Слепые вожди пьяных (Photo collection: Moscow in autumn)

Moscow, the beating heart of Russia's great and peculiar civilization!

Begin at Red Square, the center of medieval Muscovy, and take an hour's stroll through nine hundred years of history.  From the medieval cobblestone between the onion domes and fortress walls, walk any direction to the Russian Empire, stopping to marvel at Old Europe's grand hotels and monuments to culture and commerce. But don't look backwards for too long - Moscow certainly never does. Instead choose a new direction - descend twenty stories underground into the marble palaces of Stalin's metro, and emerge under his stately and imposing skyscrapers.  Or look above you to the grid of trolley cables and holiday lights, follow it along iconic boulevards and river-walks, past world-renowned concert halls and film studios, all under the gaze of bronze and marble heroes of labor, art, science and exploration.  Just be sure to lower your gaze occasionally - otherwise you may miss a spontaneous performance of ballet:

If you can't relish life in Moscow, you were never alive to begin with.

At least that's what I hear.  Moscow probably is spectacular, but like you I've only read about it, and mostly on this blog.  Me, I've been sitting in self-imposed isolation for three months, hunched over my desk, neither working nor relaxing, listening to my neck crackle like damp firewood every time I turn to the clock to see if it's bedtime.  My life is so empty that to document it now would turn this blog into every other blog, and I hate blogs.  The most interesting thing that's happened to me since I got here was E. coli, but even that's become routine (incidentally, stay tuned for my post on local fare).  If something happens you'll be the first to know, but in the mean time, please enjoy this tour in photographs.

~~~

As a famous Russian proverb has it, God is very high and the tsar is very far away.  This proverb did not originate in Moscow.  In Moscow, the tsar is standing right behind you, making sure you don't take photographs inside the metro.  A few examples:

In the provinces, sometimes rooms get stuffy.  Most Russians, like most Americans, resolve this problem with their wits, i.e. by opening a window.  In Moscow, the problem is resolved with state power.  By each window in the reading room of the National Library, they've posted this document - roughly translated, it's the "schedule for airing out the room."

Intervals of roughly 3 hours, for 15 minutes each time - eat your heart out, OSHA.

Another example:  In the provinces, like in America, there are handicap parking spaces for the disabled.  If you get caught parking in one without permission, the state will fine you to discourage further abuse of the privilege.  In Moscow they make damn sure you don't park in the handicap spot in the first place:

Most surprising of all, at least to me, is the outward sobriety of the city.  The authorities have cracked down on public drunkenness, with the unfortunate side effect of reining in private drunkenness, too. Only stores above a certain size can sell alcohol and only during certain hours; you can't drink openly on the street (not to mention on the bus); even bars discourage you from drinking:

"Excessive consumption of alcohol is harmful to your health."  In the provinces, you aren't required to post that - they already know.  

So in addition to being grand and lively, the city is safe, orderly, and predictable - a showcase of Russia's best efforts in all spheres. This is not to say the Moscow is a Potemkin Village or somehow artificial - the showcase is largely for internal consumption, and Russian citizens from Crimea to Kamchatka take pride in their (outrageously distant) capital.  They all know the major sites and streets, they all watch Moscow's news, and in the Soviet period, all trains across all eleven time zones ran on Moscow time.  Of course, the regions wouldn't mind some of Moscow's wealth and wellbeing, and the glitz and glamour does isolate the center from its periphery.  People in Irkutsk know how Moscow lives, but Muscovites know far less about Irkutsk - the blind leading the drunk.

To me, Moscow has so far been an adjustment, and at times, a disappointment, in that it differs so dramatically from the other Russian cities I've come to love.  Sure, you still get the occasional unfortunately-named cafe

and the same difficulties with English grammar,

but something still feels off, at least for now.  This was evident as soon as I got here.

Upon arriving in Moscow, my most urgent task was to find a banya, or Russian bath/sauna, that I could frequent during my year here.  In both Irkutsk and Maikop, locals operated banyas that one could rent out for the night with friends, or drop in to, to have a steam, a snow-bath, a liter of vodka, a spell of vertigo and a fistfight.  I had assumed that this was a central feature of Russian life everywhere, and thus pursued a career in Russian studies.  It appears now that I acted too hastily - in Moscow, most banyas are either far outside the city in people's private dachas, or in the center, lavishly decorated and priced for the Soviet elite (or now, the new rich).  Try to guess, for instance, which of these two banyas I frequented in Maikop, and which one I can't afford in Moscow:

  

In my desperation and disbelief, I asked all of my acquaintances here, but their answers were always the same - "this isn't Irkutsk," "this isn't Maikop," or one time, "this isn't America."  Indeed.  I might have added, "this isn't Russia," but I already know that game.  In truth, Russia contains multitudes, but Moscow so far has fallen a bit short of my romantic, blog-distorted memories of Irkutsk and Maikop.  Fortunately, my visa is valid until May, and my impressions, like the city itself, are under constant renovation.

In the mean time, there is plenty to look at.

The following (and final) pictures are a means to coerce myself into blogging further, even if my life stays dull.  Moscow, in addition to its spectacular built environment, is dotted with equally spectacular parks, former gentry estates, and other well-curated green space.  The theme of this post was Moscow in autumn.  I will try to return to these same spots, some of the above but all of these below, during the winter and during the spring, to document the city's seasonal transformations. These are from a park near my apartment (click on any pictures, but especially these, for full-size versions).

ВДНХ (On post-socialism, or Moscow in the Summer)

I’m sorry.

I was wrong to stray from my blog in search of a larger audience; I’ve realized my mistake and I’m asking for your forgiveness.  My (excellent) article didn’t get published, and in fact, after writing it at Jacobin’s explicit request, that same editor who requested it never acknowledged receipt of my draft or my follow-up email.  In my view, I was due a "yes" or a polite "no," but perhaps I'm just clinging to my bourgeois mores like a life raft while the revolution washes me away. 

IT'S FINE - I’m actually not bitter.  Failure has more to teach us than success.  Although the editor could have been more courteous,  I’m not so thin-skinned as to take it personally.  I'm content to let him do his thing, and I’ll do mine.  And mine is here at Time Flying, sharing little words with my beloved friends and family, not in some overproduced, undersubscribed pinko rag, exhuming dead slogans from the nineteenth century and sending them to every café in Brooklyn for consumption by old classmates from the Subaltern Studies department at Wesleyan.    

Whoa, sorry… not sure where that came from.  What I meant was, I want to move past my ill-fated experiment in journalism, and refocus attention on my first and enduring love, Russia.  Forthcoming post-topics include food, my home life, and a three-part photo-tour of Moscow, in autumn, winter and spring.  

Today’s post is something of a preview – summer, perhaps, which I saw only briefly, but during which I visited Moscow’s most peculiar site.  

Welcome to the Exhibition of Achievements of the People's Economy, or VDNKh (pronounced as it’s spelled).  The name doesn't lend itself to easy translation; a less accurate but clearer variant might be the Exhibition of Achievements of the Planned Economy, or simply the Exhibition of Soviet Economic Achievements.  VDNKh was once a Soviet Disney World, a socialist theme park composed of over 80 separate, architecturally unique pavilions, each dedicated either to one of the various national-ethnic groups of the USSR, or to some obscure corner of the planned economy.  It covers an enormous area - to walk from the North Caucasus Region Pavilion to the Rabbit-Husbandry Pavilion could take all day, even if you can somehow resist stopping at the Sugar Beet Cultivation pavilion and the pavilion of Belorussian Furniture (all real).  The grounds lie north of the city center, and the exhibition itself is a fully functioning city-within-a-city, complete with grocery stores, parks and a population of construction and retail workers.  In addition to the 80+ pavilions, there are fountains, gardens, ponds and forest preserves.  

One needn't read a thing to know the history of VDNKh, which is good, because I didn't read a thing. The history is visible everywhere.  What makes the place so fascinating is that it has fundamentally changed at least four times since Stalin ordered it built in the 1930s.  At first, it was meant to be a microcosm of the rapidly-forming Soviet utopia, complete with Stalinist neoclassical architecture, ornate fountains and art, and monuments to the heroes of socialist labor.  When that utopia didn't pan out, they moderated VDNKh to match the real existing late-Socialist utopia - the authorities covered all the ornament in cheap plaster, painted it white, called it Modern, and hoped the plaster would hold until they retired.  When that utopia didn't pan out, and the plaster fell off the entire USSR, VDNKh came to reflect yet another utopia: the unregulated libertarian free-for-all.  The grounds and the buildings fell into disrepair, while hordes of speculators, mobsters and showmen claimed land and built whatever would sell, including torture and sex museums and a massive shark tank in the center of the former House of the Peoples Pavilion.  Order was maintained by motorcycle gangs.  In one sense, this iteration of VDNKh was an Exhibition of Capitalist Economic Achievements, but if you think about it, the former name was still more apt - the horror show was one final achievement of the socialist economy.  

Oh!  That reminds me.  This blog has a panel of buttons at the bottom, with which you can share posts on Facebook, Gmail, Blogger, Twitter, and Pinterest (whatever that is).  I myself just started using Twitter, and it's super fun and easy - just click the lower-case "t" at the bottom of the post, include the word "@jacobinmag" in the message, and write whatever you'd like!  Don't forget to attach a picture:

The inscription reads "The Com..unist Party ...ormed and strengt... natio......... nbreakabl.... riendshi... eople."  With that, you still have 48 characters left to tweet, if you were wondering.

Where was I.  Oh right, VDNKh!  In the last year or two, the government has taken VDNKh under its protection and is attempting to make something of it, though it's still unclear what.  They've chased out the riff-raff and are gradually restoring the grounds and uncovering the ancient ruins, as seen in the pictures above.  Time will tell how many more lives it has ahead of it.

There are various ways to see VDNKh.  To some, viewing it from the Soviet past, it's a sombre memorial to a more hopeful time, when the Soviet future seemed limitless.  From the post-Soviet present, it might be a museum of capitalism's transformative power, or more likely, a carnival of its repulsive excesses.  But to me, the real meaning of VDNKh lies somewhere in between, and may even contain a faint glimmer of hope.  Gazing into the refurbished Fountain of the Friendship of the Peoples, VDNKh recalls that momentous year 1991 when, at the threshold between the stable oppression of socialism and the dynamic horrors of hypercapitalism, all eoples of the nbreakabl Union joined hands, briefly, to dance on the rubble of Jacobin Magazine’s dreams.

Перерыв (A non-post)

My dear readers,

This week, in lieu of a blog post, I wrote a political screed for the left-wing magazine Jacobin.  I am waiting to hear if they will publish it or not; if so I will link to it.  Please do not interpret this to mean either a) that I myself am left-wing, or b) that I think people should read more.  I was simply worn out from the rigors of writing silly blog posts, and decided to try my hand at foreign policy commentary.

For your patience, please enjoy this photograph of a woman dancing with a goat on a temporary stage outside the metro:

Bureau-crazzzy (О бюрократии - pt. 2)

Smile!  

*CLICK*

This is what I look like after five rounds of writing my name (surname, given name, patronymic), my advisor's name, my occupation, my employing institution, that institution's address, my personal address, my phone number, the topic and period of my research, the "goal" of my research, my level of education, my citizenship, my passport number, my passport serial number, the name and location of the passport-issuing agency, and the passport's expiration date.  As the photo shows, Russian bureaucracy leaves people aggressively bored, like the orcas in the swimming pool at SeaWorld. Today's post is about bureaucracy.

If you'll recall, I last discussed this topic while waiting for my visa in Maine - fortunately, that situation resolved itself just in time, before the Russian foreign ministry gave me enough red tape to hang myself.  That post described the rich heritage and traditions of Russian bureaucracy, placing it in its historical context.  Today I will focus on how bureaucracy is experienced in reality; that is to say, on paper.

These are all the documents I carry on my person at all times.  Please note their numbers for your reference later in the post:

1) Registration card.  

2) Passport and visa.

3) Immigration card.  (Described previously here)  

4) Library card for the Lenin Library, the central state library of Russia.

5) Official letter from my academic advisor requesting that I be granted access to archives; validated with gold sticker (see below).

6) Pass for the municipal archives of the city of Moscow.

7) Pass for the state archives of the Russian Federation.

8) Student ID.

To get a pass for any archive or library, the procedure is more or less the same.  I walk into a tiny room called the Biuro Propuskov, or the hassle office (translation mine).  I approach a small cashier's window, behind which sits a dour Russian woman named Irina, between the ages of 55-75, in a black and gold shiny patterned dress, who simply cannot believe I don't understand how the hassle office works.  I'm given a four-digit number to dial on the internal phone system, which connects me to the reading room, from which a slightly younger and friendlier woman in a black and gold shiny patterned dress has to come downstairs to greet me.  I present documents #2 and #5 to this woman, who fills out a temporary pass, which allows me past the security gate and into the reading room, where I can fill out the paperwork for a permanent pass (e.g. documents #6 or #7) that will expire on December 31, even though I'll be here through May.  

Once I have this pass, the system is different everywhere, and to describe the procedures at each archive would put excessive strain on my wi-fi connection.  I will just give one example: the Moscow city archives.  There, I walk in the front door and show documents #2 and #6 to a police officer in a giant, mirror-plated box.  The police officer takes my passport, compares the photo to my face with one eyebrow raised, and reluctantly gives me a key to a locker and an Order Slip, on which I have to write my last name and my pass number.  I go to the locker and deposit my bag and outerwear, and then get waved through the gate into the reading room.  When I leave the archive, the gate is locked, and I'm not allowed to exit until a woman inside stamps the date in two places on the order slip and initials it, even if I don't order anything. This is the key point, I should have told you that earlier - feel free to skip everything you just read. The point is, you cannot leave the archive without getting this order slip validated by a woman inside and giving that validated slip to the police officer; there is a locked gate at the exit.  There were at least 15 researchers in the archive when I was there on Thursday, and it's the off-season.  If the building caught fire, there is absolutely no way they could process and issue enough Temporary Single-use Short-term Life-threatening-emergency Exemption Cards, even if we all qualified for the expedited process.  We would all die, either in the inferno or by the hand of the police officer after jumping the turnstyle.  

~~~

There are, however, workarounds.  Recall document #5, the letter from my academic advisor:

See that gold sticker, bearing the seal of the University of California?  They cost $3.50 at the university bookstore in Berkeley for a pack of 75.

These stickers, not unlike the revered circular stamp, certify, verify, validate, and expedite every process at all levels of administration inside the Russian Federation. At least, that is the legend among researchers.  As I understand it, gold stickers are assumed to come from levels of administration above the hassle office, while unadorned foreigners obviously fall below.  As such, the sticker absolves the women in the shiny dresses of their responsibilities to hassle me, after which they are quite content to let me go wherever and do whatever - like anybody, they'd rather not be hassled.  I put those babies on everything.

To take one example, the stickers render Western food imports exempt from the current embargo. Here is a jar of pickled fish I bought, imported from Sweden:

Here I am at work, writing my dissertation.  The stickers certify that my work meets the rigorous ethical and methodological standards of my discipline:

And here I am, gold-stickered letter in hand, seeking access to the Kremlin, where I discovered a medieval hassle office built into the fortress wall.

That hassle office, by the way, dates from the mid-12th century - one of the earliest of its kind.

Fittingly, I was stopped by a police officer after taking these last photos.  The officer, as per the hassling protocols of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, asked to see documents #1-3.  But for all its flaws, the system works - I produced the documents, gold stickers-a-blazing, and was on my way.

Третий Рим (Welcome to Moscow)

Moscow - the city that never sleeps!  That is to say, the city in which I never sleep.   As on previous trips, my flight across the Atlantic condensed the whole night into a few hours, which I spent wondering if I was sleeping or not and, after some time, wondering how long I'd been wondering that. My best guess is that I fell asleep right after sunset, woke up an hour later, right before sunrise, ate dinner, and then ate breakfast.  Then I landed in Frankfurt somewhere between 2:00 and 10:00 a.m., depending on who you asked - me, or a clock.  I'm writing now in Moscow, two days later, somewhere between 4 a.m. and noon.  In time, I will write a thorough and authoritative guide to the city as I have for Irkutsk and Maikop; this post is just to relay my first impression. And because I haven't slept, boy am I impressionable!

To understand the section of Moscow that I've seen, a single number will suffice - 75%  That's how much of Russia's total wealth is concentrated in the city of Moscow.  Of course, statistics can be deceiving, especially when I make them up.  But 75% feels true, and if somebody told me that, I would believe them.  It's not far off anyway, as you'll see in this mercifully brief tour of the downtown.

Moscow is arranged in a series of concentric rings, with Red Square and the Kremlin at the very center.

 

That second picture is from New Years 2008, but doesn't contradict what I said.  The Kremlin and Red Square lie at the very center of Moscow, and thus, the very center of Russia.  Swirling around this center is a terrible hyper-capitalist vortex; that's all I've really seen so far.  The rest of the country is organized in concentric rings, each one more remote, backwards and irrelevant, if you ask a Muscovite. The rings terminate roughly in Irkutsk to the East and Maikop to the South.  How far this blog has come!

This first jaunt around Moscow was also organized in concentric rings, though Red Square wasn't the center - even in my current state, I found the medieval cobblestone too unforgiving to sleep.  Instead, I slept as everybody sleeps in an ultra-rich future-land - in an LED-illuminated plastic sleeping-tube:

When I woke up, it was already somewhere between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., so I went to check out the neighborhood at work.  By far the most notable feature of the block surrounding my tube was the concentration of banks, banks of every variety.

There were acronym banks - BBR, OTP, and MBA Moscow:

 

Half-name banks - Forabank, Sberbank, Rosbank, and Alfabank:

 
 

And full-name banks - Bank of Moscow and Russian Standard Bank:

Of at least a dozen banks on the block, only one seemed to have fallen on hard times - the unfortunately-named Masterbank:

Those signs are advertising space for rent, if that wasn't clear.

Banks, of course, are just one horseman of socialism's apocalypse - the other three are traffic, Papa John's, and Russian men in tracksuits, about my age, break-dancing to remixes of the Spice Girls in historic Gorky Park.  I photographed all of them, but they're not much to look at.  The terrible truth is, you all can see them back home, with perhaps one exception.

On the surface, Moscow's center seems to be a remix writ large - catchy Western hooks, chopped to pieces, sped up and played louder, and marketed to an audience that, for a time, doesn't know any better.   It also boasts the comforts and conveniences of any major Western city - crowds of babukshki are no longer the most convenient source for directions.  My tube had wi-fi.  There's enough money to tear down defunct buildings, remove the debris, and build more banks.

Destination: Irkutsk!

All of this reduced my shock/stress levels some, but also left me doubtful about maintaing an interesting blog for nine months.  The question quickly arose - has the original blog met its end, smothered by the pillow of capitalist modernity like its short-lived Finnish spin-off?

Probably not.  As it turns out, you can't drink a $20 cocktail on Red Square and stumble three steps outward without face-planting back into Russia.  I am renting a room well outside the inner rings, and it's the same as all past rooms - it even has my old sleepin' couch!

Maikop

Moscow

One needn't go all the way to Maikop to escape the vortex.  At home here, there's much I recognize, and with each passing hour, I'm even warming up to the center.  Like Russia itself, the blog will struggle to its feet.

My apologies for a half-formed post, there is more to come.  Please subscribe for email updates in the right sidebar.  As always, if you are already subscribed and would like to be removed from the list, you can simply change your email address.