Black PR or market manipulation?

This fake ad (image source - advertka LJ community) was apparently stuck up all over the Moscow metro in recent days. It appears to be an exhortation by TV personality Vladimir Soloviov to invest in Sberbank. The text above the photo reads, "In 2008 I made $2,000,000 with Sberbank." And below the photo, "You can do it too! After all, I'm just as ordinary as you."

Soloviov, who appears to be even more self-absorbed than your average TV host, is convinced that this is part of a campaign to discredit him in the eyes of the public, alleging that it's government-funded. And perhaps it is, I don't know what controversies he's been embroiled in as of late, and the text of the "ad" is not exactly flattering to Soloviov (the final line could also be translated as "I'm just as simple as you."

My first thoughts (most likely incorrect but more interesting than a theory as mundane as black PR) upon reading about a fake ad using a public figure to pump the idea of investing in Sberbank were (1) maybe someone's trying a low-budget way to goose SBER's share price (but it's not as if the Moscow Metro is full of retail investors in the stock market); and (2) I doubt that anyone made $2m on Sberbank last year, unless it was by short-selling the stock, which since the start of 2008 has underperformed even the collapsing RTS index.


[UPDATE 1/29: having seen this additional (obviously fake) ad involving Soloviov, which shows him promoting a sketchy-looking weight-loss method, I am more inclined to agree that someone is just trying to make him look bad.]

April 21, 2005 - the entrance to the Mayakovskaya Metro
station that was closed all last summer was still open then.

Tashkent - beneath the surface

I returned yesterday from my trip to Uzbekistan; thanks to Aeroflot's flight schedule - 0430 departure from Tashkent with an 0810 arrival in Moscow - I slept about half of the day and was up all last night reading at home. Even though I had only a week to spend there, my first trip to Central Asia definitely lived up to expectations, and fortunately failed to justify the misgivings of some of my relatives about traveling to an area which is portrayed so often in the press as "unsettled."

The itinerary was 2 nights, 2 days in Tashkent; 2 nights, 2 days in Bukhara; 2 nights, 2 days in Samarkand; and 1 night, 1 day in Tashkent. Mainly I wanted to get just a small taste of life in this country which first drew my attention when I closely followed developments after the Andijan massacre back in May of this year. I also wanted to visit some of the country's "must-see" architectural treasures, although I wasn't able to make it to all of them (Khiva, for example, will have to wait for next time).

I didn't glean any particularly original insights into people's quality of life there - by "original" I mean observations which are not already conventional wisdom (e.g., people are friendly and hospitable, but this is a pretty poor country, everyone seems to want to emigrate, etc.) and/or have not already been bandied about on Registan.net - but that wasn't really my primary goal anyway. As for those observations I had which might be interesting to a wider audience, I may post them here later once I've had time to digest them a bit myself.

For now I just wanted to post a couple of photos from the Tashkent metro - the two which I had time to snap before being approached by a cop and told that photography in the metro is not allowed. Luckily, he was not in the mood to extort money from a guest, so he told me that while some of his colleagues might have berated me (he used the Russian word rugat' - the conversation took place in Russian, and I identified myself as being "from Moscow," as I did in many instances on the trip), he wasn't going to do that, and let me go on my way.

This was probably as far beneath the surface of things as I got in Uzbekistan. Both of these photos are from the Hamid Olimjon station, which seems to have a cotton-related theme like so much of Tashkent's Soviet-designed architecture, and were taken around 1:30pm on July 20. In general, Tashkent's metro stations are beautiful and seem to be designed with the idea of echoing or repeating the grandeur of the Moscow metro. I saw at least one instance where Soviet-era wall decorations (mosaics? bas-reliefs?), whose message presumably did not suit independent Uzbekistan's ruler, had been ripped out of the wall, with nothing left in their place.

My trusty guidebook, MacLeod & Mayhew's Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand, mentions the photo ban in the metro and directs readers to a website which I couldn't get to open for photos - perhaps this resource was disabled by the Uzbek powers-that-be due to security concerns.

Other places online where photos of and information about the Tashkent Metro are available are the following: Tashkent Subway (in English), the Toshkent (Tashkent) Metro page on UrbanRail.net (in English), Tashkentskoe Metro (in Russian), and this photo gallery. None of these sites, though, has photos which do justice to the more spectacular stations.


This is probably the only Uzbekistan-related post for which I'll have time before leaving for Moldova tomorrow morning. That promises to be another interesting trip, although I've been to Moldova many times (at least once in each of the past 5 years) since it's my wife's homeland. For that reason, the trip to Moldova will have more the feel of a comfortable trip down memory lane, as opposed to the Uzbekistan trip's rush of new impressions.

Since I probably won't have time to post anything while I'm in Moldova, further updates will come no sooner than next Thursday, when I'll be back in Moscow (leaving Chisinau at 0615 on the brutally scheduled Air Moldova flight).