So, according to Korrespondent.net (RUS), street cleaners in Kyiv will now be making $400 a month. I've just posted a GV translation of some reactions to this piece of news.

On the one hand, you'd think that this is totally natural for a city with so many fancy cars driving around (and parked on sidewalks). On the other hand, you'd think it's kind of annoying for a country where doctors, teachers and just about anyone else are barely surviving on their "average nominal salary" of about 170 euros a month (or living off bribes, shamelessly).

I was making much less than $400 a month nine years ago, when I returned from the States and was tutoring kids in English. Then I spent a year and a half living on this new street cleaner's salary when I found my American NGO job: I started with $300 a month, got a $50 raise - ha-ha! - a few months later, and then another one at the end of the first six months, and that was it for the rest of my time there. I kept a favorite student of mine, too, tutored him till he finished school - but by then, it was no longer about the money.

At this American NGO, we once spent about $2,000 for hotel, food, drink, gifts and other expenses in less than a week in Luhansk, a nightmare trip to a nightmare city. So it wasn't like we were being starved there, no. And, as far as I know, the U.S. staff salaries differed from those of the "locals" - which didn't really make me jealous, except for when someone kept spelling the word "anonymous" as "annoynamous" and I had to clean it up for him. And then once we were talking to some "small businessman" in a Ukrainian region, and he said he needed $300 to make his business work, and that just blew my mind away somehow: if we stayed in Kyiv, or skipped our dinners on a few trips, and then donated the money saved to this guy, he'd have a BUSINESS running, but here we were, nodding and taking notes (or doodling, as some of us often did)... Our work, of course, resulted in some people being sent to the States to learn stuff, all expenses paid, which was totally awesome, but I don't think that particular guy got selected - because he didn't seem to want to learn, he just needed the goddamn $300 to be able to get started, and we weren't some microcredit place or something...

Not sure what I'm trying to say here. I hope to spend some time in Pushcha Vodytsya this summer again - I'll report on the garbage situation once I get there. Who knows, maybe the street cleaning field will now become so competitive that it won't be as futile to call the Obolon district administrtion to complain about the garbage as it was last year.

If I had more time and energy, I'd translate more of this article (UKR) by Maryna Pyrozhuk in Ukrainska Pravda - about the lousy coverage of the mysterious illness of Ukraine's interior minister:

Vasyl Tsushko is feeling better... Interior minister's condition has gotten worse... Vasyl Tsushko is better... Interior minister is feeling worse again... Then better again...

Eight times like this.

These reports were traveling around Ukrainian news agencies all day long, were being retold on radio and TV stations by the ministry's representatives and those with clear personal interest - Tetyana Montyan and Kostyantyn Stohniy. The former called herself the minister's friend and aide, and the latter was just an employee of the ministry.

And none of the reports on this subject carried voices of the doctors who were treating the Ukrainian minister, or the voice of Tsushko himself, who, according to Stohniy, was feeling better from time to time, and was even telling jokes, and managed to control the situation at the ministry, and then some more. According to that very same Stohniy.

[...]

Until now, none of the TV channels has managed to check and show a true picture of where exactly Mr. Tsushko has been hospitalized, and whether he is indeed hospitalized, what city and country he is in.

In the story of the Socialist minister Tsushko, the main newsmakers were and are the Socialists themselves, as well as friends and colleagues mentioned above. And the comrades are very active in insisting that Tsushko has been poisoned, and they've even named those who harmed him.

[...]

Maybe Ukrainska Pravda will get a full translation online later. This is one of the very few texts on Ukrainian politics - and journalism, and medicine - that I've read lately, and I liked it.

In Moscow, you know it's summer when it's been over a month since you last saw the next-door neighbor you spent the whole winter smoking with on the staircase. First, when it just got only slightly warm, he must've moved his ashtray to his balcony, and then, he probably migrated to his dacha. I'll know winter is close when I see him again, I'm afraid.

***

It's cold and rainy here now, and I miss the heat. We had bought a fan right before the heat wave departed. Many people shopped for fans that day, actually, so many that there weren't enough staff at the store to explain the difference between models - and so some customers, having spent some time figuring things out for themselves, were then volunteering as consultants to other customers. I told a friend about it, and he was skeptical - the fans, how different can they be? But they are: many come with remote control now.

:)

On Tuesday, I did a GV translation on the situation with the LiveJournal in Russia: many people (including Mishah) could neither post, nor comment for a few days.

DPNI (the Movement Against Illegal Immigration) acted the most hysterical, claiming they were being censored by the Russian authorities.

Six Apart, the folks in the U.S. who run LiveJournal, issued a statement, explaining that the problem was both technical and political:

DDoS Attack. Official reaction from Six Apart

According to the explanations we’ve received from Six Apart this morning, a powerful DDoS-attack is being carried out against the LJ servers in California since Friday, June 1. The source of the attack is allegedly located in Russia. Servers are receiving 50,000 requests per second. The attack’s main goals are dрni, ru_рolitics и ru_nаzbol communities. To resist the attacks, the LJ administration introduced filtration of incoming packages and limited access to the server for large blocks of Russian IP-addresses beginning last Friday. These are temporary measures that had to be taken. Technical services of Six Apart decide on the specific lists of words and addresses to be blocked, taking into account the analysis of incoming requests.

These filters make it impossible to post LJ entries and comments that contain the words “ru_рolitics,” “dрni” и “ru_nbр.”

[...]

Nasty business, but to call it censorship carried out by Putin's regime is an exaggeration, definitely.

Well, on Wednesday, Reuters ran a piece that further promoted DPNI's distorted view of things:

Russia monitors Internet to dampen ethnic violence

By James Kilner

MOSCOW, June 6 (Reuters) - Russian authorities for the first time blocked nationalists from using a popular Internet blog to organise anti-migrant demonstrations, one of the leaders of a nationalist group told Reuters on Wednesday.

In January President Vladimir Putin ordered the security services to stamp out growing extremism and racism partly fuelled by envy towards successful businesses run by Caucasians and Central Asians and two wars in Chechnya from 1994.

Authorities monitoring the livejournal Web site made it hard to organise protests on Tuesday against Chechens in the southern city of Stavropol, Alexei Mikhailov, one of the leaders of Action Against Illegal Immigrants (DPNI), told Reuters by telephone.

"I think we should organise a protest but in Stavropol everything is under police control," he said.

In a fight between Russians and Chechens on May 24 in Stavropol, a city of 350,000 bordering Chechnya, a Chechen man died. Ten days later unknown attackers killed two Russians in what many think was a revenge attack.

On Tuesday hundreds of angry Russians gathered in the city's main square after the Russians' funerals.

In September Chechens fled the northwestern town of Kondopoga after Russian rioters avenged two murders by torching their businesses, homes and cars.

DPNI, which says it is against violence, has organised marches in Moscow and helped the demonstrators in Kondopoga.

Media said Stavropol had all the hallmarks of another Kondopoga. But in Stavropol the police were organised and DPNI were missing.

"It's a southern region with more immigrants and relations are more tense and more explosive than Kondopoga," Mikhailov said.

Police detained 50 protesters at the rally and Mikhailov said police held another of DPNI's leaders for nine hours when he arrived in the city, preventing him from reaching a meeting.

Crucially, Mikhailov said, the authorities had extended their watch to the Internet and any blog on livejournal containing DPNI failed to be posted.

"It is a significant part of our work and the most politically active people read livejournal and write there," Mikhailov said. "This group is a priority group."

[...]

Nowhere in this piece do they question what this Mikhailov dude is saying about LiveJournal. They also fail to point out this contradiction: Chechens are not illegal immigrants in Russia, they are this country's citizens, which undermines DPNI's cause - and their credibility, if there was any - a great deal.

And this being Russia, it's hard to guess who is behind what: the regime may be attacking LiveJournal, but, in some murky kind of a deal, it may also be behind DPNI, who, on April 14, were allowed to rally and scream all they wanted, right after Kasparov's people and anyone who happened to be nearby had been detained. And maybe I'm as wrong here as DPNI is about LJ - but hey, this blog ain't Reuters, right?

Called my mother, but she wasn't there: papa picked up the phone and we spent half an hour talking.

I don't understand about 90 percent of what he's saying. Absolutely heartbreaking.

Of what I do understand, he is very happy for me, because of Marta and all that I'm doing and seeing (which isn't a lot, but still). He's still the kindest person in the world - his three strokes in one year weren't able to change that.

Here's a picture of him 27 years ago, at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow - he's the one in the center of the picture, smiling into the camera:

Bought kumis ("a fermented drink traditionally made from the milk of horses") at a store yesterday - what a fake.

Or perhaps the kumis at that vegetable store on Yalta's Embankment all those years ago was a fake - but boy, was it delicious. The real thing, I'm sure. Or almost real.

It was one of those (many) things that made Yalta a different world for me as a child, the only place in my universe where they had kumis, which I, for some reason, loved so much. Because it's not a drink you'd expect a child to like - it's not sweet and it is said to contain a tiny little bit of alcohol. Though that probably explains why I loved beer so much in later life.

Anyway, this bottled kumis here in Moscow seems to be fake - but it reminded me of Yalta and my childhood enough for me to write this note, which is good.

A free public bathroom at Neskuchnyi Sad ("The Not Boring Garden"). I've no idea what this whole thing means. "Meeting of the return" is what it says.

Moscow, rush hour, Thursday evening:

So busy and exhausted, wish I could be writing more, here and elsewhere...

***

Marta turned 18 months old (1 1/2 years) last Friday, on June 1. Poltora goda... :)

How terribly sad... Belarusian blogger br23 has passed away.

Here's a post from his family, and here's a small obit, in Russian.

Rest in peace, Uladzimir.

Luzhniki is such a strange place.

As Julie wrote in a comment a few days ago, it used to be "a giant toilet" - thanks to the huge open-air market based there. But that was five years ago.

The market has since been shrunk and moved indoors, into the pavilions located at a safe distance from the stadium, closer to Sportivnaya subway station than to the impressive metal fence encircling the stadium.

And "the stadium" is, of course, the wrong word to describe Luzhniki. There are several football fields there, including the giant arena in the center, and quite a few tennis courts, and a skating rink or two, and the swimming pool. And there're roads, and all kinds of fancy cars driving around, and inside the giant central arena, there's a driving school, and a restaurant (or, perhaps, nothing but a Soviet-time sign that survives where the restaurant used to be), and even a hotel (or, again, just a sign). There's a statue of Lenin there, too.

FC Torpedo, one of Moscow's several teams, is based in Luzhniki: a few days ago, young boys were having a practice game, and the way the coach was yelling and cursing at them was absolutely unforgettable.

There's the Olimp Restaurant, on the embankment: often, it sends the lovely smell of grilled meat all the way across the river, to Vorobyovy Gory. The cars parked in front of it are sort of intimidating, way too fancy, and so I've never ventured inside, but we've seen the vehicle of the ambassador of Azerbaijan there and decided it must be a place specialising in Azeri food.

The best-looking tennis courts there are clay, and somehow I managed to guess how much it'd cost to play on them for one hour, and Mishah didn't believe me, but I checked online after our walk and it turned out I was almost right: I'd said it must be something like $100 an hour - well, it's $110 (2,800 rubles). Crazy, huh? But there are cheaper options in Luzhniki as well - things aren't as hopeless as they sometimes appear to be here.

The skating rink looks pretty from the outside, its architecture reminded me of the stuff they had in Tallinn back in the Soviet times - but inside it is awful: squeaky doors, leaky-looking roof, dim lights over the ice and shivering kids on it, no decent space for parents willing to watch their kids shiver and skate. But I'm sure the main couterargument of the folks there would be that we have the best coaches in the world. Like we have the best doctors in the world and that, for some reason, is supposed to make one feel okay inside one of those horrible post-Soviet hospitals. (Marta's too small to learn how to skate yet, so why am I complaining? Because I hoped to be able to skate there myself - but now I don't think it's a good place.)

The swimming pool, unlike the skating rink, looks dingy on the outside, and they had fire at a sauna there a few days ago, and the area around it still stinks of burned plastic. (Julie, I know it's been five years - but, how was it swimming in there?)

I tried to take a picture of some writing on the swimming pool's wall, but an Azeri-looking guy told me it was forbidden and threatened me with a guard. I can't possibly imagine what secrets they are hiding. Or perhaps I can. Fire hazard is one guess. Illegal workers is another.

Must be plenty of the latter, for on the edge of the compound there's a makeshift bus station, with a few dozen buses, most of which are ready to depart for Makhachkala, Dagestan. And Derbent, and Budyonnovsk. Lots of people with huge bags and sacks nearby. Quite impressive - and, needless to say, it didn't even occur to me to attempt to take a picture there. I felt happy, though, that there was no way for Moscow skinheads to attack these people - if the fence isn't enough, Luzhniki seems to have enough human security guards, too.

All in all, Luzhniki is a nice place to walk. I let Marta take her naps near the tennis courts - I want her to get used to the sound of tennis: a complete failure myself, a heartbreak for my tennis coach father, I want Marta to grow up a brilliant player, of course.

:)

***

Here're some pics:










The swimming pool:

A journalist friend of mine was filing a piece on Ukraine's political crisis for a major Western news outlet - and his editors made him re-do the part about Yushchenko accusing the parliamentary majority of buying up votes of the opposition factions. An allegation, according to them.

Last night, this same journalist friend of mine was swamped with messages from a friend in Italy, who was really worried after hearing on TV that Ukraine was on the verge of a civil war. Not an allegation, obviously.

In the middle of this imaginary civil war yesterday, Kyiv residents spent a whole hour admiring the really splendid fireworks - with lightning bolts having "a show of their own in the background" all over the horizon.

"People applauded," my friend wrote me.

***

Enidd has mixed a BBC report on Ukraine's political crisis with her own photos from Kyiv - an awesome illustration of how the reality presented in the news diverges from the reality of the street.

And here's a comment from Little Miss Moi (and a longer post on civil war, Ukrainian-style):

[...] I celebrated the civil war by going to Hidropark and meeting some civilians, getting caught in a thunderstorm and eating shashlyk... [...]

Here's my today's GV translation (looks like my "family members" and I aren't the only ones sick of Ukrainian politics):

Ukraine: Politics Overdose

On April 2, Ukrainian president Victor Yushchenko dissolved parliament and called early elections, but prime minister Victor Yanukovych and his allies disputed the president's authority to do so (see here and here for earlier Global Voices translations). This week, Yushchenko dismissed the newly reappointed prosecutor general, Svyatoslav Piskun, who is the prime minister's ally. Interior minister Vasyl Tsushko accused the president of usurping power, and riot police stormed the prosecutor general's office. Yushchenko responded by placing interior ministry troops under his direct command. Yanukovych condemned the president's order, and the interior ministry said it would defy it. After a day of confusion over who controlled the interior ministry's troops, Yushchenko ordered extra units to Kyiv, but most were stopped on the way to the capital by traffic police acting on behalf of the government.

The outcome of this highly complicated conflict is yet to be seen, but one thing seems clear: many Ukrainians, on whose behalf the politicians involved in the current feud claim to be acting, suffer from politics overdose (and from unusually hot weather).

Here's what two journalists of the Ukrainian weekly news magazine Korrespondent wrote about this political and climatic heat on their blogs (RUS) on May 25.

Vitaliy Sych, Korrespondent's editor-in-chief:

I've a feeling that our politicians and ourselves have turned into parallel realities. And that our paths no longer cross. That's it. It's over.

Here's what you see on TV: the parliament wants to impeach the president, the president wants to fire the premier, the Constitutional Court's judges have been accused of taking millions in bribes. You watch it and think: So what? It doesn't mean anything anymore. The amount of important political news has grown so huge that it has practically lost all value. If tomorrow they show on TV that the premier or the president strangled and then ate three infants, everyone will say: How amusing.

Ukrainian politics has turned into a TV soap opera that never leaves the screen and no longer has any effect on the people's lives.

Local businessmen have understood this too already. Upcoming elections used to freeze most significant projects for a year, but now no one pays attention to the elections anymore. They have become routine. Yesterday, I looked through the English-language newspaper Kyiv Post, where I worked once myself. Never before has Ukraine seen such an influx of foreign investors. We used to run an item on arrival of a big investor in the market once a month. Now, there are five or six every week. Even the international ranking agencies have stopped downgrading Ukraine in their economic forecasts.

You'd think that the events like this should cause anxiety. No. No one gives a damn.

That's it, politics has strayed away from the people.

But please tell me one thing: if I [leave the city] for an overnight barbeque tomorrow, will they let me back in if the emergency state is declared?

Olga Kryzhanovskaya, editor of Korrespondent's The Country section:

Sleepy Kingdom

The country has found itself on the brink of emergency state, two of the three branches of power have basically become illegitimate. Amazing, but there is no sign of it in Kyiv. There's no tension in the air, people are calmly discussing their weekend plans, no one hurries to turn on the news. After two months of political confrontation, it looks like everyone has simply lost interest to what's going on up there on the top. Summer, heat, beer in the open air. To hell with all this politics. The economy is working, banks are giving out money, stores are giving out food, subway is giving out tokens. This creates an illusion of everything being okay, and the TV news about the storming of the prosecutor general's office resembles yet another Jackie Chan action movie. Wake up, people! A healthy cynicism towards politicians is good. But at some point it becomes dangerous to be apathetic and carefree. Think of 2004. What would have happened if thousands of people hadn't come out into the streets and taken control over the situation? If only 300 paid extras had gathered at Maidan, instead of 300,000 citizens, there would have been no round table and no compromise. And now, until we turn into citizens again, politicians would continue making empty sounds with their authority, instead of looking for a way out.

UPDATE: Several hours after this translation went up, Ukraine's leaders reached an agreement to hold an early election on September 30. According to president Yushchenko, the political crisis is over.

Svyatoslav Piskun is no longer our prosecutor general (yet again), and some consider his (yet another) sacking a coup attempt.

A month ago, his (yet another) reappointment did nothing but emphasize the pointlessness of Ukrainian politics. Today, this pointlessness feels nothing but surreal.

***

Back in September 2005, I wrote this:

Following this country's politics too closely is as useless as being an expert on all the comings and goings at some obscure little company.

I feel the same way today.

***

One family member in Kyiv has prefered watching the Simpsons this evening, instead of Victor Yanukovych's emergency press conference.

Another family member says the weather's simply hellish, and everyone's melting in the heat and couldn't care less about politics.

***

On May 8, I called my friend whose husband died of cancer six months before, on November 8, two and a half months before their daughter was born. She was on her way home from the church when I called, her precious little daughter asleep in a sling. The park near Mariinsky Palace, occupied by the Yanukovych gang, happens to be the only decent place for them to go for walks - and there's no way they can go there now, she told me.

When I think of the current situation in Ukraine, this is making me feel the strongest: not the meaningless politics of it all, but my friend's absolutely desperate situation, aggravated by a bunch of losers camping in the park. So heartbreaking.

***

A report on BBC World today seemed to give an impression that the pro-Yanukovych rallies were genuine. I might've believed it had I not been there for a while back in April. I suspect that the reporter is perhaps aware of that herself. It's interesting how objective, impartial, purely factual reporting can sometimes obscure the complex truth.

Voting in the Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards (which I won last year in the Best CIS Blog nomination) is now underway over at A Fistful of Euros.

Just like last year, there's lots of great stuff to choose from, and it's also a great way to discover new blogs - so go there, read, vote.

To those of you who'll vote for me - a HUGE thanks.

And, it's not Eurovision, so please don't cheat. I won't.

:)