MOSCOW , July 23, 2006 -- It was an expensive little show that Putin put on for the world, but neither he nor the planet seems to have much to show for the St. Peterburg G8 spectacle.
Putin didn’t get his WTO membership, and Iran left egg all over his face by backing out of its promise to negotiate the nuclear issue. On the other hand, he got to – in the words of press observers – “swagger” in his new role as energy kingpin who doesn’t have to accept any more demeaning handouts or self-righteous lectures from the likes of the Bushwhacker and his neocon handlers.
In fact, his crack about not wanting Bush’s brand of Iraqi democracy was one of the highlights of the weekend.
Nor did the US or Europeans get any concessions from Bush’s ex-soul mate on Iran sanctions or freer access to gas pipelines; and Bush’s two huge blunders – offering his simplistic solution to the Israeli slaughter of Lebanese civilians into an open mike and giving German Pres. Angela Merkel an unwanted backrub – helped solidify his international standing as a dimwitted Texas clod.
Not only did the Russian hosts shell out 400 million bucksi for the bash – twice as much as Tony (“Bush’s British poodle,” as his subjects now call him) did last year at Gleneagles, but local business lost an astronomical sum from the four-day closure of the city’s airport and shipping facilities.
Trains and buses into the city were also cancelled and even city buses were halted. People trying to get to the city before the trains stopped running were stopped, questioned, and many who were suspected of planning to take part in protests were taken off the trains, arrested, and held till the summit was over.
Carting half the sidewalk kiosks away because they were too ugly for European leaders to look at took a lot more money out of the pockets of those who couldn’t afford it, and shoppers deserted the downtown area.
Two positive effects: The snarling St. Peterburg police bandits smiled – they were ordered to; and there were no hate killings, prompting critics to observe that it merely showed that the city could end racist attacks if it wanted to.
The iron fist of authoritarian rule reminded old-timers of the 1980 Moscow Olympics under Brezhnev, when KGB agents saturated the streets and undesirables of all kinds – including feminist firebrand Tatyana Mamonovna (Chapt. 191, 200) -- were shipped out of the city for security and beautification.
But while the Western ruling elite were biting their tongues to keep from scolding Putin for curtailing the human rights of Russian citizens, it never dawned on any of them to protest the draconian clamp-down on those self-same human rights that was taking place outside their windows at that very moment in their own name -- to preserve for them the sterile, surreal atmosphere of life on another planet which, as detached and disconnected rulers, they have grown accustomed to.
Human rights, after all, is one thing, but slowing down their limousine on the way to a jet-set party is another. Crack heads if necessary.
Because they themselves will crack heads with the same relish when it comes their turn to host the G8 or WTO or some other dog-and-pony showcase of democracy in their own country.
Angela will get her chance when Germany hosts the G8 next year.
Last New Year’s vicious Army recruit hazing in which a gang of drunken young sergeants beat 19-year-old Andrey Sychyov so relentlessly and so mercilessly that he had to have his legs and genitals amputated (Chapt. 185), has come to trial.
But don’t look for justice in this blatantly manipulated case, although the whole country knows what happened and the beating was witnessed by several fellow soldiers.
You see, Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov, whose first reaction was to dismiss the battering as “nothing serious,” is one of the two Russian glitterati being touted by Putin as a possible successor in 2008.
It would not be good publicity for the Emperor-in-Waiting if a court confirmed that this kind of battering is not only passively tolerated in the Russian Army which he commands, but is actively encouraged as the traditional and time-honored formula for keeping order in the barracks.
Second-year soldier Alexander Sivyakov has been charged with actually administering the beating.
The Moscow Times reported that a mysterious unidentified Russian general in civilian clothes recently interviewed and threatened key witnesses in the case, ordering them to change their testimony against Sivyakov or else.
Five witnesses so far have done just that.
Last week key witness Andrei Shevchenko became the fifth when he told the court that he had lied in his written testimony. He said that prosecutors had beaten him and threatened him with jail time, and forced him to sign a prepared statement. He could not remember the names of the prosecutors who beat him.
Star witness Artyom Nikitin, who was on duty as an orderly and witnessed the beating first hand, did not show up at last Friday’s court session, sending a telegram instead stating that he had had to go home for family reasons. He had already recanted his earlier testimony.
On Thursday, a civilian emergency room physician who had treated Sychyov upon his arrival from a military hospital testified that he had found anal fissures and tears, a possible indication of rape, although the physician refused to speculate. In any case, he said the fissures and tears had gone unnoticed by the military physicians who had treated him.
It’s not too hard to imagine the scene linking the torn asshole with the beatings. Rape in prisons and the army is one of the most brutal and effective ways of asserting personal power. And from his picture, Sychyov was also sensitive and docile – as well as cute – and might well have posed an irresistible target for the caveman mentality of his army tormenters.
Earlier, the chief surgeon at the Chelyabinsk military hospital which had treated Sychyov testified that he found no evidence that the victim had even been beaten.
The carefully scripted scenario turning the vicious maiming into a non-event is on course. No military voice has testified against him, and now the army maintains the beating never even occurred.
Sychov’s problem, they maintain, is simply that he has a chronic blood disease which caused blood clots in his legs that in turn led to gangrene and forced the amputation of his legs and genitals.
This national shame will not stain the future Glorious Leader’s equally glorious record.
I’ve nailed down my flight to Dubrovnik in Croatia, which used to be part of Yugoslavia. Well, it’s not exactly to Dubrovnik, it’s to the resort town of Tivat in the newly-minted country of Montegnegro – which also used to be part of Yugoslavia -- on the Adriatic Sea three hours by train from Dubrovnik.
Except there’s no train.
But they do have buses. I will arrive on a charter tourist flight on the 12th of August, and my American friends – Marco, Scott, and Ken – will arrive in Dubrovnik on the 14th. So I have two days to wend my way there one way or another.
Rooms in Tivat are ridiculously cheap. I’ve found them on the Internet for as little as 5 Euros a night, and I’ve rented one from Adrian Nikolic for 15 Euros a night. I think it will be a fun adventure, even though my friend Max in Nizhniy Nogorod was there and said there’s no gay action. But then who knows what Adrian may turn out to be 
Cost of a ticket on Austrian Airlines would have been about $ 1200, and on Czech Airlines, $ 800-something. The really nice part about my flight, which I got through a tourist agent friend of Yegor’s, is that it only cost about $ 500. So I can afford a couple of days, to say the least, in Tivat.
I haven’t yet figured out why Dubrovnik is such an expensive destination. I flew to Budapest and back for $ 200, and to Prague for $ 400. But my students tell me Dubrovnik has always been an expensive holiday destination. Maybe I’ll understand why when I see it.
My landlady Natasha has solved the problem of how to get rid of my flat-mates. I called her Wednesday to tell her that the kid downstairs had informed me that his grandmother was suing.
She was aware of this, she said, adding “you have to get those hooligans out of the apartment. You rented it for yourself and you have to live there by yourself.”
Well, that’s not exactly true. I rented it for me and Misha, and she was fully aware of that. But after Misha, as the chronicles of the Red Queen will attest, there have been Anton and Yegor and Shurik and Andrei and Sergei and Zhorik and Igor – with Yuri, of course perennially hanging in any corner where he could find an empty space.
But who’s quibbling? It gives me the excuse I needed for evicting Igor and Yegor and Yuri.
But that would leave me alone to cope with the day-to-day exigencies of Russian life.
It occurred to me to ask Vanya from Nizhniy Novgorod to move in with me. I think I could convince the landlady to agree. He just graduated from the university; he’s been working in a bank for two years; he’s responsible, mature, intelligent, sophisticated, and is a charmer.
His one problem in the past has been inability to control his booze (Chapt. 47). He’s also a bit self-centered.
So I suggested it to him in an e-mail. He is going on vacation on Aug. 10, at which time he will submit his resignation to the bank. Then he has two weeks to decide whether to try to find another job in NN or move to Moscow. He would prefer to move to Moscow.
But he stressed we will no longer be lovers. That’s okay, because I lost my lust for his gorgeous piska a long time ago. We will have our individual love lives.
But what he’s afraid of, he said, is that I will go bonkers over another “loser” and invite him to move in as I have all the rest, and soon we’ll be back where we started from.
“That's a reasonable concern,” I agreed, but added that I’ve learned something in the last eight years. I also respect his judgment and will seek his opinion of any potential new boyfriends.
“I may not agree with you,” I said, “but in any case I will not invite them to live here. Nor can your boyfriend live with us. If I find somebody I want to live with, I will rent another apartment and he and I will live alone.”
As for the booze problem, “I think you can draw your own conclusions,” he said. “If I drank a lot, I would have long ago been fired from the bank. Yes, I drink a little beer on my free days….”
That doesn’t bother me, I assured him. In any case, if his drinking gets out of hand, I will simply ask him to leave, too.
One thing we didn’t resolve – but will before he makes the move: As soon as he gets a job, I want him to pay $ 100 a month toward his room and board here. And that’s absurdly cheap. After that, we’ll negotiate. No more free hotels – even for him. He needs to carry his own weight.
Igor is planning to go to St. Pete on the 14th of August to visit his brother for a week. He will stop here on his way back to say goodbye to me and then head on to his parents’ home in Svetlograd. I think I will tell Yegor and Yuri they can stay here until I return from vacation. They’re dependable, and I’d rather have the apartment occupied.
It’s too bad Igor didn’t work out. I still adore him and when I look at his smooth, little-boy inner thighs as he’s changing pants, I still ache to caress and lick them, like smooth sweet lollipops. But he’s just too immature and too macho. Though he liked – still likes – me, that sadly just isn’t enough.
Bad international publicity from his Neanderthal handling of the gay pride parade (Chapt. 202), plus the city’s failed bid for the 2012 Olympics last year, plus the recent spiral in the cost of living (Chapt. 207), have prompted Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov to wonder if maybe the city has a PR problem
He and the city duma figure that more parties for diplomats and foreign journalists will resolve the problem, according to the Moscow Times.
Luzhkov ruminated over the options “in a rambling, sometimes incoherent speech” before the city duma, according to the Times. For instance, he posited that “image is not only a substance of consciousness, but also that of being”; and pondered “the development of the basic principles for the positioning of the city of Moscow in the modern world.”
It might promp one to wonder if maybe Hizzoner the Lord Mayor was just a wee tad drunk on his ass.
But of course that’s pure conjecture. I haven’t heard that he suffers from the Yeltsin syndrome.
Some of his more lucid suggestions, according to the Times, included building more affordable hotels, hosting international science and sports events, and for the first time forking up money for a tourism advertising campaign -- a la NYC. Maybe call it The Big Potato.
He might also consider a little less hostility towards the gay community.
Somebody should let him in on the secret that the American travel business discovered two or three decades ago: Gays have lots of disposable income and love to travel, but not to where homophobia puts their lives in danger.
Jokes about Russia’s great leaders were a staple during the Soviet years and persisted up through Yeltsin’s drunken reign. But jokes about Putin are almost non-existent.
For this observation, I am indebted to former Moscow Times editor Lynn Berry, whose op-ed piece on the topic appeared this week on the pages of her alma mater.
Brezhnev’s rather dull wit, further honed by advancing senility, was an easy target. A typical Brezhnev joke goes like this, Berry recalls:
Brezhnev begins his speech at the opening of the 1980 summer games:
“O! O! O!”
An aide interrupts him with a whisper, “The speech starts below, Leonid Ilyich. That’s the Olympic symbol.”
One problem with trying to make jokes about Putin is that he has no obvious vulnerabilities, like Yeltsin’s slurred speech or Brezhnev’s short attention span. “He’s always in control, always on cue. He dresses well, speaks well, and drinks in moderation,” notes Berry.
In the few jokes about him that do make the rounds, he is never the butt of the joke, as in this one:
Putin goes to a restaurant with the leaders of the Duma and the Federation Council. The waiter asks him what he’d like to order.
“I’ll have the meat.”
“And what about the vegetables?”
“They’ll have the meat, too.”
Jokes deriding him would be considered in bad taste at best and offensive at worst, we’re told. One newspaper columnist compared his place in the Russian ether to that of god, “and you don’t make jokes about god.”
But there’s one other reason, perhaps the most compelling of all: It might be construed as slander, and a bill now making its way through the Duma would make slandering the president a crime:
“Political candidates and their parties could be barred from elections. Journalists could be jailed and their news organizations shut down. Even without this law, the editor of an Internet newspaper was called in for questioning and had his site closed down in May after satirizing Putin’s plan to encourage families to have more children.”
The U.S. hasn’t quite sunk to this point, but we’re just one step away. If you oppose Bush’s Mid-East slaughter, you’re branded as disloyal, un-American, and a traitor. This has so far worked to the same end: It’s effectively kept opponents from being elected and dissenting voices from being heard.
The neocons are already putting it to work for the November elections. I’ve learned something in the last eight years; we’ll see if the American electorate has.
This day years ago:
2005-7-23: Chapt. #149 - Ugh-oh! “Nuclear terror” exercise looms for U.S.
