MOSCOW, March 1, 2004 -- The first day of spring in Russia. Though it’s cloudy and drizzly with no hint of sunshine, it is noticeably warmer. The temperature is several degrees above freezing, and the snow and ice are melting big-time, filling the streets with water -- again.
This morning the streets near the Tulskaya Metro Station are even fuller than most. It seems that a water main has broken, flooding the streets and shutting down electricity and gas in the area. It’s another symbol of Russia’s rapidly deteriorating infrastructure.
When, I first heard Russians talking about March being the first day of spring six years ago, I thought they were speaking metaphorically, that they meant by March 1, the weather was warmer and it seemed like the first day of spring. But they really mean it. Officially, it’s now spring in Russia.
The fact that the vernal equinox on March 22/23 will signal the official debut of the season in most civilized countries – and maybe uncivilized, for all I know – doesn’t phase Russia. They don’t need an equinox to tell them when spring is. Similarly, June 1 is the first day of summer, September 1 is the first day of fall, and December 1 is the first day of winter.
Hey, it works for them!
So the first day of spring -- official or not – seems like a good time to review the state of my being. Post-Misha, post-Shurik, my personal life has returned to a state of bliss. Once more I am living in a world of love and support, free of anger, contentiousness, and unkindness. Former lover (and still roommate) Anton and I are probably closer than we ever were as lovers. We’re certainly better friends. And Yegor grows more precious by the day, though our mutual sex is almost non-existent because of our sexual incompatibilities – he’s into anal sex, and I just can’t handle either giving or getting it.
But our mutual love is very deep, so he encourages me to find satisfying sex elsewhere. Right now [Seryozh] is filling that bill admirably, along with – occasionally -- Sasha and Vanya. Consequently, I’m quite fulfilled and emotionally want for nothing.
My blissful life was invaded by an aching tooth last Friday. How a little piece of pulp and enamel can cause such pain is astonishing. I was actually on the metro enroute to the dentist Friday afternoon when I started thinking:
This is not a cavity. It’s an abscess. There’s only one way for a dentist to deal with an abscess: root canal. Expensive – probably $ 250 or $ 300 or more in an American style dentist’s office!
But hey, wait a minute! When I had a tooth abscess just before coming to Russia in ’97, Dave Wagner, my lifetime drinking buddy who died last year of a heart problem, advised me to rinse the tooth several times a day in very strong booze. I did. The abscess miraculously disappeared.
I still have some 70% absinthe from my Prague trip! So I got back on the metro, came home, and starting rinsing and swallowing. By the next day it was noticeably better. Today it’s still tender, but obviously on the mend. Maybe with the $ 300 I saved I’ll buy some more absinthe!
Sasha said Russians do the same thing with rubbing alcohol, which Sasha said you could buy – contrary to my repeated assertions – at drug stores. I had been told you couldn’t buy it because too many Russians had killed themselves using it as a substitute for vodka. I have confused rubbing alcohol with industrial alcohol, Sasha insisted. No doubt he’s right. But I’ve still heard that drug stores won’t sell rubbing alcohol to people who look like alcoholics. I’ll try to buy some and find out for myself.
The only downside of my home cure is that I had promised to share my remaining absinthe with Kostya, whose birthday we’re going to celebrate Wednesday night. If I continue on my present cure, there aint gonna be much left for Kostya’s birthday. Sorry, buddy.
Kostya is the one I was going to go to Egypt with on Women’s Day, which is next weekend, March 8. But he has a new job at the French Societe Generale Bank and hasn’t accrued enough vacation time, so we’ll postpone it to the fall.
It looks like my rendezvous with my Seattle best buddy Marco Cassone, mainstay of the “M-pact” a capella pop-touring group, is also not going to come off. M-pact is moving to LA, and they will be too deep in reorganizing, etc., for Marco to make the trip to Europe this spring.
Actually, it’s just as well, because I’ve promised Yegor that I will try to have $ 5,000 for him to enter the university this fall, and I need to save as much money as possible -- another reason why Shurik was expendable. In addition to being a jive ass, he was also beginning to be an expensive jive ass.
His replacement, Seryozh, on the other hand, hasn’t asked me for a single kopek. He’s determinedly independent, which I appreciate and admire. He wants to buy his own computer and has asked me if he can install it here if he does. It would help institutionalize his presence, so I almost certainly will let him.
He still wants to enroll in architectural college next year. Maybe by then, I suggested, I could give him some financial help. “Nyet, nyet, I want to do this myself. I can earn enough as a merchandiser and manager to pay my way.” His standing just went up several notches.
Vanya completes his fifth year at Nizhny Novgorod Univ. this summer, and I’ll be free of that economic responsibility. So it will be fairly easy to shift that money to Yegor’s next year’s tuition. Yegor and his lawyer have filed all his documents, and he may have his Russian citizenship before August, which would save us a bundle on his tuition. It costs about $ 1,000 less for Russian citizens than for “foreigners.”
The Russian presidential election is in two weeks, and Putin is shamelessly and unabashedly trampling all over the election laws set up to keep the incumbent from having unfair advantage. He is leading all radio and TV news broadcasts each day. A monitoring firm has recorded 45 mentions in newscasts in the last two weeks for Putin compared with just seven for his most viable competitor, Sergei Glazyev, and most of those seven have been negative.
Putin’s goons are also making campaigning all but impossible for Glazyev, a former communist whose political image Putin ironically helped create last fall as a means of draining votes from the communists in the Duma election. But Glazyev’s stalking-horse party, “Motherland,” stormed into the duma with a surprising 23% of the vote.
So he decided to take on Putin in the presidential election. This upstart independence did not sit well with the Kremlin. In Nizhny Novgorod last Friday, local authorities tore up the contract Glazyev had for his appearance in a local building and then cut the electricity to the building just for good measure. A few days before, in Ekaterinburg, he and his audience were routed by local police under the guise of a bomb scare.
And now it’s come to light that Russia’s TV networks, all now controlled by the Kremlin, are refusing to run his hard-hitting political commercials. One of them, reports the Moscow Times, shows clips of a long list of disasters that have hit Russia in the last four years while Putin, in a voice-over, soothingly assures Russians that under his government, things have stabilized.
The commercial “also features segments from an interview Putin gave to CNN’s Larry King as mystery continued to swirl around the sinking of the Kursk submarine, which killed all 118 sailors on board,” the Moscow Times reports. “King asks Putin what happened to the Kursk. Putin pauses to smile, and then replies, ‘It sank.’ The commercial ends with the question, ‘Four years of fear and pain; is that what you want to vote for?’”
But Putin and his Kremlin managers are making sure that the Moscow Times reporter is one of the few who will ever see the commercial. It will never affect the March 14 vote.
There’s no question but what Putin will win, but he’s worried about two things: 1) that not enough people will vote to validate the election (at least 50% of registered voters must vote); and 2) that he won’t get a majority on the first ballot, in which case there will be an embarrassing second round of voting. It would diminish his legitimacy.
But this ham-handed manipulation of the vote only reveals Putin’s basic weakness and his trembling fear of opposition, declares Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. He is turning the election into a transparent farce and destroying the very credibility in the West which he is so relentlessly seeking.
Instead of endowing him with legitimacy, it is “depriving him of genuine legitimacy” and could prove a “time-bomb” for him if things should suddenly turn sour, Shevtsova contends. And with no ideology or communist party to share blame, he’s the only scapegoat left. It’s true that the Russian people have lost their taste for uprisings and revolutions and blood in the streets, and that stability is what they want above all else. But if – no, when – there is no water or sewage or heat in major population centers, will there be an angry surge of national outrage? Will Putin be willing to call out the troops to quell and kill and arrest masses of Russian protesters, destroying, as the world watches, the last remaining illusions of democracy?
Of not, what else is there for him to do?
Thus by eliminating the free and open electoral process, Putin may be assuring his reelection, but he also may be painting himself into a corner from which there is no escape. In the meantime, what will be the costs to the Russian people?
Stay tuned.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #45 - Celebrating the Red Army and Maslanitsa
