Kidding Herself

The Last Bogatyr Messenger of Darkness – a trilogy’s end

A while ago Mama wandered into my room and told me Prince Phillip had died.

I was shocked.

Not Philipp Kirkorov? I gasped.

It’s an easy mistake to make for an AngloRusski child.

Kirkorov is Russian TV light entertainment royalty.

Bulgarian by birth, he’s been a pop singer since the late eighties, but what really projected him into superstardom fame is ~~fronting Russia’s entry for Eurovision in 1995.~~

Sorry, that’s not quite right. Actually it was marrying Alla Pugachova, whose fame as a singer in a career spanning four decades, is along the same lines as that of Madonna. In Russia and the surrounding area anyway.

She also represented Russia at Eurovision, by the way. Came nowhere. I was quite surprised Russia went back to the competition after that.

Anyway. Kirkorov’s other unique selling point, aside from being incredibly tall, is his performance persona. Which is fabulously dressed. Fab-u-lous-ly.

He is currently the chief judge on the Russian version of the Masked Singer, with season three due to kick off any time now. Mama is super looking forward to it as Mama finds Philipp an uncomplicated joy, and looks forward to his outfits each week.

Although not the time. Mama thinks a family friendly show that ends after 11pm on a Sunday is inexplicably not family or worker friendly. Especially as it is precisely the sort of silliness that goes very well with a few sherries.

Which is a long way of saying that hearing that Philipp Kirkorov was making an appearance in the third installment of The Last Bogatyr film series was absolutely guaranteed to sell it to Mama, even if she weren’t already sold on this set of movies.

Which she is, as you will have gathered from our reviews of The Last Bogatyr and The Last Bogatyr, Root of Evil.

This final to the trilogy is called The Last Bogatyr, Messenger of Darkness.

(Someone has shoved an article into the English language title that Mama feels is unnecessary. But then, the English language internet seems to have settled on The Last Warrior as a good translation too where they haven’t given up entirely and called it Posledniy Bogatyr and Mama is not having any of that either. Search engines be dammed).

The unique selling point of the film this time was that it takes place not in fairytale world, but Moscow.

Does this set up a whole bunch of jokes about people like Baba Yaga interacting with modern life? Yes, indeed it does. Aside from the business with the tissues, there’s a whole riff on what middle aged couples do with the remote control for the TV, and also a timeless one about the frustrations of dealing with the Post Office.

There are a few in jokes for the locals too, like the one about what might happen to the hut on chicken’s legs when they park it to go off adventuring. Mama found the film quite funny, and even laughed out loud at least once. Indeed there were a number of shouts of laughter from the whole audience throughout the showing, which has got to be good in a family blockbuster.

And that’s not even including why it is chuckle worthy that Philipp Kirkorov is playing himself in The Last Bogatyr 3.

Mama also enjoyed the setting, and the fact you can tell it’s made by Russians because the bit of architecture the characters managed to keep wandering past, regardless of the actual geography of the streets they were supposedly walking/ driving/ running/ flying/ motorbiking/ teleporting down, was Moscow City. Not St Basil’s.

In fact, shock horror, St Basil’s, Red Square and the Kremlin did not feature once in this movie! I know! How will the foreign audiences even know it is Russia?

Although the film makers seem to have changed the location of Ivan’s flat, which Mama found a continuity blip too far. She might not travel round Russia that much, but she does know her Moscow.

But, basically, it’s good. Rather better than part two, and definitely living up to the promise of part one. And the fact has brought the trilogy to a fairly emphatically endingy ending is probably also a point in its favour for people resigned to the inevitable existence of the Avengers part seven hundred and eighty two.

The hat tip to the famous art work in the final scenes didn’t hurt either. Niiiiiice little Easter egg for those of us who haunt the Tretyakov Art Gallery.

The only mild criticism Mama has, in fact, is similar to the one Papa started with, which is Baba Yaga was a bit lacking in unearthly menace. I mean yeah, family friendly, but Baba Yaga should be a properly scary character, even when she’s broadly being helpful. Nobody does it better. Making her a slightly grumpy but essentially benevolent old biddy is weird and wrong in Mama’s opinion, and it’s not even her cultural heritage.

Plus there’s a slight tendency for the script writers to assume that Russian audiences haven’t actually seen any English language kids’ films in the last twenty years or so, and won’t recognise a bit of recycling.

Still, should you see The Last Bogatyr, Messenger of Darkness, and the other films too? Yes, and surely by now there are versions with English subtitles for at least the first one at the very least.

Although if you had got cracking on with learning Russian when we first brought these films to your attention, perhaps subtitles are no longer necessary.

Says Mama, who still can’t reliably remember which words have myakii znacks or deal with more than two cases at a time.

The trailer for The Last Bogatyr, Messenger of Darkness:

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about the Post Office at the end of the world.

Photocredit: Mama has shamelessly used a couple of interesting pictures she found lying around on the internet to promote this Disney film, a service for which she, once again, is not receiving any form of compensation whatsoever. Hint hint, Russian filmmakers and distributors, Mama is very much available for invites to premiers and similar, especially if she gets to meet Philipp. Also, follow Kirkorov’s Instagram, see above, because everybody should, see caption and photo above. However, if we should not be using these pictures, we are very willing to take them down.

Where are the Moose at the Elk Island Biological Station?

To the very immediate north of Moscow is a nature reserve called Losiny Ostrov, or Elk Island, which is not an island but a forest. With elk in it.

Or possibly moose. It turns out everyone is quite unclear on the difference, including Mama.

The nature reserve has a Biological Station which you can go and visit. It’s been on our list for a while. But given that Mama considered the location (the middle of a forest) unfriendly and had somehow decided we needed to go in the dead of winter, things kept intervening, and it was only recently we made it to the nature reserve’s visitor centre.

The final obstacle turned out to be the booking system. Allegedly, according to the website, one can only set foot in the Elk Island Biological Station if one is on an excursion, and the excursion needs to be booked in advance.

The website booking system is broken, however.

It doesn’t look broken, you understand. And you will get email confirmation of something. But since you can’t actually specify a day let alone a time or indeed pay, Mama was confused, and decided to ring up to find out what she was doing wrong.

At which point she discovered that she needed to run the gauntlet of press one to report an escaped moose, press two to book an excursion, press three to report a problem with the website type experience first.

On the upside, having carefully selected the right button and only spent ten minutes listening to Venessa Paradis singing Joe Le Taxi on a loop (I promise I am not making this up), it turned out that Mama was not being inept. There really was a problem with the website.

So she booked by phone.

Not sure why, really, though, as you still don’t pay when booking by phone either.

And when we arrived, bang on the time for the excursion we had signed up for, no mention was made whatsoever of the existence of any prior booking.

However, I’m sure the question you are all really interested in is, did we see elk? Or even moose?

And the answer is, yes!

A moose in the snow, with his face turned to show us a very mooselike nose

We also listened to a number of interesting facts to do with elkmoose. Including (but not limited to) the fact that mooselk like to get deliberately high from car fumes. Also, mushrooms.

An elf nibbling on a silver birch branch at Elk Island Biological Station

What the talk did not address is why there is so much confusion over the difference between elk and moose, a debate not helped by the English version of the explanatory placard about the animals, which had them labeled at elk (moose).

Mama has finally gotten fed up with the debate, and fired up Google. It seems that while in Europe the words elk and moose are interchangeable, in North America, what we were looking at were definitely moose, as elk is the name of a different animal.

Hope that clears it up, although we were expecting something bigger. Where the information that the type of elk we have near Moscow are far smaller than the type of elk they have in Siberia leaves us I do not know, except to say that the elk at the Biological Station did have the sort of nose you would associate with moose, and Mama may have not been paying attention when the guide mentioned how old the one we were looking at was.

Anyway.

Given that Losiny Ostrov is a nature reserve, and the animals are generally supposed to be roaming freely, the existence of some in enclosures at the Biological Station needs explaining, and so when we were not furthering our zoological knowledge, we were finding out about why the individual animals were there.

This elk (moose), which as you can see is sitting down so it’s hard to say how big it is compared to the other one, is awaiting re release back into the wild after it ambled out of the forest and into a park deep into Moscow proper, meaning it needed fetching back. Sokolniki, in case you are wondering.

A moose sitting down in the snow surrounded by silver birch trees

Apparently this sort of thing is not an entirely isolated incident (Elk Island really is hard up against the borders of Moscow) and so while Mama has a long standing line of ridicule about the impression that there are bears on the streets of Russia’s capital, she is now going to have to concede that there are sometimes quite large wild animals at loose after all.

Not all the animals in the Elk Island Biological Station are moose or elk. Some of them are wild boar, which again is typical for the surrounding forest.

Overhead shot of two wild boar eating food a guide in a green coat has fed them from a bucket, while visitors look on

This pair are here, though, because some woman got hold of a pair of wild boar piglets, and was raising them in her garden (as you do), when suddenly they turned out very large and dug up her entire vegetable patch.

Two wild board and the guide (green coat, right) at the Elk Island Biological Station

And in this next picture you may be able to see at the very back of the enclosure some lovely small spotted deer. Mama was a bit more intent on trying to capture the lively crisp winter weather than the wildlife, while also leading us in a reminiscence about London’s Richmond Park, aka the Poo Park, mainly because it is both full of these and other deer, and their poo.

Feeding trough in the foreground of a snowy enclosure with some very small deer very far away at the back

Although Losiny Ostrov also started off a a royal hunting preserve, as it happens.

Mama thinks they may be fallow deer, mainly because there are only a few names of deer she knows and that’s one of them, but this is relevant because these deer are not native to Russia, but brought over for a private collection by somebody rich (as you do). Which is illegal, so they ended up here and will NOT be released in case they, I dunno, start outbreeding the elk or moose or something.

Some of these next deer are sika deer.

Close up of a deer's muzzle at the Elk Island Biological Station

Mama does not know quite why this is exciting (she was changing the battery in her camera because the cold had done for the first one) but she knows that it is, and that the large male one with the antlers is called Vasya.

A deer with large antlers feeding from a trough

A deer with large antlers sitting in the snow

A deer with large antlers walking through the snow

And that was the end of the tour. I pronounced it well worth the effort, Big Bro got to touch a moose/ elk and is never washing his hand again, and Mama’s only regret was that there did not seem to be anywhere to celebrate her triumph over flakey booking systems with coffee and hot chocolate.

It’s possible that there’s a bit more to it in the warmer months, and certainly the website advertises all sorts of other related activities such as a longer tour round more of the reserve, and some Winter Holiday related children’s activities.

Mama is a bit skeptical about what the website says, but is definitely up for going back again in summer to find out.

More information

The Elk Island Losiny Ostrov website.

Location: Moscow region, Kropotkinsky proezd, coordinates – 55.879232, 37.784380.

Opening: Tuesday – Sunday from 10am to 6pm.

Admission: 600 roubles for adults and 400 roubles for kids.

Getting there: There is parking (costing 250 roubles) next to the Elk Island Biological Station, and by car is by far the easiest way to get there, as it’s a good 30 minute hike from the nearest bus stop at 4th Parkovaya Street. Possibly that’s what the Joe le Taxi song is all about. You can get the minibus 333 (from VDNKh metro, or 3 from Perlovskaya station, or the 547 bus from Los station. These run infrequently, 30 minutes apart or to a timetable.

Kimry: shoes, art nouveau, nalichniki, and the Volga river

None of us can remember why we decided to go to the town of Kimry, a small town over 100 km north of Moscow.

Kimry is best known for two things.

Well, three, if you count the fact that every internet source Mama casually looked up also mentioned that it has the reputation of being a bit of a regional drug dealing capital.

Mama thinks this is because the train really stops in Savyolovo. Savyolovo used to be a separate town, full of the usual tower blocks, and is important enough to have a Metro station named after it in Moscow. But currently, it is trying very hard to associate itself with Kimry proper on the other bank of the Volga as a suburb of its more desirable neighbour. I shouldn’t think that a casual visitor will come across this activity on either side of the river, mind you, and it could just mean that everyone is copying the three things they found on the Internet about Kimry from each other. Just like Mama!.

The upside of this determined cosying up is that there are regular buses across the bridge to the place you are really trying to visit.

We, naturally, walked instead. Which is how we found the beach volleyball area.

The airplane at the start of the bridge also came as a bit of a surprise. Apparently one of the great Russian airplane designers came from near Kimry, Andrei Tupolev. Before all Soviet airplanes were Il-something or another, they were Tu-something else. He has commemorative stamps and everything. And swore a lot. Mama approves.

However, Mama digresses, because the bridge itself is also worth a mention (its architects think). To be fair the Volga is very wide, and frankly getting across it must have been, and must remain, a bit of an obsession. Mama, who has lived in London on the wrong side of the Thames, sympathises, and is therefore prepared to tell you that the reason why it is impressive is because it was the first time in Russia that light nanoconcrete was used for carriageway leveling coating. Apparently.

It is also the longest bridge in the Tver reigion.

The airplane and the bridge are not what Kimry is famous for though. What Kimry is famous for are shoes and an architectural style which somewhat improbably blends traditional Russian wooden houses, lacy wooden window surrounds called nalichniki and art nouveau.

These two things are not unconnected.

And to be fair to Mama and her lengthy introduction, the location of Kimry is also highly significant. Kimry, as with much of the land north of Moscow, is surrounded by mosquito infested peat bogs and forest, largely unsuitable for growing crops. Kimry had access to cows though, or rather cow hides, and was making very serious money from leveraging this fact at around the same time that art nouveau became popular.

Or possibly at about the same time as the town burned down and needed rebuilding. Mama is a little unclear on this point.

Although not until after the townspeople, who all began as serfs belonging to the Saltykov family (prominent members: Catherine the Great’s lover, various field marshals, a satirist, a Tasrina and a notorious serial killer. By marriage, to be fair) had made enough from being bootmakers to buy their collective freedom. And even then it took them until 1900 to completely clear the debt. No wonder that shoes feature prominently on the coat of arms of the town. As well as a boat, which moved the fruits of their labours all over Russia. Even as far as the prestigious trade fairs of Paris and such like.

Sometimes living with the difficulty of getting across the Volga is worth it.

You can find out more about the rise and fall of the shoemaking industry, which lasted well into the Soviet era, at the local museum.

Eary 20th century ladies shoes in Kimry museum

Mama insisted we went round this, and in fact, we recommend it – not just for the regular plinths of desirable footwear punctuating more general information about the town but also for what Mama thinks are very elegant hessian mountings.

Brown lave up boots from the 19th century in Kimry museum

And, in fact, the displays of typical interiors throughout the town’s history.

Plus, the obligatory mammoth bones. Mama does find it amusing that Russia has so many mammoth bones they appear in every local museum she has been to so far.

Traditional Russian felt boots in Kimry museum

And you should also look out for the work of another local hero, the wood carving artist, Ivan Abalyaev, who Mama thinks probably did not have the tourist trade in mind when he swapped making wooden forms for the cobblers for whittling.

Wood carvings by Ivan Abalyaev of a man drunkenly drinking from a bottle and another man in the act of hitting a woman, who is cowering away

Although all of life is there, and some of it is happy.

Wood carving by Ivan Abalyaev of a part scene of villagers sitting around eating, tdrinking, talking and listening to music

And there’s more airplane bumpf, including Tupolev’s desk and a mock up of the Soviet Concorde (actually not Tupolov’s work, but his son was involved).

Mama does like a good local museum and this is one of them.

Naturally, though, what you should do when visiting Kimry is just lose yourself in wandering around the streets and admiring the buildings, art nouveau, covered in nalichiniki, or otherwise .

An example of a run down art nouveau buidling in Kimry Russia

As you do this you will note that many, if not most of them, are not in a great state of repair.

Gone are the footwear glory days, and just to prove that location can break as well as make a town, the Kimry really is quite a long day trip from Moscow. Although Mama gathers that there are tours, and that some of the Volga cruise ships stop here.

Certainly, there is some restoration going on. This is one of the more famous buildings in Kimry. Yes, it is very yellow.

A restored bright yellow traditional Russian wooden house in Kimry which also has art nouveau florishes

And here is one of the two older churches, now in the closing stages of being fixed up.

A man sitting on scaffolding, decorating the ceiling of a Russian Orthodox church

The third was knocked down in the Soviet era to become what Mama gathers is quite a thriving theatre, housed in a striking building that Mama spent the whole visit failing to persuade us we needed to go and take an up-close photo of.

Luckily, Kimry has come to the attention of the Tom Sawyer Fest. The Tom Sawyer Fest is a volunteer movement that started in Samara, after a group of locals decided to get together and renovate some of the older buildings in their town. It has spread, and Mama can only hope will continue to help drag Kimry and its wooden art nouveau houses and nalichniki towards a well-deserved resurgence.

Currently this is most in evidence in the number of well-housed supermarkets that seem to have been recently opened.

Go and spend your tourist roubles in Kimry to help out. Or, get in there and enjoy the ruin porn before you are too late. There are hotels! There is airbnb. There are cafes! Whatever will get you to this off the beaten path gem in Russia.

More information

Getting there: There are trains from Savolovskaya station (which is on the grey line of the Metro). This will take you two and a half hours of gentle chugging. There are also buses from Dubna and Tver, and youy can drive up from Moscow (or from Tver) by heading out of Moscow towards Dmitrov and then towards either Dubna or Taldom, which will take you around two and a half to three hours.

Mushrooming at the Timiryazev Biological Museum

You might be wondering why, given my Beastly Big Brother’s animal obsession, my family have been in Moscow for over five years now and not visited the Timiryazev Biological Museum. Especially because it is housed in a particularly nice old building.

Well, we were a bit shocked by this too. Which is why it was one of the first places we went to when we started going out again after the great year of lockdown.

To be fair, we had tried to go once before. But there was a queue round the block because of some mushroom conference. Papa does not do queuing, so we abandoned our visit.

And then we put it off some more because, whisper it, I went there on a school visit. Mama thought that perhaps it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and at the time she didn’t want to overdo it.

But right now we will agree to go and watch paint dry as long as it involves doing it somewhere other than our own house. Off we went, then, with very few expectations, but high high excitement.

The Timiryazev Biological Museum started off strongly, as far as we kids were concerned, when the obligatory trip to the toilet revealed that the walls were covered with poo factiods. In fact Mama was pretty delighted by this too, given how much of the time she normally spends arguing about whether we want to go for a preventative widdle. No need to worry about this at this museum! The problem will be more in removing your children from the cubicles as they bound around happily chasing down another interesting tidbit.

This poo fact placard is about the guano wars

Not to mention ogling the display of actual poo in the vicinity of the washbasins.

Various types of poo in a case at the Timiryazev Biological Museum

Very wisely the museum then kicks of the real tour with a couple of rooms of stuffed animals. No one is ever bored of stuffed animals. Particularly not my Beastly Big Brother, who will work the room going, appreciatively, oh good! They’ve got a [insert name of obscure animal Mama is not convinced is not made up here].

Scary looking stuffed manul at the Timiryazev Biological Museum

There was also an opportunity for us to argue about what a Russian-named bird might be called in English, which is rapidly becoming our favourite thing. Mama and my Beastly Big Brother spent a whole hour disagreeing about the translation of the word robin recently. Because, while robins exist in Russia, the bird that actually seems to be considered the generic snow flutterer is a sort of chaffinch. Which is not, my Beastly Big Brother says, indignantly, even much of a winter bird! Mama had not noticed the confusion until now (red is involved with both of them), but it does explain why certain Christmas cards and snow scenes always seemed a bit off to her.

At this point the Timiryazev Biological Museum recalled that biology is not just about animals and we moved on to mushrooms. Two large rooms of them. Mama feels that the queues may not have been a one off and that museum may, in fact, be a mycologists’ paradise. Which if you know anything about Russians and their penchant for bounding into the woods and picking a wide range of apparently edible fungi every autumn is probably not surprising. Although Mama always considers this a test of any foreigner’s trust in their Russian partner. Still. She’s not dead yet, despite Papa being in every other way a conformed urbanite.

Anyway. We duly contemplated what mushrooms have done for civilization, and how they have hindered it; mushroom names and the reasons for them; edible mushrooms that are easily mistaken for poisonous ones; and why hedgehogs do not really carry mushrooms around on the backs.

Hedgehogs in Russia are said to collect foot on their spikes. The Timiryazev Biological Museum disagrees.

Bit of a harsh reality check that last one I feel, given how generations of Russian and Soviet cartoon lovers have been brought up on this idea.

And then we moved on to the room with the two headed dog.

Now I do not know what you expect when you go to a museum that is billed as both child-friendly and slightly stuffy in its approach to museuming (poo infested toilets notwithstanding). The actual dog which had had another dog’s head sewn into its neck to test something something nerves, and which lived for two days subsequently and was then stuffed and added to a Timiryazev Biological Museum display case at a nine-year-old’s eye height was not one of them.

Along with original photos, and another stuffed dog which lived some two years after someone grafted a liver inside its throat.

Mama took lots of photos and is including them here because she reasons if she had to see it, so do you.

If it makes you feel better, she also lectured us at length on medical and scientific ethics, introducing us to the idea that just because you can do something it does not always mean you should.

At which point she may have remembered about modern day animal testing. So we moved on.

Quite what was in the next few rooms I am not sure any of us were really concentrating on. Except possibly the puzzle of how in the anthropological study of various peoples from around the world, the second most important group, Anglo-Saxons, seem to have been left off entirely. Much to our half-English disapproval.

There was also a room dedicated to Darwin and man’s connection to apes, as well as quite a lot about evolution in general. The evolution of horses, carrots, all the important things.

Evolution of carrots display from white to orange at the Timiryazev Biological Museum

Kliment Timiryazev was a big deal in botanical circles not only has this museum, but a metro station, a bit of the moon and an agricultural college named after him, and was a big fan of Darwinism. And greenhouses, apparently. Quite right too.

And then somehow we were surrounded by prehistory, at which point my Beastly Big Brother perked up and asked us to guess which of these animals is responsible for the extinction of horses in North America.

Go on, guess.

And apparently it too died out because it was eaten by big cats from South America.

On which improving note we will leave you with another image of the very attractive building.

This has always been a museum, although the original owner actually built them to hold his large, eclectic antiques collection. Much like the Horniman and the Soanes Museums in London, although with less actual living alongside the knick-knacks required from the wife. Nice to see that the 19^th century transcends borders. Interestingly, we cant even blame the Revolution (for once) for its closure – the owner bequeathed his bits and bobs to the Historical Museum, and the buildings had been empty of interesting guns, swords, fabrics, carpets, paintings, drawings, engravings, crockery, and church paraphernalia for sometime until the 1930s when the animals and plants moved in.

Good then, that there are plans for a full renovation in the works. Yes, even the underground passageway!

The Timiryazev Biological Museum is not perhaps, the museum that should be first on your list if you are thinking about going to a life science themed experience in Moscow. That’s the Darwin Museum. It may not even be the second or third, given that there is a dedicated stuffed animal space right next to the Kremlin, and a modern, interactive experience all about the human body lurking about too. But it did wile away a happy couple of hours for us, and provided Mama with a surprise too. So it should, nevertheless, the on the list somewhere.

More information

The Timiryazev Biological Museum’s website.

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about ethics.

Address: 15 Malaya Gruzinskaya Ulitsa, Moscow, 123242

Admission: Adults 280 roubles, kids over 7 180 roubles, kids under 7 free

Opening: 10 am – 6pm every day, except Thursday (opens at 12) and Sunday (opens at 11) and Monday (closed)

Getting there: Barrikadnaya (purple line) or Krasnopesnenskaya (brown circle line). Cross the road and turn right away from the Zoo, and the street is quite soon up the road on the right.

2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art and Beauty

As we approach the first year anniversary of the pandemic quarantine it’s a given that there are many big things to mourn. And we do. And we should.

It’s also true that it’s been hard to have slide past unmarked or unattended all the little pleasurable events with which we usually mark the year.

I mean, yes, you can have a lockdown stay at home Zoom party birthday, and actually quite fun those are too, but if you always spend some of June in a muddy field in Glastonbury, it’s a wrench to have to seen that week go by and only have the comfort of the music festival’s greatest hits on TV.

A guilty wrench, maybe, because of all the more important things to be upset about, but a wrench nevertheless.

One of the things Mama was really looking forward to for 2020 was the 2^nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. Given that she had had to wait three years since the last one for it, I think she can be forgiven a slight internal scream of frustration when it was cancelled last summer.

Perhaps you can also understand why she did a little jig of joy when it was rescheduled for the autumn.

But events conspired against her, and Mama did not make it to the Garage Triennial in the autumn.

Then another lockdown happened.

And to cut a long story short, here we are finally writing about the 2^nd Triennial quite shortly before it closes again at the end of February.

This is probably a good thing, mind you. The only exhibition Mama has ever visited and managed to write up promptly was the one that closed abruptly about two minutes later because of covid. Mama thinks she may have jinxed it.

Anyway. You may remember that the idea of the Garage Triennial is to showcase modern art from all over the large territory that is the Russian Federation. The way they ensured a diverse range of participants this time was to ask last time’s exhibitor’s to choose who to include.

Handmade rug portrait of a man from the Caucuses, with a TV showing a film of the rug being made

Thus each exhibit gives the relationship between the artist and their recommender. These have been explained by the artists themselves, and inevitably if you know anything about Russians, there are some quite entertaining labels such as ‘guru – sect member’ or ‘Siberian past – handing ladders and recreation therapy’ or ‘landmark – satellite’ or ‘accomplice’ or (Mama’s personal favourite) ‘<~#*^//:+=>#:_ _ _ #~<||’.

The 2^nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, not content with an already long title is also called ‘A Beautiful Night for All the People’, which I, for one pre-teen girl, do not agree with.

The exhibition was not full of beautiful things; it was full of weird things.

A tire which has been turned into a sculpture of a parrot at the 2nd Garage Triennial

Chief of those in my loudly voiced opinion was the canvases of gopniks. I do not consider gopniks (Slavic chavs, for those of you in the UK, but with more Adidas tracksuits and squatting) a suitable subject for art. Mama just wants to know where I have heard about them in the first place, and is contemplating, once again, limiting my access to YouTube.

Gopniks squatting at the 2nd Garage Triennial

Luckily, the notes to the 2^nd Garage Triennial say that the title is not the theme. It is taken from a book by a Russian mathematician, which was written in ‘a special process-based language’ using no symbols, allowing for many readings without a definite plot.

A much better description of the overall idea in fact.

Thus I was also inclined to be severe about the communication skills of the talking bushes, which my Bemused Big Brother and I both tried to have lengthy and quite nonsensical conversations with, without much success. Can’t think why not.

A plant with a microphone angled towards it

And Mama rather boggled at the story behind this piece which includes the artist getting thrown out of their job, making gravestone art, for subversive behaviour. Punk’s Not Dead and all that, but it’s a commitment to the idea Mama actively found herself blinking at. I suspect she, too, is showing her (increasingly stodgy) age.

Plaques in the style of gravestone plaques at the 2nd Garage Triennial

We did rather like the captioned toy dioramas, mainly because we are, after all, children of the meme generation, and also because some of them were quite funny. Although it was Mama who grinned at this one, which says ‘another angel has fallen from heaven’. She says she’s thinking of a pickup line, but that leaves me none the wiser.

Three lego figures stand around a dad plastic angel next to a toy ambulance

Mama and I quite disagree about this room. She thinks that it is strikingly attractive, whereas it gave me vertigio.

A dark room with back and white paintings of white splodges and a pile of ashes on the floor

Mama also spent actual minutes in front of this piece telling us about lace making and how it is a specialty of the place where our ancestral village is. Which would have been more uplifting if out of the corner of our eye we couldn’t see the accompanying video with the headdresses, masks for what are apparently Russian aliens, in action.

Three traditional carved wooden window frames with busts of women in traditional Russian costumes made of lace at the 2nd Garage Triennial

But we were delighted to find coffee machines for Mama.

Not really a coffee machine but it looks like one

And all of us really enjoyed the waiting room. You choose from a list of things to anticipate, enter the booth and experience hanging around for things like 12 midnight on NYE, with the image of a clock ticking back and forth a few seconds before the big moment, with the very beginning of the chime sound on loop. Or the end of Russia, which contrary to our apprehension, was footage from inside a train carriage carrying you towards, presumably, the border going on and on and on and on on and on and on and on. Mama actually snorted with appreciative laughter over that one. Russia is, after all, very very very big.

There were also some hands on exhibits, which are always welcome, and the jump scare we got when we turned round and found the docent in the corner of a blacked out tent with us was real and exciting, if an entirely unintended part of the installation, which was about spinning things.

I did approve of the name of this one, which is ‘Battle Cats’.

Although quite why we spent ten minutes each having our aura mapped I do not know as what we found was that while mine is round, Mama’s and my Bemused Big Brother’s are somewhat squiggly. But it did allow Mama to tell the story (again) of how she got assessed for psychic ability in the Tate Modern once.

Perhaps, all unsuspectingly, the Garage Triennial has managed to capture the basic ludicrousness of the last year and us all having our normal routines and comfort upended. Certainly a point made by the piece called ‘a portrait of my Babushka’, which is in fact an illustrated story of some of the more memorable moments from her life.

A life which was not, as you can imagine, all joy. Yet, here is one of the pictures.

A blue pig with an orange sewing machine on its back

And in the end you take your enjoyment where you can find it. For us, since Mama was so pleased to be out of the house, we were delighted to be treated to lunch in the Garage cafe (we recommend the soups, the hummus and the chicken cutlets) AND a trip to Burger King later in the day.

Plus the location of the Garage Art Gallery, Gorky Park, is quite delightful in the snow, and well worth a gallop round after you have been culturally satiated.

If you have the opportunity to trundle down to the 2^nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (A Beautiful Night for All the People) before it closes at the end of February, you will find it wildly inventive, quite bonkers in places, probably not pretty, and definitely not disappointing.

If you cannot attend this year’s, make plans for the next one, in 2023. Mama has certainly already pencilled it in.

More information

The 2nd Garage Triennial’s page on Garage’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about Angels and the classification thereof.

Address: 9/32 Krymsky Val, 119049, Moscow

Opening: The 2nd Garage Triennial of Contemporary Russian Art is on until 28th February 2021. 11 am to 10pm daily.

Admission: 500 roubles for adults. Children under 11 are free. Children over 11 cost 150 roubles. Currently, you need to buy tickets in advance for timed slots.

Public transport: The Garage gallery is in Gorky Park. The two nearest metro stations are Oktyabrskaya (brown and orange lines) and Park Kultury (brown and red lines).

The Last Bogatyr 2, Root of Evil is…?

I’m sure you have been waiting for baited breath – as Mama has – for the second instalment of the Russian made Disney fairytale Last Bogatyr (slash Knight, slash Hero, slash Warrior) vaguely promised at the end of the first film.

But that came out back in 2017 and Mama had almost lost hope when an idle google came across the info it would be out within the year.

[Pause for the global pandemic]

After one failed attempt to get into a screening with a much reduced cinema capacity, Mama and the somewhat less enthusiastic rest of the family (there’s also a cartoon about a horse out) settled down in a darkened room OUTSIDE OF OUR OWN FOUR WALLS and watched the Last Bogatyr 2 (slash Knight, slash Hero, slash Warrior), Root of Evil.

Ivan (Viktor Khorinyak), the reluctant hero from the real world, returns, and has somewhat uneasily settled down to fairytale living, only sneaking back to the civilization of Moscow, ooooh, once a day for a hot bath and some proper coffee, a practice which surely many Russians with a datcha can relate.

In fact, almost every single character from the first film is squeezed into this one. Given that the film makers have also added new arrivals on top of that, this means that some people are rather pushed for meaningful screen time, or any real point to their being there at all aside from a name check and perhaps one good moment each. Vasilysa (Mila Sivatskaya), for example, who was one of Ivan’s main travelling companions and the muscle for the group for the first film really doesn’t have much to do apart from continue to be Ivan’s love interest this time, despite her presence on the inevitable quest.

Koshchei (Konstantin Lavronenko), who of course returns, he’s Deathless, and Baba Yaga (Elena Yakovleva) are rather upstaged in the grumpy comic side kick role by Kolabok (Garik Kharlamov), a hooligan bread roll (yes really), whose back story Mama once actually learned off by heart in Russian the better to torture our early years with (‘…and then the fox ate him’). Not easily done.

There’s also not one, not two, but three villains this time round, although they have managed to fit a bit of moral tension into this situation, plotwise, which means Mama will allow it. That said, annoyingly, this time Mama did guess the plot twist related to Galina (Elena Valyushkina) and her excellently coiffed daughter (Ekaterina Vilkova). The ROOT of EVIL, geddit? Well, you will.

Two ominous women stand looking determined in the film the Last Bogatyr 2 Root of Evil

Aside from the minor issues of overstuffing the cast list, there are plenty of jokes; Ivan is both endearingly caddish and what he lacks in true heroic ability, he makes up for in what is surely a very timely reminder of the value of acceptance of the full range of the weird and wonderful in Belogorie; the fight scenes are fast and furious; there are some genuine pang-inducing moments of sadness at opportunities lost; the scene with the riddle is just perfect; and the writers have continued to be inventive about how they adapt what we know (or in Mama’s case, mostly don’t know) about Russian folklore, children’s stories and fairytales.

And at least the sheer number of people on screen includes plenty of women, some of whom are still not young.

Baba Yaga, looking fabulous in front of the hut on chicken legs in the film the Last Bogatyr 2 Root of Evil

Which makes up (a bit) for the mess the story makes of trying to square the fact that all the most effective characters are women with the fact that only men seem eligible for heroic status and that only a pissing contest with the splendidly irritating Finist the Falcon (Kirill Zaitsev) can spur Ivan to get off the metaphorical oven and prove himself.

Not that that goes very well for Ivan, mark you. Ah well, perhaps that’s the point.

On the upside, there’s a bonus whale.

Plus this time the Last Bogatyr 2 (slash Knight, slash Hero, slash Warrior), Root of Evil was sponsored not by the Southern Russia Tourism Board, but the Northern one. Who does not like lovingly-filmed shots of snow-covered landscape?

So all in all, if you were in any way entertained by (the idea of) The Last Bogatyr (slash Knight, slash Hero, slash Warrior) you should definitely entertain the thought of seeing The Last Bogatyr Root of Evil.

And luckily for Mama’s impatience levels, they seem to have cracked straight on this time with the next instalment, which intriguingly seems to be set in real life Moscow itself.

Photocredit: Mama has shamelessly used a couple of interesting pictures she found lying around on the internet to promote this Disney film, a service for which she is not receiving any form of compensation whatsoever. However, if she should not be using these pictures, she is very willing to take them down.

More information

Our other Russian film reviews:

The Last Bogatyr

Viy 2: Journey to China

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about Zen and the Art of Making Baguettes.

Follow your nose at the Gogol House Museum

One of the first Russian jokes Mama learned goes like this:

Once, a man was walking through a forest and he came across a pond and in the pond was a frog. ‘O frog!’ said the man, ‘Why are you so green, slimy and horrible?’ And the frog said, ‘Well, actually, normally I am white, fluffy and kind, but right now I’m sick.’

Not really believing that this was all that funny, every now and again over the years she has told it to a Russian. Inevitably they smirk, which just goes to show that while the rest of the world thinks that Russian humour is a best cold and black and at worst non-existent, in fact what it is, is surrealist.

(Or, possibly, just not very tolerant of stupid questions).

Which brings us to Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, who is known, somewhat inexplicably to Mama and she gathers to Gogol himself, as the founder of a movement of literary realism in the Russian language.

A famously gloomy sculpture of Nikolai Gogol, who sits enshrouded by a cape

Not because he was actually born in and grew up in Ukraine, although that is true too.

One of Gogol’s celebrated short stories is about a man who wakes up to find that his nose has gone off and is basically living its best life all over St Petersburg, independent of its former host. His first big successes, a collection of short stories mixing folklore with details of rural Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, includes the horror story Viy, about a seminarian’s encounter with a witch and her hellish entourage over three nights in an abandoned church. A theme that was not unusual in the book. It’s not obviously the fodder for a bard of the boring.

Even his satire was fairly broad. Mama was delighted by some of the quips when she started reading Dead Souls recently. In which, at the risk of giving away the plot twist for you, look away now if you really do not want to know, SPOILERS, a corrupt bureaucrat is taking advantage of the fact that at one time you could use your serfs as collateral to raise a mortgage. Something which Mama thinks might have been much more blindingly obvious to a contemporary reader a lot earlier, and was certainly obvious to Alexander Pushkin (the greatest poet who evah lived), who gave Gogol the idea. Mama, on the other hand, felt that Dead Souls really span out the big reveal quite considerably.

She found lines such as this amusing:

‘Every conceivable subject was discussed, including politics and military affairs; and in this connection guests voiced jejune opinions for the expression of which they would, at any other time, have soundly spanked their offspring’

But Gogol pokes fun at Russian society more in his creation of somewhat repulsive caricatures than the witty comments he makes about them. No-one is spared in Dead Souls, not even the horses. It’s not real life, it’s larger than life. It’s also pretty horrific in places. You can see why people were quite surprised that Tsar Nicholas I was a fan of another work lampooning bureaucratic shenanigans, The Government Inspector. It’s not complimentary.

The thing is, though, that what Gogol is also really good at is descriptions, squeezed in around what Mama is generously going to call the action. The countryside. The houses. The clothes. Little day to day details. Mama found herself wildly distracted at one point by Gogol talking about a road made of wood, which the hero was not enjoying being bumped along. The courtyard of the old lady. The weather. The food. The fleas. And so on.

Now there, that’s the poetry of the mundane. In fact, Mama was rather sad Gogol didn’t just go all out for straight-faced word painting. You can taste the dust. Sort of thing.

And THAT brings us to the Gogol House Museum, which our little museum going collective went to in happier museum going times last year.

It’s not so much the dust you can taste going round, but the coffee you can smell. It was positively tortuous as it was rich and dark and look Mama is definitely not going to be able to describe the smell of coffee as well as Gogol would, but just imagine it was really really tempting and permeated almost every room of the Gogol House Museum.

Upsettingly, Mama only found the café at the very end of the tour, and then we did not have time to go in.

A small cafe, showing the serving area and list of drinks and two chars in front of a window table

Gogol’s house is not really his house, but a three room apartment in the ground floor given to him by Alexander Tolstoy (some relation to the more famous Lev, yes) for the last four years of his life. It’s just off the old Arbat.

As visitors you get to go in and look at the antechamber where they have stored his travelling trunk, which gives the guide the opportunity to wax lyrical about his quite extensive journeying. He spent considerable time in Italy, for example, and went as far afield as Jerusalem.

They talked a bit less about the time when he took the money his mother had given him to pay her mortgage and went to Germany after his first attempt to get literary fame was a flop.

Mama is quite interested in what Gogol’s Mama did about that, although unfortunately no-one else seems to be so she hasn’t found out. The family estate stayed in family hands until it was turned into a Gogol House Museum by the Soviets though, meaning that while financial precarity was a bit of a theme in Gogol’s family’s life, obviously things never got that bad. Gogol also spent a lot of time back on the family estate over the years and his mother was always super proud of him, so there clearly wasn’t any lasting damage there either.

Mama has since encouraged my Speculative Big Brother and I not to get any ideas about playing fast and loose with her money, mind you.

From there we went and looked at Gogol’s living room. He liked cards, apparently. But it is also here that the tragedy of Gogol’s final days started unfolding, because this very fireplace was where he burnt the finished and only manuscript for part two of Dead Souls, the bit that was supposed to turn the ugliness of the first half on its head and redeem his main character, Gogol’s own soul, and the Russian Empire itself. Sort of thing.

He wasn’t happy with it, his religious confessor wasn’t happy with it, or the devil made him do it. Sadly, Gogol seems to have been in that kind of place.

It’s been dramatised on the tour. There are sound effects and everything.

What he then died of, just over a week later, we did not find out for another two rooms.

Off the sitting room is a bedroom, which Gogol, who had a secretive (or possibly repressed) streak, was not given to inviting people into. This is where his writing desk stood, and I do mean stood because Gogol’s writing desk was one you stood up to write at. Very modern.

I can’t remember the exact status of the furniture and such you can see on the tour because OBVIOUSLY this house does not remain untouched from when Gogol lived in it. It went through a number of owners after the Tolstoys, and when the revolution came was turned into flats for 31 families. Then it was occupied by the Kyrgyzstan representatives to the USSR, the Soviet equivalent of the Radio Times, and a library. From the library it slowly morphed into the current museum, memorial centre and still has a research library going strong.

So the desk may not actually be THE desk. Still. It’s pretty snazzy.

Next on the tour, was a salon type room, which was not Gogol’s special preserve but allowed the guide to talk more about Gogol’s writing career and his facility with dramatic readings of his own work, under the guise of showing us some old editions of his books.

A glass display case at the Gogol House Museum with an old edition of the Government Inspector inside, open at the title page

And finally we made it to the death room.

Because surprisingly, the tour of the Gogol House Museum did not start memorably with the details of his passing, as with he house museums of Tchaikovsky and Yesenin.

No, it built up to it.

This is because he died as he often wrote, with a certain amount of macabre panache and absurdity, which echoed on long after he passed.

The guide was at pains to explore these, but also explode some of the many myths about Gogol’s death. He did not, apparently, starve himself to death. He was not buried alive. And when they dug him up, as they did some years later to move him to a different cemetery, his skull was not missing.

That said there are some mysteries. What he actually died of, for example. The doctors at the time originally thought meningitis, the treatment for which involved boiling hot baths and ice cold water poured over his head, and a lot of leeches. It probably wasn’t meningitis, but it sounds like it could well have been the doctors that killed him.

Nikolai Gogol was 42 when he died.

After that rather depressing reflection, we hung out in the room showing various dramatisations of his works. They haven’t got Mama’s favourite one there yet, the action adventure Viy 2, which is wholly satire free but is gloriously over the top.

A statue of Nikolai Gogol outside the yellow façade of the Gogol House Museum

Anyway. You might be wondering at the lack of photos on for the post, compared to most of our other posts. Well, Mama can only blame the destabilising effects of Gogol’s proximity for the fact she seems to have lost the entire batch she is pretty sure she took. Woooooooooooooo. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Woooooooooooooooo. Etc.

More information

The Gogol House Museum website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about the truth about nose picking.

Address: Nikitsky Boulevard, 7a, Moscow

Opening: Tues, Weds and Fri 12.00 – 17.00; Thurs, 14.00 – 21.00; Sat and Sun 12.00 – 18.00; Monday and the last Tuesday of each month CLOSED

Admission: 200 roubles for adults, 100 roubles for children over 7, children under 7 are free. Currently, entrance is via timed tickets.

Getting there: The nearest metro station is Arbatskaya on the dark blue line. Technically this is in the same building as Alexandrovsky Sad (light blue line) Borovitskaya (grey line) and Bibliotecka Imani Lenina (red line). Technically.

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The Russian Fairy Tale Exhibition, from Vasnetsov to the Present

‘Babushka woke me up at 7am today,’ said my Mythic Big Brother quietly desperate on the phone to Mama, having unwisely bargained an afternoon round his friend’s with a morning at his grandmother’s. ‘We’ve been doing maths ever since’.

‘Not to worry’, said Mama, bracingly. ‘I’m on my way to break you out’.

‘Mmmmmmm’, said my Mythic Big Brother. ‘Are we going somewhere, or are we going home?’

‘We’re going to an art exhibition!’ Said Mama. Enthusiastically.

‘Well’, said my Mythic Big Brother, ‘I could just stay here…’

However, he changed his tune when we arrived at the Russian Fairy Tale, from Vasnetsov to the Present and we were given a map.

The Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

The exhibition is being held at the New Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val’s west wing, which was news to Mama as she didn’t know the New Tretyakov Gallery had a west wing. It turns out that it has achieved this expansion by taking over the Central House of Artists portion of the giant square concrete block in which they were both housed. This, Mama thinks, probably means that the era of cat shows and real estate conventions is definitively at an end. On the other hand, Mama has long felt that the New Tretyakov Gallery was a bit underrated, retrospectives of great pre-revolution artists notwithstanding, and she welcomes this sign that they are going on the attack.

The map shows the different rooms the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition is divided up into, all coded by a typical Russian fairy tale setting – the forest, underwater, the underworld. Visitors are encouraged to travel around the mythical world, identifying significant magical items or characters on a proper fairy tale quest.

Which meant that as soon as we got inside, we children abandoned Mama to set off on our epic journey, occasionally popping back up to say that we had completed that section or to show Mama something particularly entertaining we had found, almost by accident in our hunt for a talking frog. Mama thus got to wander around the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition at her own pace, read all the explanatory placards she wanted and take many many lots photos from every angle without a lot of eye rolling and complaints. Bliss.

The carrot of the exhibition is the inclusion of really famous paintings by Viktor Vastnetsov, who was one of the first fine art painters to choose folklore as a worthy subject for his works.

Many of which are found hanging in the Old Tretyakov Gallery, and so you might be wondering how moving them half a mile down the Moscow River is adding value. Especially because Viktor Vastnetsov also has his own house museum, which has just gone on Mama’s list of places to check out in Moscow, because presumably there are more gems for the ardent fantasy lover hiding out there.

Vasnetsov at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

But Mama would hazard a guess that even if you have visited both locations, you won’t have seen Vastnetsov’s paintings in a setting quite like the one at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition.

Bear at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

The map, you see, is not a metaphorical conceit, as the exhibition spaces are actually made up with papier-mâché styling into magical forests, underwater kingdoms and underground caverns, complete with twisty underground passageways.

Mixed in with the Vastnetsovs are some very contemporary takes on the archetypes.

And on Vastnetsov’s masterpieces themselves.

Three bogatyrs at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

There’s also quite the collection of film clips inspired by folklore and fairy tales. I mean, it was prolific, was the Soviet film industry, so it’s not surprising that they picked up on the potential. And if they are going to provide seating and headphones about half way round, who can blame all the kids and some of the adults from taking a lengthy a time out to watch Soviet-era cartoons?

Cartoon at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

Also, some items from plays or ballets.

And there are well known prints from Ivan Bilibin, whose fairy tale illustrations combining Russian folk art and crafts, Japanese prints and Renaissance woodcuts are iconic to the point of being inescapable.

As well as objects d’art.

Magic carpet at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

There are short introductions in both Russian and English to the characters or stories you see around you, in case you have somehow managed to miss out on Baba Yaga, the perennially benign idiot, lucky Ivan, Vassilia the Compensatorily Extremely Competent Wise, the (Even More Accomplished) Frog Princess, the three headed dragon, bluff bogatyrs, all the talking animals you can handle or the deranged underwater king.

Heroine at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

Did you know Russian mermaids don’t have tails? You do now.

Mermaid at he Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

And even the quest is appropriate. If Mama were in the mood for wild generalisations she would point out that organised fun is very much part of the Russian psyche. And riddles are both quite embedded in a Russian upbringing and something that Russian fairy tales are very big on. Where do you find the death of Koshchei the Immortal? In the needle inside the egg inside the duck inside the hare inside the chest buried under a tree on an island. Obviously. It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma and everything.

Koshchei at the Russian Fairy Tale exhibition Tretyakov Gallery

In short, the Russian Fairy Tale, from Vastnetsov to the Present is exceedingly bonkers. We absolutely loved it.

And because Mama has for once managed to go to an exhibition not on the day before it closes, but the very first day it opens, there is an actual chance that you might be able to follow our recommendation and go! Go! Go! It’s on until May 10th 2020.

More information

The exhibition page on the Tretyakov Gallery’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about Urban Fantasy: Vampire Porn, Feminist Pipe Dream or Misfits Revenge? (which Mama wrote).

Address: Krymsky Val, 10/14, Moscow, 119049

Opening: Until May 10 2020, 10am to 6pm Tues, Weds and Sun, 10am – 9pm Thurs – Sat, CLOSED on Monday.

Admission: 600 roubles for adults, 250 roubles for kids, and there are family tickets available, which would have saved Mama a whole 100 roubles had she or the ticket seller been a bit more on the ball.

Getting there: The New Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val is half way between Oktabreskaya metro station (orange and brown lines) and Park Kultory (red and brown lines), opposite Gorky Park, in the middle of Muzeon sculpture park. There is also a circular bus route ‘Б’ that stops right outside and hits quite a few metro stations on its way around the city.

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The Museum of Telephone History Moscow is not phoning it in

Sometimes even Papa gets lost when trying to find an obscure Moscow courtyard.

Which is disconcerting enough, but what is particularly odd when you do finally locate it, this spot in the capital city of Russia, is being greeted by some bright red British telephone boxes. Just sitting there. All innocent-like.

British red telephone boxes outside the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

However, that’s what happens when you go to the Museum of Telephone History in Moscow.

On the one hand, so bizarre. On the other hand, another day, another museum of a Russian businessman’s personal collection. Vitaly Ezopov, CEO of Mastertel, a telecommunications company big in St Petersburg and Moscow, and sponsor of the Moscow Telephone Museum project, in fact.

Mama didn’t know the Museum of Telephone History’s Moscow branch was only two years old and a private enterprise before we arrived, which is one reason why she let me stay at home. She wasn’t sure quite how much fun I would have staring at some dusty, out of date technology, dead inside a glass case, which was how she conceived it was going to be before she, Papa and my Wired Up Big Brother went along.

Bust of Edison and a display of his telephone equipment at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

This may have been a mistake.

It turns out that Moscow’s Museum of Telephone History knows that a large number of its audience is suspicious of tales of not being reachable by phone beyond the length of a wire that disappears into a wall, and wonders why someone would bother to call, anyway, when they could just WhatsApp instead.

(Please don’t write in and tell Mama that actually, all the cool kids are now not even using words and are communicating via the medium of interpretive TikTok clips, and even that is due to be old hat in 5…4…3…2…1. She is aware. She is just determined to remain behind the curve).

The Museum of Telephone History also understands that when it comes to technology, even moribund technology, what everyone actually wants to do with it is have a go.

So their tours are very much built around explaining to the next generation the evolution of mechanical communication, and the museum is not afraid to get out the plastic cups attached by string to help it do so. Or teach everyone a bit of Morse code so they can laboriously spell their name in telegraph speak. And even send their mobile phones though a pneumatic tube for the sheer exotic hell of it.

Shhhpoooooooooook! Ppphhhhhhoooooop. Cooooooooooooool.

Many of the prettier, more historic or celebrity connected phones are locked away from questing hands, of course. But it’s a pretty eclectic mix of the aesthetically interesting, such as this rather elegant model.

And then there is the curious.

The sinister black phone with only one number, for example.

Single number black telephone at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

Observe the British class system at work via the telephone labeled with the rooms of a huge stately home.

White telephone from a stately home for summoning staff with a photo of Winston Churchill

And an early payphone.

Early payphones, black candlestick model with a box to take coins on the side in a case with other vintage phones

It also has a lot of fan girl appeal. Phones used by ABBA!

A photo of ABBA holding telephones, and the same model telephone at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow

Yuri Gagarin!

White freestanding Ericsson phone handset used by Gagarin in a glass case. at the Museum of Telephone History Moscow.

Gorbachov!

And look! An early example of IKEA mentality with a put-it-together-yourself phone kit!

A box with bits of an old fashioned telephone in that you were supposed to assemble yourself.

But you also get to play with the phones on the walls during the tour of the Museum of Telephone History Moscow, while the guide demonstrates how you stand (with your elbow helpfully propped up on the special elbow rest). How you actually place a call. How the bell summons you. How lots of bells summon you. Ooooh, what does this one sound like? Ahem.

Very early telephones on a wall at the Museum of Telephone History in Moscow

They also demonstrate how switchboards worked.

Two early telephone switchboards in front of a photograph of women operating them at the Museum of Telephone History in Moscow

And so on.

Gzhel porcelain figure of a lying soldier and communications equipment

Mama particularly enjoyed the exhibit which reproduces not just the feel of different dials but also the noise they made. Mama and Papa, in fact, had a bit of a cross cultural exchange as they tracked down the sounds of their respective yoof at the opposite ends of Europe. Ah, bless.

Telephone dials mounted on the back of a display case for visitors to touch and operate

Anyway. Let’s just say it was a lot more interactive and a lot more interesting than Mama was expecting.

You don’t have to go on a tour (although as you can see Mama recommends it, assuming you speak Russian). There is an audio guide provided via Q codes too (how modern, says Mama, who is determined to show her age today). Possibly in English. Possibly even in other languages. The museum seems keen on French. The have souvenirs in French!

Lots of old telephones hanging on a wall.

And!

The Museum of Telephone History is yet another museum tantalising Mama with the seductive smell of coffee from the cafe area in the corner!

[Actually Mama has just realised we haven’t gotten around to writing about the first one that did that yet. Oooops. Watch this space. *Waggles eyebrows mysteriously.* Although if y’all just followed me on Twitter you would already know.]

The Museum of Telephone History, then, is a small but well appointed museum, and well worth a drop in for Moscow residents, telephone enthusiasts or people who need to explain why we say ‘dial’ a number to their kids. Recommended.

More information

The Museum of Telephone History Moscow’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about mysteries of the telephone explained.

Address: 19 bld. 2, Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya St., Moscow, 123001, Russia

Opening: Tuesday – Sunday, 10am to 6pm (on Thursdays it opens at 12 noon). Closed Mondays.

Admission: Adults – 200 roubles, kids – 100 roubles. Excursions 1000 – 3000 roubles.

Getting there: The nearest metro stations are Mayakovskaya (green line) and Barrikadnaya/ Krasnopreskinskaya (purple and brown lines). There is a map on the website, which Mama suggests you look at and actually follow. Ahem.

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Should you go to KidZania Moscow (and around the world)?

Quite why I wanted to voluntarily spend a day working at KidZania Moscow rather escaped Mama.

Two adult KidZania Moscow workers stand smiling at each other in front of a theatre school and fashion studio next to a cartoon themed totem pole

KidZania, as the corporate website puts it, is a kid-sized indoor city using interactive roleplay to fuel a global learning and entertainment brand and develop financial literacy in children.

Or, as Mama puts it, it is a brutal introduction to the fact that at some point we will experience the joys of choosing between getting a fun job which doesn’t pay much or a boring job that doesn’t pay much. Or fighting with 700 people to get a chance to do something that looks interesting but turns out not to be. Or failing to get the job of our dreams. All while being chased around by our parents, who keep trying to give us advice about why we shouldn’t just follow our whimsy. Or why we should.

A white room with a large mattress tester in the middle and sample mattresses on a self to the left

Plus, other aspects of adult life such as trying to decide whether to spend the resulting pennies on pizza, rock climbing or a new car, and then realising that you either haven’t enough time or haven’t enough savings to do any of those.

KidZania Moscow shopping area with small colourful shops lit by neon signs

Advertising probably explains it.

However, in the spirit of proving that Mama does not always spend our free time dragging us round such culturally improving spots as house museums of unsuitable role models, we did, in the fullness of me nagging about it for ages, go to KidZania.

And it was GLORIOUS.

Says Mama, who found the adult zone, where they do not let the kids in at all, very relaxing.

A square workstation with charging sockets in the adult lounge at KidZania Moscow. A TV is on the wall in the background and a Bauhaus artbook on the table in the foreground.

Look how adult it is! Supremely tasteful decoration. Mama particularly appreciated the attention to detail involved in the very adult giant coffee table art book.

Oh, and my Industrious Big Brother and I enjoyed ourselves a lot too.

This is not an accident. KidZania Moscow (and almost certainly everywhere) really does put the effort in to help us achieve that.

When you arrive, for example, they have amped up the impression of going on a journey to a different world by making the area where you book in and pay very much like an airport departure lounge, a theming which is carried on as you go through the portal into the town itself.

And it is a town.

An indoor street at the KidZania Moscow themepark

There are streets. There are buildings. There are different levels. There is a race track. A construction site. A parked aeroplane. And everything. There is even the Bolshoi theatre. In KidZania Moscow anyway.

A mock up of the Bolshoi theatre inside the KidZania Moscow themepark. The blue sky and white clouds are painted on the ceiling and there is a streetlamp in the foreground.

It’s pretty big, in fact. Apparently there are at least 150 different things to do there.

The first place you go is the bank, so that us new citizens can get ourselves plugged into the capitalist system and prepare to take our places as the new cogs in the industrial machine.

And then off we went. Alone. Because adults are banned from entering the offices and factories and so on, let alone taking part.

The interior of a tea factory with a kitchen island set up with small coloured tea bowls surrounded by various stainless steel tea processing machines

The way KidZania operates is that each workplace has a little plaque outside which explains the work options offered, how long it will last, how often you can sign up, and how much you will earn.

Now Mama’s main objection to theme parks is standing in line. But at KidZania Moscow she was pleasantly surprised that this was not a particularly big feature of the day (and it wasn’t as empty as it looks in the pictures by any means).

She did find it paid to do a bit of scouting around to see what was going on, where and at what time, especially for the options that took place less regularly, like hanging out in the TV studio. But it was relatively easy to bound from one experience to another, and the waiting turned out not to onerous. And there was seating!

She was also relieved that we got just as much, if not more, out of the easy to get into jobs as the ones that she, personally, was eyeing up with interest, such as the opportunity to parade around on stage in a play.

A music studio with various instruments such as drums and a guitar on the right and padded benches on the left

Particularly fun were the ones where we got to make something like yogurt or our very own teabag or trot around the city on a quest to deliver letters or put out a fire.

A view of a model fire engine from above as it drives along a KidZania Moscow street. Bunting is hung across the street.

On top of the basic options there are some additional extras you can pay for, more extensive master classes involving things like making your own burger. Mama doesn’t think your kids will feel as through they have missed out if they don’t do them, but on the other hand, they get a burger to eat out of it.

It is, in fact, just a rather elaborate way of taking care of lunch (for the kids).

If you don’t fancy that, the town has its very own cafe, where kids can take their lunch break, and the parents can join them for an update on the busy day so far. Which looks like GUM, just to spice things up a bit.

A mock up of GUM in KidZania Moscow which is the front for a cafe

KidZania started in south America, specifically Mexico, and is expanding slowly across the world. There’s one in London in the Westfield Centre in West London, for example. And it’s coming to the US soon!

That said, you may find that copycat ventures have already arrived. In Moscow there are two very similar venues – Kidburg in the Central Children’s Department Store at Lubyanka, and Masterslavl in Moscow City. My Industrious Big Brother has been to Kidburg, and enjoyed it, but says KidZania was bigger and so better, for what it’s worth.

Also, KidZania is in the middle of one of the more fabulous of Moscow’s shopping malls, Aviapark. I mean, if you think it’s marginally weird that people in the middle east go on about their shopping malls, and you want to know why, then you can find out in Moscow (and for much the same reason – weather conditions make indoor play areas for adults as well as kids a very sensible proposition).

Aviapark is, in fact, the largest shopping mall in Europe, and has an Ikea as well as a Marks and Spencers, and room for 35 football pitches (there isn’t a football pitch inside, but there is a huge football stadium next door). Aviapark also has the tallest cylindrical fish aquarium (repeat after Mama) IN THE WORLD.

Parents will have ample time to wander around in a happy little shopping haze, or lounge around the (in places) upmarket food court area while their kids are occupied inside KidZania. If they don’t want to lounge in the adult zone, that is. We were in KidZania ALL DAY. And I reckon there’s still enough we didn’t do, or might want to do again for at least one more epic visit.

KidZania, then, is a theme park that really lives up to the hype. It’s probably best for kids between sixish and twelveish, and it probably helps if younger ones have an older sibling on hand to boss them into shape. But there were some teenagers bounding around when we were there too and Mama found that she was quite jealous of having to sit outside and press her little nose against the window to get an illusion of participation.

And so she was entirely unsurprised that KidZania Moscow does the occasional adult only evening.

Tempted?

If you take your kids to KidZania, and you really should, to be honest, wherever you are, then you will be.

Mama is booking herself into the town’s museum experience, for starters.

More information

KidZania Moscow’s website (in English).

This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say about Checkout: a job in the retail world.

Address: Aviapark Shopping Centre, 4 Khodynskiy Blvd, 4th floor

Admission: Kids (4 – 16) – from 1290 roubles, younger kids are cheaper or free. Adults (17+) – from 590 roubles.

Opening: 10am – 9pm Monday to Sunday.

Getting there: Metro station CSKA (western yellow and turquoise lines) is right next to Aviapark. There is, of course, ample parking, it being in a shopping mall.

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