MOSCOW, July 23, 2007 -- They’re gone! Sergei and Andrei hit the road Saturday, headed for Ukraine, Moldova, and….? For the first time in nearly a year, I’m living alone – peacefully -- except of course for Missy.
I drained my bank account to finance their exodus. I’m flat broke, but I figured it was worth it to get Sergei’s rage out of his system and out of my apartment. No telling what he might have done if he’d stayed here.
For the several days that Andrei lived here, he was for the most part well behaved, helpful and respectful. On their last evening here, they did get into another classic twins’ brawl over something.
If I understood Sergei correctly, it started when Andrei suddenly announced that he had changed his mind. He would stay here with me and Sergei could go by himself.
Sergei was livid. They needed $ 500 for their trip. Sergei only had the $ 300 I gave him. He needed Andrei’s financial and emotional support. Andrei had promised!
Even before I knew what it was about, I told Andrei I didn’t want him living here without Sergei; and after revisiting the flare-up of their fraternal animosity, I also told Sergei they could never live here together. They are the epitome of twin passion: Can’t live without each other one minute; the next, they’d murder each other.
Cute for a sit-com, but not to live with.
I had to stand between them to keep them from coming to blows, and even then, Andrei got through with a right to Sergei’s jaw.
I told them they simply can’t live together. Sergei said his father had told them the same thing. And they sure as hell can’t live together with me – ever again.
Sergei said he might be back in six months. “Can I live here with you if I do?”
“Yes,” I told him. “But when Zhorik gets out of the army, I want just him and me to live together.” So Sergei knows if he returns, it won’t be open-ended.
If he returns. If they don’t kill each other somewhere between here and ?
After they left, I SMS’d Zhorik that they had finally gone, and recounted the unsettling trauma of their last minutes here together, when my blood pressure shot up to 151.
He wrote back: “How I miss you.”
“Honey,” I replied, “are you sure that it’s not possible for me to come see you at New Year’s?”
“Do you really want to come?” he asked.
“Yes, but I’m afraid after the run-in you had with your CO, that he won’t give you permission to live with me off base for a week.”
“Wait till New Year’s gets a little closer,” he wrote back, “and I will find out for sure whether he will let me.”
In the meantime, I’ve warned Sergei that I have no money left to send him, and not to ask me for any more money – no matter what happens. I simply don’t, and won’t, have it.
Meanwhile, Igor asked me to send him $ 30 to live on. I had to tell him I can’t – maybe next week.
And Zhorik lost his mobile phone and asked me to replace it. “I don’t know when that will be,” I told him. In the meantime, he has bought a new sim-card, which he puts in his friends’ phones so that we can still communicate using the same number. But he will need to get his own phone. On Saturday he asked me to put $ 10 on his account so he could call his father.
“Unfortuately, I can’t,” I replied. “I gave Sergei all my money.”
I had really counted on $ 100 from my student Valera at Saturday morning’s lesson, the first in a new cycle of four, which he always pays for in advance. But he cancelled. Masha also cancelled both her lessons last week, which took another $ 100 out of my budget.
So as I write this, I have about $ 10 between me and destitution. Peter and I had talked about getting together on the weekend, but I couldn’t even afford to do that.
This week will also not be a good week. Information-Plus has already canceled two lessons – another $ 100; and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Masha will keep both her lessons. If so, and if Valera resumes his lessons next Saturday, I’ll take in about $ 300 for the week. If they both cancel, I’ll rake in the grand sum of $ 100. So at the moment, I’m living hand-to-mouth, or “from bread to water,” as the Russians say.
It looks like I won’t be really well until October, after my Potemkin U. And Inst. of Diplomacy classes resume.
I only hope I don’t have an emergency between now and then.
On Saturday, Zhorik SMS’d me: “Dane, what are you doing?”
As a matter of fact, I had just awakened from a nap and was working on the story I’m writing about his and my unlikely love affair. I was going to call it “When Do You Write Finis?” but it’s becoming happily obvious that there is going to be no “Finis.” It will continue as long as I do.
I have to find a new title.
“I just woke up from a nap,” I wrote. “In fact, I was thinking about you.”
“I like it when you think about me,” he wrote back.
“You’re living alone now, right?” he added.
“Yes. I wish you were here.”
“I wish I were too.”
We still have a little over ten months to go. Time is slowly but inexorably bringing us together again.
The killer of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London last November (Chapt. 227, Average Russian’s reaction: “What Litvinenko affair?”) is Andrei Lugovoi, another former KBG agent, now one of Russia’s millionaires and Kremlin patsies.
Scotland Yard announced it several weeks ago, and when Great Britain got around to demanding Lugovoi’s extradition, Putin called it stupidity, declaring that Russia’s constitution prohibits the extradition of Russian citizens. “Do you Brits have no respect for the law?” he asked.
Not one to be lectured on respect for the law by a bloody Russian, England escalated it to a diplomatic crisis last week by kicking out four Russian diplomats.
And then Russia kicked out four British diplomats, and who knows where this tit for tat will finally end? It certainly won’t be in a London trial for Lugovoi.
Judging from the people, the countries, and the institutions involved, I think an uninvolved observer would have to side with England, since the polonium-210 leads persuasively to Andrei Lugovoi as the one who flew it to London and administered a lethal dose of it to Alexander Litvinenko in a cup of tea, leaving a trail of radioactive polonium-210 wherever he went – airplanes, hotels, restaurants. Since – unlike the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI under Bush – Scotland Yard has not yet been politicized, its highly respected conclusions carry a great deal of weight.
As usual, Putin is applying his constitution arbitrarily. The same constitution also guarantees freedom of religion -- a laughable provision, based on the number of religious denominations which have been declared illegal in Russia, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Salvation Army.
It also guarantees that “the basic rights and liberties of the human being shall be inalienable; that the dignity of the person shall be protected by the state,” with no circumstance justifying belittling it; and that “everyone shall have the right to freedom and personal inviolability” (Chapt. 26, A day to ponder the worthless constitution).
Sounds like human rights, right? But human rights, as they are defined by the civilized world, have never existed in Russia, and don’t today, as evidenced by the routine arrests and trials of dissidents who dare speak against Putin or other authorities. The state not only fails to protect the dignity of the people – guaranteed by the constitution -- but grinds them into dust as if the constitution did not exist.
And except when the Kremlin needs it as a shield, it doesn’t.
According to the chairman of the Federation Council's constitutional legislation committee, extradition is in fact not absolutely prohibited by the constitution. The 1957 European Convention on Extradition, to which Russia is a signatory, does allow for such extraditions, but gives the country receiving the request the right to refuse.
And according to a letter to the editor of the Times of London, Russia has already extradited at least one Russian citizen -- in 2001.
So it seems that Russia has the right, rather than the obligation, to refuse extradition. What Putin is doing is simply exercising his right to refuse while wrapping himself in a Russian constitution that is as worthless to him as America’s is to Bush (remember “it’s just a scrap of paper”?).
Putin would probably suddenly find Lugovoi extraditable if England would agree to swap him for exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky or former Chechen leader Akhmed Zakaev. Putin is furious because London has repeatedly denied his extradition requests for both, and now they have the audacity to ask him for Lugovoi!
Putin is obsessed with getting his hands on Berezovsky, who as an oligarch is almost certainly guilty of committing enormous economic crimes, but Putin would not be prosecuting him for his criminality. Putin would be prosecuting him for his defiance of Putin. The trial would be a sham. To its credit, England continues to refuse his extradition.
Another deep-seated motive of the paranoid and defensive Russian authorities is revealed in the response of Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee:
“You can act this way toward a banana republic, but Russia is not a banana republic.” In Russia’s new role as the oil and gas bucket for much of Europe and the West, to fail to show proper international respect to this resurgent world power is the ultimate insult. Like the blacks in America emerging from centuries of slavery, the insecure Russia, emerging from 70 years of world scorn, wants respeck.
Scotland Yard has spoken. In my view Lugovoi is guilty as sin and should stand trial in Britain. He almost certainly also was acting as a tool of the Kremlin in slipping Litvinenko the deadly radioactive poison, so the notion put forth by Putin that the evidence should be turned over to the Russian prosecutor for a trial in Moscow is ludicrous.
Since the courts are controlled by the Kremlin (another violation of the constitution), the evidence would be ignored and Lugovoi would continue to walk the streets as freely as he does now.
But whether England did the smart thing by elevating this humdrum Russian violation of international justice and morality to a diplomatic crisis level is another matter. What can it possibly accomplish, except push Russia and the West a little closer to the brink of a new Cold War?
If British intelligence should somehow succeed in slipping Lugovoi some polonium-210 to punish him for his crime, you’d be astonished at how fast the tune would change.
Another lawyer with great success in defending Kremlin opponents has fled Russia in fear of political prosecution. Boris Kuznetzov says the Kremlin is out to get him because of the high-profile cases he is representing or has defended in the past.
They include the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya (Chapt. 221, 20-year-old dream headed for Moscow – and me!); Manana Aslamazian, head of the now-destroyed Educated Media Foundation (Chapt. 254, Apartment prices confirm “most expensive” status); and Igor Sutyagin, a research scientist convicted of high treason in 2004 for selling information to China that was taken out of publicly available journals (Chapt. 80).
Russian prosecutors say that, in representing former Federation Council Senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan, who is accused of accepting a $ 300,000 bribe in a sting operation, Kuznetzov disclosed state secrets when he submitted an appeal to the State Constitutional Court relating to a KGB>FSB wiretap of his client.
And how, according to the KGB>FSB, did lawyer Kuznezov reveal state secrets when he didn’t know any? According to the newspaper Vedomosti, they say he violated the law “by copying and distributing secret wiretap recordings of his client” and then in his appeal to the Constitutional Court, sending the tapes by mail so that Court employees without security clearances could read them and make them available to journalists.
Kuznetzov in turn points to Article 7 of the law regarding state secrets: “Information regarding the violation of a citizen’s rights and freedom shall not be regarded as classified.”
But of course, it’s merely a law, and like all others, can be ignored at the whim of the Kremlin.
A Vedomosti editorial pointed out that “even before the district court’s decision, authorities demanded that Kuznetzov sign a statement that prohibited him from disclosing the facts of the case. This means that the authorities deliberately intended to classify the information on the tapes.”
Two prominent Moscow lawyers told the Moscow Times that Kuznetzov’s actions were appropriate. “A lawyer is obliged to protect his defendants and to file appeals,” said Mikhail Barshevsky, the government’s representative to the Constitutional Court, adding that the district court which ruled that he had revealed state secrets “ruled incorrectly.”
Another prominent lawyer told the MT that “this will be a total embarrassment in the international community.”
But Kuznetzov is taking no chances. He is now somewhere abroad considering whether or not to seek political asylum. “None of this is happening by accident,” he told the MT by phone from an undisclosed location. “They want me out of a number of cases,” including that of Politkovskaya’s family.
Vedomosti describes Kuznetzov’s problems as “a fairly typical case” in the recent intensification of Russian authorities’ battle against high-profile lawyers.
It is an unfortunate reversion, Vedomosti noted, to the KGB tactics of the ‘70s and ‘80s against lawyers defending dissidents. Vedomosti warned that it will exacerbate, not resolve, the Kremlin’s legal problems by driving more victims of persecution by prosecution to file cases with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg because “they have been deprived of their right of legal defense at home.”
A high-profile lawyer who didn’t get out in time, Mikhail Trepashkin, has just won one of three cases he has submitted to the Strasbourg Court.
Trepashkin’s troubles go ’way back before the Putin presidency, to when Putin was still just the head of the KGB>FSB, and apartment buildings in several cities of Russia – including Moscow -- were being blown up, allegedly by Chechen terrorists.
These explosions were used by Putin after Yeltsin appointed him prime minister to justify the invasion of Chechnya and the launch of the second Chechen War, which sent his popularity among the Russian population soaring.
There was one minor problem: There was increasing evidence that it was the KGB>FSB itself that had masterminded the explosions. A group of legislators created a committee to investigate. One by one, they were all murdered (Chapt. 42, Russian hatred; my paranoia). Trepashkin was not a member of the committee, but was pursuing a case before the courts on behalf of some of the former residents of one of the detonated apartment buildings.
A week before he was to formally present his evidence, he was stopped on a minor traffic charge and police claimed they found a pistol in his car. Trepashkin says it was planted. While he was being held for investigation he was charged with divulging state secrets.
What state secrets? Apparently it was the fact that the Russian security services had blown up the buildings to foment support for the Chechen war. It’s the only state secret that Trepashkin knew. And his arrest on the charge in effect proved the state’s involvement.
Of course he was convicted, and is still serving a four-year sentence. The Strasbourg Court found that during his illegal detention Trepashkin was subjected to physical abuse. They ordered Russia to pay him $ 4,150 in compensation.
Two more of his suits are still before the Court – being deprived of the right to a fair trial and withholding of medical care.
He has chronic asthma, which of course is exacerbated by his prison detention. The Russian secret services will not be displeased if he doesn’t come out alive. In fact, it would save them the problem of murdering him, which is always a messy and problematic business, even in Russia.
Putin’s tough-guy international image may not be winning friends and influencing people in the West, says a new poll of Russia’s 46 regions by a national polling organization, but it’s wildly popular in Russia.
In fact, it’s so popular that the government-controlled pollster, VTsIOM, speculated that compared to his population, Putin is actually something of a liberal.
In the poll, reported in the Moscow Times, 81% of all Russians agreed that Russia is forging a strong global role; 90% said they liked the government’s more controlling role in the economy, and 66% said they were living better now than in the Soviet Union in 1991.
More than half – 52% -- said they would vote for Putin’s chosen successor, whoever he may be, if he steps down next March.
“Given the significant popular pressure,” wrote VTsIOM in an accompanying commentary, “it is impressive that the government under President Putin has been as hand-off as it has been with the economy….
“Similarly, Putin’s more aggressive foreign policy stance, while undermining relations in the West, has proved popular at home. The case can be made that Putin is a liberal relative to the median Russian voter.”
So for the average Russian, expectations and hopes are being met: They’re better off financially, there is political and economic stability, and there are no knocks on the door in the middle of the night -- yet.
So does the average Russian really care that the government is damming the stream of information on state-controlled television, that some political dissidents are whisked off to jail under the guise of extremism, or that private property – as long as it’s someone else’s – is occasionally confiscated?
Civil rights, shmivel rights! Just keep the kohlbassa and vodka coming.
The elusive UFO PAC executive director is alive and well. One of my e-mails managed to reach Scott Beagle (Chapt. 257, Sergei roller-coast takes to the road), who replied that our mutual friend, Blair H. “thinks my work is utterly ridiculous, but that helps to keep me grounded.
“But his protestations aside, I am completely committed to my work in this field. It has been an extraordinary 11 years, and the next few years should prove even more extraordinary.”
So it is my old acquaintance, and he does have a permanent e-mail address. So the aliens didn’t kidnap him.
A follow-up press release says that the organization has submitted a question via YouTube for the U.S. presidential candidates in the CNN debate today.
It asks the candidates to state their intentions as president regarding “being fully briefed on the ET/UFO issue by the military and civilian intelligence agencies and regarding their calling for open, comprehensive congressional hearings to take the testimony of scores of former government employees ready to come before the Congress now.”
It’s a provocative and interesting question, and I for one would love to see the candidates have to tackle it. It offers enormous squirm potential. But I think the chances of CNN posing it as part of the debates are somewhere between zero and none.
But you gotta give Scott credit for trying. Somebody’s got to do the dirty work.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #259 - Igor headed home from Moldova
Chapt. #80 - Another step closer to the past
Chapt. #257 - Sergei roller-coast takes to the road
Chapt. #26 - A day to ponder the worthless constitution
This day years ago:
2005-7-23: Chapt. #149 - Ugh-oh! “Nuclear terror” exercise looms for U.S.
2006-7-23: Chapt. #210 - Better PR needed after gay fiasco
