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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
Claire,
You have touched a nerve. I am the worst foreign language student in all of Western Civilization. They attempted on three separate occasions to teach me Russian. I managed to retain just enough to fulfill my college requirement. After that, I forgot everything but how to pronounce Cyrillic and two phrases.
Я не понимаю по русски
YA ne ponimayu po russki
means “I don’t understand Russian.”
я ничего не знаю
ya nichego ne znayu
means “I know nothing!”
The second phrase should be spoken loudly with your hands raised in the air in the universal symbol of surrender. Especially if you are speaking to someone with a Kalashnikov.
My Russian teacher in college was a sweet bubbly German woman who had the most success (little) with me. The class was at 8 am and I would come in bleary-eyed with a cup of coffee in my hand. She would sing out, “Ah, Gospodin Gavron and his coffee!” I never had the heart to tell her that it was my third cup.
Regards,
Jim
Another instance where your cynicism about Trump and lack of current experience in the US is clouding your vision. If you don’t understand what’s going on, you’re going to see a Russian under every woodpile. And I say that as a #reluctantTrump. Why should the democratizing media influences roiling Europe and Russia pass over America? Do we not have a government media, though not labeled as such? How could you watch the antics of Obama and Clinton and miss the fundamental corruption of putting the interests of their ruling caste over those of the citizenry?
Yes, I am working on learning Spanish. Having finished the Duolingo Spanish course I’ve moved on to reading Spanish books and la Biblia. It is dicey in Spanish – a huge help and at times impressive, but I usually have a sense of what I expect it to be when I type something in and it comes out strange more times than it should – which sends me off to other references.
But it is still an impressive resource. We stayed at a chambre d’hote in southern France two years ago with hosts (and other guests) who spoke about as much English as I spoke French. The host broke out their ipad and brought up Google translate, and we were taking turns – it was great.
And that was the old version, which wasn’t good at all!
OK OK Claire,
I’ll make a serious comment. Isn’t it interesting that technology used by the right people such as yourself can make a large difference? First, we must realize that Russia is not the totalitarian regime of old. It is an illiberal regime for sure. Thus much of the information flow is already there. Add to this google translate & phone videos and you get an incredible real-time news flow that can only be partially cut off by the government. (Remember that it was the ubiquitous cheap fax machine that was a key tool in bringing down the Soviet Regime.)
I think you should make ClaireVision: Google Translation News a regular feature to enhance the transparency of the Russian Regime. OK, that’s enough seriousness.
Now for a little Russian Folk Music Dark Eyes.
Regards,
Jim
Does anyone remember the guy a few years ago who, in an effort to prevent himself from being taken away by Russian law enforcement, nailed his testacles to the pavement on Red Square? This did happen, and for all I know this brave and stalwart protestor is still there. Don’t think Alexander Hamilton or John Adams would have gone quite that far.
hey @claire …..
Works pretty good. I phone app too.
You and I should compete to see who is really the worst. But I’ve tried to learn how to say “I don’t understand” in a lot of languages.
I recently finished watching all 120 episodes of Кухня on YouTube. It’s a sitcom set in a fancy restaurant, and ran for 6 seasons. It seems to be popular; some episodes have received over 8,000,000 views. There are no English subtitles, but one phrase I learned just from the context was, “You’re fired!” (Ты уволен). People are getting fired all the time, some of them coming back to get fired from their jobs again and again.
But Donald Trump is also associated with the phrase, “You’re fired!”
There you have it: Proof that Russia helped to get Trump elected President.
The series is fun to watch, and even though very little English is spoken, most of the vocal music is in English. Maybe some Ricochetti are already familiar with the artists. I am not, but the music seems to have been chosen well.
I can’t speak regarding Beppe Grillo, but I’m certainly unhappy with the past several years of incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption.
If it’s been elites running things during this time, then I’m perfectly happy to give Donald Trump a chance.
It seems by way of your education and you identify with these elites, and that’s why you voted for Hillary Clinton.
One wonders what skulduggery Google might work. It seems to me this tool is most likely to be used by people who cannot check its results.
Now I myself can be skulduggerous with Google. Googling myself a while ago, I found one of the topmost hits was for a boxer. I am not a boxer. However, it may be useful to me to be thought of as a boxer. So of course I clicked the link to the boxer. This, I am sure, is how Google learns the meanings of what people ask it: throw out a bunch of possibilities, and see which ones get picked.
The idea of example-based machine translation has been around a long time, but the problems have always been amassing enough examples and then reviewing them very quickly. It has to have helped Google to have served as a search engine for so long: with every inquiry, and more important every followup click, it learned something about popular semantics.
So what did you all make of the Russian newspapers themselves? Find any interesting items? I found it really intriguing to see what they did and didn’t report about the protests, and what they do (and don’t) report about US and European politics. And the Middle East.
If the Russian press reports that 53,000 people went on unemployment last week, they’re generally accurate. When they generalize it to “as everyone knows, they can’t count on their families to help feed them, because America has virtually abolished natural family relations”, they aren’t. However, I don’t think they’re always following a dictated line, at least in most cases. You don’t have to force a Russian to choose the worst possible explanation for American actions. It’s the default setting.
RT, a state broadcaster, is that way, plus a difference. They really believe that much of the world hungers for a non-American or outright anti-American viewpoint, and they see themselves as uniquely free to express that. Aljazeera? Bah, mere lapdogs. France 24? Don’t make us laugh. But somewhere in a media universe that fuses together Van Jones and Alex Jones, RT has cleverly figured out how to captivate news junkies with a conspiratorial bent.
Much like the U.S. media when reporting on anything that’s seen as unhelpful to the aggrandizement of the administrative state. I haven’t looked at any news from Russia today, but I presume it’s much like reading the front page of today’s WSJ: They’re lying even when they tell the truth. And nobody forces them to do this. Nobody issues a direct order. They know how to please the people who matter, and how to avoid displeasing them.
I assume you mean the US media, not the Russian media. In the latter case, somebody forces them to do it and someone issues a direct order.
Lets assume that the witchfinder’s narrative on Russia is true. The failing post war institutions and ideologies are the best allies putin ever had.
All putin has to do to win is just wait, maybe point and laugh a bit.
Claire,
This topic is close to my heart. When I was stationed in Seoul 15 years ago, I managed a project to install a machine language translation system on a bilateral military network. My Korean counterpart and I went in with realistic expectations. We found a system which wasn’t that could be installed on our computer system. As a proof of concept, we set it up to provide translation capability from the main website. Its limitations meant that few Koreans wanted to use it, since most of them could translate better than the computer (translation was one of their primary tasks). But it showed that things had advanced from the truly rudimentary capabilities which were available in the ’90s, and the flag officers liked to see us try new things.
Jump forward a few years, and now I occasionally use Google Translate to go between English and Japanese. The results have generally gotten better than what I saw in Korea, but can still occasionally come out bad. Anything which isn’t grammatically correct invariably results in terrible results. My English to Japanese skills are still lacking, so I use it regularly to try out word variations and check grammar. I use the Japanese to English occasionally to see how the computer would word it before I do my version. The machines are getting better, but still have a ways to go. So long as people don’t write proper English, there’ll be a place for us humans.
Agree completely.
(continued)
Going back to college, it seems that I shared @jamesgawron‘s challenges with learning Russian. I got through the classes with decent grades, but didn’t make any progress with using the language. I made it to Russia for a few days over 20 years after graduating, and found that I could still read a lot, but my conversation skills were just about zero. Thankfully, I found something else to do over the years which could “pay the bills.”
The amazing thing is watching it learn. It’s genuinely learning. Since the new version came out, it’s noticeably become better. I can only really evaluate it for English-French and English-Turkish, but it seems to me to be learning at the speed of a bright ten-year-old. (Note that I don’t say, “a bright two-year-old.” The speed with which a two-year-old acquires language is one of the great wonders of the world.) But this thing’s making progress, a progress you can watch — and that’s both amazing and … well … just slightly spooky.
Claire,
Regards,
Jim
I have returned. My old boss has published something on Russia’s Resurgence in the latest Modern War. I shall expound on it. Probably Weds night.
In order to have a profitable discussion about this we probably need to get more specific. The more I’ve learned in my years or reading history about aggressive, oppressive regimes, the more I’ve learned how little is done through direct orders. There are such things as direct orders, of course. But not even a thoroughly evil person such as Hillary Clinton manipulated the media very much through direct orders, either recently or during the first Clinton administration.
In the case of the Russians, I suppose you could say their equivalent of 50-cent bloggers were operating through direct orders of a kind. They were given a little room for creativity, but not much. In my experience with them it was pretty hard, though not always impossible, to get them to depart from their scripts. I no longer subscribe to any newspapers, so I don’t take part in the comment sections where they sometimes used to appear, so I don’t know if these people are still at work. But if that’s what you mean by direct orders, yeah, I suppose you are right.
Putin’s media have the example of dead journalists to work from. Journalists who are too independent have tended to die violent deaths. But those who are still living still need to be creative in serving the regime. As long as they know what the party line is, they can do a lot of work without direct orders, and will probably do it better without direct orders. I suppose one could say Media Matters and the New York Times perform a similar function here in the United States, but I wouldn’t refer to it as carrying out direct orders, either. And it’s not exactly the same as media control in Putin’s Russia. Journalists in our country who don’t follow the party line here don’t usually end up dead; however, they may end up blacklisted like Sheryl Attkinson. I imagine people will disagree on whether that is more or less effective than Putin’s method of media control. But neither is necessarily done through direct orders.
Maybe I’m not talking about the same thing you have in mind, or am ignorant of some things you know about.
Here is a video that Alexei Navalny’s group posted on YouTube. It has both Russian and English subtitles. I just started watching, but have seen enough so far to recognize this as part of Navalny’s on-going populist campaign where he exposes the corruption of the Russian elites – with photos of supposedly hidden dachas, evidence of elite illegal land grabs, etc. I learned about it from a CNN article, which says this video is what may have instigated the protests.
One good thing about the recent Russia/Trump hysteria is that it’s motivating the MSM to at least pay a little attention to Russia now.
It would be nice if President Trump or others in his administration were to speak a word of support for the people in Russia who are trying to resist this sort of corruption. On the other hand, maybe Trump is on the wrong side; after all, he has spoken favorably of the use of eminent domain to appropriate private land for purposes that may not be all that different than the ones Navalny is exposing here. Trump could perhaps put some of our uneasiness to rest by at least calling our attention to the current struggles in Russia.
I’m about 2/3 of the way through it.
Navalny talks fast but enunciates his words very clearly – making this a good video to use for learning to listen to Russian being spoken.
Sometimes he has the wry sarcasm of a Michael Moore, making me LOL. I’ve never watched a Moore movie, but I’ve seen the work of a couple of Eastern European filmmakers whose work has been compared to Moore’s.
I guess I jumped the gun here. This one is about corruption, but there are no land grabs on the order of Naboth’s vineyard.
This Navalny video is from last October. It looks like the Clinton Foundation isn’t the only foundation involving a President’s daughter, and is not the only one used for money laundering and influence peddling. The Russians have one, too.
And of special interest, here is Navalny’s video from November 9, the day after election day, when he addresses the question of how Trump’s election will affect U.S. relations with Russia and Putin. (Spoiler alert: not very much.) It’s about what you’d expect from a Russian populist talking about an American populist upstart. Navalny has a pretty good idea of how the American political system works, pointing out the ways in which a system with checks and balances likes ours keeps things like foreign policy from changing very quickly. He also contrasts Trump with Putin on a variety of issues, including corruption, taxes, and immigration, and at the end contrasts what happens when elections are free and fair with what has happened in Russia.