Important Stories

The following two stories turned up next to each other in my inbox several mornings ago. The first story (about the hidden costs of common areas in Petersburg’s new estates) was promoted as its “Article of the Week” by the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, whose chronicles of post-Soviet capitalism on the march in my favorite city I have been reading and sharing here for two decades, usually against the grain. The second story (about how the authorities in Kaliningrad hushed up the recent death by self-immolation of an antiwar protester at the city’s main WWII memorial) was published by the exiled investigative journalism website Important Stories aka IStories, which is celebrating its sixth birthday. Seemingly written on different planets in different languages, they give an accurate sounding of the bewildered, muted condition of the “Russian soul” (i.e., Russian society) after four-plus years of a vicious, genocidal war unleashed by a thoroughly corrupt “post-fascist” dictatorship. ||||| TRR

Photo: Sergei Yermokhin/Delovoi Peterburg

When she buys a flat—a fifty-square-meter flat, for example—a tenant also gets into the bargain several hundred square meters of lobbies, corridors, and stairways, for whose upkeep she will pay monthly. Those same square meters determine whether she will be able to squeeze past her neighbor in the lift lobby, whether it is easy to push a pram into the building , and whether coming home is a pleasurable experience.

The common areas are the only part of the apartment block the buyer does not choose although she passses through them every day.

How many square meters are not allocated to flats

The proportion of sellable space in apartment blocks depends primarily on their category.

“In the comfort class, the average is sixty-five to seventy percent; in the business segment, sixty to sixty-five; in the premium class, sixty; and it’s fifty to sixty for the elite class,” explains Olga Ryankel, head of residential property research at Nikoliers.

ELEMENT product director Alexander Matyushkin cites a target figure of up to seventy percent in his firm’s projects, with the actual average standing at around sixty-five percent

Lenstroytrest reports a ratio of seventy-five to eighty-two percent, and considers this to be balanced. According to Maxim Zhabin, development director at the Edino Group, the range for market heavy hitters hovers between sixty-five and eighty-five percent.

“If a developer artificially ‘squeezes’ common areas for the sake of the ratio, this is usually interpreted in practice as cutting corners on the facilities,” he says.

What constitutes non-residential space

An increase in total floor area is determined not by a single factor, but by a combination of factors, and the contribution of each depends on the project category and architectural designs.

In the mass-market segment, the primary contributors to floor area are landings, corridors, and stairwells. And yet, an increase in the number of lifts expands the non-sellable area by fifteen to twenty percent, smoke-free stairwells add a further eight to ten percent, and complexly designed building exteriors also increase the non-sellable perimeter, notes Matyushkin.

Zhabin also cites lift lobbies and stairwells as primary factors, adding to them the utility areas and entrance lobbies.

Optional spaces the developer includes over and above the standard requirements comprise a separate category.

Natalia Kukushkina, head of product and analytics at the CDS Group, differentiates between two categories of common spaces.

“The total floor area includes both essential elements, such as stairwells, basements, entrance lobbies, and communal facilities on each floor, spaces without which a building cannot be constructed, as well as spaces added at the developer’s discretion. These may include non-essential spaces such as spacious lobbies, coworking spaces, pram storage rooms, gyms, swimming pools, communal terraces on top floors, and so on.”

Where comfort ends and excess begins

Ultimately, each developer decides for themself how much common space to include in their project. Yekaterina Zaporozhchenko, chief executive officer at PRO Aparty, suggests a specific indicator: arrears on maintenance fees exceeding ten percent are a sign that residents do not feel the spaces they are paying for are value for their money.

“There should be just enough common spaces for them to be used, and the maintenance budget should not exceed the average figures for the segment,” she explains.

Yudita Grigaite, marketing director at Lenstroytrest, is convinced that excessive common space increases costs and operational burdens without adding any value.

Matyushkin highlights the reverse risk: excessive optimization is also dangerous. A shortage of lifts or narrow corridors diminish the quality of the built environment more than is apparent when a tenant is purchasing an apartment.

“A well-designed common space sets down a clear daily route from courtyard to flat without imposing unnecessary obstacles, and it provides practical arrangements for dealing with prams and deliveries, adequate ventilation and lighting, and clearly defined areas of liability,” says Zhabin in describing the working model.

Inefficiency arises when maintenance costs are high yet residents are unclear about what exactly they are paying for.

How square meters of common space are converted into a line item on the bill

The ratio of sellable space to total floor area translates into two figures residents encounter on a regular basis: the price per square meter at the time of purchase and the maintenace charges they pay after they move into their flat.

The math is straightforward: the higher the percentage of common space, the more expensive each square meter of living space. Developers figure the cost of building and finishing common space into the price of flats.

“The ratio between living space and total floor area directly impacts both the cost of a square meter and future operating expenses, all of which are reflected in the maintenance rates. Therefore, a building’s economic model should be balanced. The comfort of the common areas should be in line with the project’s class and the buyer’s expectations, while maintenance costs should be reasonable,” says Anzhelika Alshayeva, commercial director at the KVS Group, when asked to describe the process.

The difference in maintenance bills among segments is tenfold.

According to PRO Aparty, the difference ranges from sixty to six hundred rubles per square meter. Kukushkina warns of the scenario that this gap generates in practice.

“All additional expenses in a maintenance bill are regarded as too high, and some residents absolutely refuse to pay them. Ultimately, a building might end up with a swimming pool which is closed, a common terrace which is not cleaned, and facade lighting which is turned off.”

The third factor is density which, as Zhabin reminds us, is manifested in “queues to the lift, acoustics, and the amount of traffic in the courtyard,” that is, in factors which are not visible when potential buyers look at flats but which are felt daily.

What buyers don’t see

Ryankel notes a systemic problem in the mass-market segment: prams.

“Unfortunately, the spaces for storing prams and bikes are not separated n the majority of new apartment blocks, ultimately giving rise to a conflict of interests and the impossibility of organizing the space comfortably. And yet, developers often mention a pram storage area without specifying its size. As a result, a space of just seven square meters ends up trying to accommodate prams, bicycles, and tires.”

“Up to eighty percent of the user experience is shaped not inside their flat, but on the way there: from the building’s entrance to their front door. This includes logistics, how the lift works, acoustics, traffic flow, and the convenience of the infrastructure,” says Matyushkin.

There is also a time-related factor that is not taken into account at all when purchasing a flat.

Zaporozhchenko points out the costs of renovating furniture in common areas and maintaining the building’s utility systems after five to seven years, as well as keeping the building’s exterior clean—expenses that no buyer factors into their budget when signing the contract.

Zhabin adds that without a cleaning schedule and proper ventilation even the most luxurious finishes in a building’s entrance lobby will cease to feel “upscale” after a few years.

According to the market players surveyed, pressure on profit margins in the mass-market and comfort-class segments will soon compel developers to increase the share of floor space sold while maintaining visible indicators of quality, such as high ceilings in lobbies and high-quality finishes in entrance areas.

Club-style venues—coworking spaces, community centers, and gyms—will remain a key marketing tool, but some of them will be switched to a fee-based model or be leased out to external management companies on a commercial basis to ease the burden on utility bills.

The gap between rates in the mass-market and premium segments will continue to grow, along with the number of conflicts over maintenance bills in buildings whose infrastructure is at odds with the financial solvency of its residents.

Source: Pavel Nikiforov, “The non-residential building: what the tenant gets along with the flat,” Delovoi Peterburg, 5 May 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

Information about the self-immolation of a resident of Kaliningrad born in 1988 in protest against the war was first published in an open report of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service. The authors of the report did not disclose the name of the deceased. We managed to find out the details of the incident together with Delfi Estonia and Lithuanian broadcaster LRT. We reconstructed what happened based on Russian Investigative Committee documents, conversations with Okunev’s relatives and colleagues, and European security sources.

Five CCTV cameras are installed in front of the 1200 Guardsmen Memorial in Kaliningrad, the USSR’s first monument to soldiers killed in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945. In the center of the memorial is the Eternal Flame. From time to time, various incidents occur near the memorial, which are then widely reported in the local news, and their perpetrators become the subjects of criminal cases. Since last year, for the “desecration of war memorials,” a sentence of up to five years in prison has been [stipulated].

Thus, in February this year, a drunken Kaliningrad resident wanted to light a cigarette from the fire and warmed his feet over the flames. In January 2026, a couple of residents stole a basket of flowers from the monument. In September 2025, another couple had sex at the memorial.

Six months before that, around 5 am on February 24, 2025, 37-year-old Kaliningrad resident Alexander Okunev burned himself alive at the memorial to 1200 Guardsmen in protest against the war — and no one found out about it.

“He was sitting in a corner, not where all the people were”

In the 2010s, Kaliningrad earned the title of the protest capital of Russia, and a series of large-scale rallies even led to the replacement of Governor Georgy Boos.

However, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the city has not exhibited any notable protest activity. In the first days of the invasion, a wave of anti-war actions swept through Kaliningrad. At one point, the city became a leader in the number of protocols issued for “discrediting” the army. But almost immediately, protests died down as they did throughout the country. Igor Luzin, a Kaliningrad activist and former employee of Navalny’s local headquarters, explains that the “political field” in Kaliningrad has been cleaned up just like the rest of Russia.

Alexander Okunev was not an activist. He avoided talking politics at work (he was a sysadmin at a firm selling retail equipment), did not argue about the full-scale war with his family, and apparently was not active on social media. Okunev had almost no friends, had no girlfriend, and lived alone.

He practically did not talk to his colleagues, could ignore even his superiors: he could keep silent in response to a greeting or not answer the questions. At corporate parties, New Year’s Eve, for example, he tried not to leave his office.

“Was sitting there in a corner, not where all the people … Somehow always in himself, lived his own life,” recalls his former colleague. “Closed. Strange.” However, there were no complaints about his work: “His programmer’s brains were cool”. His colleague believes that Alexander could have made a good career, “but it feels like he didn’t care much about money”. When Okunev decided to quit (about six months before the incident), everyone was upset.

“We asked him, have you found another job? No. Are you going somewhere? Maybe. No one had any idea what or why he left,” says his former colleague. Acquaintances call Okunev “kind, responsive, fair”: “He always helped everyone”. He was fond of origami, and when one of his colleagues had a birthday, he could secretly put “some flowers” on their table. Regarding his hobbies, people close to him say that he liked to watch movies and ride a bicycle.

After the dismissal, Okunev really did not find another job. “Sat at home, practically did not communicate with anyone,” heard his ex-colleague.

Cleanup

Having decided on such a desperate protest act as self-immolation, Alexander Okunev did not seem to be trying to attract attention. Maybe he was afraid that someone could stop him. But he obviously chose the date (the anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine) and the place (the main war memorial in the city) for a reason. Perhaps the time too: the Russian missile struck Kyiv on February 24, 2022, began just about five in the morning.

Okunev’s charred corpse, despite the numerous cameras at the memorial, was discovered by a random passerby only at around 6:40 a.m. The snow appears to have been spray-painted with the words “No to War”. Employees of the investigative department for the Leninsky district of Kaliningrad went to the scene. In the report of the events of the night, Okunev’s self-immolation is mentioned along with reports of two other corpses and a ninth-grade girl who had left home.

The incident was reported to the head of the city administration, Elena Dyatlova. She immediately took everything under her control, the European intelligence officer knows. She was assisted by Evgeny Maslov, head of the local service for the protection of cultural heritage. The main thing for them was to quickly get rid of the body and the words on the snow — the officials were worried mostly that journalists would know what happened. The Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Kaliningrad Oblast, Andrey Yermak, was especially worried that the self-immolation took place near the monument of the Great Patriotic War — too symbolic.

Everything was settled by 9:15 am. Traces of the incident were removed, and authorities were relieved to report to the local governor and other local officials that no one had seen anything, the source of IStories Media said.

Information about the self-immolation of an unnamed Kaliningrad resident first went public only along with a report by Estonian intelligence in the winter of 2026: “On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war, at five o’clock in the morning on February 24, 2025, a man born in 1988 wrote ‘No to War’ in the snow near the monument to a Russian soldier in Kaliningrad and set himself on fire in protest.”

None of the Kaliningrad media ever reported the news. There were no local or propaganda Telegram channels or other social media posts about Okunev. [Alexander’s] family did not spread the word about the incident either. “What’s the point of somehow publicizing and telling all this? What for?” one of them told reporters.

“There is another way”

An acquaintance of Okunev says that on the eve of his suicide, he behaved “absolutely normally.” There was no hint of what he was going to do, and “what happened came as a shock to everyone.” Okunev’s relatives speak of some “expert examinations” conducted as part of the investigation, which found that “there was no outside influence” on A[l]exander. The family was questioned by the local Investigative Committee; the police came to Okunev’s former colleagues for a “character [profile]” but came away with “Worked well, did not communicate with anyone.”

A close friend of Okunev recounted to IStories Media the content of his suicide note.

“He wrote that there is another way. Apparently, he meant a world with peace. And he didn’t want to live in the world we have, so he made this decision… But we are all aware that world peace is a utopia.”

The note also shows that Okunev understood that “most likely, it will not be in the news anywhere, it will not be widely covered anywhere,” the source tells IStories Media.

Elena Maslova, head of the Kaliningrad administration, and Evgeny Maslov, head of the cultural heritage protection service, have not responded to journalists’ requests.

Culture Minister Andrei Yermak replied that he was not familiar with the results of the investigation of this “accident”, so he would not comment on anything. He expressed confidence that law enforcement agencies “will comment on the situation as soon as the investigation is finalized.”

“These people are afraid not of the people, but of their superiors”

In January 1969, the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a philosophy student at Charles University, brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets and became a symbol of resistance to the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi provoked mass protests in Tunisia, which eventually led to the resignation of the country’s president.

In Russia, the self-immolations of journalist Irina Slavina and Udmurt scientist Albert Razin did not lead to any notable collective action. Could Okunev’s suicide have provoked some protest if people had learned about it?

Sociologist Margarita Zavadskaya thinks not.

“Self-immolation is a powerful symbolic act,” she says, “but public outrage alone is not enough to trigger large-scale collective action under conditions of severe repression and limited access to information.”

So why did the Russian authorities try so hard to conceal information about what happened? To prevent “protest contagion” and imitation, she explains. Moreover, such an anti-war suicide contradicts the government’s theory of a universal public consensus on war. And local officials would look incapable of maintaining control in the eyes of their superiors.

Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman also does not believe that fear of further protests was behind the Kaliningrad authorities’ actions.

“Local authorities are not afraid of the people, not of protests. They are afraid of their superiors,” she says, “they were afraid to hear: ‘You oversaw, allowed a scandal, there are media publications, what do you eat your bread for?'”

“Authoritarian regimes are afraid of symbolic sparks. They understand that a single act of protest may not cause an immediate mass movement, but can become a moral symbol around which scattered anxiety and discontent begin to crystallize,” says Lithuanian political scientist Nerijus Malukiavicius. “That is why such regimes seek to ‘clean up’ the scene, silence history, and discredit the victim.”

Source: Maria Zholobov et al., “He Burned Himself Alive to Protest Russia’s War in Ukraine. The State Tried to Erase Him,” Important Stories, 6 May 2026. A disturbing caveat appears above the English-language version of the article: “AI based translation. If you find a mistake, please highlight it and press Ctrl + Enter.” ||||| TRR

MOVE

Source: The Rookie, Season 3, Episode 11: “New Blood.” You can read more on the 1985 MOVE bombing here.

“I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long, they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.”
–James Baldwin

LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY: When it comes to the recent deaths of immigrants being held in detention, it would be wrong to describe the situation as wholly unprecedented. Detainees died under Bush, Obama, and Biden. But detainee deaths have accelerated during President Donald Trump’s second term, with 17 already since his inauguration. During the Biden administration, there were 26 deaths in 48 months—roughly one death every two months. During Trump’s term, that rate has nearly quadrupled. And ICE, now one of the best-funded operations of the federal government, is planning to double detention space before the end of the year.

“It’s absolutely horrific,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the immigration subcommittee, told me before jumping into the numbers above. In July, ICE was awarded $45 billion to expand its operations—its budget is now significantly larger than that of the federal prison system. And now, Jayapal points out, a little-known LLC has been awarded a $1.2 billion contract to build a facility in Texas despite never having previously won a federal contract for more than $16 million. Meanwhile, another $2.25 million contract was given to a Republican donor who received a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in 2000 after having pleaded guilty to mail fraud.

“Contracts are being distributed to Trump’s buddies and people with no experience running detention centers, many of these contracts are no-bid,” Rep. Jayapal said. “They’re incarcerating people and allowing them to die, not providing medical facilities. There are no standards. It’s horrific.”

Most ICE and border patrol agents will continue working during the government shutdown; their status as “essential” will shield them from the layoffs OMB director Russell Vought has requested in lieu of furloughs from most agencies and departments. But the nature of immigration officers’ “essential” work has significantly changed over the past eight months to become something far more brutal than procedural; in some cases, it has come to appear simply heartless. We have entered a period in which it is becoming important to ask: What happens when our leaders and the people who work for them see immigrants not as human beings but as scum? And what happens when that way of thinking about people starts also to be applied to others, like journalists and political opponents?

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Well-Being and the War

“We love and miss Berlin so much that we decided not to wait until we find ourselves there again . . .”
Samotechnaya Square, Moscow, April 2025. Photo: anatrrra (used with their permission)

Despite being hit with unprecedented Western sanctions, the war with Ukraine has been accompanied by a noticeable increase in the well-being of Russians. A new study has revealed the extent of the domestic feel-good factor, with economists at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economics (BOFIT) finding the level of Russians’ satisfaction with their household and personal circumstances has hit its highest in a decade.

To understand how the restructuring of Russia’s economy during wartime affected Russians, economists Sinikka Parviainen (BOFIT) and William Pyle (Middlebury College, USA) used data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Service (RLMS), which has been conducted by the Higher School of Economics almost every year since the 1990s. This research tracks the economic well-being of Russian households and individuals with a sample size of around 6,000-8,000 households and 17,000-21,000 people.
The economists looked at RLMS data from 2013-2023, scrutinising responses to the questions: “how satisfied with life are you right now?” and “how satisfied with your financial circumstances are you right now?”. They also looked at whether households had made large purchases over the past year, how much they spent on cultural events and how long they could maintain their current lifestyle if they lost their main source of income.
They concluded that the first two years of Russia’s invasion — 2022 and 2023 — saw the highest levels of general satisfaction, and specific financial satisfaction had also returned to 2014 levels for the first time. That year is seen as a benchmark before Russia was plunged into an economic crisis following the annexation of Crimea, imposition of Western sanctions and an oil price crash.
Large purchases fell to a minimum in 2022 but demand for non-food goods has since increased faster than inflation and wages, in line with The Bell’s earlier calculations. There was also a sharp rise in the proportion of households spending money on entertainment: in 2023 this reached 2018 levels, the researchers noted. The number of respondents who said they would be able to last more than a few months on their savings reached a 10-year high.

These findings correspond with Russia’s official statistics which also point to improved financial circumstances since the start of the war. In 2023, real incomes in Russia not only returned to 2013 levels after a decade of lost living standards, but surpassed the pre-Crimea level by 5%, the researchers highlighted.
There are no surprises as to the cause — a huge increase in state spending on the invasion and the military-industrial complex that has driven record labor shortages and pushed wages up across the economy. The high salaries offered by the state to people sent to work at the front, as well as those paid to soldiers (from 200,000 rubles a month) have played a big part, and the main winners have been residents of Russia’s poorest regions, which have recorded an unusually sudden increase in bank deposits.

Why the world should care

Putin’s regime is unlikely to face any internal threat as long as Russians’ well-being and overall happiness is on the rise.

Source: “Russians’ wellbeing levels surge in face of war, sanctions and repression,” The Bell, 2 April 2025

KVS, “SouthTown: The Olympic Quarters” (YouTube, 8 June 2021)

Today’s developers pay no less attention to creating comfortable residential environments in their projects than they do to configuring apartments, for example, and sometimes they pay even more attention to this.

In recent years, the concept of beautifying the area around residential buildings has been transformed from elementary landscaping of yards and equipping playgrounds to creating theme parks within residential complexes, divided into different activity zones, as well as designing additional spaces where residents of the neighborhood can gather, get acquainted, relax, play sports, and organize their own or their children’s leisure activities.

The role of such spaces is most often played by neighborhood centers, and planning these centers has recently become a real trend among developers.

***The neighborhood center at the SouthTown development, designed by Anton Rudnik. Photo: KVS Group, via Delovoi Peterbu***rg

The reasons

Residents of apartment buildings have always needed to socialize and spend time together. Back in Soviet times, people would often gather in courtyards to play dominoes, bingo, and table tennis. At some point the tradition was lost, but after the restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic were lifted, it literally sparkled with new colors.

In their article [sic: no link in the original] on communities, neighborhoods, and neighborliness, researchers from the Higher School of Economics noted that the first contemporary attempts to unite people living near each other into groups were especially noticeable after 2015, when people all over Russia began celebrating Neighbors Day. From a holiday in the classic sense of the word, Neighbors Day has quickly evolved into a multifaceted know-how for working with residents and getting them involved in such community work as spring cleanups and decorating yards for the New Year’s holidays.

With the emergence of urban agglomerations and the integrated development of new estates by developers, the need for communication among the people living there has increased. There is a logical explanation for this. In her time, Birgit Krantz, a Swedish sociologist, architect, and expert on neighborhood relations, argued that the ideal apartment complex contains between fifty to eighty apartments. If a complex has more apartments, it is difficult to manage it and maintain good neighborly relations.

There are many more apartments in new large residential projects, however, even if they are low-rise developments. This is where neighborhood centers come to the rescue. Consequently, they have become an integral part of people’s everyday lives in entire neighborhoods, functioning, per the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, as “third places” (between home and work or school), as social anchors which facilitate creative interactions among individuals.

A clear demand

Today, the neighborhood centers running in new residential neighborhoods are literally bustling with life, and they are usually open seven days a week from early morning to late evening.

Delovoi Peterburg talked to residents at the KVS Group’s SouthTown development, where such a neighborhood center has been up and running for over six months. The center offers sports classes; clubs for children, including preschool prep; nanny services; rooms for business meetings and negotiations; and movie screenings. A puppet theater also periodically comes to the center on tour, and a planetarium was once even recreated in the space.

According to Anzhelika Alshayeva, director general of the KVS Real Estate Agency, all activities were free of charge for residents during the center’s first three months of operation; the tab was picked up by the developer. Now, the cost of classes is only 200 rubles, and the interest of residents continues to grow. With this in mind, the decision was made to launch the second stage of the neighborhood center — a teen club, which will be equipped with ping-pong and billiards tables, which will undoubtedly appeal to local youngsters.

The teen club at the neighborhood center in the SouthTown development, designed by Anton Rudnik.
Photo: KVS Group, via *Delovoi Peterburg*

An important social role

Most importantly, such neighborhood centers, in addition to creating stable communities of around particular interests and hobbies, offer residents various opportunities for professional and personal growth. As practice shows, neighborhood residents themselves provide professional services, working as nannies, coaches, and teachers. Thus, another important issue for the neighborhood as a whole — job creation — is solved. And the concept of the 15-minute city is implemented in the particular housing complex: without leaving home, a person can comfortably take advantage of the full range of social services and work in the same place.

In this sense, co-working spaces can be an important component of neighborhood centers, serving not only as a pleasant but also as a useful feature for buyers and future residents. In addition, a co-working space can potentially generate revenue, thus covering the costs of its own upkeep.

And it does not necessarily have to be a classic room with computers and a coffee machine. For example, in the aforementioned neighborhood center, in the amphitheater of Olympic Hopes Park, the developer decided to create a beauty co-working space — a space with work areas which can be leased by beauty industry professionals. The project promises to be an important element of the neighborhood’s infrastructure, contributing to the growth of small business and strengthening the local community. This comprehensive approach to neighborhood development and neighborly relations was also recognized by Delovoi Peterburg, which awarded it the newspaper’s award for Residential Environment Project of the Year in Creating Versatile and Comfortable Neighborly Infrastructure.

The beauty co-working space at the neighborhood center in the SouthTown development, designed by Olga Fedotova.
Photo: KVS Group, via Delovoi Peterburg

When speaking about the importance of neighborhood centers for residential developments, the experts interviewed by Delovoi Peterburg generally voiced confidence that adding such facilities to residential developments does not make projects much more expensive, but it can increase an an apartment’s per meter cost, as well as make a developer stand out from the competition. The experts recognized that the trend toward neighborliness, according to psychologists, will continue to grow, especially among residents of new neighborhoods.

Source: “Focusing on uniting residents of new neighborhoods,” Delovoi Peterburg, 31 March 2025. Translated by the Russian Reader

Drones over Aprashka

As Ukrainian drones attacked the surrounding Leningrad Region this past weekend, life went on, seemingly unaltered, at downtown Petersburg’s notorious, glorious Apraksin Market aka Aprashka. Thanks to anatrrra for kind permission to reprint their stunning photo reportage from the market.

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Tautology (2)

Gartenstadt Falkenberg and Preussensiedlung

Yesterday was a rare sunny, warm day, so my boon companion and I traveled to the city’s far southeast to walk through Bruno Taut’s Falkenberg Garden City in Berlin-Bohnsdorf. It was like a tiny vision of heaven.

As it happened, it was also a short walk from Max Bel, Franz Clement, and Hermann Muthesius’s Prussian Street Estate, which was also quite handsome and built to a properly human scale.

I’ve noticed Berlin’s modernist housing estates seem to have had a beneficent effect on their neighborhoods, so that even current architects designing new houses and developments there try to get into the Tautian spirit, as it were. The overwhelming impression, however, is that you’re looking at a future we have lost forever.

The Russian Reader, Berlin-Friedrichshain, 30 March 2019

And now we come to this verb “see.” Within fifteen lines it’s been used six times. Every experienced poet knows how risky it is to use the same word several times within a short space. The risk is that of tautology. So what is it that Frost is after here? I think he is after precisely that tautology. More accurately, non-semantic utterance. Which you get, for instance, in “’Oh,’ and again, ‘Oh.’” Frost had a theory about what he called “sentence-sounds.” It had to do with his observation that the sound, the tonality, of human locution is as semantic as actual words. For instance, you overhear two people conversing behind a closed door, in a room. You don’t hear the words, yet you know the general drift of their dialogue; in fact, you may pretty accurately figure out its substance. In other words, the tune matters more than the lyrics, which are, so to speak, replaceable or redundant. Anyway, the repetition of this or that word liberates the tune, makes it more audible. By the same token, such repetition liberates the mind—rids you of the notion presented by the word. (This is the old Zen technique, of course, but, come to think of it, finding it in an American poem makes you wonder whether philosophical principles don’t spring from texts rather than the other way around.)

Source: “Joseph Brodsky: On ‘Home Burial'”

Gennady Shpalikov: The Soviet Guy Debord

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.

0:00 Teaser

0:18 Why Gennady Shpalikov is the Russian Guy Debord, and what Soviet existentialism has to do with it

3:32 Guy Debord as the founder of Situationism: “Never work”

6:34 Henri Murger, Guy Debord and Gennady Shpalikov’s characters as bohemians

8:32 Guy Debord’s psychogeography: the drift as a practice for discovering a city’s atmosphere

9:55 Debord’s Paris and Shpalikov’s Moscow

10:50 Alexandria as the capital of memories

12:32 Shpalikov’s poetics and Debord’s Paris: between the real world and the imaginary world

14:07 Sartre’s nothingness as the key to understanding Shpalikov’s poetics

16:20 Sartre’s being-in-itself and being-for-itself, or predetermination and consciousness

18:38 The philosophy of existentialism: existing in a situation as in the fabric of life, which is not defined by personal qualities

20:25 Non-narrative shots from Shpalikov’s films: scenes from I Walk Around Moscow

21:56 Situationist form as a link between Shpalikov’s poetics and the philosophy of existentialism

25:52 Existentialism in cinema: the atmosphere of the movie Breathless

27:08 Shpalikov’s psychogeography for Moscow

30:45 How to reprise Shpalikov’s existential know-how in today’s Moscow

31:45 Détournement: reverse appropriation and distortion of meaning for reclaiming the poetry of urban space

33:28 How Shpalikov rejects Soviet Moscow and appropriates the space of the city in the movie I Walk Around Moscow

37:03 The transformation of Shpalikov’s natural charm into poetry

38:45 The poetic eternity of Nikita Mikhalkov’s character in the movie I Walk Around Moscow

40:42 The dream of an imaginary West as the driver of Soviet existentialism

Source: Peredelkino Dom Tvorchestva (YouTube), 10 October 2024

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.

Gennady Shpalikov, 1965. Photo: Georgy Ter-Ovanesov/RIA Novosti

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 The Wharf, 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.”

Source: Igor Gulin, “Elusive simplicity: how Gennady Shpalikov found no place for himself in the Stagnation,” Kommersant Weekend, 1 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

I Walk Around Moscow (1964). In Russian, with English subtitles

Source: Mosfilm (YouTube)

Hideout

It took me a while to understand why the news about the prisoner swap has been making me feel bitter rather than happy, although I wish all these people freedom, of course.

No, it wasn’t because, thanks to an American journalist’s arrogance and a German tourist’s stupidity, a professional FSB killer has been set free, meaning that his crime will go unpunished and nullifying the enormous efforts a large number of people made in apprehending him. And not because they mainly swapped for prisoners celebrated by the media, leaving in the gulag the unknown loners who wanted to fight on behalf of Ukraine. And not even because the leaders of the Anti-Corruption Foundation themselves took credit for the release of Navalny’s supporters while failing to thank the US authorities for their unbelievable efforts in haggling for their people’s freedom.

My bitterness arises from the very fact that the haggling took place. It shows that Putin is treated as a force to be reckoned with, that he is given what he wants. And that means that Putin’s Russia will be around for a long time to come. The regime is recognized and there is still no strategic decision on what to do about it.

Source: Julia Khazagaeva (Facebook), 1 August 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

In 2024, the creators of the Wynwood Hotel opened Hideout, a new public space [sic] at 22 Rimsky-Korsakov Avenue [in Petersburg]. Bumaga shows its readers what the neighborhood looks like and explains how it is laid out.

“You’re easy to love.” Photo: @3axapkina (Instagram)

People started talking about the space in the spring of 2024, when a banner emblazoned with the words “You’re easy to love” was hung on the facade of a historic building. This Is a Sign, a team that installs similar messages in the urban environment, was commissioned by Hideout to do the piece.

The Hideout Residence apartments began operating in the summer, and a Scandinavian garden in the courtyard was also opened, Hideout told Bumaga.

The garden in the courtyard was designed by landscape architecture studio L.Buro. The main works have been completed, but the garden will be developed and improved in the future, Hideout said.

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L.Buro’s new Scandinavian garden project is now open to the public! Hideout is an urban space featuring an aparthotel, restaurants, and a fitness studio. Spoiler: a hotel and a contemporary art gallery will open there soon🤫 When designing this project, the studio’s architects managed to take a fresh look at Petersburg’s historic centre . In the video, L.Buro founders Valery Fedotov and Pyotr Lari talk in detail about the Hideout project.

The space’s press service of the space also noted that trees and plants were already growing at the site in the late eighteenth century. State Councillor Charles Gascoine, who owned the plot, laid out a fruit orchard near his mansion.

Suite Beauty Salon, Power Peach Yoga and Functional Training Studio, and other tenants operate in the space. The space’s first gastronomic tenant was Jam Café, by the creators of Atelier Tapas & Bar, which opened at the beginning of the year.

In the summer, Hideout added another gastro project, Aster Bakery‘s 23-table patio terrace in the courtyard.

Aster Bakery’s patio terrace. Photo: Hideout

An aparthotel featuring 60- to 100-square-metre residences has been welcoming guests. They have been decorated in neutral colors and sport designer furniture.

In August, the residences can be booked starting at 43,000 rubles [approx. 500 USD] a night.

Source: “Hideout is a space in Kolomna with a Scandinavian garden, an Aster Bakery patio, and a sign that says, ‘You’re easy to love.’ Here’s what it looks like,” Bumaga, 31 July 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

Do Russians Have a Conscience?

This is Odessa today. It is useless to appeal to the conscience of Russians. They don’t have one. None of them, practically none of them. Accordingly, one can only wish them one thing: may you all go to the devil, bastards! And so it will be, I believe, and fairly.

Source: Yuri Leiderman (Facebook), 23 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Punters outside Chronicle Bar Nekrasov Street in Petersburg, 27 June 2021
Photo: vladislavkharchev (Instagram), via Bumaga

Consulting company NF Group analyzed the trends for the openings of cafes, bars and restaurants in downtown Petersburg in the first six moths of 2023. Their analysts came to the conclusion that the city’s principal bar street is Nekrasov Street, the NF Group’s press service informed Bumaga.

This claim is based on statistics on the distribution among different types of establishments on Nekrasov and Rubinstein streets. By mid-2023, bars and pubs accounted for 58% of all public dining projects on Nekrasov. On Rubinstein Street, this figure was lower: only 40% of all establishments there are bars or pubs.

In the first six months of last year, Rubinstein was also inferior to Nekrasov in terms of the percentage of bars and pubs: 42% on Rubinstein and 51% on Nekrasov, respectively.

Percentages of bars/pubs (goldenrod), cafes/restaurants (navy blue), and other business that opened on Rubinstein (left) and Nekrasov streets in central Petersburg in the first six months of 2022 (inner circles) and 2023 (outer circles).
Pie charts courtesy of NF Group

What other conclusions did the analysts draw?

In the first six months of 2023, fifty bars, restaurants, and cafes were opened in Petersburg. This is comparable to the figures that were observed in the city before the coronavirus pandemic.
On Nevsky Prospekt, restaurateurs are increasingly opening affordable establishments, including chain outlets.
Public dining establishments have room to grow on Nekrasov Street: there they occupy 51% of all commercial space. This figure is much higher—78%—on Rubinstein Street.

The Context. Rubinstein was long considered Petersburg’s primary bar street, but the recent Bar Affair and other scandals have spoiled this location’s image. Recently, the security forces have been organizing raids on Nekrasov Street: police visited local bars several times in July alone.

Source: “Nekrasov Street is Petersburg’s main bar location, according to statistics,” Bumaga, 22 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Looking for Ecuador

I was walking down Dostoevsky Street when a middle-aged dame jumped right at me from out of Candle Lane and screamed, “What an obnoxious street, solid zigzags! There’s no way I can find the right address!”

Somewhat blown away by the notion of a “zigzag street” in Petersburg, I asked what street she needed.

“Razyezzhaya, 12. Ecuador is there too.”

“Ecuador!?” I repeated, even more flabbergasted.

“Well, yeah.”

“Razyezzhaya is over there,” I said, pointing up ahead. “You haven’t reached it yet, but you’re blaming the zigzags, although you can actually break your leg here in South America.”

The woman looked at me unkindly, and quickened her pace. I caught up with her at the intersection of Dostoevsky and Razyezzhaya. She was pestering a young fellow about which way Number 12 was even as she stood right under a sign that showed the range of house numbers on that block. The young man was in fact trying to point the sign out to her.

Then she saw me and charged off in the right direction, gesticulating and repeating, “One moron after another.” And I, waving at her as she walked away, suddenly realized that she had meant Aquaphor, [a water filter store] in the consumer services center on the corner of Razyezzhaya and Bolshaya Moskovskaya, not Ecuador.

Source: Marina Varchenko (Facebook), 3 March 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

“Serving Russia is real work: voluntary service in the armed forces”: a recruitment ad outside Yamskoi Market in downtown Petersburg. Photo by Marina Varchenko, who captioned it on Facebook as follows: “The horrors of our little town.”

Source: Marina Varchenko (Facebook), 19 March 2023

Yikes!

Today I wound up in the Metropolitan Garden at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Even though it’s March, the weather was wintry: sunny, frosty, pretty clouds in a blue sky, birds chirping. It was fine. I wandered around, taking pictures (which I’ll show you later). A fairly young lady came towards me and looked at me and my camera.

“What is there to shoot here?” she said. “Go to Kazakhstan, to such and such city”—I’ve forgotten the name—”there is definitely something to shoot there.”

I was so taken aback that I said nothing in reply, which is strange for me in such circumstances.

Okay, whatever: I’d had my little walk. As I was leaving the garden I saw a twenty-something kid begging pitifully and mournfully for money to buy food. When someone gave him ten rubles, he would ask for twenty. When someone gave him twenty, he would ask for forty. When I handed him a 100-ruble bill, he asked for 200 — so insistently that I decided I wouldn’t give more. So he shouted, “That’s something, at least” at me as I walked away, his voice dripping with mockery. Okay, the day was getting interesting.

I wanted to go to the Fontanka, but I was tired already. I decided to take a bus down Nevsky several stops. The bus was packed. I was shoved up against some old biddy, who immediately asked, “Is this where I get off for the Interior Ministry House of Culture?” That was when I let loose about culture, and the Interior Ministry, and everything else. The passengers responded aggressively. Basically, I didn’t make it to the Fontankа — I got off earlier. Otherwise, I would have risked being charged with defamation.

I walked the rest of the way to the Fontanka. The sun was shining, and it was beautiful. I began to calm down. I saw a decent-looking dude, opposite the Mayakovsky Library, doing number one right into the Fontanka. People were walking by him, trying not to notice. I decided to walk on by too: otherwise, I would have got carried away again. As I walked by I was thinking about culture, of course.

I turned onto Lomonosov Street, then onto Razyezzhaya. Seeing a young woman coming toward me, I tensed up in advance. “Where is Dostoevsky Street, 12?” she asked.

“I don’t know where Number 12 is exactly, but it’s somewhere nearby. But you have just passed Dostoevsky Street, you need to turn around and go back,” I said to her, pointing with my hand.

I went on, but the girl stared at her smartphone. And don’t you know, she took off away from Dostoevsky, not toward it.

Since I was freaking out big-time as it was, I went into a store, hoping that nothing would happen at the final frontier before home. And everything did go well, but while I was unloading my groceries at the checkout, the cashier lady was possessed to congratulate me on the upcoming holiday [International Women’s Day], and I was likewise possessed to reply that I didn’t celebrate communist holidays. In a nutshell, I walked out (ran out) of the store as old women and not only old women screamed at me that they had lived well under the Communists, but “liberasts” like me had ruined everything. Yes, sir, it wasn’t a good day.

Source: Marina Varchenko (Facebook), 7 March 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Fascism with a Human Face

Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a session of the Valdai Discussion Club, acknowledged a decline in the real incomes of our compatriots.

He noted that the issue was being resolved in cooperation with the trade unions, RIA Novosti reports.

This dialogue continues. We see that people’s nominal incomes are growing, but real incomes have become slightly lower. Bearing in mind the state of the Russian economy, we can solve these problems and should do so in accordance with the existing plans of the Russian government.

Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation

The head of state also said that it was necessary to fight for wage increases. At the same time, he addressed his appeal to both Russians and “ordinary citizens” of the United States and Europe.

Since the start of the special operation by Russian troops in Ukraine, people have experienced a loss of income and savings. Putin also noted earlier that many Russians were at risk of layoffs.

Source: Andrei Gorelikov, “Putin urged both Russians and citizens of western countries to fight for higher salaries,” Rabota.ru, 28 October 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

“There are more than 485 air fresheners in operation: they were installed in the air ducts of the climate control system. They spread the fragrance around the car every ten minutes. The fragrance is called ‘Moscow Metro,'” explain the metro’s press service , stressing that all the aromas were safe, hypoallergenic, and complied with regulations.

In 2019, during a vote on the project’s implementation, ninety percent of passengers surveyed said they would prefer an air-freshened carriage to a regular one. Muscovites especially wanted the smell of cherry blossoms in the subway.

Source: “Air fresheneres installed on the Filyovskaya metro line,” Russkii pioner, 3 November 2022. Photo courtesy of Russkii pioner. Translated by the Russian Reader

What attracts people [to the shot bar Fedya, the Wildfowl!]? The irony and the simplicity, but at the same time the pleasant crowd. Here you can meet people who, the day before, dined on sets [sic] of scallops and dill sauce at designer restaurants, but they are glad to eat belyash and kvass at Fedya’s. Every other table orders kebabs (from 325 rubles) and drinks tinctures and macerations. Security guards monitor everything: if you swear loudly, they will politely ask you to leave.

Source: “From brilliant shot bars to giant food halls: 12 Petersburg openings in 2022 — Vitya Bar, Noise Cabaret, Moskovsky Market, and the inclusive Outside Entrance,” The Village, 5 December 2022. Photo courtesy of The Village. Translated by the Russian Reader

The “Fedya, the wildfowl!” scene from the beloved Soviet comic crime caper The Diamond Arm (1969), starring Andrei Mironov and Yuri Nikulin