This week, Ren-TV started a new drama series set at what used to be Moscow’s biggest clothing and goods market, Cherkizovsky. The channel says the show, “Cherkizona: Disposable People,” is the first “honest” depiction of the market, which was closed down by the authorities last summer amid a storm of publicity.
The drama features a doctor, Sergei,? who loses his young daughter, Dasha, after she slips out of the car while he buys a fan belt at the market. He descends into a kind of underworld to find her.
He meets homeless beggars, Central Asian workers who sleep in a maze of underground passages and seemingly friendly traders who think nothing of selling rotten meat or smuggling drugs in boxes of fruit.
“It’s just Sodom and Gomorrah,” one visitor complains.
In the first episodes, Sergei manages to lose his daughter not once, but twice. The hapless security guards find her, but then leave her alone in their office with a sleeping blood-stained junkie. When they return, both are gone.
A trader, Lilya, takes pity on Sergei and lets him sleep in her den inside a freight container. Meanwhile, she negotiates a dodgy deal to resell meat that has rotted in a broken-down freezer. “I get a buzz from this, I’ll sell it all,” she boasts. She dupes a naive trader into buying the lot after adding vinegar and spices and plumping it up with chemicals in a filthy outbuilding.
Lilya also sells a batch of Uzbek migrants to the genial owner of a Caucasian restaurant. “Can your men hold their tongues?” he asks, before getting them to heave boxes of oranges, with a drugs ampoule stuffed inside each fruit.
Increasingly desperate to find his daughter, Sergei descends into the “snake pit,” a network of dark tunnels furnished with bunk beds but without sanitation, where the market workers live. “There are whole neighborhoods here underground,” he is told.
Workers at the real Cherkizovsky were also rumored to live in a vast underground bunker. That might be hard to believe, but then again, there is a wartime bunker museum next door. The market grew up in the 1990s on a sports ground that was designed to disguise the bunker.
Close to Izmailovsky souvenir market, Cherkizovsky was a claustrophobic, overcrowded network of stalls selling cheap Turkish and Chinese clothes, household goods and food.
“A state within a state” is how the show’s title song describes the market. It was said workers never had to leave the real Cherkizovsky, since the market provided everything, from cafeterias to hairdressers to brothels.
The multimillionaire who controlled the market, Telman Ismailov, once invited Jennifer Lopez to sing at his birthday party. He is a nattily dressed man with a taste for jeweled rings.
The market was closed in June 2009 after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly castigated officials for making no arrests in a smuggling case involving Chinese goods at the market.
The closure came shortly after Ismailov opened a luxury hotel in Turkey and invited Sharon Stone to the party in a flamboyant gesture. He has since agreed to invest in hotels for Putin’s pet project, the Sochi Olympics.
Although the market setting is inspired, the “Cherkizona” show doesn’t really ring true so far.
The show’s makers have built a realistic-looking market set and hired Central Asian extras to push trolleys. They even slip in shots of stray dogs and giant rats.
But it would probably be impossible to capture the sheer seediness of Cherkizovsky.