Happy Valentine's Day!

Liveblogging from Igor Butman's jazz club, Le Club - who knew they had wireless internet?! - where Lorina and I are on a date.

OK, back to the romance...

Greetings from SPB

I just got back from a weekend in St. Petersburg - it was good to get away from Moscow but now it's nice to be back home, even though I'll be getting up to go to work in a mere 9 hours.

Among other things, I found some interesting street art in SPB; stay tuned for more this week as I pick out the best photos and get them uploaded. This one I must share immediately:


Corner of Liteiny Prospekt and Ul. Zhukovskogo, 2:40pm,
Feb. 13, 2005.

Aside from the juxtaposition of cheesy, slick commercialism with rough and not entirely friendly street art (both using one of SPB's many architectural treasure as their canvas), I was pleased to capture the "Just Love Us" tag in between. I saw this tag in several places around SPB and was intrigued - is this a young tagger asking the older generation to just love the kids even though they deface buildings? An adolescent asking the ladies to "just love" him and his friends? A Russian appealing to English-speakers? The possibilities are endless.

From the Motherland - DC sky

OK, I know this is a bit off-topic, but try to forgive me - we've been back in Moscow less than a month and I'm already homesick for DC (not too homesick, but since I'm not usually homesick at all, this is strange). Plus, I have been meaning to post these photos from our trip for a few weeks. Isn't the sky pretty over Washington?


Farmers' and Mechanics' branch of Riggs Bank
(a once venerable and now disgraced Washington
institution, and a former employer of mine)
at Wisconsin Ave. & M St., NW, 3:50pm, Jan. 15, 2005.


13th & W Streets, NW.


Looking north up 12th Place, NW, where I
lived for a year back in the day (1999-2000).


From inside the courtyard of the Harrison Square
townhome development, 12th Place between V & W Sts., NW.

The last three photos are from between 5:15 and 5:20pm on Jan. 14, 2005.

More shadows

Archway off of Malaya Nikitskaya St., 2:15pm, Feb. 10. 2005.

Art

I went for a walk today around lunchtime and found these two murals, if that's even the right thing to call them, adjacent to each other in a courtyard right off of Patriarch's Ponds. They are not visible in their entirety at the moment because of the snow, but I still found them interesting. Do you think they meant "Posse" instead of "Pose"?

Fruits of the post-Soviet period

The relatively large number of English-speaking expats spending time in the post-Soviet space in the 1990's is starting to yield excellent works of fiction by some of those ex-expats. Last weekend's Moscow Times Context section had a review by the author of (one of?) the first books of this sort - Katherine Shonk, author of The Red Passport - of the latest, Tom Bissell's God Lives in St. Petersburg. As has already been noted by Laurence Jarvik in a post on the Argus, this one looks like it will be worth reading for sure. Based on Shonk's review, I've already ordered a copy and can only hope it's as good as billed:

Out of Control
When expatriates crack up abroad, who or what is to blame? It's as much the person as the place in Tom Bissell's collection of stories about Americans traveling through Central Asia.
By Katherine Shonk [...]

When expatriates crack up abroad, who or what is to blame? It's easy to pin an overseas crisis -- whether of faith, conscience or confidence -- on the host nation itself. Exotic locales are breeding grounds for alienation, fear and loneliness; depravity and depression often follow. But expatriates arrive with their own baggage. Reckless as gamblers, idealistic as missionaries (and often one or both by trade), they seek more fulfilling lives in places they don't know very well. No surprise that when they crash, they crash hard.

"God Lives in St. Petersburg," which, despite its title, is set primarily in post-Soviet Central Asia, is populated by expatriates crashing spectacularly. Whether saving souls in Samarkand, documenting war in Afghanistan, or pleasure-tripping in Almaty, American characters stake their claims to salvation, adventure and the spoils that wealthy visitors to poor nations expect as their due. In the process, they retrace the psychological and cultural missteps of the most deluded crusaders and colonialists.

A Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan during the mid-1990s, Bissell returned in 2001 to research the depletion of the Aral Sea. His first book, "Chasing the Sea," was an enthralling, hour-by-hour account of the trip. Bissell's writing conveys a passion for this part of the world and an intense curiosity about the motives of Central Asians and visiting Westerners alike.

The American travelers in "God Lives in St. Petersburg" are multi-faceted, which is to say they are often unlikable. Bandits, soldiers and kidnappers punish them for their carelessness and naivete, and the threat of violence is a constant. "Aral" explains how Amanda Reese, an environmental biologist visiting the Aral Sea as part of a small UN delegation, winds up the captive of a man who may or may not be a government spy. In a risky and satisfying twist, the story's focus switches from petulant Amanda and her arrogant colleagues to characters more worthy of the reader's sympathy.

"Expensive Trips Nowhere" finds New Yorkers Douglas and Jayne in the wilds of Kazakhstan, enduring another of the senseless vacations he has been springing on her since inheriting money from his parents. "Steppe makes strong what is strong ... Makes weak what is weak," cautions war veteran Viktor, their contemptuous Russian guide. Throughout the trek, Douglas, a man who once accidentally broke his wife's arm in a game of touch football, is handed new and bigger opportunities to disappoint her.

Bissell's stories are long and bursting at the seams with clever dialogue, well-sculpted settings and full characters. It is a rare pleasure to find a young writer (Bissell was born in 1974) handcrafting prose with such patient care. Constructed in the tried-and-true shape of a roller coaster, the stories chug to dramatic and emotional peaks, then plunge earthward, leaving the reader shaken and dazzled.

Shaken and dazzled...sort of like the way I always used to feel after brief trips to Russia. After living in Moscow for 3 years (this is now the second time I've lived in this country for such a long time - the first time I was a wee foreign service brat in Leningrad), this place has still not entirely lost its power to shake or dazzle me in ways both positive and negative.

I mentioned to my assistant at work today that I was shocked by the unwillingness of a certain service provider to quickly remedy a situation which they admitted was their fault. She was surprised that I could still be outraged over such a situation after working in this environment for so long. The reason for my outrage, though, is quite simple. There have always been smart and competent people in this country. In recent years, many of them have started operating businesses which demonstrate an understanding of what proper client service is all about. So it's not as though it is impossible to find a good service experience in Russia. Unfortunately, everyone here has such low expectations that they don't force service providers to work harder or better.

This is not just an extended gripe about getting things done in Russia (though I could go off on one of those, I don't think there's enough space here for all I'd have to say); there's a political parallel to be drawn here. Just like many Russians expect that their local plumber will show up drunk as a skunk at 11 in the morning, they expect that their political leaders will be either thieves or dictators, or worst of all a combination of the two. Sadly, I think the current group in power has started to demonstrate the worst of both of those traits. Whereas the Yeltsin "family" may have lined their pockets, at least they didn't try to tell the citizens what to think (OK, except during the 1996 presidential campaign). Obviously this is a rather simplistic parallel that may not actually mean anything, but I think it's worth pondering at least for a moment.

Icicles

By popular demand (OK, one person requested this in a comment to my last post), here are pics of a building I mistakenly thought to be the Vietnamese embassy (since the building next door is their Defense Attache's office), which Veronica of Neeka's Backlog has revealed to be the embassy of an unspecified African nation:






Pretty big icicles, eh?

Shadows

Strolling around in the area between Ostozhenka and Arbat, I took a couple of pictures of a building that I think is the Vietnamese Embassy, an old mansion with lovely if grandiose architecture which had icicle clusters of amazing size dangling from clearly faulty gutters. Then I took a picture of an address sign on the building next door just so that I could remember the street name and ended up liking it better than the icicle photos:


Pomerantsev Pereulok, around 2:30pm, February 5, 2005.

Russia's Gaza?

I have to confess, whenever I hear people talk about Russian critics of the Putin regime being financed by foreign "special services" or taking money from "Soros and the CIA," after briefly considering how paranoid and Soviet such theories sound, I can't help but think of Pavel Felgenhauer. I think it's something about the combination of his consistently anti-Russian-government and pro-US views and the bio line on his articles - "independent defense analyst." I feel a bit ashamed of always making this association, because I doubt there's anything to my suspicion other than a reflexive desire not to see anyone praise America all of the time - that and maybe I've been in Moscow for too long.

In any event, the foregoing silly paragraph notwithstanding, Felgenhauer often has commentary that seems very insightful to me, and I liked his piece in Tuesday's Moscow Times:

Putin Fans Region's Flames
By Pavel Felgenhauer
Moscow Times, Tuesday, February 8, 2005. Issue 3101. Page 11

In 1994, when Russian forces first invaded Chechnya, and in 1999, when we went in again, one of the main official explanations of the costly endeavor was that if left in the hands of separatists and other anti-Russian elements, the conflict in Chechnya would spread like the plague to surrounding regions. Russia would begin to break up just like the Soviet Union did in 1991, as Muslim-populated areas rebelled.

For 10 years, this nightmare scenario of an all-out war across the Caucasus seemed improbable: The Chechens resisted the Russians in a clear-cut national liberation struggle, while other Caucasus groups looked on in apprehension.

The Chechens are the biggest North Caucasus ethnic group and surely the most belligerent. The heads of most other local groups traditionally feared Chechen domination and preferred to deal with the known evil of the Kremlin, rather than fight a bloody war of liberation and find themselves under the Chechens' thumb.

Now the situation is changing dramatically. The local ruling elites still tend to gravitate toward Moscow, but the war is spreading from Chechnya across the entire region. There are almost daily reports of serious clashes in various parts of Dagestan, the republic east of Chechnya populated by a multitude of different ethnic groups. Ingushetia, located west of Chechnya and inhabited by a group closely related to the Chechens, had long been a place of peace, where Russian officers and Chechen fighters would hang out in the same cafe and relax from the nearby war zone. Now, Russians in Ingushetia are constantly clashing with local and Chechen rebels.

Christian Ossetia, west of Ingushetia, has been a bastion of Russian rule in the Caucasus for more than two centuries, but after the bloody attack in Beslan last September, dissatisfaction with Moscow is growing there as well. A steady stream of reports of armed clashes with Muslim extremists is flowing out of Kabardino-Balkaria, the mountainous republic west of Ossetia. There is also unrest in Karachayevo-Cherkessia to the west of Kabardino-Balkaria.
Chechnya is no longer an isolated phenomenon. It is also important to note that it is not Chechen fighters who are moving out to engage pro-Moscow forces on outlying battlefields. Russian officials' reports from Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria note that local non-Chechen fighters are involved.

The Russian response to the spreading Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus has been as heavy-handed as in Chechnya. To engage small groups of fighters, Russian military commanders are using flame-throwers, tanks and armored personal carriers in urban areas. Damage to civilian property is huge, and civilians themselves have been injured.

Moscow's principal response to trouble in the Caucasus since President Vladimir Putin came to power has been to wipe out any resistance without remorse, by virtually any means and without negotiation. Officials apparently hope that steady resolve coupled with unspeakable brutality will terrify Russia's enemies and bring victory.

Brute repression, kidnappings and the extrajudicial murder of suspects have only made things worse. Unemployment in the Northern Caucasus is high, in some places as high as 90 percent. Corruption is rampant, as it is all over today's Russia. The conditions for recruitment of Islamic radicals are almost as good as in Gaza.

Another troubling new feature is that Islamist non-Chechen rebels in recent clashes with Russian-led forces have chosen to fight to the death rather than surrender in totally hopeless circumstances. The main source of this fanaticism is apparently the Russian authorities' inhuman treatment of prisoners. Cases of unexplained death during detention and vicious physical torture are common.

Russia had a chance to find a plausible solution to the Chechen problem by reaching an understanding with moderate secular Chechen nationalists. Now it seems to be too late, and there is not much moderation of any sort left in the Caucasus. The rampant falsification of election results in Chechnya and other Caucasus republics has left Moscow without any serious partner for negotiation, and now elections of local leaders have been abandoned entirely.
Russia still has enough military might to stabilize the situation in the Northern Caucasus, in Abkhazia, in South Ossetia and in Georgia ad infinum. However, we no longer have the power to reap the benefits of the strife we create.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst based in Moscow.

The comparison to Gaza is especially chilling now that we've had a few suicide bombings in Moscow. See what I mean about the bio line at the end of the article, though?

Blogging for rubles

I heard this morning on Echo of Moscow Radio - on the EchoNet program, to be exact - that Bol'shoi Gorod magazine has launched the first paid blog (i.e., the blogger gets paid by the publisher) in Russia. In fact, they are pretty much making the blog the front page of their site - here's their press-release and a post from the magazine's editor about this.

Nikolai Danilov, who blogs under the pseudonym Norvezhskii Lesnoi, is the pioneering blogger. Congratulations are certainly in order. This blog could quickly become one of my favorites for two reasons: 1) I liked the old Bol'shoi Gorod, and the new version (the print magazine was recently redesigned) looks to be better, and 2) Lesnoi intersperses his comments with photos, a blogging style that is near and dear to me.

Lesnoi titled the post about this development on his LiveJournal diary (to remain his personal blog) "I sold out" ("Prodalsya"). He later wrote an interesting post about how his commercial and personal blogs will be divided, but not competitive - no doubt an issue faced by just about any blogger who turns professional. (Sorry, English-speakers, these links are all in Russian.)

I wanted to find out who might have been the first professional blogger in the United States (this post suggests it may have been Romenesko), only to learn that Google finds a wealth of sites containing the words "first professional blogger." Aspiring professional bloggers may find this article to be of interest, as well as this site. There's also apparently an organization known as the Professional Bloggers' Association, so I guess this concept is way more widespread than I thought.

Anyway, congratulations to Danilov, a.k.a. Lesnoi, on being the first in Russia.