What do Russian prisoners produce? According to this year’s report by the FSIN, the country’s penal system, prisoners already manufacture a wide array of products, from cars to military uniforms.
Scandals about overworking inmates – specifically in a Mordovia penal camp where women were virtual slaves in garment sweatshops, laboring 17 hours a day – have led to the sacking of some prison directors.
All in all, inmates make 100,000 types of goods, grossing the government over 32 billion rubles annually, the FSIN said. Some items used in Russia’s electrical infrastructure are produced only in Russian prisons. Inmates manufacture ventilation equipment, construction materials, and furniture, and also grow produce and raise livestock.
There are currently 602,176 inmates in Russia’s prisons. This is one in every 239 citizens and puts the country in first place among all European countries in terms of total prisoners. Britain is in second place with 84,300 prisoners (one in every 783 citizens, about the average across Europe). On September 1, 2016, there were 859,102 prisoners in all of Europe, excluding Russia.
Russia spends €2.5 per day per inmate, while Sweden spends €380 per day. The average across all of Europe, including Russia, is €51 per day. (Vedomosti, citing a Council of Europe report)
63% percent of Russians feel that their town’s greatest problem is road conditions and road safety. The other top concerns were: Lack of parks and rest areas (38.4%); poor work by utility companies (37.2%); pollution (36.9%); lack of sport facilities: 34.5%. [Gks.ru]
Ford, which has manufactured passenger cars in Russia since 2002, profiting from the booming auto market, has decided to shut down three factories in the country. The move is a devastating blow to the towns that hosted the production lines that employed hundreds of people.
At the peak of the auto boom in 2012, Ford sold 130,000 cars per year. But in 2018, sales fell to just over 50,000 cars. The chief culprit is apparently decreased spending in an economy squeezed by sanctions.
Ford is closing its facility in Vsevolzhsk, near St. Petersburg, which produced the Ford Focus and Ford Mondeo models, as well as a factory in Nabereznhye Chelny in Tatarstan, which assembled the Ford Fiesta and crossover Ecosport. The third facility to be shuttered, also in Tatarstan, makes engines.
One Ford factory making commercial vehicles will remain open. Ford will pay up to a 12-month severance to employees affected by the closure and plans to cease production in July.
The shutdown will also have devastating consequences for producers of auto components. In Vsevolzhsk alone, over 800 people will be laid off, union leader Mikhail Sergeyev told RBK, adding that the workers will fight for a better package.
The beloved filmmaker Georgiy (Giya) Danelia, a Georgian whose bittersweet movies and comedic genius made all of the Soviet Union fall in love with his native country, has passed away in Moscow at the age of 88.
Danelia has described his path to filmmaking in a typical mise-en-scene (he was also a talented screenwriter): While working in an urban planning institute in Moscow, he went for a post-lunch walk to kill time, and stumbled across a drunk lying in a ditch, reading a newspaper. On the front page of that newspaper was an article calling on professionals from non-artistic disciplines to apply for a MosFilm filmmaking course.
Though Danelia’s films are not well-known in the West, his works have become an essential part of Russian culture and language, much like the films of Eldar Ryazanov and Leonid Gaidai, both of whom passed away long ago.
Many of Danelia’s works were either situated in Georgia or prominently featured Georgians missing their homeland. In one of Danelia’s most touching scenes in Mimino, a film about an eponymous Soviet pilot from Georgia played by Vakhtang Kikabidze, the protagonist makes a phone call from abroad to his hometown of Telavi. He is instead patched through to Tel Aviv by mistake, only to be connected to a fellow Georgian, and the two strangers tearfully sing to one another over the phone, nostalgic for their Caucasian homeland.
But Danelia’s films were not just about Georgia, and they appealed broadly to all Soviets, as they deftly combined human tragedy and comedy. The film that first brought Danelia fame was the optimistic Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964), starring a very young Nikita Mikhalkov.
Danelia also made the tragic-comedic actor Yevgeny Leonov famous, casting him in a number of films, including the unusual 1986 science fiction production Kin-Dza-Dza, about the dystopian planet Plyuk. After perestroika, Danelia’s movie-making ground to a halt, but he wrote memoirs of his life and experiences as a Soviet film director that were full of insightful and hilarious anecdotes.
Rosstat, the government statistics agency, has long been accused of fudging the numbers, adjusting economic output figures to show growth rather than decline. Many independent analysts say they do not rely on figures put out by the agency.
Now even official statistics on poverty have become controversial. The agency issued a statement after Peskov’s reprimand, saying that “monitoring the population’s living conditions is one of the most representative and detailed socio-demographic studies in Russia.” While the figures published in late March (saying 35 percent of Russians could not afford two pairs of shoes) have been the target of media pushback, they actually suggest that quality of life has slightly improved since 2016, Rosstat said. Back then, half of the Russian population could not afford two pairs of shoes every year.
Ice skating’s teenage phenom, Elizabet Tursynbaeva, who hails from Kazakhstan, became the first female ever to land a quadruple salchow jump in competition. The achievement helped her earn a silver medal in March’s World Championships in Saitama, Japan.
Tursynbaeva is the latest ingenue trained in Moscow by Eteri Tutberidze, who has led an array of very young female skaters to the top of the podium, though not without controversy. The current world champion is Alina Zagitova, who is only 16 but already has a gold medal thanks to Tutberidze’s training.
But other Tutberidze graduates have left her, complaining about the relentless training regime. One, former Olympic champion Yulia Lipnitskaya, who wowed audiences with her dizzying twirls in Sochi, cracked under the pressure of training, ending her career and landing in long-term rehab for anorexia. Another, Yevgenia Medvedeva, an Olympic silver medalist and two-time world champion, quit training with Tutberidze in 2018, leaving a veil of scandal as she headed for Canada, also citing psychological issues. Medvedeva finished this year’s worlds with a bronze medal, meaning that the entire female podium was filled with current and former athletes of Tutberidze.
Controversies aside, Tutberidze has hinted she has more talent on tap for the future. She recently published a video of prodigy Sofia Akatyeva landing a quadruple toe loop during practice. She’s 11.
52% of Russians report never having seen a stage performance (down from 70% a decade ago). 37% say they go to the theater at least once a year, while 5% see performances several times a month. Russians’ favorite theater is the Bolshoi (12%), followed by Moscow’s Sovremennik Drama Theater (6%), and the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg (4%). [VTsIOM]
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