Street art from Russia's northern capital

CIMG4062, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

Late last year, I finally uploaded the rest of my graffiti photos from St. Petersburg. The full set is here.

Remembering Piter

I've added a few photos to my St. Petersburg photoset; this one is my favorite:

CIMG6265, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

In Honor of Past Defenders of the Fatherland

Apparently, last month was the 65th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Leningrad. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the siege, or the Blockade, as it is called in Russian, on the city. The signs advising citizens which side of the street to avoid when the city was being shelled remain in one or two places on Nevsky Prospekt as a reminder. Survivors, or perhaps today their descendants, still lay flowers beneath them.

Even in the 1980s, infrastructure problems and dolgostroi issues were being blamed on the wounds the city suffered during the Great Patriotic War, and of course the devastation of some of the tourist attractions surrounding St. Petersburg was still being restored in this century.

Anyway, I thought I'd post, somewhat belatedly for the anniversary noted above but right on time for Defenders of the Fatherland Day, a photo of my own blockade relic. Not that I was a survivor of those hellish 900 days. No, my connection is a bit more tenuous and involves this document:


This is the certificate issued to recipients of the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad," received on March 6, 1944 by one Ivan Vasil'evich Nikiforov, if I'm making out the handwriting correctly. Although it now seems impossible, my memory of how I acquired this item is that it was tossed on the trash heap in the courtyard of the building where we lived in downtown Leningrad, along with the rest of the belongings of its deceased recipient.

Archival photos from wartime Leningrad can be viewed here.

Unknown Petersburg

The deadline for submitting photos to this contest has passed (and I'm sad to say that I missed it, too - but at least I can share a few of my SPB photos on Flickr - most of them pretentiously but non-optionally black-and-whitened for purposes of submission elsewhere), but you should still go to the contest information page to see the dozens of pages of submissions that follow (click on the numbers at the bottom), some of which are really amazing work and all of which make me want to go back to SPB with nothing but a camera and a lot of time on my hands. Alas, that's not likely to happen soon.

A sutki and a half in Piter

I can't resist posting an article like this, especially given the lede:

36 Hours in St. Petersburg, Russia
NY Times, May 13, 2007
Clifford J. Levy

BACK when foreigners in Leningrad were treated almost like interlopers, shunted into dormitory-like hotels and pummeled with propaganda about the primacy of Soviet Man, the city was an improbable destination for families. No longer.

Plus, the article recommends Teremok, another thing I find irresistable.

Photoset at winter's end

I thought I remembered seeing something in a Russian blog about snow in Moscow in the past few days, but I can't find any verification on the internet (interestingly, it's much harder to find info about the weather three days ago than forecasts for three days in the future). But as recently as late April, snow in Mo-town was documented by Chris at his blog. Anyway, here in DC it's definitely safe to say that winter is over and the summer heat is about to set in. So here are a few photos that might prove useful to us all as we try to stay cool in the coming summer months. All are from a couple of morning walks in St. Petersburg on Dec 25-26, 2005.

Local prosecutor's office

L'vinyi Most (Lions' Bridge)

Cat by the entrance to Nikolsky Sobor

On the bright side, The Bright Line...

I'm fortunate enough to be on the editorial staff of a small (print run of about 700 copies, put together by a few student editors) arts and literary journal published by and for Georgetown Law students. It has been fun to see some of my photographs appear in print, although of course our publication is fairly modest in scope. Next year, we're hoping to establish an online presence.

Anyway, to celebrate the printing of what was unfortunately our only issue this year (next year, there will be one per semester!), I've decided to post the photos I had in the issue. I immodestly suggest clicking on them to expand for full appreciation. And yes, I know it's pretentious to take black-and-white photos and give them titles...

Front Cover (can't remember the title, but we forgot to note
a title inside anyway - Tbilisi, Georgia, Aug. 13, 2006)

CDG Ceiling (Paris, France, Aug. 19, 2006)

Christmas Morning (St. Petersburg, Russia, Dec. 25, 2005)

Dusha Peterburga (with apologies to Antsyferov)
(St. Petersburg, Russia, June 18, 2006)

Robot Che (Moscow, June 28, 2006)
We ran a poem about robots, and this seemed to fit.

Shadow of Faith (Tbilisi, Georgia, Aug. 13, 2006)

Off the Air (St. Petersburg, July 22, 2006)
This one ran with a poem (not mine) called
"Turning Forty Feeling Like an A**hole"

Too Much Fun (Paris, France, Aug. 19, 2006)

Moscow 2006 (Moscow, Russia, June 30, 2006)

[Update: I wanted to add a link to the Flickr photoset containing all of my submissions to the Spring 2007 issue - most of which, of course, didn't make it in]

More post-Soviet abandonment

As a follow-up to this earlier post:

Abandoned (or at least heavily vandalized) Oka in St. Petersburg.
Note the misspelled graffiti - "F**k oof" - in the background.

And behind the car, some stray puppies.
Both photos from April 30, 2005.

Better (and more properly described as "abandoned") photos:

Abandoned biochemical laboratory, presumably somewhere in Russia. (at the LiveJournal ru_abandoned page).

Burned-out and abandoned Hotel Abkhazia in Sukhumi. One of the comments there:

They say that after the fire all of the walls cracked((. What a pity. They used to have such great ice cream there!

Fear of an Orange Planet?*

I don't want to beat the topic to death, especially when the protests were probably not a good barometer of public opinion and ultimately may be just a blip, but it was an interesting weekend. And I should preface these comments by saying that I don't think any kind of color revolution is likely in Russia - or even necessarily desirable (although, as Berezovsky tried to say recently, it's hard to imagine the regime giving up power any other way). But of course beating on protesters is not the best way to make sure people stay loyal to the regime. Even people who didn't sympathize with any of the eclectic group of groups protesting have to acknowledge that this was authoritarian overreach.

Anyway, regarding Saturday in Moscow, the general consensus seems to be that the story was not the turnout for the protests (which was low) but the excessive force deployed to prevent the protesters from enjoying their day in the sun. Russia Profile has a good piece on the protests and some original photos by their correspondent, who also shares this vignette:

As the speeches concluded and the police tensely watched the dispersing crowd, Andrei Illarionov and a group of sympathizers stopped just short of Chistye Prudy subway station. A former economic advisor to the Russian president who is now an adamant critic of the government, Illarionov started to harangue an officer standing in a ring of riot police. Pointing vituperatively to a booklet of the Russian Constitution, Illarionov explained how everyone involved in the operation had violated basic constitutional freedoms and will inevitably be held accountable. The officer stared glumly and shifted feet as the jeremiad went on, until the shuffling crowd enveloped them.

Illarionov can't even get arrested in Moscow! He should come back to DC. This was the lede from RP's piece - titled "Springtime for Putin":

Lockdown on Pushkin Square effectively started before dawn, and by the time Muscovites emerged on Saturday morning for the unsanctioned “Dissenters’ March,” phalanxes of security forces left little to chance. Beginning inside the nearby subway stations, and continuing through the underpasses and along the many approaches to the square, rings of riot police and law enforcement corps of every stripe filtered the procession, minimized mobility, and descended swiftly upon the more vocal protesters. The much-vaunted demonstration was over before it even started.

The NYT on the related happenings in St. Petersburg:

The marches have become a test both of the determination of the opposition and the willingness of the government to use force to suppress it, imbuing the marches with more weight in Russian politics than the small numbers of demonstrators imply.

All of the talk of reminded me of something from nearly two years ago - the excessive force deployed to guard against protests at the Khodorkovsky trial, whicn became a story of its own, separate from the trial. At the time, I posted a partial translation of a commentary from Ekho Moskvy on the situation:

But one question remains, and it's not an idle one. Guys, if this is just a regular criminal court proceeding, if this is a clear-cut case of fraud, then why are you making such a fuss about it? Why did you wave your nightsticks a week ago, why did you deploy three cordons of guards and all of those trucks? Are you expecting Shamil' Basayev and his posse? Why do your eyes start darting around when people ask simple questions? And for whom did you set out the so-called [anti-Khodorkovsky] "general public" like hedgerows, for Bush and Schroeder? And if you're so tough and sure of yourselves, really, why do your eyes keep darting around? The way you're doing it looks so petty and pitiful. You can see the threads sticking out. Like blue jeans made in Sovok.

The difference between then and now is that the authorities seem to be a bit more organized (according to RP, it was "coercively administered crowd control, orchestrated and implemented with sinister precision") - if no less heavy-handed - in keeping a lid on things nowadays. I guess that is another accomplishment of the last few years.

As for the answer to the question "why," I guess the authorities believe their own hype about foreign-sponsored NGO's working tirelessly to effect regime change. This (rather vaguely sourced - which "critics of the Kremlin and political analysts"?) comment from the NYT:

Critics of the Kremlin and political analysts said that the abundance of Interior Ministry troops on the streets over the weekend — and their use of force — reflected concern by Mr. Putin and his advisers that street protests could snowball ahead of parliamentary elections planned for the fall. They point to the large rallies in Ukraine that came to be known as the Orange Revolution, which forced a change of government in 2004.

The MT - one of whose journalists was detained - noted that it's hard to see how fear of the color orange could provoke such an extreme response to the "Dissenters' March" - noting that, given the unlikely political success of any of the "Other Russia" leaders, "it is difficult to see how Saturday's gathering posed such a threat" of a color revolution.

Tangentially related - Lenta.ru's photo collection from the DPNI/Congress of Russian Communities protest. An especially classic sign - reminding Chubais that he won't escape jail time and depicting him springing forth from a privatization voucher. The MT had a brief snapshot of the level of discourse at that event:

Hundreds attended a nationalist rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad to hear Dmitry Rogozin criticize "a Russia run by Abramoviches," in reference to Russia's richest man, Roman Abramovich. Hundreds of police near Bolotnaya Ploshchad stood by quietly.

* With credit and apologies to Public Enemy.

More on the "Dissidents' March"

LJ user misslob has a great post with lots of photos and comments (in Russian). Via the Yandex "top blog posts" page.

[Update: More photos on fishki.net - slow-loading, but comical juxtapositions of OMON guys with Moscow street advertising. Via Apricot Flan]

[Upd 2: great arty photos of the march in Moscow from drugoi; a pdf book of photos from SPB by studio204 (via GVO).

Also, the original title of this post misidentified the march as one of "dissidents" - while that may apply to some of the participants, I guess the generally agreed-upon title (aside from clunky ones like "March of Those Who Do Not Agree") is "Dissenters' March" - I'm not correcting the title because that would change the hyperlink of the post]

[Upd 3: I just posted one of drugoi's photos at moscow graffiti with a translation of the text]

While (some of) Moscow marched...

Lots of blogging about the various protests in Moscow on Saturday, for the time being mostly on Russian-language LiveJournal (some of the better material seems to be at Ilya Peresedov's blog). Robert Amsterdam's blog has strong coverage; Veronica has a few posts (this one has some particularly funny photos, nice comic relief from the day's dire tone) and a slew of original pictures; Whims of Fate has done a great job of aggregating photos (from SPB, too!) and links to a few of the Russian LJ commentaries. Lenta.ru had a pretty good roundup of the day's events (or so it seemed to me, but of course I didn't see the actual events - or protesters - being rounded up). But while some marched and were arrested, the target of much of the protesters' ire was enjoying the sweetest form of victory over his opponents - ignoring them as irrelevant and relaxing in his hometown with his favorite sport:

BBC Monitoring
President Putin attends mixed martial arts tournament in St Petersburg - TV
Excerpt from report by Russian NTV on 15 April

[Presenter] Russian wrestlers celebrated their triumph in St Petersburg's Ice Palace, where a mixed martial arts tournament took place under the slogan: Russia vs America. Conquering the Americans was to a large extent a matter of prestige. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin came to watch the tournament. Here is our correspondent Vladimir Kondratyev with the report.

[Correspondent] It is incorrect to say that these mixed martial arts have no rules. In these games it is against the rules to do anything that could directly damage your opponent's health, or goes against sports ethics. For example, one cannot elbow one's opponent, hit them in the upper stomach or the spine, pull their hair out, spit in their face and so on. The sportsmen with the most success in this tournament are sambo* and judo wrestlers, precisely the two kinds [of sport] President Putin used to practise. It is well-known that Putin became Leningrad's champion for sambo and judo more than once. And it is not surprising that the president came to attend the tournament entitled: Russia vs America.

The thousands of spectators in the packed hall of the Ice Palace couldn't believe their eyes when after the first honorary guest, Jean-Claude Van Damme, the [tournament's] host announced the arrival of the Russian president. The surprise was a first-rate success; even the press only found out about Putin's plans at the last minute. Soon, yet another high-ranking spectator arrived: former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Putin does not forget his friends, even when they are no longer in power. The organizers had planned for Putin to sit by the ring for a while - the price for seats in the stalls was R7,500 by the way - then to move him to a box of honour in the upper circle. The president declined however, and remained downstairs so as to get a better view of the wrestlers' actions. [Passage omitted: details of the tournament.]

Putin applauded the victory [by Russia's Feodor Yemelyanenko] standing up, along with all the others. The times when the Americans dominated in professional boxing and martial arts have become a thing of the past. "We must be known and reckoned with," Yemelyanenko announced after his victory, unaware that his words sounded like a political statement. But this is not politics, only sport. Putin embraced the hero, and closer to midnight invited him and his friends to a late tea at the Konstantinovskiy Palace.

[Putin, in Russian, with consecutive translation in English] Your kind of sport is very tough. But it is not void of nobility, of respect towards your opponent. It is of course a sport for courageous people.

[Correspondent] Putin's short visit to his native town must have been enjoyable. It gave him the chance to go back to his sporting past, to his youth, he walked along the Strelka [spit of St Petersburg's Vasilyevskiy Island], where he congratulated a newly-wedded couple, and Palace Square. Next on the agenda are entirely different types of battles: political ones, also along the lines of Russia vs America. But in those, unlike during the martial arts tournament, knockouts are counterproductive.

For some reason, I thought (among other things) of W clearing brush on his ranch. The link would seem to be willful obliviousness to criticism. Although Putin was not running from politics at all - in American political terms, he was "connecting with his base." Just think - while one of his political opponents was arrested and another was roughed up, VVP was chilling in Piter with his buddies Jean-Claude and Silvio**, along with his new America-beating pal Feodor Yemelyanenko. Sovereign democracy means never having to say you're sorry...

Actually, the most absurd part of this is Van Damme being there. I can just imagine the sambo- and judo-heads' reaction - "Berlusconi - eto ladno, a Van Damme - eto da..."

While writing this, I remembered that I once almost attended a martial arts tournament in SPB in 2002 or 2003 - a friend of mine had been involved with the sport in his youth and wanted to go for the sake of nostalgia. But we wound up meeting a friend of his in front of the arena and unsuccessfully trying to get in (as I recall), and then adjourning to a nearby "zakusochnaya" to practice a different ancient art.

* Note that "sambo" in Russia refers to a martial art invented during the Soviet era, not the racial term.
** For those of you interested in another Silvio (sort of like "another Russia," but not really), check here. I have a real soft spot for the Tales of Belkin.

[Update - Whims of Fate has a post - with RIAN photos - poking fun at Putin's weekend with Jean-Claude.]

[Update 2 - Lenta.ru's story about Putin's weekend in SPB - apparently he visited with Matvienko and discussed the important issue of soccer team Zenit's success and whether it is linked to VVP's attendance at their matches - Putin's modest answer: "я здесь не при чем".]

[Update 3 - Robert Amsterdam reposts a Moscow Times editorial positing a Van Damme Trade Theory, as well as Putin's remarks from the judo tournament.]

Abandoned in SPB

Nikolsky Cathedral

Along Griboyedov (or Fontanka - can't remember for sure) Canal

Both photos from July 23 of last year.

Waiting for a coincidence...

Last week I posted a photo and titled the post "Waiting for a miracle" - it just happened to be the first phrase that popped into my head, although I was able to explain my choice of title when asked about it. Now I see that there's a film with that same title, and it's set in St. Petersburg, just like my photo. Strange coincidence...

On a different note, like Sean, I have some academic obligations which will keep the frequency of posts down for the next few weeks. I'm sure you're all quite sad...

Waiting for a miracle

St. Petersburg, July 23, 2006.

A break from our regularly scheduled programming

St. Petersburg, July 22, 2006.