One more thing on Sept. 11...

Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, and on this, the tenth anniversary, it feels like most of them are being told. The events of that day are almost too large to look at with our usual tools of distance and detachment, because they fail to describe what we remember. What happened, in one way or another, wounded everyone, so to understand it, we feel an obligation to break it into manageable little stories.

I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.

I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."

The Space Age

I'm always going to think the "Monument to the Conquerors of Space" is pretty cool. The enormous, titanium-coated arc to the sky was completed in 1964, and mixes space age cool with socialist realist silly. The whole area around it -- the old VDNKh is next door -- is a bit like that. But it seems with each passing year it feels like the past is becoming more, well, passed.

The last time I went there was in winter 2003, during my first visit to Moscow. Back then, it was a full-blown Soviet kitsch experience. I remember the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics -- which is in the base -- back then was a small, dark, and very much like visiting a mausoleum. An extensive renovation was completed in 2009, and did quite a lot to bring it into the, well, 20th century.

But the result is still a little curious. There is a lot of hagiography, especially about Gagarin, and a good bit of red meat for techies and engineers. But unfortunately for my visit, it couldn't quite capture the attention of my four-year-old girl. She skipped right past rocket scientist Pilyagin's reading glasses, and did not share my amazement at how closely the sleeping compartment of a Soyuz capsule resembles an overnight train compartment.

I find it absolutely hilarious that for a museum that relies rather heavily on models and replicas, they have on display Belka and Strelka. The real Belka and Strelka. Right near the front, which prompted a strange conversation with my daughter about how yes, they came back safely. And went on to have long, happy dog lives. But were stuffed because they were heroes (like Lenin, I guess).

Russia's Lost Bastille Day

The memorial to the 1905 uprising. We're still waiting on the memorial for 1991.

Last month, on August 19, Russia could have celebrated its version of Bastille Day. There were some television specials and broadcasts of glasnost-era movies, but the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, the failed coup by Communist hardliners, came and went. The memory of those historic events among today's Russians is mixed, and seems to reflect that in politics, sometimes success is only managed disappointment.

The coup began on August 19, and the next day, a Monday, Russians heard the news that their leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was "ill" at his Crimean dacha and that a committee of reactionaries was now in charge. But it was clear from the start that the putsch was a farce. They issued a stream of bizarre, apocalyptic statements, and ostensible "leader" Gennady Yanayev couldn't keep his hands from shaking when he appeared on television. Within hours, a crowd had gathered around Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Parliament building, the White House, and began throwing up barricades.

American writer Jamey Gambrell, writing in the New York Review of Books just days after the coup failed, summed up the giddy sense of confusion and excitement. "At the first mass demonstration, there was at last a feeling, which was to grow as the days passed, that Russia had taken a stand, perhaps for the first time in its history."

The coup fizzled over the next few days, as the military declined to participate in a bloodbath, and the Soviet Union quickly began to unspool. By the end of the week, the enormous statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the hated founder of the secret police, had been ripped from his pedestal outside KGB headquarters, which itself was covered with derisive graffiti. Emotions in those days spread, soon vented against not just the Party and the KGB, but at Gorbachev himself. By Christmas, the Soviet Union was history.

But not everyone remembers the story as an uplifting journey from oppression to freedom. A recent poll by the independent Levada Center found that only eight percent of respondents viewed the events of August 1991 as the start of a democratic revolution. About 43 percent said the coup attempt was nothing more than a struggle for power among bureaucrats. To this day, 36 percent say the collapse of the USSR was a negative thing.

A lot of that comes through the lens of hindsight, through all the shocks and traumas that Russia endured in those years. When the coup took place, Soviet citizens were already adjusting to a radical realignment of their political space. They lost an "empire" in Eastern Europe, and the splintering of the USSR into separate republics left about 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly as minorities in foreign nations. And it was unclear when the unraveling would stop, raising questions about the territorial integrity of Russia itself -- the Caucuses were already in revolt, and there was a danger that Tatarstan, in the heart of Russia, would be next.

No clear order had emerged in domestic politics either. Yeltsin may have been hero at the White House, but a little more than two years later he would bomb the same building after months of squabbling with the Congress of Peoples Deputies. The irony was lost on no one. And the appearance of free markets held little appeal. The "shock therapy" recommended by the international neoliberal elite meant that to most, instead of being robbed blind by Communist nomenklatura, they were now free to be robbed blind by elitny businessmen.

There are many ways to read all these struggles. Russophobes insist Russians, after centuries of oppression, are culturally unable to handle freedom. But Russians weren't alone in finding the Brave New Post-Socialist World more complicated and difficult than they expected. Disappointment and frustration appeared everywhere once they had moved beyond the black-and-white struggle against Communism. "We are witness to a bizarre state of affairs," lamented Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, in April 1992. "Society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse that when it was in chains."

There are many moving parts in politics, and success is sometimes a matter of how you organize them into a story. In Russia, the past ten years the story has been about the horrible 1990s, how Russia was rudderless and adrift and only a "strong hand on the tiller" -- like Vladimir Putin's -- could keep the ship on course. The story worked while the economy was treading water -- thanks to Russia's disproportionate reliance on the export of raw materials. But as the global economy stumbles and another round of disappointment takes shape, it is a tragedy not to have the memory of moments of courage and promise to rely on.

Someone loves us all

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.

Where else would they be?

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."

The sidewalks of Moscow

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.

'Boynya nomer pyat'

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 Embankment

The view of the Smolenskaya Embankment, from Kutuzovsky Bridge, August 4. 

The voyage out

Compared to the last time we went abroad for a long time -- four years ago, with our little six-month old in tow -- this time leaving the States was not very dramatic. Last time, I remember going through those last few days at home taking mental notes of all the things I did, hoping to be able to remember them through the months away that lie ahead.

This time, I mostly only noticed how busy and tiring it all is. How many loose ends kept popping up, how I almost willfully tried to avoid thinking about what it means to leave home for a long time. So far, this trip has given me little chance to ruminate on the metaphysics of what we're up to. It has been a very immediate experience.

To give ourselves plenty of time to make our flight, we stayed the night before at the Days Inn near the airport. It is one of those airport hotels that is a lowest common denominator space. Everything felt small and cramped, cheap and plastic, easy to clean and yet somehow still filthy.

Our flight out was on Transaero, one of the newish Russian airlines that has recently begun the New York-Moscow route. We knew little about them, but the tickets, bought months ago, were priced alright. In our usual fashion, we made it to the gate at the last moment, and was surprised to see that the plane was a Boeing 747. Imagine the jumbo jet that took you on your first trip to London, way back in the 1980s or so... this was the exact airplane that the company must have bought from BA on eBay. The paint was cracked, the lights were dirty, the upholstery was threadbare. The only difference was that the seats were painfully close to one another. Now, this is a common refrain among air travellers, who have been slowly squeezed through the years. But this wasn't the case here: I was unable to put the tray down all the way, the seats were that close together.

But what was weirder was how Transaero chose to divide their space. As we walked onto the plane, we walked through a completely empty Business Class section. Empty. The company has a weird strategy for making money that seems a bit too rigid to make much money or to make customers happy. Apparently, according to the inflight magazine, the First Class sections in the front and on the upper deck are given over to full-blown elitny bullsh*t. Which explains the better dressed, friendlier, prettier stewardesses we caught brief glimpses of on the way in and out. They boast dining tables, beds, meeting rooms. But lord, when Mila accidentally walked close to that empty section, the stewards freaked out.

The usual finding our way around Russia process went as would be expected, with a predictable mix of new and various annoyances. First, there was the visa registration process. It is in some ways easier now -- you can do it at post offices. Trouble is, in actuality we had to visit three different post offices to find someone competent to do this, and then had to account for lunch hours, computer breakdowns, and half-assed attempts to fish for bribes. That took two days.

Then I came down with a massive bout of food poisoning that sent me off the earth for many days. Then there was a big editing project that needed my attention, and so since we arrived, I haven't gotten out much.

At the moment, my wife is on a business trip, Mila is at the dacha with her grandparents, and I find myself with time on my hands. I'm amazed at how quiet things can be. I'm still getting adjusted, thinking about what's next.

A poem for heading off

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.


Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.


The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.


(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)


-- Walt Whitman, from "Song of the Open Road."