A Swede's take on Moscow

I found this excellent photoblog, which (if I understand it correctly - it's mostly in Swedish) is by a Swede named Erik Petersson, who's living in Moscow. It has a graffiti photos (including a Zachem tag), at least one Moscow metro photo, great Moscow scenes like this one, and seems to also have photos from other towns where Erik travels from time to time. Definitely recommended viewing. He has even been thoughtful enough to put some of the photo captions in English for those who are not worldly enough to know Swedish. Keep up the good work, Erik!

Aeroflop

At 10:07 PM, Tim said…
Ah, Aeroflot.....all the comforts of a military transport without the organisation.

Tim, would you believe it if I told you they delayed our departure for 2 1/2 hours AFTER the plane had been fully boarded? Of course you would... I then overheard a stewardess threatening a stroppy passenger with revealing to all of the other passengers that he had been the tardy one responsible for us missing our take-off slot and being delayed. Shut him up real quick.

Sitting on the tarmac, thankfully we were able to activate the seat-back ventilators (unique to the IL-86 and IL-96, as far as I've seen), although mine emitted a subtle odor of indeterminate origin which was extraordinarily foul when inhaled deeply. This photo shows the seat-back fan, as well as revealing that if you want to hang a coat on the back of the seat AND have personal ventilation, you're outta luck on this airplane:

An additional design flaw that's visible here is the placement of the seat numbers on the back of the seats - this never fails to cause mass confusion during boarding.

And a killer design flaw that's sort of visible here is the not-so-ingenious seat-back table, which folds in half when not deployed. The problem with this space-saving measure (necessary to make room for the seat-back ventilator) is that the table won't fold or unfold unless the person in front of you has their seat fully upright. So, getting ready for a meal and tidying up afterward involves manhandling your neighbor's seat forward in order to deploy or stow the troublesome table.



The above photo shows why so many things have to be on the backs of the seats on this plane - there's no overhead bin unit above the center row of seats. While this does create a rather expansive - one might even say cavernous - sense of space, it does make you wonder what the design goal was. It certainly wasn't to allow them to screen movies using a projection system, as the state-of-the-art IL-96 we were on had (as I mentioned before) nary a video monitor or projection screen in sight.

All in all, the plane we were on was definitely not worthy of its namesake, the Soviet pilot Valery Chkalov.

Then, when we arrived at Sh-2, we made it through passport control quickly, but then had to wait about 45 minutes for our luggage to come out. That is the law of Sheremetyevo arrivals - you will wait somewhere, it's just a question of where. Sheremetyevo seems to have opened a second bank of passport control windows, which is a shocking customer service improvement unless it's just something I didn't notice before, and added - gasp - SEATS in the baggage return area where the little duty-free shack used to be.

I guess they figured that most people would rather sit and cradle their head in their hands in despair while waiting for their luggage to emerge from the wall than shop for overpriced liquor and perfume. Plus, with the added passenger throughput of the new (I think) passport control windows, but no addition of new baggage carousels, all they've really done is moved the bottleneck a bit, since people get pretty backed up at the baggage claim. so there should be plenty of people waiting and looking for a seat.

OK, I've spent way too much time on this subject already, and now I must get some sleep, so the blogging on more profound topics (which you have of course come to expect in this space) will have to wait for another day.

Heading home

It's been a great week in Shanghai, I am not sure how representative this city is of the rest of China, but the development here is truly amazing. We are on our way back to Moscow now; found a China Telecom internet access point at the airport, which once again will not allow me to access blogspot websites, so responding to comments will have to wait ntil we're safely at home. Also, I had to give the attendant my passport number to use the internet, although it seemed like a very pro forma thing.

I can't say that I'm looking forward to this flight. On the way here, I had been assuming that Aeroflot would fly decent equipment on such a long flight, and was unpleasantly surprised to find myself seated on a Russian-made IL-96. Forget the in-flight movie (in Aeroflot economy class they always seem to have "technical difficulties with the video system" anyway) - this plane didn't have a single monitor or TV screen anywhere. And rather uncomfortable seats, which made the redeye here less than restful. I'm expecting the same on the flight back.

At least we will have very pleasant memories of this trip. The wedding last night was at an incredible venue, a club situated in a villa in the French Concession which apparently used to be the British Consulate and is quite posh.

Greetings from Shanghai!

We finally made it to an internet access point after being here for 4 days. Internet access is hard to come by, and here in the basement of the Shanghai Library I'm unable to access any "blogspot" sites for some reason (although accessing the blogger site to post has not been a problem), so I can't use this time (as I had hoped) to respond to some of the comments I've received in the past few days.

Shanghai is an amazing city. There is definitely lots to see here. In the interests of seeing more of the city and less of the basement of the Shanghai Library, I'm going to make this post short and promise to post some photos from here later (perhaps much later) once we're back in Russia.

Технический перерыв

Among the Multitran.ru on-line Russian-English dictionary search results for "технический перерыв" ("tekhnicheskii pereryv"):

Деловая лексика (business lexicon):
перерыв по техническим причинам - interruption for technical reasons

Техника (equipment):
перерыв по техническим причинам - maintenance outage

Телекоммуникации (telecommunications):
перерыв по техническим причинам - out-of-service

Some people talk about their blogs "going on hiatus," or "taking a break," or use other phrases to describe what happens when they don't have time to update as much as they would like. I prefer the all-encompassing Russian phrase "tekhnicheskii pereryv." Literally, it translates variously as the phrases listed above. In addition, I actually found - at a website called for office workers called klerk.ru - a lively online forum discussion of the legal meaning of this concept, which is worth checking out for laughs if you know Russian.

In practice, though, as anyone who's ever needed to (just for example) urgently change money in a one-exchange-booth town knows, it's a phenomenon that can occur at any time, although generally at an inconvenient time, and for just about any reason. One cashier and she has to take a bathroom break? "Tekhnicheskii pereryv." The paper receipt roll in the cash register ran out? "Tekhnicheskii pereryv." Smoke break? "Tekhnicheskii pereryv." You get the point.

Anyway, I've been posting less than I would like to recently, and I'd prefer to just call this my own little "tekhnicheskii pereryv." I'm happy, though, to break with the usual custom and provide an explanation for it. I am going to be transitioning out of my job here in Moscow by the end of June, which is requiring a fair amount of preparation. At the end of the summer, I'll be moving back to my hometown of DC, and getting the move organized and making sure we have a place to live there are also turning out to be labor-intensive endeavors. Also, I'm going to have about 6 weeks free this summer and a bunch of Aeroflot frequent flyer miles to travel in Russia and the CIS, so I'm spending some amount of time just daydreaming - well, and researching on the internet, ordering guidebooks, etc. - about where I might be going.

On top of all that, we're leaving tomorrow (well, today, actually) for a week in Shanghai to attend the wedding of an old, old friend of mine from DC (how often can you travel someplace you've never been to attend the wedding of someone you've known since pre-K?). I'll try to post at least once from there just for fun, but hopefully we'll be busy seeing things we may never get the chance to see again.

Plus, we're trying to get the most out of what Moscow has to offer while we're still here. Tonight, we just got back from an awesome show by Russian punk rockers NAIV at Tochka. In addition to playing a great set, the band screened their latest video, for the song "Chto nam delat'?" ("What are we to do?"), which contains many images from the tumultuous Russia of the 1990's: tanks around the "White House," Zhirinovsky picking a fight on the Duma floor, and Yeltsin dancing drunkenly, just to name a few of the nostalgia-inducing moments. Apparently, MTV Russia has refused to play the video, because it's "too political." And on MUZ-TV (the home-grown Russian MTV clone), apparently, if you don't pay, your video gets no play. But it turns out there are alternative music television channels, such as "Alternative One," which bills itself as Russia's "first alternative music channel" (and which I hadn't even heard of before), who are willing to take the risk.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled tekhnicheskii pereryv...

On power and weakness

I started to respond to a comment, and got so long-winded that I decided to make my response a separate post.

At 5:06 PM, danil said…
hey lyndon where have you been? so much interesting things are going on last time ) khodorkowsky for example and light shutdown in Moscow - btw, did it affect you?

Danil, I was actually unaffected personally by the blackout - I live and work in the northwestern portion of the center (around the Garden Ring), and in our area there were no power outages. I have heard lots of dire prophecies, though, in the past few days, about how this is just the beginning. Mosenergo is supposedly way overextended and does not have the capacity to deal with the increasing power demands of a growing metropolis, and people are saying we will see more blackouts in the future as a result.

Who knows if that's true - back at the beginning of 2003, I seem to recall many people forecasting a "2003 crisis," because that was supposedly the year when deteriorating Russian infrastructure would reach a tipping point and would no longer be able to function without maintenance as it's been doing for over 15 years now (some would say for much longer). That never came to pass, perhaps because Russians are absolutely ingenious when it comes to squeezing the last life out of any piece of equipment that's on its last legs. For example, plenty of cars are on the road here which would be sent to the scrapyard in the US or in Western Europe, held together by baling wire and the figurative equivalent of duct tape, applied by their loving (or perhaps cursing) owners.

I have the utmost respect for the ability of people here to find ways to function under difficult circumstances, but unfortunately that's no way to run a power grid. The problem with always operating on the verge of a crisis and pursuing band-aid solutions instead of making real investments in infrastructure (I leave it up to the pundits - and the courts - to determine if this is the fault of Mosenergo, UES, or the Soviet legacy) is that it eventually catches up with you.

The more immediately disturbing fact which was revealed by the power outage is that many of the "strategic" establishments (e.g., places with nuclear reactors) which we've always been reassured have secondary sources of emergency power were revealed to not have good backup plans in place for an outage. Someone was supposed to buy a generator but pocketed the money instead, or the generator was there but someone had siphoned off the diesel for personal use. I hate to say this, but this underscores how ridiculous it is for people here to say that the US and "the West" are afraid of "a strong Russia." Yes, perhaps there was justifiable fear of the USSR 20 years ago, bolstered by the partial illusion of Soviet military might. But at the moment, I'm afraid the more realistic fear is of Russia's infrastructural weakness and institutional corruption creating environmental or other disasters.

By the way, I may be wrong to reject it out of hand, but I think Basayev's claim of responsibility for the blackout was absurd. He's recently claimed responsibility for some other disaster which was not likely his handiwork (it's escaping me right now what specifically), and I think this is part of a general pattern of him trying to grab the spotlight and show that he's not on the run.

As for your other question ("where have you been"), I'm going to deal with that in a separate post. There have indeed been lots of interesting events here in the past week or so, and the coverage at Siberian Light has been outstanding as usual.

Russia: Stop picking on Karimov!

This story almost got drowned out by the power outage hullabaloo:

Russia says UN, NATO calls for Uzbek probe 'unfair'
Wed May 25, 2005 8:52 AM ET

ARE, Sweden (Reuters) - Russia on Wednesday denounced as unfair a call by the United Nations and NATO for an international investigation into a military crackdown in Uzbekistan, in which hundreds of people may have died.

Moscow backs the Uzbek government in blaming the bloodshed in the town of Andizhan earlier this month on radical Islamists. [...]

"Putting forward a demand for an international investigation as an ultimatum is neither appropriate nor fair," said Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Chizhov at a meeting of NATO countries and partner states in Sweden. [...]

"We are gathered here as partners and partnership means trust. If one partner says it can carry out an investigation itself, that should be respected," Chizhov told reporters.

"The countries calling for an international investigation recently competed with each other hailing Uzbekistan's role as a key player in the global anti-terrorist coalition. Now they realize who they were dealing with," he said.

Presumably Russia would like the US to replicate its reprehensible mid-1990's stance on Chechnya and say that this is Uzbekistan's "internal affair."

But it will be interesting to see whether the last sentences quoted are much talked about - this Russian Deputy Foreign Minister seems to be saying, "lay off the Uzbeks, you knew Karimov was capable of this and so did we." He may have a point, but at least the West is half-heartedly demanding an investigation. Russia, on the other hand, appears to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with China in its response to the events in Andijan.

After the outages...

...comes the finger-pointing. Looks like for now most of it is in Chubais's direction, which is to be expected. The nationalist political party Rodina has already weighed in:

Rodina faction to demand resignation of UES head in Duma
May 25 2005 5:52PM MSK

MOSCOW. May 25 (Interfax) - The Duma's Rodina faction plans to raise the issue of dismissing Anatoly Chubais from the post of head of Unified Energy Systems (UES) at the Friday meeting of the lower house. "We have been saying for a long time that Chubais is the wrong person to head such a major monopoly and the outages in Moscow today only prove that we are right," said Ivan Kharchenko, faction member and deputy chairman of the Duma property committee. Kharchenko said the faction would have an emergency conference on Thursday over the large-scale energy crisis in Moscow and initiate the ouster of Chubais at the Duma Council.

No doubt the professional pundits will be all over this by the time tomorrow morning's Moscow Times op-ed page goes to press, but I have to wonder when one of these stories about blaming Chubais will mention what an easy political target he is, due to his extreme unpopularity with the Russian electorate. So far, the blame game looks like a way for Rodina to score some easy points with elderly and lower-income people who are bitter about rising power costs; and for Putin to try to cripple Chubais's chances (if he even has any) of mounting a challenge or playing a role in the upcoming 2008 presidential succession battle (I hesitate to use the word "campaign").

What challenges such as Rodina's miss is the fact that changing the management of UES will not change the fact that the country continues to squeeze the last drops out of infrastructure improvements made during Soviet times (in this case, the plant that failed was over 40 years old), without any comprehensive plan to replace these facilities as they age beyond their usable lifespan. While Chubais has to bear some of the responsibility for failing to prevent these outages, he can't possibly be blamed for the overall situation.

Update: In addition to a sincere-sounding apology, Chubais has come out with a couple of comments - one pointing out that the power outages in the US a couple of years ago were much more serious than what happened in Moscow today; and one pointing out that investment in the country's electrical supply infrastructure has been underfunded for decades. These statements will no doubt be criticized in coming days, as the latter one already has - "With the growth of electricity tariffs that we've seen recently, this is a quite a cynical statement," said Andrei Isaev, chairman of the Duma's Labor and Social Policy committee. (all of those links are to brief RIA Novosti wire items in Russian)

Look out, Anatoly Borisovich!

From Reuters:

Putin slams power monopoly after big Moscow outage
Wed May 25, 2005 9:23 AM ET, By Christian Lowe

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Moscow was plunged into chaos on Wednesday after a big power outage that President Vladimir Putin blamed on the state-owned electricity monopoly headed by a liberal politician viewed with suspicion by the Kremlin. [...]

Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said the breakdown was caused by a fire and explosion overnight at an electricity substation. There was no evidence of a terrorist attack, he said.

But Putin, who delayed a provincial trip because of the crisis, pointed the finger at the management of Unified Energy System whose chief executive is Anatoly Chubais, one of the architects of the post-Soviet market revolution whose liberal views sit uneasily with Kremlin hard-liners.

"It is entirely possible to talk about a lack of attention on the part of RAO UES to the current activity of the company."

"They should work not only on global problems about company policy and its restructuring, but also pay attention to current activity," Putin said in televised remarks.

Chubais, one of Russia's best known figures who survived an assassination attempt in March, was quoted as saying he accepted full responsibility for the outage.

Putin was clearly suggesting that Chubais was spending too much time on his widely-publicised plans for a corporate restructuring of the electricity behemoth and was losing sight of the operational running of the firm. [...]

While he has generally refrained from open criticism of Kremlin policy, Chubais was one of the few public figures inside Russia to condemn the prosecution of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky who is on trial for fraud and tax evasion.

Chubais may soon be looking for people to condemn his own prosecution:

Russia opens criminal case against UES management
Wed May 25, 2005 10:05 AM ET

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian prosecutors on Wednesday opened a criminal case against the management of power monopoly Unified Energy System (UES) after a major power outage in Moscow, Interfax news agency reported.

The case was opened to investigate possible negligence, the agency quoted the prosecutor general's office as saying.

Under Russian law, prosecutors must formally open a criminal case to allow police fully to investigate the incident. It does not necessarily lead to prosecution.

President Vladimir Putin has already blamed UES Chief Executive Anatoly Chubais for the power cut which left much of the capital without power, saying management had neglected the company's problems to concentrate on a restructuring plan.

Chubais, a leading political liberal who is spearheading the reform of the electricity giant, is viewed with suspicion by Kremlin hard-liners.

He seems to wisely be trying to get out in front of the issue:

Chubais ready to bear responsibility for Moscow power outages
May 25 2005 4:19PM

MOSCOW. May 25 (Interfax) - Unified Energy Systems (UES) CEO Anatoly Chubais told reporters in response to President Vladimir Putin's criticism of the UES management that he was ready to bear responsibility for the trouble in power supplies in Moscow.

"UES and its chairman are responsible for energy supplies," he said. "I am not shirking responsibly," he said.

Chubais said he was aware of the presidential criticism adding, "there can be no difference of opinion on that."

"It is my key task in the next few hours to revive power supplies. Everything else will be done later," he said.

Power outage - RIA Novosti's apparently comprehensive update

A thorough rundown of what's known about the outages in Moscow today is available here in Russian. I've paraphrased it in English below.

To sum it up, Energy Minister Khristenko has now stated that the initial cause of the outage was a fire at the Chagino substation just outside of Moscow. Sources say that the fire was due to aged equipment at the substation, which was brought on-line in 1963.

As a result, cascading outage took place, which was brought under control by 13.09 today, according to RAO UES, and Moscow is currently operating with access to 10% less electricity than required. Large "mega" stores on the outskirts of the city closed en masse, leading to huge traffic jams, and some stores downtown are closed as well.

In addition, telephone service was out for a time in the south-western part of the city, but all of the capital's airports continued to operate normally, and 95% of those stranded in the metro have already been evacuated without casualties.

RIA Novosti also reports Khristenko's claim that these outages are not due to the activity of terrorists.

No doubt this will all be blamed, by the public if not by the authorities, on RAO UES CEO Anatoly Chubais.