Beyond the Zone: Social and Political Costs of the 'Ruin Porn'

I'm having a hard-hitting essay published, on the political and economical costs of the aesthetisation of the Eastern Europe's poverty, and, at the margin of that, how it is a part of the 'ruin porn' (incidentally, there's a piece this week on that very subject about Detroit by Andy Beckett) in the Australian edition of Architectural Review. Here small fragments as a teaser, buy it or wait until the next issue to read the whole thing, or wait until my book is written:

(...) The former USSR has become a scene of such fetishization exponentially with its own economical demise after the collapse of socialist system and capitalist shock therapy. As pictures of heavy drinking, impoverished folk from Siberia populate the internet as “Hipsters from Omsk”, the tons of pictures from Pripyat notwithstanding, at the same time, Ukraine and Russia haven't had a poorer record from the western commentators since the dissolution, for things like jailing their liberal west-friendly politicians, like Yulia Tymoshenko, or anarchist punk bands, like Pussy Riot, performing anti-Putin gigs in front of cathedrals. (...)

(...) The ongoing fascination/repulsion of the capitalist West with the ex-Soviet Bloc started during the cold war years and prepared very well the ground for the flourishing of all sorts of urban and political myths, that were only confirmed by photos circulating in magazines like LIFE. They were consolidated by a few works by the most popular Russian director in history, a man with an extraordinarily distinct vision, Andrey Tarkovsky. Most notably it was his vision in Stalker, which, despite being shot in 1979, is popularly perceived as a “Chernobyl” film, for its uncanny prophetyism, endlessly reproduced in the company of the reactor-trips pictures and transformed into a Ukrainian-produced video game STALKER:Shadow of Chernobyl. There, instead of involving in philosophical debates, as in the film, one becomes an amnesiac urban explorer, whose one of the tasks is to kill a villain called “Strelok”.(...)

(...) And yet, Zona fascinates: fascinates the characters in the film and now, the scavengers, who want nothing more than to be there. Why? Slavoj Zizek suggests that this popularity is prompted exactly by its prohibition: Zone's properties are augmented by the fact they are somehow wrong, bad for you, a Lacanian interpretation of the Real as an area of exclusion prompting its power. The ex-communist area, as possessive of dark forces for that reason precisely is popular among the westerners. The problem is that what they do, the money they leave in the former East is based on this place staying toxic: remaining forbidden, radioactive, sick. And the guarantee this world can remain sick is precisely because where we come from, the West, is safe and healthy. in addition, macabrely, this film lead to a number of “victims”, a true chain of corpses behind it.  It was not shot in Russia, but in Estonia, near Tallinn, at the two deserted power plants at the Jagala river and several other toxic locations, like a chemical factory, which was pouring toxic liquids. At least three people involved in the production, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Larissa Tarkovska and Tarkovsky himself, died of cancer in the aftermath. (...)