MOSCOW, June 4, 2007 -- I have a chilling sense of foreboding that my life is unraveling and that I am about to come face to face with disaster, Russian style. Up against the wall, MF!
I always tend to melodramatize, but the facts are piling up:
The ucheskovkiy reared his ugly head again last Wednesday when he summoned Igor to his office nearby. Twenty minutes or so later I got a call from Olga, landlady Natasha’s daughter-in-law. I turned the phone over to Sergei. The ucheskoviy was demanding that illegally registered Igor get out of the apartment. And if he doesn’t, I heard the word “fine.” Natasha’s husband Volodya has already threatened to kick me out of the apartment if everybody but me doesn’t leave (Chapt. 249).
Igor apparently mollified the ucheskoviy with his assurance that he’s leaving for Moldova on the 8th of June. He’s since moved that up to the 6th.
But of course he’s coming back – or at least planning to -- in not more than a month, he vows.
The solution would simply be to rent another apartment and get the hell out of here.
But that takes money -- as a minimum, usually two months’ rent to move into an apartment.
My pension money hits the Bank America account on the 14th. Rent is due on the 17th. That gives me three days to find and move into an apartment – if I can even afford it.
I’m getting $ 600 from the Inst. of Diplomacy on the 8th. On the 14th I’ll get my $ 850 pension. That’s only $ 1,450 at most.
I have no cushion. The $ 1500 to Zhorik’s and Sergei’s father and the $ 300 to Zhorik (Chapt. 250) have sucked up all the spare cash I had – and then some. Even worse, when I tried to contact Nizhny Novgorod Vanya to remind him about the $ 200 loan payment he promised me “at the end of the month,” he’s nowhere to be found. He’s changed his phone numbers and doesn’t respond to my e-mails. I’ve come to the sad – and in this case terrifying – realization that my former lover and “friend” of eight years whom I put through the university at a cost of some $ 16,000, has stiffed me for the $ 2,800 I loaned him last fall. I’m still hoping I’m wrong, but the signs are ominous.
He was my back-up. He assured me several months ago that in an emergency, he could “lend” me back $ 500 or so.
But he’s disappeared.
And it’s summertime: I’m losing lots of students to vacations, business conflicts, and the usual. I’m supposed to have four lessons a week at Information-Plus, for instance, bringing me $ 200. Last week I had none. Both of Masha’s lessons had to be cancelled because her company’s bank account is frozen by the tax police. There went another $ 100. And now she’s announced she’s taking two weeks’ vacation. University students Gleb and Ilya both cancelled English classes until their school classes end – another $ 70 a week out the window. Lawyer Alexei is taking a month’s vacation in June. Student Andrei cancelled all lessons in May for business reasons and hasn’t contacted me yet about June.
So the $ 1,000 I counted on having from my private students is completely out the window.
All in all, I took in a grand total of $ 150 last week, $ 120 of it from Oksana, who completed her last lesson before her TOEFL test next week, so no more from her. The lush pasture land has dried up. My final Inst. of Diplomacy lesson is next Saturday.
So all I can count on for certain is my final $ 600 for Inst. of Diplomacy lessons, and my pension, though there will be more than that – I just can’t count on it. Let’s say maybe I could find an apartment for $ 500 or $ 600 within one or two stations of the center of the city, and that it would only take $ 1,000 or $ 1,200 to get into it. If I moved out in the middle of the night without warning the landlady, I could manage it, but I think I’d be setting myself up for legal action – the thing I want to avoid at all costs.
If on the other hand, I gave Natasha 30-day notice on the 17th, would she demand a lot of money for repairs before I left? Missy has done a lot of superficial damage. Of course the place was a hovel when I moved into it – ancient wall paper, junk furniture, etc. – but it was at least all there and rentable enough that I, for instance, could move in and live.
A person probably would not move into it in its present state.
But to my mind, that’s for the most part merely six years’ normal wear and tear on furniture that was essentially trash when I first sat on it.
What are my legal rights and my legal obligations? Always before when I’ve moved, I’ve had somebody else to take care of the details. Misha and cook/housekeeper Tanya, for instance, found this apartment, dickered with the landlady, and packed and moved.
Packing and moving alone is a nightmare I dread almost more than anything else in the world.
I asked student Masha, a lawyer, what the legal situation is with regard to apartments in Russia. “Of course it depends on your contract,” she lawyerly replied.
Contract? Do I have a contract? I must have signed one, but where the hell would it be? I don’t have it now.
But she went on to say that it’s pretty standard to give at least a 30-day notice. I mentioned that to Sergei. He waved it off. “Don’t worry.” But he’s a 22-year-old homeless bum who’s lived for the last five years by skirting the fine edges of the law. I’m a teacher with a visa. I’m easily deported for minor transgressions.
To complicate matters, my Bank America debit card expires in July and my power of attorney in America, David G., informs me that he’s received the new one. I told him to send it to me by DHL and to take any costs out of my account. So I don’t want to be in the middle of moving and have my debit card disappear because they couldn’t find me.
It also means I’ll probably have less than $ 850 to work with in my Bank America account.
The final coup de grace is that my Russian visa expires July 6. To renew it, I have to have a landlady who says she’s giving me permission to live here for the next year. If we’re in the middle of moving, obviously she’s not going to do that. Without it I don’t get my visa renewed and it’s back to the Bush outback. But I don’t have the money for that, either!
Ahhhhh!
Okay, what are my options?
a) Find an apartment and move out with no notice. That would be setting myself up for legal recrimination. Without looking into the legalities, I think that’s not an option.
b) Tell the landlady that because of the situation with Igor I am going to look for a new apartment and move in July. I would ask her to bring a copy of the contract when she collects the rent on the 17th to give me a chance to see what I’ve agreed to. If necessary have a meeting with her and an interpreter to reach an agreement on the state of the apartment. I would have Igor stay in Moldova till we’ve move into a new apartment. Downside? It would probably mean I would be without a visa, so that’s no option either.
c) Do nothing. That would solve lots of problems at the expense of abandoning Igor. But in the survival biz, first you save your own ass, then you worry about the others’. Igor would have no place to return to in Moscow and would probably view it as treachery. He has already said he doesn’t want to stay there more than a month, and that if he does he might get into fights and wind up in prison, because “I have lots of enemies there.”
I would have to explain by SMS that I don’t have the money to change apartments now, but when I do he can come back and live with me – though it might be several months away. I could also send him a couple of hundred bucksi a month to subsist in the meantime, which should enable him to live decently in that desert of civilization where 40% of the country’s population survives on an average income of $ 2.15 per day – about $ 65 a month.
Unpleasant as it is – for him and me -- I really think this is the only viable option. We bought his ticket this morning. 300 bucksi at most stands between now and his departure Wednesday noon. He needs another $ 35 worth of stuff before he goes and $ 50 pocket money; I have to send Zhorik $ 50 tomorrow for summer clothing; we have to eat; and there are always unforeseen incidental expenses.
I already bought him a $ 50 used mobile phone yesterday so we can continue to communicate while he’s in Moldova.
So while things are looking bleak, I’ve got some maneuvering room under this option.
One bit of pressure is off: Zhorik said that I didn’t need to worry about trying to go to Novosibirsk in September if I could definitely come at New Year’s. $ 400 or $ 500 saved is $ 400 or $ 500 earned. And I will definitely go at New Year’s.
When I got home from my Inst. of Diplomacy class on Wednesday night, Igor and Sergei were waiting for me in the court yard. They’d lost their key to the apartment.
They were excited and affectionate. They had been to the nude beach at Serebrenniy Bor. They didn’t get naked, they said, but they’d had a good time.
Igor disappeared shortly afterward to meet his friend Suzanna, who works in the little grocery store in the courtyard. Is he fucking her, I wondered.
I drank a canned screwdriver, watched a little TCM on TV, and passed out in bed. I awoke when I felt a finger tickling the bottom of my foot. I looked up to see a smiling Igor.
He crawled onto the bed and kissed me, and lay there for a few seconds in my arms, chatting.
When he came to bed in earnest around 3:30, he stretched out on his back beside me, his tantalizing torso and thighs begging me to explore them.
During the brou-ha-ha two years ago over whether or not Lincoln was gay, his biographer, C.A. Tripp, cited the rather unconventional eloquence expressed by Abe’s English coach, Billy Greene -- who shared his room and bed in Springfield – in describing his 22-year-old bed mate’s physique (Chapt. 104-1/2):
''His thighs were as perfect as a human being’s could be,” Greene effused to his friends.
And I could well say the same of Igor’s. They lie beside me night after night like huge luscious chicken drumsticks that I can scarcely keep my hands and tongue from caressing.
Instead, on Wednesday night I merely put my arm around his stomach and caressed the pubic hair that meandered south from his belly button.
“Whaddayuh think?” I asked, figuring I knew the answer already. “Do you think we could play a little bit?”
To my utter surprise, he drawled a soft, gentle “umm-hmm.”
So he hadn’t fucked her! Well I’ll take care of that!
He got harder and came quicker even than the last time (Chapt. 250). Again, with him still shooting into my mouth, I grabbed my own cock and in seconds had prevented another case of prostate cancer.
I think he’s getting used to the idea that it’s okay to have sex with me. He seems increasingly comfortable, maybe even satisfied. But like most Russian – and Moldovan – boys, he’s also excessively modest. He wants a cover over his legs up to his balls, and he pulls his shorts back up over his dick as quickly as his vas deferens has no more gism to squirt.
But I think he’s coming around to thinking of us more and more as pals, partners, and fuck buddies, the latter being a secret between us that nobody needs to know, a secret he seems to be content with.
And this is what is leaving on the train on Wednesday. When will I see him again? When will I suck his dick again?
Very bad timing.
Maybe in belated recognition of the role of cigarettes in Russia’s demographic crisis, although that’s giving them credit for a level of intelligence they don’t normally demonstrate, Duma deputies seem to be in the process of passing a new anti-smoking law.
There’s already an anti-smoking law in effect, but it’s generally ignored – probably because there are no penalties for smokers who violate it.
The new law will provide stiff penalties for violators -- $ 190 for individuals and $ 3,900 for companies, including restaurants, that fail to comply.
Russia is the biggest tobacco market in Europe. Whereas in Europe, the cheapest cigarettes cost about $ 7 a pack, you can buy them here for about 50 cents, enabling even the poorest a grisly equal opportunity death at an early age. This is helped along by Russian law, which allows 14 mg of tar per filtered cigarette, compared to 10 in Europe.
Consequently, health leaders here say that in some regions, such as Chelyabinsk, 82% of all men are chronic smokers. Overall, the UN estimates that 64% of all adult men and 21% of all adult women in Russia smoke. Another source says half of all teenage boys and 40% of all teenage girls smoke.
Russia’s chief epidemiologist estimates that 375,000 Russians die of smoking-related disease every year. The country’s production of cigarettes has doubled over the last decade. 14 billion of the coffin nails were produced in 2006.
However, there may be a small silver lining to all this. My students tell me that it is now becoming cool among teenagers not to smoke.
As beautiful Maxim from my Inst. of Diplomacy class (photo, Chapt. 237) and I strolled to Kropotkinskaya Metro Station after Saturday’s lesson, I casually asked, “what’s new in your life?”
“My grandfather in Tatarstan died yesterday.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “How old was he?”
“Mid-70s – 71 or 72.”
That’s younger than me!
“What did he die of?”
“When he woke up yesterday, his arm was numb, so they took him to a hospital, but he died.”
“It sounds like a stroke.”
“Yes, a stroke. He had been working just the day before in the garden with my father,” he said.
I thought back to my mini-stroke of a year ago (Chapt. 205). With all the other realities of my life at the present moment, this bit of news was not designed to assuage my anxiety.
“Was he a smoker?” I asked.
“He was till his mid-60s.
“How about alcohol?”
He drank vodka a lot.”
Okay, I feel better. So he’s another victim of the Russian male life style – tobacco and vodka – which Russian health authorities seem to be making at least a feeble attempt to address.
Still, it’s a reminder of my vulnerability. With or without butts and booze, I’m at the age of strokes and heart attacks. It could happen to me!
Is conflict between Russia and the U.S. inevitable? That was the question Russian journalist and political analyst Evgeniy Kiselyov posed – and tried to answer -- at a recent Wash. DC conference on U.S.-Russian relations.
“Conflict is practically unavoidable…although,” he quickly added, “not necessarily armed conflict.”
A major reason, he explained in a Moscow Times op-ed piece, is that we are now in the run-up to elections next year in both countries, and in Russia, “the ruling elite appears to have decided on external threats as the focus” of both the upcoming Duma and presidential elections.
As did Bush in 2004, the Kremlin is trotting out the age-old tried-and-true election bromide: “The enemy is at the gate and we must unite to defeat him. Vote for me.”
And the enemy, of course, is the West in general and the U.S. in particular.
Hence the increasingly blatant revival of cold war rhetoric, for which both Russia and the U.S. are blaming the other. Bushica (Bush’s America) is playing into the “we-are-surrounded-by-the-enemy” theme with its plan to put anti-ballistic missile batteries in Poland and the Czech republic, which Putin insists is aimed at Moscow despite Bush’s blithe assurances that it’s only for defense against “rogue states” like Iran and N. Korea.
The agreement between Putin and Condoleezza Rice last week to tone down the rhetoric was scarcely reported in the Russian press, Kiselyov points out, because its message countered the official Kremlin “enemy-at-the-gate” theme.
Kiselyov, who has been at the receiving end of several of Putin’s onslaughts against Russia's free press (he was a leading Kremlin critic at NTV when Putin successfully removed that channel as an independent media voice) notes that there is little the West can do now to influence events in Russia.
Though Kiselyov doesn’t spell it out, this is due largely to the fact that after nearly eight years of neo-Fascist Bush’s Machiavellian rule, America no longer claims any moral standing in the world. Neither Putin nor anyone else pretends to pay any attention to Bush’s cynical lectures about how to run a democracy.
But the present trend will not continue forever, Kiselyov predicts, because Russia will soon face a new crisis as “a new and completely different generation” replaces the current one, whose “attitudes and thinking were formed during Leonid Brezhnev’s time.”
The crisis looms, he says, because “it is impossible to build an authoritative regime parading as semi-Russian orthodox in a secular country with a market economy….
“….Russia has endless ties to the outside world, where members of the (Russian) ruling elite own real estate and bank accounts and their children and grandchildren study in the West.
“It is wrong to constantly act as though the country were ruled by Democratic principles when there is no independent parliament and no functioning opposition parties, and where leaders must run to the Kremlin to ask permission for every move they make. There are no independent courts, national television channels, or civic organizations.
“With so many dark clouds on the horizon, a storm is sure to break sooner or later.”
Kiselyov’s advice to the West: Don’t be as unprepared for this crisis as you were for the Communist collapse in 1991.
Of course, this is exactly the course of events that Putin is trying to prevent by tightening controls and eliminating opposition. But ironically, exerting more state control will simply precipitate the crisis more quickly, Kiselyov warned.
The journalist-training organization Internews, which was unceremoniously raided in April (Chapt. 245), has had its bank accounts frozen in what representatives of the non-governmental organization (NGO) says is a coordinated effort to shut them down.
“I can’t understand who does not want us to be in the country,” the NGO’s director, Manana Azlamazian, told the Moscow Times.”
But it’s really not hard to figure out. Now renamed the Educated Media Foundation, the NGO trains journalists to act like journalists instead of state propagandists. And to the Putin Administration, this is training them to behave unpatriotically and to present unacceptable extremist views. News is, after all, what the Kremlin says it is.
And Putin will no doubt succeed in his goal of simply getting rid of the organization. Opposing views and dissent must, after all, be stifled if the empire is to survive.
89 investigate reporters have been killed in Russia in the last decade, the Brussels-based News Safety Institute said last week during a gathering of world journalists in Moscow.
One of the major reasons for the International Federation of Journalists’ meeting here is to point up the fact that more journalists are killed in Russia than in any other non-warring nation. In fact, Iraq, is the only country in the world where more journalists have been killed than in Russia, noted Igor Yakovenko, general secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists.
The entire world recognizes Russia as “the most dangerous place for journalists,” asserted Alexei Simonov, chairman of the Glasnost Defense Foundation.
Putin pointedly ignored invitations to meet with the IFJ, made up of 161 journalist unions from 117 countries, although it is customary for the head of state of the host country to address its triennial meetings. Putin’s absence was unusual, noted Yavovenko, and constitutes “…a public statement of his position.”
The government’s disdain of the journalists union is further evidenced by the fact that the Federal Property Management Agency is now in the process of evicting it from its historic offices -- punishment for its defense of press freedom, say Union officials.
Fortunately stifling political dissent is a pastime only of the Russian autocratic regime, right? The American government wouldn’t do such a thing, now would it?
Just ask Adam Kokesh, an honorably discharged U.S. Marine corporal who faced the possibility of being discharged less than honorably for wearing a Marine fatigue uniform -- with military insignia removed – in an Iraq war protest.
Although he had received his honorable discharge after one combat tour in Iraq, he remained part of the Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of former active duty service members in unpaid, non-drill status, according to the Associated Press.
Kokesh's attorney, Michael Lebowitz, termed the threatened discharge an attempt to stifle critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
"Someone in the Marine Corps needs to exercise a little common sense and put an end to this matter …," observed Gary Kurpius, national commander of the 2.4 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars.
"Trying to hush up and punish fellow Americans for exercising the same democratic right we're trying to instill in Iraq is not what we're all about."
Tell it to the Marines.
America is among the least peaceful nations in the world, according to the newly published Global Peace Index. The U.S. is 96th out of 121, between Yemen and Iran.
Norway is the most peaceful.
Unfortunately, Russia is even further down the line – 118th out of the 121 countries ranked.
What conclusions are we to draw from this? Probably that peace loving people should probably stay out of both countries.
A group of $ 21,580 alligator handbags was featured at the opening of Ralph Lauren’s first Moscow emporium in the upscale Tretyakovsky Passage near the Tretyakovsky Art Gallery a couple of weeks ago.
They were all sold out by the end of the first day.
Style is everything to the Russian super-rich. A self-proclaimed Siberian-turned-Muscovite style expert has 50 women waiting in line for $ 3,000 style consultations.
The days of the “New Russian” may be past, but the super rich of Moscow still live by the motto, “if you got it, flaunt it.”
See also related pages:
Chapt. #104 - Lincoln’s birthday; was he gay? Was I a criminal?
Chapt. #249 - “Illegal Moldovans” threaten apartment crisis
Chapt. #245 - Zhorik exits; and so do human rights
Chapt. #237 - Moldova adventure almost a certainty
