Turning Her Back on Propaganda What does daily life consist of in a prison camp? It consists of work, of course, work which is dull and exhausting. It consists of sleep, which is fitful, as sometimes there are inspections every two hours. And it consists of spending time with people whom you didn’t choose to spend time with. The wardens make sure to burden convicts so that they have nothing that is theirs alone, so that they have no time to think about anything, so that they are entirely subordinate to the powers that be. The goal of prison camp “re-education” is the same: breaking the will of the prisoners, turning them into obedient robots who obey all the orders of their superiors.
This is especially true for political prisoners—people who think independently and have their own principles. The overarching mission of the wardens is to attain voluntary submission, joyful and proactive submission, from political prisoners. But the wardens rarely succeed in this mission.
They have utterly failed with Valeria Zotova, a political prisoner at Kostroma Penal Colony No. 3. The wardens have insistently offered her a path to redemption, that is, cooperating with the authorities and taking part in “civic life.” Zotova has turned it down.
Recently, the prison camp’s club showed a movie, a Russian propaganda film titled Callsign: Passenger. Here is what Wikipedia says about the movie: “The movie is set in 2015. The movie’s main character is Nikolai Ryabinin, a trendy Moscow writer and carefree party animal. His brother volunteered for the war in Donbass and has gone missing. Nikolai goes looking for his brother and joins a separatist unit, the Aurora Battalion, in which his brother previously served. There, he gets the ironic nickname “Passenger” and under the leadership of the commander (callsign: Trigger) reevaluates his own life and comes to support the separatists.”
It’s an unimaginative piece of propaganda based on Alexander Prokhanov’s novel The Murder of Cities. It’s cheap trash, of course, like the writer himself, but the convicts are obliged to drink this cinematic concoction down to the dregs. All of them are herded into the club. Zotova refuses to go. Ultimately, it’s her right to watch the movie or not. But what do rights matter when it comes to Russian patriotism! Zotova is forcibly escorted into the auditorium. Watch our high art: look what talented filmmakers made it, what actors starred in it! But Lera Zotova turns her back on the screen and looks the other way.
Turning one’s back on propaganda is simple—simple but dangerous. The pressure on Valeria continues unabated. The harassment has been endless. The wardens summoned a friend of Zotova’s and stipulated to either: “Either freedom or Zotova—you choose.” They have been trying to create a vacuum around the political prisoner, depriving her of contact with those who are close to her in any way. The young woman is twenty-one years old, but she has been bullied like a hardened criminal. Because, as prison authorities envision it, she should be like everyone else: obedient, involved in the prison camp’s civic life, acting in plays, fulfilling the production quotas, and not smarting off to her superiors.
Abkhazia is a country (some would argue an occupied region) with which it is impossible to work without ignoring the political context. It is an unrecognized state that in the 90s separated from Georgia, wanting to gain independence. Independence that came at the cost of war, brutality on both sides, historical trauma and nationalist myths. Most of the international community calls those events the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, while Abkhazians themselves believe that it was the Patriotic War, singing about the victory in traditional music. Unrecognized, but actual separation from Georgia became possible due to participation of North Caucasian volunteers, and after that, assistance from Russia. Today there are Russian military bases in Abkhazia, so Georgia perceives Abkhazia as an occupied region, although similar thoughts can be voiced on the other side of the Georgian-Abkhazian border.
Given the painful past, ambiguous present and shaky future of Abkhazia, any project with its culture can be perceived as a political statement. Especially if the project is made by a North Caucasian label with residence in Germany and an independent nomadic director. That is why we are happy that we are releasing films 12 years after they were recorded: we had time to think and choose our words.
While filming on Gagra beach, a local TV station caught him for a story titled “Wow, a French filmmaker came in search of a unique culture,” quite typical of regional media in the Caucasus. The journalist then asked Vincent if Abkhazians have well preserved their musical heritage.
[Vincent laid it on thick.]
“It is very bad. You have the most beautiful music, but it is very difficult to talk about its preservation and development. If everything goes on like this, you will lose everything. You need more work.”
This was a very important and thoughtful reaction for us. European attention to Caucasian cultures sometimes perpetuates oriental clichés and deceptively reassures locals: “Europeans are coming to us in search of lost antiquity, so everything is fine. We are still ancient and unique.” In this sense, Vincent’s response was both sobering and provocative. And even total disagreement with the brash Frenchman is also a good option. It’s either work or don’t listen to those who learned about your culture yesterday.
In addition, in interviews, and in general during the course of the project, we said a lot that it was important to document the diversity of Abkhazian music. While we were trying to find the most ancient and ‘authentic’ forms of folklore, Vincent insisted on recording everything from state choirs to late patriotic songs.
Today it seems to us that this is the political and social meaning of the project: to start a living archive with different music from Abkhazia. Music that is not limited to the war for independence and the defense of political freedom before a new ally. Before the 90s, Abkhazians had bright moments in history and battles sung in songs.
Besides, in 2013 we could only meet folklorists, bearers of tradition and rare indifferent officials who were interested in working on the project. Today we are releasing this release with the support of the cultural center SKLAD in Sukhum. It is not enough for young curators and artists to preserve culture and revel in nostalgia. Instead, they are creating a new context. 12 years ago such initiatives were hard to find. Now they are a visible voice of contemporary Abkhazia. Our films and recordings are intended, among other things, to make such voices audible.
A collection of ten short films recorded in Abkhazia, an independent republic bordering the Black Sea. Filmed by Vincent Moon and produced by Petites Planètes in collaboration with Ored Recordings. Listen to the album on https://oredrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/sounds-of-abkhazia
“When an empire falls, does it make a sound? And who is there to hear it?” – so read the opening line of the call for papers for this issue in October 2021. Looking back at that text from the vantage point of 2025, that sounds far too optimistic and premature. Shortly after that call was published, the empire in question made a whole lot of noise about its unwillingness to stay fallen. The shadow of Russia’s brutal war of conquest in Ukraine hangs over this issue – as it has over any project that deals with the post-Soviet since February 2022 – determining both its shortcomings and, in a perverse way, its urgency.
That the full-scale invasion came to many of us as a shock is the result of complacency and unwillingness to listen to the comparatively quieter rumblings that have been shaking the region over the past two decades. To the fact that the invasion commenced already in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea and Russian military support for separatist forces in Donetsk and Lugansk. To the 2008 week-long war with Georgia that concluded with Russian occupation of the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. To the forceful integration of Belarus into Russia that began as soon as the Belarusian dictator Lukashenka came to power in 1994 and intensified with the establishing of the so-called “Union State” in 1999. Not even to mention the Russian imperial ventures in Africa and the Middle East.
The world refused to listen until the noise became impossible to ignore – the noise of bombs and artillery shells falling on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odesa, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and many more. Yet even these sounds fall on deaf ears far too often: many among the anti-imperialist left, enamored by the platonic ideal of a multi-polar world, seem to prefer listening to Putin’s propaganda, just as many left-leaning intellectuals were similarly entranced by Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. And many across the political spectrum – including the sitting US president – who campaign against military aid to Ukraine seem to prefer the comfortable silence of subjugation to the noisy cacophony of resistance.
What, then, can a niche academic publication on sound(s) from the post-Soviet realm – in itself a controversial designation tinged with colonial history – hope to achieve? Especially one edited by a Russian-Jewish academic based in Western Europe, with all the problematic positionality this brings? Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps, the promise of a sonic epistemology long held as a keystone of sound studies – that of attuning and entangling oneself with the object of listening as opposed to holding it in a distancing gaze – could be fulfilled at least to some extent here, opening some ears and minds to the politics of the region.
In the video installation Repeat after Me by the Ukrainian artist collective Open Group – arguably the most important sound artwork of this decade and the centerpiece of the last Venice biennale – Ukrainian war refugees recount their experiences of the invasion while recreating its soundscape with their voices: the sounds of shelling, explosions, war planes and drones, air raid sirens, etc. A row of microphones in front of the screen and onomatopoeic subtitles in the video invite the public to join in and voice those sounds in karaoke fashion as a “gesture of togetherness” (Keylin 2023: 128). The playful format allows participants to empathize with the refugees’ traumatic experiences from the safe distance of Verfremdung (estrangement), while making them acutely aware of the very safety and distance that they enjoy. In this way, Repeat after Me attunes the audience both to the (sonic) reality of the war and to their own positionality.
Hence, the aspiration of this issue: to make the post-Soviet realm audible – not as a continuous, homogenous soundscape far too often conflated with Russia, but as a cacophony – decidedly not a symphony – of diverse cultures, identities, aesthetics, and political programs; to sound out both the connections that gave the Second World its identity against the First and Third ones and the contradictions that made it fall apart. In the hope that listening – from a safe distance – to the sounds of the post-Soviet realm can attune the reader’s ear to the voices coming from it.
A multitude of limitations – some fundamental, some situational – work against this aspiration. First, the diversity of sound cultures and the complexity of political relationships within the post-Soviet space are far too vast to address comprehensively in any single publication. Second, the discipline of sound studies has only begun to establish itself in the region over the past decade, often lacking institutional support and publication venues. Moreover, much of this emerging discourse, especially in Russia, orients itself more towards Western academic scholarship than towards the post-Soviet realm and its own sound practices (e.g., the History of Sound book series at the New Literary Observer press, which in large part consists of translations of key anglophone works). One important exception that has to be mentioned here is the 2018 multilingual special issue of the Topos journal, P.S. Soundscapes,edited by Benjamin Cope and Pavel Niakhayeuand dedicated to sound and music in contemporary Eastern Europe. All of this greatly limits the pool of potential authors for this issue, to the extent that half of the texts included here are written by Western scholars. Finally, the war itself had an obvious impact, delaying this issue by over two years and leading several prospective authors, particularly those hailing from the post-Soviet realm itself, to withdraw their texts. Not a perfect issue, then, but hopefully still capable of opening the space for a dialogue.
Listening to the Subaltern Empire
Despite recent post- and decolonial turns in sound studies that shift focus away from Eurocentrism and acknowledge the global diversity of sounding and listening practices, the post-Soviet space remains largely a sonic terra incognita. The few exceptions that prove the rule include the sound experiments of the Soviet avantgarde – owing to Andrey Smirnov’s monumental study Sound in Z (the title’s correspondence to the current Russian military symbol is an unfortunate prophetic coincidence) – and the overtone singing traditions of the Far East. However, the academic attention that both these phenomena received does not stem from any specific interest in the region, but from their attachment to more famous “brands”: the historical avantgarde and Tibetan spirituality respectively.
The post-Soviet world falls into the cracks between the Global North and the Global South, persistently absent from the sonic maps of either realm. It tests the limits of post- and decolonial frameworks, which were largely developed to address the relationships between European empires and their overseas colonies. Political scientist Viatcheslav Morozov describes Russia’s peculiar position in this coordinate system as a “subaltern empire” that, “while remaining a sovereign state,” has “colonized the country on behalf of the global capitalist core” (Morozov 2015: 32) into which it was integrated on unequal, subordinate terms. As a result, Russian political consciousness is built on an unsolvable paradox of holding in suspension Eurocentrism and Euroscepticism: the aspiration to be an equal part of the Global North and the resistance to its cultural influence. In a twist of fate that the academic community still struggles to wrap their heads around, Morozov was arrested in January 2024 in Estonia and later plead guilty to spying for Russia. Although this fact may cast a shadow on Morozov’s academic work, the notion of the subaltern empire has been crucial to the postcolonial discourse on the post-Soviet realm.
In his influential – if controversial – book Internal Colonization, cultural historian Alexander Etkind similarly approaches the Russian imperial project as one of self-colonization that inevitably results in self-othering. “The state was engaged in the colonization of foreign territories and it was also concerned with colonizing the heartlands,” he argues, leading “peoples of the Empire, including the Russians” to develop “anti-imperial, nationalist ideas in response” (Etkind 2011: 2). Etkind’s work was rightfully criticized (as I will discuss below) for sidestepping Russia’s actual colonial conquests – its subjugation of Siberia, Caucasus, East Asia, or Belarus and Ukraine – and its colonial subjects. It is, however, notable for pointing out the “reversed, internal orientalism” (Etkind 2011: 16) suffusing modern Russian culture – one that simultaneously construes Russia itself as a colonial other to the enlightened West and conceives a colonial other within Russia in the form of its uneducated and uncivilized narod (a word that literally means “people”, but more often than not is used to denote peasants and commoners).
Two articles in this issue demonstrate how this contradictory mentality unfolded in the experimental music and sound art scene in 1980s Saint Petersburg, a city originally designed as a flagship for the Europeanization of Russia, but which came to be known in the twenty-first century as a hub of Russian nationalism and fascism. Giada Dalla Bonta’s article “Sounding the dissolution from a Cosmic Space” introduces the universalist trend typified by the electronic music duo New Composers, Valeriy Alakhov and Igor Verichev. Bridging avantgarde legacies and rave culture, the pair’s work was informed, on the one hand, by the avantgarde concept of vsyochestvo (from the root vsyo – “all, everything” – and the suffix combination -chestvo that typically refers to “practice”), of an inter- and postmedia approach to art taken to extremes. On the other hand, their work was rooted, in the holistic worldview of Russian Cosmist philosophy, rhymed with the everyday mythology of the Soviet space program. Dalla Bonta’s article pursues two lines of inquiry: first, it reassesses the role and influence of sonic practices on the late Soviet underground art. Second, it examines the New Composers’ idiosyncratic blend of aesthetics and philosophies through the lens of Kodwo Eshun’s notion of sonic fiction (1999) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s relational theory of sound (2007), revealing how they expressed a politics of togetherness characteristic of late Soviet underground culture.
New Composers, “Exactly Today and Exactly Now” (1989)
Dalla Bonta acknowledges an ostensibly paradoxical ideological shift towards conservatism and nationalism in the underground art scene following the dissolution of the Soviet Union but purposefully limits the timeframe of her account to the 1980s to focus on liberatory impulses in the New Composers’ early work. Conversely, Sam Riley’s article “A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad” examines how the roots of this shift can be found already in the late Soviet period. The text focuses on two other emblematic figures of underground sonic experimentalism: composer and pianist Sergey Kuryokhin and critic Efim Barban. Through a reading of Barban’s book Black Music, White Freedom, which initially circulated in Samizdat and laid the theoretical foundations for the late Soviet experimental music scene, Riley explicates the racism inherent in Barban’s theory and Kuryokhin’s practice as they strived to disentangle jazz from its Black American origins, formulating a purportedly superior Soviet-Eurocentric “new jazz” idiom. The late Soviet sonic underground thus aligned with progressive and conservative trends simultaneously: both emancipatory – in resisting the authoritarian state and its ideology – and reactionary – in reinforcing the Eurocentric cultural hegemony under the guise of Enlightenment-style universalism.
Belliphonic Relationalities
The principal critique of the theory of Russia’s self-colonization, as presented in Etkind’s work, addresses two fundamental issues. The first concerns how its focus on internal colonization obscures the external conquests of the Russian Empire. The second, more insidious issue relates to what exactly is construed as the internal territory being self-colonized. As literary scholar Vitaly Chernetsky points out, “in his argument about Russia’s internal colonization, […] Etkind’s frame of reference is constituted by the events that took place and the phenomena that existed in Ukrainian and Belarusian territory. Thereby Etkind perpetuates the aspects of Russian colonialist ideology that he apparently internalized to an extent that makes them invisible to him” (Chernetsky 2007: 43). Etkind’s blind spot is indicative of a key characteristic of the Russian imperialist mentality: an unselfconscious refusal to see Ukrainians and Belarusians as anything other than inferior Russians. The lack of racial difference between these peoples is weaponized to conceal the reality of colonial difference. This denial of self-determination undoubtedly drives much of Russia’s expansionist politics: the forceful integration of Belarus and the violent invasion in Ukraine – clear attempts to replay the history of the not-so-internal colonization. In this context, it would hardly be controversial to say that the three texts dedicated to the current political soundscapes of these two countries, as they are conditioned by Russian aggression, form the core of this special issue.
In “Warbound: Collective Audio Streaming from Ukraine,” Olya Zikrata directly addresses the sonic dimension of the ongoing Russian invasion in Ukraine and the Ukrainian resistance. Her article revolves around the 2022 project Listen Live consisting of five online broadcasts by sound artists from different parts of Ukraine that together weave a multifaceted soundscape of living in the middle of a violent invasion. Building on – but also challenging – J. Martin Daughtry’s notion of “belliphonic” as the agglomeration of war-related sounds (2015), Zikrata argues that the sonic experience of the war in Ukraine is not reducible to a catalogue of explosions and sirens but rather includes the totality of acoustic environments affected and effected by the invasion. In stark contrast to the sound design of war movies, the streams of Listen Live focus on the quieter aspects of war: the digging of trenches, the life in frontline cities in between bombings, the refugee experience in western Ukraine. Zikrata approaches them as acts of acoustic witnessing, a “collectively developed sonic intelligence,” revealing the situated relationalities that bind together the land and its human and non-human inhabitants living through the invasion.
The themes of witnessing, testimony, and acoustic relationality also suffuse my interview with Sashko Protyah, an independent filmmaker from war-torn Mariupol, as he reflects on the past 15 years of his career. His early influences, including experimental music and sound poetry, shaped his affinity for sound as compositional material rather than mere accompaniment to visuals, which has resulted in a number of collaborations with experimental musicians, sound artists, and beatboxers. The evolution of Protyah’s artistic trajectory took him from playful absurdism to politicized documentary storytelling, underscoring an approach to sound and cinema as tools for reflection and resistance, gaining a particular urgency under the condition of war.
Finally, Pavel Niakhayeu’s article (bordering on a short monograph in its breadth and detail) “Voices, Noises, and Silence in the Political Soundscape of Belarus” is a meticulous sonic ethnography of Belarusian political life, covering the period from 2020 to 2023. The 2020 election, in which the dictator Alyaxandr Lukashenka once again fraudulently declared himself the winner, catalyzed a peaceful protest movement. It quickly became the largest protest in modern Belarusian history before being violently quelled with Russian backing, forcing protesters into hiding or emigration. Combining field recordings and soundwalks, sociological interviews and media analysis, Niakhayeu’s article documents how these phases unfolded in the acoustic dimension: from the political soundscapes of the protest itself – suffused by poetry, folk songs, and the sound of Belarusian language – to the “sonic violence continuum” of the authoritarian state’s reaction and the silence(s) that followed. These soundscapes may also be called belliphonic – both in the sense of Putin using Belarus as a launching site for his attack on Ukraine, and in the sense of Belarus itself being the object of a hybrid warfare of sorts.
Soundscapes of the “South of the Poor North”
Whereas Russian imperialism in Ukraine and Belarus was (and is) driven by the ostensible non-distinction of their peoples, other forms of Russian colonial conquest relied on familiar constructions of the racialized colonial other. One of the critiques levied at Etkind by the decolonial theorist Madina Tlostanova is that, in his focus on the internal, self-othering Orientalism of the Russian elites, he fails to notice the more obvious, outward Orientalism “directed against Russia’s South – the Caucasus, and its Orient – Central Asia” (Tlostanova 2014: n.p.). A linguistic quirk that would be amusing if not for the oppression that it represents: While in English, the term “Caucasian” connotes “white,” in (post-)Soviet vernacular Russian, “Caucasian” (kavkazets – formed from the bureaucratese “person of Caucasian ethnicity”) is a term of racialization and othering, coding the members (or presumed members) of any of the diverse Caucasian nations as decidedly non-white.
Tlostanova’s own theory proposes that the post-Soviet realm neither fits within nor breaks off from the colonial North-South dichotomy, but rather mirrors and complicates it. She conceptualizes Russia as “the poor North,” separated from the global (rich) North by imperial difference, as well as from its own “South of the poor North,” by colonial difference (Tlostanova 2011). The “imperial difference […] refers to various losers that failed to succeed in or were prevented by different circumstances and powers from fulfilling their imperial mission in modernity. These losers took second-class places and became intellectually, epistemically or culturally colonized by the winners” (Tlostanova 2011: 71). Consequently,
Russia projected its own inferiority complexes onto its non-European colonies in the Caucasus and Central Asia through its self-proclaimed modernizer and civilizer role. The Russian colonies either felt the double dictate of coloniality of knowledge in its modern Western and Russian/Soviet versions, or, regarding themselves as standing higher on the human scale (within the same Western modern epistemic system, grounded in taxonomizing people into those who have the right and the ability to produce knowledge and those who are doomed to act as objects of study and consumers of theories produced in the West) than the Russian subaltern empire, have refused its dictate and negated its epistemic authority, choosing a direct European influence instead and dreaming to become at some point fully integrated. (Tlostanova 2015: 47)
Brian Fairley addresses the sonic experience of such a paradoxical positionality through the example of Georgian Orthodox chant in his article “Singing at Your Own Funeral: Overdubbed Intimacy and the Persistence of Tradition in Soviet Georgia.” Counted among the oldest Christian denominations in the world, the Georgian Orthodox Church was first subordinated to the Moscow Patriarchate following the integration of Georgia into the Russian Empire, then persecuted and all but banned (along with all other religious practices) under Soviet rule. Fairley discusses amateur tape recordings of Georgian requiem chants made in the 1960s by the singer Artem Erkomaishvili, which were later played at his own funeral. The article weaves together the sonic history of Georgian indigenous musical culture under colonial rule and the media history of anti-Soviet dissent. Fairley likens Erkomaishvili’s recordings to magnitizdat, a dissident practice by which censored music – most often rock music bootlegged from the West – found unofficial circulation in amateur tape recordings. This case study thus exemplifies the complex entanglement of contradictory indigenous, Soviet, and Western vectors characteristic of the sound cultures in “the South of the poor North.”
Tlostanova does not make a principal distinction between the imperial projects of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. This position, however, is not universally shared, particularly among historians of Central Asia. Adeeb Khalid, for example, argues that the Soviet project consisted in “homogeniz[ing] populations in order to attain universal goals” (Khalid 2006: 233), a strategy associated with the modern state rather than a colonial one, which would conventionally be built on perpetuating difference. Historian Botakoz Kassymbekova, on the other hand, points to the futility of classifying the USSR as either a modern state or a colonial empire, as its “cultural policies […] were contradictory and entailed elements of both modern(izing) and colonial rule […] Blurring boundaries between imperialism and socialism, colonialism and state building, the Soviet political design combined ideas and mechanisms of liberation and oppression, universalism and difference” (Kassymbekova 2016: 15, 17). Pointing out that most Central Asian societies have never thought of themselves as colonized or postcolonial, ethnographer Sergei Abashin similarly suggests that the culture and politics of the region are better described as a complex and site-specific entanglement of local and metropolitan forces that act at times in accord and at times in conflict with each other (Abashin 2015: 44).
In my interview with the Kazakhstani “imaginary art institution” Krëlex zentre, its members Ruthia Jenrbekova and Maria Vilkovisky discuss how such localities facilitate highly idiosyncratic sonic idioms that can be described as a kind of creole. The duo lists among their influences Soviet radio, Western classical and experimental music, punk, electronica and techno, and the soundscapes of Almaty’s industrial suburbs, all of which coalesce into an equally eclectic practice incorporating sound poetry, experimental theatre, and installation art, among many other things. They describe themselves as pirates, plundering the global cultural archive in order to challenge the ethnicization and genderization of artistic identities.
Finally, Phoebe Robertson’s article “The Chanting Flute: Uncovering Russian Orthodox and Shamanic Sounds in Sofia Gubaidulina’s …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair (2005)” traces a similar creole-esque aesthetic in the works of the late Sofia Gubaidulina. Of Tatar ancestry and Russian Orthodox faith, working in the European New Music paradigm, and hailed as the most important Russian composer of the past century, Gubaidulina exemplifies the contradictions that permeate the sound cultures of the post-Soviet realm. Robertson examines how the composer brings together musical references from Russian Orthodox and Siberian shamanic chants within the European concerto genre – an act that in other contexts could amount to cultural appropriation. In the post-Soviet context, however, both the eastward and westward cultural vectors point to a shared history of repression and dissent, one that Gubaidulina’s work highlights.
The eight diverse texts collected in this special issue throw into sharp relief a point I made in passing in the opening section: that the (post-)Soviet is emphatically not a symphony. The region’s political and cultural history is one of contradictions, holding many familiar dichotomies – of the East and the West, the progressive and the reactionary, the colonial and the emancipatory – in a superposition, a dissonant cluster defying harmonic resolution. (Post-)Soviet sound thus demands a mode of listening that is attuned to these contradictions and that attends to the region not as a monolithic soundscape but as a collection of idiosyncratic localities, each resonating their own sets of frequencies.
References
Abashin, Sergey (2015). The Soviet Kishlak: Between Colonialism and Modernization [Советский кишлак: между колониализмом и модернизацией]. Moscow: New Literary Observer.
Chernetsky, Vitaly (2007). Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press.
This is a single release of the song “Hand in the Air,” which is the first track on our forthcoming sixth album, Goodbye Work (2025).
This song is an ode to the nerdy child who raises their hand when the teacher asks a question in class. An impressionistic, autobiographical song about the awkward years in junior high.
The picture in the window Lights up from behind The richer is the meadow That we seek but fail to find
chorus: Was it you Was it you Was it you On the landing? (Too demanding?)
Was it you Was it you Was it you With your hand in the air?
The poster isn’t yellow Maybe orange, maybe green When a man starts to bellow One makes sure not to be seen
A chair in the corner To pretend to try to hide A face getting warmer So it turns to the other side ______________________
Rosie Harris: lead vocals Sumanth Gopinath: backing vocals, acoustic guitar, Hammond organ Beth Hartman: backing vocals, egg shaker Cody Johnson: bass guitar Nate Knutson: electric guitars Paul Hatlelid: drums
music by The Gated Community, lyrics by Sumanth Gopinath
Much beloved Minnesota Americana band The Gated Community celebrate the release of their sixth full-length studio album, Goodbye Work! Special guests acclaimed musicians Rich Mattson and Germaine Gemberling (aka “Rich and Germaine”) of Rich Mattson and the Northstars open the night.
The Gated Community is an Americana band with a nearly twenty-year history. Formed in 2006 in Minneapolis’s storied West Bank neighborhood, the band is known for its gripping original songs, beautiful vocal harmonies, and multiple lead singers. Led by South Asian American singer/songwriter Sumanth Gopinath (aka Sonny), the band’s music is eclectic in style, encompassing country, folk, bluegrass, and rock. Born in Chicago and raised in Louisiana, Gopinath relocated to the Twin Cities in 2005, after stints in Texas and Connecticut.
Current members have been in the band for a decade or more. Their lineup includes Sumanth Gopinath (acoustic guitar), Rosie Harris (banjo), Beth Hartman (percussion), Paul Hatlelid (drums), Cody Johnson (bass), and Nate Knutson (electric guitar). Everyone in the band sings lead and plays multiple instruments. They perform in a range of configurations, including as small as a duo or trio.
The Gated Community is thrilled to hold this album release show at The Parkway Theater. After placing in the venue’s first-ever “Battle of the Bluegrass Bands” in 2019, the band later headlined The Parkway that same year. Six years and a global pandemic later, the band returns again to the theater with renewed energy and purpose amid the chaos of the present.
The Holy Bible (1994) was a remarkably coherent and thoughtful, if violent and unreasonable protest against the ‘end of history’ that had been declared a couple of years earlier – theirs was the 1994 of Srebrenica and Rwanda, not of Fukuyama or Anthony Giddens. Musically, while hardly avantgarde, The Holy Bible had a newly acquired postpunk angularity and a disdain for the American marketplace. Subjects were political (‘Revol’, a bizarre song speculating on the sex lives of Soviet leaders), historical (two songs about the Holocaust, hugely ill-advised in theory but surprisingly tactful in practice), or concerned different forms of personal collapse, told in the first-person, as in the staccato, self-undermining assertions of ‘Faster’, or ventriloquised through female narrators, such as the depressive sex worker of ‘Yes’ and the anorexic teenager of the exceptionally disturbing ‘4st 7lb’.
Manic Street Preachers, The Holy Bible (1994)
These songs asserted physical and intellectual self-control to the point of psychosis, as a means of armouring the self against a terrifying and repugnant outside world. The Holy Bible is striking not just for Jones’s and, especially, Edwards’s punishingly moralistic and sometimes surreal lyrics, but for the fact that Bradfield and Moore were able to crowbar them into rock anthems, of a sort. The results can still send shivers up the spine, as when the brutal, unforgiving words of the disgust-filled, misanthropic ‘Of Walking Abortion’, or ‘Archives of Pain’, a Foucault-inverting paean to the guillotine, are bellowed as stadium rock choruses. In these songs Bradfield didn’t sing so much as ‘bark phonemes’, as Tom Ewing put it of the breathtaking ‘Faster’. Bradfield had managed to turn the amusicality of his two lyricists into a virtue, and ‘I am an architect; they call me a butcher’ into my personal favourite first line of a rock single.
It was an incredible performance, bearing no apparent resemblance to what the Manics had originally aimed to do – this wasn’t selling sixteen million copies in any lifetime – but there was no failure, now. The Manics had set out, to quote a Ballard interview sampled midway through the album, to ‘rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror’, and that’s what they did. There is still nothing in rock music quite like it, and it was practically impossible to follow.
Aotearoa singer/songwriter Marlon Williams (Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tai) performs an intimate concert to a small group of fans at the RNZ studio to celebrating 20 years of NZ Live on RNZ National. Marlon performs five tracks and chats to RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan about making his fourth solo album, ‘Te Whare Tīwekaweka’ and the process of songwriting in te reo Māori. […] Tracks as they appear in the session:
Watch Ambika Mod read from Heart Lamp, the #InternationalBooker2025-shortlisted novel written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi. In twelve stories, Heart Lamp exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. In the titular story, Mehrun, a young mother, despairs at the way her life has unfolded.
Filmación de los históricos conciertos en el Estadio Nacional que marcaron el retorno triunfal de Los Prisioneros después de casi 10 años de separación. Grabado los días 30 de noviembre y 1 de diciembre de 2001.
A recording of birdsong made in the late afternoon of 30 April 2025 at George Washington Park in Pacific Grove, California, by Comrade Koganzon using the Merlin Bird ID app. The following birds can be heard on this recording: Hutton’s vireo, oak titmouse, yellow-rumped warbler, American crow, lesser goldfinch, acorn woodpecker, bushtit, American robin, dark-eyed junco, California towhee, Anna’s hummingbird, chestnut-backed chickadee, house finch, spotted towhee, and song sparrow. ||| TRR
Future History of Earth’s Birds
Amie Whittemore
—after Alexander Lumans and Jennifer Ackerman
Among them, a common language of alarm.
Also, rapture.
Know that when zebra finches felt the first pinch of climate change, they chirped to their offspring, still shelled, to warn, to insist, they hatch smaller and fiercer. Dawn’s chorus is a peace-making operation. The birds with the biggest eyes sing first. Thus light is the first part of song.
Some birds create barriers of pinging notes—golden bells dangling
in the air, alarms and warnings. Does it matter
what kind of birds did this? They’re all dead now.
In bird language, there’s a call for mobbing, a call for fleeing.
To avoid danger, sometimes you must approach it.
In the shell, a bird recognizes its parents’ voices. In love, mates sing duets they invent together. On death, the survivor must learn a new tune.
There are such things as universal truths.
Some kites drop fire onto the earth to scare up dinner. Some kites,
dropping fire, taught humans their first warm meal.
Neither ice nor snow lived long enough to hear the last bird sing—just wind,
which carried those notes as far as it could before they slipped from its palms—
There is a common language of alarm.
Source: poets.org. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 11, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
Riot police disperse protesters in Baymak, Bashkortostan, on 17 January 2024. Photo: Anya Marchenkova/AFP via Getty Images via Foreign Policy
On Wednesday, a local court in the Orenburg region handed out prison sentences to four participants of peaceful rallies in support of Indigenous activist Fayil Alsynov.
Up to 5,000 people gathered in Bashkortostan’s southeastern Baymak district in January last year to protest the imprisonment of Alsynov, a prominent Indigenous rights and environmental campaigner. The protests were followed by sweeping arrests.
Aydar Yusupov, Ilnaz Makhmutov, Zaki Ilyasov and Vallyam Mutallapov, who will spend from three to four years in a penal colony, are among more than 80 men and women facing criminal prosecution in the “Baymak case,” the largest political trial in Russia’s history.
To mark the first anniversary of the Baymak events, Kremlin-installed authorities in Bashkortostan released a propaganda film “The Anatomy of Bashkir Nationalism. The Baymak Tragedy” produced by state-aligned journalist Timur Valitov.
In her piece for From the Republics, Bashkort social researcher Iliuza Mukhamedianova considers why regional authorities invested in the film and aired it during prime time, as well as how carefully crafted smear campaign against the protesters could impact Bashkortostan’s civil society.
Kremlin-Funded Propaganda Fuels Destabilization in Bashkortostan
By Iliuza Mukhamedianova
25 minutes. That’s how much time the creators of “The Anatomy of Bashkir Nationalism” dedicate to speaking about the local national organization “Bashqort.” This is almost a third of the entire movie.
But why pay such close attention to an organization dismantled back in 2020, long before the protests in Baymak?
Perhaps, that’s the easiest way to construct an image of an almighty enemy.
In the film, “Bashqort” — an organization that aimed to reinstate Bashkortostan’s sovereignty and preserve the Bashkort language and culture — is portrayed as the ultimate evil. The filmmakers place sole responsibility for the Baymak protests on “Bashqort” members, accusing them of “extremism” and collaboration with “foreign enemy states.”
Demonizing an organization that no longer exists helps to absolve Bashkortostan’s authorities of responsibility, legitimizes their actions, and justifies their brutal response to the protests.
The film also glances over the fact that protests in Baymak were not organized by a single group like “Bashqort” or one individual but were instead a grassroots action, an organic reaction to the sentencing of activist Fayil Alsynov.
Neither does the film mention who killed protester Rifat Dautov or who tortured the many Baymak detainees. And that’s truly a shame because these are the questions we, the people of Baymak, would like to have answered.
The Baymak protests would not have gained momentum without extensive media coverage — the authorities understand this well.
Faithful to its avant-garde nature, Noise Cabaret premieres the immersive series Dialogues, based on the philosophical works of Plato, on December 25. Alexander Khudyakov turns ancient Greek philosophy into a lively, witty and provocative dialogue with the audience.
Along with his partner Ivan Wahlberg, Khudyakov, who not only acts in the project but directs it, will guide the audience through the labyrinths of Plato’s thought. What is justice? Where is the line between existence and non-existence? What is the true nature of love? These and many other fundamental philosophical questions will serve as starting points for reflection and debate.
Dialogues is a series of interactive performances in which each viewer is involved in a philosophical discussion consisting of adapted texts by Plato and actorly improvisation, meaning that the way the performance goes depends on the audience’s involvement. Each new performance is a separate chapter dealing with a specific philosophical problem, so you can join the series at any stage. The first episode deals with the concept of justice.
Noise Cabaret plans to invite Petersburg celebrities to enrich the conversation with the audience with their own opinions and views.
Khudyakov shared the idea behind the project.
“We wanted to do a story related to people talking in a bar. But just people talking to each other is not interesting. There has to be a big focus. When I studied Plato, I was interested in several aspects of his philosophy. It would have been wrong to limit ourselves to a single topic. So the idea to make a series arose: take Plato, read him, and discuss the themes he raises in the Socratic dialogues.
“We plan to produce a new episode every two or three months. There’s no pretense here that we’re serious scholars of Plato’s philosophy: it’s more of an excuse to talk to people about difficult topics, to air the Dialogues and reflect on them. And a bar is a place where you can talk about all sorts of things, including philosophy.”
Russians spent almost 6 billion rubles on Ozempic generics in 2024
Semaglutide-based drugs are commonly used for weight loss
In the first ten months of 2024, Russians spent 5.9 billion rubles [approx. 52 billion euros] on over one million packs of generic versions of the drug Ozempic (semaglutide), according to DSM Group, as reported by Vedomosti.
Among the most popular generics are Geropharm’s Semavic and Promomed’s Quincenta. The original drug Ozempic stopped [sic] official supplies to Russia in December 2023, opening the market to domestic analogues.
2024 was a record year for drugs in this category. By comparison, in 2023, Russians spent only 297 million rubles on Ozempic, buying 20 thousand packs. In 2022, they spent 1.9 billion rubles (256 thousand packs); in 2021, 758 million rubles; and in 2020, 76 million rubles.
Semaglutide-based drugs are used to treat diabetes but have recently been gaining popularity as weight loss drugs, which has also contributed to their sales growth in Russia.
St. Petersburg will open a new metro station this week, Governor Alexander Beglov announced Thursday, marking the former Tsarist capital’s first new metro station in five years.
The Gorny Institute metro station, located on Vasilievsky Island, will extend the fourth (or “orange”) line westward. It will begin operations at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, with its vestibule open for both entry and exit, Beglov said.
“The opening of Gorny Institute is a milestone,” the governor wrote on Telegram, noting that the city had overcome “significant challenges” during the station’s construction.
Beglov thanked President Vladimir Putin, metro builders, engineers and residents of St. Petersburg for their patience and support, calling the station’s completion the “first results” of sustained efforts to advance the city’s metro system.
The station’s opening comes after years of delays. Initially scheduled for completion in 2015, its opening was postponed to 2018 and later to 2022. Construction efforts were further overshadowed by a fatal scaffolding collapse in June 2020 that killed one worker and injured another.
Gorny Institute is the first station to open since 2019, when three others — Prospect Slavy, Dunayskaya, and Shushary — were inaugurated.
St. Petersburg’s metro is currently made up of five lines and 72 stations. However, it has expanded slowly over the years, in stark contrast to Moscow’s burgeoning metro system, which this year opened eight new stations.
In trying to grasp the tonality of the film [Anora], I am reminded of a line from Francis Bacon: “You can be optimistic and totally without hope.” The situation the characters find themselves in, being at the mercy of the rich, is totally without hope. The “hopeful” version of the script would be one in which Vanya does stand up to his parents and runs off with Ani, even at the price of losing his wealth—this is the film’s narrative lure. Or maybe another where the ruthless capitalist mother gains a grudging respect for her tough daughter-in-law, like in the last season of Fargo. But despite its grim closure, the impression the film gives is far from dreary or pessimistic. The hopeless optimism of Baker’s cinema lies in the sheer life that seems to almost burst out of the filmic frame, and, especially, his deep care for his characters, even Vanya.
In the fall of 2023, with the goal of understanding what is really happening with Russian society during wartime, the Public Sociology Laboratory team went on ethnographic research trips to three Russian regions—Sverdlovsk, Krasnodar and Buryatia. Over the course of a month, PS Lab researchers observed how people talk about the war and how it affects daily life in cities and villages. In addition, they recorded sociological interviews with local residents. PS Lab has compiled three detailed ethnographic observation diaries (more than 100,000 words apiece) and conducted 75 in-depth interviews. Overall, it has managed to collect truly unique data that provides an idea of what people say and think about the war in everyday situations, and not only when answering researchers’ questions.
The full text of the report is book-length and written in a book-style format: it consists of seven chapters, introduces many characters, and allows readers to be fully immersed in contemporary wartime Russia. The following summary, meanwhile, highlights the main analytical conclusions.
Russian society remains politically demobilized and deideologized. Despite the prevailing opinion that it is strictly militarized, we see that the war has become routine and therefore a disregarded part of reality. For example, compared to the first years of the war, the amount of prowar symbolism in public spaces has decreased in all three regions. The war has neither become a source of new ideas in the cultural life of cities or villages nor been integrated into familiar and already-established cultural formats. The war is not discussed in public places, including, with rare exceptions, local online communities.
In spontaneous conversations, Russians rarely discuss the overall goals and causes, criminality, or justifications of the war. They are concerned with the impact of the war on their everyday lives. When they talk about the war, they mostly talk about the same things they discussed before the war, for example, everyday difficulties, money, or ethics. Men more often discuss topics that are considered “masculine” in society, such as the technical side of the war, and women usually talk about “feminine” topics, such as how war destroys families.
Participation in various types of prowar volunteering and organized assistance for the military, which are often cited as an example of the mobilization and militarization of Russian society, is rarely motivated by people’s firm support for the “special operation.” It is usually associated with pressure from the administration, community moral norms (concerning mutual assistance), and/ora desire to help loved ones, rather than a wish to make victory for Russia more likely. Observation of volunteers’ activities show that while working, they do not discuss the war or politics, rather choosing topics that are personable and relatable to them: prices, pensions, families, and/or stories related to the volunteer centers.
Despite all these similarities, the war is perceived slightly differently in different regions. The peculiarities of each region’s view owe to factors like the number of military units and penal colonies from which prisoners are recruited, proximity to the combat zone, the prosperity of the region and the availability of decent jobs, the density of social ties, the circulation of news transmitted by friends on the front lines, etc. In other words, the differences in perceptions of the war are attributable mainly to the peculiarities of life in the regions before the invasion of Ukraine.
The conflict between opponents and supporters of the war is gradually subsiding, while the rift between those who stayed in Russia and those who left is growing. This is happening both because the shared experience of living through a difficult situation within the country is becoming more important for many Russians than any differences in viewpoint, and also because people are discussing the war less.
At the same time, the waning conflict between opponents and supporters of the war does not always mean more social cohesion. Since people are trying to live as if the war is nonexistent and the government does not talk about any losses or problems associated with the war, all negative consequences of the war are either normalized or pushed into the realm of “personal problems” that are not discussed with anyone and that everyone must deal with on their own.
Overall, many people do not feel able to influence political decisions. Therefore, they are increasingly distancing themselves from the war. They understand that they cannot change government policy, but they retain at least some control over their private lives—and therefore they are immersed in them. Over time, not only apolitical Russians but even sure opponents of the invasion experience this powerlessness and, as a result, some of them accept the new reality while continuing to condemn the war internally.
Consequently, many Russians are increasingly distrustful of political news from a broad range of sources. Instead, they put their trust in local media. Local problems and news seem much more important and relevant to them. Moreover, they feel that, unlike the war, local issues are at least sometimes within their ability to influence.
At the same time, the war is weighing people’s emotional state. Many of our interlocutors admit that they experience anxiety, tension, uncertainty, fear, even if these things are not usually spoken about openly. The departure of sons and husbands to war makes women “scream at the top of their lungs.” However, people rarely share such emotions with others, and if they do, they do so in groups with close friends.
Many Russians who are not interested in politics may justify or condemn the war depending on the communicative context.
They tend to non-emotionally justify the war through normalization (“there are always wars”) or rationalization (“it was necessary”) when asked about it directly in more formalized settings, such as research interviews.
They are more likely to criticize the war when prompted to think about how it negatively affects them as ordinary Russians. This criticism differs from that of war opponents. For opponents, the war is a moral crime against Ukraine, whereas for apolitical Russians, the war is seen as something that destroys Russian society and harms ordinary people. However, this criticism does not lead apolitical Russians to question the war’s necessity or inevitability, nor does it extend to criticizing the Russian government.
They tend to emotionally justify the war when confronted with traditional anti-war narratives. When Russia is accused of committing moral crimes against the Ukrainian people, they often take such accusations personally and attempt to defend their own dignity.
Some people have experienced a strengthened sense of national identity, and sometimes a demand for greater solidarity arises. It’s important to note that this increased sense of national identity does not lead Russians to adopt the official imperial brand of nationalism. Unlike the Kremlin, ordinary people live in a world of nation states, not in a world of imperial fantasies (according to which Ukraine is not a real state and Ukrainians are an inferior people).
A feeling of uncertainty is what truly unites Russians today. Despite the fact that people choose various strategies to cope with this feeling, it still significantly complicates the ability to plan one’s life and plunges Russians into pessimism.
Thus, on the one hand, the formerly extraordinary nature of the war is giving way to normalization: the war is gradually becoming something ordinary, another unremarkable part of the surrounding world. In a sense, many Russians resist both the Kremlin’s attempts to turn ordinary citizens into ideological supporters and the attempts of the anti-war liberal opposition to force society to actively experience guilt and fight. On the other hand, the war constantly reminds us of its existence, creating new threats, new anxieties, and new reasons for discontent in Russians.
Dear readers! Times are tough, and the key in this case is holding on in every sense. No one says it’s easy. But it’s not so hard either. The other day I asked Vladimir Putin whether he expected anything more from himself in the outgoing year. But I want to ask you: do you expect anything more from yourself in the coming year? We need to expect things. We need to want things. It’s a way of holding on to ourselves. Of looking after ourselves. Of not losing ourselves. And even of finding ourselves. A hard sign (“Ъ”) will never be a soft sign (“Ь”)! Happy incoming New Year! Let’s not be on the defensive!
Andrei Kolesnikov, Special Correspondent, Kommersant Publishing House
Source: Email from Kommersant, 31 December 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. The so-called hard sign, which the Bolsheviks dropped from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet in 1918, has been the logo of Kommersant since the newspaper’s relaunch in January 1990. Andrei Kolesnikov has been the newspaper’s special Kremlin correspondent — that is, its chief Putinversteher — for many years. Of course he’ll deny it all when push comes to shove and Putin goes, and he’ll point of course to the cynical, jocular (but ultimately loyal) way he’s written about the Russian dictator and war criminal all these years.
I’d like to say I was first drawn to Russia by a fascination with late Soviet politics under Gorbachev, or the great works of Russian literature. But for me the initial interest was the language itself, as taught by an eccentric but effective teacher called Mr Criddle. Short and bearded, even a little gnome-like, he usually dressed in sandals and socks and ran his classes at Worcester Sixth Form College with old-fashioned discipline. Before we started the course, he had handed out copies of the thirty-three character Cyrillic script at our college open day with instructions to learn it or not bother turning up for class.
Mr Criddle had learned his own Russian in the mid-sixties at the Liverpool College of Commerce, taught by a graduate of a Cold War creation known as the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL). The JSSL had taken around 5,000 conscripted men from military boot camps in the 1950s and produced a whole generation of Russianists. The kadety, as the students called themselves, were trained to be high-level interpreters, ready to interrogate Soviet prisoners, decipher classified documents and run counter-propaganda operations should the USSR ever invade. As it never did, many ended up teaching the language in UK universities and schools.
The JSSL method was fast, deep and tough, with heavy emphasis on repetition and rote-learning. Its students had a skukometer, a made-up word from the Russian for boredom, to measure how brain-numbing a class was, and I would come to know how they felt. Mr Criddle had picked up the JSSL military style from his own teacher. Ignoring any official syllabus, he had a giant library of homemade flash cards which he used to drill us relentlessly. He’d cut all the images out of magazines and glued them to one side of the cards, writing the correct adjective endings or verb declensions on the back. He kept them in recycled envelopes at the back of the room. It was the exact opposite of how I’d learned French and German, where we chose a ‘foreign’ name and then role-played trips to the bakery or camp-site shop. For Russian, Mr Criddle had us create our own carefully indexed grammar books and then he dictated every page. It was a whole year before we learned anything practical like how to introduce ourselves perhaps partly because no one was planning a summer holiday in the Soviet Union, but we could soon form the genitive plural in our sleep.
Source: Sarah Rainsford, Goodbye to Russia (2024)
The Booker Prize: “Nonso Anozie reads from ‘James’”
Watch Nonso Anozie read from Booker Prize 2024-shortlisted James, written by Percival Everett.
The story so far: It’s 1861 and Jim, a slave and soon-to-be companion of Huckleberry Finn on a dangerous journey along the Mississippi River, is a man driven by a fierce instinct to survive and to protect his family. This includes teaching his own and other children the behavioural and language skills needed to avoid antagonising the white people who have made their lives hell.
All traces of Ukraine are being expunged. Schools have switched to the Russian curriculum, and Russian youth and paramilitary organisations work in the territories. Repression combined with Russification aims to transform the social and political fabric of the territories, says Nikolay Petrov, the author of a new report for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
“I dreamed that I was talking in my dream and to be safe was speaking Russian. (I don’t speak any Russian, and also I never talk in my sleep.) I was speaking Russian so that I wouldn’t understand myself and no one else would understand me either.”
Alexander Ivanov, “Gennady Shpalikov: Being Restless” (in Russian, with no subtitles)
Gennady Shpalikov and Guy Debord were nearly the same age, and their popularity peaked at the same time. But is this the only thing that unites the French philosopher and the Russian writer? Alexander Ivanov, founder of the publishing house Ad Marginem, will show that these two figures were connected not only by the time in which they worked but also by the very spirit of the time, which they saw, felt and were able to convey to others.
Debord’s adage “Love is possible only on the eve of a revolution” could well have been endorsed by Shpalikov.
Debord was the founder of Situationism.
An amazing poet, screenwriter, and director, Shpalikov was the Soviet Guy Debord. Like Debord, Shpalikov had an explicitly spatial mind: he understood space not as a receptacle for bodies but as a way of assembling the soul in the gaps, intervals, and flashes of aimless, unprogrammed, slippery movements around the urban environment. Debord called this mode of movement détournement — a deviation, an illegitimate, reverse appropriation in which the spaces and cultural signs captured by other people’s meanings are reappropriated by turning them inside out semantically or simple shifting their meaning. This was exactly how Shpalikov dealt with the anonymous, official space of the Soviet city: by romanticizing its most banal corners and nooks. Both of these artists conjured the mood of an entire epoch in the late 50s and early 60s.
November 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Gennady Shpalikov, the screenwriter, filmmaker, and poet, one of the symbols of the Thaw era, an extremely popular writer and yet one whose work has been poorly read. Igor Gulin explains how Shpalikov looked for an answer to the question of where good people end up, and how the drama of his characters reprised his own.
Gennady Shpalikov on the set of the film I Am Twenty. Photo: Gorky Film Studio
Screenwriting was an honorable profession in the Soviet Union. Screenwriters were not considered to be craftsmen consigned to the sidelines, but serious writers, and so the screenwriter’s name was listed first in the credits, before the director’s. Nevertheless, not even the best of them were stars. Gennady Shpalikov was an exception. From his very first efforts in cinema, his name was a symbol of the new art of the Thaw — first among his fellow filmmakers, then for a relatively wide swath of the intelligentsia. His death in 1974 was a token of the sixties generation’s demise.
The cinematic Thaw was already in full swing by the time Shpalikov joined the profession. Marlen Khutsiev and Felix Mironer’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street(1956), Mikhail Schweitzer’s The Tight Knot (1957), Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier(1959) had been released, but these beautiful pictures still lacked something that would instill a sense of decisive reform and renewal. Shpalikov carried out a tiny revolution in Soviet cinema — not alone, of course, but he was its leader. He contributed an open sense of form, showing that a movie could be something other than an itinerary from point A to point B. It could be a stroll, a stroll with no clear goals, from one impression to another, from one funny and touching incident to another.
Almost all of Shpalikov’s scripts from the 1960s are just such cinematic walkabouts: A Streetcar to Other Cities (1962), directed by his friend Yuli Fait (1962); The Star on the Buckle (1962) and I’m from Childhood (1966), written for Viktor Turov; I Walk Around Moscow (1963) directed by Georgiy Daneliya; The Wharf and Summer Holiday, which were never made into films; A Long Happy Life (1966), of course; and Ilyich’s Gate (1962–1964) to a great extent. This film was more complicated, however. Khutsiev’s lofty idealism counterbalanced Shpalikov’s nimble gifts, and it was their confrontation and, at times, conflict that gave birth to a masterpiece. This later worked with Larisa Shepitko, when she and Shpalikov agonizingly co-wrote You and I (1971). To produce something truly significant, Shpalikov needed a co-writer-slash-director — a collaborator and an opponent, not a faithful executor of his ideas.
The stroll was the genre not only of Shpalikov’s creative work but also of his life. He existed in the same way, charming everyone he met, traipsing from one crowd to another, from one idea to another. He wrote the same way: on telegram blanks and napkins, not bothering with punctuation and spelling, and often not worrying whether the text was coherent, paying mind to its intonation and pacing, rather than to the idea and the logic of form. His scripts and songs, poems and prose experiments often seem sloppy to a sober eye. But their sloppiness never irritates: it comes across as organic, as a hallmark of authenticity.
Dozens of memoirs have been written about Shpalikov. Their authors constantly wonder aloud how it happened that this carefree, lively man took to drinking heavily and eventually committed suicide. They often blame the era. There is some truth to this, but it is a little different than is commonly thought. The Stagnation was not only a time of disillusionment after the upswing of the Thaw. It was also a time of complication. The members of the Sixties generation who continued to create and grow learned to resist better. It required them to mobilize their inner strength, making them more reflective and deeper. Shpalikov was a genius of splendid superficiality, of drifting and gliding. He understood this perfectly well. The drama of his art kicked off long before the frosts of the Brezhnev era set in.
The same disturbing intuition — sometimes well concealed, sometimes voiced as directly as possible — was evident in everything Shpalikov wrote. Surprisingly, this anxiety was hardly detected by his contemporaries, who remained under the hypnosis of the myth they had created themselves. It concerns the central figure of Shpalikov’s entire oeuvre. What to do with the fact that the “good man,” about whom he always wrote, so easily goes to the bad? What to do with the fact that charming frivolity quickly turns into grim irresponsibility, moral freedom into immorality, the freewheeling life of the tumbleweed into pathetic escapism, and nonstop wittiness into nauseating clownishness? Committed to the utmost sincerity, Shpalikov had an absolute ear for falsity and from the very beginning heard the rudiments of falsity in himself. Perhaps that is why he seemed doomed (and suicidal notes appear in his texts very early on). Drunkenness, however, made it easier for him to accept his fate.
This intuition is almost nonexistent in Ilyich’s Gate, in which the romantics and the bastards are delineated from each other. But it is already present (for the time being, as a quite vague hint) in I Walk Around Moscow (the young Nikita Mikhalkov’s ambiguous charisma works perfectly in this regard). It is also palpable in TheWharf, Shpalikov’s first major feature. (Its director, Vladimir Kitaysky, committed suicide while working on the picture, and the movie was never completed.) The script of The Wharf is an enchanting, airy text centered on a rather savage deed. Coming to Moscow for a single evening, the main character, a barge captain, decides to kidnap his son from his mother, wanders around nighttime Moscow with the boy for a long while, and when he falls asleep on a bench, simply runs away to his barge. A good guy’s transformation into a scoundrel is amped up to wholly Dostoevskyean cruelty in Summer Holiday and A Charming Man’s Day (another script that was never produced). This trajectory devolves into total despair in You and I, in which a Thawnik’s romantic flight to the Far North is played out as an egoistic escape from his own worthless life, frittered-away talent, ruined romance, and lost friendship.
Shpalikov never judges his characters: their meannesses and downfalls just happen. There is no reflection at all in his art. There is only movement, and this movement has its own laws. At the beginning of the trajectory there is a good, harmonious man, but once chosen, the freewheeling life gradually whittles him down to the ugly figure of a cynic, a vulgarian, a scoundrel. Shpalikov has a very frank poem about this:
Аh the streets, the only refuge Not for the homeless, but for those who live in the city. The streets pester and haunt me, They are my comrades and my adversaries.
I don’t feel as if I am walking them, I obey them, I move my feet, And the streets guide me, they lead me Through a sequence set once upon a time,
A sequence of cherished back alleys, A sequence of jaunty notions and good intentions.
The same thing happens in Shpalikov’s only directorial work. A Long Happy Life is usually remembered as a light, lyrical picture, but actually it is chockablock with contempt for oneself and one’s kind. It is a movie about how a typical man of the 1960s, a charming unshaven geologist, runs off into nowhere and away from a beautiful woman, and at the same time from any future, from that selfsame long happy life, simply because he cannot help but run. A lighter note is generated by the finale: the famous five-minute scene of a barge on a river is Shpalikov’s homage to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his favorite film.
This is Shpalikov’s main gimmick. As intoxication relieves a hangover, so the shame of escape is relieved by yet another escape. And if the body can no longer escape, there remain flights of fantasy. Distracted from the protagonist’s mediocre fate, the gaze follows the barge and loses itself in this marvelous tracking shot. All of Shpalikov’s best poems are about the same thing: not about the joy of life, but about the desire to escape from it to a place that is obviously impossible, somewhere “where mother is young and father is alive.” To leave, but not by sinking into drunkenness, illness, and rows, but to disappear gently, to be weathered away from the world. “My head is vacant, / Like a deserted place. / I’m flying off somewhere, / Like a tree from a leaf.”
Richard Viktorov, Per Aspera Ad Astra (1981). In Russian, with English subtitles.
Per Aspera Ad Astra/Through the Thorns to the Stars (1981), a new version, in Russian with English subtitles.
Soviet film directed by Richard Viktorov, based on a novel [sic] by Kir Bulychev. Music by Alexey Rybnikov (original score); Sergei Skripka (conductor).
Yelena Metyolkina as Neeya • Uldis Lieldidz as Cadet Stepan Lebedev • Vadim Ledogorov as Sergei Lebedev • Yelena Fadeyeva as Maria Pavlovna • Vatslav Dvorzhetsky as Petr Petrovich • Nadezhda Semyontsova as Professor Nadezhda Ivanova • Aleksandr Lazarev as Professor Klimov • Aleksandr Mikhajlov as Captain Dreier • Boris Shcherbakov as Navigator Kolotun • Igor Ledogorov as Ambassador Rakan • Igor Yasulovich as Torki • Gleb Strizhenov as Glan • Vladimir Fyodorov as Turanchoks • Yevgeni Karelskikh
The lone survivor of a derelict spaceship is brought to Earth to recuperate and regain her lost memories. Given the name Neeya, a series of events triggers her telekinetic powers and a number of flashbacks reveal her origins on the planet Dessa. A human spaceship returns her to Dessa. The planet is found to be in ecological ruin and run by a businessman who intends to keep it that way. The crew of the ship, aided by their robot and Neeya’s powers, defeat a monster unleashed against them. They repair the planet’s ecosystem and Neeya remains to help rebuild Dessa while the crew returns to Earth.
Igor Mozheiko was born ninety years ago in Moscow. Mozheiko was a failed spy, a narrowly focused academic and extraordinarily wide-ranging popularizer and encyclopedist, a passionate collector, a skillful translator, and a great writer. As an author, Mozheiko was renowned under the pseudonym Kir Bulychev, but far from all his accomplishments are well known.
Soviet science fiction writer Kir Bulychev (aka Igor Mozheiko) Photo: Ogonyok magazine photo archive/Kommersant
The Darling
The popular take on the happy Soviet era is founded, as we know, on the realities of the final Five-Year Plans. The cultural component of these notions consists almost entirely of cinematic images and lines from movies. The enormous eyes of Natalya Guseva and Yelena Metyolkina, the ominous Turanchoks, the catchphrases “I have the mielophone” and “He will turn speckled purple,” jokes about the android Werther and, of course, the song “The Beautiful Afar” stole the hearts of thousands of Young Pioneers.
Thanks to clever mental gymnastics, for many of these erstwhile Young Pioneers the beautiful afar speaks not from the future, which they would have had to make happen, but from the past, when Young Pioneer ties were redder, ice cream tasted better, and friendship was stronger.
The key creator of this beautiful afar was Kir Bulychev, the screenwriter and author of the literary works on which these movies, TV series and cartoons were based.
It is impossible to argue with this, as well as with the fact that this reputation would amuse, if not offend, Bulychev. He explained the popular love for science fiction by the fact that “any alternative reality was hostile to communist reality,” and in the Theater of Shadows series he turned the concept of yesterday into a dusty boring hell in which scoundrels perpetrate madness.
The cinema noticed Bulychev late, and at first not as a writer, but as an imposing extra. His beard and his friendship with novice actors got the young Orientalist a role in the film Hockey Players (1964) as a silent sculptor who beautifully shares the screen with a portrait of Ernest Hemingway. The first screen adaptation of his work — based on the story “The Ability to Throw a Ball” — happened twelve years later in Alma-Ata, and after that his cinematic career was up and running.
Writer Kir Bulychev, aka scholar Igor Mozheiko, in the film Birthmark, based on a story from his collection Aliens in Guslyar: Photo: Mosfilm
Bulychev’s stories were adapted by both novice filmmakers and the country’s leading directors. A vivid example in all senses is Georgiy Daneliya’s Tears Were Falling (1982). Bulychev’s plots were the basis for comedies (Chance, 1984), action films (The Witches Cave, 1989) and slapstick tragedy (The Comet, 1983). Some of the stories have been adapted more than once. For example, “The Ability to Throw a Ball” was reshot for Central Television twelve years after the first adaptation, and another twelve years later in Poland. The story “Abduction of the Wizard” was made into a two-part television play in Leningrad in 1981, and into a feature film in Sverdlovsk in 1989. It is superfluous to remind readers of the fresh remake of Guest from the Future into the science fiction film One Hundred Years Ahead(which diverges almost entirely from its source), but it does make sense to note that this year the television series Obviously Incredible, based on the Veliky Guslyar series, was released.
There are a lot of questions raised by the 1989 film adaptation of The Witches Cave, but they definitely don’t involve the plot and the cast. Photo: Gorky Film Studio
In his memoirs, which Bulychev wrote in 1999, four years before his death, he said, “I did not make a noticeable mark on the cinema.” Since then, the number of films, cartoons, and TV series based on his texts has increased by a dozen. Now approaching fifty, this number will clearly continue to grow.
Sanctuary
The adventures of Alisa Seleznyova, as played by Natalya Guseva, deprived Soviet schoolchildren of sleep, but they were seemingly the least worried about the mielophone. Photo: Gorky Film Studio
Kir Bulychev became the number one Soviet science fiction writer in the early 1980s. He was awarded two State Prizes at once — for his screenplays for The Mystery of the Third Planet and Per Aspera Ad Astra, thus revealing at last the real man behind the pseudonym. Previously, few people had known that the mega-popular books were written by an Orientalist specializing in Burmese history.
He proved to be one of the few science fiction writers whom editors were not ashamed to publish and who were safe to publish. This was a massive virtue in an era in which the people in charge were guided by the slogan “Fiction is either anti-Soviet or crap” (said to Boris Strugatsky by a Leningrad filmmaker) or “I divide socially engaged science fiction into two kinds: the first I send to the trash bin, the second to the KGB” (related to Mozheiko by an editor at Molodaya Gvardiya, the only dedicated publishers of new Russian science fiction at the time.)
The film A Guest from the Future was window into another world for many Soviet children. Photo: Gorky Film Studio
In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was going through the so-called gun carriage races (a series of funerals for the country’s rapidly expiring leaders) and the unnamed Afghan war, and butter and meat rationing cards were introduced in some regions at the request of workers. Meanwhile, schoolchildren were being readied for nuclear war by taking them out of classes for practice runs to bomb shelters, which in most cases were nonexistent. And the cries of punks (who, according to Soviet propaganda, were exemplars of decadent petty-bourgeois ideology, and sometimes even neo-Nazis), “No future for me,” resounding from the other side of the Iron Curtain, resonated painfully in immature hearts, and they did not presage confidence in the future.
The Olympics proved a poor substitute for the communism promised by 1980. The Food Programme, scheduled to run until 1990, was little inspiration, and the world’s most advanced ideology could not offer any more attractive image of the future. But Kir Bulychev could and did.
The animator partly modeled the characters in Mystery of the Third Planet on her own relatives. Image: Soyuzmultfilm
He brought Alisa Seleznyova into every home and the dreams of man. Even more importantly, he became a major source of intellectual entertainment, a kind conversationalist and a sensitive shepherd for a vast army of Soviet teenagers. Bulychev’s stories and novels were printed in most children’s newspapers and magazines, which were widely available, unlike the books (especially those with illustrations by Yevgeny Migunov), and anyone could try his or her hand as a co-author. Mozheiko agreed to publish two of his novels in Pionerskaya Pravda in an interactive mode: the author took into account the suggestions and wishes sent by Young Pioneers by mail in each new installment.
Neither children, their parents, nor any normal person could resist the world described vividly and painstakingly in his books: a prosperous, bright and fascinating world with no ideology at all, a world in which a girl can fly not only to the Medusa system, but also abroad, dress beautifully and easily break century-old Olympic records, descend to the seabed in the arms of dolphins, fight with pirates, make friends with Baba Yaga, sit down for a chat with her teacher, know all languages and basically everything in the world, while being friends with whomever she wants. She is A Girl Nothing Can Happen To.
It was a world of private interests and emphatically personal growth rather than a collective existence based on the principle that the majority were always right. It was a world of tenderhearted people, where only pirates were evil and only robots were stupid.
It was a world in which one would like to live, like the Noon Universe of the Strugatskys, only tailored to younger and middle-aged children. “Let’s give the globe to children,” sang Sofia Rotaru, and nobody believed it, but what if we could do it? Everything was free, everything was cool, you didn’t have to die at all, and there were vending machines on the streets dispensing free ice cream and soda of all sorts. And there was no communism, capitalism and other historical materialisms, no Young Pioneers, Komsomol members, Communards and Soviet power, no giant monuments to Lenin looming over Sverdlovsk, as in the early Strugatsky novels. On the contrary, the Stalinist monument to Gogol on the eponymous boulevard was replaced by a pre-revolutionary one, and the boulevard itself was turned into a jungle complete with cypresses, bananas and monkeys.
Actress Elena Metyolkina (seated) starred in the film Per Aspera Ad Astra, based on a script by Kir Bulychev, and then appeared as Polina in Guest from the Future. Photo: RIA Novosti
Such an approach was tantamount to an “Attack!” command for conservative editors and their curators in the security services. But it was Molodaya Gvardiya whose internal reviewers noted that “We know what the author is hinting at when he writes that dark clouds were creeping over Red Square” and also pointed out that the author’s secret goal in “Cinderella’s White Dress” was to discredit Soviet cosmonauts. This review, according to Mozheiko, had been written by Alexander Kazantsev, a veteran Soviet science fiction writer and the prototype of Professor Vybegallo in the Strugatskys’ novel Monday Begins on Saturday. The requirements of the publishing house Detskaya Literatura (Children’s Literature) were milder, and the censorship’s scrutiny of it, more lax.
As a matter of fact, a well-fed future in which carefree children bounce between planets had long been a commonplace in Soviet science fiction, but the world was quite sterilely fantastic, the characters were cartoonish, and the action was forced in the works of Vitaly Gubarev, Vitaly Melentyev and Anatoly Moshkovsky.
As painted by Bulychev-Mozheiko, Alisa’s world is natural and authentic.
The girl with with the Carrollesque name made Wonderland beautiful and desirable.
Few people paid attention to the fact that in the original version of the song about the beautiful afar, as heard in Guest from the Future, the voice summons viewers not to “marvelous lands” (as in all subsequent reprints and collections of lyrics), but “to non-paradisal lands.”
In any case, the voice asks strictly.
An Aerial View of the Battle
Science fiction writer Kir Bulychev published serious historical books under his real name. Image: Molodaya Gvardiya
According to a popular legend, Kir Bulychev was born by accident. In 1967, the censors removed a translated story from the upcoming issue of the almanac Iskatel (Seeker), which already had a cover featuring a dinosaur in a glass jar. Replacing the cover would cost a hell of a lot of money and threatened the editors with the loss of their bonuses, so the young feature writer Mozheiko overnight came up with a sci-fi story on the given theme, which he signed with a pseudonym inspired by his wife’s name and his mother’s surname, in keeping with the habit of academics of not blowing their cover in in non-academic outings. The editors kept their bonuses, and world literature gained a new author.
The legend, of course, is false. By 1967, Mozheiko had already published four books, including a very popular one about the Burmese revolutionary Aung San, in The Lives of Remarkable People series. He has also published a couple of science fiction stories under the pseudonym Maung Sein Ji, passing them off as translations from the Burmese. Most importantly, he had published several stories about Alisa under the pseudonym Kirill Bulychev.
As a translator he had debuted a decade earlier, when he published a story by Arthur C. Clarke, which he translated with his childhood friend and future academic colleague Leonid Sedov. Initially, the pals had offered the publisher their translation of an unknown book about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole into a magical land. The young men had no clue about the book’s cult status beyond their one-sixth of the world nor about the existence of at least four previously published Russian translations. But at least one of the failed translators obviously remembered the heroine’s name.
In any case, Bulychev — initially, Kirill or “Kir.”, then just Kir — was born an experienced author with a steady hand, a broad outlook, a constructive mindset and a quite recognizable style. It was a style capacious and not simple even, but simplified at times, almost, to the point of outright silliness. But only almost.
The life of Soviet individuals was subject to a set of unwritten rules that changed markedly from department to department and from decade to decade. Mozheiko learnt them early —because there was no other way.
He was born into the family of a prosecutor from the Middle Volga region and the commandant of the Shlisselburg Fortress. However, by that time the fortress had been turned into a chemical warehouse. His mother had gone into the reserves before her maternity leave, and came to work as a rank-and-file staffer at a chemistry institute. His father soon took the post of Chief Arbitrator of the USSR (a position similar to the chair of the Supreme Arbitration Court), but by that time he had already left the family. Igor’s stepfather, who had fought through the entire conflict, was killed on the last day of the Second World War. Igor and his sister and mother survived bombings, evacuation, a return to Moscow and starvation.
He learnt to read late, fell in love with science fiction early and started writing it, went to a “special faculty for future intelligence officers,” which “was modestly called the translation department of the Institute for Foreign Languages,” and twice dodged KGB drafts (after graduation and as a correspondent for the APN news agency in Burma) and escaped into academia, which he combined with popular science journalism from the very beginning.
As a translator he worked on Zarubezhstroy construction projects in Burma, Ghana and Iraq. As a correspondent for the magazine Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) he journeyed to the most exotic fringes of the Soviet Union, and as a simultaneous interpreter he traveled in Europe and the USA. “Asimov greeted me with a handshake, Harlan Ellison chatted with me, I heard [Clifford] Simak speak, I argued (I was so brazen) with Frederik Pohl, I appeared on the radio with Lester del Rey, and I palled around with James Gunn, but most importantly I spent a whole day drinking with Gordon Dickson and Ben Bova, not to mention his gloriously beautiful wife, Barbara Benson,” recalled Mozheiko. This, of course, was not only unimaginable for most venerable Soviet writers, but also for the so-called Gertrudes — the Heroes of Socialist Labor [Geroi truda] who led the Writers’ Unions for decades.
Mozheiko himself never joined either the Writers’ Union or the Communist Party, flatly refusing the most persistent invitations. The explanation “I consider myself unworthy” did the trick, but just barely. When it didn’t work, Mozheiko changed jobs.
This, by the way, enabled him to keep his beard, since the recruiters from state security, or high-ranking guests like cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova insistently advised him to shave it off. (“As a correspondent for APN, I photographed cosmonauts for our newspaper. Valentina Tereshkova sent back one of the photos I had given to her with the following autograph: ‘Your wife should make you shave off your beard. After all, a person’s dignity is determined by their character, not by their personality.’ Our guest believed that personality was the nose and the ears.”)
Mozheiko was no longer allowed to travel abroad after 1970, but at least he did not go to jail with several of his acquaintances, passionate collectors like him who were handed lengthy prison sentences in the so-called Case of the Numismatists. (Dozens of lines in the indictment amounted to nothing more than “Defendant No. X criminally exchanged one coin for another.”)
And he continued to write.
The Academicians’ Reserve
The talking tiger in Two Tickets to India, a cartoon based on Kir Bulychev’s screenplay, has an unearthly charm. Image: Vitaly Karpov/RIA Novosti
Mozheiko’s reputation as a supremely tenderhearted storyteller was reinforced by his appearance and his work for Detskaya Literatura, but he was actually quite a tough-minded author. Bulychev’s first novel, The Last War, deals with the aftermath of a nuclear armageddon: even if it was set on another planet, such topics were not encouraged in Soviet literature. A couple of years earlier, a scene depicting a tactical nuclear strike was thrown out of the magazine version ofInhabited Island, by the Strugatskys, and the book edition was put on hold for two years. The release of The Last War in the same series (The Library of Adventure and Science Fiction) seemed to pop the cork, so Inhabited Island was also published, but both books waited twenty years to be reprinted in the capital.
A considerable portion of “Abduction of the Wizard” is given over to a quasi-documentary account of brilliant children killed in childhood by Nazis, pogromists and torpid relatives. In the prologue to the story “A Pet,” the touching rendezvous of a young couple ends with the words, “They were incinerated.” And the protagonist of the later story “A Plague on Your Field!”, whose son has died of an overdose, dooms a outsized segment of humanity to starvation in order to take revenge on the drugs mafia.
Bulychev was also quite decisive in interviews and in correspondence with dissatisfied readers: “I beg you: stop reading me. Spare your nerves.” He spared himself even less, however, and he repeatedly explained this in his final years. “I had no willpower, no courage, no determination to oppose the authorities. Yes, I was duplicitous. I wrote certain things for myself, for my friends. I’m not a battler by nature. Since I lived in our country, I went to my job at the institute and was certain that I would die under unfinished socialism.”
The phrase about his job is significant: censorship troubles occasionally threatened him not only on the literary front, but also on the academic one. A good illustration is the 1966 popular history book about the colonizers of Southeast Asia, With Cross and Musket, whose depth and unconventionality overwhelmed readers and amazed experts. Mozheiko wrote it in collaboration with Leonid Sedov and Vladimir Tyurin. Sedov, his old friend and now a prominent Khmerologist, resigned from the Institute of the Peoples of Asia after Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Tyurin, a specialist on Malaysia, was declared a defector and dismissed fifteen years later. (Subsequently, however, he returned safely and was reinstated to his post.) The book has never been reprinted.
But Mozheiko published many other scholarly and popular scholarly books, including those dealing not only with his main subject of study, the history of Myanmar.
It is time to mention the encyclopedia Nagrady (Honors; 1998) and the fact that Mozheiko spent the last ten years of his life as a member of the Presidential Commission on State Honors developing the country’s current system of state honors, based on the traditions of the Russian Empire.
Mozheiko’s fundamental study of piracy, In the Indian Ocean (later published as Pirates, Corsairs, Raiders) also deserves special mention, as well as the absolutely revolutionary monograph 1185, a cross-section of one year in world history, focused on events which the author considered crucial in many senses.
Reviewers noted with some bewilderment that individual people’s motives and feelings are far more interesting to the historian Mozheiko than historical processes and the movements of the masses, and even more so than quotations from the classic Marxist-Leninist authors (defiantly ignored even in a book published on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution).
The River Chronos
The animated film Alisa’s Birthday was produced in 2008, marking Alisa’s rebirth in the twenty-first century. Image: Cinema Panorama
The writer Bulychev declared his humanism with his trademark rigor. “There is nothing in literature but man,” he explained in an ancient interview (in 1980). Bulychev’s texts, which are chockablock with miracles, journeys through time and space, incursions of fairy tale into reality and vice versa, are populated by nothing but people, or rather, by what he identified as the typical triad of “man, society and time.” That is why his work is still massively reprinted and, more significantly, still massively read, along with the Strugatsky brothers and Vladislav Krapivin. Other stars of Soviet science fiction have not passed the test of time much less well.
Bulychev pointedly assigned himself on a lower shelf. “If God has not given me the talent of Tolstoy or the Strugatskys,” he said, “I am to some extent willing to compensate for this deficiency through hard work,” while also stipulating, “I can usually spare two months a year for science fiction.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reason for the stipulation, apparently, became less pressing. In any case, the author’s productivity increased manifold, if not by an order of magnitude.
According to his own estimates, Bulychev wrote a total of fifty volumes: a dozen were popular science books, another dozen were children’s science fiction, while the rest were science fiction for adults. Understandably, the most visible and talked about were the works in the Alisa Seleznyova series, almost fifty novellas, most of them pounded out in the post-perestroika years in frankly machine-gun mode. Only the first five or six of them are actively reissued nowadays, which is not surprising.
Puppet animations based on Kir Bulychev’s series about the town of Veliky Guslyar are less renowned than the drawn stories about Alisa. Photo: Kuibyshevtelefilm
Almost as popular is the series about Veliky Guslyar: a hundred stories and seven novellas, alternately ironic and mocking, about the inhabitants of a provincial town teeming with aliens, and rife with paranormal phenomena and outright devilry.
Fans of old-school science fiction love the Doctor Pavlish series, about a space doctor facing generally insoluble ethical dilemmas.
Bulychev himself appreciated the River Chronos series, which plays with the twists and turns of Russian history. The author always gravitated to such games: back in 1968, he wrote (with no hopes of publishing it) the story “Misfire ’67,” about reconstructors who accidentally cancel the October Revolution.
And yet Kir Bulychev remains in world literature and in the hearts of readers as a genius of the short story — psychological stories for adults about the impossibility of understanding someone else’s mind and feeling someone else’s love and the fierce necessity of it. These stories are told in the same stingy style, which does not distract from their initially unpretentious plots, which conclude quite unsophisticatedly. But they make you catch your breath for a moment, because you recognize them as familiar — as painful and akin and tenderhearted.
Few people call these texts their favorites and keep them at their fingertips for quick infusions of wisdom, but every few weeks, the story “Can I Ask Nina?” suddenly pops up in social networks, messengers, and private conversations, and like an avalanche, everyone starts asking each other, “Have you read ‘The Snow Maiden’? And ‘Professor Kozarin’s Crown’? And ‘Red Deer, White Deer?’”
The list goes on and on and on.
At the end of the Soviet era, Bulychev explained, “I write only what I find interesting. This is unforgivable from the point of view of a reader who loves science fiction of a certain style and school. But it isn’t a shortcoming to me.”
If you have been to Chronicles Bar[in downtown St. Petersburg], you have definitely seen the photos discussed in this film. In today’s session of “Screening the Real,” we are watching Leningrad 4, a documentary about Sergei Podgorkov and other champions of Leningrad’s unofficial photography scene during perestroika. Yuri Mikhailin spoke to the filmmaker, Dmitry Fetisov, about dramatic structure, time as a form and rhythm, and Soviet-era beer stalls.
“Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023 (in Russian with no subtitles)
My path to documentary filmmaking was a tortuous one. At school, I was interested in writing texts, and at the age of seventeen I decided to apply to the St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television (KiT) to study drama, but at the interview I was advised to go into documentary directing. At the time, Victor Kossakovsky was accepting students, but I didn’t go to study with him, I went to Tver (I’m from the Tver Region) and studied three years at the College of Culture, specializing in directing and theatrical acting. Then I went to study in Konstantin Lopushansky’s feature filmmaking program at KiT. I studied for a year, but them I decided to try my hand at documentary filmmaking again, although I didn’t really understand what it was.
I transferred to Vladislav Borisovich Vinogradov’s course, and I more or less made a go of it there. I guess I had found my master. It was the first time I saw examples of poetic documentary films with characters and dramatic structures that intrigued me. I also really liked Vladislav Borisovich’s work (I Return Your Portrait, A New Year at the End of the Century). I think that I have inherited to some extent his format, in which the films are based on interviews with the characters, and the themes have something to do with Leningrad culture.
Still from “Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023
My interest in photography stemmed from moving to St. Petersburg. I liked the texture of its central districts, the most banal things—palaces and , the difference between the Petrograd Side and Vasilievsky Island. And I was very interested in the movies made at Lenfilm Studios—Ilya Averbakh, the so-called Leningrad school, the perestroika-era pictures. This texture intrigued me. I came across the photographs of Boris Smelov, Leonid Bogdanov, and Boris Kudryakov. I became a big fan of theirs, and started looking for lesser-known photographers.
You could say that Leningrad 4 was born in 2011, when I went to a photo exhibition at the legendary Borey Gallery on Liteiny for the first time and saw Sergei Podgorkov’s work. I thought that I should make a movie about this man. I was very impressed by Ludmila Tabolina’s show at the Akhmatova Museum, as well as the exhibition on the Zerkalo photo club, from which many photographers had emerged.
Still from “Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023
In 2021, I decided to make a short film about Sergei Podgorkov. At the time, I had no idea that it would turn out to be a forty-minute movie. I wrote to Sergei on VKontakte, and he invited me to his place in Borovichi. If I were making the film now, I would probably add a video chronicle of the trip. Podgorkov showed us around the town, including the old railway station, and after filming we drank some good Novgorod moonshine with him to celebrate our acquaintance.
Many of the shots were made with Soviet gear—a Helios 40 telephoto lens. I bought it in a thrift store, and I successfully fitted this 1965-made lens to a Sony mirrorless camera. The Helios 40 handsomely blurs the edges and thus emphasizes the subject in the frame. It is my favorite lens.
After filming Podgorkov, I realized that the topic could be pursued further. I had always been interested in the Leningrad Rock Club, and so I decided to film Andrei “Willie” Usov, who was the staff photographer for the band Aquarium and did all the covers of their records, and was friends with Mike Naumenko.
Andrei “Willie” Usov, holding his iconic image of Boris Grebenshchikov and Mike Naumenko. Still from “Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023
The third character was the pictorialist Ludmila Tabolina. I appreciate this movement in photography. The next character was Alexander Kitaev. I liked the Kitaev’s powerful countenance, that of a bohemian. Petersburg photographer, and I decided that I would film him even before I got acquainted with his images myself.
Another character is Valery Valran. He is not a photographer, but a well-known artist in Petersburg, a popularizer of photography, a curator of photo exhibitions, and the first to turn [photos by Leningrad’s underground photographers] into a photo album: the book Leningrad Photo Underground appears at the beginning of the film. I decided to include it in the film to tell about this photography movement a little from the outside.
And finally, there was Sergei Korolyov. I filmed him, but during editing I realized that, unfortunately, a short subject about him did not fit into the film. I edited it separately and posted it on my “Blog Stall” which I dreamed up when blogging was the cool thing and where I publish stories related to cinema. This episode is called “The Photographer Korolyov”.
“The Photographer Koroylov,” Blog Stall, episode 26
How did I realize that these characters were enough? When I filmed them, I had an idea for the next film I might make: about photographers who are no longer alive, like Bogdanov and Kudryakov. And I decided that the filming was over.
The film took a long time to edit, almost a year. I realized that each photographer has a certain leitmotif. Sergei Podgorkov has a story connected with beer stalls (although he does not emphasize it himself), Andrei Usov has rock, Ludmila Tabolina has the white nights, and Kitaev has [Petersburg’s] Kolomna neighborhood.
Still from “Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023
To separate the interviews and photos, I decided to use a film footage frame. Some of my colleagues think that this is visual bad form, but for me it seems logical: conversations with photographers are the present day, while their photos are the past, and the footage works as a transition between them.
Sometimes I wanted to connect the times. The chapter “Conversations at Beer Stalls” features music by contemporary jazz-noir artist Bebopovsky and the Orkestry Podyezdov. I had enjoyed him for a long time. I met the artist, and the opportunity to use his music in the film presented itself.
While I was editing, I did a photo shoot on black and white film for an acquaintance. I was supposed to make shots like in the scene in Godard’s movie Le petit soldat in which the main character takes a picture of a young woman. For this photo shoot, my friend bought a Leningrad 4 light meter on Avito. I realized that I would call the film that, because the main character is late Soviet Leningrad, and there are four photographers in it. Then I decided that I would divide the movie into four parts. Besides, perhaps these photographers possibly also used the Leningrad 4, as it was one of the most popular exposure meters of its time.
It was later that Sonia Minovskaya, my co-director and assistant on the movie, noticed that in some mythologies the nuumber four is the number of decay, death, and demised. And indeed, in each chapter something fades away or dies. In the first one, the Leningrad white nights are buried, while in the second, Mike Naumenko and a whole erа exits the stage. Then we see the end of the Summer Garden in its historical guise, and in the final chapter, where the rallies in the squares are shown, we see a country disintegrating. I didn’t think about this symbolism when I was making the film. I did it intuitively.
Photographer Alexander Kitaev. Still from “Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023
I understand that the editing is finished when a special, unique time emerges in a film. Time is a rhythmic form to me. A movie is ready to go when it suits me rhythmically. My films are calm, lyrical, and meditative. I probably like the documentaries of Wim Wenders for a reason.
Leningrad 4 was screened at the Arctic Open Festival in Arkhangelsk, where it got a super-warm reception; at the Salt of the Earth Festival in Samara; and in the online program at Artdocfest.
At one of the premiere screenings at the Rosphoto Museum, Sergei Podgorkov, with his usual irony, criticized the film for being too sentimental about an era that, in his opinion, is not worth the nostalgia. I did not put nostalgia in the movie, especially nostalgia for the Soviet Union, which I do not have. Andrei Usov noted that the films uses images from a time when the city was more interesting texturally for photographers. Nowadays, Petersburg is quite touristy, shiny and bright. He also admitted that the film left him with a heavy feeling. He and Naumenko had a great, strong friendship, and he still takes his departure quite personally.
Still from “Leningrad 4,” Dmitry Fetisov, 2023. Photo by Sergei Podgorkov
Another character in the movie, Svetlana, attended the screening at the bar WÖD. In the final scene, we see a photo of her standing on the roof of a building opposite the Mariinsky Palace during the attempted coup in August 1991 and looking into the lens—as if that era were upon us today. This is a famous photo by Sergei Podgorkov. Recently, Sergei found Svetlana through the internet and invited her to the screening. And now, thirty-three years later, she saw herself on the screen and recounted how the picture was taken. Podgorkov had run out of film, but Svetlana was also an amateur photographer, so she lent him her own camera, and he photographed her.
Recently, I went to Chronicles Bar on Nekrasov Street and saw Podgorkov’s photos there. It was amazing. It is a young people’s bar, and yet the walls are adorned with photos of Soviet-era beer stalls, so it is as if two eras were connected through Podgorkov’s photographs.
Rusebo is Georgian for “Russians” in the vocative case. The word is chanted in Tbilisi by demonstrators protesting against the Georgian government’s draft law on “Transparency of Foreign Influence.” The draft law is called the “Russian law” because it is similar to the Russian law on so-called foreign agents, targeting organizations that receive funding from abroad.
In 2023, large-scale protests in Georgia stopped the law from being passed, but now the government is trying to pass it again in order, according to the opposition, to demonstrate loyalty to Russia and distance itself from the European Union.
The chant rusebo! is directed at the police officers dispersing the protests and, more generally, at the Georgian authorities, which the opposition labels pro-Russian. However, the word rusebo is also taken personally by many Russian emigrants who fled to Georgia after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They include persecuted political activists, men fearing mobilization, and ordinary people who disagree with Putin’s politics. The attitude of Georgians toward them is wary and often outright negative, simply because they are from Russia. As one of the emigrants puts it, “Tough people, they resist, I wish they could be like that in Russia too. But I also feel a little bit on the other side. They shout rusebo—that’s literally me.”
Russian emigrants amidst the protests in Georgia is the subject of Rusebo!, a film by Yulia Vishnevetskaya.
Yulia Vishnevetskaya, “Rusebo! Russian Emigrants Amidst the Protests in Georgia” (2024; in Russian, English and Georgian; no subtitles)
An argument between a Georgian activist and a Russian emigrant
— I was walking down the street, and a Russian was walking towards me. I didn’t know whether tomorrow he would change into a Russian uniform and shoot at me. The people who have no money but who had the opportunity to settle down here in some way I understand very well. But those who could go anywhere in the world because they had money, why did they come here too? They eat khinkali, it’s all they talk about. They post pictures on Facebook of themselves swanning around here, but I don’t understand why they left Russia. Just to tag along?
— Would you just leave your home like that and run away?
— No. The only thing I do know is that running away won’t change anything.
— You think you can change anything by not running away?
— Well, they’d be put in prison.
— So, it’s okay to “emigrate” to a place where people are raped with mops? Wouldn’t that scare you?
— I understand perfectly well. I feel sorry for the people who had to leave their homes, their beloved dachas, and so on. But it doesn’t change my attitude at all. I would not have run off to any country. Maybe I would have sent my son away so that he would not be mobilized, but I would have stayed and continued to fight.
“Russian is terrible.” A still from the film “Rusebo!”
— Do you hold it against us that we ran away?
— Navalny was not afraid: he went back and did the right thing, despite everything that happened afterwards. I respected him after he came back: he knew that he would be imprisoned and killed, but he went back anyway. I’m not encouraging anyone to go back and die in prison, but the man did the right thing. That’s what justified him in my eyes.
— I care more about a living person than symbolic ones….
— A living person who can’t do anything?
— Yes, as opposed to a dead man who wanted to do something. I’m not willing to pay with lives.
— And I’m willing to pay with my life for my freedom.
— You don’t understand how infuriating it is. When you realize that there is Putin, who is ten times stronger than you, who can do anything to you, when people you respect, whom you know perfectly well, are in prison, dying there, and then you come to Georgia and are told, “You are trying badly, we want you to win, but you somehow don’t want it badly enough.” I just don’t understand how you can seriously say this. I am quite offended that you say it.
— You occupied twenty percent of Georgia, your country occupied us.
— I am not responsible for my country.
— But we are responsible for our country, that’s the difference. Why do you take offense at me for complaining? You’ve been letting it happen for three hundred years—all of you, there are many of you and not enough of us. And for three hundred years you’ve been allowing it to happen and occupying us. You speak for everyone now. We have a shitty government, we’ve been sitting in shit for twelve years and we’re fighting our government. Take offense at your fellow Russians, not at me. I’m not at war with you, I’m at war with our regime and your regime. Everything was taken away from us, they took away the place where I had been going since I was a child. I cried, I stood and sobbed, there were Russians standing there with machine guns. And this is my life, this is how we have been living for so many years.
— Everything was taken away from us too, can you understand that?
— No, I can’t. Nothing was taken from you. Did you have a protest rally when we were bombed in 2008, when they took away more Georgian territory? This building shook because a bomb was dropped nearby. I walked around for three months, looking up at the sky to see if any airplanes were flying by. It was a fright. So I understand Ukrainians perfectly well. We will win.
— No.
— Why won’t we win?
— Because you’re outnumbered.
— We are few but we are strong.
— It is just important that there is a moment when you have to start believing.
Monologues of Georgians and Russians
— I had a friend from Russia. We would meet at international conferences. He was a young Russian, very interesting, very fond of Georgia and Georgians. We became friends, and one day, right after the war in 2008, he and I met. He hadn’t written anything to me during the war, which seemed crazy to me. He never once asked how we were doing. And so we met, and I expected him to say something, but he didn’t say anything. So I told him I was very upset about it. And he said, “Oh, come on! Did those few little firecrackers make you scared?” That reinforced my feelings about Russia. If an ordinary, normal, good Russian has these feelings about a war that was terrible, that took people’s lives and people’s homes and divided their lands, and says, “You were scared of a couple of firecrackers,” I thought that it must be true that everyone in Russia thinks that way. Before 2008, my university friends still went to Russia to get their residency training. But if someone went after 2008, everyone said, “What? What are you doing?” That was really a turning point.
I was anti-Russian from the age of eight when I learned that members of my family had been murdered in a single night in 1924. My parents joined the anti-Soviet movement in the 1980s. In 2008, some of my friends went off to fight against the Russians. We have a lot of reasons to hold grudges. But I think this war, which brought so many anti-Putin Russians to Georgia, has shown a different side of Russia. I thought, Okay, these people can bring us know-how and knowledge of how to fight Putin. They came here to survive. I see Russians in Tbilisi, some of them have even opened their own establishments on my street, and if the fact that I buy a cup of coffee from them will help defeat Putin, and if they are here without guns, not killing Ukrainians, then I support that.
— I lived most of my life in Nizhny Novgorod, but the last ten years I lived in Petersburg. I was a carpenter, a joiner: I built ships and did all sorts of renovations. I was involved in the anarchist, anti-fascist and environmentalist movements. Then it all became about helping political prisoners. The rumors that the borders would be closed was the last straw: I realized that I had to move while I had the chance. I hoped that the regime would not withstand such a thing, that there would be mass strikes and so on. No way.
The unemployment here [in Georgia] is serious, of course. There is little purchasing power. The rates for all work are lower than in Russia. While an IT guy can tuck his laptop under his arm and throw everything he has into crypto, I have a workshop and machines. I’m not a little boy anymore: you’ll break down drilling all your life. You can’t go back. If you’ve made that choice, go on pivoting as you wish.
With its values—its love of freedom, love of nature, love of history, and love of human rights—Georgia has everything I need, except that “I am part of the power which forever wills good and forever works evil.”* Georgians have the sense that there is a mighty power on their doorstep and that it is hostile. Accordingly, you can be seen as part of this danger, even amongst those Georgians who are friendly to Russians. I have local friends here who treat me normally: there is nothing imperialist about you, they say to me. But you can’t expect to fit in in a country that has been experiencing Russian aggression essentially nonstop for better or worse since it gained independence. Some Russians intend to stay here, but I don’t think it will be particularly possible.
But we should support the people protesting for their freedom if only out of gratitude to this country that they put up with us here. Anarchists basically have this principle: we are always on the side of the oppressed and against the oppressors. I do not wish any country to suffer the same fate as Russia. I do not want the same idiotic regime to be established here. No one has any use for it, neither the Georgians nor us.
* An inversion of the quotation from Goethe’s Faust that serves as the epigraph to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita: “I am part of the power which forever wills evil and forever works good.”
Source: “A life for freedom’: Russian emigrants amidst the protests in Georgia,” Radio Svoboda, 12 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. The film also features a former auditor from Rostov who moved to Tbilisi after the war started and now works as a cleaner, but her monologue wasn’t included in this online article. I have translated the Georgian doctor’s monologue as reproduced here in Russian, although her original remarks, made in English, are nearly entirely audible through the Russian overdub.
The trailer to A Shaman’s Tale (Beata Bashkirova & Mikhail Bashkirov, 2024). Thanks to Pavel Sulyandziga for the heads-up
A Shaman’s Tale
A modern-day shaman sets out across Siberia to Moscow on a protest march and is gradually joined by others. How will the Russian authorities react?
Alexander Gabyshev, a shaman from Yakutia in the Russian Far East, has a revelation: God has chosen him to be a crusader, whose role is to exorcise a demon – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – from the Kremlin. He’s willing to sacrifice his life to fulfil this task, which will lead to a new and bright future for Russia. Alexander’s walking pilgrimage captures the attention of many people as well as the police. He discusses his ambitious plan with passers-by in remote parts of Siberia and with lorry drivers travelling on the endless roads. His 8,000 km journey offers a mosaic of current pro- and anti-Putin opinions, and highlights the social instability in both the eastern and the western parts of Russia.
Five years ago, in the spring of 2019, Alexander Gabyshev, who calls himself a warrior shaman, set out on foot from Yakutsk to Moscow. When he arrived in the Russian capital, he wanted to perform a ritual to exorcise Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. Along the way he was joined by kindred spirits, and he held numerous protest rallies.
The shaman’s trek was cut short: Gabyshev was detained on the border of Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region and charged with “calling for extremism.” In October 2021, a court ordered him to undergo compulsory treatment at a special psychiatric hospital.
The Memorial Human Rights Centre placed Gabyshev on its list of political prisoners, and Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. Despite an international campaign in his defense, the shaman remains in a psychiatric hospital.
The documentary film A Shaman’s Tale details Alexander Gabyshev’s plight. It was made by documentary filmmaker Beata Bashkirova (née Bubenets) and her husband, playwright Mikhail Bashkirov, who live in France. Bashkirova joined Alexander Gabyshev on his trek, while Mikhail Bashkirov wrote a play about the shaman. Performances of the play at Moscow’s Theatre.doc were disrupted by Putinists. This was not Bashkirova’s first clash with ultra-patriots: in 2017, screenings of her documentary film Flight of the Bullet, about the soldiers of the Ukrainian Aidar Battalion, fighting in Donbas, were disrupted in the same way.
This conversation with Beata Bashkirova for the Radio Svoboda programme “Cultural Diary” was recorded after the film’s premiere at the One World International Film Festival in Prague.
Beata, how did you meet the shaman Gabyshev?
I first heard about the shaman in March 2019, when he had just set off on his journey. At that time he was not yet known throughout Russia, but he was beginning to gain popularity in Yakutia and in the Amur Region. He initially gained popularity thanks to truckers: they shot videos [of him] and posted them on their own network, then on YouTube. When I went to Yakutia in the spring to look for an idea for a film, my friends sent me videos of the shaman, recommending him as my future protagonist. But I decided to film him only in June. That was when Vlad Ketkovich, an independent documentary film producer, contacted me. He had made many political films and not only offered to be my producer, but also contributed his own money to my project. We dreamed of making a road movie about the shaman, of filming for two years on the roads of Russia. It was a beautiful idea, which unfortunately didn’t come to pass, because it ended up being film about the political crackdown. In recent years, nearly all films from Russia are about that.
Did you become friends with the shaman?
Yes, we developed a very good relationship. When we were filming in Yakutsk, we were probably among the people closest to him.
He didn’t mind you filming?
He welcomed us filming: he wanted more people and different people to talk about him, to spread his ideas. He was accompanied by a lot of bloggers, and journalists were heavily filming him. Although in the beginning he didn’t let us in so easily. The distrust was not on his part, but on the part of his entourage. They were wary of us, but later everything was fine.
Gabyshev and his squad marching toward Moscow
The shaman is certainly a charming man. But you can’t say that about some of the people in his entourage, judging by your film. Colourful personalities, I guess, always attract strange people, to put it mildly.
Yes, he had a very motley entourage, and he realised it himself. He gave everyone who joined him fabulous nicknames. He called his first two companions Raven and Angel. One was a good, happy man of the new world (the shaman divided the world into the new world and the old world), while other was a man of the old world, a dark character; he had been in prison before, he was this maverick. Raven had many conflicts with other members of the squad. The shaman told me often that yes, there are very different people walking with me, but this is Russia, you have to accept them as they are. Yes, they are different, everyone has their own peculiarities, not all of them are the nicest people in the world, but at the same time they are not the most terrible evil, which they all oppose.
In the film, Gabyshev tries to explain to a Japanese journalist how he became a shaman. Why did he decide to go to Moscow and exorcise the demon Putin?
The poster for the film “A Shaman’s Tale”
He studied at university and served in the army: he had an ordinary life. Then he got married, but his wife was quite ill and died, and that was a huge blow to him. For some time he went to live in the woods: he lived there for several years. Naturally, he knew who Putin was, but he was not interested in politics. As he says, at some point he heard the voice of God telling him that Putin was a demon and you should go and exorcise him from the Kremlin. It was a very clear thought, a realisation that this was his mission. It didn’t come to him in 2019, when he set out, but much earlier. He started preparing years before his trek, but he prepared in secret; he didn’t tell anyone that he had this mission. He practised martial arts — not to fight, but for the spiritual benefits.
And for quite a long time he travelled unhindered, and the authorities didn’t immediately realise what was happening?
Yes, in fact, not many people took it seriously at first: everyone thought it was a joke. But then people started joining him. A few months later, when we were walking with him, there were thirty people with him, and new people were joining every day. His squad grew quite quickly. Two theories as to why he was stopped. The first is that after a few months there would have been hundreds of people walking with him, and that would have been a political threat. But the second theory is that the authorities were afraid of his mystical power. The closer he got to Moscow, the worse things went for Putin, the more protests kicked off. The protests in Belarus began around the same time. Putin was allegedly having health problems — again this is a matter of rumor. So, perhaps, the shaman has now been exiled to the farthest point from Moscow, not even to Yakutsk, but even farther away. That is, as he got closer to Moscow, the Russian authorities lost their grip on things.
Yes, they say there is a lot of superstition in the Kremlin. And in your film, the lawyer Pryanishnikov also explains that the authorities were afraid of the shaman’s mystical power.
That the authorities are superstitious is, of course, a hypothesis — Putin doesn’t perform rituals for us, and there are a lot of myths around this. It is known that one of his closest associates, Shoigu, is a Tuvan and he practices shamanism. So it is quite possible. My Yakutian acquaintances often said that an acquaintance of their acquaintance performed rituals for Putin himself. But, of course, this is all very secret and impossible to prove. I would not claim that Putin performs shamanistic rituals.
Did you have the feeling that Gabyshev actually has supernatural powers?
The first time was in 2020. When the year 2020 came, the shaman kept saying: guys, new times have come, everything will be different now, this year the worldview of all people on the planet will change. And in 2020 there was a pandemic, and mankind did indeed transit into another reality. His words proved prophetic.
Filmmaker Beata Bashkirova
People who met Rasputin spoke of his incredible magnetism. They say the same thing about many prophets and magicians. Did you feel something similar when you conversed with Gabyshev?
He is very kind and very open, and there were people in his entourage who believed in his mystical power. I am a rather skeptical person in this sense, but still I noticed a good energy emanating from him.
Did people in his entourage regard him as a prophet, as a saint?
Yes, of course, there were people in his entourage who believed primarily in his mystical power. The Moscow crowd, the opposition-minded liberal intelligentsia, basically sympathised with him, but regarded him ironically. If we’re not talking about Moscow, but about the rest of Russia, I had impression that people believed in his mystical power.
When you presented the film in Prague, you compared Gabyshev with Navalny. This is a quite unusual comparison: in Moscow, few people would agree that these people are cut from the same cloth. Why do you think it is possible to put their names in the same sentence?
At the time, it had been forty days since Navalny’s death. Navalny in his last years seemed like a loner who was fighting the system. Our protagonist is also a loner who fights the system. In this way, I think, they are similar.
Were you present at the moment when his journey to Moscow was finally thwarted?
That was 19 September, and I was not with him on that day. Eyewitnesses say it happened at night, and very quickly. For the first few days nobody knew where he was; there were various rumours. Then it transpired that he was in Yakutsk. We met almost immediately, and he was in pretty good spirits despite what had happened.
Why did they decide to permanently isolate him?
He was going to set out again in the spring. Members of his squad had come to see him. I don’t know whether that’s why they decided to shut him down permanently.
Maybe it was the New York Times article, the attention from the West?
Maybe, but that was in September. The first time he was detained, in the spring of 2020, he was taken away from his home, but then he was released. They finally decided to close him down in early 2021.
The Shaman in the Theatre.doc production of A Shaman’s Tale
In the film, you show excerpts from a performance about the shaman at Theatre.doc. Did your husband direct this production based on his own play?
Yes, my husband wrote the play, and he and I staged it together. It was an experimental work. We decided to make a puppet show, a fairy tale, because the shaman conceived his own story as a fairy tale: he gave fairy tale names to all the folks who accompanied him, and he gave Putin a fairy tale name. That was the reason for our fairy-tale production, which did not last long, because on opening day pro-Kremlin provocateurs came and tried to disrupt it. Every time [the play was performed], they put obstacles in the way: they would come in a big group, stage a performance in front of the theatre, call the police, and start shouting from the auditorium during the performance. The owner of the premises where Theatre.doc was located became afraid that he would face consequences nd broke his lease with the theatre. It became apparent that we wouldn’t be able to perform the play.
Beata, when did you leave Russia?
We left in late March 2022.
And it was only in France that you decided to edit the film?
The film had been in post-production while we were still in Russia. The shaman predicted that he had to reach Putin in 2021, because otherwise there would be a catastrophe not only for Russia but for the whole world. Principal filming wrapped in early 2020, but we realised we had to wait. We were editing the film and discussing it with the producers. The producers suggested releasing the film in 2020, when it became clear that the shaman would not be allowed to go [to Moscow], but we understood that the story was not finished: the drama had already been defined by the shaman himself, and we would have to wait until 2022. The events that followed affected how I saw the story; I started to look at it differently, if we’re talking about the mystical aspects. The shaman had been right: he was talking about war. He was saying that there would be a physical war, not a spiritual war, if he wasn’t allowed to reach Moscow. It’s amazing that somehow he knew all the dates.
Did he have a premonition there would be a war in 2022?
He spoke about the fact that mankind, Russia had two ways to evolve. The first way was the good way, the happy way. If he were allowed to reach the Kremlin, Putin would simply resign peacefully, the regime in Russia would change, and then people would move to a new level. If they didn’t let him [reach the Kremlin], a dark path would ensue, the path of warriors, and that meant war. He didn’t say that there would be a war between Russia and Ukraine. He said that there would be a war and only by military means would it be possible to overthrow Putin.
He’s been transferred from one hospital to another several times. What is happening to him now?
He is in a psycho-neurological clinic in the Maritime Territory (Primorsky Krai). Since this system has several levels, the lawyer is trying to ensure he is transferred to Yakutsk, where he can be released through the court. A legal fight is now underway that is aimed at achieving his release step by step.
At first they held him in a high-security facility and tried to “treat” him with haloperidol?
At the very beginning, in Yakutsk, he was given harsh drugs that did have a negative effect on him. Things in the Maritime Territory are now easier: they give him medication, but it’s not so heavy.
You wrote that he knew about the film’s premiere in Prague and conveyed his greetings to the audience. Are you able to correspond with him?
Yes, we communicate through intermediaries; the lawyer Pryanishnikov has the most access to him. His friends talk to him on the telephone from time to time: he is able to call once a week.
What’s his condition? Haloperidol and other serious drugs can be very harmful to a person’s health.
Fortunately, they are not injecting him with these drugs now. He always tries to be in a cheerful mood. You can write him a letter or send him a card. He is very much encouraged by the thought that people remember him. He is, of course, happy that the film has come out because it is a continuation of the message he preached. His emotional state is also very much affected by whether his mission can be completed.
For several years he had many supporters who were will to march with him to Moscow. Did this circle disperse or has the core group remained intact?
We can say that the core has been preserved. For example, Viktor Yegorov (aka Father Frost), who makes videos (you can watch them on YouTube), is constantly in touch with him. Other Yakutian friends of his also continue to support him. There were those who walked with him, and those he met on the road, but there was also the rest of Russia, which did not walk with him, but followed him via YouTube. People still even ask me about him, and so I feel like there are a lot of people who remember him and support him.
“Father Frost from the Shaman’s Squad Appeals to Vladimir Putin,” 25 September 2019 (in Russian; no subtitles)
Did you ever suspect that he might be mentally unwell?
No, never. He’s a fairly well-educated man, he has a broad outlook, and he is quite self-deprecating. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I haven’t detected any mental abnormalities in him. I much more often encounter people on the streets who are crazier looking than he is.
It is quite difficult to make films on Russian topics nowadays: Russian directors are viewed with suspicion in Europe because they are seen as representatives of an aggressor state. Was it complicated for you to make this film?
Yes, it was indeed difficult to make the film because of the tendency towards boycotting. I think that this boycott helps Russian propaganda first of all, because the voices of independent, opposition filmmakers are not heard, but the voices of the propagandists, who cannot be influenced by this boycott, are heard. Consequently, propaganda wins out in the information sphere. The boycott of Russian culture works in favour of Russian propaganda, it seems to me.
Will Russian viewers be able to see your film?
We’re in the festivals stage of screening now. The film will later be shown on Current Time, but it’s hard to say when yet. Current Time broadcasts to a Russophone audience, and so one will be able to watch the film on the internet in Russia.
