When I snapped this picture the other day, the man in it was initially suspicious of my intentions, but I smiled at him by way of saying I was interested in the car he was about to get into and drive away, not in him per se. He understood my message and smiled back.
The car was parked less than a block from my house in Petersburg. It’s part of a fleet of 400 cars that the carsharing service Delimobil (Sharemobile) claims, on its website, to have available in the city. It has a lot more cars, naturally, in Moscow. It also operates in Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Grozny (!), Novosibirsk, Samara, and Krasnodar.
This is not a hidden ad for the service, which I had only just heard about it before witnessing this scene of a young, progressive looking Petersburg picking up his sharecar. I merely wanted to register the fact that Russia consists of many Russias, and not all of those Russias are reactionary, militaristic, nationalist, and tyrannical, like Putinist Russia. Some of the Russias are surprisingly progressive, worldly, environmentally friendly, and forward looking, like Delimobil and, I gather, its customers.
The traffic has become so gnarly and vicious over the last twenty-five years that one thing I never do in Petersburg is ride a bike, which I do and love to do everywhere else. I would be even more reluctant to drive a car here. But the friendly paint job on the Delimobil and the service’s slogan, Vodi menya (“Drive me”), almost make me want to sign up and take a spin around the city, just to see what it’s like. {TRR}
The Russian Reader 