The last couple weeks have been rather eventful: May Day, Victory day, and the inauguration of a new president and Putin’s no less public shift to the Prime Minister’s office in the Russian white house.

May Day is a complicated holiday here; although most of the fanfare and state backing of the soviet years is long gone there are still sizable marches in most cities. Depending on the location they span the range from dissidence to pride. In Moscow, as I read, the massive march was backed by United Russia, the party in power (and by no means a socialist organization). In Petersburg the scattered opposition rallied to the March as a surrogate to the Marches of Dissidence that have been frequently and effectively suppressed in both capitals. I only caught the end of the Nevsky Prospekt procession; but even that was complete with slogan-wielding anarchists, Babushki holding portraits of Stalin, and the menacing march of the OMON special police trailing the parade.

Victory Day might be the most emotional and dramatic of the holidays owing to both the enormous significance WWII occupies in Russian history (particularly in Peter) and the Kremlin’s effort to rekindle the Soviet grandeur of earlier parades. The big story was the massive parade of Military vehicles in Moscow, the first of its kind in 15 years and seen by most as more than just a little saber rattling in the direction of the west, despite Putin’s insistence to the contrary. All the same, most of the Russians I know reacted to all of this with more consternation and bewilderment than pride or awe before the power of the contemporary Russian armed forces. Soviet Nostalgia may be surging in parts of the country, but tanks on red square have a creepier and far more tangible significance than the sickle and hammer or even portraits of Stalin. Besides this, Muscovites are no doubt unhappy with the fact that the parade shut down the center of the city for the better part of a week with rehearsals, executions and now road repairs, which, by the way, are set to cost the city something like $40 million. In Petersburg we woke up early to see what sort of millitary parade was in the works, but were sort of disappointed in that respect. On account of our late arrival and the massive crowds, we didn’t see much more than the heads of some soldiers and the red tips of some rockets, but it’s safe to say there wasn’t anything near as grand as the Moscow parade. Later in the day we watched the city’s veterans and residents during the blockade march along Nevsky, ordinals clattering all about. A far more worthy spectacle.

The inauguration of Dimitri Medvedev seemed to go off without a hitch. I watched a bit of the ceremony on tape a couple days later and was mostly struck by the tradition and rigor of the whole thing, something like a coronation, from the incredible gilded hall to the nearly goose stepping constitution bearers and the presence of the Orthodox Patriarch. The tsarist atmosphere was only set off by Medvedev’s rather awkward entrance and walk down the red carpet; he’s really such a little man. After his rather run of the mill speech he went to one of the Kremlin cathedrals and kissed an icon, the first time such a thing has happened, as I understand. The following week has been packed with appointments of ministers and rearrangement of government structures. I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the whole thing, but from overheard comments and the few things I’ve read most people are saying the arrangement of the new government shows that Power is moving to the new Prime Minister. Putin certainly hasn’t left the public eye, at any rate; I heard a statistic on Echo Moscow that in the weekend following the inauguration Putin appeared in the mass media two times as frequently as Medvedev.

But in Petersburg this is all kid stuff next to the main story. On Wednesday the Petersburg football club Zenit won the UEFA cup and the city went absolutely nuts. My flickr (assuming I ever catch up with my uploads) should give you something of an idea about this. In my experience of the impromptu holiday everything was, comparably, peaceful. I witnessed minimal destruction and I didn’t see any fights, quite the opposite: there was a lot of hugging and dancing. (Fabrizio and I skipped maybe a kilometer down Nevsky singing “Ole, Ole”) Nevertheless there have been reports of violence and the like all around the city, continuing even through the weekend. A couple of my friends got in a fight with some miscreants somewhere after 5 am, thankfully after I’d already set off for home.

By comparison, Russia’s victory last night over Canada in the Hockey world championship went over with out much fuss. I watched the match get tied up in the final dramatic minutes but then had to run out to a film before it entered overtime. Later when we left the movie there were some cars honking about and waving flags, and some complete idiot trying to ride on top of a speeding land rover, but otherwise Nevsky was empty.

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A week or so has passed since writing the above (lazy internets) and in the meantime I’ll add two more things. The other day I was walking around the center, looking for a good place to sit and finally finish Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow – Petushki, when I happened across a crowd of orthodox clergy and worshipers outside of the Church on the Spilled blood (built over the spot where Aleksandr II was assasinated). The strange thing was that the atmosphere was more like a political protest than a religious service. Everyone was waving strange flags colored black, yellow and white, others had signs cryptically reading “Black gothic, Sacred Rus,” still others were carrying pictures of Tsars as if they were icons (Nicholas II is in fact a canonized saint). An old man was holding an icon and the declaration to the Russian people that they’ve “forgotten that they are Russian.” There were even police standing around. The service was difficult to understand, but what I did catch was all about forgiveness for the sins of the sacred slavic peoples. I later found out that the black/yellow/white flag is the Tsar’s standard, making the group some kind of monarchist orthodox group.

On Wednesday I was roaming about the Russian Museum (paying tribute to the Filonov’s there) when one of my friends called to let me know that there was some kind of nuclear accident just south of the city. He was running around pharmacies trying to buy some iodine, which was bought up soon after rumors of the accident spread. I didn’t quite know how to react, the museum was nice, the day outside was beautiful, and everyone around me was behaving incredibly normal for such a “crisis.” At any rate, thinking about Chernobyl, of course, I decided to at least take a step outside and find out what was going on. On my crummy portable radio I caught enough through the static to here that there was nothing going on, just spurious rumors spread by the help of the internet and SMS. Later at home I watched enough news to confirm the rumors were false, thought a bit about White Noise, and then quite calmly went out to watch the Man U. – Chelsea final. It’s now pretty safe to say that nothing has happened, but it’s rather interesting to think about how people reacted. In the first place, few Russians were willing to believe the news reports, but they also didn’t believe the rumors. Most sort of shrugged and said there was some kind of explosion, but no crisis, although maybe, all the same, it might be a good idea to take a nice healthy dose of iodine. For one of the teachers at Smolny, the real refutation came from the complete absence of the event in the international news media.