You decide

As all of you undecided voters prepare for Tuesday's choice, I leave you with this:



A leader we can all be proud of for the respect he gets worldwide. The article is actually about Karl Rove, or, as the cover says, "The man who made George Bush." The magazine - Kommersant-Vlast' - is one of my favorites.

Government domination of the "NGO" sphere

First, they kicked out the Peace Corps. The excuse given for foreign consumption was the environment of "changing economic and social tasks facing our country." For domestic consumption, the Kremlin relied on reasoning more along the lines of Soviet propaganda, sowing paranoid suspicions among anyone who had ever had a pleasant interaction with a Peace Corps volunteer by suggesting that they "were collecting information on the social, political and economic situation in Russian regions, on officials of governmental bodies and departments, on the course of elections and so on" (that's CNN's sound bite from Patrushev on the occasion).

Then they unceremoniously threw Mikhail Khodorkovsky in jail, in no small part because of his support for various political causes and civil society initiatives.

Then Putin infamously shed unjustified suspicion on and engendered fear among the NGOs hard at work in Russia in his State of the Union address.

Now, there's a bill in the Duma to make donations tax-deductible only if they are made to state-funded organizations.

And the Duma (and odious Deputy Viktor Alksnis of the Rodina party) is going after the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, and at least part of the basis for their attack seems to be that this organization accepts relatively small grants from foreign grant-making organizations.

The situation is similar to the rejection of foreign aid in the Kursk submarine tragedy - the public spin was that the foreigners needed to be kept out because they might see something secret (and the insinuation was made for some time that maybe "they" were even responsible for the tragedy in the first place), but the authorities' actual reasons for refusing assistance were more likely a mix of shame at the situation; pride and false certainty in their own ability to solve the problem; and genuine suspicion, left over from the Cold War, of the motives of those foreigners proffering assistance.

Blaming outsiders and refusing assistance is the logical course of action for a government which wants to be seen as the sole source of strength and salvation for the Russian people - if only that government were up to the lofty goals which it sets for itself.

Does anyone think that the Russian government will solve the coming demographic crisis without the assistance of international NGOs? Maybe the solution proposed recently by Patriarch Alexey - make more babies - will somehow prove to be a brilliant low-cost solution? Somehow, I think not.

Russians are right to be proud of their nation; I don't begrudge them their pride and have a healthy respect for the historical strength, ingenuity, and endurance of the Russian people. However, it becomes difficult to understand and respect a country when its people allow the supposedly democratically elected government to act as irresponsibly as the Russian government has acted with respect to foreign assistance.

Free postcards

My mother was visiting us these past few days (she gets top billing as a loyal reader), and one night we went to a restaurant that for me has over the past couple of years illustrated just how eclectic Moscow can be. When we moved here, it was called "The Great Canadian Bagel," and they did serve bagels & cream cheese, along with a relatively complete menu and full bar service, all open 24 hours a day. Google has once again revealed its powers to me by just now enlightening me on the fact that this is actually a Canadian franchise operation. At some point maybe a year or so ago (I don't remember for sure) it became "No Name Cafe," now serving sushi instead of bagels, but still with a complete menu of European cuisine and desserts, and still open 24 hours a day. The takeout sushi has become a favorite of ours because of the location directly on my walk home from work.

It's one of the many, many places here where the free postcard providers who infiltrated this market from points west have put up a rack, and once in awhile there are actually visually appealing cards on offer:



I guess it's a matter of taste, but I liked this one.

Flu shots

It's amazing to observe from afar the controversy (impassioned letters to WaPo, a series of articles on Slate) surrounding the shortage of flu vaccines in the US. There has been no such shortage here, probably because many Russians believe getting the shot will do you more harm than good. I got vaccinated today at work, as did every one of my American co-workers who was in the office (5 out of 5, including one spouse who came in specifically to get the shot), but not many of our Russian colleagues were interested in joining us (6 out of about 35). That tells you something, although I'm not sure exactly what. Take your pick: a) we're more enlightened about the benefits of modern medicine and believe we can take control of our health and prevent certain illnesses, rather than being fatalistic; b) we are gullible and will believe whatever the medical services industry tells us to believe; c) we just wanted the chance to crow to our friends at home, FINALLY, about being able to get in Russia something that is desirable but not available in the States.

Picking up Mom at Leningradsky Vokzal

Right next to the exit to the train platforms, I noticed this helpful sign indicating a number to call with "citizens' suggestions and complaints about the work of militia employees":



On the platform at night:

Blast from the past

This Belgian equivalent of a Good Humor truck reminded me of the VW van our family had in the 1970's through 1981 when we left it in Nigeria - same color and just about the same model (except ours didn't have the big window or waffle griddles!).

Birds in Brussels

Brussels – lunch at Tea & Eat and overpriced boutiques on Avenue Louise. I picked the wrong days for this trip, as the dollar is at an 8-month low against the Euro. Budgie birds (pictured) who were scared of me in a cage outside a florist’s shop just off Avenue Louise at Stephanie Square. They seemed to be doing OK despite the chilly weather, although they were a little alarmed when I stuck my cell phone up to the cage and snapped a picture - I wasn't able to catch them cuddling because they were startled by my presence.

It's all about soul

My ticket to Brussels was the first place I saw the English-language version of Aeroflot's relatively new "...потому что от души" ("...because it comes from the soul") campaign. I guess they mean blue-eyed soul...

End of the line #2 - Выхино

The southeastern end of the purple line - Vykhino.

Selling flowers in the shadow of a port-a-potty and some classic end-of-the-line-type high-rise apartment buildings:



Waiting for one of the marshrutki (minibuses that run on regular bus routes) to depart:

Doloi Putina!

I stuck around until almost the end of the rally - a social commitment intruded and I couldn't stay until the very end, although I did catch Valeria Novodvorskaya's remarks (pictured here) and several instances of the crowd chanting "Down with Putin!"



I tried to tape some of the remarks using my mobile phone's dictaphone feature, but think the journalists in attendance probably had better equipment and got the best sound bites.

Here's what the Moscow Times had to say about it:

At least 2,000 people gathered on Pushkin Square on Saturday to call for an end to the war in Chechnya. It was one of the largest antiwar protests in years and also provided a rare public platform for broader criticism of President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

Protesters listened to speeches from prominent antiwar figures and chanted slogans like «Peace in Chechnya!» and «Down With Putin’s Politics!»

They held «No to War» balloons and signs that said «Putin Is Killing Our Freedom," but they also held posters of jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and photographs of people who died in the storming of the Dubrovka theater in 2002.

Saturday’s protest acquired an extra sharpness because it fell on the second anniversary of the beginning of the Dubrovka hostage crisis.

The protest, which began under gray skies at 4 p.m. and lasted for about two hours, was organized by For Human Rights and the Committee for Antiwar Activities and supported by the Committee 2008. [...]

There was some debate about how many protesters showed up. Ponomaryov said there were 2,500 to 3,000. City police, who had 200 officers on hand, counted about 2,000 protesters, Interfax reported, citing city official Sergei Vasyukov.

But in any case the number of participants was well higher than anticipated, Vasyukov told Interfax, noting that organizers had predicted around 500 people would show up when applying for permission to hold the rally. Vasyukov complained that this made providing security difficult.

Speakers included prominent human rights activist Valeria Novodvorskaya, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, State Duma Deputy Oleg Shein of Rodina and Vladimir Kara-Murza of Committee 2008.

Politkovskaya, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta who negotiated with the hostage-takers during the Dubrovka crisis, addressed the crowd from the podium and above a sign that read, «Five Years of Putin, Five Years of War and Terror, Enough Already!» [...]

The MT won't let you see the article without paying, but the Chechen Times website has the full text available.

Favorite signs

Of all the creative messages being sent at this protest, I liked these two best:


"Putin and Khodorkovsky - trade places!"


"Vova [Putin] can't win his game of toy soldiers but doesn't want to stop playing. Isn't it time to give him [medical] treatment?"

Counterprotest

Across Tverskaya, some shills for the current Administration had gathered, with signs, reading "Putin's enemies are accessories to terrorism!" and "Stronger authority means a healthier society," among others.

Optical illusion

One of the protesters noticed me taking pictures and rightly pointed out this image as worthy of being snapped:


Poor Aleksandr Sergeevich, cuckolded ("with horns," in this case two pigeons) even long after his death...

Protest

Came out of the metro today at Pushkin Square and decided to check out what all the commotion was about. Walking around, I saw the square was entirely surrounded by militsia and access to the gathering protest required passing through a metal detector.



The anti-Chechen-war theme of the protest was made pretty clear by this sign:

End of the line #1 - Щелковская

An irregular series where our intrepid blogger ventures to the terminal stations of various Moscow metro lines. The first installment - the eastern end of the dark-blue line, Shchyolkovskaya station.

An impromptu bait store left unattended by the steps to enter the metro:



Locals wait for the bus next to a bulletin board inundated with offers of rooms for rent:



Buying a ticket back downtown (obesity is not as much of a problem here as it is in the US, but it is not uncommon, either):

Golden handcuffs

Is this ad for a jewelry store (seen in a blue line metro car) more than just a joke? Perhaps a commentary on what can happen to the super-rich in Russia today?

Close call

Did I really have enough time, though? As I hit Moskovsky Vokzal I saw that the digital clock above the exit to the train platforms read 3:58, and my train was at 4pm (I wasn't on the 20th anniversary edition of the ER-200 shown on the railphoto.ru website, which is a treasure trove for train buffs, but it's the same type of train shown here and this one is correctly shown leaving Moskovsky Vokzal). I boarded the closest car possible literally one minute before the train rolled out.

The obligatory букинист run

At first my intention to use my remaining 30 minutes in SPB for book shopping was stymied by a power outage which affected a wide area that included the several shops I like to frequent on Liteiny Prospekt - note the several perplexed would-be book buyers milling around outside the "Bukinist" store on Liteiny (clustered to the left):



Finally the lights came back on and left me with just enough time before my train to visit my personal favorite (because they take credit cards) store which is entered from a thoroughly decorated courtyard off Liteiny:

"Still Life with Morsberry Can"

This is inside the hallway leading up to our friend Evgenia's apartment on Ul. Zhukovskogo in SPB. As I ran down the stairs on my way to the nearby antiquarian bookstores (an essential element of any trip to SPB for me) I was in part trying to capture the tree growing in an old car tire in the courtyard - you can see it as a blur of yellow leaves through the window - but what made the shot for me was the Morsberry can among the other detritus in the foreground.

Bait Shop

Walking around near Bram's apartment on the Petrograd side looking for a place to get my glasses fixed, we found instead a bait store with an entertaining sign: "For sale - bloodworms, grubs, and maggots."

Ёжики

Being in St. Petersburg inevitably reminds me of the 3 years I spent there as a kid in the '80's. One of my nicknames was "ёжик," or "hedgehog," both because of my unkempt hair and because I played one in a holiday skit based on Yuri Norstein's classic animated film "Hedgehog in Fog":


(more stills from the film)

This time up in SPB I actually met someone else who had this nickname as a kid, which was a first for me.

I can't tell if this ad, in the window of the Impexbank branch in our apartment building, is meant to suggest that the ёжик is a cute advertising spokes-animal or example of someone not so sharp:



The caption says the bank's deposit terms are "comprehensible even to a hedgehog!" But the cuteness of the hedgehog is exploited in a banner ad currently on Impexbank's website.

Золото Болот

The real purpose of my trip to SPB was to attend the opening on Thursday of Anatoly Belkin's exhibit at the State Hermitage Museum, "Золото Болот" ("Swamp Gold"), a multi-media installation depicting an imaginary series of anthropological expeditions and their discovery of an imaginary society of dwarf-like people, complete with "remains" as in this photo from the exhibit. Belkin has been a family friend for nearly 20 years - in the 1980's he was an "unofficial artist," but more recently he has become part of the cultural establishment as the publisher of the glossy St. Petersburg magazine Sobaka.ru - and by coincidence I was also able to be present at the opening of his most recent solo exhibition, "Private Territory," at the Russian Museum in the summer of 1996.

A more interesting coincidence was pointed out to me recently by Bram, who went with me to the opening and later emailed me this Washington Post piece titled "Dwarf Human Ancestors Lived on Pacific Island." Maybe Belkin is onto something. On the same tip, see also this Slate article on the "Tiny Humans."

Off to SPB

[Don't know if it's kosher in blogland to back-date posts, but I am going to try to reconstruct my trip to SPB in that fashion. I guess this is my space so I should be able to do what I want, right?]

I got up at 5am to get in a cab at 5:45 - the cabbie dialed up 120 km/hour pretty much the whole way, barely slowing down to blow through a couple of police checkpoints and getting up to 135 on the home stretch, so we got to Sheremetyevo-1 in about 20 minutes. He did stop at the stoplights, for the most part, but still it was one of those times when Russian "bespredel" (a term people here like to use to describe the lack of order here that's developed in the past 15 years, translated loosely as "lawlessness," in this instance in a relatively innocuous form) was exhilarating and refreshing - this happens often enough to merit a separate post.

In the Sh-1 business-class lounge (the one perk I've so far been able to gain from my "silver" status in Aeroflot's bonus program aside from checking an extra bag a couple of times), I put on the earphones of my mobile phone radio and observe somewhere between 25 and 50% of my fellow loungers taking advantage of the free bar to drink brandy at 6:30 in the morning on a Thursday. They might prefer to call it коньак - CIS-made "cognac," which can be Bely Aist (White Stork) from Moldova (described along with the rest of the Moldovan wine & liquor industry in this interesting Kommersant article, which is in English unlike some of the other links here); Ararat from Armenia; one of the many Dagestani brands; or, in a pinch (or as the free brand at an airport lounge bar), Moskovskii - although this site about the classifications of French cognac demonstrates that there are Russians who understand the difference. Listening to a melancholy techno-polka song about a girl who wants to learn just 3 guitar chords, so she can be “like Zemfira” - who has no doubt become a role model for a generation of young girls who wanna rock, and justifiably so - I sip coffee and then get some tomato juice.

The annoying obese guy in a dark-brown shirt and gold lamé (I mean shiny, but the spelling without the accent mark fits also) tie is gone now, so I can safely take off my earphones - I did that earlier and my ears were filled with his musings to some captive listener about how the Americans after “September 9th” [sic] should really have gone after the Chinese, etc...

But I won't stop the music, because another other hot song with an accordion loop - “Chorny Bumer” is now on. This song - by one Seryoga - has been a pretty big hit here, and the lyrics are actually a pretty good snapshot of what one imagines is the mood in this country outside of Moscow (and even in some of the suburbs of the capital). The song is all about a young guy growing up on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by hopelessness but delighted with his own situation at least temporarily because he owns the black BMW mentioned in the title. This is probably a better reflection of what the youth here today values - and a more realistic portrayal of the many challenges they face if they are not from a rich or well-connected family - than anything that the pro-Putin youth movement Идущие Вместе (Moving Together) can offer.

You should be able to download and listen to the song here - the combination of a decent, if basic, hip-hop beat and several elements traditional in Russian folk music is pretty interesting. Seryoga's debut album is called "Мой двор: спортивные частушки" - "My Courtyard: Athletic Chastushki" - the last word of the title is incompletely translated as "couplet," "ditty," "jingle," or "limerick," and describes a particular form of rhyming song traditional in Russian folk music. But the beat and the hard-core tone of voice are imported from the US, and they sing the praises of a German automobile. Globalization, indeed.

NZ - not New Zealand; НЛО - not a UFO; OZ - no Dorothy

I have never been much on riddles, but this was too easy. I'm feeling a need to promote some of the best "serious" materials in Russian that exist out there on the web:

Neprikosnovennyi Zapas (Untouchable Reserve), also available in English, which contains "debates about politics and culture." These can be a bit esoteric and unless you are a native Russian speaker may require a dictionary in the original - not all of the articles are available in English, either.

An apparently associated publication, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New Literary Review).

Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland, but they just call it OZ in the English-language abstract) - a true "thick journal." Expensive in hard-copy form, but apparently free on-line.

I guess Polit.ru can be included in this group as "serious" also, even though I can't think of any funny riddles about the title.

Tomorrow I am off to the airport at 5:45am to SPB - maybe I will be able to translate something of interest on the way (using my handy Blackberry не совсем по назначению), and come back with a few interesting posts at once on Friday night (when I'll be back in Moscow) but more likely it just means I'll come back tired and that there won't be anything new here for a couple of days.

More amazement

Should I just get over being amazed by the power of the internet? We're planning a trip to Kiev (or Kyiv, whatever, all of that linguistic nationalism and taking offense at different spellings is so 1993), which, since it will be Nov 5-8 could, I suppose, be turned into a post-election observation trip if we were so inclined. You know, since, according to John McCain, these elections will be pretty "crucial" -- you may have to register at WaPo to read that somewhat pompous piece. I prefer the more informal tone of a recent Bol'shoi Gorod cover piece (my linking is already becoming predictable less than a week into this blog thing) about Russians living in Kiev and, among other things, meddling in the presidential campaign there.

Anyway, we're trying to figure out if the rental apartments being offered to us are legit and needed to see a detailed map of the city - all I had to do was search rambler for "карта киева" and there it was - searchable by street name and everything.

Of course I was already familiar with the Moscow and SPB equivalents - remarkably helpful when getting around in a land of confusing addresses where buildings sometimes have various wings (корпуса) which may be located hundreds of feet from the street named in the address.

Incidentally, the estimable Mr. Johnson (see previous post) found room after all to include my latest contribution in his most recent batch - I think I'll leave it up here, though, also - why not?

A sharp turn...

I wasn't sure I would get into political or current events topics in this blog, but how can they be avoided in this environment? Demonstrators and journalists getting roughed up in Minsk, witnesses to apparent planned terrorist acts being beaten to death and then having the body switched on the way to the hospital (the Pumane case - according to NTV and the man's common-law wife, it WAS Pumane being carried out of the police station, but they say - on the air, not anywhere on the site - that eyewitnesses report a different ambulance arrived at the hosipital. The implication seems obvious), "Pal Palych" Borodin making off-the-wall statements about how Putin's power is granted by God and he should stay on for a 3rd and maybe 4th term (on second thought, perhaps those might more properly be called "trial balloons"), etc.

What I find amazing is how people are making more and more references to the political atmosphere feeling like the one familiar from 20-30 years ago here, in which honest conversations can only be conducted among friends in the kitchen. That is a disturbing undercurrent in a recent Bol'shoi Gorod feature story on the Russian LiveJournal community - I wish that article were available in English, but it's not, and I don't have the energy to translate it right now.

I did, however, translate the Bol'shoi Gorod article below from the original.

If you'll permit a brief digression here, I feel a strange need to explore my strange compulsion to translate articles which seem significant to me and then submit them to Johnson's Russia List - no doubt I subconsciously hunger for the approval of the Russia-watcher community or want to feel like I have something to contribute. Recalling a previous job where a co-worker and I mocked a job applicant in absentia and eliminated him from the pool for stating on his resume that he was a "frequent contributor to JRL" as though that were an exclusive club, I swore I wouldn't do this, but some variety of that compulsion is making me post links to a couple of my better JRL contributions (here and here).

Anyway, back to the point - this particular article (which didn't make the JRL cut, which explains why I am posting it here) describes an anti-terrorist initiative which might be unremarkable but for the response it generated in the Moscow press for several days after it came out. In the discussion which I saw and heard in the media, a focal point was the potential for officials to profit in various ways from the decree described in the article. What is remarkable about this story, then, is the way it demonstrates, in this particular article especially at the end, the profound cynicism with which many (if not most) Russians view the actions of the authorities, be they local, regional, or federal.

Sadly, this cynicism is often justified; in Putin's Russia, it is the norm for officials to use tragic circumstances to advance their own agendas. This was certainly the case with United Russia's brilliant plan (derided by representatives of most other parties in this article on the Echo of Moscow site) to guarantee that Moscow schoolchildren could be identified in the event of a tragedy on the order of Beslan by issuing them identification cards -- with one entire side of the card covered by the United Russia logo. This must have seemed like a win-win for Soviet-thinking bureaucrats: increase the atmosphere of paranoia and anticipation of an attack by the enemy (which can, of course, only be prevented by "measures" taken by the authorities) while at the same time reintroducing at a low level the sort of from-the-cradle party indoctrination which was ubiquitous in Soviet schools. The Moscow branch of United Russia demonstrates its obliviousness to such concerns by continuing to shamelessly promote this initiative on its website, in a press release which certainly stays on-message, mentioning or quoting people mentioning unspecified "external threats" three times and referring to the party-logo-bearing cards as "security passports."

What is even worse is that repeated cynical invocations of the terrorist threat by officials with their own agendas destroy the chances of success of legitimate security initiatives by reducing the public's propensity to buy into such initiatives. Political observers and even average media consumers scouring the news for the authorities' hidden agenda(s) in Russia is not a new phenomenon by any means, but to see the authorities live down to these low public expectations is especially offensive in the aftermath of Beslan.

"Underground Money" by Marianna Globacheva, Bol'shoi Gorod, Oct. 8, 2004, p. 10.

October 1st is a sad day in the Metro. "We don't know where we're going to move. We haven’t been told yet," a saleswoman at the drugstore kiosk in the passageway at the Teatralnaya station said dejectedly. Her counterpart at the exit to Okhotny Ryad is more direct -- "We’re closing down," she says, and refuses to say anything else. Only the saleswoman at the kiosk selling Russian Orthodox paraphernalia in the vestibule of the Planernaya station is happy. "We're not going anywhere until December 1st," she says with certainty, "we'll wait and see." She obviously has faith that everything will work out, perhaps because of the abundance of godly merchandise surrounding her.

On Friday [Oct. 1], a Moscow city government decree went into effect requiring all booths, stands, and other non-permanent points of sale and fast food establishments within a 25-meter radius of the Metro to be removed. According to the decree, the city will provide displaced traders -- those who have leases giving them the right to do business in the Metro -- with spots to continue their commercial activity aboveground. It's not clear how this will actually be accomplished -- there is an acute shortage in Moscow of commercial real estate, and of course it was no accident that these entrepreneurs located their stalls and stands where it’s convenient for passers-by to purchase some small item, whether a newspaper or an aspirin; in the confines of a tiny druggist’s stall it’s pointless to attempt to compete with a regular drugstore. It appears that thousands of salespeople will lose their jobs.

And it's all because of terrorism. The decree banning trade was based on the recommendations of the Moscow Inter-agency Antiterrorist Commission, which determined that, in this age of terrorist threats, stands and stalls which inhibit the passage of Metro riders create a direct threat to their safety. The merchants with their bales of goods and the people crowding around them are as bad as a bomb. And if, god forbid, that bomb should explode, then those very stalls will impede the passage of emergency medical and security services.

Accordingly, as part of the war on terrorism, all stands except those selling transit tickets are supposed to vanish from the metro by December 1. Newspapers, magazines, and theater tickets will be sold exclusively in specialized kiosks and vending machines. The assortment of publications available in those vending machines will be determined by Moscow city government officials, to their obvious delight. City government minister and head of the Moscow department of consumer affairs and services Vladimir Malyshkov could not conceal a grin at a press conference on the new decree, where he declared that the selection of publications available in the metro will now be radically different. Of course, Malyshkov did promise to consult with certain unspecified public organizations and large publishers of periodicals.

Three weeks ago, the tables selling newspapers, glasses, and other sundries vanished from the underground transfer passages between metro stations practically all at once. The metal carcasses of display racks stacked lonesomely against the wall are the only reminders of the former activity by the escalators to the Pushkinskaya and Tverskaya stations. There aren't even any people illegally trading privately; this time they are even taking that seriously.

The decree states that only stationary kiosks should remain in all underground street crossings and passageways. The many aboveground shops, stores, slot-machine halls and other temporary structures within the 25-meter zone and in any aboveground metro vestibules are to be done away with by December 1. By some measures, clustered in and around Moscow's 170 metro stations are some 15,000 such facilities, but officials count only 965.

That isn't the only point on which there is confusion. When asked at the press conference about what would happen to the famous "pipe" under Pushkin Square, where there actually was an explosion in August of 2000, the city officials said that underground street crossings are outside of the metro's jurisdiction and that everything would stay the same at Pushkin Square. However, according to the decree, all of the kiosks underneath Pushkin Square should be declared nonpermanent trading spots, which are subject to be dismantled and exiled. Here it emerged unexpectedly that on other issues the officials might also back down, for instance an exception might be made for pharmacy stands.

All of this proves yet again that terrorism is an excellent excuse to work out new informal agreements about various things.

Well. This first political post turned out to be a long one. I won't be able to keep up this pace in the days and weeks to come (which I know my many readers are counting on) if I don't get some sleep now, so it's time to sign off for the evening.

Contact with the Motherland

This Internet thing is fan-tastic. I was looking at a couple of US-based blogs and saw a story about an interesting episode of "Crossfire" last week -- something about Jon Stewart calling Tucker Carlson a dick on the air. Then I was able to actually link to a site where I could watch the whole hilarious episode on small-screen.

I felt like I was right back in DC, except I was in my office in Moscow.

The good life...

Time to start a series...things I will miss about Moscow.

1) Blogging via wi-fi from my kitchen while watching "Strana i Mir"

...to the ridiculous (the inside of the men's bathroom door at Pirogi on Nikolskaya Ulitsa). 

...to the mundane (OK, I confess this is actually a scrap of SPB - Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, to be exact)... 

The mobile phone camera enables one to capture images on the go...from the sublime (bust of A. S. Pushkin in the Pushkinskaya metro station)... 

Rainy Day Sunshine

I had one of those things happen today that makes you think, just for a second, that big cities get a bad rap and are actually delightful and nurturing places to live, and that people are fundamentally decent. It was raining, and I left my umbrella by the counter at the 36.6 drugstore which is located on the ground floor of our apartment building. When I came back 6 or 7 hours later, my umbrella was immediately returned to me by practically the first person I asked.

Duma

OK, the last photo is real, I took it from Ploshchad Revoliutsii looking through the scaffolding that is still surrounding the site of the Hotel Moskva demolition. But the imagery is too good to be real...

I know people have said Putin's got the Duma locked up nowadays, but this is a bit much... 

A true scrap of Moscow - the Dal'pico dried squid package, a common snack food here, which comes all the way from the Russian Far East to increase the thirst of Muscovites. Note the cartoon at the bottom with the archetypal Russian wife and the third guy from the left contemplating his beer and daydreaming of - what else? - shredded, dried, salty squid. Mmmm... when the package is full, his thought bubble (white in this image) is chock full of squid shreds. Brilliant.

Sunday

This is my first foray into the blogosphere, many thanks to Bram(http://ufannikaplan.blogspot.com) for the inspiration.

I haven't really decided whether this blog will have a point yet. Probably not, it will just be a place to store things that strike me as interesting or that I might want to share with others without emailing them.

Lorina and I have been living in Moscow for nearly 3 years now, and we won't be here forever, so there is no time like the present to start laying a trail of memories that we might one day follow back here like so many breadcrumbs. OK, so I'm feeling a bit soft-headed and sentimental. That's what you get for starting off Sunday in the banya and steaming the brain.

The work that brought us here is really not important for the purposes of this blog, fortunately it allows us to live downtown on Tverskaya, in the belly of the metropolis.