Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Why a blog about the bleak Moscow suburb Zheleznodorozhny?
Writing about the town of Zheleznodorozhny, once known as Obiralovka (the spot where in Lev Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina the eponymous heroine threw herself under a train) is, in many ways, no mean task. The idea has been present in my mind for some time and yet the question of how to do so has been a moot one. This can, of course, be no travelogue. Tourists simply do not come here to this grey, uninviting Moscow suburb that has grown from a small settlement of less than a hundred in Tolstoy's time to a town of almost 140,000 people today. In spite of having lived here on and off for about four or five years my attitude hasn't really differed from that of the school administrator where I used to work. Although born here she really had very little to tell me about either the history of the town or anything of great interest about the present day life of Zheleznodorozhny. For her (as for myself) Moscow was the city she wished to be associated with and the unfortunate fact of being located in a town 20 kilometres away meant little apart from a journey to and back in one of those overcrowded, smelly, local trains known as the elektrichka so immortalised in Venedikt Yerofeev's Moskva-Petushki. Zheleznodorozhny, by the way, is one of those stops on this line and so the town has been immortalised at least twice in great Russian literature.
For me is that I write about Russiathere is a certain irony in writing about cinema from a town considered for entry into the Guiness Book of Records for being the settlement with the largest population in the world not having its own cinema. While a location in the town has been marked for an entertainment centre it has been standing more or less idle for something like a decade. Of course, this is not a town likely to be showing Godard in the near future even if the cinema eventually gets built. An attempt of my own to show Lindsay Anderson's If ... at the school where I worked for a new cinema club turned into farce as the turnout consisted of three people two of whom insisted that I show a Tom Hanks film instead that was lying on the desk of the receptionists. I could do little but look on with jaundiced prejudice during this years Moscow International Film Festival to see that the cinema clubs of Moscow Region gave the weirdest of ratings to the competition films. From their votes it suggests that Moscow Region was the least cinephilic of all regions from the whole of Russia. Being close to a cultural capital seems to mean little. Cinephiles from Yakutia or Sakhalin seem far more informed than their Moscow Region colleagues.
Yet surely writing from the 'void' is a necessary task. Bleakness can surely be both a subject matter and the source of deep reflections. After all without Brezhnev's Soviet Union where would all the Conceptualists and Sots Art be and that extraordinary profusion of talent that emerged in the 1970s Soviet art world? How can the void that Zheleznodorozhny appears to be serve as a kind of source of reflection and creation? How can the banal become interesting without surrendering oneself to a cheap journalistic prose which simply turns travelogue writing into its opposite becoming a denunciation of the unprepossessing and the unsightly? I'm not sure whether one could try to write a psychogeography of the place (and psychogeography in Anglo-Saxon translation has become rather synonymous with psycho-babble) but it is surely worth trying to prise apart life here from its different accretions.
In many ways I can't help thinking that this blog was born many years ago in the summer of 1999 while on a Czech language course in the town of Ceske Budejovice. Each and every weekend (on both Saturday and Sunday) we would be taken to yet another Czech castle and expected to admire the beauty of this historic location. A fellow student on the course (a geographer with an interest in the high rise building) convinced me that these absurd trips were of no interest (and I needed little convincing already by the second weekend) and that the townscape of Ceske Budejovice could give more scope for aesthetic reflection. Describing Zheleznodorozhny may also give some scope for reflections on a different plane. Who knows? In the process of writing the blog I hope to make certain discoveries of my own of how to portray the unportrayed.
Tuesday, 3 September 2013
Vasily Arkhipov, the man from Zheleznodorozhny who saved the world!
Having lived in the small town of Zheleznodorozhny for some time now, I have long been thinking of how I could start an occasional blog on the town. It's rather difficult in many ways to talk about small satellite towns outside of Moscow. For one cultural life in these places seems to be rather non-existent. There is a certain irony of arriving at the station in Zhelezodorozhny. A few months ago bilingual signs at the station were put up in Russian and in English pointing you in certain directions. One of the most curious signs gives a pointer to a place which apparently sells theatre tickets. The problem is that Zheleznodorozhny does not even have a theatre. For that matter it doesn't even have a cinema in spite of the fact that in the 2010 census it was recorded as having a population of over 130,000 souls. There has been a sign suggesting for most of the past decade that a cinema would be built (undoubtedly one of those multiplex cinemas purely for action films from Hollywood)- but there has been little real work carried out in the vicinity. The yellowing placards denoting public works have been replaced recently. Anyway, for cultural life, Moscow is only just over half an hour by elektrichka, so as long as one puts some effort into things, culture can be had.
Of course, Zheleznodorozhny's main claim to fame is that it was once named Obiralovka. It was a settlement serving a station of the same name which became well-known due to Lev Tolstoy setting the suicide of his fictional character, Anna Karenina, in this very place. Truth to say, the town doesn't appear to have taken much advantage of this - not trying to draw the tourists in for example with some statue of Anna Karenina plunging to her death, though there is an Anna Karenina nightclub here. Yet apart from this and the fact that one of the great Russian symbolists Andrey Bely lived nearby, there seemed little to really write about for this blog.
Until today it seems when I learned that a certain Vasili Arkhipov lived here. For those who have never heard of Vasili Arkhipov is, they may be surprised to hear that they owe their very existence to this man. He was the co-officer who prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis when the Americans were firing depth charges to force the submarines to the surface. Thomas Blanton, a NSA director back in 2002, was quoted as saying that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world". Apparently, he was the only one of three senior officers who withdrew his consent from launching the nuclear torpedo which would have started World War Three. He had already heroically exposed himself to radiation in order to deal with an overheating reactor on a Soviet K19 ballistic missile submarine known as a floating Hiroshima over a year earlier. One year later it seemed that it was only Arkhipov's reaction which prevented the kind of nuclear madness that the superpower leaders were only too ready to contemplate.
So after all Zheleznodorozhny does have something to boast. A great shame, though, that no one has sought fit to honour him with any memorial apart from his tomb. The tomb of the man whom the human race owes its existence is hidden away in the Savvino cemetery of Zheleznodorozhny.
This anyhow is how Edward Wilson in the Guardian described the unacknowledged role of Arkhipov to twentieth century history and the fact that there is a twenty-first century:
If you were born before 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life. It was the most dangerous day in history. An American spy plane had been shot down over Cuba while another U2 had got lost and strayed into Soviet airspace. As these dramas ratcheted tensions beyond breaking point, an American destroyer, the USS Beale, began to drop depth charges on the B-59, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear weapon.
The captain of the B-59, Valentin Savitsky, had no way of knowing that the depth charges were non-lethal "practice" rounds intended as warning shots to force the B-59 to surface. The Beale was joined by other US destroyers who piled in to pummel the submerged B-59 with more explosives. The exhausted Savitsky assumed that his submarine was doomed and that world war three had broken out. He ordered the B-59's ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing. Its target was the USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the task force.
If the B-59's torpedo had vaporised the Randolf, the nuclear clouds would quickly have spread from sea to land. The first targets would have been Moscow, London, the airbases of East Anglia and troop concentrations in Germany. The next wave of bombs would have wiped out "economic targets", a euphemism for civilian populations – more than half the UK population would have died. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's SIOP, Single Integrated Operational Plan – a doomsday scenario that echoed Dr Strangelove's orgiastic Götterdämmerung – would have hurled 5,500 nuclear weapons against a thousand targets, including ones in non-belligerent states such as Albania and China.
Of course, Zheleznodorozhny's main claim to fame is that it was once named Obiralovka. It was a settlement serving a station of the same name which became well-known due to Lev Tolstoy setting the suicide of his fictional character, Anna Karenina, in this very place. Truth to say, the town doesn't appear to have taken much advantage of this - not trying to draw the tourists in for example with some statue of Anna Karenina plunging to her death, though there is an Anna Karenina nightclub here. Yet apart from this and the fact that one of the great Russian symbolists Andrey Bely lived nearby, there seemed little to really write about for this blog.
Until today it seems when I learned that a certain Vasili Arkhipov lived here. For those who have never heard of Vasili Arkhipov is, they may be surprised to hear that they owe their very existence to this man. He was the co-officer who prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis when the Americans were firing depth charges to force the submarines to the surface. Thomas Blanton, a NSA director back in 2002, was quoted as saying that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world". Apparently, he was the only one of three senior officers who withdrew his consent from launching the nuclear torpedo which would have started World War Three. He had already heroically exposed himself to radiation in order to deal with an overheating reactor on a Soviet K19 ballistic missile submarine known as a floating Hiroshima over a year earlier. One year later it seemed that it was only Arkhipov's reaction which prevented the kind of nuclear madness that the superpower leaders were only too ready to contemplate.
So after all Zheleznodorozhny does have something to boast. A great shame, though, that no one has sought fit to honour him with any memorial apart from his tomb. The tomb of the man whom the human race owes its existence is hidden away in the Savvino cemetery of Zheleznodorozhny.
This anyhow is how Edward Wilson in the Guardian described the unacknowledged role of Arkhipov to twentieth century history and the fact that there is a twenty-first century:
If you were born before 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life. It was the most dangerous day in history. An American spy plane had been shot down over Cuba while another U2 had got lost and strayed into Soviet airspace. As these dramas ratcheted tensions beyond breaking point, an American destroyer, the USS Beale, began to drop depth charges on the B-59, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear weapon.
The captain of the B-59, Valentin Savitsky, had no way of knowing that the depth charges were non-lethal "practice" rounds intended as warning shots to force the B-59 to surface. The Beale was joined by other US destroyers who piled in to pummel the submerged B-59 with more explosives. The exhausted Savitsky assumed that his submarine was doomed and that world war three had broken out. He ordered the B-59's ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing. Its target was the USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the task force.
If the B-59's torpedo had vaporised the Randolf, the nuclear clouds would quickly have spread from sea to land. The first targets would have been Moscow, London, the airbases of East Anglia and troop concentrations in Germany. The next wave of bombs would have wiped out "economic targets", a euphemism for civilian populations – more than half the UK population would have died. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's SIOP, Single Integrated Operational Plan – a doomsday scenario that echoed Dr Strangelove's orgiastic Götterdämmerung – would have hurled 5,500 nuclear weapons against a thousand targets, including ones in non-belligerent states such as Albania and China.
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