Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 168 – 2004 words
Columns :: Sergei returns – only slightly damaged

MOSCOW, October 2, 2005 – Comments:   Ratings:
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Sergei returns
Love undiminished
Martial law in Russia?
Religion harmful to your health
My NN mafia rekindles ties



MOSCOW, October 2, 2005 –On Monday morning came a phone call from Zhorik in St. Pete: “Sergei’s in the hospital.”

I was in a class and didn’t have time to talk. Had he, as I feared, tried to commit suicide? When I got home, Andrei called Zhorik.

“He was beaten up pretty bad,” Andrei explained after the call. He didn’t know any more details.

The last thing Sergei had done two nights before was ask for the phone number of Oleg, Zhorik’s buddy and former roommate with whom Zhorik would be staying in St. Pete. Sergei obviously hadn’t gone home, but rather to St. Pete to try to find Zhorik, his one remaining link to the past and everything familiar. And now he was in the hospital.

How seriously was Sergei hurt? Was he brain-damaged? Did he have permanent organ rupture? Was he a cripple?

Andrei seemed remarkably unconcerned.

Wednesday afternoon the house phone rang. Probably my student Ilya. “Open the door,” instructed the voice at the other end.

That didn’t sound like Ilya. I pushed the “enter” button and waited inside the apartment. Before me suddenly appeared a wan, pale, shaky figure with one arm in a cast and a bandage on its head.

I took him into my arms. “Honey, I’m so glad to see you. How are you feeling? I’m so sorry.”

He said something about a prostitute, a typical set-up where he had paid for a prostitute and then her “boyfriends” had beat him up and stolen everything he had left. So at least it wasn’t a suicide attempt or a random street beating.

We held each other. He had lost even more weight. “Honey, I don’t want us to ever quarrel again,” I said.

“Me too.”

But we didn’t have time to talk long, because moments later Ilya arrived, and then I left for my Institute of Diplomacy class.

When I returned home about 10 that night, he had passed out. Zhorik had bought some pain killer in St. Pete with codeine and morphine, and they had zapped him. Andrei said he had had a high fever earlier, but his temperature seemed normal by the time I got home.

I fixed some rice and the flounder I had bought over the weekend, which he had eaten for the first time a week before and had gone bananas over, so that when he did wake up he would at least have something to eat. So far he had eaten nothing since his arrival, and for god knows how long before.

He was still sleeping when I left the next morning for my 8:00 class.

But at least he was alive and well and in my bed.


Student Anton had cancelled our 3:30 class, so I had some time to go shopping that afternoon. Sergei hadn’t touched the fish. “I’m not hungry.”

“If I fix the peach barbecue pork, will you eat some?”

“Yes,” he replied, adding: “I’ll go with you to the store.”

So he was beginning to revive. I bought him some yogurt and anything else he hinted he might eat.

He wolfed down the yogurt and the barbecued pork and peaches that night. He was beginning to be his old self.

He told me that he had flipped out when he had come home last Saturday night and found me and Andrei in bed with my arm around him. It proved I loved Andrei, but not him. He had told me earlier how jealous he had been of Denis, when he thought I loved Denis more than him.

But I had thought from his behavior that he had rejected me. A classical case of lovers not communicating – although I had tried to drag out of him something about the missing money. But he had dodged the answers because he wanted to surprise me; I thought he was deliberately lying to me and could no longer be trusted.

His appetite is approaching normal, and I hold him in my arms at night to reassure him. We have been loving and appreciative of each other. I still get teary-eyed when I think of how I have hurt him. He is so vulnerable -- stubborn, impetuous, and volatile – but vulnerable and loving. I want to protect him – from the world and himself.

I think that now perhaps I can.


I heard a new prediction in my Institute of Diplomacy class yesterday from Stass, who works for some sort of international organization. He said he had been in a meeting a couple of days earlier with someone who was predicting the scenario of events between now and the Russian election in 2008.

There will be many new Chechen “terrorist” bombings in Moscow and St. Pete, and the Chechen war will again escalate to full scale. Under the made-to-order war conditions, Putin will be “forced” to declare martial law, setting aside the constitution and the 2008 elections. He will remain in power.

Sounds remarkably like the script I have heard predicted for Dubya.

Do I need to remind you again? I’m living in your ___.


In Soviet Russia, teachers were perhaps the nearest thing to a deity – except of course for party leaders --in a regime that forbade religion.

They had absolute authority. Students quaked before them in abject fear.

In many schools – certainly in my School #69 -- those days are past. In fact, my colleagues are confronting the American educational dilemma: Where does greater student freedom and independence end and classroom anarchy and chaos begin?

But this new reality hasn’t reached most schools in the provinces – or, it seems, even some of the education factories in “cosmopolitan” St. Peterburg, where a 14-year-old threw himself under a train earlier this week because he could no longer bear the taunts and ridicule of his teacher over his inability to contribute money to classroom repairs.

While Russia is wallowing in billions of dollars of windfall oil profits, the once-vaunted education system is smothering in poverty. Teachers get $ 100 a month – far below the poverty line – and schools are falling down from disrepair.

So it’s not uncommon for parents to be asked to contribute to repairs and maintenance.

And it seems some students who can’t afford to pay are berated and shamed, a practice which 14-year-old Roman Lebedev said in his suicide note he could no longer bear.

Since his mother had died, he had been living with his official guardian, his grandmother, who like most elderly Russians, lives in poverty. She didn’t have the 300 rubles – about $ 10 – the children were asked to pay for building repairs. For this, his teacher ridiculed and badgered him, and made him mop the classroom every afternoon until he finally ended the abuse the only way he knew how.

His teacher is being investigated. In Russia, driving someone to suicide is a crime punishable by five years in prison.

But still they might not lose their job. According to the Moscow Times, a principal of a school in the Altai region stuck a sock up a child’s nose when he caught him cheating. He was sentenced to 10 months “corrective labor,” but wasn’t barred from teaching.

This latest scandal, the Times reports, “comes just after a mother in Omsk complained that her 8-year-old daughter’s gymnastics teacher had forced the girl to stand naked on a table with one leg held in a vertical position above her head as punishment for allegedly stealing candy from another student.”

It seems cruelty is still the most pervasive lesson taught in many Russian schools.


Zhorik returned yesterday -- Saturday -- morning. The court case ended happily. Oleg was sentenced to two years’ probation and Zhorik was given a nominal fine. Oleg’s sentence will prevent him from working in the field of law, but Zhorik’s won’t.

We resumed our bench sessions last night after my full day of teaching, which ended only at 8 p.m.

Zhorik said that Sergei had called from the hospital, and when he got there, his arm was in a cast, his head was bandaged, and his shirt had been so soaked with blood they had had to throw it away. Sergei at first refused to return to Moscow because of the fight we’d had. He would live like a homeless urchin on the streets of St. Pete, he insisted, but Oleg finally convinced him to return.

And once he got here, he told Zhorik yesterday, I was the only one who had offered him love, sympathy, and comfort.

My student Andrey, the DHL sales executive, had given me a recipe for cooking shrimp in our class yesterday evening, so Zhorik and I bought a kilogram at the supermarket for about $ 3 a pound. After our bench session, Zhorik tasted the first shrimp of his life.

“Let’s go to our room,” he said afterward, “and massage my back.” We lay down crossways on the bed, and I went to sleep rubbing and hugging. When I woke up this morning, we were all four stacked like cordwood crosswise of the bed – fully clothed, unfortunately.


Too much religion could be dangerous to your health, warns an evolutionary scientist after a study of religiosity and “societal health” in 18 “prosperous” democracies, including the U.S.

The study found, reports columnist Rosa Brooks in the LA Times, that “most religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages of atheists and agnostics.”

And guess what: “Of the nations studied, the U.S. – which has by far the largest percentage of people who take the Bible literally and express absolute belief in God (and the lowest percentage of atheists and agnostics) – also has by far the highest levels of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases.”

The findings were reported by Gregory S. Paul of Creighton University’s Center for the Study of Religion in the current issue of the Journal of Religion and Society.

In her column, Brooks draws the obvious conclusion: “Too much religion may be socially dangerous.”

Obviously Russia, definitely not in the “prosperous democracy” camp, was not included in the study. Here almost nobody has read the Bible because it’s discouraged by the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. You’re supposed to let them read it and tell you what you’re supposed to know.

There are so many other skewing factors – 70 years of communism, centuries of blind obedience to the tsar and the church, a profound level of superstition, etc. – that it’s impossible to extrapolate these findings to Russia except to say that without question, one of Russia’s historic problems has been too much religion, and it has certainly contributed mightily to its present social catastrophe.

So a country doesn’t have to be prosperous or a democracy for religion to fuck it up. If in doubt, just look at any Muslim dictatorship. You’ll find its extremism every bit as destructive and socially dangerous as that of the Bushmaster’s “christian” America.

Thinking of becoming a “born again Christer?” Better think it over carefully. In fact, maybe you should take up something less inimical to your health, like smoking or drinking or wrestling alligators.


Ex-Nizhny Novgorod boyfriends Max and Vanya called Saturday morning after a night of (their) drinking and sex. Made me a little homesick for the tumultuous, sex-charged and frenetic summer of ’99, the summer we met.

I promised them I’d stay in touch and that I would come visit them. I would really, really like to, but my current schedule makes that impossible. And Andrei said today that it would only cost $ 250 each to go to Yalta; so if that’s the case, Zhorik and I – and maybe Sergei as well – will almost certainly go to Yalta on my November School #69 term break, leaving no time to rekindle my ties with the NN mafia.

But a roll in the hay with both of them again would be good for my mental health – a lot better than a Baptist tent meeting.