I never kept a diary, of course, but must have been, like, from 1993 to 1997 when I first lived and worked in Moscow. The second time was ... what year was 9/11? In 2001? I was back in Moscow then; I remember that for sure. That was my second time. I probably spent only a year there that time.

I went back home to Kazan for the same reason both times: financial and governmental catastrophes occurred, economic crises.

My first departure from my native Kazan was directly related to what was going on in the country. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the market became tied to the dollar and the economy collapsed. At our university, Kazan State University, where I was studying to be a biochemist, the only chemical reagents left in the laboratory, as I recall, were table salt and water. It's quite difficult to do serious scientific work on these two substances.

I had gotten married very early. By 18 I was already faced with the task of supporting my family, so when a friend offered me a job in Moscow, I agreed. I didn't want to leave, to be honest, but at a family meeting we decided that I had to go or my young family wouldn't survive. Only in Moscow could I earn any money.

Not in biochemistry?

Of course not. In Moscow, my friend and I got into sales, first alcohol, alcoholic beverages, and then fruits and vegetables. Grain, too. It was wholesale.

By the end of 1997, the financial situation in the country began to deteriorate sharply and I was forced to return to Kazan. Three years later I was back in Moscow, again working in wholesale trade.

I'm very grateful for my experience in trade in Moscow. Thanks to that job, I learned to talk to all kinds of people. I got into unimaginable situations.

I grew up in an intellectual family. My parents had protected me from the hostile outside world for a long time. You could say I never learned anything about it, so I had to learn about it in Moscow, in the late 1990s.

My first day at the job in Moscow started unusually. We were renting a room in a hotel for an office, and I got in, sat down at the table by the window, and at that exact moment a woman dropped right in front of me. I found out later that she was a prostitute who had thrown herself out of the window of the room above us.

I started to realize that the large world outside bears little resemblance to the world of my childhood and youth; the rest of the world is exactly as I saw it in Moscow in the late nineties.

Unfortunately, this is a very valuable quality for anyone living in our cruel, modern world.

So, thanks Moscow?

Thank you Moscow!

Wholesale trade wasn't your first job, was it?

No. I was 14, I think, when I got a job as a janitor. Then I worked as a night watchman guarding an experimental station in the forest on Tovarischeskaya Street in Kazan. Then I worked at a company translating technical texts from English into Russian. Trade! In the nineties I think everyone sold whatever they could.

I remember those tights from Cheboksary didn't sell very well. And then there were these TV ads for Italian tights with the slogan "Dolci Calze Are Damn Good!" so I wrote on a piece of paper with an ordinary pen: "Cheboksary Tights Are Damn Good!" and gave it, along with the tights, to friends who had a stall where they sold Snickers and Royal alcohol. They had been selling my tights too, along with their products. At first, without the sign, no one bought the tights. Then they hung my advertisement on the window and they were sold out in two days!

Did you go to an elite school?

No, a regular school, No. 68, on Gorki. It had a low level of education. My parents decided to transfer me to School No. 131, which specialized in physics and mathematics: it was sponsored by Kazan University, and my dad worked at the university. Thanks to my dad I got in, and I started studying there in the seventh grade.

The lessons at School No. 131 are very hard, and that's a good thing. But I didn't understand that at the time, and I complained about it.

I got C's in math at school. Yeah, I got C's in almost all subjects. I wasn't a brilliant student. Only in history and biology did I get A's or B's, I don't remember exactly.

Was it your choice to enter the Faculty of Biology?

Yes. I come from a family where no one had ever been associated with the communist ideology. I grew up surrounded by books, classical music, and paintings. I didn't like what was happening with the official state at all. I saw that all those slogans don't correspond to reality: "The Party Is Our Leader!" "Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Always Live!" ... To be honest, it all disgusted me.

I was physically repulsed by all of it: the snitching that was widespread in the USSR, and the constantly having to lie in order to move up the career ladder. So, I decided to become a botanist.

I decided to become a botanist because botany was the field that was furthest from politics and ideology. However, my uncle told me that all the discoveries in botany and zoology had already been made, so he advised me to focus on another science: biochemistry. I did, and I never regretted it. A fundamental science education provides a methodology for any kind of research in any field, and biochemistry specifically gave me a direct, comprehensive understanding of all life processes.

After graduating from the Faculty of Biology, I passed the exams for graduate school and planned to work on my dissertation. But that never happened: the USSR collapsed, and Russian science found itself in a very difficult situation.

How did you manage to graduate from two more faculties of Kazan University: law and economics?

When I realized that biochemistry in our country was falling apart, but lawyers, most likely, will be in demand, I entered the Faculty of Law, where I studied civil law, before even finishing biology. This was my second higher education, and we had a mixed form of study: full-time and part-time. I wrote my thesis on a very interesting topic: bank guarantees as ways of securing obligations.

I entered the Faculty of Economics thanks to a special program for retraining management personnel called the Yeltsin Program. Applications were selected on a competitive basis from anyone wishing to get a new education in the field of market economy. That was in the late nineties, when I was working in Moscow. But after I finished the economic program, I returned to Kazan.

Of course not. At that time there were over two hundred theaters in Moscow and no more than seven in Kazan.

In Moscow I met people from different levels of society and different intellectual backgrounds. To my delight, I noticed that, in terms of general education, I was at the same level as the families of great poets that I became acquainted with in my new circle. That is, I, as someone from Kazan, had no feeling of inferiority in Moscow, and for this I am grateful, of course, to my parents, first and foremost.

When I returned from Moscow to Kazan, I found that we had only one "official" culture rooted here: time-tested classics were staged in theaters and time-tested classic paintings were exhibited in museums. Pieces of modern culture could be found only in two private galleries—in the Volga, which was located in the basement of one of the houses on Bauman Street, and in the Aurora, which was located on the premises of the Unix cultural and sports complex.

The Aurora was opened by my older brother's first wife, the daughter of artist Viktor Arshinov, Natalya Silkina. She was a very successful art dealer: she organized exhibitions for artists from Tatarstan in Kazan, Moscow, and other cities. By the way, I painted then, and Natalya exhibited (and even sold) some of my paintings. I remember that I was pleasantly surprised when my painting The March Horse was bought by Kazan's XXI Century foundation for 25,000 rubles! I lived on this money for six months. I wonder what that foundation is doing now.

Natalia opened Aurora in 1991, and in the early 2000s she closed it and moved to the United States. No one took the place of the independent, interesting, and cutting-edge Aurora in Kazan.

This was probably in 2004. I coordinated everything with Natalya, of course.

Aurora 1991 didn't have its own permanent premises: I organized events at different venues. The first project, if I remember correctly, was the exhibition of a photographer from St. Petersburg, Bogdan Zwir. Then we did screenings of films from the collection of the Future Shorts festival. Then we were off: tours to Kazan by Petr Mamonov [Russian musician and actor] and [Georgian theater and film director] Rezo Gabriadze's marionette theater, night excursions in the Anatomical Theater ...

Who is "we"?

At first, I was alone. Then Polina Morozova joined me. We worked together for a long time until she started working as a flight attendant in a Russian airline.

Then Ayrat Bagautdinov worked with me. He's now widely known as an engineering historian and creator of the popular project Moscow through the Eyes of an Engineer. After Ayrat, the artist Lena Prokhorova helped me. And Aurora 1991 always had many volunteers, different people who were very inspired by the idea of building up the cultural environment.

Which project was the most difficult for Aurora 1991?

The tour of Rezo Gabriadze's Theater. This was in 2007, and a conflict arose between Russia and Georgia, and nothing went according to plan: Gabriadze himself never made it to Kazan; thank God the artists arrived, but the scenery of the performances was delayed at the border. The Minister of Culture of Tatarstan was Zilya Rakhimyanovna Valeeva. Many thanks to her; she helped out a lot.

Aurora 1991 didn't make me any money, so I worked for the Federal Road Agency at the same time. I started out as a legal adviser, and then became the deputy head of the department of federal highways in the Volga-Vyatka region.

When I left the agency, I was attracted by the idea of downshifting.

In Sviyazhsk [a historical island village not far from Kazan], no one had wanted to work in the administration as the mayor. There was no money there; the annual budget was 350,000 rubles, which was just for the salaries of the local executive committee. I was elected there first as a deputy (and, contrary to the opinion of the townsfolk, rural deputies earn neither a salary nor benefits) and then mayor. Sviyazhsk is very small. Each local deputy has only 30 constituents there, so they voted for me in unison; this was in 2008.

Two years later, when they decided to create the museum reserve in Sviyazhsk, I was offered to head it. I think Minister of Culture Zilya Valeeva recalled me and our collaboration with Aurora 1991.

I didn't immediately agree to leave my post as mayor of the village to head the museum.

At that time, we had just registered the municipal tourist bureau in Sviyazhsk and we wanted to develop tourism.

However, upon reflection, I decided to agree to become the head of the Sviyazhsky Museum Reserve, because museum work was, of course, very close to my heart. At the same time, Aurora 1991 was still running, albeit not as actively as before.

Am I correct in thinking that the Living City Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art, which you created in 2013 together with Inna Yarovaya and Diana Safarova, arose largely thanks to Aurora 1991?

Well ... my colleagues probably don't see it this way, but yes, it is. Inna and Diana contacted me through our mutual friend: they wanted to bring director Alexander Sokurov to Kazan. At that time, they had no experience in organizing something like that, but I did, thanks to my work at Aurora 1991.

And so, in April 2013, we held a very successful retrospective of Sokurov's films in Kazan. He presented Faust, the final part of his tetralogy about the nature of power, which was preceded by Moloch (about Hitler), Taurus (about Lenin), and The Sun (about Hirohito).

The foundation's projects—theater laboratories, festivals, film screenings, and concerts—are now taking place in Kazan and Sviyazhsk.

Is Sviyazhsk better for you than Kazan?

There are ups and downs in both places, but in Sviyazhsk I have a vegetable garden and I can grow lettuce and tomatoes in the summer. That in and of itself makes my life better there.

I love Kazan too. But since I live in Sviyazhsk more often and travel on quite a few business trips, sometimes when I'm in Kazan, I'm standing on some street downtown and I'm not sure where I am. Either everything had been rebuilt there or renamed: it's such a strange landscape! I find it weird. For that reason, I don't really want to walk around Kazan right now: some places, of course, have been improved, but, in general, it's not the city I grew up in.

I remember how you could walk down Kremlyovskaya Street (back when it was called Lenin Street) and you could turn into almost any courtyard to the right and go along strange wooden galleries and passages (often dilapidated) to Lake Chernaya.

I probably sound like a grumpy old man, but my city, my Kazan, has disappeared.

What kind of person is your typical resident of Kazan?

Not to be too serious, buy it's someone with a slight case of megalomania. A local who thinks that everything is great and wonderful in Kazan, but who has often never even left the city. Their great experience of Kazan is often the result of watching local media.

But this is probably a good thing. In America they have what they call rednecks, and that's what typical residents of Kazan are; they're like rednecks: they're all a bit jingoistic, which can be kind of cute.

This outflow occurred before positive urban developments started here.

Incidentally, I've observed these processes. I don't want it to seem as if I was whining: "My Kazan has been destroyed!" That's just my own personal trauma. I can see that, on the whole, Kazan is now very attractive, especially for young people. It's a significant player in regional competitions.

It just hurts me that there aren't any historical parks left in Kazan. Gorky Park, where I loved walking as a child, has now been so urbanized that there are no, like, wild places left. I was very impressed by the park in the center of Bonn, Germany for this reason: it's like a forest. Everything is more or less clean there, and the design isn't overbearing. It features very delicate landscape work: everything looks as natural as possible. At first it seems like you're looking at a spontaneously grown forest, and then, when you notice that all of it is the carefully thought-out work of very hip designers, you're overjoyed.

What was the first foreign country you visited?

Yugoslavia. I was there as a child. My father had an internship in Ljubljana at the Jožef Stefan Institute. He lived and worked there for two years probably, and my mother and brother and I visited him on vacation.

Once, quite by accident, when my parents left for the city (we were living in Yugoslavia by the sea; it was almost like camping, kind of like a Russian dacha in terms of comfort, the only difference being that it was by the sea), my brother and I went for a walk and accidentally ended up on a nudist beach. For me, as a Young Pioneer from the Soviet Union, that was, of course, very impressive.

What did it represent to you? Freedom?

I was nine years old at the time, so I had no concept of anything like that. It was just like, well, they were crazy! These naked people are crazy!!! That was my reaction, not freedom at all.

But the standard of living there, of course, was completely different. Definitely better. I understood that.

Have you ever wanted to leave Russia?

A short poem by Khlebnikov came to mind: "A patch of land is a wonderful thing; it is the meeting place between me and the state." Meaning, there are two players at point X: me and the state. But Khlebnikov isn't entirely right, because, besides the fact that I formally live in the Russian state, I still live in a certain social environment, which also plays a very important role. Perhaps it is more important to me than the fact that I live at this spot in Russia.

I have childhood friends here, classmates, random acquaintances from all different periods of my life, in general, people whom I can help and who can help me.

What am I talking about? Anyone can, of course, move to any city they like, but the question remains: why?

I'm a man of the Volga. My life on the Volga is very good. I have a connection with the landscape, which is stronger than with the city. Our Volga atmosphere suits me. Why would I move anywhere else? For what? To make more money? I've been philosophical since childhood, so I understand perfectly well: you can't take anything with you to the grave, so I don't intend to waste time on moving, effort, or machinations just to increase my wealth.

I'm an unassuming person. Pretty much any kind of living condition suits me, and I really don't care that there are individual shortcomings in our country: I live in my own world; as a rule, I feel good in it, and I certainly never get bored.