There's a little frisson that hits the air when you are walking through Moscow and suddenly come upon a group of OMON riot police standing at attention glaring at passers-by. Then you hear the megaphone, and then, you find a public demonstration. Yesterday, on the way back from the zoo, we stumbled upon a pro-Gaddafi demonstration put together by the LDPR by the monument to the 1905 Revolution outside the Ulitsa 1905 Goda Metro station. It was a little hard to believe at first, mostly because the most prominent photos of the Colonel were more than a few decades old. It just proves this guy is a fashion icon -- his image really changes depending on how you want to see him. The speaker was reading off a list of European politicians who have condemned the West's intervention in Libya. One sign offered the peculiar statistic that 73 percent of Russians support the Libyan leader (although the thin crowd gathered suggests a definitely silent majority). The subtext, though, wasn't really about supporting a tribal strongman in North Africa, but against NATO and the United States. Frankly, it seems to me that if opposing one thing means you have to line up behind someone like Gaddafi, you ought to rethink your priorities.
This sign, spotted on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street a few days ago, kinda makes my head hurt. If your cyrillic is rusty, it says "Ruby Ray -- Interiors in da house."
Moscow can be a city of abrupt and sudden changes, and everytime I come back, there is a period of a few days when I try to figure out what's different. This year, for example, I noticed there are no longer any ads in the subway. I haven't looked into why, but I have noticed that a consequence seems to be that spray-painted ads on the sidewalk near subway stations have become the preferred means of commercial communication.
The decisions of the powerful are very mysterious. This year, the city government seems to have decided to replace all the city's sidewalks at once. The photo above is of some of the piles of tiles lined up along Ulitsa Pokrovka. This makes pedestrian traffic even more slow and annoying than usual -- this in a city that already hates pedestrians with a passion.
Today, the Moscow Times started poking around in the matter. Perhaps the most important part is this observation, which I've heard as a rumor or a joke for several weeks, but appears to have a little more substance:
Complicating matters, City Hall has been forced to fend off media reports that Sobyanin's wife has a finger in the sidewalk pie, and experts have questioned whether the bricks will really be better for Moscow than good old asphalt.
Sobyanin rolled out the 4 billion ruble ($136 million) plan in late March, promising to replace the 4 million square meters of Moscow sidewalks within the Garden Ring with bricks over the next few years.
While more expensive, city officials point out that bricks have a longer life span, withstand rough weather better, are more environmentally friendly than asphalt, and are more pleasing to the eye.
Contractors, however, will not be able to meet this year's goal to replace 1.1 million square meters of sidewalk because brick production facilities cannot keep up with demand, First Deputy Mayor Pyotr Biryukov said earlier this month.
For the record, in our distant neck of Moscow, they've gone and replaced all the asphalt paving. As a result, Mila's scooter riding skills have increased dramatically.
I found another one of those things in the attic at the dacha that complicates my understanding of the life of the mind in the Soviet Union. Like many summer cottages, ours also serves as an off-site storage place, with a ton of musty old books and journals lying about. There are tons of science journals (my father-in-law is a physicist), books about chess (my wife's grandfather was a fanatic), and a little used complete collected works of V.I. Lenin (pages of which are frequently used as kindling when the family makes shashlik).
They also have a large number of crinkled copies of the literary journal Novy Mir, which had a fascinating run in the 1960s. Every time I look into a random one, I find something surprising.
This time, I opened the issue from March 1970, and discovered a lengthy excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which had been published only the year before.
It is particularly poignant, because that book was one of the nine books banned by a New York school district and led to the landmark 1982 Supreme Court case Island Trees School District v. Pico, which found that the First Amendment applies to school libraries too.
And it is particularly ironic that the book remains to this day, in America, the source of controversy for being too dangerous for young minds. The school board in Republic, Missouri, just this summer decided to ban it.
The view of the Smolenskaya Embankment, from Kutuzovsky Bridge, August 4.
