<nettime> mailghetto # 31 (Kurgan-trip-1)

["Oleg Kireev" <kireev2000@cityline.ru>]

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text #90 
12.12.2000 

KURGAN-TRIP (first part)

Noone will ever know, where it is. Kurganskaya oblast' (region) situates in a tiny corner of Russia, between the rich industrial regions of Tyumen' and Chelyabinsk, and a poor agricultural Kazakhstan. The flight from Moscow takes, nevertheless, only two and a half hours. The ticket costs about $ 150, what is like a flight to Central Europe. A strange public fills the airplanes to there: serious people, siberian men evidently having business or earnings aim, some with golden watches, small secured suitcases. 

I worked as a journalist for observing the pre-electoral campaign for the governor's post. Two days ago the elections are over, a former governor Bogomolov had won in the second tour. We were looking at our story in a course of simultaneous US-elections, which paralleled ours in a funny way. Kurgan region gives an example of representational democracy at work, completely opposite to the American one. But the theory must go later.

The candidates' headquarters were all filled by people of two different kinds: the local political/economical elite and the politconsulting/journalist guests. The previous. Right they must be those, who now own and manage the notorious "privatized property". They "seat there and do their dirty things (unlike you, the noble gentlemen)", as Steve Buscemi in the beginning of "Desperado" says to the crowd of narcomafia-dealers in a deep Latin province. Their world consists of eurodesigned cottages and offices, Jeeps, saunas, Tequila - these prestige-signs seem especially alienated here, in a town of 300 thousand people, village houses and dark panel houses. Here they sell over the whole rest of the poor regional industry and get therefore sponsored by the more powerful Ekaterinburg oligarchs, who do buy it. 

The latter. We, the guests, also belonged to two camps: we, the Moscow invited journalists and consultants, and the Ekaterinburg ones. All the Bogomolov's headquarter consisted of the EKB specialists (the way they call it, or with an old Soviet name - Sverdlovsk). A head was also a journalist, who won some reputation, probably, within the ruling political circles. No doubt, he could, for the regional media, especially TV, have very special and intimate relationships with the power. What is curious, is a contrast between the younger and advanced media-intellectuals and the old "genetic" bureaucrats who fight each other at the campaigns though keep sharing a power. Journalists are mostly the people of a free lifestyle, freelancers, more or less educated. For there exists no profession like "polittechnologist". A main Bogomolov opponent's, Nikolai Bagretsov's team was right of that kind. The campaign was headed by a really young (27) Moscow manager, completely insane. He ever str!
essfully spoke of the "system programming" and he covered all the computers with pentagramm-stickers. His team included two yoga-neofits, one Capoeira fighter, one inspirated bonpo-meditator and others. All they were, nevertheless, experienced managers and speechwriters. The chief started with forcing all the team meditate on Bogomolov's defeat. 

(A small detail describes a commonplace of political campaigns, where you can easily meet NLP-ists, hypnotizers and people of that sort. One friend, also working in Siberia, told me how one manager was warned by somebody: Good luck, but you have a bad Carmic tail. The tail's removing did cost a few thousand bucks. The campaign had been won.)

The region itself performs a state of an extreme devastation. Sometimes it gets somehow shameful to talk, how rich or poor the regions are: a degree of their richness can never be seen at the streets, and the bosses' offices are ever eurodesigned. Maybe they count a number of budget dotations coming from Moscow? But it all comes to the same bosses' accounts. From Ural mountains and further East, the usual landscapes are: the unbelievable misery of living in towns and villages and the fantastic, wild landscapes of the nature. Some parts of Kurgan region are truly back to some ancient past. The peasants of former kolchozy (collective owned agricultural enterprizes) didn't receive any salary since 1993-96. Some earn ten-twenty dollars a month at the small halfly-soldout industries or something. The villages somewhere are fully cut out from the world, for no buses go between them. People live for what they get from their gardens or natural exchange. Every peasant house has a nice !
guestroom with a certain crystal behind the glass and a carpet on the wall. These are the people whom all the fate of candidates depends on, for whose votes they fight with cruelty. Bagretsov's newspaper was published in so much copies to reach every third kurganian. Bogomolov didn't require so much, for all three leading regional newspapers, all the local newspapers, and, the most important, Kurgan TV served him passionately. They used different ways to make people hear them: Bagretsov's activists agitated etc., as they do everywhere, and in Bogomolov's case the local administrators in villages or at factories just pushed the people to visit his meetings, whether it's a working time or not.

Oleg Kireev

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