Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 28 – 1533 words
Columns :: Day of the Turkey

MOSCOW, Nov. 27, 2003 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Thanksgiving Day
Putin tightening power – censoring textbooks
Yegor goes to baths and somebody’s house
Seryozh out of hospital



MOSCOW, Nov. 27, 2003 -- It’s Thanksgiving.

Turkey Day, halfway around the world.

I suppose we have something to be thankful for. I’ve managed to round up enough money to pay for our Prague adventure.

And yesterday I saw sunshine for the first time in three weeks.

But today, the third day of December, the sun has hidden itself again, and the gloom has once more settled in.

Khodorkovsky and his increasingly beleaguered oil company, Yukos, are again in the news. Today headlines are about an allegedly leaked letter from the tax ministry saying Yukos owes billion in back taxes; and speculation is that Putin has been playing footsie with Abromovich, the compliant oligarch who recently bought England’s Chelsea Football Club, to halt the proposed merger with Abromovich’s company Sibneft.

It’s all two murky and complicated for most of the rest of us. But what it’s clearly spelling out is Putin’s almost frenzied determination to eliminate all political opposition, a move which began after Khodorkovsy began making noises about building a more open Russia and actually funding opposition parties as an initial attempt to do just that.

So it looks to most of us like Putin’s power and authority are festering according to plan.

And with the Duma, or Congressional, elections only a few days away, the KGB colonel-turned Tsar/Kommisar is taking no chances. Real opponents are being disqualified right and left by the Kremlin-controlled elections commission under various guises. So the new Duma will be even more of a lap dog than the one that it’s replacing.

So everything is looking rosy for Putin’s grand plan to consolidate power, right?

Well, maybe not, according to an analysis in yesterday’s Moscow Times by some guy named Belkovsky who is chairman of something called the Council for National Strategy.

Belkovsky seems to be agreeing with my friend, dissident Andrei S., who is predicting that the Putin regime is not long for this world and that the present structure may simply collapse. But with all Putin’s chessmen being moved so adroitly into place, how could this be?

Well, Belkovsky says that Putin’s apparent victory in bringing the Duma to heel – it’s already nothing but a rubber stamp and will become even more compliant with Sunday’s election – means that the battleground for power and the future of Russia will be moved from the open political market back into the shadowy confines of the Kremlin. It seems Kremlin watching – an obsessive Western preoccupation during the Soviet era – is reclaiming its vaunted status.

Putin is already practicing schizophrenic politics in trying to balance the interests of the Yeltsin “family” that brought him to power -- which includes the oligarchs – and his own passionate interest in, as a true-believing KGB colonel emeritus, the state as the ultimate power.


While it may not seem so on the surface, Russia is “dangerously unstable,” contends Belokovsky, in no insigificant measure due to the collapsing infrastructure: Entire regions are already sometimes without heat and water, and most of the country lives in squalid poverty – conditions that make widespread revolt not inconceivable.

And Andrei S. says that with its finally becoming obvious to everybody that the KGB is now the real power, the anger and frustration of the Russian people over the crumbling state of the national infrastructure will now come cascading down on the head of the KGB. They won’t be able to dodge and point and accuse “the real power,” because everyone knows they’re “the real power” now.

These two alternatives – the all-powerful state and the all-powerful oligarchy – are of necessity divergent and conflicting; and whichever one Putin opts for, he’s in trouble, says Belkovsky.

Only a strong showing by Putin in the presidential elections next March can save him, Belkovky contends. But he’s certain to have a “liberal” opponent – very possibly even Khodorkovsky himself, since he can’t be prevented from running until he’s actually been convicted, and his trial isn’t expected to even begin before next April. That liberal candidate would probably drain off 10 to 12 per cent of Putin’s support, bringing Putin down to 40 to 42 per cent in the election and thus forcing a run-off.

“The brief interval between the first and second rounds would be a nightmare for Putin,” contends Belkovsky. All the “enormous resources” of the oligarchs – money, Western backing, political manipulation, etc. – would be brought into play against Putin. His superficial parliamentary majority would desert him at the drop of a hat, and he himself has no such enormous resources. (On the other hand, the state itself is a pretty significant resource, it seems to me).

Reverting to force would only work against him, and backed into a corner, he would be forced to knuckle under to the oligarchs or….

“No one can say how it will end,” concludes Belokovsky, “but we can say that it could possible lead to the collapse of the state.”


In the meantime, Putin is continuing his very obvious tightening of power. A textbook that invites students to “prove or disprove” a journalist’s statement about Putin’s “personal power and authoritarian dictatorship” is about to be banned.

The textbook also alludes to a charge by a political opponent that “a police state was formed in Russia” when Putin came to power.

“Textbooks should not be used to fuel current affairs debates,” Putin told a meeting of historians last week. Their purpose should be to “provide historical facts, and they must cultivate a sense of pride among youth in their history and their country.”

And pride in one’s country presumably necessitates pride in one’s president. Right, George?

Again, I see our two countries’ paths merging.


At 1:00 in the afternoon, Sasha is in bed. He arrived last night about 10 for the usual beer, cribbage, and sex. But as an Asian Tatar not many generations removed, his body doesn’t process booze very efficiently – not even beer. So though we only had three or four glasses, he’s suffering from a bad hangover.

Just before Sasha arrived, Yegor asked if he could go with Anton to the gay baths near Mayakovsky, just 20 minutes away. “We’ll be back at 6 in the morning,” he said.

I was about to explode, then remembered that Sasha was coming and that that would give us some time together. So I said okay. But when I woke up this morning at 7:15, there was no Yegor and no Anton.

When I returned at 10:00 from my early class, there was still no Yegor and no Anton.

About 11:00 I called Anton’s mobile phone. “Where’s Igor?” Barely coherent, Anton mumbled that they had gone to somebody’s house. “Whose?” “I’ll explain later.”

I hung up angrily.

About 12:30 Yegor called repeating they had met somebody and gone home with him and he was going to wash his face and be home in an hour. An hour and a half later they arrived.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“You said you’d be here at 6:00 this morning. Why weren’t you?”

“We met some guy and he invited us home.”

“So of course you had to go?”

“He had a nice face, so we went with him.”

“Do you go home with everybody with a nice face who asks you?”

“No.”

“Then why did you go with him?”

“Not only me. He (nodding to Anton) went too.

“So you have to go everyplace he goes?”

“No.”

Then why did you go?

“I called you and told you where I was.”

“I called Anton at 11:00 and asked where you were. You didn’t call till 12:30 this afternoon.

“You’re always accusing me of not keeping my word,” I continued. “When you asked me last night to go to the baths with you, you said I had said I would go and that because I didn’t go last night I wasn’t keeping my word. I told you that I had an early class this morning and that sometime when I don’t have an early class I’ll go with you. But still you accused me of not keeping my word.

“You said you’d be here at 6:00 this morning and you weren’t. Do you consider that keeping your word?”

“You didn’t let me take my mobile phone…”

I’m not talking about phoning, I’m talking about not keeping your word.”

“Well, if you consider this information this way….”

“I do.”

That was a frosty 15 minutes ago. Nothing has been said since.


Seryozh is out of the hospital, he announced in a phone call a few days ago. I haven’t tried to go visit him because I didn’t want to be disloyal to Yegor. Maybe I should disappear and then show up at noon the next day with the explanation that somebody invited me, so of course I had to go.

I just bought Yegor a new pair of shoes and hooked up his mobile phone yesterday. I don’t feel very well rewarded.

So the gloom gets gloomier.

“Turkey!” the mirror mumbles accusingly.

Putin thinks he has problems.

He should be a 70-year-old gay ex-pat trying to juggle half a dozen lovers and three room-mates in a two-bedroom apartment. He’d find out what problems are.