It’s negative 20 Celsius, another day of St. Petersburg’s coldest winter in 30 years. It’s dark, too, close to midnight, but then it’s dark all day long in winter in St. Petersburg.
In an archway behind a gate on a deserted street stands a man, a thick black winter coat snug around his rotund body. A black curtain hangs behind him, and against it you can clearly see his breath—thick and heavy like smoke. An electric heater, which may or may not be on, is next to him. A clipboard is clutched in his bare hands.
I am on one side of the gate. He checks the board. Now I am on the other.
I pass through the curtain and hang a quick left. A cement passage into a subterranean lair beckons me, English letters on the wall spelling out “Decadance.”
Beyond a door lies a club—one of the city’s most respected and, well, decadent. And tonight a humble worker, born and raised in Tajikistan, and more recently working in a warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow, will grace its stage.
It was in that warehouse that a co-worker coaxed the man to perform his unique act on video for the first time, uploading the grainy cell phone footage to YouTube. Stardom ensued, or some digital version of it: his videos have garnered hundreds of thousands of hits, respected Russian publications like Bolshoi Gorod have written him up and a few concerts were booked, from which the reaction was generally positive. Finally, The New York Times ran a story late last year.
“The great cities of Russia are still strange to Baimurat Allaberiyev,” Ellen Barry began, adding, he “cannot walk through a crowd in the Russian capital without being stopped by fans.”
Yet none of the Russians I questioned at St. Petersburg State University had ever heard of him. Maybe those weren’t fans stopping him after all. Just the police asking for the papers of another dark-complexioned chuvak from the Caucasus or Central Asia.
