Rave On by Matthew Collin

Author:Matthew Collin [Collin, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Interlude

Pirates of the Black Sea

ON A SANDY STRETCH OF LAND on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, far from the nearest city, in what was once the ancient kingdom of Colchis, a new republic had been established – a republic that would shine brightly for ten days only, sun-soothed by day and sonorously illuminated by night, until it finally evaporated into the subtropical air, all its energies spent in the quest for pure bliss, leaving no trace of its marvellous existence behind. Or at least that was the plan.

Kazantip was the most notoriously bacchanalian festival in the former Soviet Union, the Burning Man of the old Communist East. It had gained renown over two decades as a beachfront extravaganza on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, attracting thousands of Russian and Ukrainian youths with its promise of hardcore techno, free expression and limitless intoxication in the sun. ‘It seems to me that the closest description to the festival’s image among ravers is the work of the Soviet writer Sergey Mikhalkov, The Festival of Disobedience, where a city is described in which children were left without adults,’ explains Ilia Voronin, the editor-in-chief of Mixmag Russia. ‘It really was a unique festival with a cultural ecosystem. Partly Burning Man, partly rave, partly some analogue of Ibiza.’

Kazantip was also a self-proclaimed ‘republic’, with its own president, foreign minister and constitution, although it only existed for a few weeks each summer. To gain entry, one had to purchase a Kazantip ‘visa’ – a symbolic gesture of commitment to the cause and an indication that this was autonomous territory where normal rules didn’t apply. The Kazantip Republic, or so its propaganda material claimed, was a ‘real alternative to reality’. In other words, it was one of those bizarre phenomena that have occasionally been thrown up by the rave scene over the past few decades, in those moments when the freewheeling do-it-yourself ethos of the culture has empowered the craziest of characters to step forward and set the agenda with little care for material rewards, moral conventions or the consequences for human sanity.

It started in the early nineties as a get-together for windsurfers on the Kazantip headland on the coast of the Sea of Azov. The location gave the event its name, and it went on to develop into a full-on rave festival which lasted for almost a month each year, occupying the turbine hall of the unfinished Shcholkine nuclear power plant, where construction work had been abandoned after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Kazantip then moved to the beachfront village of Popovka on Crimea’s Black Sea shore, where a reporter from Vice once memorably if somewhat inaccurately hyped it as a debauched free-for-all, full of half-naked Slavic lovelies and vodka-crazed mafia dons who came for the alfresco sex as much as they did for the music. But it was actually rather more like a techno holiday resort with a touch more sartorial flamboyance and a pervasive feeling of nonchalant beatitude, as journalist Will Lynch reported for Resident Advisor: ‘People

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