Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 268 – 1,735 words
Columns :: Beautiful students lighten heavy class load

MOSCOW, October 9, 2007 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Full schedule gets fuller
Igor, officially an “invalid,” at last headed home?
Afternoon with dissident Andrei
Over 6,000 Russians are a century old!
Army reforming? Probably not
Politkovskaya’s murder hasn’t curbed press attacks



MOSCOW, October 9, 2007 -- My impossibly full teaching schedule continues to get impossibly fuller, which is both pleasing and dismaying. Pleasing, because it means more and more bucksi; dismaying, because there’s simply a limit to my time and energy, and I don’t really want to get rid of any of my students. Well, maybe one.

Andrei from DHL has already referred two students to me, one of whom last week asked if I could handle yet another. A day or so later a woman named Katherine called. Our first lesson is for one of my sparse slots at 11:30 on Wednesday. My lawyer student Alexei asked Tuesday night if I could take one more, a young university student son of a friend of his named Artyom. I sandwiched him in on Sunday between Maxim’s brother Alex and Alex from DHL.

When Artyom showed up at my door, I nearly lost my English. He was close to 6 ft. 5 in., very handsome and equally engaging. We liked each other so much it was almost embarrassing. “That was really cool,” he said when he left an hour and a half later. Unfortunately, he only has time for one lesson a week.

Saturday morning another Alexei called and said the Inst. of Diplomacy had recommended me for private lessons. He will start lessons on Saturday and Sunday mornings this coming weekend.

And finally, the piece de resistance! Ivan, my to-die-for 18 yr.-old tall, skinny fantasy from the Inst. of Diplomacy last year (Chapt. 222, Shtokman, Sakhalin, just part of Putin’s defense), sent me an e-mail Saturday night asking if I had any free time “to give private lessons to me.” I wasn’t about to turn him away, especially since I think he may actually be gay. We met Sunday evening at the Chocoladnitsa around the corner and decided to have lessons twice a week. Our first lesson was yesterday.

And finally, my Inst. of Diplomacy classes start tomorrow night. A couple of the students are very bright and very cute. I think I will enjoy them.


Igor’s epilepsy has officially rendered him an “invalid,” qualifying him for a Moldovan state pension as a person unable to work, he reported when we finally got in phone contact Friday night. He’s been receiving free treatment, and said he would be able to come back to me in “five or six days.”

Andrei said Igor called a gay mutual friend of theirs in St. Pete on two different occasions three or four weeks ago and asked him to send money for him and Denis to come home on. In the meantime, in a phone conversation a couple of weeks ago I told Igor that Denis could not under any circumstances come back to this apartment, to which he replied, “they won’t let him leave for a long time,” meaning -- I think -- that because of his physical deterioration from drug addiction, he will be a long time recovering.

Lots of questions that won’t be answered till Igor finally returns. Is he really unable to work or is that an administrative nicety? I suspect the latter. Will he be eligible for a pension in Russia? Almost certainly not. Why did he ask Andrei’s friend for money for him and Denis to come to Moscow, especially if he knew Denis wasn’t coming back?

He again signed an SMS a few nights ago “your Igor,” and he has repeatedly told me how much he misses me. I hope so. My withered tonsils need a good shot of gism, and my withering dick needs a good shot of stiff inspiration.

In the meantime, Zhorik and I remain in almost constant SMS communication from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed. On Saturday afternoon he went to the Russian baths again, and on Saturday night he said he was getting drunk with his barracks buddies. “Are you coming in December?” he asked. “I miss you, Dane. I love you very much.”

In a little over two and a half months, we will see each other in Novosibirsk.


Once and future dissident Andrei Sh. came over Saturday afternoon, the last Saturday I will have free for some time because of my Saturday afternoon Inst. of Diplomacy classes.

“When is the regime going to collapse?” I asked, half kiddingly. “I think before long, actually,” he replied somberly. “When you have to spend as much energy maintaining as tight a control as Putin is spending on Russia, there’s no energy left to run the system. It’s a law of physics.”

While inflation is spiraling, despite official figures, the income of the peasants in the provinces remains abysmally low. Everybody is well aware of the poverty of the pensioners, but even employed automobile factory workers only make a little over $ 200 a month, he pointed out.

“What’s going to happen when they simply no longer have the money to survive?” he asked. “Of course, there’s always the possibility they will just quietly die.

“Russia is a dying country,” he added. “And it’s the Russians’ own fault. They let it happen.”

He said there is talk of Liberty Fund, where we both worked when we first met, being revived, and of his resuming work with them as a translator. If it doesn’t happen, he said, he will leave the country. Now that his mother is dead (Chapt. 248, Dark suspicions worsen personal tragedy, 249, “Illegal Moldovans” threaten apartment crisis), he has no reason to stay, especially since the KGB>FSB sabotages every job he finds, making it impossible for him to make a living here.

Where will he go? He hasn’t decided yet. He still has his international passport and there are lots of places that don’t require visas from Russians.

“Be sure to keep in touch,” I told him, “I’ll come visit you.”


Despite Russia’s low life expectancy, there are over 6,000 centenarians in the country, many of whom still remember the last tsar, according to statistics cited by the Moscow Times. Most of them, of course, are women.

They were officially recognized on Oct. 1, International Day of Older Persons, an observance which the MT says “has been celebrated world-wide since 1999” by people 65 and older, although I had never heard of it.

A grave discovered in August may at last solve the mystery of what happened to the 13-year-old Tsarevich and his sister, whose remains were not found with those of the rest of the family. Preliminary dental and bone analyses confirm that they may indeed be those of the missing royalty. But genetic tests are difficult because the bodies were also burned.


Something is happening with the army! The head recruiting honcho announced last Monday that from now on there would be a member of the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committees, which has been a steadfast and unflinching critic of military atrocities in the past, on the draft board of every recruiting office.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Mothers’ Committees haven’t heard anything about it.

“We wouldn’t be against sitting on the draft board; we’ve been asking for this for years,” says an official in the Moscow office, “but so far we haven’t heard anything.”

At the same time, the defense minister announced that the Russian Army will soon be ready for 12-month tours of duty – probably just about the time Zhorik’s 24-month tour ends in June.

Or is this just more window dressing as part of the run-up to the election? Probably.

Despite his alleged 80% popularity, Putin seems to remain morbidly afraid of a spontaneous uprising over one of the many deplorable conditions of Russian life – anything from pensions to road rage – and seems to be rushing around keeping brush fires from getting started anywhere; and maybe the sudden inclusion of the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees is just another brush fire he’s trying to keep from spontaneously combusting.


It’s been a year since Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the elevator of her apartment building after returning from Saturday afternoon grocery shopping (Chapt. 221, 20-year-old dream headed for Moscow – and me!), reminds a Moscow Times op-ed piece. It was a tragic event which, had the Kremlin heeded the International condemnation that followed, “would have set Russia’s besieged press environment on a different course.”

Instead, note Christopher Walker, director of studies at Freedom House, and Robert Orttung, a senior fellow at the Jefferson Institute, “the crackdown on Russian news media has continued unabated, and if anything, with even greater ferocity.”

In addition to the long list of assaults against the press detailed in these columns over the past year, the Kremlin has also launched a sustained attack against the air waves of Radio Liberty and BBC. In fact, BBC has already been taken off the air.

The authors note that freedom of the press and freedom of the individual typically go hand in hand. As the former is kicking its last in the run-up to the next presidential election, it’s not hard to imagine that the days of the latter are also numbered – to the extent it ever existed.


More shades of the Soviet past: In Yekaterinburg, when an elevator got stuck in a 16-story apartment house – an alarmingly common occurrence in Russia’s tens of thousands of ancient elevators – the daughter of one of the passengers who was suffering an asthma attack asked neighbors to pry open the elevator doors. They obliged.

Also trapped in the elevator were two small children, a pregnant woman, and five others.

When the asthma sufferer collapsed on the floor, according to the MT, a 4-year-old boy became hysterical at the sight of the attack. Explained a neighbor: “Not long ago his mother died in front of him…and now a new shock. Can you imagine what the child has gone through?”

The asthma sufferer wound up in the hospital. The trauma also led to hospital admission for pre-birth complications for the 7-month-pregnant woman.

These things can happen even in civilized countries. But only in Russia would the elevator company threaten to sue the trapped passengers for damaging their elevator. The elevator belonged to the state, after all! The people trapped in it were only people, and had no business damaging state property.


See also related pages:
Chapt. #269 - Zhorik goes berserk and I pick up the tab
Chapt. #267 - Russian Sputnik launched 50 years ago
Chapt. #249 - “Illegal Moldovans” threaten apartment crisis
Chapt. #222 - Shtokman, Sakhalin, just part of Putin’s defense


This day years ago:
2003-10-9: Chapt. #11 - Not prejudiced, “we just don’t like them”