A love affair with Siberian graffiti: Searching for contemporary street art along the Trans-Siberian route
By Abigail Thompson, M.A. candidate in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Siberia is a land of paradox. The cultural region within the modern Russian Federation, commonly understood as encompassing everything east of the Ural Mountains and west of the Pacific Ocean, has mystified, challenged, and fascinated visitors for centuries. The severity of its brutalist architecture, held over from a past reality, stands dissonant with a multitude of enchanting, charming statues of beloved artists. Their patrician visages frozen in time, these metal men dot central sidewalks and interrupt passers-by on their way to the store or school or gym, reminding them never to forget the dreamers who once did the same. Its harsh, bleak winters, legend to the point of cliché, are gently belied by the warmth and ebullient hospitality of its people, who, year by year, live through the cold. And its burgeoning street art, at times sportively colorful and at others pitilessly stringent, chafes against the famously repressive nature of the infamous regime that provided the discipline with its principal canvas. At the center of this phenomenon is graffiti, and — from defiant subversion to illegal advertisement to government-sponsored campaign to youthful doodle — in Siberia, graffiti is everywhere.
I first noticed the abundance of graffiti in Siberia while fulfilling a nine-month-long Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Irkutsk. Irkutsk, a city in central-southern Russia of 600,000 people, is located four hours north of Mongolia and an hour’s drive northwest of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest (by volume) and deepest freshwater lake. To visit Irkutsk is to visit another world. One where Pringles and Snickers taste off (but not enough to vitiate the taste of home), where Adidas and McDonalds reign supreme over the informal hierarchy mysteriously recognized by teenagers, and where nonplussed drivers zip over a frozen lake resembling a vast ocean more than the local backwoods.
I loved it. And more than anything else, I loved its graffiti.
Something to which, before, I’d never really given a thought, graffiti — found hidden down narrow alleyways, loudly scrawled on the outward-facing sides of solid metal fences, or tucked away within spacious courtyards — suddenly became a source of my fascination. I increasingly found myself late to everything. My attention snagged by the peek of a painted tendril at the corner of a building, I would heedlessly abandon my timely pursuit and follow that tendril to the fruition of its entirety. Forcing my fingers to abandon the lulling warmth of my mittens for a bracing cold, I would risk the freezing death of my phone’s battery for a photo. I’d then send the photo to friends, family, or social media, trying to figure . . . Who made this? Why? What are they saying?
Eventually, graffiti faded into the recesses of my subconscious. Like many other fascinations, it became something I, fickle, had embraced and then abandoned, a casualty of my inability to intellectually commit. After returning stateside, I moved to California, started studying law, discovered podcasts and poke bowls and the Fast & Furious movies, and mostly forgot about frozen fingers and delayed appointments. Except for sometimes, when I’d spot a tendril, tantalizing, and I’d quickly slip away to snap a photo. But like before, these pictures proved a futile exercise, often inevitably exiled to my virtual trash bin in lieu of more cloud space.
This practice persisted until late last spring, when I lamented my uninspired choice of thesis topic — the global economic, legal, and political implications of Arctic ice melt — to a friend and fellow graduate student at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. I’d lost any academic fire I’d once shown towards the topic, having written on it too many times prior. Over a grubby picnic table outside the Sancho’s Taqueria in Redwood City, littered with tortilla-chip crumbs and sticky margarita glasses, my friend novelly suggested that, if I was so uninspired by my topic, I just pick something else. “Happily,” I replied, if only I were a creative type, if only I could think of something else. My friend, unimpressed with my excuses, simply asked what interested me, and suggested I “do that instead.”
The answer was easy: graffiti, of course.
He then informed me that the Stanford Global Studies Division offers students grants to fund research abroad. I couldn’t believe it. Someone was going to pay me to fly to Siberia and hunt down graffiti? I quickly emailed my program director, changing my topic.
So, courtesy of a sardonic sage and a liberal university endowment, I found myself in Siberia for three weeks in December 2019, searching for and photographing graffiti to serve as primary source material for my graduate thesis. Unsure of my budget or my timeline, I had spent much of the autumn quarter juggling my desire to see far-flung outposts like Yakutsk, a city of 300,000 people in eastern Siberia unreachable by road and popularly dubbed one of the coldest cities in the world, with my fear of Arctic flying and the practical need to collect as many photos as possible. The latter won out, and I decided to collect my photos from six of the largest cities along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railroad: Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok. I would spend two to three days in each city before jumping back on the train and hurtling through the night towards my next stop, rocked to sleep by the comfortable, average speeds of fifty miles per hour and the merry awareness that I was eschewing travel by perilous plane. Not knowing where to look for graffiti apart from what I’d found through cursory internet browsing, I nervously planned on “just asking the locals.”
Much to my surprise, it worked. After spending the twenty-eight hours from Moscow to Yekaterinburg regularly walking the length of the 082IA train to prevent blood from clotting in my knee after a fantastic, grizzly fall in the Moscow Metro, I said goodbye to my newly surrogate Russian grandparents, Peter and Galina, who waved me off with bright, if not uneasy smiles, and our cozy, second-class kupe cabin. Conscious of how I’d never been to five of the six cities I was to visit, I recognized the grim possibility that what I contemplated as a Siberian graffiti phenomenon could, in fact, be only an Irkutian phenomenon. Apprehensive, I asked the cab driver taking me to my hotel where I could find the best graffiti. He looked at me with an expression of delighted bemusement — I, a young, American, female law student alone in Siberia in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter, asking where one could find the best graffiti — and told me to start at the river. He’d never really noticed before but, come to think of it, there was plenty of graffiti over there.
His advice proved fruitful. As is common in Siberia, every city I visited was situated on the banks of a river, so I started there. From those frozen banks, I moved to the city center and worked outwards, photographing whatever I could find, be it tiny scrawl or large motif. Sometimes I asked locals: individuals in restaurants, on trains, on the streets, my cab drivers. Sometimes I found information on local graffiti websites. Sometimes I even used 2gis, a GIS application widely used in Russia, which unexpectedly contained the names and locations of known graffiti works in several cities. Much like before, I wandered narrow alleyways and labyrinthian courtyards.
I waded through heaps of garbage in Omsk to reach a work that looked particularly subversive. (It was.) In Irkutsk, I was chased out of a centrally located courtyard and down the street by an enthusiastic guard dog. In Krasnoyarsk, I became so cold on the banks of the Yenisei River that I was forced to employ what would have looked an exceptionally curious routine, if anyone had spotted me in the act. I ran from one work of graffiti to the other, hopping between solid slabs of ice and daring to venture further and further from the shore, hidden beneath a relentless white, in order to get the widest angle. While negotiating the ice, I charged my phone with one of the two portable chargers kept warm in the pockets lining the waist of my enormous, tomato-colored parka, and frantically stored my freezing hands under every layer of clothing I wore, skin to skin, praying feeling back into my fingers with every minute-long interim. By the time I stumbled back into a hotel room overlooking the 151-foot-tall New Year’s tree being assembled in Theatre Square, I was completely exhausted, three hours alone on the ice having proven too long for my fragile limbs, fresh from the unchanging, moderate weather of the Bay Area.
I climbed to the top floor of an abandoned house in Vladivostok, every inch of the structure, from the furthest recesses of the attic down to the musty subterrain of the cellar, covered in graffiti. After emerging from the ramshackle, bottom floor of the house, I noticed several Russian policemen smoking in the back yard of the small police station next door. Clad in the bulky, all-black winter uniform ubiquitous to members of any local Russian police force, bold white “politsia” lettering in a cherry red box on their left breasts and black, sheepskin ushankas secure over their eyes, they wore guns at their hips strapped to wide, black leather belts. Noticing me, one of them broke away and slowly approached. He appeared older than the rest, his face weathered by a smoking habit still common among men in Russia, the evidence held securely by his temporarily ungloved, pale hands. The others hung back, smoking and watching.
Arriving, the officer looked at me, looked at the house. “Young woman, what are you doing?”
Aware of my obvious foreignness, but remembering my previous, mostly pleasant encounters with local Russian police, I chose not to be concerned. “Researching graffiti.”
The grizzled officer repaid my lack of alarm with equal nonchalance. Raising thick eyebrows, he glanced back at the house with new interest, and, finishing his cigarette, flicked it to the clean snow before grinding a grey scar with his heavy boot.
“Interesting. Carry on.”
His reaction, along with those of the cab driver and Peter and Galina, was not unique. Upon learning of my purpose in Siberia (after getting past the shock of me, an American, wanting to come to Siberia), Russians — friends and students and strangers alike — were confused, worried, and impressed. How did I come to learn of graffiti in Siberia? They’d never thought about it before. They’d never thought it was anything of note. Why did it interest me? It didn’t seem all that interesting to them. Wasn’t I afraid, worried about my safety? They didn’t think it safe for a woman to travel alone, let alone a foreigner, especially in Russia. (It’s fine.) Wasn’t I cold? They’d heard the United States wasn’t very cold. My university was funding my travel? Why? To have a university send a student so far for research so obscure was simply remarkable.
Ultimately, Russians were impressed I came from an institution that would fund such research and worried about me traveling alone in a Siberian winter. But, come to think of it, their graffiti was pretty cool.
In Siberia, I found far more graffiti than I anticipated, and a graffiti culture as fascinating as it is complex. In Yekaterinburg, graffiti was left over from the unofficial “Guerilla Graffiti Festival” and the official “Stenograffia” festival, both having taken place in July 2019 and the latter an annual, international graffiti festival featuring several prominent artists. In Novosibirsk, I found two “graffiti shops” as well as a large, community graffiti wall, works superimposed on each other to the point that discreet images were difficult to discern. In Vladivostok, I found an immense mural of the Amur tiger, the emblem of the city and a regional symbol of environmental activism, stretching long and proud along one side of Central Square. In Irkutsk, friends and former students offered me their favorite graffiti works, 2gis our helpful guide. As it was in Krasnoyarsk, though most of the named works had been covered, forever erased. I found similar in Shelekhov, a town of 48,000 people about twelve miles southwest of Irkutsk proper. Its walls were utterly bare, displaying instead only patchworks of empty, off-white scars. In Omsk, I found little graffiti apart from that for which I crawled through the trash.
My thesis discusses all of this and more, and was truly a pleasure to write. More than that, it was an exploration, one I never would have experienced without CREEES, SGS, and my stern, sassy, burrito-loving spirit guide.
In Banksy’s excellent Wall and Piece, a self-compiled collection of captioned photographs of some of the influential British graffiti artist’s favorite works (circa 2005), he writes,
Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall — it’s wet.
Siberia is by no means Banksy’s imagined city — its graffiti is still illegal and its street art is still commissioned by governments and big businesses — but like Oakland, Mexico City, Berlin, Bogota, Dresden, Prague, and countless other cities where graffiti is forging a new voice for itself within an evolving local consciousness, these realities are not enough to stop artists — whoever they may be — from painting the walls.
Visit the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies for more information about its master’s program at Stanford University. Global Perspectives Awards provide funding for graduate students to pursue research abroad and language training.
