We're flying to Istanbul in the morning so I won't be here for a while. Best of luck to everyone!

Some Victory Day-related pictures are here, including photos of the veterans who were walking back to their buses from some celebration organized for them at Hotel Rossiya.

This woman I fell in love with - she's so full of life I can easily imagine her 60 years ago:




And this one made me sick and mad - she carried Stalin's portrait in the Pravda newspaper like it was an icon - close to her heart and with this solemn look on her face...

I've just posted a bunch of photos on my photo page.

These are my favorites:

Eccentricity's all gone, I'm afraid: this is what Khreshchatyk looks like now... Hard to believe but they're parking their cars right on the sidewalks... I'd have preferred to have the tents back there... Someone please tell me this is not true!..

Yesterday, they arrested eight Ukrainians and 14 Russians at a rally in Minsk.

One of the young Russian activists, Ilya Yashin, had his picture taken together with a bunch of Belarusian riot cops:


Photo: AFP

According to Charter 97, one of the Ukrainians who got arrested - Ihor Huz, a politician from Lutsk - looked like he'd been severely beaten when they brought him to court today.

Zubr is citing some reports, according to which "the Ukrainians were treated brutally" by the riot police.

For more news updates, visit Charter 97 and Zubr websites.

A story on Ukrainian migrant workers in the Ukrainian edition of Expert Magazine (in Russian):

- Seven million Ukrainians have worked or work abroad; of the 28-35 million workforce, every fourth person works abroad; Italy, Portugal, Spain are the favorite destinations.

- In Russia: 200,000 Ukrainians work in construction in and around Moscow; 300,000 work in oil production; 1.5 million work in other fields; former Russian premier Yegor Gaidar said: "If the labor migration from Ukraine stops, public transportation in Moscow might stop as well."

- These countries have signed relevant agreements with Ukraine, which makes it easier on the legal Ukrainian migrant workers: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Livia, Moldova, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Vietnam.

- Anna, a 42-year-old Ukrainian, formerly a chemical engineer at a defence enterprise, but, for the past ten years, a street vendor in Moscow, with no work permit. She says: "It's better to eat an illegal sandwich than to starve legally."

There are 126 political parties registered with the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice.

I hope they aren't forcing school kids to memorize all the party names and slogans now... It was pretty tough back in the Soviet times, with all those CPSU Congresses one had to remember everything about...

A few years ago, I saw a commercial of a microwave with a shish-kebap cooking option.

I thought it was sacrilegious.

Now they also advertise instant borscht - and red caviar potato chips!

Andriy Shkil, leader of the UNA-UNSO and one of the tackiest Ukrainian politicians, and Stepan Khmara, a former dissident, were among those who signed a letter to Yushchenko (in Ukrainian), asking him to quickly do something about "organized Jewry" in Ukraine. Both Shkil and Khmara are members of Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna Party. The letter is remindful of the one written in Russia earlier this year - only the Ukrainian copy has gotten a lot more signees and a lot less publicity.

***

In Lviv today, someone painted a swastika and wrote this on the wall of the wonderful 14th-century Armenian church: "Armenians, the other kikes, get out of Lviv." According to Korrespondent.net (in Russian), the slur was signed by "Stepan Bandera's UPA."

More on Zvarych from "good old bob" at Abdymok:

according to bob, columbia university says that ukraine's new justice minister roman zvarych, who spelled his name "zwarycz," never received a degree. he studied at the ivy league school's dept. of international affairs from the fall of 1976 to the spring of 1978.

zwarycz's official resume says he was a professor at new york university 1983-1991. but according to bob, zvarych was a part-time adjunct professor at its school of continuing and professional studies from sept. 1989 through may 31, 1992.

the silence is deafening where's the ft and nyt when you need them?

[...]

***

The whole Zvarych thing started when an anonymous someone sent an angry letter to Ukrainska Pravda:

First we thought it was an April Fool’s hoax. An anonymous letter to expose Justice Minister Roman Zvarych’s alleged lies arrived to the Ukrayinska Pravda office on April 1, right after he had taken part in the US-Ukraine Business Networking Forum.

This quite successful and useful conference took place at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York, on March 30-31. Incidentally, New York City is hometown of Minister Zvarych. And on the 1st of April Minister Zvarych had a speech at his alma mater, Columbia University.

[...]

The gist of the anonymous letter was that its author(s) took advantage of the Minister’s visit to the campus and decided to arrange an interview with him and the Columbia alumni magazine.

However, the alumni magazine staff replied that they were unaware of any Columbia graduate named Roman Zvarych.

Most likely, the alumni magazine in question is Columbia Magazine - "the only University publication sent to all Columbia alumni, both in the U.S. and around the world." I didn't find anything relevant there.

Of the irrelevant things, I began to miss NYC like crazy again (thank God, we're going to Istanbul soon - Istanbul is almost like New York) - and I bumped into the name of the guy who had designed the Columbia Magazine site: Ihor Barabakh. The transliteration of the first name is Ukrainian - the non-Ukrainian way to spell it would be 'Igor' - not 'Ihor.'

Mr. Barabakh is a painter living in New York. He was born in Lviv in 1958 and graduated from the Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts - also in Lviv - in 1984. (A note to Mr. Zvarych: this is an example of a straightforward bio - a bio that cannot cause a career-threatening confusion.)


#0122, by Ihor Barabakh

It's amazing how much Pakistan and our part of the world have in common: it's not just the fucked-up politics but even the way we smile - or the way we perceive the difference between our way of smiling and the American one...

Smile Like You Mean It - from Chapati Mystery:

[...] There are no public smiles in Lahore. Strangers greet each other with poker-face. Those above you on the social power-relational scale [clerks, traffic cops] greet you with a hostile sneer. Those below you [clerks, traffic cops] get greeted with a contemptuous sneer. There are no smiles when you complete a transaction at the store. There are no smiles when you open the door for someone. There are no smiles when you find yourself looking at the same thing or sharing the same public space. There are no smiles when you ask directions to Mall Road. We don’t even smile at our weddings [...]

[...]

All this because a dear friend visited Pakistan for the first time recently and was struck by “how very few people smile at newcomers in a welcoming gesture of cheerful unilateral acceptance? not a one. guess i never really knew just how american i am.” [quoted without permission and with apologies]. Everyone I know who came from homistan to vilayat had this run-in with the smile. Everyone I know who went from here to the old country, asked me why everyone is so grim all the time? It is an odd sign of our collective other-ness. Unsurprisingly, I am constantly reminded by my friends and relatives of how American I am [the no-accent thing is my inside joke]. I do smile at strangers. I even mean it sometimes.

This whole Zvarych thing reminds me of one NGO director I used to know in Kyiv: on his business card it said he had a Ph.D., while in reality he held a master's degree - and I'm still wondering whether the office manager who had ordered those business cards made this mistake deliberately, to please her boss, or not. He didn't seem to mind the embellishment, of course, even though he was smart enough to realize how ridiculous this ego trip appeared to some of his colleagues.

***

I've just noticed that there's a good editorial on Zvarych's education in the Kyiv Post, and also that the original Ukrainska Pravda piece has been translated into English.

Abdymok's got lots of links and leads, in all three languages.

And Korrespondent.net has a piece (in Russian) that sort of confirms that Zvarych does have a master's in international relations from Columbia University, but no Ph.D., and that he did teach at NYU.

Still, if you read the Ukrainian Weekly, a Diaspora publication, you'll know that Zvarych holds a Ph.D. in philosophy. And from his Parliament bio, you'll learn that he's a "Master of Philosophy" (in English) and "a sociologist, psychologist, politologist" (in Ukrainian). His Cabinet of Ministers English-language bio will tell you that the minister of justice is a "holder of a master's degree" - but has also produced "Ph.D. thesis 'Ontological bases of Plato ethics'."

***

It's confusing, and this is exactly why it reminds me of that cheap NGO director guy: Zvarych didn't seem to mind the confusion until it began to threaten the very nice chair he's sitting on.

More on Chernobyl:

Svetlana Alexievich's book - Voices From Chernobyl - has been translated by Masha Gessen's brother, Keith Gessen. An excerpt was published in the Winter 2005 issue of the Paris Review.

Here's what I wrote about Alexievich's book in summer 2003:

In 1999, I attempted to read a book about Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian author in exile. It was one of the most powerful books I had ever held in my hands: a collection of voices of the Chernobyl dead and the Chernobyl living, a history of Chernobyl and a history of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union recited in a choir of monologues. Needless to say, President Lukashenko's people accuse Alexievich of working for the CIA, her "Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future" has to be smuggled into Belarus and she has found refuge in France.

I wasn't able to finish the book, though. I wasn't strong enough. When I think of it, I always think about one narration, by an ethnic Russian refugee who escaped the civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s. A maternity ward nurse, she had once seen a group of armed men grabbing a newborn girl and throwing her out of the window. This woman re-settled to one of the most contaminated areas of Belarus, where she enjoyed taking long walks in the nearby woods, content at last. She didn't worry about radiation; as long as there were only trees around her and no people, she felt at peace.

***

I've also found a bunch of good pictures from the Zone today - by a British photographer John Darwell.

And I've looked through Elena's Ghost Town collection once again today - and felt as heartbroken as ever.

Via Dan at Orange Ukraine - a novel by Marina Lewycka, a British author of Ukrainian descent, has been shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction.

It's futile to judge a book by a random selection of reviews on it - but, when one is stuck with no access to quality bookstores, it is unavoidable. From what I've read in the Times, Lewycka's novel - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - should be an interesting read - even though Andrei Kurkov sort of hated it.

April 21: winter's back.

It's been snowing heavily both in Moscow and in St. Pete today.