MOSCOW, February 20, 2007 -- Will you be able to come visit me next New Year’s?
It was an SMS from Zhorik in Novosibirsk. Barely a month has passed since we huddled together against the Siberian winter in the seedy Novosibirksk hotel, and he’s already thinking about my return visit next New Year’s!
“Do you really want me to come spend next New Year’s with you?” I wrote.
“Yes, I really want you to.”
“Super,” I replied. “Of course I will. I am very happy that you want me to. My mood has just improved 100%.”
“When I’m on leave in March, we’ll talk about it.”
“Great. How’s your mood?” I wrote back.
“Good, except that I can’t wait for March to come “
He ended the exchange with, “I love you and miss you very much.” This is a pro forma sign-off for close friends and family. But it really sounds like he means it!
Even so, I’m still a little curious about why he’s already longing for my return engagement. Was it the bathtub sex? Was it eating lunch meat, drinking beer, and watching TV in a third-rate hotel room? Or dare I hope that he really loves me as much as he says?
Maybe I’ll find out when he comes to visit next month.
In the meantime, I got a little more positive feedback from him today when, in response to his SMS asking what I was doing, I replied “working on my memoirs.”
I was actually working on this column, but where do memoirs leave off and Red Queen begin, after all?
“You probably write about me, right?”
“Yes, of course. You’re an important part of my life, honey. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No.”
Soldiers have long been selling their bodies for gay sex to make extra money to supplement their meager salary. I rented a couple myself in my first year or two here.
Zhorik told me during one of our bathtub chats last year that soldiers don’t receive any money while they’re serving, that they receive their monthly salary only when they are discharged. But he told me yesterday that they do get their monthly salary after all -- $ 10 a month whether they need it or not.
$ 10 a month is the total salary of a soldier in the Russian army?!!!! Even I have trouble believing that. “Yes, that’s the Russian army,” confirmed Zhorik.
Except for that pittance, they have nothing to buy cigarettes, candy, beer, etc. with. No wonder soldiers are happy to get their cocks sucked for $ 20 or $ 35 – and sometimes less.
And it’s no wonder Zhorik periodically asks me to send money, which I of course do. I want to be the only dirty old man he sells his body to!
Now from St. Peterburg comes the charge that soldiers in a unit there were being forced into prostitution by their superiors, and that a KGB>FSB general and a former colonel turned banker have both had gay sex with the soldiers.
Soldiers got as much as 1000 rubles for a sexual encounter – about $ 33. It didn’t say how much their superiors got.
The army’s response?
“Shame on you.”
Shame on the officers who forced their subordinates into prostitution? On the abysmal defense establishment that tolerates it? On the unbelievably miserable army conditions that make it an attractive alternative?
No. Shame on the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees for reporting it.
You’re not trying to defend the rights of soldiers, protested the Interior Ministry PR hack. You’re just trying to “discredit the armed services.”
But this scandal on top of last year’s hazing scandal which resulted in the amputation of the legs and genitals of 19-year-old Andrei Sychov (Chapt. 185) could further sully the reputation of the leering Minister of Defense, Sergei Ivanov, whom Putin is priming as his possible successor in next year’s election.
[Sychov says he’s going to write a book about his victimization, which will not be flattering to the army. Let’s hope it comes out before the election. But if it’s perceived as a possible threat to Ivanov’s chances of election – if Ivanov indeed turns out to be Putin’s chosen heir – then Sychov could wind up with more than his legs and balls amputated.]
Perhaps, the speculation goes, that’s why Ivanov has been moved from Defense Minister to “First Deputy Prime Minister” for “coordination” of some nebulous “part of the civilian sector of the economy.”
It not only relieves Ivanov of the responsibility for “the functioning, or more appropriately, malfunctioning, of the Defense Ministry,” notes a Moscow Times editorial, but it presents him with many more opportunities to preen before the cameras and develop his image on TV news in preparation for the election.
It also solves another problem for Putin: To keep the suspense up for the election and keep from being perceived as a lame duck, he’s pitted Ivanov agains Dmitry Medvedev, the other First Deputy Prime Minister, to see which one the public prefers. A recent poll showed that 17% of Russians support Medvedev for president, but only 11% support Ivanov.
It seems these damned Russians insist on blaming the army’s scandals on the army’s boss. But now that he’s no longer the boss, maybe they’ll forget.
Amusingly enough, all the Army brass are livid over his replacement, a guy named Anatoly Serdyukov, whom nobody has ever heard of, because he has spent more years in the furniture business than in the government.
He must have made a lot of bucksi in the furniture biz, because from furniture dealer, Putin appointed him to head the Federal Tax Service (remember, it takes at least $ 10 mil to nail down a ministry - Chapt. 197), where he earned his Kremlin credits by developing the tax case against former Yukos chief Mikhail Kodorkovsky.
Ivanov’s parting Big Lie was to declare that the Chechen war has been a success. “The problem has been solved.” The war is over and Russia has defeated those who wanted to establish Chechen independence.
Of course this is news to Chechnya, where the killings and atrocities by the occupying Russian army continue unabated, as reported recently by Moscow’s Demos “think tank” (Chapt. 235).
But concern for truth has never been one of Ivanov’s strong points. And why should he change just to become president. Or maybe that’s why he shouldn’t change, since being able to get away with telling the gullible voters a whopper has become one of the most essential prerequisites of the office – just like in the U.S.
We had an ominous drop-in this week from a frumpy 40-ish Russian housewife looking like a space alien or at least a dowdy Soviet hold-over, who announced that “I’m your new neighbor, and I want to see what kind of people I’m living with.”
“Come in,” I said. “My name is Dane. I’m an American. I’m a teacher here.”
“Where do you teach?”
“At a university and an academy, and I have private students.”
“What university? What academy.”
“That’s none of your business,” I smiled.
“Why don’t you want to tell me what university you teach at?”
“Because it’s none of your business.” I couldn’t articulate it, but that’s the old Soviet system of neighborhood control. If you don’t like somebody, you complain about them to their boss and get them fired. I really don’t need that.
“Do you teach private students here?”
“Yes. In the kitchen.”
“Don’t you have a school?”
“I teach my private students here.”
“Do you have a license to teach?”
“I have credentials,” and showed her my certificate for completion of the Cambridge business English teacher’s course, which of course she couldn’t read or understand.
“How much do you charge?” she asked.
“$ 20 per academic hour – 45 minutes.”
Apparently she has bought the apartment below us, the one whose bathroom little Igor flooded last summer (Chapt. 208), and she seems to suspect that my apartment is a nest of thieves and hooligans – as, come to think about it, it has been from time to time.
But not now. They do stay up all night playing computer games, sometimes play music too loudly, and walk too heavily on the linoleumed floors, but they’re not hooligans.
“When I was visiting downstairs earlier today, about 2:00, I heard a lot of running up and down the hall.”
“Maybe it was the dog. Sometimes she runs and plays in the hall. We can also hear our upstairs neighbors walking. It’s just the construction of the building.”
“Maybe you should put in a new floor.”
I smiled.
“How many people are living here,” she continued.
“Me, Vanya (he was standing next to me), and one other (Sergei). I didn’t mention Denis or Tanya.
“Are you legally registered?’ she asked Vanya.
“Yes. (He just bought his phony registration last week).
“Do you work? Go to university?” she asked.
“No. I’m going to work next month.’
“As what?” I didn’t understand his answer.
By now Sergei had joined us.
“I saw a girl on the stairs. She had red shoes. Does she live here?”
“That was my girlfriend,” Sergei said. “She comes to visit. What business is it of yours? We can have as many guests as we want.”
“I just want to see what kind of people I’m living with. Could I see your bathroom?”
“Sure.” I opened the door.
The frumpy visitor from outer space, who claimed she's our new downstairs neighbor, was shocked at the state of our kitchen, but seemed molllfiied when I said we expected to repair it. Repairs were never completed after we replaced the bathtub and the kitchen sink last September (Chapt. 217). Not pretty, but it keeps the rent down.
The repairs in the bathroom and kitchen have never been completed, and they both look like something from Baghdad.
She looked at the kitchen. “Are you planning to repair the wall?”
“Yes, we’re planning to. But what business is it of yours? How does the state of my kitchen affect you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why haven’t you done a restoration in the apartment?”
“If it were restored, it would be a lot more expensive. Why would I want to do a restoration. I’m just a renter.”
“Have you ever thought of moving?”
“It’s very convenient here. It’s close to the metro for my students. And it’s not too expensive. Why would I want to move?”
“I’m thinking of buying this apartment,” she said.
“You mean buy it to live in? To rent out? What?”
She didn’t answer.
“If I found you a new apartment, would you consider moving?”
“Sure, if it’s in the center, close to the metro, and not over $ 800 a month.”
“I’ll look and see if I can find you one.”
“Great.”
“I think I’d like to take English lessons.”
“If you’re really serious, call me and we’ll talk more about it.”
But she was clearly dissatisfied with “the people I’m living with.” And I expect to see her again. She could cause lots of problems. And, I suspect, will.
Oops! Somebody noticed! The U.S. is showing “greater and greater disdain for the rules of international law” in forcing its values on other countries, and is exhibiting an “almost uncontained hyper-use of military force in foreign relations…that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”
It is making the world a place “where no one feels safe.”
Heah! Heah!
But since it was Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin doing the noticing, the Bushites airily dismissed it as merely a revival of cold war rhetoric and reassured the world that the United States would still deign to work together with Russia on common goals..
But hey, it’s ain’t just the Russians. In a German poll taken a couple of days later, more than two out of every three Germans agreed with Putin.
And if there was a poll of citizens around the world, you’d probably find the same – or greater -- repudiation of Bush’s Amerika.
But they don’t vote in American elections, so who cares.
Since bush is ignoring Americans, who do vote – not to mention his own Congress -- why should he pay any attention to a bunch of uppity Krauts? And just where do they get off refusing to be kowtow to Amerika? Who do they think it was, after all, that saved their sausage after WWII?
There are now more mobile phones in Russia than there are people. Daily survival has become virtually impossible without them, and the ubiquitous cell phone stores are always crowded.
Many executives have two or three. I used to give private lessons to the personal assistant to one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, and he always had three at his fingertips.
One factor boosting sales is that mobile phones are frequently stolen, broken, or lost. I’ve lost one, had one stolen, and had one die on me. And I’m more careful than most. Everyone I know, including Ivan, Zhorik, and Sergei, has lost or broken at least half a dozen. The last one I sent Zhorik broke soon after he received it.
Another sales booster is the prestige factor. Every teenage Russian has to have the latest model with the newest bells and whistles or, like man, you know, he’s just not kruta!
Mindless consumerism is no prettier here than it is on your side of the Atlantic!
Despite the fierce disapproval of the Russian Orthodox Church (Chapt. 187), St. Valentine’s Day has caught on in Russia in a big way.
As in America, it gives guys a chance to buy candy and flowers and soft toys to show that their undying love will probably last until at least the end of next week.
When I first came here nine years ago, I had to explain to my students what Valentine’s Day was. A poll last week showed that 58% of the population now consider it a holiday, and 40% planned to celebrate it with their significant others.
But it’s not a Russian holiday, and therefore should go into the trashcan of history, contend the Russian church and traditionalists like State Duma Deputy Andrei Savelyev, who told the Moscow Times: “It’s a holiday from another culture and shouldn’t be celebrated.”
But neither the church nor the state has ever managed to get love as much under their thumb as they’d like. So Potemkin U. celebrated with a big party and dance on Friday night, which I couldn’t attend because of my class with Masha, who in turn celebrated the occasion over the weekend in a restaurant with her husband.
My first Russian boyfriend, Maxim, from Nizhniy Novgorod, arrived Saturday on his way to Sofia, Bulgaria, in search of a new job.
I was looking forward to seeing him. While I dumped him eight years ago after he introduced me to Misha because of his insincerity and because I thought he was just using me, we have remained good friends.
But I was reminded Friday night why we’re no longer boyfriends. He had had a couple of gin and tonics and who knows how many beers before he got here, and all he did was bitch at me because I live in such a grubby apartment.
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, but that’s enough,” I said after half an hour.
“No, it’s not. I’m only telling you this because I love you. You should live in a better apartment. You should have better boyfriends. You should…..”
“Max,” I interrupted. “You’ve just reminded me why we’re no longer boyfriends.”
“Why?”
“You know everything.”
Have a good trip, Max. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. And Happy Valentine’s Day.”
See also related pages:
Chapt. #208 - 73rd birthday leaves more sediment than sentiment
Chapt. #235 - Igor reaffirms doctrine; wants to stay with me
Chapt. #187 - Twins exit with St. Valentine and 2000 bucksi
