Moscow and Muscovites

When late at night after a long road and a long break you enter Tverskaya, there is a feeling that you slide along a carefully washed, shining with whiteness of the human skull. Any organica - everything that breathes, smells, is born, dies and lives, is etched and cleaned, and in return the space is populated by phosphorescent surgery. Moscow under Sobyanin turned into a city of dreams, where a hallucinogenic expirence at every step even lies in a teetotaler: every minutes from under the ground, like mushrooms, new metro stations jump; Overnight, like cosmic pollen, the Zaryadye Park landed near the Kremlin; The territory of the city is growing at the speed of an aggressive cancer tumor. Suddenly - a giant felt boot in the middle of the central street, a detachment of crusaders on the boulevard for storming; According to the guard in each lane, the “golden mile”, and I must say the password “there is no God”, because the guard guard the queue to the relics from those who want to get into the middle. A huge copy from European originals - the Usachevsky market, by which travel in mink caps are walking; full of foreign tubes and jars of Moskhoztorgi, where you can never find what I bought a week ago. A desperate search for parking, a daily multi -hour operation to transfer children to the opposite shore of the avenue, because the school was compacted, and the GCP in the district decided not to open it. An uninterruptedly working separator, squeezing out naked with salaries below 200 thousand a month from the historical center. Together, this is called "Watch how Moscow was prettier at Sobyanin." To the universal metropolitan snobbery and specific arrogance in relation to the “SOMPARTS” a new Muscovite, even if he is dissatisfied with changes, acquired the habit of daily stay in the point of absurdity, almost unbearable for outsiders. Obviously, absurdity cannot but affect consciousness, not format it for himself; And then your old friend's eyes glasses, and he says: “What, products from Vastiville completely replaced me with imported food.”

Song from the movie Alexander Medvedkin "New Moscow" (1938)

It has long been noticed that the sample in the form of Kapkovshchina, and then the entire full -scale Sobyaninsky urbanist carcinogenesis were an answer to Bolotnaya - to dissatisfaction with the middle class by stopping the Medvedev “modernization”. The reaction to the carnival protest was a non -stop, feverish carnival all year round.

Having entertaining and distracting its inhabitants, over time, the re-packed Moscow, which became a showcase of Putin’s Russia, began to perform another important function to maintain the status quo: the city that exists at the expense of the whole country pumps out not only natural resources-it also pumps out the human resource, the most ambitious and talented to direct their energy to the production of ethereal chimeras. Formally, this is the same deal that the usual centralized state offers its citizens: moving to the capital in exchange for money and opportunities that are not in the province.

But in fact, today's Moscow, which is in the heart of today's Russia, offers something else. She offers status in exchange for a voluntary refusal to produce meanings. You can become a “curator”, “director”, “journalist”, “microenfluunser” (a person who photographs and laid out his food and clothes for contentment from advertisers on social networks), “Yandex”, “Scriptwriter”, “Hest-Manager” (a person who receives money personally invites his friends to the microinfluenters to Parties), “Artist”, “Promoutor” - the list can be continued. You will have something to write on a business card, there will be a salary and a medical insurance card, you will switch from one work to another and triumphantly report it on Facebook, but the Lord is salating you to the territory where you can at least some kind of meaningful conversation about the present and future. Culture in Moscow is when people who paid 700 rubles for a ticket look at the Strelka or in the Garage the last Cannes hit, which will never be released, because political and economic censorship has finished off independent rental. But if you were at least three times with a “garage”, you will never be allowed to show the film of the Donbass luster, because the question of the maximum state of the post -Soviet man and the post -Soviet space cannot be asked seriously and out loud.

The head of the staff of Sobyanin Konstantin Remchukov says something about the global competition of cities in which the updated capital of Russia takes part with New York, Paris and London, forgetting that New York, Paris and London produce ideas for the whole world, and Moscow, surrounded by imaginary enemies and a real bloodless country, does not even produce hybrid propaganda of of International Fame , since the Olginsky trolls are in another place (as you know, 12 people received Russian citizenship for four years in quota for “useful specialists”). The only large Russian phenomenon of international scale today - designer Gosha Rubchinsky - in his collections is operating something completely opposite to Sobyaninsky decoration: “aesthetics ****”, nostalgia for formlessness and disorder. The only bright pop cultural phenomenon of recent years-rap battles-originated in Krasnodar and thundered in St. Petersburg; In Moscow, they would not have enough energy, uncompromisingness and inner freedom for them.

What sometimes breaks out of this hermetic electric acidic universe is multimillion -dollar costs for Sobyakurs (plastic trees in tubs) or the Olympic stadium, full of people who were given from a monthly salary of an ordinary person in an evening in the company of a motivational lecturer, causes frightened bewilderment in the rest of Russia. The point is no longer envious of the capital's money and opportunities - envy is gradually replaced by fear of the danger of infecting Moscow madness.

Ben Witley film trailer "High School" (2016)

Watching Moscow and Muscovites from afar, it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that you are watching the Remake of the “skyscraper” - Bena Witley’s film, according to the anti -utopian novel by James Ballard: the ultra -modern design residential complex with a strict social hierarchy on floors, in which self -identification, re -relief and class conflicts are indifferently unintentionful lead to monstrous degradation; How did it happen that a respected doctor, dressed in rags, gnaws the leg of a neighbor's shepherd on the balcony of his elite apartments?