A visit to Russian “Larp-poem 1905” to do living history and dream of changing the past
Have you heard about the Russian revolution of 1905? Don’t be embarrassed if you haven’t, it’s not that well known, not even Russians talk much about it. Yet, it was an interesting and decisive time in Russian history and, as it turned out, a great theme for a larp. A larp with an impressive scale and ambition, a cavalcade of beautiful costumes, and highly complex mechanics.
The event was called “Игра-поэма 1905“, translated to ”Larp-poem 1905”, and was set up by a group that has done some of the world’s biggest larps. It is also one of few Russian groups with the capacity to inv1.4 foreign participants. We ended up being two Scandinavians at the game. Erik played Finnish-Swedish nationalist Konni Zilliacus, a historical character who was active in politics at this time and who has been described as a “Monseigneur cowboy”. Frida took the shape of Anja Sjö, a journalist with communist sympathies. They were in Saint Petersburg to support Russian revolutionar1es, undercover as a newspaper tycoon and a cultural reporter.
Life the Saint Petersburg Way
It was astounding to see at what rate the old Soviet era children’s camp, in the woods south of Moscow, was turned into a larp version of Saint Petersburg. There were lots of restaurants, bars, cafés, a casino, opium joints, hairdressers, hat makers, an opera/ballet house, an amateur theatre, photographers, telegraph and post station, and several newspapers. The hundred-headed game master (GM) team, together with the five hundred participants, managed to raise most of it in a day. It was a town where you could get a hair-do and a new hat, eat in restaurants, have tea in a café, see a theatre play in the evening, and much else – all for in-game money.
Not only did these options exist, but many were of remarkable quality. The restaurants and cafés were serving good food, cake and tea most of the day. Each newspaper was told to print two daily issues, which they did, apparently they had more than enough of material. The telegraph station gave the option to send letters and telegraphs to other players as well as to the GMs. From the station some twenty telephone lines spread out, leading to houses all over town. The players could thereby communicate over the phone, through an old fashioned switchboard in the telegraph station, operated by a person constantly on duty.
Perhaps the most impressive was the “Mariinsky theatre”. It had new ballets and operas each night, which were one to two hours long. The quality of these were almost as you would expect when going to a real opera house. It was way, way beyond any acts we’ve seen before at larps. The singers and dancers were professional or semi-professional, but had not all met before the game. They created the four evening shows in a week, starting with rehearsals on Monday and did the final act on Saturday. The music was playback but most of the singing, and of course the dancing, were original acts.
The game had a very well working economy. The fact that there were so many things to spend in-game money on meant that all players had good reasons to acquire and hold on to money. The bills and all kinds of paperwork – there was huge amounts of paperwork – were good looking. For one thing, everybody had their own passport, and you better hold on to it. After the first larp day there started to be inflation, a planned design feature from the GMs. While at first we hadn’t aondn’t e inflation,llMethod.apply(n,argumenta:n, opechgce cafés, a casst of spre of thre>Stylf spr one eatcplanneheirkateria there act called “
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