What a wonderful photo of my father - and of my 18-year-old blind cat, Kosya, who died on April 15.

I miss them so much.

I'll never stop missing them.

Somehow ran into this Jan. 2006 interview (RUS) with Myroslava Gongadze on Radio Ekho Moskvy. Don't have the energy to post any background or other info/thoughts - mainly because it is common knowledge that, nearly ten years later, those who ordered to kill Georgi Gongadze still haven't been brought to justice. And this, more or less, is the only thing that really matters. But - I can't resist translating Myroslava's description of the room in which the trial of Georgiy's suspected killers was initially held.

A tiny room - the size of the Radio Ekho Moskvy studio, some 15 square meters - and...

M. GONGADZE - [...] In this room, there are three defendants, their guards, five people, their three lawyers, four representatives of the victims and one victim, five, the judge, six, and associated judges and three people who are transcribing the hearing. Can you imagine what it is like to work in such a situation? [...] I share a chair with the lawyer of one of the defendants. [...] How could it have occurred to anyone that a trial could be held in such conditions? The highest profile case in Ukraine. The president calls it an open trial. It's totally absurd, [...] I just don't have enough words. [Journalists] can't physically squeeze themselves in there! [They] are trying to get through to the [trial room], the police are beating them with sticks. [...]

Again, I don't know where or how to begin this post.

I'm shocked, sad about what happened on Saturday. Don't have the words to describe how I feel, actually. Have been trying to write something here, but just couldn't. Instead, in the four days and nights since the crash, I've read and published these texts by GV's wonderful volunteer author and translator Sylwia Presley:

- Poland: President Kaczyński is Killed in Plane Crash in Russia - Initial Reactions
- Poland: R.I.P. Black Saturday 10.04.2010
- Poland: Video Reactions to the Deadly Plane Crash
- Poland: Online Grief After 10.04.2010
- Poland: Controversy Over Polish President's Burial‎ Location

And this text - Russia: Reactions to the Polish Tragedy - by Alexey Sidorenko, who was going through passport control at a Warsaw airport (RUS) at the time when the terrible news arrived...

***

I went to the Polish Embassy on Saturday, and to the Catholic Cathedral a couple blocks away:















***

I stayed through most of the Russian-language service at the Cathedral, even though I normally prefer to listen to religious messages in languages that I don't understand. I was on my way home from the Cathedral, passing by the Embassy once again, finally feeling as peaceful as was humanly possible under those circumstances, and I wouldn't have paid attention to a group of ordinary-looking young people - relatively well-dressed, cheerful, carefree - at the trolleybus stop across the park from the Embassy, if it hadn't been for the flowers and candles in their hands. An even number of flowers - two or four: a funereal arrangement. Mostly red carnations.

I stopped nearby, sort of automatically, and almost right away they regrouped into a neat column and marched off towards the Embassy. One or two of them were wearing green hoodies, on which I later spotted the word МЕСТНЫЕ (Mestniye, 'The Local Ones') - a youth group that I couldn't recall anything specific about right then, only some vague memories inspired by the group's somewhat xenophobic name. 'Kremlin youth,' I thought, using a very convenient shortcut to label this sort of crowd.

TV camera crews started running around as the young people approached the Embassy and began placing their flowers and candles on the ground by the wall. I took a picture of them, too:



Those of the kids who were done with the commemoration part were crossing the narrow street, and now I was standing right behind some of them, close enough to hear them giggling, chatting, discussing who was going to be on the evening news. It was disgusting.



And then they all left, dispersed, as quickly as they came.

Back home, I watched a newscast on Channel 1 - and, sure thing, the kids were on it, as sympathetic Muscovites.

[Channel 1 video is no longer where it used to be, fails to load, so I've deleted it.]

Not a word about the group that these kids belong to - even though there's an item (RUS) on Mestniye's website about their April 10 initiative. Ordinary Muscovites.

The journalistic aspect of it seems very interesting. There weren't too many people by the Embassy on Saturday. Just enough from a human point of view - but not enough for a good TV picture that would adequately reflect the current Poland-friendly agenda. So they bring in these kids, to act as extras. News as movies. A tiny little example of yet another manipulation, nothing new, not a big deal - but since I don't have any firsthand TV experience, it was pretty educational to witness how those guys work here.

***

In the blogosphere, there'a plenty of genuine grief and sympathy, but also tons of sick shit poured on Poland. Putin and Medvedev - and even Yanukovych - got their share of criticism (read: curses), too - for their decision to declare April 12 a day of national mourning, in Russia and in Ukraine: it's Cosmonautics Day - how dare they...

***

Something that I can't stop thinking about: the fact that the language of communication between the Polish crew and the Russian air traffic controllers was Russian. And some broken English.

To what extent could this have contributed to the tragic outcome?

Mentions of this "language issue" here and there, now and then, and still some more (all in Russian); in English, a Wikipedia summary - here.

Things are moving too fast, and I can't keep up. One déjà vu followed by another, flashback after flashback. Having a nasty cold doesn't help. Below are some links and stuff - the post is messy and way too long, but I need to sort things out for myself a bit, to be able to move on.

***

Current events in Kyrgyzstan made me re-read what I was writing here five years ago - I've just tagged those old posts with this tag: kyrgyz2005. (This is a blog, okay, and for a meaningful reading experience you have to read backwards - not too convenient, I know. So, start reading at the bottom of this page, then move to the bottom of this one.)

I feel very sad for the people who were hurt and killed in the riots.

A quote from five years ago - that probably sums up best some of what happened then - and now:

A Kyrgyz woman, Fatima, a supermarket owner and a victim of the looting, on ORT: "This was done by the hungry ones to those of us who work hard."

***

It reminds me of Moldova a year ago, too - their "orphans' revolution"...

And the social media component - endless discussions on whether this or that unrest was "a Twitter revolution" or not, etc. My last year's GV roundups on Moldova are here, here, here and here. Alexey Sidorenko's GV text on Kyrgyzstan is here (and on the Moscow subway bombings - here).

***

Of the reality-based blog comments on the Moscow bombings, one of the most powerful is by Olga Allenova, translated for GV here. It's as much about Nord-Ost and Beslan as it is about what happened two weeks ago. I admire Allenova, have always looked forward to reading her texts in Kommersant-Vlast - and I'm really glad she has a blog now. (My brief post on her collection of war reportage is here.)

And while I'm at it, here's a link to my other GV translation on the subway blasts, with comments from Anton Nossik, Marat Guelman and Yulia Yuzik. (Ouch. The latter, however, has deleted her blog. For some reason. Not the first time for her, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe she'll be back.)

***

I took subway last Saturday. On autopilot, sort of. Not out of necessity. Without flowers, though. Entered at Park Kultury, meant to go to Lubyanka from there, but was so overwhelmed by what I saw that I took a train in the opposite direction and only noticed this when the next station, Frunzenskaya, was announced. When I entered the train car at Park Kultury, every single person in it was trying to have a look at the makeshift flower memorial on the platform. Halfway to Frunzenskaya, a sharp, explosive sound made nearly everyone in the car jump - turned out it was a balloon that burst in the hands of a little boy traveling on that train with his mother. A group of teens sitting across the aisle from the boy began to laugh, and many passengers, including myself, managed to produce nervous yet relieved smiles after that, too. I got off at Sportivnaya, took a picture of four skinny, young cops guarding the empty station, then got onto a Lubyanka-bound train and happened to stand next to a young woman with four red carnations, who got off at Park Kultury and walked towards the crowd gathered around the memorial. At Lubyanka, there were flowers both on the platform and outside, next to the Solovetsky Stone.

Here are some pictures:















***

On Monday, one week after the bombings, Kommersant-Vlast and Russian Newsweek had identical images of Lubyanka station on their covers:



***

Also a week or so ago, I took a walk to Luzhniki - because I had to have a look at that surreal-looking bus station that the suicide bombers had allegedly arrived at on Monday, March 29, all the way from the North Caucasus. I wrote about the place almost three years ago, in this post about Luzhniki:

[...] 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.

Last time I was in Luzhniki was in early November 2009, when we went to see Varekai, an absolutely magical production of Cirque du Soleil. On the way back, as we struggled through slush and mud, we passed a large, dirty bus parked at the side of the road, its engine running, its rear window smashed to pieces, and a few dark-haired, beautiful but exhausted-looking boys hustling around, trying to somehow fix the damage and clean up the mess. It was one of those buses from the North Caucasus. I remember thinking some sad thoughts about the kind of lives these boys had to live - how different the reality was from the awesome, idealized version presented in Varekai's Georgian Dance segment that we'd just watched a few hundred meters away:



Another "back to reality" thing I remembered from that evening was the crazy old woman at a grocery store across the street from us, where I went to buy cigarettes: she was loudly cursing the store's non-Russian staff - for some reason, or for no reason at all. "Go back to your Dagestan," she was screaming. And - "I'm a native Muscovite!" And then one young Russian man standing in line in front of me told her indignantly that she was such a disgrace, and she shut up and left.

Anyway, last Sunday I went to Luzhniki, thinking about the subway bombings - and about the night we went to see Cirque du Soleil. The North Caucasus bus station was completely empty - and looked as surreal this way as when it was filled with buses and people. It could've been deserted because it was Easter Sunday, or because of the post-bombing investigation (RUS) that affected most of the bus drivers working there, or both. Here's a photo (two images merged together in Photoshop, actually):



And this sign for WC next to the bus station, with a Russian curse scrawled over it:

P.S. While I was writing my previous post, they seem to have updated the New York Times piece, and the stuff in the quote that I give has been somewhat re-arranged, but is still there.

There's a ton of articles about this girl in other media.

Some confusion about whether this girl blew herself up at Lubyanka or Park Kultury.

Kommersant, where the photo appeared first (or not?), reports (RUS) it was the former:

[...] Следственный комитет при прокуратуре РФ считает, что Дженнет Абдурахманова взорвалась в фирменном составе метрополитена "Красная стрела" на станции "Лубянка", убив вместе с собой больше двадцати пассажиров. [...]

According to the Times, though, it was the latter location:

[...] Ms. Abdullayeva’s life ended at 8:40 on Monday morning at the Park Kultury station. Riding in a train, Sim Eih Xing, a medical student from Malaysia, said he noticed a strange-looking woman near the door “in a very abnormal posture.”

“She wasn’t wearing a scarf,” he told The Moscow Times. “Her eyes were very open, like on drugs, and she barely blinked, and it was scary. But I didn’t think she was a suicide bomber. I thought that she might be just mentally ill. So I stood behind her.”

He got off at Park Kultury, and was a few feet away from the woman when the bomb detonated. Sparks appeared before his eyes and the station went silent. When he came to his senses, he saw bodies in piles on the floor of the train. One of them was Ms. Abdullayeva’s.

(The Moscow Times story mentioned above is here.)

P.P.S. According to Gazeta.ru (RUS), too, it was Park Kultury, not Lubyanka:

[...] На «Парке культуры» взорвалась 18-летняя Джанет Абдурахманова (Абдулаева), жительница Дагестана, заявили в Национальном антитеррористическом комитете (НАК). [...]

Doesn't really matter much, but since there is some confusion, it's kind of interesting to see who is reporting what...

An article in the New York Times about one of the suspected suicide bombers, a 17-year-old from Dagestan. A picture of her with a gun - and with a guy with a much bigger gun.

A cab driver from Dagestan, two weeks ago, on Nowruz, was telling me about the beautiful hospitality his people exhibit during the holiday celebrations - you can enter anyone's house, he said, and you'll be offered all the food and drink there is in the house - and there's a lot! - and you'll be treated like a king, even if you're a stranger. And Moscow, it's such a tough city, he added. I said it was a pity that there was so much fighting and hatred in the Caucasus region, a pity it wasn't safe to travel there, and he replied that there wasn't any fighting whatsoever. Right, I thought.

"Muslim people are very good, aren't they?" he asked, after I told him about our trips to Istanbul, the regular escapes for warmth and friendliness. I hate generalizations, but he was so cheerful and so homesick that it seemed wrong to go into my usual mantra: "There are good people everywhere - but, unfortunately, there are as many assholes everywhere as well, if not more." So I just said that I had many Muslim friends - and that I loved them all.

And five minutes later, by the end of our ride, all of a sudden, he was fuming about how amoral people in Moscow were - how you always saw young women smoking and drinking beer in the street here - a totally unacceptable behavior, blah blah blah. I laughed it off, sort of, saying that I, too, couldn't understand how they could drink that beer outside in such cold.

I've been thinking about this cab driver on and off this whole past week. Somewhere along these lines: "И эти люди не разрешают нам ковыряться в носу?" And these people aren't allowing us to pick our noses?

But he's probably as shocked as anyone else right now...

[...] A local official in her native village of Kostek said Ms. Abdullayeva attended school there for six years, then moved to a larger city a few years ago. The official, Aida Aliyeva, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Abdullayeva was raised by a single mother who traded goods at a local market.

Teachers in the village remembered Ms. Abdullayeva as a promising student who recited poetry in local competitions, she said.

“People are in shock here, they say it couldn’t be true,” Ms. Aliyeva said. “We are honest workers here. We think that the city must have had some influence on her, because we don’t have anything like that here.”

“She is a child,” Ms. Aliyeva added. “Such a quiet, calm little girl. In all honesty, I don’t know what to say.”

An official at Dagestan’s Interior Ministry said it was not uncommon for militants’ wives to act as accomplices, and some were members of hierarchical women’s organizations linked to the insurgency. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said that it was not difficult for militant groups to recruit teenage girls in a region with more women than men.

“The girls say, ‘Here is how you will live, and a man will always be beside you,’ ” the official said. “There is some romance about a man with a gun, with an automatic weapon. They make the fighters into heroes, naturally. These girls aren’t thinking straight, at 17 years old.” [...]

I still haven't watched a single TV newscast - cartoons is all we watch here. And I still haven't been to Park Kultury or Lubyanka stations - I might go there over the weekend, with flowers. I've seen photos from the scene on the web, of course, but the only thing directly related to the tragedy that I saw firsthand were the white-and-green buses riding back and forth down our street on Monday morning - dozens of them, thrown in by the city to substitute for the disrupted subway service on this route. A shocking image to wake up to, partly because it reminded me of the 2002 Nord-Ost theater siege, when the same buses were lined up along Dubrovka Street, awaiting the release of the hostages.

Here's a picture that Misha took on Monday, as he walked to work:



And here's a Dubrovka picture I took on October 25, 2002:



These buses, now and then - they are like visual bookmarks in my mind. And the story - it keeps getting recycled.

Once again, I've re-read what I wrote about Nord-Ost back then: most of it, though not all, reads smoothly, as if it all happened earlier this week - and it did, in a way - and it still hurts like hell, especially now. Beslan and the murder of Politkovskaya weren't part of the narrative in 2002 - these events belong to the recycled versions of the story.

What happened in Moscow on Monday is so horrible.

I was still asleep when my cell phone rang at 9:02 AM - the crazy alarm ringtone that keeps scaring the shit out of me and everyone around me every time I get a call: I imagine a sound like this is used on submarines in times of emergency - and I remember what a powerful effect it had on fellow passengers on the Moscow subway a couple times in the past - I even used to joke about it.

It was my friend calling - the mother of Marta's best friend here. She happened to approach Frunzenskaya subway station entrance around the time the second suicide bomber must have been passing right underneath, on the way to Park Kultury, the next station, where she blew herself up. My friend was running late - her daughter had been cranky that morning, and this had delayed her, and, possibly, saved her life.

There seem to be many stories like this one in this neighborhood now. Someone at the playground told my friend she was on that train, in that car, with her daughter - and the daughter, for some reason, decided she wanted to ride in a different car, so they switched - and the car they got out of was the one that blew up later. I've no idea if this is true or if it's an urban legend in the making. What matters is that wherever you go here now, you always run into someone who was close enough that morning.

Having Marta in this epicenter with me is unspeakably heartbreaking. I don't want her to know anything about it all just yet - but I had to explain that something truly awful had happened, and she kept asking me to be more specific, while I was doing my best to be as vague as possible. I told her there'd been an explosion, a big boom.

The risk has always been there - they keep saying now that it's been six years without major attacks in Moscow, but with the crazy mess that's been going on in Dagestan and Ingushetia all these years, it would've been strange to feel fully safe, plus everyone here seems to remember quite vividly the 1999 explosions, and Nord-Ost in 2002, and the 2004 subway bombings - it's just that most people try not to dwell on it too much, in order to keep going. And there is risk everywhere, not just in Moscow.

Beslan took place over five years ago, and I was only now beginning to recover from the shock and the pain and the horror of it. Marta's arrival 15 months after Beslan turned me into a different person. Also thanks to her, I was able to pull through my father's disappearance and death in relatively one piece in 2007. And now, too, her presence doesn't allow me to focus too much on the horror of what happened here on Monday - I can't afford to be depressed when she's around, and she wouldn't let me switch channels to watch the news, and we always have to run somewhere, or I have to force meals into her - so yes, she is the greatest distraction that can be. I'm very grateful - but I also hate myself for being forced to use her as a shield.

So I ended up escaping from Kyiv - to Istanbul, on Friday. Evacuated myself. My short-term emigration. Here are some pictures.

I've had this Nick Cave's (oops, sorry!) Tom Waits' song playing in my head for about a week now:



One of my most favorite songs of his, but I don't listen to music much now.

All started with this line this time: "If I stay here I'll rust." Again and again.

Used to be such an Iowa song for me - "The sky is red, and the world is on fire, and the corn is taller than me."

Now it's a Kyiv song, too... "And the places that I'm dreaming of, do they dream only of me?"

***

WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND

I've grown up here now
All of my life
But I dreamed
Someday I'd go

Where blue eyed girls
And red guitars and
Naked rivers flow

I'm not all I thought I'd be
I always stayed around
I've been as far as Mercy and Grand
Frozen to the ground

I can't stay here and I'm scared to leave
(Just kiss me once and then)
I'll go to hell
I might as well
Be whistlin' down the wind

The bus is at the corner
The clock's on the wall
Broken-down windmill
Ain't no wind at all

I yelled and I cursed
If I stay here I'll rust
I'm stuck like a shipwreck
Out here in the dust

The Sky is red
And the world is on fire
And the corn is taller than me

The dog is tied
To a wagon of rain
And the road is as wet as the sea

And sometimes the music from a dance
Will carry across the plains
And the places that I'm dreaming of
Do they dream only of me?

There are places where they never sleep
And the circus never ends
So I will take the Marley Bone Coach
And whistle down the wind

To recover from the election, I spent part of Tuesday night looking at other people's photos, hopping from one relatively random photo site to another, really loving it.

And then I went and made myself yet another pseudo-blog - Neeka Smetana - photography blog - to make it easier for myself and others to admire my own photos.

I can't figure out where to fit the links and other functional info, but otherwise it's all done and you're welcome to have a look.

(Another election post may or may not appear at some point later this week.)

No more surprises in the second round, I suppose.

98.70% of the vote counted.

Yanukovych - 48.64% (12,229,505 votes)
Yulia - 45.77% (11,509,152 votes)

Yanukovych's margin of victory so far: 2.87%

Against all: 4.38%

Voter turnout: 69.15%

Those "against all" votes and the no-shows look really tasty, and it's tempting to focus on imagining how they could've been Yulia's votes, etc., but that sort of thinking is such a waste of time. Yulia should've tried harder in the past five years - tried harder in many different ways - and then she would've beaten Yanukovych easily. She would've been running against a completely different candidate even, and Yanukovych would've been history - if only she had tried harder and had been more consistent.

I re-read my last night's post and felt sick because of all the silly figures of speech we are all so fond of using. An abyss, typhus, whatever. Tiger Yulia, damn it.

But, here's one more: we live in a ghetto, and if Yanukovych becomes president, the ghetto will grow a bit more overpopulated than it is now. Our everyday lives will resemble the Feb. 5 Yanukovych concert a bit more. Many things will not change at all: it will remain as scary as it is now, for example, to find oneself sick and in a hospital.

It could've been different.

According to the Central Election Committee, Yulia is 3.5% behind Yanukovych so far (74.43% of the vote counted).

***

The map of the vote looks the way it always does - one half red and one half blue, as if we indeed need to split Ukraine into two and each have the president we prefer. But it's not that simple, of course.

***

The only surprise of the first round for me was that Yulia got only 6.5% in Luhansk region - despite having Natalya Korolevskaya run things over there.

***

The only surprise of the second round so far has been that two people I have huge respect for decided not to abstain from voting for Yulia after they spent some time at the Feb. 5 Yanukovych concert on Myhailivska Sq. As I wrote earlier, you had "to get real close & hear it to really understand" why it was such a shockingly awful experience - and I shouldn't be really surprised that it had the same effect on these reasonable and determined people as it had on me - and actually I'm not. It's just that I had thought that nothing could force them to change their minds and end up "choosing typhus over cholera" or "eating the less smelly chunk of shit" - but the abyss between Yulia's event on Sofiyivska and Yanukovych's bacchanalia on Mykhailivska turned out to be too blazing to ignore.

***

Here's a video of Yanukovych supporters marching past me while Volodymyr Hryshko, an opera star, is singing a 1964 song (Beauty Queen/"Королева красоты") for them, in Russian:



***

While I was writing this and editing the video, they've counted some more votes (83.95%), and the distance between Yulia and Yanukovych has shrunk to 2.59%.

Also, Zakarpattya has become the first region with all the votes counted: Yulia won with 51.66% (279,631 votes) there, while Yanukovych got 41.55% (224,917 votes).

In the city of Sevastopol, the second location with all the votes already counted, Yanukovych has 84,35% (178,201 votes), while Yulia's are 10.38% (21,940 votes).

February 5, 2010

Sofiyivska Sq - Yulia Tymoshenko's "Prayer for Ukraine" rally:




Mykhailivska Sq - Victor Yanukovych's pop music concert:











***

A few more quick notes and pics - on Twitter. (I feel as if I'm cheating on this blog over there - feel guilty about it...)

Too tired - and too depressed - to write more about it. (Yanukovych concert was such a nightmare.)

Under a spell: