The Real Russia. Today.

The women of Russian hip hop, Facebook's crackdown on Russian trolls, and a comedy about Putin

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

• Meduza speaks to the women breaking through in Russian hip-hop music
• Moscow's governor says he's offered a Dutch vacation to a girl who famously threatened him
• The FSB says instant messengers are terrorists' roadways
• Police in Taganrog catch a man who allegedly poisoned his coworkers
• Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook has cracked down on Russian trolls targeting Russians
• The State Duma spends less than three minutes discussing major reforms to military conscription notices
• Russian mobile phone operators start auditing unidentified clients
• A shopping center in Moscow catches fire, killing one person
• Russian cinema gets a surprisingly subversive comedy about Putin

Story of the day: The Women of Russian hip hop 🎤

Hip hop is a musical genre rooted in the empowerment of racial minorities, but its motifs are often simultaneously founded on sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination. In Russian hip hop, this issue is all the more prominent: if, in the United States, rap is steadily becoming more diverse, Russia still hasn’t found its Erykah Badu or Nicki Minaj. Nevertheless, the number of women involved in Russian rap has grown in recent years, both in the rap battle scene and outside it, and new players are emerging literally every month. In a special report for Meduza, Evgeniya Ofitserova spoke to a group of women rappers from Russia to learn more about how they're building their careers in a male-dominated genre.

• Read the full story: “‘This is my rap scene’: Life for the women of Russian hip hop”

Let's be friends, little girl 🇳🇱🇷🇺

Moscow Governor Andrey Vorobyov announced on the radio on Wednesday that the regional government has offered to pay for a local family to tour Holland to learn more about waste management in Europe. The lucky family isn’t just anybody, however. Vorobyov extended this excursion to the Lozovs, whose young daughter recently became an Internet meme after standing beside Vorobyov in March at a landfill in Volokolamsk, making threatening gestures in his direction. The governor says he hopes the trip will “clear up any misunderstandings as quickly as possible.”

But it’s not so simple. Tatyana Lozova, the girl’s mother, says her family hasn’t received any plane tickets or travel accommodations yet. In fact, her passport is still being renewed and she currently can’t even leave the country. She also says she was told that it was the Dutch who wanted to pay for her family’s trip, supposedly because a Dutch company will help resolve the trash crisis in Volokolamsk. “If this offer is from our officials, then we’re not flying anywhere,” Lozova told RBC.

Want to know more about protests against overflowing garbage in the Moscow region? Meduza has reported on this story here and here.

Terrorist messengers 📱

A year after a deadly terrorist attack on the St. Petersburg subway, Federal Security Service chief Alexander Bortnikov revealed that instant messengers were used in every successful terrorist attack (four) and every thwarted terrorist plot (25) in Russia throughout 2017. In all cases, terrorists coordinated “through a global network using messengers, including from territories in Iraq and Syria.” Bortnikov says terrorists also used cryptocurrencies to finance their activities, though he didn’t clarify if the FSB advocates new regulations in this area. He also said the development of “a single anti-terrorist information space” is promising.

• On Tuesday, April 3, Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee reminded the public that the individuals who orchestrated and carried out the April 2017 subway attack in St. Petersburg never actually met in person and relied entirely on the instant messenger Telegram. On April 4, the deadline passed for Telegram to surrender encryption keys to the FSB. The company says it can’t comply with the order because it doesn’t store these keys.

Apprehending a poisoner 👮‍♂️

Police in Taganrog have detained a man suspected of poisoning several employees at a local aviation center. According to the Telegram channel Mash, the suspect works at the facility. In late March, newspapers reported that the mass poisoning was likely the result of a personal dispute, though no further details were made available.

Making Facebook great again 👾

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has “taken down” more than 270 pages and accounts apparently operated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. “This particular set of pages and accounts was used to target people in Russia and people speaking Russian in neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine,” Zuckerberg said.

• In an effort to respond to concerns that hostile states can use Facebook to disrupt democratic elections, Zuckerberg highlighted the company’s increased investments in staff working on security and content review, and advances in the website’s artificial intelligence, which “proactively detect and remove fake accounts,” he says.

Report for duty, whether you know it or not 📫

The State Duma has passed the first reading of legislation that would shift responsibility for reporting for military conscription to individual draftees, even when the military fails to deliver a conscription summons by the time an individual is expected to come in. Lawmakers spent exactly 180 seconds discussing the draft law. The document passed with the support of 341 deputies. No one opposed it, and just one deputy abstained.

Before this draft law arrived in the State Duma, the federal government endorsed it, while simultaneously noting that clauses in the bill contradict existing laws on military service. The maximum penalty for evading the draft in Russia is two years in prison. In the first six months of 2017, more than 300 men were convicted of draft evasion. They were all let off with fines.

What is this legislation? It would allow the government to deliver draft summons through the postal service, and the military would consider conscripts to be notified as soon as someone signed for the parcel. Additionally, a draftee would be held responsible for appearing before his deadline, even when his conscription summons arrives late. The legislation doesn’t specify how men are supposed to know when they’re required to report for conscription without getting a summons.

Ring ring, what's your passport number? 📞

Russian mobile phone operators have started reviewing customers using “gray” SIM cards (plans registered without verified identification). VimpelCom, MTS, and Megafon all told the magazine RBC that they’ve begun auditing their subscribers and contacting anyone with missing or suspicious passport records.

• According to a federal law passed last year, phone companies have until June 1, 2018, to cut off service to any clients who haven’t verified their identification. Selling SIM cards without recording customers’ passport information has been illegal in Russia since 2014, but this prohibition is often ignored.

Another mall fire 🔥

A shopping center in eastern Moscow caught fire on Wednesday, April 4. According to preliminary reports, 300 people escaped the building, and at least one person was killed. On March 25, a fire destroyed a shopping mall in Kemerovo, killing 64 people.

Laughing at Putin 🎬

Late last month, the first movie directed by Ilya Sherstobitov hit Russian theaters. “The President’s Vacation” is a comedy about an unnamed commander in chief (clearly modeled on Vladimir Putin) deciding to travel Russia incognito to learn more about his people. For all the movie’s dubious artistic merits, film critic Anton Dolin says Sherstobitov's comedy actually succeeds quite wittily in lifting the Russian movie industry’s unspoken taboo on “films about Putin.”

• Read Dolin’s movie review: “‘The President's Vacation’: A trashy new film reinvigorates Russian cinema with a comedy about Putin”

Yours, Meduza