(A Quiet) Civil War

(A Quiet) Civil WarDictionary of War, Novi Sad edition, January 25–26, 2008

My concept is “civil war”— or rather, “a quiet (civil war).” Another variant might be: cold civil war. I will talk about how the (global) economy of war—hot war, cold war, civil war—is experienced by victims and bystanders in a place seemingly far from actual frontlines. In reality, the frontlines are everywhere—running down the middle of every street, crisscrossing hearts and minds. This permanent war is connected to the project that posits the presence of civil society in one part of the world, while also asserting the necessity of building civil society in other parts of the world where allegedly uncivil social, political, and economic arrangements have been or have to be abolished. The real effect of this high-minded engineering is the destruction of people, classes, and lifestyles whose continued survival in the new order is understood (but hardly ever stated) to be either problematic or unnecessary. The agents of this destruction are varied—from random street crime, assassinations, inflation, alcoholism, factory and institute closures, to pension and healthcare reform, the entertainment and news industry, and urban renovation. The place I will talk about is Russia and Saint Petersburg, where I have lived for much of the past fourteen years. My concept is intended as a memorial to a few victims and local eyewitnesses of this war—people I either know personally or came to know about through the stories of friends or other encounters. I will also sketch the tentative connections between that civil war and the troubles in this part of the world; and, very briefly, show how the victors in this war claim their spoils.

This term—(a quiet) civil war—was suggested to me by the Petersburg poet Alexander Skidan during a conversation we had last spring. I had been telling Alexander about the recent murder of my friend Alexei Viktorov. Alexei is fated to remain a mere footnote in Russian art history. I mean this literally: in a new book, Alexei is correctly identified as the schoolmate of the Diaghilev of Petersburg perestroika art, Timur Novikov, and the painter Oleg Kotelnikov. I met Alexei in 1996, when Oleg let me live in his overly hospitable studio in the famous artists squat at Pushkinskaya-10. Alexei showed up a few weeks later. He had spent the summer in the woods, living off mushrooms and whatever edibles he could find. In his youth, he had acquired the nickname Труп (Corpse). With his gaunt features and skinny frame, he certainly looked the part. As I would soon discover, he was one of the gentlest men on earth. He was also a terrific blues guitarist. And he was the first Hare Krishna in Leningrad and, perhaps, the entire Soviet Union—which was quite a feat, considering that his conversion took place in the dark ages of the seventies.

Last winter, friends chipped in on a plane ticket, and Alexei was able to fulfill a lifelong dream and travel to India. When he and his companions arrived at the Krishna temple, Alexei was greeted by the community as a conquering hero. Since Alexei’s life had been quite miserable of late back home, his friends insisted that he stay behind in India. Instead, he decided to return to Petersburg. A few days after his arrival home he was walking from the subway in the northern Lakes district of the city to the house of a friend. Along the way he was attacked—the police say by a gang of teenagers. The teenagers beat Alexei within an inch of his life and pushed him into a ravine. The police investigator guessed that Alexei had lain unconscious for some time. When he came to, he had apparently struggled to raise his battered body up and clamber out of the ravine; in his struggle, he had for some reason started tearing off his clothes, perhaps because his rib cage and chest were so badly crushed that he was suffocating. His body was discovered a couple days later. The police held it for another few days while they completed their investigation, which led to no arrests. Alexei’s funeral was held a few days afterwards at the Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island. He was buried a few hundred meters from the grave of his schoolmate Timur Novikov, who died in 2002.

It was this story that prompted Alexander Skidan’s remark to me: “A quiet civil war has been going on here.” What did Alexander have in mind? What could the random albeit violent murder of a single human being have in common with the explicitly political and massively violent struggles that have taken place here in the former Yugoslavia and such parts of the former Soviet Union as Abkhazia, Southern Ossetia, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Chechnya? How could Alexei—who, as the Russian saying has it, lived “quieter than the water, lower than the grass”—be viewed as an enemy combatant in such a war? Can we really compare his unknown assailants to representatives of the opposite warring party? Given what they did to him, it is clear that they viewed Alexei as their enemy—an enemy subject to sudden, violent execution when encountered in the proper (hidden, invisible) setting.

I anticipate serious objections to my line of argumentation. One such objection I have already heard in the person of my friend Igor. Igor, whose father is Ossetian, and whose mother is Ukrainian, grew up in Dushanbe, which was then the capital of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. I have never been to Dushanbe, but I have heard Igor describe it so many times in such glowing terms that I have come to think of it as heaven on earth. While I am sure that much of the paradisiacal tone in Igor’s recollections has to do with temporal and physical distance, it really does seem that the Dushanbe of the sixties and seventies was a kind of cosmopolitan oasis—a place where all sorts of forced or voluntary exiles from all imaginable Soviet ethnic communities and other cities ended up living in something like harmony.

This harmony bore the name “Soviet Union,” and Igor himself has often seemed to me the ideal homo soveticus (in the positive, internationalist sense of that term), a person to whom the refrain of the popular song—“My address isn’t a street or a building, my address is the Soviet Union”—fits perfectly. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Igor was the country’s leading expert on the seismic stability of electrical substations. From the onset of the Tajik civil war, in the early nineties, Igor was unable to return to Dushanbe. This had to do with the fact that in his internal Soviet passport, his place of birth was identified as Khorog, the capital of the Pamir region, which is where some of the “anti-government” forces had their power base. If Igor had returned to Dushanbe, he could easily have been stopped by soldiers during a documents check and executed on the spot. This is what happened to a number of his friends and schoolmates.

After the war was over, Igor’s father was able to reclaim the family home near Vladikavkaz, in Northern Ossetia, which had been confiscated by the authorities when Igor’s grandfather had been executed as an enemy of the people in the thirties. Northern Ossetia was a relative oasis during the nineties, despite the fact that Chechnya and Ingushetia were just over the mountains and neighboring Southern Ossetia had broken away from Georgia. This relative calm came to an abrupt end in September 2004, when terrorists besieged the school in neighboring Beslan. During the siege, members of Igor’s extended family were killed.

This is how Igor puts it: “Civil war is when the bus you’re on is stopped by soldiers and some of the passengers are taken off to be shot. And you sit there in the bus listening to the sound of gunfire and waiting for it to be over so that you can continue on your way. That’s civil war. What you’re talking about is not civil war.” Igor is certainly right.

He is also wrong in another sense. The quiet civil war I am describing here—among whose victims, I claim, was our friend Alexei—draws its energy and some of its methods from the real civil wars that have been fought in the hinterlands that are literally unthinkable to folks in such seemingly safe, prosperous places as Petersburg and Moscow. An immediate consequence of the siege in Beslan was that President Putin abolished gubernatorial elections in the Russian Federation’s eighty-four regions and federal cities. This, it was argued, would strengthen Moscow’s control—its so-called power vertical—over local officials whose incompetence and corruption had led, supposedly, to guerrillas infiltrating Beslan and capturing the school with such ease. Meanwhile, the civil wars and socioeconomic collapse in places like Tajikistan have led to a flood of refugees and migrant workers into Central Russia and its two capitals. The booming building trade in Moscow and Petersburg to a great degree now depends on the abundant, cheap supply of workers from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and other former Soviet republics.

These workers are literally visible everywhere nowadays: with the oil economy fueling a tidal wave of consumerism whose major players have now turned to real estate as an outlet for investing their wealth, the capitals have become gigantic construction sites. And yet the conditions of their work and their lives are just as literally invisible. For example, Tajik workers and other darker-skinned Central Asians and Caucasians are subjected to frequent, unnecessary documents checks in public places such as subway stations. This is something that every Petersburger and Muscovite has seen ten thousand times, but it is also something they pretend not to see, judging by the lack of public reaction to the practice. Even less reaction is generated by neo-Nazi attacks on such workers, other foreigners, members of Russia’s ethnic minorities, and anti-fascist activists, which have become more and more common in the past several years.

I want to paint one more, brief verbal portrait of another victim in this quiet civil war. This portrait is connected with the violence inflicted on this city and other parts of Serbia during the NATO bombing campaign of 1999. The official and popular reaction in Russia to this violence was quite harsh. There were massive demonstrations outside the US embassy in Moscow; unknown assailants even fired a grenade into an empty office at the embassy. What surprised me were the more spontaneous reactions to the bombings. One day, a young American artist and I were standing in the courtyard of the squat at Pushkinskaya-10 chatting with a local artist. Two acquaintances of ours—members of a well-regarded alternative theater troupe—entered the courtyard. When they saw us, they shouted, “Don’t talk to those Americans! They’re bombing our Serbian brothers!” Since they said all this with a smile, it was hard to know to what extent we were supposed to take their warning as a “joke.”

It occurred to me then that a fundamental shift was occurring in the consciousness of Russians who had been, both in practical and philosophical terms, “westernizers” and “liberals” not long before. That this shift was also extending into the “masses” was confirmed for me a few days later. Late one night, I suddenly heard a drunken-sounding young man yelling up to an apartment across the street: “Masha! Goddammit, come downstairs and let me in!” Since repeated requests had no apparent effect on the silent, invisible Masha, the young man became more explicit in declaring his unhappiness with Masha’s thwarting of his affections. “Masha, you fucking bitch, come down and let me in! You’re breaking my fucking heart!” The turn the man’s soliloquy took next, however, signaled to me that we all were living in a new world. “Masha, go fuck yourself! NATO, go fuck yourselves!” (Маша, пошла ты в жопу! Блок НАТО, пошли вы в жопу!) This effusive condemnation of Masha and NATO continued for some time, after which the thwarted lover fell silent or fell over drunk.

If I had known that I would be invited to speak at this conference nine years later, I would have recorded the whole performance. Instead of speaking to you now, I would have played back the recording in full. Not in order to make fun of the young man whose heart had been broken in two by the combined forces of Masha and NATO, but so that you could hear what the quiet civil war I am trying to talk about sounds like. This is what I meant when I said, at the beginning of my remarks, that the frontlines in this new kind of war cross through hearts and minds and run down the middle of streets. This is not what happens when civil society breaks down; it is what happens when “civil society” is a code word (pronounced and enacted in tandem with other code words such as “democracy” and “liberal economy”) used to camouflage the incursion into the city of invading forces. The new regime they have come to establish can in reality do quite happily without “civil society,” democracy, and liberalism. But these words and the real actions taken and deals made behind their smokescreen are quite effective in destroying the historic and imaginary forms of solidarity that might have given folks like our unhappy young lover the means to defend themselves somehow. Instead, we end up with the muddle in our heads that lets us imagine that Masha and NATO are allied against us. Or that NATO is bringing democracy and security to Afghanistan. Or that, instead, to thwart NATO’s expansion to the east we have to round up Georgian restaurant workers and deport them back to Georgia—which, paradoxically, used to be nearly every Russian’s favorite place on earth.

As Alexander Skidan himself told me, the NATO bombing campaign of 1999 really had destroyed the illusions that he and most everyone else he knew had both about the west and about the meaning of the radical transformation of Russian society that was carried out under the banner of a rapprochement with the west and a leap forward into liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. What Alexander and his friends saw as the west’s treachery in the Kosovo crisis had thrown a new retrospective light on a period they had until then been experiencing as a golden age for artists and ambitious young people like themselves—an age of unprecedented opportunity for self-expression at home and dizzying trips abroad. Why hadn’t the massive immiseration and unemployment of the post-Soviet population during the early nineties produced this same enlightenment? Or the violent disbanding of the Russian parliament, in 1993? Or the first war in Chechnya? Or the fact that, in Alexander’s case, his own father, a professor at the city’s shipbuilding institute, had gone in a matter of a year or two from being a respected member of his society to being an outmoded nobody who had to struggle to survive? Somehow, Alexander and his kind had noticed all this, of course, and not seen it. Or seen it and decided that these were the sort of temporary measures and necessary obstacles on the road to a better future. As he sees it now, the whole point of the Russian nineties was to decommission and eliminate whole sections of the population—teachers, doctors, factory workers, the poor, the aging, the less ambitious, and the more gullible. And this civil war, which continues to this day, paved the way to the quite logically illiberal current regime.

Which of course is wholly staffed by the victors in the quiet civil war of the nineties—not by the victims, whose victimhood is converted into ever-greater quantities of political, symbolic, and real capital by those same victors. Thus, the current favorite to win the Russian presidential elections in March announced the other day that his goal was to create a strong civil society where the freedoms and rights of all citizens would be cherished and protected.

This is one way to cash in your chips at the end of a successful quiet civil war. But our globalizing economy is such that you can even profit from someone else’s civil wars. My favorite new example of such capitalization is the American alternative band Beirut, the brainchild of 22-year-old Zach Condon, a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Overly sensitive types might wonder how you grow up in peaceful Santa Fe and end up calling your band Beirut—but as we Americans love to say, It’s a free country.[1] (In its article on the band’s “Balkan-inspired” debut album, Gulag Orkestar, Wikipedia helpfully explains that the “Gulag was a system of Russian [corrective labor camps] in Siberia.”)

It is too much to expect that alternative radio stations would play, instead of Beirut’s fake Balkan wedding music, the 1999 lament of Masha’s spurned lover. Besides, I didn’t have the good sense to record it and release it as an album.


[1] “One of the reasons I named the band after that city was the fact that it’s seen a lot of conflict. It’s not a political position. I worried about that from the beginning. But it was such a catchy name. I mean, if things go down that are truly horrible, I’ll change it. But not now. It’s still a good analogy for my music. I haven’t been to Beirut, but I imagine it as this chic urban city surrounded by the ancient Muslim world. The place where things collide.” Rachel Syme, “Beirut: The Band,” New York, 6 August 2006.

Mardikor

“Every Day We Go Out on the Road”: A Documentary About the Lives of Female Mardikors Has Been Made in Tajikistan
Fergana
July 2, 2020

Tajik journalists have made the documentary film Mardikor [“Day Laborer” or “Handywoman,” as the filmmakers themselves have translated the term], which details the plight of female day laborers in the city of Bokhtar, 100 kilometres from Dushanbe. The picture was created as part of MediaCAMP (Central Asia Media Program), implemented by Internews with financial support from USAID, writes Asia-Plus.

Pop-up mardikor markets exist in all the cities and major towns of Tajikistan. But whereas earlier only men offered their services there, women’s markets have also recently appeared. Women who are divorced or left without the support of husbands who have gone to work abroad are willing to undertake any hard work for the sake of two or three dollars a day.

“The short film Mardikor tells the story of these women, most of whom are the abandoned wives of migrant workers. Their husbands do not return from the Russian Federation for years on end and do not send money to support their families. The majority of unemployed women at this labor market do not even have a school-leaving certificate. More than half are mothers with many children,” says the film’s director Mahpora Kiromova.

Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up. Film poster (below) courtesy of Mahpora Kiromova’s Facebook page. Translated by the Russian Reader

mardikor

tellme_sister

nazh-1Elena Nazhmetdinova. Photo from her Instagram page

“Tell Me, Sister”: A Tajik Woman on the Web Urges Young Woman to Speak Out About Harassment
Zarnigor Dadabayeva
Asia Plus
June 30, 2020

When she launched her first blog on Instagram, 23-year-old Elena Nazhmetdinova could not have imagined that it would garner more than 1,500 subscribers in a single day. On the blog, Nazhmetdinova tells the stories of women who have been sexually harassed. She has already posted thirty-six such stories.

“There Are No Such Problems in Tajikistan!”
This is not the first time that Nazhmetdinova has spoken about sexual harassment. She started writing about it a long time ago, when she first started blogging on Facebook.

“But there was no response from the people who were reading me. I think this was due to the fact that Facebook is mainly used by the adult generation. While most of the people on Instagram are young people, who are not unfamiliar with the topic of sexual harassment on the streets. It was there that I decided to find my own voice, and it wasn’t a miscalculation: more than 70% of my audience now is young women,” the blogger says.

nazh-2Elena Nazhmetdinova. Photo from her Instagram page

Recently, according to Nazhmetdinova, young men who could not ignore this painful topic for young women had also started to swell the ranks of her readership.

“But they did not come [to the blog] to support us. On the contrary, they came to insult, humiliate, and hate on us and thus, supposedly, persuade us that there was no sexual harassment in our country. They would say, ‘There are no such problems in Tajikistan!” Nazhmetdinova says, quoting her male readers.

That was why, the young woman explains, she came up with the idea of launching a separate project on Instagram called Tell Me, Sister. This was so that others who have suffered from such humiliation can tell their painful stories along with her. Nazhmetdinova received exactly thirty-six stories within a day.

nazh-3“I’m really scared to go out in the evening, or in revealing clothing.” A story of sexual harassment on the Instagram page tellme_sister

Tellme_sister
“Without knowing it, I was inspired to create this project by male readers whose comments often started with the words ‘Sister, don’t dress like that . . .’, Sister, don’t look up [at men] . . .’, ‘Sister, it’s your own fault . . .’,” Nazhmetdinova explains.

nazh-4Elena Nazhmetdinova. Photo from her Instagram page

“So, I decided to write a post in this vein, and surprisingly it was the most read and the most commented-on post, in the end. It was then that I decided to dub the project Tell Me, Sister,” Nazhmetdinova explains.

As soon as Nazhmetdinova launched the project, she began receiving stories from women and girls that ended the same way: “I haven’t told this to anyone yet.” According to the blogger, her subscribers realized that they could trust her.

nazh-5“As I ran away, I heard [him] shouting in my direction that I was a ‘prostitute,’ ‘not a Muslim,’ and basically a ‘chalab’ [slut].” A story of sexual harassment on the Instagram page tellme_sister

“The main goal of the project is to give women an opportunity to speak out, to give them a virtual shelter where they will be supported and understood. Naturally, I understand that this will not vanquish sexual harassment on the streets. However, I hope that eventually we will be heard, and it will stop being considered a normal thing,” Nazhmetdinova says.

Over the past six days, the number of subscribers to tellme_sister has grown to 2,180, which Nazhmetdinova is sure only points to the problem’s urgency in Tajik society.

Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Outcasts

domoMigrant workers from Tajikistan stranded at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, March 31, 2020. Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko. Courtesy of AP and Radio Azzatyq

Around 300 Migrant Workers Driven from Domodedovo onto Street at Night
Radio Azzatyq
Март 31, 2020

In the early hours of March 31, unidentified uniformed men chased about three hundred migrant workers, two hundred of them Tajik nationals, from the terminal building of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, as reported by Russian journalist Galiya Ibragimova on her Facebook page. All of them, she wrote, were trying to return home, but had been stranded at the airport due to the coronavirus and closed borders.

According to Ibragimova, she got a call from Farukh, a migrant worker from Tajikistan who was stranded at Domodedovo, and he told her what happened.

“We were kicked out of the airport. Uniformed employees arrived, asked how many of us there were, and told us to get everyone together. They promised that we would fly home tonight. We gathered everyone, nearly three hundred people. When we had gathered, they just tossed us out on the street at night, in the cold. They said, That’s it, you can’t be in the airport. And they kicked us out. People are now out on the street. We don’t know what to do,” he told Ibragimova.

Farukh also complained that the migrant workers did not have the means to leave the airport and get to temporary accommodation.

“We  work like oxen in Russia. We rarely have a day off. But now no one wants us. We were simply thrown out like an unnecessary burden. Why are things this way? Help us!” Farukh complained to Ibragimova.

Farukh also made a video of how people ended up on the street in the wee hours of March 31.

The TV channel Current Time also made a report about migrant workers who were stranded at Domodedovo: they had no way to wash up and slept on chairs.

According to the migrant workers, neither the Tajik embassy nor the Russian authorities helped them in any way—it was volunteers and compatriots who brought them food and water. A promised charter flight to Tajikistan on Somon Air was canceled.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Sergey Abashin: Remittances by Central Asian Migrant Workers in Russia during the First Quarter of 2018

central asian migrant workerCentral Asian migrant workers hard at work on a roof in central Petersburg on a Sunday in early May.

Sergey Abashin
Facebook
June 18, 2018

Finally I’m writing again about migrant workers, a subject that right at the moment interests very few people.

Data on remittances by private individuals from Russia to other countries for the first quarter of 2018 has been released by the Russian Central Bank after a great delay. Here is the picture they present.

Uzbekistan was the leader among the CIS countries. Its nationals remitted $726 million, which is 17% more than in the first quarter last year.

Tajikistan came in second place with $487 million, which is 15% more than the same time last year.

Kyrgyzstan took third place with $434 million, 9% up from the first quarter last year.

The figures thus show a significant increase in remittances, which testifies to an growth in the wages paid to migrant workers and an increase in the numbers of migrant workers themselves. Remittances to Kyrgyzstan have been growing more slowly, but in fact that means a large portion of the money earned by Kyrgyz nationals now stays in Russia to be spent on setting up their lives here.

P.S. By the way, the champion in terms of private remittances received from Russia is Switzerland—to the tune of $1.7 billion.

Photo and translation by the Russian Reader

Sergey Abashin: Reading About Migrant Workers

Central Asian migrant workers queueing to obtain work “patents” at the Russian Interior Ministry’s migrant workers processing center on Red Textile Worker Street in central Petersburg, March 10, 2017. Photo by TRR

Sergey Abashin
Facebook
March 19, 2017

Very few people are interested in reading about migrant workers in Russia. True, many people readily believe the myths and repeat them, but they don’t want to get to the bottom of things, even if you hand them the data on a silver platter. This apathetic attitude to figures and facts is also typical of how migration is regarded.

I wrote yesterday [see below] about the trends in the numbers of migrant workers from the Central Asian countries in Russia for 2014–2016. Let me remind you that the number of Kyrgyz nationals first fell and then began to grow, exceeding the previous highs by 10%. The figure is now about 0.6 million people. (I am rounding up). The number of Tajik nationals has decreased by 15–25% and has been at the same level, about 0.9 million people, for over a year, while the number of Uzbek nationals has decreased by 30–40%, to 1.5 million people.

Now let us look at the data on remittances, all the more since the Central Bank of Russia has published the final figures for 2016. In 2016, private remittances from Russia to Kyrgyzstan amounted to slightly more than $1.7 billion, which is 17% less than during the peak year of 2013, but 26% more than in 2015. Meaning that, along with an increase in the number of migrants, the amount of remittances has grown quickly as well, even at a faster pace. Remittances to Tajikistan amounted to slightly more than $1.9 billion in 2016, which is 54% less than the peak year of 2013. The amounts have been continuing to fall, although this drop has slowed as the number of migrant workers has stabilized. Remittances to Uzbekistan were slightly more than $2.7 billion in 2016, which is 59% less than in the peak year of 2013. Meaning the largest drop in the number of migrants has led to the largest drop in remittances.

*****

Sergey Abashin
Facebook
March 18, 2017

Data on the number of foreign nationals living and working in Russia has not been made public since April 2016, when the Federal Migration Service was disbanded. But this does not mean there is no such data. The figures exist, and they become available from time to time. For example, an article published in RBC [on March 16, 2017] supplies some data as of February 1, 2017. What follows from the figures?

The number of Kyrgyz nationals has increased since February 2016 by 5.6%, and since February 2015 by 8.9%, and amounts to 593,760 people.

The number of Tajik nationals increased by 0.7% over the past year, and by 13.3% over two years, and amounts to 866,679 people.

The number of Uzbek nationals has decreased over the past year by 15.2%, and by 31.7% over two years, and now amounts to 1,513,694 people.

So we see three different trends. After Kyrgyzstan joined the Eurasian Economic Community [now, the Eurasian Economic Union], the number of its nationals in Russia has continued to grown. After a decline of 15–20%, the number of Tajik nationals has stabilized, while the number of Uzbek nationals has fallen by 30–40%.

There are slightly less than a total of 3 million people from Central Asia living and working in Russia. (I did not take Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan into account. If I had, the figure would have come to about 3.6 million people.)

Sergey Abashin is British Petroleum Professor of Migration Studies at the European University in Saint Petersburg. His most recent book is Sovetskii kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei [The Soviet Central Asian village: between colonialism and modernization], Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015. Translation and photo by the Russian Reader

Not My Job

Film about Tajik Migrant Worker Wins Special Prize in Switzerland
Russia for All
April 26, 2016

Главный герой документального фильма Дениса Шабаева «Чужая работа» мигрант из Таджикистана Фаррух<br /> Главный герой документального фильма Дениса Шабаева «Чужая работа» мигрант из Таджикистана Фаррух
Still from Not My Job (2015), Denis Shabaev, director

Denis Shabaev’s film Not My Job has won a prize for “most innovative first film” at the international documentary film festival Visions du Réel, which just wound up in the Swiss town of Nyon. The film was shown in the Neuf Regard competition.

The documentary tells the story of a native of Tajikistan who has come to Russia not only to work but also to launch a career as an actor.

“Farrukh is a migrant worker. With his father, mother, and brothers he lives in New Moscow and takes any job that will bring even a little money. But this is not why he has traveled from his native Tajikistan, leaving behind his young wife and small children. Farrukh wants to become an actor, a famous actor,” write the filmmakers in their annotation of the film.

While Farrukh searches for roles, he plays a migrant worker mistakenly accused of murder in a film. However, a bit later, Farrukh really causes the death of another man in a traffic accident and ends up behind bars.

“The camera literally follows the footsteps of this tragic character trying to find his way between the respect of his traditionalist parents and the will to integrate into a universe where no one is expecting him. With this first film, Denis Shabaev tells a cruel parable, whose dry and elliptical form captivates us from the first shot to the last,” writes Emmanuel Chicon in his synopsis of the film on the festival’s website.

The winner of the main prize in the Neuf Regard competition was The Dazzling Light of Sunset, by Georgian filmmaker Salomé Jashi.

Visions du Réel was founded in 1969. It was the first festival to open its doors to documentary cinema from so-called Eastern Bloc countries. This year was the forty-seventh edition of the festival, and over 180 pictures were shown in competition.

Migrant workers from Central Asian countries often feature as characters in fiction and documentary films in Russia. Thus, one of the most high-profile Russian films of recent years was the feature film She, in which most of the main roles were played not just by people from Tajikistan but real migrant workers.

She tells the story of a young Tajik woman who breaks the taboo and escapes from marriage in Tajikistan to join her boyfriend in Russia. He works illegally in a landfill, where he sorts garbage with other migrant workers and lives in a shanty. The main characters of the film will initially settle there and experience all the hardships faced by migrant workers.

Still from She, Larisa Sadilova (2013)
Still from She (2013), Larisa Sadilova, director

The film is based on real events, and nearly all the characters were played by non-professional actors. The casting for the lead female role in Dushanbe took a long time, but ultimately Nilufar Faizieva was chosen for the part. Subsequently, the actress and the picture would win several awards at Russian and international film festivals.

Thanks to Sergey Abashin for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Renowned Tajik Theater Director Barzu Abdurazzokov Expelled from Russia

Barzu Abdurazzokov
Barzu Abdurazzokov

On His Way to Meetings in Russia, Director Expelled from Country
Radio Ozodi
April 13, 2016

Seeing stamps from Ukraine, Turkey, and Georgia in the passport of famous Tajik director Barzu Abdurazzokov, Russia border guards denied him entry to Moscow. 

Russian border guards did not allow the famous Tajik director Barzu Abdurazzokov entry to the country. After detaining and questioning him for an hour, he was expelled to Tajikistan.

Abdurazzokov had flown to Moscow with a company of Kyrgyz actors, and from Moscow he was scheduled to fly to Saint Petersburg, where he was staging a production of Ballad of a Mankurt at Meetings in Russia, an international theater festival of CIS and Baltic countries.

The famous theater director told Radio Ozodia in an interview on April 13 that the actors of the Chingiz Aitmatov State National Russian Drama Theater were judged the best at the festival and won the Kirill Lavrov Prize, named in memory of the People’s Artist of the Soviet Union.

The play Ballad of a Mankurt is based on Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years.  Abdurazzokov was the production’s director, script writer, and musical director.

The festival, which was held for the eighteenth time, also featured another production by the Tajik director, Classmates: Life Lessons.

Abdurazzokov said that over the past six years he had traveled to different countries with his passport and had encountered no problems, but Russian border guards took issue with his papers and expelled him.

​”We flew from Bishkek to Moscow, whence we were supposed to fly to Saint Petersburg. When we arrived in Moscow, the Russian border guards examined my passport, in which there were numerous stamps from Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, and Iran, for a long while. An FSB officer came up, took my passport, and made a photocopy. I was told there were inaccuracies in the document and was detained. I wanted to call the Russian Ministry of Culture so they would know about the difficulties one encounters, but the border guards didn’t let me call,” said the director.

Abdurazzakov said he was held at Domodedovo Airport around an hour and then sent home to Tajikistan on the next flight from Moscow to Kulyab.

“On the day the festival opened, I was already in Dushanbe, and my company was performing there without me,” he said.

Abdurazzokov has already received a new passport and should leave the country in a few days to continue working. He believes his sudden arrival  Tajikistan was no coincidence. He had a ticket for an April 10 flight from Petersburg to Dushanbe, because he wanted to visit his mother immediately after the festival.

“Fate decided to speed up our meeting,” he said, laughing.

Honored Artist of Tajikistan Barzu Abdurazzokov was born in 1959 in Dushanbe. His father is the famous actor Habibullo Abdurazzokov;  his mother, the actress Fotima Gulomova. In 1980, he graduated from the directing  department at the Tajik Institute of Arts, and in 1987, from the directing department at Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts (GITIS) in Moscow.

In 2009, his production Madness: The Year 1993, staged at the Russian Dramatic Theater in Dushanbe, was banned by the country’s culture ministry.  Subsequently, Abdurazzokov was unable to get work in Tajikistan, but Bishkek was happy to have him. Since 2013, he has worked at the Aitmatov Theater, and for two years in a row he was awarded Kyrgyzstan’s best director award.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo courtesy of Radio Ozodi

“You’ll Be Gone in Three Minutes. I’m Going to Kill You”

“You’ll Be Gone in Three Minutes. I’m Going to Kill You”
Elena Srapyan, Civic Assistance Committee
refugee.ru
April 12, 2016

On Friday, April 8, between Novye Cheryomushky and Kaluzhskaya subway stations in Moscow, an elderly man fired a trauma pistol several times into the head of a man of non-Slavic appearance. The wounded man is now in the intensive care ward of City Clinic Hospital No. 1 in serious condition. The Civic Assistance Committee has taken charge of the victim’s legal defense.

сулаймон саидов
Sulaimon Saidov

On the evening of Friday, April 8, Sulaimon Saidov, a 38-year-old Tajik national, was traveling home from work to Tyoply Stan. He was accompanied by his 19-year-old nephew Mukhammajon Khakimov, who had recently arrived in Moscow from Tajikistan. Saidov has lived in Moscow for over thirteen years. Like most of his relatives, with whom he rents a small flat in Tyoply Stan, he works in construction. The job enables Saidov to feed his four children.

This time, the trip home on the subway proved disastrous. It all began quite casually. At Profsoyuznaya station, a drunken middle-aged man who could barely stand on his feet burst into the subway car. He immediately spotted Khakimov. He went right up to him, pushing him and shouting.

“Who the hell are you? Where are you from? What are you doing here?” he asked Khakimov.

Khakimov modestly replied he was from Tajikistan.

The assailant called Tajiks “black monkeys,” swore, and demanded that uncle and nephew immediately leave the car because it was “only for [ethnic] Russians.” Khakimov went over to his uncle, seeking protection. Saidov stood up, pushed his frightened nephew behind him, and tried to calm him.

“The man is just drunk. Don’t look at him. Don’t pay any attention,” he said.

Staring point blank at Saidov, the assailant said, “You’ll be gone in three minutes. I’m going to kill you.”

As Saidov relates it, he felt no danger: the threat from the elderly, frail-looking man seemed too absurd. Even when he spotted a pistol in the assailant’s hands, he did not believe it. He thought it was a toy. However, the pistol was real, a trauma pistol, and the assailant began firing.

He managed to squeeze off several shots at both Tajiks. He missed Khakimov, but he hit Saidov three times in the head and once in the stomach. At short range, the shots could have been deadly. One of the bullets entered Saidov’s eye and damaged the sclera, while another left a huge wound in his skull.

Saidov realized he had to fight for his life. He felt no pain. In a state of shock, he grabbed for the assailant’s pistol and managed to wrest it from his hands. At that moment, the doors of the subway car opened, and assailant and victim found themselves on the platform of Kaluzhskaya subway station. According to police, there was no CCTV camera in the car, but on the station’s cameras what happened looks like a fight. Rushing to the scene, police detained the man holding the pistol: Saidov. Police grabbed him, wrested the weapon from him, and put his hands behind his back. Only when bystanders shouted that he was the victim was Saidov released.

The assailant managed to escape the scene, but was detained quite soon thereafter. When witnesses identified the attacker on video surveillance recordings at the station, it turned out the man’s face was familiar to police. After the pistol was fingerprinted, there could be no doubt: the assailant was 58-year-old local resident Sergei Tsaryov, who had been detained at the same subway station a week earlier.

Tsaryov was brought in literally minutes later. However, police were unable to talk with him for a long time. The man was so drunk he could not answer clearly. At the same time, relatives of the victim were giving testimony in another office. Saidov was almost immediately taken away by ambulance. His injuries were so severe that doctors feared for his life.

Saidov’s cousin Dilshod Saidov, who speaks Russian well, soon arrived at the scene. At the time, Police Captain Ilyinsky was questioning relatives and witnesses, and drawing up an incident report. Dilshod Saidov assisted the captain by translating for Khakimov. But when Ilyinsky read the interview record aloud, Saidov was struck by the differences between it and Khakimov’s testimony. Saidov began verifying the interview record phrase by phrase. According to the text, it was Khakimov who had got a rise out of the passenger with whom Sulaimon Saidov had later fought.

“As if Mukhammajon had provoked the assailant by the mere fact of his existence,” said an indignant Dilshod Saidov. “I had to fight for every word in his testimony: that alone took two hours. They also tried to give me a hard time. They said, ‘Who the hell are you? Let’s check you out.’ Only I wasn’t scared. I’m a regular guy: all my papers are in order. Yeah, the night at the police station was just awful.”

But most importantly, the ambulance doctors managed to get Sulaimon Saidov to City Hospital No. 1 quickly, where he immediately underwent surgery. Thanks to the efficiency and professionalism of his doctors, Saidov survived.

Saidov’s family are alsop grateful to a young female witness who went with them to the police station and stayed there to the end. Unfortunately, they were unable to exchange telephone numbers. The police were vigilant and made sure that communication between them was impossible.

Saidov’s relatives stood watch outside the intensive care ward all through the evening of April 8 and the early hours of April 9.

“I was at work when it happened,” says Dilafruz Sharapova, a close friend of the victim’s. “I called Sulaimon, but he didn’t answer. That usually doesn’t happen, and I got scared right away. Then his nephew picked up the phone. First he said  they were just on the subway. He didn’t want to scare me. When I got home, his cousin called and told me everything. I remember I immediately said to him, ‘Come and get me, and let’s go to the hospital.’ I couldn’t just sit there, you know? We arrived at the hospital, and I waited so long for the doctors to say at least something that it was frightening. I was able to see him only a day later. The operation was over, and the danger had passed. Things will probably be rough for us now, because he won’t be able to work. But I’m not thinking about that for the time being. I am only worried for him. I can’t think about anything else.”

The doctors are now optimistic in their prognoses. Although Saidov suffered a severe bruise to the crown of his head, the brain was not affected. Saidov remembers everything perfectly, and has no problems speaking. The biggest worry is his eye, but the doctors hope to be able to save it despite the damage to the sclera. Perhaps another operation, a more expensive one, will be necessary. The Civic Assistance Committee plans on announcing a fundraiser for Saidov when details have become clear and his relatives have received the necessary medical documents.

The Civic Assistance Committee is defending the interests of the victim, Sulaimon Saidov, in the case.

“For the incident to be qualified correctly it is vital that our lawyer begin working as quickly as possible,” said Marina Leksina, head of the project for the victims of hate crimes. “Because we already have cause to assume that they will try to acquit the assailant by presenting Sulaimon as an active party to the conflict. From what Sulaimon has told us, the attack was motivated only by xenophobia. It was direct aggression, which the assailant accompanied with corresponding language.”

Representing the victim will be Filipp Shishov, an attorney for Memorial Human Rights Center’s Migration and Law Network. Shishov previously represented Maratbek Eshankulov, the young man who unable to return home for four years because of the “dissimilar” photograph in his passport.

Photo courtesy of the Civic Assistance Committee. Translated by the Russian Reader

“tajikistan is russian country”

Yesterday, somebody googled the phrase “tajikistan is russian country” on (t)he(i)r personal confuser and somehow happened upon my crap blog.

In keeping with this hoary (imperialist) and blighted conception of Tajikistan’s mysterious existence, let’s take a gander at all the stories on this blog tagged “Tajikistan.”

Since they are listed in reverse order, with the latest story coming first, what you will find near the top is a really heartwarming article, translated from the website Mediazona, which I entitled “Deported Mother Returns to Tajikistan with Baby Son’s Body.”

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Here’s the nasty little editorial I wrote on that fine occasion:

Do Tajik lives matter in Petersburg? The official answer has so far been a resounding no. (And the “grassroots” answer has been a resounding yawn, actually).

Well, now that that pesky Zarina Yunusova and her creepy little dead baby are out of our hair, we can move on with our more important “European” lives, which here in the former capital of All the Russias are entirely built, swept and cleaned, and stocked and supplied with all the essentials for a pittance by expendable, utterly disempowered insectoid others like Zarina’s husband and Umarali’s father Rustam.

I don’t have the foggiest why anyone who lives in such a backward cesspool can imagine they have anything meaningful or helpful to say about the actual Europe and its alleged “Muslim,” “refugee,” “terrorist,” etc., problem, but as many of us know, nattering on endlessly and furiously about the “fate of Europe” is almost a national sport among the Tajik-loathing Russian jabberwockies.

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Unfortunately, I cannot improve on or amend anything I said back in the heady days of November 2015. All I would add is that a less stupid Google search might be “Russia is  Tajik country.” Just a thought.

flag of tajikistan