When going to the airport to leave Kazan, I usually listen to your song "Kitmä Kazannan" ("Don't Leave Kazan"). To whom is it dedicated?

That song? You know ... in that year new asphalt was put down in Kazan ... I wrote it about three years ago, in 2017, in May. Then people around me started mentioning in conversations that they were leaving Kazan for Moscow, to study. Not for good, but for a month or two weeks, for a semester. Somehow that influenced me.

Now I'm thinking maybe I recall how I left for the first time, how that was. I left Kazan in 2005, in December. I had lived in the city for six and a half years at that point.

I was standing at the station, my friends were there, we are all hugging, crying. That had never happened before.

That's what was going through my head at the time.

I got on my bike and rode down Dzerzhinsky Street, around Lake Chernoye, and I wrote this song in fifteen minutes, all the lyrics. That's pretty much how it happened.

You know what I remembered? The last play I saw before I left was Khanuma, directed by Tskhvirava [Georgy Tskhvirava, chief director of the Kazan Youth Theater from 2000 to 2004, now a director at the Omsk State Theater]. Tskhvirava also left the Youth Theater, and took his favorite performance to the Kamalovsky Theater. I watched it and cried, thinking it would be the last time I would see Tatar theater.

I left Kazan in December ... I got on the train November 30, so by December 1 or 2 I was in St. Petersburg.

Exactly fifteen years ago.

Yes, I moved exactly fifteen years ago. It was weird. I explain it as a way to get out of my comfort zone, because I think if I had stayed in Kazan then, my whole life would have turned out differently.

Why St. Petersburg? Why not Moscow or other country?

You know, since 2003 for some reason I had been traveling to St. Petersburg every year. Well, I've always been in the underground scene. My friends and I went to Moscow for Nashestviye [a rock festival]. But after Moscow, for some reason, I always went to St. Petersburg. By electric train or in a seated passenger train, I would take a seat and leave, although I didn't know anyone there. And I walked around the city for a day or two until my legs got tired. For some reason I was drawn to St. Petersburg.

Even when I saw it for the first time, in 1998, I think, for some reason I felt an immediate connection with this city. I understood: I can't go to Moscow, I'm not a Moscow kind of person. My personality is closer to St. Petersburg, I think.

You left Kazan without any hesitation?

Well, of course, I had doubts, not about whether I should stay in Kazan, but in general: I had a job, housing. And I had nothing in St. Petersburg.

And there was another motivator to move: I have a friend Dima, Dima Romakhin, a fairly well-known person among anyone from Kazan. We met in Kazan, and he says: "I live in St. Petersburg." And I say: "Can I crash at your place?" And he was like: "Of course, I have an extra bed." And I just moved, and for three months I lived like that.

Then I began to get up on my own two feet and moved to another place; the house where I lived on my own was at Five Corners, right on Lomonosov, near the Fontanka River [downtown].

To be honest, you can live very well in St. Petersburg for one year, well, just by discovering it. You have tourist Petersburg; Petrograd, where all the industry is; Leningrad, with its Stalinist Imperial style; there are the residential neighborhoods. Each of these St. Petersburgs has its own philosophy, its own revelations. I've lived in each of them.

I am ... what's it called? Kupchino. I'm a patriot of Kupchino [a historic neighborhood]. That's an amazing place for me because of all the rock musicians born there.

How long did you live in St. Petersburg?

Eight years and three months. The desire to return to Kazan hit me at some point in 2013, after I went to the Forum of Tatar Youth in Europe. It's hard for me to explain all the factors, but I felt sad in Petersburg. I started having ... how to say ... personal problems. Life became uncomfortable. Work was going well; there was a lot of work. But I wanted to change something. And I found the way.

Maybe I should've moved to Moscow, but, I like I said, Moscow was ... well, or I should've left for another country. But by then I had a kid. So …

And, you know what else? I realized that then if I moved somewhere, I wasn't about to rent another apartment—I was tired of that. I we would have to buy an apartment. In St. Petersburg, with the kind of money I had, you can buy something on the outskirts, a fixer upper, and then you have to spend another year remodeling. That's what influenced me.

I somehow found an apartment in Kazan through an advertisement, but I couldn't go see it myself, so my dad went and said: "well, it seems like an OK apartment." So, I said, then let's take it. And we bought it quickly.

So, your return to Kazan is connected with the purchase of an apartment?

In 2013, I had this strong desire to speak Tatar. The main reason for that was because, in the same year, I had gone to the Forum of Tatar Youth I mentioned. It took place in August, and August is the worst month for me. Every week I would leave St. Petersburg, spend a week in Finland; a week in Latvia; then to Estonia, and that's where the Tatar forum was.

And then, returning to Kazan ... in St. Petersburg, I had reached a certain level and thought: so, now the unpleasantness begins, mortgages, my work routine. I felt like a venerable music critic: everyone knows me, all the clubs, all the concert organizers, I was invited to festivals. I worked for the most popular glossy magazine. Now what? Am I going to work there all my life?

It just hit me out of nowhere, and I said: let's move. And we moved back to Kazan. In just a month: in January I decided and in March we already moved.

So you returned to Kazan because you missed the Tatar language?

First of all ... it's not that I began to take an interest in Tatar again—I had gotten fired up about Tatar back in 2004. Wait, was that really 2004? I got my job in 2002, and probably in 2003 I went to a concert by Zulfiya Kamalova [a Tatar singer] at the [Tatar] National Cultural Center, and Zulfiya Kamalova gave a concert at the National Cultural Center, where the library is now. For me, of course, this performance was a huge discovery.

Why hadn't I written songs in Tatar before? Because I had no idea that Tatar could sound like that. I had other influences, Russian rock, Western rock. And here was this wonderful woman. And it dawned on me ... to combine the music that I listened to with the Tatar language.

After that I went to band practice and said "now we'll have Tatar songs as well." And I began writing them myself.

After some time in St. Petersburg, I began hanging out with local Tatar youth; you know, I wanted to show these Tatar songs other Tatars. Because I would sing in Tatar in a club and no one but me knew what they were about. Sometimes I translated of course, but ... you can probably understand that my songs aren't that easy to translate.

Did you ever have any contact with the Tatar environment of St. Petersburg?

Well, I went to a Sabantuy [a Tatar summer festival] for the first time. I didn't really like Sabantuys then, and I still don't. I don't know how they do it abroad, but in St. Petersburg the main sponsor was a brewing company. And there are kebabs, songs, dances all around. There was no real Tatar environment there at all ... at least I didn't feel it.

I went to a mosque, but they would look at me weird. You know, that was another sign: after moving, in March or February, I went to a religious center, right during the scandal with caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. And I went there to get some commentary on it, but they wouldn't let me. Well, they let me in, they just kicked me right out.

Then I realized: this is St. Petersburg; Muslims aren't doing very well here. They have only two mosques for the whole city. Several million Muslims live there, and it was evident: every Eid al-Adha, they were everywhere. And people would ask: where did they all come from? And I said: well, what do you mean, where did they come from? There's only one mosque here, where else can they go?

You were born in Rybnaya Sloboda, but your childhood and youth were spent in Naberezhnye Chelny. Can you be considered a citizen of Chelny?

I was born in the 1982, on June 9, in the Rybno-Slobodsky District. Why was I born there? Because my father was in the army; he and my mom got married and my dad was drafted. That happened back then, they took everyone. And dad left to serve in Kaliningrad Oblast.

I was born at seven months. Everyone thought I would be born in August, but on June 7 or 8, my mother decided to go to Kazan on business. She went to the movies to see the ABBA film, about the group, a concert film. As I was listening to those songs, and I just decided to be born there in the only hospital in the village of Kutlu-Bukash.

So, we lived there for a while, then moved to my dad's. We lived in the city of Sovetsk for about six months, our military family.

Then, if I'm not mistaken, my father decided to move, and was choosing between Kazan or Chelny. He was offered an apartment in Chelny, and we moved there in 1985. I don't remember which month anymore, but I clearly remember this: I was about three years old, walking up to the eighth floor, a small family apartment. We had such a small room, twelve meters. And the three of us live there; there were three of us until my sister Aigul was born.

I'm not a country boy, I'm a city boy: I lived in Chelny until 1999, where I finished school. It was a Tatar gymnasium. This is how I was a "child of sovereignty."

In the 10th grade, Fauzia Bayramova [nationalist politician, Tatar writer, and deputy in the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan in 1990–1995] came to an extracurricular lesson. Then the director, of course, reprimanded the teacher for inviting her to our school.

I didn't have much love for the Tatar language at school. Somewhere before the sixth or seventh grade we had one Tatar teacher, a very charismatic man. Then, as far as I know, he fled to a neighboring district with another man. A rather strange story.

After that, another teacher came to us, who to this day still asks, surprised: "Radif can still speak Tatar? Really?"

In the Tatar gymnasium, during breaks, we usually spoke a mixture of Tatar and Russian anyways. I don't know why that was, probably because Russian was the language of the street. To be honest, I don't consider Chelny to be a Tatar city. Of course, there was a strong national movement, a national wave, but ...

Did you belong to any of the criminal gangs in Chelny?

You know, I read the book by Shamil Idiatullin (The City of Brezhnev), and a book by Robert Garayev on the same topic was published recently. It's very strange, to be honest, everyone says that they were supposedly forced to join a gang, that they had to, that's the way it was in the city. For some reason, I there's one memory stuck in my head: I was about seven years old, an older guy came up to me and said: "Here, check out my watch. Pretty cool, huh? You want one like it?" He was probably trying to recruit me into a gang. I don't know what it was. But I never joined any gang.

To be honest, I was rather bookish ... what is it called ... a black sheep? I had a lot of conflicts with my classmates at school.

And I moved to Kazan from Chelny in 1999, when I entered Kazan State University in the Faculty of Russian Journalism.

And what did you think of Kazan then?

For some reason I don't remember old Kazan. Someone recalls "Well, they tore down the slum on Degtyarnaya, where Millennium Park is." And I know nothing about it. For some reason, I have no specific picture of it in my memory.

My band practice was on Bolshaya Krasnaya, and from there I saw Fedorovsky Hill, where the Dom Kolkhoznika is now, the newly restored Cathedral of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, etc. There were many wooden houses then; for some reason I remember them.

I should also say that my first year in Kazan was very dark. I was like, here's a bus, you have to get on it. And that's all there was. For some reason, I still remember from those times how I would go to Muzurovskie nomera buildings, where the Kol'tso shopping center is now. There was a bakery there. I would buy a cake and eat it there. For some reason, those kinds of things stayed with me.

Of course, you can't compare Kazan and Chelny. You know, in the late 1990s, the underground scene in Chelny was cooler than in Kazan, because we, well, we practically had no theaters, just about nothing. We had to invent it all ourselves.

We had a newspaper called Lodki prichalov, which was very good. There were always concerts and they played filmstrip slides; there was a cinema club where they showed arthouse movies. If you were curious, life in Chelny was interesting from that point of view. I never saw anything like that at the time in Kazan.

Was your first concert in Kazan or Chelny?

My first concert was in Yudino. I met Misha Vyrin, he worked in the Railway Workers' Palace of Culture, and had a local band. And he had these three guys, Yudino gopniks [Russian chavs], 16 years old, but they played very earnestly. So, I, with my blue hair and earring, joined these Yudino gopniks. We started putting songs together.

I went on stage, singing, and they told me, "Radif, you sing OK, but you don't move around a lot on stage." So, from then on, I moved around the stage more.

How did you get a job?

I went to the Orient Express, which is now called Business Online—all its publishers and editors came from there—in my fourth year of college. This is thought to be late; usually people go to work in their second year.

I remember that the journalism department had a list of students on the wall, an announcement of whom had been expelled for academic failure, and it included the entire cast Efir [TV channel]. And I thought: why even get a diploma if you already work in prime time every day?

The work was easy; at first it was even interesting. I wrote about the underground scene. Because at the time I was the only journalist writing about music, the one who went to all the rock parties.

Then the whole class envied me: Radif didn't even study, but in the end he got a job in the most read newspaper.

Was it that because of your publications that they held a grudge against you? Was there any toxicity?

Probably. I wrote some negative reviews of theatrical performances, and they called me up and told me the director had come to see me. I won't name names, because they've changed their minds. Now, when I write about them, they say "we've read it, thank you." Back then they would come and say to the editor "He's Tatar, an underaged Tatar! How can he write such things?!" And I answered them: "Well, what else am I supposed to write? It was impossible to sit through."

When you said that you were returning to Kazan, how did your loved ones react? Were they happy?

I think they were happy. It was impossible to come from St. Petersburg often; it took a lot of money. The St. Petersburg–Moscow–Kazan train was not cheap, and it was a long ride. I was lucky if I saw my mother once a year. We talked more on Skype. And these days I have to look after my mom, she's sick. Somehow ... In this regard, things have improved, to be honest.

She never said anything like "Oh, finally Radif is back, finally smartened up. I told you, you don't need to go anywhere." They always supported me, defended me, they always said Radif knows what to do.

Does Kazan suit you architecturally and aesthetically?

It's the same as in St. Petersburg, everything is demolished, everything is broken. In Kazan, when I walk along these streets, since I know a lot about them, I can almost see buildings that no longer exist. I even, well, start calling some streets by their old name. For example, Senniy Bazar Street, Zakharievskaya, Voskresenskaya. I still say, like, we went to Nikolaev Garden [the old name for what is now Universitetsky Garden].

When İlyäs and I [İlyäs Ğafar, member of the İttifaQ hip-hop group, founder of the indie music label Yummy Music, and coproducer of the TAT CULT FEST] filmed Tugañ yak [a documentary], right after Riga, our final stop was Petersburg. And I was afraid that it would pull me back. But I sat down and realized: I still like this city, I know a lot about it, all of its ins and outs. But, at some point, I had to leave. I never felt like I had left something here, like I had forgotten something. I don't live there anymore, but the city never became a stranger to me.

Are you comfortable in Kazan? Does your nomadic blood draw you to other cities?

I don't know where the Tatars got it from, but to tell you the truth, we're a sedentary people. I mean, of course, I always tell people "we're wanderers, nomads, the entire globe is under our feet." But for you I'll reveal the truth.

A lot has changed for me. For example, I used to think of myself as a Jadid [a movement of Muslim reformists in the Russian Empire], I felt like we should be striving to be more European. Lately, ancient history has been calling out to me; what was before all this? Everyone can feel it. Yoldyz [Minnullina, a Tatar poet] wrote Otuken [Boot] for a reason. We're all moving in this direction.

In many ways, Kazan is stuck in the past. I moved in March; it was really cold for March. I got out of the subway and was stopped by a policeman because of my beard: he says that they were focusing on guys with beards. I tell him "This is Kazan, half the city has a beard." No one ever stopped me and my beard in St. Petersburg, but here, in my peaceful Kazan, that's how it is.

On the other hand, after moving to Kazan, I began to really love it, because I began to study it, marvel at it, admire it and its history.

Now, everyone here knows you here, sure, but I still see some room for growth. And the city keeps opening up from new sides.

I live in the Old Tatar Quarter, on Tukaya St.. I have Gubaidullin's building [a historical and cultural landmark] in my yard, the former building of the Tukay cinema. The house of the Aytuganovs, Yunusovskaya Square ... If you look to the right, there's the Märcani Mosque. I feel like I belong here.

Sometimes I think "they tore down this, demolished that, no one here understands me, I'm going to leave, move to Canada." I think about it from time to time. That's only natural. If need be, I'll up and leave.