Evgeny Nikolaev – Skazka
Rather than clumsily attempting to sum up what this video part means to Evgeny in the context of his life being turned upside down by Russia’s senseless, devastating invasion of Ukraine, we’re just going to share the email he sent us about it… Here’s some much-needed context to the release of this unbelievable footage that almost never saw the light of day:
‘In 2021 we started filming a video, which would represent us as a part of Vans’ Russian team. The year passed, full of great times skating and working regular jobs, just like we always did. By autumn we thought that we were going to need more clips and decided to save the project till next year to continue filming a bit…
But after a typically long Russian winter, when we were ready to hit the streets again our government decided that it was better for us to stay silent and live in great fear as they invaded our good neighbours, Ukraine. It was really scary to see how the amount of people all across the country, who believed in our government’s lies…
Luckily, being brainwashed by skateboarding protected our minds from all of our government’s shit-talking, so we continued filming as much as we could, trying to work hard and focus on different things as we watched our society fall apart. In the end, it ended up being too much for our main filmer Andrey Vladimirov who could not handle all this and moved back to his beloved city to stay with his family.
By the end of 2022, due to some heavy reasons, many people, including myself, decided to try to leave the country. I’m happy that I succeded on my second attempt.
These are all my clips from this project that ended up marinating on Andrey’s hard disk once he no longer had the time nor the desire to edit them. In the end, I did the editing myself, which was an experience that I really enjoyed, but can’t say that I’m a master in this domain.
It took a really long time and I hope you will enjoy watching these moments when we could still skate together.
Big thanks to Kirill Korobkov, Kostya Belozerov, Pasha Kovalenko, Leo Lukin, Max Shirokikh and Marat Delyanov.
– Evgeny’
