Cherkizovsky Market


Whereas the stadium was originally supposed to provide an arena for mass performances demonstrating the superiority of the political order of the Soviet Union, it has now become the archaeological site testifying to the inner emptiness of a Babylonian city-within-a-city into the cracks of which the ants of globalisation have now moved. No longer do revolutionary tanks roll or patriotic armies march on the parade ground, which has disappeared beneath the Eurasia Market. Instead, thousands of carriers and tea-sellers swarm out around the endless labyrinth of its kilometres-long halls to keep this rough trading organism alive.

As a central trading place for the sheer necessities of life, the Cherkizovsky Market has become the contested scene of cultural identities where attempts to reconstruct a Russian national identity encounter the complex realities of a globalised migration-economy. The progressive commercialisation of even the tiniest of niches has generated a large number of unforeseen spaces for micro-cultural negotiations, like the one for the 3,000 Mountain Jews from the Caucasus, for whom a 20-square-metre room – laid out with carpets and located between the shoe storerooms and the sportsmen’s and women’s toilets in the caverns of the stadium stands – serves as a synagogue. Like the majority of the hundreds of thousands of people whose existences are inextricably tied up with the market, they, too, are both marginalised and transformed into targets of a global tug-o-war over cultural identity. To some, they are ‘blacks’, to some they are not orthodox enough, while some doubt whether they are Jews at all.

While the owners’ good contacts to the government and the mayor have led to repeated delays in implementing the plans to close the markets, a ruling to restrict the share of foreign workers at markets to 40 per cent, which came into effect on 1 April 2007, really did have a widespread impact. From Moscow to Vladivostock, there are reports of markets collapsing completely. This has not only affected immigrants working at the market, but also all those impoverished sections of the Russian population who are dependent on the cheap products available at these markets. These policies (Russia for the Russians), which are propagated by Russia’s prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin, are frequently seen as a tactically motivated response to the increase in racially inspired attacks. Consequently, the bombers of 12 August 2006, who felt that there were ‘too many Asians at the market’, ultimately did not only kill thirteen people and wound fifty-three others, but also affected, with their actions, the existence(s) of an estimated five million illegal immigrants in Russia.


Studies