Oil Exhibition - the Ecstasy of Black Gold

There’s an anecdote of which I’m fond that is commonly attributed to the novelist Kingsley Amis who, upon staring at his mirror reflection and the melancholic void into which had passed the many years and travails of his life, pondered on “what a strange thing it was to have happened to a small boy…”

I found myself slipping into this shallow pool of surreal reflection as I stood in the grand hall of the Kremlin quaffing champagne and scoffing canapes whilst a tuxedoed string section knitted flurries of notes together with their bows. The absurdity of life had never seemed quite so luminous; what strange alchemy of events and circumstance had conspired to deposit me here?

I was in Moscow to attend a major international petroleum congress with work, an opportunity as unique as it was unexpected. Just the weekend before I had been exploring the city of Kiev, marvelling at its European charm and stoicism; and now here I was in Moscow, and in the Kremlin itself!, revelling in the opulent yet adamantine heart of Russian statehood. I felt like the weasel-kid at school sympathising with the weakling at one weekend sleepover and then living it large with the big bully during the next.

It was the opening ceremony and in the general melee my workmate and I got chatting to a Ukrainian photojournalist who said he felt like something of an interloper being there at so volatile a time, on the eve of Russia’s Gazprom cauterising the flow of energy to his homeland.

Not unsurprisingly, he seemed to harbour quite genuine remorse at the predicament and expressed his hope that Putin, mooted as he was to be delivering the keynote address, might offer an apology ‘to save face’ with the Ukrainians. I felt tempted to break this levee of hope by saying that there was probably more chance of Putin stripping naked, oiling himself up and wrestling a brown bear on stage, but demurred for fear of causing upset.

Bizarrely, our photographer friend then siphoned into our circle from the mass of bodies shuddering like contained molecules, a grumpy Russian scientist/businessman, proceeding to expostulate grandly on his pre-eminence and how honoured we should consider ourselves for such a meeting. Throughout this sycophantic introduction, our esteemed associate puffed out his cheeks and roved his fat marble eyes around the vicinity, clearly keen to discern anyone of remotely higher standing than two press-badged minnows from London; obviously mentally admonishing himself for having been ensnared in this way like a dawdling pedestrian by an eager charity-rep.

Not doubting his stature but being fairly convinced as to his poor social etiquette, I attempted to draw him out on the difficulties he had experienced due to the increasingly taut relations between Russia and the West. He sighed heavily and, whilst scanning other attendants rather than meeting my eyes, grumbled “business is business, politics doesn’t much matter…” With such wisdom imparted he offered vague excuses and shuffled off into the fray. Our Ukrainian friend appeared on the verge of breaking into applause, whereas I just wanted to slap him across his root vegetable head.

But then I thought that actually, his rhetoric was quite telling. For in this hall full of oil executives and industry heads it was quite salient that, as far as the metaphorical water table was concerned, the political top soil might be shifted around here and there but below the surface the dirty business of oil keeps on flowing according to its own particular whim.

There is something both overwhelming and terrifying about playing witness to such a colossus of an industry showcasing itself for a few days; particularly one that (not wishing to succumb to hyperbole), has a very considerable influence on the future stability of the entire planet.

The Congress itself was based at the Circus Expo Exhibition Centre, a mammoth manikin to be dressed in the finery of entire industries at will. Sitting in the dehumanising judder-and-jolt of the Moscow morning traffic, I couldn’t help but reflect on how tortuously apposite it was that the only way to attend a congress displaying the efficacy and might of the oil industry should be through the kind of gridlock congestion that makes central London roads look like free-wheeling autobahns.

Exhibition centres are the most diaphanous of modern buildings, they are like airports without the allure of impending flight, shopping malls without the wish fulfilment of commerce, motorway services without the juxtaposition of stopping amidst continuous momentum.

They are vast monuments to nothing except empty space, phantom architecture taking on transparent forms. Gleaming bright marble floors, escalators pinioned between multiple levels, wide expanses of corridor that feed into a tremendous delta of a foyer, and the constant swimming pool burbling of static noise that clots the air like a thick wool.

The immense hall was gridded with stands from all the major oil players – BP, Shell, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, et al – as well as more minor figures; there was a Ukrainian Petroleum Stand (or cubicle) but it remained poignantly bare, a mere tin shack next to these futuristic villas of monopolised market power. On the second floor was a showroom of luxury sportscars – Ferraris, Bugattis, Lamborghinis – for delegates to peruse and splash their black gold on these oil-thirsty symbols of personal prestige.

If there’s one thing I always find oddly amusing about exhibitions, it’s the ubiquitous lanyards, with the excess length dangling down peoples’ backs like a ponytail. I start to see peoples’ heads as balloons on the end of string, severed by the scissor-legs of yet another stereotypically attractive Russian woman to float away with distraction from their conversations.

Entering into conversation with anyone is presaged by a reflex flickering of the eyes over the inscribed lanyard details, in what I see as a forebear of the social scanning techniques that will become an involuntary instinct as soon as we are all overlain with displays of our ‘digital profiles’.

Away from the talks and discussions there are small huddles of grey-suited men, the cogs of business deals being wrenched into rotation. Escalators ascend and descend with static conga lines of people furiously tapping on or barking into handheld devices. Quite a lot of the time I feel like Jonathan Pryce in ‘Brazil’, turning up to the Ministry of Information and finding himself being swept up in the flash flood current of bleating and braying bureaucrats as they circulate the building without an apparent destination.

Over the four days of the Congress, I find myself traversing through the four ideological seasons that can generally be said to inform the span of a lifetime.

On the first day I am awe-inspired by the scale and the vibrancy, my senses becoming accustomed to such a voluminous environment. On the second day, I become frustrated at the stumbling blocks preventing headway being made with my own agenda, and after attending a few talks, become inflated with a righteous anger at the perceived intransigence I perceive of those at the top table. By the third day, my residual anger has been shouted down by a surge of pragmatism and a determined effort to ‘play the game’ and achieve the aims I had been tasked with. And on the fourth day, I arrive at a place of weary acceptance, however reluctant, that this is unavoidably ‘the way of things’, encroaching upon a vague gratitude that the whole charade is nearing its close.

Despite approaching the congress knowing that my personal socio-political views would likely be out of kilter with the received wisdom of the delegates, I still found myself, at the end of the second day, infected with a certain misanthropic disenchantment.

From the talks that I attend, the impression I’m left with of the debate on display is of its stiflingly prosaic tone, evocative of a party political conference. Barely any alternative opinions of any discernible persuasion are aired, there are scarcely any searching questions posed, it all appears like a giant rig platform for people to demonstrate how firmly their hands are clasped around the same pump.

At my lowest ebb I start imagining everyone as an oil derrick, mechanically bobbing up and down, dredging up the same PR messages from the same well.

Whether they would acknowledge it or not, the petroleum industry have many complex issues and predicaments to address, both internally and in the public arena. Instead, the general aura surrounding the presentations and limited discussion is (to quote that tiresome phrase) to ‘keep calm and carry on’. From what I observe there is never any mention of renewables or the issues of climate change that the oil industry plays such an influential role in affecting.

The only time environmentalism is uttered is with the kind of condescending sneer that makes you believe their perception hasn’t moved an inch from the image of 60’s hippies, when people grew long hair, smoked drugs and chained themselves to trees in an irritating affectation of eco-awareness. There's a sense that anyone with such views of energy plurality are akin to the heretical Cathars to be crusaded against by the all-powerful Catholic papacy of oil.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certain that there are very many incredible achievements being wrought in the industry that offer a continual benefit to very many societies worldwide. I’m also aware that the industry is as uniformly maligned as the banking industry, and that disastrous events such as Deepwater Horizon cast a disproportionately large shadow over the industry as a whole.

That being said though, it is my firm belief that history will not judge these people kindly at all. The generations to come, who will have to contend on an ever-increasing regularity with ecological catastrophes, and face disruption through ever more global conflicts, with rightly look on the era of our unrestrained thirst for oil, like bees sucking up the nectar with a single-minded lust, as a truly shameful folly.

Positive progress can, and should be made, but is attainable only as a result of dialectical discussion and introspective examination; and this is surely possible on the proviso that there be a forum in which honesty, transparency and rigorous interrogation can be allowed to thrive.

Those making up the panels are high-profile, highly paid representatives who should be subject to a far greater degree of scrutiny than the self-congratulatory feather-bedding they face here. On one panel I observe, focusing on the ethics and the public perception of the industry, there is such a nauseating air of apologetic entitlement; each trying to represent themselves as being sorely misunderstood yet coming across as unwilling to demonstrate engagement with, or responsibility for, a great many geopolitical, ethical and environmental quandaries that stare the world in the face.

The critical problem, I deduce, is not strictly with the practitioners such as these, however tunnelled their vision might be, but the larger scale systems in which they operate; a problem that is promiscuous amongst countless other industries in our modern age.

The natural resource that these companies exist to exploit has been so valorised that it has become just another product to be traded according to the exigencies of the marketplace. They are beholden to their shareholders who demand healthy investment returns, and it is this unassailable fact that prohibits the kind of honest and searching debate that might fuel decisive progress.

You need only look to Ecuador’s recent energy policy as an example of a developing nation attempting to manage their abundant natural resources responsibly and prudently only to be let down by the perfidious short-sightedness of the international community.

I think this exists in parallel with late capitalism and the sense that somehow the current ‘way of things’ must begin to shift into a new gear. The answer is regulation, sanctions and a tighter control on transnational energy companies that utilise their vast wealth of human knowledge simply to maximise profits and raise share prices above those of their major competitors.

You don’t have to be a fully paid-up Marxist to know that such a manifest desire for more of everything at a greater profitability is ultimately doomed to expire; but it takes governments that are resistant to lobbying to stand up to these companies and impose industry-wide structures that compel them to cooperate and act in a socially and environmentally responsible way.

I came to the realisation that my ire was wasted on these company mouthpieces, given that they are operating perfectly naturally given the field in which they have for too long been given free rein to graze.

With my moment of clarity casting a halcyon glow over the event, I found myself able to disengage somewhat and drink in the proceedings with a renewed ambivalence. By the final day I felt I was able to identify the nagging oversight afflicting the whole event.

The whole raison d’etre of the congress, every statement, every proclamation is centred in the some way around this commodity known as ‘oil’. A naturally occurring substance formed deep underground by intense pressures exerted upon long-dead life forms which then comes to represent this quasi-mystical elixir, this ‘black gold’ for which wars are waged and without which our lives are scarcely imaginable.

And yet, this organic substance is, I come to realise, completely absent from the event. Instead of this fundamental detachment, I felt everyone would benefit enormously from getting their hands dirty with the stuff; get barrels of the crude liquid into the centre of the exhibition hall, let people swim and squirm around the oleaginous oom-ska; becoming attuned to some deeply sublimated primordial psychology; and by the very physical process of communion perhaps breach the mental barrier between the commoditised unit of trade, and the pungent, butyraceous gloop in all its glory.

I’m being facetious of course. The lanyards would be ruined and just imagine the dry-cleaning bill for all those grey-toned suits…

Tearing the city at the seams #21 - Moscow to the end of the line (before giving up)

There are certain places that seem to pulsate with the tremors of historical significance. Entering Red Square through the twin peaks of Resurrection Gate, and walking across the subtle camber of the cobblestones for the first time, you get the sense that you’ve stepped into some kind of vortex in which history and the present intertwine in helixes of simultaneity.

The sheer weight of history applies almost physical pressure as though all those people ambling across the square were subterranean marine life pinned down against and crawling across the ocean bed. The birth and rebirth of a nation, the revolutions inspired, the grand displays of power, the meetings of minds and ideas, the quashing of insubordination; all have wrought their psychical energy upon this place. Whilst Red Square might appear openly flat; imaginatively it is wrenched upwards with peaks and troughs of historical import like a colossal mountain range.

Directly ahead, St. Basil’s Cathedral is bulbous and abloom with colour, like a cluster of hot air balloons ready to float untethered from the ground. In terms of its symbiotic relationship to ‘Mother Russia’, the cathedral is as synonymous as the Statue of Liberty to America or the Eiffel Tower to France; and yet it retains an almost comical fascination, as though it were liable to morph into fresh and more flamboyant forms by the day like an exotic plant.

Juxtaposing this architectural abandon, the Kremlin citadel with its turrets, golden domes, crenelated red-brick walls and towers, is almost the physical embodiment of ‘statehood’ and power that has remained fortified here since the original settlement in 1147. A shining red star gleams atop the Saviour Gate Tower like a kitsch decoration upon a stern brick Christmas tree.

Hunched against the wall is the mausoleum playing host to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body. The room is hushed and reverential with synthetic chilled air, spotlights bathing the corpse in light, and statuesque guards monitoring for no dawdling, no talking and absolutely no photographs. At the behest of Stalin (himself afforded a more modest burial just outside against the Kremlin wall), his body was to serve as a relic of the communist revolution, and legions of scientists tasked with concocting a formula of preservatives, dissecting his brain to uncover the chemical genius therein as though it were a neurological genie waiting to be released.

The personality cult of Lenin that has been cultivated since his death 90 years ago is something of a socialist mythology, very similar to that of Che Guevara who is now little more than a production line image for mass consumption. Lying in state in such pope-like repose, Lenin is now little more than iconography, a 20th century Tutankhamen whose principles and influence have long been contorted by analysis to fit the particular agenda of ideologues.

Flanking the opposite side of the Square is the GUM shopping mall, its resplendent curved glass roof invoking Paxton’s Great Victorian Way that was to encircle 19th century London. Strolling around this cathedral for the new faith in consumerism and purchase power, I can’t help but wonder what Lenin would make of it were he to roll back the stone on his tomb and walk amongst this new proletariat with their Louis Vuitton handbags and Gucci shoes?

It is this cognitive dissonance (the presence of two contradictory ideas at once) that I find initially jarring and, after a week or so, quite puzzling. Everywhere the Soviet hammer-and-sickle is emblazoned as wantonly as the golden arches of McDonald's or the red bubble of Coca-Cola. Touring the metro system, with its opulent mosaics, bas-reliefs and marble sculptures, I marvel at the evocative symbols that persist. The glory of the Bolshevik revolution, the resilient peasant women toiling on the land, the bouquets of wheat, the proud soldiers marching off into battle, the strong-willed workers standing their ground at the factory gates.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Gorky Park on the south bank of the Moscow River, where people roller skate and pose for photographs amongst the statues and monuments celebrating Russia’s past. A grand monument of Peter the Great looms over the point at which the river splits in half, his ship pointed defiantly towards St. Petersburg, the city he would champion, in the process consigning 18th century Moscow to pestilence and ruin.

There is scant subtlety to these installations; instead there is a pervasive sense of proud nostalgia, the continuation of the urban space as propaganda, from the extravagance of Stalin’s metro system (designed to shore up the Muscovite workers’ morale), to the VDNkH Soviet Exhibition park – a demarcated zone for the fulfilment of leisure.

By contrast, just around the corner from the Metropol Hotel at Lubyanskaya pl is the humble Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism, understated to the point of invisibility, a chunk of stone lifted from a labour camp to which untold numbers were exiled during Stalin’s ‘Great purge’. State-sanctioned terror as an instrument of civilian control. The anonymous masses disappeared to Siberian gulags, Stalin’s mere statistics.

My workmate and I ponder on the contemporary implications of all this persistent semiology left by the Soviet Regime. Stalin’s ruthless collectivisation schemes of the 1930s – enforced agricultural austerity – led to the deaths of several million Russians. I cannot help but wonder whether this would have been the fate of the Third Reich had a less-megalomaniacal and war-hungry tyrant than Hitler steered the Nazi party to power; Nazi aesthetics persisting as proud icons of a once mighty state power, coming to embody little more than sentimental historical intrigue?

Across the river sits the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the site of the protest group Pussy Riot’s infamous performance in 2012. Western media agencies threw their grappling irons into the story with an eagerness that belied the old narratives of intolerance and authoritarianism that they were glad to see Russia conforming to. Although, as my workmate commented, “in what kind of church could you sing a song like that and not get arrested?”

Nevertheless, it reveals the moral dilemma currently facing modern Russia. After Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia threw itself headlong into capitalism, enthused by the perceived ‘end of history’ which unshackled it from its austere past. For all the nouveau riche in their blacked-out Mercedes, and the oligarchs buying up half of West London, you can discern a wider sense of disenfranchisement, hence (presumably) the candles still being held for the security and familiarity of the old regime.

Strolling down the Arbat, I pass an openly gay couple and almost feel tempted to applaud them for such an audacious display in contravention of Putin’s punitive legislation. Meanwhile, I walk the streets keeping an optimistic eye out for the exiled fugitive Edward Snowden, domiciled here in Moscow after spilling America’s surveillance secrets.

Keen to bake in the authentic Russian culture, my workmate and I visit the Sanduny banya, the eldest in the city (established 1808). Instantly clocked for the novices we are, a pair of well-built and well-nude Russian men demonstrate the soaking of the birch branches in warm water before beating your partner with them, thereby aiding circulation. It’s said that in Britain business deals are often secured on the golf course, whereas in Russia it is within the masculine sweatbox of the local banya. Which makes perfect sense, for once you’ve beaten someone across the bare arse with birch branches it’s likely to perspire away any of the egotistical bluster that might act as a barrier to a smooth deal.

Fleeing from the lobsterific heat to plunge in the ice bath, I see the two Russians – clearly banya aficionados – taking it in turns to rub lotion into one another’s broad backs, which is where my workmate and I resolutely draw the line. With open homosexuality increasingly subject to prohibition within Russia, perhaps it is inside the confined and steamy quarters of the old banyas that such activity bubbles to the surface; latent desires summoned forth from the hot coals in these gay speakeasies.

Not to be swayed by such temptations, my workmate, who had been playing the Tinder fruit machine all week, finally landed on a jackpot; further proof, as I see it, of the instrumental powers of web technologies to realise instinctive and primitive sexual encounters without the awkward frigidities of social convention or cultural differences.

Free from such distraction, I began to feel desperate to break out of the central fist and explore the wide arms of the city. I set off early one morning, keen to plot a path linking the literary coordinates of the great Russian writers as though I were a detective tracking the crimes of a serial killer – the Tolstoy estate to Pushkin House, Lermentov House to the Bulgakov Museum and Gorky House, and north from there to pay homage to Dostoyevsky’s childhood home. The plan being to complete this circuit before meeting up again with my workmate at the Cosmonautics Museum in the northern district of Ostankino.

Almost instantly I feel an encroaching sense of entropy seal itself over me like a dawn fog. I felt the same on my first explorations in Los Angeles, the gigantic geographic scale of the city acting as a hobbling agent, trampling down my endeavours into the mud of insignificance. There seems no feasible way of escaping the vast thoroughfares; thick spokes in the concentric wheels of the Golden and Boulevard Rings that encircle the city centre.

The tyranny of traffic is complicit in my malaise, stacking up in stasis along 6-lane highways that teem with noise and fumes, forcing the pedestrian underground to subway systems. Very often these are patrolled by begging babushkas; old women whose pensions were lost without recompense in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The begging population of any city is a condemnation of the governing power, but somehow the sight of frail old women in headscarves and shawls is even more of an abrogation of the state’s moral responsibility.

Walking the sclerotic veins of the streets, I feel hemmed in by the bleak functionalism of the architecture, oppressive and uncompromising, evidence of Stalin’s slash n’ burn programme to remake Moscow anew, in the process culling so much evidence of the old Tsarist regime. Coming across an old church like the Upper St. Peter Monastery, its spiked domes like military zischagge helmets, is almost a visual sigh of relief.

I traipse past the Planetarium and the Narkomfin, an once-lauded exemplar of Le Corbusier-style urban habitation, now looking sadly dilapidated, much like similar complexes being purged across London like the Heygate Estate and Robin Hood Gardens. One of Stalin’s ‘Seven Sisters’ dominates the eye-line; these imposing art deco monuments standing as short and stubby interpretations of Manhattan’s skyscrapers that Stalin insisted on positioning around Moscow like sentinels keeping a tight watch on the movements of the subjects below. It’s hard to imagine any coalition with human agency, they seem to be unresponsive structures left, like the statues in Gorky Park, as remnants of an abandoned and discredited ideology.

I eventually locate the Bulgakov Museum; alas it doesn't open until the afternoon, and so I veer off the main road and down a side street to Patriarch's Ponds, featured in the opening of Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', two men meeting 'under the shade of freshly budding lindens'.

Instantly, the psychic energy of the area is displaced, from the sauna of the roadway to this pleasant ice bath of fresh air and quiet. There are locals walking dogs, running laps and sitting on benches to read papers and straight away I find the pressure of the stultifying cityscape being offered a brief respite.

Reluctantly, I abandon my literary walk and catch the metro to the area of Ostankino with its knitting needle TV tower which was, in 1967, the tallest free-standing structure in the world.

It is often said that history is defined by the victors, and in the case of the Space Race that is certainly true of how NASA have sought to dress the narrative with their characteristically patriotic gloss. The Cosmonautics Museum goes some way to tilting the balance the other way, honouring as it does several leading Russia cosmonauts, foremost of course Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel into outer space.

The Soviet powers used their space programme as a powerful propaganda machine, releasing fragments of information as and when they felt compelled to reinforce the conviction in the populace that the vast capital investiture was justified. Details of space flights were often confidential until after the event and several major accidents were brushed under the carpet of obliviousness; the Nedelin catastrophe in 1960, a launch pad explosion that killed around a hundred people and was suppressed until 1989.

For all that Russia has reformed and to a certain extent embraced 'Western cultural values', it is my view that it now stands at a critical crossroads in its history. The Western powers of NATO, largely in collusion with the mainstream media, have succeeded in antagonising and backing Russia into a corner from where Putin still tries to exert dogged resistance, seeking to cement ties with a suspicious China and succeeding in extending revanchist tentacles around Crimea.

More concerning perhaps is the increasing level of authoritarianism and state censorship currently sprouting like very familiar weeds from the Kremlin soil; many journalists have found themselves imprisoned for 'subversive acts', and rules decreeing that an online blog with more than 2500 followers must be registered as a state organisation. In addition, Putin has condemned the internet as a 'CIA operation' and mooted plans to create a Chinese-style nationalist alternative.

John Steinbeck in his 'A Russian Journal' wrote -
“In Russia it is always the future that is thought of. It is the crops next year, it is the comfort that will come in ten years, it is the clothes that will be made very soon. If ever a people took its energy from hope, it is the Russian people.”

How appropriate that quote can be applied for 21st century Russia is most uncertain. John Bowlby's famous Attachment Theory denotes that the level of security and reassurance experienced by the child is directly influenced by the stronger presence of a maternal figure. Perhaps for Mother Russia to move towards a better future in this uncertain era of late-capitalism and tense geopolitical relationships, the people need to step out from under the feet of the parental authority figures to whom they seem so obedient.

Culture - June

Books Read:

Mikhail Bulgakov - 'The White Guard'
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'Notes from Underground' (re-read)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The House of the Dead'
Tony Benn - 'The Benn Diaries' (single volume edition) (non-fiction)
Will Self - 'Psycho Too' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'No End' (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
'The Ploughman's Lunch' (Richard Eyre)
'The Battle of Chernobyl' (Thomas Johnson)
'The War Zone' (Tim Roth)


Albums Played:

The Orwells - 'Disgraceland'
Kasabian - '43:13'
Lana Del Rey - 'Ultraviolence'


Theatre:

'Titus Andronicus' (at Globe Theatre, London)
'Carmen' (at Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow)

Gigs:

Ollie Howell Quintet (at The Vortex Jazz Bar, Dalston)

Chernobyl - A Pompeii for the 20th century

"Avoid the moss. Whatever you do, don't touch the moss." Such were the cautionary words imparted by my tour guide Nick regarding these verdant radioactive sponges as we progressed past the checkpoint marking the entrance to the 30-kilometre exclusion zone of Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster.

For the second day of my short trip to the Ukraine, I had decided to sign onto an organised tour, reasoning, perhaps perversely, that in light of the civil war scorching its very visible destruction upon the country, it might in fact be one of the safest places for a hapless foreigner to find himself.

It was on the night of April 26th 1986, during a scheduled safety test, that Reacter No.4 erupted like a radioactive volcano, expelling the equivalent of 100 times the combined radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The westerly winds propelled the fallout into Sweden, Italy, Germany, the South of France and even Great Britain.

Nearly three decades on and the area immediately surrounding the reactor is still radioactive, although for a drop-in visit of 4 to 5 hours the potential implications of the fallout is equivalent to the exposure during a flight from London to New York. In fact, Nick says, as we drive on closer to the epicentre, his Geiger counter remaining subdued on the dashboard, there is less radiation in this outer ring of Zone than in Kiev where nearly all the buildings are made from granite.

Indeed, despite the region having been rendered inhospitable for approximately 200,000 years, human activity in the 'Zone of Alienation' has steadily increased. There is a hub of scientists based near the reacter, a construction team working on the long-awaited protective dome, not to mention small cliques of local residents evacuated in the mass exodus of the 186 satellite villages, seeking reassimilation to their homes and former way of life.

There's something affecting, almost noble, about seeing small clutches of these people, living something of a nomadic existance, foraging for wild mushrooms and berries amongst the forest; victims of circumstances far beyond their control, stoically defying both the health risks and the necessary detachment from modern civilisation to reclaim their homeland.

Driving past these diminutive cottages surrendered to the woods that have grown to swallow them, I began to feel like I had embarked upon a kind of morbid safari, observing this evidence of the profound human impact the catastrophe had wrought on local inhabitants of the region.

Progressing on to the 'Chernobyl City' we pause by an iron monument to the 28 firemen who died as a result of their immediate response. The strataspherically high dose of radiation their bodies absorbed as they entered the burning reactor caused them to die gradually and painfully in a Kiev hospital over the following fortnight, the injuries they sustained far exceeding the realms of medical cure. These, plus two engineers who died in the explosion, comprise the 30 victims officially recognised by the Soviet government as being casualties of the disaster.

There has been no authorised investigation into the number of secondary casualties who suffered from virulent cancers, radiation poisoning, and blood diseases as a result of their exposure; nor the abortions, miscarriages and seriously deformed children born shortly after, or those yet to suffer from latent disorders; all of whom are estimated to comprise hundreds of thousands across Europe.

Approaching the nuclear plant complex itself the geiger counter starts to accelerate like a terrifying taxi meter forcing you to momentarily query your own sanity for being there. We pass by a tree stump of a cooling tower paused for all time mid-construction, a project doomed never to reach operability.

And then we are there, only a couple of hundred metres away from Reacter No.4 itself, encased in steel and concrete in what appears to be an improvised and haphazard arrangement with scant recourse to coherent design, which of course is probably not far from being the case.

In the weeks and months following the explosion, around half a million miners and construction workers were conscripted from across Russia to combat the burgeoning emergency situation which threatened to toxify the entire continent of Europe. Their mission was to contain the continual leakage of radioactive waste into the atmosphere; in effect to create a sarcophagus around the superstructure. The design life was limited to around thirty years, at which point the tourniquet would begin to unravel and require substantial reenforcement.

Several years later than planned, construction began on the steel dome that now sits neighbouring the reactor, nearing completion and waiting to be edged across to form another stabilising layer; like a kind of structural Russian doll that will over many years be encased in ever more insulating layers.

From there it is on to the abandoned town of Pripyat, where more than anywhere else the true symbolic and imaginative potency of the disaster is laid bare.

On the approach road a proud sign establishes the city's formation as being 1970, lending a degree of retrospective poignancy to the fact that the city (with a population of over 49,000 at the time of the disaster), was to fall at the premature age of only 26. Poignant too in that Pripyat, being a kind of Ebenezer Howard 'garden city' for the nuclear age, had provoked a great deal of opportunity and optimism for this confident investment in nuclear as a source of energy. Workers were offered handsome salaries and young families were encouraged to move there; the immigrants to a new unpopulated town, with naturally expanded hopes for what the future held for them.

Stepping out across the main town square, there is a silence that lies thick like dust over everything, that repudiates the intrinsic nature of urbanity. The square is flanked by large concrete high rises - a hotel, a leisure complex, an apartment block - that conform to the architectural blueprints of the Soviet ideal; the rigid constructivism in tandem with Stalinist neoclassicism.

In fact, given the town's untimely descent into ruins, it can be seen as ironic that the traditional ethos of the Soviet architecture that 'form follow function' (unlike so much of contemporary neoliberal capitalist architecture), has been inverted. Since there was no function for these buildings to fulfil post-1986, all that remains is the aesthetic.

It was at this point, as Nick pointed out a path across the square, that I felt the overwhelming congruence with Andrei Tarkovsky's classic 'Stalker', a film that many deemed to be a prophesy of Chernobyl, with the mysterious 'Forbidden Zone' that is traversed in search of some elusive philosophical truth. There is a metaphysical force that threatens those who travel to the Zone, similarly, it could be said that radiation is a natural metaphysical element, usurping visibility, manifesting itself into all and any tangible physical property including of course the sanctity of our own bodies.

We ambled around the iconic fairground; the ferris wheel and dodgem cars standing in slow decay, gradually being overcome by rust, almost like the sombre, neglected toys of children who suddenly morphed into adults and moved on to alternative means of distraction.

In the high school, we roam between classrooms that have all the appearance of being vacated in a chaotic frenzy; textbooks lie strewn in snowdrift piles, glass from every window is splintered across the floor like a bomb blast pattern. Particularly unnerving is the huge collection of plastic gas masks gathered on one of the upper floors as though they were a corpus of dead birds.

Surveying these relics of urbanity, I ruminate on how Pripyat exists as a city totally cleansed of its 'Debord-ian' spectacle in a way that is completely antithetical to the way in which people live and relate to cities; constantly immersed in and compelled by a myriad of commercial imperatives, stimulation and simulation, pushed and pulled in all manner of physical and emotional directions.

I'm aware of the frequent references made to J.G. Ballard in my writing. However, in this instance the connection is simply unavoidable, given that Chernobyl is the landscape that most closely mirrors the fictive 'Ballardian' plains - the abandoned hotel, the drained swimming pool, the resurging synergy between the natural and the built environments as wildlife continues to reclaim the terrain for itself. Not only this, but the fact that this was a highly modern community built from nothing, with its primary purpose being to support the technological 'machine' that in the end destroyed itself and cast the town into desuetude.

It was the equivalent of a city settlement expanding around the holy ground of a cathedral, with religious faith being the elixir that both sustained and legitimised the community. Nuclear power was the deity to which the inhabitants, and the USSR as a whole, bent their knee; a belief in the primacy of harnessing this force to sustain their existance and elevate their society on the continual march of progress. It was a belief that, at the hands of human folly (the power plant concealed numerous critical design flaws that rendered its demise an inevitability), would provoke an apocalyptic wrath upon the denizens.

There was one point on the tour that I found striking in the multi-faceted narratives it seemed to encapsulate. In a storage room of one of the high rises, a tableau of Soviet banners and flags, iconography of Lenin and other local political figures, were arranged against the walls; preparations for the May Day celebrations of just a handful of days hence. The fact that they remained here forgotten, in all their proud nationalist pomp and finery, relics of a celebration that never happened, I found immensely symbolic of just how integral the disaster was in contributing to the dismantling of the Soviet state that had come to dominate Mother Russia since the revolution.

With the USSR experiencing economic decline, and after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, there was a dawning radicalisation brewing amidst the populace which Gorbachev tried to harness with his programme of restructuring. This period of 'Glasnost' (openness) was a stark contrast to the cloak of secrecy with which the Soviet Union had attempted to envelope the events of Chernobyl.

In the days after the event, the government refused to acknowledge or report it, only doing so when scientists in Sweden were alerted to adnormally high radiation levels emanating from foreign regions. Not only this, but they sought to manipulate the numbers of those affected by radiation by raising the threshold level at which one could be deemed contaminated. With such engrained deception levering a disjunct between state-held ideology and civilian well being, it was surely inevitable that the tide would soon have to turn against the Communist Party.

In the end, my overriding impression of Chernobyl is that the desolate towns, the ruined structures, the dessicated ambition, are all fundamentally emblematic of a possible future for humankind.

Pripyat in particular, stands as an Athens or Rome for the 20th century; its lifespan from creation to destruction proceeding at a very modern hyperspeed. The landscape is evidence of a broken marriage between faith in science and technology, and fallible human endeavour. It represents, in the short term, a marked cultural shift for a nation that would be profoundly altered in 1991; and, in the long term, a vision of human civilisation after some cataclysmic 'doomsday' event, after which nature has the freedom to reassert its control.

It is not pessimism to state that all cities will eventually be ruins, or that all that is must some day cease to be, and with that in mind Chernobyl exists as a stark yet highly modern vision of the future urban landscape.

Culture - May

Books read:

Nikolai Gogol - 'Dead Souls'
Sun-Tzu - 'The Art of War' (non-fiction)
Iain Banks - 'The Wasp Factory'
William Powell - 'The Anarchist Cookbook' (non-fiction)
Noam Chomsky - 'Interventions' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Blue Ruin' (Jeremy Saulnier) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'The Candidate' (Michael Ritchie)
'The Two Faces of January' (Hossein Amini) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'La Jetee' (Chris Marker)
'Everything you always wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask)' (Woody Allen)
'Concussion' (Stacie Passon) (at Cornerhouse, Manchester)
'Before Sunset' (Richard Linklater)
'Before Sunrise' (Richard Linklater)

Albums Played:

The War on Drugs - 'Lost in the Dream'
Coldplay - 'Ghost Stories'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Revelation'
Leftfield - 'Rhythm and Stealth'
Little Dragon - 'Nabuma Rubberband'

Gigs:

Nine Inch Nails at O2 Arena, London
Nine Inch Nails at MEN Arena, Manchester

Events:

Irvine Welsh at Southbank Centre
'May 1968, Spring Revolution. A Tale of two cities' (Atlas Gallery)
'Under the influence: John Deakin and the lure of Soho' (Photographer's Gallery)
David Lachapelle - 'Land Scape' (Robilant + Voena, London)

Tearing the city at the seams #20 - One day in Kiev

Hoisting the anchor of stable circumstance can lead to a tendency to drift in impulsive and uncharacteristic directions. And so it was, mired in early-year personal turbulence that I found myself one evening booking a flight (non-refundable as it turned out), to a place in the world that had most recently detached itself from the mainland of stability into uncertain waters - Kiev.

The Ukraine has barely left the headlines since late-2013 when vicious street protests flared up in response to President Yanukovych's overt flirtation with Putin's Russia and shunning of any closer alliance with the EU. The revolutionary skirmishes in Maiden Square were covered almost in real time by the media and so naturally, the usually restrained, impulsive side in me set the controls for the heart of the action.

I was all of a sudden imbued with a defiant conviction that any writer worth reading at all is one that has lived a tempestuous life; the power of the imagination lies almost secondary to having rolled the dice of fate and chance and dealt with whatever the outcome. Ballard, Burroughs, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Bukowski, Celine - all writers with lives that served as the skeleton upon which their imagination conjured flesh and muscle. I was in thrall to writers like Orwell and Hemingway who bade farewell to their homelands and threw themselves into the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and by the war photographer Don McCullin, who decided to travel to Berlin as the wall was first being erected, splitting Germany into East and West, and in the process breaking down his own personal wall separating him from a successful media career.

Not, I hasten to add, that I was deluded enough to think I would be able to join in the protesters or try and 'make my name'; merely that for a short period the sensation that the natural progression of life insulates with a comfort blanket of prosaic routine became intensified to the point at which in some way I felt I had to respond.

As it happenned, the date for my departure ended up being repelled by the heat of erupting civil war from March until early-June, by which time both my own circumstances and that of Kiev have largely subsided to a state of calm dormancy.

There is something to be said for arriving at a place shortly after an upheaval has occurred, when the unsettled dust still floats perceptibly in the breeze like dandelion seeds uncertain of where to come to rest. Indeed, sitting on a grassy bank with a panorama of Maidan Independence Square, it's hard not to draw equivalence with the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who posed the provocative thesis in 1991 that 'the Gulf War did not take place'.

He was raising the idea that the conflict had been experienced in a light refracted so prevalently through the media/propaganda prism for those in the West, contorted into shapes to fit specific agenda and directives. To such an extent that there was little connection to be felt with the conflict in any way other than through a nonchalant acknowledgement of the stylised spectacle that had been manufactured around the real events like an incubator.

Having been exposed to the action broadcast on the news - the elusive snipers dotted around rooftops, the entrenched protesters clashing with armed police - it feels profoundly strange to be peering through the spectacle at reality itself - it felt like the unrest had played out in the reified plain of the media landscape and no where else, and that this was little more than a stage set for a drama that had now broken for an interval.

Surely it couldn't have all taken place here?, I found myself thinking. Where singers and bands take turns on a stage, where young couples saunter in the sun eating ice cream, and where parents bring small children as though they were sight-seeing in central London, particularly apt with the Independence Monument standing like a gold-tasselled Nelson's Column.

But of course, one soon notices the barricades and rubble mounds that block the streets leading onto the square; the ramparts of sandbags and tyres built up like an urbanised Western Front; the solemn wreathes and urn-like candles that line the kerbs as markers of those who died here only a handful of weeks ago.

There are the yellow-and-blue flags, the graffiti proclamations, and large sections of the road brickwork that has been broken up and stacked to one side as an improvised arsenal ready to be utilised as missiles should circumstances dictate. Broken bricks lie strewn across the ground like the spent cartridges of a battle over which the locals stroll apparently trying to affect a front of calm ambivalence.

And why shouldn't they? Politics and civil disorder have their place but before long people just want to reinstall some degree of order. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's Willy Wonka, has been elected in the May elections promising to extinguish the still-raging fires of resistance in the East of the country, particularly in the Donetsk region where, having held their own (largely symbolic) elections a few weeks ago, there are many pushing for the establishment of a People's Republic, carving themselves away from Kiev's authority.

Later on in the day, I chance upon St. Sophia's Square as motorcades carrying politicians and senior figures race past applauding crowds lining the roads en route to the President's official swearing-in.

It is astonishing just how circular the historic narrative is within the space of nearly one century, in parallel to how Mikhail Bulgakov in 'The White Guard' documented the agitation and the frenzy of 1918 as the occupying Germans fled the city, leaving nationalist forces and Russian socialists to roil for supremacy in a whirlpool of discontent.

His novel deals with the patriotic cynosure that so often leads to blindness, and the struggle to assert basic humanitarian principles in a time of factionalism and perfidy. It is more than a little obvious to the detached outsider that, climbing down a few rungs on the generational ladder, the very same passions and tensions are brewing to full strength once again.

The usually free-flowing access around Maidan Square is still snarled up with a jam of khaki tents, a kind of refugee settlement in which protesters sit in defiant solidarity for a cause that persists despite, or perhaps because of, its ambiguity. I can't claim to have conducted a straw poll of local opinion during my time there, but both the female manager of the hostel I was staying at and a male tour guide I met the following day, seemed bemused by their determination in remaining encamped. The latter cynically remarked that, "I think they've gotten quite comfortable there, they get donations from the tourists, I don't think they want to go home".

I suppose they might feel that by their very visible presence, they might continue to hold Poroshenko to account during his tentative first steps in office, acting as a peoples' court against which his progress will be judged. Symbolically at least, they represent the scabs hardening over the still-raw wounds of the unrest, which only a successful transition of power and time will heal into obsolescence.

The greatest challenge facing the foreign traveller to Kiev is the obstacle of language. The vast majority of signage and text is in Cyrillic, a rigid and angular alphabetic cliff face on which it's nigh-on impossible for the ignorant to gain a foothold. I had learnt approximations of the staple Ukrainian phrases but progressing to saying "do you speak English?" (which my guidebook translated as "vy rozmovlyayete anhliys'koyu?") proved a step too far and my garbled articulations - mainly in restaurants and ticket kiosks - resulted in quizzical and uncomprehending stares. That said, the desired effect of my atrocious pronunciation was that they instantly grasped that I certainly did not speak Ukrainian, and pityingly obliged as I was reduced to gesticulating awkwardly.

Getting up early on a Saturday morning (Bulgakov described the awakening city as 'looking like a pearl set in turquoise'), I decided, before heading to Maidan Square, I would take the metro over to visit the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra, the major monastery of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church and the 'spiritual heart' of Ukraine to which thousands of pilgrims migrate every year.

Founded by St. Anthony in the mid-11th century, the site has suffered extraordinary devastation at the hands of the invading Mongol and Tartar armies, and most recently the centrepiece Dormition Cathedral was bombed by the Russians as the German army entered Kiev in 1941 (although Russian historians have long tried to extricate blame, instead pinning it on the Nazis).

Now rebuilt, the Dormition is magnificently ostentatious with its 7 golden onion-domes gleaming in the intensifying morning heat, from which drifted the undulating bass tones of a male choir. Overlooking the Lavra is the Golden Bell Tower, resembling a telescope unfolded and stood on end.

The epicentre of all this holiness though are the Caves, tucked away inside a more modest church, containing the mummified bodies of St. Anthony and 120 other monks. The caves are confined and claustrophobic, lit only by a few wax candles, with the caskets set into small alcoves and niches in the walls.

Observing the shrines and the camp at Maidan Square, I did not overtly feel like a voyeur, but here in the caves I certainly felt that I was trespassing in a way on this holy terrain, as pilgrims passed me by spasmodically crossing themselves and bending to kiss the caskets. Some appeared to be racing through the alcoves in the same manner as they would through the aisles of a supermarket doing their Saturday morning shopping, whilst for others it did appear to be a profound enactment of their devout reverence.

Feeling like something of an infidel, I fled the Lavra and made my way back to central Kiev. I headed south down the main promenade of Vul Khreschatyk, a street that has welcomed the post-independence influx of Western franchises like Zara and Marks & Spencer, to where it abuts with Tarasa Shevchenko Bul. It was at this junction that the statue of Lenin had stood until being torn down at some point over the last few weeks, leaving a stumpy pedestal waiting for another stone idol to be installed.

Turning to head north again up Vul Volodymyrska, I pass the resplendent National Opera and Ballet Theatre as well as the hunchback Zoloti Vorota, a replica of the main entrance to Kiev. Before making the descent towards the quarter of Podil, the exuberant St. Andrew's Church dominates the crest of the hill, with its white, purple and gold Baroque ornamentation and spires shaped like perfume bottles.

Sweeping down the cobbled Andriivsky uzviz, on which sits Mikhail Bulgakov's house, it's impossible not to become distracted by the many souvenir stalls that line the pavement. There are an abundance of quintessential handicrafts - pysanky (decorated Easter eggs) and rushnyky (embroidered hand towels) - as well as Russian dolls and a panoply of Soviet-era memorabilia.

I cannot help but purchase a grey fur Soviet hat emblazoned with the hammer and sickle badge, despite being certain that such items will now be produced and imported en masse from China, but as the stallowner tries to emphasise the hat's authenticity I don't feel inclined to shatter the illusion.

Feeling footsore and weary by this mid-afternoon point I use the Funicular to winch me back up Vladimir's Hill and make my way back towards Maidan Square to a bohemian basement café to sample some authentic Ukrainian cuisine - borsch (a flavoursome beetroot soup), varenyky (dumplings stuffed with cheese, potato and mushrooms), and the obligatory horilka (vodka) served with lots of ice and lemon. The bill comes to 130 hryvnias or roughly £6.50!

But the agreeable exchange rate is just one reason why more people should ignore caution and make the trip to Kiev. It is an attractive and tidy city, abundant with greenery and flowers, and a wealth of history to explore. Indeed, the architecture itself denotes a sense of identity crisis and conflicting allegiances that have and will certainly continue to leave their impression on the city. On the one hand the expansive boulevards, cobbled streets and elaborate cathedrals are reminiscent of the Europe with which many citizens would like stronger bonds to be forged; whilst there are many striking and imposing slabs of Soviet architecture (particularly on the bus ride from the airport),that illustrate the overarching dominance exerted by Russia for so long, and that threaten to hobble Ukraine's moves towards autonomy.

There still remains unrest in the East that has yet to subside, Poroshenko needs to work hard to convince the electorate that the endemic corruption of his predecessors can be eradicated. He also somehow needs to balance the diplomatic scales between Putin's Russia and their dramatic inflation of previously generous energy prices on the one side (the tour guide I speak to tells me he has grave concerns and recently disposed of his TV); and avoid becoming unnecessarily beholden to America in the same way as the Baltic states such as Estonia, Latvia and Belarus have become effectively NATO outposts used to push American imperialism antagonistically up against Russian borders.

It is a delicate tightrope to walk and only time will tell whether it can be realised effectively without further disruption being brought upon the lives of the Ukrainian people.

Sitting on a bank surveying Maidan Square I can't help but think of the present as a definite lull, a period of calm before an inevitable resurgence of the storm. Coincidentally, overhead a timpani of thunder rolls across the sky after the day's engorged sun, yet no rain is forthcoming. The couples and the families saunter by, eating ice cream and drinking beer, whilst musicians play on the stage.

My eye becomes caught by two soldiers in camouflage attire walking past, each with a firm grip on the arms of a man who remonstrates between them. The manner in which they have hold of him is clearly in an effort at being as inconspicuous as possible, heading towards one of the hotel complexes that flank the square, and certainly it would appear that everyone around is oblivious except myself.

Who is this man I wonder? What offence has he committed and what fate awaits him? After a few seconds they are lost from sight amidst the bustle of the crowd and already I'm querying the implications of what I've seen, perhaps merely importing my own desire for a more tangible sense of drama to inflect upon the narrative.

For what had I sought to gain from this foray to a fractious land?; merely to survey the wreckage of recent events, carefully arranged like forensic evidence at a crime scene?; to intricately extract some inspirational serum from this volatile plant?; or perhaps to glimpse just for a moment through the shroud of ambivalent normalcy and discern something momentary of the very real disharmony still present?

In any case, all selfish personal reasons for being there - for adventure, experience, to break from the sanctuary of routine - remain ineluctably so. I realise that, although I may have travelled here as an intrepid, slightly daring, slightly risk-seeking tourist, nonetheless I am, and have little more insight on the real complexities of the situation as they stand than, a tourist.

REVIEW - David Lachapelle - 'Land Scape'

There’s something psychologically compelling about our perception of scale being manipulated, something innately alluring about seeing things reduced to their miniature representation. The sense perhaps of redefining the frustratingly rigid scale of our own physicality and the assertion of some semblance of superiority.

I remember my fascination and fondness for London stemming from a family holiday when I was 8 or 9. It was my first exposure to such a city, and the sheer enormity of it all left an indelible impression on me, like a geographic tinnitus that is still ringing on within me today.

Although more recently, as I’ve begun to think about these things, I do wonder whether it was the homeward-bound visit to Legoland, with its many colourful representations of London, that assisted in some way to distort or enliven my haptic sense of the amorphous city as a place of intrigue and imagination.

It is an inherent attraction that Swift captures so brilliantly in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, and manifests itself in the preoccupations of model-making, toy train enthusiasts and other stereotypically ‘bloke-in-a-shed’ pursuits.

So, attending David Lachapelle’s ‘Land Scape’ exhibition at the Robilant + Veona gallery, I was impressed at how his work manages so successfully to dispossess you of your sense of scale, at least temporarily.

The exhibition presents his model representations of industrial power stations and oil refineries, placing them in naturalistic landscapes – deserts, city backdrops, and such like – and taking photographs that are then exploded into enormous prints. The effect is disorientating – the size of the prints appears to demand some distance of the observer, and yet it is only on drawing nearer that one realises that these steam-belching behemoths of industry are actually composites of everyday items arranged and built like some highly elaborate ‘Blue Peter’ model.

Intricate pipe runs are plastic straws, ventilation plant are old egg boxes, cooling chimneys are beers cans; the minutiae of the detail is persistently revealing, the ingenuity behind the constructions considerable. The success of the models lies in the implementation of such perfunctory items; the paraphernalia of the everyday – mobile phones, biro pens, matchsticks, cardboard – that we have come to regard on an almost subliminal level; their new application forces the observer to recognise them under a new guise.

It is a clever construct in repackaging a panoply of familiar products, camouflaged by their very ubiquity, to try and convince us of something altogether different – perhaps an allegory for the consumerist ‘confidence trick’ as a whole?

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I saw Lachapelle’s pieces as being – whether by design or otherwise – representative of the holistic process of production and consumption; the recycling of the end products of industry to assume the form of the mechanical apparatus, energy and power that generated them into existence in the first place.