There are now so many Russian women on the net that the bottom has dropped out of the market. But who are these chicks, and what makes them ‘tchik‘ ? Here finally is your comprehensive, at-a-glance, cut-out-and-keep guide.

Mealchiks

Always pleased to meet you at the Radisson or Metropole. Mealchicks are professional social goers and the type of girl who gets a last-minute call from a dating agency when somebody hasn’t bothered emailing or needs a back-up. Will become moody and withdrawn without shopping therapy.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Tripchiks

Like Mealchiks, but focussed on holidays. Tripchiks have usually graduated to mailing Western men after sponsored trips to Turkey, Cyprus or Cuba. They pose on the net as candidate brides and the idea to meet in an exotic country will usually come from them. Invariably skinny, tripchiks may be easily confused with matchchiks.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Sputchiks

Upwardly mobile and just as goal-oriented as their Western counterparts. Sputchicks already speak English well and have a good idea of where they’re going, usually as models or tennis players. Sputchicks can make good partners but only if you can keep up with them and fund their many aspirations.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Romanchiks

Romanchiks have waited all their lives to be rescued by a Western man. They want someone who will suddenly wave a magic wand and change their whole miserable existence. Unfortunately, romanchiks have never thought beyond this scenario and are hopelessly unprepared for an equally miserable life in the West.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Aggravatchiks

These chicks come across as just ordinary women from ordinary Soviet apartment blocks. Practised liars, they will do or say anything, and very convincingly, to get their kids, old mother, relations and money out of Russia. Unless you have a degree in street savvy you’ll be taken in.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Dipchiks

Russian dipchiks play the net for options. They have usually been on and off the net for some time, while between lovers and ex-husbands. Dipchicks will happily string along and play off valuta suitors - Russian and Western - in their futile attempt to become lucky dipchicks.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Kwikchiks

Kwikchiks are the kind of Russian girls who say, ‘I’m not so desperate that I’ll say yes to the first man who comes along’, but always do. They gravitate towards men who say, ‘I’m not so desperate that I’ll propose to the first Russian girl I meet’, but always do. There isn’t a lot you can say about kwikchiks because it all happens horribly quickly.

Distinguishing features: Short skirt, high heels, sexy foreign accent

Novaya Gollandia, aka New Holland, is an urban regeneration project in St Petersburg.

It’s a triangular island in the Neva canal system and it isn’t the first time its had a prosperity purpose. Peter the Great was the driving force behind St. Petersburg’s canals and shipbuilding industry, bringing many new ideas from Holland where he studied.

Peter, however, didn’t have a credit crunch to contend with. The island’s new developer is a cash-strapped oligarch finding a shortage of investors. The estimated £300 million is looking more like $800 million and completion has already been put back two years.

The winning design for Novaya Gollandia came from Britain’s Norman Foster. Norman Foster also bagged the contract for Moscow’s Crystal Island, but the proposed world’s biggest building is equally beset by the world’s biggest economic crisis. Both projects were designed as ‘mixed use’ sites with plenty of culture, exhibition halls, theatres and plazas. Or as someone put it, ‘one helluvah party zone’. Problem is, the party’s over for the time being.

I have an idea, though, that this is good news for conservationists. Novaya Gollandia was the work of famous 18th century architects. The distinctive redbrick warehouses, built to store ship timber, were commissioned by the Russian Admiralty in 1765.

The archway leading to the inner basin, with its columns of red Tuscan granite, was created by Jean-Baptiste Michel Vallin de la Mothe , who had a hand in the Hermitage. According to Semyon Mikhailovsky, historian at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, ‘Classicism came through this triumphal arch to Petersburg.’

Yes sure, the whole area is a bit run down at the moment since the island fell into disuse under military ownership. But wandering around here, you can question whether malls and mirror glass are entirely appropriate.

There’s much debate about whether Russia’s historic cities have been renewed or trashed by the construction boom. By chance I discovered that Novaya Gollandia’s developer took part in a 2006 debate with ABC. The transcript is here.

He’s all for cranes and bulldozers of course. Now they might be a long time coming.

Last couple of times around in Russia, I’ve made an effort to collect cigarette packs. As an ephemera lover, I notice the old brands are disappearing fast. Though you’ll often see old versions still fading in the kiosk windows.

It’s a bit of luck I photographed these CCCP Ovals, because my sister came in to tidy up one day and threw them all out. Some people have no feeling for the graphic arts.

Continue reading What Are You Smoking?

I should have blogged this weeks ago but I was off the net. And maybe by now the New York Times has forgotten about Kaliningrad again. But at least its reporter, Ellen Barry, actually pitched up here.

I’m impressed. Ellen Barry really does work out of Russia (NYT’s Moscow office) and doesn’t sit in a London pub making stuff up  like the Daily Telegraph boys.

Ellen contacted me at the height of the Kaliningrad Missile Crisis, when a siloful of Iskanders were about to be trained on Poland in response to the US Missile Shield. Mind you, it is hard to be precise about the height of this crisis, like how high exactly and when even. It still hasn’t totally gone away, but it’s well on the back afterburner now they’re talking. By contrast, the legendary Cuban Missile Crisis was sorted in two weeks flat. I wonder if that says anything about the stalemate of modern diplomacy?

But, back to Ellen’s piece on the Kaliningrad Missile Crisis which I thought was truly wonderful. A couple of choice extracts:

‘Attracting tourists to see an Iskander is a creative idea,” said Mr. Abramov, a political scientist. ‘Especially for the Poles. When it is flying toward them, they may not be able to see it. Come to Kaliningrad! Pose next to the missile which is going to kill you.’

Ellen also took time out to visit Kaliningrad’s famous Zoo.

Lyudmila M. Anokha, the director of the Kaliningrad Zoo, found herself in an awkward position last month when she held a contest to name a new baby giraffe. One of the most popular suggestions was ‘Iskander,’ but Ms. Anokha immediately saw the problem. ‘The giraffe was delivered to us by the Berlin Zoo’ she said. ‘The giraffe came from the West. The Iskanders would be pointed toward the West. We at the Zoo are beyond politics.’

More Russia articles from Ellen are filed here

If you’re a relatively minor blogger, it’s actually quite nice to get spam. Even if it is thinly disguised as a comment. Yesterday the blog was graced by a visit from Russian Bride Guide, which left a comment on Why Russian Women Don’t Marry Russian Men. I found the comment quite revealing. Quote:

However, for the informed man who knows what he is looking for, he can find a superb, SLIM, sexy wife in Russia.

Capitalising ‘SLIM’ just shows the naive prejudice and obsession with skinny. I think some honestly believe there is some kind of ‘Thin Gene’ in Russia. Hmmmm, maybe the ‘Thin Gene’ was stolen from German laboratories during the war along with Von Braun’s rocket science secrets. Or maybe skinny blondes were developed by the Nazis in South America alongside the Boys From Brazil . . .

Russsian Bride Guide obviously didn’t stay around here long enough to read my cogent explanation of ‘Why Are All Russian Women So Skinny‘. (Which, thankfully, they aren’t.)

And like the fanciful stereotype in the pic - which I snagged from a computer game - they don’t wear torn tights either, even in the height of combat. It just ain’t dyevushka style.

You can be concerned about companies like Russian Bride Guide who are unashamed flesh peddlers, but somehow I find peddling these kind of myths equally upsetting.

(Related buzz on this perennial topic currently under Ukrainian Man Syndrome and Who Is Looking For Russian Men? )

If you’ve ever rented an apartment in St Petersburg from the net, you’ll know how it goes.

You give the address to the taxi driver who drops you outside this gorgeous, stucco and sculpture fronted building. And you think . . . Wow. Am I really staying here?

But then you discover that all the wonderful facades of St Petersburg don’t include things like entrances or front doors. To find your apartment, you have to go round the back through a dim and grim archway, into some labyrinthine courtyard, stepping carefully over drunks, trash cans, prostitutes, rusting Ladas and broken bottles until you find the right, graffiti-splattered steel door with the unfathomable Russian, push-guess-buzz entry machine.

I took these pictures in the light, obviously. It’s less fun arriving in the dark.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It is huge fun for oddballs and culture shock freaks. If, however, you need a good apartment plus some hand holding on the way, may I recommend the lovely Irina Borisova. It may not entirely cure culture shock - or what psychologists prefer to call ‘acculturative stress‘, a syndrome first diagnosed in 1958. Moscow State Linguistic University is currently researching this among expats in Russia. Symptoms can include tics, twitches, obsessive washing and food poisoning. So, you know you’ve been in Russia too long when . . .

For many, the films Goodbye Lenin and The Lives Of Others started the cult: nostalgia for the old East Germany.

An interesting example is the Ostel, a Berlin hostel full of communist era kitch. The website describes it as a ‘Design Hostel’. In fact many junk shops were scoured for hideous rugs, non-working radios and old pictures of Honecker.

The collection proved too much for real Ostalgia freaks who picked off some communist treasures as souvenirs. This prompted the manager to open a DDR souvenir shop of tacky nostalgia ware.

The Ostel is housed in a ‘Plattenbau’ - the East German version of the Soviet pre-fab apartment block. There’s no Stasi Suite but budget travellers can choose to bunk up in the Pioneer Dormitory. Organised tours of Berlin are by Trabant naturally.

My only big disappointment was the new laminate flooring but certainly the outside has that authentic, uninviting look.

The Ostel claims to have the odd East German guest but it’s obvious that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Some insist that East Germany’s culture was snatched away too quickly. On the other hand, figures show that the DDR was bankrupt and doomed anyway. So much so that it was actually selling those trapped behind the wall to the West.

Between 1963-1990, the West German government paid a total of 3.44 billion Deutsche Marks, roughly 1.8 billion euros ($2.62 billion) for the release of nearly 32,000 prisoners and 2,000 children from the communist East.

The clandestine trade began with suitcases of Deutschmarks, but it soon became a barter for goods - oil, metals, chemicals and in some cases people were swapped for bananas. Presumably those people won’t be coming back to stay at the Ostel.

SuperHeroes were the mainstay of comic strips - and for so long that generations of Bat Girls and Sons Of Robin had to be invented.

With demand exceeding supply, it was only a matter of time before Russians were drafted into the genre.

Red Star - real name Leonid - was the creation of Teen Titans, a comic produced intermittently from the 50s to the 90s.

Leonid had many adventures with the Titans with most of the plots being hatched by his wicked father, Konstantin, who worked in Russia’s evil Science Park. It’s not clear from the comic whether that’s the one in Novosibirsk but . . . . hmmm.

By 1996, Red Star learns that his wicked father is breeding Meta Men - a special brain dead variety of the human species - in an attempt to overthrow President Yeltsin and blame it on the Americans. Sounds like La Russophobe wrote the script, doesn’t it?

All comic book heroes should have a romantic interest of course, and Leonid’s significant other is a girl called Maladi Malanova. Appropriately, Maladi is sent as a KGB agent to America with an infectious and terminal disease which will wipe Americans off the planet. But in the nick of time, Leonid and the Titans intervene.

In his endeavours, spanning many comic bookyears, Red Star is helped by a mysterious agent called Anna. There’s no romantic interest here, probably because Leonid does not realise that Anna - pictured right - is in fact Anastasia, the heiress to the whole of Russia! Comic book heroes can be really thick at times.

Leonid quits the Titans when he discovers the US are funding the Titans as a foreign NGO. (No surprise there.) But after a brush with rogue agents Hammer and Sickle he finally receives asylum in the US.

In the later strips, Red Star morphs into someone looking remarkably like Putin. Very prophetic these comics. Maladi is the blonde in the pink blouse and no, she never does make it to the wedding.

International Women’s Day. Link.

This site is being comprehensively updated. If some stuff doesn’t work and the old posts look a bit iffy . . . well, that’s to be expected. In the meantime, I am posting some pics from St Petersburg. The view is just simply too high and too wide to get around it - even with a cheap Chinese wide-angle converter.

But it’s impossible to take really bad pictures in St Petersburg. All the light is reflected from so much water . . . exactly the same kind of light that inspired the Dutch painters. The architecture glows.

Here we are in winter but everyone, as you can see, is out on the street with cameras. (Click on image to enlarge)