OM at the exhibition Russia – the Land of Achievements
We arrived at VDNH bleary-eyed, weary tourists weighed down by the melancholy of a train journey, just in time for the opening. As it happened, all the hotels closest to the exhibition center were packed to capacity, which meant there was practically no chance of early check-in. So, drowsy and unaccustomed to the snow and the vast distances between Moscow neighborhoods, we set off
for VDNH not out of an irresistible desire to see what was there, but simply because there was nowhere else to go.
There weren’t many people at first — though we only realized that closer to noon, as the halls of the exhibition center steadily filled with more and more visitors. The first pavilion we trudged into through the snowy slush was the Regions Pavilion. Flags flapped at the entrance, and navigation was not always obvious to sleepless train travelers. Inside — a security checkpoint: metal detectors, conveyor belts, “empty your pockets,” “everything — yes, even cigarettes and a lighter.” It’s hard when you’ve just arrived from a long train ride, don’t visit Moscow often, and back home your office is right next door. Hard, because when you left your luggage at the hotel storage, you hesitated for ages about what to bring for a full day at the exhibition — and ended up with a bizarre assortment of items you fi
rst tried to cram into every pocket, then, realizing it wouldn’t all fit, also brought along a bag.
And so at the security checkpoint, we started pulling everything out of our pockets…
This deserves its own paragraph, because we had to go through that checkpoint procedure very often. Very. And that sensation, perhaps, was the only unpleasant and irritating impression we took away from the exhibition.
Overall, though,
the exhibition was great fun — especially for the uninitiated. The initiated — those are the ones who work with exhibitions, come up with stand concepts and every individual installation, source (and sometimes invent) multimedia devices, and design and produce content. Even we, “the initiated,” though we noticed flaws and unfinished details invisible to the average visitor, still came away largely satisfied.
It’s wonderful when the people staffing the regional stands come from those very regions. Incredibly beautiful people with such different faces. All around you everything is dazzlingly innovative — flashing, speaking, moving, demonstrating, immersing, explaining, presenting, revealing, inviting — and yet you find yourself looking into the face of this delig
htful, smiling, genuinely kind person simply telling you something about their Kazakhstan, and you feel this childlike, bubbling joy rise up inside you.
And then it turned out that in our world of multimedia technologies, devices, presentations, and content, people still respond brilliantly to simple, nostalgic technologies. Physical devices, phenomena. And the interaction with them is physical too — not tapping screens, but turning levers and pressing big round buttons. That’s how it is. Science has gone to great lengths to make life easier so that you can get almost anything without leaving the couch. And yet now people have run into an unexpected problem: they don’t know what to do with their hands. They’ve got two of them. And five fingers on
each. Not just one finger sticking out of a person to tap a screen — ten whole fingers. And these hands…
…Did you see the stage at VDNH? So did we — from afar. “Ten days on a tractor across the snowy steppe — beauty never came easy” (c). The stage and its surrounding area — stadium-sized — were fenced off. If you planned to quickly reach the pavilion opposite, forget about the word “quickly,” because you had to go the long way around. Perhaps sometimes it all works more logically, but we happened to arrive at a time when someone was performing on the stage, but there was no way to get close enough to see who. It felt a little strange. And we felt sorry for the performers — probably standing there in costumes with no coats in seven icy winds, while we couldn’t even make them out.
We were surprised how powerfully the youth were drawn to games with neural networks. Like “Find out which international pop star you are” or “Who will you be in the future?” The mechanics are simple: you stand in front of a screen, take a selfie, wait a minute, get your AI-generated image, scan the QR code with your device, and take the picture home. Wherever there’s an interactive like that — there’s always a crowd. We work so hard, thinking of ways to surprise and attract, and people just want to generate photos with a neural network… Well, we won’t despair — all toys lose their charm eventually.
Immersive presentations remain just as popular with visitors. Even if the “immersiveness” is basically just 360-degree footage on a screen, people still enjoy 
it. Perhaps it’s the very idea of instant transportation that captivates them.
Then again, the idea of instant transportation captivated us too — only in the most down-to-earth way. Unaccustomed to the vastness of VDNH, we wore ourselves out already at the beginning of the second day. We started paying more and more attention to stands with seating, and began dreaming more and more longingly of the pickled mushrooms we’d seen at the market in one of the pavilions. So that’s where we finally headed, after a joint decision to stop pretending to be curious tourists. The farther you get from the entrance to VDNH, the dee
per the snowy slush. And the wind has room to roam here. And the snow… We trudged through a gathering blizzard to the very end of VDNH. In our minds the market appeared as a bright, lively picture — almost with a traveling theater, barkers, and samovars. But — no. The pavilion felt more like an ordinary market. Still, a market was promised — a market delivered. Nobody promised minstrels. After sampling strange but wholesome drinks and unfamiliar dishes, we decided we’d had enough exhibition for one day.
Bright, lively, kind in the way people treated each other, open and welcoming. That’s how we experienced the exhibition Russia — the Land of Achievements. If you’re in the capital, go — you won’t regret it. Just don’t try to see everything at once. Better to pace yourself, drop in from time to time. There’s still plenty of time — they say the exhibition has been extended until July.
