Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 203 – 2764 words
Columns :: Zhorik’s perfidy revealed; Anti-Americanism growing

MOSCOW, June 3, 2006 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Igor kicked, beaten, and robbed of dream phone
Intimacy takes a short recess
Volodya discovers Zhorik’s treachery
“Cuckoo’s nest” again preferred punishment for dissenters?
Is Andrei Sh. headed there? Am I in danger of losing visa?
America’s cold war mindset increases Russian hostility
Anti-Americanism: Glue holding Putin’s support together
Gays “got thrashed,” boasts Moscow mayor
Friend Marco, Dubrovnik furnish vacation destination



MOSCOW, June 3, 2006 -- The sad reality of nighttime in the Evil Empire made short shrift of Igor’s elation over his new telephone, “my dream; I won’t want another” (Chapt. 202).

When he woke from his alcoholic coma at 2:30 a.m. with my arms still around him, he got up for a smoke, which woke me up.

But he didn’t have butts. He had inhaled his last Chesterfield before he had passed out on the bed.

How ’bout some juice to stave off the pangs?

Uh-oh. We didn’t have any juice either.

But a smoker’s got to have his fix, even if it does violate the survivalist’s rule against wandering the streets of Moscow alone after midnight -- especially around Belarusskaya Station, which is considered a very dangerous place at night. About a year ago a man was killed and robbed in our courtyard.

So I didn’t even try to talk him out of it, although I did have serious trepidations. He would simply have dismissed me as a sorry wart.

It was 2:45 a.m. when he left. I figured he’d be back in about 15 minutes, so I went back to bed to wait for him.

The clock turned 3, then 3:30. I called his mobile phone number. “The subscriber has either turned off the service or is out of the service area.” Oh-oh! This is serious!

At 4 a.m. I called again. The same message. There is something terribly wrong. The only question is how wrong? Is he unconscious? Is he in the hospital? Is he dead?

Finally, about 4:45 I heard his keys turn in the lock.

“What happened?” I cried, running into the hallway.”

“They beat me and stole my phone.”

And then he fell sobbing into my arms.”

Three thugs had pursued and attacked him as he returned from the nearby kiosk. When he fought back, two of them knocked him to the ground and one of them kicked him repeatedly in the ribs and back. He had lain in the grass – probably unconscious -- for an hour and a half. His back, ribs, and kidneys were in pain, and he was experiencing the initial grief of personal assault.

He fought back the tears. I repeatedly held him, hugged him, kissed him, and tried to comfort him. “At least they didn’t kill you. We can always buy a new mobile phone.”

But again, fortune rises in misfortune. “I want to take a bath.” So I helped him undress and watched as he sank into the bathtub, his gorgeous little willy hiding demurely beneath the phimotic foreskin. I forced myself not to stare except when he occasionally put his head under the water and had to close his eyes.

I helped him dry off – his back and ass, which may well be the most beautiful pair of haunches I have ever seen. How I wanted to lovingly caress and kiss it. Instead, I toweled it dry. Maybe some day.

He couldn’t go back to sleep, so we stayed up together until 6:00, when he had set the alarm on his now non-existent new mobile phone.

The intimacy and trust and love we shared for those couple of hours was unforgettable.

I hugged him tightly and kissed him lovingly when he left for work at 7.

“I love you,” I reminded him.

“I love you too. You’re my best friend.”


The coolness with which he related to me that evening was consequently especially stark and hurtful. He was terse, uncommunicative, unresponsive. And when it came time to go to bed, he slept in the armchair, not in the bed beside me.

But he began to soften on Tuesday. When he called (using his old mobile phone) to ask whether we had a fax, he called me “honey.” Things are looking up. But that evening, after taking a late bath, he again sat down in the armchair to sleep.

“Why don’t you lie down on the bed,” I asked; “I want to talk to you.”

He immediately responded. I put my arm around him: “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing. Everything’s okay.”

“How about our relationship?”

“It’s okay. But I want to go to sleep. I’m very tired,” and turned away from me on his side. I put my arm around him and held him. We slept the night in the spoons position.

The next morning, when he left for work, he voluntarily hugged and kissed me. And that night he again slept beside me.

No doubt he does have a lot on his mind besides me: The mugging and theft; losing Zhorik, his best buddy; worrying about being able to send money to his parents; and trying to find a notary and a fax machine to send a notarized message to the cops in Svetlograd stating that he does not want to prosecute the guy who broke his jaw and put him in the hospital (Chapt. 194). “I don’t want to send anybody to prison”.

By Friday night, we were again best buddies. When he came to bed at little after midnight he lay beside me. I immediately put my arm around him and lifted his T-shirt so I could fondle his naked stomach. He didn’t flinch.

This morning, I woke about 5 and immediately started exploring. I beat my own record from last week. After playing with his, I barely touched my own dick and came without even stroking.

But a couple of hours later, when my alarm went off, I decided to explore again. I felt his semi through his jeans. I unzipped his pants, pulled out his semi-erect piska, and played with it. He didn’t stir. When I bent down to lick it, he woke with a start, sat up and turned over on his stomach.

Uh-oh.

But he was immediately back into a coma. A little later, after he had rolled back onto his back to expose his unzipped trou, I gently zipped them again. When I joined him in the bathroom, the “smoking room,” after my student left at 11:30, he gave no hint of anger. I think he doesn’t even remember it or maybe thought it was a dream.

In any case, the only way our relationship could be better now would be if his phimotic foreskin were massaging the scars of my tonsilectomy.


My fantasy Volodya dropped by unexpectedly Wednesday to ask about the weakness in my legs (School #69, where his mother also teaches, is a hotbed of gossip). While he was here, he quizzed Igor about Zhorik and discovered that: a) Zhorik never paid the army the nearly $ 3,000 I gave him in the fall (Chapt. 171), but lied to me repeatedly about it; b) the cost of bribery in Svetlograd isn’t anywhere near $ 3,000 – more like $ 800; c) he had told Igor nothing about my giving him the money or what he did with it; the police have been trying to nail him for over a year; d) he’s being drafted “because he doesn’t have the money to bribe his way out,” and will go directly into the army within the next two weeks.

Zhorik’s perfidy hurts even worse than the twins’. I absolutely believed him and in him. While he was leading me to believe that he had locked the twins out of his life, he was in fact sympathetic to their lies and thefts. I think he gave the $ 3,000 to them, because just before that he had asked me if I could lend them $ 3,000. “No!” I had snapped. So he simply took a devious route and got them the money anyway.

So, he, too, is now out of my life forever. He will never enter my apartment – much less my life – again.

Equally disturbing was Volodya’s advice about Igor: “Kick him out; don’t get into a relationship with him and don’t give him any money. I don’t trust him; he has shifty eyes.”

It makes sense under the “birds of a feather” principle. Still, I have detected nothing to indicate that he’s cut from the same cloth. He’s been straight as an arrow (pun intended). I think he’s open, frank, and honest. I don’t think he’d steal a kopek from me.

But then I used to think that about Zhorik.


In the post-Stalinist Soviet era, sentencing dissenters to gulags became crudely old-fashioned and politically counterproductive in the international public image competition. In place of gulags, the Brezhnev regime turned to “punitive psychiatry” to punishment critics of the regime.

My friend Andrei Sh. was twice the victim of such repression (Chapt. 59). I had thought this form of recrimination had collapsed with the Soviet system in 1989. After all, laws have been passed providing protection for psychiatric patients on a par with international standards along with guarantees of legal representation; and psychiatric commitment can occur only on the orders of a court.

Problem solved!

But the Moscow Times this week chronicled the renewed rampant manipulation of the psychiatric system to get rid of all kinds of pesky nuisances: Political dissenters, fading spouses, uncooperative business partners, and any other human obstacle to one’s personal, political, or business goals.

“This has only just resurfaced in recent years,” reported the MT, quoting the president of the Independent Psychiatric Assn., Yuri Savenko. “For a time, we couldn’t even believe this was happening; but it seems quite clear that such abuses are on the rise, and that this is a trend.”

But now, the news article reported, the repression of dissidents doesn’t appear to be orchestrated on the federal level. Instead, they now appear to be victims of regional or local authorities.

I sent my once-and-future dissident friend Andrei a copy of the article, noting that “it seems they're back at it; but according to the article, it's regional and not federal -- yet. Any thoughts?”

“It's true,” he replied. “Nothing has really changed since our communist-fascist times. It's a comfort – though maybe a poor one --that the western public has come to realize this.

“The only reason psychiatry is used punitively on a lesser scale nowadays is because open terror tactics are much cheaper.”

As for the practice not being a federal one, Andrei continued: “I don't think this phenomenon is regional; the KGB always preferred their dirty jobs to be done by someone else.”


The MT chronicled the case of a businessman and human rights activist who was running for the legislature last fall in Cheboksary, capital of the republic of Chuvashia.

Just days before he was supposed to appear at the local election commission to finalize his candidacy, according to the Times, an investigator from the prosecutor’s office met him at the courthouse with three police officers.

“They kept him locked up until a judge could be found to sign the order committing him for a psychiatric evaluation.” Of course by the time he was released nine days later, “the election filing deadline had passed and he was out of the race.”

His “act of insanity,” it turned out, was filing complaints charging local officials, police, prosecutors and judges with corruption, violation of court procedures, and “cronyism,” which could be justifiably filed against local officials in any town or city in Russia.

Nonetheless, the prosecutors, “a frequent target of (his) darts,” the Times reported, denounced him as “paranoid” and remanded him for psychiatric examination.

He was taken “straight off to the aslum” after the hearing, he told the MT.


An opposition deputy in the Cheboksary duma, or parliament, was convicted of libel in 2004. While in jail, he was committed for psychiatric hospitalization after a judge agreed with government lawyers that the opposition deputy’s charges of corruption among local authorities was so “somber” that it “might constitute a mental disorder.”

And in Moscow, a whistleblower in the Audit Chamber, which is supposed to monitor federal spending, was fired when she charged that $ 140 million had been drained out of the federal budget in 2001 and 2002. According to the Moscow Times¸ subsequent quarrels with her supervisors over the missing rubles got her fired, “and when she filed suit seeking disability compensation, a state psychologist reported she had a mental disability.”

So once again, under Putin, the Russian Federation is more and more resembling the Soviet Union from which it sprang.


A worrisome footnote: I e-mailed Andrei suggesting we get together this Sunday and drink some of his “samogon,” or home brew. In response, a “failed to deliver” message appeared on my screen saying that his host server had reported that his e-mail address “is blacklisted by bl.spamcop.net.”

I was instructed to send questions to abuse@okb-telecom.ru

Blacklisted? Abuse? It has all the earmarks of another FSB (KGB) campaign to harass and discredit him. But in the meantime, there’s no way I can get in touch with him to let him know what’s happening.

And I haven’t written to enquire about the nature of the problem because I’m afraid I will be pegged for consorting with a dissident, making me persona non grata when it comes time to renew my visa.

I’m living in your future. It’s just a matter of time until the Bushmaster – whose crimes of mass screening of the American public’s private communications have already been revealed -- starts using the same excuse of “net violations” to keep offending bloggers and dissenters from disseminating their anti-Bush – hence “anti-American” “poison.”

In the meantime, is Andrei Sh. headed for another stint in the loony bin? And have I been tagged by the FSB/KGB for collaborating with a known dissident? Time will tell.


America should get out of its mid-’90s cold war mindset. This was the concensus of most of the Russian officials, public figures, and political analysts – even pro-Western ones – gathered for a one-day conference here last week on Western-Russian relations.

America has with good reason become the rallying point for Russian patriotism and nationalism.

Even Mikhail Gorbochev expressed dismay: “I am an avid supporter of developing relations with the West,” he told the conference. “But the West should not be telling Russia that it is headed in the wrong direction.”

Especially galling was Veep Cheney’s childish tirade against Putin for backpedaling on democracy while praising other even worse despots – whose oil America just happened to badly need – for their exemplary democratic credentials.

Anti-American sentiment is growing fast. As of April 8, according to a newly-released poll, only 8% of Russians polled favored closer relations with the U.S. compared with 13% a year ago.

Ella Pamiflova, head of the Council for Fostering a Civil Society, warned that America’s outbursts against Russia can only have the effect of giving Putin or his heir apparent even more support in the 2008 election.


Anti-Americanism is the glue holding Russian patriotism and nationalism together, observed German intellectual and university lecturer Andreas Umland in a Moscow Times op-ed piece. The current round of anti-Americanism is more virulent than that of past cycles, he said.

“Anti-Americanism has become one, if not the, major feature of Russian foreign affairs journalism….Opposition to ‘American imperialism,’ in turn, serves as a justification for Putin’s illiberal policies and provides the glue that holds Russia’s elites together.”


Gays in last week’s scuttled parade “got thrashed,” boasted “Lord Mayor” Yuri Luzhkov in another homophobic tirade this past week.

The tomb of the unknown soldier, where they tried to lay flowers last Saturday (Chapt. 202), “may not be a church, but it is a state and national altar,” and their attempt to dishonor it by placing flowers at its eternal flame was the “desecration of a holy place.”

“They broke through” the barriers, “and of course they got thrashed.”

He said he refused permission for the parade in deference to public opinion and religious opposition.


My vacation dilemma may have been resolved. Earlier this week my dearest friend and former Seattle housemate, Marco Cassone, a singer with the touring a capella group M-Pact, wrote and suggested that he and another friend and former housemate come to Moscow in August to visit.

Then he amended that to suggest the three of us (actually four, including Marco’s boyfriend Ken) meet somewhere in Eastern Europe. Then I had another e-mail today proposing Dubrovnik as our destination. Actually, that’s one of the places I had in mind (but couldn’t remember the name), so I’m very excited. We’ll rendezvous in mid-August.

We’ll also look into renting a small boat with berths for four for (legitimate) cruising and bedding down instead of a hotel. It all sounds very exciting.


This day years ago:
2005-6-3: Chapt. #133 - Khodorkovsky: “Beginning of the end? A lot more cuckoos