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EAST-WEST-RESEARCH  December 2006

EAST-WEST-RESEARCH December 2006

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Subject:

To understand contemporary Russia, consider its airports (The Economist)

From:

"Serguei Alex. Oushakine" <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Serguei Alex. Oushakine

Date:

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 11:48:16 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (303 lines)

http://www.economist.com/world/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=8401107


...Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to
change—much like Russia itself....

 
Russian airports 

Kama Sutra and feral cats

Dec 19th 2006 | MOSCOW 
From The Economist print edition


To understand contemporary Russia, consider its airports


WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless
steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It
involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant
surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors
may want to take off again immediately. 

But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the
cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful
encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family
resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the
variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they
suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and
the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally
collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't
changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how
much is beginning to. 

Sheremetyevo: 
Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be
unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for
a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or
before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.

Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980
Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old
regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even
worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the
runway. 

The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow
queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the
queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches
the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair,
six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian
notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist
confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in
Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).

As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal:
beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the
counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush
of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on
Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate
himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle
things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach
his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of
queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he
will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is
nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors.
The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the
profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers
offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration,
they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke
alarms in the toilets. 

Mineralnye Vody: 
To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a
series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are
checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a
sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the
airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian
swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a
large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.

Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before
the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies,
blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular
holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia
that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African
than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold
inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since
perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are
arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of
the Soviet Union. 

Vladikavkaz: 
Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody,
is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the
semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the
Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might
be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and
internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take
some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the
restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples,
the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took
part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.

Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and
unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads
past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the
terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead
children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves.
The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.

It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a
couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport
official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are
they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the
official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the
runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.

Kaliningrad: 
This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before
being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their
standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why
Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven.

It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture.
By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with
it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it,
deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet
Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly
that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as
contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing
Baltic fleet. 

The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take
Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas
of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the
consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy
passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably
finish it.

Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): 
At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan,
Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous
during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and
interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't
been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic
Russian-airport dilemma.

You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned
Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the
cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the
aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether
affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his
nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden
the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics,
securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade
attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether
you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is
asking or offering. 

A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's
drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and
salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power
struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are
too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are
giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is
no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this
driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your
flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?

Murmansk: 
Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with
snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with
still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of
sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for
a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the
toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat,
silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief
on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region,
or that was once produced.

The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for
and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a
destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was
utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the
Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry
docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built
in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to
deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual
post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls;
pavements that seem to dissolve into the road. 

For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be,
but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is
light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel
around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against
the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the
town.

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: 
In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890,
Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in
Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of
Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with
four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of
Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the
Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment
bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment
failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can
still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of
the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.

Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as
well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas,
which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of
Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests,
and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's
throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find
in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even
less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and
jobs.

The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the
announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear.
Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in
desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers.
Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport
authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international
terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there
speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.

Irkutsk: 
Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city
to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that
it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads
through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous
Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was
home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them
into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that
might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a
diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown
into the icy Angara river. 

Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment
blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut
on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the
baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the
hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently
borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is
chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an
interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.

The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built.
It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are
hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened
by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from
the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.

Yekaterinburg: 
Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the
state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often
no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to
it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal.
And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively
Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It
has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where
the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers
proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”

It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's
airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg
that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to
the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims
of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.

In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the
victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of
the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of
the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the
war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most
of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are
parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates
are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new
airport. 

Sheremetyevo: 
Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is
happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's
other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which
airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are
often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the
other airports mentioned in this article).

There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage
carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if
they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them,
much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The
nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is
going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of
Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo
has started to change—much like Russia itself. 

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