MOSCOW, June 11, 2007 -- Igor and I had one last roll in the hay last Monday night. What he didn’t know is that it may be the last one for a very long time.
Before that we were lying in bed watching junk Russian TV when he accidentally punched me in the eye with his elbow. I winced and he put his arms around me and hugged me and kissed me as if I were a little child. It was a tenderness which he rarely shows, but which I know is there.
He is affectionate and loving. Unfortunately, at least for me, he’s also -- -- like Zhorik -- incorrigibly straight. How he envisions our long-term relationship, I have no idea. Unlike Zhorik, he doesn’t talk about that. We rarely talk about our relationship at all. It’s simply there.
Or at least was. But now it’s a long-distance affair. He’s back basking in the sea of man-eating Moldovan twats. His balancing act will be trying to get as much poumintang as possible while dodging a commitment to any of them.
He would have been able to manage it for a couple of weeks – or even a month; but whether he can keep them at bay for the three or four or five months – or more -- he’s going to be there, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, his return has become even more problematic. Hizzoner Lord Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov is pushing a law through the city Duma making it even harder for people from former Soviet republics, like Igor, to live in Moscow.
Right now the city issues 800,000 work permits granting such immigrants the right to work in Moscow. He’s cutting that to 500,000.
Even worse, he’s moving to criminalize “the import of foreign citizens” and to require migrants to physically appear before a city authority to declare their arrival and departure. Up to now, they could do this by simply mailing a letter to the Federal Migration Service. But I’m certain that Igor didn’t even do that.
Another measure would fine landlords who “grant dwelling to illegal migrants,” but from what landlady Natasha’s daughter said on the phone two weeks ago (Chapt. 250), that option already exists. But it will become more draconian.
According to the Moscow Times, the city also plans to create a data base for foreigners “that would allow police to run more frequent checks on the locations where foreigners work and live.”
Moscow’s registration law was long ago declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but Luzhkov – the consummate law-abiding citizen -- dismissed the court’s decision by rhetorically questioning how many soldiers the Supreme Court had to enforce it. So the law lives on illegally to complicate the lives of kids like Igor who just want to find a better life and future than exists for them in their impoverished home countries.
If I understand the law correctly – and I’m not at all sure that I do -- everybody who lives in Moscow must be registered in a residence. This requires the landlord to sign a notarized agreement for the person to live in his apartment. But archaic Soviet laws still in force stipulate that once registered in an apartment, it is almost impossible to get rid of a tenant. So most landlords simply refuse to register anyone.
So there is a thriving business in counterfeit registration, which involves an individual paying $ 800 or more to a registration agency to legally register them at a bogus residence somewhere in Moscow or its environs. In the past, I paid for both Anton and Yegor’s phony “legal” registrations. If I want Igor to return, I think there’s no alternative to doing the same again for him. But that’s somewhere in the distant future, if at all.
The bottom line is that Moscow is making it increasingly difficult for people like Igor to come and stay here. Until I understand the law better, I frankly don’t know if he can ever come back.
On Sunday night I had an SMS from him. “Where are you and who are you with?” I SMS’d back.
He was with some of the friends I had met. I told him to tell them hello for me. “They all say hello to you,” he replied. “They all want to see you.”
As if he sensed the gathering doubts about his return, he asked when I could go visit.
“Maybe in August,” I replied. “We’ll see.”
“Try to come sooner.”
“It depends on the money situation,” I wrote. “We’ll just have to see. I really want to.”
“We all wait for you and love you,” he said.
“Thank you very much. Kisses to you. I miss you and love you.”
So that’s the way it stands now. It would be fun to make a return trip sometime during the summer if I can scrape up the bucksi to do it.
In the meantime, I’m assiduously nursing my ties to Zhorik. In an SMS on Thursday he dropped a bit of a bomb in our – Sergei’s and my – laps:
“They’ve asked me to sign a contract to stay in the army,” he wrote. If he would agree to stay in the army another five years, he said, they promised they would make him be a quartermaster “boss.”
Sergei and I both reacted in instant dismay, and each wrote independently essentially the same thing: “Don’t under any circumstances do this. If would be the worst mistake of your life.”
He hastily reassured us. “I don’t want to sign a contract. I simply want to get home in one piece and forget the army. I’d give anything if I could tell the army to fuck off right now.
“How I miss home,” he continued. “One more year. Wait for me.”
“Of course, I’ll wait for you honey,” I assured him. “We promised, remember?” (Chapt. 194)
“Yes, I remember.”
I had told him I would send him some money to buy some summer clothes. On Monday he SMS’d me asking if I had sent it.
“No, honey. Money is really tight for me now. I have to give Igor some money for his trip. It may be Thursday or Friday before I can send it.”
“The money isn’t important,” he answered. “What’s important is your health and your mental health. Are you taking care of yourself?”
“As you know I have a lot to worry about right now,” I replied, “but I’m trying not to let it stress me out.”
“Just hang on for one more year,” he countered. “Then I’ll be back and everything will be all right.”
“I can hardly wait,” I wrote. And I can’t.
The compounded complexity of surviving the next two or three months (Chapt. 251) just got less complex. The foreign registration law has changed, and I no longer have to get a letter from my landlady saying I can live here for the next year.
That might have created a crisis, given the tense situation that the “illegal migrants” and my teething puppy Missy have created for me.
It will make it easier for me to simply maintain the status quo until I amass enough money to rent a different apartment so that maybe – depending on details of the migrant registration law -- Igor can come back and live with me.
Rod, my pal and the head of English Exchange, also agreed Friday to run my visa through English Exchange one more year, so I won’t have to fork out money for that.
And David G., my power of attorney in America, just e-mailed me that he is shipping my new Bank America card today, so I should have that soon.
Life is getting a little less worrisome.
How am I going to bridge the sexual gap between now and when Igor or Zhorik returns?
Sergei unexpectedly provided the answer. On Saturday, he came into the kitchen grinning. “Do you want to have sex?”
His girlfriend Tanya is working almost every day in a café. She often doesn’t get home till 11 p.m. or later, and when she does, she’s dead tired. The money she’s earning, which isn’t much, isn’t coming to me, it’s going to help her obnoxious alcoholic mother pay for an upcoming leg operation.
But in the meantime, Sergei apparently isn’t getting any sex. “I haven’t had any in at least two weeks,” he lamented.
It didn’t take him long to get off. “Do you want to come?” he asked after he had shot his wad into my tonsil scars.
“Not now,” I said. “Maybe next time.”
And that’s the problem. After Zhorik and Igor, he just doesn’t turn me on any more, although his dick is still as big and his body still as little- boyish, and his affection just as sincere as ever.
He proposed that we hit the sack together two or three times a week. Since sucking cocks is my favorite hobby, that suits me fine, even if I don’t come, though from time to time I’m sure I’ll be horny enough that I probably will.
The anti-extremist law is being used to silence Kremlin critics, just as its opponents predicted it would (Chapt. 212). Trying to curb the increasing violence by skinheads against dark-skinned immigrants was just the adornment put on the law as an excuse to get it passed. Now we’re seeing the real reason.
The Moscow Times this week detailed the attempted silencing of some of the most liberal – and courageous – critics of Putin’s dictatorship and Kremlin policy.
“Renowned human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky, and political scientist Andrei Piontkovsky say the FSB (KGB) has targeted them recently under the pretext of stamping out extremism.”
They agree that there is an active and widening campaign underway to get rid of Kremlin critics by branding them “extremists” and bringing them to trial and jailing them.
It has all the earmarks of the beginning of a re-run of Stalin’s infamous “pogrom of the intelligentsia,” when even the mildest criticism of the Stalin regime brought the deaths of hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of writers, artists, poets, and other intellectuals and the subsequent “dumbing down” of the surviving Russian population.
According to the MT, the FSB interrogated Ponomaryov in their Lubyanka headquarters and accused him of “shouting extremist slogans,” but couldn’t tell him what the slogans were that he had shouted.
This seems to be a catch-all excuse for arrest, since they used similar words in justifying the detention of Kasparov before the dissident rally in Moscow a few weeks ago (Chapt. 244).
Ponomaryov was told that the “material” – whatever it was – would be forwarded to the prosecutor general for a decision as to whether or not to press charges.
“The law on extremism is like the Soviet-style law that forbids any criticism of the state,” he told the MT.
As for Pribylovsky, his apartment was ransacked a week ago by the FSB, who carted off computers containing draft chapters of two books he is writing about Putin, one of which is in collaboration with U.S.-based historian and author Yury Felshtinsky.
Felshtinsky told American reporters that the computers contained “a huge volume of information” on top Russian officials. “There is a lot of very interesting and important information which might be lost, because they could drag the investigation – any investigation – for some years now, and the idea was to publish the book before the election.”
But Pribylovsky told the Times that in anticipation of such a raid, he had hidden a flash card with an electronic copy of the book in his trash can. And the Kremlin’s attempts at intimidation are having the opposite effect.
Because of fears for Pribylovsky’s life, they had decided not to publish the book. “But in light of the illegal FSB actions, we’re going ahead with it,” Felshtinsky told the MT by telephone.
Piontkovsky, the third victim, has written books critical of Putin that have been distributed by the liberal party Yabloko, of which Piontkovsky is a leading member. The Times reported that the FSB told Yabloko’s Krasnodar branch that if they didn’t drop the book, the branch would be closed down as extremist.
Piontkovsky also compared the current use of the laws on extremism “to get rid of any opposing views” to Stalin’s pogrom.
Last week 150,000 copies of a newspaper advertising a Dissenter’s March in St. Petersburg that was scheduled for today were confiscated on grounds that they might contain extremist views.
Former Prime Minister and declared opposition candidate Mikhail Kasyanov told the Times that the FSB had confiscated computers from his campaign headquarters in the city of Tula last week under the same pretext.
Any information critical of Putin or the Russian government, it seems, is by definition extremist and will be banned and its disseminators punished.
“We’re living in a police state,” confirmed former chess champ turned Putin oppositionist Garry Kasparov after an interview with Bush last week. “And Bush is in denial about it.”
He said Bush had “repeated the same stories about [Russia’s] growing middle class and prosperity and elections.” He said he had urged Bush to confront Putin at the G8 summit.
“We want these leaders to state the obvious: Russia and Putin don’t belong in the G8 because it’s not a democracy and it’s not an industrial power.”
Bush’s doublespeak in the run-up to the G8 summit in Germany by labeling himself a “dissident” president was one of the most absurd and disgusting things he has done yet.
“I pledged America to the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he said in a Prague speech. “Some have said that qualifies me as a dissident president. If standing for liberty in the world makes me a dissident, then I’ll wear the title with pride.”
To those who truly earned the label “dissident” by courageously standing against the Russian state, and are now facing a new onslaught against human rights, the Fascist Bush’s arrogation of the title to his own political ends is particularly loathsome.
If there are any dissidents in America, they are those who oppose Bush’s shredding of American values and historic constitutional rights. Bush is the state. To declare himself a dissident is as absurd as Putin suddenly announcing to the world that he a dissident.
If Bush had any sense of shame he would apologize to those who earned the title by endangering their very lives in defying the state. But then if he had any sense of shame he wouldn’t still be calling himself the President of the United States.
A college student detained at a dissenters’ march in Moscow says she has been threatened with expulsion. She told the Moscow Times that two policemen met her as she exited the principal’s office at the Ryazan College of Electronics and took her to Moscow’s organized crime department.
She had been arrested by riot police at a march sponsored by “The Other Russia,” of which the now banned National Bolshevik Party (Chapt. 245) was a sponsor.
She said they kept her for two hours, telling her that unless she informed on the activities of the National Bolsheviks, she would be expelled from her college.
Her principal told the MT that she was in danger of expulsion because of missed classes.
There will be no more taking of hostages in Russia by Chechens or others trying to bring pressure on Putin’s government, predicts Yulia Latynina, a Moscow journalist and human rights advocate.
Hostage-taking is only effective if the government or other target cares whether the hostages live or die.
But in the hostage taking in both the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow in October, 2002, and in the Beslan School in September, 2004 (Chapt. 84), the KGB>FSB and the Russian government made it abundantly clear that zapping the hostage takers was more important than saving the hostages.
So in Russia, a country which essentially places no value on the life of its citizens, hostage taking is a waste of time and we will probably not see any more of it.
Stavropol, the city to which I was initially going to move with the twins and the city where Zhorik wants to buy an apartment and eventually live with me (Chapt. 244), has been embroiled in inter-ractial battles now for several weeks.
First a Chechen student was killed in a street fight on May 24; then on June 4 two ethnic Russian students were stabbed to death – some say by Chechens, but others say by another ethnic Russian.
Whatever the case, the small city of 750,000 is bristling in Chechen-Russian hostility. It was here two years ago that Zhorik insulted a Chechen (I think he called him a cocksucker) and the Chechen was going to kill him unless twin Andrei paid a couple of grand (Chapt. 151) ransom.
It’s also the place Andrei Sh. warned me two years not to move to, because he predicted Russia would continue to fall apart, and by this time a revolution would have occurred, with Stavropol winding up in the Caucuses region, which would by now have established itself as a separate state from Moscow (Chapt. 142).
But it was almost exactly two years ago that he predicted this would happen “within the next two years.” It hasn’t happened yet.
Anyway, “there’s trouble in Riverside City.” But by the time Zhorik and I are ready to move there five or six years from now, whatever’s going to happen will have happened, and the decision will probably make itself.
Andrei Sh. brought some of his superb moonshine for a chat on Sunday, and we discussed his prediction of two years ago. He has since changed his mind about revolution, he said. Russians have no stomach for it.
Instead, there will simply be an implosion of the Russian state, in which Moscow will no longer be able to impose authority on most of the rest of the country.
The central Moscow region will be all that’s left of “Mother Russia.”
The political vacuum created by this will be filled with “occupiers” to keep order, he predicted – UN or NATO forces in European Russia and perhaps China in the Asian territory.
“Don’t you think the fact that Putin also sees this as a possibility explains a lot about the increasing state control we are seeing now?” I asked. “Don’t you think he’s trying to prevent just such a scenario?”
Andrei replied, as analyst Sergei Kiselyov observed (Chapt. 251), that the more the Kremlin tries to prevent the dissolution of the Russian state by increasing dictatorship and state controls, the faster it will fall apart.
To me, this scenario seems most unlikely. But the Kremlin is certainly afraid of something, as evidenced by the blind fury in which they are striking out at real or imagined threats to their power and to the very existence of the state.
We can only wait and see whether Andrei’s prediction is just the wishful thinking of a former Soviet dissident or an accurate look into the future.
City center of Boxmeer, Holland, which could hardly be distinguished from any small modern city in another other western country, one of the controversial side effects of globalization.
It was off to Holland last week for Red Queen administrator Basil and a couple of his colleagues in the chicken processing company they work for.
They were studying the computerization of the chicken “dis-assembly” line in which some 8,000 chickens an hour get hanged by their feet, stunned, beheaded, plucked, de-gutted, “dis-assembled,” sorted, and assessed.
They flew into Duesseldorf, where I lived for a year as an army counter-intelligence agent back in the early days of the cold war, and were driven on to the “Stork” poultry production facility in the Dutch town of Boxmeer.
Basil got an up-close view of the effects of globalization. The shops in the city center of Boxmeer were indistinguishable – both in content and architecture (see photo) -- from those of any small modern city in America – or Germany or Canada or Spain or almost any other Western country.
They couldn’t even find any wooden shoes to bring home as souvenirs.
Even so, Basil found it a refreshing and relaxing alternative to Moscow. It was clean and quiet and the oppressive police presence was non-existent. He thinks he’d like to move there some day.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #253 - Landlady lifts sense of oncoming disaster
Chapt. #251 - Is U.S.-Russian conflict unavoidable? Probably
Chapt. #250 - Second attempt at a gay parade thwarted
Chapt. #245 - Zhorik exits; and so do human rights
Chapt. #244 - Zhorik interlude proves frustrating
Chapt. #212 - Conspiracy theory: Putin is American tool!
Chapt. #151 - Sergei’s blond boy flunks try-out
