Sergey Loiko: a suitcase of cheese instead of fat

Travel Sergei Loiko on the route Kiev-Minsk-Moscow. Photo: from the personal archive of Sergey Loiko

“What used to be transported from Kyiv to Moscow? That's right - lard, vodka and Kiev cake. And now? Now there are suitcases full of French cheese and Spanish jamon.” During his recent trip along the Kyiv-Minsk-Moscow route, the famous Russian journalist and photographer Sergei Loiko reflected on the current realities in the Russian Federation, and not only, and shared his thoughts in an author’s column specifically for ForumDaily.

All that remains is to build the wall. Many people insist on this. They can be understood. In the meantime, while Russia is preparing to fight with the whole world, starting with Turkey, and Ukraine suddenly became preoccupied with the fight against corruption by throwing glasses at each other by famous politicians - in all sorts of roundabout ways, if urgently necessary, Ukrainians and Russians continue to fly to visit each other. The cheapest route (about $200) is with a transfer in Minsk.

In general, this is not so bad. Time on the way from Kiev to Moscow and back you spend in the deep Soviet past.

Only the local company Belavia flies to Minsk and from Minsk. It is boring to look at the list of arriving and departing flights on the scoreboard.

Neither you are McDonald's, nor Fraydis, at the end of the hall (very long as a corridor) is a huge “Dining Room” sign. In the hall there are almost no passengers, a lot of free seats. I can not believe that at all something will fly at least sometime. A faded Soviet kiosk (I want to clear my glasses all the time) sells Belarusian Soviet champagne for some crazy local money (amounts with six zeros).

The toilet sparkles with medical cleanliness and whiteness, but it is impossible to go there, because some gloomy, broad-shouldered woman in a blue robe with a mop cleans it all the time - it seems like 24 hours a day. I didn’t leave the airport building, but my friends say that the whole country is so clean, clean. I willingly believe it.

The only connection with the 20st century at the Minsk airport is, scary to say, WI-FI. But it's not free. And it costs crazy money - about 000 local “bunnies”, or about one American dollar - for a few hours. But everything is not as simple as it seems. You can buy an Internet card in one single place - at the post office. You need to go again to the farthest end. There is a large premises there, which advertises itself with the sign “Poshta”.

In 2015, for his work in the war in eastern Ukraine, Loiko was awarded the Overseas Press Club Bob Considine award “for the courage, authenticity, originality, depth and expressiveness described.” Photo: Vladislav Musienko

Is this establishment really located at the airport with one sole purpose - to sell cheap WI-FI cards? It was not possible to find out, because no one except me entered the Post Office while I was there presenting my passport and filling out some form, which for some reason did not contain the column “Have you been in the occupied territories.”

Jokes, jokes, but in Ukraine such a column in some questionnaire may soon be introduced ...

Yes, this day lasts a long time in flight. It is sad and boring, and there is no one to give a hand.

But it is still less exhausting than a sleepless insomnia in the stuffy, like a gas chamber, a compartment of a rare Moscow-Kiev or Kiev-Moscow train. For the same $ 200 equivalent.

Even if you took a potent sleeping pill that can protect you from the merciless snoring of your neighbor in the compartment, nothing will save you from waking up four times during this endless night: you can’t escape from the border guards and customs officers of some and the customs officers and border guards of others.

Ok, you did not die of boredom at the Minsk airport, or from the lack of sleep and oxygen in the night train, and you got to Moscow.

And Moscow is already some other. Some kind of sad, in a word. In the afternoon, people fall, break their arms and legs on the icy tile laid throughout the city last fall, when Putin’s minion, the Moscow mayor, understood that the ship was going to the bottom and began to master the budget sharply (while the Turkish workers were not sent out of countries), laying out the entire city with tiles and lining on avenues and boulevards rolls of already turned yellow lawn for the winter.

At night, bulldozers break tents and pavilions throughout the city, where it was so convenient to buy cigarettes, beer, bread, pay for the phone. All this without trial. Only by authoritative sentence. Tens of thousands of people were left without work overnight, thousands of small enterprises ceased to exist.

Cheerless Moscow, Bolshoi Theater. Photo: From the personal archive of Sergey Loiko.

At the entrance to my house, I meet face to face with a neighbor. Surprise. I was sure that she had already left for permanent residence in America, where she had long been going. Wow, life plans have changed.

The neighbor has a wonderful four-room apartment in our euro-renovated building in the very center of Moscow. Prior to the unexpectedly coming era of “KRYMNASH”, she planned to sell it for $ 600 000, buy a house in Texas for $ 100 000, and don’t live off the rest of the half-lemon.

But it was not there. A little bit did not have time. Now her apartment in dollar equivalent costs already $ 200 000, and ... for a whole month not a single buyer.

She wanted to go to the dacha to live and rent out the apartment. Another problem. Previously, such an apartment could be rented out in one day for $3 - $000 and, again, you wouldn’t have to worry about living. Now you can’t sell it for a thousand.

“The market is dead, there is no demand,” says Pavel, manager of the private hotel chain. “Foreigners - investors and businessmen - are leaving Russia en masse. Everything is covered with a copper basin. Our profits decreased by 48% last year and continue to fall. We need to come up with something new.”

Moscow region. Photo: from the personal archive of Sergey Loiko

Pavel, waiting for the worst times, moved from a luxury jeep to an economical Skoda last year. Moved from the cottage village in the CHT (garden partnership). Every penny counts.

In one of Moscow's most prestigious supermarkets, the fresh seafood department stinks like a dead fish dump. There is nothing to be done - import substitution. In response to Western sanctions against corrupt officials, initiators and participants in the seizure of Crimea and the war in Donbass, the Russian government announced sanctions against its people - it refused to buy Western food products.

The result is obvious: the disappeared food was soon replaced by olives, passion fruit and oysters from friendly Belarus. Only prices have increased every two.

Prices rose by leaps and bounds.

Previously, what was transported from Kyiv to Moscow? That's right - lard, vodka and Kiev cake. And now? Now - suitcases full of French cheese and Spanish jamon.

People are switching to less expensive and lower quality food. And it turns out that they need such an imported medicine as Creon. But it is no longer in the pharmacy. But there is an incomprehensible Russian analogue that appeared out of nowhere with an unpronounceable name, for the same $10 per pack. How it is made from what is unknown.

But the author of these lines, for example, is well aware of how Russian cheese is made. During my work in an American newspaper, I wrote over a thousand articles about science and life, about ballet, about war. But the reader will not believe which of my articles turned out to be the most popular in the last ten years. Hundreds of thousands of views and millions of reposts and reprints received my little material about how cheese was made in the city of Omsk. The workers of the local cheese factory during the daytime siesta bathed in baths with milk, the main raw material for cheese making.

In Egypt it is no longer possible, in Turkey it is impossible. In the rest of the country, “vouchers” cost crazy money.

Travel companies are massively out of business.

I have run out of pages in my passport. I came to the new multifunctional center, spacious as a palace, to order a new passport. No queue. Not a single person at all. A couple of years ago - only by appointment. And now, as they say, goodbye America, no one needs foreign passports anymore. Where should we go? Soon, they say, there will be a war with Turkey, we need to stock up on everything we need and find out where the nearest bomb shelter is...

Just as Eskimos do not process alcohol in their blood, so Russians do not process Ukraine in their brains. As soon as you start talking to a very intelligent, and even quite intelligent, Russian interlocutor, and the conversation comes up about Ukraine, you get the feeling that some matrix Putin has quietly crept up behind him and inserted a zombie chip into the back of his head.

“Ukraine is to blame for everything.” Photo: from the personal archive of Sergei Loiko

It turns out that Ukraine is to blame for everything - the Jewish Banderaites and the Pindos who sympathize with them. It is they who do not allow Russians to live in peace, they raise prices and tariffs on everything, they kick them out of work, they tax them like wolves, they shoot down planes - “defenseless” bombers, they threaten with war, they demand the “KRYMNASH” peninsula, from which all this nonsense began, back...

And the refrigerator is already in the minds of some individual Russians is beginning to overtake the TV. One currency borrower recently, during the anti-Kremlin demonstration, publicly cried that Crimea should be immediately returned.

And it will return. Where are they going. Now the Turks will lose the war and return. How pretty ...

***

Sergei Loiko is a Russian journalist and photographer who worked for The Los Angeles Times for many years. In 2015, for his work in the war in eastern Ukraine, he was awarded one of the highest awards in American journalism - the Overseas Press Club Bob Considine award “for courage, authenticity, originality, depth and expressiveness of what was described.” In the same year, Sergei received the prestigious Los Angeles Times editorial award for “best reporting of 2014.”

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