Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 242 – 2394 words
Columns :: Is Peter fantasy becoming reality?

MOSCOW, April 3, 2007 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Rude Moldovan consul may get his come-uppance
“Shortest and warmest” winter frees deadly virus
Peter fantasy becoming a reality?
Russian spring brings fear to draft-eligible Russians
“Little sister Ivana” visits from Spain
Weird memory loss sparks new health worries
Zhorik in Svetlograd; Moscow stop
…will expel igor from my bed – hopefully temporarily
It’s official: Russians have lost interest in politics
Moscow dissenter’s march banned
Gay parade ban also upheld
Russian Academy of Sciences defies Putin’s Kremlin



MOSCOW, April 2, 2007 –- The incredibly arrogant and rude Moldovan consul (Chapt. 238) may get his come-uppance, thanks to Red Queen courtier Dan Schramm (see “comment,” Chapt. 238).

I received an e-mail from Dan last week saying he “…was disturbed by the way you were treated by the embassy.

“Maybe none of my business, but I generally enjoy putting jerks like that in their place. Seeing as I have some connections and experience in such things, I thought I would give it a shot.

“I have talked with the secretary of the head of the Moldova diplomatic service and have been asked to provide further details of the incident. I will use your description but edit out all the personal things. I have not revealed who you are and will not do so. I have no idea if they will do anything major, but I bet they will at least ream his ass. Don't know yet if they will even tell me what happens, but we shall see.

Might be fun.


Then a few days later:

I received a message today that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Moldova diplomatic service, has opened an investigation. They said they will let me know the results.

Even if that clown just gets a little black mark in his file, it can
cause him all sorts of problems for promotions, postings to plum
assignments, etc. Diplomatic services, even little countries, take
themselves as seriously as a heart attack. Even if it causes him to think twice before being a jerk to another American
(or anybody else for that matter – Dane), it will be of some benefit.

The last thing a diplomatic worker wants to do is embarrass or piss off the ambassador.

Obviously besides that one guy there are a number of things wrong
there that need to be addressed.

We shall see.


So maybe, just maybe, one of the countless arrogant, officious, masochistic, and rude consular assholes of the world will be taken down a peg.

It’s reassuring to believe that in some little niche of this rude and surly planet, some little bit of kindness and justice can still prevail.

Thanks, Dan.


We’ve just experienced the shortest and warmest winter in 126 years, according to the weather bureau, but there are ominous hiuts of a brief return of winter in the next week or two.

Below-freezing temperatures and possibly snow are predicted for the middle of the week.

Snow lay on the ground only 50 days, “80 days fewer than average,” according to the head of the meteorological observatory at Moscow State University.

In late March temperatures in Moscow hit around 17 degrees C (63 degrees F). In fact, the March temperatures were "the highest…ever recorded in Moscow," according to the weather service.

Some women didn’t get to wear their furs a single time this winter, and a lot of people reported being emotionally upset by the lack of snow and ice – like people in Seattle by the absence of sunshine. And the bears in the zoo, who only nodded off to sleep in late December, are already emerging from their hibernation, grouchy as a bear in the springtime.

It turns out there are some much more alarming consequences of warm winters in Russia: Tropical diseases whose viruses remain inert in the sub-zero temperatures of Siberia are suddenly released to do what they were designed to do: Infect people with deadly viruses.

Already, reports the Washington Post in an article by Russian correspondent Cheryl Lynn Dybas, more than 3,000 cases of infections caused by something called “hantaviruses” have been reported in northern Russian cities and towns, including some only a few hundred miles from Moscow.

The hantavirus is linked to two serious diseases; one of them – the Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) – is usually fatal. The other -- hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, HFRS – can be fatal but more often results in “merely” lengthy debilitating illness.

The virus is carried by mice, who thrive and multiply much more rapidly in warm winters that don’t kill them or the plants which provide them food and shelter. Rodent control so far is the only effective means of prevention.

University of Heidelberg nephrologists Martin Zeier is quoted by the Post as warning that if climate change continues at its current pace, “we might easily see HFRS cases again reach the tens of thousands.”

This warning becomes much more ominous with the news that over the past century, average temperatures have increased by 3.5 degrees C – about 7 degrees F -- in western Siberia, the Amur region near China, and the Primorsky region, according to a European Commission-sponsored report on global warming in Russia.

More alarming, temperatures are predicted over the next 50 years to increase another 6-8 degrees F in western Siberia and 4-6 degrees F in the northern European part of Russia, which includes Moscow, making the possibility of hantaviruses epidemics significantly more likely.

With any luck, in 50 years I won’t be around to find out, but I hope not because of the hantavirus.


My beautiful Peter fantasy and I, after several weeks of cancellations and rescheduling, finally found a couple of hours on Sunday, April Fool’s Day -- a sunny but slightly chilly spring afternoon in Moscow -- to plan our lives together.

Lives together?

Well, okay, maybe not our lives. Would you settle for an August vacation?

This is the year of China in Russia, and in addition to a much-publicized exhibition earlier in the week in which Putin and Chinese Pres. Hu Jintao proclaimed 4 billion bucksi in trade deals, there were a couple of Chinese exhibits at the Tretyakovskiy Gallery here.

Peter and I went to the porcelain exhibition, where there was some truly lovely stuff. But essentially subscribing to the if-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all doctrine, we quickly adjourned to an Irish pub around the corner and our conversation turned to a more meaningful topic: our summer vacation plans.

Peter again proposed that we take our vacation together. He will have two weeks in August and laid out three options: a trip together through the Baltic States and maybe Finland and Sweden, which I’m not too keen on, because the only new venue would be Lithuania; a jaunt to Minsk (Belarus), Poland, and Kiev (Ukraine), which would be okay, because I haven’t been to Belarus or Poland; or a tour of Central Europe that would begin in Minsk and take in Warsaw or Krakow, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Amsterdam, a lot of places I haven’t seen.

Obviously, my choice is the latter, with the Minsk/Kiev jaunt a back-up if we don’t have enough money for our trip of choice.

Rather than traveling with a scheduled tourist group, we will plan our own itinerary via train, bus, and plane, and we will buy guidebooks and be on our own rather than being stuck with what the tour guide has planned. We will stay in two-and three-star hotels.

Why is he as hell-bent on taking a trip with me as I am with taking a trip with him? I’m extremely gratified and immensely happy about the prospect, with the level of happiness directly contingent on my assessment of what I hope is churning through his pretty little head (see photo).


Peter, the fantasy I've been nourishing for a year and a half, is serious about traveling with me to Europe in August. He's got everything: breeding, culture, empathy, charm, and good looks and seems willing to share it all -- and hopefully just a little bit more. Furthermore, he'll pay his own way!

My theory is that he’s a deep closet case and wants me to seduce him. (Remember Sasha’s dictum: “Everybody wants to be seduced”?) Yes, of course it’s a self-serving theory, but I think not an unreasonable one. He doesn’t have a girlfriend; I called him “honey” several times during the afternoon, which upset him not in the least and even seemed to please him; our legs pressed insistently together beneath the table; he seemed adamant about taking only a trip on which I could accompany him -- his first choice was the British Isles, for instance, but he switched to the Central European excursion because that’s the one I preferred. He pointedly mentioned the idea of “hotel” two or three times.

He also invited me to his parents’ home for dinner and conversation sometime in the early summer. His mother speaks English and he wants us to meet.

And maybe some day we’ll even go to China together!

I’ve been nurturing this fantasy for nearly a year and a half (Chapt. 166), and it seems to actually be slowly emerging as a reality. Am I building castles in the air or is there a real possibility that Peter and I may develop an intimate sexual relationship to supplement the intellectual and spiritual relationship we’ve already cultivated?

Stay tuned.

P.S.: Peter’s and my plans directly conflict with the plans that Igor, Denis, and I made last week for a return trip to Moldova in August. But maybe we’ll make that trip earlier – in July, e.g. – or maybe not at all, especially if I’m going to have to foot the bill for everybody.


One threat that Peter and all other young Russian men are facing directly at the moment is the “spring draft season,” when teams of police and military gather in the metro to round up pretty young boys for the Russian Army.

Peter says they work in pairs. The cop checks your ID and the army thug checks your name against a thick catalog of the names of young of draft age. Although as a university student he’s exempt, if there’s any bureaucratic slip-up your ass is grass. There are horror stories of the military immediately shipping you to induction camps without so much as a phone call to tell your mother you’ll be late for dinner.

Both Basil and Sasha had close calls in the past.

Putin has upped the draft to 134,000 conscripts, and the army is under enormous political pressure to fulfill its quota. So Peter is understandably running a little scared at the moment.

Induction would not only be a personal tragedy for him, but with the prospect of two weeks together in Europe this summer, a personal tragedy for me as well.

Besides, Peter’s much too pretty to be a soldier.


Ivan, my “little sister” from Spain (Chapt. 231), called while Peter and I were downing our Irish beers, and arranged to drop by yesterday evening.

It was great to see him, and we chatted “sister talk” for a couple of hours. His and Pedro’s relationship seems more solid, although they don’t have sex any more; Pedro is growing more insistent on coming out of the closet, getting married, and adopting children; he seems to be less philandering than he was; and Ivan is probably going to come back to teach at the Institute of Diplomacy this fall.

He is seriously looking for a surrogate mother in which to implant his semen, maybe as early as this fall. He’s willing to pay eight grand. I’ll be the godfather, he says. He asked me to help him find an appropriate donor recipient, but the only ones I know are the tramps that Denis and Igor bring home from time to time, and I wouldn’t want my godson to call any of those sluts Mama.

He’s also asked Yegor to help him find a surrogate mother – maybe one of the provincial girls in Milksville, near Tver, near where his aunt lives (Chapt. 11).

Ivan is as mystified as I am about why I am able to have such rewarding relationships with these beautiful young “straight” boys. But it is not mine to reason why, only mine to do or …die? Naaah.


Although I did have a puzzling episode Saturday morning. When I woke up and started to send Zhorik an SMS, I suddenly couldn’t remember his number. I had memorized it the day before and it had become second nature. Now I couldn’t even remember how it began.

I also began to realize that I was floating as if in a dream state. I couldn’t remember from one moment to the next if something had really happened or if I had dreamed it.

Alarm bells rang. Had I had another mini-stroke? There was no noticeable physical weakness, as was the case the last time (Chapt. 204, 205), and I had no trouble walking or coordinating physically.

But my brain didn’t seem to be firmly attached to my head.

Student Valera came at 9 a.m. and we chatted for an hour about whether the oil crisis was real or just a phase in the recurrent price cycle. I’m convinced of the former; he, of the latter.

But even an hour or two later I realized I was having trouble separating what I had said from what I had dreamed. I’m rather concerned, but don’t know exactly what to do about it. Probably nothing for now.

By Monday morning, I seemed to be completely back to normal – for me.


Zhorik embarked Friday on his visit home to his father in Svetlograd and then to me, here. He arrived in Svetlograd Monday after three days on the train, during which we kept in pretty close contact through our mobile phones.

He bought a mobile phone with the money I sent him and managed to get a sim-card, even though you can’t get one in Russia without your domestic passport and the Army has his passport. I’m not sure how he pulled it off, but he managed to get one.

But for some reason, I can’t simply just press the “reply” button to respond to his SMSs. I have to re-write the number each time, which is what I was trying to do when I had my brain-lapse Saturday.


I still haven’t told Igor that he will be kicked out of bed when Zhorik comes. What will his reaction be? Another question is where to put him? He and I at present occupy my room and my airport-sized bed. The only place to put him is in the other bedroom where Sergei and Tanya share a single bed and Denis makes a bed on the floor. He’ll have to share the floor with Denis.

He had promised we would have sex Sunday night, but he had a headache when he came to bed about 3 a.m. I don’t think it was just an excuse, because he took aspirin, and he doesn’t like taking medicine unless he has to. And he still had the headache when he woke up about 2:00 Monday afternoon. I just hope this is not a precursor of an epilepsy attack.


Russians have lost interest in politics, and their disinterest is growing, according to a new survey published by the State-controlled VTsIOM, which reported that 54% now say they have little or no interest in politics, up from 50% two years ago.

Guess why, according to the survey. It seems they figure since they have no ability to control politics, there’s no point in taking part in a make-believe process, a conclusion that might be expected, given the increasing manipulation of elections by Putin’s Kremlin (Chapt. 241).


Also predictable was Moscow’s refusal to permit the protest march that had been planned for the middle of April in Moscow (Chapt. 241).

“Another Russia,” an opposition group initially formed by Garry Kasparov as a counter-balance against against last year’s Russia-hosted G8 extravaganza (Chapt. 208), on Friday requested permission for a “Dissenter’s March” on April 14 that would form in Pushkin Square in the heart of the city and march down the main drag to “Theater Square’ near the Kremlin.

Well, gol-lee, they’d really like to grant a permit, but Putin’s young thugs, “The Young Guard” – purely coincidental, of course -- had already reserved the site and the date.

Maybe the Dissenter’s March could instead be held at the Tushino Airport several miles from the city center, suggested lord mayor Luzhkov.

So the stage is set for a replay of the St. Peterburg and Nizhny Novgorod protests (Chapts. 239, 241), where city authorities denied permission for a protest march in the city, but the march went on – or attempted to – anyway with scores of arrests and beatings and a lot of negative international publicity.


An appeal from organizers of Moscow’s gay parade to the Moscow City Court in an attempt to overrule the mayor’s office ban and a lower court ruling upholding the ban, was also rejected last week.

Organizers said they would appeal to the Supreme Court in hopes a decision might be reached before May 27, the day the parade is scheduled.


On a more defiant note, the Russian Academy of Sciences has rejected a Kremlin proposal to turn control of the elite conclave, founded by Peter the Great, over to government bureaucrats and policy makers.

The scientists have has a history of government defiance, most notable of which was its refusal to expel Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, father of Russia’s hydrogen bomb and champion of human rights, in the 1980s.

Russia’s Education and Science Ministry recommended in January that control of the organization be turned over to a governing body of nine, only three of whom whom would be scientists. The rest would be Kremlin stooges – three appointed by the government, one by the State Duma, one by the Federation Council, and one by the presidential administration.

“We are all fed up with this attack on the Russian Academy of Sciences,” declared Academy Vice Pres. Alexander Nekipelov, adding that it would be better to close the Academy than to turn it over to government control.

But the government isn’t throwing up its hands. It controls the $ 1.7 billion budget, for one thing.

The government is determined to control the direction of Russia’s science; Russia’s scientists are determined to control it themselves. The government will not cave in; whether the scientists will or not depends on how the scenario unfolds.

It is conceivable that the issue could wind up in deadlock. And nobody’s sure what that would mean.

According to Reuters, “if the Education Ministry and the Academy fail to reach a compromise, the government has the power to enforce its version of the charter. However, the Kremlin would likely try to avoid an open clash with the widely respected body that could erode the government's prestige in the run-up to the parliamentary vote this fall and the presidential election next March.”
In any case, Putin hasn’t lost a battle yet, and will no doubt figure out a way to conquer the Russian Academy of Sciences. It promises to be an interesting match.


Sergei’s preoccupation with computer games is obsessional -- hardly surprising, considering the fact that he’s already gone through two addictions – alcohol and gambling.

He often plays all night and sleeps all day. On Tanya’s birthday last Monday (March 26), however, he announced that he had seen the error of his ways and was giving up computer games “except for a couple of hours a day.”

That didn’t last long. Last night he again played all night and relinquished the computer only about 8:30 this morning when I told him I needed it for my work.

Despite his insistence that he was playing only because he couldn’t sleep, he was -- as I expected -- asleep within minutes of hitting the pillow.

At least he hasn’t killed me, as a 22-year-old man in Petrozavodsk in the Republic of Karelia north of St. Pete, did his grandmother last week when she interrupted his computer game.


The law on extremism (Chapt. 212) is having its intended effect: An editor in Ufa is being tried on charges of extremist activity for publishing two commentaries calling for the resignation of Bashkortostan Pres. Martaza Rakhimov.

If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison for publishing articles charging corruption and human rights abuses that were written by a local opposition leader, who is being tried on the same charges.

So as predicted, the law isn’t being used to identify, apprehend, and punish extremists. It’s being used to identify, apprehend, and punish those who pose threats to the ruling power. That is, as everyone knows after all, the real danger of extremism!


See also related pages:
Chapt. #243 - Missy “resurrection” inspires Easter celebration
Chapt. #241 - Fade out Moldova, fade in sex
Chapt. #239 - Anti-Putin demonstration kept under wraps
Chapt. #238 - Moldova’s bureaucrats ruder than America’s
Chapt. #212 - Conspiracy theory: Putin is American tool!
Chapt. #208 - 73rd birthday leaves more sediment than sentiment
Chapt. #204 - Igor fantasy plummeting to finality?
Chapt. #166 - Sergei: On the slots and out of my apartment
Chapt. #231 - Galicia: Land of bagpipes and miracles
Chapt. #11 - Not prejudiced, “we just don’t like them”