THE VICE GUIDE TO RUSSIA

PART 7: X - Ч

(Kh)—Khachi

Khachi is one of the main pejorative words for people from the Caucasus, such as Chechens, Azeris, Armenians, and Georgians. If you have dark Mediterranean features and dark eyes, you will be targeted by cops for document checks and shakedowns, while chicks will shun you and skinheads will stomp you.

Pale-skinned Slavs believe that khachi are responsible for most of the crime in Russia. It’s true that Caucasian gangs were incredibly ruthless and successful in the 1990s, but today Caucasians are far more on the receiving end. The only thing keeping them in Moscow is the fact that life is even shittier back in the homeland.


Tsereteli

photo by AP


(Ts)—Tsereteli

The single worst artist in the entire world—and perhaps mankind’s history—is Zurab Tsereteli. For some reason he’s a close friend and favorite of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. It’s easy to see what a corrupt politician would like about Tsereteli’s humongous, high-price-tagged projects. Tsereteli is Georgian, and if Georgians know one thing it’s the art of charming people and making sure that in any corrupt deal all the right people walk away happy. The result being that Moscow in the last decade has been transformed into a giant exhibition hall for the collected works of Zurab Tsereteli.

Easily the most notorious of his creations is his $25 million, 15-story-high statue of Peter the Great, which looks like the old Van de Kamp’s frozen fish sticks mascot: A monstrously oversized buffoon in a three-pointed-hat holding an oversized Minnow-like steering wheel and brandishing a rolled-up map with his other arm atop what looks like a grotesquely undersized toy boat. A group calling itself the Revolutionary Military Council of Russia tried blowing up the statue with three kilograms of dynamite, but they were caught in the act and subsequently jailed for terrorism.

Tsereteli has tried his luck several times in America but with less success. He built a 300-foot-high statue of Columbus as a “gift from the people of the Caucasus,” but it was rejected by five states for being a “monstrosity” and an “inaccurate behemoth” (Miami city council’s words) and today sits in disassembled storage in Puerto Rico. He also tried to foist a 9/11 statue, a 100-foot-high nickel-plated vagina called “Tears of Grief,” on Jersey City, but horrified residents rejected it after it was unveiled. A scaled-down version of it found a home in lovely Bayonne on a remote waterfront.


Chikatilo



(Ch)—Chikatilo

The greatest serial killer of the 20th century is without a doubt Andrei Chikatilo. What makes him stand out among the fierce competition isn’t just the body count—52 victims, mostly children, most of them partially eaten—but the circumstances. He was the first modern serial killer to be recognized as such in the Soviet Union, starting his murder spree in the late 1970s and continuing on until his capture in 1990. It took the police 12 years and a ton of mistaken executions to finally nab him.

Russia is the serial-murder champion of the world, and Rostov, a city of 1.5 million, is their star franchise player. Rostov is where Chikatilo did his deeds. Following Chikatilo’s capture, about 30 more serial murderers and rapists were caught over the next ten years in Rostov. That’s just one city we’re talking about. Multiply it by 11 time zones and 144 million people, and you begin to see why serial murderers rarely make big news in Russia. Chikatilo raised the bar too high. These days, you have to score a body count well into the double digits just to break out of the “news in brief” section.

MARK AMES

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