R.I.P., Izmailovo?

Izmailovo, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

I don't want to believe this is true. I want to believe that while they may have shut down the vast Cherkizovsky market - a bureaucratic cat whose nine lives may have run out - that catered to locals right next door, they won't have the heart to permanently get rid of gingerbread-city stage set of the Izmailovskii Vernissage that reliably lured tourists and expats. Cherkizovsky was an amazing place where, shortly after arriving in Moscow in late 2001, we memorably bought a thick 2 x 3 meter carpet and a 3-liter jar of pickles and then had a hell of a time hauling both items home in one of those oversized "kitaiskie sumki." Some parts of that market were like walking into another country, complete with signage and street food from many time zones east.

It is a shame that Luzhkov and others favoring the reconfiguring of Moscow markets to exclude for'ners have failed to understand that such pockets of other-ness always added to Moscow's richness. And even operating from their xenophobic logic, it makes little sense to shut down the Vernissage, since nearly all of the vendors there were Russian, many of them artists and craftspeople selling their own work.

In any event, although we became more locals than tourists in Moscow, my more personal lament is not for Cherkizovsky but for the kitschy, tourist-oriented "Vernissage" section of the market, the one with paid admission to keep the riffraff out, the one with the mean-looking old drunk and his tragic trained bears just outside the entrance, across the walkway from the Central Asians cranking out cheese samsas using a huge iron vessel. If it's true, this means I will never be able to return to the mother lode of Russian souvenirs and flea-market-style borokhlo, or bric-a-brac.

It seems Moscow is no longer the consumer-oriented paradise of the boom years. Where will I now be able to go to buy vintage cuff links, pre-revolutionary books, fine carpets from the Caucasus, pirated DVDs, fake pashmina shawls, embroidered linen tablecloths, hand-carved chess sets, ratty (and not-so-ratty) fur hats, Soviet-era tourist maps, finely painted wooden eggs, and Chicago Cubs nesting dolls? Where will I now find the many missed opportunities of those past weekends spent at Izmailovo? I remember one in particular, an exhaustive collection of mint-condition Soviet-era bottle labels that filled five or six large albums. I couldn't bring myself even to haggle with the guy when he identified his starting price of 20,000 rubles, but now I wish I had bargained him down to 12 or so and walked away with a piece of graphic design history.

The photo above is from a happier, simpler moment - the day after Christmas, 2004, waiting to be warmed by some usually-good-but-never-great Izmailovo shashlyk. If it's true that the place is gone for good, I guess all I can say is, "Thanks for the memories."

Izmailovsky Market Closed
22 July 2009
The Moscow Times

Moscow authorities on Tuesday closed Izmailovsky Market, a magnet for tourists seeking deals on souvenirs, in a crackdown linked to the closure of nearby Cherkizovsky Market.

The prefect for Moscow’s Eastern Administrative District, where the markets are located, ordered the closure after authorities confiscated 5,843 truckloads of merchandise from Izmailovsky between July 11 and 20 and detained 25 people, including 14 Vietnamese citizens who will be deported, police spokeswoman Zhanna Ozhimina told Interfax.

Ozhimina said more than 150 police officers have been deployed to Izmailovsky to maintain public order as the remaining merchandise is removed.

Izmailovsky, which covers 10 hectares between the towering Izmailovo hotel complex and Izmailovsky Park, has been the place to shop for souvenirs since the 1990s. Its hundreds of stands also offered trinkets, Soviet kitsch, clothing and shashlik.

The market has been the site of two fires in the past four years, including one in March 2005 that killed a woman.

Authorities closed Cherkizovsky Market, located on Izmailovsky’s border, late last month during a smuggling investigation sparked by the seizure of $2 billion in Chinese goods last fall. More than 100 Chinese and Vietnamese traders from Cherkizovsky have been deported this month.

Update July 24: It looks like I may have broken out the black mourning clothes for naught - Rubashov has helpfully commented, adding this news from yesterday's MT:

However, the famous Vernisage, where tourists have shopped for souvenirs since the 1990s, remained open Wednesday. Interfax reported Tuesday that the souvenir market, located in the middle of Izmailovsky, had been closed together with the rest of the market.

Stay tuned, I guess...

Update July 28: A very interesting NYT story on what might be behind the closing of Cherkizovsky:

The trouble in this case was that the market’s owner, Telman Ismailov, who had made billions of dollars as Cherkizovsky evolved from a mere flea market into an industrial-scale distribution hub for Chinese imports during the oil boom, had violated unwritten codes of business conduct that put him at odds with Mr. Putin, according to analysts and Russian news reports.

The market was closed with a flurry of citations of fire code and health violations not unlike the use of environmental allegations to force Royal Dutch Shell to sell a portion of its investment in a Siberian oil field two years ago, or the shutdown of the Yukos oil company with tax claims before that. [...]

“Of course, if you applied the official hygiene, fire and labor codes, it was not done the way it was written,” Arseny Popov, an authority on the Chinese diaspora in Russia with the Russian Academy of Sciences, said of the market’s operations. “But nothing was happening there that wasn’t happening for the past 15 years.”

What was new was Mr. Ismailov’s $1.4 billion investment, using proceeds from the market, into a glittering, five-star resort thousands of miles away in a seemingly unrelated world of luxury on the Turkish seaside. It was called Mardan Palace, after Mr. Ismailov’s father, with 560 rooms, 10 restaurants, 17 bars and a lake-size swimming pool.

Mr. Ismailov, an immigrant from Azerbaijan who survived the sharp-elbowed world of street capitalism in the early 1990s to create the Cherkizovsky empire, threw a lavish series of opening parties in May. Mariah Carey was hired to perform a set and sing “Dreamlover” for Mr. Ismailov and his guests. Monica Bellucci, Sharon Stone and Paris Hilton also attended, the resort’s publicist said. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov, cut the ribbon.

It is unclear what about the lavish resort may have set off the regulatory onslaught. The ostentation in time of economic crisis, the investment abroad of profits made in Russia and a move to undermine Mr. Luzhkov, a one-time rival of Mr. Putin’s, have all been suggested in the Russian press. Mr. Ismailov declined to be interviewed about his market’s closing.

But within a week of the Mardan Palace party, the case had reached the ultimate arbiter of the business affairs and lifestyle of the Russian rich: Mr. Putin.

The prime minister broached the matter at a cabinet meeting June 1, leaving little doubt what he had in mind. “The fight is on, but results are few,” Mr Putin said, referring to smuggled goods at the market, according to news reports. “The results in such cases are prison terms. Where are the prison terms?”

Meanwhile, the people likely to suffer the most serious privation as a result of the shutdown of Cherkizovsky are the tens of thousands of migrant laborers who called the place both work and home. The NYT continues:

Mostly, the laborers can do nothing. Bakhodur M. Mirzoyev, a Tajik, squatted outside the market on a recent afternoon. He has been living in Kazan Train Station. “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, open our containers,” he said. “We want to work.”

Asked why the market closed, Mr. Mirzoyev shrugged. The owner, he said, had built a hotel in Turkey. Now he was left with nothing but “three hungry children in Dushanbe.”

An opinion piece by Alexei Pankin in the MT weighs the "versii" and draws a slightly different, no less interesting, conclusion.