We invite you to wander around the Vernisazh with us and meet some of the people who brightened our day, challenged our thinking, and helped us to understand Russia in new ways. Every person whom we met was unique, but we noticed some recurring motifs in the twists and turns of our conversations, so we have put the stories of our encounters into four broad categories:
Intro
First, let’s meet Evgenii, a charismatic young man who served as a Dantean Virgil for us after we found ourselves lost and bewildered during our first plunge into the marketplace wOne of us bought two gilt peacock napkin holders for 500 rubles, charmed by the vendor’s story of their provenance: he said that he remembered them from his childhood in the 1950s, and that his father brought them home from a trip somewhere, either up North or at the border with China. He said he had never seen such objects anywhere else. The most compelling part of the vendor’s story was his reminiscence of seeing the peacocks at the two ends of a long table. When there were napkins in the holder, the lights refracted in the glass decorations, generating rainbows, he said. He conjured up a mesmerizing, almost Nabokovian memory for us with those radiant peacocks bedazzling the family meals. However, the peacocks’ design did not look Soviet, but rather somewhat imperial. That should have tipped us off. ith its overwhelming sights, sounds, strangeness, and resistance to interpretation. Perhaps Evgenii’s advice will be useful for other visitors braving the market for the first time.
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At the start of our exploration of the Vernisazh, we asked a merchant selling antiques where his wares came from. He said that he did not know, and that his job was just to restore the objects without damaging them, to make them appealing to customers. It was our first realization that the stories that we sought—about these objects and the people through whose lives they had traveled—were not going to be so easy to come by.
It was then that Evgenii swooped in and rescued us from that frustrating exchange. Evgenii explained that many of the vendors at the Vernisazh were middlemen (literally re-sellers, perekupshchki) who did not know about the provenance of the objects that they were selling. Evgenii himself, though, took pride in being knowledgeable; for example, he told us that he had just recently bought an antique book that he could tell was worth a lot more than what the seller was asking.
However, according to Evgenii some of the vendors at the Vernisazh are experts at one particular thing, such as coins, fir tree ornaments, or Soviet toys. Evgenii also told us about the out-of-the-way Novopodrezkovo market (also known as Levsha, “Lefty”) where many of these vendors go to buy things that they resell at a higher cost at the Vernisazh. We later took an epic journey to that market and acquired our podstakannik (metal tea-glass holder) there.
Evgenii told us that the best time to come to the Vernisazh is very early in the morning on Saturday. In winter, people come armed with flashlights while it is still dark to get the “cream.” When we asked Evgenii what he looks for here, he said that he walks around keeping his eyes open (he used the word brauz, the Russified form of “browse”; the existing Russian consumer behavior vocabulary seems to lack that concept) and certain objects catch his attention. As he explained it, he will have some sort of desire that he can’t put into words until he sees the object; then the object makes the desire coalesce. Talking to Evgenii highlighted for us how the objects at the Vernisazh manifest what scholar Jane Bennett calls “thing-power.”
Thing-power
A commuter who, like countless others before him, could not resist touching this bronze rooster in the sculpture-adorned Revolution Square metro station in central Moscow.
In her 2010 book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett proposes that all bodies, whether animate or not, “affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power.” This is a way to re-imagine agency as not belonging to living beings alone, but as something distributed among all forms of matter; just think about how the material world affects all that we do as we react to it, struggle against it, and use it to connect with one another. What’s at stake in this way of thinking? For one thing, Bennett argues that the image of matter as “dead or thoroughly instrumentalized […] feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” Our own bodies include cyborg parts and microscopic critters, forming the “human-nonhuman working group” where Bennett situates agency. Citing the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky’s notion of humans as “walking, talking minerals,” Bennett points out that when we consider how bony structures developed in living beings over millennia, we can observe a “mineral efficacy,” the capacity for self-organization within what most consider inert matter.
To illustrate how thing-power works, Bennett describes how a pile of litter in a storm drain, despite being inanimate, seemed to call out to her one day; and she speaks of serving on a jury and observing the persuasive power of a container known as a Gunpowder Residue Sampler, a small glass vial with a sticky metal lid:
“This object/witness had been dabbed on the accused’s hand hours after the shooting and now offered to the jury its microscopic evidence that the hand had either fired a gun or been within three feet of a gun firing. . . . This composite of glass, skin cells, glue, words, laws, metals, and human emotions had become an actant, that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen.”
Likewise attuned to the power of things is Ivan Krotkov, an antique restorer with 20 years’ experience whom we met in Moscow. Ivan previously worked as a tailor, as a furniture restorer, in a puppet theater, and in a church. He is particularly drawn to metal things including religious objects and swords. Ivan frequents the Vernisazh market where, as he tells us, “his things find him.”
This and the next three photos show objects from Ivan’s workshop. This is a dagger dating back to the second century.
A restored sword from the 19th century.
Krotkov icon cover and other things.
Religious items, including examples of the ornate icon cover known as the riza (and alternatively, oklad) that leaves only the face and hands of the sacred figure visible.
Whether at the market, or out in a field with a metal detector, Ivan looks for what he calls “details” such as metal brackets, bits of a cross, and fragments of old objects whose use might not be obvious. He strives to use just the right materials and technologies in order to create museum-quality restored objects.
Thing-power takes on an additional dimension when considered in the context of Russian religious beliefs. As James Billington writes in his classic interpretative history of Russia, The Icon and the Axe, Russian Orthodox Believers view icons as material portals into the divine. The belief in wonder-working icons, such as the Mother of God of the Sign (Bogomater’ Znamenie) that, according to legend, played a decisive role in the twelfth-century siege of Novgorod, is a striking example of how Russian Orthodoxy ascribes power to (certain) things.
This 15th century icon depicts the attack on the Novgorodians by the Suzdalians, who shoot their arrows at the icon of the Mother of God that the Novgorodians display from their city walls. In response, the icon weeps and turns its face away, casting the Suzdalians into darkness and allowing the Novgorodians to overcome them. Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Novgorodians_with_the_Suzdalians#/media/File:Battle_between_Novgorod_and_Suzdal.jpg.
But there is more. In a 2002 article, Inna Shevchenko recounts that the power of sacred objects such as icons was sometimes linked in the popular imagination with the prayers that these objects absorbed akin to a form of energy: “Stealing from churches was considered to be not only shameful, but also dangerous. Numerous legends tell of criminals suffering the most terrible punishments, even death, after robbing cathedrals. […] Those who steal icons are also playing with fire: the more ancient the icon is, the more ‘prayed-to’ it is, and thus, the greater its mystical power. But that’s how the icon is for the Russian. For the European, it is something akin to an African mask.” The latter statement gets at Russians’ self-perception of their Otherness vis-à-vis the West. But let’s return to the word that we translated as ‘prayed-to’: it is our best attempt to render namolenneye—a comparative form of the adjective namolennyi, derived from the verb namolit’, which means “to achieve something through diligent prayer.”A related term, namolennoe mesto, refers a place such as the site of a cathedral or a monastery, where prayer has taken place for many years. So the adjective namolennyi really means something like “prayer-saturated.”
The idea of namolennost’ –the quality of being “prayer-saturated”—is not an official teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church but rather a popular understanding of icons’ power. An article from the Russian Orthodox site pravmir.ru contests the idea of prayer-saturation and affirms that the power of icons comes from a divine rather than human source, using the analogy of an icon as a window that lets in the light of the sun. Yet it is fascinating to see how the folk interpretation is reflected in the Russian language itself.
As we conduct our fieldwork, we find the things at the Vernisazh exerting their power on us, too. We head out into the antiques market with a plan but we get swept along by some power stronger than us, and end up going with the flow.
Abdul told us about how people in the Caucasus specialize in one craft (remeslo), and his is fur. Both foreigners and locals buy his fur hats, mostly of rabbit fur, which he says is warm enough. Abdul showed us the old style ushanka hat with ear flaps and said that now there are all kinds of hats (like a semicircular one with fur around the edge, somewhat evocative of the Monomakh crown, but he seemed to favor the ushanka style and recalled how as he used to run around as a child wearing that sort of hat. We noticed vendors sharing childhood reminiscences with us from time to time; the objects at Vernisazh have this effect in eliciting memories.
Abdul told us that it is challenging to find employment in Dagestan, so people come here to work at the market; he spoke in positive terms about being a tradesman—it’s a job, and he is doing what he loves. He said that Russians only buy the fur hats when the first frost appears, and cited the saying “when the thunder strikes [kogda grianet grom]”—in other words, they don’t plan ahead. (On a number of occasions, vendors would share with us reflections about national identity such as this; perhaps it was inevitable given that we were foreigners and invited this sort of rumination.)
Abdul used to come to the market only in winters but now works here in the summer as well. His neighbor, also a seller of furs including rabbit and mink, was a younger man from Tajikistan who had been coming here for eight months. We asked if he liked working at the market. “Sure, I make my money, I like it.” He added that he had also had a chance to see Moscow itself. Even on an 80-degree summer day, a young lady came up and showed interest in a pointed military cap known as a budyonovka–along with the ushanka, another iconic Russian hat—so we left him to make the sale.
Performance
Early in Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark, the character of “the European,” modeled on travelogue author Marquis de Custine, declares as he wanders the halls of the Hermitage Museum, “Russia is a theater!” Sokurov’s film invokes and holds up to scrutiny the long-held western notion of Russia as a land of facades and fakery born from eternally foiled attempts to emulate, or even dare to compete with, its more civilized neighbors. The concept of the Potemkin village served as a shorthand for that idea (the real story is more complicated). In modern times, reports of Russian falsification—Olympic sports doping, trolls posing as American activists as part of Russia’s ongoing information warfare—continue to reinforce the stereotype.
A gentler variant of this notion appears in the seminal critical essay by semiotician Yuri Lotman about the theatricalization of everyday life among the Russian nobility in the wake of Peter the Great’s radical westernization of the country, a concept that informs the visual design of Joe Wright’s 2012 film version of Anna Karenina. Wright himself was inspired the description of “St. Petersburg high society as people living their lives as if upon a stage” in Orlando Figes’ 2002 book Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia: “Figes’ thesis is that Russia has always suffered from an identity crisis, not quite knowing whether it’s part of the East or part of the West. During the period Anna Karenina was written in and about, Russians decided they were definitely part of Western Europe and that they wanted to be cultured like the French. […] The Russian side was always observing and checking the French side to make sure that you were behaving, or ‘performing,’ correctly. Their whole existence became a performance with imported ideas of decorum, manners, and culture […] I realized, ‘Okay, we could situate this film in a theatre.’”
So as scholars of Russian culture, we were primed to think about theatricality as we embarked on our exploration of the Vernisazh. But then the market setting itself throws into high relief questions of the real and the fake, as the value of the objects for sale so often depends on consensus about their authenticity. As we were confronted with attempts to basically deceive us, we started to ponder how human beings define value, and what other sources of value there are aside from authenticity. We also reflected on what, aside from purely mercenary reasons, might compel an individual to make things up. And on the flip side, what is the value for individuals to share their authentic memories with complete strangers whom they will likely never meet again?
In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1937 novel Despair, protagonist Hermann provides an eloquent, aesthetic frame for his childhood fibbing: “I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.”
At the Vernisazh, we encountered artisans whose handicraft was for sale, and sellers who offered carefully crafted stories. Elena Nikulina writes about the manufacturing of object stories at the market (we have preserved the Russian words for some of these objects as English does not fully convey their expressiveness):
“Every bauble [bezdeliushka] immediately becomes overgrown with legends. The vendors, with enviable artistry, tell stories about the historical value of the trinkets [pobriakushek]: this bottle, they say, used to stand in Stalin’s cupboard, and Lenin himself ate with this very spoon. Foreigners believe these fairy tales and with goggling eyes and cries of ‘Wow!’ buy up all the junk [khlam]. They do not have the slightest idea about the actual value of these things, which can be found in every grandmother’s storage bin. For Russians, a different, slightly cheaper amount is quoted. But the prices still remain exorbitant. The Russian shoppers understand that they are being fooled, but they still pay up.”
Nikulina’s account echoes what Michèle de La Pradelle argues in Market Day in Provence—the market becomes a consensual illusion for buyers and sellers. Both agree in an unspoken way to the deception, because the market serves as an escape from the everyday with its hierarchies and forms of inequality and oppression. This illusion-making is a joint production, and both sides benefit.
In article from 2002, Anton Savin describes how the market offers an alternative sort of economic and social interaction:
“For the majority of vendors, standing behind the counter turns into an absorbing way to spend time, a form of recreation […] A person could end up selling nothing, or could sell three or four cheap things that had been lying around, and still come away satisfied.” Indeed, we observed vendors for whom social interaction seemed just as, if not more, important than selling things. Savin goes on to add: “I am beginning to think that the Vernisazh is the only place in Moscow where trade happens the way it should happen in century after century, washing off the vendors the eternal filth of their profession. It is only here that you interact with the person behind the counter as with an equal. And this does not have to do with the specifics of the goods, but with the people; moreover, it is so pleasant to forego cash registers, branded packaging, everything that regulates the life of the current … proper Moscow. The last little island of liberated people [ellipsis in the original].” The last word, vol’nitsa, that we have rendered as “liberated people” is difficult to translate—it refers to a community of free individuals who have escaped oppression of serfdom and live on the fringes of society. Now, for Savin (writing in the aftermath of the “wild 90s” bringing economic shock therapy, the loss of the social safety net, and staggering wealth disparities) it is capitalism that oppresses. His reference to the filth of commerce is striking, as is his suggestion that modern forms of commerce deprive us of freedom.
A collection of brightly colored plastic vegetables, nestled in a pink rubber swimming cap, caught our eye as we were making our way through the flea market. The men selling them identified themselves as former actors, and told us that the plastic vegetables once belonged to the director Alexander Mindaze. The person selling them told us that he had appeared in 98 movies. (Both actors gave us their names, and we later verified that these were the names of actors who had performed in the films that they listed for us. But to honor their wishes that we preserve their confidentiality, we are going to refer to them by the pseudonyms Grigorii and Stepan.) Grigorii shared that he had acted with Harrison Ford and served as his double. We asked each actor their favorite film in which they had acted. Grigorii named a TV series about a love triangle from 2016, and Stepan, an action film from 2006.
Stepan said that the vegetables were from Soviet times and were given to children to help them learn how to draw. “Nowadays they make them out of wax,” and that is worse because kids can chew on them, which would be unsafe. These plastic vegetables, on the other hand, are not dangerous unless the child swallows them whole (not likely to happen given the size of these objects) The men also expressed nostalgia for the old-timey actors’ face paint because it was all natural, not like today’s chemical-laden makeup. They told a story about getting ten kopecks extra in their salary because they had to apply makeup to their skin.
While the transactions in the Vernisazh market have become more formalized and regulated over the years, a shadow economy persists at its margins, intricately tied up with the excavation of Moscow and its environs, a process that has been unearthing archaeological riches. These sites have become contested areas as archeologists battle developers. The story of “Moscow under construction” took a new turn in 2017 with the mass protests by residents of low-rise khrushchevki that were facing demolition by developers aiming to build high-rent properties there, as these buildings occupy prized central Moscow locations. The residents, fearing that they would be resettled into inferior housing (lacking green spaces and not accessible via the metro) on the distant outskirts of Moscow protested: there were mass demonstrations with people carrying historically and politically charged signs such as “No to deportations.” The Moscow mayor ended up delaying the plan for a few years. (To read more about the protests, see the story at this link ; another article covering the story can be found here.)
While we were taking a break from our fieldwork, two construction workers clad in orange vests approached us and sought, eventually successfully, to sell us what they claimed was an ancient coin; they were quite honest about needing money for a drink. The coin, they said, was a silver ruble dating back to the eighteenth century that they had found at a construction site at the excavations in Mytishchi, a town located to the northeast of Moscow, where “buildings are being torn down and construction is starting,” the men told us. The chattier of the two workers, who showed a passport listing his first name as Ramzan, said he was a former doctor and apologized for the condition of his teeth, several of which were missing. Ramzan told us a wild story: he said that he was from Dmitrovgrad where during a dig he had found in a basement human bones including a strange elongated skull that he thought was a Neanderthal one. Police arrived and at first thought that someone had been killed, but then noticed the odd shape of the skull and were relieved, realizing that it was from a long time ago. Then archeologists arrived and took the whole thing away.
Ramzan also spoke with vexation about the presence at the construction site of “Greens,” referring to people working on ecological protection. He insisted that news crews had been there filming it all and said we could look it up—it had all appeared in the news media. We did some investigating later, and found a story about a body discovered in a basement in Dmitrovgrad, though nothing about Neanderthal bones. We were left wondering about Ramzan’s motivation for spinning that entire yarn. (His more taciturn partner, Mikhail Ivanych, quietly took off with the money they had gotten from us, leaving his dismayed buddy empty-handed by the time he realized what had happened.)
One of us bought two gilt peacock napkin holders for 500 rubles, charmed by the vendor’s story of their provenance: he said that he remembered them from his childhood in the 1950s, and that his father brought them home from a trip somewhere, either up North or at the border with China. He said he had never seen such objects anywhere else. The most compelling part of the vendor’s story was his reminiscence of seeing the peacocks at the two ends of a long table. When there were napkins in the holder, the lights refracted in the glass decorations, generating rainbows, he said. He conjured up a mesmerizing, almost Nabokovian memory for us with those radiant peacocks bedazzling the family meals. However, the peacocks’ design did not look Soviet, but rather somewhat imperial. That should have tipped us off.
In Russian folk iconography these birds are denizens of paradise. Who doesn’t fantasize about paradise. In a sense, we all long for the Eden of childhood from which we are exiled, as an émigré writer once said. Maybe that sort of longing drove the vendor’s fabrication.
Indeed, soon after our purchase an older woman named Nina came over to insist that these peacocks were so cheaply made that they could not possibly be antique. Nina was very invested in foregrounding her expertise in recognizing authenticity through workmanship and type of material. She read us a stern lecture apropos of the peacocks that we had bought and was very sincere about protecting us from being cheated, but also showing her own knowledge—a form of power and agency in an economically difficult situation. She condemned China for flooding the market with fakes, a recurring motif in our conversations at the market.
When we ran into Evgenii again and told him about the construction workers and their coin, he informed us that our experience was part of a widespread scam—copies of old coins manufactured in China (!), bought by Romani traders, and peddled by construction workers (a kind of perfect storm of Russian Others). We observed that it was all like theater, and he laughed, saying “teatr odnogo aktyora [a one-actor theater].” Evgenii further said that at this market, “knowledge is the currency.” Two people meet, one with money, one with experience, and each receives the opposite. He advised us to watch for details that stand out—vystupaiushchie detali—in figurines and other wares. You can bargain if you spot a crack or other imperfection through a magnifying glass.
Evgenii also shared a story about how he glued two parts of a cup together –a Soviet base and nineteenth-century top—then sold it as an authentic whole.
Evgenii’s story is reminiscent of Putin’s grafting together aspects of Soviet and tsarist heritage to create a narrative of Russian greatness that suits his political purposes, but also Plato’s Symposium reflection about seeking one’s other half:
“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him. […] we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
What does it mean that we hope Evgenii’s story of the century-spanning glued-together cup is true, even if it means that someone—Evgenii’s hapless customer— was truly deceived?
Geopolitics
The issue of Russian theatricality is quite hard to disentangle from geopolitics, because concepts of Russia’s staginess stem in large part from Russian intellectuals’ self-conscious view of themselves as being weighed on Western scales (of progress, civilization, and so forth) and found wanting. At times during our discussions with Vernisazh vendors we ran head-on into issues of national identity and global competition, when all we were hoping for were stories about beloved objects. We learned something from every encounter, even the most unsettling ones.
We met a vendor named Gennady Vasilievich who specializes in antiques such as Soviet porcelain (farfor) from the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s—he turned them over to show us the details and stamps on the bottom attesting to their authenticity. He had older porcelain as well, including cups from the imperial period. Gennady told us that the objects in his stall came from Russia as well as from Europe. Among them were samovars, selling for $100, painted by Gennady and his friends to look like soccer balls in honor of the World Cup, which was about to take place in Russia for the first time. (Gennady hails from Tula, renowned for its production of samovars and other metal wares, including weapons, as well as ornately decorated spice cookies known as prianiki, the oldest Russian dessert). Gennady told us that we would not find such samovars anywhere else. At that historical moment, sports were a fraught topic in Russia, simultaneously a source of shame, with the Olympic doping scandal unfolding, and a point of pride, as Russians looked to past triumphs to affirm their country’s standing in the world. The World Cup thus offered the hope of Russia proving itself as deserving a place among the civilized nations, as well as authentically strong and heroic—a world champion.
On “wholesale day” at the Vernisazh (taking place every Wednesday) we saw a different set of merchants who come just on this day, including a seller of an array of dolls in military dress, all with the same face; one us recognized it as that of her childhood doll Lyalya who traveled to the U.S. with us when we emigrated in the late Soviet period, and who survived rough treatment by Soviet customs officials looking for contraband.
These dolls hailed from the Kirov factory and were originally made to be female baby dolls. Their vendor buys and dresses them, using authentic materials (e.g., a hat made of astrakhan) and authentic representation (the right insignia for the right officer). We spotted gold znachki depicting tanks on some of the dolls. The seller is a former military man, retired for two years. As he said to us, “Pension—what are you going to do? (Pensiia—chto delat’?)”; he had a very chipper demeanor. He told us that the most popular doll was the one dressed as the commandant of Crimea. Both Russians and foreigners bought these dolls; French and Italian visitors favored ones with a nautical theme, while Chinese customers, according to the vendor, all went for the doll in the red peaked cap (furazhka). These dolls, priced at 4000 rubles wholesale, 6000 retail, were obviously for display, not for play.
Inside this doll are more match-ups of Russian and American leaders, all the way down to Kennedy and Khrushchev. The maker of the matryoshka, Andrei (not his real name), hails from Riazan’. He draws sketches for artists and they paint the matryoshka, which are made of linden and aspen wood. Andrei is an art school graduate who now teaches history; he wrote his dissertation about the influence of the national idea on Japanese government in the Meiji period. When we pointed out how matryoshki are Japanese in origin, he replied –echoing the motif of national competition that we heard from time to time at the market—that they had the original idea but did not develop it, and moreover they don’t have the right soft sort of wood.
We told shared with Andrei our impression that his depiction of Obama in such close proximity to Putin looked utopian; he replied that on the contrary, what he was seeking to show in this particular matryoshka with its leader pairings was a “history of cold relationships.” Yet even if that was his intention, the faces of the two leaders have a certain charm to them; perhaps those faces reflect the artist’s own essential irrepressible good-hearted nature.
Turning to a critique of his own government, Andrei spoke of mass hypnosis by the “iashchik” (“the box,” i.e., television) that generates consent, invoking the phrase “bread and circuses” (khleb i zrelishcha—in Russian it is “bread and spectacles”) that we had heard a number of times from locals, against the backdrop of relentless festivals that summer in Moscow. When we noted his critical stance, Andrei replied that it was shared by “everyone,” but they keep it to themselves because they need to get along, and no one wants revolution.
Andrei told us that World War II continued to be a source of unifying memory in Russia around which the people could rally (in contrast with the Bolshevik revolution, whose resonance was much more controversial); this tragic period came up often in our conversations at the Vernisazh, and in the visual culture of the city that summer. Select trains of the metro had bright yellow interiors adorned with stills from classic black-and-white Soviet films about the war and politicized, pro-Stalin historical texts.
In a very masculine part of the antiques market dominated by tough-looking men who did not wish to be photographed and metal objects including military gear, we met a young man who seemed a bit more approachable. When we asked about the small, rusty, pointy things displayed on his table, he said they were arrowheads dating back to the Time of Troubles (smutnoe vremia) which he explained as the time when the Poles invaded “our land” (nashu zemliu). We were struck by this motif of defending the motherland from invaders that popped up in his description of the objects. This vendor’s outlook might have been shaped by the ambient WWII discourse and imagery that surrounded us.
The person who sold this figurine to us is Tatiana; she referred to the figurine with the charming word pliasunya (Russian has several words for dancing, the loan word tantsevat’ and the folksier pliasat’ derived from a Slavic root meaning “to make merry”). Tatiana told us that they don’t make these sorts of figurines now. Unprompted, she asked whether we thought Trump would win the U.S. presidential election. Tatiana was interested in talking about world affairs; she asked, “what does the world have against Russia?” At times she seemed to echo the sentiments voiced by the rural grandmother in the video “Don’t Go to War, Obama” from 2014. Mostly she spoke about how she wished there would not be war and couldn’t understand why the powers that be wanted it.Tatiana lives across from a shuttered factory that used to export power lines abroad; now, as she said, all the factories had closed. She also told us about a once-thriving collective farm where she has her dacha near Moscow, with people raising pigs, chickens, and cows in the mid-90s up to the year 2000, that was all destroyed to make room for new dachas: everyone slaughtered their chickens, and the birch trees were all cut down. But now things were starting to return, and life was getting better. Interestingly, Tatiana connected these improvements with the Western sanctions against Russia, in the sense that these measures, or more specifically Russia’s counter-sanctions that forbade the import of Western goods, were encouraging domestic production, a kind of return to self-sufficiency.
(The Lavka-Lavka restaurant in Moscow that also publishes a farming-advocacy newspaper strikes a similar chord in their messaging. It is a recurring discourse in Russia today—echoed, for example by the chef Vladimir Mukhin of White Rabbit in the Chef’s Table Netflix documentary where he credits the success of his restaurant with this surge of interest in authentic old-fashioned Russian food made with local ingredients.)
Tatiana spoke critically of the 1990s as a period when there was an influx of Western goods into Russia, as if “they” wanted to shut down our production (it was not clear who Tatiana meant by “they”: Western business, Western government, or the Russian government letting it happen). Putin, however, was making things better. Tatiana talked animatedly about Putin’s appearance, noting that he is short but feisty, and she was impressed by how his divorce had been treated like it was not the end of his career; he gets things done and can deal with terrorists.
Tatiana is retired, on disability, yet has to work; she used herself as an example of how “we are the richest country in the world yet we live like the poorest.” When we mentioned to her the notion of person-to-person diplomacy that guided our fieldwork, Tatiana was very receptive to the idea, as were other vendors whom we met at the Vernisazh.
Two artisans with adjacent stalls – Andrei Savrasov, a maker of model lighthouses, and Roman, who makes wool banya (Russian sauna) caps—were very friendly and eager to share information. They began with asking about politics, whether Americans believe what our (American) leaders say, but quickly decided to switch to more positive subjects.
Andrei S. makes model lighthouses with working lights. He visited the United States for the first time in 2001 and saw lighthouse-souvenirs there. He said there had not been such souvenirs in Russia. Behind his display was a map of Russia with stars marking the locations of lighthouses. Andrei pointed out a big difference: in the US, souvenir lighthouses are made of plastic, while his models are made of wood, so they are lightweight. What is more, in the US, the structure that stands at the highest point is a lighthouse, while in Russia, it is a church. We noticed that ideas about national distinctiveness, framed in terms of closeness to nature and spirituality, shaped how Andrei talked about his wares.
The artisans told us that in the 1990s, 90% of their customers were American, so they studied English in order to be able to talk to them. Now, there are only a few Americans who come to the Vernisazh. Both men said that they used to believe in the US, in its ideal of democracy, but now they felt let down, upset at how Obama called Russia the biggest threat to the world when it is really ISIS. (We were startled to hear this, when in fact it was Republican Mitt Romney who had said this about Russia; Obama by contrast had called Russia a “regional power,” a characterization that likely incensed Putin.) We replied that Americans did not all feel that way. At the Vernisazh we encountered two kinds of local knowledge, both the forms of understanding (about, for example, crafts traditions and their sources and significance) that are grassroots in origin, and the “knowledge” that locals have based on top-down misinformation campaigns, accompanied by a distrust of experts and expertise. In the United States we confront these challenges as well.
One of the two vendors at this stall said that the toys had come all the way from Nizhnii Novgorod. Nizhnii has a huge dump, he said—it is the dirtiest city in Russia. His friend interjected, “He’s kidding.” According to the more vocal vendor, Nizniii used to have samyi krutoi rynok [“the coolest market”] in Russia, which had been recently revived.
They were strange men, contradictory, inviting us to sit and chat in their stall on tiny folding chairs but then declaring, “really all Americans should be swept out of Russia with a filthy broom.” (Brooms figure prominently in Russian political symbolism—they were wielded by Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki; a jolly Lenin in a 1920 poster showing him sweeping the enemies of the revolution off the globe; and by Moscow mayor Luzhkov depicted as a janitor by court sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. The WWII posters in the Vernisazh flea market even featured a Red Army soldier holding a broom.) And us too?, we asked. “No, you’re nice.”
See also this brief video analysis of the poster by Prof. Ethan Pollock
The vendors drew us into a conversation about Americans as a whole. We were asked whether it was true that, as comedian Mikhail Zadornov says, vse amerikantsy tupye [all Americans are stupid]? They were hostile toward George Soros, anticipating by a few years an attitude that would gain currency in the Anglophone sphere. A woman with a young daughter who was hanging out nearby kept disputing their harsh claims about Americans, asserting that ordinary people do not believe what the politicians say. The men did not consent to being photographed—“we’re afraid of you Americans.” And one said “if my wife sees me on the Internet, she’ll take the kids away.” “He’s kidding.” And after all that as we took our leave, they chorused, Prikhodite! [Come again!]
Reviving the Past
Our summer of fieldwork at the Vernisazh was framed by archeology in a number of ways. The Moscow press featured stories of real estate developers pitted versus archeologists, the latter seeking to protect the material traces of the past from obliteration. Construction workers unearthed all sorts of things as Russia underwent reconstruction. And at the market, our interlocutors sought to excavate the past for us.
We met Kirill, an architect who has designed some buildings in Moscow; he collects znachki and model cars still in their original packaging and sells them. Kirill talked about Chinese tourists visiting the market to buy old stamps because they had all been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution–now they are coming to Russia to rescue their cultural heritage.
Our main informant about these items was Ivan, who wore a striped tel’nyashka shirt and whose stall offered a vast array of znachki. Ivan let us photograph his pins but politely declined to be photographed himself; so we hope that our images of his wares can convey at least a glimmer of his encyclopedic knowledge and vibrant personality.
Ivan comes from six generations of Muscovites. He told us that his great-grandmother was the love child of the great satirical writer Saltykov-Shchedrin, and his grandfather sang at the Bolshoi Theater. Ivan was formerly a military engineer and now serves as a consultant on non-firing weapons for many vendors at the Vernisazh.
We learned from Ivan that znachki originated in the Soviet period, evolving from purely military ones. He listed for us the many uses of znachki: they were worn on special occasions, like medals, and collected as souvenirs in cities one had visited; they commemorated triumphs (the Olympics) and tragedies (he showed us a German Democratic Republic pin with flags of all nations of people held at Buchenwald) and were awarded for various achiеvements. Some znachki were educational (poznavatel’nye), such as ones featuring birds native to Russia, with the bird names included: zhulan (shrike), remez (known in English less pithily as the Eurasian penduline tit), and ivolga (oriole) –serving to let children (especially ones dwelling in urban high-rises and afflicted with nature deficit disorder) know that such creatures existed.
There were znachki to be worn by university graduates with different symbols based on the graduate’s field of study, and post-Soviet pins with the tsarist emblem for graduates from the FSB (formerly KGB) academy. Another pin was emblazoned with one of our favorite slogans, “propagandist of reading,” and we regretted not snapping it up—we will look for it the next time we visit.
Ivan also offered to sell us personal documents that accompanied a collection of medals and znachki, all of which had once belonged to a woman whose relatives sold her estate. When we hesitated, he told us not to feel so sad for her because “in our [Russians’, that is] stormy life [burnaia zhizn’]” to live to seventy is really something. Ivan also traded in amber jewelry and sold quite a bit of it while we hung around his stall. Our friend Ramzan (now in regular clothing) tried to sell Ivan a coin, but no luck.
In contrast with other vendors whom we met, Ivan did not resort to broad generalizations about national groups. Instead, he shared his view that “there are no bad nations, only bad people.” Like Tatiana, who had sold us the porcelain folk dancing figurine, Ivan reflected on the impact of Russia’s post-industrialization. When we spoke about the transformation of such urban spaces as the ZIL Culture Center, once the site of Russia’s first car factory, Ivan seemed wistful about the once-mighty industrial hub sinking into historical oblivion; he mused that what the people are getting primarily now is entertainment—invoking the “bread and circuses” motif that had come up in a number of our conversations at the Vernisazh.
Before we left, Ivan gave us a gift—an aluminum medal from 1975 commemorating a successful partisan ambush of Nazi German troops in the forests of Briansk in present-day Belarus, which makes a curious companion for the Peter III coin sold to us by Ramzan.
Igor Stupkin, a sculptor working with wood, was the most positive person to whom we spoke at the Vernisazh. He seemed driven not by profit but by the love of art-making and connecting to people. Trained at the Abramtsevo artists’ colony, Igor is an intense amateur historian of material culture and intangible cultural practices, the language of things. He told us that he has collected bits and pieces of information in his studies, but has never had the patience to write it all up.
Igor was eager to share with us an alternative narrative about the origins of matryoshka: he told us that ongoing excavations led by archeologist Valentin Yanin at Novgorod have revealed families of figures, each smaller than the previous. The numbers of matryoshki have symbolic meaning, so the total number signified different things, for example, the number five meant good fortune.
Igor was thankful to early cultural commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky who allowed folk crafts (remesla) to be sustained during the Soviet period even as war was waged on pre-revolutionary traditions–for example, artists trained as icon painters were able to switch to creating decorated lacquer boxes with ideologically suitable subjects such as the Soviet ritual of the subbotnik (collective voluntary work on weekends), so that in the 1990s when there was again a big demand for religious painting, the artists had kept up that the methods essential to that tradition. For Igor, local well–developed craft serves as an alternative to that of military tragedies and triumphs as a framework for thinking about the past and national identity.
For Igor, craft-making is a source of inspiration, energy, and sustenance. He talked about carving wood as a happy time of flow—he told us about staying up all night to finish a commission, though he added that he does not like to make things to order, preferring to work at his own pace.
Igor spoke of how the linden tree is involved in pagan rituals. It grows straight, so it is a symbol of strength for men (they would take part in khorovody, circle dances with song, around the tree going off to battle) and for women who put ribbons around it because it was multifaceted like women themselves: you can make tea out of it, but also the woven peasant shoes known as lapti. Igor conducts research on pagan Slavic folklore, but he is interested not just in the uniqueness of Slavs but also their connections to the Celts that can be traced via traditional design, and other examples of mutual cultural influences. Igor is from a multiethnic family, with a Muslim father and Catholic mother, and speaks several languages. He is inspired by the possibilities of intercultural understanding, and the idea that children can interact in a way that transcends language. Igor cited an example of how people from the Caucasus talk loudly and foreigners might take that the wrong way, and suggested that interacting with objects can help to overcome problems of translatability.
Coda: Wooden toys and thing-power
When we walked by artisan Mikhail Slavinskii’s stall, we saw him at work carving a wooden hedgehog, a little creature that seemed to call out to us.
Mikhail is a self-taught artist, an engineer’s son who lives outside of Moscow but hopes to move to the capital soon. Some of the objects that he carves are meant to serve as an “antistress” (a category in Russian referring to squishy stress balls, fidget spinners, and other such handheld devices); the ones of softer wood for kids who are teething. Mikhail told us about the wood and kind of oil he uses on the figurines so that the end product is all natural (“ecological” was the word he used). He was a very positive and pleasant man who conveyed well wishes to us in English.
In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett she sets out her project’s aim in terms of recovering how children see the material world: “I will turn the figures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange, in something like the way a common word when repeated can become a foreign, nonsense sound. In the space created by this estrangement, a vital materiality can start to take place. Or, rather, it can take shape again, for a version of this idea already found expression in childhood experiences of a world populated by animate things rather than passive objects” (emphasis in the original). We are grateful to Mikhail and other people we met at the Vernisazh whose wares connected us with that sense of world wonder that lets us revel in the vital materiality all around us.
Sources
- Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
- Billington, James. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture. Vintage, 1970.
- Buckler, Julie A., Julie A. Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson, eds. Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action. U of Wisconsin P, 2018.
- de La Pradelle, Michèle. Market Day in Provence. U of Chicago P, 2006.
- Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Metropolitan Books, 2002.
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Despair. 1965. Vintage, 1989.
- Mystical power of icons:
Shevchenko, Inna. “Syshchik: Antikvarnyi iskhod.” Rossiiskie Vesti 03-20-2002. http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/1923119 - Myth-busting the concept of prayer-saturated icons: https://www.pravmir.ru/namolennaya-ikona-chto-eto-takoe/
- Interview with Joe Wright regarding his film version of Anna Karenina:
https://www.focusfeatures.com/article/from_novel_to_screenplay_to_unique_setting - Plato’s Symposium:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half - How the market offers a way to transcend the filth of commerce:
Savin, Anton. “My gorozhane: Iarmarka bezvremen’ia.” Obschaia Gazeta: 01-31-2002 http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/3961804 - The manufacturing of stories at the Vernisazh:
Nikulina, Elena. “Izmailovskaia barakholka. Star’evshchiki-lokhotronshchiki”
Argumenty i fakty, No. 20, May 14, 2003. http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/4933877 - Danila Master educational program at the Izmailovo Kremlin: https://www.kremlin-izmailovo.com/licey-danila-master
