As the opening of Ziferblat coincided with the beginning of the 2011–2012 protests and the subsequent ‘urbanism boom’, Mitin became a spokesperson for both. In December 2011, at the height of the protests, one of the Russian national television channels interviewed him among the representatives of those social groups that were not considered politically active until 2011 but joined the rallies. Mitin was labelled as a hipster (as the reporter summarised, ‘long bangs, tight pants’76) and a digital native
(‘they followed the news on Facebook and filmed the rallies on their iPads’), while Ziferblat was framed as a project ‘inspired by the same demand for democracy that spurred the protests’—as Mitin explained, ‘I want to be on equal footing with my guests… they rent a space here and they treat it as their own, nobody serves them’
(NTV, 2011)77. In summer 2012, after the crackdown on the protests, he was
interviewed by another popular media as a representative of ‘the new Russian intelligentsia’; this interview demonstrates his disenchantment with the protest movement and, speaking more widely, illustrates the reasons for its fall (class alienation, lack of a clear agenda) and a typical strategy of channelling/sublimation, embraced by the ‘angry urbanites’ (note how Ziferblat is discussed within the framework of ‘the politics of small-scale changes’):
J o u r n a l i s t : Occupy Abai was in just a five minute walking distance from Ziferblat—have you been there?
M i t i n : I went there almost every day. We brought there some food from Ziferblat, invited some to warm up and sleep over. At the beginning, there was a lot of those you call ‘the new intelligentsia’, but they failed to self- organise. At some point, they were replaced by some hobos, nationalists, and other freaks. I quit when I saw some people boozing up and singing cheesy pop songs—this was definitely not the new intelligentsia.
J o u r n a l i s t : Why do you think did protests fail?
M i t i n : Seems like we aren’t ready yet. And the leaders… I approached some of them, ‘Let’s do something, let’s repaint that ugly playground…’— ‘Sure, sounds good…’, and then nothing.
J o u r n a l i s t : Do you think that protests are useless?
M i t i n : I think it’s not Putin that’s the problem, it’s the nation. Every nation has the government it deserves, which is why I want to change the nation to make it deserve another government. If Navalny takes the power, it will end up the same—people haven’t changed.
76 In a similar way, all English publications on Ziferblat’s opening in London commented on Mitin’s look
(in 2014, he wore a moustache) as evidence of Ziferblat’s ‘hipster’ orientation.
77 According to another media publication, this TV report caught the interest of Vladimir Kulchitskiy (b.
1950), the top manager of a Russian company providing consulting services in the aerospace industry. After a quick visit to Ziferblat, touched by the scene he saw there (‘decent young people were talking about poetry like professional critics’), he decided to invest in this business (interview with Alymkulova, see in: Zhanalinova, 2014). I am not aware of whether he still has a share in Ziferblat.
J o u r n a l i s t : And how to change them? Are you going to use Ziferblat for that?
M i t i n : Ziferblat is already changing the world. It’s a place that is free from simulacra, false values, toxic relationships, hypocrisy and outrageous prices. We are creating a model of cultured and humane relationship between people, we are trying to inculcate consideration, sophistication, humanity in the masses—by means of our music, our cultural events.
(Mitin’s interview in: Vylegzhanin, 2012)
Although in this interview Mitin distanced himself and Ziferblat from the political (as he said elsewhere, ‘Sometimes I want to do something in Ziferblat in response to certain political events, but I always stop myself’)78, in his public talk at the conference on third
places, organised in 2012 in Kiev, where he was invited as the founder of the ‘most large-scale third place project in CIS countries’ (the list of speakers also included Oldenburg, who joined via video call from the USA), he explicitly linked the appearance of Ziferblat with the fact that ‘Russian authorities don’t create any comfortable public spaces—neither in schools, nor in universities, nor in houses of culture, nor in parks, nowhere… public institutions don’t need to pay rent, so they should create spaces like Ziferblat, but with free access’ (Mitin’s direct speech in: Vazari, 2012); see also his reference to German housing as a positive example of placemaking (p. 79).
Another ever-recurring topic in Mitin’s media interviews and public talks in 2011–2012 was the question of Ziferblat’s origin, or, rather, originality, which was constantly challenged by journalists and the public.79 Although none of them could identify a
specific venue or a form of public place, allegedly plagiarised by Mitin, there was a remarkable consensus on the fact that ‘this could not have been invented in Russia’;80
in some publications, anti-cafes were explicitly called ‘a Western novelty’ (Belova, 2012). This attitude was still persistent in my 2016 interviews with Ziferblat’s guests in Moscow—as one of them argued, ‘Basically, anti-cafes emulate Europe’s cafes’81
(interview with Rita, December 2016). To a large extent, this phenomenon comes from the ‘Imaginary West’ discourse: just like the new Gorky Park, positioned and perceived as a ‘world-class’ or a ‘European’ park (Kuchuk, 2012) but in reality designed as a hyper-assemblage of the attributes of global urban modernity, Ziferblat was constructed as a heterotopia of compensation for the shortcomings of Russian urban culture,
counterposed to the utopia of the ‘Imaginary West’.
78 Mitin’s interview in: Skibiuk, 2014. 79 See more about this on p. 94.