Distant Neighborhoods

Looking Through the Russian Mirror

This video was produced by Ilya Varlamov, a technically skilled, brave, and often charismatic Moscovite who travels out into the hinterlands of his country to see what's there.

While I appreciate that he's capturing and sharing this footage, much might be lost in translation, it seems that he frequently judges and shames people living in extremely difficult conditions without adequately acknowledging the systemic disadvantages that they face.

Coal, cobalt, and agricultural goods all flow out of Tuva, but little of the wealth they generate remains in the area. Guess where a lot of it ends up?

There's an arrogance and a willful blindness to living in the capital—the place where an empire's resources collect—that I definitely feel being here in New York, and see clearly on the faces of those higher up the layer cake.

We don't want to acknowledge where all this material abundance came from, or who paid the costs for our enjoyment of it.

Frequently I find myself thinking of the low towns of Arizona or Nevada, a world away from here, and how Morenci and New York are virtually invisible to each other, and yet our lives are deeply entwined.

Everywhere in North America there's a manufactured blindness to where things come from, but it feels particularly pronounced here in New York, perhaps because we are the biggest beneficiaries of this global process of taking valuable resources from one place, and hoarding them in another.

Our island is literally sinking because we've put so much stuff on it.

Of course you don't even need to leave Manhattan to get this same effect. Some zip codes would collapse without the blood, sweat, tears, and labor of others.

So I share this video for two reasons.

1. This creator appears blind to the fact that his wealth as a Moscovite–intellectual and material—is derived from the impoverishment of people like this across Russia and its sphere of influence. By seeing this, I hope we can more clearly observe these attitudes when they inevitably emerge in ourselves.
2. Tuva and its capital Kzizl are bleak and beautiful. Seeing it expands my perspective on humanity and reminds me that people live very differently than I do, and yet we're all fundamentally the same.

Enjoy,

Dan Flag