We've got two cats now. The first one, Kosya Kos'kin, is black and blind and is nearly 13 years old. He's been blind since we found him at the crowded subway station in summer 1992 - a tiny kitten, his claws were painted red then, and he ate nothing but raw potato for the first few months. Even though he doesn't see a thing, his eyes are beautiful and he moves around quite easily. He's a very precious cat.

The other cat had been crying in our backyard for about three days, until we took pity and brought him home. Initially, we thought he was a girl and would make a nice mate for Kosya, but he turned out to be a boy. So now we have a problem. He is a totally charming cat, beautiful - black and furry and yellow-eyed - and very friendly and funny. He knows how to use the cat's toilet. Very smart, very young. Whoever lost him must be very brokenhearted now. But Kosya is depressed. He can't see him but he smells him, and he gets cranky all the time and refuses to eat. He stopped purring, too, and is very tense. I really hope we'll find a new home for this young cat soon. I wish he could stay - but it'd be too traumatic for Kosya.

Mikhail Kalashnikov is 85 - he was born on Nov. 10, 1919.

Until a few years ago, I had no idea he was still alive and I doubt I even realized Kalashnikov was the name of a real person related to the famous gun. (Now I wonder if there's a live Smirnoff/Smirnov related to the famous vodka somewhere out there as well.)

They used to teach us to disassemble a fake AK-47 at school, but I was a bad student and those military education classes were the first ones to skip (there was also labor education, where we were taught to cook and to sew, and PE).

Anyway, I wouldn't have paid attention to Kalashnikov's anniversary - but I'm reading Chingiz Aitmatov's novel now, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, and keep searching the web for information on Central Asia. One of the links for the Karakalpak region of Uzbekistan eventually took me to the page about Afghan War rugs, which contains some truly awesome details and images - quite a tribute to Kalashnikov and his invention...

Yesterday afternoon, shortly before the Central Election Commission announced Yushchenko's lead, Channel 5 aired footage of Yanukovych chewing on either sunflower seeds or candies at the pre-election parade honoring the liberation of Ukraine in 1944.

He was standing next to Putin and some other guy, and, at one point, he reached into his pocket and then put something into his mouth and started to chew on it, happily and vigorously. Then, as a good boy, he reached into his pocket again, turned to this other guy on his left and offered this tasty something to him, too. The guy accepted the treat. Putin stood on the right from Yanukovych, like a tiny little mouse (he's a small man in general and a very small one compared to the mountainous and monstrous Yanukovych), and it was clear that he saw what was going on - you could tell by the naughty look in his eyes. When Yanukovych turned to Putin to share whatever he was eating with him as well, Putin smiled politely and refused. Actually, he looked like it was all cracking him up, but his damn status didn't allow him to burst out laughing in front of everyone.

It was so hilarious. Yanukovych looked so idiotic. He looked like one of those rubber dolls from the extremely biting and popular Russian political TV show that Putin put an end to a few years ago. It was totally hilarious.

And all of a sudden, I began to wonder: what are we gonna do if Yushchenko gets elected as this country's next president? What, apart from building a truly democratic and prosperous state, are we gonna do if Yanukovych loses? Who are we gonna make jokes about? What are we gonna do with all our beautiful sense of irony, cultivated for so many years by our Soviet leaders and then by President Kuchma? In the past ten years, we've grown so used to disrespecting our current leader, who had provided us with such a smooth transition from the idiocy of the Soviet times. What are we gonna do when Yushchenko gets elected? He's such a positive man, he wouldn't give us reasons to sneer at him. Moreover, his victory would be too precious to mar with our totally healthy sarcasm. What on earth are we gonna do?

We'll see, I guess. We'll find ways to sublimate. Yanukovych and Kuchma aren't gonna vanish into thin air after their fiasco in two weeks. We'll survive.

I still hope so much that Yushchenko, boring or not, wins.

Yushchenko has won the first round!!! (The Central Election Commission finally announced it around 4 pm Kyiv time.)

Yushchenko 11,125,395 votes (39.87%)

vs.

Yanukovych 10,969,579 votes (39.32%)

The difference is 155,816 votes (0.55%)...

This is so wonderful - and I'm sure he'll do much better in the second round!

The Central Election Commission has promised to announce the results of the first round in less than ten hours, at noon. They convened for a meeting at 6 pm Tuesday and had 62 issues on their agenda - most concerning violations during the Oct. 31 vote. The announcement of the final results was #51 on their list, and by 1 am, before they left for a break, they'd managed to get through the first 40-something points. I'm not sure if they're still counting or whether they know the results already but have other priorities than sharing these results. In any case, Nov. 10 is their official deadline to let the people know how many votes each candidate got.

It didn't take them long to count 97.67 percent of the bulletins - but then they got stuck. For over a week following the first round, Yushchenko had 39.22%, and Yanukovych - 39.88% of the vote. Very soon we'll know the winner. The second round is Nov. 21.

I still have a cold and, since there've been no rallies in the past three days, I'm staying home. Of the many, many handkerchieves I'm currently using, two are very special: they are what remains of a dozen that my mama stood in an endless line to buy 18 years ago.

It was winter of 1987, less than a year after Chernobyl, and we were living in Moscow, my mother and I, sharing a tiny two-room apartment with mama's friend and the friend's elderly aunt, college-student niece, bitchy dog and, occasionally, other relatives from all over the country. My father had stayed in Kyiv, to work and look after our cat, dog and plants.

Mama was on her way home when she entered a nearby store and saw a serpentine line of people that filled the store's whole ground floor. The ritual in those years was to come up and ask what they were standing for, and then join them, even if right then you didn't need whatever you were going to buy at the end of the line - and this is what my mother did. She spent the next two hours standing in line for a dozen of handkerchieves, very nice ones.

Beautiful, I'd even say: I thought they were beautiful then and I still think so now, when we've got only two of them left, faded, each with a hole or two. They were delicate; the prints on them didn't look like they'd scratch themselves off onto your face the moment you decided to blow your nose - the prints are still there, after all these years; flowers and three butterflies, purple, orange and green on the beige background, drawn so diligently, with such an obvious, un-Soviet pleasure. Neither mama, nor I can remember now where the handkerchieves were made, in China or East Germany, but we both agree they were "foreign."

So my mama stood squeezed together with all those people and, at some point, she felt she needed some fresh air or she'd faint. She went outside, walked a little and sat down on a bench around the corner from the store. It was very cold so she sat on the plastic bag in which she carried all her stuff, including her wallet (it was a non-transparent plastic bag with some kind of a picture on it, a "foreign" one - those were harder to get than leather bags). She sat for a while, breathing, and then returned to the store: you get to know the people around you as if they are your family when you stand in line for so long, and, if you have to walk away before it's your turn, you trust them to recognize you when you come back, and normally they do, though not always; my mother had no problem getting back in.

When, at last, she was about to pay for the handkerchieves, she suddenly realized that her hands were empty - her plastic bag, and her wallet, had stayed on the bench. She ran outside again and found the bag where she'd left it. The people in the line were sweet enough to let her pay when she returned the second time, and, 18 years later, we still have two of those twelve wonderful handkerchieves.

I asked her today why she hadn't bought more than just one dozen - and she looked at me like I was crazy and said, "But they weren't giving more than one package - a dozen handkerchieves - to one person! You'd have to stand in that line again if you wanted more."

Mama used to spray them with Pani Walewska, a Polish perfume very popular (but hard to find) in the Soviet times and still available today (just about anywhere). I remember the perfume's smell as if it's still there when I look at these two old handkerchieves. (Marie Walewska was Napoleon's Polish mistress - I didn't know about it until I decided to look for a link to the perfume for this entry.)

The Central Election Commissions is to release the results of the first round tonight, sometime around midnight. Maybe not. We're all waiting.

Oh. And now I realize it must have been my father's silly old monitor that caused all these problems... Sorry...

First, I downloaded Firefox; then, I fixed the size of most of the pictures here, and a few other minor things. I'm not sure, but I really really hope it looks better when viewed in other browsers. I've no idea what it looks like in Safari now, have no way to check, hope it's not significantly worse. I promise to never ever post any more pictures here. Not those huge ones, anyway. I can't believe I've been making this site look so outrageously stupid for the past two months and everyone's been so kind and didn't tell me... I've suffered enough today. From now on, my fotopage is the place for pictures. Only occasionally will I post a cartoon or somethng as irreplaceable here.

Love to all,
Veronica

I've just looked at this blog of mine from a different browser, IE for Windows, and boy, does it look horrible... And all this time, I had no idea - and no one told me... I'm quite frustrated now, and embarrassed, and very confused: how come it looked okay in Safari and is so different in IE? I've tried to fix some things, but the more I think about it, the more confused I get... I wish I understood more about this shit... Or, at least, I wish someone had told me early on that this thing was totally ugly, before I've written over 40,000 words here... I'm doomed to use IE for the next few days - so I guess I'll stop coming here for a while...

I woke up from a weird dream today: a male voice of someone I didn't see was addressing Putin, in a slightly too familiar manner, considering it was Russia's President he was speaking to:

- Vladimir Vladimirovich, how come you showed up in Ukraine just a few days before the election there? You did it as if it was your job, to communicate with the Ukrainians, to sit on their TV and tell them good things about their prime minister, Yanukovych. And yet, you've hardly ever been so fussy about the Russians, haven't you? When the submarine was sinking, you were vacationing in Sochi, and when they seized the school in Beslan, you were God knows were, too, not bothering to address your own citizens when the urgency/emergency existed. Which country is your priority, man?

I did see Putin in this dream: he sat across a very polished wooden table from this unseen someone and, obviously, was facing a window - the blinding sunlight poured right at him and he was forced to squint real hard, and it looked as if he was grimacing like some naughty kid, or was trying not to cry.

Yesterday was a wonderful day: so many people showed up wearing or carrying something orange; Yushchenko spoke beautifully for about an hour; Moroz has joined Yushchenko's coalition, bringing in 5.83 % of the vote with him.

I've just posted 55 photos from yesterday's rally on my fotopage.

Below are two more letters sent by Ukrainian readers to the Spectator regarding John Laughland's opinion piece on our election:

What a piece of biased crap it is! I wonder what were the author's sources of inspiration to present the information the way he did. To me, a Ukrainian citizen and a Jew living in Russia, it seems that Mr. Laughland reads too much Russian pro-Kremlin newspapers and watches too much Russian pro-Kremlin TV. I may suggest the editor of The Spectator to translate this article into Russian and sell it to the Russian media and to the Yanukovich election team in Ukraine. You'd make a fortune out of it. Really.

***

I found the article on the Ukrainian presidential elections to be misleading and biased. Mr. Laughland is obviously out of touch with the Ukrainian reality when he attributes the improvement in the economic situation to the activities of the current Prime Minister and a government-appointed presidential candidate Mr. Yanukovich. Every observer of Ukraine would have told Mr. Laughland that the foundation for the economic growth (elimination of the barter trade, introduction of transparency in the banking system, serious privatization) was laid down several years ago, at the time when opposition candidate, Mr. Yuschenko, was the Prime Minister – the fact which for some reason the author neglects to mention. On the other hand, under the current government (Mr. Laughland forgets to say that Mr. Yanukovich spent two terms in prison on criminal charges) Ukraine slipped back in the corruption index issued by Transparency International to 106th place. I was also shocked by Mr. Laughland’s assertion that Mr. Yuschenko’s power base is limited to the poverty-stricken Western Ukraine. Had Mr. Laughland checked his facts he would have known that, even by the government’s count, Mr. Yuschenko collected more than 10.7 M votes and won in 17 major regions of the country out of 27 in the first round of the elections. As for the alleged “skinheads’” support of Mr. Yuschenko, the article does not mention that, first, this segment of the Ukrainian electorate is negligible and, second, that the nationalist extremists had been voting for their own candidate, Mr. Korchinsky (49,001 votes). A simple comparison of the two major contenders and their respective platforms provides a more than sufficient explanation of the reasons why the West appears to be more supportive of Mr. Yuschenko rather than of Mr. Yanukovich. Describing this support as a “Western aggression” is laughable. Yours truly, [...]

I'm reading Vasyl Stus book again - skipping the poetry, skimming through his letters and other documents. What they did to him and others like him is beyond words. Those who can forgive and vote for Communists and Socialists and thugs like Yanukovych have the right to do so - but I'm not one of them. Actually, to consider forgiveness, one first has to condemn - and I doubt many of these people have ever bothered to.

I wanted to write about Stus and others like him last month, but kept getting interrupted. Also, I couldn't find it in me to focus on so much pain for too long.

I decided to write about Brezhnev's atrocities after reading about Yuri Galanskov in that first Pushcart Prize volume (1976) that I ran into back in August. Yury Galanskov was a dissident poet who died in a Mordovian labor camp in 1972, at the age of 33 - I've never heard of him before, nor has anyone I know.

The Pushcart Prize book has the Amnesty International translation of the samizdat materials on Galanskov (pp. 22-29): a timeline, an obituary by "political prisoners of the Ural and Mordovian camps," a letter of condolence to Galanskov's family signed by two dozen people, and a statement by two political prisoners addressed to "USSR Prosecutor-General." Not much. But no matter how little these seven pages reveal about Galanskov, it hurts to think about him - because to think about him is to think about the rest of them, collectively and one by one.

Yuri Galanskov, Vasyl Stus, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Sergei Parajanov, Mustafa Jemilev, Pyotr Grigorenko, Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Vysotsky - there were thousands other innocent people who, thirty years after Stalin's death, lost their lives/health/freedom/dignity. And before them - there were millions. It doesn't just hurt to think about them. It fills me with hatred. I hate collectively and sometimes one by one, although the latter is harder to accomplish: obscurity is the perpetrators' blessing. (For the victims, obscurity is nothing but obscurity.) Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Osip Mandelshtam, Lidiya Chukovskaya, Yuri Dombrovsky. They are all my personal reason for never losing this hatred, never forgiving.

I wanted to start that entry with a quote from a middle-aged cab driver I met in Moscow, in Sept. 2001, a pathetic quote: "Life was so much simpler in the times of Brezhnev." I also wanted to mention that the glue holding the Pushcart Prize book together was 28 years old and, as I was typing my entry, several pages began to detach: either I was the first reader of the paperback, or the previous owner was a very neat person. I wanted to supply links for each name I mentioned - but that proved to be too much work. I wanted to translate some of the samizdat writings - but there's just too much of it, all quoteworthy, and I don't like translating, and I know that it's all been translated a long time ago and any decent university library in the States has much of it on its shelves.

Right now, I wanted to pick and translate something from Vasyl Stus - but there's too much of it, too... Here's one quote, from his first trial in 1972:

"I'm asking to provide a scientific definition of the term 'anti-Soviet,'" I demanded in court. But the judge just smiled and didn't say a word. What could he say?

And here's another one, from a prison notebook Stus kept while serving his second sentence, from 1980 to his death in 1985:

I've been following the events in Poland since I was still in Kyiv. Long live the freedom volunteers! Their, the Poles', refusal to submit to the Soviet despotism is comforting, and their public protests are impressive: workers, intelligentsia, students - everyone but the military and the police. If it continues like this, soon the flames would jump onto the military as well. What are the Brezhnev-Jaruzelski types gonna do then? In the totalitarian world, there is no other nation that is defending its human and national rights so faithfully. Poland is giving Ukraine an example (psychologically, we, Ukrainians, are close, and maybe even the closest, to the Polish character, though we lack what's most important - a sacred patriotism, which consolidates the Polish people). What a pity that Ukraine is not ready yet to learn from the Polish teacher.

Finally, here's an excerpt from the Pushcart Prize book, on Galanskov's life and death:

Beginning in 1959 he took part in readings by young poets in Mayakovsky Square. His poems were published in the typescript anthology Sintaksis, edited by A. Ginzburg. He was very active in writing on public affairs (expressing a humanistic, social-legal, and pacifist trend) and in 1966 published the anthology Phoenix-66.

On 19 January 1967 Yury Galanskov was arrested. At the trial which ensued, in January 1968, he was sentenced to 7 years in strict regime camps (A. Ginzburg, A. Dobrovolsky, and V. Lashkova were convicted at the same trial [...]).

Since the summer of 1968 Galanskov had been serving his sentence in camp 17a of the Mordovian complex. He actively participated in actions of political prisoners for their rights, and took part in hunger strikes.

The serious case of ulcers which had troubled Galanskov even before his arrest made his life in camp enormously more difficult. Medical care was given him only irregularly and was ineffective.

Galanskov's relatives and friends and also his camp-mates appealed repeatedly to the authorities, asking that he be given adequate medical care. In particular, they asked that he be put on a special diet and be given a complete examination at the central hospital of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Leningrad. These requests were not granted.

In the autumn of 1972, because of his worsening health, Galanskov was sent as a matter of routine to Dubrovlag hospital compound in the settlement of Barashevo. After an operation he developed peritonitis. As his condition became increasingly critical, the camp administration began to call in physicians, first from the district hospital, then from Saransk, and finally, apparently from Moscow. But it was too late.

And a fragment of the statement of political prisoners V. K. Pavlenkov and G.V. Gavrilov to Prosecutor-General R. A. Rudenko, from the same Pushcart Prize selection:

In March of this year a statement was sent to you, signed by seven political prisoners of corrective labour colony 385/17. We, now located in colony 389/35, were among the signatories. The statement protested against the anti-humanitarian conditions established in corrective-labour establishments of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, which transform healthy people into sick ones and can bring the sick to premature death. We protested against the poor and low-grade food, against the lack of special diets for sick prisoners to meet their nutritional requirements, against the prohibition on receiving the needed quantity of food and medicines from home (especially in the case of the sick). We protested against the fact that, for all practical purposes, the legal provision for the early release of seriously-ill prisoners is not applied. We wrote that as a result of this, and in the absense of appropriate medical care, several people who had been sentenced only to a specific term of imprisonment were in fact condemned to gradual death. In the first place we related all the above to our fellow prisoner, Yu. T. Galanskov, who was seriously ill and who was slowly expiring before our eyes. Despite his illness he was receiving neither the necessary diet, nor qualified medical care, nor was he excused from work. He frequently did not sleep for several nights in a row because of his terrible pain [...]. The colony's administration deprived him of the chance to buy food products in the canteen with his pittance of five rubles per month, and also to receive the single food parcel allowed him each year by law; and by its humiliating and provocative actions it forced him into hunger strikes. [...]

We do not think that you personally, or any of the individuals invested with full power and responsibility for the maintenance of prisoners in the USSR, deliberately wished the death of Yu. T. Galanskov or of any other prisoner. But the conditions of prisoners' confinement in our country today are such that they produce physical suffering and premature deaths.

For the fact that conditions of precisely this sort have become established, you are personally responsible. [...]

Last night, my friend didn't bother to send me the other text on Ukrainian election that the Spectator published alongside John Laughland's piece. And I didn't bother to explore the Spectator site further. Well, today I have, and found a story that more or less balances off what Laughland has written - Yearning to Breathe Free, by Radek Sikorski.

I'm sort of glad I didn't see it yesterday because maybe it would've made me too shy to send the letter to the editor - and I'm very happy I did.

Anyway, here's a bit from Sikorski's piece that sounds like a reply to Laughland:

Some people have become so blinded by anti-Americanism that they assume that whatever Uncle Sam backs must be a bad thing. In this twisted logic, if the US Congress passes a ‘Belorus Democracy Act’ or helps the struggling Ukrainian independent media, that is interference, but when Russia pulls out the stops for Yanukovych, that’s just good old Slavic solidarity. In fact we Slavs no more wish to live in kleptocracies, or be ‘disappeared’ by our governments, than people elsewhere.