The Only True Guide to Russia: Hidden Secrets Revealed

About

Graphic Fiction by Ilia Kitup
Translated from the Russian 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.

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

Ilia Kitup (translator)

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.
Context

Links available online only

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

(Listen to audio on SoundCloud.)

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 . . .

Read more in the introduction.

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.”

“Moscow can be official, unofficial, informal, and absolutely unofficial!” Read about the 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 7-8 to read about the gap between the mafia—one component of "informal" society, and the "official" government realm.

Find out why one author says that in the '90s 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 hand reflective of a typical image of Russia? 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.”

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.)

What kind of subway is the Moscow Underground? Learn about the Moscow Metro, and find out about the conspiracy theory about Metro-2, a secret underground railway.

Then, find out the reasons why “Post-Soviet cities are a perfect location for the existence of secret subterranean networks, real or imagined,” in “Subterranean Secrets,” from Atlas Obscura.

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.)

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

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.

Learn the millennium-old history of Moscow, or read about the era of these stories in "Transitional Moscow," two thirds down the page.
Playlist
Links available online only

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.

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 gypsy girl and a horse thief. (The film is based on several short stories by Soviet author Maxim Gorky.)

Watch other scenes from the film in a YouTube playlist.

Watch a video of the historical and rarely seen rooms at the Kremlin from BBC. (Flash player required. Or, watch on YouTube.)

Browse through the website for the Kremlin Museum.

Find out about some recent instances of Russian xenophobia, and 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 about Russian anti-Semitism.

Biased actions by police officers are not unique to Russia. Read a collection of studies about police and racial bias in the United States.

See images of police around the world and find out about their protocols.

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.)

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.)

Read about stereotypes and realities of Russian life in the '90s 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 Conspiracist.”

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.

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

Other graphic literature about cities

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
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.

More Literature of Exaggeration and Fantasy
- “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
Read about the history of Moscow from the city’s official website.
Teaching Ideas
- 1. A City in a Comic
- 2. Truth, Rumor, Exaggeration, and Reality
To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Related Reading

Sharing - Graphic Fiction

The Pharaohs of Egypt - Graphic Fiction