Got this from a Kyiv friend yesterday:

Announcement: Looking for dedicated, uncorrupted individuals who wish to serve their country

Dear colleagues,

As the Orange Revolution enters into its next stage, the hard work of building a government of professionals begins.  Personnel policy is critical and many of the individuals who you saw on the stage of the Maydan are now looking for young, trained, dedicated young professionals to staff their work in the new Presidential Administration, Cabinet of Ministers and Parliament.  While the salaries are not competitive, there are changes forseen to change the salary scale of the public service sector in the medium term.  Today, though, individuals will likely have to overlook the poor salaries for the experience.

Right now, individuals, especially those trained (MPA, MPP, MBA, Phd) or with experience from other nations, who have a deep deisre to utilize their knowledge and their experiences to improve the country, are needed to staff the new administration. 

I have several contacts who are ready to interview and to match experiences with needs in the new government, etc.  If you have contacts that are interested in such opportunities, please have them send their resumes to me asap with a cover letter outlining their desired area of service.

Thank you.

If anyone's interested, please email me and I'll forward the contact info of the person who wrote this.

Vladimir Putin announced a pension increase Monday: an additional 200 rubles a month - or even "a little bit more" - will be paid to Russia's elderly beginning March 2005 (twice as much as originally planned and a month earlier).

Roman Abramovich, the governor of the Russian Chukotka region and the second richest man in Great Britain, is expected to sign a new 5-year contract with José Mourinho, the manager of Chelsea Football Club: Mourinho will be making £5 million a year (via sports.ru, in Russian).

200 rubles is $7.13; according to the 2002 Russian Census, there are 29.8 million people of retirement age in Russia; thus, the state will be spending an additional 71.5 billion rubles a year - or $2.5 billion, or £1.4 billion.

£5 million a year is $9.3 million, or 260,5 million rubles; thus, Abramovich is planning to be spending 21.7 million rubles a month on Chelsea's manager.

The bottomline: assuming my calculations are correct, if Abramovich chose to spend his football coach money on Russian pensioners, he'd only be able to give them 0.72 rubles a month - or $0.02, or £0.01. Totally pathetic, in general and compared to what Putin is offering.

Russia is a huge and weird country.

Wow. Quite a bombshell from the New York Times' C. J. Chivers - How Top Spies in Ukraine Changed the Nation's Path.

Also, yet another proof that what's happened in Ukraine is not going to happen in Russia anytime soon:

Throughout the crisis an inside battle was waged by a clique of Ukraine's top intelligence officers, who chose not to follow the plan by President Leonid D. Kuchma's administration to pass power to Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich, the president's chosen successor. Instead, these senior officers, known as the siloviki, worked against it.

Such a position is a rare occurrence in former Soviet states, where the security agencies have often been the most conservative and ruthless instruments of state power.

Just saw today's (Sunday) rally on TV - a lot more people than yesterday, and the ugly red flags have been diluted with the white ones of the Yabloko Party (headed by Grigoriy Yavlinskiy, forever in opposition but out of the Duma since the Dec. 2003 parliamentary election).

In an interview with the BBC Ukrainian Service, Yavlinskiy said this today about the possibility of an "orange revolution" in Russia (via Ukrainska Pravda, in Ukrainian):

The necessary conditions do not exist in Russia today and to make such forecasts for the nearest future is not serious. Pro-democracy politicians and forces do exist in Russia but their influence isn't strong enough to organize a widespread struggle for our rights [...]. However, I can add that in Ukraine, too, there were not many people a year ago who could predict the recent events. That's why, looking at what's happening in Russia today, we may say that though the necessary conditions do not exist, the events may start to develop very fast.

Hopefully, when it all get serious enough, they'll consider changing some of the slogans. Yesterday, I saw one that sent little shivers down my spine: "Putin, give us November 7th back!" It referred to the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, a holiday/day off cancelled not long ago. Putin returned the Soviet anthem to them (the tune, not the lyrics), and now they want more...



(The woman was hitting the metal pan with a spoon yesterday, and someone noted wisely: "Everyone needs to bring those, to make more noise!")

***

I've just received an email from one of my dear Ukrainian friends:

Just read that the poor pensioners pitched orange tents at the intersection of Nevskiy and Sadovaya, shouting, "Nevskiy--vtoroy Kreschatik!" [Nevskiy is the second Khreshchatyk!]

Did you give them the tents?

Well, contrary to the reports, the tent doesn't really look like a toy one, nor is it as orange as I imagined... (via Ukrainska Pravda, in Ukrainian).

How sad: I'm stuck at home with a toothache AND a cold (yes, again...), and at the intersection of Nevskiy and Sadovaya the protesters have just set up five orange toy tents, which, they say, "symbolize the arrival of the 'orange revolution' to St. Petersburg" (according to the Interfax, Radio Ekho Moskvy and Gazeta.ru, in Russian).

I wish I could go there to take a picture but I can't, really, even though it's just a 15-minute walk... I wish I could find out the reaction of the two women I accidentally alienated yesterday... I wish I had been there when it happened...

I doubt it'll last till tomorrow - the tents are on the tram tracks. Of course, Sadovaya near Nevskiy is sort of useless anyway, because it's so terribly jammed all the time, but that wouldn't justify an 'orange revolution' to the authorities... The police, however, say they aren't going to do anything about the protest until they get orders (one thing I forgot to mention yesterday is that the cops seemed very friendly, talking to people, smiling and retelling to them the latest news from the other protest venue).

55 photos from one of the two pensioners' rallies held here in St. Pete today (Saturday).



[Hitler stole our childhood, and Putin stole our old age. The Blockade of Leningrad is back. Give us back our pensions and our benefits. Down with the bloody government of thieves.]

The media say a few thousand people gathered at two locations, Nevskiy and Sadovaya intersection, and Moskovskiy Prospekt. I went to Nevskiy Prospekt and Sadovaya around 4 pm - never been able to calculate how big the crowds are but today it looked comparatively small - compared to Maidan, that is. One way in which Nevskiy resembled Khreshchatyk today was no traffic was allowed on it (unlike Khreshchatyk, Nevskiy is never pedestrian on weekends). Old people were blocking the street, letting neither cars, nor public buses, trolleybuses and trams pass. A hundred or so young people were represented by the National Bolshevik Party guys (their flags are remindful of both the Nazi and the Soviet ones, and here's a link to their posters), the Russian Young Communist League (Che Guevara flags) and the anarchists.

The slogans were anti-Putin ("Putina - v sortir!" - something like "Putin down the toilet!" - was the cutest one, an allusion to his famous quote about killing terrorists when they're taking a leak, a very approximate translation of "mochit' v sortirah"), anti-Matviyenko (St. Pete's governor, Putin's protege), anti-United Russia Party (pro-Putin majority in the Duma) and anti-government.

The reason they are protesting, in a nutshell, is because a new law has replaced certain benefits, such as free public transportation for pensioners, servicemen, people with disabilities and other groups, as well as discounts on housing and utilities costs, with monetary compensations (from $7 to $15 monthly as reimbursement for transportation fares, for example), which are not enough and the people feel robbed. (I'm not sure what an average pension here is but I doubt the majority is getting over $100 a month.)

Here's more on the protests and their causes from The Moscow Times:

Analysts said that a new wave of protests will likely take place at the end of the month and in the first week of February, when people who have been paying only half of their housing maintenance fees start receiving bills demanding they pay in full.

Under the new law, the federal government will be responsible for subsiding housing costs for 14 million war veterans, disabled people and Chernobyl cleanup workers. But another 18 million people in various categories, who were also entitled to discounts, will now be at the mercy of often cash-strapped regional budgets.

Russian Air Force commander General Vladimir Mikhailov added his voice to those criticizing the law Thursday, saying that the removal of benefits for servicemen will worsen their living standards and hit young officers hardest.

"When a pilot gets something like 4,500 rubles [$160] per month, it's just shameful to talk to these pilots sometimes," Mikhailov told reporters.

[...]

[...] more than a dozen pensioners have been charged with administrative violations for participating in unsanctioned rallies in the Moscow region towns of Khimki and Podolsk earlier this week, The Associated Press reported.

In one of the more bizarre protests against the law, Viktor Prokopenko, a pensioner from the Moscow region town of Reutovo, has sent his first compensation payment of 250 rubles [almost $9] to Putin in an effort to get the law repealed, Ekho Moskvy radio reported.

Staff at his local post office promised Prokopenko that the money would reach Putin at the Kremlin, but he said he was not expecting a personal reply from the president.

I spent about two hours at the rally, and my main impression is that it is so different from Kyiv's Maidan. I know people here who hope that this is the beginning of a bigger thing, which would lead to "imoranging" Putin (my Kyiv friend has written me that the word was his personal creation, and since he's a Ukrainian, it can still be considered folklore, I guess...).

But I'm not so optimistic.

First, all those Nazi/Soviet/Communist/Che Guevarish trash - it's repulsive, and dangerous, and if bringing down Putin means giving power to these people, I'd rather stay with Putin. Really, I don't understand this "my enemy's enemy is my friend" approach.

Second, I didn't see anything potentially uniting - not at today's rally, at least: old babushkas demanding to let them ride city buses for free again may elicit pity in many fellow citizens, but pity isn't enough to risk losing your job and, possibly, risk your life. "They lost their benefits - but what does it have to do with me? I've never been eligible for any benefits in the first place, always had to pay my bus fare in full - and survived... So why would I protest together with them?" - I wonder how many people are thinking like this now.

What's really interesting, though, is that I saw at least two men wearing orange and looking like they've been transported directly from Maidan (one seemed very familiar but I was feeling somewhat shy and out of place to come up and say hi to him).



I also heard a group of student-looking guys talking about Ukraine and making a joke about Yanukovych - but I didn't stop to talk to them, either.

I heard several people complain angrily about not being able to take a bus because of this rally; one woman was talking to herself, saying: "I can't believe it, I didn't think something like this was still possible! People have lost all fear... And all the trolleys are stuck there, not able to pass because of it..."

There was little humorous about this rally - one very, very big woman standing on top of what's a flower bed in summer suddenly took a firecracker out of her bag and blew it up, and then laughed mischievously and announced that she'd been carrying it around since Christmas. That was sweet, but otherwise the rally was quite heartbreaking, depressing and hopeless.

As I was taking one of the pictures, I heard a woman behind me ask her friend in a rather paranoid voice: "And why is this girl photographing? Who is she? What is she doing here?" She meant me. Thank God, her friend was a normal person: "Don't worry. She's one of us. She's just taking pictures and will then show them to her friends so that they know about us all." I turned to them at this point and smiled, and the normal one continued: "See, the girl is a foreigner, moreover." I felt totally stupid - but smiled again and moved on.

It reminded me of Maidan - how at the very beginning I felt uneasy to ask people's first and last names when I was assisting foreign journalists. I felt uneasy because I remembered how uneasy we former Soviets tend to feel when we have to reveal personal information to strangers. I kept imagining those people thinking, "And what if they turn me in to the secret police, or what if they tell my boss that I was here?" Well, I stopped feeling uneasy very soon, because everyone - yes, every single person we interviewed except for one - was eager to tell us both first and last names and, I suspect, they would have gladly invited us to their homes if we asked, fearing nothing...

In St. Pete, it's different.

Two women later came up to me and asked me again why I was photographing. They weren't too friendly, sounded more like school teachers - so I told them I was a tourist, and they melted down for a moment, then asked where I was from and when I told them, they suddenly got tense and asked me if I was "orange." I happened to be wearing an orange scarf, out of habit, I guess, and they noticed it before I had time to reply, and one pointed to the scarf and said, "Yes, she is orange. Are you?" And I said, "Well, I voted for Yushchenko, so yes, I guess I'm orange." And they started to move away from me, saying something like "We are against you," several times, very fast, and I shrugged, and then one of the women stopped and declared: "You'll all be living very miserable lives because of the way you voted." And it made me slightly sick but I decided not to show it, pretend I didn't get it, so I replied, "I hope everything will be fine with you. Can I photograph you?" They didn't mind, so I quickly took a picture, and the woman repeated her judgment - "You Ukrainians will have very bad lives" - and I again told her that I hoped everything would work out fine for them. Then I moved away.

Here's the picture of these two women:

This afternoon, I had a discussion about Ukraine with a middle-aged guy who came to fix our kitchen vent fan or whatever that thing's called. First I chose to complain about my predicament with cameras - it was a bit like complaining about your medical problems to a doctor you met at a party, a torture for someone spending his whole life fixing things or people. Then we discussed digital cameras in general, whether they were worth their price or not. And then I was tempted to show the guy a photo I took of a Yushchenko supporter talking to a Yanukovych supporter that was published in the Ukrainian edition of Viva! magazine - not my first photo credit but the one I'm extremely proud of because of the picture's placement and size, and its charm. After that, it was natural to talk about Ukraine.

"I think Ukrainians overreacted," the guy said. "It wasn't such a big deal to make such a mess out of it."

I explained all the basics to him: the "proffessor" thing, and the two criminal convictions, and all the violations, and the wife's bitching about drugged oranges and felt boots "made in the USA," and the humiliation of having someone like Yanukovych represent your country.

"It was all done just to spite Russia," was the next thing he said.

I explained that Russia, or any other country except Ukraine, was the last thing on most people's minds during that month, and that Putin had no one to blame for making a fool of himself, and in any case, if he managed to survive the Kursk disaster, Nord-Ost, Beslan and everything in between, it'd be such an overreaction for him to collapse because of a tiny Ukraine fiasco.

"Ukrainians want to join the EU but it'll never happen because they just don't belong there - they aren't Europeans," was the next argument.

I replied that joining the EU was such an abstract goal while the desire to live a decent life seemed totally realistic - and one thing that Maidan has, hopefully, taught us is how to demand that the politicians at all levels follow up on their campaign promises.

"But our people are too timid, they can't change anything because they're scared of their own shadows," the guy said as he was leaving. "It's like in that proverb - a crow is jabbing out your eye and you do nothing to chase it away. It took Europeans centuries to become what they are, and Ukrainians aren't Europeans."

"No, they aren't. But you've got to start somewhere, and we've done it, and I'm wishing you the same."

It was a totally peaceful discussion, really. The guy wasn't hostile in any way, just totally convinced he was right. Same about me. It was interesting. It was my third encounter with the Russians who, in my opinion, were totally clueless (I'll write about the other two, which occurred in Istanbul, later) - and it's hard to blame these people: the way the Russian channels were covering Maidan is said to have been so absurd that I wish I had had a clone here in Russia, watching TV and reporting to the real me in Kyiv about it...

An interesting New York Times story on the allegations that quite a few veterans of Poland's Solidarity movement might have been collaborating with the Communist secret police back in the 70s and 80s.

Among the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, Poland is a relative latecomer to what has become know as lustration, so called because the bringing to light of secret Communist files may serve as a purifying sacrifice, a process that roiled countries like Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary in the 1990's.

Several years ago, none other than Lech Walesa, a founder of Solidarity and Poland's first democratically elected president, was charged with having collaborated in the early 1970's. While he was cleared by the Polish Parliament, the taint on his reputation has remained.

But there has been a sharp increase here lately in lustration cases because, after years of delay, Poland only this month completed the process of opening its former Communist secret police archives to anybody who can claim to have been a target.

I don't recall any such "lustration" cases in Ukraine, but this may be because I've been living outside Ukraine too much. I did meet a few individuals, though, who claimed that two of our best-known dissidents, Vyacheslav Chornovil and Mustafa Jemilyov, had spent all those years in the Soviet labor camps not as a result of their political activities but because they were rapers. Paradoxically, Vyacheslav Chornovil's son, Taras, head of Yanukovych's campaign #2, turned the same kind of charge upside down and used it to try to cleanse the reputation of his boss (Ekho Moskvy radio interview, Dec. 7, 2004, in Russian):

Question from the audience: Your current boss Yanukovych was convicted on two very disgusting articles. Did you have any doubts about his reputation?

Taras Chornovil's answer: Around the time Yanukovych was being convicted, or perhaps a bit later, I received a warning, a threat, because, being a dissident's son, I couldn't establish a normal contact with the local KGB of Ukraine: "If you continue to get involved in anti-Soviet stuff, we'll throw you to jail. And the article we'll use to convict you would be rape." I know that in those times, in order to close many cases and get rid of the backlog, the police used to put the blame on just about anyone. It would have been very easy to do it with a person who was an orphan and totally powerless. In order to close the backlog cases. And it was very difficult to prove your innocence in those times. If a person with no means and no power had managed to do it then, I think this proves more than enough that the accusations were inadequate. Moreover, if a person in this situation has managed to reach such heights, despite the very difficult early years, then, it seems to me, he has a huge potential.

The evil ways of the KGB's Polish equivalent are mentioned in the New York Times piece, too:

"Their attitude is that if the secret police wrote something, it must be true," Ms. Niezabitowska, 56, said of her accusers during a conversation at her home outside Warsaw. "But this is a fundamental misunderstanding. In the Communist time the core of the system was a lie and the system's executors were professionals. They knew very well how to make lies look like truth by mixing both in words and in documents.

"There was a special service inside the secret police called Office T that specialized in making false documents," she continued. "Sometimes they invented fake agents altogether, or they fabricated letters with compromising information."

To me, however, a lot more important is this paragraph:

This has led some people here to wonder if the process is not harming the wrong people - former democracy activists rather than the many current government officials who were members of the very Communist Party that persecuted them.

This must be true of most if not all post-Soviet states: the rhetoric has changed, the word "democracy" has replaced the word "Communism" - but the faces haven't changed, the same people who ruled the old countries remain in power today. Or they are in charge of the really big, profitable businesses. Or their children are.

With Ukraine, these names come to mind: Victor Medvedchuk, who pretended to defend a dissident poet Vasyl Stus during Brezhnev's rule and who now heads Kuchma's Administration and isn't likely to leave politics after Kuchma's gone; and Yevhen Marchuk, who had spent part of his 30-year career in the Soviet security services dealing with the dissidents and who then became Ukraine's prime minister, and then a presidential candidate in the 1999 race, briefly posturing as a dissident of sorts and then swiftly re-joining Kuchma's team after the defeat in the first round.

Politics is such a stinking swamp.

I'm feeling so anticlimactic now. I spent the first two days back in St. Pete constantly reminding myself it wasn't September anymore, not even October: Beslan was over, Kyiv was such a wonderful distraction, a different life, etc. The main reason for these flashbacks was the couch on which I'd spent last fall, insomniac most of the time, writing this blog like crazy: now I knew I wanted to write about Kyiv, not Beslan and Russia, but I couldn't, because the room was the same as it had been then, and I had to sit on the same couch. So I decided to busy myself with reading and with my little photo backlog, and it worked beautifully: I've managed to catch up with my present self, I've managed to feel cozy and snug in our wonderful St. Pete apartment. I didn't feel like writing about Kyiv, not yet, but I knew it'd change soon. And now, for the second night in a row, I can't sleep again. I haven't had a single insomnia in Kyiv and Istanbul - I've forgotten what it feels like. To make things much worse, Mishah snores. He didn't snore in Istanbul. How should an insomniac cope with a snoring husband? I don't know.

What's also terribly anticlimactic are the babushkas, the old women - not just the ones on the news, but the real ones, ubiquitous. When I first came to St. Pete, I discovered I loved taking pictures of them: their faces and all the stories, all the drama they held. In a way, I sublimated not having been lucky with grandmothers of my own. It lasted a few months, until St. Pete got too dark and gloomy. Since then, the only things I feel looking at the miserable babushkas are pity and horror. At the market today/yesterday, one babushka asked me for money to buy some bread, and I gave her 10 rubles (30 cents), and she looked happy and grateful. Then I stood next to another one, who was considering buying a big tomato - she was talking to herself, sort of happily, "Oh, these are the beautiful ones, I'll buy one here, I guess," but the saleswoman told her not to touch the tomatoes piled up for exhibit, and the babushka asked if the ones for sale were as big and beautiful, and the saleswoman said they were small, but the babushka decided to buy one anyway, and the saleswoman asked if she'd like to buy two, and the babushka said, "No, just one. I don't have enough money." And the third babushka I saw at the market today/yesterday was yelling at some poor meat seller - she was screaming so furiously that her face seemed to have nothing but a huge mouth on it, open wide, like a shark's jaws, disgusting. And it all reminded me of the text I wrote about this same market back in March - it was published on the International Women's Day in The Morning News - and I told myself today/yesterday, Veronica, stop paying attention, you've already written about it. The anticlimactic part of it is that I spent two months in Kyiv, admiring the brave young people changing Ukraine right before my eyes, and now I'm back in the country where young people shave their heads, get drunk, paint swastikas on the walls and then go and kill 9-year-old Tajik girls - while their grandmothers rally against Putin because he's robbing them of what little they have.

It looks like we'll be moving back to Moscow at the end of January. I think two years in St. Pete is more than enough. I can't wait to return to Ukraine, though. Never thought I'd feel this way - but I do.

To end this insomnia entry on a good note, here's one of my favorite St. Pete babushka pictures, with the comment on how I ran into her:



Sept. 23, 2003
A Dignified Babushka: Anna Akhmatova looked nameless, too, in her old age

She and her friend, an old lady with a cigarette, must have seen me shooting Matviyenko, Putin and the air conditioner ads nearby.

"Come over here and take a picture of me," she called out.

Her friend stepped aside when I approached. "She doesn't like to be photographed," was the explanation.

But her friend was curious: she stood behind me as I was shooting and commented: "All your pictures appear on that little screen right away!"

I came up to show her what I thought was the best shot and suddenly she seemed flustered: "Oh, I'm not gonna be able to see anything there!" She didn't realize the picture was on the monitor, not inside the camera or something. She loved it.

I wished her and her friend good health, and they wished all the best to me.

On this picture, she reminds me of the aged Anna Akhmatova, just a little bit: surprisingly graceful and still full of life and good humor.

A Kyiv friend has just written me: he feels sorry for the poor babushkas protesting here in Russia and is also enraged about law enforcement officials detaining some of these people and filing lawsuits against them. "They just need to impeach Putin," he writes. "Or imorange."

I totally love it: impeach or imorange. I wonder if he has coined it himself or it's part of the new Ukrainian folklore...

A series of nine photos of Roza Yusupova, head of the finance department of the Culture Ministry of Chechnya, at BBC's In Pictures section.

It's too horrible to imagine what she and her family and others like her have been through this past decade.

And it's as horrible to catch myself thinking that way too many people outside Chechnya live in similar conditions or even worse - this woman's salary of $270 a month would be considered a fortune by many... All those elderly people rallying all over Russia, I read somewhere that in addition to their miserable pensions they are now receiving 200 rubles a month, which is something like $7, to pay for transportation that used to be free for them...

On the photo below (I couldn't find the photographer's name), Roza Yusupova is standing in front of what used to be her home - and there's also something called Kafeteriy Skazka behind her, Fairy Tale Cafeteria...

It feels totally weird to be back in Russia.

Elderly people across the country are protesting the replacement of benefits with money, the authorities are threatening to persecute them, and the TV keeps reminding us of the approaching 60th anniversary of our victory in WWII and of how precious the "children of the war" are, meaning not some kids from Grozny or Beslan, but the very elderly who are out in the streets now, calling Putin "an enemy worse than Hitler."


Photo: ITAR-TASS

And then there're the Russian parliament members with their ridiculous ideas. Here're parts of the Moscow Times story on yesterday's vote in the Duma (though, honestly, it was a lot more amusing and somewhat more shocking to hear and watch them talk about it yesterday than read this text):

Duma Asks Foreigners for Respect
By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer
Thursday, January 13, 2005. Page 1

The State Duma on Wednesday tentatively approved legislation that would allow authorities to deny a visa to foreigners who show disrespect toward Russia, are sick or use illegal drugs.

Political analysts said the bill falls short of democratic norms and that President Vladimir Putin may reject it in an attempt to flash democratic credentials in the faces of critics worried about a rollback on free speech and human rights.

Duma deputies passed the amendment to the law "On Exit From the Russian Federation and Entry Into the Russian Federation" in the first of three readings by a vote of 353 to 44 with six abstentions.

The amendment says foreigners could be denied entry if they "commit actions of a clearly disrespectful nature toward the Russian Federation or the federal organs of the government of the Russian Federation."

Denial of entry could also result from actions that disrespect "spiritual, cultural or public values," bring about "significant material harm," or are harming or have harmed "the international prestige of the Russian Federation."

"Other disrespectful or unfriendly actions" could also result in a foreigner being barred from entering the country, the bill says.

The bill does not spell out what specific behavior could lead to being denied entry, but states that such a judgment would be in the hands of the president, the Federation Council, the State Duma, the government or a court.

[...]

Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said the Duma and Federation Council will easily pass the legislation and send it to Putin for his signature. Putin, however, may soften its language or scrap it all together in some democratic grandstanding, he said.

"This gives the president a chance to play the role of the liberal," Pribylovsky said. "He's done this before. But, of course, it's just a show."

In March, the Duma passed in a first reading a bill banning rallies in virtually all public places. The bill was widely condemned as an attack on constitutionally protected democratic freedoms, and while the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, which controls the Duma, was reviled by critics at home and abroad as being indifferent to democracy, Putin capitalized on the opportunity to appear enlightened in contrast to parliament. "To whom is it necessary today to limit the rights and freedoms of citizens to demonstrate and march?" Putin told members of his government on April 13. "There shouldn't be any such unhealthy restrictions in this respect."

Putin subsequently requested changes to the bill that would allow protests outside government buildings, lower the age requirement for organizers, and shorten the period of advance notice needed to be given for some events.

I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow now - started it in Istanbul, borrowed it at the hotel we're always staying at, the first fiction book in months - well, except for Cingiz Aitmatov's novel, but that one was in Russian, and I often feel like a different person when I read in Russian, like a bad student I used to be, finally eager to catch up with my high school and college curriculum reading, sort of... and Pamuk's novel is from a different universe - it's an English translation, from Turkish, about the country I thought I knew much about but now realize that was very little, the country I'm beginning to understand, the country somehow so remindful of both Russia and Ukraine, in many aspects, both good and bad... I've had too many interruptions - travel, photography, other books - so I'm still at the very beginning of Snow, but I love the voice, dry and subdued, journalism tinged with sadness...

***

I've just re-read the post at Aegean Disclosure about Christopher Hitchens' review of Snow - here's the part of it that I totally agree with, even though I haven't finished the novel yet:

Hitchen’s criticism of Pamuk’s style is most clearly summarized when he notes that “Pamuk’s literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn’t trust the reader until he has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most didactic kind.” Although I haven’t read Snow, I know this attribute comes up once in a while to bite Pamuk in his other works.

Then on the political side, although praising him for his ambivalence, Hitchens criticizes Pamuk for his lack of courage:

“Some important Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the Armenian genocide and a critique of the official explanations for it. The principal author, in this respect is Taner Akcam, who, as Pamuk is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany—whereas from reading Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at.”

Hitchens is criticizing Pamuk here for not being blunt enough, for not taking a stand, even though he scolds Pamuk for being too explicit and didactic with respect to other aspects of the novel. However, with such a blunt explanation, wouldn’t the sense of eeriness of Kars subside rather than swell? Pamuk may in fact be guilty of not wanting such an admission to eclipse his entire novel.

***

Our Istanbul hotel receives Turkish Daily News, "Turkish first and only English daily," each morning, and a few days before our departure I read an opinion piece on the approaching 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide - a piece noteworthy for its author's horrible taste, if nothing else. Here's the beginning:

Be ready for the Armenian tsunami

Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Mehmet Ali Birand

I am writing this article for those who have no idea what we will face during the year. It aims to prepare for the things to come.

A huge tsunami is approaching our shores.

I can almost hear it. The sky is getting darker and the water on the shore is retreating.

The tsunami I am talking about comes as a result of the earthquake among the Armenian Diaspora and will soon be upon us. If the necessary precautions are not taken in a timely manner, we might face a huge calamity. We might never recover.

The reason why this tsunami formed is that on April 24, 2005 is the 90th anniversary of the symbolic date of the Armenian genocide allegations.

Armenians want to utilize this chance fully.

For years, due to Turkish indifference, they succeeded in making the world accept the genocide allegations as a fact. No matter how much we deny them, Armenian efforts have persuaded the international public. If you go anywhere, especially in the western world, you will see 90 percent of the people you talk to believe Armenians had been the victims of genocide at the hands of Turks.

That is why Armenians do not want to waste this opportunity. They want a final assault and finish the matter.

If I were a Turkish citizen, I'd be ashamed to have someone like this man speak for me. But I'm a Ukrainian and we've got plenty of our own shitheads - no need to look elsewhere.

Kyiv has been mentioned in a New York Times piece on Budget Travel 2005. Very nice.

Kiev was always considered one of the prettier cities in the Soviet Union, but like many places in former Soviet states, it has struggled against the economic and political tumult following independence in 1991. Fueled by one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Kiev - with its forested hills, glorious churches and monasteries - has been transformed. The Orange Revolution that followed the disputed presidential election in November could well do more, turning Kiev into the next Prague or Belgrade. For now, Kiev's restaurants, cafes and bars remain inexpensive. And while some hotels have reached European standards - and prices - many more still charge around $100, including the Domus, the Kiev and the Ukraina, which overlooks Independence Square, where hundreds of thousands gathered to protest the November election.

I've got only one comment: I'm not sure Hotel Ukraina is a very good place to stay, especially in cold weather - the view of Maidan is amazing from there, but two journalists I was assisting were overjoyed when they managed to move to another hotel after a couple days - they said they were freezing at Hotel Ukraina and there was no room service there.