Poke This

The Pokémon Go craze has swept Russia,* despite not being technically available in the country. More than a million people are playing in Moscow, according to Bloomberg. The phenomenon has worried some officials, while others promise to accommodate what they believe to be a short-lived craze.

Russia’s Sberbank, the largest and most popular bank, which also includes the insurer Sberbank Life, is now offering insurance for Pokémon Go-related accidents – to cover players who fall into construction pits or get run over by cars as they traipse around Moscow totally engrossed in the battles they are waging on their phone screens.

Russia’s Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov has also indicated that authorities are taking the perils of Pokémon seriously, holding special classes on safe Pokémon hunts. “Our experts from the Fire Prevention Academy… are already holding master classes on safe Pokémon catching,” he said.

Moscow authorities announced they would launch an app similar to Pokémon Go (called Discover Moscow), in which tourists chase 3D historical figures like Yury Gagarin and Napoleon around the capital in order to take a selfie with them.

Meanwhile some police officers in St. Petersburg are facing disciplinary action after they handcuffed a young man who they thought was filming them with his smartphone, but who later explained that he was merely catching Pokémons with his device.

In Russian museums, reaction has been mixed to tourists wandering the historic halls with smartphones held up in front of their faces.

“Omnia transeunt et id quoque etiam transeat,”* wrote St. Petersburg’s Russian State Museum on its VKontakte page, by way of answering why it would not ban Pokémon hunts in its halls. The Hermitage Museum also said it would not ban Pokémon chasers “until someone crashes into an exhibit looking for Pokémons.”

At the Emmanuel Kant Museum in Kaliningrad, on the other hand, Director Sergei Yakimov said Pokémons would not be welcome.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “But we want to create a virtual Kant. He’ll appear in the museum to tell people that there is nothing more important than the starry sky overhead and the moral law within us.”

* In the game, players use a mobile device’s GPS capability to locate, capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player.