travel.miltsov.org

Lenin’s cradle part 3

Travel.Miltsov.org — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:32:41 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

Ulianovsk today

Local dentists

Of course our trip would have been incomplete without driving the Uazik jeep, a source of local pride.

The road back

Protect the forest:

A mother always waits…

Lenin’s cradle part 2

Travel.Miltsov.org — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:29:17 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

The local Youth Palace. During the Soviet Union Youth Palaces were established all over the country to offer a variety of workshops, ranging from visual or martial arts to science, et al.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin was born a real Russian (i.e. with all the possible ethnic combinations for heritage) in this house on the 10th (22nd) April 1870 when the city was still called Simbirsk. His father was a school inspector and his mother was home-schooled, growing up to be a compassionate and independent thinker – qualities she transmitted to her children, whom she supported strongly and all of whom, except for those who died young, turned revolutionaries in an attempt to annihilate servitude and injustice in society. The family struggled the first years financially, sometimes moving several houses a year for lack of resources to pay rent. They finally settled in this house, where Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, experimented with chemistry and built a home laboratory behind the kitchen in order to make the explosives to execute the Tzar. The bomb didn’t detonate, though, and at the age of 17 he was killed by the Tzar’s government (yes, it’s also called execution) on 8th May 1887.

The family was devastated, particularly that they had lost the father, Ilya Ulyanov, the year before. Also, his sister Olga died at the age of 19.The workers of the memorial house of Lenin talked with love and respect about the family, keeping the memorial almost on a volunteer basis, hardly being paid or appreciated for the effort and time.

Lenin graduated from the local gymnasium, went on to study law, and even though he was expelled from the university for “radical” opinions, he went on to become the world’s most famous lawyer in history. There goes another piece of evidence that schooling and university degrees are not always the surest way to “success”.

The spirit wanders

Lenin’s cradle part 1

Travel.Miltsov.org — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:27:42 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

My cousin Misha remains as vivacious and spontaneous as I remember him from childhood. One evening, he walked through the door and announced that first thing in the morning he was driving a car to Ulianovsk, the former Simbirsk, the birthplace of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 950 km towards the Ural mountains, that famous range that separates Europe from Asia. We couldn’t resist such an opportunity and so, the next dawn Sasha, Liouba and I headed towards sunrise.

Through Kolomna:

The river Voblia (река Вобля), border of Moscow and Riazan’ regions:

Going from Montreal to Washington D.C., as an example, or say Paris to Berlin, even when one passes through natural reserves, the road leaves the impression that humans are the primary occupants of the world and that everything is trimmed and cleaned up for their use and pleasure. The road to Ulianovsk, although is the same in the number of kilometres, humbles this impression and presents human population as scarce, appearing sporadically in the vastness of the unknown.

Upon leaving the Riazan’ region we passed through the single spot, of approximately ½ km, that conglomerated all the food of Russia.

Food shacks, restaurants, truckers and cows.

The Eatinger

The Eater

Alenka

Raspberry Ringing

Little Darling Spring

Yum-Yum

Visiting Natasha

Cafe Rally

Georgia

Ruslan and 1000 trifles

The Volga Girl (but where is the Volga?)

More colourful and luring places

It’s a busy place

Little Masha, Mashenka, and further down, we get the promise that more is coming in the future

After the intensive food-mall, we left the world of temptation and entered Mordovia, a space free of any commercial advertising, where we could stare out at the scenery and actually see the endlessness of what we know not and the limits of our vision and horizons. Periodically, there were free maps posted under protective shields and information on the importance of respecting nature and keeping it clean, of social cooperation, and astronautics. Unfortunately, we haven’t captured these pictures and will have to go back for them.

We stopped at a local “supermarket” (универмаг) in Mordovia and heard the local customers and the personnel talk in a completely unfamiliar to us language. Of course, we had forgotten that Mordovian is in the Finoo-Permic and Ugric linguistic group, which is spoken in Finland, Estonia, Hungary and related languages as spoken by the Sami, Karelians, Udmurts, Mari, and a few others. Liouba was fascinated. We chatted a bit with the locals, got provisions, Liouba ran behind the store.

Any Russian speaker who has seen the hilarious Russian “translations” of the famous Ring of the Lord films would have doubly enjoyed the trip through Mordovia. It meant much more to us, since the translations took into account the racist implications of the “good”, “bad”, and the “primitive” designations in Tolkien’s books and the various connotations in the films. We had fun “translating” further as we drove through this yet unsoiled land.

Local architecture.

Local chicks cackling on a bench in a spirit of community.

A lunch break.

A little house on the prairies

The Russian prairies.

Approaching the Ulianovsk region we frolicked atop the rainbow (if you squint well enough, you will see us up there)

and then carried on with our trip

Ulianovsk

A memorial for the veterans of WWII. While the various dimensions of time occasionally intersect in historical monuments, there still remains the problem that monuments dissect time and separate the wholeness that fuses the future, present and past into a flowing quantic momentum, vibrant with mysterius energy, because the monument focuses on a personality or a symbol or a mythological moment in time and excludes all that is dynamic, interactive, and fluid, all the forces and the possibilities that made each soldier possible and each revolutionary both a reality and a dream, each war, moment of love, birth and sacrifice a part of the cosmic unknown and unheard symphony. And yet, at the same time, it is the treasured memory of where we came from, that mysterious memory of the flesh which we cannot escape.

We found Ulianovsk to be a remembering place.

Volgaand remembrance:

Karl Marx breaks out from beneath the weight of capitalism and our future generation erupts free.

Baby Lenin with his mother.

Malino

Travel.Miltsov.org — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:07:42 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

After visiting aunt Lida and cousin’s Lena’s family in Moscow, we headed to my eldest aunt Zina,where she lives in a house with her youngest daughter, Tania in Malino. Malino is where my grandmother had finally agreed to move to from Nikolo Titeli and where she died. Although Nikolo is my beloved ideal, a time of pure happiness, where I used to hide in sunflower fields in the summer or watched the earth hidden in a deep comforter of snow to its horizon in winter – my secret moomin winter past – I have fond memories of Malino too. My cousin Misha would drive me on his motorcycle over the picturesque river and the surrounding flowering grass and lush forests. This year, we made a pilgrimage to both places.

Aunt Zina

Cousin Tania, a schoolteacher, shows a rock her pupils have found in a forest stream on one of the excursions and presented it to their teacher.

The chick-guardian

Nikolo is 12 km to the north of Malino. As a child, my mum walked with other kids from Nikolo to the Malino school and back on foot through sunshine and snow, fields and woods. When she learnt from her geography lesson in primary school about the majestic White and Blue Niles and how they met in Khartoum to flow into Egypt and the Mediterranean as one powerful water, mum always searched for the confluence of streams on her way to Malino and back to Nikolo and lost herself in a dream about what it would be like to live in that spot in Africa. Fate had it that she married my father and went to live with him in Khartoum for many years in Mogran (the confluence), where we all marvelled at the exact line where the blue waters met the muddy white and tumbled together to rush to the north.

On the way to Nikolo we stopped by the local saw-mill to check out the quality of the future chopsticks in the IKEA near you before heading to my balding motherland.

I drove this Pazik and, for some reason, this ability of mine evoked much admiration from the local public.

The guillotine.

The trees after having been guillotined are then loaded on:

And off we go to Nikolo:

And here we are in Nikolo:

Moscow spring

Travel.Miltsov.org — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:47:24 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

Funny how the use of language can influence our experience of reality. If people are told repeatedly that green is black and that yellow is green, that’s what they begin to see. In fact, there are numerous experiments in the study of psychology of language, where it’s been observed that when different shades of the colour blue, as an example, have been flashed to native speakers of languages that had different names for these colours and to those who didn’t, the native speakers of the more shades of blue perceived them as different and separate colours, whereas those whose native language had only one term, saw them as basically one colour.

So, to cut the long story short, people have been hearing about how grey and anti-environmental Russia has been ever since its leap into the industrial bliss (well, of course like everywhere developed, industrialism was no party for ecology), however, because the Soviet ideal was quality and not quantity, i.e. “use and make things but not to the extent of capitalist consumerism”, then among European and North American cities, Russia can boast of the most green space.

And yet, we hear people of various nations, professions, and hues insisting adamantly on that Russia is polluted and that it needs to emulate western cities. But if only these ardent orators could shed their linguistic schizophrenia, they would see that if they truly mean by ecological improvement the increase of green space, trees, the variety of life-form, and the access to fresh water and air by all regardless of their social or economic backgrounds, then the developed and the rich should emulate the simple and the humble and start by looking at how could such a huge metropolis as Moscow be so much more ecological and pleasant than London, Paris, Toronto, Tokyo, or New York, for example. I’ve been to many large cities on five continents, so I know what I’m talking about.

You can see for yourself if you compare the various cities on google earth.

I noticed that I had this image of Russia myself. Thus, every time that I flew or crossed the border by land to Russia from some western city, I always experienced the same overwhelming feeling of awe at the exact point at the border of Poland with Belarus or when flying over Saint Petersburg or anywhere along that frontier that divides languages, hopes, and the experience of the world. That frontier is an imagined line that has been turned into a fatal reality. There, I left behind the brown, raped and irrigated land of the people who first dreamt then turned themselves into the masters of the world and entered a land drowned in green, lush Russian forests, which Ikea, among other “successful” western openers of eastern markets and horizons (which are not expansionist but expanded) are turning into bourgeois furniture, fruit bowls and chopsticks.

Yes, democracy and market economy have changed much in the world. The greedy embrace the principles of humility when those principles are imposed on their servants (and most of the population in the developed service societies are servants, that’s how they can’t solve the immigration “problem” - they need the servants, but every now and then, instead of being happy to give their time and lives, the servants come up with some “I have a dream” frenzy which then is so costly to stump out and bring back the abused servants to order). In the place of what has now become furniture and utensils, we get roads, cars, petroleum – the blood of the earth, the few insane rich and the impoverished human masses in despair, and the irony that makes possible for trees to be turned into red books to record the rapidly disappearing species.

Parts of the Moscow have preserved the original forest that once covered the whole area surrounding the Kremlin.

Still as soon as the snowy whiteness recedes, life sprouts and buzzes in spite of us.

Inside a building entrance in the centre of Moscow, metro Kievskaya.

The backyard of the same building:

Moscow, Strogino:

In the typical Russian fairy tale tradition, a beam of light descends upon the mystical sign:

Lake Bottomless to the left
3 a row of Good’s Silver Wood
and other good things to the right
you go straight on your own risk

Strogino opens up on Serebrjannyj Bor, or the Silver Wood in English, a large protected forest enclave.

Grazing horses, swimming, playing, walking, pondering….

Lazying around

Local anarchists:

More pictures of Moscow:

Celebration of the vampires

Travel.Miltsov.org — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:33:51 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

Something fun always happens in Russia. Historically, it’s been a place with much more action than any hollywood film. O.k. This doesn’t compare with 1917, but it still was full of passion and contradictions, and all that is so wrong and wonderful with the human soul.

Sasha dropped by the celebration of Red Easter by Alexandre Dugin and his sheep. Russians are not worse than anybody else and so fetishism and gadgets have an appeal with the young and dreaming (of a bright future filled with shiny gadgets) and when a youth has his armpits bandaged with Dugin’s arrows, well that helps contort that intelligent, concentrated look, the one that is dressed in school, when the teacher’s pet looks at her wide eyed and big mouthed, ready to gobble anything that would give a chance to a cakeful life.

But not all of them are vamps:

Young generations gasp in awe: Wow, Count Drakula is descending amidst us in his balloon!

Cops usually are the first to appear at demonstrations to receive wisdom. They listen and observe attentively. But, unlike New York, here, they haven’t resorted to beating. Well, there were more cops at this demonstration than vamps themselves (Sasha estimated the ratio of 2:1). They must have recognised their kindred spirits in those smart uniforms with funky gadgets and so each cop brought with him a balloon to celebrate Count Drakula’s descent from Romania:

Contemplative Copper

Medieval choir echoed from the beyond and from the before on stage:

Great friendships forged with Chechens and the rest of the world:

The multitudinal masses, too, gleefully celebrate Count Dracula’s descent for Red Easter:

Kneeling before the eternal feminine! And this is why Western feminism will always lose in the face of the unpredictable, the incomprehensible, the humble, yet the free and passionately matriarchal Russian land!

Random thoughts: “Hmmm. What is to be done? Alone again, with my muse hovering over the black skies that I made those idiotic kids with my shiny badges paint. My muse is behind me like the faithful angel guiding me over my right shoulder towards, hmmmm…. towards some red horizon. Why is it red? Hmmmm. Colours don’t exist, so that’s what I’ll tell’em, they don’t exist and so you’ll have to make whatever it is you think you see. Hee, hee, hee, that was a good trick with the gadgets, those sado-masochistic, yearning for the mirage youths… It’s good to be all by yourself, sometimes. Great thoughts visit me then…

…There’s a balloon… Yes, the count has landed…

Grab…

Aha, gotchya. Brrrrrrrrrrrr (no not like the gross drooling of the gross Homer Simpson), balloon, whaaaaa

Aaaaaeeend, snap, aaaaand crunch, and ….

… More audience, with the same human qualities as many of our species, such as greed, vengeance, blindness, etc.:

Moscow winter

Travel.Miltsov.org — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:33:28 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

Ah, Russia, forever acontrast with everything and with itself!

When Sasha and Liouba left the States at the end of March 2005, from crocuses in full bloom and the beginning of the second harvest of grass they plunged into this:

These pictures were taken by Sasha in his Strogino neighbourhood in the north western part of Moscow

Democracy and the freedom to consume the imposed and expensive junk during the Yeltsin era has achieved the same level of sophistication as that of any developed country:

But then came Putin. He picked up a broomstick and swept the floor a little. Hence, ever since 2004, beer ads are no longer allowed to run on TV between 7 am and 10pm. However, you can imagine the compensation after that hour (forbidden fruit is the sweetest).

And ads for that which looks and smells like piss roll on, almost exclusively and non-stop in the allotted spot of time, with people paid to fake drinking it and lying that if only everyone drank it too they’d become so cool, so energetic, so financially, so successful and so altogether so fantastic and so bla bla so bla. Some have made the logical deduction though, “why spend money on something fake that looks like piss and not go straight for the original stuff, available anywhere and any time, and so far, completely for free”: Urinotherapy!

All that exists alongside the remnants of another epoch of abuse: could this have led to that or was it the other way around? Yeah, the eternal question of dimensions and quantum and all that. Tsaritsino, the southern part of Moscow where the queen’s spirit wanders along the quiet waters and amidst the ducks:

Passengers awaiting the bus:

A Moscow view:

A Russian colony on Mars. Russians have always been the first in outer space!

Long live consumerism and human waste! The servants roller-blade around the store:

Consumers ride cars:

Return to Babje part 2

Travel.Miltsov.org — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:11:49 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

Senelga offered rides.

Pavel, too, offered rides.

Senelga is being trained for jumping

Ira is a skilled rider, too.

A surprise envelope appeared in the mail box that the kids have discovered. It was addressed:
For KIDS
Babje

Inside the envelope, there was a mysterious map.

Following the clues

Time to celebrate and eat the treasures!

Lionja reading near one of the icons he is restoring for the church.

Bandit in deep reflection on the human paradox down there, he is thinking existence through a direct contact with the skies.

Inspired, Liouba spent a few hours designing her own treasure hunt:
Little village Babje
Big secret
For grown-ups only

A hedgehog dropped by for some milk.

Just like my re-awakening – or probably re-falling into the nightmare – last year in St. Petersburg, I found the transition from culture to civilisation too abrupt. One fine morning, we left Babje. We took the train from Spirovo to Tver, a bus from Tver to Moscow and at 3 am that night, Liouba and I were at the Shiremetievo airport to catch our flight to New York, a shuttle to Philadelphia, where my mother picked us up and drove us to Bryn Mawr College to meet her colleagues and my old fellow-students with whom she had an appointment. It seemed to me that it was several millennia after we had left Babje, it began to rain and by the nightfall of civilisation we were at mum’s home on time for the storm, whose wrath and lightening tore out trees, destroyed houses and cars and against which civilisation was helpless. We sat in the dark and listened to the night roar.

Return to Babje part 1

Travel.Miltsov.org — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:21:42 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

A year later, we returned to Babje, whose population has grown, once again:
The horse Senelga had room-mates in her barn: a goat with her kid.
May has grown into a beautiful Collie.
And little Afanasij, who was born the previous summer, joined the 3 older knights.

When we arrived, we were surprised by a friend from Tver, Tania with her two daughters Lada and Lialia (we were together on the 1st of May kayaking trip in 2000) who were visiting.
From left to right: Ira, Lada (8) with Lialia (1), Liouba (7) with Bandit, Tania.

Ira, Lionia, Liouba with Bandit, Lada with Lialia, Tania (from left to right)

Pavel, Sasha’s younger brother, the baby-uncle of Liouba and Tania with Lialia

Going for hay. Ira said that now that they have a goat with a kid in addition to the horse, Senelga, they need more hay for the winter time. So, they spend 4-5 days in the summer, first cutting the grass in the fields near the forest, leaving it to dry under the sun, and then collecting it. We joined them on the spree to rake the dry hay and discovered that one day of work in the field – on all parameters – beat a yearly membership at the most prestigious health-club in any city. The sun, the birds, the bees, the sweetness of the earth and a healthy work-out, even if only for a day or two, bring the feeling of happiness and the desire to live and with that comes health. I always found it torture to toil out in closed, sweaty gyms or to madly inhale chlorine doing laps in noisy warehouses full of water and dampness, called swimming pools which rather bring the feeling of depression.

I believe that the “sports” and “gym” culture is necessary to perpetuate the sado-masochistic tendencies in civilised people, so that when people refer to certain arduous, painful, and downright unhealthy activities as “leisure”, “relaxation”, or “pleasant” they end up believing in that these activities are good for them that they love doing them and end up loving them. Doctors push these kinds of sports, which ensure them and the pharmaceutical businesses a stable revenue from selling drugs, including vitamins and anti-depressants, to combat the “side-effects” of sports, such as allergies, weakened bones, asthma and other pulmonary problems, manic-depression, etc. Without the synthetic replacement of sun-light by vitamin D, steroids, antibiotics, surgical interference, in these crowded, stressful conditions people, as history has shown, would have perished from crumbling bones, destroyed immune system, and the various plagues.

It is amazing that so much less effort and resources are needed for a simple and joyful time somewhere in the wild.

May came along to help

The kids played hide and seek in the hay and jumped up and down on it.

Babje part 6

Travel.Miltsov.org — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:25:26 +0000

pictures by Sasha
text by Layla

30% of Babje’s human population:

Finally, it was time to part. Sasha and Liouba were to take the morning train from Spirovo to Moscow and I was heading to St.Petersburg to catch the train to Helsinki and then fly to the Childhoods 2005 conference in Oslo which began on the 29th of June.

Makar stayed up late. Shortly before it was time to head to Spirovo after midnight for my train from Moscow to St. Petersburg he asked:
“So, you’re leaving?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And I won’t see you when I wake up?”
“No,” I said. “But I will come back.”
“Too bad you’re leaving,” he said. “I had merriness with you once upon a time.”