Robert Amsterdam

Below is the second installment of Grigory Pasko's video interview series with ordinary Russian citizens during his travels in the summer of 2007, Moscow-Petushki. The title of the series is borrowed by the popular work of samizdat by Venedikt Erofeev, whose subversive stories of a traveling, conversing, and drinking intellectual in Soviet Russia were once considered to be a sharp critique of the government's strict control over private life and personal freedoms. It is notable that many of the people who Pasko interviews in this series knew that Dmitri Medvedev would be the next president of Russia back in the summer of 2007, and had therefore declined to participate in any vote.