More than 800 Russian academic articles retracted after "bombshell" report reveals plagiarism and other misconduct

Ffft, ‘other societies’. I’m wouldn’t call Japan fundamentally dishonest like Russia, nor would I call most of the other places I’ve been to like France, Canada, Iceland, Switzerland, Greece, blah blah. Mainland China yes, and I’m calling Russian society fundamentally dishonest because it is abnormally dishonest. American societal dishonesty would be somewhere above Canada and under Mexico. This is all easily visible in global corruption indexes as a proxy. Russia’s corrupt from top to bottom whether I’m sneering about it or not.

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Gee, I’m beginning to believe that academia (right round the world) is full of bullshit and frauds! Can’t be, tho, right?

He does not. He’s noting about the entire world is full of this kind of shit. It’s not just “them” that are the problem. Until we look at our own society and root out evil shit like this, we’re going to continue to spiral down the tubes as a planet…

But hey, as long as we get one over on those Ruskies and on those Commies, eh? /s

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Yes, yes, where there’s humans, there will be cheating, stealing, and corruption. However, in the non-Baltic former republics of the USSR it is endemic and very, very common. I encountered here at university, and while living and working there. It’s a cultural feature.

When my nephew from Russia came to attend university here in the US my wife, who is Ukrainian, and I sat him down to explain the differences in the educational systems he failed to take it to heart. He’d been used to bribing, wheedling, and cheating his way through school. Needless to say, after a few Fs he finally believed us.

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You are absolutely correct in your observations of former Soviet republics. However, the rest of Eastern Europe is no where near as corrupt

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I worked as scientist and academic teacher at university in Poland and there were many students coming from Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. Generally speaking most of them had to adjust to studying in different language first, but they were honest and hard working. I didn’t notice any cheating.

Maybe not full, but there’s truly impressive amount of both. During my career I’ve met some unbelievably toxic people and I’ve decided to resign after finishing my PhD due to hostility, toxic masculinity and other pathological behavior at workplace.
Most people were nice, hard working and very passionate about their work, but those who weren’t have ruined the experience for me.

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13 posts were split to a new topic: Kieth McClery’s pedantic Russian digressions on racism: a treatise

Yes. That’s the joke, I’m in academia too, and wonder why I wasted my life.

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Corruption dates back all the way to the Soviet era, when there was a rigid planned economy and everything was in short supply. Calling in favours and bartering what you could get (including by pilfering from work) for what you needed was how people survived.

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Hungary says hello. Our entire economy runs on corruption, and no, I’m not exaggerating - we’ve achieved practical state capture at this point. Sorry to say but corruption here is as natural as breathing, it’s present everywhere, from healthcare (where “gifts” to doctors are pretty much expected) to the so-called judicial system, etc. Our politics is basically powered by corruption, Fidesz and Orbán in particular built up their power by literally stealing EU funds, fixing tenders so that their business circle gets all business, etc., and again, no, I’m not exaggerating, if you’re curious, get a bowl of popcorn, Google “corruption in Hungary” and be prepared to spend a nice evening reading shit you’d normally see in political satires. The richest person in the country is a former gas-fitter who just happens to be a childhood friend of our Dear Leader, and just happened to have really good luck with his business endeavours. Our current administration has an obsession of building football stadiums not only because the Dear Leader really loves football (there’s a huge stadium literally in his backyard), but also because his father just happens to own a stone mining business, and people in his business circle just happen to be in the building business… and I could go on. Hell, our previous President (not to be confused with the Prime Minister ie. our Dear Leader) plagiarized his doctoral thesis, MPs have been known to have bought their language proficiency certificates, diplomas… Our current administration has been known to send “doctored” translations of reports and official documents to the EU more than once, to distort reports, etc.

Corruption and generally craftiness and trying to circumvent rules, exploit loopholes, etc. is rooted very deep within the collective psyche of the nation, because the ~half century of “building communism” under Soviet leadership, in which older generations have grown up absolutely encouraged this kind of mindset. No, hating on other ethnicities is absolutely not cool, and every single nation and ethnicity has its own deep-rooted societal issues, but also I think it needs to be acknowledged that Eastern Europe does in fact have a pretty serious corruption/cheating issue.

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Thankfully, I never had the urge to go into academic life, but I continue to get some insight into it via relatives. It is fucking ripe with bullshit, cheating and petty politics.

Noble scientific ideals are rare to be found and the people who adhere to them are usually the only ones who can afford to: tenured professors (and even then, only a portion of them). Since tenure is increasingly hard to come by, everyone else is left to fight each other scratching and biting for funding and lecture hours like peons.

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Yeah, I’d pin the problem on the Soviet system. It was a society built on open dishonesty and maintained by oppression, where corruption was often a necessity, and things like reporting the right numbers on production was vastly more important than actually producing things. Several generations of that had a warping effect on Russian culture, and sadly, the faux-democratic Putin regime hasn’t made things any better since the fall of Soviet Union either.

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I don’t think the Putin regime is even pretending to be democratic at this point, though. It doesn’t even need to be, Putin does have a fairly strong supporter base who just want “order” under a strong leader, and the opposition’s effectiveness is held back by violence (murdered and jailed journalists and activists, “independent” far-right militia playing vigilantes, etc) and threats to their businesses/livelihood.

Btw, if someone has two hours to kill, this is an incredibly interesting and revealing documentary:

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In Russia, plagiarist copies yo… (oh, wait. Darn!)

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I couldn’t speak to what is in Russian people’s hearts. But the thing with golden-rule principles like honesty is that unless everyone sticks to them most of the time, they soon become meaningless pieties. If you’re the only academic who refuses to massage your data or plagiarise others, you’re not making academia better, you’re just abandoning it to the less scrupulous people who will advance ahead of you.

I wish people would understand this when they blithely excuse stuff like (say) everything the Republican party does. An ethical society doesn’t mean people following the rules 51% of the time; it’s more like 99.9%, and it’s a thousand times easier to break that consensus than to rebuild it.

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Anyone who’s studied Russia seriously and visited there knows about the ruthless corruption inherent in the workplace and “beeznus” cultures. Cutting corners and screwing over others is a peasant-mentality survival mechanism going back to Tsarist times. Consistently incompetent and brutal leadership, whatever the ideological label, leads to this sort of thing, and with a few very brief exceptions Russia has had nothing but that.

What interests me is that, in every ideological era, there have been people in the West eager to lick the arses of whatever tyrant was in power there – and not even get paid for it. These days, it’s mainly the white nationalists, who have obvious affinities with Uncle Vlad’s regime.

Related, Sterling’s stuff on Russia in this year’s WELL discussion is gold:

The Russians, by contrast, have learned to drink less vodka. Their birthrate has even popped up a little. Physically, they’re improving, and I’m glad at that news Yes, the Russians are diligently waging all kinds of asymmetrical warfare, they have built their own domestic Splinternet to subvert, repel and destroy the Internet, and they will pitch any dreadful thing over their firewall from nerve-gas to barrel-bombs, but I feel happier about them. They scared me, because I thought they would die en masse of sheer disillusionment, hapless spite, weltschmerz and morbid despair.

Probably the Russians will manage. They’re a great nation which is not suicidal. Their fearless leader will dump the wife of the children for a sexy gymnast, but they aren’t kamikazes, and they don’t need belt-bombs. The Russians in MMXX are Putin-Czarist hick fundies whose ultra-illusory worldview make literally no sense, and deliberately so, but at least they’re not dead on their feet. Even a dopey GRU assassin from the backwoods of Siberia is less scary than a hollow-eyed zombie.

[…]

The world in MMXX is not in Crisis like it was in 2008, because it’s become Oligarchic. It’s a nascent oligarchy that is global in scope, but is unsure of itself and hasn’t written any rules. It lacks the palace etiquette of functional aristocracies. They’re like the rude-and-crude Oligarchs in the post-Soviet Transition, and who went to the same sauna bath-houses and knew the same call-girls,
but lacked a rule-of-law to protect them from murdering one another.

But they did have Putin, who got it about them and their issues, could out-murder anybody else because he was wrapped in the national flag. The siloviki clique of the Petersburg FSB set up a stable spy-based deep-state, which is now becoming Russian Sovereign Cyberspace. It’s not “rule of law,” but it is a stable surveillance state and a stable media-control state. Managed democracy.

Also, Russians don’t mind it that much. They’re upset if they’re intelligentsia or ideaiistic, but if you’re Ivan Sixpack, daily life seems doable, if not exactly truthful or reasonable. Moscow looks clean and shiny, your country is grabbing chunks of Ukraine in the teeth of the former international order and getting away with it, while Drumpf does whatever Putin says, mostly… So there are valid reasons for patriotic national enthusiasm, because the world is coming to look like you — much more than you have to conform to the world.

So, yes, Putin is an oligarch spy autocrat and secret multi-billionaire, but compared to cheap upstarts like Erdogan, Muhammed bin Sultan, Drumpf, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban in Hungary,Modi in India, Putin is visibly a seasoned statesman. He’s, by comparison, a classy, on-top-of-it guy. He poisons traitors, sure, but he’s KGB, so they’re suppose to do that. If you’re Russian, it’s actually fun to watch Putin joke about murder in public. Also, if you’re Russian and you imagine yourself being Putin, and wondering, well, what would I do in his place — yeah. They’d do what he does. They’d have to get a little narrow-eyed and cold at heart, but hey, James Bond. Enough said.

Even the Central Asian gymnast mistress doesn’t bother them. Why that chick isn’t world-famous, I’ll never know. She’s like an Ivanka Drumpf who can twist herself into a pretzel. A more fantastic court-mistress even than Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and that’s saying something.

So in MMXX I don’t think Russians are “depressed.” If so, less depressed than normal for them. They may be getting a little spooked about Siberia being on fire and those springlike winters in Moscow, but since a lot of that is their fault, they’re especially motivated to lie about it. After all, they don’t burn all that much carbon themselves, they just sell it to other people who burn it.

The world is remaking itself in their image, and after decades of abject moral, political, economic and military defeat they are a vanguard state in 02020. If you know a lot about them, you can kinda outguess how things are likely to go in this decade – or, at least, the beginning of it.

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More or less. And I don’t think it’s Russophobia or whatever to point these things out. People over there in the west often have no idea just how deeply different their culture is from what we have over here in Eastern Europe (in fact I think this was partly behind the EU’s inability to react in time and handle rising fascism and Russian influence in Eastern Europe properly). It’s not that the individual people are worse than elsewhere, but the culture we grow up in is just different and so we get different things ingrained in us. (And it goes the other way around, I still remember some my immense culture shock moments re: the US.)

Story time: in Budapest we have a fairly well-designed underground system, however it was built way too long ago, and the cars had been worn down so much that eventually the municipal govt. had no choice but to replace them. As a result of some good old-fashioned corruption, instead of buying new cars they ended up going with used cars from Russia (for more money than new cars would have cost, too) - cars that had been, allegedly, renovated, but not to the point of including, say, air conditioning. (The then-mayor called air conditioning on the underground a luxury.) The cars broke down literally on first use. After some back-and-fro with the Russian company they sent them back repaired (allegedly) and we’ve been using them ever since… only, a few days ago it was revealed that they have to be sent back to Russia for further repair because the work on them was so shoddy that in these few years their chassis had been corroded to the point that it’s dangerous to use them any further. So… we send them back… for further repair. Instead of buying new, modern ones. But ah, of course that wouldn’t involve doing business with Russia.

And on a much more sombre note: the state-owned Russian nuclear agency, Rosatom had been contracted to build our new nuclear plant. It’s the same company whose work was deemed so shoddy and unsafe by Finnish nuclear authorities that they cancelled their deal for their own new nuclear plant. The background on our deal with Rosatom is that the Russian government gave Fidesz (the Hungarian governing party) a fairly hefty loan, on the condition that they would build a new nuclear plant. This is it. This was never polled, never run by Parliament, never run by any third-party nuclear agency or safety expert. This was a corrupt business deal that was only concerned with money, and not any environmental or nuclear safety aspects; also the loan was large enough so that we’ll be paying it back for the better half of a century, while hoping that the plant doesn’t explode on us.

Welcome to Eastern Europe.

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The tender was to refurbish the existing trains running on M3, because the Russians would never win an open competition for new trains.

There were two big obstacles in Metrowagonmash’s way.

The first obstacle was Dávid Vitézy, the young CEO leading BKK, whose loyalty to the governing party was never questioned and his position seemed solid. Vitézy showed no interest at all in foreign policy and had nothing against Russia as a political actor. “Maybe Vitézy did not sympathise with the Russians, but as far as I remember he did not explicate to me, he did not advertise it”, the mayor said.

But as a traffic expert, Vitézy opposed the idea of simply refurbishing the rusty, outdated Soviet metro cars. The head of BKK would have preferred a fair and competitive bidding process, where Budapest would buy new cars, not just face-lift the existing old ones. Despite their different backgrounds, Vitézy and Tarlós were on the same page this time, both preferring brand new metro cars for the cheapest price possible, with financial help from the EU. That was the second obstacle in front of the Russians because Metrowagonmash knew that in the case of purchasing new cars, their inferior technology could not stand up to the competition.

Therefore, the Russians needed to accomplish two things to win the public procurement. The first thing was to get Vitézy out of the picture, the second to make sure Budapest would buy refurbished cars, not new ones. Luckily for them, the Russians had a very experienced representative placed in Budapest. For more than a decade, Metrowagonmash has been represented in Hungary by a man called Béla Juhász.

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AFAIK Russians are comprised of several races. Cultural stereotyping, for sure, and about the equivalent of looking and the US GOP and deciding that all Americans are right-wing nazi sympathizers.

But remove the unfortunate generalizations and the points about corruption are as salient as the criticisms of right-wing politics in the US.

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Well yes - it was obvious from the get-go that we would be dealing with Russia. Everything else was only window dressing. When M4 was completed under the previous administration (god, a lifetime ago…) the cars to be used on it were bought from the French company Alstom, but that was the previous administration and the previous prime minister Gyurcsány Ferenc (who was, and is, an incredibly controversial figure even on the left - as far as Fidesz and their propaganda is concerned he used to be Satan himself, until they discovered George Soros, since then Gyurcsány is kind of a vice-Satan). So it was a different, much-vilified administration with its different business circles and different corruption pipelines.

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Or maybe Trump is a symptom of increasing American corruption (In USSA they eliminate corruption by passing laws to make it perfectly legal).

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