Kharkiv
from the novel Belgorod-Belgrade
I. had left her passport at Bank Vostochny, and at the Russian‑Ukrainian border we are deported back into Russia. This is my first and so far only deportation; I can say that nothing in particular happens: the border guards simply take us off the train and force us to wait for the return train in a deportation prison — or rather, they put I. into a small filthy cell. I see her face full of horror behind the bars, and beside her a sick man covered with sores. For most of the time she spent there he was sleeping, but every now and then he would wake up and cough loudly, spraying droplets of saliva over the entire cell.
The elektrichka arrives, I. is let out, and we go back to Belgorod under the parting glare of rough‑mannered border guards. In the carriage we run into the smugglers, who are returning to Russia with Ukrainian sausage, tinned goods, and cheeses. Absorbed in their contraband business, they take no notice of us whatsoever.
It is getting dark. We have already retrieved the passport from the bank and are standing in an alleyway near the Belgorod bus station. The last elektrichka left half an hour ago and we decide to take the bus. I. had about a gram of weed on her and I told her I would not cross the border that way, that it was too dangerous, that a second prison in twenty‑four hours was more than I could take. And so now we are hurriedly disposing of it in the alleyway, inhaling the fumes that smell of spruce needles.
At the border, stoned, I see signs in Ukrainian and an idiotic snicker involuntarily escapes me. I’m ashamed, I’m scared, but I can’t stop. I’m just like the other Russians who burst out laughing when they encounter another Slavic language for the first time. I feel cheerful and anxious at once. What if they deport us again? We hand our passports through the little window along with small migration cards filled out with our passport data and the address of arrival; what comes back to us is a crookedly torn half‑page with a red stamp. Russian citizens are allowed to be in Ukraine for three months on this card; then one has to cross the border again and come back for another three months. From Belgorod to Kharkiv is only eighty kilometers. I often hear this from people who live on either side of the border. Eighty kilometers! Only eighty! From Perm to Kudymkar, the capital of the Komi‑Permyak District, it is two hundred kilometers, almost twice as far.
When I was packing my things, Mama asked me, “Are you going to Ukraine? What for?” To her this was the most incomprehensible of my decisions. She had reconciled herself to my walking around with long hair, listening to heavy music, wearing black clothes with pentagrams, becoming an alcoholic at fourteen and getting Cs at school, but she could not understand why I needed to go to Ukraine. Soon a fashion for trips to Kyiv will appear in Russia — it’s cheap there, everyone is very fashionable and beautiful, clubs, parties, contemporary art. Not long before this trip, in Perm I went to an exhibition of Ukrainian contemporary art, Yakshcho (“If”), curated by the Russian curator Ekaterina Degot. At the entrance to the museum the viewer was met by a black car covered with countless bullet holes — a sculpture by the Ukrainian artist Volodymyr Kuznetsov, for whom the museum had bought a black BMW so that he could hire several gunmen with pistols and rifles, who unloaded several dozen rounds into the gleaming black body of the vehicle. When there are no openings on at the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, a cold wind drifts under the overcast sky around its building; teenagers from the neighboring houses pick their noses and kick a ball about; drunken men hunt for bushes to relieve themselves in. The shot‑up Beemer looks here like a lost piece of the city’s familiar landscape. That car is one of the most eloquent monuments to the nineteen‑nineties, when traces of street shootouts could be encountered in every part of town — better than any bronze idol of Lenin or other Soviet figure. Some townspeople grumbled that an expensive car had been written off with their tax money; others complained that they hadn’t been invited to its execution.
I have often heard the colonial assertion that Ukraine is “Russia, only in the nineties” — gangsters, corruption, the way people dress, the way they talk, the way they live. I have often heard that Russia itself is decades behind Western countries. I have often heard that any province is several years behind Moscow, and that any representative of an indigenous people is behind the Russians in development. I. tells us she chose Ukraine because it is closer to Europe, that in Kharkiv you can wrap yourself in the alleys of Budapest, in London neighborhoods; that from Kyiv you can fly cheaply to Italy and to France, take a train to Prague or to Vienna. We had covered fifty kilometers out of the eighty, but it seems to me I am already breathing an imagined European freedom.
Crossing the border in the hope of staying, we at once become migrants. I was born in the USSR, and then, as a four‑year‑old child, I acquired Russian citizenship. So in Russia, too, I am a migrant — as are the millions of people born before 1991. If one thinks of nationality as one’s first citizenship, then I am the citizen of some mythical state which never existed for me, but which left a monstrous imprint on my life in the form of a curse of class poverty, accompanied by the shadows of the demons of unaccountable fear. When I was little, it seemed to me that “Soviet” was a synonym for rudeness, tactlessness, backwardness, emotional estrangement — a characteristic of people who’d ended up in the wrong era, people who never accepted the collapse of the Union, ideological fanatics who never even traded in their passports for Russian ones, as a form of protest.
In my Soviet birth certificate, with a hammer and sickle on the cover, both my parents are written down as Russian. The “nationality” line was introduced in the Soviet Union in 1932, and at first whatever the person said was entered there — and the person himself could sometimes have trouble determining his ethnicity, could be ashamed or afraid to say it. In the Russian Empire, when documents were issued, nationality could be determined by confession of faith — so any Orthodox person could become a Russian, whether he were German or Komi. In 1938, NKVD officers and passport clerks could write down nationality in passports at their own discretion, drawing on information about the parents’ origins, without asking the person himself. The possibility of automatically determining identity for a person significantly simplified the Soviet state’s task of carrying out numerous repressions and deportations along “national lines,” with quotas. Officers met the plan for the destruction of Poles, Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and others by artificially assigning to future victims whichever nationality was, at that moment, out of favor with the authorities. As a consequence of the policy of persecution and assimilation, many representatives of non‑Russian peoples would tell the Soviet passport clerks that they were Russian, would change their names and surnames to Slavic ones, would falsify the entries in their documents, so as not to become people of the second, third, tenth order. In the passport of post‑Soviet Russia, issued from 1997 onward, this line is gone; this saves many people, perhaps, in the future, from the risk of deportation and camps at least on the basis of nationality.
Practically nighttime. The road into the center of Kharkiv passes by quickly changing stripes of a long white‑columned fence framing Gorky Park — a park bearing this name exists in nearly every city of the former Soviet Union. I. announces the program: we absolutely have to take a ride on the cable car, look at Derzhprom, eat pizza at Bufet, and also have a look at the sex workers.
On one of those spring evenings we take two bottles of pink Crimean port and go to Constitution Square to look at the sex workers, who in the evenings take up their staked‑out spots in the center of Kharkiv. Now and then the headlights pick their silhouettes out of the dark. They are dressed like the heroines of the films Pretty Woman and Intergirl — long leather boots, black tights, short skirts, tiny little jackets and loose curly hair; cars pull up next to them, men get out and talk at length about something. I. and I laughingly attribute imagined dialogues to them, picturing business negotiations; not far off a pimp is on duty, and a little further still a policeman on patrol who is also keeping an eye on what is going on. The echoes of this gigantic industry I see in the advertisements in the metro: “Marry a foreigner, call our agency at this number,” “Work in Europe for girls”; on the poster, happy young girls smile and wave their hands. One of the sex workers asks me to buy her a beer at the till in Michael, the grocery store by our building; in awe I give her five hryvnias, and she immediately loses interest in me and goes back out onto the street. It is a tender, very dark night, through which one can drift for a long time, moving from alley to alley; I want to weave myself into the bushes that climb the old, crack‑laced nineteenth‑century buildings, turn into a gray‑muzzled mutt begging for alms; I feel here an astonishing sense of freedom. There are many corners here that cannot be seen into, small buildings, small squares, cozy grocery stores and secondhand shops, in which one quickly loses oneself. They hide behind the monumental Soviet giants, grow over with bindweed, with headless mannequins, with hooligan rats; they call to you, they hide you, they embrace you, you very quickly dissolve into them. This is a completely different country, these are completely different people.
“Zamovlyayte, bud’ laska,” the young cashier at McDonald’s says to me. I am at a loss for an answer; I don’t know any Ukrainian at all. When I was living in Perm, to go to a McDonald’s one had to travel several hours to Yekaterinburg, crossing the border between Europe and Asia each time. I choose the least appetizing item on the menu — a Ukrainian‑style burger on black bread — and, stumbling, pronounce its name. The girl answers in Russian and I let out a breath. We are learning Ukrainian from the sitcom Friends. I. believes that even though people in Kharkiv speak Russian, one ought to know Ukrainian. I don’t really understand whether I want to stay here, and for how long. For a year? For two? For the rest of my life? What do I do next? I understand almost nothing of what Rachel and Joey are saying, I don’t understand why one of the main heroines is called not Monica but Monitsya. I didn’t watch Friends as a child, and so I cannot intuitively work out, from the plot, what the characters are talking about. I. translates some of the words for me; others I look up on a translation app.
A horrid wind picks up, from which my lips begin to crack. I had thought I was traveling south, to warm and snow‑light winters. For several days we sit in the apartment without leaving, feeding ourselves from a large pot of chicken soup and wheat porridge. We have no window, and so, when I finally do go out, the sunlight blinds me. I repeat the words I see on signs: Odyah, Vzuttya, Kramnytsya, Ukrenergo (Clothing, Footwear, Shop, Ukrenergo); I see on a firewall the portrait of Yanukovych with the inscription Bazhayu vam shchaslyvoho novoho roku ta Rizdva (“I wish you a happy New Year and Christmas”), and I imagine the president pronouncing this phrase, reading off a sheet of paper and getting the stresses wrong. Our friend the artist R. takes us on an evening tour of the underpass leading to the University metro station. Tomorrow is January 25, and in honor of Student Day a copper bas‑relief of Saint Tatiana, sculpted by him and other artists, is to be unveiled there. They had finished it a month early. At that point a deputy of the city rada, blind drunk, called him in the night and ordered all the artists to come down to the station immediately. He was furious, screaming obscenities, that the sculpture had to be finished by the next morning, otherwise they were all dead men. R. and his friends worked all night on the bas‑relief, and it came out not as they had conceived it; and the sobered‑up deputy discovered the next morning that today was only December 25.
“So the work was delivered a month ahead of schedule — unheard‑of speed for an artist these days,” R. wraps up his story jokingly.
To the unveiling of Saint Tatiana the mayor comes, surrounded by his security detail; I’m whispered to that he splendidly combines care for the city with drug‑trafficking. I picture an office stuffed with plastic bags of white powder and a short man in a suit signing documents. It astonishes me that everyone in town knows about his shadow business — though why should it be astonishing: the previous mayor of Perm was known for covering up rapes of schoolchildren.
The Kazakh artist Yerbossyn Meldibekov, whose method has been called decolonial conceptualism, investigates the ways in which totalitarian and neo‑feudal regimes use urban space and the human body to simulate their own grandeur. Meldibekov works with a substance he himself calls “mutation” and “political Plasticine.” This is a state in which no form is final, no name eternal, and any stability is only a pause between the next round of false decrees.
When power treats art as a pliable raw material, history turns into the grotesque. In his long‑running cycle Transformations, Meldibekov turns to a specific geographical point — a square in the center of Tashkent. Over the past century, this landscape has lived through a series of ideological amputations. On one and the same pedestal there succeeded one another: a monument to Governor‑General Kaufman, a hammer and sickle, Lenin, Stalin, Lenin again, a monument to Karl Marx, and finally an enormous equestrian monument to Tamerlane, meant to symbolize the new national sovereignty.
Meldibekov takes copies of these busts and subjects them to physical violence: flattens them, crosses their profiles, turns what was conceived as granite monumentality into deformed, viscous mass. This is a direct rhyme to any absurd state commission, when the artist gets a phone call from the administration demanding that the work be redone by morning, because the political vector has shifted. Meldibekov lays bare the deep decolonial trauma of the elites. Their mad leapfrog with monuments is not strength but a symptom of the inability to stand on one’s own feet — a convulsive attempt to please the current conjuncture by erasing the traces of one’s own past.
In a landscape where the signboards change faster than the citizens can reflect upon them, a total loss of orientation arises. A person falls asleep in one country and wakes up in another — where strange flags hang in the cold, and the portraits of new leaders demand immediate submission. Meldibekov’s series Family Album explores this ideological chaos through the juxtaposition of archival Soviet shots and contemporary photographs made decades later in the same locations.
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In one of the pairs of photographs a group of people is captured against the backdrop of a majestic mountain peak in Tajikistan. Under Soviet rule, this summit was proudly named Stalin Peak. During de‑Stalinization, it was hastily renamed Communism Peak. Today, under the new regime, it is Ismoil Somoni Peak. The mountain has remained motionless. The people are standing in the same poses. But the framework of meaning around them has been broken and reassembled three times. Meldibekov captures the absurdity of the existence of the post‑Soviet person, whose identity is stamped out by the state on a conveyor belt. The space around him shimmers, turning reality into a bad dream.
In order to fit an object — or a person — into the state myth, the system has to apply force. In the project Lenin Peak Meldibekov investigates this process with frightening directness. He refuses noble materials and takes the banal Soviet utensil: metal pots, basins, buckets. Then he begins to methodically deform them with a hammer, to the sound of the blows.
Under the blows the metal buckles, breaks, and its dented contours gradually begin to resemble the outlines of the Pamir mountains — in particular, the silhouette of Lenin Peak. In this gesture there is hidden a deep irony aimed at the imperial drive to monumentalize and subdue even wild nature. But at the same time it is a precise metaphor for administrative pressure. For the artist to deliver the required bas‑relief on time, for the official to be pleased, the form must be “beaten into shape.” The system does not create — it deforms everyday life, turning household dishware into monuments to totalitarian madness.
The violence sewn into the fabric of the everyday inevitably breaks through into language. When regional elites — be they mayors‑drug‑traffickers or deputies drunk on power — communicate with their subordinates by means of obscenities, threats, and shouting, they transmit a colonial attitude toward the human being as expendable material. For Meldibekov, who grew up in southern Kazakhstan near the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, this theme is deeply personal.
In the performance My Brother — My Enemy, figures in semi‑military uniforms deal each other endless, absurd slaps. There is no dialogue here, only pure, unmotivated aggression, having become the principal means of communication. This is a visualization of that very “administrative resource” which holds together solely by fear.
The art of Yerbossyn Meldibekov is valuable in that it strips power of its sacred status. By cutting away the pathos, the conceptualist leaves the viewer face to face with the grotesque. In his optics, all these stern rulers, redrawing cities and breaking lives for the sake of a momentary gain, are not strong leaders but deeply traumatized, hung‑up marginals of the post‑colonial era. They have gotten hold of the levers of control and are now trying, by means of Plasticine monuments and false slogans, to simulate their own significance in a world of catastrophes succeeding one another like a cyclone and an anticyclone.
If Meldibekov melts and deforms the very fabric of monuments, showing the convulsive mutability of the elites, then the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi, in his 2009 project, approaches the problem from the opposite side — through the monumentalization of the unchanging. His public‑art object The Authorities (Power), made within the framework of the program of the Museum of Contemporary Art PERMM, became one of the most radical and at the same time most functional interventions into the urban space of Perm.
Ridnyi manufactured, out of gray, mute concrete, enormous letters spelling out the word VLAST’ (“POWER” / “THE AUTHORITIES”). The massive monoliths, with a total length of 16 meters and a height of about 80 centimeters, were installed on the Esplanade directly in front of the façade of the parliament building of Perm Krai, my homeland. The artist made use of the double meaning of this word in Russian, where it denotes simultaneously an abstract political force and a concrete group of people holding state offices.
In this work Ridnyi laid down a conceptual conflict based on optics and physical presence. For the letters were installed in such a way that for the deputies and state officials looking out at the square through the windows of the Legislative Assembly, the word VLAST’ turned out to be upside down. The system was, for a long time, looking at itself “head over heels,” which created a disorientation of its habitual narrative. For the townspeople, by contrast, this monument was stripped of any sacred quality — people used it as a bench; during the day children ran around it; in the evening groups gathered there with beer and chips, occupying the territory of POWER, which in the authoritarian consciousness was supposed to instill reverent awe.
The sculpture registered the colossal distance between the political elite and society. In the early 2010s, during what was called the “Perm cultural revolution,” initiated by a group of Moscow businessmen, the owner of a private gallery, and the then governor, who was infatuated with the concept of “place marketing,” this object looked like a bold liberal experiment. The local officials at that point tolerated the irony under their own windows — the installation was moved away during repairs to the surface of the square, and then put back in place anyway.
However, just as with Meldibekov’s deformed pots, Ridnyi’s Power exposed the system’s tendency to monumentalize its own simulacra. Conceived as a sarcastic symbol, this heavy concrete block could not simply be ignored or quickly destroyed without overt administrative violence. Remaining in the space of the city, the object fixed a historical moment when power still allowed its name to be used as street furniture, foreshadowing the subsequent period in which any such utterance in public space became impossible.
The object was discreetly removed from the Esplanade under the pretext of yet another reconstruction of the square. The symbolic finale of this intervention turned out to be as prosaic as possible: the monument, conceived to desacralize state force, was dismantled and sent off to the city’s outskirts, dissolving into its industrial zones, far away from governmental windows.
A similar fate befell other landmark objects left behind in the urban space by the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art. Among them — the enormous wooden Perm Gates by Nikolai Polissky, a vast letter “П” made of chaotically fastened logs, resembling both a triumphal arch and a raft of timber‑floaters. It was constantly under attack, arson attempts; and in 2024 the gates were finally torn down by the authorities under the pretext of the construction of a new road interchange. The urban environment of Perm was consistently cleansed of the traces of artistic interventions, returning to its familiar, safe Soviet monumentality and neoliberal practicality — a glass‑and‑granite tsunami and the brutalism of shopping and entertainment.
The change of cultural paradigm in Perm naturally grew into the personal persecution of those who had brought this revolution about. The confrontation between contemporary art and the state machine quickly moved beyond the bounds of purely aesthetic discussions and into the chambers of the criminal court. The real cleanout of PERMM’s legacy touched both its founder and the last director of the institution in its previous, independent format.
The founder of the museum, Marat Gelman, who had left Russia back in the mid‑2010s, became one of the principal targets of the new state cultural policy. For his criticism of the Kremlin and his support of Ukraine, a criminal case was opened against him; later he was declared a terrorist, which effectively cut off his way back to his homeland and made his name forbidden within the walls of the very museum he had founded.
Even more dramatically and tellingly unfolded the persecution of Naila Allakhverdieva, who for many years had run the museum, trying to preserve it as a living, contemporary institution recognized at an international level, even as the screws were being tightened. She was accused of insulting the feelings of believers because of wooden sculptures of angels held in the museum’s collection since the early 2010s, as a result of which she had to hurriedly leave Russia.
For groceries we go to a big Billa, the Austrian chain of supermarkets with its bright yellow logo; in Perm there are no such handsome, clean shops. There we buy a little meat, grain, Georgian wine, which one cannot buy in Russia because of the long‑running economic (and, in 2008, real) war between these two states. I had never drunk such delicious wine, and had never made friends so quickly. We are in the center of the city’s artistic life — parties in studios, gatherings at the dorms of the art school, openings of exhibitions in basements and private galleries. At 12 at night, for the sake of saving energy, all the outdoor lighting is turned off, and like moles we feel our way home along the smells of spring and damp stone.
We live on the second floor of an old two‑story building with a creaking, wobbling staircase; we have no windows and don’t know what is going on outside; we buy clothes in secondhand shops and swap things at city swaps, attended by the users of the online portal Darudar (“Gift-for-gift”). Mostly the people who come there are simply slightly mad and possessed of the privilege of free time; they wear name badges, and seek, like Aristophanes’ androgynes, their other half, to trade a sack of nuts for a Soviet handbag of imitation leather.
We go to visit M., who lives on Kholodna Hora behind the Southern Station. She came from Belarus to her husband, the producer of a trance festival in Crimea, in a cozy one‑room flat with white walls. We chatter for a long time to the rumble of the washing machine. M. complains that it is very hard for a foreigner to get Ukrainian papers — the (female) officials are constantly yelling at you and demanding bribes. She doesn’t pay, on principle, and is already about ready to give up. By this point I had already been thinking about a real migration into Ukraine — getting a residence permit, looking for work; M.’s account planted doubts in me.
I fell in love with Kharkiv almost at first sight, in spite of the stomach‑corroding taste of the tap water, leaping along to the trembling of the rushing Czech tram down Poltavsky Shlyakh; fell in love with the conductress who suggests you pay 50 kopecks instead of a hryvnia past the till; with the cathedral with its spirals of brown stripes climbing into the sky, which we jokingly called the lollipop. I could never stay here, I would not find work, I would not be able to assimilate, even if we do speak the same language — we exist in different dimensions. Right now Russian rockets and bombs are falling on the city, turning into ruins the streets we once walked along. Mama told me that some relative of ours lives somewhere there, her cousin; I wonder what has become of him, whether he’s alive, whether he has left. I don’t even know what his name was. The most important photograph of mine from Kharkiv is not a photo of the lollipop cathedral, nor of the great Constructivist masterpiece Derzhprom — it is an unexploded rocket lodged into the ground next to the house of the grandmother of my friend D. I think about writing a family drama whose action takes place in this city, but the only associations with it today are connected only with the war.
I. and I go to the studio of the artist Mykola Ridnyi on the top floor of a nineteenth‑century building, in the corner protrusion of which is a well‑known nalyvayka with tinctures. Other artists gather there, drinking beer, chatting, discussing exhibitions, discussing their works. Mykola is slender like the tree trunks of Maurice Denis, with a pale, expressive face. He is dressed in something austere, perhaps even an army tunic of the British Royal Navy, of which there were plenty in Kharkiv’s secondhand stores. I want to tell Mykola that I am in awe of his Power, that I still feel the trepidation one is supposed to feel before an artist, but instead, for all the several hours we spend there, I stand in the corner and say nothing.
