Meet The Russian Kids Who Take The World’s Riskiest Photos
Photo Credit: Ivan Kuznetsov
” Walking briskly, Ivan Kuznetsov leads Kirill Vselensky and Vasilisa Denisova out into the courtyard of a 30-story building in Moscow’s business district. He turns and perches alertly on his heels, anxiously looking for a security guard like a bird watches for a garden cat. There are none, as far as Ivan can tell, and he continues to the entrance of the underground parking garage and down a sloping driveway. He’s searching for a way to the building’s roof — then a way to get off it.
Past a few parked cars, the trio head for a service door. It’s locked, but with one solid shoulder slam it flies open. Everyone is now inside the building. So far, so good. They’ve done this before.
Behind the service door are service escalators and stairways and weary workers who pay no attention to the three young people, who find an elevator and ride it as far as it goes, to the 16th floor. They exit and quickly climb 14 flights of stairs. They are now where they wanted to be, where they aren’t supposed to be — on the roof, taking in the illegal view of Moscow’s old and new city stretching out before them. Skyscrapers loom imperiously, and the Moskva river winds its course through the heart of the city.
Ivan, a slim 19-year-old student with dark hair and an air of blissfully ignorant confidence, steps to the edge and peers down to the street below. “One hundred meters,” he says, eyeballing the distance to the ground.
He spies a needle-like shard of metal jutting out from a parapet. With no safety harness nor net, no rope nor hesitation, he steps onto it. There’s just Ivan, a thin piece of metal and the sky.”
” Ivan, Kirill and Vasilisa are “roofers,” a loose-knit group of insanely non-acrophobic daredevils who scam and sneak their way to the tops of Russia’s highest buildings. Once they get up there, they perform death-defying tricks — hanging by their fingertips, standing on one leg — that they capture in photos and videos that frequently go viral, garnering multiple millions of YouTube views and widespread awe and disbelief at their vertiginous Instagram photos, a heap of which could lay claim to being among the most dangerous selfies ever taken.”
Rolling Stone profiles these crazy Russian thrill-seeking kids and we’ve touched on this subject before as a young Russian woman lost her life in an attempted “dangerous selfie” just two weeks ago .
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