The Soviet Occupation Forces entered Germany in 1945 and would spend the next 40 years stationed in the GDR. The Berlin wall fell in 1989, followed by the reunification of Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev announced his plan for the unilateral reduction of the Armed Forces of the USSR. The Soviet Occupation Forces, by that stage renamed the Western Group of Forces, began their return home, a process which was officially completed in 1994. The Ministry of Defence invested enormous sums of money in uprooting and resettling the military towns onto Russian soil, leaving ghost-towns in their wake.
***
In the 1950s, South Korea adopted the policy of import substitution: a famous Korean economic miracle that was the result of the close partnership between industry and state. A specific kind of corporate politics grew out of this long-running policy, one based on Confucianism and the system of so-called Chaebols. Chaebols are conglomerates known for their paternalistic management culture, ruled by clans comprised of the relatives and friends of certain families. Chaebols are organized like dynasties: companies treat their employees like sons, and employees must honor their superiors as they would their fathers. By the 1990s, cracks had begun to appear in that rigid hierarchy: Chaebols were heavily in debt and were no longer able to meet their financial obligations.
In 1993, the president of Samsung, Lee Kun-hee, invited hundreds of his colleagues to the conference hall of the Frankfurt hotel Falkenstein Grand Kempinski (whose interior was later replicated in the Korean city of Yongin) and gave a speech that lasted 3 days. It would later be called “The 1993 Frankfurt Declaration” and turned into a 200-page book called “The Bible of New Management” which every company employee was required to read. In his declaration Lee proposed reforming the company; he thought it had become far too fixated on Korean culture and wanted to transform it into an international corporation that made high-quality goods. Kun-hee’s declaration marked the starting point for Samsung’s global expansion, a time when the company began sending Korean employees abroad and hiring foreign workers for the first time. One thing Lee said in his speech went on to become a company catchphrase: “Change everything but your wives and children.” Simon Denny, a New Zealand artist who created the art project “New Management” that was dedicated to that Frankfurt conference wrote: “On the one hand this is a beautiful, euphoric dream of expansion, on the other, it is a dream for political and economic assertion that is ruthlessly competitive, exclusive, and strongly nationalist.”
***
When travelling on the Lastochka intercity from Moscow to Smolensk, a woman’s voice announces the name of each city and its rank of military distinction. Upon arrival at the final station, the voice declares Smolensk a “Hero City.” It is regarded as something of a transit, or border post (it’s nickname is “The Key City”): During the time of Ancient Rus’ Smolensk, located on the Dnieper river, was one of the stops along the water trade route that ran from the Varangians in the north to the Greeks in the south. It was later considered the capital of the Eastern region of the USSR, functioning as a kind of window display for the country’s European neighbors. Thanks to its position on the border with Europe, Smolensk was always the first to be visited by war. In fact, war is such an integral part of the city’s history that it would be impossible to imagine the city infrastructure without it, set up as it is, in no small measure, to cater for war tourism with its guided tours of ruined fortress walls, war memorials, and museums.
***
In 1994 the construction division of Samsung Engineering won the contract to build one of twenty-five military towns being built for the repatriation of half a million Soviet soldiers from the former GDR. The Ministry of the Armed Forces and the German consortium CWU, both armed with German and Russian money, oversaw the construction of Kutuzovskii, a suburb of Yelnya, a city in the Smolensk region. In Yelnya, Samsung erected a camp of flatpack metal houses for the arriving company employees, as well as for other hired workers from Korea, Czechia, Germany, and Russia. The project (1994-1996) delivered 10 buildings and 1011 apartments, along with a hospital, polyclinic, school, shopping center, post office, cafe, restaurant, night club, hotel, and shops. During construction a 28-year-old unmarried specialist from Russia met a 35-year-old Korean engineer who had a wife and two children waiting for him back home. The Samsung employees were the ones earning the most money, the woman was paid pennies in comparison. The man, a hired worker, was subject to the constant ridicule of the Samsung employees: he was not part of their family, their Chaebol, and they did not consider him one of their own.
The man and woman had just a few photographs taken together. In one of them (16.03.1996) they’re standing in front of a wall of blueprints and graphs, both wearing shirts and light jackets. The man has his hand on her shoulder; and while you can’t tell, she is already pregnant. Almost 30 years old and childless, she decided to risk everything and keep the child, knowing that the man would not stay. In another photo (Summer 1996) they are dancing at the farewell picnic in Yelnya (probably listening to The Future by Leonard Cohen, their favourite album). The man is the only one wearing white for the outdoor picnic. Thanks to the conditions co-created by the Russian government and an international corporation, I was born on 16 October 1996. My mother told them what name to write on my birth certificate, kind of like a pseudonym given at birth. My father’s name was not recorded, I was given my mother’s surname and the patronymic Mikhailovich in honor of my maternal grandfather. My father wasn’t employed directly by Samsung, but he still adopted their motto and changed everything but his wife and children.
In one photo my father poses in front of wallpaper covered in images of the Russian countryside, and in another he stands in a kitchen with a paper samovar glued onto the cupboard. There isn’t a single photo of him wearing casual clothes, he is always there in a waistcoat and tie, like he’s playing a role on a film set. My last meeting with him took place in Moscow in the spring of 2001. In the one surviving photo from that meeting, I am playing with the huge stuffed penguin he gave me. Fourteen years later (27.03.2015) I wrote a Facebook message to my father in which I called him a sperm donor who inseminated my mother and left us without looking back even once, a roving inseminator, freely moving across the globe, bound only by his contract and visa which expired whenever he finished a particular job (He also worked in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and India). At the same time, my mother, strapped for cash and tied to Smolensk by her parenting responsibilities, never left the city.
I spent the first years of my life thinking that I was adopted and I would ask my mother who my real parents were. My skin would tan quicker than other people, and other kids teased me for having the narrow eyes of a Yakut, a Chinaman, or ‘churka.’ My mother, grandmother, and other Zakharovs drilled it into me that I was no different from anybody else (which was true to a certain degree), so when I leafed through our family photos I didn’t feel any surprise, my difference was just taken as a given. In one of the photos, taken in the former, not yet gentrified, industrial part of Smolensk, my cousin holds four-year-old me in her arms. The wooden bell tower in the background would later be turned into the stone cathedral of the Holy New Martyrs, while a huge shopping mall would appear in place of the forest. My cousin would graduate with flying colors from the faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University and then, to everyone’s dismay, join a monastery.
***
June 2018. My mother asked me to pay a visit to my cousin to pick up a parcel for my grandmother. I had already planned to have lunch with a friend in central Moscow and to show them round the exhibition I had been working at. After that I had plans to go to a party in the evening, so I was in skinny black jeans, black patent leather shoes, and a black short-sleeved shirt with yellow flowers sewn onto it. I entered the nuns’ monastery and could feel eyes watching me. It was Sunday, the football world cup was in full swing, and there was a huge queue in the courtyard. That said, the queue there was always huge. I remembered the last time I was here, ten years prior, when a long chain of people stretched towards the holy relics inside. It was loud outside so I went into the monastery shop to ring my cousin; it was forbidden to use phones in the shop so I was shooed back out again. While outside I got through to her and she asked if I could wait in the main administration building. The security guard asked via the intercom who I’d come to see.
A red carpet stretched along the first floor of the administration building; it looked more like the entrance hall of an oligarch’s palace. Photos of the Patriarch Kirill hung on the walls: him being promoted to Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, him preaching to parishioners of all ages. I still wasn’t let through to see my cousin and again I was asked to wait. A couple of minutes later she came down the stairs. She was not yet 40 but already she looked like a different person. She greeted me with a bright, young voice, but I could see the wrinkles on her face and her hair had gone grey, which was particularly noticeable next to her black habit. She led me across the courtyard and I could feel glances brushing over us. Sticking to the task at hand, I asked her to give me what I had come for so I could get on with my day. My cousin asked if I had been baptized in the time we hadn’t seen each other, and if I would like to kiss the relics. I replied with a polite “no” to both questions (I wanted to add: “I have only prayed once in my life, and that was while doing a simultaneous interpretation of Ulrich Seidl’s film “Jesus, you know.”) Regardless, my cousin brought me past the crowd of people and into the cathedral, leaving me by the entrance while she disappeared into the nuns’ quarters. She reappeared 10 minutes later with a pot of lilies (indecently expensive and, by the looks of things, meant for a funeral), some church candles, and three CDs of church choir recordings. I accepted the gifts and quickly made my exit.
After exiting the monastery, I made my way to the nearest bin and threw away the candles; I already reeked of them and had unsuspectingly become a walking monastic advertisement. My first impulse was to throw the lilies and CDs away with the candles, but I rejected that thought after remembering my promise to my mother. I spent the rest of the day carrying the flowers across the city, and later, at the party, I absentmindedly picked at the petals. The next morning, I put on the most unremarkable clothes I could, you don’t want to stand out in Smolensk, and took the pot of lilies to Belorussky train station. I found a seat on the intercity train and took the funeral flowers to my living grandmother.
***
This book is about what happened in the time between two photographs: An analogue photograph from a photo album, taken in front of a wooden bell tower in Smolensk, and a digital Instagram photograph taken at a party in June 2018. This is a true story, and while it doesn’t claim to be all encompassing, it does recognize that it has a lot in common with what happened in Russia, and the world, over that period of time. The book has two roots: “Dorama” which refers to the genre of Korean TV series, and “Roman,” a reference to the coming-of-age Bildungsroman. Together, they form a meditation on race, cinema, literature, and emotional maturity – achieving freedom of thought and defeating hypocrisy.
If I am the result of a governmental experiment, Samsung’s Smolensk offspring, its illegitimate corporate baby, a faulty product, then this is a story about how that product was created. After all, a product isn’t significant just in of itself, but also thanks to the conditions that created it. This book is about the material structures that surround the work of an art critic. It is about a media-generated sexuality which is projected and then absorbed into the bodies of those who make their living by watching films and writing about them. It is about how the internet serves as a platform for opinions, simultaneously setting the boundaries of what we see and imprisoning the user behind the bars of the visual image.
This book is an autoethnographic report on how this book was written.
Note: ‘Churka’ — in Russian, literally ‘a block of wood’, but in urban slang, used as a cruel way to address someone from the Caucasus or Central Asia.
Nathan Jeffers (ig: @jikooo) is a translator, writer, and teacher. He translates from Russian and Ukrainian into English; translations released in 2024 include the posthumous memoir Socrates the Skinhead, the Life of a Russian Antifascist (Active Distribution) and The Art of Ukraine (Thames and Hudson).by Alisa Lozhkina. His translations and other writings have appeared in the Asymptote Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, RHINO poetry, and Pocket Samovar. He is also currently working on translation projects with Oxford University, UK and Rutgers University, USA.
Misha Zakharov (ig: @m_m_zakharov) is a russian-born, queer-identifying person of Korean descent (he/they), a political immigrant, and a London-based author, translator, film critic, and curator. His work includes an autofictional novel set in putin’s russia, titled Doramaroman (No Kidding Press, 2022), as well as English to Russian translations of Maggie Nelson and Sarah Schulman. The manuscript for his English-language debut, set during the russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine — a blend of eschatological narrative and picaresque novel, with the working title Dromomania — is currently in development.