Highly recommended

This is a great article.

In their own words

Following up on my earlier post with a couple of tales of Moscow life from Americans who live there, I've received permission from a friend to post her friend's story of passport woe, as emailed to the folks back home. This one is from St. Petersburg:

Well, as I was stretched out on my windowsill, looking out at the Russian sky, I began to think about the different experiences a young woman may have when traveling abroad. Many in my position, I suppose, have used such an opportunity to meet and fall in love with some local man.

They would then stroll through his native city together, she on his arm, learning of the soul of this new and exciting country with the advantage of an attentive and handsome guide. I, however, do not believe in such mundane foolishness. No, no, I feel a far more productive use of one's time and the ideal route to a thoroughly enlightening visit to a foreign country is to have one's passport stolen within the first week. This is especially good if the country you are visiting requires a visa for exit. Yes, I managed to accomplish this last week while strolling down the street near my house. My school needed my passport to register me, and it had been returned earlier that day. When I noticed it in my bag, I thought, "Uh, oh! I sure wouldn't want something to happen to my passport if my bag were to get stolen...I know, I'll put it in the pocket of my pants where I can keep track of it better and would certainly feel it if someone were to take it!" Well, apparently my butt is a lot more numb than I gave it credit for, and I didn't realize the passport was gone for about 10 minutes.

After searching all my belongings, returning to apartment, and crying on the floor for 5 or 10 minutes, I call my school's director and the US Consulate.

The application for a new passport cost 100 dollars, which I regretted paying, but had no choice. The visa poses more of problem, and I was warned that the Russian government might decide at any moment to throw me out of the country.

So I made sure to see the Hermitage on Sunday.

Anyway, the person who stole the passport then called the school with a really lame story about "some guy" finding it on the street and giving it to him. Anyway, he demanded $300 dollars within 30 minutes, or he would sell it to someone else. The US Consulate then called him and threatened him, and demanded he return it at once. He, of course, then quickly "disappeared" from phone contact. The US Consulate instructed me to go to the city police headquarters
and make a formal statement.

So in the end, this lovely adventure gave me the rare opportunity to spend the evening inside a Russian police station, which is something you really wouldn't be able to pay to be allowed to do!

The police officers were more or less like those in the US, except they were smoking constantly and doing shots of vodka every few minutes. I thought they were joking when they asked if I wanted a drink, but they then produced a huge bottle of vodka and finished it within the 4 hours it took them to fill out the 1 page report. The station itself was something like a dungeon, with heavy, dented metal doors, and hand and footprints smeared on the concrete walls. On my way out, a heavyset officer with one tooth, and only one tooth, slipped me his phone number and wiggled his eyebrows. If I get really lonely next weekend, who knows, maybe I'll give him a ring. It's more attention than I've gotten in quite some time.

Oh, yeah, as to the Hermitage, it is everything they say--gorgeous, overwhelming, enormous. After a few hours, though, I became exhausted with all the beauty and began looking for ugly things or thinking of inappropriate thoughts about the paintings and sculptures (ie "Well, well...what's HE doing?" or "Smell me finger", etc). So I'll have to return when I'm more mature, maybe next weekend if they don't kick me out of the country and I'm not on a hot date with a hefty, single-toothed, heavily intoxicated police officer.

In the interest of keeping things "fair and balanced," and just so that people don't get the impression that Russia is all about pickpockets and scams, I have a more optimistic tale involving a lost passport. This one is from my own experience back in early 1999. While spending my winter break in Novosibirsk visiting an American friend who was teaching there at the time, I lost my passport - and didn't even require a pickpocket to do so. We later determined that it must have fallen out of my pocket while I was wrestling in a snowbank with my friend on the way home from the bar(s).

After several days of panicked visits to the local authorities and marginally successful attempts to contact the US consulate in Ekaterinburg, I was in a state of despair. Naturally, you can't travel from Novosibirsk to Ekaterinburg without a valid passport. And getting the police to issue me a document confirming my document's loss was difficult - remember that this was all taking place during the week after new year's, when, as one of the people I met on that trip told me, "all of Russia is drinking," and even at the US consulate everyone's on vacation. Then, I think on the very day I went to the AmEx office to get some extra cash - a bailout package from the parents at home - I learned that someone had fliered the entire campus (I was in Akademgorodok, not Novosibirsk proper) with leaflets announcing they had found an American passport, with only an email for contact info.

I emailed the guy, and we arranged to meet at the main entrance to NGU. I went with a Russian friend (who was then a student and is now a successful oil geologist), just in case it was a shakedown. As it turned out, the good samaritan didn't want any money, but I still gave him as much as I could spare (which was not much). Lesson learned? Good things can happen in Russia, sometimes.

Ukrainian election observation - in DC

Following up on last year's photo report from the elections at the Moldovan Embassy in Moscow, here's a similar report from the Ukrainian elections in late March of this year - as they were conducted at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, DC. I guess I am rather tardy in posting this, given that the election was over a month ago - these photos are from March 26th, right around noon. I have to say, the scene was considerably more orderly than what I saw in March 2005 on Kuznetsky Most.

The Ukrainian Embassy occupies a beautiful and historic building in Georgetown - a lovely area, but inaccessible by Metro.

Apparently this is the building where the agreement was signed to carve the District of Columbia out of Maryland and Virginia. Virginia, of course, later took its part of DC back.

This bus was carrying diaspora Ukrainians from Pennsylvania, if its license plate can be believed (often, though, the license plates of commercial vehicles have little bearing on what state they're actually coming from).

Inside the Embassy - more staff than voters! Everything was running very smoothly, and the Embassy security officer was friendly and not averse to a non-citizen (me) accompanying his Ukrainian friends and taking a few pictures.

"Find yourself in the list of voters," if I'm not mixing up this translation.

The ballot boxes. In the background are the voting booths.

Not particularly attractive photos, aesthetically, but it is always nice to see people excited about voting, and just about everyone there was. I don't have photos of people dropping ballots into the box, etc., because I figured they might not want to be featured in a stranger's blog. Note - the voters here did not get a stamp in their passport like the Moldovan voters in Moscow did last year.

Rebranding

Snowsquare has a post about a cryptic ad campaign apparently setting up a rebranding by mobile telephony provider MTS.

There is something strangely appealing about the crazy drama of these "secret" ad campaigns. I can remember several from my time in Moscow. The silliest was one that involved a bunch of posters with nothing more than the letters "AB" (if memory serves) and eventually turned out to be advertising a new (and ultimately unsuccessful) line of potato chips being promoted by Alla Borisovna Pugachova, an aging, overweight pop star. Happily, I think the Russian marketers have become more sophisticated in the past couple of years, although some of snowsquare's photos suggest there are still companies taking a low-budget approach to advertising.

Another, more recent - and more captivating - campaign of this type involved a man with his hand on a curvaceous figure that looked like the silhouette of a woman, with the caption, "So that she doesn't leave [you] for someone else." ("Chtoby ona ne ushla k drugomu") Turned out the ad was for car alarms, and the man was resting his hand on what emerged (in the second version of the ad) to be a luxury automobile.

Strangely, I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in the US, except maybe once in a long while promoting movies. I think this is a function of Russia's money being concentrated in Moscow, a city which has more than enough outdoor advertising space to create a huge impression on any of its 10+ million residents. There is no such single concentration of wealth/influence in once US city, although maybe there are ad campaigns like this in New York and I've just never heard about them. Maybe it also has something to do with people who are only 15 years into the daily visual assault of advertising and are thus more willing to look at the billboards and think about them. On the other hand, I guess there are sometimes some pretty cryptic ads on US TV (our nation's equivalent of the common city-space), but I have been living TV-less and therefore have been deprived of them for the past 6 months or so.

If I may rave briefly, I'm a huge fan of snowsquare - the best English-language slice-of-Moscow blog around.

Not quite there yet

From a BBC Monitoring report sent around in Johnson's Russia List earlier this week:

[...] Ren TV's late-night news on 12 April noted that the number of bureaucrats has risen to 1,462,000, which is some 100 per person. Presenter Mikhail Kurennoy noted that since 2001 the number of officials has been "growing at an amazing rate", despite pledges to the contrary by President Putin and Prime Minister Fradkov. "There are now more bureaucrats than there were in the USSR," Kurennoy observed.

Right, the USSR never had more than 80 bureaucrats per person, tops...

Moscow holiday diptych

The first photo (12:33pm, Dec 27, 2005) causes one to envision a group of friends swilling Sovetskoe champagne from little plastic cups on the embankment of the Moscow River, their moods buoyed by the early hour, the festive flags on the bridge and the inspiring architecture of the Ukraina Hotel across the river.



The second photo (8:37pm, Dec 28, in the Belorusskaia metro station) reminds one how such festivities can end - with yet another, clearly uncalled for, bottle of Sovetskoe.

Gratuitous Metro pic

Since I've been rather text-heavy of late, I'm trying to even out the balance with a few photos. Much more fun than politics or answering personal questionnaires. This one is from December 30th, around 4pm, in the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina metro station. Note Vladimir Il'ich's bald dome, rendered lovingly in a mosaic, peeking out above the crowd at the top of the stairs in the background.

I love you

If only the message scrawled on the subway door in this photo was a bit more legible, it would make a great Valentine. The faded graffiti reads, "Ia tebia liubliu," or "I love you." Photo taken at 4pm on December 31, 2005, on the green line somewhere between the Belorusskaia and Aeroport stations.

...in which the blogger perpetuates a tired blogosphere game

I've been "tagged" by Kevin of Languor Management. Because I like Kevin's blog, and because this week is National Procrastinators' Week, as well as my spring break*, I guess I'll take the time, though I don't think many people will find this interesting.

*I started this post two weeks ago, and it's been languishing as a draft since then. Since then, I've learned I was also tagged at about the same time by Wally Shedd, the Accidental Russophile.

Four jobs I've had (though none of these was within the past 9 years):
Waiter
Standardized test essay grader (sometimes those 8th graders had really depressing things to say)
Housepainter
Recycler of newspapers (including driving a 20-foot, 5-ton truck full of them - favorite job ever. That was a summer job; I also worked for these folks during the school year.)

Four movies I can watch over and over:
Leaving Las Vegas
Burnt by the Sun
Ironiia Sud'by
Can't think of anything else - I've never been a very discerning big-screen viewer.

Four places I've lived:
Lagos, Nigeria
Leningrad, the USSR
Washington, DC (the District, none of this suburban nonsense)
Moscow, Russia (too obvious)
North Cambridge, Massachusetts

Four TV shows I like:
X-Files (not the last few seasons)
Namedni (R. I. P.)
Law & Order (preferably the original)
Simpsons

Four places I've vacationed:
Uzbekistan (made it to Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as the gateway city of Tashkent, although not to Khiva or the Aral Sea)
Shanghai, PRC
Moldova (I've been to just about every big city in the country - Chisinau, Balti, Soroca, Comrat, Ungheni, and others - even made it to Tiraspol twice)
Kenya (a week on safari and a week on the beach in Mombasa - something like 20 years ago)

Four of my favorite dishes:
Blini from Teremok
Starbucks Eggs Florentine sandwich (favorite food of the moment) / Starlite Diner Eggs Benedict
Hammered pork cutlets and yellow string beans with garlic
Anything my mom makes

Four sites I visit daily (there is actually no such site, but these are the ones I visit most frequently):
Neeka's Backlog
Slate.com
Lenta.ru
My counter logs

Four books I've read this year (or, to be precise, within the past year):
Acts of Faith (highly recommended)
Lying Together: My Russian Affair (don't draw any conclusions)
Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams (it didn't really work)
The Man Who Tried to Save the World : The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of an American Hero (interesting if you're interested in Chechnya)

Four bloggers I'm tagging:
Nobody. I don't want to lay this burden on anyone else.

More on Litvinovich

I was following the story of the beating of opposition activist Marina Litvinovich earlier this week - here, here, and here - which has now been thoroughly covered in English by the Moscow Times (they try to make you pay for their stories after the first day, but David McDuff of A Step At a Time has the story here. Information wants to be free.).

Masha Gessen had an opinion piece in the Moscow Times yesterday, which is worth quoting in full:

Moscow Times
March 23, 2006
A Message Delivered
By Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist.

If you follow the news, you know now that Garry Kasparov, the chess king who has devoted his life to deposing President Vladimir Putin, has an office on Ulitsa Makarenko in central Moscow. There is no sign on the door announcing his grandly named United Civil Front, nor is his office marked in any way. When you enter, you encounter a couple of his bodyguards (altogether he has eight or so). These guys follow the opposition activist everywhere and watch over everything that concerns him, including food preparation. And if you follow the news, you know this is not paranoia.

Monday night, Kasparov's right-hand person, the political consultant Marina Litvinovich, left the United Civil Front office just after 9. About an hour later, she opened her eyes to discover that she was lying on a cellar awning and someone was trying to ascertain if she was all right. She was not: She had apparently been knocked unconscious by a blow or several blows to the head. She had been badly beaten, was bruised all over, and was missing two of her front teeth. Nothing had been taken from her: not her notebook computer or cell phone or money.

She spent three or four hours in the emergency room that night, and she spent another three or four at the police station the following day. She found the police to be extraordinarily polite and considerate -- and, as the organizer of many of Kasparov's public speaking events and any number of protests, Litvinovich is something of an expert on police behavior. Some higher-up had apparently been sent down to the station to handle her case. At the same time, she told me, "I am not stupid and I could see what they were getting at: that I was just walking down the street and passed out. That I must be in poor health." Litvinovich is 31 years old and healthy. "And that I fell in such an unfortunate manner that I got bruised all over."

Russian police are generally fond of blaming the victim as a way of solving crimes. I have read case descriptions in which police claimed that victims of beatings stumbled and fell (in one memorable case, a person was said to have insulted a police officer, then stumbled, fallen and apologized to the officer). Even Private Andrei Sychyov, the apparent hazing victim, has been said to have injected himself with the substance that necessitated the amputation of both legs. But failing the she-hit-herself-on-the-head theory, the police were willing to offer Litvinovich another version of events: She may have been hit by a car.

Litvinovich has a bruise on her leg that, the doctors told her, was probably caused by a blow with a rubber baton. The police suggested it may have been a car bumper. Litvinovich pointed out that her clothes were so clean that she was wearing the same trousers and coat the following day. She clearly was not hit by a Moscow car. Moreover, this is one of several signs that she was attacked by professionals: She must have been held while she was beaten, then laid carefully on the awning on which she found herself.

In other words, the attack was a message. The pristine execution and the fact that Litvinovich's valuables were not touched serve to underscore this. So what's the content of this message? Another young political consultant, an up-and-coming member of the Kremlin's Public Chamber, Alexei Chadayev, put the message forward in his blog: "Women should not be in this line of work. ... Marina is on the warpath, and no one ever said this war would be conducted according to rules." This is this country's ruling regime speaking. Its message is crude: as simple as a rubber baton, as brutal as a blow to a young woman's face. If you are going to oppose the Kremlin, it is saying, this will happen to you.

Perhaps the powers-that-be are even more angry at Litvinovich because, years before her recent attempt to get possible Putin successor Sergei Ivanov booted from his job as Defense Minister, she seemed to be on their side. Without wanting to call her opposition cred into question, it seems relevant to mention that she got her start working for Kremlin spin-doctor Gleb Pavlovsky's Fond Effektivnoi Politiki, though, to be fair, I think back in '99 Pavlovsky wasn't considered to have gone over to the dark side - actually, back in '99, concern about the Putin administration becoming a "dark side" was rather muted overall.

And back in '99, Litvinovich was also apparently the victim of a beating, although that time her assailants stole a briefcase containing "important FEP documents." That last bit is according to an exhaustive piece on Lenta.ru which covers the recent beating and provides a thorough backgrounder on Litvinovich's career as the "work horse of civil society."

Compromat.ru (caveat - a questionable source, which sources much of its article to the even more questionable Stringer.ru) has an article which recites some of the same facts about Litvinovich's early career, but adds the tidbit that author Tatiana Tolstaya's son is the father of Litvinovich's child. But that's getting too far into tabloid territory, I guess, and we try to keep things serious here.

One of the projects that Litvinovich worked on back in the day was strana.ru, which is still going strong. Here's an interesting excerpt from an MA thesis (which seems to be from 2004) about "The Changing Face of RuNet":

The establishment of high profile government propaganda sites further fuelled concerns in an online media community already made jittery by deteriorating press freedom and the state control of television. “It is not a business project,” said strana.ru director Marina Litvinovich (LaFraniere, 2002). “It’s a political project. The idea is to support Russian authorities and the Russian president.”

A project of this nature was viewed by its rivals as potentially an overture to actual repression: “Today we do not really feel interference,” said Anton Nosik, editor in chief of news site lenta.ru. “That’s because they haven’t started yet. Ever since Mr. Putin has been in the picture, there has been an urge to control the mass media. They are just not ready to come for us yet.”

Is it too obvious to suggest that it looks like "they" may be getting ready?