get inside the national mind of the enemy, reconfiguring habits of mind and frames of discourse so that Americans would do what the Russian leadership wanted. …
What’s notable to me is that Timothy Snyder is not a crackpot. He has good reason to believe he has more insight into Russian behavior than most Americans would. And this is a pattern: The more familiar people are with Russia’s history and language, the more they worry that this time, Russia is winning. And it’s succeeding, in part, because they know us so much better than we know them.
With AI translation, though, it’s possible for any of us to get to know Russia better than we could have before. Here are links to some of the highest-circulation newspapers in Russia. For the first time in history, Russian newspapers are, to the average, non-specialist American citizen, an open book:
- Izvestiya (Известия)
- Kommersant (Коммерсантъ)
- Komsomolskaya Pravda (Комсомольская правда)
- Moskovskiye Novosti (Московские новости)
- Moskovsky Komsomolets (Московский комсомолец)
- Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Независимая газета)
- Novye Izvestiya (Новые Известия)
What do you conclude from reading them? Does anything surprise you? Does anything seem to be missing? What’s missing, do you think — if anything — from English-language news accounts and interpretations yesterday’s events?
Published in General
So my daughter studied Russian at DLI. Now I’m supposed to tell her she has been replaced by Google?
(-:
Not yet, but when they can do this for spoken language? Yeah.
I’ll let her know. She’ll probably say “neyt.”
Can I suggest two things:
Okay, I toss away cynical jokes and say this is an unalloyed benefit for humanity, not quite as seamless as Gene Roddenberry’s Universal Translator, but pretty damn close, and getting closer every year.
Thirty years ago, in the thick of the Eighties, I was part of a project to recover a small amount of Soviet TV for the National Video Festival here, and ten minutes of translated material a day or two late was considered a miracle. Now, like many others, I’ve got a $12 Bluetooth speaker/mike linked to my laptop, and I can call out to a number of disembodied voices: “OK Google, my 1985 interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda”, and it pops up faithfully.
Claire, this is the kind of post that only someone of your range of experience could write.
Computer language translation was widely predicted to be one of the first benefits of the gigantic mainframe computers beloved of spy movies. We can see it finally came true, like self-driving cars, another Sixties goal turned Eighties laughingstock and now 2017 reality.
To be fair to the skeptics, the first machine translation programs had trouble with metaphors. From Russian to English, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” became “The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten”.
I had not heard about the protests. Thanks for letting us know.
It was Facebook’s cooperation with the Russian government in suppressing Navalny information that was the immediate cause of my deleting my Facebook account in January 2015. Navalny seems to be a courageous and intelligent populist reformer, which I like, but he is also strong on ethnic nationalism (as are many other populists) which makes me nervous. Just the same, I do not want to support the ruling elites like Facebook when they cooperate with people like Putin in suppressing basic freedoms.
The spread of distrust of elites in democracies has been around a lot longer than the Comintern. It was part of the battle over ratification of the Constitution, though I suppose you can say the anti-Federalists had an uphill battle. The money and resources were mostly on the Federalist side, and the anti-Federalists couldn’t agree on a replacement plan.
Maybe some of the same problems plagued the agrarian populists of the late 19th century.
BTW, just today I started reading (listening) to Ron Formisano’s book on ante-bellum populist movements in the United States. I think I’ll get a printed book so I can quote from it and check the endnotes. Formisano seems to have an even-handed approach to the topic. So far he has talked about populisms of the left and of the right, and how sometimes they merge, and how they aren’t necessarily movements of ethnic nationalism (though many times they are).
I learned about Formisano from an interview that a Ricochet member did recently with one of his students about her PhD research. (I can’t remember the name right now or I’d give the member credit. And Ricochet’s wretched search system is no help.)
It’s incredible, isn’t it? As for my range of experience: I stress again that I believed this could never be achieved. I didn’t think it made any sense, linguistically. I’d never have invested a penny in this scheme. The people who said it could be done — and done this way — were right. And it’s truly thrilling: It’s like having the curtain lift and seeing the whole mansion, instead of just the room you’ve been in your whole life.
Or as he puts it:
I don’t find compelling the argument that these movements are a reaction to the elites’ incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption. People who want competence, honesty, and probity don’t put Donald Trump and Beppe Grillo in office.
I’m sorry, but I translate for a living and …Google Translate is sure better than nothing but the results I often get with German, Dutch and Swedish (all close relatives of English) range from the barely serviceable to the laughable to the downright dangerous. Use with caution.
I use Google Translate quite a bit. I can read the Cyrillic, though not very fast, and I recognize a lot of Russian words when I see or hear them. But I still don’t usually understand what people are saying, or know what written sentences and phrases mean without help. Sometimes even when I can understand simple sentences and phrases, I use Google Translate to help me be sure.
But it’s still slow going and awkward. Sometimes knowing a little of the Russian is helpful in figuring out what the google translation is trying to tell me.
Russian is more phonetic than English, so I should be able to pronounce unfamiliar words, too, but there is always the question of which syllable to stress, which is important to making one’s self understood. I haven’t looked to see if there are any Russian text-to-voice converters that would help.
Sometimes people on the internet write Russian in sloppy fashion, and Google Translate doesn’t seem to be able to deal with sloppy typing and slangy ways of writing things. I come across this when trying to read comments on YouTube or discussions of movies at kino-teatr.ru.
How about unresponsiveness to legitimate concerns of ordinary people?
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Maybe they do, if the other side is competent only in corruption and dishonesty.
Of course, I’m the person who has been saying for twenty years that if we lived in a civilized country the Clintons would be in prison instead of at large. But they’d probably be running loose in the countries that imagine they are more civilized than ours, too.
Seems a clear-eyed view to me – no snark there. Or, rather, nothing but snark. This seems an approach to trying to understand recent events that is pretty much guaranteed to fail.
I can see folks in the Washington bubble and the MSM in a tizzy. Meanwhile, in the real world, sensible and stern messages are being sent to America’s allies and enemies, moves are being made to reform a sclerotic government system, laws are being enforced, confidence is up and markets are responding.
I fail to see how a system where Harry Reid becomes a multimillionaire and the breathtaking corruption of the Clinton machine is officially regarded as morally praiseworthy can be said to be sustainably democratic – and therefore stable.
Have you tried it lately? Since they switched to machine neural? I don’t know if they’ve rolled it out yet for Dutch and Swedish, but they have for German. Their claims don’t seem exaggerated to me: They can’t beat me on French-to-English, but they’re now better than I am in English-to-French.
We now get “Дух желает, но плоть слаба.” Which when reverse-translated gives me “The spirit desires but the flesh is weak.” Does it look right to you?
So you think 800 people is a large protest for a nation of 150 million people? I mean I live in an urban area of about 2.1 million people and that would only make the local news if there was a protest that size. I understand with all the death and “accidents” in Russia of political opponents that there is a big risk protesting but it still is really not much of a protest.
Yeah, I tested it yesterday just for grins in response to a friend’s Facebook post. I am still not terribly impressed and don’t think it of much use beyond the “The hamburger restaurant downtown is very nice” level. It’s a disaster for anything technical or medical.
That’s the number arrested (by some estimates), not the number who protested.
I’ll give it some credit. I fed it yüz yüz and it said just “face” but it correctly handled yüz yüz görüyorum as “I see a hundred faces.”
And where once Ibrahim Karagül would have made no sense whatsoever to English-speakers, now he definitively makes no sense whatsoever.
While the thrust of the article in relation to what is happening in Russia is very important, it’s most fascinating to me that Google translate has evolved to this extent.
My first job as a teacher was in an ESL classroom. Many of my students who spoke seven different native languages would try to use this to help them with their homework. It would spit out sentences in English that looked as if they had gone through a garbage disposal.
I could always tell from the syntax who was cheating with the internet.
Fascinating.
Part of the motivation for the protests is the behavior of Obama’s “flexibility” bro: “The group accuses Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of amassing a vast collection of properties and using charities, offshore companies and networks of friends to disguise his wealth.”
@claire,
Assuming the new Google Translate has replaced the old as what is used by Chrome and by websites that have a translation button to translate using Google, I have not noticed a huge improvement recently in my use primarily with Japanese and German legal and technical documents.
Excellent post Claire, thanks for informing us. I had heard a bit about the protests, but had no idea they were as large as they were. Good stuff here!
Actually – we now are at a point where the size of the protest is not what determines its newsworthiness – but what the protest is about. These days, if three of four Leftists on a college campus start making a squawk about anything Conservative, the national news is happy to give them air time.
In context, Google Translate rendered your “so frisch und ausgeschlafen fühle” from this past weekend as “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” while the best my high school German could do was “fresh and having slept.”
Translating out of an idiom is fraught with peril. Translating into one is astonishing.
I have used Google Translate a couple times in face-to-face conversations; not extensively, but for a statement here and there. It helps.
A hope is that it will help me learn a language or two the natural way, phrase by phrase. Spanish is easier for me to read than to discern when spoken. Speaking slowly really does help listeners because it’s natural to slur words together.
Good luck to the Ruskies translating the next generation of Americans. The number of forum posts I see without any punctuation whatsoever makes me wonder what schools actually teach.
Hi Claire. I cannot express how tiresome this meme has become from you. Especially since it is quite the opposite. HRC has a documented 40 year career in public life that is replete with dishonesty, incompetence and corruption. She and her husband hold the American franchise for corruption and dishonesty! No one concerned with those issues could support her.
I wish them the best of luck. Really, though, Pussy Riot is pathetic and vulgar.
As for the quoted section here …
This is nothing but The Art of War. The trick is to win the battle before the engagement begins.
It isn’t a particularly clever strategy because the way to defeat it is simply to shine a light on the persuasion. The first step on the path to defeating propaganda is to become aware of the propaganda; and the steps after that become dramatically easier, once you get past the first step.