Abandoned in SPB

Nikolsky Cathedral

Along Griboyedov (or Fontanka - can't remember for sure) Canal

Both photos from July 23 of last year.

Demonstration Day

No doubt everyone will be following events in Moscow closely tomorrow (along with events in Kiev!). Unfortunately I don't have time to write or even think too much about what's going on in my former city of residence, but I wanted to share the email that the US Embassy in Moscow sent out today to the Americans who have registered with them as residing in Moscow. They send these out every once in awhile when something big has happened or may be about to happen - sort of like a travel advisory, but more targeted. I guess I need to tell them that I no longer live there...

From: Moscow, Consular Warden [address redacted]
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 10:02 AM [EST]
To: Moscow, Consular Warden
Subject: Warden Message

This is a warden message for U.S. citizens in the Moscow Area. Please distribute it to your American citizen friends and colleagues. If you are a Warden, please notify your Warden Group. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by e-mail [snip] or telephone (7-495-728-5577).

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has advised the U.S. Embassy in Moscow of several large demonstrations planned for Saturday, April 14th in Moscow at the locations listed below. Moscow city authorities do not rule out the possibility of violence, and will be providing a large militia presence, particularly in the area of Pushkinskaya. The Russian authorities advise Americans to avoid downtown Moscow on Saturday, or to exercise caution if you must be in the area. We wish to remind American citizens that even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence.

The times and locations are as follows:

12:00 PM - Pushkinskaya Square, Sparrow Hill, and Turgenevskaya Square – Molodaya Gvardia and Other Russia, expecting up to 20,000 people.

1:00 PM – Slavyanskaya Square – Union of Right Forces.

2:00 PM – Bolotnaya Sqaure - Movement Against Illegal Immigration and Congress of Russian Communities, unlikely to draw as large a crowd.

For the latest security information, Americans living and traveling abroad should regularly monitor the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs internet website at http://travel.state.gov, where the current Worldwide Caution, Public Announcements, and Travel Warnings can be found. Up-to-date information on security can also be obtained by calling 1-888-407-4747, toll free in the U.S., or for callers outside the U.S. and Canada, a regular toll line at 1-202-501-4444. These numbers are available from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday (except U.S. federal holidays).

For more information about safety and security while traveling in Russia, please reference the State Department’s Consular Information Sheet for the Russian Federation: http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1006.html

Waiting for a coincidence...

Last week I posted a photo and titled the post "Waiting for a miracle" - it just happened to be the first phrase that popped into my head, although I was able to explain my choice of title when asked about it. Now I see that there's a film with that same title, and it's set in St. Petersburg, just like my photo. Strange coincidence...

On a different note, like Sean, I have some academic obligations which will keep the frequency of posts down for the next few weeks. I'm sure you're all quite sad...

Kaluga, before the storm

July 16, 2005.

One of my favorite photos of the past two years, mainly because of the circumstances surrounding it. We were spending the weekend at a friend's so-called dacha (actually a house on the outskirts of a medium-sized city, so not the classic rural dacha one imagines) in Kaluga and went to one of the local lakes to celebrate someone's birthday. Not five minutes after this photo was taken, we were all huddling in a car (and unluckier members of our party were huddling underneath a rubber raft and some towels outside) for shelter from a huge thunderstorm.

Ukraine

Seems like lots of stuff still going on in Kyiv. Lots of chat earlier in the week at this Siberian Light post on matters Ukrainian and otherwise. I'll leave the pontificating to the pundits and the eyewitness accounts to the people who are actually there.

Tangerines, Moldovans far from home, and a river named Psou

This nearly five-year-old story definitely fits into the "truth is stranger - and sometimes more tragic - than fiction" category:

Tangerine Fever Grips Abkhazia By Inal Khashig on the Psou River
(IWPR Caucasus Reporting Service No.156, 21-Nov-2002)

The "yellow fever" season has begun in Abkhazia.

That is what Abkhaz call the time of year when the tangerine harvest is ripe and thousands of residents of the unrecognised republic flock to its northern border with Russia to trade them.

Since the end of the war with Georgia in 1993, the tangerine trade has become the main source of income for Abkhaz families. With the region's chronic lack of employment, the money they earn in the three months of the season must be enough to sustain them over the rest of the year.

With the border closed to the south, the tangerine traders all head north to the river Psou that divides Abkhazia from Russia. Here on either side of a narrow bridge, the respective customs services have set up posts. [...]

"I could trade my tangerines on the Abkhaz side too, but the price here is much lower than on the Russian side and my family badly needs the extra roubles," said Nadezhda, a woman in her fifties, standing in the long queue.

She said the salary she earned after 30 years teaching as a maths teacher was not enough to live on. Which is why she has to spend her weekends ferrying up to 50 kilogrammes of tangerines in a small cart, made out of an old child's pram. When she has sold her cargo, she generally uses the money to buy food, which is cheaper in Russia.

"My daughter-in-law used to come here," Nadezhda said. "But she developed health problems and the doctors told her that if she did not stop dragging heavy loads, she could not have children. So I took over the tangerines. Otherwise we would have nothing to feed the family." [...]

The most industrious of these traders earn up to 300 roubles (a little less than ten dollars) a day, which in Abkhazia is regarded as a good wage. Over the last two years, they have been joined by people from the North Caucasus and places as far a field as Moldova and Ukraine.

"When I was a child, tangerines were a fantastic treat, but now I can't bear the sight of them," said Svetlana Koditsa, from the town of Beltsy [Bălţi] in Moldova.

Svetlana makes three trips across the border a day before she has something left over from what she pays to cover her accommodation, food and bribes to the police, who, she complains, demand money even from those standing patiently in line.

"You try not to give it to them and they might not let you through," she said angrily. [...]

The whole story is worth a read, as it talks a bit about who profits from the trade and why the problem is intractable - an object study in corruption. I would imagine things have changed for the better since 2002, but perhaps not by much.

I found this story last fall while doing research on Russia's passportization campaign in Abkhazia. The article at one point mentions all of the Abkhazians* who had recently begun to receive Russian passports - and perhaps citizenship, depending on what you think constitutes citizenship. I decided to try to find the story once again and post the part about poor Svetlana from Balti, and it was easy to find - I just googled "Psou tangerine Moldova," and the article was, of course, the first result.

Incidentally, IWPR is a treasure trove of searchable, first-hand reporting by local correspondents. They even publish (online it's in pdf format) a locally oriented newspaper, Panorama, in Georgian and Russian, which turned out to be a good source of citations about Russian economic interests in Abkhazia (e.g., the Moscow Military District renting a Sukhumi resort for use by its personnel) and the local controversy they create; and about some of the ongoing debates in local politics. Of all of the post-Soviet secessionist statlets, Abkhazia seems to have the most developed political culture - elections which even Moscow can't fully control, for example.

For some stunning photos from Abkhazia, check out LJ user kunstkamera's recent set (HT Levan); this railway-themed set from cyxymu (who has many other photos from the region), recently featured at Registan; and of course the set I linked to earlier here.


*I prefer to use a non-ethnic term referring to people of all nationalities who live in Abkhazia, since the ethnic Abkhaz are still not a majority there - even after ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Georgians, they are but a plurality in their own land, which they share with Russians, Armenians, and some returned Georgians. And of course, statistics from the region are unreliable and disputed.

More on MGU SotsFak - in Russian

I've already written way too much about the turbulence at the MGU Sociology Department. Russian website RuleofLaw.ru (which I found thanks to Robert Amsterdam's blog) has a long and apparently original post interviewing some of the students involved.

Oleg Ivanov [RUS] has the very latest info, including news of two press conferences related to the scandal on Thursday.

Waiting for a miracle

St. Petersburg, July 23, 2006.

A "dead fish" precedent?

"There are some problems that, like dead fish, do not improve with age and neglect."

- Daniel Fried, Ass't Secretary of State for European & Eurasian Affairs, referring to the need to resolve the status of Kosovo sooner rather than later.

I heard this sound-bite at least twice on NPR this morning but was unable to find it online anywhere.

Burjanadze at CSIS

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk by Nino Burjanadze, Chairwoman of Georgia's Parliament and star of the Rose Revolution, at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. You can listen online to the whole event. Burjanadze spoke a great deal about the situation in Abkhazia, referring to the Georgian government's proposed roadmap for settlement, and to the fact that a new roadmap on settling the situation in South Ossetia would be forthcoming - and indeed, it was circulated in the Georgian Parliament just yesterday. One interesting talking point she had - Georgia is prepared to offer South Ossetia more autonomy than North Ossetia (which is part of Russia) has from the federal center in Moscow.

My favorite comment of hers was in response to a question from CSIS's Cory Welt, who was chairing the event. Welt asked about Russia's use of "soft power" instruments to try to convince the Georgian public that NATO accession will be detrimental to Georgia's attempts to resolve the so-called "frozen conflicts" in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Burjanadze had a long response, including the insight that "soft power is soft from here [DC] - it doesn't look soft from Ukraine and Georgia."

For more on Russia's use of "soft power" in its near abroad, see Fiona Hill's piece, "Moscow Discovers Soft Power," from last fall and Nicu Popescu's brief on "Russia's Soft Power Ambitions" from around the same time; see also this recent lecture by Andrew Wilson, and Ivan Krastev's article from a year and a half ago.

On a lighter note, I arrived a bit late and was seated at the very back next to one of Burjanadze's security guys (I can only assume, as he was a big guy who answered his cell phone in Georgian and had no interest in the talk whatsoever). Throughout the event, he was reading a well-worn copy of a Russian suspense novel - Akvarium, by Viktor Suvorov (full text available here).

I have to say that I was very impressed with Burjanadze. She spoke in English with practically no difficulties, sounded convincing about the reforms underway in Georgia, and managed to be unequivocal about Georgia's NATO aspirations without making it sound too much like the country wants or needs to suck up to the United States. My point of comparison for this was a speech by Eduard Shevardnadze that I attended back in 2001 at the Kennedy School of Government. At the time - just after 9/11 - I remember being almost alarmed at the degree to which Shevy seemed to be cozying up to the US. At the same time, the event summary still on the KSG website shows that the Silver Fox did still have some powers of prediction, even if his forecast was a few years off:

Shevardnadze, who has expressed hopes that Georgia will ascend to NATO membership by 2005, offered his endorsement of further NATO development and expansion, saying, "aspiration toward NATO membership is the inviolable right of every democratic nation in Europe."

Another interesting moment in that 5 1/2-year-old transcript/summary is a question from someone identified as "Paul Joyle," recently more famous under his actual name, Paul Joyal, as someone targeted by either carjackers or Chekist henchmen in suburban DC.