Welcome home?

Moscow greeted me yesterday with a slightly renovated passport control area at Sheremetyevo and a snow flurry.

Right away, I noticed some things which have changed since I was last here in August. For one thing, there seems to be a new license plate designation for Moscow. In Russia, the region of a car's registration is indicated by a 2-digit number set off to the side from the license number - Moscow's had been 99, 77, and 97, but yesterday I saw a new one - 177. So they're breaking the rules by adding a digit; I guess there are just too many cars in this town to stick with the old numbers. This comes on the heels of the change to Moscow's area code - from 095 to 495.

The new hotel being built on the site of the old Inturist at the foot of Tverskaya is going up quickly, and across the street sushi restaurant Gin-no Taki has opened a new third-floor dining room, alleviating the lines which always used to make it difficult to dine there. The prime real estate near Pushkin Square from which Trinity Motors was unceremoniously ejected earlier this year has now become - what else - a mobile phone store, done up in a hideous shade of pink, no less. All along Tverskaya between Mayakovskaya and Belorusskaya there seem to be new banks and other businesses, although that's an area that's always had a lot of turnover. Downtown I noticed street advertising for the new televised version of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita - the new Russia taking the protest literature (though M&M is, of course, much more than just protest literature) of the old and making it commercially viable.

And this morning we woke up to see that yesterday's snow flurry had been but a precursor to an all-night snowfall. The streetlights reflecting off the new-fallen snow created a pre-dawn light that's beautiful to the city-dweller in the same way as moonlight is to denizens of more rural areas. I heard from a cabbie yesterday that a metel' (a blizzard with drifting snow) was forecast for today, and I'm glad to see that it looks like the forecasters were right for once.

The photo shows the early stages of morning traffic (around 8 am) on a snowy - but never snowbound - Leningradsky Prospekt. Moscow maintains its ability to operate regardless of the elements thanks to convoys of snowplows and salt trucks like the one in the photo at bottom right. In the background you can see the illuminated spire of the gargantuan Triumph-Palace apartment building, shining through the snow.

If you're looking for a few things to read, I recommend Sean Guillory's recent bit on the Moscow metro - one of my favorite parts of this city - and this Moscow Times article which Sean mentions; also worth checking out is the homepage of one of our favorite sources of Christmas presents; and, for those of you who are more financially inclined, the Russian Stock Market Blog.

I'm sure I'll notice lots of other changes in the coming days in Moscow. I'm hoping that it keeps snowing - it feels like the city's putting on its best winter face. It's good to be back.

End of the Line #7 - Красногвардейская

The southern end of the green Zamoskvoretskaia line - Krasnogvardeiskaia.

This station is named after the Krasnaia Gvardiia - the Red Guard. All these photos are from April 23 of this year.


On the station platform.


Unattractive, Revolution-themed artwork - the slogan at the bottom of the composition is "Workers of the world, unite."


Slot-machine hall (at left) next to a bread store and currency exchange.


Slot-machine hall (at right) next to a mobile phone store.


Two slot-machine halls next to each other, with a gold and antiques appraiser sandwiched in between.


Sloppily photocopied "wanted" poster announcing that police are seeking one Ruslan Rakhmanovich Ibragimov in connection with the February 2005 bombing in the Moscow metro. The sketch artist made the wanted man look a little like a skinnier version of Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov.


Residential buildings near the metro before nightfall...


...and after. Everything looks better at night.


Graffiti in the elevator, which says, "Limita*, don't piss in the elevator!"

*A pejorative word derived from the Soviet-era concept of "limitchiki," people who would come into Moscow to acquire groceries and consumer goods which were not available in the provinces. It's now applied to people who are recently arrived in Moscow, are looked down on by native Muscovites, and often don't have proper documentation to live in the capital, whose lives inspired a movie of the same name.

Memories from last winter

December 26, 2004, at the Izmailovo market.

We had been out in the cold shopping for Christmas presents for hours and decided to get some shashlyk to warm up.

Laughing all the way to the bank?

This photo shows good friends Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder sharing a light moment in Kaliningrad last July. But what were they really laughing about?

Gerhard: The opposition actually thinks I want to win this election! Remind me again how much you're going to pay me once I'm done with this politics crap?

Volodya: Hah! The opposition! They are always such lokhi*. That's why I don't even bother having an opposition. Just be glad your money will be coming directly to you. Sechin keeps telling me mine's in Switzerland somewhere...

*chumps, suckers.

The "revolving door," Russo-German-style

In the US political context, the concept of the "revolving door" refers to the practice of elected government officials and bureaucrats leaving public service and immediately going to work for a lobbying firm or a private-sector company with activities somehow related to their prior official role. The instances of this happening in the US at the federal and state levels of government are numerous, in spite of the "cooling-off period" guidelines that exist for some officials and require them to wait some period of time after their government service before doing this.

Likewise, private-sector top managers who are politically well-connected often receive appointments to work in government departments which regulate or otherwise deal with the industry in which they have made their careers. Hence, the "revolving door" metaphor, which also implies that it's the same people coming and going, a dynamic promoted by the two-party system in the US. If you're an expert on topic X and are affiliated with the Democratic Party, for example, right now you're probably working (if not on the staff of a Democratic Member of Congress) at a think tank or, if your area of expertise is in demand in the private sector, with a corporation. And when the party in power eventually changes (thank goodness it always has in this country, at least in the past), you will be in line to be appointed to an appropriate government department. The most frequently cited example of this is Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration, went to work for the defense contractor Halliburton while Clinton was in the White House, and then essentially nominated himself to be W's running mate.

In some cases, it makes sense - the individual was an official dealing with some technical field and is qualified to consult on the same issues for a private-sector company, or, in the case of a legislator, the individual's legislative activities corresponded with their areas of interest and they want to continue to work on the same issues after they leave office because they are not re-elected or are not eligible to be re-elected (because of term limits). By the same token, it is easy to see why the government might in some cases want to hire experts in certain fields from the private sector.

Often, however, ex-government officials and legislators are hired on the basis of who they know rather than what they know, and they are expected to use their connections in government in the service of their new employer's (or their new employer's clients') economic interests. And individuals moving from the private sector into government service sometimes have opportinuties to influence their former employers' business which look very much like a conflict of interest.

Perhaps there isn't anything inherently wrong even with this, but in general the process tends to have an unsavory air about it and is often decried by media commentators (see the next-to-last paragraph of the second piece linked). At its most egregious, the "revolving door" involves jobs being promised to public officials while they are still in office (although this is, at least in some cases, illegal), with at least an implication that before leaving office they need to perform some sort of favor for the company that intends to hire them. It seems that nowadays, the potential opportunity to "cash in" on one's public service is viewed almost as an entitlement by a growing number of so-called "public servants." But perhaps this has always been the nature of the game in Washington. [LA: Think this is enough background? --Editor: I thought this was supposed to be about Russia - ?]

In any event, money does make the world go round, and former officials do need to make a living doing something, so these incestuous relationships are more or less an accepted practice in the US. The Washington Post, for example, even titles its periodic updates on people's comings and goings to and from various jobs "Revolving Door."

Being a native of Washington and therefore accustomed to such behavior, I wasn't surprised to hear that Gerhard Schroeder has taken a position with the new Gazprom-controlled North European gas pipeline - a massive infrastructure project with important geopolitical implications for Russia to which Schroeder and his good friend Vladimir committed their countries just over 3 months ago. I guess this just goes to show that when the Russians and the Germans collaborate - instead of going to war with each other, which was more commonly the case in the 20th century - they can accomplish remarkable feats. Through cooperation, Schroeder and Putin, with the help of Putin's underlings colleagues at state-controlled Gazprom, have managed to achieve a revolving-door scenario that is so laden with retrospective conflict of interest concerns and potentially so scandalous that it puts to shame just about anything you would ever see in Washington.

I heard about this story first on the BBC's World Today news program, which is broadcast after midnight by our local public radio station in DC. At 12:30am, the same station broadcasts Deutsche Welle's Newslink. Not surprisingly, DW didn't have a word to say about this story.

Davids Medienkritik caught the scent of this story quickly - it does smell rather bad - and his post on this has some initial reactions and discussion in the comments. The Times of London doesn't like the way this looks, either:

The move was announced yesterday by Alexei Miller, the Gazprom chairman, as he opened a new Russian-German gas pipeline, but has yet to be confirmed by Herr Schröder.

His reticence is understandable. Gazprom’s pressure on East European states has been growing and the EU is becoming deeply dependent on the company’s gas supplies.

The management of Gazprom is very close to Mr Putin, whom the former Chancellor befriended during his seven years in office.

Herr Schröder, 61, is determined to boost his pension with business contracts. He is already signed up as a consultant to Ringier, a Swiss company. Reports suggest that he will earn about £300,000 a year from them, but the Gazprom position is likely to pay more.

Really, though, who can live on a mere $500+k a year nowadays?

And the Financial Times quotes an anti-corruption activist:

Hansjörg Elshorst, head of the German section of the Transparency International corruption lobby group, said: “Is Schröder giving his elder-statesman backing because he believes in the political significance of the venture? Or is he being rewarded for supporting the deal earlier? The latter would be unacceptable, but either way he has to come forward and explain.”

Reuters reported the following on November 18:

Shortly after he lost the September 18 election, there were reports from Moscow that the chancellor, who is a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, would become an adviser to Russian gas giant Gazprom. The stories were quickly denied.

Just as in DC, denials - especially hasty ones - don't always mean the story's not true. It looks like for this massive pipeline project an equally massive conflict-of-interest scandal may become a part of the deal that no one bargained for. Or perhaps this is just business as usual anywhere in the world, and no one will raise a fuss.

Proto-blogger

Before there was SiberianLight (R.I.P.), and long before there was Scraps of Moscow, there was Belly Button Window. This is a blog by an American who travels a fair bit these days, judging from the recent posts - more to the point, he lived and worked in Russia for several years surrounding the financial crisis of '98. Thanks to the miracle of Movable Type, you can check out his first impressions of Russia in 1997 as a Peace Corps Volunteer and his subsequent life and times (apparently as an office worker in the professional services field with an accounting firm) in 1997, '98, and '99. It's not clear whether he actually had all of this on-line back then or uploaded a diary of some kind, interspersed with timely press clippings. But the flavor of pre- and immediately-post-crisis Moscow is unmistakable.

I can't say I read everything - the guy's awfully prolific - but my favorite of the posts I did see was this one (about a topic I just can't avoid) aggregating some news coverage around Alla Pugacheva's 50th birthday back in '98 (though he back-dated it in '97 for some reason). He also has posts like this one about fixtures of Moscow expat life like the Starlite Diner, about what it was like to be an expat back in the day, and about some things that never seem to change. Oh, and some observations from his time in Ukraine in 1999. Fascinating, really, like a trip back in time to a bygone era. I spent a small bit of time in Moscow myself in 1997 and 1998, and it's strange to compare that Moscow to the Moscow I came to know in 2001-05.

Rahat Lukum (Lokum?)

On a lighter note, there was a delightful article by Liesl Schillinger* in Slate today exploring one of the great mysteries of the confectionary world - what is so delightful about Turkish Delight? This is actually very season-appropriate, methinks, since it's soon to be the time of year when vacationing Russians wing their way to Turkey in droves (OK, maybe they actually go to Egypt over New Year's and Turkey for the May holidays, because the Med Sea is too cold right now, but work with me here, please) on clapped-out, Soviet-made airliners that are cheap to charter because they aren't allowed to fly into Western Europe anymore. In addition to the other things Russians being back from Turkey - first-degree sunburns, cheaply made "water tobacco pipes," and the odd STD (I can't help but remember the ads for an STD clinic that used to run incessantly on Echo of Moscow around vacation season) - they bring home with them boxes upon boxes of unwanted "Delight."

[Wistfully] Ah, I recall our first (in fact only, so far) trip to Turkey back in 2000 like it was yesterday - 'twas a honeymoon, of sorts, albeit one that preceded the wedding - when we, too, were charmed by the salesmen and dearth of other gift options into bringing back several boxes of the stuff to give to friends and family. Perhaps some of them enjoyed it, but I've always more or less shared the opinion expressed in the abovementioned Slate article: "It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust, or like a lump of Renuzit air freshener: The texture was both waxy and filling-looseningly chewy." It's not that it's totally inedible, just that it's not a particularly rewarding experience, especially for something that is doubtless not light on the calories. Anyway, the article is about how the book (and movie) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe build up Delight as though it's a delight, and about why that might be the case. Very interesting - you wouldn't imagine the topic could turn to sugar rationing in post-war Britain, but it does. Highly recommended.

*She has also translated (from German) at least two short stories by the Russian emigre author Wladimer Kaminer (of Russian Disco fame) into English, which are available - yes, free and enjoyable content - here and here.

...in which the lens is turned on my own country, for a change.

While I was living in Moscow, this space was often filled with my frustrated observations - rants, even - on the state of the Russian media, Russian political elites' mentality, et cetera. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has taken but a few short months in the cocoon of hypocrisy that is Washington, DC, under the present administration for me to grow just as weary of the tone of many American commentators, not to mention the political elites, if they can even be called that.

The sentiment behind this post has been brewing for some time - as an American who has enjoyed poking fun at the Russian authorities' attempts to control the media in their own country, I realize that our own recently revealed attempts to free the nascent Iraqi press through payola don't do much for any American's credibility on such matters. And as someone who's been known to call attention to Russia's misconduct in - and of - the Chechen conflict, I don't exactly feel as though America has even a semblance of the moral authority we once enjoyed on issues of human rights and war crimes - even on an issue as basic and fundamental to America's national identity as what it means to promote freedom and democracy - anymore.

Not that this is an entirely new feeling - after all, the Bushies have been making America look bad for a couple of years now with policies both foreign and domestic, which was hard not to notice even from halfway around the world - but it's getting more and more pervasive.

Although may seem like a bit of a non sequitur, I was going to link next to an article by a pro-American news service talking in incredulous terms about Russia's latest move to cozy up to Iran - oh, hell, here's the link - which sort of set me off on the above train of thought. The author sounds surprised that Russia feels itself able to conduct a foreign policy consistent with its own vision of the world as opposed to one consistent with the (official) US view of the way things oughta be.

Although I was impervious to and unswayed by Russian indignation about such articles and attitudes while I was in Russia, being back in the capital of the sole superpower of what remains, for now, a unipolar world, and seeing once again the fruits of American provincialism cross-bred with a desire to project power around the world, I find it much easier to sympathize with the Russians' seemingly reflexive and sometimes misguided (though just as often shrewdly self-interested) desire to serve as a counterweight of some sorts to America in the world.

Good thing I'm going back to Russia for a visit in just 10 days - I guess I need to be reminded that the guys in charge over there have generally been much more successful in their media manipulation and silencing of dissenting political views than even the Bush-Cheney team, and there's nothing for that like a few nights of watching the Russian TV news. Then, just when I start feeling proud to be from the US again, I'll get to come back to Washington.

A note on sources*: A first-time visitor to this site might look at the articles linked in the post above - predominantly previous posts of mine with a few Slate articles mixed in - and conclude that I'm a self-absorbed, knee-jerk liberal, and perhaps a flag-burner, too. But that's not the case (although I guess you'll have to take my word for it). I'm just a simple guy who's nostalgic for the feeling of easy, righteous indignation generated by observing the Russian government's blunders up close and personal - and one who gets very uncomfortable when forced to observe my own government's similar shortcomings in such close quarters. Maybe this is why some expats never come home.

*in true academic tradition.

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OK, I'm glad I got that out of my system. Now I can get back to preparing for my last exam (next Monday) and, more importantly, forgetting about the one I took today. Our regularly scheduled programming will resume next week.

Spoofing the MSM*

Check out this piece in a recent eXile, poking fun at the "sky-is-falling" tone which the eXholes perceive in much recent mainstream Western journalism about Russia. Glad to see they are carrying on the proud tradition of deflating the Western journalistic establishment. Thanks to Konstantin for posting this.


*MSM = US blogger-speak for "mainstream media." Often, this acronym is employed by people who think the MSM are hiding some fundamental truths that only heroic bloggers can discover. I am not a subscriber to that point of view.

Proshchai, Rodina? I doubt it.

Dmitry Rogozin's Rodina party has been banned from the Moscow City Duma elections for running a truly offensive, racist TV ad - or, if you believe some commentators, for outgrowing their intended role as the Kremlin's "loyal opposition." Andy at SiberianLight has been covering developments in this story, which is an interesting one and could be providing a look at developments to come in Russian domestic politics in the next 5-10 years.

Ilya Yashin, the co-chair of the Yabloko party's youth wing and a candidate in tomorrow's elections, has an interesting forecast on his LiveJournal blog about what the outcome of the ban on Rodina might be in the next several years (it seems like a conspiracy theory, although it's hard to tell who Yashin is implying the conspirators to be), along with this caricature of Rogozin dressed up as a young fascist. Yabloko's official point of view on the removal of Rodina from the elections is as follows (my translation):

"...we believe that the removal of Rodina from the elections in response to Zhirinovsky's lawsuit has nothing whatsoever to do with the battle against the xenophobia of nationalism and does not serve the cause of eradicating fascism in Russia."

Rogozin - who, incidentally, shares a birthday with Iosif Stalin and Mikhail Saakashvili - has always seemed like a dangerously ambitious politician to me, the kind of guy who will do anything to get to the top and stay there. While there may be legitimate planks in Rodina's platform, I hope that Rogozin and his team understand what they seem to be doing - and how dangerous it is to loose the genie of ultra-nationalism onto the main stage of Russian politics.

Or maybe I'm taking this all too seriously, and the whole thing was an elaborately choreographed "PR-aktsiia," agreed upon ahead of time by all involved except the chumps who make up the general voting public, to set up Rodina as a target for the supposedly "anti-fascist" youth movement "Nashi." The fact that the LDPR clowns were apparently the ones to levy the charge of racism which got Rodina banned only makes one more suspicious that the whole thing is a puppet show, given LDPR's history of selling its political mouthpiece to the highest bidder. That's all just speculation, of course; on the other hand, maybe this is what "managed democracy" means to someone with a KGB background.

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More on Rodina (in case the links above are not enough reading material) - all in English:

Small factsheet from MosNews.
Interview with Rodina's "leading ideologue," Mikhail Delyagin - worth reading.
"Experts" at the Russia Profile website discuss what they're calling "Rodina-gate."
Blogger Veronica Khokhlova on Rodina.
Background on Rogozin's political career from RFE/RL.