I want to have quick access to these videos, so I'll post them here. This kind of comic relief is something many Ukrainians need right now. Can't be just me alone, right?

Yanukovych, Medvedev and the wreath:



As I wrote elsewhere, it reminds me of something out of a 1980s French comedy - I keep thinking of 'Nevezuchiye'/'La Chèvre' with Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu... :)

Also, I really liked how one of Kyiv friends put it on Facebook, "The little Big Brother comes to the rescue of the big little brother"...

***

Surkis picking his nose, then wiping his hand on Shufrych:

Last weekend, as we were waiting for our trolleybus near Luzhniki, I took a couple of pictures of one of those buses that commute between Moscow and the North Caucasus: I mentioned them in a 2007 post - and in this year's post-subway bombings post...





The two guys are pasting a sign announcing that this particular bus would be leaving for Makhachkala, Dagestan - some 1,000 miles from Moscow - on that very same day. The bus, parked at some distance from the huge and surreal makeshift bus station inside the Luzhniki compound, used to belong to Biuro Podróży Bartuś, a Polish travel agency located on ul. Niepodległości - Independence Street - in the town of Pszów. For some reason, I find this geographic aspect fascinating...

A vendor selling flower bulbs at a Moscow farmers' market yesterday:

I'm a biologist's daughter, and sometimes I wish I grew up a gardener. But we don't even have a dacha, damn it.

Some more pics from Aptekarsky Ogorod (and there'll be more, because I can still feel the smell of these flowers as I look at these photos, and it's making me happy):

Moscow, May 9:

A trolleybus driver in Moscow:

I took a ton of flower pictures at Aptekarsky Ogorod (RUS) today - very therapeutic...

Victory Day in Moscow: no pictures of Stalinists this year. Fuck them and their Stalin. No pictures of the veterans, either, unfortunately: saw only one today - lonely, with flowers and medals, she was climbing up the stairs at Park Kultury underground pass, stopping every now and then to catch her breath. Tons of people; many of them drunk; others just happy; striped ribbons everywhere; lots of those absurd, fake war-time khaki field caps; adults acting childish, excited about the fireworks. There were even some proud Ukrainians in the crowd, with a flag - and with Lisa Simpson on a t-shirt.

Moscow:

This freak - a regular at springtime communist gatherings - passed by our house today, reminding me that tomorrow is May 1:



The picture above is five years old, but the crazy lady looks the same, just a bit older, and dresses as idiotically. Marta, however, went "ah" and "oh" and "wow" when she saw her: pink tights, pink ribbons on her pink hair, and a pink backpack - a new one! - with some Western cartoon characters on it - don't remember which ones, should ask Marta, perhaps, when she wakes up - maybe she remembers.

I'm tempted to go and take pictures of the Stalinist clowns in the morning - but it is morning already, so I'd rather sleep in - or take Marta to the swimming pool instead. I've seen these nuts before, more than once, so why waste time on them again.

I'm kind of curious, though, whether all the Kremlin's recent anti-Stalinist messages will find some sort of a reflection at the communist rallies today. Five years ago, the freaks with Stalin's portraits seemed useful to the regime as a sort of a warning to the general public: see, this is what the alternative to Putin is like. Now, with the reset button and all, they may somewhat screw up Russia's friendly and civilized image that the state-run channels are trying so hard to highlight.

A quote from an editor at an Anglophone broadcast media outlet, supplied by a friend:

Frankly, if it weren't for the flying eggs, I don't think we'd be covering it.

Says a lot about both us and them. What else would you expect when the country's president thinks Chekhov was a Ukrainian poet. Then again, we should perhaps be happy that 'Ukraine' is more pronounceable than 'Kyrgyzstan.'

I'm so fed up with these quasi-political video scandals here in Russia. So sick both of this obscene shitstorm - and of the chorus of moralizers that accompanies it. So unsexy, all of it.

Funny, but after spending the whole day thinking about the latest video installment - the one featuring Shenderovich, Limonov and Potkin - and having no time to write any of the thoughts down, I've ended up escaping into Allen Ginsberg's poetry. And I no longer feel like saying anything about the whole nasty thing. I'll just quote one poem here:

When the Light Appears
by Allen Ginsberg

You'll bare your bones you'll grow you'll pray you'll only know
When the light appears, boy, when the light appears
You'll sing & you'll love you'll praise blue heavens above
When the light appears, boy, when the light appears
You'll whimper & you'll cry you'll get yourself sick and sigh
You'll sleep & you'll dream you'll only know what you mean
When the light appears, boy, when the light appears
You'll come & you'll go, you'll wander to and fro
You'll go home in despair you'll wonder why'd you care
You'll stammer & you'll lie you'll ask everybody why
You'll cough and you'll pout you'll kick your toe with gout
You'll jump you'll shout you'll knock you're friends about
You'll bawl and you'll deny & announce your eyes are dry
You'll roll and you'll rock you'll show your big hard cock
You'll love and you'll grieve & one day you'll come believe
As you whistle & you smile the lord made you worthwhile
You'll preach and you'll glide on the pulpit in your pride
Sneak & slide across the stage like a river in high tide
You'll come fast or come on slow just the same you'll never know
When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

(I wish YouTube carried that Cornershop track with Allen Ginsberg reciting the poem himself - but I can't find it.)

I stumbled upon some inept Russophone comments on Armenia coming out of Georgia yesterday. Comments that would seem more or less relevant and valid on any other day, but kind of stink on April 24, when Armenians mourn the innocent people killed 95 years ago.

It reminded me of the idiots who patiently store their smart opinions about the United States until September 11, as if this is the only day they expect to be heard properly. I don't mean to say that such comments shouldn't be made, but they reflect badly on the people who make them: they are bursting with schadenfreude today, then spend the rest of the year demanding sympathy and support for their own cause and their own innocent ones.

And I don't mean to say that the bitchy comments were numerous on April 24 - no, there was just a tiny bunch of them. But they've left me with a really bad aftertaste somehow.

On a different note, I was also reminded of a conversation about Georgia with an ex-Yugoslav friend: he asked for a quick explanation of the summer 2008 situation there - and ended up concluding that Georgia was very much like Serbia. His ex-Yugoslav background is pretty complex, which is typical, and his Georgia/Serbia analogy went beyond the usual good/evil geopolitical labels that stick so well to the two countries. And it has occurred to me now that it's really helpful for a relative outsider to know a thing or two about the situation in the Balkans to better understand the situation in the South Caucasus - and vice versa.

I hate generalizations, but I've spent the past nine years convinced that Luhansk is the nuttiest region of Ukraine. I've only been there once, I know, but the experience was so bizarre and nerve-wracking that I just can't help it. It's a long story - a rather comical horror story. Maybe I'll write about some of it one day. Maybe not.

And nothing seems to have changed in Luhansk since late 2000, according to this piece (RUS) on Korrespondent.net.

Lenin turned 140 years old on April 22, and the folks in Luhansk held a rally to mark their idol's birthday. One guy ended his speech with these words:

Putin, Lenin and Christ are with us!

The only difference, perhaps, is that Natalya Vitrenko is no longer on their minds. Who knows, maybe ten years ago the chant went like this: "Lenin, Vitrenko, Christ and the Virgin Mary are with us!"

And the region's Communist leader said this about the goals of his party:

First, they'll join forces with the Party of Regions "to kick the nationalists out of the parliament," then they'll "defeat the Party of Regions and kick all the capitalists out of the parliament" - and then, "together with the brotherly nations, they'll build a new union state" - the one that will grant the nations the right to self-determination.

Simply beautiful.

:)

Vasyl Tsushko, our new minister of economics and former minister of internal affairs, believes that after nearly 19 years of independence, Ukraine still hasn't come up with clear definitions "of what a poor person is and what a rich person is."

He talked about it on Savik Shuster's show last Friday (for a couple minutes, beginning somewhere at 1:54:30).

He chose to focus on the problems with public utility payments to convey his vision of the social gap. One of the common arguments, he said, is that the rich ones must pay for their utilities themselves, while the state's duty is to help the poor. But some of the poor are actually quite rich.

There's a hypothetical elderly pensioner, male or female, who lives in a three-room apartment on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv's main street, which, according to Tsushko, costs $1 million even in the time of the financial crisis. This person is nevertheless barely surviving on 700 hryvnias a month of his/her state-paid pension (800 hryvnias would be $100, more or less) - and expects the state to cover his/her utility bills.

Then there's a hypothetical pensioner who is surviving on the same 700 hryvnias a month in a village 500 kilometers away from Kyiv, in a house with a small plot of land that would sell for no more than $5,000, provided that this village has a road, gas and electricity (some don't, obviously).

If we compare these two, Tsushko continued, we'll come to a conclusion that the latter is dirt poor, while the former is a millionaire. Still, the state offers utility payment assistance to both.

How outrageously unfair.

Some 20 minutes later, at around 2:20 into the show, Vitaly Portnikov, one of my favorite Ukrainian journalists, exposed Tsushko's messy reasoning as a Freudian slip totally typical of a Ukrainian government official. Yes, right, he said, let's kick those elderly people out of their expensive Khreshchatyk and Lipki apartments - and move in there ourselves. Tsushko tried to argue that Portnikov had misunderstood him, but with little success: his point was, he said, that a person with $1 million in assets shouldn't be walking around begging for money.

I can only add that there remains just a handful of those elderly people on Khreshchatyk who, according to Tsushko, aren't aware of the fortunes they are sitting on/living in. There are not enough of them to deal a serious blow to the state budget: they aren't the real culprits. Many of them tend to vote for Tsushko's friends in the Party of Regions, too - but, apparently, "their number is negligible and they are stupid" (apologies to Dwight Eisenhower for using this quote in a somewhat wrong context).

Also, a three-room Khreshchatyk apartment costs around $500,000, not $1 million, but Tsushko, an agrarian populist, had to somehow squeeze 'millionaire' - a loaded term - into his brave little speech. And while his words must have appealed to some of his rural voters, the truth is, there's a Khreshchatyk sort of thing in every city, every town and every village in Ukraine: it's all relative, a slippery slope. You free the budget of the Khreshchatyk-based elderly burden, enriching yourself along the way, and then your lower-ranking, less privileged colleagues elsewhere will use the same noble justification to arrange some nice property deals for themselves - in areas that you, a Kyiv-based brat, would never consider worth fighting for. Not that they ever needed Tsushko's guidance to do that, of course...