Dispatch #33
Read about the socialist visions of mass tourism in Eastern and Central Europe, the global reckoning with abuse in elite youth sports, and the conspiratorial beats of French underground rap.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, from Eastern and Central Europe, a fascinating essay looks at how early 20th-century socialism not only shaped politics and work but also built an unlikely infrastructure for leisure, making mass tourism possible for workers across the region.
From Russia, a disturbing report investigates the scandal surrounding a top figure skating coach accused of abusing an 11-year-old, opening a wider conversation about how elite youth sport across the world has become, in one journalist’s words, “synonymous with violence”.
And from France, a cultural study traces how conspiracy theories have found new resonance in the underground rap scene, with rapper Freeze Corleone becoming a lightning rod for recycled anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic tropes.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
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Workers of all nations, relax!
Аn essay explores how 20th-century socialism brought tourism to the masses in Eastern and Central Europe.
Leisure tourism began as a bourgeois pastime. But over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was reclaimed by socialists and trade unions as a form of cultural education, solidarity and what today might be called “self-care”.
A fascinating essay by Przemysław Kmieciak in the leftist online journal Krytyka Polityczna is both a short cultural history and a manifesto: it presents workers’ tourism as a respite from the “stifling city” and as an instrument for shaping working-class identity.
Kmieciak locates the movement’s origins in the mass associations of Central Europe: in 1895, Viennese socialists founded the Naturfreunde (Friends of Nature), an early prototype for worker-led outdoor life. Similar organisations soon spread to Poland (at that time divided between empires ruled from Vienna, Moscow and Berlin).
By 1912, Polish socialists were organising workers’ outings into the Tatras Mountains and beyond; pamphlets proudly announced that “the times when culture was alien to the worker” had passed. The aim was overtly political: seeing the country, breathing mountain air, visiting museums and factories were not mere pleasures but part of “building consciousness” among labourers.
The movement’s rhetoric – and its practices – differed considerably from middle-class tourism. A workers’ outing was not about visiting vogueish sites; it was meant to be a social, educational experience. Publications of the period urged modest, sober travel (“no dancing, no gramophone”), argued for temperance, and celebrated shared labour on the road. Joint meal preparation was framed as emancipation for working-class housewives.
Kmieciak describes one such tour of a dozen Polish cyclists to Belgium and France in 1929. The small group was met with astonishing hospitality – in the city of Lens, a crowd of 3,000 people cheered them on, and local socialist officials toasted them with champagne. Moments like these showed how worker-to-worker solidarity across borders could turn a humble trip into an occasion of public recognition.
Another workers’ journey mentioned in the text is a 1930 river voyage to Chernivtsi, in what is now Ukraine. Travellers slept on straw, drank milk offered by villagers, and were hosted, when they arrived, by fellow socialists. This is travel as a series of communal encounters rather than tourist separateness.
Kmieciak’s brief history looks backwards. But it contains lessons for today as it explores the idea that rest, relaxation and discovery should not be privileges limited to a few, but an essential part of everyone’s life and development.
Original article (“Z dusznego miasta na słoneczne szlaki. Rzecz o turystyce robotniczej”) by Przemysław Kmieciak was first published in Polish on 7 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Krytyka Polityczna is a Polish leftist publication and activist network focusing on progressive politics and culture.
Summary by TM
Elite youth sports have become “synonymous with violence”
In Russia, a top figure skating coach has been accused of physical and sexual violence against an 11-year-old athlete. The scandal has sparked a conversation about abuse in children’s sports worldwide.
Sergei Rozanov, a coach at a top figure skating academy in Russia, made headlines in the country this spring when he was accused of abusing a then-11-year-old he was training. While Rozanov has since quit the academy, he continues to work in Estonia, according to reports.
The journalist Sofia Gushina of the independent Russian outlet Veter uses the incident to shine a light on what she describes as a much larger problem of abuse in children’s sport – not just in Russia, but across the globe.
Gushina describes a closed world in which parents hand authority to coaches and where control, humiliation and injury can be normalised. The piece threads together vivid interviews with former youth athletes, examples of other public scandals, and international research to show how easily abuse can be written off as “discipline” and “pushing for results”.
One anonymous interviewee is “Nastya”, who started practising martial arts at the age of seven and eventually decided to train seriously in sambo (a Russian-origin martial arts and contact sport). Her description of the training programme is brutal. In one sparring session, a much larger boy hesitated to hit her; the coach, she recalls, instructed him to “train in beating up a woman”.
There were push-ups on asphalt covered with broken glass – Nastya remembers later picking out tiny shards from her hands – and a concussion after she was forced to attempt a move she didn’t understand. Suffering from injuries, bullied by the coach – and later by peers who followed the instructor’s lead – Nastya quit the sport. She says she is still dealing with the psychological aftermath.
Then there’s “Anna”, who got into organised hiking aged 12. Her own coach told her he was “drawn to young girls” and showed her nude photos of another woman on his phone. Anna came to see this as grooming only years later; when approached by Veter, her former coach denied overstepping boundaries.
European researchers who are cited in the article surveyed some 10,000 athletes and found 75 percent of them had encountered some form of abuse before 18. The mechanism, researchers argue, is structural: training is opaque to outsiders; “early specialisation” and the race for results heighten risk, while the child’s sense of identity becomes tied up with their sporting performance, making protest harder.
While Gushina’s report doesn’t offer any explicit answers on how this abuse might be stopped, it does show what happens when people speak – and are believed. Anna’s retrospective naming of “grooming”, Nastya’s decision to walk away, and the public scrutiny unleashed by the Rozanov allegations suggest that breaking the silence could be one way to protect children’s safety.
Original article (“Она орала, дрессировала, лупануть могла по рукам, по ногам”) by Sofia Gushina was first published in Russian on 29 June 2025.
It is available here.
Veter (“ветер”, means “wind” in Russian; its name is a reference to “the winds of change”), is an independent news site that began as a YouTube channel in 2023. It aims to present the stories of “ordinary Russians living in difficult times”.
Summary by TM
Beats of conspiracy
French rapper Freeze Corleone embodies how conspiracy theories and recycled anti-Masonic tropes seep into youth culture through the underground rap scene.
In his essay “Rap et anti-maçonnerie, étude d’un cas français”, published in La Chaîne d’Union, historian Stéphane François traces how French rap has become a surprising vessel for the transmission of anti-Masonic ideas. For François, the case of Freeze Corleone, born Issa Lorenzo Diakhaté in 1992, stands out as emblematic. The French-Senegalese rapper operates on the fringes of the rap world, aloof from interviews but notorious for provocative references, blending Star Wars and Marvel with conspiracies about the Rothschilds, Illuminati lore and Holocaust denial.
The controversy began in earnest with the release of his 2020 album La Menace Fantôme (LMF), defended by some critics for its “artistic quality” but condemned by anti-racist groups like Ligue Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme (LICRA) for its anti-Semitic content. What appears new is in fact a remix of very old ideas. “We are clearly in an anti-Judeo-Masonic discourse identical to that of far-right conspiracy theorists,” François argues, “enriched nonetheless with a few new themes.” References to the Illuminati, HAARP and MK-Ultra, borrowed from American conspiracy culture, sit alongside familiar tropes of Freemasonry as satanic, elitist and destructive of nations. For François, the pattern is unmistakable: Corleone and others are recycling 19th-century fantasies for a 21st-century audience.
Yet rap gives these refrains a reach that earlier pamphlet pushers could never have dreamed of. Underground tracks rack up millions of views on YouTube. Provocation is part of the business model: Corleone released Projet Blue Beam on the anniversary of the 2015 Paris attacks, and delayed LMF to 11 September 2020, aligning it with 9/11 conspiracies. Such choices marketise outrage, while also embedding the music in a conspiratorial worldview that suggests hidden forces manipulate every global event.
François situates this within a broader current: conspiracy-tinged rap across Europe. French rappers such as Nekfeu, Keny Arkana and El Matador, or international figures like Wiley in the UK, have trafficked in variations of these themes, from Illuminati to Zionist plots. For adolescents and young adults, rap continues to carry the aura of rebellion, even though, as François points out, many artists are “above all businessmen who manage their image very well.” To maintain credibility as subversive, some gravitate toward conspiratorial radicalism.
For François, what is troubling is not only the persistence of anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic tropes but their industrial-scale dissemination. Rap is a lucrative market, and provocative artists such as Corleone are highly profitable. Music, messaging and money are intertwined. Few of these groups face legal consequences for the viral dissemination of their nauseating messages, in part because underground scenes evade mainstream scrutiny.
The case of Freeze Corleone, then, is not merely about one artist. It reveals how conspiracy theories adapt to new cultural vehicles, surviving by embedding themselves in subversive aesthetics.
Original article “Rap et anti-maçonnerie, étude d’un cas français” by Stéphane François was first published in French in La Chaîne d’Union, vol. 108, no. 2 (2024), pp. 95-101; republished by Fragments sur les Temps Présents on 26 March 2025.
It is available here.
La Chaîne d’Union is a French journal dedicated to the study and history of Freemasonry, its philosophical traditions and its cultural reception.
Fragments sur les Temps Présents (often abbreviated as #FTP) is an independent French-language editorial platform blending essays, short-form reflections, and commentary on extremist ideologies, conspiracy theories, identity politics, geopolitics and cultural phenomena.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team