MOSCOW, August 6, 2007 -- The “whenever you want” doctrine kicked in immediately, as I had surmised it would (Chapt. 259, Igor headed home from Moldova).
Igor arrived at 2 a.m. Wed., Aug. 1, safe and sound and unhassled by border guards or customs agents. He had taken an 18-passenger commuter bus that wasn’t as comfortable as the train, but which also was not subjected to the usual border harassment and which delivered him literally to our front door.
It had cost more -- $ 60 compared to about $ 40 for the cheapest train seat – but avoiding the scrutiny of the border and customs bandits was more than worth it.
He and a childhood friend, Vanya, had bused back together. Vanya lives with his sister in suburban Moscow. He is younger than Igor but not as handsome or endearing. He didn’t even trip any fantasies, much less my peter meter.
Igor looked good – both healthy and delicious. It had been very hot – up to 120 degrees F! – and his upper body was well bronzed. He probably never wore a shirt. But he had lost weight, which isn’t surprising given the poverty in which he subsisted there.
He came bearing a large box of fruit and vegetables – mini-watermelons, another melon that resembles a cantaloupe, grapes, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers -- and some home-made goat cheese and four jugs of Moldovan wine.
He was happy and relieved to be “home.” The police had been on his ass the entire time. They had stolen both his mobile phone and my digital camera that I had let him take with him. I’ve now lost track of the number of cameras I’ve had stolen since I came to Russia. Probably at least a dozen.
I had fixed his favorite meal – pork chops and peaches in a sweet’n’sour barbecue sauce – but he was too excited to eat except for the sweet home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers and goat cheese. We also downed one of the 1.5 liter jugs of wine. I had had two large cans of lemon vodka cocktail before going to bed about midnight.
We hugged and kissed and held hands and hugged and kissed some more. It was another fit of epilepsy that had put him in the hospital. He had been taking a piss in a men’s room with his cousin Vanya and had fallen backwards, hitting his head on the concrete floor and pissing all over his shirt. Vanya hadn’t known anything to do except to call the ambulance. Big mistake. But at least he wasn’t seriously injured.
Unfortunately for my pocket book, but fortunately for my health, my 8 a.m. students had sent me a text message canceling their Wednesday morning class. When I finally got too sleepy to stay up any longer it was 5 a.m. I kissed him goodnight. He said he was going to take a bath and would join me later.
I woke up about 7 a.m. and heard the television, but a few minutes later, he came in and parked his beautiful frame beside me. We again hugged and kissed.
“Can we play?” I asked as I caressed his chest and stomach.”
He didn’t hesitate.
So for the first time in broad daylight, we pulled his shorts down and I scanned his body in the full light of day. His pubes aren’t kinky and coiled. Rather they’re straight and shoot off in all directions like iron filings on a magnet, more like the Asian pubic pattern.
As I played and gently stroked, it gradually got harder, but didn’t get fully stiff until I wrapped my mouth around it and massaged it with my tongue. Then I went to work in earnest. It probably took about 15 minutes and followed the usual pattern. Toward the end when it was iron rod stiff, I knew he was about to come. With only a slight movement of his body he shot. I missed the first glob, which I later licked off his stomach.
As soon as he had spurted the last of his gism, I pulled my shorts down and started to work on myself with my right hand, holding his still-stiff cock in my left. It didn’t take long, and for the first time in over six weeks – despite being rather drunk and despite having turned 74 three weeks earlier -- I prevented another case of prostate cancer. I immediately pulled my shorts back up to soak up the cum from my body and pubic hair. Then he turned on his side. I put my arms around his torso and we went to sleep in the spoons position.
Welcome home!
But will he get promoted to ‘first place’ as I speculated he might (Chapt. 259, Igor headed home from Moldova)?
Probably not. He’s still relentlessly straight. We haven’t “played” since the first night, although he continues to be loving and affectionate.
And Zhorik and I have been drawing closer through our SMSs (text messaging). We usually spend half an hour to an hour “chatting” every evening. On my birthday (July 6) he sent me a couple of photos of himself with some of his army pals, but he had addressed the envelope with the wrong zip code and it arrived only Saturday, a month later.
In the pictures he seems resigned, but not really happy. I asked him which army colleague was his best friend. “I don’t really have a ‘tovarishch’ among my army friends,” he replied. No best buddy. Just fellow soldiers stuck together in an intolerable Siberian hell hole. He repeatedly tells me how much he misses me and “home.”
On Friday he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Fixing food for Missy,” I replied.
“Will you fix food for me when I come home?” he continued.
“Of course. With the greatest pleasure. I’ll fix you everything.”
Saturday night we were chatting when Missy starting letting doggy farts. Oh-oh. So we went for an unscheduled walk. “Tell Missy hello for me,” he said when I told him what I was doing. “You have no idea how much I miss…” and didn’t finish the sentence.
“How much you miss Missy or me?” I asked.
“Missy and you.”
When Americans want to know the state of your mental health, we say, “how are you feeling?”
The Russians ask, “How is your mood?”
When he asked how my mood was Friday night, I answered that Igor was here and I was in a good mood.
He replied with a little home-made Russian rhyme: I’m very happy for you. You lack only one thing – me.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I wrote back. “How I do miss you.”
To which he replied: “Yes, I know. It’s a shame that I’m not beside you now.”
A couple of weeks ago I asked what he was doing.
“Drinking tea. It’s all I had to eat today.”
“Why?”
“The food is so terrible I can’t eat it. In the winter they feed us pretty well, but in the summer, it’s slop. You wouldn’t even feed it to Missy. Nobody eats it. I haven’t had anything but tea for two days.”
“If you had money, would you eat better?”
“Of course.”
“How much would it take?”
“500 rubles a week” – nearly $ 20. “The others buy food from outside. They pay 500 rubles a week and he brings sausages, noodles, and regular food.”
“Honey, I will send you 500 rubles a week. You can’t continue like this.”
So Saturday night I asked if he’d received the 500 rubles I had sent Thursday.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“So you can eat this weekend!”
“Yes. Thank you again, Dane, for worrying about me.”
“I really, really miss you,” I said.
“That’s a really nice thing to hear.”
Now all this sounds really trite: “He said, I said, he said.” Give me a break! But I repeat these conversations because Zhorik is a man of few words. He’s not into the social conventions of saying things because they’re proper or because it’s the correct thing to say or because he thinks somebody wants to hear them.
When he says something, it’s because he feels it and means it. So all these “really miss you”s and “I’m glad to hear you miss me”s are what he’s really feeling. He’s alone and lonely. He has no “tovarishch,” no best buddy to sit around on their bunk beds and shoot the bull with. Instead, he spends his evenings sitting on his bunk bed shooting the bull with me.
Igor has friends and girlfriends. He left Saturday evening to meet his Moldovan friend “Finish” and spend the night carousing with him in the suburbs. His friend, Vanya, who rode back from Moldova on the bus with him, has also visited him twice. So while Igor loves and appreciates me and lets me romp on his playground, we don’t really have the depth and history between us that Zhorik and I have developed.
So I think Zhorik will stay in first place.
Sergei and Andrei never made it to Moldova, much less to Europe and America. Sergei called Monday evening from Sochi, the Black Sea resort city that is going to play host to the 2014 winter Olympics.
He sounded happy. He said they were both working, and that he’d be back “in two or three weeks” for a visit and to pay me the $ 300 I gave him for his trip (Chapt. 258, Putin wraps himself in a constitution he doesn’t believe in).
He said a lot of other things, but he talks so fast I often don’t understand him. He also has a speech impediment, which makes him ever harder to understand.
I can only hope he will follow through with his plans. I can use the 300 bucksi
Headlines last week:
Police arrest 120 protestors demonstrating against State Policy.
Outspoken editor gunned down in the street in what appears to be a contract hit.
Law officer threatens to arrest drivers unless they cross his palm
Is this from another week of reading Russian newspapers for a dip into the Russian human rights cesspool?
No, these are American headlines from last week’s Yahoo news pages.
So clearly Russia hasn’t cornered the market yet on crooked cops and dictators. But here is the major difference between civil rights abuses in America and Russia:
- The D.C. government had to pay the 120 protesters $ 1 million for their illegal arrest.
- The killer of the Oakland editor is being tracked down in an intense police investigation.
- The Texas sheriff’s deputy who extorted Mexican motorists has been arrested and is facing trial.
Siberia will melt before you see that here. Siberia may actually melt some time in the next 100 years in the global warming that’s descending on us. And you may see civil rights in Russia in the same time frame. But I would put my money on the melting.
The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time – H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism -- got resounding confirmation in a Philadelphia court last week.
A New Jersey businessman who came to Moldova and had sex with teenage boys now faces more than 20 years in an American prison.
Of course, I wasn’t in the court room and don’t have access to the transcript, and the Internet news story didn’t give adequate details, but 45-year-old Anthony Mark Bianchi’s crime appears to be that he went to a remote village in Moldova, the same impoverished third-world economy that I visited in March (Chapt. 240, Extreme poverty, one-holers, and pretty boys), and had sex with or attempted to have sex with “at least” six teenage boys.
According to the news account, “One boy said Bianchi raped him, and one said he was assaulted while he was intoxicated. Another said Bianchi fondled him in bed.”
They don’t make journalists like they used to. How old is a “teenage boy?” Thirteen or fourteen or eighteen or nineteen?
Whatever the age, rape – if it actually occurred – was wrong. If he was too young to drink, “assaulting while he was intoxicated” was wrong. If the kid willingly went to bed with him, “fondling” him may have been the devious act of a “dirty old man,” but hardly a crime that merits 20 years in an American prison.
While their president, smiling and waving from the helicopter pad, sanctions rape and murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, American justice is preoccupied with wreaking vengeance on some closet faggot who goes halfway around the world to take boys to restaurants, go bowling with them, give them money and then take them to bed?
Even if they were crimes, were they of such magnitude that they warranted spending a huge wad of taxpayers’ money so that prosecuting attorney Kenya Mann could travel twice to Moldova, bring six boys to America and feed and house them during the three-week trial just so she could show that sinful man that you can’t dodge the wrath of America’s puritans just because you go-outside its borders to get your jollies? Mencken is rolling over in his grave!
Mann justified it by explaining: "It's hard. It's costly. But they're really important cases."
To whom? What purpose was possibly served beyond scaring repressed American closet queens into staying home and jerking off to porn?
Her daring stand for morality will no doubt stand her in good stead when she runs for District Attorney.
I think it’s not just defense lawyer hyperbole that the boys very likely “told prosecutors what they wanted to hear to snag a trip to the United States.”
The boys I met there would have probably told anybody anything for a trip to the dreamed-of World of Oz. I didn’t even touch cute little 16-year-old Dima (see photo, Chapt. 240) – well, at least not below the waist -- but I’ll bet if they offered him a month’s trip to the U.S. to say I did, he’d jump at the chance.
Kevin Philips was right in American Dynasty: America has become a theocracy. It is sin, rather than crime, that must be punished
Immorality does not pay!
And what is immorality? Ask Mencken: “The morality of those who are having a better time.”
Meanwhile, back on the road to Stalinism, a member of opposition politician Garry Kasparov’s United Front Party in Murmansk was tossed into a psychiatric hospital last week, the standard post-Stalin Soviet punishment for opposing the state.
According to the Moscow Times, Larisa Arap went to a doctor for the routine medical and mental health check required by law before a driver’s license can be renewed.
Her daughter told the Moscow Times that when the doctor realized that Arap was the author of an article published in an opposition newspaper that was critical of conditions at a local psychiatric hospital, the doctor disappeared and returned with police, who bundled her into an ambulance and took her to the psychiatric ward of a local clinic for forced treatment.
A United Front spokeswoman called it state retaliation for participating in an opposition group, smacking of “the Soviet practice of locking dissenters in psychiatric clinics,” of which my friend Andrei Sh. is one of thousands of unwilling alumni (Chapt. 59, A dissident’s cry: Plus ca change…).
Gorbachev lambasted the U.S. last week for its “major strategic mistakes” and lauded President Putin’s for pushing Russia in the right direction.
Unfortunately, America used the collapse of the Soviet Union, for which Gorbachev set the stage, to try to establish a world super power, with disastrous consequences, Gorbachev said:
“What has followed are unilateral actions, what has followed are wars, what has followed is ignoring the U.N. Security Council, ignoring international law and ignoring the will of the people, even the American people.”
Right on, Gorby!
Present-day America “has made so many mistakes….”
I find only one fault with Gorbachev’s assessment of America as a war-mongering empire builder: He laid it at the feet of “present-day America.” He should have put the blame where it belongs: at the feet of George “Duh”-bya Bush Jr.
In the accounts I’ve read, Gorbachev came close, but stopped short of pounding the nail in, when he supported Putin’s call for a multi-polar world order, then added: “I don’t think the current president of the United States and his administration will be able to change the situation as it is developing now — it is very dangerous.”
Bush’s crusade to build an American empire to rule the world “is a massive strategic mistake: no single center can command the entire world, no one,” – not the G8 and certainly not the U.S., Gorbachev warned.
He also – rightfully in my opinion – laid the blame for the resurgence of cold war rhetoric on the Bush Administration’s doorstep.
The criticisms by America’s jingoists that I have read of Gorbachev’s assessment have not addressed his accusations against America under Bush, but only his glossing over of Putin’s human rights record.
So why, in expressing his support for Putin, does Gorbachev seem to endorse cracking down on dissidents, the state control of major news media – even though he himself is part owner of a major newspaper (Chapt. 204, Igor fantasy plummeting to finality?) -- and the selection of governors by the president rather than by the people of the region as “generally the right direction” for Russia?
Because, in the mind of the great majority of Russians, including Gorbachev, it seems, it makes sense and is the reasonable and Russian thing to do.
We’ve often pointed out here that the average Russian does not dream of unfettered freedom. He or she dreams of stability. And under Putin they have it as they haven’t had it for decades.
That Putin is pursuing the only logical course for Russia was underscored in a lesson with my lawyer student Alexei last week.
Alexei is one of the most thoughtful, well-read, and independent souls I’ve met in Russia. As a child in the then Soviet Union, he refused to join the Pioneers, a career-destroying act of defiance. He worked for several years with the Glasnost Defense Fund, one of the most effective civil rights groups in Russia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he always voted with the liberals and against the power structure. However, this time he’s supporting Putin or his designated successor – whoever he may be – in the presidential election next March. He echoed Gorbachev: “I think Putin is going in the right direction.”
Furthermore, he says the liberal parties and candidates – Kasyanov, Kasparov, Khakimada – have offered nothing in the way of a platform. They’re just against Putin.
We discussed the “Great Russia” party’s denial of registration by the Registration Service (Chapt. 259). “Don’t you think the Kremlin orchestrated that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that Putin is not allowing Kremlin opponents the opportunity to be heard and to participate as oppositionists in a presidential election?”
“Not really,” he said.
He noted the right-wing nationalist slant of the Great Russia party. They could become very popular and might conceivably even win. That would be much worse for Russia than Putin, Alexei reasoned. Thus Putin – in the manner of something of a relatively benign dictator -- was simply acting in Russia’s best interests to keep Russians from caving in to their worst basic instincts.
As undemocratic as it is, you can’t argue with the wisdom of it. I think back to the election of 1968. Wouldn’t the United States have been better off if a benign dictator had told the Republican Party they couldn’t field Nixon because he was catering to America’s worst instincts?
Wouldn’t America and the world be infinitely better off if, in the 2000 election, a benign dictator had told the Republican Party they couldn’t run Bush as a candidate because he appealed to the worst instincts of the American people?
Ah, if only we had a benign dictator. If only I were he!
A dictator – benign or not – is not the anathema to the Russian people that it is to Americans. From the very beginnings of the state they’ve always had a dictator. And after Ivan the Terrible, Stalin the Worse, and Yeltsin the bumbling drunk, Putin the benignly determined seems like not such a bad idea after all.
Solzhenitsyn was truly voicing the conviction of the Russian people (Chapt. 200, “Freedom is incompatible with our culture”) when he said the Russian Orthodox Church was right in pointing out “quite justly, that ‘realization of freedoms should not jeopardize the existence of Motherland or offend against people's religious feelings or ethnic sentiments’ and that sacred things are values on a par with ‘human rights.’”
And Solzhenitsyn went ahead to define Russian conservatism as “striving to preserve and uphold the best, the most humane and reasonable traditions that have justified themselves throughout centuries-old history.”
And that is exactly what the average Russian sees Putin as doing. So a few civil rights get kicked aside along the way and some crank gets tossed in a psych ward. So what? The important thing is for Mother Russia and its centuries of tradition to be preserved intact. And because Putin is much more liberal than most of his subjects (Chapt. 259), you might say he’s actually gently leading the way toward democracy – in a way that the Russian people can accept and live with.
Alexei, like many other observers, believes that whoever Putin’s successor is, he will be so much less charismatic and popular than Putin that he won’t have the country in the palm of his hand as does Putin, and that there will be fiercely competing ideas and forces in the Kremlin, with the result that:
“I actually think Russia may become more democratic after Putin.”
Well, we can always hope.
It’s things like this that make the Russian character so inscrutable to the Western mind.
Someone long ago said, “It’s Russia. Don’t even try to understand it. Just accept it.”
Russian prison population has risen again, but once again in their perennial race for first place, Russia comes in only a close second to the U.S. .
Five years ago, U.S. prison population soared to 2.3 million -- 702 inmates per 100,000 people -- the highest incarceration rate in the world. Last year the rate rose to 738/100,000. America has reached these daunting statitistics despite the level of violent crime dipping to its lowest since 1974.
The Russian Federal Prison Service announced last week that Russia had a mere 889,600 behind bars. Independent statitistics put the rate of Russian incarceration at 684/100,000 in February of this year.
What accounts for America’s towering incarceration rate? The Puritan laws against sin, of course. Sixty percent of those in federal prison were put there not for violent crimes, but for acts of sin -- violating drug laws, laws that were adopted with the solemn promise that they would reduce drug use.
The incarceration rate in Holland, where having harmless fun is encouraged and marijuana is legal, is 128 people per 100,000 residents.
Malcolm C. Young, executive director of “The Sentencing Project,” a non-profit organization which promotes greater use of alternatives to prison and more effective methods of reducing crime., puts it into more succinct focus:
"The relentless increases in prison and jail populations can best be explained as the legacy of an entrenched infrastructure of punishment that has been embedded in the criminal justice system over the last 30 years."
Spelled another way, that’s Puritanism at its most eloquent.
So how is the diplomatic crisis over the Lugovoi extradition battle playing in Russia’s equivalent of Peoria?
Moscow Times columnist Boris Kagarlitsky notes that “the average Russian isn’t all that interested in the Lugovoi case. Nor has he noticed that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has stepped down or heard about his successor, Gordon Brown. But lots of Russians surely want to visit Britain this summer.”
He goes on to tell an interesting story:
He needed to renew his British visa during the height of the crisis, and was a little apprehensive to see how visa rules might have changed as a result of the diplomatic tempest.
When he received his visa, he asked the travel agent if there had been any unusual problems in getting it.
“What are you talking about?” she asked incredulously. “It’s the same as usual. It has become even easier to receive visas to Britain. We haven’t had a single denial!”
“When I reminded her of the international crisis catching so much media attention, she acted even more astonished. She hadn’t had time to read the newspaper or watch the news, swamped as she was with visa documents from clients, running back and forth between her office and the British Embassy, and there were no signs of crisis whatsoever at the Embassy, she said. “
So was this, after all is said and done, queries Kagarlitsky, a manufactured crisis that boosted everyone involved? It helped Gordon Brown look firm and principled as the new British leader; It helped Putin further establish his pre-election credentials as a Russian leader not afraid to stand up to the West; and of course it helped Lugovoi, who has become something of a Russian hero as a result.
“Moreover, voters need some kind of show, some reason to talk about politics and to reflect deeply about Russia’s position in the world.
“In short,” he concluded, “everyone got exactly what they needed from this affair.”
What does the typical Russian look like? Check out this Time Magazine link to find out: http://www.fishki.net/comment.php?id=24032 and tell us on our Forum what you think.
Red Queen administrator Basil says, “Tell us what you think.” Okay, what do I think about these photos?
I think they represent a cross section of the Russian population, but they don’t give you a fair picture of what to expect to see – at least in Moscow. In Moscow, the people that you see daily are much more attractive than this. Both young Russian men and Russian women are much more beautiful than these pictures convey. Even the “students” here aren’t attractive. That’s not a fair picture.
Now, what do you think?
See also related pages:
Chapt. #261 - Present from Sochi: Dick bigger than his brain
Chapt. #259 - Igor headed home from Moldova
Chapt. #258 - Putin wraps himself in a constitution he doesn’t believe in
Chapt. #240 - Extreme poverty, one-holers, and pretty boys
Chapt. #204 - Igor fantasy plummeting to finality?
This day years ago:
2005-8-6: Chapt. #154 - Hiroshima: Are we victims too?
2006-8-6: Chapt. #212 - Conspiracy theory: Putin is American tool!
