[dt]MOSCOW, February 23, 2004 – [/dt][ch]It’s Red Army Day in Russia[/ch], the time for celebrating the day in 1918 when Bolshevik Defense Minister Leon Trotsky signed a piece of paper officially creating the Red Army.
My student Valera says he doesn’t understand why the nation marks the anniversary of the creation of the Army of a regime which wreaked so much ghastly destruction before it crumbled a little more than a decade ago.
And officially, they don’t. Like most of the other Soviet commemorations, the name has been formally sterilized to honor the “Defender of the Fatherland.” But few people take note of the update and still call it Red Army Day.
[ch]More important for most was Mazlanitsa,[/ch] whose observance ended yesterday. It’s a celebration of the end of winter. A bit previous, unfortunately, since it’s still below freezing. But still a solid week of sunshine – the first of 2004 – has lifted the winter spirits of nearly everyone and given convincing evidence that spring is about to.
Russia celebrates March 1 as the first day of spring. It’s a little hard for me to get used to, since we often have some bitterly cold weather before the spring equinox, which marks the first day of spring in the West.
There are big celebrations of Mazlanitsa. Straw effigies of “Winter” are created and set on fire, and everyone pigs out on blini, the Russian version of the French crepe. Last night Anton made, not blini, but the traditional Ossetian aladi, which are much more like our pancakes. It was our contribution to Mazlanitsa.
Our population had dipped to only four last night – [Anton], Seryozh, [Yuri], and me. [Yegor] left a week ago to go to his aunt’s in Sandova in the Tver District to take more documents necessary for getting his Russian citizenship. He was only going to stay for a couple of days, but his aunt wanted him to stay longer.
He is such a dear person. This last week was financially a little tight. It wasn’t really, but I didn’t want to take any more out of my pension account and all my private students were either on business trips, sick, or preparing for career exams, so there was no money coming in from the side. English Exchange payday wasn’t till Friday, so I was watching my money very carefully. As usual looking for the silver lining, Yegor comforted me with, “one thing about my being gone: You won’t have to buy food for me.”
“I’d rather spend the money.”
But he had to go, and there have been many diversions. Sasha was here Tuesday night. Both Seryozhes were here Wednesday night, and my Seryozh stayed Thursday night. Sasha came back Friday night. Saturday evening Andrei Y. and beautiful Valodya dropped in and we played grab-dick, but nothing more, and I slept alone that night. Then Seryozh returned last night and we had another lovely evening of aladi, blackjack, and sex.
Seryozh landed a job last week as a merchandiser for Wimm-Bill-Dann, a very successful Russian juice and dairy products company. He will make $ 400 a month, which is quite good for a merchandiser. Anton, for instance, only makes $ 200.
Seryozh’s new goal is to become a manager. I think he’s given up the idea of architecture. He showed us the design of a house he had drawn the plans for, and to get to the only bathroom, you had to go through the master bedroom.
So he wants to be a manager instead.
He hopes to visit Israel this summer. His mother lives there, though he has had no contact with her for years. She gave birth to him while she was a student here, and her mother made her put Seryozh in the orphanage because neither her mother nor she could afford to keep and raise him. Seryozh doesn’t know if he will see her. He is going to visit an uncle.
[ch]I have a new English Exchange student[/ch], Ruslan, an adorable minion of a company called Basic Aluminum, which I think is really the Siberian Aluminum Company. He is probably 24 and I could feel the warmth of his soul when we met. He was not at all what I expected of a Russian aluminum company robot. He was very kind, respectful, and friendly. His first class was on Wednesday, and I was disappointed when his secretary called and said he had had to go out of town and would not be here for his Friday lesson.
My administrator at English Exchange also told me that he had liked me very, very, very much. I think we will have a very close relationship. We sat side by side at a conference table for the lesson, and I was leaning over and sharing his textbook. My leg was pressing very hard into something that was pressing back equally hard. I thought it was the leg of the table, but I looked down and discovered it was the leg of the Ruslan. Interesting.
[ch]For the first time in my life, I spoke to an audience[/ch] about the coming oil catastrophe. One of my colleagues at the Institute of Diplomacy, Margarita, asked me if I, as a native American, would talk to her Friday night Business English class about something, preferably economics. I don’t know jack-shit about economics, but it occurred to me that as closely intertwined as are economics and energy, it might stretch.
So my talk was entitled, “Four Reasons Why the Invincible U.S. Economy Is About to Crash (and Take Some Others With It).
The first reason is what Bush has done to the economy. We are now committed to a national debt of $ 344 trillion, with no hope whatsoever of ever being able to pay it back. Social Security will go bankrupt; and as my nephew Dennis says, take with it the stock market, wiping out what’s left of the American economy.
The second was the almost imperceptible transformation from a nation state to a segment in a global economy, where jobs move around the world to find the cheapest labor. It, too, will take its toll on the American economy. I quoted an Atlantic Magazine article noting that over half of the world’s largest economies are corporations, not countries; and the world’s 500 biggest corporations control 70% of the world’s trade. As a side note, there are $ 8 trillion worth of goods being traded each year, but only 288 trillion dollars pushing them. One can only surmise the significance of the 280 trillion dollar difference between the value of the goods and the amount of money chasing them.
The third, of course, is energy and what that’s going to do to the world economy; but the U.S. will be hardest hit because it is the most energy dependent – 5% of the world’s population slurping up 25% of the world’s energy.
Because Russia has the largest oil reserves outside of OPEC, I told them I thought Russia would be better off than most countries, but I advised them to keep their ties to their grandmas in the villages of Russia, “because you might need them some day.” In fact, many – probably most – of Russia’s millions of peasants are largely unaffected by availability of petroleum-based energy and have little or none of it themselves, so they didn’t know when the energy bubble appeared and won’t know when it bursts – unless, of course, radiation from the atomic wars that may be fought over what little energy is left destroys them.
And finally, as if there weren’t enough to worry about, the Pentagon is now acknowledging the fact that the effects of global warming may hit sooner rather than later – perhaps in the next 15 years, introducing a new ice age that may begin with droughts, storms, losing top soil, and various other catastrophes, including war over food and remaining resources. Stock markets and economies – if there are any left – will be decimated.
I hated giving the talk, because I don’t like to talk about catastrophes without being able to point to a solution. But I see no solution. When Wilson’s and my book, Energy for Survival, was published in 1974, we said it could all be averted if governments would begin investing then in alternative energies that could help cushion the fall.
But we didn’t, and now even Bush’s energy advisor, Matt Simmons, admits “it’s too late.” We’re too near the abyss.
But my students, like most of the rest of the world, provided their own upbeat ending by asserting their certainty that alternatives will save us, and “something will turn up.”
I gave them a lot of links to my information. Unfortunately, there were none in the class cute enough to make me want to explore with them personally the alternatives at greater length.
Is that what after-the-peak will be like?
See also related pages:
Chapt. #46 - First day of spring in Russia
Chapt. #44 - Cold day for birthdays, good year for love
