MOSCOW, October 2, 2007 -- A lackluster week in Russia: News seems focused on the events in the political arena and alludes in reverential tones to the coming transition, meaning specifically Putin’s mystery-shrouded intentions.
Who’s the real candidate going to be? What will be new Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov’s real role? What’s the hidden meaning in the creation of the new cabinet this past week?
But the bottom line is, who really cares? Only those with a vested interest in the outcome: i.e., whose fortunes will be enhanced or soured by one choice or another. To the average Russian – and to me -- it makes absolutely no difference. The country will still be run by, for, and of the KGB-packed Kremlin.
In the meantime, Putin seems to be using the forthcoming election as an excuse to crack down even harder on dissension, opposition, and protests.
The latest “protection” against such a threat is the announcement that the swelling band of Russian teenage thugs known as “Nashi,” Putin’s youth, which have been – not inappropropriately -- analogized to the “Hitler’s Youth” of Nazi Germany in the ’30s, will “help” police patrol the streets of Moscow in the December elections to keep peace.
“We don’t know what the opposition will plan,” Oleg Lobkov, a Nashi leader heading up the volunteer project, told the Moscow Times, “so we have to be ready.”
Nashi contends the country is under threat from its political opposition, groups like The Other Russia, a coalition of opposition political voices which include former chess champ Garry Kasparov and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who plan an opposition march in Moscow on October 7, next Sunday.
“It’s no secret,” Lobkov told the MT, that Nashi patrols will be mobilized for the event.”
The Moscow Times also reported that:
Asked separately what specific threats the patrols would head off, teenage Nashi activists Svetlana, Yegor, and Anastasia gave identical answers.
“The opposition wants to destabilize Russia,” each of them answered.
Some activists said they couldn’t name the threat, but that it was important to protect the stability of the country. Others shrugged and walked away.
The head of the youth wing of the liberal Yabloko party called the formation of the Nashi patrols “extremely dangerous….When young, energetic people are politically indoctrinated and given the backing of the state, they feel invincible. And that is very dangerous.”
So it’s clear that anyone who opposes the Putin election script is trying to destabilize the country and is thus a direct threat which must be defended against. And the best defense is a good offense. Thus they must be attacked.
A couple of weeks ago a pensioner was arrested and charged with extremism when he protested the abysmal pension he was receiving. He obviously was trying to destabilize Russia.
The real destabilization, of course, is coming from the likes of Nashi, whose Lobkov just last week was part of a Nashi gang who disrupted a book-signing event in a Moscow bookstore by liberal former Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov. They taunted him and threw copies of his hard-bound Confessions of a Rebel at him and aides before they were finally hustled out by bookstore guards.
The new prime minister is talking tough, berating his cabinet for not getting things done and ordering one top-level financial bureaucrat to go to Sakhalin Island, where a recent earthquake destroyed many homes, and not come back until the hapless victims had received the money the government had promised them.
Since his former job as head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service involved policing money laundering, there is a lot of speculation that he is going to get tough on corruption, always a good ploy just before an election.
And not a moment too soon, it seems. Transparency International, an international monitoring group which tracks corruption around the world, put Russian down 22 notches, from 121 last year to 143 this year, about even with Togo, Gambia, and Indonesia.
According to the Moscow Times, Yelena Panfilova, the Russian director of Transparency International, was asked to evaluate the measures taken by outgoing Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov.
“I would love to evaluate the anti-corruption activity of Prime Minister Fradkov,” she said, “but unfortunately, I never noticed any. So it’s hard for me to give a definitive example of what he did.”
Zubkov has promised, or threatened, to set up a special anti-corruption task force.
But how seriously should that be taken? Not very, says Aslund Anders, senior fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics in Wash., D.C. “If he were truly serious about fighting corruption,” Anders says, “he would not have accepted the reappointment of Putin’s worst cronies in the government” as part of his new cabinet.
But that’s another story.
The endemic corruption problem in Russia is that business and government are built on it. It not only greases the wheels, it is impossible to get a major contract, either in government or business, without it. My student Andrei, who is CEO of an $ 18 million IT business, gave me half a dozen examples last week of how impossible it is to function without paying huge bribes to the bureaucrat in charge of granting you permission to do what you’re already entitled to do anyway; and of how even contracts in business are routinely padded to make sure that the guy who gives you the contract is amply rewarded for his good sense.
As an example of the size of some of the bribes, a Defense Ministry auditor was arrested last week on charges of trying to extort nearly $ 10 million from an engineering company that makes engines for Lockheed Martin in return for reinstating the company’s export license, which the same auditor revoked back in March.
And a lackluster week in my life: Igor is still in Moldova, being treated for, he said, his throat, his ribs, and his head. He also had another bout of epilepsy.
In the meantime, Andrei and Sergei have launched a “hate-Igor” campaign. I know that Sergei is very jealous of Igor, and Andrei is feigning fury because he says Igor went off to Moldova with some of his clothes.
He has threatened to “beat” Igor when he comes. I’m afraid I’m headed for a show-down: I will make it clear to Andrei and Sergei that they are not to touch Igor. For one thing, we are committed to each other, and I will protect him at all costs. I know he has never lied to or cheated me. He has already received serious trauma to the head, and another blow could do irreparable damage.
I will warn them that if they strike him, I will immediately call the police. Igor will be registered in this apartment. Neither Sergei nor Andrei is registered in Moscow. Furthermore, Andrei has last his passport, and has been using Sergei’s. Neither of them can afford a confrontation with the police.
I will tell them that if they can’t live with Igor, it is they who will have to move, not Igor.
In the meantime, Zhorik and I continue to whisper sweet nothings through the ether. Today, when I returned to the apartment after my class with Information Plus, which we have resumed while students Andrei and Masha are vacationing in Crete, Zhorik SMS’d me: “Why haven’t you written? I miss you.”
Later, while I was giving my Potemkin U. Organizational Behavior class their midterm exam, he asked out of the blue if I missed him. “Of course, honey,” I wrote back. “You can’t even imagine how much I miss you.”
“Do you know what I would like right now?” he answered.
“What?”
“To be beside you, sitting on a bench, drinking beer.”
“How I love you and miss you,” I wrote back.
“Me too,” he replied; “very deeply.”
And so we bide the days and weeks till we are together again.
The Russian word for pain in the ass is, logically enough, “gemoroi” the Russian pronunciation of hemorrhoid.
And Saturday night I was reminded of just how apt a description it is when the maddening burning and itching began. I can’t go on like this, I told myself. I’ve got to find something.
Rummaging frantically through the medicine cabinet, I discovered a tube of “Preparation H” ointment. Unbelievable. But where did it come from? And then I remembered that one of the sensible things I did when I came here 10 years ago was to bring a lot of over-the-counter medicines for anything that might, so to speak, pop up.
What’s really remarkable is that even after 10 years it worked! An unsolicited testimonial from the Red Queen in Moscow.
If only some of the other “gemorois” in Russia were so easily gotten rid of!
Fifty years ago this week the Soviet Union introduced the space age with the launch into space orbit of an 86.3 kg lump of metal with a radio and four antennae.
The far-reaching consequences of their awesome achievement was totally lost on Nikita Khrushchev and the other leaders of the Soviet Union, according to a recollection in the Moscow Times this morning.
The launch occurred on the 4th of October. A downplayed “Notice from Tass” on the right margin of the front page of the Oct. 5, 1957, edition of Pravda casually mentioned that the Earth’s first artificial satellite, called Sputnik, or fellow traveler, had been launched the previous day.
The rest of the world, including the U.S., was not so laid back about the feat. It lit the fire under the U.S. space program that ultimately put the first man on the moon. In the meantime, we wrung our collective hands about what else the Soviet technocrats might launch – nuclear weapons perhaps?
At the time, I was by coincidence studying Russian in the Army Language School in Monterey, CA, and from time to time at a certain time of evening during the 26 days it stayed in orbit we could spot the pinpoint of reflected light from the tiny scrap of space hardware.
It was an awesome, if uncomfortable, feeling and made the language we were studying suddenly seem even more significant.
One of the amazing things about the Soviet satellite launch was that it occurred at all. Sergei Karolyov, the brilliant Soviet scientist who brought it into fruition was nearly killed by Stalin’s thugs during the “Great Purge” of 1938.
He had become the deputy chief of the Jet Propulsion Research Institute (RNII) when he was dragged out of his apartment in the middle of the night by agents of the NKVD. He was beaten until he confessed to “subversion” and sentenced to 10 years in the notorious Kolyma Siberian gulag, where conditions were so inhuman that one-third of the population died every year. His jaw was broken, he lost all his teeth and developed a heart condition as a result of the torture, but at least he survived – the only RNII scientist who did out of the dozens who were imprisoned there.
The renowned Soviet airplane designer, Andrei Tupolev, finally interceded on his behalf and he was allowed to again pursue his dreams of rocketry, but only under continued prison-like conditions in what was essentially a slave labor camp for scientists and intellectuals. Only in 1944 was his earlier conviction finally reversed and he again became a free citizen.
Despite his wretched treatment and constant brush with death, he continued as a patriotic scientist dedicated to serving the Motherland.
When in 1957 the Americans started talking about launching a space satellite to observe the Geophysical Year, Karolyev decided to try to beat them to the punch. The rocket was designed in less than a month and launched on a rocket that had only been successfully fired one time before.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The final irony was Karalyov’s death. One of my Inst. of Diplomacy students brought an article in earlier this year which recounted all of the above and noted that despite his scientific training, Karolyev was a superstitious Russian who had a special lucky coin that he carried with him at all times.
When he accidentally left it home one day, he became so frightened that without it he might die that he suffered a fatal heart attack.
There was one other development referred to in my internet research which obliquely touched my life. The Soviets brought a bunch of low-level German V-2 rocket scientists to Russia to help Russia develop its rocket technology. The reason they were low-level is that the U.S. had nabbed all the leaders of German rocketry, including Wernher von Braun, in a secret operation code-named Operation Paperclip.
After I completed my Russian language studies at the Army Language School I was assigned to the Army Counter-Intelligence unit in Frankfurt. Many of the older agents there had worked on Operation Paperclip and I frequently heard whispered references to it.
Von Braun, the project’s major target, of course became the head of the U.S. rocket development program and when I was assigned by my newspaper to cover the early space launches at Cape Canaveral, von Braun conducted many of the press conferences. He was the only news source I ever asked for an autograph.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #266 - Busy sched, Zhorik’s, Igor’s absence, curb love life
This day years ago:
2005-10-2: Chapt. #168 - Sergei returns – only slightly damaged
