World of New Russians Dictionary

The World of New Russians was an ironic business art venture by Grigorii Baltser, a prolific art dealer and collector. It launched in 1998, with a storefront on the prestigious Arbat Boulevard in central Moscow. Its first offerings included a book series by artist Katya Metelitsa and a variety of handcrafted objects in Russian folk-art styles. Every item sold at the World of New Russians mocked and mythologized so-called “New Russians,” the class of professional criminals and carpetbaggers whose wealth, violence, and excess dominated the public imagination during the 1990s. 

 

The ironic works sold in the store depict New Russians in genre scenes emphasizing their ridiculous luxury, wild fashion, and overall habitus. This artifact, a 1998 “dictionary” of trends and terminology associated with Russia’s new elites, was created by a team of writers headed by Metelitsa and illustrated by V. Fomina. As in a children's alphabet book, each page of the Dictionary offers a playful representation of a New Russian pastime or problem, aligning keywords with the featured letter. 

 

The image in this artifact, from the page opposite the table of contents, represents a “typical” New Russian as Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man amid multiple signifiers of his ridiculous and glamorous identity. The text at the bottom of the page instructs the reader to find specific objects in the image, using potentially opaque slang terms for each: “Challenge. Find the following in the picture: the addiks [Adidas sneakers], the Versaces, the golds [sic]…” The list concludes with an ironic direct address to the reader: “Too hard? Study our dictionary!”