I was born in 1988 in Kazan in the hospital on Karla Marksa Street next to the Kazan National Research Technical University. At the time, our family lived on Tukaya Street, so I was born downtown, in fact, on this very street [we are sitting at the WERK music and art space on Tukaya] ... Our house was where Bakhetle [a grocery store] is now. You could say I'm a downtowner.

I kind of remember my very early childhood on Tukaya Street. I remember the coarse walls of the Gabdulla Tukaya movie theater, which my dad and I went to. For some reason, I can remember how we would walk down the street and, as we turned the corner of the cinema, I would touch the sandpapery wall and feel its roughness.

When you were two or three your parents took you to the movies with them?

Yes, it was a family legend even, how they took me to see King Kong and I got scared and threw a fit, screaming, and they had to take me home.

In 1990, my parents decided to achieve the, well, American dream and buy a home outside the city. They bought a small dilapidated wooden house in the Quarter, in the village of Briketny, and I lived there until I graduated. I was two or three years old when we moved. So, I became a Quarter kid.

What's a Quarter kid?

Well, a Quarter kid isn't a downtowner. That's the biggest difference. The Quarter doesn't have the beautiful architecture; there are no theater actors walking around. Just plain old kids from the Quarter live there, and you live side by side with them.

In fact, I never realized that something was weird about my neighborhood until after I left, in 2010, after graduating from university at the age of 22.

Let's talk about your school years. What period was it? What was Kazan like then?

I was pretty lucky; I went to school in the nineties. Well, the Kazan nineties. I remember walking home with the kids from school, down Adoratskogo Street, it was late spring, almost summer. We weren't wearing jackets; we had on backpacks. It was nice, everything was green, there were butterflies ... and some guy was being beaten up on the lawn. He was lying there, squealing, and they were kicking him and we just moved on. Cars were driving by; it was "normal." I mean, no one intervened; everything was fine. Some guy was getting beaten up, a common occurrence.

The nineties, from the point of view of historical richness, were a wonderful time, and I'm glad that I have that experience. For example, at our school, everyone—teachers, vice principal, children, and parents—knew that on Thursdays you don't go out to the soccer field, because the mafia would meet there on Thursdays. Everyone knew that, the whole area. And nobody went there on Thursdays. It was just the norm.

Now in 2020, that seems just insane. Just imagine, there's a bunch of criminals hanging out there on Thursdays, and everyone's OK with that. It's kind of strange, right? In the nineties it was just the way things were. Like everyone knows that there was a fight the day before, and the next morning you come to school and half of the high school students were bandaged up, and no one asks any questions; that was the norm. It was such an amazing time.

Were there people at school who influenced you? How did school affect you in general?

I think, going chronologically, the first person who had a serious influence on me was my Russian language and literature teacher Gulnara Mustakimovna. She saw that I was interested in literature, and she just started bringing in books for me, a lot of extracurricular programs. That was in like third through fifth grade: newspapers and literature magazines.

How did you become interested in literature?

I don't know. My kindergarten teacher told me that they loved me because I would gather all the kids around me and retell them the stories I had read, and the teachers would go drink tea.

I had four schools, one of them was the Tatar–Turkish lyceum [TTL]. I studied there for two years. It's a very strong language school, and all subjects were taught in English. I was already into musical subcultures. When I was in about seventh or eight grade, Detsl [a Russian rapper] put out the video for the song "Friday," then I saw "Tears," and I already knew about baggy pants, rap, hip hop ...

You and the other kids, or just you?

Just me, because the TTL, for all its modernity, was full of gopniks [neighborhood ruffians]. I mean, they were nuts there, and that was the hardest period in my life as a freak.

They didn't accept you?

Of course not! They smirked, and what's the word they use now ...

Bullied you?

Bullying, yeah! It was real bullying, intense. But then I fought one of them, and they left me alone right after that, but that's another story. So, I already listened to, like, Detsl, Bad B., Al'yans, Legal'ny bizne$$, all the Russian rap, on the one hand and, on the other, NAIV [a Russian punk band] and I knew about punk rock ... I was already into the underground and dressed like a freak. And I was alone; it was very hard.

Then one day I was walking along Bauman Street and some freaks hanging out there. I didn't even know that they existed or that they had a hangout. After school one day I went to Bauman and just sat down with them and was like:

"Hey! I'm joining you."

"Hey! Who are you?"

"I am Bulat."

"Do you have a nickname?"

"No."

"Well, we have to get you one. We need to come up with a nickname, like, I'm Sova [Owl]. And you're Bulat. Well, we can't have that. That's your homework assignment."

And I started going to Bauman every day straight from school: I had a Sex Pistols T-shirt under my white shirt and jacket, which I would take off after school, hide in a bag, and proudly walk around like a freak on Bauman. I walked very proudly, until the first time the gopniks beat me up. Then I didn't walk quite as proudly, but, nevertheless, I walked.

As for my second influence: two high school students at TTL come to our class and were like: "Can we make an announcement?" The teacher says to them sure, please. And they say "Guys, if you happen to like break dancing, we're opening a breakdance school." And I thought that was insane. Just amazing!

It turned out that they had some kind of connection with B-People, which was a pretty strong breakdance group. I even went to their school once, just to put myself out there. Then I would shake hands with these high school students in the corridor, and that was very encouraging; I mean, I was no longer alone.

That was my second serious influence, because, due to bullying, I was hidding my rocker persona, while these guys just went from class to class, and just, you know, showed themselves. I thought that was were very brave.

My third influence was in my final school, No. 9, a great school. I love it very much. It was so freedom-loving, rebellious, you could say. There were more people who listened to rap than there were gopniks, and that was unheard of. We had Tolkienists, and there was a girl who knew Elvish.

I went there with a clear desire to start my own rock band. So, with my more or less well-trained eye, I monitored what was going on during breaks between classes, and I found some local rockers, went up to them and said: "I want to start a band." They were like: "Too late, we already have our own punk band here. We're called Eclipse and sound kind of like Korol' i Shut [the original Russian horror punk band]. If you want, you can come to band practice ..." And I went to their practice, which was the Alisha House of Culture, and I could see that the bassist and guitarist could play, but the rest couldn't.

Do you have a musical education?

No. You know, in rock music, especially amateur music, the most important thing isn't your ability to play, but your energy. It's either there or it isn't. And I could see the bass player and the guitarist were on fire! As for the rest, you could tell that in another six months they'd drop out from the scene. Their leader was the drummer, who had told me they already have a band.

They agreed. I just poached them.

School no. 9 had the best principal. I just remember her first name was Larissa. Unfortunately, she has passed. The lesson would start and she would come into the class and says, "Don't stand up! I'll be literally five minutes. We're going to buy new desks this summer, and we want to know what desks you want. Please vote." That's how she was, can you imagine? She was wonderful, I only remember great things about her.

When I put on my first concert (it was, of course, in the assembly hall at school), we came to her and said: "We want to have a concert. We have we have a group here and there's another group from a nearby school, a Viktor Tsoi [Soviet rock star] cover band, and we want to put on a concert." She says: "Sure, let's do it; it'll be great. Is this date okay for you?"

Later I found a drummer on Bauman Street, Sasha Gerasimov. He loved Tequilajazzz [post-Soviet alternative rock band]. Go figure, a schoolkid in 2001 loves Tequilajazzz; that's worth its weight in gold. I told him, like, we have a group, you should join us. He says he can't play anything. I say: "None of us can play anything; what would you want to play?" "Well, I'll be a drummer." After that he ended up playing in different bands, including Ioch and Yaineya, and he still plays somewhere. I mean, he became a pretty good drummer.

We needed a place to practice and had no idea where to find one. They introduced me to one guy at school, two years older, named Roma Zyuzik, and said that he had access to a practice space. Roma took out a notebook out of his jacket (there weren't any mobile phones yet), thumbed through it for a number, and said "This is Valery Shashorin's number, call him." I thanked him and said: "We still need a synthesizer; do you have anybody in your notebook who plays?" And he flips through the pages and says: "Here's Nail's number. Call him. " So, we started playing with Nail. Roma had a very big influence on me. Other than the fact that he helped us out, he became a great friend. We hung out for like three or four years, every day. In the end, he became very famous. He put together the Nole Plastique project and then he played in a very noisy group called NRKTK.

Roma introduced me to Dima, who was a student then, they had been childhood friends. Dima said that they have a group at the university called Spory? that plays punk rock, ska punk. I loved ska punk then, and I had been praying for that kind of music to appear. I went to them and said, like, "guys, you play ska punk and I dream of playing ska punk, take me with you." They said that they already have a vocalist, but they needed a sound engineer. I turned them down. But then in like two or three months passed, they called me and said: "Listen, we want to cover NOFX, buy our singer just can't sing in English at all, could you sing with us?"

Their first vocalist, Sergei, was really jealous for the first six months, but then we sang together like that, like two songbirds, like two brothers. He became my closest friend. We were probably the only ones in the city who used two vocalists.

Spory? became popular in the city overnight, and not only here. We became popular. My peers, I don't know what they were doing, probably drinking beer in the courtyards on weekends, and I was going on tour on weekends. We went to Izhevsk, to Yoshkar-Ola, to Naberezhnye Chelny; we played in Kazan, and it was a completely different level. We had places packed. I don't want to brag, but we were really lucky, because we were the first ones in the city to play more or less real punk rock, so all the punk fans started going to our shows.

The punk-rock community in Russia was just starting out in the early 2000s, and we managed to be one of the first on board. There was no social media then, just forums and the first punk site in Russia, punk.ru, where we all communicated. There was a news feed, like: "Hi, we're from Kirov, we have a fanzine, here's our email." So, I wrote all of them in a row: I bought ten envelopes and wrote ten letters and threw in CDRs with our demos. Those zines wrote reviews, and that's how Spory? became a band that all Russian punks were aware of.

I made the first punk label and the first punk distro in Kazan, and that gave me a high level of trust and respect. Everyone was like, "Now we have punk rock!"

When you got your first taste of popularity, do you remember any specific impression?

I don't want to brag, but it's amazing, of course, when you're an eleventh grader, and take the 116 bus to Bauman, get out, walk along Bauman, and people are running up to you to get autographs. It's incredibly simple!

At some point, I let it get to my head; I was starting to act like a petty rock star. Our oldest member of Spory?, Anton, took me aside, hit my upside the head and said: "What are you doing?" Put me in my place.

Was that out of envy, or what? What happened that you deserved a slap on the head?

Well, no, I started acting like a celebrity. I don't want to go into any dirty detail, but there were some fans there too ... In short, in any case, star fever is the worst. So, Anton, as an older brother (we were all brothers in Spory?), did the right thing.

It was an amazing time, when punk festivals were held illegally in the woods. Like British raves in the 90s, we had the same thing with Russian punk in the 2000s.

There were fewer people into punk back then because it was actually very dangerous. Like, Nazis would actually kill punks. I mean, only the people who really needed it went to concerts. Everyone into the scene then were real fans. You'd go to a concert, all sixty people in the club would have some sort of project: a label, a band, gluing stickers on the street, feeding the homeless, anarchism, beating up Nazis. Everyone was busy doing something. Everyone was active. No one was passive, there was no consumer attitude. All punk rock is DIY. That is, there was a very positive and creative period of punk rock. Everyone was vegetarian, without exception. I still haven't eaten meat for 14 years now, thanks to punk rock. I still, I'm no longer straight age, but I still practically don't use anything, I very rarely drink, don't use drugs, don't smoke, and all that is the influence of punk rock.

And all the punks in Russia knew each other either personally or through someone else. You could go to any random Russian city, make two calls and they'd give you a place to stay, feed you, show you the city, take you to check out local groups, local people. You know, we were just like the Bolshevik underground before the revolution: there were few of us, and we stuck together. And a common, dangerous enemy unified us. Neo-Nazi street terror was, well, a real threat.

Girls can take a year off and think about what they want to do in life, but boys don't have that opportunity; they have to act immediately.

I had no idea where to go. I don't think anyone at that age has any idea what they're going to do. In the States, for example, after high school, kids can work as waiters or something for a year or two and think about what they want to do in life, and then they can more carefully choose where to go to school.

I was a typical Russian kid, and I had six months left before graduation, so I had to think of something. My parents were like, "go into IT. There's always money; it's a good career." But I couldn't get into the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Information Technologies because I failed physics.

You had forward-thinking parents, if they told you to get into IT back then!

Sure, my dad is a professor—now an academician—so he's from the science world, and he dedicated his life to it. At that time, he was a teacher at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Cybernetics, so he was well aware of the future of computers. But I come from your average Tatar family. Both parents came to Kazan from the countryside. My mom was an accountant her whole life. They are good, honest people, making an honest living. My mom never worked less than two jobs at the same time. I probably took after her. My dad's a scientist, meaning poor! So, my mother was forced to feed herself, her scientist husband, and the kids as well.

I failed physics, and my dad was like "We need to figure out what to do, and fast. Let's try construction! They're always building houses; you'll always have a job." So, I got into the School of Civil Engineering, a pretty respected department.

But if I was given two years to think about what I wanted to, like they do in America, I would probably have gone into PR or, most likely, theology, because that's my great passion.

Nothing's stopping you from studying it now.

Basically, sure, I do. I mean, I just spent five years studying something I find completely uninteresting: the structural performance of materials and theoretical mechanics [laughing].

After university you went to Moscow?

I got my diploma in June and by July I was already living in Moscow. I first went to Moscow in 1996, when I was eight. My parents took me on vacation, and I fell in love with Moscow at first sight. And I still love it. I immediately fell in love with Moscow's powerful imperialism; it's a majestic city. Then, while I was in school and college, I went to Moscow pretty often. I mean, when I was still in school, I was part of the Moscow punk scene. And when they ask me why I love it (and they often ask), I have a ready answer: I love Moscow like a woman. I have feelings for this city like for a woman. We have had such a long and difficult affair: we get along, then we part. We live together, and then we share custody of the children. We have a difficult relationship, but I'm very comfortable there.

By the time I graduated from university, I had a girlfriend in Moscow. We met in Ufa at a punk festival. We dated long-distance for a whole year, seeing each other twice a month: once a month I went there and once a month she visited me. We didn't even talk about it, she just said: "Once you graduate, you're moving in with me." So, in July I packed my stuff and moved to Moscow, to Pechatniki.

And so there I was, leaving my parent's home, a secular, but still quite conservative, Tatar family, to a super-secular open-minded Russian nonreligious family, where, you know, the grandmother would smoke a thin cigarette in a cigarette holder discussing Vvedensky [a Russian poet].

My parents always wanted me to hide my tattoos, but the old lady there loved to look at them and ask what they mean, and she was like "Great work, in my opinion!"

And my girlfriend's grandfather was of Jewish origin, a Soviet intellectual engineer in a sweater and glasses, like in old films, real old school. And he helped me find a job. I got a job in a construction company as a maintenance engineer.

I hated construction and promised myself I'd never work in that field again. I kept my word for 10 years. In 2010, times got tough; there was no money at all and work wasn't going that great, so we decided to move to Kazan.

She got a job as a designer for the Akcharlak newspaper, which is in Tatar. She didn't work with text, but she needed to select pictures to go with the text. She called me five times a day, read the articles phonetically into the phone, and I translated for her so that she knew which picture to use. She studied Tatar here.

We rented an awful one room apartment on Chuikov and I worked at a crappy job in housing and communal services. I read meters; but, really, I worked for an hour a day, and then just read books and they paid me 20,000 rubles, which was cool.

I had a very productive time in punk then: I put on concerts and played in two bands. I had my girlfriend's full support. She never complained, even if I had three rehearsals in a row or I said: "I'm going to Perm! There's going to be a concert, God knows where, in the forest or something. We may be killed or arrested." She was like: "Have a nice trip, honey, call me."

Then she moved back to Moscow and I lived here for three more months before moving back to Moscow as well. In all, I lived there for almost nine years, then from Moscow I went to Kazan twice for about six months, and these were very productive trips. The first time I founded Vegan Day and the second time I founded Siyanie.

How did you come up with Vegan Day?

I had been a vegetarian for a long time, and there were no vegetarian businesses in Kazan at all. Moscow has Jagannath [vegetarian restaurant] and vegetarian stores. When I came from Moscow to Kazan, I brought all this food with me, and my friends in Kazan asked me to bring some for them too. It made sense to become a wholesaler. Vegan Day was originally just an online store.

Vegan Day isn't a business project, but a project I do for the love of it. I mean, I'm a vegetarian, and I need to eat something and my friends need something to eat. So it was noncommercial from the very beginning, like everything I do in life, for the most part.

Then I met Diana. She's a very talented and intelligent girl; I'm not that talented. She saw me working and said: "Let me help you." We started working together, and eventually it turned into a cafe.

Then I left that business and went to St. Petersburg. I had period where I was kind of a lost. You know, my nomadic blood was boiling. I'm a nomad: I really like to move from place to place.

Why St. Pete this time?

St. Pete is just ... Well, I'm in a relationship with Moscow, and St. Pete is my mistress. I don't even want to talk about it.

Now, as I reflect on it years later, I see that.

I went to St. Petersburg because it had been the capital of the Russian Empire, the capital of literature, the capital of rock music. There is an amazing punk scene; there's an amazing vegan scene: it's the vegan capital of Russia. It's very cool there. It's a very European city. It's great.

And all my friends were like: St. Pete? you should live there. That is why I went to there. I moved there in September. I got a job. There was an office that printed merchandise; they had their own shop there, and they printed flags, T-shirts, whatever. I worked there as a PR agent and, like, an art director. That's what I did; I lived there for three months.

Why three months? Because I rented a room on 8th Sovetskaya Street, in a communal apartment. The way the house was built, sunlight physically never entered our yard.

And autumn in Petersburg is like ... if there is hell, then that's it. It's just the most dejection you'll ever experience. September, October, and November it's an unbearable, awful place. That's St. Petersburg in autumn. There's no sun for months, puddles under your feet, ice under the puddles, water under the ice, and snow. It's terrible. The wind from the Gulf of Finland freezes you to the bone ... And then the bugs appeared. That's actually the worst thing to ever happen to me. I'm almost 32, and the worst thing in my life was bedbugs. Seriously.

I still remember the moment when I saw that bug. I was reading the Bible right then; it was thick, and there was a bug on the Bible. Well-fed. I mean, he had a full stomach, a burgundy stomach.

That's when I realized that I wasn't about to stay in that city. Screw you, St. Pete. That's it. No Petersburg. Just. No.

Well, they're not everywhere there, are they?

All of downtown, it's just, well, it's decrepit, the entire downtown. And if you're going to live in St. Petersburg, you have to live downtown. I mean, I could've moved to like the Chyornaya River area or somewhere to live. But that just about broke me. That and the weather, the lack of sun, and there was very little money in that project.

I moved back to Moscow in December. I rented a room on Voikovskaya and, like that, I was living in Moscow. I already had a label that I called Siyanie; that's what I did.

I went to Kazan in December for the New Year. I met with the guys at Smena [Center of Modern Culture] on the second floor. And Kirill Mayevsky was, like, "let's open a vinyl record store in Smena." And I'm like, "Good idea. Let's do it."

And so I packed my things and went to Kazan in January. We opened in May. I hired Igor Shemyakin as an administrator and left again for Moscow: I had a relationship there. And I naively believed that it would be possible to run a store from Moscow. Then business began to drop and Igor says to me, like, "why don't we just buy this business from you, because we can't work like that." What else could I do?

I'm all in in Moscow. I have, well, my love there. I wasn't going to ever leave it. Ok, sure, it was a great offer. Igor had just given me all the money that I invested in the store. He bought it from me at cost, or not, or at a higher percentage there; maybe I made something on it, but it wasn't much. I mean, we're talking about 100,000 or 200,000 rubles, definitely no more than 200,000. I don't remember exactly.

I sold him the entire project and moved to Moscow. I decided to try out office life, see how it actually works.

It's in demand. I went to look for a job. I went to a construction company, a good one, and said "I want to work for you. I have zero construction experience, but I'm a great project manager. I've opened a cafe, a publishing house, a second store. I've organized festivals, tours, concerts. I'm a great project manager."

They were like, "Great. You're hired." And they took me on as a manager.

With a good salary? Was that the goal?

Yeah, of course. I worked as a project manager for a construction company for two years. We built the OKO Tower skyscraper (in Moscow City), where Sobyanin is now sitting. We built a new Gazprom office in St. Petersburg. I mean, it was a regular construction company with a regular salary for Moscow.

Construction is a very serious field and it takes a lot of time, so I put the label on pause, and it existed in kind of a sluggish stasis.

I made good money; it was fun. My love was there; everything was great. And I tried very hard because I set a goal: to earn money, and I earned it.

I would go to my boss sometimes and be like, "I want to raise my salary by another 40,000, what do I need to do?" And they were like, "Well, take this extra project." And I worked like that, just for the money.

I've always been a punk who never thought about money. One day I just decided to try to see how it would be to live with money. What would it be like to be, like, a successful middle manager and, I don't know, vacation in Rome? Something like that.

And my girlfriend also had her influence.

I told her: "I love you. I want to be with you, you're so cool." She answers me "I love you too, you're cool too. I want to be with you, too. But. Look, you visit me—I live in the Central Administrative District, you and I live in downtown Moscow—we wake up and have breakfast at Tsvetnoy Boulevard. We have a delicious meal, then we go for a walk. We don't go down into the subway at all. It's great, isn't it?"

And I'm like, "Yeah, great ..."

She was like, "Let's keep living like this! I don't need anything from you. I don't need your money at all, because I make very good money, but I'm not going to move to Voikovskaya for you. I'm going to stay in the Central Administrative District. If you want to be with me, live here in the Central Administrative District with me, not on Voikovskaya."

And I was like, "Ok. I love you, and I need money to be near you, so I'll earn it."

But I think it was a very positive impact. A woman who can influence her man like that is worth her weight in gold. Because, if not for her, I'd have continued living in a rented room on Voikovskaya and eating crappy food. Suddenly I was forced, I discovered this potential in myself, to make money, and I started earning it.

But, the universe doesn't work like that: nothing comes just to you; everything converges to a single point. And that's when it came together. I just started getting tired of it. Because I still love punk rock.

I love having the money for what I need. If I want to eat, I go eat. If I want new jeans, I buy them. Just at that level. I'm tired of the commercial lifestyle. My work suffered. That's why it happened. I went back to my boss again and said: "I want another promotion, what should I do?"

He says, like, take this job. So, I took it, did it, but when my paycheck came, it was no bigger. And I was like, "There must be some kind of mistake here." He was like, "Ah! We forgot to tell you. I talked to HR and we decided to give you your old salary."

And just like how the bedbugs broke me in St. Petersburg, this broke me. Like, oh, we just forgot to tell you. I started to work carelessly and eventually got tired.

I quit in December 2018; six months had passed, and almost everyone there also quit. The golden age had ended.

When you have the money, you need to take a break! My girlfriend and I went to India for vacation, where we amicably broke up and parted as friends. It just didn't work out.

So, I think, I could look for a job in Kazan! And I left for Kazan in January 2019.

My label has blossomed here, and now it's all I do. Life in Kazan somehow pulled me in. All I do is the label right now. Nothing else. And it basically feeds me, at the very least.

I live in Kazan, but, of course, Moscow beckons me, because she's the woman I love. And Kazan is just my parental home. It is comfortable, cozy, tasty, satisfying and quiet here.

Is Kazan changing for you, do you think? Why do you think you're staying here this long? Is it because something is happening here now that wasn't here before?

Yes, that's part of it. When Vegan Day started at Kaban Lakes, I started hanging around downtown every day. I suddenly realized that, it turns out, the city does have a center! Because I always thought of Kazan as being made up of just the Quarter, Sotsgorod, the god-awful Bauman Street [the city's main pedestrian street and hub of tourist activity], and the even worse Peterburgskaya Street.

Peterburgskaya is worse than Bauman?

Petersburgskaya sucks even more than Bauman! Three blocks of 19th century wooden houses were demolished to build it! I'll never forgive this street for that.

Kazan is unique in this respect. Take, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sverdlovsk, well, all the old Russian, Soviet cities: they lost a lot of architecture in Soviet times (in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s they demolished a lot of everything). Obviously, churches and monasteries, but some old buildings were also demolished, so all of old Russia has suffered a defeat.

When you look at old photos, we had such an amazing city! It was so beautiful, like Nizhny Novgorod, but a thousand times better! And this all the charm survived Stalin, it survived the Soviet era, it survived into our lifetime, and then it was destroyed in our lifetime, and that doubly insulting. It's doubly insulting. That's why I won't forgive Petersburgskaya Street.

It was so cool! To be clear, I watched all those old trading houses, where the Kol'tso shopping center was built, be demolished. I was sitting under the statue of [Tatar revolutionary Mullanur] Vakhitov near the Kazan Federal University and watched as one of those things, an excavator, arrived and started tearing down the house. I sat and watched it. I remember the old town. It was gorgeous! So I won't forgive it.

I'll never forgive the Kol'tso mall or Petersburgskaya Street, first and foremost.

Second, well, Petersburgskaya didn't live up to its expectations. It was built as a continuation of Bauman Street, but it doesn't work as one. You can come at any time of the day and it's empty. People don't go there! The street isn't doing its job.

It used to be a bunch of dilapidated barracks. It was dilapidated, tourists didn't go there, it was dangerous. But it could have been restored, and now it would be like the New Tatarskaya Sloboda [New Tatar Quarter]. It would be just as cool, just as touristy. And if New Tatarskaya Sloboda has something in common with Istanbul and the Muslim world, then this would be Russian, prerevolutionary, noble: that's what we have lost the most in Kazan. The part of Kazan that is old has been lost.

So I came back a year ago and saw that now our city is going through a wonderful period, because it is trying to find its own identity, a real identity. Not the one that, for example, some people with bad taste are trying to force on us to make Kazan the third sports capital, and that's it. Rubin [Kazan's professional soccer team], Ak Bars [it's professional hockey team], and so on. Not this Kazan!

Kazan is part of the Silk Road. Plus, there is its Muslimness. We had a Madrasah here; we had a very close connection with the Muslim university life in Istanbul. We were a center for Muslim education. This is a very important part of our identity!

And during my stay here this time, maybe it's my imagination, but it seems like our city is trying to find its Eastern identity. And that's great, because this is our path.

And I really like the fact that they're pushing the Tatar language, and not in the silly way they used to, but in a hip way. Like that festival ... It's great that these days Tatar isn't the language of collective farms, like was in the 90s, for hicks. Now it's cool to know Tatar.

Tat Cult Fest is very cool; I'm really very happy with it. Together with Vegan Day, we took part in the Pechun Bazary (Hay Bazaar) festival twice; it's hip, it has a chic name, chic aesthetics, chic style, everything is chic. Jadid Fest features modern Tatar music. There's a group called Juna that I really love and which I, well, if I had one wish, I would send them on a tour of Europe. They're cool, they're just really cool.

It's just that I don't really believe in FC Rubin and us as Russia's Third Capital of Sports; that's just crazy.

It seems to me that we're now the third capital in all respects, not just sports.

I think so too. The city should just be allowed to move in the direction that's most natural, towards Istanbul, really. Our path is the path to Istanbul.