White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  ‘I even spent two weeks in prison’, he complains. ‘For our songs. For allegedly stirring up national unrest, inciting racial hatred and violence. Bloody hell! Music is pure abstraction – you can’t take it so literally.’

  ‘You sing a song saying blacks should have stakes stuck in their chests.What’s abstract about that?’

  ‘That’s how they staked vampires. Pure abstraction. It’s not as if there are any vampires, is it?’

  ‘Your fans take it literally, then go out and beat up or even murder immigrants and African students.’

  ‘It’s not my fault if someone understands me wrong.’

  PATRIOTIC ROCK – A PRESIDENTIAL REIGN

  ‘It’s terrible in Moscow’, says Valery Naumov, who also wants to horrify me. ‘In my son’s class, out of thirty-four kids seventeen are immigrants, foreigners of non-Slavonic origin. Exactly half the class! When I was at school there was only one of them in my class. Here in Moscow land is more expensive than in London, but they’re buying it all up. They burn money in the stoves in their palaces. Our country is dying.’

  ‘I know. Every day 1500 people die in Russia. It’s a demographic disaster, but Russian women don’t want to give birth because children prevent them from working.’

  ‘The television is enemy number one. And drugs, Pepsi-Cola, McDonalds . . .And all that pro-Western lack of values, the nastiest side of humanity comes dripping from the screens and stops us from producing offspring. They say that if you want to destroy your enemy, educate his children. And television’s educating them to think the only goal in life is money.’

  He is talking about the generation of people born in the 1980s, which in Russia is scornfully called ‘the Pepsi-Cola generation’.

  Valery is the leader of a folk rock group called Ivan Tsarevich, which refers in its songs to the traditions of medieval Russia. For eight years they have been unable to make it into the big time. They perform in leather and chains, bash each other with swords on stage, and their biggest hit is a song called ‘Russia, Forwards!’ Forward march, for the land, for the faith, for the Urals, for Crimea, although Crimea is in another country now, a fact that many Russians cannot accept. On the other hand, it is impossible not to agree with Valery about Russian television.Whenever possible, it apes Western models, but undoubtedly not the ones concerning standards of information. It has outstripped every other country in the world in devising tasks for the stars of reality shows, who for money lick whipped cream off each other’s bums, or eat excrement, carrion or live cockroaches . . .

  ‘It was only when Putin came to reign as president and allowed patriotism that things became easier’, says the leader of Ivan Tsarevich.

  They have become the annual star of the Slava Rossiya (‘Long Live Russia’) festival organized by Putin’s party, United Russia.

  ‘The more young people listen to our music, the less they’ll drink Pepsi-Cola. But it’s not succeeding, because the whole of show business in Moscow is terrible shit. If you don’t pay big money, you’ve no chance of getting on the radio or television. Two or three people decide what the nation likes. And the Russki lies on the couch, drinks his beer and loafs about – you can give people like that any bullshit you like.’

  OLD CHURCH ROCK – SELF-CENSORSHIP

  In Russia, since Soviet times there has been a legal requirement for bands to ‘hold text consultation with the ideological organs’. Now they have to do it at the FSB (Federal Security Service) – formerly known as the KGB – post on whose terrain the concert is going to take place.

  The shaggies have also had a sort of name change. Nowadays they are called mazerfakery.

  ‘Before a concert I collect the song texts from the bands and take them where necessary’, Pulia tells me. ‘But for performances in public places I ask them to choose songs with no nationalism or incitements to violence, and with no swear words.’

  ‘Punks can’t talk without swear words’, I worry.

  ‘Tough. “Kill the cop” won’t get through either.’

  ‘Pulia’ means bullet, missile or cartridge. And that’s what she’s like. Quick and sharp like a bullet from a revolver, energetic, feisty and keen. Slender and agile, but not weedy. A hippy type aged thirty-plus. She is head of the Holy Princess of Petersburg Youth Culture Centre. The centre is a wooden shed on the construction site for the Church of All Muscovite Saints in the Bibirevo district where Father Sergei, the priest who was once a hippy, is the incumbent.

  ‘Father Sergei knows from his own experience’, says Pulia, ‘that if young people get involved in poetry, painting and music, it’s 100 per cent certain there will also be alcohol and drugs. Without God that’s how it’s bound to end. I sing songs about that. And about how in our cellar there’s now a large shop and a common brothel. And I have a criminal case against me saying that while pretending to conduct cultural activities I was running an illegal business.’

  The girl is the lead singer of a group called Southern Cross. She says it plays Old Church Slavonic rock.

  ANDREI – A MIGHTY BLOW

  The Jerry Rubin club in the cellar of number 62 Leninsky Prospekt is a sacred place for all Moscow’s antifa – the thinking, radical, but anti-fascist youth. For all Moscow’s rebels and fighters for a just cause – human rights, but also freedom for laboratory rabbits, rats and mice. On occasion they have broken into poultry farms, abattoirs and scientific institutes, set the animals free and demolished the labs.

  This is where Sid and his band,Tarakany, started their underground career, but now the biggest punk hero is young Pit from the band called Ted Kaczynski.

  They occupied this cellar in 1992. Its patron saint is Jerry Rubin, the ideologue and leader of the American hippies and anarchists. It is more of a cultural centre, or rather basement, than a club. Moreover, it’s alternative, non-commercial culture, with no security guard, cloakroom or entrance tickets.

  ‘We haven’t got a bar either’, says Andrei Otis Gonda. ‘The anti-fascists don’t drink or smoke or take drugs, because if you’re going to be radical you have to be active, and that means sober.’

  Andrei came to Moscow to study to be a vet in the Soviet era, but in 1995, two months before his diploma, he dropped out of college. He explains to me that veterinary science is a branch of the knowledge that serves to breed animals, which are killed and eaten.

  So he has been a janitor, a sales assistant at an all-night shop, a teacher of French, English and PT, a manager, a trainer for karate, aikido and tai-chi, a building contractor and a salesman. Every few months each of his businesses in turn came crashing down. But he got married and had children.To save money he got his meals at the Hare Krishna canteen. He worked beyond his strength, but got into more and more debt. Finally he ended up in hospital suffering from physical exhaustion and a nervous breakdown.

  Then they were evicted from their flat. The couple and their two small children lived in a cellar, then a garage, in which Andrei installed a small cast-iron stove. And then the worst thing of all happened. His documents were stolen in the metro.

  Every second or third day he spent several hours at police stations, repeating the same script a hundred times over ad nauseam, round and round in circles. Who he was, where he came from, what had happened to his documents, where he lived, with whom, how he made his living, what was happening about his residency . . .

  ‘They usually caught me in the metro’, he says. ‘They stand there so it’s impossible to avoid them, and I’m easy to spot.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask stupidly.

  ‘Because I’ve got a black face.’

  ‘You could pull up your hood.’

  ‘They go for those guys even more.They hunt the stream of people for “niggers”, meaning Caucasians, but when a real black face comes along, a black person, they’re going to check him for sure. Every time I was threatened with deportation, but I haven’t even got the money for a bribe. So they told me to open my bag. For many years I was a salesman. They took what they want
ed and told me to get lost. That’s normal, but there have been disasters too, when they’ve taken everything.’

  ‘What sort of products did you have?’ I ask.

  ‘Cosmetics or music CDs. Once they robbed me when I’d just been to the wholesaler’s. Those goods were everything I had. That was a mighty blow. So I go home . . . My wife’s at the door asking about medicine for our son. I was supposed to buy it, and something to eat too, because the fridge is empty. It was the worst day of my life. I wanted to do away with myself, but I didn’t have the courage. I spent days on end trudging about the city and got myself into some terrible situations.’

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  ‘Death.And I found this club. I’d never heard of Jerry Rubin before, but I went in, because they were letting people in for free. They were showing a film about Che Guevara.’

  He fell in love with the place. For several years he has kept order in the club, and runs karate, aikido and tai-chi classes.

  In 2002 he was given Russian citizenship.

  ‘And as soon as I had the documents in my hand, the cops immediately stopped checking me.’

  GANGSTA RAP – FOR A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS

  They’re a very odd couple, a bit like a young version of Laurel and Hardy. The small thin one is twenty-seven and has a very swarthy face, and the big fat one is twenty-nine with size forty-nine feet, and is extremely freckly and ginger-haired. The first is a Georgian from Sukhumi in Abkhazia, and the second is a Jew from Donetsk in Ukraine. Midget – otherwise known as Zurab Sharabidze – is a rapper, and Iceman – real name Sasha Wiseman – is the director (so they say), head of the artist’s one-man staff, his manager.

  ‘As a Jew I’ve got commerce and diplomacy in my blood’, he jokes in a booming voice. ‘I do a superb job as a creativist . . .’

  ‘A creator’, I say, correcting him.

  ‘A creator is for fashion, but I think up strategies, I devise plans and initiate things.’

  It was the devil of a job for me to understand the latest strategy he had devised. It was more or less that Stim, a rapper from the rival hip-hop stable of a big star called Seryoga, had not paid him back the money for some bling Iceman had had made for him at a jeweller’s. A piece of bling hanging on a thick gold chain is a musician’s decoration and trademark, something no rapper can do without. Finally Iceman caught up with Stim and demanded the money, and Stim gave him back the bling. An opportunity like that is too good to miss. Iceman immediately told the whole story in an interview for a very popular online music journal.

  ‘A rapper is a great authority for his fans’, he says. ‘The kids listen to him and copy him, and I ruined his image. The fact that he did the dirty on me is no big deal – the problem is he gave back the bling! A rapper who loses his bling, it’s like he lost his balls, lost his honour. But he didn’t feel it like that at all.You know why?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘’Cos he shaves his legs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A rapper who shaves his legs! A man! I told them about that on the Internet too.’

  ‘Sasha, I don’t get – is that some sort of metaphor?’

  ‘No! He really does shave his legs!’ Iceman is bursting with laughter. ‘How can a man shave his legs? Especially a rapper. I saw it with my own eyes, because I once worked with Stim and Seryoga.We used to be mates, but now they’re threatening me. They said that if I show up at the club now, they’ll beat me up. I’m no match for Seryoga. I don’t have his sort of fame or money, or even the same physical parameters. He used to be a boxer and he’s always pumping iron.’

  ‘You do it for the marketing’, I realize.

  ‘Yes, rap thrives on conflict. And everyone will write about a war, some aggro or a fight. Those two can only lose, and I’ll gain, even if they kill me. I’ll be a hero. They’ll write songs about me. Midget will for sure.’

  He is wasting his breath, because in any case he knows he’s not cut out to be a hero. He could have been one long ago – in Donetsk he fell foul of the local gangsters, but he ran away from the place and left the country.

  He had a hundred dollars when he arrived in Moscow in 1999. When the money ran out, he ended up on the street. He starved. For six months he lived in a stairwell. He was given food by a Georgian guy from the top floor. That was how he met Midget, who dragged him off to his job at a car wash. There they made some money together and got into rap.

  ‘If only for some peace and quiet’, says Iceman. ‘But with my ginger nut and size it’s tricky. Every time I go somewhere, to the cinema with a girlfriend for instance, it always ends in a fight. And they’re always from the Caucasus. They insult the girl, they provoke me and shout abuse. They always behave incorrectly. I’ve had enough of it. I can’t stand Caucasians.’

  ‘Sasha, for pity’s sake’, I respond,‘Midget is from the Caucasus. He’s right here with us.’

  ‘But he’s different. And the Georgians are the most correct, intelligent people in the Caucasus.’

  ‘I know why that is’, puts in Midget. ‘In our country all the bandits and people the militia are after end up in Moscow. It’s a city with many opportunities. For them too.’

  Midget’s family had seven dollars when they arrived here. As Georgians they had to escape from the breakaway region of Abkhazia. They chose the country that helped the Abkhazians to drive them out of their own home.

  MAZHORY RAP – PASSION AVENUE

  Last year Iceman was given Russian citizenship, but as a Georgian Midget has no chance of getting it. Every six months he has to buy a residency certificate on the black market for 10,000 roubles (£200). Other foreigners only pay a thousand.

  We drive through the city in Iceman’s fabulous old Lincoln, collecting lads for the strelka – scrap, row, organized fight or settling of scores. Other cars join us. At midnight we’re outside the Zhara club (meaning heat) on Strastnoy Bulvar – ‘Passion Avenue’. This is a very expensive, swanky place with a screening policy for hip-hop mazhory – the bourgeois youth.

  Iceman distributes women’s colour magazines to the lads. If they are rolled up very tight, they make an effective, painful blunt weapon with the power of a wooden baton, but without causing bloodshed. This is the Donetsk bandits’ favourite inheritance from the Soviet Spetsnaz – the special military forces that were subordinate to the KGB.

  Iceman and Midget’s friends don’t look like hooligans from the suburban districts. They are failed clones of New York dudes, plastic mazhory, the spoiled little sons of oligarchs in posh hip-hop clothing. Midget’s fans.

  It’s they who set the musical fashions in Moscow, because only they can afford frequent outings to the fiendishly expensive clubs. Tidied-up mazhory rap, also known as club rap, is the top favourite now, and its pop, dance variety, R’n’B.

  As we wait for Seryoga and Stim’s brigade, our teeth chattering with the cold, I tell them how there was supposed to have been an artificial sun shining above Moscow and keeping it warm by the end of the past millennium.

  The authors of Report from the Twenty-First Century, who died in the 1970s, wrote their book on the basis of conversations with scholars from the USSR Academy of Sciences. There the idea was born of using several enormous mirrors to send electromagnetic waves upwards. Twenty or thirty kilometres above the ground, where the rays crossed, the artificial sun made of heated nitrogen and oxygen molecules would shine forth.

  It would have been visible all round the clock, but without harm to the health of Moscow’s residents, because by that time medicine was meant to have solved the problem of tiredness pharmacologically. It would be possible to work without resting; Moscow would also be a friendly, affluent metropolis of five million people, with no cars (there would be a ban on driving into the city) and no snow on the electrically heated streets. In the 1950s the scientists estimated that as much fuel was used to clear the snow from Russia’s streets as for the entire harvest.

  After an hour of waiting, Iceman and Midget’s e
nemies are obviously not going to turn up. The lads invite me into the club, but I have vowed never to go into a place where they have a screening policy (in Russian it’s called fizkontrol).

  ‘They have to judge if you’re suitably dressed and if you can buy something at the bar.’

  ‘If I had a hand missing or were hunchbacked, disabled, they wouldn’t let me in’, I say angrily. ‘Shitbag rappers! Why do you agree to that? That’s worse than racism.’

  ‘But what would happen if they let in badly dressed, stinking people or cripples?’ Iceman comes to the defence. ‘This is a place to be happy. It wouldn’t be much fun for me to dance next to a cripple.’

  ‘But they let in midgets’, notes Midget.

  ‘Midgets are all right.’

  ‘Cripples look sad, but if they were happy like that, well then . . .’

  Next day the Internet was buzzing with the news that Seryoga and Stim had chickened out. Two days later, when Iceman and Midget were on their way home at night, five masked men were waiting for them at their door. Four of them beat the lads up badly, while a fifth filmed the incident. In the morning the film was on the Internet.

  Three weeks later, before leaving for Siberia, I visited Midget in hospital.

  ‘Moscow is the best city to bounce back, make up for your losses, build a career and make money’, whispered the young Georgian from under his bandages. ‘It’s a beautiful city. I love it. Because it teaches me life, it feeds me and sometimes it punishes me. I love Moscow more than all those nationalists do. I never drop litter in the street in Moscow. I love it so much!’

  And now let us move into the distant future and walk across a Moscow street in the twenty-first century. Can you smell how clean the air is, as if scented with the aroma of meadows and forests? The reason for that is not just the large number of parks and squares. We are on the Moscow River embankment. Look, you can count all the stones on the bottom. Small shoals of gold and silver fish weave their way among the water plants. No dirty sewage is channelled into the river any more. Instead it is purified on the spot. Every kind of residue is exploited for a suitable purpose, and only clean water, previously enriched with oxygen, then flows into the river.