Photodomination

Some of you may wonder why I have been so photo-heavy in my posts of late. For one thing, I haven't had the inclination to translate anything lately - it just seems like it takes so much time to do a good job of that. Also, I've had lots of good (I think) photos to post. And let's be honest, laziness does play a role as well - a picture is worth a thousand words, and while it may take some effort to get pictures worth posting, getting them and posting one is certainly less effort than banging out a thousand words of original content.

But the main reason, I think, is that for the moment at least I've grown tired of the news here. The main story yesterday was Putin's address to the Federation Council, often referred to as something like the State of the Union address given by the President of the US. I didn't have the patience to watch the speech, read its text, or analyze it. What I was able to pick up from some of the coverage on NTV was that even some Russian political pundits are willing to state publicly that Putin's speeches in the past have had little to do with the policies his administration has then pursued. Triumphalist and optimistic talk, backed up by nothing and thunderously applauded by a gallery of careerists, sycophants, and opportunists. If things keep going in this direction, we'll have to ask the old-school Kremlinologists to come out of retirement and help us read between the lines, because more and more Putin and his team hew to one party line in public statements while the real policies are made and implemented far away from the eyes of the average Russian citizen.

Oh, and the 60th anniversary of US and Soviet soldiers meeting on the Elbe was also one of the top 3 stories on both NTV's 7pm news and RTR's Vesti news program last night. I should mention that I inherited from my father a Soviet poster commemorating this event and was proud to have it hanging in my office when I worked on a program at a US university for Russian and US military officers, and that generally I think the experience of being allies in WWII shows that the US and Russia should be able to cooperate for everyone's greater benefit.

However, I'm sad to admit that for some reason all the coverage of this anniversary on Russian TV did was spike my cynicism level. Both programs highlighted the fact that Presidents Bush and Putin had issued a joint statement on this occasion. For Putin, this is a big deal. Bush, on the other hand, may not even know that the statement went out with his name on it. And my American readers will correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt the 60th anniversary story ran as one of the top items on any of the evening network news programs in the US. So my take on this was that it's just another example of Putin desperately grasping at parity with other world leaders, and the TV coverage just another example of people here wanting to remember when their country was ascendant rather than on the decline.

So, given that I've not of late been possessed of my usual sunny disposition, maybe the preponderance of photo posts in the past few days is for the best.

Stopmotosniato

I know that the "Moscow native looking anachronistic next to a cutting-edge ad" genre of photos has been worn out over the past 10 years by many photographers, here's my attempt at a contribution to that body of work.


Elderly lady selling pussy-willows next to Motorola ad
on Triumfal'naia Square, 9:54am, April 22.

Memories of Hong Kong

Please humor me as I go off-topic here, with some photos from our vacation in Hong Kong earlier this month. The ones I'm posting here are not your typical tourist vistas, I figure you can see those here and here. It's surely a matter of taste, but I liked these photos best of the many which we took over the 5 days we spent in Hong Kong:


Self-portrait taken from the front seat of the upper level of a double-decker bus, showing the single thing that most impressed me about HK - the sheer verticality of the city, April 4.


"Slow," taken from the Central-Mid-levels Escalator, April 4.


Since I've devoted substantial space in this blog to the Moscow metro, I need to include at least one photo of the Hong Kong subway here. The subway was quite clean, just like the rest of the city; the MTR trains differ from any other subway or train I have ever been on in the fact that all of the cars of the train are open to each other, which creates the impression of being in one long, flexible train car. April 5.


The view from the bus on a hilly road on Lantau Island, where we had just seen the world's largest outdoor seated bronze Buddha statue. Note the "Hello Kitty" toy hanging from the mirror, and if you look closely in the smaller mirror you can see me taking the picture and Lorina keeping her distance from her camera-crazy husband. April 6.

Nighttime reflection

It's been too long since I posted photos here...


Hotel Pekin reflected in a big puddle on 2nd Brestskaya St.,
11:53pm, April 19. The blur in the upper right-hand corner
is a passing car. Arty, right?

More on recently re-appointed Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov

Another article that I've translated (partially) off the Novye Izvestiia website:

"Other than prosecuting I don't know how to do anything."
["Кроме как прокурорить я ничего не умею"]
Vladimir Ustinov is going for a second term
By Sergei Tkachuk, Novye Izvestiia, April 13, 2005

[...]On the subject of whether he was prepared to manage the prosecutors for another five years, Mr. Ustinov said the following: "My whole life has gone by in the prosecutor's office. I haven't known any other work life and can't imagine myself doing anything different, although someday I'll have to think about that, too." He even cracked a joke on the topic, "Other than prosecuting I don't know how to do anything, I'm a third-generation prosecutor, and so my answer is unambiguous."

The experts consulted by Novye Izvestiia (NI), however, have strong doubts that Mr. Ustinov is the best choice for the job. For example, Yabloko deputy chairman Sergei Mitrokhin told NI, "There is no doubt that Ustinov's term will be extended, because he is a loyal ally of the Kremlin in all matters. In that sense, they won't be able to find a better replacement." According to Mr. Mitrokhin, "Ustinov shouldn't be in the prosecutor's office." "From the standpoint of efficiency the prosecutor-general's office can't even be awarded a 'C', they haven't solved a single socially significant murder or terrorist act," opined the politician, "instead all of the political orders of the Kremlin have been fulfilled 100%. Just look at the heroic deeds of the prosecutor-general's office in putting kids in jail for five years because they acted like hooligans in a government office [the incident when National Bolshevik Party activists seized the lobby of the Health Ministry building - NI].

"Well-known attorney Boris Kuznetsov, who conducted an investigation of the sinking of the Kursk submarine independent of the prosecutors' investigation, agrees: "A prosecutor-general like this apparently suits the powers-that-be." "If I were a senator, I wouldn't confirm him under any circumstances, because on his watch the level of prosecutor's office employees has declined by an order of magnitude, and instead of enforcing the laws, they use non-judicial means to achieve the decisions which they seek," the attorney told "NI." [...] According to Mr. Kuznetsov... "If in the courts an the Ministry of Internal Affairs at least some minor reforms are being carried out, the prosecutor-general's office is in a state of utter stagnation. The atmosphere there is one of untruth, in which it is very difficult for young prosecutors to work."

Ashcroft and Ustinov - top cops with soft spots for God

Former [somehow I missed his departure so this was wrong in the initial post] US Attorney General John Ashcroft's eccentric religiosity and proclivity toward prayer in the workplace is well known, but I was surprised to see that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Ustinov has similar tendencies. The following article (translated by me) provides details:

Everybody Get Down on Your Knees
Russia's Prosecutor-General Calls His Underlings to Prayer
Novye Izvestiia, April 14, 2005, By Shagen Ogandzhanian

Yesterday the senators in the Federation Council confirmed Vladimir Ustinov's nomination to a new 5-year term as prosecutor-general with 149 votes to confirm, one abstention, and none against, and gave him a bouquet of roses. And the man of the day himself once again made several statements which sound strange coming from a prosecutor, especially the nation's number-one prosecutor.

The fact that Vladimir Ustinov, whose term was to expire on May 17th, was confirmed for another term, was no surprise. Vladimir Putin nominated him, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov commended the prosecutor-general for his "civic position and professionalism," and the other senators are in general famous for their corporate solidarity and frequently, very frequently, vote along with Mr. Mironov. Nevertheless Mr. Ustinov was able to make a sweet news story ["informatsionnaia konfetka" in the original] out of the more or less routine procedure of his technical confirmation. In order to accomplish this, all he had to do was address the upper chamber.

Mr. Ustinov turned out to be very much inclined to self-criticism, and he told the senators, "We haven't been able at this time to stop crime once and for all. I don't mean in statistical representations, because you can do anything you want with statistics. I mean the feelings of our citizens about security issues. I think that if citizens are able to say in a survey whether they are safe or not, that represents a positive assessment of law enforcement agencies." The prosecutor-general considers other criteria to be "more deceptive," because he is sure that "behind numbers you can always find those who manipulate the numbers."

In addition to the battle for public opinion, Mr. Ustinov also touched on the topic of corruption within the prosecutorial system. "Within the prosecutor's office we are working on getting rid of negligent workers, and sometimes even traitors. On this point there can be no compromises," said the prosecutor-general menacingly, but he did not specify what he meant by "getting rid of." [...]

Some of the senators had practical questions for Mr. Ustinov. For example, Senator Gennadii Burbulis asked about the state of spirituality among prosecutor's office employees. Mr. Ustinov replied that significant attention is paid to the spirituality of employees, and that designating special rooms for conducting religious ceremonies in various prosecutor's office buildings is encouraged. And in general, Mr. Ustinov reported, he thinks that "religiosity should be of primary importance in the formation and cultivation of people's spirituality" and that "all religious trends which are being observed in our country are wonderful. They maintain the spirituality of people at a high level." This is not the first time that Mr. Ustinov has touched upon this lofty theme. Last winter at a prosecutor-general's office meeting he told his colleagues that "society has lost the concept of sin and shame."

After being confirmed, Mr. Ustinov promised to improve the work of the prosecutor-general's office. He refrained from troubling the senators with talk about Beslan, for example, although formally there was good reason to do so. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the tragedy in the North Ossetian city, Alexander Torshin, just announced that the terrorists had placed weapons in the school ahead of time, while the prosecutor-general's office in the Southern Federal District has stated on more than one occasion that there was no weapons cache in the school. On the other hand, this [omission] was understandable, after all Mr. Ustinov's remarks were not devoted to specific cases but to the system as a whole. And first and foremost, of course, to spirituality.

"Russian economy declining" - phone-in survey

Not that one should put any stock in these things (call-in surveys, after all, attract a self-selecting pool of respondents, and there is nothing to keep people from calling in multiple times), but here were the results of the survey on this evening's edition of TVC's nightly news program (they do a different "survey" every night:

In your opinion, is the Russian economy currently:

Response....................# of respondents....(percentage of total)
Growing and strengthening.......339...............(2.5%)
Standing still...............................634...............(4.8%)
Declining................................12,334.............(92.7%)

It's not social science by any stretch of the imagination, but I found these results to be surprising.

60 years ago

I encourage anyone who wants to be reminded of the true lessons of World War II - rather than just get caught up in the patriotic, militaristic hoopla that I'm sure is about to engulf Moscow as May 9th approaches - to view and listen to this slide show, courtesy of the BBC, about the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The exploitation of a tragedy?

One of the top stories on the Russian TV news (here are links to the coverage on NTV, ORT, and Rossiia) the past couple of nights has been the trial of Chicagoan Irma Pavlis in the death of her adopted son, who was born in Russia. It has been called a "sensational" story, and I suppose it is, but in my opinion it's been getting an inordinate amount of news coverage here.

I hate to inform my Russian readers of this, but the story is not being covered by the national media in the US. It is being covered by the Chicago newpapers as a local story (here and here, for example), but that's about it. The reason for this is not that the United States is a nation of heartless child abusers, but simply that child abuse is a tragic fact of life in the US just as it is in Russia.

Obviously the Russian media should cover this, since it's clearly of interest to their viewers/readers. And I would like to believe that one of the purposes served by this coverage will be to increase scrutiny of the adoption agencies which make money by hooking Russian orphans up with foreign parents. The cynic in me, though, sees the story being covered in a way that paints all foreign adoptive parents - and by broader implication all foreigners - with a broad brush of suspicion and vilification.

What I object to is the tone of the coverage in the Russian media, which implies that Russian children adopted abroad are in mortal danger. The statistics often cited are 12 Russian adoptees (out of some 40,000 currently living in the US) who have died at the hands of their adoptive parents in the past 10 years or so. Certainly these are heinous crimes, and the perpetrators should be vigorously prosecuted, as has been the case with Irma Pavlis, but the implication in the reports I've seen is that the larger tragedy or outrage is not the 12 individual cases of horrible abuse resulting in children dying, but the fact that Russian children are being adopted by foreigners.

I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that in the current climate of growing xenophobia, this looks like more of the same from state-run news programs like Vesti - "our" children should stay in "our" orphanages, rather than being adopted by "them." I don't want to sound like a shill for the international adoption "business," but the fact is that if the Russian media want to do their part to cut down on the number of Russian children dying, they should focus on the dire situation which exists in many underfunded Russian orphanages. International organizations like Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross have reported on this in the past (links are to their reports), and while the situation has probably improved in the past couple of years, I would bet that on average a child still has a better chance at a happy, healthy childhood with a foreign adoptive family than in a Russian orphanage. But instead of any mentioning of these problems, on Thursday night Vesti showed rosy footage of the orphanage in Krasnodar Krai from which Alyosha "Alex" Pavlis was adopted.

Maybe I am seeing America-bashing where none exists - all these years of living in Russia may have made me as paranoid and cynical as the people currently running the country - but it galls me to think that the Kremlin media-meisters may be making political hay out of a child's tragic death.

Hopefully some good will come out of this, and the adoption agencies (incidentally, the Pavlises used a Russian-operated agency whose fees were substantially cheaper than those charged by foreign-operated agencies) will be subjected to more stringent regulation - and prospective adoptive parents to more careful screening.

"Ukraine demands Russian respect"

The latest on Ukrainian PM Tymoshenko's on-again, off-again visit to Moscow...

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was supposed to visit Russia this week. Then, all of a sudden, she wasn't. As often happens in this part of the world, there were several theories advanced by various sources to explain the turn of events. Veronica at Neeka's Backlog covered these quite well, and I am not going to try to rehash the debate here.

Thanks to NTV's "Segodnia at 22:00" news show, though, I learned that Tymoshenko gave an interview to the BBC on Friday, and that she had some interesting things to say. NTV provided audio of the interview, by the way, and Yulia was speaking Russian (as opposed to Ukrainian). Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Ukraine demands Russian respect
By Sarah Rainsford, BBC News, Kiev

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko says she cancelled her first official visit to Moscow because she wants Russia to respect her country.

It should have been her first official trip since taking office in the wake of the victory of the Orange Revolution. But it was postponed after Russia's state prosecutor warned that she remains on a wanted list relating to claims of fraud in the 1990s.

Officially, the trip was delayed as the prime minister was "too busy". She is supposed to be tied up with urgent agricultural matters as it is spring sowing season in Ukraine.

But speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Ms Tymoshenko made it clear she was protesting against "an act of stupidity" by a bureaucrat, and one that she insists must be corrected.

"I think everyone remembers how certain Russian bureaucrats used to work against the Ukrainian opposition, I think it is hard to drop old habits," she said. "I want to believe the statement is just the stupidity of one bureaucrat and that it is not the national politics of Russia. If that is the case, then that bureaucrat must correct his stupidity."

The incident has reignited tensions between Moscow and Kiev - already strained since the controversial elections that sparked the Orange Revolution here. Russia campaigned openly then for the candidate of power, Viktor Yanukovych. Now Ms Tymoshenko says it is time Russia stopped treating Ukraine as its inferior, and learned some respect. [...]

Ms Tymoshenko said she never doubted for one day that Mr Yushchenko would become president. "I watched as that faith was justified," she said. "The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage."

Ms Tymoshenko dismissed rumours of a growing divide between the two leaders of the revolution, Mr Yushchenko and herself, as groundless. She told the BBC she planned to work side-by-side with the president for decades and insisted the two had no serious disagreements.

Ms Tymoshenko also revealed she was aware of some of the other things people on the streets were saying about her. As well as the orange jumpers and outfits, her braided hair became a trademark feature during the days of protests - a style that has since been copied around the world. "I just heard the latest joke about my hair: 'Do you know what that is on her head? It's a steering wheel to drive the state'," she said.

"It's just comfy this way and I think it suits me. I'm honoured that models around the world are sporting the same style on catwalks these days, that means Ukraine is not only forming the fashion for politics and democracy but for hairdos too, and I am very proud of that."

This additional nugget from the interview was highlighted in a sidebar to the article: "I know the Russian political elite has got used to the Ukraine suffering from an inferiority complex, but I want this to disappear from our relationship."

The page also provides a link allowing you to listen to the interview - in English translation, presumably.