MOSCOW, November 19, 2007 -- My foreboding (Chapt. 270, Kremlin clans battle over rights to smuggle, launder bucksi) was warranted. I’m not going to be able to get rid of Andrei and Sergei. In the meantime, Igor has found a job in St. Pete and is renting an apartment there. Andrei announced he was going to go with me to visit Zhorik in Novosibirsk, and I’m not sure Igor will even ride on the same train with him.
Andrei had another encounter with the drug cops Saturday as he was going shopping at the local market. They took the 600 rubles – about $ 25 – I had given him to buy groceries and reminded us that we’re going to continue having to deal with them until we move; so we’re now focusing on getting out of this apartment before I have to pay next month’s rent.
Andrei and Sergei have promised they will find the apartment and help me pack and move, so their presence may be justified. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have to be moving if it weren’t for them; but the truth is, I want to get out of this wretchedly ugly dump.
Zhorik hadn’t communicated in two days, and finally sent me an SMS Saturday night that his mobile phone had broken. It cost 100 bucksi, twice what I wanted to spend for a used cell phone, but he said it was just the phone he wanted and he would not lose it or let it get stolen or broken, and that he would still have it when he got out of the army.
He hasn’t yet asked me for money to replace it, but he will soon, and I will tell him I’ll send him enough to buy the cheapest phone that works and no more. I’ve lost track of the number of phones he’s lost, given away, had stolen, or broken.
Sergei has managed to pick up a job as courier. He’s excited and alive again. He envisions us living together and maybe reviving sex and living together as a couple. He promises he will give me part of the money he earns and open a bank account and start saving the rest.
He confided that “Andrei is my brother, and I don’t want to throw him out, but I’m going to encourage him to go back to Stavropol. When I earn some money I’ll give him some to go back and get a new passport (he lost his old one, without which he can’t get work) so he can find a job there.”
Sunday night, just as I was getting used to the idea that Igor has moved on and has probably already forgotten me, and that maybe I will settle down with Sergei until Zhorik returns to the scene next June, I got a phone call from Igor reiterating how much he missed me. “I think about you all the time.” He’s gotten a job and an apartment, but “if you can get rid of Andrei and Sergei so we can live together, call me and I’ll come immediately. It’s my dream.”
“Thank you, honey, I’m glad you haven’t forgotten me.”
“As long as I’m alive, I won’t forget you,” he promised. “I really miss you.
“Some day we’ll be together again,” I promised. But frankly I don’t see how.
In the meantime, he invited me to come visit him in St. Pete and to stay as long as I can. I miss him enormously, though I’ve been getting a full night’s sleep since he’s been gone, without him coming to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning and putting his headphones on to listen to Russian rap, which is as obnoxious and as loud as its American cousin.
My blood pressure has also dropped to remain consistently in the one hundred tens and low 20s. But I haven’t prevented a single case of prostate cancer since he left. My dick is withering away.
The pre-election circus continues to entertain. The latest act is that Putin’s jugend are gearing up to counter any potential “orange revolution.” At a time when the polls continue to insist that Putin has 70-80% support and that most Russians will vote for whoever he tells them to vote for, the Kremlin’s continued preoccupation with and draconian counter measures against opposition in any form continues to confound.
We have to again ask, what’s going on? What is he so deathly afraid of?
A hint comes in a column in the Moscow Times this week by Richard Lourie, an expat author and journalist. He reminds of the motorist uprising in Moscow and other cities which removed from the streets the blue lights and sirens that all duma members and every other bureaucrat that fancied himself a big shot used to put on his car that enabled him to ignore traffic rules and tie up traffic.
“There are indications of deepening resentment among the working class,” Lourie wrote. “The divide between the new rich and everyone else is too vast and glaring. As writer Viktor Strogalshchikov put it: In Soviet times, a big shot had a better car than a working stiff, but not 20 cars more. There is something fundamentally insulting in the discrepancy.
“Grumbling can already be heard. And if there is one thing Russian rulers have always feared, it’s the people.”
Food prices have been skyrocketing in recent months. Ordinary Russians are getting angry. And perhaps this is the thing the Kremlin is scared witless of: A spontaneous uprising around election time that would suddenly turn all Putin’s professed support against him and bring defeat at the polls.
This would explain the puzzling overkill of any political voice that is raised against him. He’s determined not to permit the emergence of any figure around which the enraged masses might rally.
Russians taking to the street is hard to imagine right now, but Russia’s history is fraught with unpredicted uprisings sparked among an angry populace pushed too hard.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #272 - Contrived vote paves way for endless Putin rule
Chapt. #270 - Kremlin clans battle over rights to smuggle, launder bucksi
This day years ago:
2003-11-19: Chapt. #26 - A day to ponder the worthless constitution
