mesto47

Misha (Blago), 43 years old

I grew up in Blagoveshensk. I work as a shoemaker and sew mukluks: a type of traditional Buryat boots. I didn’t have a mother: when I was two years old, they took away her parental rights. I don’t remember her, I don’t even have photos. She drank all the time and my father took me to live with him. She died when I was ten, from vodka.

My stepmother raised me. I learned that she wasn’t my birth mom when I was 13 years old. I somehow suspected it and looked at the documents. Her name was Valentina and in my birth certificate it said my mother’s name was Natalia. I brought it up to my stepmom and she admitted that I was right, she showed me the documents saying that my mom hadn’t been allowed to raise me. I wanted to find her but there wasn’t any information about her. Probably there’s a grave in the cemetery but I never went. I don’t know why.

I had a normal life with my father and stepmother, it wasn’t worse than anyone else’s. Normal, average family. I was a bad student, it was really hard for me, especially chemistry, physics, geometry: all those x’s and y’s and equations. I was better at French, I liked that. Then I went to college for municipal construction but I didn’t even stay until the end of semester.

My father was a shoemaker, so I also went off to learn to make these traditional Buryat boots. They paid you a stipend while you studied. Within half a year I learned everything that I needed to. Afterwards, in 1993, at 17 years old, I was put in jail for the first time for four years.

I hadn’t been working alone, my partner Slava was four years older than me. The first time we broke into an apartment we didn’t even really want to take anything, we just wanted to walk around as though we owned it. We didn’t even really steal anything special, just small things.

From outside of an apartment you can tell how people live. We selected those  with pretty windows, or an expensive door, or which had air conditioners. You set your sights on an apartment – you go during the day, and put a bit of tape on the door or stick a match in the lock. In the evening you look again: if everything is where it was, then no one’s home. If the tape has been unstuck or the match is on the floor, then someone is inside. Or you can look in the windows. Now that wouldn’t work anymore, as soon as you get near the entrance, the cameras are already watching you.

When I was held in a temporary detention center for three days, I was just a kid and there were adult men there and they immediately said “Well it’s gonna be jail, it’s gonna be tough, you should follow a strict set of rules.” As a child, that’s scary. Actually the first time I went to prison, they stuck me in the sweatbox. There two forty five year old guys forcing confessions out of kids 15-17 years old. They force them to confess the crimes they hadn’t admitted to committing. For this they get a reward – their sentences are cut in half.

The first two days were okay, I didn’t know they did that yet. And then they told me, “ok go write your confession” and gave me a stack of blank sheets of A4 paper. Then one of them grabbed a metal mug and hit me with it – I started bleeding all over the floor. That saved me. I wrote down what I’d already told the cops. I thought he would kill me, you know? Within a day they transferred me to a normal cell. One older guy and about 20 underage guys. There it was okay, it wasn’t as crazy and lawless as in the sweatbox.

In jail you live by the code. If you’re a normal guy, you hang out with normal guys. If you’re a sniffler (editorial note: here and further is the description of a known Russian caste system in Russian prisons), you hang out with others. A sniffler is like…people are constantly telling him bring this, give me that, go there, leave that alone, make tea. If no one pays attention to the sniffler – then he’s just nobody, alone he has no life at all. He’s not even able to say anything himself. He is agreeing with someone else or helping someone else…just sniffling, as we say. And once you start being like that, then that’s it, this is how your life in jail will continue. You can’t get out of that position, you can only fall lower.

Even lower – those are the hurt people. You know who they are? No? Well, it’s the gays. And the pedophiles. At some point in jail they start talking about something that happened once, and there, people are strict about that kind of thing. If you’ve done something bad with a woman, even if you’ve just licked her somewhere, then that’s it. If you, as a normal guy, even drink tea with him, just “splashed” as we call it, in the same cup, then you’re associated with him. You also can’t smoke after him, if you get cigarettes from him it has to be a closed, full pack.

I was a normal guy, as we say “mujik”, I wasn’t reliant on anyone. That was how most mujiks were. I didn’t want to be one of the criminal chiefs. That’s a shitload of work. I saw how they lived. Totally over the top, very showy.

In the early 90s, they fed us stinking herring and barley. The herring wasn’t cleaned, it still had guts, it still had its head. In my second sentence it was already better. They started to make good borsch, they gave us one can of tinned salmon a day.

Every morning at six we’d wake up to music. Every day the same song: “What a hard day” by Minaev. (Editorial note: Russian version of “You’re in the army now”).  Then we did exercises for 15 minutes, always outside, in summer and in winter. Before breakfast, there’d be a check. Everyone comes out of their rooms and there’s a roll call for half an hour. Then you sit down and wait for breakfast. Not everyone fits into the cafeteria so you’re divided into groups. Then you wait until lunch, in hope of someone getting a package from a visitor. A lot of people got ephedrine. Those were pills from China, sometimes people would even eat 10 pills in soup or in condensed milk. I never tried it, but the guys who did it, they were running around like crazy all night long, they were on a different level. Of the guys I know who were in jail, half of them are already dead. Some overdosed, some are still in jail, some caught tuberculosis and died.

In the jail there was a library. In our free time we read or watched one of the two television channels. I read all of Chase’s detective stories there.

I also did my first tattoo in jail when I was underage. Instead of tattoo ink, we burned and cut off the heel of a boot, then we ground it into a powder and mixed it with urine. And then you sit there all day long, poking and poking away the time with the needle. Tattoos like: “It’s more likely that a lion will turn down meat, than that a woman would stop manipulating and lying.” Or “The more I know about people, the more I like dogs.” I used to have a tattoo of the crest saying “Hello thieves” but people looked at me weirdly in the bus, so I covered it with a bigger tattoo in Thailand. And other tattoo I had removed. I didn’t know what it meant when they made the tattoo, but later it turned out that it was a crest and stripes meaning that you’re fatherless. Then I thought, why the fuck would I be fatherless, my father is still alive. To remove the tatoo, you take the plastic barrel of a pen, pull out the ink ball, light it on fire and blow. The skin swells, your eyes are burning, and you get blisters. It’s so humid in jail, the wound was rotting for a month. Maybe it was infected.

After I got out of my first sentence, after exactly a year, I was put back in again. Me and a partner broke into an apartment where a barterer lived, he dealt in mink coats from China. Unpacking and taking away 20 fur coats wasn’t easy, we didn’t have a car so we went back 3 or 4 times to grab everything. When we left, the apartment was empty. My partner met a drug addict who was collecting cigarette butts to smoke and offered to buy him a cigarette. Then my criminal partner (he was an Asian Buryat, you can’t mistake him for anyone else) and the drug addict with a braid went to go buy cigarettes at a kiosk right by that apartment — with just a ton of cash. Of course the lady in the kiosk remembered them and later told the cops everything. Then it turned out that the apartment actually belonged to a cop, the barterer was renting it to him. Then the cops got the entire town looking for us and found us very quickly.

During my second term I also worked as a shoemaker inside the jail, I sewed felt boots and mukluks for the policemen. In exchange, they brought me tea, cigarettes, meat. Ten packs of cigarettes, half of a kilogram of tea in exchange for a pair of warm mukluks. It was good for me and good for them. When I was in jail the first time, my parents came and visited every month to see me and bring me stuff. The second time I went to jail, I wrote them and said they didn’t have to come. My dad came to see me just one time, he brought me the materials so I could work.

When I got out for the second time, I still had this urge to go back to apartments. I don’t fucking know why, now it’s not like that anymore. I broke down a door, took the electronics and the television and hid them by the garbage shoot to go back and look for cash. Then the door opened, the owner came home. I heard it and jumped off the balcony from the second floor. It was nighttime and I didn’t even look to see what was down there. If there had been a stake or something, I don’t know what would have happened. I fell and ran, kept running, I ran about 100 meters and my heels hurt so much. I fell down, I just couldn’t any more. And I yelled for help. A lady called out from the balcony, “what’s wrong, what happened.” I said, “The cops hit me, they broke my feet. They threw me out of a car, I’m lying here.” She came out and called for an ambulance. Later I learned that she’d recently lost her son, he’d also been beaten up. You see, that’s why she came out.

In the hospital they put two casts on me. I lay there and waited, wondering if they would come for me or not. They didn’t. And since then I’ve been clean. That was a last warning. Now I don’t want to anymore, it’s gone.

I was married for ten years. It was in the 2000s, after I was released, I immediately found myself a seventeen year old. We met at a market, I suggested we go have a shot of vodka – and that’s how it all started. After that I bought her clothes, I got her all cleaned up, and then she didn’t need me anymore. She started partying, cheating on me. Of course I also cheated on her, maybe twice. But she did it completely openly. Every Friday she drank with her friends, she’d just get dragged into something. Once I called her, and she couldn’t talk at all. She was mooing like a cow and she couldn’t get out a single word, she was in a car somewhere. Then I heard two guys talking. I asked where she was, said I would go get her, but she couldn’t answer me. I put up with it for a while but then it was just too much. Maybe it didn’t work out with us because of children. She had an ectopic pregnancy and then they had to remove her Fallopian tubes. I hope the child had been mine, but I can’t be sure.

In 2013 we officially divorced, but after leaving the registry office we went to a pub and ended up in a hotel room. She got married but she still comes to me and cheats with me on her husband. That’s better than if she was married to me and cheating with someone else. At least she’s with someone else, coming to me. She knows that if she came back to me I wouldn’t put up with her running around like she did before. When she comes over, her husband knows that she’s with me. He doesn’t call me himself but his friends do. They’re mad, of course. But I don’t give a damn, I’m having fun. I don’t force her to come, she comes herself.

If she wanted to come back to me, I would take her of course. She actually said “buy an apartment and I’ll come back to you.” I bought a studio apartment and she said she had to think about it. Right now I don’t have anything, I even sold my car when they took away my driving license. And her man has a car, a two room apartment, guns. So she decided to stay with him.

Night train Blagoweschensk – Khabarovsk. Mesto47 team is heading to the dining car. We take a table across a group of miners with an empty bottle of vodka. From their conversation we figure that they are travelling from a corporate event on lake Baikal, a soccer competition commemorating Steel Miners’ Day. They are having a drunk discussion about their final match and celebrating their victory as they bring the competition’s Cup back home, to Mnogoverschinniy, a tiny village in Khabarovsk region that mines 3,5 tons of gold each year.

They hear a foreign language and initiate a conversation. They ask us where we are from, what we are doing and where we are heading. They take me for a prostitute who accompanies a foreigner and ask me how much I charge for my services per hour. I get angry and tell them I am a journalist. They apologize and ask for a permission to sit at our table. We drink and talk. The most talkative are their leader Jenya, he is around 50 and Grisha, 21.

9:30 pm Two vodka shots. Miners profession. Jenya is loud. He shows off his huge golden ring, bracelet and a shiny heavy thick chain on his neck. He lets us take a photo of his jewelry.

Marina: What is it like to be a miner?

Jenya: We are living in Mnogovershinny village. It is a Swiss gold mining company. A miner is a person who comes under ground and starts extraction. He comes out happy, puts his hammer on one shoulder and goes to lunch with a big smile on his dirty face. In order to become a miner, you have to be strong and dumb. Why strong? Because it is physical labor, you have to turn off your brain and work, work, work. Why dumb? So that you are not scared in a dark confined space. You are alone there, 120 meters under ground with a lantern and a hammer that weights 70 kilos. We have this black humor joke: if I die, they get me out, then dig me back under ground. I will chill there for three days, and they will send me back to work. We have this superstition; we don’t have a word “last”, we say outermost. If you ask a miner, which shift he has today, he will never reply the last one. You can’t say that, what if it really becomes last?

Grisha: I am doing vocational training for miners and each summer I work under the ground. You just turn on your flashlight on and walk. Rockslide can happen anywhere. If a rock that weighs a ton falls on you, your helmet will not save you.  It happened twenty times, when you sit there, look at a rock and think, “It looks like it’s about to fall”, but it doesn’t. You walk away a bit, and it falls down. At the end of the day, everybody has their mission, we are all like ants in a big ant hill.  A miner should be paid as much as an engineer. Nothing will happen without him, he does the most difficult job.

Jenya: A mine does not forgive mistakes. If you don’t break nature laws, no accidents will occur. Are you in doubt? Don’t go there. Don’t remember something? You should not do it.

10: 10 pm We drink two more shots. Life in Russia’s Far East. Putin.

Grisha: if you watch mass media in Moscow, what do they say about people’s life, how do they live, good or bad? When you take a train through Far East, have you seen many beautiful houses and roads?

Marina: No.

Grisha: It is 21^st century, and life outside of Russia is changing rapidly. But in our country people are learning again how to hammer in nails. A westerner will live till he is 100 years old, he will be happy, the ecology is OK there, they have Teslas. Not like here, people live until 60, when they retire. Miners used to earn more: older generation in the USSR were paid 100 rubles. They managed to go to Khabarovsk just for a weekend to drink beer. We knew that we worked in bad conditions, but at least we were paid well for this and the family was covered. Now they pay pennies, and you might die, so what’s next?

Our President doesn’t fulfill a single promise. It feels like Far East lives in a separate country, not in Russia. They don’t open new kindergartens. Children are playing in dirt. People work without following safety instructions. They work anywhere, as they need to provide for the family. He gets pennies, but he does it for the family. Do you have many bad roads in Moscow?

Marina: No

Jenya: I am an old man, and this is young people talking. Just imagine what opinion they have about Russia. I am sure that the youth will not betray the motherland, but it will not follow its President.

Grisha: To be honest, I feel like half of Russia will be sold soon. I can see how they sell forest. Yes, Siberia has enough forests for 1000 years to come. Locals are not allowed to cut the wood. But then some guys from Moscow come with connections and they do it. The same goes for fish. We have this law in Far East if you just want to fish, they will fine you for 1 million rubles. And then the fish goes to Moscow, it is sold cheaper than here. It goes to the center from Far East it doesn’t get to the locals. You don’t even pay attention to domestic politics.

Jenya: FSB works well here, so shhh…

Grisha: At the end people do not have anything. How are we supposed to live? In a country that doesn’t want to support us. People, who sit up there, don’t fight for it. For what they need to fight. They are just unreachable.

11 pm We meet a Korean dude, he buys beers for everyone. The beer’s called Siberian Crown. We drink and chat about gays.

Jenya: Marina, tell me, are we adequate people?

Marina: You have a special approach towards life. You say everything as it is, you don’t really have a filter.

Jenya: Yep, we are not about filter for sure.

Korean dude tells Grisha that he is beautiful.

Grisha: Translate to him we don’t say beautiful to a man, this is unacceptable. You can’t say this, it will lead to no good. When in Rome, do as Romans do!

Jenya: We don’t have gays. We just destroy them. It does not matter if he is good or bad.

Marina: if you don’t have gays, why is it a problem? 

Jenya: We had one guy move from Irkutsk to our town with his 3 mln rubles motorcycle and tubes in his ears. We put a lock on his ears and locked him up to a door handle and left. After four hours we came and unlocked him. He quit and left.

Grisha: You need to experience living here for some time. People are programmed this way: we are one kind of people, and you are another. If we give in, there will be no families. How will women have children? And there are so many single girls nowadays, they just don’t give birth. The nation is just dying out. Who will love you then if everyone is gay?

Normally, after progress and human development reach their, regress starts. Same sex marriage means that people are killing themselves just because they made up some kind of addiction in their head. Can a birch tree grow and then suddenly become an orange tree?  It is a psychological disease, something must have gone wrong with his head. There are gays who were shown images of naked women, and they wanted them. They just deny it. Faggots are useless people.

Jenya: One guy from our village fell in love with a girl. A girl left for Saint Petersburg. He moved there and got a job of a bouncer at a night club. He told me, “I come out of the club, and I see two dudes kiss. I tell them to leave, but they don’t listen.” The administrator told him that this was not accepted. They fired the guy. You see, we are raised differently. We don’t understand it when a dude kisses a dude.

An advantage of the Far East is that you will not let them in here. Your bold guy will not bring them to march here. (editor’s note: reference to Yuri Luzhkov, former mayor of Moscow, who allowed Moscow’s first gay parade). A man and a mujik are different. Mujik will defend the motherland. A man can commit treason.

23: 50 We finish our beers. The speech is not that clear already, but we somehow manage to talk about soccer and poetry.

Grisha: I don’t like reading that much. They gave us Esenin (editor’s note: famour Russian poet) to read at school. Some alcoholics wrote something beautiful, yes, but it does not mean that children should learn this by heart. In poetry I don’t see anything beautiful or useful for me in life.

Actually, I would like to move to Rio de Janeiro. It is a beautiful city with masquerades, parades, and ocean shore. It is also a soccer capital. I used to have just one favorite player: Cristiano Ronaldo. And now when you watch soccer, you see many players stand out.

Soccer in Russia is not in the best condition. We have no soccer fields. We’ve got million talents in Russia. Did you see our team play at the Championships? I think they should be fired. So many sick kids could be getting their treatment with the money they are making. Foreign soccer players play soccer professionally, and they get paid accordingly. Our players just kicked the ball like kids in the backyard. They just talk, they don’t act. Tell the youth, “we will pay you a quarter of that salary”, and a younger generation will start winning.

Midnight. Empty bottles and a snoring miner at the table. A fat train stewardess in a short skirt decisively walks our way.

Fat train stewardess: Dining car is closing.  Thank you, good-bye.

Marina: What time is it? Could we stay a bit longer?

Grisha: You have foreign guests here. And you are closing down so fast.

Fat train stewardess: Thank you, good-bye.

We obey and continue to drink in a third class carriage, but with no recorder running.

Victoria, 42

(Editor’s note: this co-traveller’s name has been changed on her request due to signing a non-disclosure agreement upon retirement)

In my job one has to have good sense of humor, otherwise, I would go mad. I always wanted to work for the police. I can’t say my parents were happy about my choice. My dad was a policeman for 27 years himself. I am a young pensioner; recently I retired after being a policewoman for 23 years.

This job comes with unregulated hours, so it’s hard on family life. One needs an understanding husband or wife. You come home, and they call you up. A murder just happened. It means that your workday has started. You have to wake up, put some clothes on and go there at night. Of course, it’s annoying when you have some weekend plans, but then someone just gets murdered, raped or beaten so severely, that he or she is about to die. If you work in the murder department, you should check out the details of the crime scene yourself.

On average we get 125-128 calls a day. We have three crime scene investigation teams plus three patrol and inspection services. We manage. Sometimes we would get just 80 calls, but this is considered to be few. Apart from this, we study law, shooting, have work out sessions and self-defense wrestling exercises.

Sometimes young girls join the police with romantic ideas in their head, based on books and movies. They think that they will just stand in their uniform be writing something down or investigating. And in reality they work with morally deficient people, who verbally abuse them. You have to interrogate them, sometimes they are under alcohol influence and can be aggressive. You should calm them down, but it doesn’t always work. They get back their anger at you, even though it’s not your fault.

But it’s not exactly every day you  get thugs, assholes, and scumbags, who should be either in nut hospital or on a life-sentence. You have to treat such people as humans. It’s easier to do for a woman, as she has more patience.

Crime psychology of a woman differs of that one of a man. A woman is more insidious. She has no obstacles, no long-term strategy. She just has a short plan: to get her revenge on this asshole here and now.

One time a woman stabbed herself, because of jealousy. She saw her boyfriend with another woman and said that it was him who stabbed her. He got arrested, but the doctor said the pathway of the stroke showed that he could not have done it. She continued to claim it was him, but then later lied that she was cutting meat and did it herself by accident.

Once I faced a similar situation. They called us because of theft, and a woman said that her partner stole her earrings. In reality there was no theft. He has been physically abusing her, and she wanted to revenge, to get him punished. To scare him. But at the same time she didn’t want to claim the beating. The physical abuse was obvious, but she claimed that she had fallen down. This situation really upset me as a woman. I came into a room, and there were three babies lying on the bed. One was a breastfed child, and the other two were between year and a half and three years old. The youngest one was spluttering with a bottle. I took him, and his lips were already blue. I started shaming her, “how can you do this, you are a mother”. At 23 she already had three kids from different men. She didn’t even have papers for the smallest baby.

When we watch detective movies on TV at the police station, we laugh at this nonsense. Arrest and evidence collection in the movies is just ridiculous, just bloopers everywhere, it reminds me more a fantasy or a comedy genre. Things don’t happen like this in real life, one can get fired for such mistakes. Any evidence extraction is always recorded, by photo or video.

Policemen don’t have many rights, even though they work for a low salary and have really high working loads. And they have a lot of responsibility. We had a situation: a boy stole his dad’s keys and got his gun, but didn’t manage to kill a teacher, who gave him a C for the term. Luckily his sister saw this and told somebody, so the police could prevent him from doing it. But the neighborhood officer was fired, as apparently, he wasn’t watching them close enough.

It is impossible to define a criminal by the way he or she looks. You can tell a drug addict by his behavior or by their eyes. When I was attending police academy, I had a nice neighbor. He was saying hello to all grannies next to our house, he would hold the door for women with strollers. He studied well and was his mom’s pride. But one day we found out that he killed more than 20 people. He organized a criminal group, they would stop at the road and pretended that their car had broken down. They used a girl with a little child, while other members of the group were hiding in bushes. They killed people, took their cars and hid the bodies by putting them under concrete in a friend’s garage. One day they were talking about it, and a girlfriend heard it. She ran away, they were chasing her, but she managed to get into a stranger’s car and asked for help. She got to the police station and told them everything.

 Half of the neighborhood attended the court hearing, nobody could believe this, everybody thought that he had been arrested on false charges. Nobody could have identified a criminal in him, regardless of experience in the police. His behavior was not changing in any way, he was always self-restrained, polite and calm.

In road police we have police guys with tummies, they have to sit around a lot. And in our department, if you are not in shape, you will not be able to fulfill your work duties. At some point your shape can save your life, and I am an alive proof to that.

It happened when I was not on duty. I was just walking home, it was winter, strong wind, around 9 pm. Suddenly a man attacked me from behind and started choking me. The most terrible thing in this situation was the fact that I was pregnant. He didn’t say a word to me, was just choking me silently. I shook my head, hit him with it and bent him. He was much heavier than me, and my weight was insufficient, but I managed to escape. I didn’t even think about arresting him. If he kicked me into my stomach, I would have been dead. That’s why I could not risk it, I didn’t have the right to do so. Maybe he wanted to take my purse, maybe to rape me. I don’t know what he wanted.

One has to work out in order to be able to stand up for themselves. Of course, it is tougher for a woman. Even a well-trained man would not be able to withstand the fight. But to hold on for some time, call for help and have a possibility to at least run away, invest all strength in one stroke. There is a chance. One has to be realistic about it. All self-defense methods are targeted at knocking out a gun or a knife. Of course, not when a gun is pointed at you. In this case you might be better off to agree to his demands and hit him on the sly, when he relaxes and his attention is diverted.

The most important is not to behave like a victim. Never be a victim. It is not important whether you have muscles. If you are tense or nervous, they will pick up a fight. You have to be confident.

Stolbi nature sanctuary is a national park near Krasnoyarsk. The stolbi – “the pillars” – are some of the oldest mountains on our planet. Rocks of unusual beauty and shape, surrounded by endless taiga.

Throughout the last centuries Stolbi became more meaningful for a local community than just a national park. It became the symbol of a whole subculture. All this time, Stolbi has been pulling in all sorts of people like a magnet: adventure seekers, climbers, people who were running away from something in search of freedom. Freedom from routine. Freedom from regime. Freedom from social inequality.

This is the story of our guide Irina, who is a recognized Stolbist (ed. note, Stolbi regular climber). She recently turned 60. 50 of those years, she spent in Stolbi, conquering the peaks that are too difficult even for the strongest athletes.

“I was born and grew up in the Far East. One childhood memory is very vivid: when I was three, I escaped from my parents and made it to the top of a mountain. Older guys found me and took me back to my parents. Even back then I was drawn to the heights.

When I was 6 years old, my family moved to Krasnoyarsk and my mother took me to Stolbi. After this, she would hardly see me at home…. For me and my friend blini (ed. note, Russian pancakes) became a currency and for a blini with cottage cheese or minced meat strangers would let us drag along to climb the Stolbi with them.

When I was a teen, people took me from the wall and beat me for climbing without rope. Older comrades beat my butt with rock shoes, they said that I shouldn’t climb like that. Now it’s different: people know that I climb free solo all the time, and they respect me. Out of all women, I am one of the most dedicated Stolbists. I often go climbing with guys on rocks with a high level of difficulty. Many men would not even try to climb pitches that I have completed.

You have to have a certain mindset and emotional state before difficult areas for free solo. Only this way you can overcome extreme situations, by suppressing your will and emotions.

Many people climb with headphones on, but it doesn’t work for me. I feel more comfortable hearing natural sounds. What is going through my mind as I climb? If it’s a difficult route, I think, “Why did I climb here? They warned me it was not a good idea to climb here.” If I am climbing with another person, I carefully watch that he is doing everything right. This grabs all my attention.

When the route is incredibly difficult, you can’t think of anything, you just need to concentrate. You sort of get into an autopilot mode. Sometimes, after descent, people are curious about how you managed to overcome this difficult section, but you can’t remember it, because your own internal navigation system put your hands in the right spots.

In the backpack of any Stolbist you will find the following items: magnesium for our fingers, for them not to slip on the rocks, a short rope in case you suddenly need to save or just belay somebody. And of course a water bottle, we fill them with water from a local spring.

I never had serious injuries. One time I fell into the rope on the wall from a height of 12 meters and just stayed hanging there. After this I was very scared, but with time you are able to get rid of your fear. With experience I can understand where I can climb on my own and better calculate my abilities.

I am just not afraid of some things. I have so much energy, that I need to invest it into something so that it doesn’t disturb other people. If I don’t put it into climbing, it may burst out of me, and then I will be up to no good. There must be something wrong with my brain. I like living like this, to feel the rocks with my hands and legs, with my mind too. Rocks are my emotional half. Sometimes I approach a mountain that requires a technique that I don’t possess, and I think, “How will I do this?” And then I just do it. For me Stolbi is a place of power, a temple of nature, where God himself envisioned us, humans.

I am teaching climbing at Krasnoyarsk University. When I take my students to Stolbi, I teach them how to listen to nature and communicate with it.

I don’t show many things to my grandchildren, because it is very dangerous. Once they see something, it is impossible to tell them they can’t do it. They think, “If granny can do it, so can I”.

Krasnoyarsk locals spend a lot of time in Stolbi. Originally Stolbism was shaped as a protest movement. People came here not only for spiritual, but for social freedom. In the city you could be a general. But in Stolbi you are free of any social ladder. In the mountains everyone is equal before difficulties, it doesn’t matter if you are a professor or a millionaire. If you climb well, everybody will respect you.

As soon as the national park was established, people started building huts up in the rocks, which became an important part of Stolbist culture. Most people who came to Stolbi were involved in politics. They annoyed the Stolbi administration with their behavior, they constantly fought for their rights. Sometimes the huts were burned down. Very often police would come to the hut, put everybody in buses and leave.

A hut is essentially a closed club, and it’s very difficult to get in. I am the only person on Stolbi, who belongs to two huts, and I have keys to both of them. There are 15 huts in a national park and only experienced climbers and awarded professional athletes become members. They help find people who lost their way and assist fire fighters in putting out forest fires.

A couple of years ago, guys from our hut found a couple, who had been missing for three days. The man, 20 years old, died, but they managed to save his girlfriend. She was wearing a skirt and pantyhose in cold weather. There were many situations, when we called emergency serices for people we found on the way. Once we had to bring a man who weighed 90 kg down from a pillar. He was climbing alone and fell down 30-meters; that’s equivalent to a 10-floor building. I don’t’ know how he survived.

Once I played a role in a movie. They filmed a TV series in our hut, and I was a stunt woman for the leading character. It was in winter, we had -30 degrees, and the actress borrowed my clothes. It was funny to watch the show on TV later with an actress walking around in my pants and hat.

There are many stories, legends and jokes that go around Stolbists. Once a Stolbist fell down during a climb and broke his hand. Then he came back to the same spot a year later to show his buddies where he broke his hand. And guess what, he fell down again on the same spot and broke another hand.

Stolbi took many human lives. One of the most decorated Stolbists, Volodya Teplyh, slipped on the Feathers, a route that he had climbed hundreds of times before. Each year I host night competitions in his memory under the moon light. A small church was built next to Stolbi with the names of people taken by the mountains and rocks carved on it. I used to climb with many of them, and knew them very well…

These people influenced me, they shaped who I am today. They taught me how to survive sorrow and happiness. How to love my family. Because of Stolbi, I never feel alone.”

Dima, Ekaterinburg

I grew up in Ekaterinburg, I’m transgender. It all started because I thought I liked to dress like a boy. Then I started thinking about it more, and at first I decided that I was agender, something in the middle of both sexes. Then, about a year ago, I realized that I wasn’t happy with how I am. This realization came slowly. I felt like if I were to continue ignoring it, it wouldn’t get any better. It’s when you look in the mirror and you don’t see yourself. It’s me, but something is off. It’s not the same feeling you have when you notice you are overweight. You see that you’re just not the person that you could be. It’s difficult, because it really exhausts you psychologically every single day.

When I met my new friends a year ago, I introduced myself as Dima for the first time and asked them to use male pronouns. I was 12. Up until then I wore girls clothes, I didn’t feel like that was wrong because I was a child. I have a traditional family: mom, dad, brother. My parents are great. Both my mom and my dad are good people. They’re always ready to help. I love them. My parents don’t know about this, about my other life. At home and at school people call me by my official name, Sveta. I have some acquaintances that I asked to refer to me as masculine. They accepted that. Sometimes they use the right pronouns, and sometimes I correct them.

I buy clothes from the boy’s department and from time to time I steal clothes from my dad. He gave me one jacket because he didn’t like it. Right now I’m wearing his jacket. At school I only feel uncomfortable when people call me Sveta or use the wrong pronouns. I’m not really friends with any of my classmates, it’s not like I’m an outcast, I’m more just quiet. I don’t really want to tell them about this because no one will care. And if everyone knows still keeps on calling me the wrong name knowing that I don’t like it –  that’s worse than if they just don’t know. I don’t have the strength to correct them all the time. If I start a new life somewhere, that would make everything much easier.  Soon I will visit a university fair  with my mom to check out some international colleges with free tuition.

I have two friends who are going through something similar – one in Ekaterinburg and one in St. Petersburg. I met the friend from St. Petersburg online, we met on Vkontakte (ed. note: Russian Facebook) in February. He’s older than me, he’s about 20. We’ve never met in person.

When people call me Sveta, I feel disappointed. I’m not disappointed in the people, but I just feel like something isn’t right. I don’t feel like I’m in the right place. With friends, I can be myself. Dima and Sveta aren’t two different beings. I use Dima, a name that makes me feel comfortable, with my friends.

Trans people can choose whether they want an operation or not. It is only up to them to decide. If they feel like they’re not themselves in their body, just somehow off, you can call them trans even if they have not had an operation. I don’t feel at home in my body. I’ve thought about the possibility of having an operation. As far as I know, it starts with hormone therapy. Then you can do the surgery. I’m sure that my friends would support me, they know that it’s not an easy process. I don’t know about my parents. I think at that point I would move out and leave. In Russia you can get prescriptions for hormones, but I think you can only do the operation somewhere out of the country.

 All the time, I’m thinking about how I look. A big issue for me is which locker room I should go into. The locker room is assigned for women, and I don’t assign myself to that category. I can change at home and just leave my things in the locker room. I’m not happy with either option. The variant of using the men’s toilets, when I can manage it, that works. In malls, when I’m not there with my parents, I go to the men’s bathrooms.

I think I bisexual. I was dating a girl, she lives in Estonia, so we only talked online or with video calls. We stopped dating because we started talking less. I understand her really well and now I love her like a best friend.

The Mesto47 team also met Dima’s friends at a meet up of the group “Twenty One Pilots” in Ekaterinburg. We met at the square 1905, about 10 teenagers from 13-17 were at the meeting. They were immediately noticeable: they got our attention because of bright yellow tape. The whole group had tape on them from head to toe. We got to know them, put tape on ourselves as well, and headed with them to a park, where we spent all day. I discredit myself with the first question.

Marina: What is a meet up?

Alena: (pink hair, 17 years old) A meet up is a gathering of people who are connected by something. In this case it’s the group Twenty One Pilots. We have a lot of common interests. When you come to a meet up, it’s like you’re with friends that you’ve known forever. The first time it’s strange, but then with each meeting, you feel more at home. You already know a lot of people. Two years ago I was scared to come, and I ended up coming to a meet up for the first time a year ago. I’ve been friends with these guys for a year and they’re like a second family to me. I’ve gotten less shy, less scared of talking to different people. Before I was really closed and I was scared of asking people for things, I would be almost hysterical, completely shaky. Now I can ask people for things with no problems.

Dima: It was music that brought me to my friends, and I actually started to play music, which helps you to feel music even more and let out your emotions. They’re different feelings, playing or listening to music. You can listen to music and understand what the writer was feeling, or you can play music, and think about what you’re feeling.

We sing a few songs, first in English and then in Russian. As usual, everyone is very interested in Georg, the foreigner in our group. Everyone tries to talk to him, but is shy and asks us to translate. One of the girls takes his arm and gives him a henna tattoo of the word СЧАСТЬЕ, happiness. We talk about happiness as the fulfillment of dreams.

Marina: What are your dreams?

Lyosha, 16 years old: My dream is to start a band. I already know a bassist and a keyboard player. I already have the name: the last day of summer. Although it’s up for discussion.

Alena: I don’t know how to describe it. But after studying, I don’t want to live like my parents. They can never just go somewhere, have fun, unwind. Most of the time they sit at home and watch TV. I don’t want to just sit around like that, I can’t stand monotony, I always need to go somewhere, even if it’s just going to a different city for two days. I can’t really formulate this into a dream, but not to just sit in one place, not to have every day be the exact same.

Alina, 15 years old: About different generations…I wanted to go to Moscow, actually in February, when I wanted to go to a Twenty One Pilots concert, I’d already bought the tickets, but my parents said I couldn’t go. They said that they’d heard so many stories about women who had gone to Moscow for work and they’d been recruited into ISIS or taken into slavery, or raped and killed. They thought that would also happen to me, so I couldn’t go.

Dima: My dream is to move out of the country, because I have some friends there, that’s a plus, and also because in Russia there are too many stereotypes. There’s a ton of homophobia here, sexism, and all of that and it’s really hard. There are more possibilities in different countries. Actually, a dream that I’ve now already fulfilled is to talk with a native English speaker, because I’m really trying to learn English, I watch movies. Actually it’s because of Twenty One Pilots that I got interested in English. But what’s missing is practice. I have no one to talk to.

The teenagers tell us that right now we’re at the very place, where the people of Ekaterinburg fought against the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s this square, and a symbolic place for this interview.

Marina: Do you get along well with some of your other peers at school?

Everyone: Nooooooooo

Lyosha: People separate into groups. For example, more influential people with money, people who just get along and have the same interests….

Alena: I hated my class. At school, no one actually touched each other but in the air there was just an oppressive atmosphere. At recess I would also run to my friends in other classes. I was so happy to graduate.

At school we had “notes” like who drank, who smoked. In the square outside there was even a place where people would meet up for cigarettes. They didn’t really do anything in particular. Sometimes there were interesting people there, but they still were living really boringly. They also were cutting, they had scars. There wasn’t a single one of them with unscarred hands: they like to suffer a lot.

 Aisu, 14 years old: About peers…I’ve been in four different schools, and I was bullied in three of them. In the first two it was just because of my nationality. My classmates were Nazis. In the others, if someone insults you, and you don’t say anything back, then they just see you as a perfect target and start making fun of you to raise their own self-esteem. Right now I’m lucky in my class. I can’t say that they’re friendly, but they’re tolerant and they just don’t care that much about each other. We can get along and joke about the same topics. With the other classes it’s not great. You can stand there and someone will just push you, just because you exist. I tried complaining, I told my parents. They went to the school and talked to the teachers, but after that people just made fun of me even more. Saying that I was a snitch. They think that this is essentially the way to get cool. Like look at me, I’m awesome, I smoke and I bully people.

Alena: Also about school, you know, when you see it in American shows, how they bully people…they stick someone’s head in a toilet. Here, it’s more like that people are talking about you, that they start rumors, they bully you online.

Aisa: But sometimes they also hit people. Once a boy took a running start and kicked me in the stomach. I was like….what did I do to deserve this.

Alena: At my school no one really hits each other, maybe just the boys. It’s more verbal. Emotional violence.

Interestingly, the entire time at the park, none of the teenagers took out a beer or a cigarette. When we asked them about this, they all categorically said that that that type of thing isn’t what brings them together. They’re brought together by music and talking about the same things. A conversation topic that kept coming up was parents.

Alena: We try to shake up our parents. I fight with my mom about homophobia. It’s especially difficult if the child has a different orientation or does something that goes against their parents norms or societal norms. At their age I can’t convince them of things, but I question them, I tell them some facts, and when they don’t have any more arguments, then for me it’s a victory, I’ve won today.

Aisa: I in general try not to talk about that kind of stuff with my parents. Or any stuff.

Arina: Three years ago I started talking to my mom, saying that the way I see it, it’s not necessary to be homophobic. At the beginning, she almost wanted to kick me out, but now she already stopped saying insulting things about people. Like for example if a girl is walking and she comments like “wow, why is that girl dressed like that.” So I believe that you can change people, because in their soul, they know that it’s good. I told her, that you can’t hate love, you need to accept it as their life. She started understanding that I’m right, she had no arguments left and it got better.

Aisa: Talking about optimism. When you say that you’re trying to be an optimist, they tell you that you have to be a realist, or that you don’t understand real life.

Lyosha: And when you saw that you’re a realist, then they ask you why are you so sad.

Aisa: Or then if you complain about some problems, they tell you, that you’re exaggerating. They tell you that other people have it worse, that they have real problems. They really think that I’m just exaggerating and exaggerating. And now I really know people who now have serious psychological problems.

We leave the group, we take a picture all together and then hug them goodbye. Some of the kids hide faces with their hands for the photos and Dima goes to the side to not be in the photo. After the meeting, we walk along the river and we talk about how it’s great that these teenagers were able to find each other. How they’re different from other people. How at school and at home people don’t understand them, but this group accepts each other exactly as they are.