Graphic Fiction by Ilia Kitup

These underground comics from the Russia of the 1990s, just after the Soviet Union dissolved, capture the sense of mingled freedom and foreboding that characterized that era.

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Definitions

Kremlin: The fortified Moscow building complex that serves as the official residence of the President of Russia, and has housed different rulers for centuries.

First published in Words Without Borders' February 2007 issue: (Worth) Ten Thousand Words: A World of Graphics.

for The Only True Guide to Russia: Hidden Secrets Revealed
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/the-only-true-guide-to-russia-hidden-secrets-revealed

Ilia Kitup

Born in 1964 in Russia, Ilia Kitup is a founding member of the Soviet comics fanzine, Kitup's Own Propeller Comics. Kitup also writes poetry and prose, paints, and plays ska music. He lives in Berlin, and continues to promote alternative comics in Russia.

Links available online only

Meet Ilia Kitup

A group of men pay homage to a 1914 futurist performance piece by walking through Moscow wearing spoons in their buttonholes, 1993. Ilia Kitup is third from the right, wearing glasses. By Фотограф Игорь Мухин, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ilia Kitup wonders whether one reason Russian comic culture is not very developed is that “Russian life itself is so ‘comic,’ that the citizens don’t need any comics.” Read more about comic culture in Russia in Kitup’s essay, “Dostoevsky Forever.”

Hear the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the Russian names and places from this story, read aloud by Dmitry Kurmanov.

(Listen to audio on SoundCloud.)

A Scholar's Notes

Photo by Vladimir Efroimson.

Read what Julia Trubikhina writes about these comics in the Russia introduction:

The clever comics of the graphic writer and artist Ilia Kitup, who was born in Lithuania and lives in Berlin, are situated in the cultural gap between the West and Russia, allowing him to draw humorously on well-worn cultural stereotypes of Mother Russia (bears wander the streets there! Russian frosts are eternal!) and conspiracy theories that both reinforce and undermine them (these bears are remotely controlled! The frosts are generated in secret refrigerators in the Kremlin cellars!). Russia and its capital city, Moscow, become a myth in their own right . . .

Visit Nineties-Era Moscow

The first McDonald's location in Moscow in 1991. By fdecomite, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Look at photos from Moscow in the 1990s. Also, look at more pictures from Russia in the first ten years after the USSR collapse. (Note: this site has some typos and grammar issues, as well as some rather random links to outside sites.)

“Moscow can be official, unofficial, informal, and absolutely unofficial!” Read about all of these parts of life in nineties-era Russia in Andrew Solomon’s story, “Young Russia’s Defiant Decadence,” from the NYT Magazine. The first few pages describe the “absolutely unofficial” side of life; go to pages 284–285 to read about the gap between the mafia—one component of "informal" society—and the "official" government realm.

Next, find out why one author says that in the nineties in Russia, “if you weren't in the trendy magazines . . . you didn't exist” in the article “Pop, glamour, and gangsters: Boris Yeltsin’s new rave Russia.”

How are these stories—of decadence on the one hand and impoverishment on the other—reflective of a typical image of Russia in the 1990s? Read about the “Russian Nineties” trope in the first half of the “New Russia” page on TV Tropes. Read about Moscow too, and scroll down the page for “Moscow in Fiction.” (Note: these articles were written around 2019, before the beginning of the war in Ukraine, so their commentary on contemporary Russia may be out of date.)

Ride the Moscow Metro

A metro station in Moscow. By A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What kind of subway is the Moscow Underground? Learn about the Moscow Metro.

Then, discover a conspiracy theory about a secret underground railway called "Metro-2," and learn why “post-Soviet cities are a perfect location for the existence of secret subterranean networks, real or imagined,” in “Subterranean Secrets,” from Atlas Obscura.

Bears in Russian Culture

Read about the role of bears in Russian culture in the entry “Glorious Mother Russia” from TV Tropes. (Scroll about a quarter down the page.)

Policing in Russia

A police car in front of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. Photo by Vadim Artyukhin on Unsplash.

Read Russian people’s explanations for their distrust (and trust) of the police in a 2008 New York Times blog post.

More on Radiation

In “Drinking Habits,” one drinker claims that “wine saves from radiation.” Read “Memories of Chernobyl,” an essay about the 1986 nuclear disaster that made radiation a real, urgent, and continuing fear for many people in the former Soviet Union.

Moscow History

Learn the millennium-old history of Moscow in this article from the Moscow Times.

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More from Ilia Kitup

Read another one-page comic by Kitup, from his series "Misha & Grisha." Then, read two pages from Komiks: Comic Art in Russia to read about Kitup's other work.

More Scenes from Nineties Moscow

Look at a series of black and white pictures the economic difficulties ordinary people faced in Moscow in the 1990s. In 1998, when some of these stories were written, many Russians lost their entire life savings.

Hear Nineties Music from Russia

Watch music videos of popular songs from Russia in the 1990s, including Mister Maloy's "I'm Going to Die Young," below.

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

See the Kremlin

The Grand Kremlin Palace. By Ludvig14, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Watch a video of the historical and rarely seen rooms at the Kremlin from the BBC.

Then, browse through the website for the Kremlin Museum.

More about the Moscow Metro

Watch a video from the Moscow Metro in recent years.

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Then, watch a scene from the 1963 movie I Walk Around Moscow. The opening lines of the song the boy sings as he walks through the Moscow Metro are: "Sometimes, everything in the world seems good, And you don't know what's caused that feeling, It's just that the summer rain has stopped falling, That ordinary summer rain."

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Xenophobia in Russia

Read a 2019 article on the rise in Russian xenophobia, and a 2013 article on the government policies that promote those attitudes.

Then, read about what happened to spur nationalistic riots in 2013 in “Why Russia is Growing More Xenophobic” from The Atlantic.

Finally, read a 2013 article about Russian anti-Semitism.

More about the Roma

The Roma people (referred to in this comic with the outdated and pejorative term "Gypsies") play a large, romantic, and sometimes stereotypical role in Russian culture. Watch a dance scene from a film entitled The Gypsy Camp Goes to Heaven, which tells the tale of a love affair between a Romani girl and a horse thief. (The film is based on several short stories by Soviet author Maxim Gorky.) Find other scenes from the film in a YouTube playlist.

To understand why the term "Gypsy" is considered offensive and learn more about the preferred terms “Roma” and “Romani,” read this FAQ page from the East European Folklife Center.

The Roma are a diverse group, with different communities and customs around the world. To learn more about some of the issues facing the Russian Roma today, read a profile from Minority Rights Group.

To see Romani art from a different part of the world, read a New York Times profile of the Polish Roma textile artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.

Policing in the US—and around the World

Biased actions by police officers are not unique to Russia. Read two recent reports on police and racial bias in the United States: one from Minneapolis and one from New York City. Or, look through a 2016 collection of studies about police bias in the US.

Then, see images of police around the world and find out about their protocols.

More Russian Stereotypes and Conspiracy Theories

Cover of Lisa Dickey's Bears in the Streets.

Read about stereotypes and realities of Russian life in the nineties and today in Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia, by Lisa Dickey. (The title references the same presumed stereotype as does Kitup's first comic.)

And read about contemporary conspiracy theories in “Confessions of a Kremlin Conspiracy Theorist.”

Exaggeration: A Cartoonist's Tool

Learn about Disney's classic definition of exaggeration and the idea of reductio ad absurdum, both concepts that can apply to this series.

More Graphic Literature about Cities*

From left to right: covers of Guy Delisle's graphic travelogues Shenzhen, Jerusalem, and Pyongyang.

On WWB Campus:

Longer graphic works:

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, by Guy Delisle and Helge Dascher; other travelogues by Guy Delisle include Shenzen, in China and Pyongyang, in North Korea.
The Property, by Rutu Modan and Jessica Cohen

*For Teaching Idea 1

More Places in Literature*

Read more literature with a strong sense of place: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Andrei Bely's Petersburg.

*For Teaching Idea 1

More Literature of Exaggeration and Fantasy*

Title strip from "The Pharaohs of Egypt."

“The Pharaohs of Egypt,” a graphic story in which a violent attack is later shown to be only a fantasy
“Sharing,” from China, in which fantastical and abstracted elements represent emotional realities
Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, the classic example of reductio ad absurdum; or Gulliver's Travels, which uses fantastical elements to satirical effect
George Orwell's Animal Farm

*For Teaching Idea 2

Reading Grade Level(s): 3, 4, 5 and up

A Note on Language
1. A City in a Comic
2. Truth, Rumor, Exaggeration, and Reality

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

The Only True Guide to Russia: Hidden Secrets Revealed

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Sharing - Graphic Fiction

The Pharaohs of Egypt - Graphic Fiction