This station is named after the Krasnaia Gvardiia - the Red Guard. All these photos are from April 23 of this year.
On the station platform.
Unattractive, Revolution-themed artwork - the slogan at the bottom of the composition is "Workers of the world, unite."
Slot-machine hall (at left) next to a bread store and currency exchange.
Slot-machine hall (at right) next to a mobile phone store.
Two slot-machine halls next to each other, with a gold and antiques appraiser sandwiched in between.
Sloppily photocopied "wanted" poster announcing that police are seeking one Ruslan Rakhmanovich Ibragimov in connection with the February 2005 bombing in the Moscow metro. The sketch artist made the wanted man look a little like a skinnier version of Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov.
Residential buildings near the metro before nightfall...
...and after. Everything looks better at night.
Graffiti in the elevator, which says, "Limita*, don't piss in the elevator!"
*A pejorative word derived from the Soviet-era concept of "limitchiki," people who would come into Moscow to acquire groceries and consumer goods which were not available in the provinces. It's now applied to people who are recently arrived in Moscow, are looked down on by native Muscovites, and often don't have proper documentation to live in the capital, whose lives inspired a movie of the same name.
2 comments:
As a native Russian speaker, I'd like to give more accurate explanation of the word "limitchiki".
It was quite prestigious to live in Moscow in Soviet times, and at the same time native moscovites where not very keen to take lower-skilled jobs. Hence every large factory in Moscow had shortage of low skilled workforce. To meet that shortage local government gave factories quotes ("limits") to bring in employees from outside of Moscow en masse. The reason the limits existed was that local gov't along side with the factory had to provide basic housing and other facilities for these newcomers.
So "limitchiki" are not people who just came over to shop in Moscow, but people who chose to move to Moscow permanently. Probably there are many hard-wroking and well behaved people among them, but since we tend to notice only the most visible, usually the word "limitchik" is associated with someone from a lower social strata, having low standart of behaviour.
Anon, thanks very much for setting me straight on that. I had missed the fact that the word derived from hiring quotas, although now that you mention it, it seems like something I might once have known but forgotten, like so many things.
I was just talking with my seat-mate on a plane yesterday (to Moscow, natch) about how some of the most hard-working and successful people in the "new" Moscow (e.g., the rapidly expanding retail banking sector) are not native Muscovites. Her theory was that people born in Moscow already have connections, plus in many cases their parents' apartment, so they don't have the motivation to work as hard. Bearing in mind that no stereotype ever applies to all members of a group, I think that she had a good point. The similarities to hard-working first-generation immigrants to the US are interesting, although perhaps superficial.
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