“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?
“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.
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 Peterburg
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.
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.
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.)
Alexander Ivanov, “Gennady Shpalikov: Being Restless” (in Russian, with no subtitles)
Gennady Shpalikov and Guy Debord were nearly the same age, and their popularity peaked at the same time. But is this the only thing that unites the French philosopher and the Russian writer? Alexander Ivanov, founder of the publishing house Ad Marginem, will show that these two figures were connected not only by the time in which they worked but also by the very spirit of the time, which they saw, felt and were able to convey to others.
Debord’s adage “Love is possible only on the eve of a revolution” could well have been endorsed by Shpalikov.
Debord was the founder of Situationism.
An amazing poet, screenwriter, and director, Shpalikov was the Soviet Guy Debord. Like Debord, Shpalikov had an explicitly spatial mind: he understood space not as a receptacle for bodies but as a way of assembling the soul in the gaps, intervals, and flashes of aimless, unprogrammed, slippery movements around the urban environment. Debord called this mode of movement détournement — a deviation, an illegitimate, reverse appropriation in which the spaces and cultural signs captured by other people’s meanings are reappropriated by turning them inside out semantically or simple shifting their meaning. This was exactly how Shpalikov dealt with the anonymous, official space of the Soviet city: by romanticizing its most banal corners and nooks. Both of these artists conjured the mood of an entire epoch in the late 50s and early 60s.
November 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Gennady Shpalikov, the screenwriter, filmmaker, and poet, one of the symbols of the Thaw era, an extremely popular writer and yet one whose work has been poorly read. Igor Gulin explains how Shpalikov looked for an answer to the question of where good people end up, and how the drama of his characters reprised his own.
Gennady Shpalikov on the set of the film I Am Twenty. Photo: Gorky Film Studio
Screenwriting was an honorable profession in the Soviet Union. Screenwriters were not considered to be craftsmen consigned to the sidelines, but serious writers, and so the screenwriter’s name was listed first in the credits, before the director’s. Nevertheless, not even the best of them were stars. Gennady Shpalikov was an exception. From his very first efforts in cinema, his name was a symbol of the new art of the Thaw — first among his fellow filmmakers, then for a relatively wide swath of the intelligentsia. His death in 1974 was a token of the sixties generation’s demise.
The cinematic Thaw was already in full swing by the time Shpalikov joined the profession. Marlen Khutsiev and Felix Mironer’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street(1956), Mikhail Schweitzer’s The Tight Knot (1957), Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier(1959) had been released, but these beautiful pictures still lacked something that would instill a sense of decisive reform and renewal. Shpalikov carried out a tiny revolution in Soviet cinema — not alone, of course, but he was its leader. He contributed an open sense of form, showing that a movie could be something other than an itinerary from point A to point B. It could be a stroll, a stroll with no clear goals, from one impression to another, from one funny and touching incident to another.
Almost all of Shpalikov’s scripts from the 1960s are just such cinematic walkabouts: A Streetcar to Other Cities (1962), directed by his friend Yuli Fait (1962); The Star on the Buckle (1962) and I’m from Childhood (1966), written for Viktor Turov; I Walk Around Moscow (1963) directed by Georgiy Daneliya; The Wharf and Summer Holiday, which were never made into films; A Long Happy Life (1966), of course; and Ilyich’s Gate (1962–1964) to a great extent. This film was more complicated, however. Khutsiev’s lofty idealism counterbalanced Shpalikov’s nimble gifts, and it was their confrontation and, at times, conflict that gave birth to a masterpiece. This later worked with Larisa Shepitko, when she and Shpalikov agonizingly co-wrote You and I (1971). To produce something truly significant, Shpalikov needed a co-writer-slash-director — a collaborator and an opponent, not a faithful executor of his ideas.
The stroll was the genre not only of Shpalikov’s creative work but also of his life. He existed in the same way, charming everyone he met, traipsing from one crowd to another, from one idea to another. He wrote the same way: on telegram blanks and napkins, not bothering with punctuation and spelling, and often not worrying whether the text was coherent, paying mind to its intonation and pacing, rather than to the idea and the logic of form. His scripts and songs, poems and prose experiments often seem sloppy to a sober eye. But their sloppiness never irritates: it comes across as organic, as a hallmark of authenticity.
Dozens of memoirs have been written about Shpalikov. Their authors constantly wonder aloud how it happened that this carefree, lively man took to drinking heavily and eventually committed suicide. They often blame the era. There is some truth to this, but it is a little different than is commonly thought. The Stagnation was not only a time of disillusionment after the upswing of the Thaw. It was also a time of complication. The members of the Sixties generation who continued to create and grow learned to resist better. It required them to mobilize their inner strength, making them more reflective and deeper. Shpalikov was a genius of splendid superficiality, of drifting and gliding. He understood this perfectly well. The drama of his art kicked off long before the frosts of the Brezhnev era set in.
The same disturbing intuition — sometimes well concealed, sometimes voiced as directly as possible — was evident in everything Shpalikov wrote. Surprisingly, this anxiety was hardly detected by his contemporaries, who remained under the hypnosis of the myth they had created themselves. It concerns the central figure of Shpalikov’s entire oeuvre. What to do with the fact that the “good man,” about whom he always wrote, so easily goes to the bad? What to do with the fact that charming frivolity quickly turns into grim irresponsibility, moral freedom into immorality, the freewheeling life of the tumbleweed into pathetic escapism, and nonstop wittiness into nauseating clownishness? Committed to the utmost sincerity, Shpalikov had an absolute ear for falsity and from the very beginning heard the rudiments of falsity in himself. Perhaps that is why he seemed doomed (and suicidal notes appear in his texts very early on). Drunkenness, however, made it easier for him to accept his fate.
This intuition is almost nonexistent in Ilyich’s Gate, in which the romantics and the bastards are delineated from each other. But it is already present (for the time being, as a quite vague hint) in I Walk Around Moscow (the young Nikita Mikhalkov’s ambiguous charisma works perfectly in this regard). It is also palpable in TheWharf, Shpalikov’s first major feature. (Its director, Vladimir Kitaysky, committed suicide while working on the picture, and the movie was never completed.) The script of The Wharf is an enchanting, airy text centered on a rather savage deed. Coming to Moscow for a single evening, the main character, a barge captain, decides to kidnap his son from his mother, wanders around nighttime Moscow with the boy for a long while, and when he falls asleep on a bench, simply runs away to his barge. A good guy’s transformation into a scoundrel is amped up to wholly Dostoevskyean cruelty in Summer Holiday and A Charming Man’s Day (another script that was never produced). This trajectory devolves into total despair in You and I, in which a Thawnik’s romantic flight to the Far North is played out as an egoistic escape from his own worthless life, frittered-away talent, ruined romance, and lost friendship.
Shpalikov never judges his characters: their meannesses and downfalls just happen. There is no reflection at all in his art. There is only movement, and this movement has its own laws. At the beginning of the trajectory there is a good, harmonious man, but once chosen, the freewheeling life gradually whittles him down to the ugly figure of a cynic, a vulgarian, a scoundrel. Shpalikov has a very frank poem about this:
Аh the streets, the only refuge Not for the homeless, but for those who live in the city. The streets pester and haunt me, They are my comrades and my adversaries.
I don’t feel as if I am walking them, I obey them, I move my feet, And the streets guide me, they lead me Through a sequence set once upon a time,
A sequence of cherished back alleys, A sequence of jaunty notions and good intentions.
The same thing happens in Shpalikov’s only directorial work. A Long Happy Life is usually remembered as a light, lyrical picture, but actually it is chockablock with contempt for oneself and one’s kind. It is a movie about how a typical man of the 1960s, a charming unshaven geologist, runs off into nowhere and away from a beautiful woman, and at the same time from any future, from that selfsame long happy life, simply because he cannot help but run. A lighter note is generated by the finale: the famous five-minute scene of a barge on a river is Shpalikov’s homage to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his favorite film.
This is Shpalikov’s main gimmick. As intoxication relieves a hangover, so the shame of escape is relieved by yet another escape. And if the body can no longer escape, there remain flights of fantasy. Distracted from the protagonist’s mediocre fate, the gaze follows the barge and loses itself in this marvelous tracking shot. All of Shpalikov’s best poems are about the same thing: not about the joy of life, but about the desire to escape from it to a place that is obviously impossible, somewhere “where mother is young and father is alive.” To leave, but not by sinking into drunkenness, illness, and rows, but to disappear gently, to be weathered away from the world. “My head is vacant, / Like a deserted place. / I’m flying off somewhere, / Like a tree from a leaf.”
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.
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.
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.
L.Buro’s rendering of Hideout’s garden
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Despite its declared war on “satanic” western values, Putinist Russia continues to slavishly imitate all the worst the mythical west has to offer, including “Black Friday,” as exemplified by this image from an email flyer sent to me earlier today by the major online retailer Ozon, featuring the pop singer Dmitry Malikov. Nor has Putin’s “proxy war” with the west stopped the pidginization of the Russian language, as seen in the second-to-last piece in this grim holiday collage. ||| TRR
The expected tourist flow from Iran may amount to approximately two thousand people a week starting in the spring of 2023, director of the municipal tourist information bureau Yuri Bogdanov said on November 24. According to him, relevant negotiations are underway with air carriers.
“We are negotiating with airlines that want to provide direct flights between Iranian cities and St. Petersburg. We hope that there will be six flights per week with an average number of around 300 seats on board. This is already about two thousand people a week. We expect that, beginning in the spring, these airlines will supply their airplanes,” TASS quoted Bogdanov as saying.
The expert clarified that there were more flights before the pandemic and six thousand tourists used to arrive from Iran every week.
According to Bogdanov, the flow of tourists may return to its pre-covid levels in St. Petersburg by about 2026, but at the same time primarily due to guests from Russia, and not from foreign countries. According to the figures he cited, in 2019, about five million Russians and 5.5 million foreigners visited the Northern Capital, while 6.4 million Russians and 150–200 thousand foreigners visited the city in the first nine months of 2022.
“We have reformatted the priorities for domestic tourism — we want to reach the same 10.5 million tourists a year. There is every ground for this to happen,” Bogdanov opined.
Earlier, the State Duma Budget and Taxes Committee recommended that St. Petersburg be included in the list of regions that charge tourists a resort fee.
At least 58 children, some reportedly as young as eight, have been killed in Iran since anti-regime protests broke out in the country two months ago.
According to Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), 46 boys and 12 girls under 18 have been killed since the protests began on 16 September, sparked by the death of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody.
In the past week alone, five children were reportedly killed by security forces as violence continued across the country.
Speaking at Kian’s funeral on Friday, his family said security services had opened fire on the family car, where Kian was sitting next to his father. Iranian security services have denied responsibility for his death, blaming the shooting on “terrorists”.
Iran’s mounting child death toll comes amid escalating violence in cities across the country, with protests showing no sign of abating.
[…]
Young people have been at the forefront of anti-regime protests, which started after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police. She had been arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly.
The deaths of two teenage girls, Nika Shakamari and Sarina Esmailzadeh, both allegedly beaten to death by security forces for protesting, provoked further outrage.
Videos of schoolgirls across the country protesting against their killing by removing their hijabs and taking down pictures of Iran’s supreme leaders went viral on social media, leading to raids on schools where children were beaten and detained. According to Iran’s teachers union, another 16-year-old girl, Asra Panahi, died after she was attacked by security forces in her classroom in the north-western town of Ardabil on 18 October.
The attacks on children in schools is continuing, according to Hengaw, which said a 16-year-old girl from Kurdistan is on life support after throwing herself from a school van, having been arrested at her school last week.
HRA says more than 380 protesters have been killed since the protests began and more than 16,000 people have been detained, including children. The figure is disputed by the authorities.
A view of Vokzal 1853 on opening day. Photo: Sergei Yermokhin/Delovoi Peterburg
On November 21, the opening of the food hall [fud-kholl] Vokzal 1853 took place in the building of the former Warsaw railway station.
It is the largest gastronomic space in St. Petersburg and, so its creators claim, in Europe.
So far, not all the establishments in the eater have opened — the launch . The event zone [event-zona] is designed for to accommodate 2.5 thousand guests and have 4 thousand seats, while the entrance to the second floor is still closed.
The cost of renovating the former railway station exceeded 1.5 billion rubles. The Vokzal 1853 food hall [fud-kholl] is a project of the Adamant holding company and restaurateur Alexei Vasilchuk. In total, as stated earlier, more than 90 restaurant concepts [restorannykh konseptsii] will await visitors, and the total area of the food hall will be about 34 thousand square meter.
The company plans to open a concert venue, craft [kraftovye] shops, and a coworking [kovorking — sic] in the space.
Earlier, DP reported that its creators had conceived the decoration of the premises to suggest the atmosphere of nineteenth-century railways stations, and visitors would find themselves in the “epicenter of a bustling creative life.”
Ukraine continued to reckon with the fallout from Russia’s air strikes on its energy infrastructure, with much of the country still struggling with blackouts. Residents in Kyiv, the capital, were told to prepare for more attacks. Russian missiles damaged a hospital on the outskirts of Zaporizhia, a Ukrainian-held city not far from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, controlled by Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said Russia was heavily shelling Kherson, the southern city recaptured by Ukrainian forces in early November. Local officials said that strikes killed seven people in the city on Thursday.
Source: The Economist, “The World in Brief” email newsletter, 25 November 2022
This is a wildly disappointing exercise in sophism and self-deception by the usually much more lucid Maxim Katz. Russia has arrived at its present murderous and self-destructive bad end not through rigorous and ruthless totalitarian indoctrination and psychological manipulation, as suggested by Katz’s invocation of Ron Jones’s 1967 Third Wave experiment in a California high school, but through a chaotic, consistent indulgence of opportunism, consumerism, escapism, ressentiment, hipsterism, “westernism,” capitalism, cynicism, nihilism, and thuggery by the elites and the much of the so-called intelligentsia, thus almost completely overwhelming the decent, democratic, and egalitarian impulses and undertakings of differently minded and empowered “other Russians” from all walks of life and all parts of the country. It has been one of the missions of this website to bear witness to both these tendencies in their extreme and trite manifestations. You’ll find vanishingly little of what Katz describes in my chronicles of the last fifteen years here and on The Russian Reader‘s sister blog Chtodelat News. You will find, however, plenty of stories of brave grassroots resistance and movement building blunted and, ultimately, murdered by a police state whose PR wing has urged Russians to trade their freedom for food courts. ||| TRR
