First things first: oh, you world travelers, for pleasure or for work, never, ever fly Baltic Airlines. First they will stiff you by making you pay sixty euros to carry regular-sized hand luggage. You will note their particular eagerness to pounce on innocent non-Baltic travellers, especially haplessYankees with credit cards.

During the flight you can expect to be charged for the air you breathe, since they don't even give free water.

Finally, god forbid if something goes wrong with your flight and ticket, for Baltic Airlines will gladly maneuver you into buying a heavily-priced new one. Fleeing home via Baltic Airlines beats prison and deportation, but not by much.

Decades of Soviet occupation leave some deep cultural habits. Despite the proud independence and nationalism of the three independent Baltic republics, it hasn't been that long since 1991. It's hard to find any mishap in Estonia that isn't some blamed on Russians. If the roads are bad (and they are bad enough to burst tires), it's the Russian roads. When the coffee is lousy (the imported Italian coffee is quite good), then it's the communist coffee. If the storks are too big and dangerous, it’s because they were bred to an ungainly size by the Russians.

Photo: Bruce Sterling

I lived under Communism, but not the Soviet kind. The Estonians saw the real deal hard core of totalitarianism, the kind with mass deportations, mass shootings and mass hunger. That kind of regime doesn't leave mere "traces" in society, it leaves trenches. The Estonian nationality barely escaped being one of Europe's submerged or even extinct nations. Well before any Soviets showed up they were gleefully trampled by Swedes, Poles, Danes -- back when they were harmless pagans, they were even massacred by Christian Crusaders.

In the seventies in Rome, I once took part in a magazine called "La Citta di Riga," an Italian pun which refered to the capital of Latvia and also meant "the city of lines." This conceptualist magazine was an art project through which period artistic luminaries such as Francisco Clemente, Alighiero Boetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Fabio Mauri, Umberto Silva, etc, wanted to change the world. Since this was the 1970s, concepts were considered more important the materialist objects or political policies. "The City of Riga" was a distant, romantic place for these Roman radicals of the Cold War days, a city carrying the flag of the globalist artsy utopia.

At the time, I was the only one in that group who came from a communist country. Most dissidents from the Soviet bloc had a keen understanding of the conceptual differences between alternative culture and the rigorous strictures of their daily lives. But I had my ticket back to Belgrade, the non-aligned way station that was half Moscow yet half Paris. I, too, could treat Riga as a mythical city of drawn lines, instead of a grim urban kolkoz where unruly ethnic populations were mixed, matched and eliminated at the whim of Stalin.

Photo: Bruce Sterling

Our Estonian literary festival in Tartu was full of stories, often stories where Siberia loomed as large as Siberia actually is. It seemed that most every family had lost relatives to Siberian exile: a parent, a grandparent.

A woman poet vividly explained how, during her childhood, her mother was deported. After years of absence a stranger returned: she had no teeth nor hair, but only wrinkles and bones. Our poet said: this is not my mom, my mom was a pretty woman! Until this day she writes patriotic poetry, due to that sense of horror and guilt towards her mother and her country.

At the same festival, a dissident Russian historian passionately described how Russians fail to deal with their impossible past, much preferring to hide the darkness under the carpet.

In Russia, history is an instrument of power, rather like Russian courts where there is no presumption of innocence, so only the guilty show up. When it comes to historical crimes like the Estonian deportations, however, nobody was there, nobody is guilty, nobody is responsible and nobody remembers.

However, this convenient denial and falsification is a poor counsel for peoples who still have to live together in the world, and who tend to repeat the mistakes of their parents.

This story is obviously well known in both the Baltics and the Balkans. It's distressing to hear that some story told in a small, Finno-Ugric language, yet on such a colossal scale. It's especially painful when told in the clear words of the victims, rather than the rambling evasions of the perpetrators.

The Prima Vista Tartu literary festival is keen on the appreciation of words. Words are cherished, and the event was held within the handsome library of the famous university of Tartu.

E-Stonia, the country where Skype was invented, has free internet everywhere. Obsessed as I am with wifi, I checked it obsessively, and I always found that connectivity flowed like water.

What a contrast to benighted nations like Italy and Britain, where free Internet is associated with terror and fraud for the benefit of rapacious and conniving phone companies.

In E-Stonia, the dark prospect of an Internet takeover by global copyright lords brought the population into the streets.

"Respect existence or expect resistance," say these shy and softspoken people, who know what human rights abuse looks like, no matter what mask it wears or what shape it takes.

Someday even the cruel dictatorship of Baltic airlines will be relegated to the ash-heap of history. Occupy Air Baltic, and give a free return ticket to all!

Photo: Bruce Sterling

The United State won the race to put a man on the Moon. But we weren't the first to land anything on the Moon. That prize went to the Soviet Union, which successfully put Luna 2 on the surface of the Moon in 1959.

Their later missions were less successful and the USSR never made it past unmanned moon landers. Even some of those failed. Last week, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the remains of two of these Luna missions, still sitting on the Moon. At Vice, Amy Teitel talks about the Luna program and what NASA has learned about why it failed.


Luna 23 met a similar fate. Launched on October 28, 1974, it malfunctioned halfway through its mission and ended up crashing on the surface in the Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crisis in the northwest on the Earth-facing side). The spacecraft stayed in contact with Earth after its hard landing, but it couldn’t get a sample. Mission scientists expected the spacecraft had tipped over as a result of its landing, but without a way to image the moon at a high resolution, they weren’t able to confirm, and the mystery endured.

It turns out they were indeed right. The whole spacecraft is still on the surface, its ascent engine never fired, and high resolution image from LRO’s cameras show the spacecraft lying on its side.

Read the rest at Vice

Editor's Note: In response to an anonymously-sourced wisecrack we published about police corruption in former Soviet states, the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs responded with a statement, which we published in full. A Boing Boing reader from Georgia also asked to respond to the anonymously-sourced wisecrack, with which he takes issue. Like the wisecracker, this person requests anonymity.

The police in Georgia are definitely not fat or lazy. They are not corrupt on the street level, either. But the whole system still retains elements of corruption  (in enforcement, in the judiciary, and in the legislative realm). The problem lies more in the definition of corruption: the fact that you can no longer bribe the policeman in the streets or at the sovereign borders does not mean everything is crystal-clean.

The fact that citizens are still afraid  of police in Georgia as if they were monsters is still an expression of the damage of corruption. The fact that you can be imprisoned for smoking pot weeks before actually being tested by cops (because you might seem suspicious to them, not because you've been caught smoking pot) is a kind of corruption, I believe.

There is a terrible feeling of vulnerability in Georgia. Police are still used as a tool to terrorize people and make money, but these days, paying bribes to individual policemen is no longer normal.

Georgian policemen stand to attention during a daily shift change at the Interior Ministry in Tbilisi, Jan. 12, 2012. (REUTERS)

There are lots of pros and cons about the reforms in Georgia, but still, no—the "fat lazy cops" comment was not fair. The police have changed greatly for the positive.

At least you don't have to pay mandatory bribes to drive around any more; the government fought very effectively against organized crime and turned Georgia into what is almost a drug-free country. In the past, the city was covered in used syringes. You could buy heroin as easily as bread.

Now, the city is clean, and it is very hard to buy any kind of drugs. I really appreciate this, as may of my friends have stopped using heavy drugs over the past two or three years.

An employee assembles a "Police Pad" at the production line of the Algorithm factory in Tbilisi January 11, 2012. Five thousand police officers will receive portable field computers assembled at this factory, according to local media. (REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili)

Editor's Note: In response to an anonymously-sourced wisecrack we published about police corruption in former Soviet states, the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs has responded with a statement, which we are more than happy to publish in full.

Georgian Police: Model for Successful Transformation

The article published on [Boing Boing on] January 12, 2012, about the initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia to introduce new portable field computers (so called “Police Pads”) ends with an anonymous quote declaring that "100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and Russian gambling services."

Stereotypes like this are easy to toss out—but are quite simply incorrect. This quote does not reflect the productivity, effectiveness, transparency, and reliability of the police force in Georgia today, but rather the bygone era of the 1990s, a reality that has drastically changed thanks to an ambitious and successful reform process.

The reform process in Georgia began immediately after the 2003 Rose Revolution. The new government inherited a completely corrupt and bloated law-enforcement system. The systemic corruption and the high level of crime throughout the country resulted in a very low level of public trust: fewer than 10% of Georgians had confidence in the police, according to 2003 polls. And the very low average policeman's salary (approximately $68 per month) made the soliciting of bribes routine. 

Georgia has since made the creation of an efficient and modern police force a national priority, undertaking a series of reforms that sought to rebuild the national police force literally from the ground up. The entire national police force was fired, and a new force hired, trained and deployed with the aim of meeting the highest international standards of professionalism.

These reforms are widely regarded as an unqualified success. Having reduced corruption and bribe taking to levels comparable to those in Europe, the police in Georgia have earned the trust and respect of the public they serve:

•According to Transparency International’s latest Global Corruption Barometer, in terms of public perception Georgia has the world’s 5th least-corrupt police force, placing it ahead of Germany or even the United States;

•According to the survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in November 2011, 87% of population have confidence in Police;

•According to a survey funded by the EU and conducted by GORBI Institute in 2011, Georgia has one of the lowest "victimization coefficients," a measure that reflects public perceptions of crime and individual security. 

On the subject of the so-called "Police Pads," reforms have transformed what was once an antiquated backlog of paper files for car imports, registries, and customs. They have been replaced with new, cutting-edge technology capable of streamlining requests and filing paperwork in record time.

Georgia has much work to do in shaking off the vestiges of nearly a century of Soviet occupation, but the transformation of our police force into a modern and professional service is an achievement that Georgians are deeply proud of, and a symbol of our commitment to retake our rightful place in the European community.

January 16, 2012
Press Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia

Photo: An employee demonstrates a "Police Pad" at the Algorithm factory in Tbilisi, Georgia, on January 11, 2012. Five thousand police officers will receive portable field computers, equipped with features that will assist them with their work, assembled at this factory, according to local media.

It's early morning on April 26 in Kiev, Ukraine, where the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened exactly a quarter century ago. On this day in 1986, reactor number four at the plant exploded, setting off a catastrophe that still reverberates far beyond the 30-kilometer exclusion zone.

Demonstrations are taking place throughout Europe. In Tokyo, anti-TEPCO protests mark the occasion and its parallel to the still-unfolding disaster at Fukushima. The "liquidators" who were sent in to clean up the radioactive mess at Chernobyl back in 1986 received medals Monday from Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, but controversy still surrounds the health impact of the dangerous work they performed. The so-called "sarcophagus" surrounding the disaster site in Kiev is leaking, and world leaders have pledged "to provide $780 million for the construction of a shelter designed to house the toxic remains for another century." But even if and when that new container is finally in place, the radioactive mess will remain active—and hazardous—for many thousands of years more.

Maggie pointed to this recent report from Chernobyl for PBS NewsHour by Miles O'Brien— it's embedded above in this post, and worth another view on this day. [video link, or watch on PBS.org, photo gallery].

Photo above by Miles O'Brien, who explains: "Scene from the former day care facility in the town of Pripyat — the company town for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The gas mask in this shot was there as we found it but I suspect it was placed there by a journalist or activist at some point over the years to make an obvious point even more obvious."

Stan TV employees told CPJ that police were accompanied by a technical expert, Sergey Pavlovsky, who claimed to be a representative of Microsoft's Bishkek office. According to the journalists, Pavlovsky said he had authorization papers from Microsoft but was unwilling to show them. After a cursory inspection of the computers, they said, Pavlovsky declared all of the equipment to be using pirated software. Stan TV's work computers, as well as the personal laptops of journalists, were seized; the offices were also sealed, interrupting the station's work. Microsoft, piracy, and independent media in Kyrgyzstan

Update: Danny adds, "Just to be clear, Microsoft says they knew nothing about this raid. Here's their statement on the matter: 'The raid against Stan Media was initiated by the Kyrgyz police without any involvement from any Microsoft employees or anyone working on Microsoft's behalf. The identified local lawyer has been representing Microsoft in a few enforcement actions targeting resellers of pirated software, but at this time he was asked to assist the police to identify possible unlicensed software in the role of a technical specialist from the local 'Association of Right Holders of Intellectual Property Protection'. No claims were filed on Microsoft's behalf and any suggestion that Microsoft approved or supported this police action is inaccurate.'

(Thanks, Danny!)

(Image: Microsoft sign outside building 99, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from scobleizer's photostream)