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摘要

The industrial zone outside Yekaterinburg, a city of 1.5m on the edge of Siberia, has seen better days. On pavements where Soviet workers once tramped to shifts at the Uralmash heavy-machinery plant, babushkas now lay out their wares: apples, mushrooms, smoked fish. Although the area has recovered from the organised crime that plagued it in the 1990s— earning the city the sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals—most of the buildings on First Five-Year Plan Square in the centre of the district stand empty or underused. The square is an unlikely place for a clash between contemporary artists and Orthodox believers. But this summer it staged a drama involving accusations of blasphemy, threats of bloodshed and an intervention by the security services. The conflict was ignited by a piece of street art inspired by the Russian avant-garde of a century ago. Unusually for a divided country and bellicose times, the combatants eventually resolved their dispute.