Ulitsa Varvarka

Ulitsa Varvarka is one of the most interesting little streets in the heart of Moscow. To appreciate how much so, you probably have to have seen it when the Hotel Rossiya towered over it. It is the subject of the last of my freelance pieces from Russia, which appeared in the Boston Globe's Travel section on Sunday. Click here. (Above, a view of the Cathedral of the Sign, with the walls and towers of the Kremlin in the background. Below, the Old English Embassy, in front of the vast construction yard that was the Hotel Rossiya).

Election Day

(Mila with our family's ballot yesterday afternoon at our polling place at Williamstown Elementary School.)

How strange and cheesy this morning, to take out the trash and see the sun come up over Mount Greylock on a bright and mild beautiful morning and getting all choked up and misty about this "new morning" in America.

I realize the awesome historic power of the moment yesterday, but to me it felt kind of anti-climactic. After the drama and struggle of the primaries, and the long lead amid a great storm of bad news, as the opposition got nastier and nastier, the win felt more like a relief than something to celebrate. It was just too hard for too long to even consider the alternative.

A few quick thoughts:

• I've been looking at this election through the lens of the books I've been reading through it. When we first got back in June, I found at the top of one of our box of books my old copy of Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago. It is impossible not to be amazed at the symbolism that Obama's celebration was in Grant Park, the very place where the Democratic Party's long, nasty civil war began during the 1968 Convention.
• I've also been reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and have been reading 2008 as a pleasantly bizarro 1972. There was the long, ugly fight against the Party bosses, building a rare coalition of people who are getting screwed by the way things are, then having to face down the latest edition of the Land of Mordor spew coming from the right. But unlike in 1972, this time our candidate did everything right.
• I admit that I first started checking in with Fox News out of schadenfreude. But to my surprise, while every other outlet was ruminating on the enormity of the moment, Fox News was doing a much better job of reporting on the important House and Senate races. Also, Fox had no holograms.
• Senator McCain's concession speech was dignified and moving, and a reflection of the man he probably is rather than the shrill caricature he became in the heat of the campaign. But the mob scene he was speaking to -- booing and hooting and shouting -- was an embarrassment. This stubborn group of hateful dead-enders will make the next few years very unpleasant.
• Not everything can go right all the time, but voters in California approving a referendum banning same-sex marriage is a pretty tough worm in this apple. On this great day when we have really overcome prejudice and hate, it is disgusting that Americans would vote to willfully rob their friends, neighbors and relatives of a fundamental civil right. That fight goes on, and we'll win.

Happy Halloween!

Cowgirl Mila at her preschool's Halloween parade yesterday on Spring Street.

A Maine moment

Mila and her mom at Pemaquid Point in Maine on Monday, Oct. 13.

Cold and heat

The "home heating season" at our house began last Friday, when Olga and I noticed as we ate our bagels at breakfast that we could actually see our breath. Heating oil prices being what they are, this is not a step taken lightly, but we have a lot going against us at our new place. It faces west, so it only gets a few hours of sunlight at the end of the day, and just to the east of us is a stand of huge fir and maple trees that cast a nice shade in the summer, but ensure we live in darkness and cave-like chill. We think a lot about the absurdity of all this. In Russia, no middle class family sits in their own home wrapped in blankets watching their breath turn to frost. And none of them risk bankrupting themselves to pay for heating fuel either. The old joke goes that in Russia your thermostat is you window: you open it to let the extra heat out. One of the positive legacies of socialism are home utilities. In most cities, every district has its own cogeneration plant that pipes steaming hot water to each apartment for heating and hot water service. It is massively inefficient, though it isn't an urgent public policy priority because Russia has the resources, and as with almost everything, the situation is dramatically different in the provinces. Half of the Siberian city of Kransoyarsk was without heat or hot water for several weeks last winter because one of their plants blew up. All that is very bad, but when I first heard this coming winter in New England referred to as a potential "frozen Katrina" -- with ordinary people freezing to death in their homes because they can't afford to heat themselves -- I began to wonder. Sure, the Russian way is built on faulty assumptions about its sustainability and disregards society's most vulnerable members, but isn't it the same here? Isn't our dependence on oil furnaces and getting by with paltry insulation a reflection of the mistaken belief that heating oil would always be cheap and abundant? and isn't LIHEAP such a pressing political issue around here because there are way too many people who are broken by the costs of heating? It seems like another subtle reminder that the way things are done here in the States isn't perfect. It also points out one of the most common and absurd stereotypes I've encountered here, in which people respond to our year in Moscow by joking that it must've been cold. Well, actually, no. America is cold. Every place I went in Russia was heated abundantly and comfortably, and when you go outside, you dress for it. Hats, gloves, scarves, thermal underwear. Russians know that you don't screw around with winter, and as a result, it isn't that bad. Compare this with here, where winter is a long slog of dull, low-level misery. Of wet and chills and once the holidays are over, a kind of sunlight-free existential despair. It is no wonder that so many northern retirees cite simply avoiding the winter as the reason they pulled up roots and moved South.

Two ways of looking at a cruise ship

Most of the work I've read by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last week, has been his journalism and nonfiction. I never read his fiction, but of course was quite aware of his singular place in American arts and letters, especially in the 1990s. I've had friends whose opinions I respect both slam and praise him, and I think that in itself is a sort of accomplishment. But there is one thing about him that has never set well with me. In one of my magazine writing classes at Columbia, we were assigned to read Wallace's impressive January 1996 folio "Shipping Out," a long essay about the cruise ship industry and the nature of vacation, relaxation and modern American life. It was a big hit in class, as it should be because it is really very insightful and well-written. At the same time, in another class, we read some James Agee, and I was impressed enough to check out of Butler Library a volume of his collected journalism pieces. Included was a feature for Fortune magazine from September 1937 entitled "Havana Cruise," a long essay about the then-fledgling cruise industry. In subject matter and approach, these two articles are very very similar. I've never been able to square how a writer as well-read and knowledgeable -- not to mention as obsessively enamored with footnotes of all shapes and sizes -- failed to include at least a passing mention of Agee's work. I'm not suggesting there is any wrongdoing of any sort, I just can't figure it out. That said, the two articles are really very interesting in presenting what I would call the modernist and postmodernist approach to narrative journalism. With a caveat that I haven't really sat down and read through them in nearly ten years, I remember Agee's story is earnest, serious, obsessed with "breaking news" and the idea of the new. Wallace's is a bit more fun, full of jokes and asides, and seems more interested in hashing out ideas and experiences in an effort to connect seemingly random and inconsequential themes into some kind of bigger coherence. What they both share is a bit of self-indulgence (Agee's sometimes pretentious verbiage [too much Joyce]; Wallace's distractions into pop culture ephemera and jumping into rabbit-holes of his own whim) and an overwhelming sense of dread (especially well done in Agee's piece. He had a much better sense of drama). Both are excellent reads.

Regarding the politics of others

While abroad I was able to follow American politics pretty closely thanks to our wonderful wired modern world. But one of the great things about this past year is it has given me a little more perspective about how people look at one another's politics.

Consider the Sarah Palin nomination, which to me is probably the least funny thing to ever happen in American politics, but to the rest of the world is kinda amusing. In a column in the Telegraph last week, Mary Riddell lamented a bit jealously that UK conservatives weren't as colorful.

"We're playing personality politics without the personalities and, in that climate, woe betide any grey figure bold enough... to stick his eyebrows above the parapet.

"Can no Tory front-bencher conjure up a pregnant teenage daughter and a non-Etonian 'redneck' boyfriend?"

Crimmy, serious people debating serious issues about the nation and its future, without the reality television show bullsh*t? Sounds great to me.

When seen from the outside looking in, political life tends to flatten and simplify in distorting ways. On a serious note, it means that Americans refuse to acknowledge the political complexity and nuance of today's Russia in favor of a simple "the USSR is back!" narrative (which makes a dummy like Mikheil Saakashvili the inexplicable underdog freedom fighter). But on a personality level, it works the same way. We look at Nicolas Sarkozy, jet-setting with his hot new model/singer wife, or Silvio Berlusconi penning syrupy love songs with cruise ship lounge singers, and we ask ourselves how anybody could possibly take these people seriously. Well, here we have Sarah Palin, and I'm asking the same question (not two years ago, she was the mayor of a town smaller than Williamstown. Have you seen its "City Hall"?).

More excuses...

It is almost perfectly impossible to imagine that this summer actually began in Moscow, included several weeks in our old house, and several more weeks in our new one here. We’re still slowly getting unpacked, I’m settling in to a new job – more on that later – and we’re still chasing our toddler around until she starts daycare. So obviously, posting here has fallen by the wayside, but I hope to have more soon…

Ordinary weird

Slowly, we’re getting into the swing of things. The great thing about living abroad is the way that it makes the weird ordinary and the ordinary weird. For more than I year, the backdrop of my life featured onion-domed churches, billboards and posters in another alphabet, people chattering in another language all around me. Several times a day it would strike me that this was the strangest situation I’d ever been in, stranger than I would have dared to imagine when I was young. That all of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean were between me and where I was born, that there was a vast country all around that I was slowly beginning to actually understand.

Then I come back, and the scenes around me are familiar but all the details are sticking out. The first thing that came as a shock was how quiet it is up here – real quiet, as in, you don’t hear anything and when you try to actively listen you realize there is just stone cold nothing out there. It is almost unsettling. Also, I’m still at the stage at which nearly anything I do is the first time I’ve done it in ages. I had a burrito for lunch today – first burrito I’ve had in more than 15 months!

But it is all starting to sink in. Reading the Russian papers online, I feel like I’m reading about a very far away place. I don’t seem to cherish the ability to communicate freely and effortlessly with people in my native language the way I did in the first few days. And today, the Eagle ran my last “Letter from Moscow” column. It was the hardest one to write, as I tried to wrap it all up and get on paper all these stray thoughts I’d accumulated over the past year. The result is as incoherent as you’d expect from someone still going through jet lag, culture shock, life with a very busy toddler, and near constant worrying about what he’s going to do next.

Still feel gone

Before I let it slip another day, the family and I have arrived safely back in the States. Our trip back last week was a major adventure, handled with our family's now familiar stoicism. We learned more than we ever thought we would about the floor-plan of Boeing 747s thanks to chasing Mila around one for over five hours over the Atlantic, and made it from one end of Schiphol Airport to the other in under twenty minutes to catch our connecting flight while picking up three kilos of aged Gouda, The Times, Le Monde, and De Volksrant along the way. Since getting back to the Berkshires, we've been fighting jet lag and culture shock here at Camp Williamstown, where we are peacefully free of telephones and television for the time being. Still getting back on track, but more to come soon...

Walking to work

We're heading back to the States in a few days. We're starting to pack, and last week was my last one at the old office. Here are some pics I took one morning last week of the things I saw each day on my way there and back...


(The entrance to the Shchukinskaya Metro station)


(The artwork on the platform at Shchukinskaya, depicting our peaceful riverside neighborhood)



(The crossing at Barrikadnaya, where you switch to the Circle Line)



(The Park Kultury Metro station)


(Looking up Zubovsky Bulvar, my office is hidden behind that giant aircraft-carrier sized Nissan ad. This is for the best, as it is one of the more hideous Soviet relics in the city. Through my time in Moscow, it has been hidden by ads for Starry Melnick beer, Nikola kvass, among others.)

My talking head debut

Just like my favorite blogging media personalities, I now have the chance to make a cross-platform promotional post: I'm slated to appear on the Russia Today channel this evening to discuss tonight's Russia-Netherlands quarterfinal at Euro 2008. Watch me try to pronounce "Diniyar Bilyaletdinov" and "Demy De Zeeuw" on live teevee.

Kuzminki

(View of the north bank of Shibaevsky Pond)

For this long-weekend (in Russia) Friday we made a rare excursion to eastern Moscow for a trip to Kuzminki Park, which is clear across town but right on the Purple Line. The weather was nice, and Mila was in a good mood, so it was a nice family outing.

No matter what you do with a toddler, you are doing something with a toddler first and anything else a distant second. Kuzminki apparently has some interesting old estates and churches to visit, but we saw none of it. Most of the park is forest and lakes, and Mila took her time running around, blowing dandelions, and the like. We spent a good portion of our day at a simple playground where our kid discovered the unique fun of pushing her toy stroller up and down some planks.



Eventually, Mila actually wound down and decided to take a nap. This is a big deal, because lately she's uncovered some additional power source inside herself and has become increasingly convinced that she doesn't need to nap. She conked out for a little while though -- all that running up and down on the playground, obviously -- which was enough time for us to get shashlik...



I have to say that after all this time here, shashlik is probably my favorite thing about Russia. These are little chunks of marinated pork grilled over an open fire, with a side of piquante tomato sauce with cilantro, and often served with lavash, vegetable kebabs and some pickled goods...





A city park, summer, and meat grilled on sticks served on plastic is hard to beat (even if it may not look appetizing in pictures!)



On the way back, Mila fed ducks for the first time. I have to say, she's got quite an arm for her age.





(looking east over the pond)

Absurdistan

One of the books I bought on my trip to Washington and just got around to reading is Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan, which I found one sale at a bookshop in Georgetown. It's the story of Misha Vainberg, an obese son of a criminally rich man, who is eager to return to the multi-culti United States to be with his South Bronx love. But thanks to his father's line of work, Misha can't get an American visa, and so concocts a roundabout scheme involving a trip to a CIS nation on the Caspian Sea for a fraudulent EU passport. But he manages to get caught up in the murky world of post-Soviet politics.

As I read it, I felt a bit of deja vu: like his acclaimed debut, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan is in large part almost two completely different novels thrown together. In each case, one is very good, the other, not so much. Handbook is about the Russian-American immigrant experience -- full of of very sharp insights into about assimilation, America, Russia. But then goes wildly off the rails when the story relocates to Prague, or however Shteyngart specifically dubs its transparent stand-in. Absurdistan goes the same way, an opening in Russia that is full of close observation, followed by a meandering plot in some imaginary place.

I also have some concerns about his madcap quirkiness. This seems to be a common affliction among hot younger writers these days. I remember I first heard the word "Absurdistan" at a strangely under-publicized reading he gave at Barnard College years ago, right after Handbook came out. It was a very nice night, only about a dozen people showed up, and I was generally impressed. But when he mentioned he thought his next project would be called "Absurdistan," I thought, "uh-oh." But Shteyngart is writing about Russia, and having lived her for awhile, I see how that is actually probably the best key in which to work. For example, twice Misha Vainberg's cellphone doesn't work, and he gets an automated message that says, "Respected mobile phone user: your attempt to make a connection has failed. There is nothing more to be done. Please hang up." Sounds a little to quirky and cute, but that's actually what cellphones here say when they can't get a signal.

But what really sealed the book for me is the realization about what Shteyngart is really doing here. When I realized that I was starting to sympathize with a gluttonous, track-suit wearing, son of a murderous oligarch, through a lot of whining and some of the least appetizing sex scenes in all of fiction, I realized he's playing a pretty big game. He's taking a close hard look at the Russian Soul. He's trying to describe in lucid prose what, famously and aggravatingly, "can only be seen with the eyes of the soul." There are two scenes in particular that I think are laser-like in defining something important about Russia: the description of the way Misha and Alyosha-Bob become friends on a snowy night in college, and the brief speech Misha's servant Timofey delivers at a key moment late in the book. Never let it be said there are no writers anymore willing to tackle Big Themes.

The view from Sparrow Hills

Last week, Olga took me for a walk around her alma mater, Moscow State University, because I'd never been to that part of the city before and wanted to see it. From the university it is a short walk to Sparrow Hills, a steep hill over a bend in the Moscow River that offers easily the best views of the city.

Moscow is a sprawling metropolis, and it really isn't designed to be actually seen from a detached perspective like other cities. There is no skyline as it were, just buildings and smokestacks in the distance. You realize this from Sparrow Hills, which is impressive, but makes you feel like a bee that has just looked back at his kicked-over hive.

Here is the view looking a little to the north. Moving from the right to the left, you can see three of the spires of Stalin's famous "Seven Sisters," which are each impressive in their own right but never really -- in my opinion at least -- dominate the skyline as some people think. At the far right is the Foreign Ministry, moving to the left in the distance is the Kudrinskaya apartment block, and in the center (near the smokestack) is the Hotel Ukraina. That little bit of Singapore that seems to have dropped out of the sky on the far left side is the famous "Moscow-City" complex, the new business heart of the city that will eventually feature the tallest building in Europe.



This next photo below is a shot looking a little to the right. Right up front is the stolid mass of Luzhniki Stadium, the home of the 1980 Olympics. Looking just above it, you can see the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with its gold dome. Just a bit further past it, you can kinda make out the gold domes of the Kremlin's cathedrals as well.

History must work

I had last Wednesday off, and took a trip down to visit Park Pobedy, Russia's primary war memorial, located down along Kutusovsky Prospekt west of the city center. I went knowing full well that it isn't quite the soundest intellectual experience in the city, but I was curious.

The giant park itself is probably the last real Soviet space -- planning for it began in Soviet times, but it wasn't actually completed until 1995. It sprawls with fountains and paved plazas. And considering the way Moscow's real estate market is developing, this is certainly the last big development here that won't entail a shopping mall, "business center," condos, and underground parking.

The Park Pobedy metro station is one of the system's newest, and you can tell as you step off the train into the gleaming bright halls. Unlike most station, there is no Soviet kitsch hanging around, just simple designs. On the one hand, it feels cleanly modern, but on the other hand it feels a bit like a western European airport.

You pop up on the Prospekt near the 1812 Triumphal Arch, and the park opens up before you. Wednesday happened to be the day to celebrate the Border Guards -- their 90th anniversary no less. Whenever any of the security branches celebrate their name-day, all the veterans don their old hats and medals, invade some prominent public space, get scandalously drunk, and do everything they can think of to embarrass their entire service. The park was full of former border guards wearing their distinctive bright green halo-hats. They were a bit better behaved than the celebrating paratroopers and sailors I'd seen before, but not by much.

The park forces you to walk about half an hour through a vast square lined with fountains and thick with obscure symbolism -- five terraces for the five years of the war, and the like. Soviet public planning and architecture is deliberately about alienation, a conscious effort to make the individual feel useless and absurd in the presence of a space that is designed for no earthly being, and only derives its value from its emptiness, implying that only raw volume alone could possibly fill it up.

Park Pobedy offers the interesting aspect of forcibly shoving in the exact same space the two worst things to happen to Moscow's architecture: Soviet excess and Zurab Tsereteli. The Moscow government's favorite hack sculptor designed the central "Victory Monument," a giant metal obelisk. You'd think that a very tall and perfectly straight pillar would be a hard thing to screw up, but Tsereteli finds a way to do so. It features chaotic etchings all the way up and down it, St. George killing some kind of Nazi dragon at the base, and a giant Nike hanging off the top bearing golden trumpets and laurels that looks like it will snap off and fall to earth one of these days.

The centerpiece of the park is the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War. I dutifully paid my 120 ruble foreigner-rate ticket took a look inside. A very Soviet space, designed around spaces that fit that alienating quality I mentioned -- in this case with lots of square rooms and right angles and plenty of uncomfortable furniture scattered around for no real reason.

But even worse, the space is designed to put history to work. It is not an educational experience, it is an indoctrination. The lower level features the "Hall of Memory and Sorrow," a long, dimly lit hallway lined with vitrines featuring volumes listing the dead. Hanging from the ceiling are million of different sized crystals dangling from thin gold chains -- representing, naturally, the millions of tears shed, etc. The hall eventually leads you up to a secular pieta of a stout Russian woman holding on her lap a deceased soldier.

Surrounding the hall are the dioramas, which sum up the fast hit nature of ideology. I guess I expected something more than the large, dusty paintings I saw, but I was starkly disappointed in what I saw. They start with the Battle for Moscow, showing ranks of new recruits rushing to the front through a snowy landscape. Smoke and fire in the distance, Soviet planes commanding the skies. The next features Stalingrad, which to my amazement depicts Soviet troops celebrating the victory amid a handful of shell-shocked and despondent Nazi prisoners. The diorama about the Leningrad blockade really works the heart-strings, featuring dead babushkas on the street and cultural treasures in flame all around. Other images of the Battle of Kursk and the taking of Berlin are cartoonish in their depiction of writhing men in battle, of dramatically flailing bodies, smoke and wrecked machines. They were taking schoolchildren through all this.

Upstairs features the Hall of Glory, a giant domed space with the names of all the Heroes of the Soviet Union engraved on the walls (interesting fact: seven unrelated men named "Mikhail Borisov" were Heroes). In the center is a typical "Bronze Soldier" kind of statue. Apparently, they swear in new officers there.

I remember a few years ago when the U.S. was in full emotive agitation about "The Greatest Generation" that there was a noticeable backlash against simplifying the very complicated experience of war. I heard some of the strongest doubts come from veterans themselves. That seemed quite healthy to me. I've written a lot about Russia's problematic use of history and ideology, but sometimes I wonder if the enormity of what happened simply makes it impossible to speak the truth.

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Since I was in the neighborhood, I walked from the park up Ulitsa Barklaya to Gorbushka, the great emporium of all things technical, pirated, and copied. As goes Russia, so goes Gorbushka. What had begun as a dodgy set of stalls selling all kinds of products of dubious provenance, the market has been tamed and moved indoors. The lower levels are pretty much like any other appliance store, full of plasma televisions, washer/dryers, microwaves, and stoves. The upper level was once jammed with small stalls of whatever you could possibly hope to find for jawdropping prices. But each time I go back, there seem to be fewer of these, and more and more "respectable" places, with legitimate prices. One more chapter in Russia's voyage to the global economy closes.

Stuff on teevee

Very busy couple of days here in Moscow. To my real amazement, it seems the Champions League final at Luzhniki on Wednesday really did go off without any trouble. The cops even put on their dressy uniforms, with the dress jackets and clean white shirts rather than their day-to-day paunch-enhancing light blue blouses.

The game was on western European time, so it didn't get underway until about 11 p.m. here, and didn't wrap up until nearly 2 a.m. as a result. Then I had to write my column about it all. I had already written something about Saturday's Russia Cup final between CSKA Moscow and Amkar Perm -- specifically about the way it ended in a penalty shoot-out. But since the big game ended the same way, I felt there was no way I could avoid hashing it in. (UPDATE 5/24: I wish I'd had more time to think through my column about the game. The commentary about the nature of these kinds of events has been very interesting, like this and this. I think I may be on to something.

It very much feels like we are going through a great clump of big events right before the slow, dull dacha season arrives. For example, this weekend we have the Eurovision finals in Belgrade. Last year, I was able to watch my first Eurovision, and was swept away by its unapologetic cheesiness, circus-like nationalism, and phenomenally curious voting patterns.

Alas, this year, I'm a bit depressed about it, especially since Ireland's entry -- a singing turkey puppet named Dustin -- was dismissed, I don't see anyone carrying the torch for us ironically-inclined viewers. Plus, I've actually heard that Russia's Dima Bilan is tipped as the favorite, which makes my head hurt. For those of you who don't follow Russian pop closely, Dima is the owner of Russia's most famous mullet -- which is saying quite a lot in this mullet-mad nation. He is very popular with teenage girls -- and apparently with certain kinds of older men thanks to some risque photo shoots in his impressionable youth.

The very fact that he became Russia's selection this year demonstrates the scandalous web of influence-peddling and nepotism that ruins the spirit of competition and international friendship behind this long-running event (pfff... tryin' to keep a straightface). Dima already had his chance in 2006, and brought shame and dishonor to the Russian people with his embarrassing second place finish. This year is nothing more than his management's effort to make another futile push into the wider European market.

I hope it doesn't work. This song, which I've seen a couple times on the music channels, is so awful that it stops being funny. It is in English, but that kind of Eastern European cheese-pop English that you don't recognize unless someone tells you, "hey, I think this song is in English!" I can't tell what the hell the lyrics are about, but judging by the video, it is about a very sick and incredibly picturesque little boy. Judging Dima's interest in him and the obviously Western quality of care at the hospital where he is staying (no nurses demanding bribes for painkillers, the floors look like they've been cleaned since the Andropov era, etc etc), I guess he is the son of a well-placed oligarch, but that's neither here nor there. The point is he is awfully sick, in a Dickensian sort of stoic heart-stirring way, and Dima organizes a "beneficent" concert for him at a hockey arena. He performs this song about hope and shit with some dude pretending to saw away on a fiddle and a fashion photographer hovering around. The coup de grace that makes this about everything wrong with today's Russia arrives when jackass ice skater Yevgeny Plushenko makes an appearance and twirls around to inspire everyone or whatever.

And this thing is tipped to win the whole thing. I am so profoundly disillusioned that I almost can't be ironic anymore. I think I'll skip the crappy songs and just watch the voting -- which seriously ought to be the subject of a colloquium at the Council on Foreign Relations or something. Fareed Zakaria ought to write a book about it.

And you know who definitely can't be ironic? Russia's state-run First Channel, which will broadcast the final. They've been running a promo with a definite message. It shows the Russian national hockey team winning the World Championships in Canada last week, plus Zenit St. Petersburg winning the UEFA Cup this month, and ends with Dima's quest for glory. So you see, Eurovision -- just like international sports -- is really about proving the amazing super-awesome glory of Russia over all the suckahs. Take that Estonia! Shove it Ukraine!

UPDATE (5/25): Ungh. Dima's "live" performance, and the nationalist backwash here the morning after, have been even more loathsome than I had imagined. The 12-year old girls of Europe have let mankind down. I voted last night -- only because how often do I get to vote in the Eurovision finals? -- and was ready to go with Azerbaijan, whose entry included men dressed as angels and a guy sitting on a throne pouring fake blood on a writhing dancer. But I chose to go with Spain's entry, which seemed in the light-hearted spirit appropriate for things like this.

A little more on Vladimir...

I tried to sum up some of my thoughts about our experience in Vladimir in this month's installment of my "Letter from Moscow" column in the Berkshire Eagle. (It'll only be up for a few days though...)

A trip to Vladimir, part two

The main street, with its belching buses and long blocks of Stalin-era housing, is not the best way to see the city. We discovered running exactly parallel Herzen Street, which is a classic small provincial town street, lined with often brightly colored wood houses, and with stray dogs running around with impunity. Below is a building at the corner of Herzen and Chekhov streets.

Above is the city of Vladimir’s department of handicapped and invalid services (where they put the elevator is a good question…). You can’t really see its other plaque, but it was also the home of N.N. Zlatovratsky, a realist Russian writer of the late 19^th century who specialized, apparently, in presenting the lives and troubles of peasants. On our trip, I’d brought along a copy of Chekhov’s letters, and the day we saw this house I happened to read the letter in which Chekhov briefly mentions that he doesn’t like his work. This was apparently a happening part of the city in the 1890s – across the street lived one Fedoseyev, who is credited on a plaque as being the first Marxist revolutionary in the district, and who Lenin came to visit in 1893.

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This strange thing on Lower Moskovskaya Ultisa is a monument to the victims of the Chernobyl Disaster.

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At the western end of downtown is the Golden Gate, one of the original seven gates in the medieval city’s walls (you can see what is left of the walls in that green hillock to the right). Mila found it a good place to make her own temporary impression on the sidewalks of Vladimir.

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The downtown is located on a long, steep hill over the Klyazma River. Considering the flat expanse of Russia, it creates some dramatic views. You can almost imagine seeing the Mongols riding up.

A trip to Vladimir, part one

Earlier this month, we spent a week in the city of Vladimir while Olga was doing some fieldwork. This is the nearest “big” city on the main rail line going east, about three hours or so. Getting away from Moscow’s urban overdrive is always a relief, and just rolling along on the train through the flat fields is a relief, even if you are shepherding a toddler up and down the aisles!

Vladimir has about 316,000 people, and it doesn’t take very long to realize just how different Moscow is from the rest of country. Everything in Vladimir feels dustier, poorer, more broken. It is a relief to get away from all the elitny baloney, but there remains an almost palpable sense of despair and isolation in the provinces.

And of course, it is hard for someone from America in particular to get his head around the idea of a place who best days were more than 800 years ago…

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Vladimir was founded in the 12^th century as one of the far flung principalities that would eventually come together as “Russia.” Its heyday was relatively brief, but enough to lead to some breathtaking stuff.

The center of the city is Cathedral Square, where sits Assumption Cathedral. Construction began in 1158 on this iconic Russian building, which is said to be the model for the more famous Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin.

The church sits on a bluff of land over the Klyazma River, with an unbroken view into the far distance. One can see why it would have been an attractive place to build a fortified town. Like many sacred Russian buildings, it is patrolled by a platoon of mean old women who specialize in frightening children and harassing visitors. Once you get past them, the church is amazing. The interior feels cave-like, with thick walls, deep shadows broken by flickering candles, and lots of little chambers and lonely places. The real treat are the frescoes by Andrei Rublev of the Last Judgment, which were painted in 1408. They are a little worse for wear, but unmistakeably powerful and haunting.

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Nearby is St. Dmitry’s Cathedral, a smaller and less imposing structure but amazing all the same. The outside is covered with incredibly detailed images from the life of King David.

The hard thing about visiting UNESCO world heritage sites with an 18-month old is that you have to keep one eye on the priceless architectures and reliefs, and the other on a running around 18-month old.

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The great thing about travel is going through all the effort to put yourself in a strange situation, and then taking it for granted long enough that you are surprised when you realize just how weird everything has gotten. This is an awkward way of saying that we passed this scene nearly every day not far from our hotel,along the main street, Lower Moskovskaya Ulitsa. The building, like many old wooden ones of its era, is leaning one way. Behind it is an Old Believers’ Church, that is apparently off the tourist beaten track.

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Residents apparently can’t put much faith in their local government, but happily, there is a political party that can help! Putin’s United Russia graciously sponsored a playground in the center of town where we frequently went to play.

This is very peculiar to me, and reflects just how profoundly party politics here is nothing more than a matter of branding. The brand creates all the fun stuff, like playgrounds, while the “serious” business of cleaning up trash and fixing potholes is up to the government. It is a sign of severe decay in the civic infrastructure when these two endeavors – politics and government – are considering completely separate in the eyes of most Russian subjects.

Victory Day

On our recent trip to the city of Vladimir, I noticed that nearly every large public building in the city center had a plaque like the one above on it. It reads that during the Great Patriotic War, the building served as a hospital. I suppose that as the nearest big city on a major rail line from Moscow and the front, it was a natural place to send the wounded. But walking around this medieval city, you realize that for awhile, it was a gigantic hospital ward.

Victory Day is probably the most important Russian holiday these days, much much more than anything like Memorial Day or what we have in the West. It manifests itself in clear ways -- the orange and black ribbons people started wearing a few years ago -- and it serves as the sort of unofficial start of the warmer months, when everyone starts getting their dacha into habitable condition again. It also happens to be when television seems to show nonstop for two weeks old Soviet war movies (and, I would dare to hope not coincidentally, a few American ones two. This week I saw Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Saving Private Ryan on national t.v. This is a big deal considering that in the popular understanding is that Russia defeated Nazi Germany, but Westerners insist on taking all the credit).

There was a big parade this morning on Red Square, which made quite a fuss because Russia decided once again to include tanks and ICBMs and other hardware in what is assumed to be a throwback to Soviet military showing-off. I watched the parade, and it was honestly not as impressive as in the old days, in large part because they closed off one of the main entrances to the Square. I hate to say it, but compared to what we see from North Korea, it wasn't that scary (what are scary are these redesigned uniforms by Valentin Yudashkin. Sorry to beat this again, but this jackass' great improvements are to add gold arm tassles and to make the clownishly oversized "halo" hats even taller and pointier. More proof that as a nation and a culture, Russia may have completely lost any sense of taste it may have had).

Anyway, there is something very unsettling about Victory Day. Selective history at work on this scale is never pretty, but the degree to which Russia self-edits can't be good. There is no mention now of the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler, the invasion of Finland, how the incompetence of Soviet leadership frequently compounded the misery for everyone, and about what the Red Army did to the civilian population when it finally reached Germany.

Part of it seems to be out of respect for the remaining veterans and their memory, but it is hypocritical. Young Russian proudly wear their ribbons, and indulge in some patriotic self-congratulation, and then on May 10 return to ignoring the pensioners in their midst, who continue to live on meagre pensions, in inadequate housing, with incredibly poor health care.

Everything I've seen of this country suggests to me that these willful myths are destined to become core components of the national character. The unimpeachable heroism of the war will go right up there with the "Tartar yoke," the murderous treachery of Poles, the insistence that Russia must be whipped into shape by a "strong hand."

The simple fact is that the fight against fascism is one of the most heroic and important moments in human history. The sad fact is that the Soviet Union at the time was perhaps the only society sufficiently familiar with hardship, cruelty, and injustice to make the sacrifices demanded to defeat the Nazi war machine.

Catching up

It's been an eventful spring for me to have taken this unscheduled hiatus, and I'm trying to slowly get back in the swing of things. Been snowed under a pile of copyediting, copywriting, and toddler-care, but hopefully things will perk up a bit in the coming weeks.

About yesterday's inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev as the third president of the Russian Federation, I don't have a lot to add about the geopolitical implications. But the teevee show itself was amazing in that it couldn't have been better stage-managed if the Kremlin's production team had just decided to chuck it all and CGI the whole thing.

The sweeping boom camera shots, the panoramic aerial shots over an eerily deserted central Moscow, nothing was left to chance -- they even threw in a few real digital CGI effects. And whenever you have a fortress as your seat of government, you get remarkable control of media access. So every media outlet on earth was stuck with the Kremlin's single, unified vision, with each and every shot completely managed.

And yet... I don't know if it just got overlooked in the shuffle or they just didn't think it was important enough, but the whole thing was still horribly boring -- In marches the flag, in marches a deluxe edition of the Constitution, Mironov and Gryzlov slink on stage. It was pure catatonia. The most interesting part were the new tsarist uniforms designed by fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin, which are, I dunno, over the top? And in keeping with the general television spectacle theme, the thing abruptly ended and regular programming returned, and everyone was shooed back to their regular routine. By nightfall, I saw news websites that had bumped it down in favor of a story about Poland's talks with the U.S. about missile defense.

That's Liza with a '3'

Back in the (former) USSR

Where've I been? Busy month, including a recently completed trip back to the U.S. of A. to get my Russian visa renewed. Going back for the first time in 11 months was quite a trip... some observations:

America has gotten kinda pudgy...: Here in Moscow you often hear jokes about fat Americans, but it seems that the kernel of truth behind this really is the size of a watermelon. This is what happens when you insist on development that forces you drive everywhere.

... But it still smells nice: I noticed something alarming on the escalator descending into a Washington Metro station. It was that strange, chemical cleanser odor these hermetically sealed concrete tubes have at certain times of the day. It takes me back. If you've seen photos of Moscow's Metro, you know all about the chandeliers and the charming bas relief depictions of Soviet labor. You don't see that every tiny corner stinks like urine (despite, oddly, the overwhelming number of cops standing around at all hours looking menacing). Plus, every subway car once fully loaded (which is always, basically) smells like dirty laundry, B.O., and sweated-out booze.

America really is a Bennetton ad: I had a very long layover at JFK, and spent a little while at a bar in the terminal. Now, for many months in Moscow, it felt like I kept seeing the same person over and over again. So when I first got off the plane, it was quite disorienting to interact with the three people working behind the bar. Mostly it was because it had been a long time since I'd met service industry workers who smiled, chatted, and made eye contact. But also, I couldn't seem to figure out what ethnicity they were. I asked: one El Salvadoran immigrant, one African-American/Dominican, one Italian/Puerto Rican. I think this is awesome.

Crap, that economic crisis is for real: The only firsthand experience I have of the collapsing American economy is watching the dollar's horrendous slide in the past few weeks. But seeing all the "for sale" and "foreclosure" signs around was a real eye-opener. And gas prices!

People seem to have tuned in to politics for a sec: Since all my political news comes from the Internet, an on-demand medium, I was happy to see that everyone back home really seem to be paying attention. I saw it in the media mostly, and granted I was in Washington, but I actually overheard people having heated discussion on the street about Obama and Hillary. (And I have to say, it was an honor to have heard Obama's speech in Philadelphia about the "Wright Controversy." I'm amazed that an American politician in this day and age would take the chilling risk of speaking to the people like they are adults. I hope it doesn't backfire on him.)

Sour cream is still not a major food group: I ate a variety of foods and never once ingested smetana. I also ate seasonings other than dill, including some spices native to warmer climates that caused me no long-term damage. I am still alive.

Three cheers for "Plain Janes": Russian girls lately have developed a reputation for being more "glamorous" than their western peers, and frankly, they can keep it. Not once in the States did I see a woman wearing clothes with unnecessary buckles, frills, straps, corsets or precarious and dangerous heels. Many girls did not appear to have spent an hour on their hair that morning, nor that they applied their makeup with masonry tools. And despite such post-feminist carelessness, there were lots of pretty girls out there. Go fig.

Thank god there is still a place where no one knows what the "World Fashion Channel" is: In Moscow, every single public eating space will feature at least one -- usually more -- mounted plasma screen television tuned to something called the "World Fashion Channel." It is some kind of satellite channel that specializes in endless loops of models strutting on the catwalk, and interviews with various fashion "celebrities" in exotic European locations. I don't know what secret hypnotic power it holds over Russians when they wolf down their borshch and black bread in public, but I suspect it is really dangerous.

'Don't be afraid to turn the corner...'

All those copy-editors nervous about fitting "Zhirinovsky" in a banner headline can sleep easy. Dmitry Medvedev won, and which ever number the Central Election Commission settles on tomorrow is academic. We knew all along it would be in the low 60's -- well over the threshold to avoid a run-off, safely below Putin's 70 percent in 2004.**

As I noted earlier, there was no real excitement or interest in this election. Why bother? Elections here at best ratify previously made decisions; you don't choose anything. There's no uncertainty or drama. The only question was turnout, which if high enough could add some legitimacy to this particular episode in the development of "sovereign democracy."

But you'd still go see plays by Shakespeare or Chekhov even though you may know them by heart. So, how'd the most stage-managed transfer of power I've ever seen up close go off?

All day was like any other Sunday. It's been warmer here lately -- a little over 0 degrees. So it is the season of wet and melting already, when the four months-worth of cigarette-butts, beer cans, bottle caps, and gum wrappers that have hibernated in snow banks resurface. It is by no means spring, but isn't as clear and precise as winter either.

The television channels were set to begin election coverage at 9 p.m. We had on First Channel, and they had an elaborate count-down clock to tick off the seconds until the hour came. When it did, we saw numbers very similar to what the polls had predicted. Amazing.

There was really no point in paying close attention to the talking head chatter. We were busy feeding our daughter, giving her a bath, and checking in every now and then.

It seemed there was a concert near Red Square, where a who's-who of shitty pop singers were lip-synching along to songs about Russia "charging forward." Among them was Dima Kuldun, who my readers may remember for his performance at Eurovision 2007 -- for Belarus -- "working his magic." (That song, by the way, was written by Fillip Kirkorov, who last week was named a "People's Artist of Russia." That honored title now officially means nothing.)

A little later, I checked in with the 'Vesti' channel, a state-run all-news program. They actually ran a 25-minute long segment about how Russian celebrities voted. Not about how they voted, but just that they did actually vote (Remember, choices can be engineered, but turnout is much harder!). We saw director (and jackass) Nikita Mikhalkov, ballet legend Maya Plisetskaya, figure skater Evgeny Plushenko, and other stars of stage, screen, government stage, etc.. For each, they were shown walking into their polling place, where they'd produce their passport (just like ordinary people!) and then insert their completed ballot in the box. Then they would say something soulful about the importance of speaking out for RUssia's future.

It rapidly became difficult to pay attention anymore. We vaguely watched on First Channel more coverage of this concert. It was held in a strange location: down by the river, with the stage facing away from Red Square, and the crowd looked up to the stage with St. Basil's and the Spassky Tower behind it. It was immediately clear from the camera angles that it was impossible to tell precisely how many people were there. The ones that were were obviously the Nashi hardcore -- no doubt protected by several cordons of OMON civil servants. You could tell by the abundance of these weird, 10-foot long flexible polls that waving around from key points in the crowd. The flags atop them were a who's-who of obnoxious pro-Kremlin 'political technologies' like "Young Russia" and "Myestnie."

On stage was Lyubeh, the 'gopnik' heroes whose rock-folk-nationalist shtick is increasingly becoming a kind of official soundtrack. They were in the middle of their anthem "Davai Za" when... what's this...

The camera suddenly shifts to the Kremlin's Spassky Gate, and two lone figures are walking out... Can it be? ... why, it's Vladimir Vladimirovich... and Dmitry Anatolyevich!

President and successor stride through a curiously empty Red Square, through a gloomy mix of wet snow and sleet. They are alone together (save for the official state television camera), marching with satisfaction and pride to meet the people down by the river. A few minutes later they are on stage. They say nothing interesting. They go back into the Kremlin. So it goes.

Russian rock legends Mashina Vremeni took the stage next. They cut away after two songs so I don't know what they played next, but if their playlist included their legendary anti-Soviet anthem "Povorot," it would be criminally ironic ...

"We've told ourselves Not to depart from the straight path, But it was destined And frankly, everyone's afraid of change, But here it's all the same"...

"And there's no reason to be afraid If you men have strength within, Set out for this gate, And don't be afraid to turn the corner, Let this road be good."

Meanwhile, I actually can't sleep because I'm so worried about the primaries in Texas and Ohio. ** UPDATE (3/6): Well by golly, the CEC says Medvedev actually won 70.22 percent of the vote. I am actually surprised at how surprised I am at being surprised by anything about these elections.