Cold War Was Bullshit

Yana lives in Moscow and spends her time the way any sensible person does: hunting for entertainment on Chatroulette, dancing to Cyndi Lauper, making weird art. She’s funny and a little unhinged and completely unbothered, and her photos and videos have that quality of genuine documentation—here is my life, here is my face, here is something strange I found today.

What I like most about her work is how it quietly deflates whatever mythologized idea of Russia I was supposed to have grown up with. The young people there look and feel and behave pretty much like young people everywhere: bored, horny, creative, occasionally disturbing in ways that are more amusing than alarming. The Cold War always required you to imagine the other side as fundamentally alien. Yana’s entire output is a refutation of that. She’s from Moscow, she wags her ass to Cyndi Lauper, and that’s your international relations lesson right there.