MOSCOW, June 12, 2006 -- I think my soaring Igor fantasy has just crashed and burned! Last Sunday we repeated our phone shopping excursion of the week before (Chapt. 203) and I loaned him the money for a Sony Ericsson with even more bells and whistles. Another 100 bucksi.
That night he said he’d like to sleep in what had been Alan’s room, where Yuri was also sleeping, so he could listen to music on his phone and not disturb me.
“Please sleep with me, honey,” I countered. “I like sleeping with my arm around you.”
I went to bed at my usual 11:30 - !200. When I woke up around 2:30, no Igor. I looked in the other bedroom. No Igor. I looked in the bathroom. Igor. Passed out on the floor with what was left of a 2-liter bottle of beer spilled on the floor in front of him.
I tried to wake him. He was like a dishrag. I managed to lift his comatose body up and carry him fireman-style to the bed. Pulled his pants off and played with his dick. Turned the light out and went to bed. Put my hand on his dick. Oops! Shorts were wet. Uh-oh. Repeat of last year’s bed-wetting episode (Chapt. 108). Pattern: Get passed-out drunk, go to bed, wet the bed. Pass and piss, I suppose you could call it.
I found another pair of shorts and managed to get the old pair off and the new pair on. Turned off the light and went to sleep beside him with my arm around his near-naked body.
He was still comatose when the alarm went off. But his dick was at least in a semi state. I managed to whack off a quick orgasm and then set about to wake him up. I finally succeeded. “You wet the bed, honey.” He stumbled to the bathroom and kitchen, fixed a quick lunch, drank some instant coffee, and headed out.
“Honey, I think you drank too much last night.”
“You think so, huh?” he replied defensively.
Nevertheless, we hugged and kissed when he left.
The next night he woke up with my hand on his erect dick. He grunted and turned onto his stomach. He’s been rather short and sarcastic since, but has continued to hug and kiss me hello and goodbye.
Friday night we bought some more Jaguar and Street cocktails, and he proceeded to get drunk as he chatted or whatever on the Internet while I watched TV in my – our – room.
“Would you come get Igor,” Yegor said, appearing in the doorway. “He’s passed out on my bed.”
But when I tried to wake him, then lift him to his feet, he refused. “Wait a few minutes,” I told Yegor, figuring that in a few more minutes his coma would have set in deep enough that he wouldn’t wake up when we tried to move him.
I was partly right. Yegor and I managed to get him into the bedroom, but he balked like a mule at being put into my bed. We deposited him in the arm chair and I went to bed.
So I concluded that he had finally figured out that my intentions were less than honorable, and was venting his anger and resentment. When I went into the bedroom about 10 a.m. after my first student had left, he was awake and watching TV.
“Are you angry at me?” I asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t want to come to bed last night.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I had a very bad day at work yesterday. I worked very hard.” He didn’t withdraw when I kissed him; so I thought maybe we remained a potential item after all.
He reminded me that Zhorik goes into the army on June 13 – next Tuesday – “and we will have to call him.”
I don’t want to spend the money, and I certainly don’t want to talk to him. Is this the time to tell Igor what Zhorik has done? Probably not.
The scene was worse Saturday night. We had remained chummy and affectionate throughout the day. After we did a shop in the late afternoon, Slava came to re-install the scanner, which never got installed after dim-wit Dima re-installed Windows the last time (Chapt. 196).
Igor was in a euphoric mood. He had awakened me from an afternoon nap about 4:00 and had sat beside me on the bed. Our heads touched and our cheeks caressed each other as he showed me some new games he had managed to put onto his mobile phone.
“This has been a wonderful day,” he enthused. “My mood is super.” After Slava, Yegor, and Yuri left about 10, we chatted and drank and continued to play touchy-feely with each other. “You’re my god,” he had said, when conversation turned to the new mobile phone for which I had lent him the money last week (Chapt. 203).
“Please sleep with me when you finish with the computer,” I implored when I went to bed about midnight.
But when I woke up at 3:30, he was not in the bed. I could hear the TV in the next room, but he wasn’t in either bed there. When I didn’t find him in the bathroom, either, I returned to the other bedroom to find him again passed out on the floor. His pants were wet – from piss or beer?
I shook him; he stirred and pulled his arms tight to his body when I tried to lift him off the floor. “Fuck off, Dane,” he said.
“Igor why don’t you want to go to bed with me?”
“I just don’t want to.”
“We’ll have a talk in the morning.”
When I woke up about 9, I went to the computer. The inert body was no longer on the floor but had found its way to the bathtub. When I heard him unlock the door, I went in to take a pee.
“Good morning,” he said cheerfully, as if the 3:30 episode had never occurred.
I returned to the computer and resumed writing this column.
We scarcely spoke. He played most of the day on his mobile phone.
He broke the silence to show me a metro map of Moscow which he had succeeded in installing on his phone.
“I have a question,” I said, sitting down beside him. “Why would you rather sleep on the cold floor than sleep with me?”
“No, no,” he replied laughingly. “I just got very drunk and passed out on the floor.”
“You told me to fuck off when I tried to wake you up.”
“I was drunk,” he laughed. “I don’t remember anything. Everything’s okay.”
“Then you still love me?”
“Of course.”
I put my arms around his shirtless torso and hugged and kissed him.
“I’m glad.”
Monday night, the last night of our three day holiday to celebrate Russia Day (it used to be Independence Day, but when they couldn’t decide who they had become independent from besides themselves, they renamed it Day of Russia), after remaining nearly incommunicado the whole day, he was sitting at the computer while I watched Sheriff John Wayne kill all the bad guys and get the only beautiful girl in the film.
When I decided I’d had enough of the celluloid hero, I kissed Igor goodnight.
“Are you going to sleep with me?”
“Yes.”
Sure enough, at some point he came to bed. I put my arms around him. Later, when I tried to pull his shirt out of his pants to caress his naked stomach, he pulled away and rolled onto his stomach. This morning he’s civil, but certainly not affectionate.
I think my fantasy has run its course. What to do next?
The answer may be in the phone call I got from Vanya in Nizhniy Nogorod this morning. He’s graduated from the university there, and plans to move to Moscow after he gets his diploma. But it won’t be for another month because the university has run out of the graduation certification forms! Only in Russia.
“There’s room for you to stay here if you want,” I told him.
But I’m also moving steadily in another direction: I’m using the internet to try to make connections. I’ve had responses from half a dozen 20- to 22-year olds. The most promising seems to be “Romantik,” a pseudonym I’m sure, who lives at home with his parents and is entering the second year of university in September in his pursuit of becoming a translator.
He hasn’t sent me a photo yet, but he sounds very nice and very intelligent. Time will tell.
And there’s also 19-year-old Lestat (also a made-up name I’m sure), who has asked me to call him Tuesday morning.
In any case, I’m not going to mope around waiting for Igor to come around. I don’t think he’s going to.
Got some more kitty litter dumped in my sandbox. I wrote my nephew Dennis in Florida and mentioned my strange – and short-lived – weakness of a couple of weeks ago (Chapt. 202).
“In all likelihood you had a TIA, which is a ‘mini-stroke’ which has no lasting damage. It is a warning sign that should not be ignored….You need to immediately take action to forestall a full blown stroke which could kill you, or perhaps worse, leave you crippled or with diminished mental capacity.”
Uh-oh.
To underscore the point, he sent me an article on TIAs, which said that, while most strokes are not preceded by TIAs, “of the people who've had one or more TIAs, more than a third will later have a stroke.” TIAs “can occur days, weeks or even months before a major stroke. In about half the cases, the stroke occurs within one year of the TIA.”
Symptoms are “sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body..., sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination….”
Yeah, that’s almost certainly what it was. The main thing is to “GET MEDICAL HELP IMMEDIATELY….Prompt medical or surgical attention to these symptoms could prevent a fatal or disabling stroke from occurring.”
Okay, okay, you talked me into it. Since Monday is a holiday, I’ll go to the clinic on Tuesday.
A Potemkin U. coed was murdered last week in a bizarre, unlikely plot. According to news reports, the second-year university student backed out of a fake kidnapping plot in which her money-strapped boyfriend would pretend to kidnap her and demand from her wealthy father $ 20,000 ransom.
When she had second thoughts and refused to go along with the scam, her boyfriend allegedly killed her and buried her in an outlying Moscow park.
Police arrested him in the middle of the reception after his best friend’s wedding, in which he had played the role of best man.
The murdered girl was not identified in newspapers, and it was not until I had checked the role for the final test in my course on Thursday night that I knew whether or not she had been one of my students. Negative: All my female students were present.
The president of the World Assn. of Newspapers (WAN), which met in Moscow this week, pulled no punches in denouncing Russian press freedoms.
With Putin sitting a few feet away, WAN Pres. Gavin O’Reilly said there is “…very widespread skepticism, both inside and outside your country, whether there exists any real willingness to see the media become a financially strong, influential, and independent participant in Russian society today. And sadly, no one can pretend this is the case today, certainly not for newspapers.”
O’Reilly said there had been dissent -- “and still is” -- within WAN about holding the conference in Moscow because many feared the Kremlin would use it as an endorsement of the status of Russia’s press.
It turned out to be no idle concern. In fact, the day before O’Reilly’s speech, Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov declared that Moscow’s hosting of the professional newspaper group reflected “recognition by the world’s professional newspaper community of the democratic gains of recent decades in which the Russian press has played an active part.”
In classic Russian-speak harking back to Soviet times, the truth was diametrically the opposite.
Also in classic Soviet fashion, O’Reilly’s and other’s criticisms of Putin and Russia’s press never appeared on TV. Instead, coverage focused on Putin’s largely irrelevant speech (“there are 53,000 newspapers in Russia….”) and Gryzlov’s twisted analysis.
Putin’s speech virtually ignored the criticism except to scoff at the idea that the government controlled the Russian press. There are too many newspapers in Russia for the government to control, “even if it wanted to.”
In fact, as critics have pointed out, only a handful of newspapers are influential enough and well enough read for the Kremlin to bother with – and it has certainly bothered with them, beginning with the 2001 Gazprom takeover of “Sevodnya,” a hard-hitting, critical newspaper which Kremlin-run Gazprom quickly shut down after firing the editorial staff.
Since then there has been a long string of take-overs by the Kremlin’s pals, culminating last year in the take-over of Izvestia – again by Gazprom. Izvestia, formerly a respected, balanced newspaper by Western standards, was quickly turned into an inconsequential tabloid.
And the demise of one of the last of the still-independent newspapers came to light the very day of O’Reilly’s speech, when it was revealed that Kommersant, the formerly anti-Kremlin newspaper once owned by self-exiled Putin opponent Boris Berezovsky, is being taken over by a group controlled by the Kremlin’s pet oligarch, Roman Abramovich.
The move would be a “tragedy” for what’s left of Russia’s free press, Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, told the Moscow Times.
“After the print media, only the internet will be free,” he said. “But I’m afraid that in two years, they will manage to control that as well.”
Echoing the official Kremlin double-speak, news coverage in Russia is shrinking – not because of government control or fear of censorship, insisted state TV broadcaster Nikolai Svanidze, but because Russians simply don’t want to be distracted by too many different viewpoints in their news.
They in fact prefer the soothing, reassuring approach of Soviet times, contended Svanidze.
“Our guests from the United States and European countries may not understand what I’m talking about,” he told a panel of journalists, but the classic Soviet viewer is not used to alternatives.
“It’s tiring to have a choice, because you have to think.”
His pronouncements were greeted with derisive laughter.
Judging from what I am seeing among the students of School #69 and of Potemkin U., the days when the Kremlin can even pretend to think this is true are numbered. Let’s hope so.
Just as the darkness descends most deeply on what’s left of the Russian free press, a ray of hope emerges: Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who presided over Glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet empire, has announced that he and millionare Alexander Lebedev are buying a 49% stake in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Novaya Gazeta has been a hard-hitting, critical observer, and its reporters have repeateded earned the ire of the Kremlin for its critical coverage of Chechnya and other contentious issues. Gorbachev bought the paper’s first computers with part of the $ 750,000 he received with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
Though some say that his commitment to a free press and his international stature will keep Novaya Gazeta from the fate of the rest of the free press boneyard, others are not so sure.
Lebedev, they point out, is a member of the Kremlin’s United Russia party that controls the lap dog duma; and while he has often opposed and criticized the duma and the Kremlin, he has generally not been an independent voice, and may change the newspaper’s editorial policy to reflect the United Russia party line, which is whatever the Kremlin commands.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Novaya Gazeta contributor, former NTV anchor, and current host of an independent TV talk show, was pessimistic: While he acknowledged that Gorbachev will be a shield from Kremlin pressures, he won’t be a very effective one, Kara-Murza predicted.
He noted that Gorbachev was also part of a public council created to prevent the state’s takeover of NTV in 2000, “but it didn’t save us, and it won’t save Novaya Gazeta if it comes under pressure.”
And Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, predicted Novaya Gazeta would end its critical coverage of Chechnya and other Kremlin-sensitive issues because Lebedev would not want to be associated with criticism of the Kremlin.
But there is room for optimism. Lebedev himself told Forbes magazine that "The most important task of any newspaper is to look objectively at the bureaucracy. For many years, Novaya Gazeta has had a reputation as objective and nonconformist, and that's what we want to strengthen."
He is also on record as insisting that "I have the right to criticize the Kremlin for the things they have done to this society: no civil society, no parties, no proper elections, no free mass media, and there's no Parliament as far as exercising the proper controls over this bureaucracy."
And Lebedev told the Washington Post that he plans to increase the frequency of the independent newspaper from a twice-weekly to daily.
So hope for a strong independent voice among Russia’s press remains. But whether it continues as a penetrating ray or turns out to be the last pulses of a flickering flashlight with dying batteries remains to be seen.
But in the end, does it make any difference to the government and policies of Russia? No, says Masha Lipman, editor of Carnegie Moscow Center’s Pro et Contro journal.
The print media is for the most part irrelevant. As in Soviet times, TV remains the only news source for the overwhelming majority of the Russian population. To be meaningful, Lipman says, a free press must be part of an entire network of free institutions, and there are none in Russia.
So the continued existence of a voice of truth – a la Novaya Gazeta -- is meaningless except to a tiny fraction of independent-minded but powerless Russians and to ex-pat and Western seekers of the truth like me, who don’t vote anyway.
Sadly, it won’t influence Putin’s decisions, the future course of the Russian state, or the ultimate destiny of its people.
