![]() |
An early statue of Karl Marx in the town of Balashikha by the sculptor Georgy Alexeev |
The idea of writing a blog solely devoted to the town of Zheleznodorozhny (which, in any case, is now only a district of the larger town of Balashikha) came up with the problem that there are only very occasional aspects which may make the town worth writing about. It may be the town where Vasily Arkhipov and Anna Karenina are connected to but it's not as though it could really be the centre of attention for many other posts. Yes there are many more curious things to say about this town:
Andrey Bely lived in the fraction called Kuchino; there's a rather curious Lenin statue (though early Soviet statues can be found not far away which are far more curious).
Balashikha is definitely more interesting and a local writer has managed to write whole books on the history of the town. Having visited the museum of local lore (kraevedchesky muzei) there are undoubtedly things to be written. But still for a blog to develop into a project more of the rare tales of places that never get written about need to become included.
So the blog project is the following:
There will be nothing here about the big capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg. Nor will anything be written about other major cities in Russia. Rather this will be a blog devoted to those many forgotten places that can only be reached by local trains (or other forms of public transport) that set out from the large cities and stop in weird little places that few would ever visit let alone write about.
Let's see how this goes. I guess the spark for this idea was travelling to Balashikha for my medical texts to get Temporary Leave to Live in Russia. As I wrote on my facebook page it was a fortuitous moment where I discovered by chance one of the early Soviet statues by a sculptor named Georgy Dmitrievich Alexeev (see above):
A moment of joyful discovery while going for my medical tests to obtain my Temporary Residence Permit for Russia- these by the way include tests for Tuberculosis, HIV, as well as narcotics tests (but not it seems the test for leprosy which is only needed when applying for Permanent Leave to Remain). The narcotics analysis consisted of pissing into a plastic cup for a flirty nurse who gave me the third degree on why I would actually want to live in Russia just after being interrogated by the head doctor whose only question was about how often I go on lengthy alcoholic benders (запой). However, it's been all worthwhile as outside the first clinic I visited stands one of the first Marx statues to be erected in Russia (in 1919) by Georgy Dmitrievich Alexeev. Curiously Alexeev also created the first bust and the first statue of Lenin, neither of which are very far from my town and are apparently still standing. Alexeev lived just a few kilometres away from my apartment and his archive is located in Balashika (of which the former town of Zhelezhnodorozhny is now part since their amalgamation a couple of years ago). A museum was planned for the sculptor in 1969 but, unfortunately, no work was carried out on it and in more recent post-Soviet times the village of Saltikovskaya has become a prestigious village for rich Russians to build expensive dachas and who presumably are not likely to be keen on Marxist sculptors being celebrated with a museum. The sculptor, incidentally, made images of Marx a good ten years before the October Revolution. Alas, I don't have a camera at the moment but here is one of the few images I found on the internet of the early Marx statue which I bumped into on my way to the HIV test.