MOSCOW, Dec. 7, 2003 -- In America, Pearl Harbor.
In Russia, Elections.
In my heart, sadness.
Misha sent me an e-mail this morning saying that he had applied for Czech citizenship. While his request was being considered, he said, he was sent to a refugee camp made up of half Chechens and half Ukrainians.
He said on his first day there, a gang of Chechens beat him unconscious and for three days he lay comatose in an intensive care unit. The doctors brought him around, and he is getting better. In the meantime, he says, he is under 24-hour government protection. He says he will remain there a long time – at least through Christmas and his birthday, Dec. 26, and New Year’s.
“I am guilty before you, Dane,” he wrote, alluding to his pocketing the 0 I gave him to pay the electric bill; “and I ask your forgiveness.”
And then the pitch:
“We probably won’t ever see each other again, and if possible, could you fulfill my last request: You know that my birthday will be soon, and then New Year's. I beg of you to send me 0 to Prague via Western Union with a code so the police can pick it up and bring it to me.
“I can’t write more because the doctors won’t let me. I am very grateful for the time we spent together. I hope you will forgive me.
“Farewell,
Misha.
Ah, my little loving, lying, stealing Misha.
I really think he can’t help himself. I think there’s a psychopathic element to his larceny. I don’t think there was any evil intent. I think he just wanted the money.
For what? To impress his friends; to set everybody up with drinks; to be a big frog in a very small pond.
And why did the Chechens beat the shit out of him?
Did they really? Yegor and Anton think he’s lying even now to give my heartstrings an extra yank. Maybe so. How can I prove it one way or the other?
But maybe they did. If so, why?
Misha is first of all tactless. He says what he thinks. Secondly, there’s no love lost between him and the Russian “blacks,” the people of the Caucuses. In a fit of anger before he left, he shouted: “I hate everybody from the Caucuses!” Anton and Yegor are both from the Caucuses. I had to intervene to keep Anton from beating the shit out of him then and there. Misha later apologized to me and to Yegor and Anton. “I don’t know why I said that, ’cause it’s not true,” he told me.
But maybe he does after all harbor some anti-“black” prejudice. Most Russians do. And after what the Russians have done to the Chechens over the past five years, Chechens hate Russians with every fiber of their body; and if Misha so much as made a wrong gesture, a wrong comment, a wrong anything, it would have been enough to set them on him with a vengeance. On the other hand, maybe he did nothing. Maybe they were just taking out their seething wrath on him.
On the other hand, maybe he’s lying again and nobody did anything.
In any case, he’s says he’s lying in a hospital, well cared for and protected.
But can they protect him from himself? I couldn’t.
I wrote him back saying I was sorry to hear about his troubles. “Of course, I forgive you,” I wrote, “but I’m very disappointed and don’t understand why you continued to steal from me when it wasn’t necessary.”
I also told him I couldn’t send him any money but that I’d be in Prague Christmas and his birthday. “I’d like to see you,” I wrote.
A few days later I got his reply:
“The hospital is located in Bruntal, which is about as far away from Prague as St. Peterburg is from Moscow. For that reason, I think it will be difficult for you to see me. But if I find the means, I will try to come to Prague.
I will never trust him after this, though I will always worry about him and love him. But he can’t come home again.
It used to be that one of the neatest things about being in Russia was that you weren’t besieged with Christmas. My ex, Jim, and I used to fondly wish that we could go somewhere where we wouldn’t be beaten about the head and shoulders with “Jingle Bells,” “Joy to the World,” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.” And it used to be so pleasant here in December, when the Western Christmas was ignored and all you had to deal with was a few decorated “New Year’s trees.”
That’s all changed now. With Moscow’s recovery from the crash of ’98 and rapid increase in the number of middle-class Russians, the holiday buying season is becoming as obnoxious here as it already was in the States. TV commercials to buy “New Year’s gifts” are incessant.
The dollar – or ruble -- hunting season has now even advanced to American Thanksgiving weekend. Which, considering the fact that their climax is New Year’s and not Christmas Day, means their silly season is a week longer even than ours.
This morning, my concentration on the NYT puzzle in the Moscow Times was interrupted – I kid you not – by the blare of Jingle Bells, Joy to the World, and Here Comes Santa Clause, live from my courtyard. Yes, there was a traveling kiddie’s show to drum up customers for Christmas – or rather New Year’s -- shopping.
The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has for the past two years decreed that every retail business in Moscow must put up New Year’s decorations by Dec. 1 or pay a hefty fine.
Aaaaah!
The colored lights and trees at the Marriott Grand Hotel, where Dubya stayed when he was here a few weeks ago, went up on the Thanksgiving weekend. So did many others.
The election results are in, and it’s even worse than most analysts predicted: Putin’s party, “United Russia,” won big-time, with more than 30 percent of the vote. What’s more, two parties that the Kremlin has supported behind the scenes as a means of taking votes from Communists – “Homeland” and the idiot Zhironovsky’s LPDR – between them took another 20%. The communists were reduced to 10% of the vote, and the two democratic parties – "Apple” and “Union of Right Forces,” didn’t even pass the 5% minimum to make it into the Duma.
Vote fraud is being charged – and of course there was. But nothing will change. And the bottom line is that the vast majority of Russians really do support Putin. They’re not sure what he stands for – he refuses to make campaign promises; but they support him because whatever else he is, he’s for law-‘n’-order. Like Amerika under Nixon/Agnew.
So Putin now has a clear majority, a “mandate,” to do anything he wants. Many worry that this will include amending the constitution to eliminate the eight-year presidential limit. Putin is promising that “I won’t touch the constitution,” but he’s broken lots of promises already, and many think this one will be broken too.
On the other hand, my student Oleg at Corning thinks it’s a good thing that Putin won big, because Putin, he says, wants to build a democratic state and he needs that kind of support to do it. Echoing almost everybody else, he reminds “there was no democracy under Yeltsin.” There was “democracy” for the oligarchs, but not for the ordinary person.
Though he voted for the democrats – the Union of Right Forces (SPS) – Oleg says it was Putin, not the democrats, who brought an end to random police demands for identification on the streets of Russian cities. An exception is still made for the dark-skinned citizens from the Caucuses – “war is war, after all” – but no longer do ordinary Russians have to fork over their identification papers to every cop on the street and pay bribes for imagination violations.
Another evidence, Oleg says, that Putin is building a democracy, is that he is making life easier and more normal for the ordinary person. He wants to take money from the oligarchs and redistribute it.
My reply to Oleg was, “Maybe you’re right. But Putin now has enormous power, and I think it all depends on what he does with that power. There’s no more efficient or better government than a ‘benign dictatorship,’ but how long will any dictatorship remain ‘benign’? Power still corrupts, and absolute power still corrupts absolutely. So the question is will Putin be able to resist the enticing lure of corruption that comes with the absolute power he is gathering around himself – especially since there is a lot of evidence that he was already knee deep in corruption from his St. Peterburg days.”
I’m personally very skeptical. The horror stories about SBS Chief Putin’s involvement in the September ’99 apartment building bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk that provided the excuse for the full-scale attack against Chechnya, which rocketed Putin’s popularity into virtual idolatry, still persist.
An event occurring a few days after the Moscow bombing -- which killed 90 people -- leaves little doubt about the role of Putin’s SBS: A couple in Ryazan, 160 miles southeast of Moscow, returning to their apartment one night spotted figures furtively moving in and out of the basement of their building.
They called the police, who found a detonator, sacks of what they determined were high explosives, and a timer set for 5:30 the next morning. The police investigation was zeroing in on the SBS when, two days later, an FSB spokesman announced on TV that the Ryazan bombing had been a practice drill to test civil defense capabilities. The sacks, the spokesman said, had been filled with sugar!
The police investigation was halted.
Since that time, several doubters of the official story who persisted in investigating it have been silenced – either by murder or beatings.
The circumstantial evidence of SBS and Putin’s involvement is overwhelming.
One unexpected and – even for Putin – unwanted result of the election is an increase in nationalists in the Duma. Zhirinovsky is, of course, the rightest of the right. But Sergei Glazyev, head of the Homeland party, is not far behind. Both of them, like Dubya, are firm practitioners of the art of bolstering domestic support by attacking foreign enemies, and Bush’s alarmingly belligerent Amerika is merely stoking the Russian nationalists’ robust appetite for paranoia.
My personal concern is that this anti-American sentiment could be built upon to the point where the Duma – with Putin hurrying to catch up so he can “lead” – will make it difficult or impossible for the likes of me to remain and work here. Which would mean I would have to leave my “paradise begot in hell” and return to the Bush outback.
I deeply grieve to even think of the possibility – both because of my great personal happiness and romantic attachments here and because of the disgust of having to live daily with the consequence of the Bushist madness. He makes Putin look like a statesman. And though Putin’s colors as an emerging dictator are increasingly evident, I at least don’t have to apologize for him. He’s not my president.
Unfortunately, Bush is.
And with the U.S. democrats looking more and more likely to self-destruct with Howard Dean – as they did with McGovern in 1972 – it looks like, barring some miracle, he will continue to be until 2008.
By then maybe he can amend the constitution, and both he and Putin can rule the world for all eternity – as long as it lasts.
Chapt. 29 – 1938 words
Columns :: Misha, Elections, dampen “Joy to the World”
MOSCOW, Dec. 7, 2003 -- Comments: Ratings: 
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