Somewhat funny found item

This has probably been all over the internet, but I just saw it for the first time and it is rather amusing, though in a scary way.

An unfavorable comparison

From a Thomas Friedman column in the International Herald Tribune that I picked up boarding the plane back to Moscow:

...if you have societies held together by a voluntary social contract among its constituent populations, and by institutions, you don't need one-man rule. You don't need to mobilize the whole society around resistance to outsiders. And you don't need the suppression of every group in the society, other than the tribe of the one-man ruler - with all the violence and extremism that such suppression brings.

Friedman was writing about the legacy of Arafat, but it seems to me that these thoughts are at least indirectly relevant to the direction Russia is going under Putin.

Ukraine campaign

The time between the general election and the run-off was supposed to be an agitation-free period, from what I understood, but even being in the country for less than 72 hours we noticed several instances in which that was not the case. Predictably, each candidate appeared to still be using those avenues open to him. Yanukovich's people (presumably) were behind a series of TV ads which we saw repeatedly, which, without naming either candidate, had what appeared to be the Ukrainian equivalents of Joe and Jane Sixpack (Bohdan Horylka and Oleksandra Salo?) - a war veteran and a milkmaid, for example - talking about the direction they wanted to see the country go in, with the tag line, "А ты за що?" ("What do you support?"). The slant was anti-Yushchenko.

Yushchenko's campaign may or may not have been behind a concert/rally which we saw on Independence Square Saturday night, but they were almost certainly behind the dozens of campaign books piled (for free access, apparently) on one of the windowsills at Boryspil airport - I grabbed one on the way out:



The cover identifies Yushchenko as the "leader of the nascent Ukrainian political nation."

And they were probably also behind this slightly more opposition-like sticker:



I peeled this off a curbstone next to Bulgakov's house-museum on Andreevsky Uzviz. The large text reads, "Election 2004 / Are you ready to go to Chechnya?" And the bottom line is a Yanukovich quote: "Dual citizenship [with Russia] is just a matter of time."

We felt like natural Yushchenko supporters (politics aside) because of Lorina's orange scarf, although it only elicited one comment (from a friendly flower vendor on Independence Square).

A brief escape to Kiev...

Lorina and me at St. Andrew's Church (Andriivska Tserkva) - a Rastrelli-designed confection that looks somewhat out of place amidst the many more "orthodox" churches of Kiev.

Fancy Kiev bus ticket

Sunset over Trinity Gate Church (Troitska Nadbramna Tserkva) at the Caves Monastery

View of the Dnepr across the Dormition Cathedral (Uspensky Sobor) from the Caves Monastery belltower.

Ticket to climb the bell-tower at the Caves Monastery. Cost: 5 griven = roughly $1.

Leaving for Kiev

After nearly 2 hours of choking on exhaust fumes (generated by the taxi we were in and the traffic jam surrounding us) we made it to Sh-2 and met up with our friends, checked in uneventfully and then were treated to a diversion as we waited to board our flight: 2 airport police manhandling a seriously intoxicated and very tall foreigner (perhaps a Scandinavian) who didn't agree that he should not be allowed to board his flight. The cops got a few licks in and didn't seem to mind the exercise.

Getting the news in London

It took me so long (3 weeks) to post this photo, and I'm back-dating it so unfortunately the blog won't even appear updated (though it's being updated all the time!).

Procrastination mixes just as badly with blogging as with everything else in life that requires even a bit of productivity. But wait a minute - blogging IS procrastination (just ask Google).