We spent half of the day today/yesterday at Afisha Magazine's Picnic - very nice, so many young, good-looking people, no alcohol and no drunks, fresh air, barbeque... Not interesting to take pictures at all - I was upset at first, thought something was wrong with me, until Mishah told me that two professional photographers, very good ones, also found little worth photographing...

A very happy day today: I've finally found and bought Masha Gessen's book, Two Babushkas, at a small English-language bookstore on Myasnitskaya, the John Parsons Bookshop.

I saw the book lying there the moment I entered the place; I grabbed it and went straight to the cashier's. I told the saleswoman I'd been looking for the book everywhere, for a long time, even in Istanbul, where the non-fiction selection is incomparably better. She seemed to have caught some of my joy and gave me a 5-percent discount: I paid 516 rubles instead of 543, but was prepared to pay twice as much, I guess. She said the book arrived only two weeks ago, on July 16.

I've already finished reading the prologue - loved it. Hope the rest of the book is as good!

True to his old, positive, self, Yushchenko has made a reconciliation phone call to Serhiy Leshchenko at Ukrainska Pravda today.

According to Leshchenko (in Ukrainian), they talked about the situation around Yushchenko's son and ended up having a symbolic handshake over the phone.

I woke up with this very lucid thought today: Yushchenko never seemed to pretend he and his family didn't have enough money.

He's a former banker; his hobby, collecting antiques, is - potentially, though not necessarily - an expensive one; his wife isn't some working class American girl, etc. The seeming populism of his decision to celebrate his 51st birthday at an expat bar is easily negated by the fact that many, many Ukrainians would find the prices at that place prohibitive: 8 hryvnias ($1.6) for half a liter of the local beer or 26 hryvnias ($5.2) for a pint of Guinness is too much. (That the president's son would most likely consider O'Brien's a shithole is irrelevant: I didn't vote for Andriy Yushchenko. Similarly, I sort of hate the look in Petro Yushchenko's eyes - so calculating, only God knows what a person like this is up to - but that's irrelevant, too, for I didn't vote for the president's older brother.)

I loved it that Yushchenko didn't try to conceal part of his wealth when, a few years ago, journalists discovered he had a really nice country house: he invited them over and showed them around, instead of pretending he had been caught visiting a rich friend's residence or something.

It's totally fine with me that Yushchenko isn't as poor as the rest of the country's citizens - and that this is public knowledge: it's so different from the old Soviet ways that it gives hope - assuming, of course, that he and his team know what to do about the economic and social situation in the country.

But the way he behaved at that press conference was so graceless; the way he made it clear he was as Soviet as it gets was so pathetic; the way his press secretary and the interior minister tried to shield him and his son was so amateurish...

With all this, it's impossible to keep the lucid waking thought about Yushchenko's lack of hypocrisy for a long time...

Yesterday, someone named Panas Periperdenko, of The Young Naturalist, Kirovohrad, was listed as #556 on the petition for a while - that name is as unlikely as, say, Archibald Overfartson, and it's good someone at Ukrainska Pravda noticed and deleted it.

If they really want to be taken seriously, by Yushchenko or anyone else, they should spend some time looking carefully through the list of people who have signed the petition, getting rid of those who appear more than once, checking all the names for authenticity.

That's a lot of work - but not as much as raising a good, modest son.

So far, 659 names, including three Stepan Sachuks and two Ivan Kolodiys (#278 and #439).

The original petition, with the names, in Ukrainian, is here; its English translation is here.

All of a sudden, I'm so sick of Moscow. I wish we had a dacha or relatives in a village. Or a car.

Yuri Lutsenko, Ukraine's Interior Minister, deserves a separate entry.

Yesterday night, during a live broadcast on Channel 1+1, he issued a fine for traffic violations to Andriy Yushchenko: the president's son now has to pay 17 hryvnias. That's $3.36.

Abdymok has more on it - here and here.

As of now, 602 journalists have signed the petition, some of them as many as three times (Stepan Sachuk, newspaper Volyn, editor-in-chief, Lutsk - #420, #422 and #426)...

***

The story of the scandal is featured in the Times and the Telegraph in Britain, and Mara Bellaby's AP piece is all over the place, too...

***

The Kyiv Post has a fresh editorial - That Kid Again:

[...]

It’s worth separating what’s outrageous about the above from what isn’t. Listening to some of the journalistic rhetoric, you’d think young Andriy was an outrageous decadent in the mold of the Marquis de Sade, squandering the national wealth on ceaseless orgies. In fact, his lifestyle is not atypical of that of young people in positions analogous to his. It might be unfair, but the kids of powerful politicians tend to be showered with gifts and offered opportunities the rest of us don’t get. They get offered high-paying sinecures. When Ukrainska Pravda editor Olena Prytula says in a recent interview that Andriy’s lifestyle raises corruption issues, because Andriy’s unnamed benefactors might be trying to influence the president, she’s mistaken. There’s nothing that says a First Child has to take a vow of poverty, and there’s nothing illegal about a private citizen – which is what Andriy is – accepting gifts or a high salary for doing too little work. Without proof of a quid pro quo involving his father, what Andriy owns – or borrows or uses or accepts as a gift – is no one’s business but his own and his family’s. Unseemliness is no crime. This is a free country.

What is outrageous, however, is Andriy’s allegedly loutish behavior. No one should be able to park illegally in the middle of the street; no one’s bodyguards should be able to warn off the police. This speaks to an old Ukrainian problem: that there have been two sets of laws in this country, one for the guys in the black luxury sedans, and another for everybody else. If young Yushchenko gets to break the laws everyone else lives under, then this is absolutely a matter for a watchdog press.

This brings us back to President Yushchenko’s behavior throughout this hullabaloo. It hasn’t been good. When an Ukrainska Pravda reporter questioned him about his son at a press conference this week, Yushchenko exploded in dudgeon. In a rambling response, he insisted on his son’s flawless morality, weirdly brought up the specter of threats of violence against his family, adjured journalists not to disgrace their profession, offered conflicting versions of who’s paying for his son’s luxuries, and – most startling of all – told Ukrainska Pravda’s reporter not to be a “hired killer.” That’s a loaded thing to say in a country where journalists have indeed been long for hire, and where they’ve too often been killed.

If Yushchenko’s going to be the leader of a European country, he should try to sound like one. Do we believe Yushchenko has the same contempt for a free press that his predecessor in office did? No. But the trouble with this sort of ranting is that it sets a bad example for officials down the food chain. If a newspaper cameraman has his equipment smashed by an Interior Ministry cop next week, we’ll wonder whether Yushchenko’s effusion didn’t have something to do with it.

[...]

The president missed an excellent chance to strengthen democracy and the media environment here, and to affirm that the days of well-connected Ukrainians being above the law are over.

The Spring 2005 issue of Iowa Journalist, a student publication of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has a piece about a faculty members' visit to Ukraine last fall, written by Erin Pfaff, a UI graduate student.

As always, it's absolutely amazing to see how foreign and mysterious we, Ukrainians, probably appear to someone who does not necessarily seem too foreign to us...

Journey highlights freedom of the press
Educating Ukraine about U.S. journalism teaches Berry more than the language

It's Oct. 31, 2004, and the future of Ukraine depends on the outcome of today's federal election. Assigned to cover a voting district, 21-year-old journalist, Hellen Pany Ly Shyn arrives at her post close to midnight. She waits outside for results as election officials have just finished counting the votes and are putting them in bags.

Yelling erupts from behind the closed door. Curious about the commotion, Ly Shyn walks into the room and witnesses "thugs" trying to steal the election bags. A gun shot is fired. The officials drop the bags and the thugs run off with them.

A short while later Ly Shyn receives a call telling her that she has seen too much and warning her to leave town. So the young journalist flees town, afraid for her safety if she stays and afraid for her life should she publish her story.

This is just one of the many personal accounts that University of Iowa journalism associate professor and Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter, Steve Berry, was told during his two-week free press mission in Ukraine.

[...]

What kind of name is Hellen Pany Ly Shyn - and Ly Shyn? Chinese?

It must've been Steve Berry's journalistic handwriting - DanyLyShyn, Olena Danylyshyn, a reporter with a Kirovohrad newspaper Nasha Gazeta (it's Kirovohad, not Kirovohrad, in the piece, but compared to how the reporter's name is misspelled, it's nothing)...

Here's Mishah's idea on how they could save Yushchenko's ass more or less gracefully (though with Irina Gerashchenko's pathetic attempt, it may be too late now...):

Yushchenko should convince his son to auction his car and his cell phone - and then they should donate all the money to an orphanage.

Wouldn't that be nice.

Me, I had a similar idea about the oranges: Mykola Bazhan should have told his nephew Yevgeniy Lauer to take all the oranges from the fridge and share them with his friends at school.

Too late for Bazhan, not too late for Yushchenko.

A Yushchenko joke someone's posted on the Ukrainska Pravda Forum (in Russian):

Yushchenko talks to his Austrian doctor:

- Doctor, I eat red caviar and shit with red caviar, I eat black caviar and shit with black caviar... Help me, doctor, what should I do?!

- Eat shit and you'll shit like a normal person.

Ukrainska Pravda's "Leonid Amchuk" comes up with Part 3 of the Son of God series - this time in Russian, not Ukrainian, for some reason.

Irina Gerashchenko, Yushchenko's press secretary, has a tough job. Here's some of the bullshitting she has to do to save Victor Yushchenko's ass:

- BMW M6: Andriy Yushchenko is going to pay "over a thousand dollars a month" to rent this car from a friend. (According to Ukrainska Pravda, if you decided to rent a BMW that's nowhere near as fancy from a local rent-a-car place, you'd have to pay from $250 a day to $40 an hour.)

- Apartment: Andriy Yushchenko rents an apartment that's more than 200 square meters for "several hundred dollars." From a friend. Across the street from where I voted for his father three times last year. (According to Ukrainska Pravda, if you decided to rent a place nearby through an agency, you'd have to pay either $2,200 a month for 108 sq. meters, or $2,000 a month for 80 sq. meters, or $2,800 for 170 sq. meters.)

- Job: Andriy Yushchenko "works as a manager in two successful construction and insurance companies." He's responsible for "finding clients, drafting documents, and for interaction with clients." He makes "several thousand dollars a month."

Fuck it. I wanted to write some kind of a conclusion, but fuck it. I'm voting against them all in the upcoming election - until they either learn how to hide their oranges well, or how not to react to accusations like complete idiots.

Maybe Yushchenko could marry his son off to Kenya, instead of exiling him to Niger, as my friend has suggested?

(Thanks to Daniel of Bloggledygook for the laugh...)

40 GOATS TO BUY CHELSEA

Former US president Bill Clinton has been offered 40 goats and 20 cows for his daughter by a love-struck African government official.

Mr Clinton was offered the deal on a recent trip to Kenya.

He was offered the animals as a traditional African way of getting a father to give away his daughter's hand in marriage.

The dowry is a very generous one by the country's own standards.

Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor wrote to Mr Clinton through Kenya's Foreign Minister.

He said: "Had I succeeded in wooing Chelsea, I would have had a grand wedding.

"I would have invited South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu to preside at the ceremony."

The councillor gave the names of the former Kenyan president Daniel Arap-Moi and two of his college mates as character references.

Mr Chepkurgor also said he was also impressed by Mr Clinton's wife, Hillary, for standing by Mr Clinton during the Monica Lewinksy scandal.

He said Mrs Clinton acted like a "like an African woman".

319 journalists have so far signed the petition (in Ukrainian), asking Yushchenko to apologize publicly to Serhiy Leshchenko, the guy who wrote the Son of God pieces for Ukrainska Pravda, and to answer questions about his family's sources of income.

- Update: 9:30 pm - 416 journalists, though at least two of them have signed up twice - Natalya Katerynchuk (#185 and #320) and Halyna Kovalyova (#186 and #321), both with the NTN TV channel...

Political scientist Andriy Duda, however, points out in a piece in Telekritika (in Ukrainian) that some of the names on the petition (Boris Kolesnikov's press secretary, the editor of the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine's site) are sadly familiar from the times when it paid more and was in general much safer to be a conformist and pour dirt over Yushchenko.

***

The story of Yushchenko vs. the press has already made it to the Independent, BBC and RFE/RL.

I loved the following RFE/RL passage - I was so busy cheering for Yushchenko then that I only vaguely remember this joke now:

Last year's Orange Revolution elevated him to near-hero status, prompting many Ukrainians to joke that the only difference between God and their new president was that God didn't think he was Yushchenko.

It reminded me of what I wrote back in November, after watching Yanukovyvh offer candies or sunflower seeds to Putin during a parade:

[...] 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.

What happened now isn't funny. It hurts.

Here's what a dear journalist friend has written me today, when I asked him to be my periscope, to help me get a better feel of what's going on in Kyiv while I'm stuck in Moscow:

It looks ugly. I think it's the second major PR flop within days of the Goverla fuck-up. Yushchenko wasn't drunk. He just wasn't and isn't Vaclav Havel and that's a big problem for him and all of us who voted for him. He was addressing the UP guy by "ty" but I can sort of swallow that since, I'm sure, they'd known each other for quite some time. Still, even then, Yushchenko shouldn't have said what he said. He said, "Behave as a decent journalist and not as a hired killer." Jesus, Yushchenko won thanks, in many ways, to that particular guy and dozens other journalists and I hope he realizes that. His son behaves like a typical president's son and if I were his father I'd send him out to Africa to help people in Niger and learn about life.

***

Abdymok has also done a piece on the scandal - Hedgehog Day:

[...]

leshchenko told the nation’s biggest daily tabloid “fakty” on july 27 that he decided to write the story after a local resident complained to him about andrey’s reckless driving.

“one local told me that he came close to running over a family of hedgehogs that lives on lyuteranska,” he said. “we then decided to find out for ourselves how the president’s son drives.”

[...]

According to Abdymok, Serhiy Leshchenko is 24 years old and joined Ukrainska Pravda when he was Andriy Yushchenko's age, 19, on Sept. 24, 2000, just a few days after Georgiy Gongadze's disappearance.

Abdymok has more on Yushchenko's son scandal, including the complete translation of what Yushchenko said at yesterday's press conference.

Many people found the following passage especially hard to swallow:

however, if every day starts with a camera following my son, police being called, a camera being on till late at night, these are not journalists. as a father i'd like to say these are the people doomed to experience the same in their lives. or the generation of their children.

you can't do business as dirty as that. so i told my son, "son, i can only alleviate your soul with this advice: learn to defend yourself! learn to defend yourself! a bill? get that bill from the restaurant. how many were you there, what did you eat, what did you drink? put that bill in that journalist's mug, and then go to court! and learn to defend yourself!"

Maybe Yushchenko was drunk yesterday? And then he sobered up and asked his press secretary to write a reconciliation letter to Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian)?

Still, 62 journalists have (so far) signed a petition demanding that Yushchenko "publicly apologize to Ukrainska Pravda reporter Serhiy Leshchenko" and "answer journalists' questions about his family's income and expenses." The petition (in Ukrainian) is posted on Ukrainska Pravda site.

- Update #1: 113 journalists have already signed the petition.

- Update #2: 10:30 pm - 183 journalists.

- Update #3: 11 pm - 197 journalists.

On a different note, Oleh Yeltsov - who hasn't signed the petition yet - reveals (in Russian) that it was actually he who was supposed to break the "son of god" story:

[...] I, Oleh Yeltsov, declare with all responsibility that it was me who came up with the idea for this story approximately three months ago, after a conversation with one of the regulars of a [Kyiv] night club. From him, I learned a lot of curious details about Andriy Yushchenko's night life. I offered [this person] to write a story for [this] "Tema" site. [I] had a preliminary talk with his source of information, who was promised a rather humble gift, and the author himself was supposed to be paid a humble $30 (pardon me, but a freelance journalist's income does not allow to spend more). Due to objective reasons, the story's publication was being postponed, and then... it appeared in [Ukrainska Pravda]. The reason for this is not known: either the author wanted to have more impact, or to make more money. [...]