2016 (Have a Heart)

About the Book

In this gripping tale of contemporary Russia, a young filmmaker and her friends run afoul of a government that ruthlessly oppresses artists who dare to satirize the regime…

When Maya, a young Russian filmmaker, makes a low-budget horror movie with her friends, it seems like a promising start to a career in indie film. Little does she know that her jokey lo-fi film will soon attract the attention of the autocratic censors at the highest levels of the Russian police state.

What follows is a propulsive narrative of an artist being crushed by state power, and the choices that one makes within a system where free expression is literally illegal. Written with the undeniable voice of a emigre from Putin’s Russia, The Undead is a tense, piercing story that serves as a parable, and a warning, about political oppression.

Contributors

Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and writer who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She is an established arts journalist with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, and others. She is currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and lives in Brooklyn. The Undead is her first novel in English.

Praise

“[An] exquisite balance between contentment and foreboding, tranquility and chaos” — Vogue

“Chillingly examines the Russian government’s stranglehold on the arts and media industries …. a convincing cautionary tale of the dangers of political apathy.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] brisk, vivid page turner” — The Milwaukee Shepherd Express

“There is nothing supernatural about the zombies in Svetlana Satchkova’s savvy, frightening novel. They are all of us, wherever we are, who keep looking away when authoritarian forces crush expression. Witty and unsettling, The Undead is a cautionary tale about, among other things, never quite admitting where the danger lies until it’s too late.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

“The Undead is a courageous and witty book about art and politics. With keen insight and wry humor, Svetlana Satchkova evokes a devastating artistic and moral reckoning. This fascinating, propulsive novel will stay with me.” —Helen Phillips, author of The Need

“The Undead has the force of an undertow, pulling us relentlessly away from safety. Svetlana Satchkova has written a gripping, haunting portrait of a world coming undone.” —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

In The Undead, the career and well-being of Maya, a young filmmaker in Moscow, unravel in the most bizarre, realistic way, showcasing the insidious, absurd nature of a totalitarian state. Deeply informative and engrossing, The Undead examines how bizarre and horrific human nature can evolve under the pressure of the desire to live unharmed rather than free. A moving examination of the meaning of home, the horror of a dictatorship, the hilarity and joy of movie-making, and one woman’s political coming of age in Putin’s Russia. Truly important reading for our times.” —Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker

Source: Melville House. The emphasis is mine. ||||| TRR

Glinstake, “Live at 16 Tons”

Glintshake‘s performance at the club 16 Tons on 2 April 2016.

Setlist:

Halfman
My New Style
Squalor
Shadows
Fifteen Minutes to Five
The Steppe is the Place
Have a Heart 8
Phoenix

ГШ (GLINTSHAKE): Facebook •. VK • Soundcloud • iTunes • Instagram

CREDITS:

Camera: Alec Mirzametov, Anton Rodionov • Editing/Grading: Alec Mirzametov

Source: Alec Mir (YouTube), 30 May 2016. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader. The emphasis is mine. ||||| TRR

Glintshake, “Have a Heart” • Erarta Museum, St. Petersburg, 2 April 2017 • Source: Denis Morozov (YouTube)

[Verse 1]
Beyond the bright lights
Of sleepy buildings
Lines in the snow
Send signals
From distant stations
Docks are waiting
Waiting in the fog
For distant shores
In the haze of summer
In the arctic circle

[Chorus]
Have a heart

[Verse 2]
A gusty wind
Noise on the line
The compactor gently crushes the white Volga, waves splash
The markings are washed away
The airfield is not visible in the fog, the camera clicks
The speed drops
The waves crash
The earliest
The most distant flight
Faces and shadows
Of random passersby

[Bridge]
In dark apartments
In yellow deserts
In blue snows
In fiery rivers
In the foggy sea

[Chorus]
Have a heart

[Outro]
Salt on the dials
The needle flutters
The airfield is invisible in the fog, the camera clicks
Step on the gas!
In the endless field, in the pink jungle, in the summer haze
Have a heart

Source: Genius. Translated by the Russian Reader

Glintshake, “Halfman” (2016)

[Verse 1]
Headlights, I see a shadow
Someone’s been hanging around for days
Standing around the corner
Lying on the grass under the window
A bloodsucker
Or the corner
Loading
His black barrel
His black barrel
His black barrel
His black barrel

Who is he, a skinner
Or a TV reporter
A maniac, a Satanist
Or a Russian Orthodox Stalinist
I hear the wind
An ominous moan
The pungent scent
Of pouring cologne

[Chorus]
A halfman
Roams Moscow
A halfman
In a half-jacket

[Verse 2]
Strolls in places
Where everything is sold without a passport
Zhiguli cars are burning
We gotta move before they sweep us away
Gritting my teeth
I dance
In a techno club
Four days

When I grow up
I’ll stop thinking and understand everything
The light of faith will dispel the darkness
My same-sex marriage will fall apart
I’ll go out into the world
I’ll throw away my syringe
I’ll become the best
Of all the shop girls

[Chorus]
A halfman
Roams Moscow
A halfman
Not in his right mind

Source: Genius. Translated by the Russian Reader

In my days as a magazine editor in Russia, I used to write about movies Volodymyr Zelensky starred in. I thought of him as a decent actor and a nice enough person. Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen him turn into a towering historical figure. Watching his impassioned address to the UN Security Council, in which he spoke about war crimes committed by Russian troops in a town of Bucha, I caught myself thinking that I want Russia’s next leader to be just like him – courageous, principled, and boundlessly empathetic.

In the fall of 1993, I began my first semester at NYU. Just one year earlier, I’d been a regular Moscow teenager, whose wildest ambition was to own a nice pair of jeans. But my father had been offered a job at an American company, and our family relocated to New York. With the move, the world suddenly opened to me, possibilities beckoning. My father, ever the practical man, told me to study business. Ever the obedient Soviet child, I didn’t protest, despite the fact that nothing could interest me less — but fortunately for me, there was no such thing as a business major at NYU, and, when I got my BA in philosophy, I moved back to Russia, leaving my parents and younger brother behind. The fact that I did so was testament to how profoundly I’d changed in four years.

I was barely 20, but my reasons for returning were clear. I’d fallen in love with a man who lived in Moscow, and I longed for the glorious city which I still considered to be my home. In 1997, Moscow was an exciting place where everything was changing at an incredible pace. New lives were being built on top of the remnants of the USSR. I also felt drawn to Russian intellectual culture, having started writing my first novel in Russian, and I wanted my child, whom I was already carrying, to speak my native language as fluently as I did.

My marriage to the father of my son didn’t work out, as was perhaps expected of a union between people so young. But I was busy becoming who I wanted to be — a writer and a mother — and quickly bounced back. Meanwhile, Russia continued to change. In August 1999, I saw Vladimir Putin on television for the very first time, introduced as the new prime minister. I’ve never been particularly politically astute, but at that moment, I saw in his face, as in a crystal ball, what was going to happen in the years to come: the scheming, the corruption, the crackdown on independent media, the police state.

In September of that same year, a series of explosions destroyed several apartment blocks in the cities of Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk; over 300 people died and 1700 were injured. I remember watching the news late at night, my two-year-old son asleep in the next room, and trembling in fear as I wondered if my building would be next. I imagined the most horrible thing – not that we’d both be dead, but dying, separated by fallen walls, him calling me, pleading for help. In a few days, rumors abounded that it was Putin who’d ordered the explosions with the aim of blaming them on Chechen militant Islamists. He became president in 2000, after starting the second war in Chechnya and famously having promised to “snuff ‘em in the outhouse,” to the delight of the majority of the population of Russia.

Had I believed my initial premonition, I would’ve left right away, but I liked to think of myself as a rational person. And so I tried to convince myself that I was being paranoid. It wasn’t easy.

Over the next ten years, Putin’s regime took away people’s freedoms in tiny steps that were probably meant to be unnoticeable, while he gathered enough power for himself that he could change the constitution and effectively be president indefinitely. Meanwhile, I built up my Moscow life. I was a writer, but I was also a single mother whose relatives lived across the ocean, and I worried about what would happen to my son if anything happened to me. So, though I wanted to report on the shrinking of democracy, I wrote instead about beauty and culture. In this way, I thought, I’d protect myself from the dangers of those who covered nationalist movements and wars. I wouldn’t end up dead, like Anna Politkovskaya and countless others.

But self-preservation under a regime like Putin’s can only take you so far. In 2014, when the people of Ukraine ousted their pro-Russia president Victor Yanukovych from his office, Putin swiftly moved into the neighboring country and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Russian society split into two opposing camps, one cheering Putin’s maneuver and the other incensed by it. The question “Who does Crimea belong to?” became the most salient marker of “them” versus “us.” Marriages crumbled under the weight of this question; friendships were irreparably broken; people became estranged from their parents. Later that year, a provision to the criminal law obligated all dual nationals to report to the authorities. I made a copy of my American passport, filled out the requisite forms, and went to my local branch of the Federal Migration Service. The man who inspected my documents had the unmistakable air of someone who was embroiled in Russian state bureaucracy, at once condescending and menacing. He made it exceedingly clear what he thought of the likes of me, and when I came home that evening, I told my partner that, finally, I wanted to leave Russia for good.

It took us another two years to make the move, and we arrived in the United States in 2016. I began writing fiction in English and continued to work for Russian media outlets that didn’t support Putin’s regime. Still, I was careful not to write about politics, knowing that, if I went back to Moscow, I could face prosecution. Everything changed this February, however: Putin’s invasion into Ukraine — a country that I’d visited often and love, a country where many of my friends hail from — made it impossible for me to keep silent. I need to say publicly that this war is abhorrent and that Russians do not equal Putin –– even those of us who, like me, have been afraid to speak out in the past.

I do realize that I’m able to take this risk because I’m in New York, protected by my American passport. A law has been passed in Russia that prohibits its citizens from using the word “war” to refer to the “special operation” that’s taking place in Ukraine, and effectively prevents them from saying they’re against it under the threat of imprisonment. My heart goes out to all the people back home who feel the same way I do. I know that there are many of them and that they are experiencing crushing guilt for failing to somehow stop Putin, the president they didn’t elect. And while we’ll agonize for a long time over the question of what more each of us could have done, it’s beyond clear that peaceful protests don’t stand a chance against Putin’s weapons and his complete disregard for human life.

Source: Svetlana Satchkova, “I’m Russian and I stayed quiet about Putin for a long time. This is what I really think,” The Independent, 11 April 2022. The emphasis is mine.||||| TRR

“Something Tells Me He’ll Never Want to Learn the Truth”

“Do you know who lives next door? Vigilance is the key to security.”

I admit that I sometimes try and get people talking to understand what’s going on in their heads. Today, however, I had no such plan. I only permitted myself to go outside for ten minutes to drink a cup of coffee and to look at the sun as seen from somewhere other than the window of my office. I went to my favorite coffee shop, a two-seater, without any ulterior motives. And without wanting to hobnob with anyone. I sometimes have a nice chat with the barista, because it was simply impossible to have an unpleasant chat with him before [the war]: he has no interest in politics whatsoever. He’s an exemplary sweet summer child, a vegan, the antipode of universal evil. But then he tried to get me talking, on the contrary, taking me by surprise. He suddenly started discussing Ukraine. For some reason I assumed that the hellishness going on there would disgust him, but far from it! When I said that civilians were being killed there, he was genuinely surprised. “Who’s killing them? What civilians?” In a nutshell, he has a girlfriend in Kharkiv. She stays at home, doesn’t go out, and hears gunshots, but she hasn’t mentioned anything to him about casualties. “There, in Kharkiv, you know, everything is fine, you just shouldn’t go outside.” Then he started complaining to me that, in Ukraine, they name streets in honor of [Stepan] Bandera. Tall and blond, the guy looks to be about twenty-five. Bandera is the bane of his existence, but otherwise everything is cool. Something tells me he’ll never want to learn the truth.

This feuilleton was posted friends-only on social media earlier today by an experienced and thoughtful Moscow-based journalist and activist. They have kindly permitted me to translate and publish it here. Photo by the author. (It was taken on another occasion several years ago, but seemed to fit this story.) Translated by the Russian Reader

Zeitgeist Checklist

taste real mexico A Williamsburg-inspired eatery in snowy central Petersburg, 5 February 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader

It’s remarkable how the MH17 final report and Ukrainian political prisoner and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike have exacerbated two sad trends among Russia’s left/liberal/creative/academic intelligentsia.

The first trend involves intelligenty out-Putining Putin and his regime’s put-on anti-Americanism by ramping up the number of social media posts and hasbarical hate-a-grams about the US, its sinister machinations, and its signal failings.

This is part of the same operetta in which the nefarious NATO is a greater threat to world peace than a country that reserves the right to invade its closest neighbor and join in crushing a democratic, grassroots rebellion in a faraway country whose people have never harmed Russia in any shape or form.

But it’s no fun talking, much less doing anything, about that at all, because it would require real collective effort. So, depending on your political tastes, it’s much easier, as a Russophone, to hate on NATO or Hamas.

Some Russians go for the trifecta, hating on both “terrorist” organizations, while also indulging in the most satisfying infantile pleasure on our planet today: Islamophobia. You know, Europe has been overrun by Islamic terrorists and that whole tired spiel, which gives such a sense of purpose to otherwise wildly ignorant people who have betrayed their own country and countrymen so many ways over the last 25 or 30 years it should make all our heads spin.

The other trend, which has also kicked into high gear again, is going hipster as hard as you can. There are any number of “projects,” “creative clusters,” eating and drinking establishments, festivals, semi-secret dance parties, and god knows what else in “the capitals” to make the younger crowd and even some of the middle-aged set forget they live in a country ruled by a ultra-reactionary kleptocratic clique that can have any of them abducted for any reason whatsoever at a moment’s notice and charged with “involvement in a terrorist community” or some such nonsense and ruin their lives forever.

That’s no fun to think about it, either, and it’s altogether scary to do something about it, so why not pretend you live in Williamsburg while you can?

The day before yesterday, I translated and posted an essay, by Maria Kuvshinova, about Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike and the non/reaction to this brave call to action on the part of Russia’s creative so-called intelligentsia. At some point, I thought the essay might be a bit off the mark, but on second thought, despite its obvious quirks, I decided Ms. Kuvshinova had sized up the Russian zeitgeist perfectly.

Post-Soviet infantilism is total. It affects the so-called intelligentsia no less than the so-called ordinary folk. Infantilism means being unable to empathize, being unable to put yourself in another person’s shoes, even if that person is President Putin, a man with a quite distinct sense of ethics, a man who has been studied backwards and forwards for twenty years. Apparently, the message sent to the creative communities through the arrest of Kirill Serebrennikov was not registered. If you want to be a dissident, start down the hard road of doing jail time for misdemeanor charges, facing insuperable difficulties in renting performance and exhibition spaces, becoming an outsider, and experiencing despair. If you want a big theater in downtown Moscow, play by the rules. Like your average late-Soviet philistine, Putin regarded the creative intelligentsia with respect at the outset of his presidential career. (See, for example, footage from his visit to Mosfilm Studios in 2003.) However, a few years later, he was convinced the creative intelligentsia was a rampantly conformist social group who would never move even a millimeter out of its comfort zone and would make one concession after another. A lack of self-respect always generates disrespect in counterparts. // TRR

Leave Our Governor Alone!

21766372_129847227759420_9165060690926800004_n — Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko (right) would rather be somewhere else. Photo courtesy of Turku.fi

I gather that Russia’s president for life is dismissing regional governors at a furious pace to shore up his shaky position against the wildly dangerous non-candidate Navalny in the run-up to next March’s self-reappointment to the post of Russia’s president.

I could not care less about all that as long as Putin leaves Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko alone. (Poltavchenko is the vaguely unhappy looking man on the right, in the picture above.)

Sure, Poltavchenko returned to his adopted hometown of Petersburg, after several years of bureaucratic carpetbagging, as an appointed satrap, who later obtained spurious legimitacy by winning a low-turnout, rigged election against a slate of astroturfed opponents. In a fit of uncharacteristic cynicism, Poltavchenko dubbed this farce “Democracy Day,” but we have forgiven him long ago for that outburst—by default, as it were, because 99.999% of us Petersburgers could give a hoot about local politics and have no clue about the Tammany Hall-style thuggery that once again covered the Cradle of Three Revolutions in shame on September 18, 2014. We are more the artsy, creative types here in the ex-capital of All the Russias. We go in for fo bo, hamburgers, craft beer, and conspicuous hipsterism.

In Petersburg, taking politics seriously is not cool.

But all the Sturm und Drang of 2014 matter less than Poltavchenko’s signal virtue, which consists in his striking tendency not to do or say much of anything, at least visibly or publicly. Unlike his colleague Ramzan Kadyrov, headman of the horrifying Chechen Republic, who is constantly running off at the mouth and scaring the bejeezus out of everyone, Poltavchenko has gone for whole weeks and months without saying or doing anything significant or noteworthy, much less frightening.

Whatever his other vices as a satrap and “former” KGB officer, it appears he would find it profoundly embarrassing to frighten anyone, especially just to show off, the way Kadyrov does it.

In an authoritarian political system in which making news means feigning to be a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth nationalist fascist Orthodox maniac, tabling Nazi-like law bills in the Duma as fast as they can be typed up and printed out, there is something to be said for a guy who always looks as if he is always bored out of his mind, as if he would rather be home watching TV, fishing in the lake next to his dacha or tinkering with his car.

Which, of course, is an old Lada, not a Land Rover.

Or so I’d like to imagine. TRR

God Is Great

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

[At Kuzyna House on New Holland] Asian, European, Mediterranean, and even South Americans are combined in the simple food [sic] tradition. For example, starters include burrata with honey, persimmon, and truffle oil (780 rubles), and the main courses include poached salmon with a champagne and caviar cream sauce (990 rubles), marinated Korean barbecue ribs (750 rubles), and grilled chicken with green salsa (620 rubles).

[…]

The intellectual cluster [sic] A Beautiful Mind was conceived by psychotherapist Andrei Kurpatov, famous for his TV show on Channel One. Alexei Yermakov (El Copitas) is in charge of the kitchen.

Source: “December’s 22 Cafes, Bars, and Restaurants (Petersburg),” The Village, 28 December 2016

"10 Serials for the New Year's Holidays: Fontanka.ru's Choice." — “10 Serials for the New Year’s Holidays: Fontanka.ru’s Choice.”

Source: Fontanka.ru

Needless to say, all ten serials in question are either British or US serials.

Photo by the Russian Reader

Lucidvox

Even a cheerfully depressive bad cop like me finally throws up his hands when he is inundated by the flood of extremely wretched news that has been coming from his usual beats this past week, especially after the short perfect summer of the last three weeks has suddenly turned to nonstop rain and gloom in this forgotten corner of the former Russian Empire.

So I am going try something newish on this weblog and introduce all you Russian readers to a band I have only just discovered today.

Lucidvox are four young women from Moscow who play psychedelic music with a touch of Krautrock. The group was formed in autumn 2013 after a hiking trip to Cape Fiolent. Originally, it was an instrumental quartet. Anna, the vocalist, played the flute, but then began to sing as well.

In July 2013, the band released the EP Drugoi chelovek (Another Man). In the following year, the group actively concertized.

On June 3, 2014, Lucidvox released the full-length album V Dvizhenii (In Movement), which the magazine Afisha-Volna listed among its top twenty Russian albums of the year.

Currently, Lucidvox are mixing an EP. They are planning to present the EP and a video to the one of the songs in early spring.

source: musicmama.ru

You can listen to all or nearly all of their back catalogue on their SoundCloud page, and listen to new tracks and keep up with their touring schedule and other goings-on on their VKontakte page (in Russian).

I know what kind of escapism and hipsterism this smacks of, comrades, but such borrowed escape valves and pretty exercises in youthful self-deception are at least as much a part of Russia’s currently violently “apolitical” political landscape as the regime’s out-and-out awfulness and the stunning heroism of the country’s so far badly outnumbered and outgunned activists and political prisoners.

And who knows what funny dreams of living somewhere and somewhen better and fairer are bound up in secondhand but enchanting music like this?

In any case, the sound couldn’t fit the current zeitgeist any better.

Lucidvox played a live set for Audiotree Worldwide, on February 8, 2021

Alina Yevseyeva (vocals, keyboards), Nadezhda Samodurova (percussion), Anna Moskvitina (bass), and Galla Gintovt — aka Lucidvox — talked to the 17:55 Sessions in December 2020, and played three songs for them as well.

UPDATE (March 24, 2021). Earlier this month, Lucidvox released a new album, We Are, which you can listen to (and order a copy of!) here and here. || THC

The Hipster’s Dream Debased (Portlandia)

A while back, I came across this curious sounding prospectus for a new convenience store in Petrograd.

Portlandia

About the Place:
Portlandia is a new project in the convenience store format.

Project creators: Natalia Davydova and Julia Zenka

The idea to create Portlandia* sprang from a love of fellowship, food, the art of cooking, and shared experiences, as well as an acute shortage of quality products (in the broad sense) in St. Petersburg.

It is very important that our customers are always satisfied with not only the quality of the goods but also the range, which boils down to the basics, but things sufficient for comfort: farm-fresh produce, popular high-end products, household goods, and kitchen utensils.

The first thing we care about is the location of the store. Since many neighborhoods in the city center suffer from a lack of hypermarkets, and there are not enough grocery stores with high quality products, we decided to take up residence in apartment buildings.

* Portland is a city in the state of Oregon in the United States. It is considered the undeclared capital of foodies and hipsters. Authentic and incredible gastro festivals and lots of interesting things happen there. Young creative people bent on healthy eating and self-realization live there. They are always coming up with strange pastimes for themselves and are proud of the result. That, in short, is Portland.

In 2011, the American TV series “Portlandia”, which we could not help but fall in love with, premiered. This series, in fact, is our whole life in a nutshell: para-gastronomical insanity, awe over the topic of bars, as well as sketches about the creativity of the silly Portland hipsters with their passion for music festivals, DJ-ing, and all the things that we in Russia (especially in St. Petersburg) are just beginning to go crazy over.

Founding date: November 11, 2014

It sounded odd but potentially interesting, only the address put me on my guard.

That address (Ulitsa Paradnaya 3/Vilensky Pereulok 35) suggested this “hipster’s paradise” was at the heart of a newish high-rise housing estate, Paradny Kvartal, that had been erected a few years ago on the bones of another old neighborhood that should have been wholly protected by city and federal preservation laws and the city’s status as an UNESCO Heritage Site. But this is what went down instead, as reported at the time by Sergey Chernov of the now-defunct St. Petersburg Times, with a little assistance from the now equally defunct Chtodelat News (whose better intentions live on in this blog).

Legality of Demolition of Historic Barracks Contested
By Sergey Chernov
The St. Petersburg Times
May 11, 2011

Another planning controversy is developing in the city, as more historic buildings in the center were demolished last week to make way for luxury apartment and office buildings.

Built by architect Fyodor Volkov in the early 19th century, the demolished buildings on the corner of Paradnaya Ulitsa and Vilensky Pereulok are known as the Preobrazhensky Regiment’s Barracks and used to house one of the Russian army’s oldest regiments, formed by Peter the Great in the late 17th century.

Following a public outcry, Governor Valentina Matviyenko ordered an internal investigation into the legality of a construction permit issued by the St. Petersburg State Construction Supervision and Expertise Service (Gosstroinadzor). The agency is subordinated directly to Matviyenko.

Matviyenko’s orders were based on a memorandum sent to her by City Hall’s Heritage Protection Committee (KGIOP) after the last building was demolished on May 3.

Yulia Minutina, a coordinator of preservationist group Living City, said that Gosstroinadzor issued the construction permit that contradicted the protected zones law.

The local press suggested that the investigation may result in the dismissal of Gosstroinadzor’s head Alexander Ort. Preservationists and public figures such as film director Alexander Sokurov asked Matviyenko to dismiss Ort in a petition in January.

The developer failed to show the demolition permit, according to Minutina.

“Demolition is a separate type of work that requires a separate permit,” Minutina said Tuesday.

“Nevertheless, it was not presented to us, nor have they seen it at the KGIOP and I’m not sure it ever existed. Of course this is a violation.”

“Besides, buildings in the center can only be demolished if they are in a poor condition, but we haven’t seen any document stating that the building was in a poor state and impossible to restore either.”

Minutina said the demolition was one of the issues the preservationists are planning to raise during a planned meeting with Matviyenko on Thursday.

While the last building was being destroyed during the May Day holidays, the authorities did not react to the appeals of concerned residents. At the same time, police reportedly harassed activists who picketed the demolition site, rather than checking whether the developer had the necessary permits.

“We waited for two hours for the police to arrive,” Living City’s Pyotr Zabirokhin said.

“But instead of stopping the demolition, they started checking our passports, copying our placards into their notebooks and threatening to disperse us if we didn’t go away.”

St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly Deputy Sergei Malkov has written a complaint regarding the police actions to the St. Petersburg police chief Vladislav Piotrovsky.

The tactic of demolishing historic buildings during public holidays was recently used when a large portion of the 19th-century Literary House was destroyed on Nevsky Prospekt during the Russian Christmas holidays in January, Zabirokhin pointed out.

“It has turned into a bad tradition that not entirely legal cases of demolition start during or just before holidays, when people are not ready to get mobilized quickly, and while officials are on holiday and nobody can be reached,” he said.

According to the project’s web site, the area previously occupied by the Preobrazhensky Regiment Barracks will be home to an “exclusive” Paradny Kvartal, an isolated “mini city” of 16 office and residential buildings.

Call Now!

“The true adornment of the quarter’s center will be a square with a fountain, comparable in size with that in front of the Kazan Cathedral,” the web site said.

However, apparently as a result of the controversy, the site was no longer available on Tuesday, redirecting to the web site of the developer, Vozrozhdeniye Peterburga. The original site can be viewed as files cached in Google.

Anna Mironovskaya, the marketing director of Vozrozhdeniye Peterburga, a subsidiary of the LSR Group, said Tuesday her company was only a sub-investor and was not in charge of legal matters and permits, citing the Ministry of Defense as the project’s developer and the Pyotr Veliky Construction Company as the commissioner.

_____

http://paradny.ru/questions/

— Who acquires real estate in Paradny Kvartal?

One of the main advantages of Paradny Kvartal is the social homogeneity of [one’s neighbors]. Our buyers are people of high social status. That is why we will be able to create “our own world” in which it will be pleasant and comfortable to live.

[…]

— What does the phrase “noblesse oblige,” which is frequently applied to Paradny Kvartal, mean?

The well-known phrase has rightly become not just the slogan but the authentic motto of Paradny Kvartal. It translates as “[one’s] station obliges [one].” For in Paradny Kvartal each detail underscores the project’s elitism, its exclusivity.

Photos courtesy of Zaks.Ru and Chtodelat News.

— “‘Noblesse Oblige’ as a Wrecking Ball (Paradny Kvartal, Petersburg),” Chtodelat News, May 13, 2011

____________________

I had not been back to that site of class warfare camouflaged as “redevelopment” since that grey unpleasant day in May four years ago, although whenever I was in the vicinity it had been hard to avoid catching sight of Paradny Kvartal towering on the horizon over its older neighbors. Not only had the elitist high-rises probably been built in violation of the height regulations for the historic center, but the whole estate, I disovered when I revisited it a few weeks ago, has been erected on a one-storey-high pile of landfill, probably to accommodate lots of subterranean parking.

Hipster convenience store Portlandia proved quite hard to find amid the vast pseudo-Petersburgian, semi-ghost town that is Paradny Kvartal.

Part of the problem was a lack of sensible signage and maps, but mostly it was hard to find anything when many of the first-floor commercial spaces were still awaiting occupants.

This, by the way, seems to be the “square with a fountain, comparable in size with that in front of the Kazan Cathedral,” mentioned above.

Since the dubious reign of Valentina Matviyenko, who presided over the destruction of the Preobrazhensky Barracks, as well as much else of architectural merit, the city has been fountanized to the point of bursting, with two of its major Lenin monuments also having been juvenilized as water fun parks of a perverse sort. But Paradny Kvartal’s (perhaps non-functioning) fountain had been wisely boxed up for the winter.

I finally found Portlandia the hipster convenience store. I can say that the picture from the prospectus, above, does it justice. It is as empty and pointless as the picture suggests, and “convenient” only if you have been locked inside this mini city and desperately want to buy local craft beer and designer aprons at a heavy mark-up. That is, if you want stuff readily available elsewhere, probably just outside the gates of this noblesseobligeville, but for many fewer rubles.

Even at its most gentrified, the real Portland, Oregon, is a delightful, gritty socialist paradise compared to the soulless, Putinesque anti-Petersburg on display inside Paradny Kvartal.

And the connection with Portlandia the TV show I just don’t get at all. Portlandia is often mildly funny and at least slightly in touch with the city it sends up and where it is filmed. I cannot even imagine a comparable program dealing with Petersburg’s foibles and sillinesses being made here nowadays, in this dark-as-pitch and utterly humorless period, although there were such programs in the “lawless” nineties (e.g., Gorodok and Ostorozhno, modern!).

It’s frightening to think that much greater swathes of the inner city would look like Paradny Kvartal now were it not for the spunkiness of the tiny, embattled, and nowadays almost totally extinguished gradozashchitniki (city defenders) movement, which only six or seven years ago set the entire country on its ear by defeating Gazprom and its planned skyscraper.

But the city’s real salvation, such that it has been, has come from timely economic crises and sheer bureaucratic corruption and incompetence.

And yet Putinism in architecture and city planning has managed to do a lot of damage to this fine city, while signally failing to fix almost any real problems, of which there are almost too many to count.

As I happily exited Paradny Kvartal, a sign reminded me I was leaving the “first fashionable quarter in Saint Petersburg.”

As I dashed down the ramp into the “unfashionable” Petersburg, it was like returning to life after a longish period in cryogenic refrigeration.

One of the first things I saw there in the real city, warts and all, was a memorial plaque, reminding me that once upon a time people in this city had big ideas, and had dreamt of and fought for better futures.

*Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in this house from August 31 to early October 1893. The period marked the beginning of his efforts to establish a revolutionary Marxist Party in Russia.*

Of course, we can argue the merits of different political ideas and the methods of realizing them. But places like Paradny Kvartal are idealess vacuums, pure embodiments of the blackest political reaction and the lack of any vision of the future on the part of Russia’s wildly corrupt ruling classes.

Even the sometimes justly maligned Russian hipster deserves better than Portlandia the inconvenience store and its airless environs.

With a little elbow grease and imagination, the old Preobrazhensky Regiment Barracks could have been transformed into a real hipster’s paradise, into a little village of low-income housing and affordable shops and cafes. Minus the hipsterism, it almost was like that back in the “wild” nineties. At any rate, it was at least as shabbily livable as any other part of the central city back then. Which despite its shabbiness was a hundred times more beautiful than it is now.

Keep Calm and Find a Fudtrak

source

Why Is There No Anti-War Movement in Russia, or, What Craft Beer Would You Like with Your Kansas City Burger?

Russian leftist activist Ilya Budraitskis has given a quite eloquent answer to the first question, which you can (and should) read here. But these recent, seemingly irrelevant items from Russian urban lifestyle web site The Village seem more to the point.

Beer Geek, a craft beer store, has opened in the courtyard at Rubinstein Street, 2/45 [in central Petersburg]. Both Russian and foreign beverages are sold there, including beverages from small experimental breweries.

The selection includes very bitter American-style ales, sour Belgian specialities, cherry beer, and much more. Twelve taps have been installed right in the wall to save bar space. The beer is predominantly poured for takeaway, but you can drink it right in the store if you like. Most of the varieties will cost 200 rubles per half liter [approx. 4 euros].

The owners of the place are Pyotr Gordeyev and Dmitry Evmenov. They have installed steps, rising towards the ceiling, on which you can sit or even lie down on the store’s small premises. Another interior design element is a cupboard with sliding drawers in which the bottles have been arranged as in a filing cabinet.

Source: The Village

[Petersburg’s] third City Grill Express recently began operating at Rubinstein Street, 4. The owners had long intended to open the new place near Nevsky Prospect, and over the next few years they plan on launching four more burgernayas with the same name.

The menu feature around three dozen burgers, french fries, Idaho fries, and several kinds of beer, including cherry beer and house beer. City Grill has beef, pork, veal, chicken and turkey burgers, as well as a Kansas City Burger with mushroom filling. All dishes are cooked to order in the open kitchen. The average check is 300 rubles [approx. 6 euros].

The first City Grill Express opened at Griboyedov Canal, 20, in 2012. Previously, City Grill cooked and sold burgers in street carts for six years. The second diner has operated for more than a year at Vosstaniia, 1. The chain’s owner, Yevgeny Arkhipov, comes up with the recipes and names of the burgers and the interior designs.

Source: The Village

NB. Words and phrases highlighted in boldface, above, are specimens of Anglicisms, transliterated English or Rusglish in the original. Photo courtesy of The Village.

Meatball Rap

Forget about Mikhail Kosenko, the “prisoners of May 6,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and other inmates in the country’s wretched penitentiary system, the demolition of the country’s welfare system, the devastating floods in the Far East, the destruction of Russia’s cultural and research institutes, the gutting of labor rights, the demonization of migrant workers, and all that. What really matters to the country’s most progressive class and the handsomely remunerated foreign observers who keenly catalogue its whimsical traipsings atop the corpses and prone bodies of fellow countrymen is the meatball wrap.

As we talk, Denisova brings me a vegetable stir-fry with buckwheat noodles and a glass of sea buckthorn juice laced with honey and goji berries. It hits the spot: light and healthful.