My friend Sasha has forwarded me this report by the Committee to Protect Journalists - "in case someone thought something had improved" was the title of his message:

UKRAINE: LOCAL AUTHORITIES CLOSE CRITICAL NEWSPAPER

Closure of independent weekly Dzerzhinets in the central Ukrainian city of Dneprodzerzhynsk and the harassment of its editor-in-chief.

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
New York, New York, Wed, March 14, 2007

NEW YORK - The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the
closure of independent weekly Dzerzhinets in the central Ukrainian city of Dneprodzerzhynsk and the harassment of its editor-in-chief.

Dzerzhinets was closed on January 30, after the Zavodskoi civil district
court convicted the paper of defamation and incitement of religious and national hatred.

Founder and Editor-in-chief Margarita Zakora said the decision is related to
the paper's highly critical articles about local businessmen and officials
that revealed corruption in the city.

According to Zakora, authorities have tried to prevent her from launching a
defense or filing an appeal by not informing her of court dates and blocking
her access to case files. Zakora said she received a notice informing her of
an appeal court session scheduled for January 30-three days after it occurred.

A week before, the same court ordered the seizure of property belonging to
the journalist and the paper, and the payment of 140,660 hryvnias (US$29,071) in defamation damages to a local police chief for articles accusing him of corruption and intentionally violating the city's laws.

This court session was also held without Zakora's knowledge; she was
informed of the decision January 31, when she found court notices stuck to
her front door.

Authorities have refused Zakora's appeal, saying the time limit has passed.
Zakora maintains she could not meet the deadline because she received the
court's notification too late.

"The closure of Dzerzhinets comes at the end of a seriously flawed judicial
process which has denied our colleague Margarita Zakora the right to answer
her accusers," Executive Director Joel Simon said.

"The paper Dzerzhinets must be allowed to appeal this verdict, which should
be overturned. We also call on local police to investigate the attacks on
Zakora and guarantee her safety."

On July 12, pornographic cartoons of the journalist were pasted on the walls
of her office building, the local library, and other public places.

Dzerzhinets reporter Nadezhda Kuznetsova also received the cartoons and a
copy of the paper by mail, which she turned over to the local prosecutor's office.

On June 17, 2006 an unidentified gunman fired into her apartment window,
days after the paper carried a letter to the editor critical of local
businessmen. Police had opened a criminal investigation, but no arrests were
made.

I've been cleaning up my photos as well:

- There's a new Nostalgia #1 set - 70 photos from Pushcha Vodytsya and Gorenka that make me feel good even though I'm not there and it's not summer.

(Gorenka really feels like the same thing as Pushcha if you live there, but is technically a separate entity - a village, while Pushcha is part of Kyiv's Obolon district.)



- There's also a tiny set of Ostorozhno, zlaya sobaka! pictures - "Beware of the dog" signs on the fences in Gorenka and Pushcha. Only two real dogs, though.



- And I've added a bunch of Marta's pictures to her set:

Mishah returned from his trip, looked around and wrote (RUS):

I'm back to Moscow from Luxembourg. Nothing but shit, mud and ugly faces around. Should either travel more often, or not travel at all. Or just once.

He then got himself a Flickr account - for his Luxembourg pictures:


© Mishah Smetana

From a New York Times' profile of Garry Kasparov:

[...] someone who sounded angry that Mr. Kasparov had given up chess for politics attacked him with a chessboard in 2005. (“I am lucky,” he said at the time, “that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess and not baseball.”)

How can someone like Kasparov - someone with his sense of humor - be called a fascist? (Folks like Nashi do call him that a lot.)

And - how can someone like him mix with people like Limonov and Anpilov?

***

By the way, I can't access NPB's site - who knows, maybe they've finally decided to get rid of those idiotic Nazi posters, now that they are allied with someone as presentable as Kasparov.

And there seems to have been a split within NBP: the site that is accessible now is NBP Without Limonov (English version is here). A quick look through it shows that they are up against Linderman, some Jewish comrade of Limonov. And Garry Kasparov ("half Jewish and half Armenian, born in Baku") cannot be their dream leader, either, I guess.

I took this picture around 6 p.m. today (yesterday): a bunch of street-sweepers (also, ice-breakers in winter) are playing football at a school playground. It was very fun to watch them: they were totally immersed in the game, didn't even notice that I was photographing them.

Most, if not all, were Asian (non-Slavic) - most likely imported into Moscow from a Russian region (not from the "near abroad").

Reading some people's blogs (mine included), you'd think all that ever happens to these "foreign migrant workers" is they get beaten and killed by ethnic Russians. Reading other people's blogs, it seems that all they ever do here is abuse and humiliate ethnic Russians. But life is more complex than that, of course.

The school near which they are playing, by the way, is named after a WWII "Hero of the Soviet Union" with a Georgian last name (which I don't remember).

Dog shit is everywhere, huge turds, and what remains of the snow is either water or it's black. The only bright spots turn out to be trash - or cars. And children's playgrounds. Mezhsezonye. Seasonal affective disorder should be renamed into inter-seasonal affective disorder - but this would kill the tasty acronym. Mishah is in Luxembourg; he wrote me that apricots are in bloom there already.









The cops in the last picture, armed with Kalashnikovs (I guess), searched this dark-haired, non-Slavic-looking young men, then put him into their car and drove off.

***

Novodevichiy Monastery remains the nicest place for walks in our neighborhood: now it's perfect for shit-free walks.

A set of 14 photos from the March 8 rally is here.

***

Here's the note-taking cop:





***

And here's the protest-addicted babushka (still haven't found that funny post about her...):

I really regret not being able to write every day - to write as much as I want to every day. To reply to people's emails. To write down all the exciting things about Marta. Once again, I wish I had a clone - and it'd also be great if the day lasted 30 hours, not 24. I wouldn't be so sleep-deprived then, too.

Anyway, here's how I spent March 8.

Mishah had a day off, so he went for a walk with Marta, and I took a cab downtown (or is it uptown? it is...), to Chistiye Prudy, the area where I hadn't been to yet, since my return from Kyiv.

The driver was a 30-year-old Uzbek guy from Tashkent who has lived in Moscow for half a year. He complained about the loose morals of the local males: on the average, he gets propositioned twice a week here, by "all those transvestites and gays." A cute guy, a Muslim. The ride was over before we got to discuss xenophobia.

It was the first really warm, really sunny day, so wonderful, so I walked and walked and walked. Originally, I had been planning to have coffee and read a book at the coffee place on Pokrovka, but I just couldn't stop walking. I only took a few pictures during my walk - here's one:



It was nice seeing women with flowers (though so many had their men with them - and it was often the guys who were carrying the bouquets - as if flowers are such a heavy burden for a woman to carry herself). It was also nice saying "Happy March 8" to those poor women who had to work on what was a day off for the rest of us: a kiosk woman I bought water from, a bookstore woman, etc. It felt nice to make them smile.

I didn't give up on the idea of having coffee, but when I was ready to pause, the place I went into on Tverskaya was choke-full. So I decided to walk past our former place on Bolshaya Bronnaya instead, across the street from the synagogue - the lousy weather of the past two months hadn't allowed me take this nostalgic walk.

I was near the McDonald's on Pushkinskaya, feeling pregnant again (because this was the area where I spent most of my pregnancy), when I saw one of those ugly buses, with curtained windows, and then a few more, and I had this click in my head right away, and I turned left, and yes, there was an awfully tiny rally near the square - which I wouldn't have noticed if it hadn't been for all the riot police around.

Just like in September 2005, two and a half months before Marta was born - I wrote about that rally here, here, and here.

There were only a dozen people or so, protesting Russia's involvement in Chechnya. I walked by, read the slogans, accepted a leaflet from an eccentric-looking man, got reminded that March 8 wasn't just the International Women's Day here but also the second anniversary of Maskhadov's death (a flashback: dead Maskhadov on every TV channel, Ramzan Kadyrov's sick sick sick sense of humor - this corpse was his March 8 present to every Chechen woman).

I continued on my walk towards our Bolshaya Bronnaya place.

But when I was a block away, I heard some noise, turned around and saw a guy climb the blue toilet booth a few meters away from the protesters, and then a riot cop got there after him, and, after some struggle, he pulled the guy down, from all the way up, into the snow.

Damn, I thought, as I saw a pack of journalists rush towards the toilets: I was there just two minutes ago - why did I not stay?

So I went back, in time to capture the cops carrying the poor guy to the bus:



But my footage is nothing, especially compared to this:



Normally, I wouldn't link to anything by the folks who shot this video - and who, it turned out, were counter-rallying against the anti-war folks (the guy on the toilet roof was from their crowd): Rossiya Molodaya, a youth movement that seems to be very much like Nashi, as moronic (though I do admit I haven't bothered reading about them at all - all I know is they are against "liberal fascists" and "political prostitutes").

But this video is different: it's something that I watched from afar - because of the really bad timing.

I hung around for a while, taking pictures of the poor anti-war people (will post them later, I hope).

One cop there had a tiny notepad and a pen: he walked around, diligently copying all the slogans. I wonder why he was doing that. In the last Esquire, there's a selection of LiveJournal entries by Moscow cops - an awesome piece - maybe he was one of those bloggers. :)

And I've finally seen that elderly woman who goes to every rally, left and right, just because she loves it. (Later, I'll post my photo of her, and a link to LJ user nl's hilarious entry about her - need some time to find it).

One woman at the rally held a poster that said Aslan Maskhadov wasn't a terrorist but a slain president of the Chechen Republic. Okay. But I've had this question about him for a few years now and kept forgetting to ask it here. A rhetorical question:

Maskhadov used to be the "anti-aircraft and artillery division chief-of-staff at the Baltic Military District in Vilnius, Lithuania" (from here) and "took part in the Soviet army's attempt to suppress Lithuania's nationalist independence movement in January 1991 - an episode he quickly came to regret" (from here):

"I was in Lithuania, in Vilnius during those events. I also thought at that time that the Lithuanians were allowed to do what they wanted, to live under the wing of Russia, they lived normally there. And today it is shameful for me that I had those views and I think differently."

(From here.)

And then he also regretted the Chechen fighters' involvement in the war against Georgia, on the Abkhaz side:

"The participation of our volunteers in the Abkhazia conflict against Georgia is not the best page in the history of relations between two brotherly nations," Maskhadov said. "We acknowledge today that our volunteers were deceived. At the outset of 1993-1994, on the eve of Russia's invasion into our territory, on the eve of Russia's aggression, we should not have been involved [in the conflict], taking into account strategic, tactical, military and political considerations. We had no right to do this. We only damaged our interests, even from military point of view, even from political point of view, to say nothing about the brotherly relations between our peoples. I hope that this will serve us as a lesson forever."

(I've no link for this, it's in my Beslan notes, but is easy to find - here's the source: The Jamestown Foundation's Chechnya Weekly, Vol. 5, Issue 33, Sept. 1, 2004.)

The question is this, I guess: how come politicians always manage to get off so easily? Or something.

To wrap this up, I did walk past our former house eventually and it was such an emotional boost for me. All the memories from that totally different life we had. And, strangely, the impromptu rally experience had the same effect on me: a glimpse into the past (a more realistic observation, though, is that the opposition seems to have gotten even thinner in the past year and a half - or perhaps I'm wrong and they've all just moved to St. Pete...)

Anyway, it was a great day, and I've written more than I expected I would, and there'll be some pics later, and then for a while I won't feel too guilty about not writing here.

According to Korrespondent.net (RUS), 14 skinheads attacked a Brazilian football player Glayton Barbosa (formerly of FC Schalke 04) in the very center of Kyiv on March 7.

It happened near the fancy-schmancy Arena City mall at Besarabka - I've always thought it was one of the safest and best-guarded places in the city:

One of the attackers sprayed some tear gas into the black player's face, and then the rest attacked him and started beating him with their legs. They were stopped by the girl accompanying the football player; she screamed: "What are you doing? This is a Brazilian football player!"

Glayton managed to escape inside the Arena City, and skinheads started lecturing the girl for being a Slav and yet walking around the city with a negr. While they were moralizing, someone called the police, and the skinheads ran away.

Let's add that the football player and his girlfriend Byata [sp?], a singer with the Lithuanian Funky [sp?] band, were guests at Masha Fokina's new album presentation.

Motherfuckers.

Warning: a long tennis post ahead :)))

This piece in the New York Times caught me unawares - How to Grow a Super Athlete, by Daniel Coyle.



I saw Yelena Dementieva's picture on the coverpage, next to the article's title, and immediately began thinking about a story of one of Mishah's colleagues: how her daughter and Dementieva had the same tennis coach when they were little, and Dementieva was deemed absolutely no good, while the daughter of Mishah's colleague was considered really promising - but in the end, it was Dementieva who managed to beat them all big time.

Then I opened the story, scrolled down, and saw this photo (by Olaf Blecker):



Larisa Dmitrievna Preobrazhenskaya, she was my coach here in 1986-87, when I lived in Moscow with my mama after Chernobyl.

Bumping into her like this so many years later is strange - and very moving.

The coach, 77-year-old Larisa Preobrazhenskaya (pronounced pray-oh-brah-ZHEN-skya), stood at the sideline, watching. She wore a red-and-white tracksuit and a knowing, amused expression. Preobrazhenskaya was Spartak's most renowned youth coach, but she wore her authority lightly, radiating a grandmotherly twinkle behind hooded eyes. She'd been quite a player in her day, the 1955 Soviet singles champion. She still looked athletic, sauntering around the court with a John Wayne limp caused by a sore hip. The parents huddled by the door, watchful and silent.

She has aged so much. And so has my father. How heartbreaking. She's three years his senior.

***

If Preobrazhenskaya's approach were boiled down to one word (and it frequently was), that word would be tekhnika — technique.

Papa made it possible for me to be her student that year - it was an honor, even then. But when I returned to Kyiv, he was displeased with the way my serve had changed, and he blamed it on Preobrazhenskaya: her "swing your arms up, like wings" approach wasn't his idea of good tekhnika.

A few years ago, at a press conference, Dementieva, teary-eyed, blamed her serve for the defeat at some tournament.

***

To put Spartak's success in talent-map terms: this club, which has one indoor court, has achieved eight year-end top-20 women's rankings over the last three years. During that same period, the entire United States has achieved seven.

Back in the 1980s, there was a very talented junior player, Natasha Biletskaya, from Novaya Kakhovka, a small Ukrainian town that we used to teasingly call "New Kakhovka." There, they didn't have a single indoor court at all, and all winter long she used to play against the wall - and then, she kicked everyone's asses at most tournaments.

***

About the translator accompanying the author of the article in Moscow, and about the tennis center where Preobrazhenskaya works:

"I learned my English listening to music, like Elton John," she said. "'Crocodile Rocks'! I love it!"

We rode the subway half an hour northeast to Sokolniki Park and started walking. And walking. Sokolniki is almost twice the size of Central Park, considerably less central and only vaguely parklike. It's basically a huge forest of birch and elm trees filled with a disconcertingly energetic population of stray dogs. [...]

Oh, man, this is so familiar. The way I learned English, but also how I became immune to Moscow: I was 12, and several days a week, after school, I had to take a bus to Universitet subway station, then ride all the way up to Sokolniki, walk to the tennis center there (no stray dogs then, though), play for a couple hours, then go back home and do my homework. After Kyiv, where everything was so close, this was such a feat, and so exhausting. But I'm grateful I had to go through this: Moscow doesn't seem like such a nightmare now.

***

[...] a Slavic gene pool that produces a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tall, fast, strong kids [...]

Funny, but the only one of Preobrazhenskaya's really successful students who I played next to that year was Tatyana Panova, two years my junior, height 5' 3/4'' (1.54 m), weight 115 lbs. (52 kg). Watching her play against Lindsay Davenport - height 6' 2 1/2'' (1.89 m), weight 175 lbs. (79 kg) - was very, very, very scary. Just imagine: Davenport is 35 cm taller.

***

[...] the economic and cultural gateway that opened with the 1991 collapse of the Communist government [...]

Somehow, this was when I quit tennis. I was lazy and liked to cheat my way out of much of the work, and it was easy with my extremely kind papa, so it wasn't like I was going to become a star anyway, but I also remember my mama telling her friends that she wasn't going to torture her child as long as all the prize money went into the pockets of the bureaucrats at Sportkomitet.

***

[...] the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin's enthusiastic (if at times klutzy) love for the sport [...]

Yes, he could spend six hours in row watching every single Russian player, with only one bathroom break. Amazing.

***

About Dementieva:

Surprisingly, she had been rejected by several other clubs as too slow before landing at Spartak. She spoke fondly, if a little vaguely, of her days at the club: dodging stray dogs, washing dirty tennis balls in the sink, doing homework on the long subway ride.

She was 5 years old when I was suffering through my subway rides to Sokolniki...

***

Driven Parents. The hunger and ambition of Russian parents is uniquely strong, particularly when one considers how hard life is in Russia right now and also that the patron saint of Russian tennis parents is the ex-Siberian oil-field worker Yuri Sharapov, who came to America with less than $1,000 and his 7-year-old daughter, Maria, who now earns an estimated $30 million a year in endorsements.

I'm so happy for Sharapova. I read somewhere that she spent the first two years in the States without her mother - because they wouldn't give her an entry visa to join her daughter. And now she's an absolutely free person - doesn't owe anything to Russia and doesn't have to worry about visas.

***

After all, at Spartak, they don't speak of "playing" tennis. The verb they like to use is borot'sya — to struggle.

My papa's way to describe some of my opponents was zubastaya - the one with the teeth. It was making me jealous, I guess, but then it was also pushing me to try growing the teeth of my own. He also used to tell us to "play our own game" - igray v svoyu igru - to avoid being manipulated by your opponent, and, as trite as it sounds, it's a good thing to remember in everyday life, too.

***

I've skipped most of the article - everything not related to Preobrazhenskaya. Will have to return to it later.

A brief note on Ukraine (via Korrespondent.net, RUS):

According to Yaroslav Davydovych, head of the central election commision, an early parliamentary election would cost us around 400 million hryvnias (approx. $80 million). This is part of the reason I'm against it: there must be a better way to spend this money. Many better ways, I'm sure.

In St. Pete today (yesterday), a surprisingly large rally.

Mishah showed me this lovely image from Reuters (from this series on Newsru.com) in the early afternoon - but this a guy with an NBP flag... I just can't get over it, you know... and I wonder how many people choose to stay home instead of having anything to do with the Nazi-style hammer and sickle... I've said this many times before, I know...

But now I'm reading the blog of someone I admire - LJ user aneta_spb, a St. Pete journalist of Belarusian descent - and here's what she writes (RUS):

In this case, I don't care what flags people were carrying. What's important is that the most popular slogan - the one that everyone supported - was: "This is our city!"

And I guess I understand how she feels: it's probably like having those UNA-UNSO guys all over the place at Maidan - I kind of hate their guts, and they do seem pretty marginal (even though they are part of BYuT - or are they still?), but sometimes I'm able not to notice them and their flags. Same with NBP, I guess... (Only it's still not the same, for some reason...)

From a number of LJ comments, I understand that many of the media do focus on NBP presence at the rally a lot - bad, bad protesters, extremists-fascists. The fact that NBP exists at all certainly helps the regime - otherwise, who would be there to get attacked by OMON? (The old ladies on the wonderful picture over this New York Times piece aren't such a good target, are they?)

Really gloomy weather here today: +2C and raining.

There are so many things I want to get done, but there's so little time, and I have this constant feeling that I'm not getting anything done at all, except for feeding Marta and doing the dishes. And doing laundry.

She's asleep on me now, so I'm writing.

She's had a cold this week or something - we wouldn't have guessed if it hadn't been for some fever on Monday night and some coughing today: in between, she is the usual Marta.

I called a doctor on Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?) and he said she was okay, developing normally, etc. But in Moscow they have this favorite condition - intracranial hypertension syndrome (sindrom vnutricherepnoy gipertenzii) - which seems to be just like hip dysplasia in Kyiv, a scary-sounding but rather vague thing that they feel safe (mis)diagnosing way too many kids with. The doctor - elderly, with a fancy medical/scientific degree and a personal stamp - said Marta should be checked by a neurologist, and, of course, he recommended someone, a friend, I'm sure, or a colleague he's getting commission from for sending customers her way... I mean, patients, not customers... I was actually thinking of one cozy restaurant in Istanbul as I was writing this - our friend, its owner, told us all about this commission thing (as it applies to him and his friends, not the Turkish doctors). Anyway, here's why the doctor thought Marta could have hypertension syndrome: because of her large forehead. Ha ha ha. If left untreated, it'd crush her brains, he told me very kindly, but was careful enough to put a question mark next to the diagnisis on the paper he issued to me. I told him (quite proudly) that the forehead is most definitely from Mishah, a familial trait, sort of. I hope he understood that his neurologist friend isn't getting any money from me.

LJ user radulova (Russian journalist Natalya Radulova) has posted photos of Moscow apartments for rent. Jesus.

They say Kyiv is drowning in garbage (thanks to the already-not-so-new mayor and his preoccupation with stealing land instead of working). Mishah's mother confirms this, my mama hasn't noticed anything (but she's such an optimist, maybe that's why). What she has noticed lately is two things, though: first, a huge bath tub made of malachite on display in one furniture store downtown - the price tag is either 10,000 euros or 100,000 euros (I have to ask her again, but either way, it's outrageous); second, a stained-glass filling for wardrobe doors at another store, really beautiful, Tiffany, either $1,000 or $2,000 per square meter (a sudden memory loss - have to check this as well). "So what?" is an obvious question here, I know. Well, I guess it's a good example of how we take such truly amazing things for granted - I wasn't planning to write about it, but since I'm so terribly busy with Marta and with Global Voices and am neglecting this blog so cruelly, I had to jumpstart myself somehow, and this little anecdote is as good as any, I guess: Kyiv, the luxurious shithole.