| JRL HOME | SUPPORT | SUBSCRIBE | RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT | |
Old Saint Basil's Cathedral in MoscowJohnson's Russia List title and scenes of Saint Petersburg
Excerpts from the JRL E-Mail Community :: Founded and Edited by David Johnson

#13
The Russia Journal
December 7-13, 2001
Say ‘Cheese’ — and all is OK in Russia
Businessmen wear casual clothes — FT says that proves the country is making progress

By MATT TAIBBI

Of all the legacies of the Clinton era, probably the most repulsive is the one of corporate powers reinventing themselves as hip, youth-friendly counter-cultural phenomena.

In the States now, it's hard to tell an IBM print ad from a Wired magazine cover, and the TV spots for everything from Ameritrade to Chevron-Texaco feature skate-punks with platinum-dyed hair, concrete-surfing against the tide of convention... Just as Clinton packaged the abandonment of his party's working-class platform selling out to the right as a Youthful New Way, corporations began marketing capitalism itself as the engine of youth rebellion. Now, instead of concluding that their parents' world was evil and lame and dropping out of it by doing drugs and dressing like homeless people, kids were invited to wear designer imitations of the clothes of the homeless and get back at their parents by day-trading and Going Public.

There were no Johnny Rottens in the Clinton era. But there were a hell of a lot of people who looked like Johnny Rotten in the offices of dot-com failures. It was a disgusting generation to be a part of.

‘Rebellious’

Russia was mostly immune to the consumerism-as-rebellion movement that hit the West so hard in the last decade. Among other things, rebellion itself was not such a hot selling point among Russians in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Whereas a company like AIG scored points (although loathsomely so) when it tied itself to a figure like Jackie Robinson, the people Russia lately identified with "breaking the old order" were, like Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, largely also credited with taking away health insurance and living wages. To make a product "rebellious" was to give it qualities that naturally scared most Russians.

The successful marketing campaigns in post-Soviet Russia were, on the contrary, mainly patriotic, traditionalist and reassuring, emphasizing quality, stability and timelessness — companies like Klinskoye beer and Prima cigarettes traded heavily on these themes.

But the country couldn't stay immune forever. While a real youth protest movement, mainly violent and nationalistic, arose in cities around the country, a small network of phony youth-counter-culture bars — the face of "corporate rebelliousness" — popped up in St. Petersburg and Moscow. For the most part, these were replicas of the notorious Seattle-style bookstore-cafes that were the breeding ground for the IPO-and-day-trading generation in Clinton's America. Only in Russia there was no mistake about it: The only people who went to spend $1.90 on a Mochacinno at Coffee Bean on Pokrovka were the well-off sons and daughters of the upper class. There was nothing "rebellious," thank God, about coffee in Russia — the new cafes were just another guilt-free luxury trimming for a small group of people with spending money in the two capitals.

All of this changed, however, when Andrew Jack of the Financial Times last week unleashed upon the world his feature on the rapidly metastasizing OGI cafe network. In this piece, Jack breaks ground in the manufacture of the "rebel as businessman" image in Russia. Here is the lead to his Nov. 26 story, "Cozy Havens in Russia":

"Dmitry Itskovich does not look like the typical tough executive destined for success in the harsh world of modern Russian business. With his big black beard and casual clothes, he most resembles the academic he used to be."

I am going to ask a rhetorical question now. If your business was running a chain of underground beer hangouts for pseudo-hippies and intellectuals in moth-eaten shirts, how would you be likely to dress? Like Gordon Gekko? In a Valentino suit, suspenders and a yellow tie? With a pound of gel in your slicked-back hair?

No. Of course not. You would dress, at the bare minimum, in casual clothes. Itskovitch dresses exactly the way you'd imagine he might, but Jack calls attention to his "atypical" look because he is trying to tell you something: Itskovich is a rebel, not a businessman. He dresses casual!

Bummer careers

The mainstream media love these kinds of stories, and for obvious reasons. For one thing, it always loves stories about non-business types who give up their old, bummer careers and go into the sunny, happy world of business. An ex-academic who becomes a coin-counting club mogul is a beautiful thing to the business press. Ben & Jerry's was another business-press favorite. Def Jam records — two savvy street hustlers finding a way to hitch a wagon to the angry message of rap music and make it profitable. These are the stories that warm the hearts of business editors. You can see this instinct bursting through Jack's piece in this section:

"Moscow's literary elite congregated, some finding jobs and partners as well as solace among like-minded souls gathered in the slightly bohemian and heavily smoky atmosphere. It was, as one macho Russian cultural critic described it, the sort of place to meet interesting women who hoped you would take them somewhere else."

You see, OGI is not a place where eggheads hang around to do counterproductive things like plot the overthrow of the state and discuss their latest novels — in fact, they go there to get jobs! So they can stop being whiny writers and get some money to buy deodorant! Through the eyes of a careerist creature like Jack, this is actually what recreation means: getting together to expand networking possibilities.

No sex for reporters

Note also that Jack has to quote an unnamed "cultural critic" to explain that OGI is also a pick-up joint. He can't just say this himself, because, as his readers know, business reporters do not have sex — so how would he know? It was, therefore, responsible of him to quote somebody else in this matter.

Jack is building up an impressive track record in the area of covering Russia by means of going to restaurants. This past August, he organized a piece that argued that Russia's economy was booming around the opening of a restaurant called "Cheese." Jack's thesis was that a country that could support a luxury restaurant whose interior is designed to look like the inside of a piece of cheese must have a booming economy. That Aug. 20 piece, titled "Fast Cars, Fancy Food; Muscovites let Good Times Roll," featured this passage:

"The unexpected appetite for the luxury cars — which have a minimum price-tag of $70,000 in Moscow — is only one sign among many that while much of the world goes into a downturn, Russia's economy is still booming."

As well as this mention of "Cheese":

"After sitting empty and half-renovated for three years on the city's inner ring-road, Cheese opened at the start of the summer. Its Italian chef offers pizzas for a minimum of Rbs400 ($13.60), but its parking lots are filled with the latest Mercedes models."

Thirteen-dollar pizzas. Club owners that don't wear ties. Russia must really be making progress. Don't these guys ever get out of town?

(Matt Taibbi is editor of the Moscow-based eXile alternative newspaper.)

Back to the Top    Next Article