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Auf wiedersehen, Putin: Berlin’s new Russian émigrés
The German capital is turning into a vibrant outpost of Russian culture
Alexander Delfinov, poet: 'The expats are people who saw no future for themselves in Russia' © Viktoria Sorochinski
It’s 9pm and the Panda Theater is packed out. A tattooed poet with a pierced nose and hair dyed a muddy red bounds on stage, eyes on fire. “Through the glorious fields of Russia rolls a mighty salami,” he declaims. “Trains, boats and planes perish under the blows of the salami/And villages and cities tremble at the onslaught of the salami.”
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Frenzied, loud and breathless, Alexander Delfinov is the uncrowned king of Berlin’s Russian poetry slams. His phantasmagorical verse, delivered in high-octane, staccato bursts, draws sell-out crowds. The punters at the Panda, housed in a converted brewery in shabby-chic Prenzlauer Berg, are ecstatic.
Delfinov’s performance has capped a busy evening of readings by Berlin’s Russian literati. The room is full of sculpted cheekbones and extravagant moustaches, set against a backdrop of paintings — a fat naked man next to a Russian Orthodox church, a self-portrait with Angela Merkel — by the émigré artist Dmitry Vrubel.
Delfinov and Vrubel are part of a growing community of Russian artists, poets, writers and intellectuals who have turned Berlin into one of the most vibrant outposts of Slavic culture, a kind of Moscow-on-Spree that is light years away from the repressive world of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Victoria Timofeeva and Dmitry Vrubel, artists: 'Politics and religion have become taboo in Russian art. As an artist, how can you work in such conditions?' © Viktoria Sorochinski
Delfinov, who moved to Berlin in 2001, says the influx has accelerated in the past five years, a period when Russians’ hopes of democratic change evaporated. Many of them quit the country after Putin returned in 2012 for a third term as president and veered sharply to the right, espousing a new nationalist rhetoric, clamping down on dissent and annexing Crimea.
Official figures show there are now 22,000 Russian expats living in Berlin, up 6 per cent on 2015. “They are people who saw no future for themselves in Russia,” says Delfinov. “Middle-class people who just wanted to breathe.”
Berlin is not the only place to have seen a Russian surge. London, New York, Tel Aviv and Riga also have big expat communities. But each city has a different kind of immigrant. London attracts the oligarchs, their wives and mistresses. Riga, the base of Kremlin-critical internet portal Meduza, is home to a kind of Russian free-press-in-exile. Human-rights activists have gravitated towards Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
Berlin’s Russian diaspora is artistic. Nowhere else outside Moscow and St Petersburg boasts so many Russian painters, musicians, composers and writers, drawn by the city’s cheap rents and alternative vibe. “You can swear like a trooper here, worship Satan — all the stuff you can’t do in Russia,” says Delfinov. “They have Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky — we have sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.”
The newcomers also differ from previous waves of immigrants in that they aren’t stuck in a Russian-speaking ghetto, says Georg Witte, a professor of Slavic studies at Berlin’s Free University. “They’re a lot more open to the world. The performers among them, especially the younger ones, get much more mixed audiences. You really feel they’ve integrated much better than previous generations.”
Nothing exemplifies that better than the reception given by the German reading public to works by Russian-speaking émigrés, some of which have become bestsellers. Among the big new names is Kiev-born Katja Petrowskaja, whose Holocaust-themed debut novel Maybe Esther won a top German literary award in 2013. She is one of a number of young female writers from the former Soviet Union to have made a mark on German letters.
Vladimir Sorokin, novelist: 'Russia feels like the Titanic… the floor is shaking but people are still sipping Daiquiris' © Viktoria Sorochinski
However, the best-known Russian writer in Berlin is Vladimir Sorokin, whose bizarre, dystopian novels satirise the repression of Putin’s Russia. Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, he is among Russia’s most famous contemporary novelists and in Germany he is a literary celebrity — an embodiment of the Moscow-Berlin cultural axis.
Sorokin first came to West Berlin in 1988, just before the wall came down, when East German police still patrolled the Friedrichstrasse border crossing with Alsatian dogs. He recalls the bright lights of the Berlin Zoo train station, a Mercedes sign and a huge billboard showing a busty woman offering cigarettes to a Soviet colonel, with the slogan “Test the West”.
“That’s exactly what we did,” he laughs. His abiding memory was of being left alone. “We had come from a state that constantly wanted a piece of you,” he says in an interview in his home in Charlottenburg, old West Berlin. “Now we were somewhere that wanted nothing from you at all.”
Sorokin’s admiration for Germany was mutual. He signed his first publishing contract in Berlin in 1988, a huge step for a writer whose work had only circulated in samizdat (the clandestine copying of banned literature) in his homeland. The German state showered him with fellowships and grants, and in 2011 he bought a flat in Berlin. Ever since, Sorokin has spent half his time here, the rest in a house he and his wife built outside Moscow.
We had come from a state that constantly wanted a piece of you. Now we were somewhere that wanted nothing from you at all
Berlin has proved a somewhat calmer working environment than the Russian capital. In 2002, Sorokin was targeted by a pro-Putin youth group over his satirical novel Blue Fat, which features a long and graphic sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev. In a rally near the Bolshoi Theatre, activists tore up his books and threw them into a giant mock toilet: police opened a case against him, later abandoned, for pornography. In 2007 he was injured in a car accident that he is convinced was an attempt to kill him.
These days, he tries to avoid Moscow. “It’s more the seat of state power than a real city, a place whose inhabitants are assigned the role of passive ants,” he says. And he can’t shake off a feeling that Russia is heading for disaster. “It feels like the Titanic, where the floor is shaking, the furniture moving, but people are still sitting in the bar sipping Daiquiris.”
The Russian writer Maxim Gorky (centre) during a visit to Berlin in 1921 to negotiate relief efforts for starving people in Russia © Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
In times of crisis, Russians have often made their way to Berlin. The largest influx came in the 1920s, as thousands fled a homeland torn apart by revolution and civil war. There were 360,000 Russian refugees in Berlin in 1921-22, most of them mired in a life of penury and homesickness, forming what the historian Robert Williams called a “community of despair”.
Yet the experience was not all grim. Berlin quickly emerged as an important centre of Russian culture, with 160 Russian-language publishing houses which, between 1918 and 1924, produced more books than their Moscow equivalents. Berlin became, in the words of one Russian poet, the “stepmother of Russian cities”.
Some of the great names of 20th-century Russian literature, among them Vladimir Nabokov, Maxim Gorky and Boris Pasternak, all spent time in the German capital. In 1922, one of the first major exhibitions of avant-garde Russian art was put on in the Galerie van Diemen in Unter den Linden, featuring the works of key modernists such as Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall.
Many of the refugees later moved on, settling in Paris and Prague. But the end of the cold war brought a fresh influx: official figures show that at the end of last year there were 130,135 Berliners from the former Soviet Union — or about 3.5 per cent of the city’s population.
Many were economic refugees, or Soviet Germans drifting back to their ethnic homeland. But after Putin became president in 2000, and Russia began to take an authoritarian turn, the exodus became cultural too. Among this wave of émigrés was Dmitry Vrubel. He had first come to Berlin in the early 1990s, and on arrival quickly created one of the most striking works of graffiti art on the Berlin Wall — a portrait of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker engaged in a passionate kiss, accompanied by the words: “My God, help me to survive this deadly love.” (A recent meme replaces the two old communists with Putin and Donald Trump). “I loved East Berlin — it felt like the Soviet Union but with freedom and no cops,” Vrubel says.
In 2008 he and his wife, the artist Victoria Timofeeva, moved permanently to a city they say was better suited to their brand of large-scale street art. Vrubel says concerns about censorship also played a role: he cites the 2003 case of a religion-themed exhibition in Moscow that was ransacked by Orthodox Christian protesters. The vandals, who smashed and defaced exhibits, were never prosecuted, while the show’s organisers were convicted of incitement to religious hatred, and fined 100,000 roubles (about £2,000) each. “Two themes have become taboo in Russian art — politics and religion,” says Timofeeva. “As an artist, how can you work in such conditions?”
The 2003 case was a harbinger of what was to come. In 2012 came the jailing of the Pussy Riot singers and, later, the passage of laws banning “gay propaganda” and swearing on stage. “After 2012 there was a return to traditional values . . . and that led to self-censorship on a massive scale,” says Sergej Newski, an avant-garde Russian composer who has split his time between Moscow and Berlin since the mid-1990s. “And things got even worse with the war in Ukraine.”
Kirill Serebrennikov, theatre and film director: 'We’re all alive [in Russia], they haven’t started shooting us, and thanks for that' © Viktoria Sorochinski
Not all of the émigrés have completely cut their ties with Russia. Like Newski, Kirill Serebrennikov, head of Moscow’s Gogol Centre theatre, and a director for stage and screen (his latest film, The Student, premiered at Cannes last year), lives between Russia and Germany. He is typical of a significant subset of Berlin’s recent Russian immigrants — Muscovites who have bought flats in the city but still consider Moscow their main home.
Serebrennikov lived in the German capital while staging The Barber of Seville and American Lulu for the Komische Oper, but has no plans to settle here permanently — Moscow is just “too interesting”. “Theatre is booming there right now,” he says. “People go to shows, discuss them — they’re seen as valuable and important.” His productions — and his time — are in huge demand: “It’s like being in a lemon-squeezer 24 hours a day.”
Over drinks at a cinema in Prenzlauer Berg, he argues that worries over artistic freedom in Russia are overdone. “We’re all alive, they haven’t started shooting us, and thanks for that,” he says. “And anyway, to quote Fassbinder, ‘Fear eats the soul.’”
Yet Serebrennikov himself has felt the wrath of Russia’s moral crusaders. He reads out a complaint sent to the Moscow culture ministry about one of his theatre’s productions, Russian Fairytales, claiming it “propagandises cruelty, violence, murders, incest, blood and a lot of very harsh swearing”. “Please clarify who is financing it and who commissioned it,” wrote the sender. But the director dismisses such interventions. Indeed, plays targeted in this way often become massive succès de scandale. “Sometimes it’s a deliberate PR strategy — people pay the extremists to attack them,” he says.
Sergej Newski, composer: 'After 2012 there was a return to traditional values in Moscow and self-censorship on a massive scale' © Viktoria Sorochinski
Like Serebrennikov, Sergej Newski believes artistic freedom in Russia will survive. The toughest period, he says, was when Putin annexed Crimea, and an aggressive new cultural policy was promulgated based on conservative values and assertions of Russian superiority. But he thinks that “patriotic hysteria” has peaked. “They couldn’t find any artists who actually conformed to the policy,” he says, “so they quietly shelved it.”
He has been encouraged by what he sees as a new openness to experimentation in Moscow: his exacting works find a ready audience there, and private capital is flowing into the arts. In February, the premiere of his Cloud Ground violin concerto was performed in the Perm Theatre for Opera and Ballet in the Urals, which, under the baton of Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, has become one of Russia’s hottest cultural centres.
Natalia Natalia Pschenitschnikova, singer: 'Money is running out, the treasury is empty…and anyone criticising the government gets sacked' © Viktoria Sorochinski
Natalia Pschenitschnikova, an avant-garde singer who moved to Berlin in 1993, is less sanguine about the situation back home. An economic slowdown caused by low oil prices and western sanctions has depressed the mood in the arts sector. “Money is running out, the treasury is empty and lots of people have lost their jobs,” she says. “All independent structures are being taken over by the state and anyone criticising the government gets sacked.” Yet she is convinced there is the potential for change. “There are always unexpected twists and turns in Russia,” she says. “In the 1980s there was such hopelessness, we were just stuck there unable to travel — and then perestroika happened. It’s impossible to predict the future.”
The writer Sergei Lebedev, author of the critically acclaimed gulag novel Oblivion, is another semi-émigré dreaming of moving effortlessly between Moscow and Berlin and other European cities (he is about to move to Berlin on a German Pen fellowship). He notes that in 1910 his great-grandfather lived in Venice for a year — the kind of jaunt that became impossible after the Bolsheviks took power. “It’s extremely important for me to try to restore this experience of freedom, this feeling that you can just go and live wherever your intellectual interest takes you,” he says.
Such cosmopolitanism stands in contrast to the mood in Russia, which, under Putin, has grown increasingly nationalistic, anti-western and anti-Ukrainian. “People could never imagine that politicians could sow such discord between our two nations, and that Ukraine could become our enemy,” says Serebrennikov, who is himself half-Ukrainian.
In the German capital, Russians and Ukrainians rub shoulders together amiably, attending the same arts festivals, poetry slams and film screenings. “In Berlin we have a Soviet creative utopia,” says Alexander Delfinov. “Here, everyone gets on — Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Lithuanians.” Cracking open a can of beer decorated with his iconic “Fraternal Kiss”, Vrubel agrees. “Berlin has become a kind of ideal Moscow,” he says. “The kind of Moscow we’d all like to live in.”
Guy Chazan is the FT’s Berlin correspondent
Photographs: Viktoria Sorochinski; Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
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US jobs growth bounces back in April
Unemployment rate falls to lowest level in a decade as economy adds 211,000 posts
© Bloomberg
The pace of US jobs growth bounced back last month while the unemployment rate dipped to its lowest level since 2007, supporting the Federal Reserve’s view that the economy’s choppy first-quarter was probably a blip and bolstering Wall Street’s expectations for a June rate rise.
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The US economy added 211,000 jobs in April, from a downwardly revised gain of 79,000 jobs in the previous month, the labour department said.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 per cent from 4.5 per cent, significantly lower than the 4.6 per cent that Wall Street was expecting. However, that came as the labour force participation rate, a measure of the working-age population that is either employed or seeking work, dipped to 62.9 per cent from 63 per cent.
“Today’s employment report should have brushed aside any concerns about the health of the US labour market that may have come up after the disappointing payroll number last month,” said Harm Bandholz, chief US economist at UniCredit Research, who pushed up his expectations for the next rate rise to June from September.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs economists added that the fall in the jobless rate to 0.3 percentage points below the level that it sees as normal in a properly functioning economy “confirms the risk of labour market overheating”.
Since the data may provide more fuel to hawks on the Fed’s policy-setting board, Goldman lifted the odds it has handicapped for a rate increase in June to 90 per cent, from 70 per cent previously.
Wall Street investors took a similarly confident view that the data released on Friday strengthen the case for the Fed to add to its March rate rise when it meets in mid-June. The probability of a rate increase next month that is implied by federal funds futures contracts rose to almost 100 per cent, according to Bloomberg data, from 93.8 per cent on Thursday, and 69.7 per cent at the start of the week.
The odds had begun to rise on Wednesday, after the Fed said that the slowdown in first-quarter economic growth to the weakest pace since 2014 was probably temporary.
“Today’s payroll print continues to underscore the strength of the labour markets and will keep the Fed on an unwavering path toward further policy rate normalisation,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer for BlackRock’s fixed-income business.
Still, growth in average hourly earnings cooled to a year-on-year rate of 2.5 per cent from 2.6 per cent in the previous month and was the weakest pace since August 2016.
Tepid wage growth has frustrated policymakers who have reckoned that the tightening in the jobs market should put more upward pressure on salaries. In fact, when the jobless rate was this low, in May 2007, earnings were rising at a 3.5 per cent annual clip.
“Wage inflation simply is not taking root in the economy. We have no doubt that labour markets are tight and that they continue to tighten further but that pressure is failing to manifest in higher wage growth,” said Michael Gapen, chief US economist at Barclays.
Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group, noted that while the wage figures were “mediocre”, the fall in the unemployment rate was “really laying the groundwork for a move higher in wages”.
The response in US markets overall was fairly muted. In late-morning trade in New York, the S&P 500 equities gauge was up 0.08 per cent. The yield on the policy-sensitive two-year Treasury note rose 1.43 bps to 1.32 per cent, and was up from 1.262 per cent at the end of last week. Yields move in the opposite direction of prices.
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