MOSCOW, May 21, 2007 -- Friday evening I came home about 9 p.m. after my class with Masha. We’re just a little over a month away from white nights, and it was still broad daylight. Igor and Finish, sitting with the bikes in the courtyard, motioned me to join them.
“Let’s go to the park,” Igor suggested, meaning our rendezvous spot near Novoslobodskaya Station.
I was in a good mood and ready for a celebratory potion, so I readily agreed. We bought cocktails from the store in our courtyard and headed out – I on my bike, which had finally gotten returned just that morning – and Igor on his bike with Finish riding on the cross bar.
It was a chummy, kissy evening with both of them, and after two and a half large cans of screwdriver (the cocktails here all come in cans, like Coca-Cola or Fanta), I was pretty smashed. Sometime after midnight Igor rode me home on his cross bar while Finish rode my bike.
When I woke up Saturday morning, they weren’t here. Igor told me later that Finish had insisted they ride somewhere – probably to some twat’s apartment, where they apparently spent the night.
Sometime after my 9 a.m. Saturday class with Valera the entry phone rang. When Igor came through the apartment door his front wheel was twisted beyond repair, and he was limping badly. He had collided with a car on Red Square. It wasn’t his fault, he insisted.
But that reminds me of the old joke they used to tell in Germany of the guy in the crosswalk hit by a speeding Mercedes. He had seen the car coming, but he had the right of way. He was of course right. Dead right.
Especially in Moscow you have to drive – even a bicycle – defensively. These guys are maniacs. So Igor may have been right, but that didn’t keep him from hobbling like a cripple. He’s lucky he wasn’t dead right.
The left side of the ankle bone, or tarsal, of his left foot is hugely swollen. I suspect it’s broken or cracked. It’s very painful for him to bear weight, but he insists on continuing to try to walk. I fished out the cane made from a bull’s dick with a metal rod through it that I bought at a second-hand shop in Wash., D.C., but he won’t concede he needs it.
Despite his painful ankle, they didn’t immediately dive into bed, as I expected them to. Instead, they headed back down to the courtyard to take Missy for a constitutional – a fatal mistake. When the doorbell rang a little later, it was Finish with Missy.
“Where’s Igor?”
“The ucheskoviy got us for a documents check. I’m here to get Igor’s passport. My passport’s not in order. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Every apartment complex has its ucheskoviy, the resident police spy who is responsible for law and order and seeing that everybody complies with the endless and maddening registration and residency laws. This is the same shit-head that has been harassing me and my boyfriends since I first moved in with Misha six years ago.
He used to harass Misha. He harassed Zhorik two years ago, and in fact everybody who’s ever lived here. He even harassed Basil a few weeks ago while we were having a beer in the courtyard one Sunday afternoon. The courtyard is a virtual night club where friends gather and drink vodka every day and every night. So his nailing me and Basil for a beer was selective law enforcement pure and simple.
Anyway, the shithead represents one of the worst aspects of Russian apartment living – the abiding and inescapable presence of Big Brother.
That afternoon during the break in my Inst. of Diplomacy class, Sergei called me from the house phone. “The landlord called and said the ucheskoviy had called him and said there were unregistered Moldovans living in the apartment; he said they rented the apartment only to you and he wants everybody but you out today, and if you don’t like it, you can move out too.”
Though I must say it wasn’t totally unexpected, this is not what I wanted to hear. For one thing, the timing couldn’t have been worse. I’m broke.
After $ 1800 for Zhorik and his father, and paying almost $ 1,000 rent just two days earlier, I have less than $ 50 to carry me through the weekend. If all my students show up, I’ll take in about $ 500 next week, but right now I can’t afford to rent a new apartment. I can’t even afford to take Igor to the polyclinic to get his foot attended to.
When I got home about 7:00 Saturday evening, I got hold of Natasha, the landlady. I let her talk with Sergei, whom she has met several times and knows lives here. The idea was that we would ask her if Sergei could continue to live here until we can find another apartment in June. In the meantime, Finish is definitely out. Sergei has already thrown Denis out. That leaves only Igor, who assures me he can survive till we get a new apartment – though in his present crippled state, I have my doubts.
Landlady Natasha said she could care less – it was the fucking ucheskovkiy that was making all the demands. So as I write this on Monday morning, Finish is gone. Igor is still here, as are Sergei and Tanya. Igor may or may not hobble off somewhere.
I’m not sure it is all going to play out, but I think we will be able to stall till I can rent an apartment next month. This may quash Igor’s plans to go to Moldova – renting an apartment is more important than his trip home, important though it may be. I’ll get $ 600 from the Inst. of Diplomacy on the 2nd or 3rd of June, but my pension check won’t be deposited till the 13th. Vanya has promised he can pay me $ 200 at the end of the month, and Yegor says he can pay me the $ 90 he owes me by Friday. If I can take in $ 500 a week from my private students, I should also be able to add at least $ 1,000 to the kitty from that, giving me about $ 2,700 to play with.
Rent here is due the 17th, so I’ll have exactly four days after my pension check is deposited to find and get moved into a new apartment. Sergei swears he will be able to find one.
Then it will be just Sergei and Tanya, Igor and I. I think things will be much better – both in general and between me and Igor. We haven’t had a “play” session for two weeks now because of bad moods, unbathed dick, Finish, etc. That will have to change.
In the meantime, things could be a lot worse. Igor could have been killed or seriously injured in his bike accident. We could have been summarily tossed out of the apartment. As it is, we’ll survive.
I’m almost sure.
Sasha, my Russian “best buddy” who is now getting an advanced degree in chemistry at Stevens Inst. of Technology just outside NYC, called at 6 a.m. Wednesday to say his American visa hadn’t been renewed.
He hadn’t passed his GRE with a high enough score. For the same reason, he didn’t get into the doctoral program at Univ. of Florida. “All the visas have gone to the Chinese,” he said. “I don’t know how they do it. They can’t speak English, but they pass the GRE with higher grades than I do.”
New York has become a foreign country, he said. “Out of 50 in my class, I’m the only white male. My boss at Schering-Plough says I’m the only white male in the laboratory.
“Your country is a dying country,” he warned. “I’m sorry, but it’s a dying country. Mine is a failed country, but yours is a dying country.
“Ten years from now it will be the United States of China.”
He will come back to Moscow for New Years, then back to Stevens to finish his Master’s before returning for good next June.
I’m sorry that he’s not going to be able to reach his goal, but as I told him, I’m selfishly glad that he’ll be returning to Moscow to take his place again as a part of my everyday life. He’s a dear friend and a good buddy. We’ve had a lot of good sex. Whether that resumes or not really isn’t important. I miss him as a friend.
As for the U.S. immigration issue, I’m too far away to have an informed opinion. On the one hand, in the approaching post-petroleum era – and with gas reportedly now hitting $ 4 a gallon in the U.S., it’s becoming increasing difficult to close your eyes to – the fewer people you have drawing on a nation’s limited soil, water, and energy resources, the more likely the population is to survive.
On the other hand, my knee-jerk reaction to draconian anti-immigration measures is that they violate basic notions of decency and kindness.
Besides, in another 50 years China’s going to be ruling the world anyway, and maybe Sasha’s right: We’ll just be another province in the United States of China.
Why did Sergei throw Denis out? Last Sunday evening, Igor fixed tomato mangia, a Moldovan version of what my mother used to call tomato gravy, which you can’t eat without bread. But we were out of bread. When I announced that I was going to go get some, when Denis volunteered: “I’ll get it.”
I had nothing less than a 500-ruble ($ 19) note, and needed every ruble I could scrape up in anticipation of having to pay the rent on Thursday.
So I handed him the 500 rubles: “Bring me the change.”
I didn’t see him again for a week. In the meantime, he told Igor he had lost the money.
Coming on top of the disappearance of my grandfather’s watch, my Oxford English Dictionary, the “loss” of mobile phones that Sergei and Igor had lent him, and a few other disappearances, the “loss” of 500 rubles without bothering to at least come back and tell me he had lost it was the last straw.
Three dozen strikes and you’re out. Sergei told him so when he came by on Friday.
What clinched it is that Sergei noticed needle tracks on Ksenia’s – his schlukha’s – arm. Since druggies seek out druggies, I think we know where all the money’s been going. Victimized again by drugs.
By the way, we did scrape up the rent money – barely. After promising he would give me $ 200 on Tuesday, NN Vanya SMS’d me that he could only pay it at the end of the month. I managed to pull it together only because my student Alexei’s three visits were completed on Tuesday evening, so his $ 100 was due. After the rent, the phone, the lights, etc., were paid, I had exactly 500 rubles left!
The saga of Andrei Sh.’s mother’s death and cremation continues, giving something of an insight into everyday life – and death – in Russia. On Tuesday, May 15, he wrote that he had that morning cremated his mother.
“The Russian undertakers are the meanest bunch of racketeers I ever saw: First, they extort your money by refusing to take the body to prepare it for burial, then they extort about the same amount by refusing to give relatives the body for burial. I won't be surprised if they repeat those tactics again by refusing to give me the urn with her ashes.
For the time being all I got are two of my mother's photos and a heap of dirty dishes after the mourning meal. Ce la vie?”
Two days later he provided “Part 2 of my mother’s death story, which might be called Life After Death in Russia.”
“….Cremation was suggested by my uncle. The alleged reason why he'd suggested it was that you cannot bury anyone in any nearby cemetery in our Schelkovo district unless you already have some patch at the cemetery where your relatives lie. So the choice was either to cremate mother and bury her urn at Schelkovo City cemetery where her mother, my grandma, and her aunt are lying, or bury my mother's body at some remote place which is difficult to reach, and where we have no relatives.
“So I gladly accepted his offer.
“After her cremation I wanted Father Gleb Yakunin, Sergei Grigoryants' friend and my acquaintance, a dissident priest who'd served his term in soviet labor camps, to celebrate a liturgy at the cemetery. Uncle strongly objected, saying Yakunin had been ex-communicated by the Russian patriarchy and if I invite him to the cemetery he would prohibit the burial of mother's ashes. So we were forced to hold the liturgy at the morgue instead. I began earnestly wondering why actually my uncle should object to Yakunin's presence, especially bearing in mind that during his term of official priesthood he was the guy who had held the liturgy for my grandma too? Father Gleb was sure my uncle's ultimatum had nothing to do with Gleb's presence but was just a ploy to blackmail me whenever such necessity might arise, threatening me with throwing out my mother's ashes from the cemetery.
“And he proved right. Because after I paid all burial fees, and filled out all the necessary forms, legally allowing my mother's urn to be buried in our family patch, the uncle voiced another ultimatum: either he buries her himself without any official papers, or he, as a relative, officially blocks the burial. I said my mother's not a stray dog to deserve such burial, and I'd rather keep the urn with her ashes under my bed instead.
“And again suspicions began lurking in my mind: was her death really an accident? Why should my uncle seek a chance to backmail me? I really cannot see his personal interest there. Questions pile up. I hope some day there will be the answer too.
“This is simply too weird,” I wrote. “Is this the same uncle who was with you and your mother when she died? What has been your relationship with your uncle up to now? Is he your mother's brother or your father's brother? What has been your father's response to your mother's death?”
Andrei replied immediately:
“He's my mother's brother, a notorious scoundrel for whom there's nothing sacred in the world. I'd hardly have any deal with him had it not been for his mother's, i.e. my grandma's, as well as my mother's, belief that he was not a scoundrel but a damn fool who bites the hand which feeds him. As for me, I always argued that what such fools need is a kick in the teeth, rather than sympathy of their relatives.
“He was incidentally instrumental in helping the authorities to snatch our land plot: he had a patch of land situated between our land plot and the construction company which later seized our land, and he sold his land and the cottage there to this company for just over 1,000 dollars, thereby giving the company the foothold for further inroads. I asked him why he did this, for I was prepared to pay him the same amount just to prevent our land seizure. He said they had coerced him. He never said who 'they' were, or what they had done to coerce him though. I think his allegation about coercion was mostly a lie: he has always been the most willing partner in all sorts of dirty dealings, though he had never profited from any of them - here my grandma, his mother that is, was right in calling him a 'damn fool'.
“When he tried to help me out with my sick mother I was a bit surprised and ashamed: maybe I should not have thought of him so badly; after all, he offered generously his help and money while father just made polite phone calls to inquire about things in general. Alas, help from a backguard is worse than a stab from a foe.
“As for my father's and the rest of the kin's response to my mother's death, the mourning meal was the best example: there was father, his sister, my son-of-a-bitching uncle, i.e. my mother's brother, my cousin on my mother's side and his daughter. Not A Single Word was spoken of the deceased, neither in praise, not just in formal memory.
“I guess now you can understand why her death shattered me so: she left, and now I have either to live with this trash side by side, or... or I don't know what.
“Hell is too good for this guy,” I answered. “Did he in any way benefit from your mother's death? Do you have the misfortune of living in close proximity to him? I hope not.”
“He didn't benefit from it in any way, he's a single person and a particularly vulnerable one in Russia's conditions, nor did he benefit from the particular trap he lured me into - I mean his suggestion to cremate my mother and bury her in his cemetery plot - as it later proved without any papers. That's why my suspicions about the causes of her death increase.
“Apparently he was again just an instrument, a willing one though, in the other guys’ game to have leverage over me. “Frankly I expected this, though not so soon: they need this leverage to have my case in Strasbourg recalled, which they thought would be easier after my mother's death.
“Details later. Off to help father with planting potatoes. Just marked 9 days since my mother's death.
“Okay, I think I get the picture,” I wrote. “He's just an amoral fool, then, it would seem. As for it being easier to recall your Strasbourg complaint after your mother's death, I would imagine that you are more determined than ever now; and the threat of killing her is pointless, now that she's already dead. Or am I missing something?”
Yes,you got the picture absolutely right, including the fact that with… my willingness to reach compromises with such scum has ended too. What for? I've crissed-crossed that pageant called 'life', each time reaching its limits and meeting with death, the only true and uncompromising thing in our lives. After such encounters you tend to scorn life with its endless concessions – for uncompromising death. So, you haven't missed anything in this latest family schism of mine
.
“BTW, do you have a portrait photo of yourself? Please, send it if you have any - after mother's death memory is becoming a powerful factor for me. Doesn't mean I'm going to live in the past though. I still have plans to give a dialectical analysis to historical cycles, to expose their physical mechanism so as to give more meaning to our human evolution, pursued so far by trial and error method. God knows only if I would succeed in these wild dreams. I thought my mother would last long enough for me to accomplish all these plans. Now there's no option for me but to regroup in my domestic affairs, then march on...
“After all "there's no discharge in the war", as Mr. Kipling said.
“Hope we'll meet over a drink some day when you get rid of your students.”
I sent him a photo, adding “a drink is a great idea.”
But for now the mystery and the anguish deepen for Andrei as the details grow both more clear and more murky. Would his neer-do-well uncle actually have been complicit in causing his own sister’s death because “they” were coercing him again? Would the KGB>FSB really go to such lengths just to try to quell the case of another angry Russian in the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg?
Or are we witnessing extreme paranoia with a persecution complex?
I think his concern is justified. Remember the old saying: Just ‘cause your paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not trying to get you.”
Russia’s most successful and most respected lawyer in bringing cases like Andrei Sh.’s before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has long been a thorn in the side of the Putin Administration.
Her recurrent victories before the court, not only requiring Russia to compensate its victims, but equally nettlesome, continuously refocusing world attention on Russia’s unceasing injustices and atrocities, continue to rankle the Kremlin.
They have tried repeatedly to stop the work of the Moscow-based International Protection Center by first questioning its initial charter, then ordering a lengthy tax audit on suspicion that the Center had used funds from the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy and the Ford and MacArthur Foundations to make illicit profits.
Although the Center quickly disproved this, the government has still not dropped the case.
But none of this has slowed the work of the Center or its founder and chief lawyer, 53-year-old Marina Moskalenko.
So what’s left for the Kremlin to do? Certainly not stop the injustices or the atrocities. Only one thing to do: Disbar the lawyer.
Thus Moskalenko is facing disbarment proceedings based on the most frivolous and specious charges: Failing to properly represent Mikhail Khodorkovsky when she had to leave a lawyers’ conference a day early to attend to the illness of her 14-year-old son.
“The story of what happened to Moskalenko on that visit to Siberia is worth telling,” says Bert Stephens, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, in an op-ed piece which appeared in the Moscow Times last week, “if only for the light it sheds on the government’s efforts -- by turn petty and sinister – to harass her and her team.
“On February 4 she arrived at Domodedovo Airport (Moscow) to discover that the rest of her legal team had been “detained” by police and Interior Ministry officials who seized their passports, ransacked their luggage, and inspected confidential documents relating to cases before the Strasbourg Court, including Khodorkovsky’s, before allowing them to board the plane.
“On her return, Moskalenko was again detained by officials, who forced her to sign papers forbidding her from disclosing the details of the government’s new case against Khodorkovsky. On account of the illness of her son, which the authorities were aware of, she signed.”
Moskalenko herself speculates that the current disbarment action stems from the legal fuss she made about the incidents at the airport. “After I complained to the prosecutor general, they reconsidered what to do about me. They stopped abusing me at the airports. Instead, they decided to finish my career.”
She points to the effectiveness of Putin’s current policy of massive government intimidation: “It isn’t necessary to put all the businessmen in jail, only to jail the richest, the most independent, the most well connected.
“It isn’t necessary to kill all journalists, just the most outstanding, the bravest; and the others will get the message.”
In Putin’s Russia, “nobody is untouchable.”
Still not convinced that Putin won’t pull a last-minute rabbit out of the hat to run for another term and “save Russia,” my student Masha, herself a lawyer, is convinced of one thing: If he does indeed have the constitution amended to permit him to serve another term, we will see a vastly stepped-up re-Stalinization.
Another lawyer, Igor Trunov, who has gained fame through representing victims of various State atrocities, like the gasing of hundreds of theater-goers in the 2002 Dubrovka Theater siege, noted last week that “through a decree here and an amendment there, Soviet repression is returning.”
The latest “decree,” he said, is this week’s Constitutional Court ruling overturning the long-standing judicial principle of double jeopardy. The court ruled that the state can indeed re-try a convicted or exonerated defendant if new evidence is found against him.
Moscow’s May 27 gay parade organizers say the event will come off on schedule despite the city’s ban. It will be, they say, a “human rights parade in support of homosexuals.”
But the city’s point man on security, Nikolai Kulikov, reiterated that the parade will not be allowed because “it would violate the rights and freedoms of other individuals.”
Meanwhile, in Lithuania trolleybus drivers in the town of Kaunas refused to take their vehicles on the street after advertisements were placed in them urging greater tolerance for gay men and women.
Some reportedly feared their trolleybuses could be vandalized, and “some said they didn’t want their friends to laugh at them,” according to an account in the Moscow Times.
Moscow police must quit extorting tourists, the Association of Guides and Tour managers pleaded in a letter to Moscow’s chief law enforcement officer a month ago. The fact that the head cop has not responded gives a strong hint of the response that can be expected from Moscow’s uniformed bandits.
When tourists register in a hotel, they must leave their passport while it’s being officially registered. But a Moscow law requires the passport to be carried at all times. It’s common practice for police to spot obvious tourists, ask them for their passports – knowing they won’t have them – and then threaten to detain them unless they fork over a hefty bribe.
The law permits police to detain individuals for several hours while their identity is being established. The police know that most tourists would prefer to simply pay the bribe and get it over with.
One of the most renowned Russian dishes is borshsch, which most Americans have heard of but don’t know anything about. Basically it’s a beet soup, except that in lots of borshsches there are no beets. So borshch means a lot of different things to a lot of different Russians.
Sergei, for instance, insists that borshch is any soup with cabbage in it.
The best recipe I’ve found yet appeared in the Moscow Times last week. It’s stupendous. The hardest thing about it is remembering to prepare the bouillon four hours before you want to eat, but this gives you plenty of time to prepare the veggies. I guarantee you’ll like it:
Old Moscow Borshch
½ lb. carrots
1 lb. beets
1/3 lb. onions
1 lb. potatoes
2 tbsp tomato paste
juice of one large lemon
And an equal amount of sugar
2 lb. smoked pork ribs
10 oz. sauerkraut
Make a bouillon by boiling the smoked pork in four quarts of water for four hours.
In the meantime, chop all the vegetables into strips. Braise the beets in lemon juice, sugar, and tomato paste (add salt to taste). Saute the onions and carrots in olive oil. Boil the potatoes during the last half hour of the bouillon preparation.
When the bouillon is ready, add the sauerkraut and boil for a few minutes. Add the carrots, onions, and beets. Add pepper to taste and sprinkle with fresh herbs (dill and parsley, e.g.). Serve with a dollop of sour cream and your favorite garlic bread.
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