Tag Archives: runet

Why De-Russification Isn’t On The Cards

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My post last week on the increasing visibility of the Russian language on the Internet provoked a heated counter-attack from commentator Ildar Adi, who asserted (without much in the way of proof) that it is actually in significant retreat in Europe, the Near Abroad, and even Russia itself.

He believes that whereas there were almost 500 million Russian speakers in 1990, there will be just 150 million of them in 2030. If that were to be true, it would imply that practically nobody outside Russia would still speak Russian in 20 years time. Does this sound like a very likely prospect?

languages-on-twitter-europe

Not if the above map, linked to by commentator Glossy, is anything to go by. In this case, one image really is worth a thousand words. Quoting Glossy:

It seems that the only languages of the former Soviet Union that are used enough on Twitter to have merited their own colors on that map are Russian, Latvian and Lithuanian. It looks like Estonia isn’t tweeting much in Russian either though. The rest of the post-Soviet space is. On the map Catalans are tweeting in Catalan, but Ukrainians are tweeting in Russian. And that’s the young generation, the future. Who else is going to use Twitter? Kiev looks like the third-brightest Russian-tweeting city in the world, right after Moscow and St. Petersburg. Slovenian, Slovak and Albanian have their own colors, but Ukrainian doesn’t.

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United Russia Steals Votes, And The WSJ Steals Others’ Work

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On December 28th, the WSJ published an article on “Russia’s Dubious Election” by Gregory White and Rob Barry (it’s behind a paywall, but you can read it here). In it they described the most famous argument for the 15% Club (i.e., the purported scale of fraud in the 2011 Duma elections) – namely, that of Sergey Shpilkin. A brief description of his approach: Observe that a higher turnout means more votes for United Russia; make a blanket assumption that all these extra votes are suspect, remove them as “irregularities”, and voila! United Russia’s plummets from 49% to about 34%! (Neither he nor the WSJ, to their credit, claim that it proves fraud; they use the more qualified phrase “cast doubt”). In the process, not only the elections are discredited but pretty much the entirety of Russian opinion polling and exit polling (a reminder: all the pre-elections polls gave United Russia 50% or more, and the most comprehensive exit poll, FOM, was 6% lower than its official tally).

What other Russian bloggers have pointed out is that a whole lot of other countries – Germany, the UK, Israel – have similar voting tendencies. There, more turnout means more votes for their conservative parties (Christian Democrats, Tories, Kadima, respectively). So since most readers would agree that those countries have clean elections, the “more turnout and more votes for one party MUST MEAN fraud fraud fraud!!!” thesis can’t exactly be universally valid.

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Measuring Churov’s Beard: The Mathematics Of Russian Election Fraud

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In the aftermath of the 2011 Duma elections, the Russian blogosphere was abuzz with allegations of electoral fraud. Many of these were anecdotal or purely rhetorical in nature; some were more concrete, but variegated or ambiguous. A prime example of these were opinion polls and exit polls, which variably supported and contradicted the Kremlin’s claims that fraud was minimal. But there was also a third set of evidence. Whatever problems Russia may have, a lack of highly skilled mathematicians, statisticians and programmers certainly isn’t one of them. In the hours and days after the results were announced, these wonks drew on the Central Electoral Commission’s own figures to argue the statistical impossibility of the election results. The highest of these fraud estimates were adopted as fact by the opposition. Overnight, every politologist in the country – or at least, every liberal politologist – became a leading expert on Gaussian distributions and number theory.

While I don’t want to decry Churov, the head of the Central Electoral Commission, for making subjects many people gave up back in 8th grade fun and interesting again, I would like to insert a word of caution: lots of math and numbers do not necessarily prove anything, and in fact – generally speaking – the more math and numbers you have the less reliable your conclusions (not making this up: the research backs me up on this). Complicated calculations can be rendered null and void by simple but mistaken assumptions; the sheer weight of figures and fancy graphs cannot be allowed to crowd out common sense and strong diverging evidence. Since the most (in)famous of these models asserts that United Russia stole 15% or more of the votes, it is high time to compile a list of alternate models and fraud estimates that challenge that extremely unlikely conclusion – unlikely, because if it were true, it would essentially discredit the entirety of Russian opinion polling for the last decade.

In this post, I will compile a list of models built by Russian analysts of the scale of electoral fraud in the 2011 Duma elections. I will summarize them, including their estimates of aggregate fraud in favor of United Russia, and list their possible weak points. The exercise will show that, first, the proper methodology is very, very far from settled and as such all these estimates are subject to (Knightian) uncertainty; but second, many of them converge to around 5%-7%, which is about the same figure as indicated by the most comprehensive exit poll. This is obviously very bad but still a far cry from the most pessimistic and damning estimates of 15%+ fraud, which would if they were true unequivocally delegitimize the Russian elections.

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Boris Berezovsky: Godfather of Strategy-31 Abroad?

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The agents of Berezovsky organizing Strategy-31 Abroad.

In recent months, there has coalesced yet another, fleeting Russian liberal movement, focused on holding (unsanctioned) protests on the last day of the month to draw attention to the 31st article of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of assembly. As is usually the case with other sagas in the (largely illusory & irrelevant) “Kremlin Regime vs Noble Liberals” narrative, Strategy-31 is something between theater and circus; a show in which the liberals provoke the authorities in front of TV cameras (of which there is no shortage), and the police happily take the bait, obliging them with an evening-detention PR martyrdom.

At this point, one may ask, “Can it possibly get any more farcical?” It certainly can, courtesy of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky: this August 31, his agents and “dissident” fellows, Alexander Goldfarb and Andrei Sidelnikov, are bringing Strategy-31 to the West, especially to the Russian Embassy at 6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens, W8 4QP, at 6-7pm GMT. Who are these guys? Goldfarb is a close Berezovsky confidante, responsible for dispensing money to a cluster of anti-Kremlin websites and “HR foundations”; in 2006, he managed the PR surrounding the death of Litvinenko and likely authored the dying defector’s j’accuse letter to Putin. Sidelnikov was the one-time leader of Pora! (“It’s Time!”), a liberal opposition movement in Russia, whose namesake belonged to a Ukrainian organization whose warm bodies and US intel-NGO tactics abetted the Orange Revolution. He met Litvinenko two days before his poisoning, and is close to Berezovsky on his own admission.

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Translation: Tatyana Korchevnaya – On Liberal Web Brigades

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It is a pity that foreigners are not privy to the wild and wacky world of LiveJournal, Russia’s premier blogging site – many prominent people have accounts there and traditions of opposition and kompromat makes for a lively stream of scandal.

One recent case involved Tatyana Korchevnaya, who used to be a prominent member of the Russian “liberal” opposition (I’ve explained why I use apostrophes around the word in that context before and my translation of her work below will clarify it further) and ran one of the top 10 Russian political blogs, but now condemns Soros funded evangelical groups / NGOs in Russia and the mafia linked Vladivostok demonstrators. She made a huge splash and political Runet is abuzz with the story. Whatever made her change her mind?

She came to the movement young, naive and with a Manichean worldview in which the Putinists were bad and the oppositionists good. Little by little that black and white picture dissolved into the gray cynicism of virtual politics. In a nutshell, she became disillusioned with how the “liberals” organized web brigades, the cynicism of their leaders and the zombiesm of their followers and above all their unbearable hypocrisy. They put “democratic” ideals above common human decency and empathy, tossing aside their cripples once they were no longer useful in the fight (on which note, LR recently provided a good example of this) and treated ordinary Russians as a herd to be guided and manipulated. As in the movie Night Watch, we realize that the borders between good and evil are porous, if they exist at all, and that should their cancer spread and the likes of Kasparov and Limonov ever come to power in Russia we are doomed to replay the history of Bolshevik Terror.

Read all about it here in the original Russian or my English translation below. She writes in a very colloquial style and I did my best to maintain a balance between keeping it both true and readable. I also tried to fill in several points of possible confusion (it was not a well organized text) and tried to find suitable English replacements for Russian idioms. This is a two part series. Enjoy!

TRANSLATION: Tatyana Korchevnaya LJ post of Feb 24, 2009, Part 1

(http://tanya-ogf.livejournal.com/202793.html; accessed March 7, 2009)

Warning: I will not reveal any of your true names1 or LiveJournal2 (LJ) identities, but only in so far that you do not force my hand.

I decided to write all this only now because by this time the “for” arguments begin to outnumber those “against”. Call me a traitor all you like, I couldn’t care less – I’m just sick and tired of your lies and the lies of your (and not that long ago, my) leaders.

When you only have access to limited information, your knowledge, your beliefs and your opinions all revolve around that information. Sometimes, the more information you acquire – the more you understand that sometimes you go off on a wrong track.

It is natural for good people to be mistaken from time to time. What is inexcusable is to continue deceiving other people, and yourselves, even after receiving new information and realizing, knowing, that you strayed into error.

As I said before, I’m usually a nice girl – but I also mentioned that I don’t like it when people lie.

I will now tell you a snippet of history from my life. I have more than enough evidence that it all happened. The problem is that if I were to reveal it, it will not only confirm my story but will also strongly compromise everyone else who is mixed up in this mess. And so they have a choice – accuse me of lying (with all the consequences for them therein) or keep their peace forever.

Yes, I understand that there might be consequences for myself – I’ve been warned more than a few times already. But I’ve insured myself…

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