The Real Russia. Today.

Joe Biden’s 1988 visit to the USSR

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

• Meet the interpreter who translated for Joe Biden during his 1988 meeting with the Soviet leadership
• Protests against ‘traitorous’ Nagorno-Karabakh settlement continue in Yerevan
• Russia’s Muslim Spiritual Administration at odds over ban on interfaith marriages
• News briefs: Putin’s peacekeepers, Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, and the Chaika family’s newly revealed real estate holdings

Feature stories

🗣️‘I was there’

Viktor Prokofiev worked as a Foreign Ministry interpreter for 10 years, bridging the end of the Cold War and the Yeltsin years in the early 1990s. He translated for the Soviet and then the Russian leadership during meetings with U.S. presidents George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, as well as Joe Biden — little did he know that the then-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would win the U.S. presidential elections in 2020. When recollections of Biden’s visits to the USSR began popping up on social media during the election, one widely distributed photo featured Biden and Soviet politician Andrey Gromyko, as well as Viktor Prokofiev. Meduza reached out to the interpreter to find out more about this particular meeting and what it’s like to translate for world leaders.

⏲️ Pashinyan under pressure

Today, mass protests opposing the agreement on ending the war in Nagorno-Karabakh continued in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. The protesters demanded that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan step down, calling the settlement signed on November 10 “traitorous.” Reportedly, the protesters were demanding that Pashinyan resign by midnight. Meanwhile, the opposition party Prosperous Armenia tried to initiate an extraordinary parliamentary session to consider the issue of Pashinyan’s resignation, but ultimately their efforts failed due to a lack of quorum.

🕌 Mixed messages on marriages

Russia’s Muslim Spiritual Administration (DUM RF) is facing internal controversy after its Ulema council (advisory body of Muslim scholars) issued a decision banning believers from marrying followers of other religions. The decision — which has no legal implications — has provoked mixed reactions from other Muslim organizations, as well as within the leadership of the DUM itself at both the national and regional levels. While some Muslim jurists maintain that this prohibition has always been in effect, others describe it as a flexible appeal to individual believers. The Ulema attributed the reasoning behind the decision to the belief that spouses ought to have common life values, including “similarities on questions of religion and spirituality.”

Other news in brief

• 💁‍♂️ He does what he wants.Today, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov informed journalists that Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to seek permission from the Federation Council to send a peacekeeping mission to Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Peskov, a resolution dating back to 2015 gives Putin legal grounds for deploying troops outside of Russia “on the basis of generally recognized principles and norms of international law.”
• 🦠 Take that, Pfizer.On Twitter, the developers behind Russia’s coronavirus vaccine announced that “Sputnik V” is showing 92 percent effectiveness during Phase III clinical trials. This statement came on the heels of the companies Pfizer and BioNTech announcing that their coronavirus vaccine is 90 percent effective.
• 🏰 We see you, Chaikas.Russia’s federal property registry (Rosreestr) has declassified records on properties belonging to the sons of Russia’s former attorney general Yuri Chaika. Artem and Igor Chaika became well-known in 2015–2016 after Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption team revealed that their identities had been hidden in state property records with a random mashup of letters and numbers.

🖋️ This day in history: 199 years ago today, on November 11, 1821, Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow. He would go on to pen some of the most famous works of Russian literature, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Yours, Meduza