Statues, Beer, and Prison Heads

Statuesque Moscow

Moscow has been on a statue-erecting binge in recent years, with seemingly every square inch of free space destined to commemorate something or someone. Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper recently tallied the capital’s monuments, after the capital’s fourth one to Nikolai Gogol and the fifth one to Dostoyevsky were unveiled in November.

People with the most monuments in Moscow:

1.      Vladimir Lenin (164)
2.     Alexander Pushkin (18)
3.     Peter the Great (10)
4.     Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kalinin (9)
5.      Leo Tolstoy (8)
6.     Vladimir Vysotsky, Georgy Zhukov, Maxim Gorky (7)
7.     Mikhail Kutuzov, Mikhail Frunze, Mikhail Lomonosov, Sergei Yesenin (6)
8.     Mikhail Lermontov, Yury Gagarin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (5)
9.     Marina Tsvetayeva, Nikolai Gogol, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kliment Timiryazev (4)

Beer Me, Says Baikal

Siberia’s Lake Baikal is known for its deep blue waters, unique freshwater seals, and pristine coastal wilderness. But in recent years this wilderness has been increasingly polluted with trash. Lack of garbage and recycling infrastructure and exponential growth in tourism has meant that illegal dumps and littered campsites are becoming a major problem. Some Irkutsk activists at the My Baikal organization decided they’d had enough: since 2016 they have been recruiting volunteers for Baikal clean-ups. This year they also launched an online trash store.

Since November, anyone in the world can go “shopping” in the supermarket at the website MyBaikal.Store. On offer are discarded toothbrushes (R389), plastic bags (R304), beer bottles (R306) and more expensive items like batteries (R10,560). In the first two weeks, the project made about R80,000. The prices have been calculated to reflect the long-term damage of discarded items to the wilderness, and purchases will fund My Baikal’s cleanup and environmental education efforts around the world’s largest freshwater lake.

Prison Heads Roll

The head of Russia’s notorious penal system, FSIN (for Federal Penitentiary Service), has been dismissed following repeated revelations of organized torture and sexual violence against inmates.

Alexander Kalashnikov, who held the post for only two years, is not the first to be expelled from leadership of the penal system amid scandal. One former chief, Alexander Reimer, ended up in prison on charges of theft.

Although no reason was given by the Kremlin for Kalashnikov’s dismissal, it came amid growing outrage at the inhumane and illegal methods used in Russian prisons. The prisoners’ rights group gulagu.net announced that a whole archive of videos documenting prison torture and rape has been smuggled out of Russia and is in their possession.

The trove of files was assembled by a former convict held in a Saratov Oblast penal colony who was assigned the job of processing footage from guards’ body cams. The convict, Sergei Savelyev, started saving the files instead of deleting them and eventually got to know the penal system so well he figured out how to smuggle the files out when he was released.

The archive paints a terrifying picture of organized abuse ordered by prison authorities but carried out by select convicts called “activists.” After the scandal broke, evidence surfaced of similar mistreatment in other colonies, leading to the dismissal of the service’s chief. Of course, the new man appointed in his place is of a similar background, with a career in the police, so few observers expect torture and mistreatment in Russian prisons to end.

Family Feuds

A great-grandson of Joseph Stalin has declared that he would like to exhume the dictator and have him reinterred in Novodevichy Cemetery, next to his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

Selim Bensaad is the grandson of Stalin’s first son, Yakov, who was shot in Nazi captivity in 1943. Yakov’s precise fate is still a subject of debate, with one rumor saying that Stalin declined an offer to exchange Yakov, a lieutenant, for a high-ranking Nazi officer.

Bensaad, the son of Yakov’s daughter, Galina Dzhugashvili, and an Algerian diplomatic worker, Khusein ben Saad, said he also wants the exhumation so as to determine whether Stalin was poisoned. Stalin’s body originally joined Lenin’s in the Lenin Mausoleum before being moved to a spot near the Kremlin wall, which Bensaad claims was counter to Stalin’s wish to be buried near his wife Nadezhda.

Though not a very public person, Bensaad has been giving lots of interviews since co-authoring a book, Stalin’s Family Secrets (for now, only in Russian as Тайны семъи Сталина).

He has since been kicked out of his apartment by his father and is living in his car.

Fisticuffs For Real

Russia has formally recognized fist fighting (kulachny boy, a kind of bare-knuckle boxing) as an official sport, with legalized betting and tournaments with doping control to be organized under the aegis of the boxing federation.

Fist fighting has been gaining ground unofficially in recent years, with fights broadcast on social media, in line with the overall growth of popularity of sports like MMA and the nationalist overtones of various Russian martial arts.

Fist fighting is in fact a Slavic tradition described in classic works, usually performed at public events associated with winter holidays like Christmas or Shrovetide. Teams of men would go “wall to wall” (stenka na stenku), pitting one side of the village against the other, in street brawls that could include dozens of people and ended with many injuries and sometimes death. Only bare hands were allowed. The Orthodox Church frowned upon these pre-Christian traditions and even excommunicated participants on occasion. The Bolsheviks, once in power, considered them a tsarist relic. But mass fights persisted, the tradition later happily adopted by football fans.

Upstaged by Scandal

The Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT) was made famous by its two revolutionary founders, Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who popularized naturalistic theater and implemented Stanislavski’s system. Through the years, the theater evolved and in the 1980s split into two different institutions: the Chekhov MKhAT and the Gorky MKhAT, each with its own traditions, and each led by respected cinema stars: Oleg Tabakov at Chekhov and Tatyana Doronina at Gorky.

But then, in 2018, everything changed. Talented innovator and organizer Tabakov passed away, and the theater’s most successful actors and directors walked out in droves when an outsider, Sergei Zhenovach, was appointed in his place. Across town, Doronina was pushed aside by another appointee, Eduard Boyakov. The Soviet star was so insulted, she pleaded with Vladimir Putin to “oust” her nemesis.

Three years later, the Culture Ministry has added to the scandals. It has switched directors in both institutions, sparking rumors that the two theaters will become a unified MKhAT once again.

At the Chekhov MKhAT, the new director is Konstantin Khabensky, a long-time stage and film actor with celebrity status and some Hollywood cameos.

At the Gorky MKhAT, the new director is a complete newcomer to the Moscow scene, Vladimir Kekhman. He is a theater-world transplant from the business world, where he worked in fruit importing. Most critics were horrified by this choice. The theater’s wealthiest private sponsors immediately announced they would not work with Kekhman. One can only hope his business acumen will put the institution’s financial house in order.

Historic Return

Kaliningrad’s only medieval fortress, the thirteenth-century Tapiau Castle, has closed its storied prison and will be turned into a museum. Tapiau is located in Gvardeysk, a town east of Kaliningrad, the main city in Russia’s European exclave on the Baltic Sea.

The fortress was built in 1265 to bolster the defenses of Königsberg (the original name of Kaliningrad). It was only later converted to a castle. Originally, the town of Gvardeysk was called Tapiau, which means “warm fields” in Prussian. In the fourteenth century the fortress, then known as Surgurbi, was managed by Heinrich Dusemer von Arfberg, who subsequently was a Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. The Teutonic Order’s library was stored in Tapiau for some time. It was a frequent stopover for European royalty (including future King of England Henry IV) during the Lithuanian Crusades.

The castle complex, despite the ravages of time and history, still has some surprisingly well-preserved buildings, perhaps due to its function as a prison all the way to modern times. But in 2021 the FSIN penal service finally handed the property over to the Kaliningrad Art Museum. Although the buildings need much work, the museum will soon be opening its grounds for tours.

Gold Awarded

In what is now the end of a very long saga, a court in the Netherlands has ruled that a vast collection of Scythian gold, which was loaned by Crimean museums shortly before the peninsula was annexed by Moscow, should not return to Crimea, because it is part of Ukraine’s State Museum Fund.

The hotly contested collection of hundreds of items from several Crimean museums was part of an exhibit at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam that opened just before March 2014, when Russian troops invaded Crimea, which Russia subsequently annexed (an act not recognized by the UN). Since that time, the museum has been perplexed as to where to return the collection, which had been loaned it by the Ukrainian government, but came from museums that are now governed by Russia.

More recently, Dutch courts twice ruled that the items should be returned to Ukraine, but without specifying to which country they belong. Crimea’s museums argued that they are the rightful owners of the items according to international practice. After all, they had been unearthed in Crimea, one of the centers of Scythian culture. After many delays, including the ouster of one of the judges that Ukraine considered biased, the Amsterdam Court of Appeals has now decided the items belong to Ukraine.

The Scythians were ancient nomads who lived in the Eurasian steppes but retreated to the Crimean Peninsula and became more settled toward their decline.

A Departure

Marietta Chudakova, a scholar whose work on writer Mikhail Bulgakov elevated the latter to near cult status in Russia, has passed away at the age of 84. A literary critic and author of several books in the 1970s and ’80s, Chudakova was an expert on early Soviet writers, including Yury Olesha and Mikhail Zoshchenko. But it was her biography of Mikhail Bulgakov that led to a surge in popular interest in the author of The Master and Margarita in the late 1980s. Her painstaking research included working for a month with Bulgakov’s widow, Yelena, to decipher Bulgakov’s handwritten notes, including 15 chapters of the first version of The Master and Margarita. She embraced perestroika and tried to enter politics as a candidate for the Union for Right Forces liberal party in 2007.

SNAPSHOT

The value of Moscow’s residential real estate has for the first time surpassed one trillion dollars, after steadily growing for two years despite the lockdown. The price of Moscow apartments has increased by 32% since early 2019. ◎ Some 53% of young Russians studying information technology say they would like to leave Russia, according to a poll of 5,000 students across the country – this despite IT becoming a well-paid career in Russia, where jobs in the field are easy to find: the government estimates a shortage of up to 1 million IT professionals annually. ◎ Moscow authorities have begun building a cemetery spanning 507 hectares that would become the largest in Europe (surpassing the current “champion” mega-cemetery in Rostov-on-Don, which even has its own bus). The cemetery would have capacity for 500,000 new graves. Currently burial is an expensive ordeal in Moscow for most, with burial places in the city costing at least R67,500 (about $900). ◎ Every fifth employer in Russia has rejected a prospective job applicant because of their social networking posts. And 7% have dismissed employees for the same reason. Meanwhile 56% of employers choose to ignore personal online activities of their staff, according to a poll of 1,000 companies by recruiting website Superjob.ru. ◎ Over 500,000 Russians have bought fake COVID test results or vaccination certificates in Moscow and Moscow Oblast alone, according to a database of personal details that went on sale on shadowy Telegram channels and forums. ◎ 48% of Russians think money from the government budget is not being spent appropriately. 22% say it is spent appropriately. 30% couldn’t say. Polling found that Russians felt the most underfunded areas in the state budget were health and recreation (44% stated this), education (38%) and social services (29%). They felt the three most overfunded areas were large state projects, such as Olympic Games or international deals (22%), the military (19%), and domestic security and police (16%). ◎ Fully 54% of Russians said they don’t pay attention to the country’s foreign policy, and 23% say the leadership is spending too much time on it, while 44% say it is just the right amount of time. 38% believe Russia has more successes than failures on the foreign policy front; 29% say there are more failures; 33% couldn’t say. Top successes cited included military support to Syria, building export pipelines for oil and gas, strengthening the army, and the annexation of Crimea.

SOURCES: Real estate – Savills company, via Vedomosti. Emigration – RBK. Cemetery; Employment – MoskvichMag. COVID – Kommersant. Budget and foreign policy – Fom.ru