The festival kicks off in a large, well-equipped theatre with a spectacular music and dance performance by native people in bright red dresses. This is the internationally famous Salekhard dance group, Syra-Sev. They play skin drums, wear large antlers, and sing beautifully. It’s great to feel such love for life in a place where, during the Soviet period, thousands of troublemakers were sent to languish in forced labour camps or to rot and die. (Siberia is still a place where outsiders are sent. A short distance from Salekhard sits the infamous Kharp Prison Colony, where Platon Lebedev was imprisoned. He was the business associate of former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once touted as the richest man in Russia, who is imprisoned further east.)
As the festival unspools, I’m surprised to find that unlike Canada’s native peoples, who are active in film and have created significant TV networks, there is no active production among the Nenets. The films here from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and, of course, Russia are less commercial, much slower-paced, and more spiritual and whimsical than what we’re used to seeing in Canada. Smartly dressed schoolchildren sit politely and clap enthusiastically.
One night, a group of us decide to seek out Salekhard’s best restaurant. A thirty-minute walk through muddy, empty streets leads us to a restaurant and disco bar perched on stilts on a bridge over the Poluy River, one of the tributaries of the Ob. It’s getting colder and starting to snow. By the time we arrive, the kitchen is closed, but Marina, the festival’s director, persuades them to reopen for us. “She has more power than President Putin,” someone says. We eat a delicious pan-fried local whitefish, muksun, washed down by Baltika 7. (Baltika beer comes in ten varieties: Baltika 0 is non-alcoholic, 3 is comparable to typical Canadian lagers, and 9 will knock you over.) Leggy, bored girls prance about on the mirrored dance floor to a pounding Russian disco beat — the worst of world music.
As we dine, I’m told that the average Russian male’s life expectancy is late fifties. A fatty and starchy diet, alcoholism, work and traffic accidents, and a high murder rate are listed as the causes. A respected government bank regulator is gunned down in Moscow while we’re there, reminiscent of the contract shootings of Yeltsin’s decade. Russia’s 141 million population is declining; many leave for Europe and North America each year.
At Salekhard’s beautiful and busy new airport terminal, I run into a twenty-five-year-old computer engineer. Dmitry is an avid reader of Jack London’s Arctic stories, and his uncle, a software designer, lives in Toronto’s Greektown along the Danforth. Dmitry met his wife, Katrina, in Salekhard two years ago. She’s a lawyer for one of the oil companies, so they moved to Moscow and now live in Russia’s Silicon Valley, in Zelenograd, the Green City. Taking his two years of compulsory military service in Kursk, Dmitry saw some of his military buddies die in Chechnya. “The politicians sit in big rooms in Moscow,” says Dmitry, “while twenty-year-old Russian boys die for causes they don’t believe in.” Too familiar.
Driving downtown from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, I’m told that half the cars on the crowded streets are now imported. Though still ubiquitous, there are fewer and fewer rusty old Ladas. On the city’s outskirts, a stylized tank trap marks the furthest advance of the Nazi army in 1941. Like other Russian war memorials, it’s now used as a backdrop for rather strange wedding portraits. A brand-new massive blue-and-yellow ikea store dominates the nearby mall.
I seek out a Canadian journalist friend. He’s been dealing with his depressed cat and is happy to go out. He takes me to a popular microbrew pub, Glavpivtorg, for some pickled herring, chicken Kiev, beer, and a weird liquor made from horseradish and vodka. A hard-driving rock ‘n’ roll band led by a bald singer in a bright red shirt and black cowboy hat bangs out Beatles, Elvis, and Chubby Checker favourites. Whole families and kids do the twist and what looks like the jitterbug. When the band sings, “I don’t care too much for money/Money can’t buy me love,” my friend quips that the irony is that all they want is money.
In search of more excitement and more beer, we stumble down the sidewalk past the former kgb (now fsb) headquarters and come upon the Shield and Sword, the former private club of kgb officers, now a restaurant and bar. The walls are festooned with portraits of kgb officials, including Putin, Yuri Andropov, and the notorious Lavrenti Beria. kgb uniforms, flags, medals, and other memorabilia are on display. The place should be a museum. There aren’t many customers, but a beautiful blond bartender in a crisp white shirt pours us a couple of delicious local beers.
My journalist friend wants to do a series on who killed the ussr. It’s a good question. One gets the sense that while everything has changed since perestroika, many feel that in fact very little has changed. Everyone I ask seems to hate Gorbachev, the darling of the West. While Russia is still the world’s largest country, the former ussr has lost a quarter of its territory, and many older people feel they have lost much of their self-respect and national pride. The polite manager finally asks us to leave and starts turning out the lights. I ask if I can take a few photos of the memorabilia-covered walls. The manager hesitates, so I tell him that during World War II my father ran the intelligence training school for the Canadian military in Aldershot, England. The lights come back on.
As in Salekhard, where nomadic reindeer herders coexist with oil and gas workers, the ironies of the new Russia are everywhere in Moscow. When Madonna gave a concert in September 2006, it was loudly protested by the Christian establishment, which wanted her to drop the religious symbols from her act and later demanded that the concert be banned outright. (The show went ahead without changes.)
