MOSCOW, Nov. 7, 2003 -- How do you glorify the Day of Revolution in a country where the system created by that revolution was such a destructive and embarrassing failure that it collapsed 70 years later?
First you change the name to the Day of Accord and Reconciliation.
And unless you’re a bleary-eyed, doddering communist relic who gathers in Red Square to wave the hammer-and-sickle and rehash the glories of the worker’s paradise that never was, you sleep late, go shopping and stroll in the park.
Gone from Red Square on this once greatest of public holidays are the mighty war machines that used to gather there under the stern gaze of the Politburo arrayed like chessmen atop the Lenin Mausoleum. There is still a parade, however, and today 130 veterans of World War II marched alongside 800 cadets to commemorate what must have been the greatest disaster of the 20th century.
Yes, they’re still preserving what they claim to be Lenin’s carcass in the sepulchre beside the Kremlin. There has been an ongoing debate about whether to finally bury him for good among the ashes of the order he brought into being or to continue the charade of exhibiting him as the everlasting Jesus Christ of Communism. There are still enough true believers to keep them from deep-sixing him. In fact, he’s now undergoing his periodic overhaul at the state biochemical research center, where they have pronounced the ghoulish bag of bones good for at least another hundred years.
Out of curiosity, I got in line and viewed the thing on my first visit to Moscow 10 years ago. As the queue wound through the mausoleum, cameras were forbidden and no one was allowed to speak. The guards looked like they might shoot you if you even smiled -- and certainly, if you laughed out loud, which I desperately wanted to do.
One of my students recalled the day he was inducted into the communist Young Pioneers. In honor of the occasion, they were permitted to go through the mausoleum to pay their respects to their god. There was a raised walkway on one side of the glass crypt so the children could get a better view. My student was laughing as he recalled the sacred moment.
The Day of Accord and Reconciliation began rather discordantly for me when Alyosha, Hong Kong Harry’s boyfriend from St. Peterburg, rang the house phone at 6:30. He had ridden all night on the train so he could spend the next night in my apartment and get up at 5:30 to catch his 8 a.m. flight from Moscow to Hong Kong for a month with Harry, his American “boyfriend,” a 56-year-old teacher of Russian History at the University of Hong Kong.
Mike is as captivated by the beautiful all-American Russian boys as I am and returns as often as possible to explore them under the guise of doing historical research. And Alyosha, the blond 20-year-old that he’s been focusing his attention on for the last three years, easily falls into the beautiful all-American Russian boy category.
Alyosha hadn’t slept and was desperately tired, but we had no bed to stash him in. Even the pallet on the floor was occupied – by Sasha, so Alyosha and I remained chatting in the kitchen where Yegor, the next to stir, joined us about 11. Then came Boris about noon for his weekly chat and free lesson.
Boris still doesn’t acknowledge even to himself that he’s gay, so we constantly play the cat-and-mouse game of touching, stroking, and sometimes petting, and then pretending it didn’t happen.
And while I was helping Boris with his homework, Volodya, my beautiful 19-year-old Turkish “souvenir” from four years ago, called and offered to celebrate the day of Accord and Reconciliation by coming and fixing dinner and again spending time with me, Sasha, and Shurik.
The “Seryozh” who had first captivated me at Misha’s going away party had called the night before to tell me he hadn’t been in touch because he was in the hospital, so I had promised I would go see him on Revolution Day.
So when Boris left, I headed out to find City Hospital No. 4 near Paveletskaya Metro Station. I found it remarkably easily, and by 3:00 had made it all the way to “Korpus No. 1,” where Seryozh lay with some as yet undisclosed affliction (“I had an operation, but I’m okay now,” he had said cryptically), where the guard informed me that visiting hours were over.
“But he told me I could visit him any time,” I objected.
No, visiting hours are only 11 to 1 and 4:30 to 7.
Seryozh called again after I had returned to my apartment. So I told him what had happened and promised to go visit him on Sunday.
About the time that Volodya arrived that evening, Anton and Yegor announced they were leaving to spend the evening at one of Anton’s friends, and Sasha announced he would have to leave soon.
By this time Yura had wafted in like a left-over Halloween spectre. “Who is that strange man?” Volodya asked.
So I explained our unique and vexing charity case – how he has no place to live and comes here every day to have a shower and cook some food and watch TV and jerk off to porn movies and then get booted out at bedtime -- and watched Volodya prepare a not particularly appetizing supper of bologna, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepper, and cheese -- all chopped and fried.
Aside from the fact that it was filling, its main distinction was that it had been lovingly prepared by Volodya’s own deft fingers. And let’s face it: I wouldn’t have cared if he’d have scrambled bat shit with dragon’s eggs. I still would have relished every morsel!
After supper, Volodya announced that he had only an hour before he had to go home, so “Let’s play some cribbage.”
As we played, we talked about Revolution Day, and while I was counting my first double run of the evening, Volodya observed that “I don’t think most Russians even know what it means. But Russians aren’t very industrious people and we grab at any chance to have a holiday. I think this is just another holiday.”
The doorbell rang. Shurik, eight hours late. “I love you!” he proclaimed as I met him at the door. I shushed him and gestured that we had a guest. While V. and I played cribbage Shurik chatted with him and ate the half of my bat shit and dragon’s eggs that I had been too full to eat. At some point I became aware that Shurik was talking about a girl.
“Isn’t Dane jealous?” asked Volodya!
I did a silent double take.
“Are you jealous?” Shurik echoed to me.
“No. You’re still here,” I smiled.
But it seemed rather apparent that Volodya knew more about Mine and Shurik’s relationship than I had supposed!
When Volodya left, Shurik exited with him to buy a pack of cigarettes.
It was a long time before Shurik returned, and I was sure that the cops had stopped him for a docunment check and had asked him where he was registered, and that Shurik hadn’t yet memorized his ersatz address from the phony registration he had bought just that day for 700 rubles – about . I could see him just entering the holding cell when I heard the electronic twitch of his key in the downstairs entrance.
“What happened? Where have you been?”
“We were chatting. He knows all about us. It’s cool, but he just doesn’t understand how two men could have sex with each other, but he likes us both a lot.”
I set my alarm for 5:30, which is when Alyosha would have to get up, and crawled into bed to await Shurik’s beautiful hairless, alabaster body. After our by-now ritual session of sex, I quickly went to sleep. He continued watching TV.
When my 5:30 alarm went off Shurik was still watching TV!
At 9 a.m. I again struggled out of bed to get ready for my class with Valera at 10. But the kitchen light was burned out -- too dark for a lesson there in this early November gloom. Fortunately, since “the twins” had spent the night with Anton’s friend, the beds were still made in our bedroom, and the table on which Anton’s computer sits was perfect for a lesson.
At the end of the hour, I asked Valera how he had spent the Day of Revolution.
“I slept late and rode my bicycle in the park.”
Shurik had asked me the night before which Russian political party I sympathized with. I don’t know much about the parties, but Yabloko, “Apple,” seemed like the most democratic one and the only one that voices sensible opposition to Putin. Besides, it’s the party that Khodorkovsky helped fund.
“Yabloko,” I had responded.
“So you’re a communist?”
“No, I’m not communist. Yabloko isn’t a communist party.”
“Yes it is.”
“I don’t think so.”
So I asked Valera about the Yabloko party. “No, it’s not communist.” As I had surmised, it’s the only party that expresses real democratic ideals.
Then why don’t Russians flock to this party instead of overwhelmingly supporting Putin’s authoritarian United Russia party?
Valera’s answer explains a lot about the Russian mindset and Russian politics. They’ve had centuries of central government with a vertical power structure, another word for an authoritarian dictatorship. The Russians are comfortable with it. It’s as Russian as apple pirogi. Putin himself once wise-cracked that “it’s in our DNA.”
It was during Yeltsin’s “Democratic” reign that the scandalous privatization program was carried out in which the rights to Russia’s natural resources were sold to various oligarchs for kopeks. What became Khodorkovsky’s billion Yukos empire, for example, was purchased for 0 million.
Yeltsin’s agenda also included decentralizing the government to the extent of giving regional and local governments more authority and self-determination. Unfortunately, one of the historically perceived advantages of the central government has been that it was a more removed – hence more objective and fair -- arbiter than local warring chieftans.
Yeltsin’s flirtation with decentralization took the lid off this traditional can of worms and created new power struggles, turf battles and gang warfare at the regional and local level.
The demoted status of the police and the KGB and its successor FSB set up conditions for unprecented Russian mafia control of many social structures, including to a large extent, business and government itself, replete with a virtual epidemic of contract hits.
Since this whole debacle was carried out under the banner of “democracy”, the very word now carries with it a distasteful odor bordering on a stench.
The Russians don’t yearn for democracy, as we clucked to ourselves during the Cold War. They simply yearn for a chance to get rich in a stable, orderly, predictable society – say, maybe Pinochet capitalism.
As the CEO of Moscow-based Hermitage Capital observed in an interview with the Financial Times, they figure that “a well-governed authoritarian regime is better than the oligarchic mafia regime.”
Thus Putin’s announced intention to re-create the vertical power structure – i.e., central authoritarian rule – was greeted, not with the outrage and protest it would have met in the West, but with actual widespread relief. The “Little Father,” the Czar, was again on his throne and would end the local chaos and bring law, order, and justice.
So the vast majority of the 150 million Russians don’t really want democracy. Democracy for them means chaos. They want the dictatorship they have always had – preferably benign, but if not, still a dictatorship. So they are not dismayed, as I am, by the current authoritarian trend. They see it as a guarantor of stabilization and order. And yes, there will be unfairness and miscarriages of justice, but that’s simply an historic given in Russian life.
And what, after all, did Yeltin’s “democracy” do for Russia?
The real democrats, like the Yabloko party, and the business elite like Khodorkovsky remain – and probably always will – a significant minority. Real democracy, if it should ever actually arrive, will be a very late comer.
Perhaps the most we can hope for in the meantime is accord and reconciliation and a walk in the park.
Chapt. 23 - 2027 words
Columns :: Celebrate the Revolution: Take a Stroll
MOSCOW, Nov. 7, 2003 -- Comments: Ratings: 
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