More than a rumor

I first heard about this story in the banya on Sunday and couldn't believe it was true. Now it's in the Moscow Times and it still seems unbelievable to me for some reason.

Moscow Times, Monday, January 31, 2005. Page 3.
Berezovsky Wants to Move to Ukraine
By Andrew Cawthorne and Maria Golovnina
Reuters

LONDON -- Boris Berezovsky, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, said Saturday that he wants to leave Britain for Ukraine -- a move likely to ruffle the Kremlin's feathers. Berezovsky said the victory of new Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, a Western-leaning liberal whose candidacy Putin publicly opposed, had made up his mind.

"Yes, I want to go and live there with my family. And since it became a democratic country, there is no reason for me not to," Berezovsky, who was granted political asylum in Britain, said in an interview in London. [...] "I do not have any business in Ukraine until now. Probably I will look for business there," he said. [...]

He was confident Ukraine's new leaders would not extradite him to Moscow, where he is wanted for fraud and embezzlement. "I was granted political asylum according to the Geneva Convention. Many countries, including Ukraine, signed it and I am sure they will respect it."

"For sure, Russia will try to extradite, but I have already proved in court that everything Russia is trying to do against me is political. If Yushchenko is genuinely democratic, I have no doubt Russia will fail in its attempts to get me."

Yushchenko, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he was unaware of Berezovsky's aim. "One thing is sure. We will be acting in strict compliance with domestic and international laws ... in this context," he told reporters. [...]

This, I think, is what we used to call a provokatsiia. You could also call it a thumb in Putin's eye and a warm turd on Yushchenko's already full plate. Can you imagine being Victor and having to deal with this?

The wasteland

1:50am on a Monday night/Tuesday morning. All of the major Russian broadcast channels are off the air in Moscow. Our building's antenna picks up at least 12 channels usually, but right now the only ones on the air are TNT, which always gets very bad reception in our building and is showing an old reality show - "Golod," I think - which probably wasn't very good the first time around anyway, and DTV-Viasat, which is showing an old episode of the "Jerry Springer Show." I wish I were making this up. Today's subject on Springer appears to be obese women who are also photo models. I am glad that the long-oppressed Russian people were able to heroically cast off the chains of Soviet power in order that they, too, might experience the wonderful freedom of being repulsed by complete strangers in the comfort of one's own home.

Seriously, where are all the other channels?! MUZ-TV always lays claim to being Russia's first 24-hour music channel, but where are you right now, Roman Trakhtenberg?! The 24-hour thing is clearly a pack of lies or has some big caveat, such as "24 hours on weekends only." Or maybe they are open 24 hours a day in a way similar to how so many Moscow hot dog stands do it - with a "tekhnicheskii pereryv" (technical break) from 4 to 8am.

Proletarskaya on Christmas Day

I've been meaning to post this for a while - a series of photos taken last December 25th in and around the Proletarskaya metro station:


The Zamboni-like machine used to polish the floors in metro stations here.


Incoming train.


This is one of my all-time favorite ad posters, even though it's total hypocrisy for the xenophobic Moscow authorities to put something like this up. The caption is a quotation from Aristotle - translated roughly from the Russian: "A city is the unity of dissimilar people" - although I've searched all manner of English-language Aristotle quotation sites and I can't find any equivalent.


Pigeons atop a metro ventilation shaft.


A Christmas-tree lot, Russian-style.

Cracking heads, breaking records

From Monday's Moscow Times News in Brief section:

Arrests in Pumane Case

MOSCOW (MT) -- Two suspects have been arrested on suspicion of conspiring with Alexander Pumane to carry out an attack on a local businessman in September, Interfax reported Friday -- raising doubt that Pumane had planned a terrorist attack as police claimed.

Pumane was detained Sept. 18 near Patriarch's Ponds with two land mines and 200 grams of TNT in his car. He died several hours later in the hospital after reportedly being interrogated by about 150 law enforcement officers. Doctors said he suffered severe brain injuries.

Prosecutors suspect at least two police officers of severely beating him.

The figure in the second paragraph is either a typo or a rather disturbing commentary on modern Russian law enforcement methods. 150 officers?! Call up the Guinness World Records people - that has to be a new mark for inefficient police brutality. And if only two officers were severely beating the guy, what were the other 148 doing?

Let it snow, let it snow, let it...

OK, so I'm not the only one talking about the snow. It was the top story on "Segodnia 22:00" (the successor program to - although no replacement for - my old favorite "Strana i Mir") tonight, specifically the situation on the Rostov-Moscow highway where traffic is stopped and trucks are backed up for 15 kilometers. Apparently they are going to employ tanks to help clear the road.

And check out this front-page (albeit below the fold) story from today's Moscow Times:

Monday, January 31, 2005. Page 1.
Heaviest Snowfall Ever Hits Moscow By Anatoly Medetsky, Staff Writer

A powerful snowstorm that raged in Moscow on Friday was the heaviest day's snowfall since weather records began, forcing planes to divert away from airports, snarling city traffic and making pedestrians wade through meter-high snowdrifts. [...]

A total of 30 centimeters of snow fell in the city over Thursday through Sunday, Interfax reported, citing the weather bureau. [...]

Roman Vilfand, director of the country's leading meteorological research center, Gidrometcenter, said that such severe snowfalls only take place every 25 or 30 years, Channel One reported Friday.

"It's not up to me to judge if this weather is good or bad, but skiers are happy," Vilfand told NTV television.

The one thing I can't believe is that a 3-day snowfall of 30 centimeters (about 12 inches) is really setting records in Moscow, although I heard on Segodnia that in the past week the amount of snow that's fallen here is actually closer to 70 cm. All I know is that the drifts are piling up, even downtown, even though I hear and see crews working all night to load the snow into dumptrucks and get it out of the city. And it was snowing again today...

More snow

Hard to believe, but it snowed steadily again on Sunday. The city looks lovely buried in white, but it is getting difficult to walk around in some of the side streets.

There was a lovely sky at sunset as well, even though it was still snowing as the sun went down (you can't see it very clearly in these photos, but it was snowing, believe me):


Krivokolenny Pereulok near intersection
with Bankovsky Pereulok.


Krivokolenny Pereulok near intersection
with Armyansky Pereulok.


Myasnitskaya Ulitsa.

All photos from Jan. 30, 2005, around 4:30pm.

Na Lubyanke

Somewhat in keeping with the theme of the previous post, here are a couple of photos I took today as I passed through the Lubyanka metro station (known as the Dzerzhinskaya station, in honor of "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, until 1991) today:


Escalator attendant dozing (as they frequently do).


Waiting for the train.

On official hypocrisy and how quickly times change

Browsing in the basement antiquarian section of my favorite neighborhood bookstore the other day, I noticed on the periodicals shelf a journal with a samizdat-looking cover:



The typewritten title reads "Katorga i Ssylka" ("Penal Labor and Exile"), 1927, book 36. Thinking this was some sort of underground chronicle of Soviet prisons (not that there are any secrets about them any more), I looked for publishing data in the usual places, half expecting to see inside that the whole thing was typed in the manner of the cover label.

Much to my surprise, and proving yet again that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I found this publishing imprint on the back:



Rough translation: Publishing House of the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners and Internal Exiles. Apparently this was a publishing house that put out this journal about the experiences of the Tsar's political prisoners in pre-Revolutionary Russia. For example, the issue I found contained an article - under a rubric celebrating the 10th anniversary of the 1917 revolution - by Alexandra Kollontai about life "In Kerensky's Prison," presumably discussing political imprisonment during the brief rule of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky.

It is hard to believe such a publication would have been imaginable 10 years after this 1927 issue came out, although tales of time spent in exile remained important parts of the official, myth-making biographies of Lenin and Stalin even as the Soviet government sent more people into forced labor and internal exile than the Tsars ever dreamed of. In fact, Google helped me to ascertain that this journal was published from 1921 to 1935, which confirms (if anyone doubted it) the profound hypocrisy of the Soviet government at the time - a government which sent millions to the GULag system of prison camps while still supporting the publication of "Katorga i Ssylka," the pages of which were a venue for old revolutionaries to rehash the unpleasantness of Tsarist Russia's system of forced labor - some of them, no doubt, would later have the chance to see firsthand how the Soviet version compared.

Real reason I took the time to write this post: I am a sucker for old publishing house imprints and thought this one was especially interesting, but wanted to put it in some historical context. Now back to our regular programming.

Winter

It has been snowing for the better part of 3 days and got really cold (-15 to -20 Celsius) for the first time all winter. As you might expect, this city just goes about its business under such conditions - things don't seem to close down. And I have an irrational and tough-to-pin-down positive feeling every time I see the flakes coming down and the snowscape, which I am convinced is 80% attributable to growing up in Washington, DC - a town where snowfall meant you got to stay home from school. The other 20% of my affinity for snow stems from the cleaning, softening effect it has on this otherwise often dirty and rough-around-the-edges city, plus the chance snowy weather gives you to dress up in winter gear and caper around outside:


My lovely wife, Lorina.
Jan 28, 10:30pm, on Triumfal'naia Square.

MSM, RIP? IMHO, no.

Jack Shafer (Slate's "Press Box" columnist) has a very interesting piece this week on why bloggers are not about to put the working press out of business. At the end of his commentary, he has collected numerous (presumably the most cogent) responses from the blogosphere, which all makes for interesting reading.

Shafer is right on target with his main point; however, neither he nor any of the many bloggers and others commenting on his piece articulate one of the major reasons why blogs are not going to replace professional journalism anytime soon: money. Of course, it costs nothing to start a blog, but in order to put out a quality blog (not just something that links to interesting articles in a "check this out" manner) a great deal of time must also be invested. Even this blog, which is really just random musings and photos which I find visually pleasant enough to share, is more time-consuming than I would like to admit. Since blogging cannot be a lucrative profession at the outset (we'll assume it is possible to actually support oneself financially by blogging if you have a blog that becomes wildly popular, though I don't know if that is actually the case and how sustainable that might be), it's not clear to me how one is able to be starting out as a full-time blogger and still pay the rent.

I agree that the blogosphere makes up for its lack of professionalism by having representatives in lots of places, but there are still numerous stories and areas that bloggers are unable to cover without tremendous difficulty for practical reasons. Let me try to approach this from my own perspective. I live in Moscow, Russia, which should in theory allow me to be present at events that are newsworthy and might not get extensive coverage in the English-language news media - the recent protests against the roll-back of senior citizens' social benefits, for example. However, I am only able to live here thanks to a job which takes up 10 or more hours of my day most weekdays, so my time to visit rallies is severely limited. Also, given the current political climate in Russia, any foreigner (even any Russian) who tries to report independently in a blog on controversial issues here is either naive or intentionally attempting to get in trouble.

So let's see, I guess if I wanted to give the MSM (for all of you old-media types, that means "mainstream media" - used pejoratively by many in the blogosphere, myself not included) a run for their money, I could quit my job, spend all of my time until my savings account hit zero running around trying to take pictures of trouble happening and otherwise chasing newsworthy stories - although they would still not be as insightful or thorough as MSM stories because of my relative lack of contacts - then publish them on-line for free and risk not being able to renew my visa. Plus, no one reading my stories would have any way to gauge my biases or know whether I at least made a pretense (which you can generally count on MSM stories to do) of seeking to give a balanced account. Oh, and if you want to cover the really interesting and under-reported story in this country - Chechnya - you would have to be suicidal to try to do so as an independent blogger.

Today Shafer posted a response to his column from "video guerrilla turned Hollywood producer Michael Shamberg," whose 1970's prophecy of a "media revolution" to be brought on by handheld video recorders Shafer used to remind us that the blog is not the first new medium to come along and generate revolutionary delusions:

Dear Jack,

I enjoyed your piece about the enthusiastic prophecy of my youth. In some ways I was right, decentralized media tools did open up many new points of view on television in a gamut that runs from the Rodney King video through The Real World to America's Funniest Home Videos. But at every turn mainstream media assimilated these new points of view and there are less media companies today than 33 years ago so I was wrong to think that new content would mean new ownership. I think the reason is that the scale of investment needed to run distribution outlets is too large for small groups to manage. However, with the internet the economic barriers to entry are very low so it is possible to imagine new businesses growing out of them.

While I support the messianic fervor of bloggers it is too soon to predict what structural change, if any, will emerge in the media. The ultimate limit isn't economic, but talent. Not that many people have something original to say. But the bloggers are right that you can get alternative information to people quickly and without censorship. Indeed, I read your article because someone in my office forwarded it to me. In the old days, it would take a letter or a fax to circulate the information. I think that is revolutionary. When I speak to college classes I tell them that now is the most exciting time in history to work in the media. Making a living at it is another story. ...

Best,

MS

What amazes me about this letter is that it touches on the idea on which I was planning to focus this post but does not draw the obvious conclusion. Bloggers' supposedly low "economic barriers to entry" are mentioned with no acknowledgement that one must forego gainful employment in order to be a full-time blogger. Shamberg admits how difficult it is to make a living in today's media marketplace; however, he writes that "the ultimate limit isn't economic, but talent." I don't buy it. You can be as talented as the day is long, but if economic forces or choices you make for economic reasons prevent you from developing that talent then it will remain unrealized.

Sausage-fest

I was going to call this post "Advertising designed to play on people's paranoia," but when will I ever get to title a post "Sausage-fest" again?


Deceptive advertising is nothing new to Russia or anywhere else for that matter, but this ad (seen in the metro in late November) takes bizarre advertising "logic" to new levels. Let me try to translate the various text and captions:

Upper left-hand corner: "EXPERIMENT - Using genetic engineering, a frost-resistant breed of tomato has been created... In order to do this, a fish gene was spliced into the plant's DNA."

Upper right-hand corner: "SURPRISING? - What other surprises can be expected from genetically modified food products (GMP)? Many scientists think that the consequences of a diet containing genetically modified food products are unpredictable."

Superimposed on the tomato: "fish?"

Stamped on the tomato: "POSSIBLE DANGER?"

In large white text on the red background (lower half of the poster): "clear [or obvious] confidence!"

Caption under the clover: "Genetically safe product"

Caption at lower right: "The Ostankino meat-processing plant has completely rejected the use of genetically modified components in its products. [in larger font] OSTANKINO / THE NEW STANDARD

How ridiculous is this? Yes, Ostankino uses no genetically modified hog snouts in its fine sausages, and the rats that sometimes fall into the production vats are also 100% natural. I am not saying that Ostankino's sausage is any worse than anyone else's, but does not using genetically modified ingredients necessarily make it that much better? In any event, this article in an ad trade publication , while questioning whether it's possible to have a totally GM-free product that includes soy-based ingredients, acknowledges the cleverness of advertising the company's products as GM-free, because this differentiates Ostankino from its domestic competitors (Mikoyan's somewhat lame branding strategy, for example, focuses on the fact that it's been an official supplier to the Kremlin since 1933).

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if Oscar Meyer had a similar campaign going in the US (Incidentally, the folks at Kraft Foods were apparently a little slow on the uptake with this internet thingy - they failed to grab the oscarmeyer.com and oscar-meyer.com domain names. Whoops. They have made sure that their site is the top result when you google Oscar Meyer, though, so I guess that's something), and I know there are companies that pitch organic hot dogs in the States.

What is interesting about all this is that Ostankino wouldn't run the GM-related ad unless they had some reason to believe that a substantial portion of the population would respond to this pitch, so I guess it resonates with someone out there, just not me.

DC represent

OK, I promise I will post some things from our time in the US, but I haven't even uploaded those photos yet - as you can tell, I'm still dealing with the backlog of things I didn't have time to post in 2004. And I'll try to do some posts over the weekend (if I have time) that are a bit less photo-heavy, or maybe just posts that contain photos of something other than stairs leading underground.

For the time being, though, check out this link - DC street art. For those of you not from the District, I'll point out that this stencil is similar in form to the DC flag, which you can see here, except the street version has skulls in place of the stars. Some would like to make the DC flag look like this, to protest the fact that voters who are residents of the District of Columbia are not properly represented in Congress - they are able to elect only a non-voting representative to the House of Representatives. This recent commentary, co-authored by a friend and former neighbor of mine, explains the situation in greater detail and with justifiable outrage.

Underground Moscow #7 - Smolenskaya

This pedestrian underpass allows one to cross under the Garden Ring near both of the Smolenskaya metro stations (yes, there are two of them with the same name, with different entrances - one on the dark-blue line known as the deeper Smokenskaya station, the other, on the light-blue line, known as the shallower Smolenaskaya station). If you need to get from Old Arbat to the Stockmann department store located in the Smolensky Passazh shopping center and don't want to use the underpass across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, this would be the one to use.


Entrance on the inner (East) side of the Garden Ring.
The sign touts a 24-hour currency exchange.


Before descending one can purchase shaurma.


This is deeper than many underpasses.


And longer.


Not much pedestrian traffic on a Saturday.


Exiting on the outer side of the Garden Ring.


The descent into the underpass is overseen by - what else -
a slot-machine hall. Note the large photo advertisements
showing young, normal-looking people engrossed in the
slots. The portable toilet nearby is an appropriate
accompaniment - might as well toss your money in there
as into a Moscow slot machine.

All of these photos were taken shortly after 1pm on Dec 18, 2004.

Underground Moscow #6 - Chekhovskaya

The entrance to the Chekhovskaya metro station, next to the Pushkinsky movie theater building which also houses the Shangri-La casino (source of the crazy flower, lights, and the Bentley-in-a-glass-box).








Note the two police officers slightly to the right of center .
You'll need to click on the photo and expand it to see them.
This is a typical Moscow cop pose - stand at a Metro station
entrance/exit and wait for someone who doesn't look Russian
to pass, then stop them for a document check.



All photos from the evening of Dec 21, 2004, around 8pm.

Back-alley Moscow

Behind Gasheka St. #8, between 4 and 5 pm, Dec. 31, 2004

Back in the saddle

What a relief to sit down at the keyboard and blog again. Since my last post from DC nearly two weeks ago, we returned to Moscow on schedule, and I found myself promptly buried in work. Many thanks to those of you who continued to visit Scraps and even leave comments during my period of absence - those comments are in part what inspired me to fire up the wi-fi and return to the keyboard this evening. I am going to respond to a couple of comments (in the comments sections, of course!) and perhaps update the blogroll and recently read books list a bit, then hopefully I'll still have time for a more involved post before falling asleep - there have been a few things on my mind since returning from the US and I would like to get them up here before the memories get too stale.

Home again (briefly)

A quick post from rainy DC, where we are spending a brief 2 1/2 days before heading back to Moscow. It always feels like there's a rush when we're here - to see everyone we want to see and do all the errands we need to do before leaving - and this time is no different. I am able to blog straight from my laptop while reclining on a couch thanks to a generous neighbor of my Mom's who has not password-protected his/her home wi-fi network. OK, off to another busy day of appointments and fun - more impressions about this trip will appear in this space soon (since I know you can't wait).

On the road again

We are now on our way back from Ft. Myers Beach, Florida, to Washington, DC (we are in the States for a two-week vacation, in case you're wondering what happened to all the posts about Moscow), and it looks like this time we'll be making the drive in two days as opposed to the three days it took us to get down there (OK, so we spent most of the first day of that trip at the Potomac Mills outlet mall). Never mind that two years ago when we took the same trip I was somehow able to drive the 1100 miles (according to Mapquest, it's 1072 miles. Just another reminder that, as the Russians say, starost' - ne radost' (loosely translated as "getting old(er) is no picnic" - more literally as "old age is no joy").

Our trip down this year was actually more like 1180 miles, thanks to our detour in South Carolina and another one the next day to see historic St. Augustine, Florida, and it was full of Americana. We saw mall walkers at Potomac Mills, lots of snowbirds headed down to Florida in their RV's (recreational vehicles, for the non-American readers) after having Christmas and New Year's at home up north, and plenty of Waffle House diners as we moved further south. We also saw quite a bit of hurricane damage in central Florida as we crossed the state on Routes 70, 78, and 80, and a couple of prison gangs (not true chain gangs, although I guess they may have been shackled - it's hard to see much more than the "State Prisoners Working" sign and the guard brandishing the shotgun when you drive by at highway speed) at work cleaning up litter alongside the highway in Florida and just south of Lumberton, NC. Perhaps my favorite moment was when we got the high-beam flash, a universal (well, at least in the US and in the former USSR) signal to watch out for police ahead, from an oncoming trucker north of Jacksonville, Florida, and luckily took heed of his warning and slowed down - cresting a hill we saw four officers on police-issue Harley-Davidson motorcycles, three of whom had already pulled over speeding motorists - the fourth one could have been ours. When we finally arrived at Grandma's house in Ft. Myers Beach, we were just glad to have made it in one piece.

Tonight we are staying at the Comfort Inn in Dunn, North Carolina - we drove until we found a Comfort Inn because we really appreciated the free wi-fi when we stayed at one on the trip down - without it, I wouldn't be able to blog these words...

It looks like this trip is going to be the opposite of my trip last fall to St. Petersburg, at least as far as the blog is concerned. After that trip, I had pictures posted quickly, but the full story of the trip itself took longer. With this trip, it seems to be the other way around - it will probably take me some time to go through all of the pictures I've taken in the last week and select the highlights to be posted here. Anyway, we are supposed to be driving the remaining 400 or so miles back to DC tomorrow, so I need to go to sleep now and rest up for the road ahead.

Sharp objects?

I know this is a strange post and chronologically out of place, but I can't understand why, after going through stringent security at the Frankfurt airport to board our flight to DC on January 1, we were given metal cutlery with our dinner on board the plane:



See, this bothered me enough that I even took a picture of it. It didn't bother me because I think it made anyone less safe - when I boarded a plane the week after Sept 11 and was asked if I had any sharp objects, I told them I had pens and keys, and I still think those items are potentially more dangerous weapons than nail clippers, so the whole "sharp object" restriction is not applied very logically, in my opinion. And I was allowed to board in Frankfurt with metal collar stays (as I looked for an explanatory link, I found this well-designed page that's funny because it is selling something I didn't know I needed), which set off the metal detector but were not checked for sharpness. It just bothered me to go through the whole security rigamarole and then see that Lufthansa was giving every passenger something that none of them would have been allowed to bring on board themselves.

One more from the road

OK, we need to get rolling - I can't spend the whole morning blogging, and I want to try out the Comfort Inn's free continental breakfast before it's too late. We are going to try to hit St. Augustine, Florida, today, before heading to our final destination - Grandma's house in Ft. Myers Beach, FL.

We took some time out of our route to circle back on this slow-moving truck after passing it on I-95 yesterday, and were rewarded with a photo of it right by Pedro's South of the Border (off to the left in the photo, it's an all-American institution which should make Americans scratch their heads - I won't begin to try to explain it to my Russian readers right now, although I may edit this post later).


Near the North/South Carolina border on
Interstate 95, around 3:30pm, Jan 4, 2005

Click on the photo to expand it and see this trucker's patriotic messages.

On the road

We got off the Interstate (I-95 does get old) briefly around Summerton, SC, yesterday. I took a bunch of pictures, trying Lorina's patience severely, which I'll try to put together into an essay-type post, maybe once we're back home in Moscow.


Near Summerton, SC, around 2pm, Jan 4, 2005.

Hometown

Before getting on the road to Florida, we spent a hectic day in DC. Happily, that day included breakfast at a cafe in Adams Morgan. While our breakfast was being cooked, I took a walk around and took a couple of pictures.


18th & U Sts., NW, around 11am, Jan 2, 2005

In response to reader demand...

...a picture of me and Lorina, hanging out in our apartment with a good friend of ours - President Putin giving his New Year's address to the nation at around 11:57pm on Dec. 31.



PS - blogging this from the road, using the free wi-fi at the Brunswick, GA, Comfort Inn. All times on this blog are local.

And one last time...

Happy 2005 to everyone one last time! This little snowman represents us fleeing Russia for 2 weeks in the States. We arrived in DC yesterday and are taking a day to deal with jet lag and see a couple of close friends before starting the drive down to Florida tomorrow morning.


[Credits to be posted when we're back in Moscow]