Here you have a book that tells an entire story. You can read it and pass it on to your children for them to read. This city is a book.

Using those five pages, you want to convey to the next generation what kind of city it used to be.

This is part two of Kaitam's in-depth conversation with Peter Safiullin, architect and creator of Yaratam furniture. The first part of the interview can be here. Reading time 20 minutes.

The main problem (I said) wasn't that it was torn down. Fine, they tore it down. But more of it probably should have been saved.

Okay, tear it down. But damnit, then you have to build something good! Build it right. But no. Not only are they building right on the frontage line ...

The problem is that there's no ... there's no mutual understanding between the developer, the authorities, the architect, the chief architect, the contractors, the people involved in transportation; that's the problem. Anyways, enough about Kazan. What is this all about?

— Why do you think there's no mutual understanding?

That's where we come to the main problem. It all has to do with education. We have a dark void there. And I find that surprising. We're already in the friggin third decade of the 21st century and we can't solve a simple problem like that.

I see my son, how they teach him—what they teach him—and it's even worse than it was in the 90s, really! It's worse than in the 90s!

— What grade is he in?

Him? He's in fifth grade. They pay a lot of attention to his appearance at school. He has long hair, piercings. Well, not piercings; he doesn't have real earrings. It seems like the teachers don't really care about the children at all. What they care about is ... They have their rules and regulations.

What can you teach a child by giving him a bad mark for behavior, by telling him "You look like a girl with long hair"? I don't get it.

And the worst thing? Okay, I don't understand it, but the people who teach our children don't understand it either! They don't see what kind of time bomb they're setting off. But it's not their fault. They're just products of their parents and the same education system. That's the problem.

And like, ten years ago I thought we had colossal potential ... Just listening to Toynbee or Gumilev, the hypothesis of passionate impulses, I thought: "Yes! We have everything we need to do it." I thought, in the next ten years ... We could somehow take the next economic step in ten years (from 2010 to 2020), right? In any direction ...

Well, it's obvious that economic development leads many other processes. A lot of it is due to poverty. I'd even say it's a result of poverty.

But ... we didn't even take a half-step forward. We took a step back.

There are more cars, more apartments. But it's all loans, all mortgages! Business as a whole is dead or dying. And who pays taxes to the state treasury? Business. Not oil. Well, oil too, of course, but that's wrong. Wait, why are we talking about this again?

It's Good Morning with Peter Safiulin [laughing].

Yes. And it's scary, of course. Me, I'm scared. That's what I really got over these ten years: what I got is fear. Come on, let's hear some more of your questions.

Let's talk about design.

Hey! That's an abrupt change in topic.

No, it makes sense. Because, well, what can you do about it all? Everything we were just talking about. Other than just do everything yourself?

What can I do about it all? Look, I mean, I've been thinking about it. Before working at TIGP [Tatinvestgrazhdanproekt, the Main Territorial Design and Survey, Research and Production Company of the Ministry of Construction, Architecture, Housing, and Communal Services of the Republic of Tatarstan], I thought there was something I could do about it.

But when I started working at TIGP, I realized that I was deeply mistaken. I couldn't change anything. That's why I have admiration for some of our mutual acquaintances.

I just don't have the resources for it. If I had the authority, I'd simply fire everyone. But then, what next? You need someone to work. First you have to educate people so they can replace the ones you fire. They need to be educated. We find ourselves facing the same problem.

To change something, I mean, globally, you need to spend a lot of energy and time. I don't have time to change anything globally. I have other, more important things to do.

I look at my parents, who built a school. Now, well, my mom is seventy, my dad's a little younger. And they're leaving. They're slowly leaving this school, and their students are taking their place.

It hurts me to see that, because it doesn't matter how they did it. It won't be like it was with them. I'm more interested in a personal story; I don't know. Ideally, just being an artist. It seems to me that, in some ways, artists influence a kind of global change even more than any bureaucrat.

The rest, well, due to different circumstances ... some maybe didn't know the best way to change it, what "better" means; others didn't want to; some people just proposed more mortgages.

There weren't as many of you.

That's right. There weren't very many of us. And then there was the whole thing with the boeryk [the Tatar word for administrative order].

Boeryk?

Yeah. On my first day at work, I found a boeryk on my desk. And, like, this boeryk, how can I put this ... I'm an architect, what the hell is a boeryk anyways? And someone quickly and clearly explained the concept to me. In the end, I had this dream when I was on vacation:

I go back to work after my vacation and there's a parade ground where our parking lot should be; all the architects and engineers are on the parade ground. They're all in uniforms. And there's a general in a convertible, like [Russian Minister of Defense] Sergey Shoygu, going around like this and everyone's like "We wish you good health, comrade general director!"

And then I went up to the guard and was like "What's going on?" He was all: "What wrong with you, Safiullin, why aren't you in uniform? Go change your clothes and get in line!"

I woke up and realized I had to get out of there! It wasn't another month after this dream before I quit. All in all, I worked at TIGP for ten months.

Apart from disappointment, did you get anything out of your time there?

Of course! That was when I came up with Yaratam. That's the year it was born. We made Vera Pavlovna [the name of a cabinet made by Yaratam, pictured below].

Congratulations! Can you tell us how the idea for this project came about?

Well, it was difficult. It wasn't like I was just sitting there and said "Eureka! I'm going to start now." I always made things for my projects ... Furniture is the totality of that, the result of a very long path of self-education, travel, observation, and work.

You know, if you do something for a long period of time, go over it in your head, something will come out of it. In my case, it was furniture.

That's largely because one of the highlights of my youth was a trip to Milan.

What did you do there? How did you end up there?

I was 20 years old. I went to an exhibition, a furniture exhibition for Milan Design Week.

How did you end up there? As a student?

As a student, yeah. My sister lives in Moscow, and she has her own bureau. She came up with (well, what a total coincidence) a collection of plywood furniture that we made in Kazan.
They made it at the helicopter plant. She had acquaintances there. We found guys that would saw this furniture out of plywood at the helicopter plant.

Was that legal?

I bought out an entire train compartment to fit that furniture and took it to Moscow. Then, somehow, we miraculously sent it to Milan. I flew there to put it together and help out there.

I was 20 years old and it was my first trip abroad. I had never even flown on a plane before. It was great, of course!

It was incredible. I mean, I had such an immense cultural shock in Italy, from the exhibition, from the designers, from how everything goes on there in general. The kind of attention that is paid to these people in general, what they do, the technologies they have. And probably from that moment on I became more interested in design than architecture.

I began to read. I learned a lot of names. In that same year, 2000, I had a small column on designers; I wrote a lot about designers.

Where did you write?

There was a magazine called Dina: Design and New Architecture.

What happened to it?

Dina just left.

Left Tatarstan?

Yes. She's left. Dina Sattarova, the chief editor.

She never returned?

Not as far as I know, no. There was a show, NA, or New Art. I had a few short episodes about design. The first I think was about Philippe Starck. It was there that I met Starck ... with all these people, and it was just incredible. From that very moment I became very interested in it; I started reading. It fascinated me a lot.

The Internet back then wasn't as advanced, so I found some books that had been published by the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics. That's what it was called then. They had some pretty good design books, in terms of information. In terms of printing, they were terrible. Well, it was rough, in black and white.

I mean, how can a design book can be in black and white?! My parents had books on architecture with terrible black-and-white photographs. Soviet books, with their peculiar smell.

You open them, they still smell like the printing press. They had bad black-and-white photos like that. Even the worst smartphone takes better pictures than what they printed.

So I started reading those books, then I graduated from the institute and left for Moscow. I moved at the end of 2001. I don't remember Moscow at all.

You don't remember?

I don't remember. I have no memories of the work I did there.

In that alien city?

Yeah. Well, I did a lot there. There were big projects, the budgets were bigger, and the money was bigger. Everything was bigger. But paradoxically, for some reason, nothing ever got completed. Something always got in the way.

What got in the way? Circumstances would change?

Circumstances would change; there would be a crisis; someone would go to jail; someone would get shot, I don't know. No, nobody got shot. One person went bankrupt, another ran out of money, one got divorced, another got married, moved, went bankrupt, somebody ran out of time. I couldn't finish anything. Not a single project!

For how many years?

Almost ten. It was terrible. I took a job. I worked for 9 months and nothing good came of it. But I was different then. Maybe it was me?

Maybe that's why I couldn't finish anything. I didn't really hold anything back. I argued with clients a lot. I would just tell them off.

Not like now, right?

Well now I just argue with them. Back then I would tell them off.

What did you get out of Moscow for yourself? What would you call that period of your life?

I probably grew up a lot there, became independent. I moved from my parents' apartment to Moscow and started living independently right away. Before that, I had never thought about food or bills. And there, well, like, I had my own home. I mean, I rented an apartment.

Do you remember where it was?

Of course I remember! It was on 3-Ya Pryadil'naya Street, Izmailovo (for three years). Then at Klimashkina 20, Presnya. Near the Mario restaurant (for three years). And the next three years in the house across from it. Nine and a half years in total. And then I moved back to Kazan. I put all my crap in my car and drove off.

Did you make the decision to return quickly?

I mean, my wife made the decision very quickly. She said: "I don't want to live in Moscow. I'm not going to move there. If you want to, live there yourself." We had lived in two different cities for a long time. But it was terrible.

I was packing my things. I thought: "Oh yeah! I can start with a clean slate. I'm going home!"

I left Kazan before the millennium. It was different. It was a much more homogenous city than the one I returned to in 2011. We rented an apartment on Kosmonavtov Street for 20,000 rubles, which seemed practically free. It was unreal! Just incredible luck. Actually, though, it turned out to be incredibly expensive for Kazan.

I liked the view of the last house in front of the horse racetrack. It has this huge field, and, depending on the time of the year, the sunrise; that's what I liked. I like it when there is space to observe. I really missed that living in Moscow. That alien city.

I moved to Kazan and (it turns out), for the third time in my life, I started all over again, because no one remembered me anymore; everyone had forgotten about me. I did some work. I built the Katyk restaurant. Somebody ordered a house from me, I designed something for someone else. I didn't have an office. I just sat in my apartment on Kosmonavtov Street.

I have always had my office in the apartments I rented. And I still do. I almost never have a living room, but I always have a study. Because well, work is a very big part of my life and guests are a very small part of my life.

We worked on some projects there; I decorated interiors, apartments. In early autumn 2012, my wife and I decided to leave Kazan for Bali.

To live there?

We went there to live. We got on the plane and flew away. We took our son; thank God he hadn't started school then, just kindergarten. He went to kindergarten.

If I was going to leave Russia, I could move to Bali. Because you don't really have to communicate with people there. There's really no point in having a lot of conversations with anyone there. It's a different society. It's very different from the western one. And it really influenced me.

The first thing that struck me was that they don't care who you are. They don't care at all. You could be anyone, friggin Jack Nicholson, it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect anything in their life, in any way, at all. They wouldn't change their attitude towards you if you turned out to be Donald Trump.

Second: if, in Western society when they ask you "What do you do?" you say your profession. But your profession isn't always your true calling. They don't do that; they don't have that tradition. No one says: "I am Kitut and I'm a taxi driver." Nobody cares what you do. You are first and foremost a person.

I really liked that too.

What is Yaratam today?

Today it is an established team. There are 17 of us, designers; carpenters; painters; and, well, a lot of people.

It seems like in 2020 we fed on this energy, right? I mean, right now we're working on pretty difficult jobs, but we have a lot of energy.

We can turn it into a really cool company. We're ready for that. What we did before was more like handicrafts. I mean, it was design, but it was really handicrafts. A workshop. And now we're completely rebranding. We'll have a different website, a different logo, a different office: everything will be different. And this year we'll finally start exporting our work.

Where to? Anywhere?

Anywhere, but now we have three areas picked out: the United Kingdom, Austria, and France. Maybe Germany instead of France. But the United Kingdom and Austria for sure.

How do exhibitions make you feel? Have you started traveling with furniture from Kazan to any international salons?

It's freaking hard work. As is as shooting, really. On the one hand, Paris was cool; it was our first international exhibition, and it was really important for me to understand if we would get in or not. Or, more precisely, exactly how. I knew we would get in. But it's important that I wasn't the only one to understand that.

Many people thought we were Danes. Like: "Oh! Are you from Copenhagen?" "No. We're from Russia." "That can't be. We thought you were from Denmark."

Did you find that flattering?

Yes. Because Danes are great designers. Some of the best, in fact. I think they're as good as Italians.

And you go to Europe for the first time and see what your colleagues [from Russia] bring. And you know how it usually goes, right? You brought your design, and they brought like Russian nesting dolls, or kokoshniks [Russian traditional headdress], or wrought-iron chairs. And then Europeans think that all Russians can make are nesting dolls, balalaikas, wrought-iron chairs, and firewood. And coal!

It was important for me to bring a design, to say:

When I was really young, I wanted Kazan to be as beautiful and pleasant as Barcelona or Paris. Over the years, I realized that that's not going to happen. The potential for that has been lost already.

I really want to create some kind of cultural or historical landmark. I don't know, like, with my last name on it.

Who are we? ... Sure, we've got the Kamaz soccer team, fine. But doing something in my profession is important for me. My grandfather was a cabinet maker. A handicraft teacher. For me, it's important to make my mark. So that it tells a story. It's like a language for communicating with the world. You tell your story through what you do.

Here's a table called Idel. What exactly is Idel? People start to wonder: What do you know? Idel is what Tatars call the Volga River. Whoa. Something like that.

That's pretty snobbish.

No. Well, I just don't like Azino.

What are your three favorite neighborhoods? Your favorite streets in Kazan?

My three favorite streets? They're always changing. I really love Tolstogo; Ulyanova; and the third, probably Karla Marksa. Dzerzhinskogo! Not really Dzerzhinskogo as a street, no. It makes a strange street ... Well, let's say Tolstogo, Karla Marksa, and Ulyanova.

If you had the opportunity, well, like, if they had a game where you could choose a profession for a year. Like you start work tomorrow, and after a year you stop, where would you work for a year?

A year? Well, in a year you can't do get very much done in an interesting profession. I would probably like to make a movie. I'm not sure about being a director, because I know that's hard work. You have to be able to … you have to try different things. Well, maybe a screenwriter, at least.

Production designer.

Sure, that would be cool.

What kind of job would you turn down no matter how much they pay you?

I wouldn't work for the police. Or really, anything connected with law enforcement.

What do you associate with being Tatar? Name three associations.

Tatar? I mean ... You know what the problem is? There are a lot of things that have been associated with that word, and I don't always really like those things.

So aside from what has been associated with it, what does it mean for you?

For me, right? Well, Tatar villages, Tatar cuisine, the Tatar Philharmonic. My grandfather loved all of Tatar culture, he wrote poetry in the Tatar language.

What was his name?

My grandfather? Ildar.

Safiullin?

Yes. Well, actually he was Ildar-Khan. He was born in 1914. After the revolution, when he received a passport, he had to remove Khan. He just became Ildar. But when we went to the village he came from, everyone called him Ildar-Khan. He was the first secretary of the executive committee in the town of Bazarnye Mataki. He was surrounded by collective farms worth millions. He was very active; he did a lot of things in different fields. He knew electronics, carpentry, he could fix a car, and all his collective farms were very rich, worth millions.

And he was a communist to the core. But, at the same time, he was very fond of private property. Well, like any peasant, like a person who grew up on his own land, like a peasant son, he had a special attitude towards private property, not the same as that of the townspeople.

So, what did he do? At the end of the year, when everything had been harvested, he handed over everything to the state, as per the state plan, and then he distributed the surplus to the collective farmers. And he was called in for it.

Was he fired?

No, they didn't fire him. He was summoned for it and they started chewing him out. They couldn't fire him, because he was getting results ... Well, they could've arrested him. But they told him, "Dude, you can't do that. What are you doing?"

"You know. There's a plan, and I've fulfilled it. Land to the peasants and factories to the workers. Surplus ... People don't have time to work in their gardens. They work very well on the collective farm, but they don't have time to work on their personal plots. And you have to encourage them. Otherwise, there's no point in all of this."

So they said to him:

"No. That's contrary to the ideology of the party."

And he's a communist, in the party. He says:

"If it contradicts the ideology of the party, then you can take my party card."

And screw em'! He left. He left the party and was immediately removed from office. If you were nonpartisan, you couldn't be a secretary. So, he moved to Kazan and got a job as a handicraft teacher in a school.

And what's great is that, at the same time, he had some private entrepreneurial work, which was, like, illegal, but everyone was doing it. He repaired televisions, tape recorders, all the household appliances. He knew a lot about electronics. He had a little suitcase.

He visited us very often with that suitcase, just in case something needed to be soldered, a radio or TV. That was before microcircuits, the tube era. The tube–transistor era. We had a vacuum tube TV, and he always brought his suitcase to solder something, adjust it. And it always smelled like rosin.

Do you know what rosin is?

Do you have any photos of your grandfather?

Yes.

Can you share them?

Sure.

When I was 19 or 20, 18 maybe, I remember, he came to visit us and we talked. Now I regret that we didn't spend that much time together. Once he just turned and said suddenly: "Can you imagine ... "

He was very interested in matter, even before people really started talking about string theory and all that. He said:

"Matter is just fluctuations of different frequencies of electromagnetic waves." I had no idea what he was talking about.

And then he says to me: "Can you imagine a space without any matter?" I said "Like, a vacuum? Like outer space?" He said, "No, man! Are radio waves passing through? Radio waves are matter. Does light pass? Light is matter." (He believed even then that light is matter). And he's like, "No. No frigging way! Huh?" I was like, "buzz off."

Get outta here?

Get out! Go tell it to someone else. And now I regret that I didn't spend that much time with him. He was very interesting to be around. We went to the village together. When I was young, 12 years old, I had to go from the village to Kazan at night, and the train was 20 km from the village, at the station.

Did you go on foot?

We walked at night through the forest. We left at nine in the evening and, like, for four hours we went through the fields and forests. On foot.

Cool.

At first, I was terrified, because my grandfather told me terrible stories. He was quite the storyteller! Even though he spoke with a crazy accent and had only a ninth-grade education.

Did he speak with a Tatar accent? I mean, Tatar was his native language, but didn't speak Russian very well?

Yeah. Like, instead of saying "look," he'd say "look out" And it was always hilarious. Like, "You look out good today." [Laughing].

Why was that different with your dad? Your grandfather spoke Tatar, and, obviously, he thought in Tatar. But your dad spoke Russian.

My dad was the only one on that side of the family to receive a higher education.

He was educated in Russian, married an ethnic Russian girl. If you look at the institute's yearbooks, the school in the 1960–1970s, 90% of my mother's class were ethnic Russians. The institute itself was 90% ethnic Russians. There were very few Tatars. I don't know why. Tatars were probably in rural areas farming.

What are your three favorite buildings in Kazan? For any reason, not necessarily because of how they look, but they are important to you for a reason.

The Publishing house at 19 Baumana Street, Nogai. Burnaevskaya Mosque, probably. And … I don't remember what it's called, a building on Karla Marksa, a two-story residential building on the corner of Karla Marksa and Lobachevskogo.

I still really like the Student Food Factory, oddly enough. The Student Food Factory on the corner of Gorkogo and Tolstogo.

I like it too, it's green.

I would say the circus too. But it's kind of … Well, anyways, the Student Food Factory, the Publishing House, and Burnaevskaya Mosque.

Okay, your now three least favorite buildings in Kazan that you would tear down. If you could tear down three buildings at once in one day.

Can I pick three hundred?

Not three hundred. Only three today.

There's a high-rise building at the corner of Butlerova and Volkova. A residential building.

It's kind of round?

Yes. Next would be Kasatkina 11A. It's glass, terrible eclecticism, a high-rise. And the third … the third ... Well, okay, I won't touch that side. I'll let everything on the other side of the river stay there. Maybe ... the Palace of Agriculture.

What would you say to young people who have left Tatarstan and are watching Kazan from afar?

What would I tell them? Jeez, you know, really, I don't know what to say to them. I don't think you have to look outwardly for a reason. I mean, you can leave, get an education; that's important. You can go and work on movies in Hollywood or something. You obviously can't do that in Tatarstan. It's kind of important for one's personality, sure. But sometimes people just leave because nothing worked out for them here.

That's a very important point.

When you leave to do something, you're leaving on a positive note. How did I get back here? When you think that a new life out there awaits you, something grandiose, something new, cool, that's one thing! A lot of people leave because they are looking for a reason, any reason, not to stay: they feel misunderstood, the climate is bad, the roads are bad, the government, you don't like the fences, whatever. I think that's wrong.

Don't do that. You should always turn inward.

I mean, you need to understand what you want to do in a global sense. What do you want to do? What I want to do is basically correlated with this place, this culture, this city.

That's kind of why I'm here.

You just have to look for it. The place you live is there for a reason, the language exists for a reason, the people around you are there for a reason. I mean, I couldn't imagine myself in Mexico. A completely different culture, completely different traditions, nothing in common with anyone. Who would be interested in hearing about my grandfather in Mexico? Nobody cares, you know. He's a nobody! Would you be interested in hearing about some ...

Mexican grandfather?

Yeah. Well, maybe you would be interested, that's the kind of person you are. But 99% of people in Tatarstan (let's call them that [instead of just Tatars], to unite them) wouldn't be interested in listening to anyone talk about their Mexican grandfather. What's going on there in Ciudad Juárez? Nobody knows and nobody cares. What's happening here is much more important than in Juarez, you know? At least for us.

And what is there to do there? It's one thing if there's a place you want to go to do something specific.

Sure there are people like that, but not many, I don't know, like Rudolf Nureyev, Chaliapin, or Chulpan Khamatova who at some point outgrow their hometown, their place of birth. But those are big personalities, right? That's a little different.

At one point you may realize that you can no longer do anything else where you are, and, to take it to the next level, you have to be at a place where you can do it. For example, I don't need to be anywhere to do what I do; I can ... well, times are a little different, we have the internet, so it's easier for us than it was for Chaliapin. So, what can you say to someone who has left Kazan?

If they have left and are thinking of returning, they probably need to answer two questions: why did I leave and why do I want to return?

And when you can answer yourself honestly, it will become clear whether it's time for you to go home.