What I learned traveling through post-Soviet countries with a skateboard

By Daryl Mersom

‘доброе утро,’ the old man with gold teeth says. Since I arrived at my Airbnb in Batumi, a Georgian city on the Black Sea, almost a week ago, he has stayed in the room next to mine, each morning greeting me, and offering biscuits, cake, a chocolate bar. Unlike ‘good morning,’ one steady rise in the waker-upper’s mouth, the Russian phrase has two slow peaks; the day is new, it is already good. Former Soviet countries exist in various states of decommunisation. Places such as Ukraine and Poland are removing Soviet era iconography and art, whilst in Kazakhstan you will still find images of Lenin down back alleys, and the hammer and sickle on building facades. One of the few commonalities in this vast and diverse region is that many people still speak Russian (that, and there will be Ladas parked outside). I reply and he smiles at my poor grasp of the Russian language.

Throughout this year I have traveled through former Soviet countries with just my bag and skateboard, working on a series of articles, so that I have money for borscht and khachapuri. I began in former Yugoslavia (which was technically apart from the Soviet sphere of influence) and spent time in places such as Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltics, and Kazakhstan. At times it was difficult to find anything to skate, but that was not the point. My skateboard became an excuse for meeting new people, who were always incredibly friendly and helpful. It was also the reason that I ended up in corners of cities I would have otherwise missed out on. As the year comes to an end I find myself reflecting on what I’ve learned from the experience.

Estonia is the hub of inventive, skateable architecture, not Scandinavia. There is a pervasive idea that Scandinavia is at the forefront of incorporating skateable elements into public space. Malmö and Copenhagen immediately come to mind as prime examples, and often feature in articles and interviews. But I want to shout out Tallinn and Tartu, in Estonia, as I feel they are somewhat overlooked, and are doing great work with skateable small forms and revivifying the public space designed during the Soviet era. In Tartu’s Annelinn mikrorajoon, or micro-district, the apartment blocks are built on a fantastic grid system that links the housing directly to the center of the city. Unfortunately, none of the empty spaces around the blocks were ever developed, as the money ran out. In steps Terje Ong, a landscape architect, who has created a linked route through the district, filled with bright yellow skateboarding obstacles: ledges, wallies, manual pads. Soviet housing blocks are often portrayed as being grey and repetitive. Yet skating these routes opened my eyes to the lively and colorful nature of the housing districts. My time in Estonia and Latvia was spent wondering why skateable routes through housing districts would likely never get built in the UK. Even simple things like the apple trees planted in Riga’s housing districts strike me as being socially minded, utopian even, when compared to my home country - Riga’s inhabitants have a free supply of apples.

Aside from the spots built purposely for skateboarding, memorials are often the best places to skate in former Soviet countries. They are granite and marble, have ledges and stairs, and look incredible in footage. In April I worked with Solo Skate Mag to produce a video in which Marek Zaprazny explores Bratislava’s Soviet era architecture (see above). Despite being close to Vienna, the city rarely features on the program of skate tours, and is rarely caught on footage. Like many former Soviet cities the history behind these monuments is raw and complex. Nevertheless, it is still possible to skate these sites and be respectful. We went from memorials filled with tourists, bussed in on tours, to sites where protests had recently happened, to quiet benches where sleeping drunks nod beneath brutalist facades. At each location there was some architectural flourish, perhaps boring for locals used to Socialist Realist architecture, but for visitors exciting and new.

Before setting out on a journey through the former USSR, the modern traveler will need a whole host of new apps. For Uber: Yandex Taxi. It works exactly the same but seems to cost a lot less and translates your conversations into Russian. For WhatsApp: Telegram. Before I had needed it for traveling, my only friends with Telegram were those who bought drugs off of the Dark Web. This is because it is meant to be deeply encrypted (there’s a $200,000 reward for anyone who can break Telegram). It is also a great place for sharing nudes, and has a cool self-destruct feature that removes your lurid posts from the chat window after a specified number of seconds. In former Soviet countries people tend to use Telegram over WhatsApp, even though you need a Proxy in Russia, as the government are trying to block it, and in Kazakhstan it is temperamental, as according to one friend, the government try to strangle Telegram and other sites such as Youtube at certain hours of the day, to prevent the opposition from airing their views. Life’s good, just make sure you don’t rock the boat, was the message I got from my time in Almaty. For Apple Maps, 2GIS works a whole lot better. I have no idea why, but I was advised again and again to get it and could not find may way to certain places using just Apple Maps.

The longer I travelled, the richer and more complex my mental map of the region became. I say region, for want of a better word. The New East, former USSR, or post-Soviet countries are clumsy terms for an area that doesn’t really exist… but sort of does. Yes there is a shared language across the region. Yes its various peoples are spread out from east to west, so that in Riga you will find Uzbek plov, and find cheap flights to Georgia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And yes, housing blocks were built to standardized dimensions from Kaunas to Almaty (albeit with certain regional variations). But what of the intriguing history of nomadism in Central Asia, before Stalin imposed borders on the region? And what about all of the links between these various peoples, before they became part of the USSR?

Nevertheless, the same 2018 skateboarding memes exist in each city. Wherever you go there will be the body varial guy. Someone, eyes closed, will spin their board one handed above a precipice. It is now universally accepted that baggy pants give you the illusion of having more grace on a skateboard, you simply have to be very good to throw the right shapes in skinny jeans. There will always be a bottle tosser. Thanks to Instagram, these trends arrive in every city on earth at exactly the same time. When DC puts a new project online they probably don’t expect kids in Zagreb to be cheering contemporaneously with diehard fans in Philly. Even the Olympics, which many of us suspect will merely pit the top Americans, Swedes, and Brazilians against one another, might see Kazakhs competing, at least if the Kazakhstan Skateboarding Federation get their way. They hope to be included, as do many in other post-Soviet countries who have been left out of the skate summer tour circuit. For some the Olympics is seen as a legitimate route to getting decent skateparks in their country, especially in countries where public funds are diverted by corrupt politicians.

As far I know there is no such thing as the post-Soviet skate scene; the scenes all bleed into one now. But I hope that like the island of Jersey, or Japan, two places where very distinctive styles of skateboarding have evolved, ostensibly apart from the rest of the world, there is a remote post Soviet scene out there, where skateboarding has evolved differently. We can only dream of the new approaches to skateboarding being pioneered out there in the Asian steppe, where there’s no connection to Instagram, and people pay no mind to current trends.