Ethnographic Expedition 2008. Part VI

August 5–9, 2008

All the Russian hotels at which the members of the expedition stayed were horrible. Fleabags with impossibly bad bathrooms, incredibly expensive Internet, unbelievably tasteless room decor—and, without exception, obscenely high prices. Half the hotels have floor clerks who hand you your room key. I was convinced that this pointless profession had become extinct the moment the Soviet Union collapsed.

Kansk

The local hotel is perfect for shooting screen adaptations of Kafka’s works.

There’s a “Shoe and Repair Factory” on the city’s main square. I never did manage to figure out what this name actually means.

Shoe and Repair Factory

The city is completely, hopelessly provincial. They host a Cannesk Video Festival as an attempt at humor here.

The local contribution to humanity’s achievements in the sphere of material culture is limited to a megalocephalic traffic light, which is installed horizontally above a regular vertical one.

There’s also an incredibly high-quality and well-preserved hammer and sickle with intact neon tubes here. Kansk is a worthy addition to the collection of cities with hammers and sickles on their lampposts, which already includes Vyazma, Kineshma, Pripyat, Novoaltaysk with Barnaul, and Syzran.

The road’s most picturesque stretch, which is part of the M-53 Baikal Federal Highway, begins soon after Kansk, once you pass the highway patrol post in the village of Nizhny Ingash. The stretch consists of rugged terrain decorated with meter-tall asphalt dunes.

Nizhneudinsk

A hole with a couple of retro artifacts. A rare specimen—a pediment with a color Soviet state emblem—can be seen in the background.

Groceries

Bratsk

Bratsk is a fairly dreary city. In some ways it’s even drearier than Naberezhnye Chelny.

23rd Microdistrict

But it’s the only city in Russia with quadruple solid lines.

The trash cans here have poor posture.

And there are lots of steel truss lampposts, like in Petrozavodsk. I’m convinced that this is the most beautiful type of lamppost in the world. Perhaps because it looks like a tadpole of the Eiffel Tower.

And what do we see on a regular lamppost? That’s right, another hammer and sickle. Vanishing species need to be preserved—after all, nobody’s ever going to make any new ones again.

The city’s traffic lights are super-strange. For one thing, they have a black border around the light lens. This is unexpected and looks beautiful. Secondly, the LEDs inside are arranged in a very strange manner—we came across both squares and diamonds. I left puzzled.

The handful of districts that comprise Bratsk are separated from each other by a significant distance. There are no buildings between the districts whatsoever, only a highway. Driving on the highway at the urban speed limit of 60 km/h would be a total pain. So there’s an “End of City Limits” sign at the edge of each district, in order to let people drive at the rural speed limit of 90 km/h. This is very humane, but leaves out-of-town visitors incredibly confused: they see that the city has ended, but they haven’t found the street they were looking for yet, so they begin to frantically ask themselves where they might have made a wrong turn. When in fact they just need to keep driving until they see a “Bratsk” sign again.

The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station doesn’t offer any tours, so instead you just have to walk up to the entrance post and say you’re from Irkutskenergo.

Warning, cable

It’s quiet and cozy inside. You can hear the turbines whirring.

A hydro station is an incredibly beautiful and powerful building.

This is a quintessential 1960s facility. The quote “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country” is laid out along the entire length of the dam. All 500 meters of it.

It’s breathtaking.

Irkutsk

In the night, approaching Irkutsk, I drove over a pothole that annihilated two of Moumousique’s new rims. They don’t like to light the roads at night here, and the pothole was covered with a puddle. One rim simply got warped and had a fissure, but the other cracked around the entire perimeter (the tire was totally fine). Good thing I had two spare wheels ready to go on the roof of the car.

Irkutsk turned out to be the city with the worst roads and the most horrible traffic scheme. On the one hand, the municipality decided to resurface all the city’s roads in one go (in connection with some important event, I already forget which).

On the other hand, the way the traffic signs are set up here is absolutely abominable. Sometimes the traffic would suddenly switch to left-hand. And sometimes I would discover that I’m driving the wrong way down a one-way street, yet there are no “Do Not Enter” signs at the beginning of such sections.

Driver! Be attentive, yield the way!

There are steel truss lampposts here, like in Bratsk.

And pretty hammers and sickles with light bulbs on one of the streets.

A distinguishing local feature: all the secular construction fences are painted with wide vertical dark and white stripes.

While priests make do with simple text.

Territory of Orthodox temple

Slyudyanka

They sell salted fish propped open with wooden sticks here. It looks like a model boat yard.

The Russian Railways press center informs us: “The Slyudyanka train station is the only building in Russia fully constructed of unpolished Baikal marble.” Reporting back: people built garish, disproportioned and tasteless buildings even before the revolution.