С Новым Счастьем!

OK, one more card to ring in 2005, just for you, Costa.

We are singing karaoke - Vysotsky, Leningrad, Pugachova - and I rocked out with one Hendrix song. I've been told that the Year of the Rooster is to be rung in in noisy fashion, and we are doing our best.


Published by the USSR Ministry of Communications, 1969.
Artwork by V. Ponomarev.

Happy New Year!

This card is appropriate for today - a snowy New Year's Eve in Moscow. Unfortunately, it was a bit too warm for the snow to stick on the pavement downtown for more than a couple of hours, but seeing the blizzard conditions in effect during much of the day did put everyone in the holiday spirit.


Published by the USSR Ministry of Communications, 1969.
Photo by N. Rakhmanova.

No time for blogging tonight - we have an apartment full of guests with whom we'll ring in 2005, and we still haven't finished packing for our 7am flight - to a 2-week vacation in the States. It should be interesting. I keep telling myself that as long as our taxi actually shows up at 4am on Jan 1, we'll be fine...

Best wishes to all of you for health, wealth, and happiness in 2005!

Wind energy

Out Dmitrovskoe Shosse a couple weeks ago, I saw an enterprise apparently advertising wind turbines for sale. That's what the sign underneath the turbine says, anyway.



I have always been intrigued by wind energy and its apparent cleanliness and renewability. America, the UK, Europe, and Canada all have their own Wind Energy Associations - maybe it's time for Russia to get in on the act?

С Новым Годом!

That means "Happy New Year!" in Russian. It's pronounced "S Novym Godom!" with the first syllable accented in both words with more than one syllable. No, it's not yet January 1 here (the time difference with the US is large - 8 hours between Moscow and the East Coast - but not that large), but I have a few of these vintage holiday postcards I wanted to share, so I am getting an early start.


"Happy New Year, Dear Friends!"
Published by the USSR Ministry of Communications, 1983.
Artwork by I. Kvavadze.

Slow news day

The Moscow Times has several items today which are unintentionally amusing (the best kind of amusing), at least to me, in various ways:

1) Among the "News in Brief":

Moldova Lashes Out

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) -- Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin said Russian troops are stationed illegally in his country and that Moscow's explanations for failing to meet a deadline to withdraw were not credible.

Voronin, in an interview with ORT-Moldova television aired Tuesday, also dismissed as "silly" Moscow's claims that separatists in the Russian-speaking breakaway province of Transdnestr were preventing their withdrawal. He said Russia has great influence over Transdnestr.

On this one, I think just the headline is amusing enough. Can you imagine Moldova actually trying to lash out?I have been planning a longer post on Moldova for some time now, because I think it's interesting how concerned pundits were about Ukraine being split in two when so little has been done to resolve Moldova having been split in two for over a decade. And now there is talk (granted, in the case of that link, by people with a clear bias) that Moldova will be the site of the next in the series of themed ("Rose," "Orange"...) revolutions.

Maybe these statements are Voronin's attempt to innoculate himself against the (valid) accusation that he tilts toward Russia. More on this later, hopefully, though not tonight for sure. Why do I care? My wife is from Moldova, I spent a summer there studying (that's when we met) five years ago, we've been back there once a year for at least two weeks ever since and have lots of friends there. So I care. And no jokes about gypsies (if you're a Russian) or trafficked women (if you're from Western Europe). Moldova gets a bad rap.

2) a two-fer - amusing that the paper would publish the fascinating but somewhat rambling (and the original in Vedomosti was longer?!) remarks of the undisputed "man of the year" - МБХ, or Khodorkovsky, of course - on the opinion page and a front-page article about the fact that his thoughts appeared in Vedomosti, which quoted entire sentences of those same remarks.

3) "Adoptees Bring Unique Problems" - I saw this headline and assumed I was looking at the usually lame and thankfully not daily "Community" page, which typically has expat-themed lifestyle-type articles. Nope, the page was headed "News." Since when is it news that it can be problematic to adopt an infant from an underfunded orphanage in a country with epidemic alcoholism and a burgeoning AIDS crisis? Poignant story, yes. News, no. Slow news week, I am telling ya.

More on bliny - and change

I can't leave the Teremok website alone. It is strangely fascinating to me, perhaps because I am hungry, although this is helped by looking at some of the photos on the menu page. I am sure the people paying good money to have this website set up think this looks like Gourmet-magazine-quality food porn, but I have to say that the bliny are actually more appetizing in real life than in these rather unnatural-looking pictures. Plus, you don't actually want all of the ingredients bursting out of the blin like that - makes it tough to eat standing there on the street. And (on a more personal note) the photo of the ham-and-cheese crepe shows that management does not understand that customers want the cheese melted. Or at least I do. But often it isn't, so I guess the photo reflects reality, although it's usually slightly more melty than in the photo on the website. Am I really blogging about this?

Anyway, physical hunger aside, the "forum" section of the site gives customers hungering for a good service experience the chance to sound off, and they receive surprisingly candid responses from Teremok's management. Visitors to the site can start their own threads and, if sufficiently disgruntled, engage in debates with the company's management about, for example, their commitment to quality. My favorite thread is called СДАЧА (yes, it's in all caps on the site, meaning someone set it up that way), or CHANGE, not the kind Putin is trying to effect, but the kind you get when you've overpaid for something.

Anyone who has tried to buy just about anything in this country using cash has a story about a surprisingly surly cashier who expected you to have exact change. Sometimes if your bill is REALLY big (500 or 1000 rubles, about 18 or 36 dollars, respectively) the cashier will just tell you that you can't make the purchase, see ya later. This is always a fun survival game. The ways to win it are 1) look sufficiently apologetic and say very sad things about how you're really, really sorry you don't have change; or 2) start yelling about how you don't understand why they don't want to take your money. Since it's never clear until too late which of these methods will work in a given situation (it depends on that specific cashier's personal life, self-esteem at that moment in time, etc.), the only foolproof method is 3) try to go change your "big" bill somewhere else, usually by purchasing a pack of gum or something, since appealing to people's desire to help you out generally gets you nowhere in Moscow. It's interesting that the posts on the Teremok forum about this issue show that this irritates average Russians (OK, make that average internet-access-having Russians) also, not just spoiled, whiny expats.

I am on a roll now - I think I'll post to the Teremok forum about making the cheese more melty.

End of the Line #4 - Медведково

The north end of the orange line - Medvedkovo

"This is Medvedkovo, the end of the line. The train does not go any farther. Please vacate the train." That is an approximate translation of approximately what the recording says at the end of every metro line. There may be another line about not forgetting to take your personal belongings with you, but I can't remember for sure. This is what the result of the recording looks like:


The orange line of the Moscow metro is similar to the gray line in that the builders seemed to run out of decent names for the stations as they got to the end (see my earlier post about the Altuf'evo station for an elaboration on this, in the unlikely event you're interested). Downtown, the orange line has stations named after Turgenev and the Tretyakov Gallery, but as you get out toward the end stations got stuck with names like Sviblovo and Babushkinskaya

On the platform at Medvedkovo:


Child, tree, pigeons, and hideous apartment blocks:


The local sledding hill:


Catching air - check out the kid in the center, I was a little slow with the zoom on this one:


A militiaman (cop) watches over the open-air Medvedkovo market (with his back turned to me, of course - I am not going to risk a fine or a beat-down to make these photos more authentic - you wanna pay me, you get the beat-down-inducing shots. Let me know):

Cops like this one love the markets because there are lots of improperly documented migrants from other parts of Russia and from former Soviet republics who have cash because they are selling things at the market and therefore are able to pay bribes. Or perhaps the militia just happens to serve as this market's protection racket, or krysha (roof), as that would be called in Russian. They do, after all, provide something called "extradepartmental security" (vnevedomstvennaia okhrana) to private citizens, for a fee.

If you squint and look into the distance in the photo above (or just click on it to expand the size), you can almost make out the Evroset' mobile phone store and Jackpot (ok, Dzhekpot) slot-machine hall, which, just like the cops, stand watch over the market and wait for people's cash to come their way.


The station entrance/exit is quite Soviet - Artemiy Lebedev actually has better photos than mine capturing that aspect of the exterior.

People of the Year

I am going to recycle below my translation (recycling something that wasn't even really mine to begin with - how original) of a subtly biting Bolshoi Gorod article by Masha Gessen from earlier this year which I placed on Johnson's Russia List in October.

It seems especially appropriate in light of Vedomosti's People of the Year picks, which will be on the front page of the December 30 issue. Vedomosti, for those of you new to the Russian media scene, is probably the most respected business daily here, it's a joint venture involving the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. And its people of the year are not bad picks at all:

Victor Yushchenko (do I really need to ID him, even to provincial Americans?) as Politician of the Year;

Maria Sharapova, (Wimbledon champ and the pride of Russia, even though she spent many of her formative years in the US) as Professional of the Year;

Victor Vekselberg (businessman who bought Forbes' collection of Faberge eggs and brought them back to Russia, thus - he hopes - securing immunity from having his business empire repossessed by the State) as Private Individual of the Year;

Vagit Alekperov (President of LUKOIL) as Entrepreneur of the Year;

Igor Sechin (Presidential aide and supposedly one of the powers behind the throne in the Putin administration) as Riddle of the Year;

and the unidentified victims of Beslan as Victim of the Year.

Not to be callous, but that last category is probably an only-in-Russia type of thing. The writers get in a good dig at Putin's administration in every single one of the categories, and they mention the Yukos affair a couple of times, but nevertheless they fail to identify the one individual who, along with Putin, will be most remembered when we look back at 2004, a year when Russia grasped defeat from the jaws of victory and managed to have an underperforming economy in conditions when the opposite should have been expected, all the while turning the screws tighter on free speech, free elections, and freedom in general.

Note that the article below was less enigmatic in its original publication and remains so in Bolshoi Gorod's online archive. The unnamed "Businessman of the Year" was/is pictured alongside.

"Mikhail Kasyanov," by Masha Gessen
Bolshoi Gorod, Oct. 1, 2004, p. 6

If you were asked to name the most important politician, businessman, man of the year, the man whose face will come to mind when you tell your children about the strange and scary year of 2004, who would you name? Mikhail Kasyanov, perhaps? No? Then keep quiet.

GQ, a glossy men's monthly magazine, conducted a poll of its readers to select the "Man of the Year." As always, the magazine invited readers to vote for men in several categories, such as "Writer of the Year," "Producer of the Year," "Restaurateur of the Year," and twelve more categories, including "Businessman/politician of the Year." The person receiving the greatest amount of votes, regardless of the category in which he was nominated, was supposed to become "Man of the Year." Except -- Shhhhh!

When the head of the Conde Nast Russia publishing house, Bernd Runge, found out who the readers of GQ had chosen, he immediately had the results of the survey cancelled; that is, altered; that is, designated. The second-biggest vote-getter turned out to be Writer of the Year Boris Akunin, but the editorial board decided to display its freethinking nature and chose number three, Mikhail Kasyanov, who had also been nominated in the "Businessman/politician" category. In exchange, the publisher allowed the editors to write that one other, that is to say, another, person won in the category of "Businessman of the Year."

Runge the publisher, though a German, is well-versed in Russian realities. This is no coincidence: the 43-year-old publisher graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). In 1981, while still a student, Bernd Runge began to work with the Stasi. In his free time he worked as a journalist. Now he is Vice-president of Conde Nast International, in charge of its German and Russian publications. This May the two largest German magazines published revelatory articles about Runge's past work with the Stasi. The head of Conde Nast announced that he didn't care about the transgressions of a valuable colleague, all the more so as they were committed in a completely different era.

Meanwhile the editors of GQ prepared the issue in which the results of the poll were to appear. The magazine interviewed all of the winners, but as for the businessman, they wrote only that his selection wasn't for nothing, after all, his company remains influential. When the publisher saw the final layout, he understood that it was liberal. The page with the businessman's picture had to be removed in Italy, where the magazine is printed, and replaced by a page with Mikhail Kasyanov's picture.

The awards ceremony for the "People of the Year" was held on September 24. The Alexandrov Ensemble played. The master of ceremonies was Leonid Parfyonov, who was introduced as "uncompromising." He immediately said that "the main intrigue will be the announcement of the one and only hero of our days." The winners received GQ logos made of crystal and mobile phones. When the magazine’s editor-in-chief went onstage to award the "Man of the Year" prize, his hands were shaking, and he even tried to refuse the envelope containing Mikhail Kasyanov's name. It was almost as though he wanted to say altogether another name. But he didn't. He kept quiet.

Happy New Year from Teremok!

I liked this poster when I saw it on the Pushkin Square bliny stand:



Teremok bliny, or crepes, are highly recommended if you're in Moscow - you can get them as dessert, filled with jam, applesauce, or chocolate; or as a meal, filled with ham and cheese or even chicken breast, as well as caviar. Though the last of those is a classic Russian dish, I don't recommend it in this venue - it's the priciest thing on the menu by far, and who knows how long the caviar has been sitting there? Plus it's a bit silly to eat anything containing caviar on the street- get your elite bliny in a restaurant.

All of the other options, though, are delicious (well, I've never tried the one with herring, so I don't know for sure about that one, but then I am not a big herring fan). They even have a professional-looking website (linked to above). Below is an older photo (December 2, am I obsessive about dating things or what?) of Lorina enjoying steaming tea and a piping-hot blin, with more being prepared in the background, at our favorite Teremok.



The last time I tried to photograph the blin-making process, a couple of days ago, I was told by the always friendly cooks that photographing them at work was not allowed - management does not want competitors stealing the trade secrets. "Always friendly" is written with no sarcasm in this case (though sarcasm is generally to be expected when discussing the friendliness of service-sector employees in this country) - one of the cashiers even knew my regular blin order for awhile, before my tastes changed and I started ordering different things every time. They offered to come out of the kiosk (it's a trailer, actually) and be photographed, but I didn't take them up on it.

Christmas in the Metro

On the platform at the Kitai-Gorod station, 2:20pm, Dec 25.