Project ogi clean ponds. “Even Khodorkovsky here ate hot sandwiches with cheese and drank Georgian wine” By the closure of “Project OGI

From the history of the middle class and one violent corporation

ZAO Project OGI - the management company of a well-known network of clubs and restaurants - and Polit.Ru are primarily related by common origins (both originated in the depths of the OGI publishing house and its various projects) and many more informal threads, and most importantly - the feeling of belonging to one socio-cultural stratum. Over the course of three years, Project OGI has become a prominent phenomenon in Moscow's urban infrastructure and, it seems, is at the apogee of aggressive expansion. Kirill Rogov, the editor-in-chief of Polit.Ru, talks with the general director of Project OGI, Aleksey Kabanov, about how it happened, how it works, what it revolves on and what it is about.

Tell us in order for the story: how did it all start, where did the Project OGI Club come from and what came before it?

There was nothing before the club. Those. there was the OGI publishing house, which published good humanitarian books and around which an environment was formed. And there was an understanding of the need for a place where you can apply the skills acquired in very different jobs and businesses. The very appearance of the first Club was connected with the crisis of 1998. But not even with the fact that everything started to work out and there was a need to earn money in a new way, but with the fact that suddenly there were many free hands, many free heads. Journalists, writers, artists who existed quite well before the crisis on all kinds of grants, works, different NTV - they all felt very well "before".

And here they were practically out of work. That is, the creation of the "first OIG" (this is December 1998) was not directly related to the crisis, but its success - when the flow of people was very dense and very concentrated there, the flow of people with a pronounced humanitarian component in the profession - was connected with this. And the second round - businessmen came there.

It was a place arranged in a courtyard way - a private apartment where books were sold, they gave bad vodka with a bad snack, and a lot of nice people gathered around it ...

Not certainly in that way. There it was formulated, as it turned out later, a very successful combination - a bookstore, a cafe, a concert venue and a gallery. And every day there was a program as dense as it is now at the OGI on Potapovsky. All the same poets read poetry there. "Leningrad" gave concerts. The vodka was just warm there, because the refrigerator was not enough, and the snack at some time was better than anywhere else we are now preparing.

And you made money from that club and started ...

No, money was not made there. The money that ended up in the checkout was enough to pay employees a salary. And it closed because it was no longer possible to maintain it.

But the skills have appeared?

Skills appeared and people appeared around. Those investors who became investors of the big Club on Potapovsky - they would not have existed if it had not been for that first one. If they hadn't seen it work.

Have you collected small investments from friends and started making a second club?

No, not friends. They were acquaintances, but not friends. People who are quite successful in business, for whom it was important to receive income from the money invested. It wasn't sponsorship money. So the first club was launched, which was already developing on its own, and began to bring profit, which turned out to be more significant than investors expected. This gave a second round of loyalty. There was an opportunity to attract investments for the next project, no longer from friends, but from people who are in no way integrated into the existing business.

So, what is OIG today, and what is the name of the company itself?

JSC "Project OGI". It is a co-owner of the OGI Project club, the PYROGI cafe, the OGI Street gallery-restaurant, PIROGOV on Dmitrovka, which have just opened, and PIROGOV on Taganskaya, which are about to open, a large project , which opens at the end of the year, and in addition is the official management company for all these projects.

On Tulskaya, as far as I know, is there some kind of OGI-gigantomania unfolding at all?

Yes, this is a large, complexly structured project, which will be arranged according to the principle well known to us - this is a large cafe, this is probably the largest club concert venue in the city for 2500-3000 people, this is a large bookstore with retail and small wholesale sales, this is a large exchange fund, with the involvement of a large number of regional publishing houses, which are practically not represented on the Moscow market now, a large children's recreation. In addition, this is a large food production, acting not as part of a project, but as an independent commercial tool that will work for our own project (prepare food for other cafes, restaurants) and at the same time - as a separate seller of services, for example, ready-made meals and cooking ...

But as far as I understand, the basis of all this well-being is public catering after all?

It cannot be said that this is the basis of well-being, although now, if we talk about the share of trade turnover, then, of course, catering is the most capacious project ... But comparable with others. Already comparable to a bookstore. With the opening of Tulskaya, this will become even more tangible. At the same time, we do not consider catering as something separate and self-sufficient.

How did you manage to get into the catering market?

Probably, precisely because we did not consider catering as a self-sufficient project, and made a unique proposal. The situation on the catering market was different two years ago, it has changed a lot. Then we were practically the first who set the task of providing services to a specific audience, while we ourselves were part of this audience, and categorically cut off things that were not directly related to the service. In fact, all the cafes that were in Moscow carried some kind of additional load. Until 1997, 90% of cafes laundered money.

Since 1998, it has become unrealistic, and half of them have closed, the gangster places have disappeared. Then a situation arose when cafes became PR projects. Allegedly coffee shops began to appear, such a boom was two years ago. They all opened up as wildly trendy places people should go to because it's wildly expensive and trendy. This is such a consciousness imputed to people, where they came.

Did you target a specific audience?

Everywhere, except for "OGI Street", we specially did minimal design so that people could arrange the space themselves. For example, the cafe "PIROGI" was driving to the point that it is, almost half a year. We figured out that journalists should meet there, but on the opening day we realized that this was impossible. The journalists themselves said that in Moscow there is such a situation that people from one newspaper will not sit with people from another.

If Kommersant is hanging out there, then Vremya Novostey will not go there. The bookstore appeared in the seventh month when we started looking at what was missing. In fact, it was not from us, it was a customer store, which immediately canceled face control, just like in the "OGI Project" ...

Well, what is this circle that you are targeting?

They are middle class.

He's not there!

He is there. Another thing is that our middle class has several features that distinguish it from the European one. First, he is under 30. Second, our middle class does not live off credit, like the European or American middle class.

But at the same time, he has all the other signs: he has a job and is sufficiently secured to be aware of and satisfy needs other than physiological. He has a relatively stable life situation, and most importantly, he positions himself as a middle class, behaviorally and mentally. This is how she feels. Our middle class consists of people who earn enough money, but cannot yet save money.

That is, the essence of your proposal was that in fact a person does not go to a restaurant, but goes to spend time, well, there he already eats and drinks. Is this the "OIG ploy"?

Yes, indeed, it turned out that a set of certain services is not just a sale, but the provision of a person's social existence, the creation of his environment. At the same time, it is important that each specific service that is in the project is very direct. The bookstore sells books, the PYROGI cafe feeds people. Today we have been arguing for a long time how synthesis differs from symbiosis, and "PIES" - is it synthesis or symbiosis? So they did not agree ... People, coming to "PIES", understand that they are coming to a place that has some form. And "PIES", unlike most Moscow cafes, has acquired a fully formed club atmosphere.

There is a large number of regular visitors ... In the line of a restaurant - fast food - there is some place where I go to eat, but this is not an event, what I eat. But there is some additional trail to all this - this is the cafe. People go to the restaurant to eat, and the food itself is a cultural component. In fast food - a person fills his stomach. But it is known from literature that a person eventually comes to a cafe.

What is the most tangible shift from the original thought? In my opinion, the club component was partly suppressed by the wide offer of food.

Quite the opposite. We always have the club component to score a project that we want to do as a purely non-club one. We spent a huge amount of time and effort to explain to people that the PYROGI cafe is not the same as the Project OGI club. Now the club component in "PIE" is rather illusory, but at the same time it is she who keeps the general structure.

Well, all the same: the first club began as an intelligent club, then, relatively speaking, the students took over there. I remember that Mitya Borisov came up with a formula that OGI should be a place where students and teachers or children and their parents could meet. Now the "OGI Project" does not look like that.

No, he looks like that. The students as such do not scare us, they scare us, and we spend a lot of energy on this when they begin to oust the older generation. At this point, we modify the program to bring it back, to bring back some balance. This is definitely not a student place, and even in the public's perception it is not. Another thing is that in the summer, when everyone leaves, it becomes a student's place, moreover, a place for non-Moscow students. Both last, and this year, the OGI was scored all summer by students from St. Petersburg, from Volgograd.

And yet there is a feeling of being overwhelmed. There are many tables in a small space, they serve for a long time ... We probably won't convince a person who attends the OGI that this is such a club presentation - everything is fast and targeted. There is already a certain train, rumor ... You know, by the way, a joke about you? Itskovich and Company opened a brothel. Everything is very cool, the interior is homely, intelligent, the girls are only from the Russian State Humanitarian University. But wait a very long time, and they do not what they asked.

Hmm ... On the one hand, unfortunately, we really cannot convince, on the other, this is part of our contract with the visitor. It lies in the fact that we make our services as accessible as possible to the widest possible stratum. This means that we must cut infrastructure costs so that we can sell food and drink for the money they sell in PIES. The main, loyal part of the OGI public is ready to joke as much as they want about how they were served, but she comes back, she knows how to live in this space, when it is really long and slowly served, and she is ready to understand that there are a lot of people around ... on "OGI Street" - there is no such thing, there is a different format.

I agree ... So, returning to our cart about the middle class, we can state that there is a middle class in terms of behavioral habits, although it is underpaid, underpaid, and does not have enough money for a full service, so the service is reduced?

Something like that.

In any case, it all has grown so much, and everyone seems to like it ... How many people are working now?

500. This is an office and people in projects.

This is already a factory.

This is a very complex management structure. The most difficult part is the administrative structure. The designs are scattered and the whole thing tends to stretch into a horizontal structure. Any manager wants to put forward what brings more money, not realizing that if there is a sharp advancement, then I have nothing to answer the question of why food has supplanted the cultural component. Not realizing that everything keeps the balance. We have 10 managers, in normal life these are top managers who lead the company, with us they are below the decision-making level.

This is really a very conflict situation, when we have to give a lot and, at the same time, very tightly control, so that the whole company is transparent to the last waiter. It's very hard. We run up and down stairs all the time and shovel dark corners.

What's in the dark corners?

They steal in dark corners. Now it is less, but there were quite crisis moments. At some point, we really felt that the whole level of workers in one of the places was closed from all sides by its own administrative structure - managers, the service of administrators. At the same time, we began to feel anxiety about the financial condition, and this required some intervention. We saw a system that we never imagined and in which almost all staff were involved from security guards to administrators, including bartenders and waiters.

Detective. And what did they do? ..

Well, it was decided in the simplest way - about 60% of the staff were fired. After that, in those places where it blew through, they put vents. In principle, theft in Russia is considered an integral part of public catering. On the one hand, this is still the Soviet reality ...

In Soviet reality, this was due to a shortage - food was a hard currency, but in Novorossiysk reality is this associated with a very high return?

The return is no more than that of a bank teller. This is due to the fact that people are actually the same. And the attitude towards catering workers remained, which slows down the recruitment of personnel. Unlike a Western young man, for whom working as a bartender, a waiter in his student years is normal, we have a psychological barrier, because the Soviet public catering taught that a bartender, head waiter, waiter is like a butcher, whom you need to have an acquaintance get what he stole, but cannot be respected. Well, most of the managers who are now in this area are students of the Soviet system.

But, in general, everything is going well, judging by the gigantomania on Tulskaya? There you are going to master the money that came from previous projects and develop to the fullest? How many meters are there in total?

Meters - 10,000. We do not "master the money" and do not invest there profit from other projects. This is an investment project, it has investors, and new ones appear. By investment, we usually mean that one big uncle is a lot of money ... And in our country, as in previous projects, part of the money is attracted in the market of small private investments, from $ 1000, part of the money, however, will be from a large institutional investor - investment company. It is an open joint stock company. 50% belongs to ZAO Project OGI, which is a management company acting as a general director. The rest of the shares are investments.

That is, now you can buy yourself a little Tula? ...

You can buy yourself a little Tula. One share costs $ 466, one percent - $ 46,690. The project as a whole is estimated at 4.5 million. Actually, the main task that we set ourselves is precisely to enter the private investment market. The problem is that a fairly large number of people have accumulated funds, small if we talk about large investments, but at the same time sufficient to ponder whether to invest in a business, in stocks, or buy real estate. We offer an alternative to real estate. We propose to invest in a very open large complex, or in a small one, which at the same time will bring a clear income for a long time.

But we have practically no market for legal private investment. How to make it legally open?

We are just struggling with the question of how to make it legal and transparent. It is formally legally open, but at the same time there are difficulties both in Russian legislation and a certain conflict between the private investment market and the investment market offered by investment companies, banks and others. The conflict lies in the fact that 80% of the money that a potential private investor has is not declared as income. At the same time, there is a certain loyalty in Russian legislation, logically correct, that the investments of the founders are not regarded as spent capital, which falls under the attention of the tax inspection, but on the contrary, it is believed that it falls from black to white. This does not apply to private investment.

Therefore, there is great resistance from the private investment market to show its real returns. Afraid. And we are just trying to work in such a way as to pull out from the shadows the money that a private investor invests as a contribution over time. It is difficult and difficult to explain, but there are some possibilities. For example, make the cost of one unit of sale as low as possible. On Tulskaya, where an expensive large project is, we have one share worth $ 450. We make it possible to get out of the declared amounts through small purchases. The most open project for small investments is a new project based on the PYROGI cafe.

It seems to us that the format that we proposed is extremely adequate to the Moscow market and the general situation, and is technologically advanced enough to replicate it. According to our estimates, about 30 establishments of this type can be opened in Moscow in the next year and a half, both in the center and in residential areas. Moreover, with a profitability sufficient to make it more interesting than putting money in a bank or buying an apartment.

After the pyramids, there is a lot of mistrust towards the collectors of small private investments, but all the same, this must change, it must be changed. It is necessary for the entire economy, not just us. We are trying to offer very direct contact with the business in which the money is being invested. We, unlike the pyramids, do not offer to invest in securities, we propose to invest directly in production.

Well, a lot of pyramid builders didn't mean to build pyramids either. When the profitability of projects becomes lower than the declared one, you inevitably become a pyramid builder ...

Therefore, we do not report any yield. We offer an open situation and open profitability. We are ready to prove that the profitability will not be lower than this one, and we prove it in business. But this is not a guaranteed return. Of course, this is a situation of trust. We guarantee that in the event of bankruptcy, investors will receive a priority right to a refund (despite the fact that we have 50% in each business) ...

This, of course, is noble ...

In fact - and expedient. For Tulskaya, for a large project, we offer additional bonuses. This is an unusual situation. For example, we guarantee 18% per annum at all times of launch at our own expense. We guarantee that if the launch estimate, which we propose as a basis for financial investment, turns out to be higher, no additional investment will be required from investors, and we will make them ourselves. We guarantee that the profitability of the complex during the entire period of its operation will not fall below 18%, while the estimated profitability is at least 70% per annum. This is on Tulskaya, smaller projects that get on their feet faster, there are no such bonuses.

Well, yes, all the same talk about the middle class ... Are you still offering the same environment to which you offered your social service, now you are also proposing to become an investor, to invest in the social space that it has lived in? ..

Well, more or less, something like that.

We are now undergoing a tax reform and its declared goal - legalization? Well, in general, for you as the general director of the OGI Project, what does this reform mean?

In terms of private investment, there is a positive 13% of income. This, perhaps, will give an impetus to the exit from the shadow of some money. Although the companies paid 35% of their salaries, they do. In general, those tax innovations that have passed, they do not make economic sense to me. Turnover taxes are the most painful for our business. This is sales tax, this is VAT, which along the chain greatly increase the cost of services and make it impossible for any catering establishment to work "in white". They simply cease to be profitable, the balance becomes negative, so you have to apply a wild number of optimization schemes.

In fact, the way the tax system is developing now - God bless it, let it develop, in a year or two, maybe some other follies will be removed. Most importantly, what is the problem with the state is not taxes, but what Itskovich likes to talk about ...

Deregulation?

Yeah. In fact, now the inspection and regulatory authorities are increasing the cost of launching a project by 20-50%. And the number of these authorities that control the business increases exactly once a month. And this is the biggest problem. And second, this applies mainly to the Moscow state - we need an open real estate market. The Moscow real estate market contains about 20% of the total number of premises that, in principle, can be sold. Everything else is unknown where, and no one knows at all what it is, or it is on a completely black market and the legal situation is such that these premises are practically illiquid. Moreover: walking through the city - and the feeling of a huge amount of square. It takes 3-4 months to find each room.

But with licensing and regulation, it seems, is the situation improving? .. All sorts of laws on deregulation have been adopted ...

No. On the one hand, a large number of licenses will be canceled, on the other hand, in Moscow it has worsened, because the trade permit was canceled and a unified register was introduced. Probably, some good thing was meant, but in reality - now I have to go through more instances, and the last one will be new, and permission will be given by a person who is at a higher level than the one who is now. Are the consequences clear?

Well, yes, I guess I guess ... It turns out that all this deregulation does not apply to Moscow?

Moscow today is structured in such a way that every action is immediately opposed. In many other cities, this is much easier. This is one of the main problems.

And what about crime?

There is no such problem in Moscow. In Moscow for two years, or even more, all the crime is doing business. There are groups that control a certain business, they have their own businessmen who are engaged in it, but this exists so separately from everything else, and does not overlap so much ... In Moscow, the market is very large, and yet the business is very strong. Although we are a young company, we are strong enough not to be afraid of it. Well, there are all sorts of hooligans in leather jackets, but this is all decided at the security level. We have a problem with the state, not with crime. It costs us a lot. Well, and what I have already said is to attract small money. Prove that this is a profitable investment and that money will not be stolen. The hardest thing is to declare that there is such a place ... And to make it open.

Mikhail Ryabchikov

then: art director of Project OGI; now: art director of the "Project OGI"

“It all started in September 1998 in the four-room apartment of Olshansky (Dmitry Olshansky - journalist, essayist. - Ed.) On the Patriarch's Ponds. Naturally, the idea to create a club in the apartment was Mitya Borisova. It was he who spoke to Olshansky's mother, the most famous playwright and wonderful woman, and she happily allowed us to do whatever we want. First of all, we wanted a separate entrance from the street. Three of us were breaking the wall: me, Borisov and Okhotin. There was no sledgehammer - they were wielding a 24-kg kettlebell. One held on to the pipe, the second to the first, and the third to the weight. I remember that all the local plumbers from the housing office came running to see what we were doing. And then Borisov and I concreted the floor in the apartment. We destroyed a lot of things: for example, we broke a bath and made a kitchen there. All this was illegal, and there was no question of any profitability at all. We poured vodka for 5 rubles. and traded in pies from the RSUH buffet. We also tried to introduce round-the-clock work. We greeted everyone who came to us at night: "Quiet, quiet, we don't make noise." Above us lived a police sergeant who periodically came down to deal with us, and behind the wall was a very mischievous aunt who was sure that we had set up a brothel. I remember a poetry evening, Timur Kibirov reads poetry, there are a lot of people in the hall, and here this aunt with a scandal is trying to break in. Of course, I didn't let her in. Nice educated people gathered, and here she was screaming. Ugly.

The place in Potapovsky Lane was found somehow very commonplace - through a realtor. They opened at the end of December, just before the New Year. It was very funny: there was no floor in the hall, there was only one concrete screed, and there were about a thousand people. They all left knee-deep in dust, and the screed seemed to have never happened. We wanted to make a real club: with a kitchen, concerts, a bookstore, a gallery. We decided that some things should be free - for example, telephone and drinking water. We had a phone with an open eight, and many came to us to call relatives and friends in other cities. True, then telephones began to be stolen, and the service had to be canceled. But the water is still free.

For some reason, during the first month of work, all the cooks left us, and I, along with the girl, who at that time was our deputy. chief accountant, fried meat for several days, boiled potatoes. At first I was also involved in security. Of course, we wanted to see normal faces in the club first of all. There was a wonderful story about a policeman. I don't remember what city he was from, but he studied in Moscow, and every evening he came to the club, changed in the toilet and went on in civilian clothes. He preferred cinema evenings: he loved cinema very much and was well versed in it. "

Dmitry Olshansky about how he turned his family apartment into a club

Dmitry Olshansky

then: student of the Russian State University for the Humanities. the owner of the apartment where the first "OGI" was located; now: publicist, editor-in-chief of the online magazine "Russian Life" (tentatively launched in August)

“The story was very simple: I lived in that apartment since childhood. Let's not draw attention to a specific address - let's just say that it was Trekhprudny Lane. We lived there, and then it somehow happened that first the parents moved out of there, and then I did. There was an idea to somehow successfully hand it over, but the 1998 crisis intervened. I was then friends with Borisov, and he once told me: “I have a brilliant idea that will win everyone! We need to make a pub. But not such a pub as everywhere else, but another - with a bookstore, with poetry reading, with exhibitions, with everything in the world! Such is the art pub! " Of course, I said that it was absolutely brilliant, but Borisov immediately admitted that there is a problem: he does not understand where to do it. And I said, "Come with me." It was funny for me, first of all, that the place where you lived for a long time completely changes its specialization: for example, in the room where you slept before, there is a concert today. Of course, in this whole story, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Everybody was offended at me from all sides: my relatives wanted a rent, neighbors wanted silence, guests wanted to have fun, and the owners of OGI - somehow minimize costs. And the last one was always me. On the other hand, I was nineteen years old. And this is such an age when you have to make what is called funny mistakes, plunge into some stories, noisy and unpredictable, and turn out to be a brothel from the point of view of the Criminal Code. As the owner of the establishment, I was credited at the bar extensively and free of charge, the result of which was that I never fell as much as that winter.

Some fights happened from time to time. For example, the artist Dmitry Pimenov, who was accused of attempting to blow up on Manezhnaya Square, came and was beaten. I also remember how some bad people pestered the beautiful Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein, and he seemed to hit them in the face. However, fights are an indispensable part of an intelligent discourse. In general, all this migrated from the Russian State Humanitarian University, where literary seminars were held in the mid-1990s. Poets Gandlevsky, Aisenberg, Kibirov organized their literary circles there. And, of course, I went there and looked at all of them, and they were the absolute heroes of my childhood. And after that all these great literary authorities could be met without any problems in "OGI". I remember how in "O.G.I." met Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. He just published his novel Live in Moscow, which I really liked. And I tell him: here, they say, Dmitry Sanych, it would be nice if you were given some important prize for this novel. And Prigov looked at me so affectionately and said: "Now you will grow up and give me all the awards." And so I grew up, and now I am on the jury of the National Bestseller award, and I will present it, but Prigov is not.

But the most important thing for me, of course, was that in O.G.I. it has always been easy and pleasant to meet girls at the Patriarch's. I could always trump that this is my apartment. No, though. There is a more important thing. I never went to the concerts of "Civil Defense", because not without reason I thought that there would be a fight. But I was at Letov's concert at OGI.

Mitya Borisov on fights, machine gunners and meetings with the beautiful

Mitya Borisov

then: partner of Dmitry Itskovich in the production group "Y", which was involved in concerts of "Leningrad" and "Auktsion"; now: restaurateur, co-owner of Jean-Jacob, John Donnov, Bontempi on Nikitsky and Shardama

“I will not tell the official version - everyone has listened to it a hundred million times. Misha Aisenberg, for example, believes that the beginning of everything is "OGI" there was not even Olshansky's apartment on Patriarch's, but an evening at my house on Chaplygin. We called poets to read poetry, set the table and all that. And then it became clear that such gatherings needed a place. Of course, there were a million stories. And more and more alcoholics, such a dovlatovism. I remember how, for my birthday, they brewed a monstrously deadly 70% fruit drink, in which there was no alcohol. And at some point four submachine gunners came. Ryabchikov was not taken aback and brought them a 200-gram glass of Morsik with ice. They drank - and in ten minutes they were ready to give up their machines. And then they went somewhere further - for women, probably. The problem was that the whole Moscow company drank the same morsik. And it was the worst drinking binge in the history of mankind. There were fights, of course. Not that evening, but later the artist Gor Chahal, for example, beat some guys. I don’t remember for what - whether for some national affairs, or for stuttering, or for a girl - in short, exactly for what they are beating. And so there were no complaints about the Mountain. Since then, I have been adhering to a very correct tactic: m ... Dacians are not allowed in the institution.

If you remember the first "OGI" on the Patriarch's, it is important to note: the apartment is an apartment, but we have there - for a minute - there was an exhibition of Vladimir Yakovlev from private collections! That is, on the one hand - squat, punks, music, drunkenness, and on the other hand - the level of programs was the best in Moscow at that time. Even Monastyrsky, who never went anywhere in his life and never took part in anything, told Liza Plavinskaya that "OGI" - this is the only place where he is drawn. And later, in various memoirs "OGI" began to figure as an important Moscow place; I definitely met references from Dmitry Bykov and Semyon Faibisovich. Somewhere there is even kept the "Book of Writers' Reviews", which we kept for the first two months in "OGI".

Closing of the "Project OGI" I do not consider it a tragedy. Quite the opposite: it's good when projects are closed and new ones appear. I am generally against archiving life, especially my own. Because it's all fleeting: some kind of successful evening of poetry or a meeting of ten people at the table with a drink. How do you fix it? What kind of film? "

Dmitry Itskovich about the first concerts of Leningrad and Khodorkovsky's visits

Dmitry Itskovich

then: founder O.G.I. (United Humanitarian Publishing House); now: Chairman of the editorial board of Polit.ru

"It all started with the fact that we founded such a group" Y ", named so partly in honor of a man, our friend Shurik, who once publicly crumpled (well, that is," Operation "Y" and other Shurik's adventures "), partly in honor of the group "Auktsion", which we actively helped then. I remember staging a big concert in the Palace of Culture. Gorbunov, where the Leningrad group is to perform for the first time. Everything was going well until Igor Vdovin (the first soloist of Leningrad. - Ed.) Showed claustrophobia: he flatly refused to come to Moscow. I remember we were terribly worried about what to do, how to be, and I even went to consult with psychiatrist Yuri Freidin, executor of Osip Mandelstam's widow. He told me that it was useless: there is not only claustrophobia, but also narcissism, and if you start persuading Igor, he will hang his legs, and then you will definitely have to mess with him like a child. In short, Seryozha Shnurov first came out to sing for Vdovin that evening, and Lenya Fedorov helped him. And then we went to the apartment on Patriarch's, actually the first place of the "Project". "Bullet" sounded there almost all the time. About the "Project OGI" in Potapovsky I only remember that it was always fun and drunk there - every day. Everyone came to us then! Even Khodorkovsky visited once or twice: he ate hot sandwiches with cheese and drank Georgian wine from a faceted glass.

This is for you "Project OGI" a memory of youth, but for me it is not a memory of life, but life. This is not only the premises of the former carpentry on Potapovsky, but a solid ideology that carries conflict and energy. It is the sum of people, the prototype of offline social networks. You can't put that in a suitcase. But if you look at the matter soberly, then, of course, you can save the "Project OGI". The name generally belongs to me - I can demand it back at any time. But let's be honest: do you really think you need it? "

Nika Borisov on daiquiri, crooks and currency Mountain Chakhala

Nika Borisov

then: student; now: manager of the restaurant "Kvartira 44"

"In the first" O.G.I. " some Negro sold discs, can not remember his name. There was also a small bar where there were sandwiches with ham, cheese, port, Baltika beer and vodka. I worked as a bartender for a while. When the beer ran out, I bought it in the passage for seven rubles, put some kind of extra charge from the bulldozer. In general, it was difficult to call it a business. When everyone left, we locked alcohol in some kind of chest with a padlock. Once such a madame came in a fur coat and asked me for a double daiquiri without ice, and we didn't even know what a daiquiri was. Gor Chahal came there, and I decided that he was German, because he asked to change one hundred marks.

Then we found a room on Chistye Prudy, where everything was already more or less grown-up, with a kitchen and a bar. It was cool - that the chefs eat, that the food is served on plates. At the opening, of course, everyone was playing tricks. It got to the point that someone was taking vodka for Borisov all the time from the bar, I asked: "Who are you?" He says: "Who are you?" I say: "And I am Borisov." The man got embarrassed and ran away. It is clear that this was the first experience on which everyone learned everything in general - how to do accounting, and something else. "

Alexey Zimin about the filthiness of Tyrolean pork

Alexey Zimin

then: chief editor of GQ magazine; now: editor-in-chief of the magazine "Afisha-Food"

"I spent on" OGI " Potapovsky is three years old, and therefore I can responsibly assert that nothing more disgusting than the Tyrolean pork and pickles there existed in nature. And it is unlikely to appear. It is clear that "O.G.I." was not a gastronomic place, but for me it was not a cultural center either. It seems that I have not been to any poetry reading, and I also missed all the concerts of the "Volkov-Trio". But he did not miss a single glass, so the memories of "OGI" Is a sentimental gray haze in which the faces of my living and dead friends flicker. Misha Ryabchikov takes out the guards "O.G.I." to the war against the "Chinese pilot"; Borisov, who has discovered the White Russian cocktail, is dancing on the bar. And if you start thinking about all this, for some reason you immediately want a beer. And the second youth. "

Maxim Semelyak about why "OGI" revolutionized club life

Maxim Semelyak

then: musical critic; now: editor-in-chief of "The Prime Russian Magazine"

“At one time I loved this place very much, and, of course, I am sorry that it is closed. At the same time, I think that Project OGI, like all really good clubs, is a landmark not so much in space as in time. "Project OGI" made a certain revolution in Moscow. It used to be somehow taken for granted that a successful club should be more or less associated with fashion, sex and drugs. "Project OGI" it was about neither one nor the other, nor the third (there were, of course, some exceptions, but they only confirmed the rule). Nevertheless, he managed to become the most lively place in Moscow in the early years of the new millennium. This place was based on three things: on philology (understood in a broad sense, because it is difficult, whatever one may say, to recognize as food itself, this is exactly what philology is), on rare in those (and in the present) times of the European atmosphere and vodka (with free drink). A lot of things can be remembered funny (from concerts to get-togethers), but briefly - in the first years of existence in Potapovsky "Project OGI" gave a feeling of incredible freedom from everything in general. Including from such burdensome things as fashion, sex and drugs. "

Nikolay Prorokov about how the "Ship" group fell asleep on stage during their own concert

Nikolay Proporokov

then: musician of the "Ship" group; now: musician, artist

“We performed in“ OGI ” more often than anywhere else - but nothing special comes to mind. For example, "Chinese Pilot" or "The Third Way" - yes, it is full of stories, chilling blood, but here somehow everything is exactly: I came, played, drank, I don't remember anything. Unless Ilya Voznesensky and I, also a member of our VIA, once fell asleep on stage during a concert. And from the cultural one I only remember shooting a video with Lloyd Kaufman for the song "Wildman". He had the idea to shoot something with the participation of local musicians. I remember that he was not very sober, and this Kaufman annoyed me, he constantly climbed on the stage, interfered with, I was trying to fill his face all the time, but it didn't come to that. "

Autumn, cement, beginning

Moscow, autumn 1998, Trekhprudny lane near Patriarshiye ponds. Petya Pasternak, Mitya Borisov and Nikolka Okhotin get out of the loaf that has arrived, unloading bags of cement. Petya is a 40-year-old artist and club designer, who by this time had already managed to make "Crisis of the Genre", "Propaganda", "Vermel" and other establishments. Mitya is 21 years old, he is producing the "AuktsYon" group. Nikolka, 26, is a film critic who lost his job after the pre-crisis closure of the Vechernyaya Moskva magazine (a prototype of the current Afisha). They have known each other all their lives, and it is not easy to determine whether they are relatives, colleagues, classmates, or children and grandchildren of unbeaten dissidents.

They carry cement to the ground floor apartment. In the hallway on a bench sits the owner of the apartment, Mitya Olshansky, a journalist from the same Vechernyaya Moskvy, drinking Coca-Cola and leafing through a magazine. In the next room, the artist Alena Romanova is busy with hollow human figures made of iron nets, right there Misha Ryabchikov, a former classmate of Borisov, is tearing pieces of wallpaper off the wall with a chisel; he is helped by Motya Chepaitis - the future seller of the bookstore and its future director, and Lenya Fedorov - not the one who "AuktsYon", but the one who will then meet the visitors of the "Project OGI" club for ten years. with the words: "We have a concert today."

The official history of the club's origins is perfected to the details - the financial crisis is to blame. Someone lost their job and finally could do not what they need, but what they want; someone, as another founder of the project - the owner of the publishing house "OGI" and Borisov's partner in the production group "Y" Dmitry Itskovich, saw the creation of the club as an opportunity for anti-crisis development. There is even a version that the club was created solely to promote the unknown group "Leningrad", whose first appearance in Moscow really happened shortly after the club was opened. But all these options are not so important: the coincidence of circumstances brought together several people who opened the club, which has become a significant fact of Moscow cultural life.

Growth and split

The history of the "Project OGI" there are two parallel lines of development - commercial and cultural. It soon became clear that the club's visitors are not just friends and acquaintances - they are the audience. Such a large audience. Which you can drink, which you can sell books, sell music, and further down the list. "Project OGI", the initial concept of which was briefly reduced to the fact that the humanitarian project should acquire its own business units for self-financing and to "strengthen its signal", very soon, through the efforts of the same people, together with Alexey who joined them Kabanov became just a commercial holding. Management company - "Project OGI" , holding president - Dmitry Itskovich, general director - Alexey Kabanov, general producer - Dmitry Borisov. A holding that possessed countless clones and sub-companies: the Pirogi chain, the OGI Street restaurant, a record label, a publishing house, bookstores, etc.

The ending of this story is not so well known. "Empire OGI" lasted five years and collapsed in 2003. The holding collapsed due to the financial crisis, but not all-Russian, but intra-corporate. The monstrously fast growth, inept financial management and swing for a project, investments in which exceeded the total value of the entire company (cultural multiplex "Fabrika"), led the company to collapse: all the founding fathers ended up in different parts of the collapsed holding or created their own companies, and from the management company was left with only the "umbrella brand": "Project OGI" ...

The owners of each part of the former empire have long been different. Borisov and new partners have created his own restaurant chain, which includes the clubs "Apsha", "Mayak", two "Jean-Jacques" and two "Apartments 44". Itskovich is engaged in the publishing house "OGI", the Internet edition "Polit.Ru", produces several clubs. Kabanov, who quite unfairly turned out to be responsible for all the company's mistakes, after the unsuccessful launch of the Platform club in St. Petersburg disappeared from the club horizon.

What was it?

Club "Project OGI" still exists almost in its original form, with an unchanged program format: the same Psoy Korolenko, Lenya Fedorov and VolkovTrio, Picasso's Children, Pakava It, The tiger lillies, Les Hurlements de Leo, but with a changed audience - other people are already going to the same artists. There is still art director Misha Ryabchikov (the only one of the founding fathers left in the club), and Lenya Fyodorov is still waiting for you at the entrance. There is still a bookstore, and you still have to wait three hours for beer. But something has changed. In the announcement of the celebration of its tenth anniversary "Project OGI" I found words that quite accurately describe the changes that have taken place: “We invite all our friends and acquaintances with whom we had fun at the end of the 90s and all the 2000s, to celebrate this past time the old fashioned way, when the main thing is not arugula in a salad or the cost of whiskey, but the presence of booze and genuine drinking companions around. "

Time has passed, and with it the attitude to culture and communication that developed in the late 90s and early 2000s evaporated. It left not only from the "Project OGI", it disappeared in Moscow as a whole and among the audience for which the club was created - among the Europeanizing youth, among the intelligentsia, journalists, producers, writers, musicians.

“When the main thing is not arugula in a salad or the cost of whiskey, but the presence of booze and genuine drinking companions around” - this is said correctly, but this is only part of the truth. In the "Project O.G.I." the main thing was not drink or communication, but information. By and large, "Project OGI" was a media project: the club was a space of monstrous information saturation, and this information was in everything: and in the prices of drinks; and in the people who came there; and in what these people did and said; and in books that were bought and read right there; and in the sounding new music; and in an abundant literary program that is relevant to Muscovites in the 2000s. Conversation and drinking were the air with which messages penetrated into people's minds more efficiently in 2000s than from a computer screen.

The OGI Project as a media, as a cultural phenomenon gave rise to many important projects for its time. The clearest of them is the club's poetry series, which published authors from Kibirov, Eisenberg and Kenzheev to Kirill Medvedev, Maria Stepanova, Elena Fanailova, Evgenia Lavut and Dmitry Vodennikov. The poet in "O.G.I." acquired some other social life. He went beyond the narrow literary get-together into the general cultural circle. Today, a poet in a glossy magazine is already the norm, and club poetry readings have turned, in fact, into a background, non-binding event. But then they were a novelty for both the listener and the poet, and were perceived with genuine interest not in a public figure, but in the word.

In the same way, the book + coffee format has become the norm today that every self-respecting book supermarket strives to acquire a coffee shop. But it was "OGI" became the first such bookstore in Moscow. It was an extremely successful project to popularize the book, to turn it into a fashionable item. The bookstore in the club was sort of a book review page. Readers, including critics, learned about new books by discovering them on the shelves at OGI. However, the books were selling very well, which cannot be said about the current situation: in one of the clones of Project OGI, Bilingwe, the bookstore was closed due to its lack of demand.

How to assess the impact of the "OGI Project" on the Moscow cultural and intellectual landscape? Was "O.G.I." just a platform that for a short time gathered the main intellectual forces in a single space; or just a project that generated cultural initiative, formed a certain lifestyle and promoted its concepts?

It can be stated that the "OGI Project" did not take place as a cultural institution. Over time, the club and its clones lost the status of a significant cultural platform, what was happening there was no longer perceived in an informational key. Rather, "Project OGI" is a time-limited phenomenon, a monument to the possible development of Moscow's cultural and intellectual life. The path we did not take. But some echoes of this phenomenon still appear.

Allies and followers

Parallel to the "Project OGI" another project developed - the PG group (consisting of Ilya Falkovsky, Alexei Katalkin and Alexander Dolphin) with a similar crisis genesis (well described by Dolphin in his memoirs) and similar incarnations: the late PushkinG club, a music festival, a magazine and a website. Falkovsky was the first director of an ogish bookstore from the time of Tryokhprudny, Dolphin was one of the first poets to read in the club. More recently, the PG group, which over the years has been more and more close to contemporary art, received the Kandinsky Prize as the main media project of the year.

The club poetic series was actually continued under the auspices of the Apshu club in the New Publishing House. (Its founder was the editor-in-chief of the publishing house "OGI" Evgeny Permyakov.) There is also an even less noticeable influence of the "Project OGI" to today's cultural reality - these are former sellers of ogish bookstores, who today are engaged in cultural management, bookselling, journalism, art and much more. The bookselling companies Burrows and Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, which distribute intellectual literature, employ almost exclusively people who have gone through the OGI Project, but this is not the only example. Ogishniks who have received a certain humanitarian impulse are working everywhere today. Ex-PR director of the club Karina Kabanova is promoting the "Paper Soldier" by German Jr. One former bookseller, Tanya Ryabukhina, oversees the fair's children's program Non \\ Fiction; another - Varya Babitskaya - editor of the "Literature" department at OPENSPACE.RU... Here are some other former booksellers: Vanya Bolshakov - designer of the "Big City" and several book series; Ira Roldugina - editor at Ren-TV... In the past, a commodity expert, Aleksey Dyachkov created the Korovaknigi publishing house. And this is only a small part of people with a great past.

Arugula ueber alles

But nevertheless, another way of development has become mainstream - not humanitarian, but commercial, flourishing on the fertile soil of domestic oil abundance, consumer rather than informational approach to culture. Both Jean-Jacques, Lighthouse and both Apartments 44 are good examples of this. They cultivate a lifestyle but lack any information. They are meaningfully empty. It was to these establishments that the audience of the great empire flowed. As soon as the economic crisis recedes, the need for cultural and information saturation decreases, and the values \u200b\u200btraditional for the new Moscow - show-off and consumption - win back their own.

This is the very "arugula in salad". The modern Moscow cultural business is based on the same principle. There are only more exhibitions, concerts, readings and books, but their existence is the existence of a product. Clubs and cultural events are today sold and served as entеrtainmentrather than as "information".

To hope that the current economic crisis will lead to some kind of cultural Renaissance is at least strange: there is nothing to revive, nothing to grow from. True, maybe right now someone will put on torn jeans again and go to carry cement. But such stories are doomed to failure or to the basement: it seems that in today's Moscow the present can only live in the underground - everything that comes to the surface dries up instantly.

The question of the financial collapse of the company and the dismemberment of the holding into independent units while maintaining a common brand used by all the fragments that have survived to this day is a fact that has never been publicly discussed by the former founders. And so far, as far as I know, it is not reflected in the media in any way. My version of events is forced to be "interpretative", but it is based on information known to me, again non-public, about the composition of shareholders of various parts of the holding, on the stories of the founders of the company, as well as on my personal observations while working in various parts of the holding.

On the dump it was, as always in the OGI, noisy, smoky, drunken, the waiters forgot about what you ordered, not having time to leave the table, but you did not come here to eat. Familiar faces floated out of the golden-gray gloom every now and then, new guests arrived. The founding fathers Nikolai Okhotin and Mikhail Ryabchikov, Lev Rubinstein and Sergey Gandlevsky, Evgeny Bunimovich and Dmitry Vodennikov, Anatoly Naiman and Evgenia Lavut took the stage. We read poetry, remembered, joked, sang. The evening was hosted by the permanent curators of the OGI literary programs Yuri Tsvetkov and Danil Fayzov.

Poet Alexander Makarov delighted everyone with an impromptu "Putin is not a thief", Marietta Chudakova delivered an energetic speech on the benefits of poetry. Mikhail Aizenberg, quoting Kibirov (“And we are sending three funny letters”), explained that these letters are OGI. The club borrowed its name from the United Humanitarian Publishing House, founded by Dmitry Itskovich.

The “OGI project” never differed in the level of service, cell phones in the basement are caught every other time, there is no WiFi, but all these inconveniences somehow miraculously did not irritate, but organically entered the atmosphere - the main thing that attracted this place. True, this atmosphere has changed in recent years.

The club was opened in 1998, for “insiders”, but almost immediately the circle of visitors expanded, and it immediately became unclear where all these people - mainly humanitarians, poets, publishers, artists - gathered earlier. In their own kitchens, of course. No wonder the very first OGI club appeared in a private apartment and only a year later moved to Potapovsky Lane.

In the last few years, this kitchen, homeliness and carelessness looked already archaic. And although the "Project OGI" is being closed for purely economic reasons - the landlords chose not to renew the lease for the current owners of the club - many visitors to the farewell concert admitted that they have not been to the club for the last five or six years; Indeed, after the heyday in the early 2000s, the popularity of the OIG began to decline - too many competitors appeared, more tasty and accurate. And yet it is not known whether they will go down in the history of literary Moscow. The club in Potapovsky has already entered.

Because he was the very first. The founders of the OGI realized that this is the place that the Moscow intelligentsia needs now. And it became so popular precisely because the environment that the club served had formed long before its appearance. The “OIG project” was not a cause, but a direct consequence of its existence.

And I was able to live for so long, because I was never content with the status of a tavern: the core magnetizing that very "unique atmosphere" was the bookstore of intellectual literature and the publishing house OGI, which published about 50 collections of contemporary poets during this time, many tastefully selected studies on philology, folklore, cultural history, children's and adult prose.

Concerts of groups "Leningrad", "VolkovTrio", Tiger Lillies, Alexei Khvostenko, Psoy Korolenko, presentation of the book by Mikhail Gronas (in the absence of the author), exhibitions, poetry readings - that's what all this was boiling around.

The time of the "Project OGI" has passed, there is nothing to argue about, especially since today the intelligentsia, tired of sitting in place for a long time, reached out from the clubs to the boulevards and squares, and it is still sad. Just because the project was alive.

On June 1, the Moscow club "Project OGI" will cease to exist. This establishment, which for 14 years consistently followed the concept of uniting booze and culture, was one of the most important places in Moscow in the early 2000s. ANNA NARINSKAYA says goodbye to the famous Moscow basement.

Culture public catering

Leaving the stage to read a poem at the evening of farewell to the OGI, the poet Lev Rubinstein looked around the crowded audience and said even without much sadness: yes, a lot of people gathered, but fewer than gathered here in the old days on the most ordinary Friday.

“On an ordinary Friday” in the early 2000s, in this basement, there really was nowhere for an apple to fall, cigarette smoke ate its eyes, a hopeless queue shifted at the inhospitable toilet, waiters stepped on the feet of the visitors crowding between tables, and those who were lucky enough to sit down spilled kneel vodka.

On such an ordinary Friday, here one could smoothly move from listening to poetry, for example, by Timur Kibirov, to dancing to, for example, the klezmers of Alik Kopyt - poets generally performed here and musicians played, but that was not the main thing. The main thing here was conversations.

One of the founders of the OGI Mitya Borisov, the son of the famous dissident, historian and publicist Vadim Borisov, once noticed that most of the places that he and his friends made (and the "OGI Project" - first in Trekhprudny, and then in Potapovsky lane - was their first establishment), "were such that our parents could behave as they did in their kitchens."

The OGI was, in principle, such an ideal Soviet intellectual kitchen in the absence of Soviet power, except that in those kitchens they fed better and certainly brewed the best coffee.

By adopting this kitchen style - talking about the important, plus drinking, plus songs and dances, plus gossip - OGI ensured the continuity of generations of Moscow bohemia. By the way, for most of the foreigners who came there, the strongest impression was the incredible mix of ages. It was not just a place of peaceful coexistence of fathers and children - it was a place where they (as opposed to what often happens in home life) were in a constant conversation that was interesting for both, and in general for everyone.

Here one could have recourse to high philosophical authorities (this was valued at the OGI) and recall Hannah Arendt, who considered the actual process of conversation, which shows how the world opens to each of the speakers, the highest value. Therefore, she explained, many of Plato's dialogues end without a definite conclusion, without result, the conversation itself, the discussion itself - this is the result.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a dark basement with a plowing toilet turned out to be a space where conversation took an almost ideal place. Not completely private, as in the very kitchen, where, by definition, everyone is their own, and therefore the word remains completely private. And God forbid, not officially public, where privacy - and therefore sincerity - is impossible by definition. The OGI gave words a way out into the world, but into a world that was by definition non-hostile.

And the decline in the popularity of OGI in recent years is rather connected not with the fact that the most charismatic of its creators have moved away from it, and not with the fact that the competition has become quite frenzied (in the once deserted Potapovsky Lane there are now several drinking establishments) ... The reason is that conversation as a process has become much less important to us. Because of the suffocating experience of "stability", which discouraged any kind of reflection, because of the triumph of social networks, which "sucked in" all the possibilities for expression, the list of reasons can be continued. As a self-consolation, we can say that today we are approaching civilized countries with their triumph of small talk - a relaxed, exciting conversation about trifles. And for this, I must admit, the OGI environment is not at all suitable. So that's enough, let's talk.