Hi! My name is Sveta Nagaeva. Today is World Down Syndrome Day, and I have drawn a short comic strip for you.
(upper left panel): “A Conversation in the Subway” (upper right): “Look! There’s (a) Down! (middle): “Aargh!” (lower left): “Yes, it is I, John Down.” (lower right): “John Langdon Haydon Down.” “And I am Sveta Nagaeva, and this is…” “Timur!!!”
My son Timur has Down syndrome. This is no secret to anyone, especially for those who see him in person or in a photo. You can’t hide Down syndrome.
Very often Timur is identified precisely in terms of this syndrome — not as Timur, who likes drawing, pasta and ice cream. Naturally, Down syndrome is a part of our life, because Timur has it. But Timur is just a human being first of all, my favorite person. It’s a shame when people call him “(a) Down.” It sounds like an insult, and usually people pronounce the word with this strange intonation.
When Timur and I ride the subway, we usually draw. People often look askance at us, because Timur speaks quite unintelligibly for his age. I’m already used to the sidelong glances, but I would rather not get used to them.
I am an animated film director — I make cartoons — and I draw pictures for books and write texts. I have published several children’s books, including ChromoSonya, Forever?, Poisoned Words, BO Is for Lunch Today: How Tolya Ate Cougar, Matics, Valentina’s Dream, The Tail Is What Counts, and Pasha the Turtle Goes to School.
I would be glad if from now on when you say “Down” you would remember Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, who lived in England in the nineteenth century and was the first to describe the genetic condition known today as Down syndrome.
P.S. The doctor’s surname is spelled the same as the English word “down” (meaning, “from a higher to a lower point”) resulting in the popular misconception that Down syndrome is mental retardation. In fact, the syndrome was named that in 1965 solely in honor of the doctor, with no further connotations.
Thank you for reading!
Sveta Nagaeva, filmmaker and artist
Source: Takie Dela emailed newsletter, 21 March 2023, as replicated here. Translated by Thomas H. Campbell
Academic freedom in the Putinist dictatorship is the freedom to criticize the enemy:
MARCH 17, 2020 | The media center at the Alexandrinsky Theater’s New Stage (Fontanka Embankment, 49A, St. Petersburg) will host the first event in a series of conversations between the outstanding scholars of our time, on the occasion of the European University in St. Petersburg’s 25th birthday. A conversation between historical sociologist and NYU Abu Dhabi professor Georgi Derlugian and Russian international affairs journalist, political scientist, and editor-in-chief of the magazine Russia in Global Politics Fyodor Lukyanov will open the series of encounter. The topic of their discussion is “TRUMP AND HIS DOCTRINE: HOW THE US PRESIDENT TREATS THE WORLD ORDER WITH SHOCK THERAPY.”
The freedom to imagine that a dictatorship is actually a hipster’s paradise:
MARCH 14, 2023 | The Open Living Room at the Lermontov Library (Liteiny Prospect., 17–19) will host a lecture by Yevgenia Kuziner, a graduate student at the HSE Center for Youth Studies, “POINT OF ATTRACTION: HOW, BY WHOM AND FOR WHOM ARE CREATIVE SPACES CREATED IN THE CITY?” | Starts at 6:30 p.m. | Registration required | Detailed information at https://otkrytaya-gostinaya.timepad.ru/event/2331631/
And the freedom to pretend that real sociology is possible in dictatorships:
APRIL 13, 2023 is the deadline to apply to the 19th Russian-Chinese Sociological Conference, “CONTEMPORARY CITIES AND SOCIAL GOVERNANCE IN RUSSIA AND CHINA,” which will take place April 21–22, 2023. The conference will be held in an online format and hosted by St. Petersburg State University, Russia. The languages of the conference are Russian, Chinese and English. Detailed information at https://soc.spbu.ru/images/nauka/inffo-letter_21-22.04.2023_3.pdf
Source: Excerpts from the emailed newsletter of the Center for Independent Sociological Research (CISR) in St. Petersburg, recently revamped as “The MILIEU” [sic], March 2020 and March 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
The Forty-First is a completely original production.
It is chockablock with irony and actorly improvisation.
There will be loads of laughter, convulsive choking back of tears, fond embraces, and love gushing down the throat during this play. As it wafts into the theater’s low flies, the powerful actorly energy is instantly transmitted to the audience.
This is a restoration of Vlad Furman’s legendary production The Forty-First, based on the novel [sic] of the same name by Boris Lavrenyov.
The love story of the Red Army sniper Maria Basova (aka Maryutka), picking off “enemies” one by one (the thirty-first, the thirty-second… the forty-first!), and the White Army officer Govorukha-Otrok (who was to be her forty-first victim, but survives) is known to audiences from Grigory Chukhrai’s eponymous film version, starring Izolda Izvitskaya and Oleg Strizhenov.
Vlad Furman staged The Forty-First at the Mironov Theater in 2000. It was one of the best theatrical productions in Petersburg, and its director and performers were nominated for Petersburg’s highest theatrical honor, the Golden Spotlight.
Boris Lavrenyov’s story is incredibly timely today.
Love is severely tested by the Civil War and differences in political views.
A new generation of actors takes to the stage in this new production of The Forty-First.
Twenty years later, the production features very young artists who have been working with Vlad Furman for several years in stagings of The Merchant of Venice and Medea. The older generation of artists at the Andrei Mironov Theater joins them in this production.
Source: Bileter.ru. Still from the play The Forty-First courtesy of the Andrei Mironov Theater (St. Petersburg). Translated by the Russian Reader
In March 1942, Pierre Matisse, an art dealer and son of the artist Henri Matisse, opened the show Artists in Exile at his gallery in New York’s Fuller Building. It featured one work each by fourteen artists who had fled the rising tide of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe. Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, André Breton , Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipschitz, Ossip Zadkine, and the other men (not a single woman was shown at exhibition) came from different countries and strata of society and represented different modernist trends in art: Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, and De Stijl. Since the late 1930s, these trends had been vilified and condemned, and in many cases their works had been destroyed by the Nazis as so-called degenerate art.
Many of these artists were aided by art dealers and patrons such as Pierre Matisse, and collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim. Museums also played a vital role in helping artists and their immediate families. The first director of the Museum of Modern Art Alfred Barr and his wife, the art historian Margaret Scolari Barr, worked with the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). The artistic community, founded as it was on humanist principles and nonviolence, generally did what it should have done: it sought to render mutual aid and fight evil.
[These two opening paragraphs seem to have been plagiarized, in translation, from this article, originally published on the website of the WWII National Museum in New Orleans, to which I have already linked above — TRR.]
Eighty-one years later, the director of the seemingly progressive Multimedia Art Museum, Olga Sviblova, appeared at the Knowledge Society Awards in the Kremlin — along with Yana Churikova, Fyodor Bondarchuk, and Polina Gagarina. Immediately after the war started, a year ago, the Garage Museum issued a high-profile essentially anti-war statement and halted all exhibitions. It could have served as an example and an impetus for other institutions to stop the widespread normalization of the war, but this has not happened. A year later, we find that museum’s statement has itself disappeared* from all official sources.
*UPD: We were mistaken. The announcement on the suspension of exhibitions remains on the museum’s website, but doesn’t appear on the main page anymore. The museum also currently shows archive-based artists projects.
Alas, we can safely say that the art community in Russia passively supports the war, living it up in the public space at venues somehow associated with contemporary art. Why is this happening? Shouldn’t the artistic community be grounded in humanist principles and nonviolence? How did it happen that (with rare exceptions) the Russian art scene, which survives mainly on government money but aspires to be part of the global community, has been silent in the midst of war? Juliet Sarkisyan, an art critic who blogs at the Telegram channel Juliet has a gun, answers these questions.
Since the war’s outbreak members of the culture community have been leaving Russia because they do not agree with the state’s current repressive and imperialist policies. They do not see any prospects here at home: they do not want to merge with the masses and have anything to do with the official agenda. They generally leave for the opportunity to speak freely and make art. But some do not see the point in producing the latter at all (at least while the war is going on), since this can free up resources and time for helping Ukrainians, as well as showing solidarity through their silence.
A narrow stratum of the artistic community underwent a reorientation — instead of the usual artistic practices, they have preferred to engage in activism, and art criticism became homogeneous. Some continue to do it anonymously in Russia, while others have been forced to leave the Russian Federation for this reason (and many others). In any case, for reasons of security, I cannot give anyone’s surnames and first names as examples. The other part of the artistic community — apparently, the prevailing one — continues to engage in the production of art, come hell or high water, within Russia’s current system. Putin recently issued a decree on the “Fundamentals of State Cultural Policy,” which is designed to reaffirm traditional values and introduce censorship for cultural events. I would like to take the liberty to criticize cultural workers (opposed to the war) who blindly continue their artistic endeavor inside Russia, while also taking into account all the difficulties and, as it were, the impossibility of choice they face. But first we need to figure out who cultural figures are and what their mission is.
What exactly is this “artistic community” face to face with this war? Are they intellectuals or an intelligentsia? In the modern use of the terms “intelligentsia” and “intellectuals,” there are two markedly pronounced trends. The first is typified by the synonymous use of terms, implying, in fact, the merging of the concepts. The second trend involves preserving and consistently distinguishing both the terminology and the concepts themselves.
Michel Foucault identifies intellectuals “in the political, not the sociological sense of the word, in other words the person who utilizes his knowledge, his competence and his relation to truth in the field of political struggles.” [This passage is not in quotation marks in the original article, although it is a direct quotation.] In the first part of the book Intellectuals and Power [a three-volume 2002 Russian-language compendium of his articles and interviews] Foucault writes: “What we call today ‘the intellectual’ […] was, I think, an offspring of the jurist, or at any rate of the man who invoked the universality of a just law, if necessary against the legal professions themselves (Voltaire, in France, is the prototype of such intellectuals). […] [T]he intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of capitalism or ‘organic’ intellectual of the proletariat); that of his conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory, the political and economic demands to which he submits or against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.); lastly, the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies” [Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (1980), pp. 128–132].
Antonio Gramsci also spoke about the organic intellectuals mentioned by Foucault. The Italian [sic] believed that there was not one, but many different types of intellectuals. Intellectual activity does not necessarily imply devotion to the ideas of socialism. Most intellectuals, Gramsci noted, were reluctant to change or saw themselves not as conservatives or liberators, but rather as technical thinkers. Gramsci offers a convenient series of distinctions among organic intellectuals, traditional intellectuals, and intellectuals of the new type.
Organic intellectuals form a completely different type of social stratum. Their activity consists “in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator” (Gramsci, 1971: 10) [sic: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971), p. 10]. “Organic intellectuals” [quotation marks — sic] not only have special knowledge, but also become legislators of meanings: they have a special understanding of what is happening and are actively involved in politics.
(Left to right) Russian businessman Leonid Mikhelson, founder and funder of the arts organization the V-A-C Foundation; V-A-C publishing programs director Grigory Cheredov [full disclosure: Mr. Cheredov has commissioned me many times in the past several years to translate texts for V-A-C, which I happily did because he and his colleagues were easily among the most decent and professional of my Russian art world clients, at least until the war broke out and they failed to pay me for the last two jobs I had done for them before the war — TRR]; Russian president Vladimir Putin; and Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, at the V-A-C Foundation’s newly opened art and culture space, GES-2 House of Culture, December 1, 2021
No matter how intellectuals are defined — as bearers of culture or as critically thinking people — it is obvious that in the twentieth century there were significant changes in the organization and nature of intellectual life. The most widespread meaning of the word “intellectual” is even narrower and includes a political dimension. Real intellectuals are those who go beyond their immediate area of expertise to intervene in public policy issues, usually in a spirit of disagreement with the authorities. This concept was first popularized by the archetypal intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre.
And Jürgen Habermas, a major theorist of the Frankfurt School of social philosophy, who has paid serious attention to the theory and practice of politics, was convinced by his own experience of the effectiveness of such an approach to political life. He has argued that “philosophers, along with writers, historians and other experts, should act in the public sphere as intellectuals and least of all as interpreters and elucidators of any one doctrine.” [This is a quotation from an 1989 interview of Habermas by Yuri Senokosov, as published, in Russian translation, in Jürgen Habermas, Democracy, Reason, Morality: Moscow Lectures and Interviews (Moscow: Academia: 1995), pp. 109–110. Judging by the peculiarly specific way it is introduced here by Ms. Sarkisyan, the wording was discovered by her in Elena Iosifovna Kukushkina, “The Intelligentsia in the Political Life of Society,”Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Series 12: Political Science, 4 (2012): 21, where the passage in question is incorrectly indicated as being on page `113 of the book —TRR.] In 1953, he took on Martin Heidegger in the wake of the latter’s newly discovered Nazi sympathies in a review of Heidegger’s book Introduction to Metaphysics. In the late fifties and early eighties, Habermas was involved in pan-European anti-nuclear movements, and in the sixties he was one of the leading theorists of the student movement in Germany, although in 1967 he actually broke with the radical core of this movement when he warned about the possibility of “leftist fascism.” In 1977 he protested against the restriction of civil liberties posed by domestic anti-terrorist legislation, and in 1985–1987 he was involved in the so-called historians’ debate on the nature and extent of Germany’s guilt in the war, condemning what he considered historical revisionism of Germany’s Nazi past. He also warned about the dangers of German nationalism in connection with the unification of Germany in 1989–1990.
Intellectuals from different countries — the scientists, writers, artists and humanists of the twentieth century — amassed a wealth of experience in solving problems on a global scale. In the period between the two world wars, they led anti-fascist movements and fought to prevent interethnic conflicts and liberate countries from colonial dependence. By initiating and being actively involved in these campaigns, the world cultural elite demonstrated the intelligentsia’s truly inexhaustible possibilities of the intelligentsia as a force capable of having a tangible impact on political processes at different levels. [This paragraph has been copied almost verbatim from page 22 of Elena Kukushkina’s scholarly article, as cited above — TRR.]
The cultural and artistic community — whether it consists of intellectuals or not — has the weight, influence, and social capital to make the fight against the current regime effective. As for their responsibility, they are capable of exposing the lies of governments and analyzing their actions in terms of causes, motives, and often hidden intentions. Privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity imposes responsibility. For me, the urgent question today is what responsibility should Russian society, in particular the intelligentsia (of which the artistic community is a part), bear when it comes to horrors of the full-scale war in Ukraine. And of course, this question (about the responsibility borne by people of the aggressor nation for the war it has launched) is not new at all.
The philosopher Noam Chomsky, for example, criticized the American government and the Vietnam War in the book [sic]The Responsibility of Intellectuals. Privilege, he argues, entails the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies. But our intellectual culture supports this ideal only nominally. Yes, it is forbidden in Russia to publicly voice an opinion that differs from the government’s rhetoric. Otherwise, one risks criminal prosecution, which can even lead to imprisonment. What other options are left if a basic human need — freedom of speech — is taken away from us? Are there niches in which we can preserve our humanity while also avoiding tentacles of the state? It seems that during a war it is difficult to engage in aesthetics. It takes us down the path to escapism and the opportunity to close our eyes to everything that is happening around you us. In peacetime, there are trends that establish a certain regime for artists.
But since the beginning of the war, Russian public cultural activity has not undergone any structural changes or even hints of them. New galleries and cultural centers have been opening (e.g., the Zotov Center, Nakovalnya Gallery, and Seréne Gallery), and the old ones continue to operate as if nothing has happened.
Only a few such venues have curtailed their public programs (and not all of them due to political convictions): Typography Contemporary Art Center, Kerka Gallery, the space It’s Not Herе, the Sphere Foundation (the former Smirnov and Sorokin Foundation), Fragment Gallery, and the Garage Museum. Where does normalization come from? The government has been sparing no efort to hide the war crimes that it commits every day, not only with the help of propaganda, but also through attempts to preserve the normal life that existed before the war. Tomorrow will be the same as today. This illusion of normality also occurs in everyday life. The cultural realm has also played a considerable role in generating it. All the existing cultural institutions and people involved to one degree or another in the production of public life are this totalitarian regime’s witting or unwitting opportunists.
Russian curator Olga Sviblova at the Knowledge Society’s awards ceremony at the Kremlin, December 13, 2022. The society has adopted a suggestively Roman (i.e., not Cyrillic) and thus pro-war “Z” as its logo, as seen behind Sviblova.
The Russian intelligentsia, as represented by the artistic community (if it can be called that at all), is against the war in Ukraine. But even if it verbally opposes war crimes and imperialism, it supports the existing state of things in its actions, thus contradicting itself. Collaboration with institutions (especially those directly dependent on the Russian federal culture ministry, whose head in an interview called for killing Ukrainians) and the absence of discussion about rethinking the cultural field within the country suggest that the cultural community refuses to react at all to the events taking place this minute in Ukraine. It refuses to accept any responsibility for what is happening.
Fairs, exhibitions, public educational outreach, and the production of uncritical art only perpetuate the status quo and play along with the official agenda. To understand what I am talking about, look at the list of exhibitors at the Cosmoscow Art Fair in September 2022. The fair, to which Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was invited, imposed strict censorship on its participants.
This familiar pre-war environment is exactly what the government wants to see. We have seemingly begun to forget that we live in a totalitarian state, and everything we produce on its territory is part of it and monitored thanks to the presence of a single comprehensive ideology. What kind of art production can we talk about when there is strict censorship of all legal channels of information? Censorship is usually exercised in the name of so-called national security interests or as part of larger-scale campaigns to protect morality. (In our case, this is the policy to preserve and strengthen “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”)
Regimes try to monopolize artistic production either by co-opting artists to the point that they become mouthpieces and servants of the state, or by restricting the access of independent artists to places for displaying and implementing artistic expression. What kind of independent public art can we talk about? The usual strategies of artistic activity no longer work. It’s time to admit it.
We have begun to forget that no uncritical culture is possible at a time when the mass killings of civilians, violence, and torture are taking place daily, and the integrity of a sovereign neighboring state is being destroyed. What kind of art production in the Russian Federation is there to talk about when you are a member of the aggressor nation? Even if you adhere to an anti-war stance, how can art in state-controlled institutional venues be perceived from the outside as anything other than serving this regime?
Russian culture should be held accountable for the war in Ukraine. But people often downplay the importance of culture in political and public life, regarding it as a separate part of the personal realm rather than as a fusion of the forms of social interaction. We need to recognize that the current regime did not suddenly emerge on February 24, 2022. It had to be built up and supported for many years to officially establish itself once and for all and launch a full-scale war in Ukraine. All these years we ignored this build-up, living in a world of illusions. Unfortunately, this illusion is still maintained. In many ways, it is created by part of the cultural and artistic communities.
Russian rapper Timati and fashion designer Masha Tsigal at Cosmoscow Art Fair, September 2022
Many people who have remained in Russia might not agree with me. How can artists earn money without resorting to public utterance and without cooperating with institutions? How can galleries stop working? After all, this is their source of income (although it often does not bring in money, but vice versa). How can we just come to a standstill and not produce anything?
But does everyone really continue to work because of economic dependence, and not out of social necessity — that is, because they belong to a scene where there is a fear of losing the context that gives a person meaning? It boils down either to staying, accepting the state of things, and leading your normal life (as far as it is possible to do that at all now) or giving up on it and leaving. Of course, this dichotomy is not the only one: there are many other ways of living this war. None of us, including me, has answers to these questions. The question, rather, is whether we are aware of what kind of force and political dimension our position can have and what responsibility we should have to Ukraine. Time will pass and the question will arise: how did the Russian intellectual community behave during the war? Silence is also an answer, however.
The ruins of the Arch of Triumph (also called the Monumental Arch) in Palymra, 2010. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
In April, the project for restoring the Arch of Triumph, the most famous structure of the Syrian city of Palmyra, should be ready and presented to the public, according to our sources involved with restoring the ancient city.
The Petersburg organizations involved in the project have been doing their design work remotely. They considered it safer because, according to the restorers, not all the terrorists in Syria have been “pacified” yet.
The restoration is coordinated by the Institute of the History of Material Culture (IIMC RAS), which signed an agreement on the restoring the arch with the Syrian Department of Antiquities in March of last year. The details of the agreement are unknown. In November of last year, the archaeological excavations were completed. The project also involves the State Hermitage Museum and the architectural firms of Maxim Atayants and Studio 44. Atayants, as a connoisseur of antiquity, is more responsible for the “theoretical” part, that is, for the choice of approach. Five specialists from Studio 44, including Nikita Yavein, the head of the firm, are involved, and they are working on technical issues. According to sources, other firms are also involved — for example, the restoration company Agio.
The Arch of Triumph itself was built during the reign of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 CE) and, apparently, glorifies his victories. It underwent restoration involving reinforced concrete elements in the 1930s. The arch was partially destroyed in 2015, during the Syrian civil war. The central span and one of the pylons collapsed.
More alive than Buddha
Until recently, it had not been decided exactly how to restore the arch — to its state at the time when terrorists attempted to blow it up (which means reproducing the version produced by the restorers in the 1930s), or in some other way. The Venice Charter on the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites stipulates that monuments should be preserved in the form in which they have come down to our time. According to established practice, reconstruction by means of anastylosis, as the most sparing method, is permitted for ancient ruins. In this approach, the surviving stones are put back in place. But experts do not want to limit themselves only to anastylosis in the case of Palmyra.
First, it would look uninteresting: the edifice would not make the proper impression, and it is probably not worth the effort. Second, much of the stone in the lower part of the arch has been lost or compromised and would still have to be reinforced or recreated. According to the IIMC RAS, about 40% of the structure remains standing. Another 30% of the stone blocks are not in their place, but they can be used in the restoration. The remaining sections are partly or completely destroyed. That is, there is slightly less genuine material than is usually required for a restoration (i.e., 80-90% of authentic stone). UNESCO has long refused to restore the statues of Buddha blown up by the Taliban in Afghanistan (they have not yet been restored) precisely on the grounds that a significant part of the stone was lost.
Archaeological diplomacy
Meanwhile, the project for the arch must also be vetted by UNESCO since Palmyra is a World Heritage Site. Moreover, not everything is cut and dried when it comes to UNESCO, as shown, for example, by the rather critical report issued by its monitoring mission that visited Russia in 2019.
Two arguments have been drawn up to justify the design decisions to high-level international institutions. First, that the recreation would be reversible. That is, sometime in the future the arch could be disassembled again if so desired and the new inclusions (such as the “crowns” on the stone blocks) removed, and it would look more or less as it looked before it was blown up. The second argument is that the arch is a symbol of both Palmyra and all of Syria. And in the case of symbols, recreation seems to be permitted.
The issue turns out to be largely legal. Perhaps that is why Alexei Mikhailov, the deputy chair of the city’s Landmarks Use and Preservation Committee (KGIOP), known, in particular, for his work designed historical preservation zones in central Petersburg, has been appointed to the team of restorers. In a comment to the TV channel Saint Petersburg, Mikhailov drew an analogy with Notre Dame Cathedral. Located in Paris, like UNESCO’s headquarters, the cathedral is currently undergoing reconstruction after a fire in 2019.
“We are now drawing the parallel that the arch of Palmyra is as much of a symbol as Notre Dame is for Paris. And it is a reconstruction that is underway there. This is very important and must be conveyed to our international colleagues. It will determine which form of restoration will be employed,” Mikhailov said.
Our sources say that negotiations were held with Petersburg restorers about restoring other sites in Palmyra and Syria. Apparently, they intensified after the devastating earthquake that hit Syria about a month ago. (According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), aftershocks from that quake continue to occur.) Last week, Vedomosti reported, citing a diplomatic source, that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is scheduled to visit Russia. As one of that newspaper’s sources suggests, he may ask for Moscow’s help in recovery work.
Scholars without borders
Petersburg experts agree that it is necessary to maintain world heritage. They disagree only about whether such aid is a burden or not.
“I don’t think it’s a lot of money compared to other government spending,” Alexander Kitsula, vice president of the St. Petersburg Union of Architects, told DP. At the same time, he noted that, with all due respect to the history of Petersburg, the antiquities of Palmyra “are incomparably more important than the excavations at Okhta Point.”
“It is wrong to let world culture be lost in any case, and if our country has reserves that can be sent there, it is probably the right thing to do. But, of course, our country also has huge holes in this area,” he believes. The expert emphasizes that Russia’s antiquities are no less in need of attention than foreign ones.
“My personal opinion is that we still have tons of work to do here at home. And this is far from a first-degree problem for the Russian Federation in general. But if someone has decided that it has to be done, then it has to be done,” Pasechnik added.
Alexei Kovalyov, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, sees no problems in the fact that our scholars are also at work in Palmyra.
“St. Petersburg has been one of the world’s major centers for archaeology. Our expeditions are working in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and our expedition in Iraq has just been resumed. Such projects are part of our international policy: they are usually funded per intergovernmental agreements. In the case of Palmyra, this means the Syrian side,” Kovalev explained. He also added that there are many specialists in ancient monuments working in Petersburg who know the peculiarities of the architecture of the period to which Palmyra belongs.
Takeaway: The countries to which “anti-war” Russians have fled in the greatest numbers since February 24, 2022, also figure prominently among the list of countries which have significantly increased their exports to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine. I’ve never seen this issue addressed, much less mentioned, by the “Russian diaspora” or the “Russian anti-war movement.” I wonder why. ||| TRR
Мій син Іван у свої 1 рік і 8 місяців знає багато слів. Зараз він дуже любить говорити слова Потяг, Борсук, Їжак, Валіза. Але фаворити змінюються щотижня:)
Немає нічого кращого, ніж чути як твої діти починають говорити. Говорити рідною мовою! Це щастя! (до речі, ще одне улюблене слово нашого Івана)
Українська мова – це чи не найсильніша наша зброя. Найбільш стратегічна, так точно.
З Міжнародним днем рідної мови, друзі!
At the age of one year and eight months, my son Ivan knows a lot of words. He now really likes to say the words Train, Badger, Hedgehog, and Suitcase. But the favorites change every week:)
There’s nothing better than hearing your kids start talking, speaking your native language! It is happiness! (Which, by the way, is another of our Ivan’s favorite words.)
The Ukrainian language is perhaps our most powerful weapon. It’s the most strategic one, for sure.
A still from Red Africa (Krasnaya Afrika, 2022), directed by Alexander Markov. Courtesy of Visions du Réel
In the 1960s, a wave of newly independent African states found themselves courted by a far-flung friend: the Soviet Union. Alexander Markov’s engrossing archival documentary, assembled from footage shot by Soviet crews between 1960 and 1990, charts the breadth of Moscow’s project to export socialism to the African continent. Red Africa threads dignitary visits, infrastructure projects, and Cold War–era cultural exchange into the excavation of a single soft-power machine, while also demonstrating the power of the cinematic image to propel myth-making at home up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Closer afield, We Love Life, which opens the screening program, revisits propaganda and home movie footage of the Spartakiads, a mass sporting event held in communist Czechoslovakia from World War II to the Velvet Revolution. Through the film’s kaleidoscopic editing, its scores of synchronized bodies vibrate as a site where ideology, collective memory, and personal experience converge.
We Love Life. 2022. Great Britain. Directed by Hana Vojáčková. North American premiere. In Czech, Slovak, English; English subtitles. 29 min.
Krasnaya Afrika (Red Africa). 2022. Russia/Portugal. Written and directed by Alexander Markov. North American premiere. In Russian, Portuguese; English subtitles. 65 min.
Thu, Feb 23, 4:30 p.m. • Introduced by Hana Vojáčková • MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2
Known as Minnesota’s favorite Americana band of the 99%, The Gated Community celebrates the release of their highly anticipated new album The Honor and Glory of The Gated Community. Showcasing beautiful harmonies, multiple lead singers and virtuosic soloists, this 5th album from the folk/country cult favorites shows the band stepping out of their Marxist bluegrass band box to create poignant songs of personal and collective loss — many of which were written just a few blocks from where Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct station was burned and abandoned following the murder of George Floyd.
Living just a few blocks from the 3rd Precinct, frontman Sumanth Gopinath (vocals, guitar) and his partner Beth Hartman (vocals, percussion) were filled with a particular anxiety and dread. “We went through a lot during the uprising itself, but we also feared repeat occurrences of violence at various points – like the November 2020 election, January 6, the inauguration and the Chauvin trial,” Gopinath says. “Moreover, family and friends died or nearly died from COVID-19. My retired colleague David Bernstein passed in March 2020, my aunt died in June 2020, and my uncle was in the hospital for months.”
Although The Gated Community started tracking some of the album in 2019 and early 2020, an electrical failure (caused by the 2020 unrest) fried the studio’s primary and backup hard drives. Left with only a few tracks and a whole new whirlwind of emotions stirred up by the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, subsequent protests and the rise of fascism in America, the band reworked old songs and arranged new ones written by Gopinath during the pandemic. “Not being able to make music with the other five band members during 2020, I began composing classical music again for the first time in 25 years,” Gopinath says. “I also continued to write songs for the band until we were finally able to do some very distanced outdoor rehearsals in fall of that year.”
With various health concerns among band members, they worked safely and slowly, rehearsing and recording the new tracks with John Miller at Future Condo Studio in Minneapolis. Mastered by Bruce Templeton at Microphonic Mastering, the album was finally done in 2022. Their most ambitious yet, it includes 13 originals with powerful lyrics and thoughtful arrangements. Although still marked by the playfulness that have won them such a loyal following, these songs have less punk urgency and more of the laid-back folk and country vibes of some of their songwriting heroes – from the Ralph Stanley-inspired a capella song “To the Sea Once More” (written for Kobe Dimock-Heisler, a young man of color on the autism spectrum who had just been murdered by police in Brooklyn Center, MN, on Aug. 31, 2019) to the Terry Allen-esque “Mariia” (about the alleged Russian spy and current politician Maria Butina) to the Townes Van Zandt-sounding “Another Fire” (written following the nightly fires that erupted in South Minneapolis after George Floyd’s murder) to the beautiful simplicity of Gillian Welch exhibited in “The Life From My Eyes” (about domestic violence towards women). The album also features the heartfelt playing of recently retired fiddler Teresa Gowan.
Once thought of as a niche novelty outfit, The Gated Community show their evolution into a sophisticated band that mixes social commentary with emotionally rich songwriting. They are incredibly proud to bring this album into the world after the collective traumas of the past three years and are finding solace in playing together once more.
——————
credits
released February 3, 2023
The Gated Community is Sumanth Gopinath, Cody Johnson, Teresa Gowan, Paul Hatlelid, Rosie Harris, Beth Hartman, and Nate Knutson
with special guest Adrienne Miller
words by Sumanth Gopinath, music by The Gated Community
produced by The Gated Community and John Miller
recorded at Future Condo Studio by John Miller
mixed by John Miller
mastered by Bruce Templeton, Microphonic Mastering
thanks and much love to our families, friends, and fans
special thanks to Tom Campbell and Adam Zahller
in memory of the family members and friends we lost over the past few years, including Liz Adams, Stan Adler, Shekhar Bal, David Bernstein, Josette Bethany, Max Bromley, Jason Christenson, Karen Dresser, Marian Gopinath, Gwen Hartman, Dave Hoenack, Qadri Ismail, Chad Marsolek, Jim McDonald, Ryan Muncy, Rita Elizabeth Nye, Peter Schimke, and Jerold Marvin Schultz
One day, I hope, someone will explain to me why “progressive” Russians find the English words speak, speaker, speech, etc., so sexy and exciting that they have to incorporate them needlessly into Russian every chance they get.
Do they know that, in English, these words are less evocative than three-day-old bread, duller than dishwater?
In this case, hilariously (and awkwardly, too: “speak” appears after chas, generating an awkward phrase that translates as “hour of speak” or “speak hour,” although it’s supposed to be a play on the idiomatic phrase chas pik, meaning “rush hour”), the word “speak” adorns Sergei Medvedev’s reflections on the “imperialist mindset.”
Indeed.
Thanks to TP for this gem of Rusglish.
Below, you can watch the actual interview (in Russian, not Rusglish — well, almost), which, if for no other reason, is interesting because it was posted almost three months before Russia invaded Ukraine. ||| TRR
Historian and writer Sergei Medvedev is the program’s guest.
In an interview with Nikita Rudakov, he explained:
Why the idea of Russia’s “civilizational superiority” is so popular
Why propaganda encourages the ideological complexes of Russians
How the elite of the 2000s is trying to turn back history.
00:00 Chas Speak: Sergei Medvedev 01:40 The imperialist mindset and the idea of Russia’s greatness 06:10 Is there no place for nationalism in the imperialist mindset? 08:05 “Russia colonized itself” 14:03 The superiority of big ideas: why didn’t the USA become an empire? 21:02 The ideological complexes of Russians 25:41 “We rise from our knees via military achievements and parades on Red Square” 26:50 “Lukashenko does with us what he will”: Russia and Belarus 30:56 “Russia wants to live in the myth of 1945” 34:40 “We were unable to create a nation state”
“MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN” FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT STUDENTS FROM UKRAINE, BELARUS, AND RUSSIA AFFECTED BY WAR OR PERSECUTION
Tamizdat Project Inc. is launching a two-month campaign “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” to support undergraduate students forced to leave their home countries due to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine or persecution in Belarus and Russia for their anti-war stance.
On January 30, 2023, we are opening two online charity book auctions and a donation campaign to help these students pursue their academic careers in a safe environment. We are inviting the public to join our Rare Books Auction, which features a variety of first editions of “contraband” literature from behind the Iron Curtain and books by émigré authors, a Signed and Inscribed Books Auction with nearly 300 titles inscribed or signed for our cause by over 100 contemporary writers and scholars, and a “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” online fundraiser.
Since February 24, 2022, many initiatives have been launched across American campuses to support scholars at risk. Very few, however, have been set up for students, who have not yet established themselves in academia but have also been forced to leave home and need to continue their education elsewhere. Tamizdat Project Inc. has taken the initiative to help the next generation of scholars when they most need it.
The proceeds will be distributed to undergraduate students to help them pay for tuition and living expenses while studying in the U.S. (e.g., we will pay their dormitory bills or offer stipends to participate in Tamizdat Project). We will work with the colleges and universities that have admitted them to make this goal a reality. A breakdown of how the funds will be distributed will be provided at a later date. Our campaign brings together prominent writers and academics in the diaspora to help today’s refugees, much as we wish no such effort was ever necessary. We are joined by Nobel Prize Laureate Svetlana Alexievich, director of Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Serhii Plokhy, émigré writer and critic Alexander Genis, rap singer Noize MC, to name but a few.
“On the last day of 2022, as we all were getting ready to celebrate the arrival of the new year the Russian missile attack hit Kyiv, causing serious damage to the buildings and properties of the Kyiv University. … It had become the worst year for the higher education since the end of World War II. Any assistance we can provide for students of Ukraine will be greatly appreciated by the students in the universities under fire and the students-refugees in Ukraine and abroad.” — Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history, Harvard University
“I am glad to take part in this project. After all, the auction that Tamizdat Project has put together is not just about rare books that make any library more precious and interesting. It is also part of the living history of free literature and thought, uninterrupted even today. These books, as dissidents used to say, are relics of the struggle ‘for our freedom and yours.’ They unite authors and readers, turning even those unfamiliar with each other into allies.” — Alexander Genis, author
Tamizdat Project is a not-for-profit public scholarship and charity initiative devoted to the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War (“tamizdat” means literally “published over there,” that is, abroad). Today, these books remind us that freedom and education know no boundaries. We are a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization with a tax-exempt status: donations and gifts are deductible to the extent allowable by the IRS.
Istanbul, December 2022. Photo courtesy of Republic
[…]
500 vacancies for military registration specialists were advertised from late September to last December last year, according to HeadHunter. Previously, this specialization was considered a rather rare and generally not very sought-after profile in the personnel departments of Russian organizations (private and public). For comparison: only 145 such vacancies were advertised in the whole of 2021. The military mobilization has changed the situation: since September — that is, in just three months — the number of such offers on the labor market has increased by about two and a half times (Superjob’s data also show the same thing). The reasons? One of them (apparently, the main one) is an increase in fines for lapses in paperwork: to avoid them, employers are willing to pay applicants for the popular vacancy 70-80 thousand rubles a month. And this is despite the fact that there is a shortage of a number of other specialists on the labor market (and, presumably, they are no less valuable than SMO-era personnel officers). The number of vacancies on Avito Jobs alone, according to a recent company study, increased by 69% in 2022. Most likely, the trend will continue, serving as a natural continuation of the outflow of people and, ultimately, personnel.
50% — the percentage of last year’s sales of existing housing in the Russian Federation made through a notarized power of attorney. This record figure for the entire observable history of the market, as calculated by investment company Flip, who were commissioned by Kommersant, clearly indicates that the sales trend was primarily shaped by property owners who had emigrated. The high volume of such transactions seems to be an anomalous phenomenon. In 2021, a power of attorney was the basis for sale in no more than 20% of deals. In 2020, this figure was 15%. It was 8% in 2019, and 5% in 2018. You ain’t seen nothing yet, though: the ongoing controversy over whether to confiscate the property of openly anti-war Russians who have left the country must be making an additional contribution to the process of selling apartments and houses, which was gaining momentum as it was.
$81.69 billion — the total amount of deposits by Russian nationals in foreign banks as of the end of November of last year, according to the latest data from the Russian Central Bank. (4.989 trillion rubles were recalculated at the exchange rate in effect on that date.) Over the past eleven months, the amount has more than doubled — and this is even if we rely entirely on the statistics of the Central Bank, which may not have a complete picture of what is happening. (Russian laws oblige citizens to report when they open accounts in foreign banks and move funds in them, but we cannot be absolutely sure that everyone strictly obeys them.) While one part of these funds remains in these bank accounts, the other goes to the purchase of real estate that, for the most part, is also located outside the Russian Federation.
16,300 houses and apartments in Turkey were purchased by Russian nationals in 2022, according to data published by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), as studied by RBC. This is not just three times more than in 2021 (when Russian nationals purchased 5,400 housing units in the Turkish Republic), but also more than the total volume of such transactions over the past six years (16,200). It is not surprising that last year, for the first time, Russians took first place among foreigners in buying housing in Turkey, producing almost a quarter of the corresponding demand with their money. Earlier, we wrote that our compatriots purchased two thousand houses and apartments in Turkey in October 2022 alone, overtaking all other foreign home buyers in that country, as reported by TurkStat.
At first glance, the advantages of investing in Turkey are not entire obvious. Inflation in the country, according to TurkStat, exceeded 84% in November, once again breaking records previously established in the autumn of 1998. The Inflation Analysis Group, an independent Turkish entity, estimated that inflation had reached a whopping 170.7% . In addition, prices for real estate, which have rising robustly, can at any moment just as vigorously drop, taking into account, in particular, the rather murky prospects for “Erdonomics,” depending on the results of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections. According to Endeksa, in September, the average price for one square meter of housing in Turkey was about 12 thousand Turkish lira (approx. $644), while the average price per housing unit was just over 1.5 million Turkish lira (approx. $83,700). The term of return on investment in housing is estimated at nineteen years, although in the summer this figure was recalculated to seventeen years.
The intense interest on the part of Russian nationals in buying real estate in Turkey is primarily related to the prospect of obtaining Turkish citizenship, Anna Larina, head of the foreign real estate department at NF Group, explained to Republic. (In turn, having a Turkish passport makes it possible to obtain an American E-2 visa, which speeds up the process of immigrating to the United States.) In this sense, it is logical that Russians have become leaders in terms of the number of residence permits issued in Turkey — 153,000, of which, however, as the Turkish Ministry of Migration clarified, 132,000 are short-term tourist residence permits, which are valid for two years.
Turkey is one of the few countries (but not the only country) that is still open to Russian nationals and their private capital. Thus, as 2022 came to a close, Russian citizens took first place among non-residents in buying real estate in Dubai, Bloomberg recently reported, citing figures provided by the brokerage firm Betterhomes.
Withdrawing funds and setting up a new life abroad eloquently testify to the sentiments prevailing among the Russian urban middle class, primarily. Not all people who sell Russian real estate and buy foreign real estate are necessarily irreconcilable opponents of the regime. And yet, it is clear that the vast majority of these people do not want to live and raise children in Putin’s version of the future, which is practically incompatible with modern civilization. In its own way, it is symptomatic that Russians who support the government and dutifully follow it into its deadly adventures are also dissatisfied with what is happening. If it were possible, they would rather return to the past, to a point in time thirty, forty, or fifty years ago.
63% — the percentage of Russians, according to a December poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), who regret the collapse of the USSR — that is, more than three decades after the event known in Kremlin mythology as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Strictly speaking, the current longing for Soviet times cannot be considered a record: after the August 1998 ruble default, there were noticeably more Russians nostalgic for the Soviet Union — 85%. Nevertheless, an important indicator of public attitudes (as recorded, we should underscore, by a quasi-state polling service) is on the rise again, having increased by twelve percentage points since 2011.
It is clear that this sentiment is primarily voiced by the 46–60 age group (88% of whom are “nostalgic”) and to some extent, people aged 31–45 years (79% of whom are “nostalgic”), assuming that a considerable portion of these people associate the late USSR with their happy childhoods and wild youths. However, according to the poll, even today’s Russian youth, that is, people aged 18–30, mostly (64%) consider the Soviet era “generally a good time.” Of course, their judgments are based on the stories of older generations, and most importantly, on the inevitable comparison with what is happening with the largest post-Soviet country right now.
Defense attorney Edem Semedlyaev and Crimean Tatar political prisoner Raif Fevziev, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, 12 January 2023. Imam Fevziev’s t-shirt reads, “Our people are not terrorists.” Photo courtesy of Imam Fevziev and Crimean Solidarity via Mumine Saliyeva
In one of his interviews from the dungeons of the Rostov pretrial detention center, Dagestani journalist Abdulmumin Hajiyev commented on the everyday lives of inmates: “Lately, I’ve been thinking about taking cooking lessons. For some reason, there has been a skilled cook in every cell I’ve inhabited since Makhachkala. Sirazhutdin (Kumyk), Magomed (Avar), Rutem and Alim (Crimean Tatars) — I always admired the enthusiasm and care with which those guys spent several hours every day cooking something delicious for their cellmates with only a bucket and an immersion hot-water boiler to hand. Hajiyev also mentions Alim Karimov, a defendant in the Crimean Hizb ut-Tahrir case, with whom he has shared a cell for a over year a year. Over this time, Alim has learned Arabic.
Yesterday, a Russian court sentenced Karimov and four other defendants, among whom there are pensioners with disabilities, to thirteen years in prison each. The two years it took to try the case on the merits were memorable in several ways. There was an ambulance present at the hearings, but its crew did not provide qualified medical care to the defendants, who were forbidden to speak Crimean Tatar during the proceedings. Putting old men in the dock for talking about Islam had nothing to do with the letter of the law. Instead, it speaks to Islamophobia cloaking itself in the law’s guise, and to the disgrace of the foot soldiers who executed this drama.
A few days ago, my fellow journalist had the opportunity to hand over to me his new articles, one of which tells the story of Ernes Ametov, a cellmate from Crimea, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison by a military court in late December because he would not do a deal with a lie.
Today, Russia’s Southern District Military Court again handed down a verdict to a Crimean Tatar religious figure. Imam Raif Fevziev was sentenced to seventeen years in a high-security penal colony (with the first three years to be served in an ordinary prison) for having a seventy-minute conversation about religion. His trial took place at the same time as the trial of Crimean defendants in another criminal case. Friends and colleagues of Fevziev’s — the religious figures Ismet Ibragimov, Vadim Bektemirov, Aider Dzhapparov, and Lenur Khalilov — had earlier been sentenced to brutal terms of imprisonment by the very same court. These are textbook political persecutions: the NKVD used the same methods, in the past, to eradicate and destroy religious and public figures who had influence among the people.
It is quite difficult to cope with such a merciless chronicle of crackdowns. But when you see and feel what kind of regime you have come face to face with, and how the political prisoners, their families, and a whole people wisely and peacefully oppose it, you have no choice but to recharge your batteries, be more resilient, and go on working, while believing ever more fiercely that change will come.
I read in a book that a system based on segregation and tyranny is a large-scale manmade disaster. The people involved in perpetuating it may well understand that the breakdown of such a “juggernaut” is inevitable, and that they themselves, collectively, are causing the breakdown. But each of them assumes that it’s not their own personal fault, but everyone else’s. Each of them, on the contrary, believes that they are trying to save it — through cruelty, by cracking down on those dubbed “enemies” and “undesirables.” Ultimately, however, they fail to save it.
Source: Mumine Saliyeva, Facebook, 12 January 2023. Translated by Hecksinductionhour
The Russian Reader 