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One of the central Moscow squares, the square of the Revolution, recently received a new decoration from the city government - two compositions of human high pine trees which looked very much like male genitals.
First, this similarity caught the attention of Russian Instagram users, who called them «pine penises». Then two Moscow newspapers and a radio station reported on these strange new trees.
The Head of the Department of Services and Trade has already claimed that the tree penis imitations are merely a joke made by the citizens of Moscow, and that the local authorities could never have designed anything of this kind. If that is true, it seems that the citizens have finally found an excellent way to express their thoughts about what is going on in the city now. If not - well, the authorities found an excellent way to show what they think about Moscow citizents.
This summer, the Moscow government began a massive reconstruction of the city's public spaces. During June, most of the main streets of Moscow were broken up and lorries were loaded with pieces of destroyed pavement, as workers quickly sought to replace the removed pavement with a new surface.
As it turns out, all this work gives people less space for walking and restricts the driving lanes for cars. So, as a result, there are now frequent traffic jams and naturally many people are annoyed.
The citizens were in fact annoyed by very many things: why did the government have to start the reconstruction of so many streets at the same time, why did they chose these particular streets, what is going to be there instead? Who in our economic crisis had found money for this ambitious project, and why could not this money be spent on something more important? Or is this, as some people suspect, just another way of channeling the money away from the state - a common Russian saying states that building is the best way to steal?
More worryingly, there have been no official explanations of what's going on in this entire renovation project, or, at least, nothing has been explained to the wider public.
The only more or less official statement was a column, written by one of the experts involved in the city reconstruction plan. He wrote that the government is trying to make the public space of the city more friendly for walks, because «this is what makes the most European cites so nice». «And citizens, they are like sheep, they need to be guided by authorities», - he also noted.
Now it is very interesting that this idea - to make Moscow become an European city - has been popular for a long time. It has been invoked by the authorities, whenever the official political climate was related to foreign powers - whether these were friendly or not. Even this time, after the conflict with Europe over Crimea, when the most common words for any Russian politician have become the odd phrase «import substitution», the notion of Moscow having to become more European has stayed in place. And this time it seems that the Moscow mayor began to make this concept real with the help of bulldozers and pink penguins.
This unexpected massive attack upon the streets of the city center is not the first one in recent months. In February we witnessed the so-called «night of long scoops», named after the event in Nazi Germany. In Moscow, dozens of small and independent city shops were literally destroyed in one night. In some areas of the city, the administration is also cutting down old big trees, promising to plant some new ones, though, again, there is no explanation, why these old trees needed replacement.
At the same time this year has become not just a year of new city brutality but of a new beauty as well. The Moscow administration started decorating the city much more actively than before - or at least all the decorations for annual festivities were so elaborate that they got much public attention. For Easter, for example, on some Moscow squares citizens could see a combination of two most popular Easter symbols, eggs and rabbits, in the form of eggs with ears. There was also sculpture of the giant women head - and on Pushkin square, we had an installation, which looks like a set of giant ribs. For the celebration of the Pervomay, the administration placed figures of sportsmen jumping and running, in all parts of the city. As this holiday happened to take place soon after Easter, these very soviet-looking figures were standing among the eared eggs.
In June, then, appeared on the streets of Moscow dozens of pink plastic penguins - again, jumping, sitting, playing. A group of four, dressed as ballet dancers was placed in front of the Bolshoi theatre, the main ballet theatre of the country. The administration later claimed that there is no tie between them and the theatre. Yesterday there appeared another group of these pink penguins - this time made by some citizens. They had placed those of them who had paws up in the middle of one square as if the penguins were protesting.
Well, this gesture, just as the pine penises may not be the worst way to answer the actions of the city administration. Moscow's administration seems to be saying to its citizens, both with in its lack of communication and in its bizarre aesthetics: we are pretending to care about you, but in reality we don't. And the idea to use their decorations against them as if penguins were real protestants fits this artificial reality very well.