Poem about Boy Meets World

I can't believe that

Cory and Topanga wed;

just...unexpected

A Star is Bernstein (Part 2)

This is sort of old news by now but a couple weeks ago I went to Salsk, a little town a few hours south of Rostov. This is where the Soviet government gave many foreign communists land to build communes. So I went there thinking that I would get to the biggest commune, Seyatel. (The name is a play on words; in Russian this means "a planter," you know, a dude who plants, but most of the settlers were Finn- or Russian-Americans from the greater Seattle area. Get it? It turned into the "Stalin Collective Farm", then the "22nd Party Congress Collective Farm" and has now returned to its orginal name as a semi-private company.) When I got there, though, I realized the people who were supposed to meet me had some other ideas, none of which involved going to the farm. They didn't know what it was, actually. They thought I was coming to give a talk at their school. The local press came so at least I got in the newpaper and on tv. In terms of research not very fruitful, but this gift from the children's museum did expand my art collection:

April Fools?

Last year I had a post with an idea for miagkii znak/tverdii znak (soft sign/hard sign) tattoos. Like all ideas I have that seem too good to be true, I let this one simmer for nearly a year. Well, the idea was as solid as it seemed and here's the result:

SMS Me

If anyone wants to send greetings to me via my cell phone (or to other friends in Russia who use MTS) for free, go to this website. You can get my phone from Facebook or email me, I guess, although that seems like a lot of work.

Little Bear

I watched Dmitrii Medvedev in Serbia on TV and I realized for the first time he's really, really small. I looked it up and he's about 158 centimeters which is a little more than 5'2", according to several internet sources. (Obviously, not official but none give him more than 166, which is 5'4".) Putin is only a little taller at 168. Then again, he's at least as tall as Stalin (158). Anyway, a photo:

Foreigners in Russian Basketball

I took a break from script writing to do a little research on Russian basketball. It had always seemed strange to me that so few foreign players played basketball in Russia, especially considering the foreign players I have seen are much better than their Russian counterparts. As it turns out the answer is pretty archaic. The answer is in the by-laws of the Russian Federation of Basketball's "Rules of the Championship of Russia among Men's Clubs" (my translation):


77.2.1: A team's roster may include:

· In Division A [the better league, like the NBA]:
-for clubs/teams taking part in the European Cup, no more than seven (7) players of category E or A, of which no more than 2 players from category A.
-for clubs/teams not taking part in the European Cup, no more than five (5) players of category E or A, of which no more than two players from category A.

· In Division B [the better league, like the NBDL] can be no more than two players of category E or A.

77.2.1: A team's technical roster may include: · In Division A [the better league, like the NBA] can be no more than seven (5) players of category E or A, of which no more than 2 players from category A.
· In Division B [the better league, like the NBDL] can be no more than two players of category E or A.

77.3 For clubs in Division A, at the same time in the course of a game no more than three (3) players of category E or A can be on the court.

In the case of violation in the course of a game, then the game must be immediately stopped and the necessary substitions made.

77.4 A team's roster can include only one player with dual-citizenship, one of which must be Russian and he must have the right to play for the national team of Russia.

So what is a E category player and what is a category A player? The glossary lists E as "an athlete with European citizenship...unable to play for the Russian national team." Category A is "an athlete with non-European [that is, American or Argentinean or Australian, you get the idea, the A stands for something] citizenship...unable to play for the Russian national team." In short, you can have seven foreign players, two of which can be non-European (usually American), five can be on the bench in a game and three can be on the court at the same time.

Some teams have circumvented this. Putin made sure CSKA point guard, John Robert Holden, recently gained Russian citizenship meaning that he counts now as a Russian on the floor and CSKA can field another foreign player. (He was also able to play for the national team in the European championship this fall and, in fact, made the winning basket. His interview was given through a translator on Russian television.)

Truth in History

According to private critical reviews, the story about Stalin's stand-up comedy and Lenin was "really funny" but my idea for a Lenin romantic drama, "also funny, but not as much." The old adage goes, it's funny because it's true.

This is actually a good point to stop and talk a little about a past movement in historical writing. A lot of radical historical comedians up until the middle of the last century took the "funny because it's true" theory to mean that various historical events did not occur because they weren't funny. Diseases we know now to have been devastating were rarely considered historically provable (an exception is the plague--Chaucer is funny) and Native-American history (a bummer) was the realm of pseudo-historians. In fact, the period in American history from the end of the so-called "Era of Good Feelings" (hilarious for obvious reasons) to the time when abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was beaten mercilessly by pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks in the Capital Building was an unverifiable, boring void.

In the 1960s, Paul Venn invented a diagram which systematically proved that while things that are funny are always true, true things are not always funny. This revelation unleashed a deluge of works on not-funny subjects such as the Holocaust, polio and slavery among others, which were thought to be false previously.

(The verity of polio was controversial before Venn. Some historical comedians considered President Roosevelt's affliction ironic because the formerly freewheeling Roosevelt gained the austerity while confined to a wheelchair that led to his election. Thus, some argued, if Roosevelt's polio had been funny, the disease happened. Others disagreed, citing the fact that the disease itself was not funny but was the cause of humor. Was it not more likely, they asked, that Roosevelt's disease was a proven entity, like scoliosis or plague?)

Getting back to Lena's Vladimir, I realized it wasn't as funny as the history of Lenin's death because it wasn't as true. In the former, I presented some linguistic evidence that young Lenin was involved in a torrid love affair with a woman named Elena and that, in the course of the Revolution, he chose to have her killed for political crimes in spite of his love for her. Stacked against the rock hard archival evidence I produced to prove my theory about Lenin's death, the evidence for Lena's Vladimir was a little soft.

Over the last week I was working in the Ulyanovsk State Archive and, though I was unable to find conclusive evidence, I found the following correspondence between a certain E. Andreeva and a "Vladimir," without a doubt, Lenin (my translation):

Andreeva to Vladimir
June 3, 1889

Dear Vladimir,

Your words brought hope to my heart. Inside you burns a revolutionary fire as red as the hair that covers your loins. Come hither as soon as you can leave the socialist front. [Emphasis mine--F.B.]

Love,
E. Andreeva

I emphasized the word "socialist" in the last sentence to point out the ideological difference between the lovers. Andreeva considered socialism to be the end goal of the future revolution, while Lenin, by this time a devoted Marxist, considered socialism a stopping point on the way to communism. Forbidden love if I've ever seen it.

On Russian Commercials (and The Irony of Fate: Continuation)

I've been rethinking my life decisions on joining the history writing profession. If Lena's Vladimir (tentative title) doesn't work out, I'm thinking about getting a degree in television advertising sociology, writing a book or two on societal values reflected in commercials and then selling out to the first consulting firm that offers seven figures. Here's a preview:

1. "Aluminum--The Civilized Container"

Scene: A movie theater. From left to right, two half-liter green glass bottles, one half-liter grey aluminum can and one plastic bottle of indeterminable size (either one liter or 1.5 liter) sit in the balcony row.

Plastic bottle (moves forward part of lid upward): Burrrrp.

Glass bottles (leaning into each other's seats): ClinkClinkClinkClinkClink.

(Theater darkens)

Can (top comes up): Click. Shhhhhh.

(Glass and plastic bottles jump and then sit down motionless.)

Announcer: Aluminum, the most civilized container.


I like this commercial because it's pretty much true. Glass bottles always have waste (the cap) and are potentially very loud and messy. A plastic bottle is no less than a liter and up to five liters. Plus, most beer that comes in plastic bottles is not good and if you aren't sharing or drinking fast, it's going to go flat. Aluminum cans leave no waste, they aren't loud and they are usually of a size that will not go flat before you can finish.

After I had seen this message a dozen times or so, I started to wonder who put it out there. The can and glass bottles both look like Baltika 7, a quality light beer, but the labels aren't visible and that particular beer does not have a plastic bottle variety. It's possible Baltika is trying to drive people to its aluminum can variety products; it recently put out a 1 liter can version of Baltika 7. Maybe Russia has experienced a rash of murders by broken beer bottle in movie theaters. (It's obvious why you would want to discourage people from drinking from plastic bottles.) Maybe the aluminum lobby finally got up the balls to take on those assholes at Big Glass.

2. Mayonnaise

I have a couple commercials in mind here, but the main thing I want to point out is that Russia is the only country I know of where mayonnaise is sold with sexy commercials or a blockbuster film.

Example 1: An attractive young couple has just moved into their new apartment. The woman gets out a bag of mayonnaise (pictured below), squeezes out a dollop onto her partner's fingertip and inserts finger with mayonnaise into her mouth. The couple goes to the bedroom, the woman carrying the mayonnaise behind her back.

Example 2: In The Irony of Fate: Continuation (which, is a travesty. This is a sequel to the Russian equivalent, in the sense that it gets played every New Year, to It's a Wonderful Life. The original is a social commentary, a good comedy and does a good job maintaining the illusion of realism through character interaction, even though the plot is a little far-fetched. The sequel is a slick, shallow picture about the children of the original characters. It's a Vh1-esque nostalgia-fest packed full of the most blatant advertising I've seen since Independence Day but none of the substance of the original. [Independence Day, for that matter, also had more substance although I do think that Linux would clearly have been more compatible with the alien operating system.]) an old lady makes a salad, which in Russia is usually a bunch of random ingredients--beets, carrots, ham, eggs, garlic etc etc etc--smothered in mayonnaise. She squeezes out the whole bottle of Calve, which is running a media blitz right now, then tastes and makes the "mmm-good!" face. Later, another lady tastes, then squeezes some more mayonnaise in and makes the "mmm-better!' face.

Could it not be that the preponderance of mayonnaise on television and in the store has catastrophically lowered the age of death in Russia? Is it not so that mayonnaise from a bag, clearly a more efficient container, has made the stuff so accessible that it is sexually corrupting young Russia? What I'm really trying to say is that mayonnaise is a big, sexy deal in Russia.

More about Lenin (a love story)

This is a revelation I had a couple months ago when I was talking to a lady I work with named Elena (shortened, Lena) about Lenin. I mentioned Lenin's room and she said, "My room?" I said, "No, Ulyanov's." She said, "Oh, I was confused there for a minute."

The confusion comes from the fact that the Russian adjective lenin means Lena's, so when I said "room of Lenin" (which sounds fine in Russian but may have been weird in context) she heard "room Lena's" (which sounds weird in Russian but works grammatically). She said that she frequently had trouble with these kinds of mix-ups, since people talk about Lenin a lot and people also talk about her in the third person frequently. (She's an avant-garde performance artist who has turned her life into an act she calls "Third Personal.")

But since Lenin's name is a pseudonym, what does that mean about him? This crappy website talks about two possibilities that have been ruled out: a reference to the Lena River as opposition to Georgi Plekhanov (real name), whose one time pseudonym referred to the Volga River, and the Lena execution, which happened after Lenin used the pseudonym.

I'm going to put forward here a totally unverifiable story about Lenin falling in love with a girl named Elena when he was young (before he met Mrs. Lenin, whose name was Nadezhda) and then using her name as his pseudonym as a sign of everlasting love/youthful lust. I'm also going to write this as a movie script, sort of like that bad Chris O'Donnell, Sandra Bullock movie about Hemingway in Italy, but with Lenin. And yes, plenty of nudity. Also, I think the end of the movie will be Lenin personally signing her death sentence, or personally watching Dzerzhinsky or Trotsky do it, and crying. (They had to kill her because she was a Social Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik.) Maybe she escapes, but probably not. I'm still working out the kinks. Any suggestions for the role of young or old Lenin?

A Story I Can't Put on the Internet; Seth Update; A Story I Can Put on the Internet (About Lenin)

Well, my days of flying under the radar registrationwise caught up to me and over the last week I was led into the Kafkaesque world of Russian justice, if only a for a day or so. On a side note, when I described to a friend the situation at the local police/registration office as кафкаский [kafkaskii], (which isn't a word) I mispronounced the word and it came out as какаский [kakaskii] which sounds more like poopy (also not quite a real word).

In other news, I signed away my life for the next five or so years to the University of Toronto's History department. I think most people knew who read this knew that but I confirmed it recently so why not post it.

The last story is related to my start as a professional historian. While digging through some 1920s Rostov Party documents I found an important missing piece of Soviet history. That Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky struggled for power and that the former benefited from Lenin's demise before Trotsky could fully establish himself in power is quite well known. Some "conspiracy theorists" have even supposed that Stalin went as far as to kill Lenin for political benefit. This theory was unsubstantiated...until now.

Stalin was well aware that he could not kill Lenin in a way that would leave evidence. This precluded most conventional means of murder. At the Tenth Party Conference in March, 1921, Stalin overheard Trotsky tell Marshal Tukhachevsky that Lenin had "laughed himself silly" that night and would be in no condition to speak the next day. Stalin deduced, correctly, that if he could tell a stunningly hilarious joke, or several very funny jokes, Lenin would laugh himself to death.

Perhaps the most intriguing facet of Stalin's plot is that it forced both Stalin and Trotsky to play to their weaknesses. Stalin, a noted and ruthless political tactician, was dour with a very dark sense of humor. (Funny hmm rather than ha ha .) Trotsky, on the other had, was known as "the original Marxist brother" and Lenin himself frequently called Trotsky "the funniest Jew I know." This coming from a man who knew a lot of Jews in his lifetime.

Stalin's first attacks (the self-deprecating and avant-garde "Black Ass Series," largely written by up-and-coming Georgian Party member Anastas Mikoyan) came as a complete surprise to Trotsky and sent Lenin to the hospital several times. Trotsky's first attempt to foil these assaults was to calm Lenin by saying "that's not funny" or "respect the solemnity of the Kremlin." Lenin, however, frequently mistook these remarks as deadpan follow-up jokes, inducing even more laughter.

Eventually Trotsky gained the upper hand by ensuring that Lenin's wife, who had no taste for racial humor, (even if it was true) was always in the room when Stalin was around. By 1923, Trotsky had practically defeated Stalin's plot by introducing the Lenin's Little Interns program, for which a rotating group of 11 year-olds followed Lenin around the clock. (Stalin had practically defeated himself with the self-written bomb, "You Might Be a Communist If..." which Lenin dismissed as "hokey" and "too populist" for his taste.) In fact, Soviet history may have taken an entirely different path if not for the Donskoi Oblast Union of Municipal Service Workers.

On March 23, 1923, the Union named Lenin an honorary pipe fitter--just the weapon that Stalin needed. At that point in Russian humor the technology of inuendo was underdeveloped. (To this day, most Russian humor is relatively crude.) Yet a young Vyacheslav Molotov was cracking sides with the insinuation that Lenin's honorary pipe was located in his pants. Stalin managed to spirit Molotov to his Moscow dacha before Trotsky had heard of the new weapon. Over the next three months, Molotov developed a routine hilarious to adults yet undetectable to children.

In a final affront to what he thought was a defeated opponent, Trotsky invited Stalin to speak at the Lenin's Little Interns' alumni meeting in August, 1923. Stalin's act ("If the Pipe Fit, Get to It") proved a fatal blow to Lenin and sent several of the Little Interns--the oldest of whom were 14-- to the hospital. Particularly damaging were the bits about "Comrade Lenin laying more pipe in Buriatia than railroads," followed by the slanty eye face, and the one about Lenin's expertise, or lack thereof, in dealing with Mrs. Lenin's plumbing.

For the next five months, Lenin languished in the hospital, occasionally showing improvements but falling to pieces every time Stalin's name was mentioned. On January 21, 1924, Stalin bribed a busty nurse to serve Lenin, along with his lunch, a wrench, and suggest that she was leaking. This was more than Lenin's fragile health could stand. His last words, barely discernable through violent laughter, were, "Stalin, you are the king!"

A Few Notes

I've been out of Rostov for the last month or so on vacation in Barcelona and researching/being sick/dicking around in Ryazan. I’ll try to upload a couple pictures when I get back to Rostov and reasonable internet.

1. Dmitrii Medvedev's last name derives from the Russian word for bear. If he was English, his name would be Bearman or something like that. Pretty good in of itself but even better when you realize that Edinaia Rossia's mascot is a giant polar bear. Anyway, when I came back from Barcelona, roughly a month after leaving Rostov and contact with Russian media, Medvedev was all over TV and Putin was relegated to the third or fourth news story of the day, instead of number one, like he had been before.

2. I was working in the Ryazan library regional history department (which is terrifying, because I am flying under the radar registration-wise, using an expired library card and copious amounts of blat--that is, name dropping--to get access to materials) when three middle-aged, bearded academic types entered and filed into the staff office. The regular workers in the department are about ten 35-60 year-old women--as far as I can tell only three of them do anything--and all of them, except the oldest lady who does the most work, went into the office. The last one added mysteriously, "Don't let anyone in here!" Librarian sex/cocaine party?

3. When I got to Ryazan I had been traveling for about a week. For adventure's sake I took the long way from Barcelona: a flight to Bremen, then a flight to Riga, then an overnight train to Pskov and then another overnight train to Moscow. Somewhere in there I caught both cold and flu so by the time I got to Ryazan, things were pretty bad. I had a fever of 103, and not the sexy kind like in the song. But the worst part wasn't being sick, it was being tended to by the lady I'm staying with, a friend's mother, who is a doctor. The trouble is she's also a Russian mother which means she has a whole repertoire of folk remedies in addition to being a real doctor and it was sometimes hard to tell what was real and what was bullshit. I couldn't eat the porridge with a full stick of butter but I did drink the vodka with hot pepper.

Emblems

Here's the last (and my favorite) article of the Soviet Constitution of 1924:


Article 11:

On the emblem, flag and capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

70. The governmental emblem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics consists of a sickle and hammer on the sphere of the earth, lit by the rays of the sun and framed with wheat stalks, with the inscription in 6 languages named in statute 34: "Workers of the world, unite!" On top of the emblem is a five pointed star.

71. The governmental flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics consists of red or scarlet cloth, with the image on the top corner near the flagpole of the gold sickle and hammer and under it a red, five-pointed star, framed with gold edging. The ratio of width to height is 1:2.


My question: will I be purged for accidentally dyeing my flag crimson?

Addendum: If you don't think this is funny yet, think about this. I was in the Ryazan Party Archive last year, doing what I usually did--looking through documents in a somewhat random fashion and finding funny shit--when I found the minutes to a conference in 1918 about propaganda for peasants. An important issue, but not pressing for the delegates. Their debate in the first two pages (representing a day) focused on the food and time for lunch during the week-long conference. The latter issue was settled in a 10-5 vote for 2:00pm rather than 4:00pm. When I related this to the university office secretary she laughed at first, but then I told her that the vote meant a difference of two hours and she said, "Oh, well that's a different matter."

Scenes from Rostov

In case you can't make out the figures, this is Karl Marx Square, where I live (That is, for now, I had a fight with my landlord over the consistent absence of water and am moving, unfortunately.) and on the left is a New Year's Tree stand, with Russian Santa, Papa Frost. A little history behind the statue. Before the Revolution the stand held a statue of Catherine the Great. She granted Armenians the right immigrate from Turkey to the area Rostov in a village called Nakhichivan, which eventually was incorporated into the city. After the Revolution you can guess what happened. Anyhow, you can see why I think this is funny.

This is a performance by a group of young supporters of Edinaia Rossia. Their mascot, a man in a polar bear costume, also was present. This performance repeated all across the city (and presumably the country). The music sounded like "The Final Countdown" by Europe, but not as awesome, mainly because the Detroit Pistons' starting lineup couldn’t make it (although Rasheed Wallace reportedly does support Putin's plan). The girl looking at me taking the picture was not, contrary to appearances, questioning the conventional wisdom of the sitting government, but was wondering why I wasn't dancing (she was).

A Naive Spy

I mentioned in a previous post that I'm doing research on political rehabilitations. My plan was to start with newspaper articles and, once I got a feel for how rehabilitations had been handled before, to get an interview with the Military Prosecutor for the Northern Caucus Military District (Военная Прокуратора СКВО).

The papers came up with a few interesting tidbits: in the mid-nineties, a woman received 6.5 million rubles--roughly $1,000 according to the exchange rate in the same newspaper or $2,000 dollars today, after the monetary reforms--for being incarcerated for political crimes under Stalin and another woman received half that amount; yet another was (and perhaps still is) receiving 107 rubles ($4.25) per month as payment for the execution for her father for political crimes. In total, of all petitions for rehabilitation, something like 4 million throughout the country, roughly 20% were rejected.

So, how does rehabilitation calculus work? In short, I have no idea and probably never will. My guess is that it works a lot like financial aid for grad school in the US, with the Military Prosecutor's office acting as admissions. My first attempt to get in touch with the office was through the military newpaper. Although they wouldn't give me the guy's email address or phone, they did give me his name and their politeness gave me the hope, sweet hope, that he would be willing to answer a few questions.

In fact, they had told me to look for him at the office at the military base downtown. My plan was to go down there and ask for an appointment or, even better, be given an audience with the man immediately. After I wrote up a list of questions in case of the latter, I told the people in my office where I was going to their horror. Occording to them, going to this base would probably lead to me being shot, or at least ridiculed. Since I fear humiliation more than death, I decided to head their advice and let my secretary call his secretary and to try to make an appointment.

The following is their conversation, half of which was reported to me:

My Secretary: Hello, can we have Colonel so-and-so's office. This is Southern Federal University.

Their Secretary: What do you want?

MS: An American student wants to set up an appointment to ask about the process of rehabilitations in Russia.

TS: You know that all Americans are spies.

She got me! Anyway, here's some secret spy shit from Rostov.

"The Plumber's Beloved"

"Meat Products"

A Predictable, Clean Finish to a Dirty Race

The parliamentary elections finished without a hitch for Edinaia Rossia, not surprisingly. The communists, who are the largest minority now, and Yabloko, a center-liberal party, have alleged some violations of the elections and have produced a list of fairly detailed complaints. While I have no doubt these things happen, this is energy misplaced. The violations are mostly limited to one or two districts or, at most, a city and are small things, like confusing ballots or voting without registration. These things probably should be investigated, but though a change of several thousand votes may swing a Duma seat from one party to another, it means nothing for the small parties.

Yabloko is grousing up the wrong tree. By and large Edinaia Rossia let the TsIK (Central Election Commission) do its work counting votes and do it openly. (I thought it strange that 99% of Chechnya voted for Edinaia Rossia but this can probably be explained by a combination of fear of the central government, fear of the local leader (a former rebel now Edinaia Rossia's leading candidate in Chechya), respect of the local leader and the fact that current and future government is pumping lots of money into rebuilding Grozny.) So if Yabloko shouldn't complain about the way the elections turned out, what should they complain about?


1. Putin's role in the election: According to the Russian constitution, the President must be party-less. So how can Putin head Edinaia Rossia's candidate list? Other political parties brought this to a judge's attention to no avail; Putin is the top candidate but not officially a member of the party. Okay, but what happens when Putin wins? He simply refuses the office and continues to be president or stops being president to become a Duma representative, much like what would have happened had John Kerry won the presidential election (only the opposite). While this legal decision is understandable, it clearly misinterprets the spirit of the law, which intended for the president to be a mediator between parties rather than a partisan supporter of one or another party.

2. Raising the percentage to enter parliament: This election required a party to receive more than 7% to have any candidate in the Duma; the minimum previously was 5%. The effect of this is two-fold. First, a party like Yabloka is unlikely to get 7% of the vote but could possibly get 5%. Ditto for the Agrarian Party, a former faction of the Communist Party. People who would have supported Yabloko or the Agrarian Party voted for a larger party, primarily Spravedlivaia Rossia (a left-wing pro-Kremlin party) and the Communist Party, respectively. In addition, some people just didn't go to vote at all.

The second effect of this change is that the four parties which enter the Duma will divide up the roughly 10% of seats representing the population that didn't vote for them. By percentages, Edinaia Rossia, the Communists, LDPR (a right-wing nationalist party) and Spravedlivaia Rossia should receive 284, 50, 38 and 36 seats, respectively. As it is, they will receive around 308, 58, 44 and 40, respectively (all the votes are not counted yet so don't quote me on these figures, not official but the best I can do). Had, say, Spravedlivaia Rossia lost 2 percentage points to Yabloko, the approximate distribution of the three remaining parties would be 345, 60, 45, respectively. As such, Edinaia Rossia has really stacked the deck against smaller parties contending for Duma seats and strengthened their own majority by taking the seats that would represent small parties.

On a side note, Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and Grazhdanskaia Sila are also to blame for their failure in this respect. As the leader of the latter admitted on television last night, the three parties are similar enough that have no reason not to combine into an opposition block. In fact, simply combining their results gives them around 5%, which would have likely inspired and mobilized the non-voting opposition.

3. The removal of the protest vote: Before 2003 Russians could cast a protest vote against all parties. If this option receives a majority, the whole process repeats itself. Hard to imagine this would actually happen but when a large percentage votes against all it at least shows public dissatisfaction. While some of these protest votes may have funneled into, say, Spravedlivaia Rossia, Yabloko, etc., more likely is that these people just stayed home.

4. Edinaia Rossia's use of the media: As I mentioned in previous posts, Edinaia Rossia campaigned in the guise of regular programming, in particular on news programs and "special reports" on protests, while other parties were relegated to late night commercial spots and ridiculous debates. It's hard to compete when the first half of the news covers the campaigns of Edinaia Rossia candidates, followed by sports and the weather.


Non-Edinaia Rossia parties are pointing these things out, too, but in a much more muted fashion, while they are putting voting fraud--a relatively minor problem--in the forefront. I can see the same thing happening in the presidential election whenever Putin reveals his preferential successor. Anyway, here's my favorite poster from the election:

Governor Cowlick

Breaking news: The governor of my province's name, Чуб (Choob), means cowlick. A childhood photo:

Бархат.ru


In response to the protests in Moscow and Petersburg, which received a lot of press for the arrest of Kasparov, the very next day the channel Rossia (owned by the government) produced a program called Бархат.ru (trans. Velvet.ru, a reference to soft revolutions in the former Soviet Union). For those of you who understand Russian, check it out. It's hilarious and disturbing all at once. For those of you who don't, a brief synopsis: first, riot police practically beg the protesters to keep moving, then reporters go "undercover" to various "anti-government organizations" that tell them all the dirty tactics. They also character assassinate 25-year-old Maria Gaidar (daughter of Egor Gaidar and head of an opposition group) for celebrating her birthday at a bar.

If this was not Orwellian enough, an opposition party, the Union of Right Forces--led by the reformers of the 1990s--has commercials that effectively serve as the two-minutes hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the commercial, Nikita Belykh, leader of the party, claims that 1990s Russia was poor but free, as pictures of people waiting in line for food flash across the screen. According to US government estimates the economic collapse in the 1990s was more devastating than the Great Depression in the United States. If you wanted to drive people away from your party, that's the way to do it.

Russian Election Debates

A number of things happened in the past month that prevented me from web logging my experiences and opinions. 1. I got awesome new business cards. 2. Work on an "odd-couple" novel about an American student-teacher and a Russian prostitute who have to break the Tolstoy riddle--or else Vladimir V. Putin may die of poisoning! 3. Incredible laziness. 4. Too cheap to pay for home internet anymore. (This is also related to point 3, because the place to pay for internet is about a mile walk round trip from the bus stop.)

I've also been watching a lot of the official political debates that come on at 11:00pm after the new pan-European War and Peace mini-series (which is awful). Each debate last a half-hour and pits three political parties against each other to political-thriller-movie background music. Each day at least two of the parties are different so every party is represented, with the noticeable exception Edinaia Rossia (United Russia), the party in charge of the country.

The majority party, which controls the government which controls the television stations airing the debates, has obviously not been excluded. I'm going to guess that the party refused to debate for three reasons: first, they could only lose authority by allowing other parties to question them face to face; second, because they already have power, the campaign basically runs itself and the candidates, all active officials, are involved in government related activities; third, if someone with real power condescended to debate, them people might watch the debates.

The debates, then, are virtually meaningless, although hilarious. They also tend to discredit legitimate political parties with meaningful programs by association with people like far-right nationalist demagogue, Vladimir Zhirinovsky (on Bush here), who screams "LDPR! LDPR! LDPR!" at the end of every debate in which he participates. He also said that LDPR's slogan "What's good for Russians is good for everybody" was changed from the previous because he wanted to make sure all nationalities were included. In every debate the representative of the Union of the Right Forces, Boris Nemtsov, poses the same question to every party, "[Says that pensions are too small, the army is weak, too many dogs in the street, etc] what party is responsible for this disgrace?!" and the person from the other party says Edinaia Rossia, because they do control the government but the answer means nothing.

That question is actually the strongest appearance of opposition in the debates. The second strongest party, Spravedlivaia Rossia (Just [as in fair] Russia), "opposes Edinaia Rossia" but votes for the legislative program to show solidarity with Putin. The Communist Party refrased their explanation but voted for the same program. (Severely criticizing it!) I suppose it's not any better in the US, although the cult of personality Putin has formed around himself (and his barrel chest) does not seem to be a factor in Bush's case.

The real opposition is of two types: the kind that is ridiculous and uses pie-in-the-sky advertising such as the Union of Right Forces and the Democratic Party of Russia, whose advertisements of a future newcast from 2020 with Russia in the European Union for some reason play more than any other party's; or the they are realistic but get very little airtime like Yabloka or Grazhdanskaia Sila [Citizen's Power]--which has an awesome video their website, complete with creepy mustache.

My Long Island Bride, Rehabilitations, Nudity

My work in the newspaper archive is going pretty well. The lady there has delivered on the promised photographs of her grand-niece-- an 18-year-old New Yorker who has probably never heard of her great-aunt except as one of the relatives in the old country. On the plus side, the girl is quite a looker and, the woman whispered conspiratorily to me, "She has Jewish blood." I think it may work out.

The research I'm doing is on the meaning of political rehabilitations in post-Soviet Russia. In short, people who felt they or their relatives were repressed under the Soviet Union can petition to receive compensation in both moral and financial forms. The former comes in the form of the removal of the title "Enemy of the People" and the latter comes in the form of a paltry sum of money or free bus passes.

In recent years, the rehabilitation process and its publicity, in Rostov at least, has been led by the military. Thus, most of my reading has been in Военный Вестник Юга Руси (The Military Herald of Southern Russia). My main goal was to try to find how long the military has been in control of this function (not long, it seems), so I have been combing through each week's newpaper since 1991.

Now, I found very little on subject until 2003, but the newspaper itself is highly entertaining. Besides pulp novels and the latest in drinking technology, it publishes lewd cartoons. And what I noticed was that on March 8th--International Women's Day--they publish a very nice cover story thanking the ladies in uniform but on the back page they have the dirtiest cartoons of all. Enjoy!


"Happy Holiday, Kind Women!"



And a happy holiday to you, too, Brave Men! (Same issue)

Reading Тихий Дон (The Quiet Don)

I'm not going to bother describing Тихий Дон, but I will tell you this: I'm doing Cossacks under the Soviets research, making this book unavoidable for me, but it's easily the hardest thing I've read in Russian. It's also 1500 pages long. The characters, especially the father, speak in a weird Cossack dialect that is almost indecipherable and I'm barely plugging away at about 6 pages an hour, when I pay attention. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing that the old man is going to get killed by the Bolsheviks (that may not be true, but I'm pretty sure he'll die soon), who I pray will bring order to the novel.