When asked how sanctions and counter-sanctions have changed their lives, some middle-income Moscow residents start with the cheeses they are missing – products that have disappeared from shelves since Russia imposed a ban on European cheese, and selected other food products, in response to EU and US sanctions. Conversation can often turn to the merits of gorgonzola, camembert and parmesan, and the defects of their disappointing Russian equivalents.



The shadow of the conflict in Ukraine still lingers over Moscow, making life harder for its residents in many ways – some of them momentous, including unemployment and acute financial problems; others no more than minor irritations. But everyone here agrees life has changed – both in a practical sense and in terms of people’s moods.

Surgeon Dmitry Ravilevich, 31, gives me a tour of the local supermarket in his home town of Noginsk, on the outskirts of eastern Moscow. Three fridge units that used to stock European cheeses and yoghurts are now full of 17 Russian varieties – there’s no shortage here. “We used to have Polish apples, now we have apples from Asia. You can’t taste any difference,” he says.

Back in their one-bedroom flat in the krushchevka opposite – the identical five-storey apartment blocks built all over Russia in the 1960s (five storeys was the maximum allowed before the expense of installing an elevator was required) – Dmitry and his wife Elena open their fridge to try to analyse how sanctions are affecting them. Elena, 26, is an engineer currently on maternity leave with their

seven-month-old son, Georgy. The fridge is full of Russian sausages, jars of homemade pickled cabbage, black forest gateau from Russia, a jar of locally made Nestle babyfood, and local eggs and bread; they find it hard to point to anything that has disappeared from their lives.

Stop anyone in the street and they'll be able to tell you what a barrel of oil costs today Dmitry Ravilevich, surgeon

“We felt the effect for the first couple of months – now we don’t feel it any more,” Dmitry says. “Those products which disappeared from the market weren’t really things that we bought – we couldn’t ever afford to buy foreign cheeses so we bought Russian cheese anyway. Things like Norwegian fish disappeared – but it’s not a massive problem for us to stop buying that. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all if it hadn’t been talked about so much on television. Richer people who were used to buying those kind of things might have noticed, but we didn’t feel it.”

Dmitry has a good job in a Moscow hospital but rents in the city are unaffordable, so at 5.30 every morning he leaves home to make a two-hour commute along the traffic-clogged Enthusiasts’ Highway – at one point passing a heart-sinking motorway sign that announces it is 29 months and 15 days until the end of the current roadworks.

Tajik migrant workers at a market on the outskirts of Moscow. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

In the evening he returns home again, past the ripped-up earth of construction zones and dozens of skeleton high-rise blocks that stretch up 20 and 30 storeys, their mammoth advertising hoardings giving details of how to buy flats here long before the apartments are anywhere near completion. Dmitry is phlegmatic about the journey, and about life in Moscow.

“It hasn’t changed much, except maybe we talk more about the economy. Stop anyone in the street and they’ll be able to tell you how much a barrel of oil costs today, and what the rouble-dollar exchange rate is,” he says, turning on his computer in the corner of the sitting room – which doubles as his office and as a bedroom for the baby and their three-year-old son, Alexander. “Look: every website has a panel updating readers on both indexes. Everyone is very conscious of it – but for the moment we’re interested, not worried.”

The family has felt the collapse of the rouble, but the consequences can hardly be described as catastrophic. “We won’t take the children to Greece this summer, we’ll go to Egypt instead,” Dmitry says. “Our friends are going to Crimea, which is ours now, or Egypt or Turkey. It makes no real difference to us. We plan to go to Crimea when the hotels there get a bit better.” Their friends have also decided not to buy European cars, choosing Korean or Japanese models instead; they fear the European car manufacturers will leave Russia and it will be impossible to get replacement parts.

The collapse of the rouble has prompted tighter spending controls at the hospital where Dmitry works. “We have rationalised our attitude to equipment over the past year; we are using our resources more carefully. Where we might have done two tests previously – an extra one to double-check – now we will only do one. But in terms of quality of the medicines and the equipment we use, it has had no effect. Most of our medicines come from Russia or from India.”

Both Dmitry and Elena feel broadly supportive of what happened in Ukraine. “We had a moment of uncertainty; we wondered, ‘do we need this Crimea?’ But, like the majority of our friends, we thought it was good for Russia. We don’t talk about it so much any more though.” Dmitry says he has noticed attitudes towards to the west changing in the past year. “We have become more patriotic as a country. People have become more negative in the way they view the west.”

‘Any Putin-related story is what they call a priority story’

Up until March 2014, Liza Lerer worked for Rossiya, the second-most-watched channel on Russian television. She was in charge of the promotional department, making clips that were broadcast between shows, advertising what was coming up later on the channel. She began to realise several years ago that there was growing pressure on her to make sure the tone of these apparently-innocuous 30-second clips reflected government thinking.

“You can cut these clips in a neutral way, to promote a documentary or a news programme coming later in the day – or they can become an advertisement for the state. Gradually they became tiny bits of propaganda,” Liza tells me. And so she resigned from her job, no longer willing to turn the trailers advertising news programmes and documentaries into pro-government publicity.

Liza Lerer outside her apartment in Moscow. Photograph: Elena Spasova/Guardian

Life for her has changed immeasurably in the past year. As a result of the moral stand she took, Liza has had to move out of the large, expensive flat she and her husband were renting, back to the small one-roomed flat where she grew up. She has been unable to find new work elsewhere, and worries about how she will pay for her college-aged children’s education or repay the loans taken out, in more prosperous times, for travel to Europe.

She is speaking in the tiny kitchen of her flat on the top floor of another krushchevka. Through the open window comes the happy sound of children playing in a playground that was installed by the Moscow government sometime in the last decade – before the economy turned for the worse.

Liza says she first became uncomfortable with her work in 2011, when she had to make promotional clips for an eight-part documentary on Vladimir Putin, which she describes as “beautifully filmed” but “extremely boring” – with episodes focused on “Putin and Russia’s youth”, “Putin and agriculture”, and so on. Russia’s then-prime minister looked tanned and healthy in every episode, she says.

“I asked why we had to do so many clips for such a tedious series that no one was going to watch” – but it was a rhetorical question. It was already clear to Liza that for the channel, “any Putin-related story is what they call a priority story. No matter how well or badly made the documentary was, the trailers themselves would be shown repeatedly and seen by a huge audience; in theory the trailers were promoting a series on Putin, but in fact they were actually promoting Putin himself.”

It would be easy to underestimate the significance of these short clips, squeezed in between the Russian equivalents of Dancing on Ice and Dancing with the Stars and advertisements, but Liza explains they are a significant part of the state broadcasting machine: “Tens of millions watch the channel every night. That’s why I was so worried about my role in the process.”

When tens of thousands gathered in Moscow in May 2012 to protest against contested election results and Putin’s return to the presidency, the nature of the news programmes put out by the Rossiya channel became much more pro-government. Liza, 43, who had attended these demonstrations herself, says she found it very difficult. She found herself undermining the behaviour and motives of the protesters and the protest leaders with suspicious-sounding questions: “The promotional clips we made told viewers the programme would be asking: ‘Who are these protesters? What do they want? Are their goals the same as their leaders? What are these people gathering for?’”

Tens of millions watch the channel every night. That’s why I was so worried about my role Liza Lerer, former Rossiya journalist

Liza discussed her unease with a few of her colleagues. She says a small proportion of them agreed with her but were afraid to lose their jobs by taking an ethical decision and resigning. A small group were ardent supporters of Putin. “The majority, though, just don’t care. There is a sense of apathy, a sense that we have the leader we deserve. People say: ‘Well is it any better in the west? They have corruption there too.’ People are so used to conforming – we grew up in the Soviet era. Very few people resigned for political reasons. I thought there would be more – but even those who do feel uneasy, they have comfortable lives; it’s hard to give that up.”

A couple of months into the Ukrainian crisis, there was renewed pressure to toe the party line. “We were told that the trailers should be more aggressive. We had to make a montage of the Ukrainian leaders, of Ukrainian protesters fighting, to show them in a bad light; to show that if they come to power, things will be very bad,” she recalls. “I began to feel that what I was doing was intolerable and positively dangerous for the country; I felt ashamed. I knew it was only going to get worse, and that the pressure to propagandise for the government would increase.”

Liza resigned. “I had no choice. I couldn’t stay. My immediate boss knew why I left, but it wasn’t widely known. The head of the channel wouldn’t really have cared about the departure of an editor-in-chief of the promotions department.”

While she doesn’t regret her decision, it has come at a huge cost to her family. Things over the past year have not been easy because her departure coincided with the economic crisis. She remains unemployed. She couldn’t go to another state channel, broadcasting news and politics, because she would have been confronted with the same problem. Elsewhere in the media sector, few people are hiring.

Sitting in her warm apartment, the walls lined with books and CDs, a grand piano squeezed into the main room, beautiful antique typewriters on display, she shrugs off her financial problems as “unimportant”. Because she was brought up in the Soviet Union and lived through the economic difficulties of the 1990s, she is familiar with the sensation of being short of money.

“But in the 1990s we were young and happy to be poor. We felt were were living through an interesting time, the country was changing for the better. We got used to freedom, to writing openly, to talking openly. It is frightening how far things have gone back in another direction,” she says. “Now we’re in this dead-end and it is hard to see how things will change for the better. It is a horrible period. For the first time in my life, I don’t see a future.”

Her husband Alexander Stoliarchuk, an arts journalist, has also noticed a stark change in the past year. “It is like living in a foreign country,” he says, coming in from the flat’s other room, to stroke their elderly black cat and make black tea. “Over the last year I have heard some people who I considered friends, people who I always thought were ‘on my side’, say things like: ‘It’s time we taught a lesson to America’; ‘We need another Stalin’; ‘It’s so good to see Russia defend her values at last.’”

Alexander feels Moscow has become more xenophobic and hostile to the west. It is a difficult time for both of them.

Beneath the European veneer

On the surface at least, Moscow seems as prosperous as ever. If you walk around the centre of the city, it is impossible not to be struck by the proliferation of new bars and restaurants, with tables on the streets; when the sun is out it feels positively Parisian. As well as Starbucks and Burger King, there are dog salons and 24-hour-sushi restaurants, karaoke nightclubs and artisanal breadshops, selling hand-made macaroons in pastel colours. On the metro, commuters travel with their necks bent at the same angle you can observe on any European metro, staring into tablets and iPhones (Moscow has Wi-Fi underground), playing Candy Crush as they make their way along the platform.

Beneath the European veneer, there are traces of a new, more ostentatious nationalism – visible in the orange-and-black St George’s ribbons that celebrate victory in the war but have become a symbol of the pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, which can be seen tied to car aerials and pinned to school children travelling home on the metro.

In the loos in the recently opened Sanctions Bar, customers get to use toilet paper decorated with $100 bills or images of Barack Obama’s head. The walls are covered with cartoons that underline the fundamental stupidity of the US president and Putin’s relative wisdom. Bills are presented inside matryoshka wooden dolls decorated with Putin’s face, the place is lit by a chandelier made of bank notes (dollars and euros at the bottom, roubles at the top) and the menu prides itself on using only Russian ingredients. Evgeny Belkin, the restaurant’s art director, who helped to come up with the theme, explains that the idea was partly a joke, but that some customers come because they want to show their annoyance at the western imposition of sanctions.

For most this new patriotism is welcome, but one woman, who is not a Putin supporter, tells me she is devoting a lot of time to the lengthy process of applying for Israeli citizenship, because she is anxious that her young daughter will come under pressure to conform to this new spirit of nationalism at school. “I grew up during an era when you could say one thing at home, but needed to be careful to say something else at school. Why would I want to put her through that?”

‘We swapped our values for Snickers and Coca-Cola’

‘I haven’t felt any panic’ ... Alisa Krylova, model and former Mrs Globe and Mrs Russia. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Alisa Krylova, a former Mrs Russia and Mrs Globe, achieved a certain notoriety in March when she was interviewed laughing off the significance of sanctions and the roubles’ collapse, explaining that she had merely been forced to cut down on European ski trips and postpone plans to upgrade to a new Mercedes. She didn’t need to worry about the blockade on western cheeses, she said, because she stocked up on her favourites during regular trips to Paris.

Conscious of the danger of sounding obnoxious and out of touch with the rest of Russia, she is more considered when we meet in her spacious flat in a new glass apartment complex, located above the orchid-festooned Italian restaurant Mario (which is listed, with relish, in guidebooks as one of Moscow’s five most expensive places to eat). To reach her apartment, you have to pass through two layers of security: a videophone, operated by security guards behind the thick metal gate that separates the block from the street, and beyond it, a second security guard in the entrance hall before you can travel up to the flat. A child-sized silver Bentley is parked in the lobby next to a pram, by the lift.

Krylova has imposed her own kind of austerity measures on family life: holidays have been taken in Russia. “Of course I haven’t travelled with the children for a holiday abroad. Why would I pay several times over the odds just to go abroad? I can’t see the point,” she says. “I’ve become very aware of how much everything costs now and how much I am prepared to pay for everything. I’m conscious of the rouble’s collapse, but I can’t say I’ve been tremendously worried by it. I haven’t felt any panic.”

She points out that as a result of people from her circle shying away from overpriced European brands, there has been an explosion in the popularity of Russian designers. “Now we are supporting our own designers – that’s a positive result,” she says, while acknowledging that her own neon pink shirt is made by the Parisian label Balmain.

Krylova’s daughters, five and 11, zoom in and out of the sitting room, leaning over the sofa to whisper to their mother, desperate to pick bits of icing off the enormous and unusual cake she has had made for her husband’s birthday – decorated with a large marzipan model of her, instantly recognisable with flowing blonde hair and cheekbones, perched on the edge of the cake, next to a winged angel. She is polite and hospitable, offering tea in porcelain cups, and a saucer of strawberry jam, made by her grandmother, to eat with a teaspoon. Huge oil paintings of her in sleeveless ball gowns hang on the walls, painted to celebrate her victory at the Mrs Russia awards in 2010 and the Mrs Globe awards in 2011.

Krylova, 32, studied economics at university before becoming a model, and her sense of perspective on the crisis allows her to shrug off the mild privations she is currently experiencing. Her family’s eating habits have changed but barely in a way she feels able to complain about. “We ate French fish before and now we eat Tunisian fish … and so what?” She does, though, lament the disappearance of some of her favourite Moscow shops, particularly the jewellery and diamond shop Graf, which recently shut the branch nearest her house: “A lot of shops have closed, because their rents were pegged to the dollar and have become unaffordable.”

Beyond these minor inconveniences, Krylova is frustrated by the sanctions and counter-sanctions because of the damage they have wrought on economic ties built up by Russia and the west over the past two decades. “All the work we have done over years and years, has been wasted overnight – what’s it all for?”

Yet she fully supports Putin’s actions both in reclaiming Crimea and in his response to the imposition of western sanctions. The events of the past 18 months have made her feel more patriotic and loyal to the president.

It is good that we have such an intelligent, wise man, a worthy leader at the head of our country Alisa Krylova

“It is good that we have such an intelligent, wise man, a worthy leader at the head of our country. As a Russian citizen, I’m very proud that finally we have a leader capable of governing this huge country,” she says. “Perhaps his methods appear rather harsh to some people, but people who understand a bit about politics and the economy and history, will understand that his actions are quite well thought through and are exactly what we need at the moment. Vladimir Vladimirovich has done so much positive for our country.”

She welcomes the new emphasis Putin has put on promoting patriotism in Russia. Her older daughter spent a month at school preparing for the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war, and the triumph over fascism – learning poems, writing essays and preparing a show for parents. “We lived through an era when all our most important values were swapped for Snickers and Coca-Cola. This new focus on the preservation of our history is very important.”

Krylova says she knows people on the list of named individuals who have been banned from travelling and subject to asset freezes. She admits it had been a very difficult period for them, and for anyone trying to do business in Russia – she herself has seen a 30% drop in the modelling work offered over the past year because of the crisis, but is trying to see a positive in this too. She plans to branch out from modelling by setting up a personal training centre: “I’m going to teach people how to be a supermodel, how to be a successful woman, mother and wife.”

‘The country has become more xenophobic since Crimea’

Evgeny, 68, a retired translator and Elena, 67, a retired bio-chemist agree readily to be interviewed in their central Moscow flat about how their lives have changed in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, the recession and sanctions, but they quickly decided they do not want their full names to be published and that they would rather not be photographed. Evgeny’s explanation of why he prefers to remain anonymous reveals how swiftly attitudes are changing in Moscow.

“Maybe five years ago, I wouldn’t have minded naming myself, but people have become more xenophobic since the hysteria around Crimea. The country has become a more isolated place; people are very sceptical of foreigners. We are old enough to have experienced many of the pleasures of the Soviet era – when there was punishment for contact with foreigners, suspicion and displeasure,” he said.

He remembers being telephoned from America by a US journalist friend in the 1980s. “I was contacted by the KGB. I had to go in for a meeting to be asked: why do you know her, how did you meet her, who introduced you? That suspicion is returning – not to the same extent, but I feel it. I think there are people who monitor the western press, who are watching what people say. I don’t know how diligently, but they do monitor it.”

I definitely wouldn’t speak about Putin in public Evgeny, retired translator

Both Evgeny and Elena opposed the annexation of Crimea, and have stopped talking to some former friends who they feel have become excessively nationalistic in their response to the situation in Ukraine.

“There has been a very sharp division of people in terms of their attitude to the Crimea. For a while, people were talking about it all the time and we began to mix with fewer people as a result. Mostly I restrain myself from talking about it. I never initiate this kind of conversation. I try to be as neutral as possible. But some of those who hold more xenophobic views are prone to be a bit more aggressive. There are a couple of friends I know not to speak to about this, and there’s another couple I haven’t seen for almost year – because their views are so different, I don’t want to hear them. In any case, we talk about it less now than a year ago. It has started being part of our life.”

Both of them say they are much more cautious about how they talk about politics now, and would be careful not to express hostility towards Putin in public. “I definitely wouldn’t speak about Putin in public. I wouldn’t want to provoke any confrontation. When you lived in the Soviet Union, you would tread very carefully; you would always be looking for signs that this was a person you could share opinions with – it was a subtle thing; you’d know from a couple of words, or a couple of grimaces. But if someone else brought the subject up, you would hold your tongue. It’s not dangerous like that now, it’s just that it has the potential to be very unpleasant.”

Evgeny recoils at the heightened patriotism on display in Moscow: “A patriot now is not someone who loves their country. It means you support the government, you support xenophobia, that you are opposed to the west, opposed to liberal thinking. It has taken on a very particular new meaning.” But he finds it hard to envisage a post-Putin era: “I’m afraid I can’t even imagine it. He has been here 15 years – how can you imagine life without him?”

Aviapark shopping centre on opening day. Photograph: Elena Spasova

From their sunny balcony, the pair point out how radically the skyline around their apartment has changed in the past decade. Two looming, glass-panelled buildings have arrived, obscuring smaller, older landmarks; they are not enthusiastic about the architecture, but try to focus their attention instead on the carnations they are growing in the window box. Elena bought them in Europe’s biggest new shopping mall, Aviapark – a massive new venture that opened in north Moscow last November with a 70ft-high aquarium, and which is due to have 500 shops and 80 restaurants. Its launch coincided with the rouble’s collapse, and many of the planned shops are still empty.

With their combined state pensions coming to around 30,000 roubles a month (£385), Elena and Evgeny, like most Moscow shoppers, have become more cautious in their shopping and have felt the impact of the sanctions and the devalued rouble. Products that they used to buy routinely have become luxuries.

“I used to buy a bottle of wine a week; now perhaps it’s more like once a month,” Evgeny says. “And, absurd as it sounds, I miss the cheeses. In Soviet Russia there were no specialist cheeses, there was really just one type. It wasn’t even really cheese – something similar to cheese, but not quite cheese – so when you got these cheeses in the 1990s, when people tried them … cheese came to symbolise the range of things you could have in a post-Soviet state.

“Even poorer people could choose between five and 10 imported varieties and it was quite affordable,” Evgeny adds, laughing about the amount of attention cheese consumption has attracted since sanctions were introduced. “I really love mature cheese, camembert, brie. You can still find them in some shops, but the prices are exorbitant.”