Russia today
Everyone switched off their TVs a long time ago. No-one tunes into the news. No-one I know anyway. We don’t need it.
© Jenia Kishenko
The KGB have taken over the rest of the country, the oil companies and the media, but for the moment they’re leaving us alone. We work in advertising, film, theatre, music, design – anything that doesn’t touch oil or politics. It’s a small island, but if you live on it, then you can try and convince yourself that you live in a free and prosperous western country. The mood is London circa ’88. Hedonism and glam and lots of it. No-one talks about Iraq. Everyone talks about designer labels, conceptual artists and coke. Business is booming. You can’t avoid getting a job or making money.
FastPhive/Jan Voigtmann (Creative Commons rights-protected)
It was Saturday morning. A bunch of us piled into a rich guy’s limo. We wanted to go to some last party out in the countryside. The girls were all dressed up as dominatrixes, the boys as aliens. No-one wanted to come down. The girls kept on giving different directions and the driver got lost. The limo went off the road. We were far from the city. We were in a frozen village. Collapsing wooden huts and angry looking cows. The dominatrixes and aliens wandered about the village looking for someone who could pass for a mechanic.
We found him in a vodka stupor in front of a TV. For the first time in ages I saw the news: ‘NGOs are a tool for Western spies… the opposition is in the pay of American imperialists… the parliament introduces an act to ban all Jewish organisations from the country…’
Everyone dances faster and faster, our island gets smaller and smaller.
Peter Pomeranzev
Peter Pomeranzev is a British film maker of Russian origin based in London and Moscow.
