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8 1

Winter 2008

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its

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Contents

—H. P. Lovecraft

Star City Limits By Andrew Biliter

Zvezdny Gorodok is just another quaint village that hasn’t seen a spruce-up since the 1970s. One difference: this village sends people into space. Page 33

12 14

T: A letter from the editor

24 Everything

Featured contributors

16 Doing

28 Laika

Business with the Neighbors

The most unlikely comic book about a dog turned space traveler and a political prisoner turned inventor

Wondering where Russia gets its overalls and prostitutes? This map can help 18 Stat!

33 Space

Russians disagree on pets, polonium 20 Made

in Russia

the Take

Leonid Bershidsky on the economy of bribery

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for Rent

Man can now buy a trip to the moon, but when can he get wasted there?

This issue’s icon: the people’s camera 22 On

Is Illuminati

Michael Idov on the new Russia’s conspiracy obsession

PLUS: Star City Limits

Ad 3

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Contents

The Degenerates Curated by Marat Guelman

Kissing cops, a Cola Christ, and a nude bathing in crude: these must be the newly banned artworks everyone is talking about. Page 94

46 Russia’s

Latin Lover

83 Apartment

The pros and cons of Georgian chivalry 54 Denis

One of the last communal apartments in St. Petersburg

Simachev

86 The

One man helps a nation regain its sense of style 57 Street

Fashion: Layered Looks

90 The

As these Muscovites show, cold weather is just nature daring you to look your hottest 68 Hitting

the Pipe

104 Painting

the Town

Twelve Moscow buildings tagged by Brazilian artists

of Arkhangelsk

Tourism here used to be of the involuntary variety. Now it’s merely recommended.

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Immovable Feast

Things may change, but the New Year table always looks the same

Russia and the U.S. take turns muscling in on Caspian oil 74 Visions

Monarchist Cookbook

Time-honored recipes from the Martha Stewart of Tsarist Russia

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Contents

The Great Translation Chart By Valerie Stivers-Isakova

From Vladimir Nabokov’s monstrously bloated Onegin to David Mamet’s extra-lean Cherry Orchard, we rifle through English translations of Russian lit classics and pick the best. You’re welcome. Page 107

112 Books:

States of Play

Boris Kachka on Zugzwang. Plus: The Selected Works of Daniil Kharms 116 Small

Miracles: Soviet Holiday Movie KindaClassics What the reds were viewing while you watched It’s a Wonderful Life

118 The

Rubes of RuTube

122 Clubbed

124 Inventory

A golden nail, an explosive piggy bank, and a poster 127 Guide: Contact info for people, places and things

mentioned in this issue 130 Document:

A top secret, if you are interested…

Meet Russia’s first viral-video celebs: a thug philosopher and a singing Borat

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to Death

The Moscow nightlife guide

A dramatic Russian twist on the old e-mail scam

You are reading

a Letter from Editor

This issue has been brought to you by the letter “Т”—the utterly unexciting, sameas-in-English “T”—and it’s hard for me to explain why. I could and probably should say that it’s here to highlight the similarities between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets (and, by extension, the Russian and Western cultures), but that would be a terrible lie. See, our previous Letters From the Editor, in the first two issues, were “П” and “Я” (our “P” and “Ya”), and now we’d like to gracefully phase out the whole damn conceit. Since each issue’s mascot letter is also printed on the magazine’s spine (go ahead, check), one way to save face is to pretend that we were doing this for a reason: to spell out a word. RUSSIA! is a quarterly, which means four issues a year, so we’d need a four-letter Russian word that starts with “ПЯ,” one that would bind our first year’s worth of issues into a cohesive little collection. Well, it’s just our luck that the Russian language only has two four-letter words that start with “ПЯ.” One is “пята” and means “heel.” The other is пять and means “five.” Thus, you’ll have to pick up Issue Four for the conclusion of this thrilling drama. An advertiser-friendly cliffhanger! In the meantime, we’re examining the spacetourism industry, printing the year’s most controversial art, judging rival translations of lit classics, and getting a horrible faux-Gypsy song stuck in our heads.Oh, and there’s Russian word starting with “T” at the top of each page. т Michael Idov

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R U S S I A ! M A G A Z I N E

Publisher

Editor

Art direction and layout

Special projects editor

Arts editor

Managing editor

Advertising manager

Prepress

Editorial assistant

Ilya Merenzon Michael Idov Ilya Baronshin, Anna Makarova Asya Dubrovskaya Marat Guelman Andrew Biliter Nora Liddell Anna Makarova Maria Vapnitchnaia

E ditorial B oard

Alexander Besputin Marat Guelman

Alexandre Gertsman Ilya Merenzon

Andrew Paulson Michael Thompson

T e x ts

Nick Abadzis, Andrew Biliter, Leonid Bershidsky, Marat and Julia Guelman, Michael Idov, Lily Idov, Julia Ioffe, Boris Kachka, Irina Kirilenko, Paul Lembersky, Valerie Stivers-Isakova, Micha Rinkus, Daria Vaisman, Maria Vapnitchnaia, Sergei Verkligen P h oto S

Art. Lebedev Studio, The Blue Noses, Asya Dubrovskaya, Dymov Ceramic, Lily Idov, Gleb Kordovsky, Alexander Kosolapov, Varvara Lozenko, Mainpeople.ru, Sergei Maximishin, NASA, Open Design, PG Group, Lena Sarapultseva, Shutterstock, Julia Vishnevetskaya, Dasha Yastrebova, 44100.com I llustrations

Nich Abadzis, Ostengruppe, Alexander Kosolapov, PG Group.

Special thanks to Cathy Kruchko, Dima Barbanel and Masha Zayakina

For subscriptions/change of address www.readrussia.com/subscribe +1 (877) 410 05 67 RUSSIA! is distributed by RCS Publisher Services & Magazine Distribution +1 (323) 344 12 00

Đ˘Ń&#x201A; ISSN: 1930-6784 Printed in Canada

RUSSIA! magazine is published quarterly by Press Release Group 419 Lafayette St., 2nd floor New York, NY 10003 +1 (347) 328 06 15 www.readrussia.com letters@readrussia.com

R epresentatives

Moscow: +7 (926) 332 84 01 Germany: D-79859, Schluchsee, Im Wolfsgrund, 20; +49 (7656) 988 97 40; bali-gmbh@t-online.de United Kingdom: +44 (20) 7993 6673

тавро

Featured

Contributors

Sergei Maximishin

Boris Kachka

Sergei Maximishin began his photography career while serving in the Soviet military in Cuba in 1985. Since then, he has worked with a number of publications, both Russian and international, including the Times of London, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He has received several honors, including two Word Press Photo awards.

Boris Kachka is a contributing editor at New York magazine. He was born in Kishinev, Moldova, and immigrated to New York with his family at the age of 2. His work has also appeared in Salon and Conde Nast Traveler. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Blue Noses Group Established in 1999, The Blue Noses are a prolific art duo out of Siberia. Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov have received international recognition for their satirical and edgy videos, photographs and performances, including shows in New York, Berlin and Paris.

Leonid Bershidsky

Daria Vaisman A U.S. native, Vaisman moved to Tbilisi in 2004 for what was to be a short stint working in the Georgian government, but ended up staying until 2007. She has written on the Caucasus and various related and unrelated topics for the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times and other publications. She now lives in New York City.

Leonid Bershidsky began his career as a Moscow correspondent for Newsweek. He went on to become the publisher of Forbes-Russia and the editor of Smart Money. He is currently working as an investment banker and authors a popular column in Bolshoi Gorod, one of the most widely read magazines in Moscow.

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табу

Wars of nations are fought to change

Maps

But wars of poverty are fought to map change.—Muhammad Ali

Russian

$339.1 million $10.5 million

Estonia

$187.3 million

$1.24 bil

thousands

Latvia

$ 250.6 million

Lithuania $3.23 billion

R.F.

$48.9 million $497.7 million $ 24.5 million

Belarus

$ 250.6 million

Ukraine

$18.5 billion

Moldova

$2.26 billion

Doing Business with the Neighbors

Georgia

Armenia

Legend:

$ 252.5 million

Azerbaijan

wine

helicopters

fresh apples

tractors

paper products

petroleum

crude oil

overalls

coal

gas

prostitutes

electricity

malt beer

wood furniture

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Federation

Total legal imports to Russia per year: Total illegal imports to Russia per year:

$137 billion $30 billion

llion

Kazakhstan

$11.6 million

Uzbekistan

Kyrgyzstan $120 million

$17.6 million

Turkmenistan

Tajikistan

The “Northern Route” Massive shipments of heroin grown in Afghanistan’s poppy fields travel through Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan before reaching Russia. Only 2.5% is seized by authorities. Illegal drugs entering Russia each year:

$15 billion

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табурет

Statistics

are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. —Aaron Levenstein

Russia… … may enjoy a cold one

… can’t agree on polonium

Are you a beer drinker?

Who was involved in the death of Alexander Litvinenko?

53% Yes, I drink beer

20% His former business associates

47% No, I don’t drink beer

15% Boris Berezovsky 10% Russian Special Services

… is quitting? Are you a smoker?

37% Yes, I smoke 63% No, I don’t smoke

… should have checked under the bed

you ever left undergarments Have behind after staying at someone’s house?

5% Yes, once in awhile

8% Foreign Special Services

18% There was one time

8% It was an accidental contamination

51% No and hope I never do

21% Not yet 5% Not sure

1% It was a suicide 13% I don’t know what you’re talking about

25% Not sure

... isn’t picky about cats. Do you have any pets? (Source: Yuri Levada Analytical Center)

4% Fish

10% Purebreed cat

36% Non-pedigreed cat

2% Birds

11% Purebreed dog

2% S maller animals (hamsters, guinea pigs, etc.) less than 1%

39% D on’t have any pets

23% Non-pedigreed dog

xotic animals E (snakes, lizards, monkeys, etc.)

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Made in Russia

ounds as funny as “Decided by the people.” s —Radio program

The Many Lives of By Julia Ioffe

Though Lenin’s heirs didn’t quite succeed in exporting revolution to the West, they did produce a Trojan horse of sorts. It’s called LOMO, and it’s a small, portable camera you can stash in your tunic pocket, always ready for that candid shot of a fat cat slurping caviar. And though the Soviet Union is long gone, its battalion of Trojan horses continues to multiply under the auspices of an Austrian company called Lomographische AG. Just last October, suspiciously close to the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution, Meg and Jack White, the rock ’n’ roll duo known as the White Stripes, came out with their very own, limited edition his-and-hers LOMO cameras in—you guessed it—cornea-scorching red. This marketing ploy is just the latest development in the cult phenomenon known as Lomography, a kind of egalitarian, populist approach to taking pictures and, some would argue, making art. The technique, which is neatly encapsulated in the Lomographer’s mantra of “don’t think, just shoot,” produces blurry, on-the-fly shots that recall the guerilla impressionism of photo vérité. Add to this the garish colors produced by the cameras’ odd focus, alternative film

development techniques, and the optional fish-eye lens, and you’ve got yourself an international hipster sensation. But back before Lomogrpahers were holding world congresses and building “Lomowalls” in European capitals, LOMO was just your typical Soviet enterprise, striving for mechanical excellence despite its map of scars tracing the arc of 20th-century Russian history.

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LOMO’s history goes a little something like this. When it was founded in 1914, the concern manufactured World War I gun sights for under a fittingly belle époque name: the Russian Stockholding Association of Optical and Mechanical Producers (RAOOMP). In 1930, the same year the company was renamed GOMZ, or the State Optico-

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Mechanical Factory, it came out with its first lightweight civilian camera.It continued its operations through the war years, surviving the siege of Leningrad without ceasing its operations for even a day, heroically pumping out vital observational optics for the front. After 1962, when it was rechristened LOMO, or the Leningrad Optico-Mechanical Amalgamation, the enterprise continued

producing video cameras, microscopes and astrophysical instruments, the largest of which, the BTA, or Big Telescope Alt-Azimuthal, had a diameter of 6 meters. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, LOMO had produced over 40 million of the highly portable cameras for which it became famous. Like Soviet warheads, LOMO

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cameras proliferated around the globe. It was not until 1992, however, when two Viennese marketing students found one in a Prague thrift shop, that the cameras went truly viral. The duo easily finagled an agreement with LOMO, which by that point was nearing bankruptcy, and the company granted them the sole right to soup up and sell the cameras anywhere outside the former Soviet Union. It took LOMO until 1995 to realize the extent of its blunder and cry foul, at which point St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor, one Vladimir Putin, intervened at the behest of the Austrians. He placated LOMO with a tax break and befriended the company’s chair, Ilya Klebanov, who would eventually become a deputy prime minister. In the end, the Austrian company retained “Lomography” as its trademark. Now, with hundreds of thousands of young people snapping photos, sharing them on myriad web forums, and organizing themselves in underground Lomography clubs, perhaps LOMO’s latest incarnation may prove to be more than a fad. т

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“One

Column

of truth cannot hold an institution of ideas from falling into ignorance.” —Bryan H. McGill

On the Take

The wonders of a bribe-based economy By Leonid Bershidsky

Just this morning, I took a shortcut on my way to work. I have a problem waking up in December: my body tells me I should be hibernating rather than showering, shaving and driving through Moscow’s deadly traffic jams. So I’m always on the verge of being late, and I hate that feeling. Ergo, I took a shortcut and was greeted by a traffic cop with an evil grin on his face. He didn’t even have to say anything, but he did. “That’s no way to drive,” he said. I didn’t have to say anything, either, and I didn’t. I just handed over my

driver’s license wrapped in a 500 ruble note. The cop returned the license and saluted. I kept going. I had just saved time: now I would not need to go to a bank (as is the way here) to pay a fine. But now I would almost certainly be late: by stopping me somewhat unnecessarily, the cop had wasted three of my precious morning minutes. That, according to the classical argument, is exactly the problem with corruption. While it seems to speed things up, thus curing certain inefficiencies, it also creates an incentive for bureaucrats

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to slow things down so they can extort a bribe. Daniel Kaufman and Shang-Jin Wei, of the World Bank and the IMF, respectively, had to study 2,400 companies in 58 countries to find out that the more firms have to bribe, the more time they waste negotiating with bureaucrats who are supposed to expedite business. But it’s obvious even without mountains of proof that a corrupt bureaucratic system writes rules and places hurdles so it can extort more money. If Moscow’s traffic police were not bribe-takers, that officer would not have been waiting for

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me on the street corner. The more corrupt traffic cops are, the more of them are out there on city streets hoping to collect. That’s why you don’t need Transparency International to see that in Vienna, traffic police are less bribeable than in Moscow: you just don’t see them anywhere in Vienna. Corruption is bad. A strong civil society reduces corruption by exercising public control over bureaucrats. Right? Wrong, if you ask respected Russian sociologist Simon Kordonsky. Kordonsky believes corruption networks are Russian civil society, and he recently articulated this idea in one of Moscow’s highbrow opinion journals. “Our corruption,” he argues, “is a system of actions by members of the civil society that allows them to attain their goals in spite of government regulations, rules and laws, using bureaucrats to fulfill their needs. And, symmetrically, it is the use of state powers by officials to satisfy the needs of their relatives, friends, friends of friends, and those recommended by friends of friends. After all, a bureaucrat is just as much a member of civil society as the man on the street.” According to Kordonsky, the strength of Russian civil society lies in its unshakable institutions: the banya (public steam bath), restaurants frequented by certain professional groups, fishing and hunting trips, summer home communities. Similar hallowed institutions exist almost everywhere, but it is possible—and Kordonsky makes a compelling case for this—that in Russia, the range of services they provide is one of the widest in the world. Kordonsky’s

partial list: “Optimizing taxes, winning a tender, getting a building permit, getting a relative care at an ‘elite’ clinic, helping a son avoid the draft, sending a daughter to a good school, getting back a driver’s license confiscated by the police, cutting short a criminal investigation against a partner, or instigating a police raid on a rival.”

The more corrupt traffic cops are, the more of them are out there on city streets hoping to collect Money and favors are exchanged through these informal networks, but you need to know whom to pay, and you need to know how not to offend while paying. When you are asking a bureaucrat to accept a bribe, you have to do it nicely. In most cases, the bureaucrat is taking a risk for you out of sincere sympathy for your plight or a deep personal liking. So while offering the bureaucrat compensation is certainly the polite thing to do, it is by no means full payment for services rendered. A building permit may be worth $500,000 to you, but helping you could cost your benefactor a twenty-year career that might have ended in, who knows, a ministerial post or even the presidency. The scale is not tilted in your favor, and your friend from the banya needs you to understand that. The notion of corruption as protest against an oppressive state, and a valid alternative to it, has gotten a lot

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of mileage in Russia. Vasily Aksyonov, one of the Soviet Union’s finest writers, wrote sympathetically of the fartsovschiki* illegal traders in Western goods, who obviously had to bribe cops to operate in Brezhnev-era Moscow. To the author, now a U.S. citizen, these minor crooks were no lesser dissidents than the few openly critical intellectuals of the time. These days, the state is slowly returning to the level of pervasiveness it maintained in the early 1970s, Aksyonov’s heyday. So once again, it is theoretically possible to use corruption as a form of protest. This would mean, for example, that a businessman who pays off cops and bureaucrats is not an extortion victim—he is a civic figure, a freedom fighter. One of the academic terms for widespread bribery is “state capture.” In Russia, it is an ambiguous term. Who is capturing whom? Both sides, the state and the citizen, are equipped with a healthy predatory instinct. So they end up capturing each other. It’s a symbiosis that Kordonsky and I find hard to replace with any other credible system. I know what to do when a bureaucrat winks. He knows how to position himself for the wink. Efficiency may be important, but it’s not everything. т

* While the word has an unfortunate connotation in English, one theory is that it actually evolved from Russian merchants’ butchery of the English “for sale,” which yielded “far-tseil.”

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Column

Everything is Illuminati

The Byzantiine logic behind modern Russia cynicism By Michael Idov Russia is a society of conspiracy theorists. In fact, the notion that politics is mere theater and policy is determined via backroom collusion is so central to the Russian worldview that “theorist” is perhaps too weak a word. Russia is a society of conspiracy axiomists. The terms “black PR” and “political technologies” dot the mainstream press. An art gallery owner (RUSSIA! contributor Marat Guelman) routinely gets credit for masterminding coups while top officials are blithely dismissed as puppets. Here is the basic formula, applicable to any bit of news: if an event makes Ivanov look bad, it must be engineered by Petrov. That’s entry-level cynicism,

though, unworthy of discussion. A real Russian knows that someone wants you to think the Ivanov-implicating event was engineered by Petrov, in which case it’s a totally brilliant move by Ivanov. Unless, of course, it’s Sidorov trying to make it look like Ivanov and Petrov are locked in a petty smear campaign while he marches off with credibility intact; which means Ivanov and Petrov are actually in a sub rosa pact to take down Sidorov. If we transplant this rationale to the U.S. soil, for instance, we’d find that, in 2000, the insidious push polls suggesting John McCain had sired a black baby were the handiwork of, say, a Condi Rice-Hillary Clinton alliance

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to weaken Karl Rove, with Jon Stewart paid off to make jokes about it. One facile, but probably correct, explanation for this phenomenon is that the Russians have no reason to trust anyone tasked with speaking to them. The Kremlin doesn’t even bother to pretend that the next president is going to be anything other than an appointed functionary, and the print media gleefully pissed away all the credibility they had briefly amassed over the perestroika years in the mega-corrupt 1990s. For a while, reporters and publishers alike were so eager to turn a buck that the line between editorial and advertising simply ceased to exist; several

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Column

years ago, I met a young copywriter who proudly called herself a journalist. The difference, in her mind, was purely academic, like the one between an entomologist and lepidopterist. So it’s only natural that the first question one asks when looking at a Russian newspaper is “who ordered this?” (To this day, one finds corporate press releases published as news in major outlets, with nary a word changed.) With TV, things are simpler: after the state chomped down on all independent networks, you at least know who’s doing the ordering. Or do you? Here is bestselling novelist Boris Akunin: “The more TV channels cheerlead for the President, the more harm they do to his so-called rating. I am beginning to suspect that they’re managed by secret agents of the Union of the Right Forces.” He might be kidding, but then again he might not. To a savvy Russian, graft is everywhere. Whatever looks genuine is just really good graft. Funny thing is, all identifiable instances of the dread “black PR” I’d seen myself were utterly inept. For instance, here’s some silly entity trying to smear the aforementioned Union of Right Forces in the run-up to the December election: Let Our Agitator In! As part of an international initiative to combat dangerous diseases, the URF employs AIDS patients and HIV-positive individuals. Let us officially assure you that, with the appropriate safety measures, AIDS sufferers pose no threat to you or your loved ones. Simply be aware! Let the URF agitator into your home! Do I even need to tell you that the Union of the Right Forces is believed to

have deviously designed this nonsense themselves, in order to make the opposition look bad? Not that this tactical brilliance helped them at the polls (as if anything could). But that fact conveniently falls by the wayside. Akunin’s own polished genre fiction, needless to say, freely dabbles in conspiracy scenarios. He’s in good company, too: secret cabals figure in a staggering percentage of Russian highbrow prose. Pavel Krusanov’s Angel’s Bite, Garros-Evdokimov’s Grey Goo and Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice come to mind. Then there’s the bestselling Viktor Pelevin, whose 1999 satire of the advertising world, Generation P (published in the U.S. as Homo Zapiens), was hugely successful in reflecting and perhaps even shaping the way young Russians think about power—by explaining that the world’s leaders are all CGI cartoons: “Reagan was animated all his second term. As for Bush— do you remember that time he stood beside a helicopter and the hair he’d combed across his bald patch kept lifting up and waving in the air? A real masterpiece.” “But is it true that their copywriters work on our politics?” “That’s a load of lies. They can’t even come up with anything any good for themselves… All their political creatives are pure shit. They have two candidates for president and only one team of scriptwriters.” Each of Pelevin’s recent novels starts as a kind of observational humor piece about the mores of the day, then opens up into a druggy vision of a secret force running the world. In Generation P, it’s

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reality-manufacturing, Ishtar-worshiping copywriters; in 2003’s DPP/NN, it’s numerology and a gay mafia. (Lately, Pelevin has gotten lazy: in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf it’s werewolves, and in Empire V it’s vampires.) The nagging vision of the man behind the curtain is by no means limited to politics: it pops up at the pettiest of provocations. In a recent episode, several popular bloggers got caught using their LiveJournals (most of Russian blogging is done through LJ) to disseminate a paid plug for a store called Platypus—all on the same day. The commenters’ first reaction: the store was dumb not to stagger the promos but to unleash them all at once, thus exposing the ploy. The almost instantaneous second reaction: the people at Platypus are geniuses! Getting caught maximized their exposure! Surely, you might say, this kind of black-is-white lunacy thrives in the West as well—any political comment thread on any open forum teems with 9/11 “truthers” and other tiresome types. Correct. The difference is that in Russia, this paranoia penetrates the kitchens and minds of completely sane people. And it’s having a crippling effect. By taking the “who benefits” question and looping it around until it loses all meaning, this logic produces a resigned stasis. Everything is a power play; everybody’s an enemy plant; nothing is knowable or changeable, by vote or by force, and, as a corollary, nothing is my fault. In the end, the Russian paranoia is a kind of self-therapy, too. It’s paradoxically more consoling to imagine a shadowy cabal than to accept the fact that a slight, balding ex-KGB apparatchik holds all the power levers in increasingly plain sight. т

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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer

Reading

—Logan Pearsall Smith

From LAIKA by Nick Abadzis. Published with permission of First Second, New York and London, www.firstsecondbooks.com

Just like every Western kid of a certain generation had wept at the death of Bambi’s mother, every Soviet schoolchild once choked back a tear upon learning the fate of Laika, the first dog in space: the scientists who sent her into orbit never bothered with the return procedure. The difference is that Laika, unlike Bambi, was depressingly real. Her 1957 flight, hastily assembled on the heels of the genuine triumph of the Sputnik (to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution), was conceived as pure propaganda; its scientific value was close to nil. Instead, it just bummed the world out.

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Forty years later, American artist Nick Abadzis took Laika’s story and gave it a wonderfully heartwrenching treatment in a rather unexpected format: a graphic novel. Teeming with real-life characters such as Sergei Korolyov, the head of the Soviet space program, Abadzis’s tale finds a mythic pitch in an oft-forgotten space-race footnote. Its central image, of a doomed pooch floating above our sad little planet, deserves to be ranked among the most profound allegories of the Soviet experiment. RUSSIA! is delighted to bring you a few pages from the book.

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таращиться

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тюрбан

татуировка

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After one look at this planet, any visitor from outer

Space

would say, “I want to see the manager.” —William S. Burroughs

таять

Tourism has reached the final frontier, and Russia is the unlikely travel agent. But are today’s space vacations fun enough? Leisure expert Andrew Biliter investigates.

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Photo: NASA

тварь

Space

Aren’t we a bit ashamed of ourselves that the space hotel from 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn’t materialized? Mankind is seven years behind schedule on completion of Kubrick’s cosmic Hilton, and there’s not a giant floating pinwheel in sight. But as is often the case with good science fiction, 2001 made a number of accurate predictions about the world of the present. Semi-permanent space stations have been in orbit since 1986. Video conferencing, which seemed so futuristic in the 1968 film, is now the backbone of many relationships. And although there’s no hotel up there yet, the long-awaited era of space tourism is upon us. It began, quite fittingly, in 2001. That was the year Dennis Tito, a private U.S. citizen, paid the Russian

space program to let him join two cosmonauts on a mission to the International Space Station. Tito’s eight-day journey lacked the glamour of Kubrick’s vision; the 60-year-old financier paid a purported $20 million for what was essentially a glorified ride-along. He also had to set it up through the Russian government, prompting NASA officials to question his patriotism, and endured six months of rigorous training. As tourism goes, it wasn’t ideal. But for Tito, who had worked in NASA’s jet propulsion lab in the 1960s, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Since then, four other paying customers have blasted off with Russia’s help, each following the same basic program: $20 million, six months of training, ten days in space.

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Their stories provide a snapshot of the fledgling space tourism industry. South African Internet whiz kid Mark Shuttleworth became the first African in space in 2002 at age 28. While in orbit, he had a live radio conversation with Nelson Mandela and Michelle Foster, a terminally ill 14-year-old. In a heartbreaking moment, Michelle, who was perched on the former president’s knee, asked Shuttleworth to marry her. His answer, “I’m very honored at the question,” was charmingly evasive. A two-year tourism gap followed the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, as the loss of the shuttle made Russian Soyuz rockets earth’s only access to the ISS. Things picked up again with Gregory Olsen’s trip in October 2005. The U.S.

Photo: NASA

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Space

infrared-gadget mogul, then 59, used the zero-gravity setting to test some products made by his company, Sensors Unlimited. Little remarkable happened during his journey, save that he observed several hurricanes and the floodwaters of Katrina from orbit. The multi-multi-millionaire says he’s dying for another chance at spaceflight, but just needs, you know, a rocket ship. Then, in September 2006, cameIranian-American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari. She’d come a long way: when Ansari immigrated to the U.S. at age 16, she spoke no English. By age 40, she had bought six telecom companies and was on her way to outer space. Ansari’s voyage marked a number of firsts: she was the first female space

tourist, the first Iranian in space and the first space blogger—it’s rumored she forked over an extra $250,000 for the Internet link. Controversy emerged when Roskosmos and NASA forbid Ansari from wearing the Iranian flag alongside the U.S. flag on her spacesuit, although she was eventually permitted to wear Iran’s colors on her personal patch. She spent a lot of time in space talking to her husband, Hamid Ansari, who surprised her with a kiss when she landed in Kazakhstan. This romantic gesture was topped in April of the following year however, when Martha Stewart sent her billionaire boyfriend, Charles Simonyi, into space by packing him a gourmet meal. Because of a quarantine before

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the launch, Stewart had to say farewell to her software architect beau through a glass-plate window at the spaceport in Baikonur, but she let her menu do the talking: duck breast confit, roasted quail and rice pudding made a fine picnic for Simonyi and the other astronauts aboard the ISS. The Hungarian-born programmer behind Microsoft Word paid for eleven days in space, but got two bonus days when mission managers extended the flight to maintain an ideal landing trajectory. While in orbit, the then-58-year-old kept a detailed blog, Charlesinspace.com, and spoke to groups of Hungarian and American schoolchildren with his ham radio. A self-styled space nerd, Simonyi also brought a few books to the station in

Photo: NASA

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hopes of starting a library there. His not-so-nerdy selections: Goethe’s Faust and Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Besides the Russian space agency, behind all of these unusual vacations is an ambitious tourist agency called Space Adventures, Ltd. Established in 1998, the company serves the rich with simulated weightlessness (when a plane dives, allowing passengers to float) and the uber-rich with the adventures detailed above. Five customers in orbit in ten years may not seem like much, but agency co-founder Eric Anderson put the number in perspective with this factoid for the BBC: “Space Adventures has created more astronauts than 98 percent of nations on Earth.” Granted, most of those nations have never tried to create an astronaut, but the agency has more space adventurers in the pipeline: extra seats on Soyuz missions are booked solid through 2009. The next space tourist will be U.S. video game developer Richard Garriott in October 2008. Garriott has so many connections with space travel that the trip must seem a foregone conclusion: he’s the vice-chairman of Space Adventures and his father, Owen Garriott, is a NASA astronaut.

2001

Despite all the enjoyment these travelers have had through this special arrangement with Roskosmos, their experience of going into space is still far from casual sightseeing. This has a lot to do with the training, which involves everything from rudimentary Russian language classes to winter survival scenarios that prepare for a botched landing. The vacation also seems less like a getaway because the tourist’s companions aren’t there to have fun. But the seriousness also has to do with the attitude of the participants themselves. Marina Driga, a facilitator and allaround assistant to the cosmonauts at Star City, knows all the space tourists personally. She describes all of them as agreeable, sociable, hardworking people who behaved professionally. None of these qualities seem surprising in hugely successful entrepreneurs, but there is one telling pet peeve that all the space tourists share: they hate being called space tourists. The official term—and the one most prefer—is “spaceflight participant.” But with political correctness currently on the wane, “spaceflight participant” seems about as likely to catch on as “differently abled.”

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Driga explained why the tourists didn’t like the term. “They claim—yes, and claim is the word I’m choosing to use—to have scientific aims because while they’re in space, they do some science projects.” Private research is in no way a requirement, but every tourist so far has pursued it. For Tito and Olsen, these projects were ostensibly connected to their businesses back on Earth. In addition to product testing, Olsen monitored the growth of some crystals he brought with him to the ISS. Mark Shuttleworth conducted—or tried to conduct—five experiments relating to AIDS and stem cells. Ansari did some medical tests on behalf of the European Space Agency, though these were as simple as giving blood samples and answering daily questionnaires about her lower back pain. Simonyi took part in similar blood testing. Driga didn’t see the point of these experiments. “Honestly, what can you really accomplish in ten days? It’s two days out to the station and two days back, and you spend the first week simply adjusting to weightlessness. By then it’s already time to go home.” But while a few days of research may not be a great boon to a space tourist’s

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Space

company, Driga estimates that the media exposure it creates can be very lucrative. “It get the company’s name onto the radar,” she says. “It’s great for publicity.” Anousheh Ansari offered an alternative debunking of the term “space tourist” in a 2006 interview with the European Space Agency: “A ‘tourist’ is someone who decides to go somewhere, buys a ticket, takes their camera, packs a bag and goes. For this experience, I had to train for six months in Star City, perform physical and mental training, learn all the systems of the space station and the Soyuz rocket. … The closest thing I can compare it to is people who go to exploration trips to Antarctica, or to the Arctic, or people who climb Mount Everest. You would never call them tourists.” The logic here seems sound, but Driga worries that putting tourists on the same footing with Arctic explorers could diminish the achievements of real cosmonauts. “Of course the tourists’ training is difficult,” she said. “But all they’re really learning is how to stay out of the way, what buttons not to push, and how to use the toilet. A cosmonaut has to know everything. And they train for years, not months.” Another component in all of this is the goodwill mission. All the space tourists so far have sought to use their trip as some sort of inspiration for others. All except Tito were in communication with schoolchildren during their flight, and all have behaved as ambassadors for spaceflight and science education since. Charlesinspace.com had an entire section for children to learn about space. Ansari and prospective space tourist Garriott both helped fund the X-Prize, a contest to create a suborbital plane that would facilitate commercial space travel. This is not how ordinary tourists behave.

But one question underneath all this is whether such commitments are purely voluntary. They may be an attempt to maintain a level of privacy. It’s a unnerving to have every stage of one’s vacation—from the medical exam to the awkward climb out of the capsule— documented and viewed by millions. In this light, calling the trip “science” or making it about educating children and promoting space exploration restores a sense of dignity to the proceedings. It must also deflect a bit of the guilt of having everyone know that you decided to spend $20 million on a vacation and not on charity. This is not to say that the space tourists’ philanthropic impulses are disingenuous. But in the current framework, not having these impulses—or not appearing to have them—would be a public relations disaster. So while some are lining up for a spot on a Soyuz rocket, many of the world’s wealthy are waiting. They are waiting for a space station where you can get drunk, where you don’t have to disclose to anyone what you saw or how much you paid for it. When we can say, “what happens up there, stays up there,” then the term “private space tourism” will take on a whole new meaning. Fortunately for some, it appears that this day is close at hand. In its mission statement, Space Adventures declares that over the next ten years, it will “fly more people to space than have made the journey since the dawn of the Space Age.” People stopped paying close attention to what astronauts were doing after the moon landing, so the scrutiny with which we monitor every space tourist is set to decrease fast. Furthermore, commercial space travel is already outgrowing its current arrangement with Roskosmos. Companies are popping up all over the world with the intention

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of using the world’s spaceports for more than just satellite launches. Virgin Galactic, headed by British billionaire Richard Branson, is at the forefront of these groups with a plan to launch its own spaceship, the sixpassenger VSS Enterprise, in 2008. Regular flights launching from New Mexico are scheduled to start in 2009, and training for the journey lasts three days, a pittance compared with what spaceflight candidates endure at Star City. The price—a mere $200,000 a seat—is even more attractive. The only drawbacks are that the trip lasts 2½ hours, and Branson’s ship will achieve a much lower orbit than the International Space Station; it travels just above the arbitrary 100-kilometer boundary that separates our atmosphere from space. The ISS, by comparison, orbits at an altitude of 340 kilometers. For something further afield, Space Adventures is already advertising a lunar mission on its web site. Some eager copywriter has clearly gone overboard in vaunting the importance of this two-man trip around the moon: “Lead the first important manned space expedition of the 21st Century” and “Join the ranks of the world’s greatest explorers” are two bullet points. But perhaps all the fanfare is necessary to justify this vacation’s $100 million price tag. Looking into the next few decades of cosmic leisure, even Kubrick’s space hotel is sure to come about. And while it’s unlikely to resemble a bicycle wheel rotating to the tune of The Blue Danube, it may take an equally whimsical form. Inflatable space stations appear to be the wave of the future, and U.S. motel baron Robert Bigelow has already tested an inflatable habitat module and plans to have a commercial space station, the Nautilus, in orbit by 2010. Nine years behind, but catching up. т

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There’s a lot to marvel at in the belly of the cosmonautic beast. By Andrew Biliter Photos by Varvara Lozenko

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Space

The hydrolab at Zvezdny Gorodok doesn’t usually impress foreigners. Equipment appears carelessly strewn over the grayish, mildewed tile around the pool. Men with radios sit chatting. Faded inspirational posters grace the walls of the observation deck. It looks a lot like a public swimming pool that hasn’t been remodeled since the 1970s. Technically, that’s what it is. Except this swimming pool has a spaceship in it. Zvezdny Gorodok, or “Star City,” is the beating heart of Russia’s space program. Every cosmonaut, starting with Yury Gagarin himself, has lived and trained in this secluded community northeast of Moscow. And while

the hydrolab may not look like much from above, below the water, prospective space travelers get their first taste of weightlessness. In the hulking centrifuge next door, trainees still prepare for the severe G-forces experienced during launch and re-entry. Tour guides here admit that Western journalists are often a bit shocked by the condition of the facilities. They look at the hydrolab, the ancient museum exhibits, the bleak, stuffy hallways, and hurry back to their hotels to write a eulogy for the once-mighty Russian space program. This reaction is partly forgivable; the décor suggests that the last person to cut Star City a

check probably worked for Brezhnev. Another part of it, however, comes from sheer prejudice. In the U.S., there is a general preconception that things relating to space—from the rockets to the spacesuits to the vacuum-sealed ice cream—should be white. Pristine. That’s how we know they are from “the future,” and thus space-worthy. We are not ready for the Soviet vision of the future, expressed in Star City’s flashy, metallic “Zvezdny” sign; its turquoise centrifuge; or its drum-shaped yellow buildings with zigzagging brick facades. We also have differing philosophies about technology. In the U.S., the decrepit space station Mir, shedding bits

left: The space station Mir takes up half the museum. It’s a replica, of course; the real Mir was mostly incinerated as it plummeted into the Pacific Ocean in 2001. Contrary to popular belief, this was not an accident. right: This woman could use a laptop.

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A trainee working inside a simulator of a Soyuz rocket. The Soyuz series has seen few major modifications since its debut in the 1960s. This interior looks exactly like the real thing, with one minor addition: a door.

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This big computer console may remind us of old shopping-mall surveillance equipment, but it’s actually tracking the progress of the cosmonaut seen training on page 41.

An engineer keeping abreast of the day’s news. Though Moscow is a mere half hour away, Star City’s residents rarely make the trip; there are stores, restaurants and a movie theater right in town.

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A view of the hydrolab pool from the lower observation deck. It’s a lot like being at the zoo, but with cosmonauts and divers instead of seals.

The centrifuge at Star City is the largest in the world. The end of its 59-foot arm houses a small cockpit where trainees are flung around in a circle to simulate the huge g-forces experienced during launch and re-entry. Though landing doesn’t usually produce forces of more than 6 g’s, candidates have to withstand 8 g’s to pass the medical qualification test. Space tourist Charles Simonyi commented on his blog that the centrifuge makes remarkably little noise.

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A trainee in the hydrolab practicing a spacewalk mission on a mockup of the International Space Station. His suit is outfitted with weights that perfectly counteract his body’s buoyancy— still the best way to simulate weightlessness on earth. The divers are there to help and observe.

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left: The “Zvezdny” sign near the highway exit made us wonder if we were really going to meet the Jetsons. right: We met the cosmonauts of tomorrow in a park outside the facility.

and pieces toward the end of its 15-year run, was a punchline. At Star City, where a full-scale model of the station takes up half the museum, Mir’s longevity is a great source of pride. “It was only designed to operate for four years,” the tour guide brags. “We mostly took it out of service because it was competing with the International Space Station.” When it comes to Russian aerospace technology, the mantra begins “if it ain’t broke…” And for the most part, it ain’t. Overall, cosmonauts have flown more missions and logged more hours in space than their U.S. counterparts, and in the history of the Russian-Soviet program, only four cosmonauts have (um, officially) died in flight, compared with 18 NASA astronauts. So despite NASA’s shinier facilities, the people training in the green swimming have a higher rate of survival. Certainly, the whole place could use a facelift. The equipment they’re using isn’t getting any younger, and some of the buildings in the residential sector look like the khruschevkas (рage 104) now slated for destruction in Moscow’s suburbs. But if you’re not a jaded journalist looking for flaws or a Rus-

sian scientist starving for a government grant, Star City can be a fascinating place. And for those with a keen appreciation of kitsch, the town’s cocktail of Soviet dereliction and cosmic memorabilia is nothing short of nirvana. Obsolete space capsules blanketed in snow are arranged in a neat row on the ground outside the hydrostation. It’s unclear why they’re placed at the forest’s edge, or indeed why they’re outside at all, but there they are. Inside, things are even more surreal. In one room, astrophysicists sit hunched over a massive blue computer covered with dials and gauges. If you didn’t know they were monitoring the progress of a real cosmonaut in a nearby simulator, you’d think they were playing an advanced version of Pong on their tiny screens. And it appears they call each other on— you guessed it—rotary telephones. Then there’s the museum. “We need to get rid of all this stuff. It’s been here forever,” the tour guide sighs. Ironically, the supposedly old-hat objects in the display cases are often indistinguishable from those in the rest of the facility. In one series of faded photos, 1980s cosmonauts go camping. Apparently, the thing to do when your spaceship

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crash-lands in the Russian taiga is build an igloo, put on a cool jumpsuit, and listen to the radio. There are orange flares involved as well. If Star City ever does get renovated, someone should first call Wes Anderson and convince him to film his next movie here. The opening scene would have to take place in the hydrolab: a space-tourist-in-training floats through the green light toward the mock spaceship. A team of divers hover around him in a kind of underwater ballet, documenting his every move with their clunky cameras. Above deck, a man wearing coke-bottle glasses watches on a snowy television screen. He whispers directions into the divers’ earpieces between pulls on his cigarette. And off to the side, a cleaning lady briefly dips her mop into the pool (an actual sight reported by one visitor). But the movie will never be made. A Western filmmaker likely wouldn’t be allowed in (Danny Boyle came close, when scouting locations for Sunshine), and a Russian one wouldn’t find the facilities remarkable. As is the case with most of the strange, beautiful things left over from the Soviet era, it’s likely that Star City won’t get its proper due until it’s gone. т

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Culture

is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don’t.—Lord Raglan

Russia’s Latin Lover By Daria Vaisman

Photos by Julia Vishnevetskaya

Returning from a trip to the highlands—force-fed shashlyk and toasted until half-blind—a friend once compared Georgian hospitality to a subtle form of hostage-taking. (Another friend recently told me of going to the post office with a package. “Why are you sending this?” the woman asked). As inappropriately friendly countries go, Georgia ranks near the top.But combine the Georgian impulse to feed and fete with the Georgian man, and you’re left with something else: chivalry. For as long as there has been the Russian writer, there has been the Georgian man, a character whose rakishness and louche, irresistible contempt have occupied the Slavic imagination for centuries. In sheer marketability, only the Italian man has come close. And while I can personally attest that much of the stereotype is, in fact, true, the Georgian man is in large part a PR invention that starts, like most things in Georgia, with God. When God was giving out land, the story goes, the Georgians were so busy feasting

that they missed their turn on line. When they explained to God that they were feasting to Him—capisce?—the Lord gave them the piece of real estate He’d been saving for Himself. A quick scan of the formerly Soviet landscape, and you have to admit that the Georgians make a point. While most of the territory is a vast and featureless place— misery soaked into the land itself, if you go in for pathetic fallacies—Georgia is all wine and mountain and sun. This, of course, affected the Georgian people, and had the Soviet Union had novelty stores (or irony), it would have also had “Georgia is for Lovers” mugs. So in the Soviet system of economic specialization, where each country was designated with a primary commodity to produce, Georgia’s was pleasure. If you wanted to drill oil, weaponize anthrax, or find a suitably desolate site on which to build a gulag, you went somewhere else. But if you were in the mood to catch a puppet show, get pleasantly buzzed on homemade wine, or eat an outstanding peach, Georgia was your place. The food was better here, the weather balmier, the

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people charmingly nuts. It was here that Pushkin wrote his sappiest love poetry (“The night mist lies on the hills of Georgia / …The heart burns and beats again”), Dumas soaked at the sulphur baths (“Why does not Paris, the city of physical pleasures, have such baths?” he asked), and Stalin perfected his early Che role, robbing banks and otherwise impressing the ladies. (One wonders how differently things would have turned out had he not gone straight.) Go to the most godforsaken corner of the former Soviet Union now and you will find a merrily painted Georgian restaurant occupying the same social need as an Irish pub in the West.

All this was excellent marketing for one product in particular: the Georgian man. Watch a Russian film from those days and you get the idea. The Georgian men in these movies are always either capricious and lovelorn or charming

and criminal. To the Russian woman, the Georgian man was a construction out of Rousseau: virile, vital, alive. This was the man who would beat up your exboyfriend (or husband), leave flowers outside your door, and write a song with your name for the chorus. His was the sin of excess, never omission—the European troubadour’s patience with the added benefit of proximity. Every summer in Abkhazia (a Soviet vacation spot before being lost by Georgia to war and secessionist politics), this would lead to a mutually beneficial arrangement between the Russian and Georgian republics. Know that story where the flushed American teenager, teetering on the brink of her virginity, loses it on vacation in Italy? This was the Soviet version in a nutshell. As with the other non-Russian republics, there was an element of race hovering over the whole affair; at its ugliest, there were references to color and character that still touch a nerve. Justresigned Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili explored this wound— turning, in his singular way, the political into the psychological—in a recent speech: “Russia loves Georgians at the table,” he said, “but they consider Georgians who have stood tall … to be some kind of unnatural phenomenon.” A quick Google search on the topic unearths articles with titles like “Eros and Empire” and dutiful references to Edward Said. But while English colonialists were busy fetishizing the dusk-eyed ladies, Russian writers couldn’t stop going on about the men. (Put another way, had either homosexuality or critical theory been given the chance to flourish, doubtless there would have been a Soviet Mapplethorpe to photograph the Georgian nude, and a graduate student to write about it.) Twenty years later, the Russians have left—but the other foreigners

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have arrived. Abkhazia is now closed off to Georgians, and with new travel possibilities, the Russians have swapped out Georgians for Turkish men. And yet the Georgian male charm seems to have been translated intact: of the expat women I know here, about half have ended up married, pregnant, or otherwise enmeshed. For years now, Georgia’s biggest export (besides scrap metal) has been boyfriends.

Sex is a lurid, heated, furtive affair. In Georgian, the verb “to have sex” is derived from the same root as “to arrest”; “virgin” is synonymous with “daughter.” Expat women—refugees from the parsimony and suspicion that often characterizes dating back home—find Georgian men awfully compelling. Clichés aside, they quickly learn that to date a Georgian man is to be worshiped—from up close or from afar, if you are, say, at work or buying groceries. A two-day business trip will elicit text messages of such touching mournfulness and delightful syntax that you will happily lay out the snacks when his friends arrive at two in the morning to finish the good wine and fall asleep on your clothes. He’s your very own Latin lover, and if there is a language gap, all the better; when you don’t know what he’s saying, he’s only as wonderful as your imagination allows. Are there other places that so commonly upend the status quo of native woman ensnares foreign man? Discounting the Gambia or the Jamaica

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in How Stella Got Her Groove Back as part of a highly imbalanced sex trade, an informal survey finds just one: the Balkans, where men evidently offer the same mixture of reverence and good, old fashioned machismo. Doors will be opened, cigarettes lit from across the room. Bills will be paid without giving you so much as a chance to leave a tip. It’s the stuff you smirk at in 1950s movies, feeling pleasantly evolved. If you’ve never left the U.S., you’ve probably never seen it in its live state. But then you start to wonder—is this what women really want? If you’re Russian, chances are, yes. Russian women are sick of feminism the way Iranians are probably sick of religion. To most post-Soviet women, feminism is not equal pay for equal work and other perfectly reasonable demands. It’s the strain of living in a matriarchal society where only the women know it. No wonder that there’s been a boom trade in how-to-catch-an-oligarch classes in Moscow—Russian women are tired. And Georgian chivalry provides them with a much-needed rest. All this gets more complicated when the Western woman is involved. For those bred on gender equality, Georgia’s dark corners are something you’re taught to despise. Date rape—a concept rooted in the tautology of No Means No— here is explored for deeper meanings. Watch Georgia’s national dance— the women fluttering like wounded pigeons, legs hidden under skirts as the men circle athletically around—and you understand why. In Georgia, no

actually doesn’t mean no: protest is the national form of flirtation. Not surprisingly, sex is a lurid, heated, furtive affair. In Georgian, the verb “to have sex” is derived from the same root as “to arrest”; “virgin” is synonymous with “daughter.” Though Georgians are Christians, their Islamic neighbors have trekked through the land long enough to leave their mark. Men walk with their arms slung around their girlfriends’ necks in loose yokes, and god save the city boy who introduces his girlfriend to village relatives as anything other than his wife. The prostitute does well here, offering not what women won’t do, but what their husbands don’t want them to. “She kisses my child with that mouth,” says the traditional Georgian man. Which is why there’s often something uneasy about the union of a Georgian man and his foreign woman. You wonder who is cutting corners, and how. Does the westernized Georgian man find dating a foreigner a relief from the rules of traditional Georgian courtship, as he says? Does the foreign woman find in herself a troubling and previously unknown desire to be subsumed? My own Georgian ex loved me so furiously and bought me gifts of such lavish design that he occasionally bankrupted himself, leading me to pay the phone and electricity bills. When we were breaking up, he said that no one would ever love me as much again—a typical closing remark at the end of an affair. But looking back, I realize he may have been right.

All Georgians men can be called djigits (dudes) even if they were raised in the city. Saddled up is Yago. He’s a translator, teacher and German philology expert. But he’s still a djigit.

Hevsuri are an ethnic group who live in the mountains near Kasbek. Here, a boy from the Hevsuri village of Tetrizhebi.

тетка This lively village near the Azerbaijani border hosts a bazaar every weekend. The event hasn’t changed much in the past century—serious-looking men mill around discussing prices, bargaining and evaluating horses.

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Former President Mikheil Saakashvili depicted on a billboard. In November, a series of anti-government demonstrations led to Saakashvili stepping down, and early elections were scheduled for January 5.

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The oldest church in Tbilisi dates back to the 6th century. Between prayers, the clergymen play chess.

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Fashion

sense on what doesn’t itch.—Gilda Radner

Denis Simachev Fashion designer by Micha Rinkus

Slouched insolently in a booth with the pull-chain of an old-fashioned toilet dangling overhead, Denis Simachev (see-ma-CHYOV) looks not unlike the rest of the clientele at his club — asymmetrical haircut, immaculately clean sneakers and an air of impenetrable boredom. He wears an ironic graphic tee, also not an uncommon clothing choice in this particular haunt, the primary difference being than he designed it. “Pykh! Pykh! Pykh!” growls the wolf on his chest, instantly recognizable to Gen-X Russians as the cartoon menace of Nu Pogodi, a Soviet rip-off of Tom & Jerry. It’s difficult to pinpoint why exactly Simachev Bar & Shop, the designer’s first monobrand store whose lower level is a white-hot hipster hangout, seems so out of place for Moscow, but it’s something to do with its quirky black humor. While other establishments spend their money to look as glam as possible, the designer chose to invest in a handful of one-of-a-kind decorations, such as a cheerfully colorful mosaic depicting a hentai rape scene, a pilot’s ejector seat for seating and antique toiletry. These are trappings of an idle wealth that can now indulge its eccentricities, including potty humor. Then it becomes clear: Simachev, like his Bar & Shop, is cool, something the rest of Russia glaringly is not. In the 1990s, New Russia had a fashion problem. Like Beverley Hillbillies cut loose on Rodeo Drive, the newly

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rich piled Dolce & Gabbana on Hermes on Jimmy Choo with reckless abandon, not caring that slavish devotion to Western brands was, at the very least, uncool. The country’s party scene suffered the same affliction: Moscow’s exclusive megaclubs were glitzy and decadent, but could never be mistaken for hip. How could they? Money was being spent purely for the sake of spectacle, and without a hint of originality. It was if an entire generation had no pants, and no one on the inside would call them out. The first cracks in this facade came at the start of this decade with the emergence of “indie elitny,” a trend that infused the same moneyed hyper-exclusivity with cosmopolitanism and an air of ironic distance. Passwordencrypted underground clubs like Gazgolder, hidden in the industrial shantytown near Moscow’s Kurskaya train station, hosted tusovkas (intimate parties) for Moscow’s golden youth — investment bankers who moonlight as DJs, models who holiday in Goa, young designers fed up with the lazy and derivative fashion of their predecessors. And when this elite circle of New New Russians needed an ambassador of style, Denis Simachev was more than willing to step in. His first solo boutique, Denis Simachev Shop & Bar, opened in early 2007 on Stoleshnikov Lane. Beloved by the wives of Moscow’s minigarchs, the lesser versions of the city’s infamous oligarchs, Stoleshnikov is where the

Photo by Manakai

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boutiques of Europe’s biggest fashion houses are located. To announce his arrival, Simachev Christmas-wrapped his twostory store, situated between Hermes and Burberry, in gaudy neon Khokhloma, a 17th-century folk print. Needless to say, there went the neighborhood. “People tried D&G, then they got sick of it,” says Simachev. “They started to think about what’s us, what’s funny to us, what evokes feelings for us.” Rather than imitate the French or Italian experience, which has been the goal of Russia’s elite since time immemorial, Simachev decided to loot the treasure chest of Russian national costumes. Thus, the telnyashka (a striped naval tank top), kitschy hammer-and-sickles, provincial headscarves and flags of all eras have found their way into high fashionability in modern-day Russia. Each of Simachev’s collections is based on a specific Russian “hero”—a soldier in Chechnya; a Siberian schoolteacher with a golden plait; Red Army commander Vasily Chapayev; a 1980s Olympian. Taken comprehensively, they are a compelling, unabashedly patriotic history lesson, preaching pride in one’s rich cultural legacy rather than mindless abuse of foreign status markers.

To announce his arrival, Simachev Christmas-wrapped his two-story store, situated between Hermes and Burberry, in gaudy neon Khokhloma, a 17th-century folk print. It was clear to Simachev that most European haute couture didn’t jibe with Russian fashion sensibilities. For example, a Russian girl wouldn’t be caught dead in austere, military Prada. “Save all the princesses from the bewitched castles of unisex,” the designer exhorted in his “Made in Moscow” collection. His girls strut down the catwalk in gold lamé tracksuits and high heels, with shirts cooing that enticing slogan, “From Rasha Viz Lave.” He also doesn’t pander to trifling environmental concerns: PETA activists would seethe at the sight of his pterodactyl-esque fur earflaps, an essential for surviving cold northern winters. While Simachev doesn’t deign to talk much about the rationale behind his designs—too cool—and comes up with an impressive range of throwaway answers (“I just make clothes

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my wife will look good in,” “Everyone has to brand themselves somehow”), nonetheless, there is one thing that is crystal clear about him: he gets it. “It” is that profound, unbreachable chasm between Russia and the rest of the world. Knowing this, he gleefully stokes all the West’s greatest fears and stereotypes about Russia, from its mail-order brides to its creeping authoritarianism. For instance, Simachev’s latest collection, “Bang! Bang!,” an ode to mid-’90s syndicated crime, featured ostentatiously bling Orthodox crosses, ominous leather trench coats and t-shirts declaring “I Heart OPG (Russian organized crime gangs).” Other tees announce “Neft Nashe Vsyo” (Oil is Our Everything) or depict Putin framed in roses, evoking Cult of Stalin propaganda. “Of course they are provocative,” Simachev laughs. “They are supposed to make people think about Russia and about Russia’s place in the world.” Nonetheless, he wishes people paid the same amount of attention to his less controversial items, such as the handmade 1940s- and ’50s-style shoes he includes in every collection. “They just don’t sell,” he laments. This candid admission tugs at the heartstrings until you remember that everything else Simachev has touched in the past year has practically turned to gold. Since the beginning of 2007, domestic sales of Simachev wear, originally targeted to Europeans as a novelty, increased from 30 percent to 70 percent in Russia. Russian movie stars wear his attitude t-shirts to premieres; banners across Tverskaya, Moscow’s 5th Avenue, announce his fashion shows; and the city’s hottest clubs hire him as their headline DJ (Simachev’s musical style is called vinegret, from the Russian salad that tosses in everything that’s lying around). Even Vladimir Putin, gazing out his office window across the Moscow River at the entire length of a building advertising a Simachevbranded PlayStation, must have a touch of Denis envy. “I’m not going to just say ‘Let’s love Russia’ or ‘Yay, Putin!’” the artist concludes. “People always accept things more easily when you give it to them with a smiley face.” To wit, the Kremlin, constantly plagued by PR problems, might do well to hire a cultural attaché like Simachev, a man who makes even patriotism look edgy and hip. Maybe it hasn’t reached the president yet, but Simachev’s message has already trickled down from the elite hipster circles to the unwashed masses who can’t afford his t-shirts: Russia is cool again. T

Fashion

Layered Looks

Welcome to the streets of Moscow, where nothing screams fashion like Decemberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s icy wind. Photographer: Lena Sarapultseva Photo assistant: Gleb Kordovsky

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Sasha, 26 Graphic designer by day, DJ by night Seen on Stoleshnikov Lane. Sweater reads “open to interpretation.” “Why aren’t there more holiday decorations up on this street? Shameful.”

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Anna, 26 Stylist Seen on Stoleshnikov Lane. Chooka galoshes; head scarf from India; blue wrap from Croatia. “I got it there last New Year’s Eve for $10. I live to thrift shop!”

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Olya, 17 Journalist Seen in front of Patriarch’s Ponds. Zara coat; beret—gift from a friend; Kawaii Factory bag, won in a contest. “I know people at ‘the Factory,’ so I could have gotten it for free anyway.”

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Artyom, 18 Student, scriptwriter, guitarist Seen on Kamergersky Street. Hat bought in Thailand; clothes are knockoff brands from Moscow markets His buddy Kolya: “Yeah, Artyom has a kind of trans-national style.”

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Sveta, 32 Housewife Seen near Patriarch’s Ponds “I am rarely in Moscow during the winter—it’s too cold. I usually go to Thailand.”

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Sayan and Sveta (not their real names) From Kazan and Germany, respectively Seen on Kuznetsky Most. Ran away after this photo was taken. “We don’t have to tell you anything. Just make it up.”

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Katya, 22 Stylist Seen on Stoleshnikov Lane Missoni coat; scarf is handmade “What can I say? I just really love yellow.””

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Sonya, 24, and Cooper, her terrier Freelance editor Seen near Patriarch’s Ponds. Poncho by Gucci; jeans by DSquared2; gloves by Arkada. “I lost my last pair of pink vintage gloves, so I was thrilled when I found these at a market.”

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Lena, 26 Artist Seen on Kozikhinsky Lane. Aladdin pants from Vietnam; cheetah fur not real “I don’t think what I’m wearing is all that unusual. Do you?”

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Business

is a combination of war and sport. —André Maurois

Regimes get rocked, and rogues get rich, as Russia and the U.S. take turns muscling in on Caspian oil. By Daria Vaisman

It wasn’t that long ago that the United States did not fear Russia as much as pity it. Russia had just been stripped of an empire (worse, the empire had peeled itself away) and what the country needed most was a soft touch, not recrimination. Or at least that was the argument posed by Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s Oxford roommate, Khruschev’s translator, and now, as the president’s advisor on the former Soviet Union, the lead Russophile of the bunch. It was a lovely idea—Russia as kind of house pet, skittish after 70 years of being lost in the woods—but it would not survive. Rosemarie Forsythe, a regional director at the National Security Council, had tramped through the Soviet Union’s distant republics in the 1980s and returned to sound an alarm that would soon shape U.S. policy. There was “nationalism lurking still in their national psyche,” the NSC warned in the early 1990s, and a lack of vigilance on America’s part would allow the country to undermine its former republics using an “iron umbilical cord”—their Surrealist coinage for the mass of oil pipelines linking the energy-rich Caspian directly to Russia. The independence of the Soviet Union’s far-flung republics, they decided, was crucial to U.S. interests as well. Considering that the United States had spent tens of billions of dollars to protect the Persian Gulf, why not create an ounce of protection by pushing a pipeline of its own?

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Looking back, it seems as much a prescient policy as an inconclusive one. The Clinton administration did, in the end, get what it wanted: a 1,100-mile pipeline from the oil fields of Azerbaijan to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, bypassing Russia and breaking its Caspian monopoly in the process. Russia, now the largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, has emerged as a superpower sooner than best expectations, the result of a tight global oil market as much of the very deft—and dirty—energy policy that the NSC had predicted. Oil has made the Caspian countries very rich, though neither more America-friendly nor more Russophobe than some of the neighbors. But as for the strategy’s raison d’etre— making Russia “more comfortable in its borders” and, as a result, an eager partner with the West—it seems not to have mattered much at all. Russia bristled repeatedly at the attempt. “The means of [U.S.] imperial defeat on the Caspian would resemble the mythical Trojan Horse, only less romantic,” Wall Street Journal writer Steve LeVine writes in his new book, The Oil and The Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea. It’s a telling phrase, and it gets to the heart of the political wound that is one of the book’s central motifs. A Trojan horse is not just a thrashing; it is a thrashing disguised a gift, and it is this

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condescension that rankled Russia the most. Since the policy’s inception, the U.S. held tightly to its original line that this was an anti-monopoly policy, not an anti-Russia one. From a market perspective, this was incontrovertibly true. Clinton’s State Department argued that competition would bring investment and innovation to the region, and bumper stickers proclaiming, “Happiness is Multiple Pipelines” were distributed in Central Asia to hit the point home. In 1994, a week after Azerbaijan had signed “The Contract of the Century” allowing oil companies exploration rights to its fields but before the issue of who would build the pipeline had been decided, then-president Clinton stepped, not for the first time, into a deus ex machina role. “Oil development in this region is good for Russia and good for the U.S.,” he told Yeltsin, asking him politely to get out of the way. Russia had always been sensitive about the Caspian. Of the vast resources the Soviet Union inherited, it was revenue from the Caspian that pushed back Hitler in World War II and later offset the cost of running an empire even as it was disintegrating. What to America seemed like creeping imperialism was, to Russia, a matter of due course. “These resources in the Caspian were discovered by Russians, and Russian companies will be the ones developing them,” Russian Energy Minister Yuri Shafranik

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hissed to Bill White, the U.S. deputy energy secretary, on a trip to Moscow in the early 1990s. For Russia, an alternate oil exit route not only broke the country’s oil monopoly, it also pushed America uncomfortably close into what Russia thought of as its backyard. (Russia still refers to its former republics, sixteen years into their independence, as its “near abroad.” This oxymoron succinctly illustrates how empires built on contiguous landmasses have the greatest trouble letting go.)

Unocal President John Imle, while trying to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, bought the Taliban a fax machine and invited four of its representatives to Houston. A fossil-fuel Klondike, the Caspian of the ’90s was also, naturally, a playground for various James Bond types. There are enough of these characters in LeVine’s book to populate a picaresque (and to thoroughly ambush the reader—I kept wishing for a genealogy chart in the front).

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Business

There is Johannes Christiaan Martinus Augustinus Maria Deuss, a floppy-haired Dutch oil trader with a scar running down his face, who has made a fortune smuggling crude from Iran to South Africa in contempt of a worldwide embargo (a group called Pyromaniacs Against Apartheid will later burn down his house); British Petroleum’s cantankerous, diminutive John Browne, the company’s “Ferrari engine” who, during a working lunch, lays out his china beside Gore advisor Leon Fuerth’s deli sandwich, in a scene straight out of Annie Hall; and, in one of the book’s most fascinating sidesteps, there is Unocal President John Imle, who, while trying to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, buys the Taliban a fax machine and invites four of its representatives to Houston, covering the nude Indonesian statues in his house with trash bags to make the guests feel more at home. Merely acquainting oneself with this rogue’s gallery partially explains why the new Russia increasingly feels it has been conned by the West—and, as a result, increasingly depredates everything the West holds dear. While a team of Harvard economists clumsily scoured its economy with painful reforms in the early ’90s, foreign mercenaries, to the Kremlin’s mind, were taking advantage of its weakened state. Now the ex-Soviets wince at the memory of the period, hurt as much by the feeling of infantilization as its material result: “This is not a third-world intellect,” Chevron executives working in Kazakhstan told their bosses back home, and even on the page you can hear their surprise. Kazakhstan is the more important oil story, but Azerbaijan the more interesting, in part because the geopolitical wrangling between Russia and the U.S. was more direct, in part because Azerbaijan lends itself better to the page. Kazakhstan, for all of its political intrigues, is a stultifying and oddly bloodless place, devoid of the Caucasus’ historical detail and virtually Midwestern in its newness. (You have to leave Kazakhstan to find it interesting: the landscape is so unyielding in its sameness that it triggers the agoraphobia of the Australian outback.) Azerbaijan, in contrast, is charmingly jolie laide. The first U.S. diplomat in Azerbaijan aptly described its capital, Baku, as “Marseilles merged with Jersey City.” Baku had been a famous oil city since the 19th century. In 1872, Tsar Alexander II, pressed by his court to undercut Rockefeller’s American exports of kerosene to Russia, grudgingly consented to a plan that Lenin and Gorbachev would later hit upon as well: opening Baku’s oil fields to foreigners. The tsar dutifully announced that 3,400 acres under Moscow’s control would be privatized, vastly enriching some prescient locals as well as three brothers from the famed Nobel family then living in Moscow. As Alfred was

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making a fortune from dynamite, his two older brothers, Ludwig and Robert, had been commissioned to make automatic rifles for the tsar. It was in this capacity that Robert was sent to Baku to buy hardwood. He returned with an oil field and a refinery instead. Alfred carped, but it turned out to be a deft move: soon the Nobels were the largest oil producers in the city. But the brothers soon had another problem: how to export the oil to distant Europe? The landlocked Caspian was 2,000 miles from the Baltic Sea, and with an inefficient system of oil export, even neighboring Georgia found it cheaper to buy its kerosene from the U.S. They soon commissioned a pipeline from Glasgow and began sending crude through Russia, an idea their competitors first found ridiculous before paying the Nobels to transport their oil through their pipeline as well. “Grandiose schemes are constantly being discussed for conveying the oil to Europe,” wrote British journalist Charles Marvin in 1885, in what would be the bumper sticker for the next century.

In the early ’90s, bumper stickers proclaiming “Happiness is Multiple Pipelines” were distributed in Central Asia. The pipeline not only made the brothers very rich, but transformed the region as well; by the turn of the century, Baku was producing most of the world’s oil, and had become a site of fierce competition between the Nobels and Rockefellers, who had arrived to build a railroad from Baku. But by 1903, there were the first signs of worker unrest. (A young Georgian later called Josef Stalin had trained in Baku, and would use its shipping network to distribute Lenin’s newspaper, The Spark.) By 1920, Baku had fallen to the Bolsheviks, and the local oil barons—those “capitalist bloodsuckers”—had fled to Constantinople, their mouths, hems, and hair stuffed with jewels. With the oil fields burned, the barons gone, and industrial production at 13 percent of pre-World War I levels, Lenin returned to the tsar’s old strategy. He announced what he called the New Economic Policy—essentially, privatization in Communist clothes—inviting American oilmen to visit at a time when Woodrow Wilson, along with his attorney general’s promising young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, were deporting suspected communists to Russia. Europe, for its part, refused to recognize Bolshevik Russia, but would recognize its oil. “We have failed to restore Russia to sanity by force,” said Brit-

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ish Prime Minister David Lloyd George. “I believe we can save her by trade.” It will be Russia’s epitaph. When we jump ahead to the 1960s, it is the stirring of a detente. Nixon has set up a promising new venture called the U.S.-U.S.S.R Trade and Economic Council, inviting some thirty odd blue-chip companies to meet Brezhnev and discuss possible deals. American companies were intrigued but wary. The Soviet Union was not just a high-risk market; it was utterly incomprehensible. It was James Giffen, the anti-hero whose Icarus-like fall occurred in 2003, in the largest foreign bribery case in history, who facilitated the first of what will be many deals to come. A California haberdasher’s son with a fascination for American aristocracy (he married his first wife, LeVine suggests, in part for her name), Giffen had finished law school with a specialty in Soviet trade and, with his “telemarketer personality,” ingratiates himself with top officials in both countries, becoming the fixer for the biggest oil deals over the next two decades. By the 1980s, Giffen had befriended the rising star of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the start of the Soviet Union’s last crisis before it would collapse. Trade between the two superpowers had all but halted. The Soviet Union (in what sounds like the beginning of a bad joke) was exporting few finished products besides vodka, wooden dolls, and weapons. Gorbachev had legalized 49 percent of Soviet resources to foreign ownership, and American businesses looked to Giffen to devise a plan that could protect their interests while turning a profit. His plan— by his own account, “fucking ingenious”—was to bring in a consortium of big businesses with an oil company at the helm. The oil company would drill for exports, split its profits with Moscow, and set aside the rest for currency exchange, ensuring that the other companies could convert their rubles into dollars while leaving Moscow virtually out of the process. But which? Exxon was too big, Mobil too maverick. Chevron seemed just right. Chevron’s story was typical to most oil companies at the time. It had grown from a local California company to a global power, thanks to huge reserves in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. But Saudi Arabia had begun to nationalize its oil sector, and with prices collapsing from $31 to $10 a barrel, Chevron was desperate for booked reserves— oil it could draw on in the future. Though there was little information on Kazakhstan’s mythical Tengiz field at the time—the best information came from the U.S.

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Geographical Survey—it was estimated that the oil field might hold 10 million barrels, making it one of the ten largest fields in the world. British Petroleum also had its eye on Tengiz, having lost much of its booked reserves to a nationalizing oil sector as well. With a Giffen-brokered Chevron delegation close to getting Moscow’s blessing for access to Tengiz, BP’s only chance for entry was to make a “disrespectful end run around Moscow” by courting Kazakhstan directly. BP had its own Giffen in the form of an oilman named Jack Grynberg, a Belarussian Jew and a former member of the Jewish guerilla group Irgun, who had befriended Nursultan Nazerbayev, then leader of Soviet Kazakhstan and currently its president. After some tennis in Caracas, Nazerbayev has slipped an arm under Grynberg’s and promised, “Jack, you will have Tengiz.” BP head Browne is immediately dispatched to Kazakhstan, on the first private jet to land in the country since the Shah of Iran’s. But an early deal was soon canceled under pressure from Moscow and the U.S., which both backed Chevron. BP was given access to Azerbaijan as a consolation prize.

“This is not a third-world intellect,” Chevron executives working in Kazakhstan told their bosses back home, with surprise. Though BP’s gambit was ultimately ineffectual, it marked an important change in the way the Soviet republics saw themselves in terms of Moscow. The republics were trying out autonomy, were seeing how it felt, and these inchoate stirrings of nationalism would soon culminate in full independence only a few years later. Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan were irked by Russia’s willingness to sell assets they felt belonged as much to them. Who was Russia to decide their future unilaterally? They were not averse to foreign investors—quite the opposite—but feeling fragile after years of Soviet rule, they were suspicious of deals made on their behalf. BP, with its promise from Moscow, arrived in Azerbaijan just as the country was gaining independence. Led by a strongman with surprisingly unerring business instincts, Azerbaijan canceled BP’s deal. It would take years of politicking, backstabbing, promise-scotching

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and a visit from Margaret Thatcher (all faithfully detailed in the book) by various companies before the final $800 million deal among a consortium of oil companies, BP included, was signed in 1994. But that was just the beginning. It would be another five years of politicking before the current pipeline traversing Georgia to Turkey was negotiated, with the debate over the direction of the pipeline even more contentious than the exploration rights to the field itself. With internal disagreement over its Caspian policy, the NSC decided to leave Kazakhstan in private hands and focus their attention on the pipeline from Azerbaijan instead. The Dutch oil trader Deuss, with backing from Oman, had nimbly maneuvered himself into building the sole pipeline from Tengiz. During “one of the most prolonged and bitter confrontations of the era,” Chevron balked at Deuss’ suggestion to build a pipeline into the heart of Russia, on its Black Sea. But unlike the U.S., its concerns were not political, but economic. Though the pipeline to Russia was the shortest and cheapest of the possible routes, monopolist Deuss pushed monopolist prices, and the Russia pipeline meant mixing Tengiz oil—some of the best in the world— with inferior Russian crude. Though a pipeline leading from Azerbaijan to Russia had already been built, and would have been considerably cheaper to update rather than build a pipeline from scratch, the U.S. aggressively pressed for a two-pipeline plan— an additional pipeline along with the existing Russian one. Russia balked, as did the oil companies, but for different reasons. Russia saw it as a personal attack; for the oil companies, which would have to cover the costs, oil prices were then so low that they wondered if they would make a profit. The U.S. stood firm, eventually bringing in Turkey to offset some of the extra costs and to sweeten the deal. “Washington viewed BP and many of the other oil companies as an obstreperous and narrow-minded lot that failed to understand that the Caspian was unlike other places—commerce shouldn’t be divorced from politics,” writes LeVine. The oil companies suggested hundreds of pipeline routes—including one through Iran, which made the most sense economically—only to have them summarily rejected by the U.S. After much wrangling, everyone finally everyone agreed on the current route: a pipeline through Georgia, a desperately poor state recovering from a recent civil war and eager to offer itself to Washington’s disposal. Last year, the rest

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became history when the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline was inaugurated during a lavish ceremony in Istanbul. The second-largest pipeline world, it will soon transport 1 million barrels of oil per day. The BTC pipeline may indeed be a “rare post-Cold foreign policy triumph” for the United States, but the deal was a triumph for Azerbaijan, which had seen in the U.S. an opportunity not just for economic leverage but also for political backing that could later serve as a counterweight to Russia’s force. Yet ironically, it is Kazakhstan, still connected to Russia through its iron umbilical cord, that may turn out to be the middling success. Though Nazarbayev recently granted himself the right to be president for life, and routinely routs out his opposition, the economy has grown 10 percent, which, unlike in Azerbaijan, has created a genuine middle class. When I visited Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, in the summer of 2007, I found it awash in nationalist fervor and prohibitively expensive; its multiple luxury hotels were all packed, and with its futurist renditions of iconic structures (the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower), it looked like Las Vegas, a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Though Azerbaijan’s economy is now the fastest growing in the world, it has fared worse. Its money will run out in about a decade, and, with power held tightly by the president and his family, there has been no development of institutions to suggest that the country will prosper much beyond that time. The model of the resource curse offers the seeming paradox that oil-rich countries generally fare worse than their energy-poor states; though there are some notable examples, such as Norway and Canada, in general the consensus is that oil wealth deters investment and entrenches authoritarian rule. When I was in Baku for their 2005 parliamentary election, Azeris told me that if only they didn’t have oil, Washington might be more willing to intervene on their behalf against their government. The opposition, now destroyed by infighting and government suppression, waved signs that read: “Stop trading our democracy for oil” in the telltale orange color used during the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. It was inevitable that the Caspian would be developed, if not by Russia or the United States, then by someone else. But meanwhile, Azeris now wonder: happiness may be multiple pipelines, but whose? т

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In America there are two classes of

Travel

—first class, and with children.—Robert Benchley

Visions

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тост

of Arkhangelsk of A photo essay by Sergei Maksimishin

This winter, we travel to Arkhangelsk, a city in Russia’s Far North. We asked a resident, Irina Kovalenko, to give us some tips. Her response is as much a warning as a welcome. Let’s be honest. In the winter, Arkhangelsk is fucking freezing. By October you need to get your triplelayer parka out of the closet (they don’t sell those at the Gap), put on varezhki (mittens, because gloves won’t do it) and learn how to cross-country ski. I know I’m supposed to be convincing you to go to this place, but take a second and look at where Arkhangelsk is on the map. Do you really want to spend your vacation in a place so cold and snowbound that skiing is a required skill for those who want to take a look at the downtown? With temperatures falling to -22º F, you can easily freeze your enthusiasm off while trying to hail a cab. One thing an Arkhangelsk winter does is provide conclusive evidence that Ivan the Terrible truly deserved his moniker. For it was the tsar (his name can also be translated as “Ivan the Awesome”) who in 1584 demanded a seaport be built on the North Dvina River next to the Archangel Monastery. Though the port certainly came in handy— it was Russia’s only access to the sea until St. Petersburg was founded in 1703—operating it required that people actually go to live in Arkhangelsk, which

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was a pretty cruel thing to require before the advent of fossil fuel. For a long time, the only kind of tourism that existed in the region was the forced kind: celebrities like Count Menshikov (Peter the Great’s ousted No. 2) and Nobel Prize winner Josef Brodsky, spent some time in exile there. The infamous Gulag at Solovki Islands is also a part of the Arkhangelsk region. Geographically, Arkhangelsk is an extremely large city for its 400,000 people. It runs along about 25 miles of

This might as well be a 19th-century painting.

A run-down church can be a nice alternative to Moscow’s over-restoration.

the Dvina’s banks. The first attractions a traveler is likely to embrace are restaurants, which offer outstanding fish dishes. But I urge you not to go to Solovetskoye Podvorie, an “Old Russia”style establishment with wooden benches and a stuffed bear holding a balalaika. As a rule of thumb, when you see a restaurant with carved wooden benches, nesting dolls in the windows and waitresses wearing peasant outfits, know that you are basically at the Russian version of

TGI Fridays. Instead, just ask the hotel doorman which downtown restaurant the average Russian or “the people” favor. Most likely that will be the best place with the most reasonable prices. One such eatery is Pomorsky, where fish is the name of the game. They have fish soup, freshly caught grilled fish and other sorts of fish, all delicious. Complimentary vobla, the dry, salted classic, comes with every meal. Once you are full of fish, you can do some sightseeing. It shouldn’t take long. Start with the statue of Lenin, referred to by natives as “King Kong” (is it because of the way he’s mounting that pedestal?). Arkhangelsk’s Lenin, like those in most other Russian cities, does more than show us the path to socialist paradise. He is a beacon showing where all the best cafes, museums and shops are concentrated. First, check out the Museum of Fine Arts, where weird 16th and 17th century wooden sculptures are on display. Then you will still have time to visit the history museum, which has an exceptional collection of ancient Russian treasures. Speaking of treasures, there are still many yet to be discovered, says Vagland, a local history buff. “In the 16th century, Arkhangelsk was a merchant town. There was only one bank here, and merchants used to hide their fortunes in their homes. St. Petersburg and Moscow were far away, so most of the gold and silver remained here, hidden in the attics or in the fireplaces. There are lots of deserted houses in the old business district, and I often find amazing stuff there. Also, in 1919 and in 1941, Arkhangelsk served as a naval base for British and American troops, and you can find astonishing objects in their old quarters: photos, bags, medals, guns, you name it.” There are at least two Arkhangelsk residents who are famous all over the country: the first is Mikhail Lomonosov, a fisherman’s son who left Arkhangelsk as a young man and walked over 400 miles to

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St. Petersburg. There, he talked his way into a university and soon became one of Russia’s most brilliant scholars. A chemist, physicist and poet, Lomonosov went on to establish the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, which still bears his name. The second most famous Arkhangelsker is Alexander Donskoi, a slightly tragicomic figure. Donskoi is the current mayor of Arkhangelsk. He is also in prison. The official charges are that he faked his university diploma while running for mayor. But it seems more than coincidental that he was arrested two days after announcing he was considering a presidential run in 2008. Since Russian law stipulates that he cannot be fired until proven guilty, Donskoi is still the mayor. And he’s accomplished a lot while behind bars. For one thing, he’s switched teams: now he’s a member of A Just Russia, the country’s second-largest political party. It’s also pro-Putin, so apparently there are no hard feelings. If you make it up to Arkhangelsk any time during its nine-month winter, you’re already a hero, so I say you might as well keep going. A 150-mile sojourn north of the city will expose you to some of Russia’s most stunning natural beauty. The Pinezhsky forest reserve boasts frozen waterfalls, caves, and 200-year-old elm trees. There’s also a picturesque tourist village with two-story cottages, a restaurant and a sauna. If weather permits, try to book a snowmobile tour. They probably won’t let you drive the snowmobile, (definitely not if you’re a woman) but then, it’s nice to have your hands free to snap pictures of the striking Russian winter. All in all, Arkhangelsk is a bit colder than an inhabited place on earth should reasonably be. But it’s the harsh climate that has made the culture and the landscape of this area so fascinating. In the end, it’s worth the price of the parka—all three layers of it.

транзит

One of the treasures that lay hidden in this snow-covered town.

A horse-drawn sleigh is still the easiest way to get around. Someone should tell the dog.

транспорт

Washing laundry in ice cold water is easier when done together. At least then you’re not the only one suffering.

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трапеция

три

Canadians will appreciate the city’s perpetual ice hockey season.

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треска

Colorful slippers rate high on the happy meter when everything else is bleak and frozen. Pickle or perish. There’s no way of getting fruits or vegetables unless they’re preserved.

треугольник

Did we mention that it’s cold there? The warm and cozy feeling of being inside is heightened by photos of loved ones and the presense of a furry cat.

It’s a small

Apartment

;

трехдневный I’ve barely enough room to lay my hat and a few friends.—Dorothy Parker

Kommunalka in St. Petersburg Nowadays, kommunalkas—“communal apartments” where several families, sometimes three generations deep, are forced to share the common areas—are a dying breed. It’s probably a good thing. (Your editor-in-chief lived in one until the age of eight). The first kommunalkas were a quick fix to the post-revolutionary housing crisis: eager workers were flooding the cities, but there were no construction funds in the Bolshevik piggy bank. Confiscating classic-sixes from the rich and subdividing them among the poor not only solved the problem, but helped spread the new regime’s message that sharing is caring – a platitude that resonates especially deep when not sharing is punishable by labor camp. A famous passage from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog recounts an elderly professor’s horror at having a formal dining room expropriated: ‘No one in Moscow has a dining room.’ ‘Not even Isadora Duncan,’ squeaked the woman.

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Filip Filipovich’s purple complexion took on a faintly grey tinge. ‘So I can eat in the bedroom,’ he said in a slightly muffled voice, ‘read in the consulting room, dress in the hall, operate in the maid’s room and examine patients in the dining room. I expect that is what Isadora Duncan does. Perhaps she eats in her study and dissects rabbits in the bathroom.’ Just like the khruschevkas (рage 104), the communal apartments were a desperate measure that stuck around way past its expiration date and wrecked many a life, not to mention many a date. Still, like most artifacts of the Soviet era, the damn things deserve documentation, and maybe even the tiniest bit of nostalgia. We visited one of the last kommunalkas in St. Pete.

Photo: Shutterstock

тригонометрия

Apartment

Finding a way to store everyone’s dishes and utensils has always been a problem.

9,5

8,2 An astronomy lesson on your way out

10,0

7,2

7,8

7,2

Each family keeps track of its electricity use.

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Photos by Igor Zhdanov

6,0

тривиальный

Location Total living area Rooms Residents Building

The arched windows and great view add grandeur to an otherwise shabby living arrangement.

Saint Petersburg 1,200 square feet 11, not counting kitchen and bath 7 families, a total of 19 people Constructed in 1901, 7 stories

4,8

8,2 8,2

It’s common practice in Russia to use carpets as wall covering.

7,5

8,2

7,8 Leaving your bike in the hall of this apartment is no guarantee that it won’t be stolen.

When it comes to wall art, anything on hand will do.

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тряпка

I will not eat oysters. I want my

Food

dead—not sick, not wounded—dead.—Woody Allen

The Monarchist Cookbook By Valerie Stivers-Isakova

Yelena Molohovets, the Martha Stewart of tsarist Russia, published 26 books between the years 1856 and 1910. Their topics ranged wildly, from Christianity and the family to advice to doctors and patients, not to mention a short history of the universe (including a map in color), but her most famous work was the first one. It was titled A Gift to Young Housewives: A Means to Reduce Expenses in the Household. Published in 1856, this book is still in print today, and most Russian women who cook seriously either have it or have heard of it. Molohovets provides over 2,000 recipes in every category of foodstuff, including soups, pirozhki and suckling pigs. There’s an

exhaustive table of meals broken down by month into four categories of expense. A typical May lunch menu from the second expense bracket goes something like this: soup puree from sorrel and spinach; lin (a type of fish) under sauce; decorative pastry basket of carrot, turnip, potato and cabbage in béchamel; beef with Italian macaroni and mushroom sauce; coffee ice cream; and pistachio torte. Obviously, all of these recipes require that you have on hand various kinds of homemade stock or homemade kvass or jam or a little bit of pig’s skin, for flavor. Here is how the redoubtable Mrs. Molohovets begins the book (loosely translated by me):

Cooking is its own kind of art, one that, practiced without supervision or dedication, requires not years but decades of experience. And the requisite decades of inexperience can be very expensive, especially for young married couples. It’s often heard how all kinds of unhappiness in family life can be ascribed in a large part to the fact that the mistress of the house was inexperienced and didn’t want to penetrate or understand the craft of housework.

So, girls, if you want your husbands to be happy, you’d better watch the servants like a hawk, keep a well-stocked root cellar, and know how to take apart a cow. As impossible as it is to cook like this in the modern world— especially in the States, where it’s not even easy to find yeast in a supermarket anymore and tracking down sorrel and black bread adds another level of complication—the recipes in this book sound so delicious that, from time to time, I give them a

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whirl. After all, Molohovets is the source of the recipe for my mother-in-law’s wild-strawberry varenie—which takes three days, involves teaspoons of vodka, and perfectly preserves the shape of the tiny berries. The torte section’s glazes (coffee, rosewater, pistachio) and fillings (poppyseed chocolate, beaten plums) are alone enough to make the translation, the Yandexing (Russian Googling) of archaic units of measurement, and the days of cooking, worth it. Here’s one I’ve tried recently:

тундра

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туземец

Food

LITTLE CABBAGE PIES General rules for dough 1. 2.

For each pound of flour, add a full teaspoon of salt. If the dough recipe includes butter and eggs, thven you should add less than a glass of water per pound of flour. For 6 to 8 people it’s enough to use 1½ pounds of flour; from these proportions, you’ll get 18 little pies. For each pound of flour, you need 2 zolotniks of dry yeast, which you dilute in ¼ cup water. Add to this 1 teaspoon flour, mix, let ferment slightly, then that start making the dough. For dough that can be made in 3 to 4 hours, double or triple the amount of yeast.

Ingredients I use 1 pound white and ½ — pound whole wheat

1 glass of milk 1½ pounds flour 2 to 3 zolotniks yeast 1 lozhka sugar 2 egg yolks ⅛ pound butter water, salt

Steps Mix one cup of water or milk with the activated yeast or 4 to 6, for the fast version pound whole wheat and half the flour. Let it rise. Once risen, make the dough as best as you can. Cream until white the sugar, egg yolks and butter with 1 teaspoon salt. Add this to the dough mixture with the remainder of the flour, so that the dough is fairly thick. How anyone handled this without a Kitchenaid and a dough hook, I don’t know W hen it rises, put it on the table, cut into pieces, roll each one out with the rolling pin. Put ½ lozhka of filling on each piece. Pinch up beautifully. Let rise on a board. Baste with egg yolk mixed with a bit of water and butter. Immediately place in a hot oven I set mine to 375 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Measurement conversion a zolotn i k, or thimble, is roughly 4¼ grams, which is a heaping teaspoon a lozh ka, or spoon, is ¹⁄³ of a cup

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ткать

Pirozhki with fresh cabbage filling ingredients or olive oil —

1 pound cabbage ¼ pound butter 2 to 3 hardboiled eggs, finely minced salt, pepper, dill

Steps Take the cabbage, I recommend using a whole cabbage. You can always snack on the filling if you have too much! mince it finely, add 3 teaspoons salt. Wait 10 minutes, squeeze out

cabbage, strain, splash with boiling water. Once the water drains away, transfer into a little pot, add butter. or olive oil Mix together. Stew, stirring often, until soft but not fried or browned. Once ready, add hardboiled eggs, salt on the end of a knife, pepper and a little bit of chopped dill. Mix.

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тюрьма

Food

The Immovable Feast

The days of hunting down herring and bargaining for tangerines may be long gone, but, in the Russian mind, this is still what the perfect New Year’s Eve table looks like. S novym godom!

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Photo by Art. Lebedev Studio

тюльпан

тюфяк

Food

The Immovable Feast

17 16

6 8 7

9 1 10

13. Sliced lemon—to garnish Cognac glasses! 14. Olivier salad—neither French nor much of a salad, this is a mix of chopped ham, potatoes, eggs, canned peas, and other winter ingredients bound by another French impostor—mayonnaise Provencal 15. “Herring in a fur coat”—herring, as the name implies, all snug in a coat of beets and pickles. Inedible without a shot of vodka 16. N ew Year tree—not to be confused with a Christmas tree. This one is a non-denominational joy 17. On TV: An Irony of Fate, a New Year classic (рage 116). The film is in color; it’s the TV set that’s black and white

1. Seven-string guitar—perfect for playing Pyotr Nalitch (рage 118) 2. Bread—not fancy enough to be on the table, yet indispensable 3. Moroccan tangerines—a very special midwinter treat 4. Mors—a homemade cranberry drink 5. “Soviet Champagne”—After extensive litigation by the actual Champagne winemakers, it was renamed “Soviet Bubbly” 6. Cheese salad—originated somewhere in the Baltic republics. A tasty mix of grated cheese, garlic and carrots 7. Cold cuts—the presence of imported Hungarian salami highlights the importance of the holiday 8−12. A ssorted pickled foods (left to right)—garlic, cabbage, cheremsha (pickled garlic greens), gherkins, and tomatoes. No fresh vegetables this time of year

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NI GH

ng ne x

t: K U TR LT A N UR TL SL A IF m AT AR E T I Gi ovie vin cla Pa ON : TH g y ssic ul L CH E ou s. p DE em A rb G ar age 1 ber RT des 16 sky By ENE ign V o R a c MU n D aleri AT oh a e esi SIC niil Sti ES : ve C v toi TU Kha ers- ura BU rm Isa te let d the s k L me AR CI ova by M i s a H N E So y a r bo EL M ou at G ld A n mo LS B : S eve uelm M r ve y pa Ser AL get st an T h ge g u L 12 ei V M ck re e fiv e erk IR 6 a lig AC ding some w en a L Na ES tran hat ta mb By sl av Li ation me p an l a an y Ido calle intin dN v d g ali Run “ The s Ru tch s : R , don Kara sia d ’ uss t w ma oes n ia get alk t zov B ’t wa s th o yo n r e v ur othe t the r n ira We l-v eare s” pa st s g ide t P e 1 to se a os ep tar lace 12 s it of C PL age U 1 des u erv ltur S: B 00 es. e to ori BO s 11 O s 8 ee th Kac KS h : PL ese US thr ka re THE : M ee S vie GR OS ovi ws E CO et ho Zug AT W lida zw y- ang ;

Co mi page 100

page 112

page 116

page 118

page 126

теща

Art

like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.—G. K. Chesterton

THE DEGENERATES Yes, Russia is once again banning art. Here are the five worst offenders.

In October of 2007, Russia’s Ministry of Culture pulled seventeen works from an exhibition of politically-tinged art on its way to the Maison Rouge in Paris, calling them “a disgrace.” It’s a safe bet to say the West would not normally be riveted by the works, most of which amounted to fairly on-the-nose topical satire, but the ban changed everything: we were suddenly looking at Persecuted Art™. Everyone knows there’s no better endorsement for an artist than a bureaucrat’s wrath (just ask Chris Ofili, whose elephant dung-enhanced Virgin Mary enraged Rudy Giuliani); everyone, that is, other than the bureaucrats, who never learn. In this particular case, though, the outrage, and thus the art, are fascinating precisely because the works are so mild. This means a kind of success: the artists, working within a highly specific context, have correctly mapped their own society’s hot buttons. “There are four completely taboo subjects in Russian art today,” says RUSSIA!’s resident art guru, gallery owner Marat Guelman. “The government, the Orthodox Church, Chechnya, and Putin.” The works below hit all of those, and throw in sex for good measure. RUSSIA! happily brings you five of the most controversial Russian pieces of the millennium so far.

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The Blue Noses Chechen Marilyn, 2005 C-print

Hot button: Chechnya

“Burn out SATANISM with a red hot iron!”—one of ten slogans suggested by demonstration organizers in anticipation of “Forbidden Art 2006,” an exhibition in which this work was shown. Other candidates included “Enemies of Orthodoxy have no place on Earth!” and “Say NO to compromises with the ENEMY!” The exhibition, at the Andrei Sakharov Community Center in Moscow, was a collection of works that other Russian museums had refused to show. In Chechen Marilyn, the offering from Blue Noses co-founder Vyacheslav Mizin, the central figure is recognizable as a “black widow,” a female Chechen suicide bomber from the early 2000s. By mixing this with the iconic image from The Seven-Year Itch, Mizin’s work aims to highlight our culture’s inability to separate one type of celebrity from another. For

some bizarre reason, it was the Orthodox Russians— not Chechens or Muslims in general—who found this painting offensive.

тонкий

In 2003, six members o called “For the Moral Fatherland” broke int this work was on disp face of Christ with bla Alexander Kosolapov This Is My Blood, 2002 Screen print on paper

Hot button: Religion

Fortunately for Kosolapov, he’d made 75 prints. Other, less replaceable works of art at the 2003 exhibit “Caution: Religion!” were also damaged by the activists. In the after-

math, however, the state chose to press charges against the organizers of the exhibit for “inciting religious hatred,” rather than the vandals. In 2005, This is My Body,

the McDonald’s-themed companion to This Is My Blood, was also destroyed. This time the culprit was a bearded, hammer-wielding fanatic who called himself “Leonid, servant of God.” Leonid smashed the glass frame and then ripped the artwork in two, refusing to let go of the pieces throughout his subsequent arrest. Kosolapov, meanwhile, says he means the church no harm; This Is My Blood/Body are intended as a commentary on our worship of consumer culture. But he is thrilled whenever one of his pieces gets mangled. “The aim of my work is to establish contact with the viewer. If the picture is destroyed, then that contact exists,” he says on his web site.

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тонна

of a religious group l Rebirth of the nto the exhibit where play and spattered the ack paint.

терапевт

“This art disgraces Russia —Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov, on the seventeen pieces he removed from “Sots-Art Political Art in Russia” before the exhibit traveled to Paris. The text reads “Glory to Russia!”—and the irony is apparent. The other photo collages in PG’s series all bear the same caption and depict some sort of embarrassing national stereotype: an old woman stooping to pick up a beer bottle, a policeman counting his bribes, etc. All were banned from appearing at the Maison Rouge. It’s hard to imagine the Culture Ministry believing that by withholding these cartoonish images, they were protecting the country’s reputation abroad. Who doesn’t know about Russian prostitutes already? The name “PG” coincidentally works out in English, as a play on the group’s raunchy material, but in Russian it stands for either “Criminal Group” or “Anti-tank Grenade.”

PG Oil, 2007. From the series “Glory to Rus Photo collage

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Hot button: Governme

a.”

he rt:

ssia!”

ent

ткнуть

тень

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100

терроризм

“It is inadmissible to bring all this pornography, kissing policemen and erotic pictures [to Paris].”—Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov This was the one that started all the fuss. When Sokolov denounced “SotsArt,” he specifically singled out The Era of Mercy, making it the poster child (or rather, literally, the poster) for the scandalous seventeen. The image appeared everywhere from the Guardian to The New York Times. The curator of the Tretyakov Gallery, where the work was originally on display, got slapped with two lawsuits by the state. The director of the museum then filed a counter-suit. The legal circus, however, was just beginning: the controversy made The Era of Mercy synonymous with Sots-Art, but the genre had existed since the 1980s. This has incensed U.S.-based Sots-Art pioneers Komar and Melamid, and they threatened legal measures to recover their stolen spotlight. Another detail lost in the hubbub is the fact that The Era of Mercy is actually based on another work. Kissing Coppers, a wall stencil by elusive graffiti superstar Banksy, is exactly the same image but with British police (and minus the birch grove and the butt-fondling). Instead of a legal battle, Banksy is reportedly itching for an actual fight. Either way, the Blue Noses may not escape this one without a black eye or two.

The Blue Noses The Era of Mercy, 2005 Color photograph

Hot button: Government, gay

“I would understand if Sokol relevant, contemporary art, Russian history. Our culture he would the 19th-century rea тепло

It should be pretty obvious why this one didn’t make Sokolov’s cut, but here are some fun facts. The Chinese invaders, if you look closely, are distinctly un-Chinese, and seem to be from the Caucasus region. The dog being eaten in the lower right is instantly recognizable to Russians as Connie, Putin’s Labrador. And some say the blonde being raped in the lower left corner is meant to represent Ksenia Sobchak, Russia’s answer to Paris Hilton. What r e a d r u s s i a . c o m / 2 0 0 8 / W I N T ER /

102

lov had taken issue with but Sots-Art is part of minister should know it as realists.”—Marat Guelman тарелка

PG Mounting Mobile Agitation, 2007 Video installation

she’s doing in the president’s office, however, is unclear. “Russians have dreaded the rise of China for a long time,” Guelman’s wife Julia says. “This is the realization of that fear taken to an absurd extreme.” If it weren’t so blatantly ridiculous, Mounting Mobile Agitation would be a fairly offensive piece even by the jaded Western standards. Once again, though, it’s the Chinese that should probably be the offended party, not Russian politicians.

Hot button: Everything on the screen

твой

Art

Painting the Town Khruschev’s eyesores become an outdoor canvas.

A view of some khuschevkas, or Khruschev-era apartments, in their natural state. There are hundreds of thousands of these all over Russia.

What do you do with old khruschevkas, crappy postwar apartment buildings named after the shoe-banging, cornsowing Soviet premier that dreamed them up? (They were supposed to last just twenty years, until better arrangements could be made. Fifty years later, they’re still here, still cramped, still ugly. And rather than replace them as promised, central planning kept building similar models into the mid-’80s). If you’re a real-estate developer, you’re probably thinking “control demolition.” If you’re an arts foundation called Marka:ff, you hire a bunch of graffiti dudes to bomb them in a more festive way. The foundation recently organized Paint Moscow, a collaborative project that has brought, in their words, “Brazilian brightness” to a dowdy…

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25 Yantarny Drive KMDG

neighborhood in the city’s north. Teams of artists converged on the Losinoostrovsky district to paint twelve khruschevkas with bright multi-story modern mural designs. The painters, whose squads had names like Pain Breakaz, More Dead Toys and Sabotage, could easily have kept going and blanketed the entire Moscow with manga-inspired graffiti, but twelve was the number set by the sponsor, MIAN, in honor of its twelfth year. Khruschev himself, no friend to the avant-garde, would probably lose the other shoe if he saw these designs, but even he’d have to admit they’re more fun to look at than the multitude of chalk-scrawled obscenities they probably covered.

104

Photos: Varvara Lozenko

22 Izumrudnaya Street By Pain Breakaz Based on a design by Rozhkov

тары-бары

Art

7 Minusinskaya Street KMDG

11 Minusinskaya Street MARXI

9 Minusinskaya Street 310 Squad

31 Yantarny Drive Influx. Faces based on sketches by Rozhkov

25/1 Yantarny Drive Sabotage

26 Izumrudnaya Street ZUKCLUB

33 Yantarny Drive ZUKCLUB

The neighborhood’s new artsy vibe has already inspired this anonymous work on a nearby garage. We call it “Big Brother is Parking.”

28/2 Izumrudnaya Street 310 Squad

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106

The man who does not read good

Books

has no advantage over the man who can't read them.—Mark Twain

The Great Translation Chart

Lost in translations of Russian lit classics? Here's our handy, if subjective, guide. By Valerie Stivers-Isakova

When I was first reading the Russians in college I don’t remember being consciously aware that the books had even been translated. There was a Canon, there were Great Books, our college library was called “the Rock,” and our parents didn’t pay $25,000 a year (how quaint, right?) for us to read not-the-real Brothers Karamazov. Now, thanks to the Nabokovian Paris-based husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—branded P&V—translation-jockeying is the new trainspotting… or something. The couple’s War and Peace, published in October ’07 by Knopf, was the thirty-first best-selling book on Amazon.com the day before its release. It was widely reviewed, hotly debated, caused a public spat between two publishing houses, and inspired an unusually perky New York Times blog post. And even if all this hubbub is more thanks to capitalism than to P&V’s superior translation work, it does throw useful spotlight on translations. Herewith, our guide to the various filters through which our literary chai is brewed.

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107

BULGAKOV

CHEKHOV

DOSTOEVSKY

First published

Master & Margarita

Bulgakov died in 1940; the manuscript was finished by his wife in 1941; first published in the Soviet Union in a censored version from 1966 to 1967; a complete version appeared in 1973.

Scandal ranking

The Seagull The Three Sisters The Cherry Orchard

The Brothers Karamazov

1896, 1898, 1901, 1904 Scandal ranking

•1 •

1880

Scandal ranking

•2 •

Plays can be translated either for literary value or

When an as-yet-unknown P&V tried to sell their

to be used in performance, with widely varying

translation in 1991, both Random House and

results, and no one gets bothered when non-Rus-

Oxford University Press snootily turned them

Relatively scandal-free, though ironically, there

sophone luminaries like Tom Stoppard produce a

down. North Point Press eventually offered an

wasn’t an agreed-upon original Russian text un-

version from a Russian “literal.”

advance of only $1,000.

•2 •

til the 1990s.

Notable translations Mirra Ginsberg (1967, Grove Press). A

Notable translations Michael Frayn (1988, Methuen).

Notable translations Constance Garnett (1912; current-

beloved classic celebrated for accuracy and good

hov plays translated by [English playwright]

ly available in a Norton edition revised by Ralph E. Matlaw).The woman who sin-

writing—and also respected by P&V—that un-

Michael Frayn. Those plays were so funny! It

gle-handedly translated almost all of the Russian

fortunately worked from the censored Soviet ver-

was a revelation to me how different the transla-

classics into English for the first time is now ac-

sion of the text.

tion could be.”—Rachel May, author of Trans-

cused of sacrificing too much both factually and

lator in the Text: Reading Russian Classics in

stylistically in order to make the books accessi-

Translation.

ble. David Remnick, writing in The New Yorker,

Michael Glenny (1967, Harper & Row; 1992, Everyman’s Library). “I always thought Mirra Ginsberg was a better writer but had a worse text. Michael Glenny had the full text but did a hatchet job. He tried to capture the live-

“Ten years ago in London I saw a series of Chek-

The Seagull: A New Version by Tom Stoppard (1997, Faber and Faber).

quotes Nabokov referring to her writing as “dry shit,” and repeats accusations that she skipped words she didn’t know.

Stoppard writes: “You can’t have too many Eng-

“I love Constance Garnett. She’s a brilliant wom-

liness of Bulgakov, but at great cost.”—Rachel

lish Seagulls: at the intersection of all of them, the

an. Once in a while she would make a mistake

May.

Russian one will be forever elusive.”

when she translated idiom, but she had a fantastic sense of language, of the period, of class con-

Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, annotation and afterword by Ellendea Proffer (Ann Arbor, Ardis,

sciousness. I teach her Brothers Karamazov.”— Vladimir Golstein, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages, Brown University.

1993). The academics’ near-unanimous choice,

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GOGOL

PUSHKIN

TOLSTOY

First published

Dead Souls

Eugene Onegin

1842

Scandal ranking

•3•

War and Peace

1825 to 1832

Scandal ranking

1865 to 1869

Scandal ranking

The authoritative Russian text includes large

• 5•

Edmund Wilson’s negative review of Nabok-

Tolstoy’s first draft, published by Ecco Press and

swathes of an unfinished Part II that Gogol tried

ov’s literal, free-verse translation sparked a nasty

marketed as an “original,” more-readable, “more

to burn before he died. Decisions about how

public falling out between the two friends, played

peace, less war,” version without all the French

much of this to include can be controversial.

out in the pages of the New York Review of

was released in October 2007, at the same time

Also, Gogol’s anti-Semitism is pretty shocking.

Books. Widely reviled, Nabokov’s version none-

as the P&V edition from Knopf. Pevear said the

theless had a chilling effect on the field, and sub-

publication and associated marketing claims

sequent efforts haven’t gotten as much attention

betrayed a “philistine attitude towards Tolstoy

Notable translations Home Life in Russia (1854). Recast by an

editor as non-fiction, Dead Souls was used as

anti-Russian propaganda in England at the time of the Crimean War.

Bernard Guilbert Guerney

as they perhaps should.

Notable translations Babette Deutsch (1935). One of the earliest

English translations, still praised by academics.

•5 •

as an artist.” Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern responded nastily that perhaps Pevear was confused, since he doesn’t read Russian (which is sort of true). Pevear generated further controversy with critical remarks about a 2005 Briggs edition.

Notable translations

(1942, updated by Susanne Fusso, 1996, Yale University Press). Persnickety Nabok-

Walter W. Arndt (1963; version was

ov called Guerney’s version “an extrodinarily fine

to preserve the iambic tetrameter; won the Bol-

piece of work” and it’s still a classic. Fusso in-

lingen Prize for translation.

ly available from Modern Library Classics). The indefatigable Mrs. Garnett went blind

cluded only a few samples of Part II to give read-

“Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be tru-

while working on this book. Ernest Hemingway

ers a taste without, in her view, violating Gogol.

ly translated with the retention of its rhymes? The

found that her take on Tolstoy made it more beara-

“To me, including Part II is damaging to Gogol’s

answer, of course, is no.”—Vladimir Nabokov.

ble for him.

memory. He didn’t intend for this to be part of the

“I am sorry to say that, though Arndt is no great

novel,” she says. Also, it’s not as well-written as

poet and that his effort to stick to the rhyme

Part I. Guerney elided some of the mean Jew ref-

scheme sometimes leads him to a certain far-

erences and Fusso let that decision stand.

fetchedness, his version is, in general, much

rently available from Oxford World Classics). The translators were friends of Tolstoy, so

closer to Onegin than any of the others I have

this version is often, though erroneously, said

sampled.”—Edmund Wilson.

to have been “approved” by him. Preserves the

published by E.P. Dutton in 1981). Attempts

Constance Garnett (1904, current-

Louise and Aylmer Maude (1923, cur-

original French.

enhanced by commentary from a noted Bulgakov biographer and published by Ardis, an important American publishing house for dissident works in both Russian and English during the Soviet era.

The Three Sisters, adapted by David Mamet based upon a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik (1990, Samuel French, Inc).

David Magarshack (1958; currently

out of print). Remnick calls Magarshack an

“epigone” of Garnett. Ouch!

“The commentary is thorough without being

Author Rachel May offers a different view:

overwhelming.”—Susanne Fusso, professor of

“Magarshack was particularly good for

Russian Language and Literature, Wesleyan

Doestoevsky. He was the one most tuned in to

University

the psychological nuances of what the characters were doing. If I just wanted the students to be

Pevear and Volokhonsky (Penguin,

interested, I used Magarshack. There was

1997). Opinions on specific P&V translations

something more compelling about his writing.”—

tend to get drowned out in the general fanfare, a

from Translator in the Text: Reading Russian

problem exacerbated by the fact that most aca-

Classics in Translation.

demics claim not to have read them. “The best-selling and perhaps most authoritative

Translation violation

David McDuff (1993, currently avail-

translators of Russian prose since Constance

David Mamet makes Chekhov sound like Dav-

able from Penguin Classics). Tried to follow

Garnett,”—David Remnick, in a November

id Mamet.

Dostoevsky’s sentence structure and preserve

2005 New Yorker story entitled “The Translation

the idiosyncratic wording.

Wars.”

Pevear and Volokhonsky (1990, North Point Press; republished by FSG in 2002).

Michael Karpelson (Lulu Press, 2006). Obscure effort from a 20-year-old Canadian,

The book that launched P&V as translators of

that, from rudimentary text comparisons, reads

Russian.

in a natural, lively way.

“P&V are good, but they aren’t as good as they think they are. They make mistakes,” says Golstein. He cites an incident in the Brothers Karamazov where P&V translate Biblical reference “Obrashenia Savla” as “the Speeches of Saul” rather than “the conversion of Saul.” But “Saul makes no addresses in the Bible!”

Translation violation Overly literal translations of Bulgakov’s playful names, such as Mark Ratkiller for Krysoboi.

Translation violation A version entitled The Karamazov Brothers.

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Robert A. Maguire (2004, Penguin Classics). The academic gold standard.

Charles Johnson (originally published

Ann Dunnigan (1968, Signet Classics).

Recommended by Russian-translation schol-

“Mcguire’s translation of Dead Souls is a labor

1977, currently available from Penguin Classics). A poetic-prose version considered

of love by one of the top Gogol scholars in the

better than Arndt, which inspired Vikram Seth’s

ics as a favorite. “The book is small and fat—it’s

world. He took the time that few professional

novel The Golden Gate.

not comfortable to hold. But I very much love this

translators have, with a scholar’s deep knowledge

“For me, if a translation can inspire a crea-

translation.” —Vladimir Golstein.

of all the possible interpretations that one might

tive response, it’s accomplished what it has to

have to weigh. It’s a cross between a work of

accomplish.”—Vladimir Golstein

art and a work of scholarship.”—Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Columbia University professor

Pevear and Volokhonsky (1997, Vintage;

2004, Everyman’s Library).

Vladimir Nabokov (1964, Princeton University Press). A mad, four-volume folly bursting with commentary, perhaps designed to entwine the two men’s names in history. Fascinating scholarship but otherwise nigh unreadable. “It’s awful, but I like it”—Richard Pevear.

James E. Falen (1995, originally with

Southern Illinois Press, now available from Oxford World Classics). A middle

ground between the literal and poetic interpretations that’s considered to be the best. “Certain-

Translation violation Pevear cites a case in Dead Souls where a maid comes out of a shed carrying a some-word-that-

ly at Columbia, everybody uses the Falen to teach Onegin. For the first time, somebody has caught

Anthony Briggs (2005, Penguin) . Briggs

supposedly wanted to rescue War and Peace, a

book about man-stuff like war, from the Victorian ladies. So he uses the word fucking.

Pevear and Volokhonsky (2007, Knopf). The New York Times blog presents more opin-

ions on the quality of this translation than anyone could possibly desire. It includes all the French that Garnett and subsequent translators took out. Is this a pain in the ass to read? Yes. But gloriously authentic.

Andrew Bromfield (2007, Ecco). The disreputable first-draft version by Boris Akunin and

Viktor Pelevin’s not-at-all-disreputable translator.

the spirit.”—Catharine Nepomnyashchy.

been variously inaccurately translated as a plate

Douglas R. Hofsteader (1999, currently available from Basic Books).Wow! An anti-

(“drippy,” he adds gleefully), jar and bowl. David

Nabokov translation by the cognitive scientist,

Magarshack’s least elegant solution (1961) was

Indiana University professor and Pulitzer Prize-

to say that she was carrying “a round wooden

winning author of Gödel, Escher Bach.

sounds-like-pogratina of honey. Pevear says it’s

ar Munir Sendich and often cited by academ-

vessel made for holding liquids.”

Translation violation “I could say quite a lot about the Briggs. He used modern slang. He mistakes the tone all the time. [In the Briggs,] Prince Vasily says of Kutuzov, “He has his head screwed on.” That’s an idiom. It has nothing to do with what Tolstoy

Translation violation

says and nothing to do with Vasily, who was an aristocrat.”—Richard Pevear

In the New York Review of Books, Edmund Wilson criticizes Nabokov for using tooobscure English words such as rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic, gloam, dit, shippon and scrab.

Read about Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" translations at www.readrussia.com

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Books

States of Play

Zugzwang Ronan Bennett Bloomsbury

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Otto Spethmann complains to the Russian police inspector. “I am a psychoanalyst.” It’s perhaps the most telling moment in Ronan Bennett’s brisk but somehow wistful political thriller, set in St. Petersburg in 1914, during the final months of tense calm before historical cataclysm. The notion of a neutral, innocent party in the prelude to war and revolution turns out to be a joke, and the joke is on Spethmann. Lychev, the cop who comes knocking, has found Spethmann’s calling card on the person of a murdered leftist agitator. The doctor knows nothing about it, of course; he’s just a bourgeois, Jewish therapist who has worked hard to bury his shtetl roots beneath the paved cobblestones of European cosmpolitanism. He cares nothing for politics, radical or otherwise, but his high-profile caseload is bringing him all kinds of trouble. Anna Petrovna, “one of St. Petersburg’s most famous beauties,” is the daughter of a powerful anti-Semitic demagogue who happens to be close pals with a colonel in the secret police. Then there’s the dangerously neurotic would-be chess champion, Avrom Rozental, who looks from the start like a Manchurian candidate just waiting for his card to come up. Bennett’s title, Zugzwang, comes from a chess term for a state of paralysis that sets in when there are no good moves left on the board. (The text is interspersed with chess diagrams depicting an endgame between Spethmann and a friend.) It’s derived from the German for “a compulsion to move,” though that move might cost the player the game. On the most obvious level, it applies directly to Spethmann, who, like Graham Greene’s quiet American, cannot continue to live on the sidelines. But the same can be said of his beloved city, poised to burst with repressed barbarities like Spethmann’s patients.

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The cool-headed narrator dropped into the fray is a staple of Bennett’s fiction. (It might have something to do with the years he spent imprisoned in Belfast for suspected IRA activities before being fully exonerated and released.) Most of these characters have arrived just in time for revolution: the liberation of the Congo in “The Catastrophist,” the English Civil War in “Havoc in Its Third Year.” Yet pre-Soviet Russia proves uniquely suited to the procedural, because of the genre’s reliance on the double cross. A tried-and-true plot twist meant to sow confusion in the mind of narrator and reader alike, here it becomes the dominant nonchess-related metaphor. There are no good guys: not the tsar, not his police, not the Bolsheviks, not even the poor, passive country subjects or the haughtily indifferent urban sophisticates.

Pre-Soviet Russia proves uniquely suited to the police procedural, because of the genre’s reliance on the double cross. But what is it with the literary tradition of the doomed chess player, too good for this world? Nabokov invented the genre in The Defense, sans political import. Last year, Michael Chabon made a chess prodigy-turned-junkie the reluctant Messiah of the exiled Jews in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Let it be known that, though he’s damned good at political thrillers, Bennett is no Nabokov, and no Chabon for that matter. Is this a character type ready for retirement? Tell that to Garry Kasparov, beleaguered (and briefly imprisoned) dissident in Putin’s new imperium. Pawn or savior? History isn’t on his side.—Boris Kachka

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Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms Translated by Matvei Yankelevich Overlook

A self-avowed hater of pets, old people and children, who also had a penchant for eccentric gestures (e.g., stopping pedestrian traffic by lying prostrate on a crowded Leningrad sidewalk), Daniil Yuvachyov (1905-1942) believed that writing under one’s own name brought bad luck. In his schooldays, the future absurdist author went through close to twenty different pen names before finally hitting on the moniker Daniil Kharms, a conflation of his hero, Sherlock Holmes, with the French word “charm” and the English “harm.” From then on, his poems, short-short stories and plays would all bear the name Kharms. Not that it helped him get published. Nor did it save his life. With a quick nod to the journalistic convention more befitting a sideshow shill, let’s go ahead and call Kharms the following: a Russian Kafka for the ADD set, a Samuel Beckett avant la lettre, and a one-man Monty Python show staged at a labor camp. Here is a typical micro-story, reproduced in its entirety: “There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing to speak of! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about. We’d better not talk about him any more.” In his inspired introduction to Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, editor and translator Matvei Yankelevich refers to the inscription made by painter Kazimir Malevich in a book he gave the young Kharms in 1928: “Go and stop the progress.” The ideas of progress, logic, reality or, for that matter, representational art, seem to have been equally alien both to Malevich, the founding father of Suprematism, and Kharms, the last Russian surrealist. Malevich’s words are too cryptic to parse, but if one assumes that the vague notion of literary “progress” implies the proliferation of trivial narratives and the trite psychoanalysis that passes for characterization, then Kharms and his OBERIU (Union of Real Art) friends did more than anyone to subvert progress. Along the way, they ran into serious problems with the authorities, who smelled ideological dissent and made it next to impossible to get anything published.

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As is the case with so many writers who disappeared during Stalin’s purges, Kharms’ way to the Soviet readers was slow and tortuous. His children’s stories and poems started appearing in periodicals more than twenty years after his death in a prison hospital in 1942. In the mid-’60s, his “adult” prose circulated underground while the Literary Gazette published a smattering of his humorous micro-fictions on its then-famed Page 16. But it was only at the peak of glasnost that the floodgates were flung open. Theater companies began staging Kharms’ plays. Critical essays and dissertations on him abounded. His influence on the Russian postmodernist writers and artists like Kabakov, Rubinstein, and Prigov would be hard to overestimate.

Typical Kharms passage: “There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.” The well-curated Today I Wrote Nothing comes across as an unabashed labor of love. Yankelevich has produced a book that will prove indispensable to the old Kharmsians and scores of new converts alike. The latter will be well-advised to heed the editor’s suggestion not to try and domesticate the work of Daniil Kharms by placing it in simplistic paradigms of artist vs. totalitarian state or avant-garde vs. socialist realism, but instead enjoy his writing for its humor, irreverence, purity of poetic expression, defiant marginality—and, yes, absurdism. —Paul Lembersky

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Viggo Mortensen The Rolling R A Excellence in A

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The length of a film

Film

тигр should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.—Alfred Hitchcock

ortensen Takes Home Award for Acting Russian The Rolling R, established in 2007, aims to highlight and honor authenticity in Hollywood portrayals of Russian characters. The creators of Rocky & Bullwinkle, for instance, are not getting one.

тикать

Film

Small Miracles

Soviet Holiday Movie Kinda-Classics By Lily Idov

It’s no secret that Russians disproportionately adore the New Year. At least we used to, back in Brezhnev’s early ’80s, when it was the only truly private holiday aside from one’s birthday: intimate, allinclusive, apolitical, non-denominational. The New Year meant a clean break, a new beginning, the promise of a miracle. Year after year, it followed the same unshakable formula: large table spread awkwardly in the middle of the living room, fir tree in the corner, oxymoronic “Soviet Champagne,” presents, frantic midnight calls to the long-distance kin… and the triumvirate of classic Soviet holiday movies alternating on the muted TV. Here they are. If this year, watching a wisecracking angel get his wings yet again feels especially old, try swapping old Capra out for one of these three.

Palace of Culture for a night of dancing and cutting-edge entertainment (jazz!) lovingly assembled by “activists” Lena and Grisha. At the eleventh hour— literally—the fusty old director of the facilities orders them to substitute the planned concert with a boring propaganda piece. Our young heroes save the night by distracting the bureaucrat and sabotaging the state-approved performances. The show goes on, fun is had by all, and Lena and Grisha manage to find love along the way.

The Carnival Night 1956

The storyline is perfect in its simplicity. It is New Year’s Eve of 1957, and workers are gathering at their factory’s

The Miracle: the film satirizes the Party bureaucracy without even com-

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ing close to criticizing the untouchable Soviet ideals.

The Irony of Fate (or Enjoy the Steam) 1956

This one is a touching romantic comedy. Our hero, Yevgeny, is meeting his friends for their annual pre-New Year gathering at the sauna. Yevgeny has a lot to celebrate: he just got engaged and moved into a new apartment in the outskirts of Moscow. Which only partially explains how he manages to get himself sufficiently drunk to mistakenly board a plane, black out during the flight, and awaken in the streets of Leningrad, without realizing he is in a different city. Nursing a monstrous hangover, he hails a cab, gives the driver his Moscow address, arrives at a nondescript apartment building not unlike his own, stumbles in (the key works!), undresses and falls asleep. Upon awakening, he finds “his”

тик

stylish East German furnishings slightly rearranged, but does not give it much thought until the true owner of the apartment, a gorgeous blonde, arrives with her boyfriend, and hilarity ensures. The titular irony thus is not that these poor people live in uniform faceless apartment buildings with generic addresses,

with only the cross-fade effect to provide for actual displays of wizardry. The senior executive witch, crumbling under the pressures of maintaining a healthy career/life balance, succumbs to the scheming of her VP, Sataneyev (clearly a diabolical figure), and puts a hex on a younger professional witch. The hexed witch forgets the fiancé waiting for her in Moscow, goes out with Sataneyev, and puts all her energy into disciplining her subordinates and organizing the office New Year party. The gargantuan supporting cast spends their allocated onscreen time wandering endless corridors and decrepit labs of the Institute (filmed in the Central Television offices, infamous for periodically swallowing up talk-show guests without a trace) and periodically breaking into disco song and dance routines, while the forgotten fiancé concentrates all his efforts on braving holiday

possessions and keyholes, but in the notion that two of those people might be true soulmates. The Miracle: the film satirizes drabness of the “central planning” live without passing judgment on Russian men.

The Wizards 1982

The plot takes place at the Research Institute of Magical Events—an organization not unlike the Ministry of Magic of the Harry Potter films, but

traffic. Will airport delays jeopardize his only shot at true love? The Miracle: that the film did not flop.

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Of course, if you are spending this New Year’s Eve in Russia (and why wouldn’t you?), your entertainment choices are not limited to the reruns of these oldies. Newly nationalized TV plus a steady influx of oil money multiplied by countrywide nostalgia equals big-budget remakes and sequels. The remake of The Carnival Night even has the same director, Eldar Ryazanov, who either has a gambling problem or grandkids hitting privateschool age. The storyline goes all meta—a film crew wants to film a remake of The Carnival Night, but the Palace of Culture they chose for their location is about to be converted to luxury condos or some such. The crew manages to postpone the commercialization of culture, and the filming goes on… A sequel to The Irony of Fate has a simpler concept—the heroes of the original, as it turns out, do not stay together. They retreat to their respective cities, marry their old partners and have children. One of these children suffers an alcohol-induced episode, misses his plane, believes that he already disembarked in a different city, etc. As for The Wizards, its director, Konstantin Bromberg, lives in Detroit—happily, he says. Now there’s a miracle. т

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Music

the passions enjoy themselves.—Nietzsche

Tubular Hells Russian YouTube serves up authentic thuggery, faux folk By Sergei Verkligen

Seeking fame on YouTube is like tossing your hat in the ocean. Your clip will stay afloat for a bit, perhaps for a full Warholian fifteen minutes, but sooner or later it will sink, and you will get sunstroke. Looking at the first stars of Russian YouTube—Nambavan and Peter Nalitch—a common recipe for success does emerge: Borat-ize yourself into a brute caricature of a rampaging Slavic id. The results, though, couldn’t be more different. Nambavan grew up in Kazan as Linar Bilalov—a bright young man with a passion for Rodchenko, Bauhaus and ’70s gay disco, thrust into a vortex of small-town degradation. He soon fell in with a group that had a performance-art edge: they did things like breaking into empty kindergartens at 3 a.m. and staging pillow fights. Before long, this wasn’t enough; he christened himself Nambavan (a corruption of Number One) and recorded a couple of albums’ worth of aggressive minimal techno with crass, no-holds-barred lyrics. “Chechnya on the Dancefloor,” “So Many Men, So Little Time,” “I Passed Your Girlfriend Around,” and “Slam Bitches In the Face” were all shock value and no hidden message. The music, however, was quite remarkable for something recorded on a home computer with a cheap guitar and a karaoke mic. Nambavan got signed by a small Dutch label, and his ear-scarring barrage of raw hate and stories of abuse spread over the web like fire through a city dump. A gig in Berlin and a dozen good reviews later, Linar decided to take things to the next level. Singing disturbing songs from the point of view of a small-town thug was no longer enough. It was time to assume the guise of a foul-mouthed troll and wage all-out media war. So taking a cue from Eminem, Linar created an alter ego to his alter ego—Yura, a lumpen-proletarian brat—and videotaped a miniseries entitled “Bratan (homeboy) Info,” a mock training course in how to swear, scrounge cigarettes and kick hippies. One of the five-minute movies featured Linar/Nambavan/Yura in full bully mode, ranting about Stravinsky and “other cool music.” Another was a “letter to the American president,” with Linar and his track-suited “bro” reading out

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a garbled plea for a green card from a piece of paper: ‘Russian people every day drink vodka and do nothing. We are two guys from this horror land.” The joke was as multilayered as anything by Sasha Baron Cohen: it was impossible to pinpoint exactly who was being mocked –dumb bratans, liberal Russians supplicating before the West, or Westerners who might take this bullshit seriously. Other videos were significantly less fun, particularly one spine-chilling re-enactment of a mugging and a “lesson” in hurling bricks from a balcony. In Nambavanland, ill judgment always prevails.

Nambavan’s song titles include “Chechnya on the Dancefloor,” “So Many Men, So Little Time,” “I Passed Your Girlfriend Around” and “Slam Bitches In the Face.” Linar has just turned 20 and looks it: his prolific output is all naiveté and passion, overeager shadowboxing and instinctive limit-testing. Half of it is clearly subpar. Thrilling sonic assaults rub shoulders with puerile musings on random subjects. Still, the young man makes the root cause of his frustration very clear. “Russia has always been grim, desperate and with a strong sense of church guilt,” he states in one of the videos, this time seemingly serious. “Name a Russian folk song in a major key. Name a painting that does not stink of oppression and shades of grey… Indignity is in our blood. Glossy mags are pimping an alien culture of snowboarders and cool clothes… But our ideals are labor camps, Orthodox crosses, graves, vodka and dirt.” Fake or real, within weeks of its premiere “Bratan Info” shot to the actual namba-van on YouTube, and its creator became the most hated young man in his native city of Kazan. Complaints and death threats followed. Soon enough, Linar

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The complete video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AOzkN8dHnjk

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топить

Music

was summoned to the Public Prosecutor (District Attorney)’s office and told to stop. Stardom over, Linar returned to his favorite pastime—blogging about Goebbels and geopolitics, and lovingly taking pictures of sleeping hobos and his remarkably obliging girlfriend. With such a vacancy open, it was inevitable that a more crowdpleasing, less genuinely pissed-off version of Nambavan would soon pop into frame. The audience was craving tamer, cleaner highs—something folky yet with an obvious urbane wink, something so bad it’s good. YouTube answered the hipsters’ prayers with “Gitar,” a video of a guy named Peter Nalitch singing a Gypsy number in pidgin-English synthax reminiscent of Nambavan’s letter to George Bush. The refrain goes, well, “Gitarrr, gitarrr, gitarrr.” This novelty Goran Bregovicas-performed-by-Borat number recently notched 570,000 views. Conceived as a joke, it ended up with Nalitch gracing the recently launched front page of Russian YouTube (http:// ru.youtube.com/). The tongue-in-cheek “welcome to Russian YouTube” video features Peter at his piano as he gingerly attempts to play a new tune, but slips into another rendition of “Gitarr”. The fad proved so sustained and sustainable that the editor of a respected Moscow biweekly has temporarily quit the magazine trade to become Nalich’s producer.

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Maybe it’s all hype. After all, silly freak shows like “Gitar” are a dime a dozen on the Internet: monosyllabic drones (“badger badger badger”), or an a capella scat loop culled from a Finnish polka (by a folk band called Loituma), or the hardcore hilarity of “I Like Bukkake”… But while those mantras got their share of laughs, they failed to stir and unite bored yuppies and students all the way across Mother Russia because of one missing ingredient: Gypsy flavor. Nalitch’s video has Gypsy by the wagonload. See, back in the 19th century, Gypsy songs were the epitome of freedom and the obligatory soundtrack to merchants’ orgies. Modern Russian “chanson” and “bard” traditions are largely based on Gypsy songs blended with copious amounts of klezmer. A few generations down the line, all it takes to get the intellectuals’ heads a-bobbin’ is the same old “crazy” touch of vagabond arpeggios propping up a whiskeyed vocal (one reason the Russians are uniformly crazy about Tom Waits). It could be the dusty notion of “true soul”, or the simple fact that this music goes well with beer. Either way, the web-enabled intelligentsia took to “Gitar” like the new state anthem— and will likely continue whistling it until a newer, angrier incarnation of Nambavan comes along. т

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Music

Clubbed to Death

By Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears

http://moscowdoesntbelieveintears.blogspot.com/

While all cities worth their salt have a way of filtering out the riffraff from the dance floor, none inflict humiliation as gleefully as Russia’s capital, which originated the practice of “feis kontrol.” Faces. Being controlled. Picture this: you arrive at the door of whatever the club of the moment happens to be, Amazonian women sashaying past you, when a wall of a man with the visage of a dead pig blocks your entry. Like a woman, he knows whether he is going to fuck you the moment your eyes meet; you have one fleeting chance to prove your worth.

Rai

“Rai” means heaven in Russian, but the club, housed in Moscow’s famous Red October chocolate factory, can more aptly be described as Studio 54 by way of Hell. Glitter, lasers, very tall hair— Rai would make a great setting for an 80‘s porn flick. Add shitty techno to the mix, and what you have is complete sensory molestation. Rai upped the human humiliation factor by instituting two levels of feis kontrol, making it more than possible to get stuck in limbo between the bar and the dance floor if you didn’t wear enough blue eye shadow.

Solyanka

As much as the Western press loves to characterize Moscow as lawless land of spies, bears and prostitutes

(which, believe me, it is) there are still pockets that look the same as the rest of Europe—Solyanka, for example, for cosmopolitan club kids who love democracy as much as they love quality underground beats. Dress like Karl Lagerfeld on the street and you’ll get a beat down; dress like Karl Lagerfeld at Solyanka and you’re a hero. It’s a haven for the city’s huddled indie masses yearning to be in the First World, and willing to pay a $20 cover.

Diaghilev

Despite the club’s relatively advanced shelf life, everyone in Moscow is still falling all over each other to get into Diaghilev, a depraved, turn-of-the-century carnival of oil barons, models, acrobats and midgets in ass-less chaps. For

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that reason, they’ve employed the sadistic Sasha Feis Kontrol, a man who attended the “Sophie’s Choice” school of manning the door. That is to say, you may be offered entrance, but only if you ditch your uglier friends. Which you’ll gladly accept, because a few minutes of grappling with moral cowardice is worth a night at Diaga.

Justo Banya Dush

The Russian version of Parisian hotspot Les Bains Douches, this one opened recently in the old Soviet Central Baths. Partying in a banya is a hipster ironic thing to do, indicating Moscow club life has really turned over a new leaf. While other clubs scream their presence with corny fanfare, Justo Banya Dush hangs out behind an unmarked door

Photos from Mainpeople.ru, 44100.com, and Dasha Yastrebova

тпру

roundabout Red Square. Which one? Only the very connected know and can talk their way in. On the inside, however, the newly modest get down just as aggressively as before.

Simachev Bar

Giving your bar a cohesive toilet theme is a bold move, but fashion designer Denis Simachev is just that sort of renegade hipster. The pocket-sized bar below his boutique is always jampacked with an arty crowd of oddly coiffed individuals, including Simachev himself. Unsurprisingly, Moscow’s only bathroom theme club also has some of the city’s best potties: plush black carpeting and a stack of fashion mags is enough to make you want to stay awhile.

The MOST

Moscow nightlife has only been around for fifteen years and change, but it’s already recycling concepts. Doubleentendre club The MOST (“bridge” in Russian) is the reincarnation of a turnof-the-millennium venue that was also super chi-chi. In a stunning reversal of Russian club tradition, biznesman Alexander Mamut, who bankrolled the club, has adopted a controversial noskanks stance for the MOST, so that his oligarch kin could party in supposed tranquility and sophistication. Don't take his word for it, though—or, for that matter, ours: it's not like we ever got past the door. т

трава

Take

Inventory

of everyone with whom you have contact. —Bruce Lee

A golden nail, an explosive piggy bank, and a poster Breaking the Bank

Retro Kino

You know the old routine: you’ve been dropping coins into your piggy bank for months, and now you’ve finally saved up enough to buy that shiny red Schwinn your heart is set on. But one part of the plan leaves you squeamish: destroying the innocent pig. The designers at Art. Lebedev studio responded by replacing the lovable oinker with something you are more accustomed to seeing explode—a bomb! Built in the shape of a classic WWII warhead, the Superbitus is not just a clever place to keep your loose change; it’s the ultimate marriage of form and function. Just fill the bank with enough money for the thing you need—plus $21.30 for another Superbitus—and deploy it directly onto your floor. Available in matte or glossy finish, Superbitus also comes with a white marker you can use to write in the name of your target purchase. Don’t look now, twelve-speed bike, but there’s a bomb with your name on it.

These days, everybody wants to be a Constructivist. Whether it’s cheeky Russian artists recreating Malevich paintings out of bread and cheese or Scottish rockers Franz Ferdinand cannibalizing a classic Rodchenko poster for the cover of their second album, designers everywhere are recognizing what the avant-gardists knew all along: it’s hip to use a square. But while some choose to plagiarize and others to poke fun, Moscowbased Ostengruppe know how to borrow with class. Their retro posters for some recent Moscow film festivals offer clever updates of 1920s Constructivist designs. The one pictured announces an Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective by adding breezy handwritten text to a angular, Rodchenko-style photomontage. Poignant screenshots from the director’s films replace Rodchenko’s gung-ho Soviet images, striking an eerie balance that Tarkovsky himself might have enjoyed. Ostengruppe, whose speech-bubble pillow appeared in our last issue, also designed the uniforms for the Russian Olympic team.

Family Tiles For centuries, the focal point of any Russian home was its massive, wood-burning stove. Though impressive without any adornment, these brick edifices were especially stunning when decorated with painted tiles. The tiles were miniature canvases depicting a range of subjects, from floral and animal designs to scenes from history and daily life. Of course, only the privileged few could afford such a status symbol. Since then, the aristocrats have been purged, stoves have become radiators, and tiles have migrated to the bathroom and the kitchen, where they are usually of the mass-produced variety. But in idyllic Suzdal, a city where onion domes may actually outnumber people, the tradition lives on. Drawing on every available source material— church frescoes, museums, even archaeological digs—the artists at Dymov Ceramics have resurrected old-world tilemaking techniques so that you, too, can live like a 17th century Russian boyar. Better, in fact, because he probably didn’t have a bathroom to put them in. The workshop, founded just four years ago, makes every piece of tile and pottery by hand. And if Suzdal isn’t on your itinerary, Dymov pieces are sold at Respublika, Moscow’s hippest bookstore.

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Tough as Nails The idea of bending a nail into a piece of jewelry sounds a like something the creepy kid in your high school shop class might have done, right up there with making a vest out of duct tape. But Hit of the Season*, part of a line of quirky jewelry from two-man design team Open Design, boasts a serious bling factor: it’s made of gold. By lavishing precious metal on a mundane object, artists Sergei Kuzhavsky and Stas Zhitsky make us wonder what makes a ring a ring in the first place. The same irreverent attitude marks many of the projects Open Design have produced in the last ten years, some of which are too crazy to ever be realized—a watch museum that is a giant watch and a two-story merry-go-round outside the former KGB headquarters in Moscow spring to mind. As for this badass ring, there are earrings to match it, and, with a little muscle, it can be adjusted to fit any finger size. * In Russian, the word for “hit” also means “nail.” Puns just don’t translate very well.

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традиция

Poster by Ostengruppe. 2. Nail Ring by Open Design studio. 3. Piggy bank by Art. Lebedev studio. 4. Tiles by Dymov Ceramics. 1.

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And that is my birthday. Peter The Great

$16.72

$15.30 Hey you, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the year I was born! Ivan The Terrible

Choose your mug www.readrussia.com

Visa Services Airline tickets to Russia and other CIS countries Hotel Reservation in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities Custom-designed guided tours (in English)

трата

Addresses Marat and Julia Guelman Gallery (Vinzavod) 105120, Moscow 4th Siromyatinsky Per., Dom 1-6 +7 (495) 228 11 59 www.guelman.ru Art. Lebedev Studio 5 Gazetny Pereulok, Moscow +7 (495) 540 18 00 www.artlebedev.com Denis Simachev 1 Beim Antonskraiz, 8116 Bridel Luxembourg +3 (522) 633 12 07 w ww.denissimachev.com Denis Simachev Shop and Bar +7 (495) 629 80 85 12 Stoleshnikov Per., stroenie 2 , Moscow Helen Yarmak 730 Fifth Avenue, 23rd floor, New York, NY or: 22/1 Kadashevskaya Naberezhnaya Moscow w ww.helenyarmak.com

Ostengruppe www.ostengruppe.com Star City Museum +7 (495) 526 38 17 (exhibitions); +7 (495) 526 38 42 (training center) You need to make an appointment to visit the museum. At present, only group visits are allowed. The fee for a fifteenmember group is 750 rubles ($30). Space Adventures 8000 Towers Crescent Drive Vienna, VA 22182 +1 (888) 85 SPACE www.spaceadventures.com

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Respublika Bookstore 127006, Moscow 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Ul., Dom 10 +7 (495) 251 65 27 www.respublica.ru Open Design Studio +7 (495) 933 08 38 w ww.opendesign.ru Solyanka (Club) 11 Ul. Solyanka, Moscow + 7 (495) 221 75 57 www.s-11.ru Rai (Club) 9a Bolotnaya Ul., Moscow +7 (495) 767 14 74 w ww.raiclub.ru Dyagilev (Club) Hermitage Garden, 3 Karetny Ryad, Moscow +7 (495) 790 74 00 The MOST (Club) 6/3 Kuznetsky Most, Moscow +7 (495) 660 07 06 www.themost.ru

трение

We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as a

Guide

—Samuel Johnson

How to read Russian а. . . . . . . . . a б. . . . . . . . . b в. . . . . . . . . v г. . . . . . . . . g д. . . . . . . . . d е. . . . . . . . . e

ё. . . . . . . . . yo ж. . . . . . . . zh з. . . . . . . . . z и. . . . . . . . . i й. . . . . . . . . j к. . . . . . . . . k

л. . . . . . . . . l м . . . . . . . . m н. . . . . . . . . n о. . . . . . . . . o п. . . . . . . . . p р. . . . . . . . . r

с. . . . . . . . . s т. . . . . . . . . t у. . . . . . . . . u ф. . . . . . . . f х. . . . . . . . . kh ц. . . . . . . . . ts

ч. . . . . . . . . ch ш. . . . . . . . sh щ. . . . . . . . shch ъ . . . . . . . . qh ы. . . . . . . . y ь. . . . . . . . . q

э. . . . . . . . . eh ю. . . . . . . . ju я. . . . . . . . . ja

112 words starting with P. 6 табак—tobacco; p. 8 табель—chart, time-board; p. 10 табор—camp, party; p. 14 тавро—brand; p. 16 табу—taboo; p. 17 табун—herd; p. 18 абурет—stool; p. 20 таежный—taiga; p. 21 таз—basin; p. 22 такт—tact; p. 23 такса—dachshund; fixed rate; p. 24 тактика—tactics; p. 26 таракан—cockroachs; p. 28 танцевать—dance; p. 29 тараторить—jabber; gabble; chatter; p. 30 таращиться— goggle, star; p. 31 тюрбан— turban; p. 32 татуировка— tattoo; p. 33 таять—melt, thaw; waste away; p. 34 тварь— creature; p. 36 твердый—hard; solid; firm, strong; stable; p. 37 твист—twist; p. 38 творог— cottage cheese; p. 39 тезка— namesake;p. 40 телега— cart, wagon; p. 41 теленок— calf; bull calf; p. 42 тенденция— tendency; p. 43 темный— dark; p. 44 темперамент —temperament; p. 45 тенор—tenor; p. 46 теория— theory; p. 47 теперь—now, at present; p. 48 тесать—cut, hew; trim; p. 49 трезвый— sober; p. 50 тетка—aunt; p. 51 тетрадь— notebook; p. 52 техника—engineering; techniques, equipment; p. 53 тешить—soothe, pamper; p. 54 тина— pond scum; p. 55 тиран—tyrant; p. 56 тире—dash; p. 57 тихий—quite; soft; p. 58 тмин—caraway seed; p. 59 токарь—lath operator; p. 60 токсикология— toxicology; p. 61 толпа —crowd; p. 62 толстый—thick, fat; p. 63 толща—thickness, depth; p. 64 топография— topography; p. 65 топор—ax; p. 66 топаз—topaz; p. 68 топот—footfall, tramping; p. 69 торговать— to sell; p. 70 торец—butt-end; p. 71 торжество— festival, celebrations; triumph; p. 72 торба—bag; p. 73 торчать—protrude, stick up; stick around; p. 74 тоска—melancholy; p. 75 тост—toast; p. 76 тот— that; p. 77 транзит—transit; p. 78 транспорт—transport; p. 79 трапеция—trapeze; trapezium; p. 80 три—three; jollyboat;p.81треска—cod;p.88ядерный—nuclear;p.82 треугольник—triangle; p. 83 трехдневный— three-day; p. 84 тригонометрия—trigonometry; p. 85 тривиальный—trivial, banal; p. 86 тряпка—rag; p. 87 тундра—tundra; p.88 туземец—native; p. 89 ткать—weave; p. 90 тюрьма—prison; p. 91 тюльпан— tulip; p. 92 тюфяк—mattress; lump ; p.94 теща—mother in low; p. 95 трансцендентный—transcendent; p. 96 тонкий—thin; p. 97 тонна—ton; p. 98 терапевт—therapist; p. 99 ткнуть—poke; hit; p. 100 тень—shadow; p. 101 терроризм—terrorism; p. 102 тепло—warmth; p. 103 тарелка—plate; p. 104 твой—yours; p. 105 таить—hide; p. 106 тары-бары—tittle-tattle; p.107татарин—tatar;p.108текст—text;p.109твердить—reiterate;p.110теология—theology;p.111термин—term;p.112тереть— rub; p. 113 тесьма—lace; p. 114 тетива—bow-string; p. 115 тигр—tiger; p. 116 тикать—tick; p. 117 тик—tic; p. 118 тип—type; p. 119 тогда—then; p. 120 топить—stoke, heat; melt; sink; drown; p. 121 тормоз—brake; p. 122 торф—peat; p. 123 тпру—whoa! wo! p. 124 трава—grass; p. 125 традиция—tradition; p. 127 трата—expenditure; p. 128 трение—friction, rubbing; p. 130 трефы—clubs.

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трефы

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to

Document

that.—Bill Gates

A Top Secret, If You are Interested… This little gem somehow slipped past the spam filter on a friend’s computer. When we imagine Barrister Edward A. Cole (and we do quite often) he is on a yacht somewhere sipping tea with his friend Emmanuel M. Tambo, a Nigerian prince who is just one social security number away from recovering his father’s fortune.

Russian ex-Spy <uklawyers@law.co.uk>

Late Mr. Alexander Litvinenko

Atten, I am Barr Edward A. Cole, a solicitor at law. I am the personal attorney to Late Mr. Alexander Litvinenko, A Russian ex-Spy in London who was poison with polonium-210 and died on the 23rd of November 2006 at the University College Hospital here in Central London. Before his death my client made a secret and confidential confession to me that he was poisoned by his Russian Associates. Two weeks before his death my client told me that he lodged a consignment worth ($5 million Dollars) in a depository firm in abroad which i cannot disclose to you now but he tagged the consignment to be Photographic materials for export i.e. the Finance Security firm are not enlighten about the content of the consignment. As his personal Attorney i believe that his associates will be coming after me because my client never told me why they poisoned him rather in his confession he told me not to disclose to anyone (Associates OR Family) about the fund. You will be ready to travel and claim the consignment from the security firm and immediate preparation of memorandum agreement that will establish a structural relationship between us and also spell out your 40% for your assistance and the working conditions for investment with you in your country, I assure you 100% risk free in this transaction now or in future and will be no trace of the transfer, Sincerely, Barrister Edward A. Cole NB. Please be informed that this is very confidential and should be a top secret, if you are interested.

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