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.

…

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.

So:

Zenit is playing in the UEFA championship; they are expected to win and all hell will probably break loose shortly thereafter. The team’s success apparently symbolize the country’s transformation from communism to capitalism. We watched the totally magical, if suspiciously high-scoring, victory (4-0) vs. Bayern in a packed sports bar with Dascha and Ljenja and I felt a little awkward about not screaming my guts out with every goal. But, I mean, i’m just not used to this kind of fanaticism.

Thursday was may day, which nowadays means all kinds of diverse things. In Moscow the Ruling Pary, United Russia, pretty much dominated the rally while in Petersburg Kasparov et. all made something of a dissident event of the thing. I was, rather unfortunately, indisposed in the morning and so didn’t make it out my front door and onto Nevsky until the very end, and this only thanks to Valerii, my neighbor, who woke me up at 11:30 insisting that the May Day march would be something of an essential experience in Russia. I snapped some crappy pictures of a woman with a Stalin picture and then, rather unsuccessfully, tried to get back to sleep.

Also on the holiday front, Friday is Victory Day (WWII) and I am definitely going to wake up early to catch the parade. This year the big hullabaloo has surrounded the Red Square demonstration which will feature heavy military equipment for the first time since the soviet era, but from what I understand there’ll likely be a similar display of tanks and rocket launchers along Nevsky. I’ve, of course, got some mixed and rather stomach turning feelings about all of this, Putin’s reassurances notwithstanding, but I’ll definitely show up for the spectacle. In Petersburg the holiday is particularly important owing to the city’s casualties during the 900 day axis siege.

On Friday Marina, Octavia and I made a small excursion to Vyborg on the Finnish border. Unfortunately we were disappointed by promises of crowds of drunk Finns, but the city was otherwise a rather nice place to walk around. Castles, strange parks, deserted and crumbling streets, and a whole lot of neat graffiti. We found a building from the 16th century, the ruins of something destroyed during world war two (probably) and a Kruschev-era five story monstrosity (“Kruschjeba” which combines the name and a word for slum) on one strangely quiet corner. Now that I’ve fixed the flat tire on my bike (acquired during an epic ride ’round the city) maybe I’ll make the next zagorod adventure to Pushkin or Pavlosk, something like 20km to the South. At any rate, the nice weather alongside slowly dawning realizations that my time here is draining away are kicking at my impulses to travel.

As I mentioned below, we’ve had an unprecedented streak of sunshine and heat, which ended, incidentally, today with some chilly temperatures and a quite decidedly overcast morning. The weather and the extended sunlight (we’re pushing past 10 o’clock) make a fellow want to do nothing more than take a walk, drink a beer, and read a book in some sort of park. Cases of the sun-crazies, on the other hand, are taking more and more of a toll.

Other than all that I’ve resumed my steady diet of pasta, I’m still listening to a whole lot of old Russian rock (send your hip music suggestions this way), and I’m trying to scheme a plan for my trip about Europe this summer.

And in conclusion, I’ll just say that the BBC world news service just used the word “Testicles.” It was in reference to today’s democratic primaries….

…that we’re on our 8th straight day of beautiful sunlight (lasting until 9:30 pm) and uncannily tolerable temperatures and we’re getting a little more unhinged every day. According to most forcasts there’s no end in sight.

So anyways, I’m collecting evidence, annecdotal, for my theory that just like seasonal depression hammers away something fierce in the winter of the northern climes (what with the count-em-on-your-hand hours of daylight and all), too much sunlight has a similarly deranging effect. And at such a low angle, most of the time. Right now the collection consists of stories relating to my delerious and wildly unsuccesful attempt to buy jeans, some kind of mad guy waving a stick of burning rubber around the River Fontanka while the Police stopped traffic for him, and a certain Belgian-Bulgarian running about in purple sunglasses all set to walk in the forbidden grass of the Mikhailovsky Sad. There’s also been a lot of blank eyed window staring and inexplicable midday exhaustion.

That is all.

Today’s desperately empty refrigerator provoked two (temporally, geographically) unique trips to the shop, and all really managed to purchase was nearly 5 liters of beverage (in order of nutritional importance and/or consumption: apple juice, orange juice, kefir, and beer). I know, this is totally uninteresting, but I’m just sort of whelmed that I can spend nearly twenty bucks and still face pretty much empty prospects for breakfast tomorrow. Thank the pope for eggs. And ketchup. Have I mentioned lately how much Russia’s honed my love for the all-five-tastebud-stimulating sensation?

But really the big news is that Ljenja (I’ll write that in cyrillic as it turned out to be a problem, later, when I made him a mix cd and received an instant shaming for not knowing that the last vowel was soft: Лёня…. I mean, I can still barely hear the я even when Dasha over emphasizes it, but what’s a fellow to do) had a birthday and bought himself a new bike. This means that he is totally (totally!) lending his old two-wheeled companion to me until he treks back to his parent’s place in Vladimir. After walking about in the glorious weather (something like +9 degrees above average for April; nobody complains about the warming on this side of winter) on Petrogradskaya for a bit I received his phone call with the joyous news.

To appreciate the magnitude of this I should remind you that I haven’t ridden a bicycle in over seven months after a period when pretty much the only thing I ever did, took photos of, or talked to my friends about was bicycling and how much fun bicycling is and etc (thankfully this never quite descended into the fixed-gear porn and wallet-hemorrhage stage). Anyways, I went for an inaugural ride with him and Dasha later that evening which we rinsed down with the moderately priced chic of desert and drink at Zoom cafe (also an inaugural, for me anyways). I had a Napoleon. Ljenja and I had pies so good we licked the sauce off of our plates and Dasha’s choice of vanilla ice cream and hot jam has opened a whole new world of deserts to me. I’ve accordingly gone through a half jar of raspberry in under a week.

Speaking of sweets last week I went a-baking so as to send my fellows off to Sibera with some swell American cookies. This gesture went over rather well, and I was repaid in a slight haircut as well as the obvious swarm of glowing affection. At any rate, their departure (and that of my Italian guests a days before) has left me to an empty apartment. The first time I’ve lived alone (excluding dorm room singles, of course) I think ever. It’s kind of liberating (unkempt is the operating term, it seems) but also a little lonely. In spite of all sorts of hermit claims and misanthropic growls it turns out I am, after all, a social creature. Nevertheless I’ve kept myself occupied with two languages, a couple books, some staggering films, some mediocre films, the BBC serial of Agatha Christies Poirot, some tinkering around with that bicycle.

I know flickr can be strange in the view department, and I’m aware that the trickle of hits on this blog and my photos are from the same small group of friends and family members who have not totally given up hope on me, but can anyone explain why this completely untagged and not really skillful picture of some random Italian dude who was living in my flat tripled the two-day accumulated views of others posted the same day (one of them featuring a girl, confections and tea, another: one damn fine yellow sweater)?

On the film front I watched Sergei Solovyov’s “Black rose, the emblem of sadness; red rose, the emblem of love” which can, I think, really best be described as carnivalesque. Solovyov is probably best known for 1988’s “Assa” which was, I understand, something of a seminal perestroika film (although really, it seems like every other film from the 80’s that I hear about these days played a critical perestroika role). For me the movie stands on the merit of it’s lovely photography, use of footnotes (!?), and Sergei Bugaev’s diction. Also there are some pretty scenes about the execution of Emperor Pavel and a midget actor/would-be assassin that will probably make you cry. At any rate, most people know it for the final 5 minutes and the credit sequence which features Kino’s Viktor Tsoi replacing the dead hero as vocalist in a Yalta hotel band somewhere circa 1982 and storming onto stage for a rousing version of “мы ждём перемен!” As the credits roll the Hotel turns into a massive, lighter-lit stadium, and we, like, totally feel how the demanded change is going to come. It’s more than a little campy these days, especially when the hotel manager asks the surly Tsoi for his residence and receives the response, “He’s a poet, he lives on this white earth.” But iit is a rather awesome scene and managed to get me riled up enough that I went on yet another week-long Kino binge.

“Black rose…” is much more abstract, employs (I think) a great deal more slang and oblique cultural references, and has pretty much nothing of a narrative for a bewildered foreigner like myself to hang on to. All the same it’s a brilliant picture and that which I did catch (the jokes, the sentiment) went down with serious impact. Instead of Tsoi, we get Boris Grebenschikov (the cliché analogy: he is the Dylan to Tsoi’s Cobain) of Akvarium who shows up out of a cupboard (Kharmsian!? Oh, why didn’t I see this film a year ago in the midst of my thesis) for a mad sing along around a small Moscow apartment. If Assa kicked me back into Kino, Black rose has gotten me into BG; when I was at Dasha/Ljenja’s apartment I jacked a couple of their Akvarium albums and I’ve been listening to them on repeat since.

Last week in our civilization course we watched “Bed and Sofa,” Viktor Shklovsky’s 1927 film, darling of all sorts of critical inquiry and truly a swell piece of work. Bourgeois objects, glorious soviet workers, open spaces, closed spaces, a whole bloom of points for the discussion soviet gender and family relationships, and all the while veiled criticism of the preceding including, most memorably (and perhaps not so veiled) the scene where the soviet worker man takes a break from construction to drink milk and gaze out over the new Soviet Moscow from the roof of the Bolshoi theater and lean, unmistakably, up into the phallus of the horse statues atop the theater. This paired sort of productively with one of the mainstream Russian movies I watched last night, “Kacheli”, about a Russian SWAT officer who’s also the ideal family man except for some cavemanery in the sack. This handsome fellow is, of course, driven to tears (lots of them and on more than one occasion) by his crazy freewheelin’ wife (it’s actually never really clear whether she’s bipolar, as the film’s make up costuming rather bluntly indicates, or just driven to insanity by his brutish sexuality). There are some truly great montages of hostage rescue scenes, really awkward sex, and a family splitting apart. Anyway, It’s all wrapped up like a complex look at the contemporary Russian family but this is hardly the case. The golden dad not only survives two close encounters with death and repents for his single sin, he plays the condescending martyr to keep the family together. The wife, on the other hand, turns out to be a sex-starved hypocrite who prefers low life drug-scum to taking care of her totally cute daughter, to the point that we’re not supposed to care whether her marital problems come from some legitimate source as opposed to complete moral turpitude. I’m not sure what all this means for the state of marriages, families, sex or whatever in Russia, but I’m pretty sure we’d all be better off if we had someone like Putin.
Speaking of, the big man’s got something less than a month left in office and the crazy thing is that hardly anybody cares. That is, none of the Russians I know or have asked have any idea if the change of power has or hasn’t happened because, as they see it, there’s really hardly any change at all. Or as Valerii of Kazan might have put it, “какая б*%$ разница.” This may or may not be correct considering how Putin has arranged his post-presidential situation. As of this week, in addition to becoming Prime Minister Putin has also agreed to head United Russia, the party with a vast majority hold on parliament. How this all will relate to his oft-declared role (not by him, modest fellow) as the “spiritual father/leader” of the country remains yet to be seen. On the other side of the transition, the most I hear about Medvedev these days is that people have “heard” he’s a swell guy. “Молoдец” actually. That these evaluations take the form of rumors after something like 70% of the country voted for him (although this too is under dispute) in the Election should indicate a little something about the state of democracy in Russia.

As opposed to, say, the United States where this whole super-extended primary situation is giving everyone that cares ulcers. In terms of bodily ailments reflecting political dismay, the whole “elitism” scandal is approaching aneurysm level. I’d say everyone should read what people like Hendrik Hertzberg and Bernard Avishai have to say about it, but it’d just be pointed out that they too are “elites.” So instead, how’s about I’ll echo Hertzberg and throw out the Bruce Springsteen card. Pawn.

Which brings me something like half circle back to Boris Grebenschikov who’s 1989 English language album “Radio Silence” is all Boss meets REM and Paul Simon, in the best possible way. For all his irony and sang froid in Russian he sure knows how to kick out a solid rock anthem in English. And then you get solid lines like: “There’s only one way out of prison, which is to set your jail a-free, but then it’s just a bunch of pretty words, to stand between the sailor and the sea.”

God speed!

Cherry juice and plain yogurt; an old sub pop promo I fished out of the free bin at record exchange something like 8 years ago and I’m pajama-pants wallowing about in this Sunday evening. Not to say I’ve lazed the week away. The nice weather and some sudden holes in my schedule have been quite handy in the free time to walk about department. Plus other odds and ends. I even finally made good on two food-related debt-promises to Maria; the first a quo-vadis sandwich (salmon, made by Julia, owed her on account of my blind insistence that Hans Christian Andersen was Dutch and not Danish) the second bliny at my new favorite Petersburg restaurant Russkie Bliny(the mushrooms are savory ecstasy, the chocolate and banana seals the deal).

In other culinary news, this has problem been the most gourmet week of my Russian life on account of my hosting 3 of Sabrina’s friends from Italy. We’ve made use of my biggest pot on three occasions now to make giant feed the family portions of delicious pasta. Also I refused to accept accommodation payment in anything but Parmesan cheese (I’m a rather stubborn host, I suppose); they brought me something like a kilo. They’re definitely the sweetest bunch of house guests: washing dishes, straightening up as well as giving exuberant thanks for the hospitality and profuse apologies for the inevitable and totally understandable second night in Russia vomiting.

On Saturday I drank some bitters with Ben, the crazy Englishman who’s the private English instructor to some construction oligarch (“I’m just, you know, cruising around in armored mercs all day”) which pretty much amounts to the cushiest English teaching anyone has ever heard of. After listening to his stories of the peripatetic, the vagrant, the criminal we ended up playing foosball (kicker, they call it here) against a Russian guy and girl. On account of Ben’s nonexistent Russian all taunts and gloats were in lovely, hilarious English (“You are the suck! What would suck be in Russian? It doesn’t work, I guess. What about you are a vacuum cleaner?!”). Needless to say we got schooled and I doubt it had much to do with their beverage choice of tea to our beer. They were rather sweet about it though and we had a jolly time until two American girls decided to snark/flirt at Ben and it was time to leave.

Some things that are nice: constellations in freckles and birth marks (I am the proud discoverer of the butterfly, the giraffe, the leaping horse and the happy lad), fuzzy am-radio voices, scarfs in warm weather, the canals of our city, disposable cameras with expired film, perfect omelet flipping. Also Kenneth Brannaugh, Harold Pinter, Michael Caine and Jude law all together in one swell little picture called the Sleuth. All the better as I didn’t have to watch it dubbed in Russian.

I went to the Ballet today and felt real classy. There were some neat jumps, some pretty ladies, a serious pile of corpses, and one real tortured Mongol Khan (I meant, that’s what you get for killing all those Hungarians). My favorite parts involved harps (both the real and prop varieties), some synchronized leaps, and parachute pants. The two Babushki sitting next to us were pretty much determined not to let the spectacle distract their gossip, snoozing. But we’re a good humored lot, and so fun/grand artistic catharsis was had all around.

Finally, I just took some Visa extension pictures that make me look like a serious hipster gangster: beard, tousled hair, wry but serious look. Here’s to you ministry of whatever!

A month drains away, and here there are practically no marks to show for it. Sorry to the three or four of you that might be concerned or saddened by this. In compensation: some impressions of varying opacity bundled into one really long paragraph:

Adventures and misadventures in solitude and society, a bout of flu, and a whole lot of pasta from the hands of our Italian, Sabrina. Julia makes the best sandwiches in Petersburg and she gives them to me on the cheap. Russian Banja’s (complete with birch-branch beatings, slow-sipped beer, and every imaginable physical variety of naked man), dramatic or not so dramatic political happenings, and unsuccessful attempts to venture out to the parks at Pushkin, Pavlosk, or just, really, the theater on a Saturday night for some more cultured, civilized air. Someday I’ll make it to the famed Petersburg water museum. A bout of manic snowstorms and a plus 8 degrees Celsius two days later. The slush lives in my shoes and my toes poke through the holes in my socks in curious but sometimes uncomfortable ways. The Petersburg-hop is a spread-leg ballet leap over the massive puddles that form against the curbs here; a reason for Russian dance renown, no doubt. But we’re already well past the sun setting at seven o’clock and given the rather rudely arriving end of daylight savings time today we’ll soon be lit well into the evening. You can feel the vitamin d. From the states I received three (three!) mix cds and a chocolate bar so precious I still haven’t managed to eat it. But then there’s the whole crate of guilt for the postcards I still haven’t managed to send (is this a defect, a compulsion, or just plain inconsideration). Wrapped up in books, hidden in looks: looking for a clean, well lit place and trying to get by with all of my F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact. Rereading Shakespeare. I seem to be living between Internet binges and obsessing about those far away American politics. The Obama speech last week got me all misty-eyed, which was sort of difficult to explain to the Europeans in the room with the computer. I have decided to return to the states in late August and my trip back has a 1.5 month stopover in Frankfurt. Expected destinations include Berlin, Ghent, Nice, Paris, Milan, Zagreb, and with any luck the Monastary in Bulgaria on top of a mountain surrounded by lakes. My lot is trekking to Irkutsk and Baikal and Mongolia (!?) in a week and a half (about 5 days on the trans-Siberian) and I decided to sit out to save money, energy for European adventures. Also, I’d like to get some serious studying done, my recent success on the state exam in Russian notwithstanding. Trading English lessons for Italian, English for Bulgarian, all the while struggling to explain English conditionals. Maybe I’ll get some French in there too, although I think Maria et al are determined to preserve its status as the secret female language. Finland is apparently the mecca of hipster fashion and tasty condiments. Even the Heinz ketchup smuggled in from Helsinki tastes divine also the Finnish accent in English, Russian is totally humorous and simultaneously, strangely, attractive. I’m thinking of words like mellifluous.

Also I finally got a haircut, again Sabrina’s work.

Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I’ve got a photo date with Ljena our friend (and teacher) Dasha’s fiancee.

That’s more or less it. I’ll bid you all adieu, to shape my old course in a country new…

And so I’ll leave you with some Pavich which I’m reading in Russian, translated from the Serbian.

Вечером здесь достаточно вытянуть руку и ночь упадает тебе прямо в ладонь.

Krasota!

Update: Anny has finally given photographic proof that in Morocco the goats traipse about in trees (!?)

Nothing much to say about the Elections, as things turned out pretty much exactly as expected and you guys have probably already read the usual complaints about media coverage and forced turnout in the nyt/bbc/economist. It’s interesting to note that this time around the most important thing for the Kremlin was overall voter turnout. Throughout Petersburg and Moscow individual candidate ads are pretty much nonexistent (excepting the massive billboard I mentioned last time, of course) but the city was plastered with exhortations to go out to vote, same goes for TV and radio advertisements. In Moscow especially the star-power strategy used by United Russia in November was replaced by an official billboard campaign featuring all sorts of well known faces explaining that they were going to vote “for the future of Russia.” That this bears similarity to most of United Russia’s slogans and shows a further conflation of party and power is besides the point; due to cynical attitudes toward this election, even from Kremlin supporters, most people don’t see the point in voting, a situation that jeopardizes the legitimacy of Medvedev’s victory, 70% land side or not.

As for the man himself, we’ll see, I guess. I think he’s a little taller and a little stockier (apparently he’s a weight lifter) and I think some ten years younger than Putin, he hasn’t worked in the KGB or FSB, and he likes Rock Music. As to this latter, I’m a bit skeptical considering that his favorite band is Deep Purple. And considering my principle associations with “smoke on the water” are land rover-driving tools from high school, I doubt he’ll be make too many steps away from Putin’s program. Especially with the latter as Prime Minister.

In other news my weekend in Moscow was mostly uneventful and minimally expensive. Highlights were my first experience in a United States Embassy (sort of a bizzaro food-courted, wood paneled world after being in Russia for 6 months), dropping by the Bulgakov Museum (some kind of high pitched woman was singing there accompanied by bells and rainsticks… no comment), and talking with a girl at the hostel who was shocked, shocked that I didn’t know anything about the Lindy Hop. The low point: they stole my mp3 player at the train station while I was trying to buy a newspaper. Jokes on them though, that thing was pretty much completely busted anyways.

Just a couple absurdities:

On Saturday we met a friend of a friend named Dima who is a Sociology student, writer, and all around swell fellow. He was collecting signatures in protest of the recent closure of the European University in St. Petersburg. The official reason, as in the recent attempt to close the Moscow House of Journalists, is fire safety–apparently a recent tactic bullying and/or closing insufficiently submissive institutions. Among the list of violations is a spiral staircase (the building was built in the 19th century, I believe) and some other architectural quirks, but due to the building’s historical status, Dima says, it’s impossible to make modifications in compliance with the “regulations.” But of course, this isn’t about fire safety, it’s political. The university was involved in a project regarding the observation of elections and aiming to reduce rigged votes; as you might imagine this is rather unpopular. The University’s foreign connections and reliance on international funding most likely doesn’t help.

Among the week’s posts over at Johnson’s list there’s a summary of some of the ways in which counter-terrorism is used to restrict speech. “Extremist language” and insulting public officials are offenses punishable by fines and even jail time. This is of course a serious issue, but there are some really crazy examples of its implementation. Right now there’s a case against the author of an article called “Putin is our good Hitler” which makes bizarre favorable comparisons to Hitler. There was also apparently an incident where somebody compared Vladimir Vladimirovich to a phallus, but my favorite is the following:

Article 282 [of the Russian constitution] prohibits the incitement of hatred or enmity “if these acts have been committed in public or with the use of mass media.” Dubrovskiy cited the case of Stanislav Dmitrievsky, who was prosecuted for writing an article critical of Russia’s handling of the Chechen war. Dmitrievsky was charged with extremism, in part, for not capitalizing the “p” in a critique of “Putin’s regime,” although in the Russian language a name is not usually capitalized when used as an adjective, Dubrovskiy noted. Experts in philology testified that this non-capitalization was intended as extremism.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of Echo Moscow who not only sports one swell logo but also debate that tends to be more critical (and lively) than not and usually featuring at least several points of view, sometimes even opposition leaders who get considerably less space in other outlets. All this in spite of a 66% share holding by Gazprom who, if you’ll remember, is now lead by the future President, Medvedev. At any rate, I’ve noticed that very often during the day the station runs long, awkward infomercials about Erectile dysfunction. I’ve often wondered if this is some kind of campaign to undermine the credibility of the station, or at least drive away listeners among the masculinity obsessed male population.

Joking, of course, probably

On a completely unrelated note, I’m gonna go ahead and parrot Hertzberg’s link to an article by the historian William Miller for all those Obama nay-sayers and skeptics.

So last weekend I made my 4^th trip to Moscow, Eric accompanying. This time a round I actually managed to see Lenin (he’s very waxy looking and they don’t let you stand still to look at him), and walked a great deal of the city on foot. In the very very bitter cold. It was so cold that when at 4 am we stumbled out onto a completely empty Red Square, swaggering not just a bit, we discovered Ice in our beer. Refreshing.The cold also drove us to frequent steaming beverage stops around the city, particularly in the period between our the end of our sleepless train ride at 6 am and the beginning of Lenin’s working hours (10-1, daily). Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to find a decent, cheap cup of joe in Moscow to say nothing of the incomprehensible difficulty we had finding a place open at the apparently ungodly hour of our arrival (all I’m saying is that shit wouldn’t fly in New York or Chicago) Insult to injury: we found a bunch of “24 hour” establishments but were slightingly rejected by the rather bored wait staff; apparently “round the clock” and 24 hours don’t apply to Saturday mornings. At any rate, we finally settled for some over priced breakfasts and some pretty mediocre coffee at Shokoladnitsa, in spite of my giddy suggestions that we break our McDonalds fast and visit the first golden arches in Moscow that were climbing over the horizon as we walked towards Pushkinskaya Square. The next stop was a Koffee hauz, which was even more over priced and considerably less satisfactory. Having blown something like 40 bucks in our first 4 muscovite hours, we went into cheap mode and dined twice at Sbarro where a 4 dollar combo gets you soup, a slice, and a beverage (a rather swell meal combined with maybe an extra slice and several relatively inexpensive Sbarro beers).

Everytime I’m in Moscow I like it a little bit more, but all the same I’m always happy to return to Petersburg. It’s a crazy, stunning city. The massive, totalitarian “Seven Sister” buildings built under Stalin punctuate the skyline along with steeples and nowadays extravagant billboards and light displays. The streets wind, bend and jut up hills and on each, the nominal “buildings” turn out to be coursed through with alleyways, substreets, and courtyards. Finding hostels and back alley bars is the beginning of an adventure for the uninitiated, but that’s sort of the whole fun. It’s a city that rewards the wanderer. Also, Muscovites seem to ask for and give directions much more frequently than Petersburgers. Which urban group is actually the friendliest is still sort of up for debate, although our friend Lena explained that Muscovites are friendlier because they are stupider (literally “from the village/country”) while Petersburgers are educated, cultured people. It seems nobody that came to age reading Dostoevsky feels much inclination to greet strangers with cheer.

At any rate, it turns out I’m headed back to the great red city next weekend to take my Foreign Service exam…

In other news, Elza leaves for France tomorrow. We’re planning a farewell party tonight and then some kind of Balkan style dirge to the airport, perhaps even boomboxing some of Maria’s gypsy music. Eric jets the next weekend. Everything is sad.

2/19/2008

There’s always copy of the Nevksy Times plastered to the side of a building on one of my daily routes around the city. I haven’t yet stopped to read the paper in detail, but I always notice the headlines and the full color pictures which are almost always being scrutinized by a bent-over pensioner. After Bush’s final state of the union they chose one of the many well timed shots of the shrub’s ugly face with the headline “Swan song for an ugly duckling.” The Putin frontpages come just short of declaring him молодец and recently, of course, Medvedev has been making appearances amidst golden-smile babushkian praise. At any rate, todays photo showed a flock of birds scattering over some decrepit apartment buildings: “Even the birds are abandoning Kosovo.”

As for a more official Russian positions on the declaration, Radio Echo Moscow has been pretty much non-stop discussing the matter the last several days. My personal highlight was an irascible duma deputy claiming that Kosovar identity was pretty much created ten years ago by American special agents and part of an attempt to weaken the Slavic-Orthodox community. He went on to blast (in what’s pretty much the standard argument here) the hypocrisy of the west for allowing Kosovo’s independence as some kind of exception when similar situations exist all over Europe (and here he named the usual handful: Basque country, Northern Ireland, Northern Cyprus). This seems to be the party line: that Kosovo is no exception and that this now sets a precedent for the independence of a whole bunch of other antonymous, and that this threatens the territorial integrity of Europe (which he also aligned with the clandestine aims of the United States). A bit later I caught him talking about Crimea, which is now a part of Ukraine thanks to Kruschev who, in the words of one of my professors, “woke up one morning” and decided to gift the Black Sea territory to the Ukrainian Republic of the USSR. All this of course much to the chagrin of Russia, who points to its large Russian population, linked history history, and swell vacation qualities in its querulous claims. At any rate, prompted about the status of Crimea this deputy started to rave about how that was an entirely exceptional situation due to the historical relations to Russia and the Russian speaking population and etc etc. The hostess chuckled as she asked, “Just like Kosovo?”

Which is to say, sadly, that it’s clear the extent to which this situation is in part yet another tool of the Russia-West geopolitical game, totally departing from the grounding it migh have in a people’s sovereignty and the history of a country, a region.

Of course, the Kosovo situation is certainly real complicated. In spite of the class I took a year ago on the Balkan crisis visa vis language, history, and politics I’m not really qualified to say much except that tangling with issues of sovereignty mixed up with the last twenty five years of Balkan history and in the context of the Russia/Europe/US/China geopolitical dynamic is making my head spin.

And Putin, if you didn’t hear, boldly declared the other day that Russia would “do something” if the west recognized Kosovo. Maybe just empty threats, but I sure don’t feel rosy considering all the rhetoric and action about raising an armored fist to the west (massive defense spending, bomber flights, a stray missile here, a snubbed treaty there). But really, All of this posturing is ultimately going to hurt Russia, or at least the majority of the population whose problems with minimal wages, microscopic pensions, and etc might be somewhat alleviated by the buckets of oil and gas cash that’s being spent on the military.

Speaking of, Eric and I just listened to a radio debate between Gari Kasparov (Chess grand master, Other Russia) and Vladimir Zhrinovsky (flamboyant nationalist, and LDPR presidential candidate). The topic was something like is Russia’s fate with Imperialism or Democracy. In the midst of the resulting, and totally expected, yelling match Kasparov went on his usual case about the complete absence of a democratic climate in Russia while Zhirinovsky (probably agreeing the democracy doesn’t exist, albeit all for the better) claimed that Russia needs to become an Imperial power more or less possessing the strength and willpower to bomb and seize the world as might suit its needs. In that respect, he said, Russia should be like America.

On the subject of democracy, it makes sense to point to the coming presidential elections. The shocking thing is that you’d hardly know there’s an election in Russia in two weeks if you arrived in the center of Petersburg tomorrow. Even the newspapers and Radio are pretty passive about the whole thing. I’ve seen exactly zero campaign advertisements apart from the generic government posters informing people that the election is on March 2^nd. This is especially jarring in comparison to parliamentary campaign a couple months ago. While then, like now, the result was absolutely clear beforehand (pretty much for the same reason, Putin’s support of United Russia then and his appointment of Medvedev now) there was at least some semblance of a normal political process and a legitimate fight for the 30% of votes that weren’t defacto going to Putin.

Apart from the guaranteed result, the meaninglessness of this election has to do with the options on the ballot. If you’re not going to vote for the handsome successor, you get to choose between Zuganov (Communist party), Mr. Zhirnovksy, and some guy nobody has ever heard of. The communists have their solid 10% and Zhirinovsky has his block of (crazed? Amused?) followers, but for the rest of the folks not frothing for Putin this is essentially no choice at all. As to why there’s no liberal candidate, Kasparov dropped out after reasonable concerns for his personal well being and safety while the former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov (apparently a pretty corrupt and unpopular fellow) was quite rudely prevented from registering as a candidate. So most of the opposition is meekly shouting to boycott the election while the rest of the population either doesn’t care at all or is absolutely confident about the results to the point of not caring. And so there’s no need for anybody to fuss about with campaigning, debating, transparency. Just some stump speeches every now and then where Medvedev makes overtures of western liberalism while Putin shakes his fist and frowns.

Actually when Eric and I were in Moscow this weekend we saw our first campaign poster, a massive several story billboard next to the Kremlin. Of course, it featured Putin and Medvedev smiling, practically arm in arm. No names, just the tired proclamation of victory for Russa.

They’ve got it worked out real swell, actually: when Medvedev becomes president, Putin will take the Prime Minister’s post, and the current Prime Minister Zubkov will slide into the executive position at Gazprom (largest company in Russia?) vacated by Medvedev. Snap, crackle, stable transition of power.

My apologies for boring the few family members that are probably still reading this, I guess I haven’t written in a long time and all of this stuff has been stewing in me. I’m not going to cast too many judgments on the regime itself (save, I guess, the patently unproductive military posturing of which of course the US is equally responsible), especially as by all accounts life is a pretty much a hell of a lot better here than ten, fifteen years ago; but I’m absolutely with Kasparov when he points to the absence of democracy and danger thereof. Really it’s even worse than that; it’s (once again) no longer even necessary to pretend that it exists, a far more dangerous position as shapes not only the tangible political achievements of a people, but their very ability, desire to aspire. Cynical realism, man.

Which of course brings me to the US elections. Living here, watching this process unfold and growing attached to people whom this all concretely effects I’ve absolutely come to appreciate the political system in my own country. For all its faults minor (superdelegates, seriously?) and major (lobbys, the electoral college, really stupid issue pandering) in American politics there is at least efficacy in theory and sometimes even practice. This is all the more so with the current race, regardless of who wins the democratic presidential candidacy. It’s incredibly meaningful to me-an only recently politically conscious fellow living in a country of increasingly meaningless politics-to watch an election campaign where there is not only an enormously significant choice, but one in which it viscerally feels compelled to get involved because that involvement is meaningful. I mean, really, feels this way: on the other side of the world; on our night train to Moscow I didn’t catch an ounce of sleep in part on account of this feeling. And yes, Obama has a great deal to do with this, and it is meaningful that in this election be it McCain-Clinton or McCain-Obama people of my political persuasion feel like we’re voting for someone instead of against. But really, and sorry for the corny 4^th grade civics, for all of my love of this foreign country and my beliefs in world citizenship over nationality (barflys, citizens of the world, unite!) whenever I manage to catch up on the election I get down right excited to be an American and decide, just maybe, that i’ll get involved in all of this when I return.

Ok. I am done now. I think. There’s some other stuff on my mind like my friend Sasha who’s going to join the army later this year and the Aleksanyan situation, but I guess that’ll just have to come another time. Also to come: adventures in Moscow with 80 year old corpses, chain coffee shops, and freezing beer. I bought a bunch of DVDs today (Among some real swell looking Russian titles, I picked up Juno and Atonement) and I’m feeling like cuddling in front of the warm movie glow of my laptop with antillies and a nice cup of French press coffee (I win).