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Playlist: Julia Barton's Portfolio

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Stories from the faraway, the forgotten, the famous and strange.

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"Dallas," Your Pitiless Universe

From Julia Barton | 14:10

"Dallas" star Larry Hagman died on November 23rd, 2012. But the prime-time soap that made him famous as J.R. Ewing lives on. The original show aired from 1978-1991, and the cable network TNT has been filming a new series based on the next generation of Ewings to booze, buy and slut forth from Southfork Ranch. What is it about the program that makes it one of the best known in the world? Dallas native Julia Barton explores this American icon.

Myth_city_small Update 2 [11/23/2012]: Larry Hagman dies in Dallas in the midst of shooting the new tv series for TNT.

Update [7/8/2011] TNT just announced that it's commissioned a full "Dallas" sequel. Website: http://www.tnt.tv/series/dallas/

notes: this feature aired, in modified form, on PRI's Studio 360

Rennies

From Julia Barton | 05:00

Renaissance festivals are olden, but they're also getting old. Many of the velvet-costumed, jousting, and sword-wielding performers at these festivals are now pushing 50. What happens as they get older? Producer Julia Barton, the daughter of "Rennies" herself, visits a Ren Faire outside Dallas to find out.

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Rennies_small [Timing note: Scarborough Faire outside Dallas starts up again April 7, 2012]

A Hug on the Way Home

From Julia Barton | 05:10

When U.S. soldiers come back home on leave, they fly through a few central airports. For soldiers headed west of the Mississippi River, that airport is DFW. The USO recently greeted its millionth soldier coming through Dallas/Fort Worth. Many of those millions have been greeted by two women. Producer Julia Barton met them and has this story.

Hug_small When U.S. soldiers come back home on leave, they fly through a few central airports. For soldiers headed west of the Mississippi River, that airport is DFW. The USO recently greeted its millionth soldier coming through Dallas/Fort Worth. Many of those millions have been greeted by two women. Producer Julia Barton met them and has this story.

Uzbekistan: The Last Witness

From Julia Barton | 05:30

Human Rights Watch Researcher Steve Swerdlow spent two months in Uzbekistan in late 2010. During that time, he got a rare glimpse into this isolated, repressive country. Defense lawyers, torture victims and their relatives took great risks to tell Swerdlow accounts both horrible and absurd. In this report, produced by Julia Barton, we hear some of their stories.

Uzbekpic_small Human Rights Watch Researcher Steve Swerdlow spent two months in Uzbekistan in late 2010. During that time, he got a rare glimpse into this isolated, repressive country. Defense lawyers, torture victims and their relatives took great risks to tell Swerdlow accounts both horrible and absurd. In this report, produced by Julia Barton, we hear some of their stories.

Soviet Art in America

From Julia Barton | 10:51

Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union was in its last throes. A hardline Communist coup failed in August 1991, but officially the USSR still existed until December. As the empire crumbled, a huge cultural edifice dedicated to the arts crumbled with it. The Soviet art world—especially painting—was its own ecosystem, largely closed off from trends in the Western art world. Now, as Julia Barton tells us, the remains of that Soviet ecosystem have started showing up in some very surprising parts of the American heartland.

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Why does a country music megastar and all-American guy like Ronnie Dunn — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act, Brooks & Dunn — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story.

Twenty years ago, in the fall of 1991, the Soviet Union was being dismantled, and its highly managed art world vanished in a puff of smoke. Unchanged since Stalin's time, the government-run Artists Union practiced Socialist Realism as the official style, timid in theme and precise in execution. If you weren't a member of the Artists Union, tough luck — you couldn't even buy real paints. When the free market came in, the tables turned fast. For Western collectors, who had the money, dissident and underground art (Grisha Bruskin, Komar and Melamid) was hot; official art (Sergey Gerasimov, Nikolai Timkov) was not.

"We found a lot of paintings that were pulled out from under a bed," recalls Ray Johnson, a Minneapolis collector who went hunting for official art in the decaying empire. Johnson was emphatically not looking for Communist kitsch. "Maybe five to ten percent of the pieces were purely propaganda, or pieces that the government thought they could use to their advantage. But most of the work the artists did they did for themselves and remained in their studios, until people like myself came from all around the world to collect what was in the studios, as opposed to just what was presented by the museums."

Johnson assembled the largest private collection of Soviet-era paintings outside Russia, and founded the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis with a financial assist from his client Ronnie Dunn. Still, Dunn knows that his passion for Socialist Realism clashes with his image as Nashville royalty.

Pro-Putin, Anti-Putin

From Julia Barton | 04:13

Thousands of protesters gathered in the months before the re-election of Vladimir Putin as Russia's president. Putin’s supporters and detractors both have pop songs to sing about him. But oddly, Russia’s best-known pro-Putin and anti-Putin songs were written by the very same songwriter. Julia Barton spoke with him Moscow.

Img_2277_small Alexander Yellin sits in an expensive café in downtown Moscow. The 53-year-old lyricist is partly bald – what’s left of his graying hair is tied back in a pony-tail.

Yellin writes songs that others sing. Ten years ago, he bet a friend $200 that he could create a hit song in Russia on the cheap.

Yellin won the bet. His pop song “A Man Like Putin” became so huge that it’s been translated into English.

 

 

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Writing the Best Known Pro-Putin and Anti-Putin Songs

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Alexander Yellin (Photo: Julia Barton)

Alexander Yellin (Photo: Julia Barton)

Thousands of protesters plan to gather in Russia on Saturday to call for political reform. But Moscow will also host competing rallies, some in support of Russia’s current prime minister and top presidential candidate, Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s supporters and detractors both have pop songs to sing about him. But oddly, Russia’s best-known pro-Putin and anti-Putin songs were written by the very same songwriter.

Alexander Yellin sits in an expensive café in downtown Moscow. The 53-year-old lyricist is partly bald – what’s left of his graying hair is tied back in a pony-tail.

Yellin writes songs that others sing. Ten years ago, he bet a friend $200 that he could create a hit song in Russia on the cheap.

Yellin won the bet. His pop song “A Man Like Putin” became so huge that it’s been translated into English.

When “A Man Like Putin” came out, Putin had been president for two years. Yellin said his song reflected the country’s admiration for the man.

“At that moment, there was such euphoria that there was this new, young leader who’d move the country forward,” Yellin said. “The song was a bit ironic. It wasn’t opposed to Putin—it was written in a way to depict Putin as the ideal man, even the ideal husband for women.”

Yellin may have written “A Man Like Putin” as light satire, but it wasn’t taken that way. Vladimir Putin made it his anthem and even played it at rallies. Yellin, who’d been a dissident rocker in Soviet days, seemed a bit uncomfortable with the embrace.

But even just a few years ago, he told foreign journalists there was no point writing anti-Putin songs—no one would listen to them.

All that changed last September, when now-Prime Minister Putin announced he was running for president — again. A political opposition leader asked Alexander Yellin if he’d write a different kind of song now, one that reflected the country’s disgruntled mood.

Yellin came up with “Our Madhouse Votes for Putin”, which is from the viewpoint of a patient in a psychiatric ward. “Why is there a hole in my head, and in the budget?” he asks his doctor. “Why instead of tomorrow today is yesterday?

“It’s all so complicated!” the patient concludes. “It’s just too messed up. Our madhouse will vote for Putin, and with Putin we’ll be happy.”

Alexander Yellin said mental illness provides an obvious metaphor for the way Russians view their leaders.

“Schizophrenia seems to me inherent in Russians,” he said. “On the one hand, Russians don’t love those in power, but on the other, they just go along with everything that’s done in the political arena.”

Yellin and his group Rabfak—a Soviet acronym for “Workers’ College”—released the song in October and the video went viral.

Rabfak performed at protest rallies here in Moscow last December. A group of Russian linguists named “Our Madhouse Votes for Putin” the Russian phrase of the year. The last time Yellin won that honor was in 2002—for the phrase “A Man Like Putin.”

All told, Yellin said he made about $8,000 off “A Man Like Putin,” plus the $200 bet. He doesn’t regret writing the song; he even hopes it might get recorded again.

“This time,” he said, “its satirical nature might come through.”

Sochi 2014 Olympic Building Boom

From Julia Barton | 05:24

Russia's southern-most city of Sochi is gearing up to host the Winter Olympics in 2014. Russian president Vladimir Putin says hosting the Games is a long-time dream for his country, but many Sochi residents say Olympic construction has become a nightmare.

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Sochi 2014: Building Boom for Winter Olympics Leaves Some Behind

By Julia Barton March 26, 2012

Katya Davidenko sits with a group of students who study English at a college in the Russian resort city of Sochi. She said she’s excited for the day when thousands of athletes and spectators from around the world will descend on her hometown for the 2014 Winter Games.

“Before Olympic Games were announced, I felt like I will leave this city and go and live somewhere else,” Davidenko said. “But now, when I see what is happening here, I obviously will stay here.”

But not all the students share Davidenko’s enthusiasm. Diana Kozlova, who recently got married, said rents are going up quickly and she can’t afford to start a family.

“The local people can’t live here because life in Sochi has become very expensive,” she said.

Whether Sochi is getting better or worse as a result of the coming Olympics, one thing is certain — this once sleepy resort town will never be the same.

Almost every corner of Sochi now bears the marks of massive construction. New hotels and condos sprout from the hillsides. The Russian government is building new highways and some 30 miles of light rail. The construction requires multiple tunnels through solid rock.

Sochi’s facelift has officially cost the Russian government at least $10 billion, and state-controlled companies like Gazprom have spent billions more constructing hotels and resorts in the area.

Russia has pledged that Sochi 2014 will be the greenest Olympics yet, but the environmental groups Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund have already pulled out of an agreement to monitor the construction. They say the government largely ignored their recommendations.

They’re especially concerned about unofficial dumps springing up in Sochi.

Tatiana Skyba lives in the hills above the new Olympic ice skating and hockey arenas. She says one night last April, she and her neighbors were awoken by a terrible noise. Their houses shook as if in an earthquake. It was a landslide.

Skyba said her house was knocked off its foundations. The city gave her and her neighbors some money to build new homes. But those houses have started sinking at strange angles. The ground is still moving, and residents now blame a large dump up the hill. They say trucks bring loads of concrete rubble there every day.

City officials say there’s no connection between the dump and the sinking of nearby homes. Still, Sochi has seen an increase in landslides since Olympic construction began.

Meanwhile, Skyba and her neighbors are stuck in their tilted houses above the gleaming Olympic park.

“We have this joke among us on the street,” Skyba said. “By the time the Olympics start, we won’t have to buy tickets. We’ll have already slid down there.”

At least Skyba still lives in her old neighborhood. About a thousand Sochi families have had to move because of the Olympics. That number of evictions is small compared with other places that have hosted recent “mega sports events.” The UN Human Rights Council found that the 2008 Beijing Olympics prompted at least 6,000 evictions.

In a statement, the International Olympic Committee said that it takes the issue of relocation very seriously.

“A certain number of relocations have been necessary for the construction of Olympic venues, and Sochi 2014 and the government has assured us that people are being fairly compensated in line with Russian law,” the IOC said.

While the IOC said it has met with some of the displaced families in Sochi, it hasn’t spoken with one man there who’s been in a standoff with Russian authorities.

Aleksei Kravets stands in front of his home on the Black Sea in Adler. (Photo: Julia Barton)

Alexei Kravets stands in front of his home on the Black Sea in Adler. (Photo: Julia Barton)

Alexei Kravets has been living in one room of his house on the Black Sea coast. He’s been without water, gas or electricity for five months, since the city demolished the rest of his neighborhood to make way for a new rail yard. His cinderblock house is surrounded by mud and rubble, and he’s painted slogans like “IOC help!” and “SOS!” in red on all the windows.

“In the evening, a backhoe comes up to the house and starts to scrape the concrete just to pressure me psychologically,” Kravets said. “If I left the place for, like, 15 minutes, they’d tear it down right away.”

Kravets said the backhoes have damaged the walls and he’s afraid the house could collapse on him. He’s refused the government’s offer of an apartment three miles from the coast. He’s a lawyer, and he’s appealed to Russian and European courts for help, but has gotten no ruling.

“We never asked anything from the state,” Kravets said. “We built the house all by ourselves, and now the state is taking it away from us.”

Kravets pulled out a small laptop and showed a video he made. Recently he put some of his belongings into a metal storage unit behind his house to save them from demolition. Construction workers immediately showed up with a crane to take the unit away.

“Where do you work?” Kravets demanded of the supervisor in the video. “Where are your orders to remove my things?”

“We are building Olympic facilities,” the man said. Kravets again asked for court papers, but the man brushed him off.

“It’s a government decision,” the man said.

The Forgotten Circassians

From Julia Barton | 04:48

As far as he knows, Zack Barsik is the first Circassian born in the US. He grew up in Passaic County, New Jersey, where Barsik’s father emigrated from Jordan in the 1950s. Barsik’s dad joined a few Circassians there who were refugees from the Soviet Union. Many more Circassians have arrived since then, mostly from the diaspora in the Middle East. Now Circassians in the US estimate their numbers at about 5,000.

Barsik spent his New Jersey childhood hearing about a place his family hasn’t lived for generations—the North Caucasus.

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The Circassians tribes of the North Caucasus were once a romantic subject for British and French writers. Alexandre Dumas and others were rapturous about Circassians’ tall sheepskin hats, their horsemanship and their code of honor; less so about the way Circassians sold their sons and daughters to Ottoman slave-traders. Still, the world had other things on its mind besides Circassians by 1864. That’s when the Russian Imperial Army made a final push to slaughter the war-like tribes of the Caucasus.

Some Circassians survived abroad, and May 21st is when their descendants commemorate what they say is a forgotten genocide. Their voices have gotten louder as Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi—a city on the Black Sea that Circassians such as Zack Barsik say should be long to them.

As far as he knows, Barsik is the first Circassian born in the US. He grew up in Passaic County, New Jersey, where Barsik’s father emigrated from Jordan in the 1950s. Barsik’s dad joined a few Circassians there who were refugees from the Soviet Union. Many more Circassians have arrived since then, mostly from the diaspora in the Middle East. Now Circassians in the US estimate their numbers at about 5,000.

Barsik spent his New Jersey childhood hearing about a place his family hasn’t lived for generations—the North Caucasus. He grew up speaking Adyghe, the Circassian language, and hearing stories, songs and poems from his grandparents as well as the Soviet refugees.

“Our history, a lot of it is based on oral history,” Barsik says. “And me constantly hearing these stories… we had a very rich exposure.”

Through those songs and stories, Barsik learned the importance of 1864 to Circassians. That’s when Tsarist forces killed thousands of Circassians in the mountains and forced others onto ships across the Black Sea. Historians say most of them died on the journey. Those who survived never saw their homeland again.

About five million Circassians now live around the world, but only 700,000 remain in the North Caucasus. Almost no Circassians live in Sochi, a city between the Caucasus and the Black Sea. That’s where Russia is spending billions of dollars to prepare for the Winter Olympics in 2014. Zack Barsik says when Russia won the Olympic bid, it galvanized the Circassian diaspora.

“Sochi was our capital, and we want to return,” he declares. “We want to have a country. Just like every other people on earth love to have a country, we want to have a country.”

Not surprisingly, Barsik and other Circassians haven’t made much progress persuading the Russian government to give up its prime, warm-coastal real estate. But the Circassian issue has become a surprising headache for Russians. Circassians are moderate Muslims—and they haven’t been a problem for the Russian state until recently, unlike other Muslim groups in the Caucasus such as Chechens. But now thousands of Circassians want to return from places like war-torn Syria. The Russian government isn’t sure how to respond, says Valery Dzutsyev, an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation.

“They see non-Russian immigration to the North Caucasus as a security threat,” he says. Dzutsyev added Circassians used to be isolated. But now with the Internet, they’re re-uniting.

“In the North Caucasus, the Circassian people became much more aware of their history in the past few years–and large part of this is attributed, I would say, to the influence of the diaspora,” Dzutsev says.

The diaspora in northern New Jersey remains active with cultural events and classes at places like Circassian Benevolent Association. One evening, Circassian youth there practiced a complicated wedding dance called the widj. The young men and women clasp arms in a tight line, then spin on a central axis.

Classes like this at the help transmit culture to a new generation. But even dedicated activists like Lisa Jarkasi say it’s not easy to keep the culture alive. The 29-year-old takes Circassian lessons via Skype from a tutor in Turkey. Adyghe is not related to any other language.

“It has 185 verb tenses,” Jarkasi says. “It is extremely complicated.”

Studying language helps her understand her identity, she says, but it only goes so far.

“For the longest time ever, I felt like I had something missing. And even til today, I still do. There’s a part of my heart that’s broken,” she says.

Jarkasi’s never been to the Caucasus. But she says her heart won’t be mended until Circassians have the right to live in the mountains of their ancestors. Short of that, Jarkassi will be among those unfurling the green Circassian flag at Russian embassies and consulates around the world on Monday. Zack Barsik admits that while he’s angry about Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Games are a rare chance to draw attention to his cause.

“We don’t want to be a footnote in history of a people that got completely decimated by the Russians and they got away with it,” he says. “And not only that, they went and celebrated the Sochi Olympics on their graves.”

Barsik is commemorating May 21st on the Black Sea, in Georgia—the only country in the world to recognize Russia’s treatment of Circassians as a genocide. Georgia has its own conflicts with Russia. Circassians say they don’t really care about the geopolitics. They’re just glad to have a friendly place to go in the Caucasus—even if it’s not home.

Russians Buckle Up

From Julia Barton | 04:48

A lot of people die on Russian roads. But things are getting better thanks to better enforcement and a clever public service ad campaign.

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When I traveled across Russia a dozen years ago, it was rare for anyone to wear a seat belt. In fact, drivers were insulted if you chose to buckle up as they sped between other cars.

Now the opposite seems to be true, at least in Moscow.

Vladimir Nagovitsyn, like many Moscow drivers, occasionally uses his car as an unlicensed taxi. He wears a seatbelt and he asks his passengers to do the same. He won’t take dangerous shortcuts, either.

“There’s no point and, at most, you gain five minutes,” he says. “In the end, you’ll just have more problems.”

The Russian police now heavily enforce traffic laws, he says, for everything from not buckling up to carrying a young child without a car seat.

“They’ll fine you,” Nagovitsyn says. “At the same time, these social ads are playing — they say you have to have a car seat.”

Promoting a positive message

Road safety ads are now a regular feature on Russian television. One shows a boy walking through a magical toy shop. The toys all point the way to the best gift of all, a car seat. The TV spot is highly produced, aimed at enticing children, but with a hint of seriousness at the end.

“Children must ride in car seats,” the voiceover says.

The organization behind this and similar public service announcements is Road Safety Russia. The group’s director, Natalia Agre, says ads alone won’t do the trick. She works closely with Russia’s Ministry of Transportation to coordinate their campaigns with changing laws — such as a hefty new fine for not using a child car seat.

“It’s about $115, which is almost the cost of the car seat,” Agre says. “We cannot give parents a chance not to use the seat.”

A lot of people die on Russian roads: more than 27,000 last year alone, according to Agre’s group. Although the country’s traffic fatality rate is far higher than in Europe or the US, things are improving rapidly. The per capita death rate on Russian roads has dropped by about a fifth since it peaked a decade ago, and that is against a backdrop of more Russians owning cars.

Agre credits the road safety campaign for saving a lot of lives. “It would be about 50,000 people during the last eight years,” she says.

A global leader

However Russians get the job done, their government’s push is welcome to others who are trying to put road safety higher on the world’s public health agenda.

“It’s been invaluable to have Russia as a leading country, both domestically — showing what can be done — and internationally, to try and get more international support for this issue,” says Avi Silverman of the FIA Foundation, a UK-based charity focused on driving issues. He recently attended a convention in New York that was timed to coincide with a UN resolution to make road safety a priority in 2015. Russia sponsored that resolution.

Natalia Agre sees Russia’s past failure to address road safety as an opportunity now. She has learned the hard way that fatalistic Russians do not respond to scare tactics — such as in her first ad, which showed a girl trapped in a car wreck that kills both parents. Now, Agre’s ads are relentlessly hip, upbeat, and positive.

One spot shows dancers wearing dark clothes emblazoned with reflective stripes. The goal is to encourage pedestrians to wear reflective gear so they will be visible to cars at night. What Agre is trying to do, she says, is change attitudes — to get Russians to look out for one another.

“We do not have to talk exactly about speeding. We do not have to talk about seat belts. We have to build a culture,” she says. “And this culture is supposed to be about people’s relationships, and their attitudes, and being proud of being Russians.” In other words, Agre wants to recast good driving as an essentially Russian trait, not something foreign to this country.

Moscow driver Vladimir Nagovitsyn admits he has seen things improve on Moscow roads over the last few years, but he points to another reason for the change.

“More people have been abroad,” he says. “They’re not violating the laws over there. You start to drive like they do.”

Birth in Russia

From Julia Barton | 04:53

The Russian government wants to improve its country's birthrate. One way to do that is to improve maternity care and reduce infant mortality. But new moms in Russia say the situation for them could be a lot better.

Img_4745_small The Russian government wants to improve its country's birthrate. One way to do that is to improve maternity care and reduce infant mortality. But new moms in Russia say the situation for them could be a lot better.