Just finished another Georgia translation for Global Voices - and have a craving for Georgian food as a result.

Seriously, though, what's going on in Russia now is so fucked up. If this were a person acting like this, the best way would be to ignore the moron completely. But Russia is too big and important to be ignored.

And the voices of the normal people in Russia are barely audible in all this noise. Reminds me somewhat of the cartoon controversy earlier this year.

And Saakashvili, he should've focused on making the country livable when he came to power, and all the Abkhazias, Ajarias and Ossetias would've come running to him then, and all those hundreds of thousands of Georgians forced to live abroad would've been able to return voluntarily, and instead, they are being deported from Russia now, picked at random, it seems...

But it is surreal, what's going on. Akunin, Tsereteli, schoolkids...

One more - I must be 10 or 11 here, definitely pre-Chernobyl:

Thank you all for your comments, for encouragement, for reading me. It's very important to me, even though I rarely comment back. Sorry for that.

***

Here's a picture from that trip to Georgia - my mama, little Katso and I - 29 years ago... Terrible quality, you can't really see anything on it, I'm afraid...

It's been so quiet here lately... Is anyone reading this at all?

I'm feeling lonely, I guess.

***

I've just posted a Global Voices translation on the Russia-Georgia cold war circus - here. Crisis, I mean.

Had a masochistic kind of fun working on it.

***

My very first memories are from Georgia: we were there in the fall of 1977 - I was almost 4 then. I swear I remember Tbilisi stone buildings, and the grape leaves covering our hotel's wall, and my father's friend Otar's big belly and his red polo shirt, and then we adopted a kitten in the seaside Lesilidze (that's Abkhazia, right?) and named him Katso, thinking it's the Georgian for "a friend," and I remember him sleeping in my mama's lap on the flight from Adler, and he lived with us in Kyiv for the next 16 years, and died Nov. 23, 1993, when I was in the States for the first time, and I grieved his death a lot, drank heavily for about a week even, despite being underage, and I still miss him, and then a Tbilisi Armenian classmate of mine, a refugee here in Kyiv, laughed really hard when I mentioned the cat's name to her, explaining to me that Katso meant something like 'a stud' - something like muzhik - in Georgian, not the innocent "friend" and not so fitting for a neutered cat...

I'd love to travel to Georgia again one day. And it's such a pity what happened there in the past few decades, and what continues to happen...

Heavy machinery took care of the pits and sand hills today, the landscape is returning to relatively normal:



***

On Khreshchatyk, they must've made an attempt to make it look less messy, but ended up creating more chaos: there is now officially marked parking on the sidewalk in the Besarabka-Khmelnytskogo segment, and a thick white line in the middle that's probably there to point where we can walk and where they can drive; some asshole nearly drove over me today; it reminds me of what someone wrote of Belgrade parking a while ago: how all those village newcomers have brought their customs with them - it's true, isn't it, that in a village you can park wherever you feel like, there are no rules there, no sidewalks, no nothing, and this is what Khreshchatyk seems to be turning into.

An impromptu Crimean Tatar reading overview...

Politics:

An interview (RUS) with Refat Chubarov, a Ukrainian PM, first deputy head of the Crimean Tatae Mejlis, conducted by Gulnara Bekirova, a Crimean Tatar historian and author, for a Simferopol newspaper in late August this year (reproduced at kirimtatar.com).

Here's why Chubarov voted for Yanukovich as prime minister - and his view on the coalition:

Election of Victor Yanukovych as Ukraine's premier was predetermined by the formation of the "anti-crisis" coalition. In my view, Our Ukraine and BYuT factions had only two ways to act in this situation: to be in the [...] opposition or to take part in the formation of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. Honestly, I have a hard time imagining myself in the opposition to the government where the key posts are nominated by president Victor Yushchenko, whom we supported in 2004.

Another motivation that affected my personal position is my understanding of responsibility for solving issues that have to do with well-being of the tens of thousands of our compatriots. Subsequently, what's important to me is the possibility of constructive cooperation with the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

[...]

The coalition situation is a mess. De facto, the process of creation of the coalition of the Party of the Regions, SPU and Our Ukraine faction began - but wasn't completed. So de jure, the "anti-crisis" coalition, which includes which [the Communist Party of Ukraine], continues to exist. And for me it is unacceptable to be in the same coalition with the Communists.

And some more on the "strange bedfellows":

- I'd also like to know what you think about the election of [Leonid] Grach, known for his attitude toward the Crimean Tatar problem, as the head of the [parliamentary] Committee on Human Rights, Ethnic Minorities and Interethnic Relations. Don't you consider this a serious retreat of the democratic forces?

- Of course, a committee's head plays a certain role in its work, but any decision is adopted during the session by the vote of the committee's members. [...]

In general, though, [...] democracy does have its own [ugly faces], as they would've said in the Soviet times: members of the committee headed by the former secretary of the Crimean Regional Communist Party [...] are Levko Lukyanenko and Mustafa Jemilyov, both of whom had spent over a decade and a half in prison camps for their struggle against the Communist regime.

***

History:

Gulnara Bekirova marks two anniversaries - Andrey Sakharov's 85th birthday (May 21) and 30th anniversary of Mustafa Jemilyov's Omsk trial - by quoting this story (RUS):

[...] The trial kept getting postponed. [Mustafa] Jemilyov had been on hunger strike for many days by that time. To take part and observe the trial, [...] Sakharov and his wife Yelena Georgievna Bonner arrived in Omsk, along with the activists of the Crimean Tatar movement. One of them was Aishe Seitmuratova, who [writes this] in the upcoming collection of her Radio Liberty stories: "The police weren't letting anyone except the mother and brothers inside the court building. Andrey Dmitrievich [Sakharov] and Yelena Georgievna demanded the right to enter. I took my mother's passport to try to enter - her maiden name was Jemilyova. The policeman attempted to drag the passport out of my hand, and I lowered it, and he wanted to grab it down there... [He] thought it was my hand and began twisting it, but it turned out to be Yelena Georgievna's hand, and started screaming: 'Oy, they are twisting my hands.' Andrei Dmitrievich promptly slapped the policeman on his face. Bonner had a tape recorder in her bag, to record the trial, and she started waving the bag, and it flew away... The police ran after it, but I, as a former athlete, got their ahead of them all - grabbed the bag, pushed it close to myself and wouldn't let go of it. They were taling Bonner and Sakharov away, and I was holding the door with my hands. But then I heard Sakharov's voice: 'Aishe, I'm ordering you to let it go: they'll detain me and will let me go go, but if they arrest you, they'll jail you. We can't free Mustafa, and we'll have to fight for you as well.' And I had to obey Sakharov's 'order.' In just 15 minutes, through our contacts, we sent the information to Moscow that Sakharov had been arrested. At the police department where he was taken, the police officer literally began to shake out of fear and fled when he saw [Sakharov's] IDs - an [Academy of Sciences member] certificate, three times the Hero of Socialist Labor. When Mustafa was being taken away, Andrey Dmitrievich ran after the car, yelling: 'Hold on, my friend, hold on.' Sakharov was demanding to meet with Mustafa to ask him to stop his hunger strike." [...]

***

Religion

A June 2004 article (.pdf file) in the ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World) newsletter, recently highlighted by the International Committee for Crimea: Islamic Knowledge in Ukraine, by Aleksander Bogomolov, Vice-President of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and head of the Modern Orient Department at Krymski Institute of Oriental Studies, Kiev, Ukraine.

Rather brief and academically dry - but hey, the subject is so undercovered that any mention seems precious, and when it does get into the spotlight, the tone is often quite hysterical. I was delighted to read this piece, even though it's from two years ago.

Here're a few passages on Islam in Ukraine - in the Soviet times and now:

[...] In spite of the absence of any institutionalized forms of Islam, such as formal mosques or a professional clergy, during the post-WWII period, religious life, as well as informal religious instruction, persisted within communities of the Volga Tatars who were scattered mainly across the mining region of Donbass, and within the compact Crimea Tatar groups of the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions; as well as among the Crimea Tatars living in exile, from which the majority returned in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[...]

The only formally acknowledged Islamic place in the public domain in that period was the cemetery — usually a section of common burial grounds, but sometimes having a separate location — such as the case of the Sverdlovsk Muslim cemetery (Luhansk region).

Beyond the cycle of these main ritual festivals and performances most Muslims gradually absorbed the behavioural codes of their non-Muslim environment. The mullahs and the pious were not able to insist on the full scope of religious observance; Muslim traditions were losing ground and were increasingly blended with common Soviet customs resulting in a rather unorthodox synthesis.

[...]

With the re-establishment of Islamic institutions and hierarchies in the early 1990, those pious Muslims who had been trained in informal settings of Islamic learning came to the fore. They filled the vacancies in the newly emerging clergy which was now comprised of muftis, deputy muftis, and imams. Some of the older religious leaders, after being succeeded by younger clerics, continued to be vocal public speakers giving voice to the traditional local Islam.

[...]

The local Islamic tradition is held in esteem by Crimea Tatar politicians.
Being nationalists they consider whatever is “our own” has greater value than any imported good. Thus they champion “our traditional Crimean Islam.”

[...]

With the advent of religious freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Muslim organizations and individuals from Turkey, the Arab Middle East and South Asia appeared on the Ukrainian scene. [...] Religious education and guidance is now being provided by a variety of international and national organizations, including the official Turkish Diyanet, Aziz Mahmud Hudayi Endowment, cemaats of the Suleymaniya, followers of Fethullah Gulen, as well as the Ikhwan Muslimun, Hizb al-Tahrir, Salafis, the Tabligh, and even Habashis. Many young Crimeans are eagerly studying Islam as imparted by these groups and often shifting from one to the other.

[...]

It is difficult to judge to what extent new types of religious knowledge and organizations impinge on the Muslim communities of Ukraine. Is it possible to say that some of the Ukrainian Muslims are actually Ikhwani or Suleymanci? For instance, are the youth distributing flyers of Hizb al-Tahrir in April 2003 and rallying against the US invasion of Iraq, Tahriris in the sense that they have adopted the movement’s ideology? Individual involvement and preferences continuously change. [...] However, the very idea that Islam involves more than ritual only is spreading and may lay out the foundation for a more comprehensive religious world outlook. What that would be remains to be seen: “We are trying to understand what is going on with our community in Islamic terms; we are looking for knowledge from all possible sources, but we do not want to be taught the one thing as being opposed to the other,” as one young Crimean Muslim put it.

(Not so brief, sorry.)

Here's our angel, 10 months old, mashaallah:

Mishah was in Nizhniy Novgorod last week - he liked it, was surprised to see lots of good modern architecture. His first sms to me, though, went something like this:

It could've been a very nice town, if it hadn't been for the Bolsheviks.

I was in Nizhniy four years ago - I don't remember much, probably because the Dubrovka/Nord-Ost hostage crisis happened too soon after the trip, but what I remember of the city isn't particularly nice. The weather was lousy, maybe that's why, or perhaps this is how my head functions, the way I notice only the shitty things in this part of the world, and they are the ones I end up remembering... What I remember of some people we met in Nizhniy is extremely nice, though.

Anyway, of the architecture, I remember being horrified by those wooden, dark-brown houses, once pretty, perhaps,but now looking like they are about to fall over, about to collapse and bury their inhabitants underneath the rubbish. These houses had the most beautiful carved decorations around the windows and below the roofs, but that didn't save the overall look. In Chernihiv, here in Ukraine, they have many houses like this, too, but they look a lot more cheerful, they do look cosy and are in a much better shape, and they are especially sweet in winter, when the icicles emphasize the carved patterns in a totally weird - and charming - way. I asked Mishah if he noticed the brown monsters in Nizhniy or perhaps I had dreamed them up, and he said that they were there alright, looking as ugly as I remembered them.

***

Mishah has posted four images from Nizhniy on his LJ - here. The first photo is of a "boutique" called "A Little Black Dress." The second is of the memorial sign on a residential building:



The sign reads:

This house was built in 1930 for the political exiles who had survived the Tsarist persecution. In 1937-38, most of the building's residents were executed.

***

To go to Nizhniy Novgorod, you have to buy a ticket for the Moscow-Gorky train. Only God knows why the Russian railway authorities insist on still using the city's old, pre-1990, name.

(Similarly, it's Leningradskaya Oblast - Leningrad Region - whereas the city has been re-named St. Petersburg over a decade ago.)

***

Here in Pushcha Vodytsya, there're plenty of old houses with carved-wood decorations - but they are deserted and, most likely, beyond repair. What a pity.

Whenever the noise about Russian vs Ukrainian languages becomes unbearable, I think about India and its official languages: Hindi, Sanskrit, English, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Maithili, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

And now there's a New York Times piece about the water situation in New Delhi:

[...] New Delhi’s water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities. Nationwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day.

An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can neither quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system.

Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.

[...]

The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks this city was born more than 2,000 years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India.

In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from heaven to earth. Today, it is a foul portrait of crippled infrastructure — and yet, still worshiped. From the bridges that soar across the river, the faithful toss coins and sweets, lovingly wrapped in plastic. They scatter the ashes of their dead.

In New Delhi the Yamuna itself is clinically dead.

As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency, the New Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water.

As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day.

Coursing through the capital, the river becomes a noxious black thread. Clumps of raw sewage float on top. Methane gas gurgles on the surface.

It is hardly safe for fish, let alone bathing or drinking. A government audit found last year that the level of fecal coliform, one measure of filth, in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.

[...]

New Delhi’s population, now 16 million, has expanded by roughly 41 percent in the last 15 years, officials estimate. As the number of people living — and defecating — in the city soars, on average more than half of the sewage they pour into the river goes untreated. [...]

Two years ago, Mishah's grandmother died. I loved her a lot and I still can't believe she's gone.

And Marta is 10 months old today.

Sometimes I feel that Mishah's grandmother somehow knows all about Marta. And sometimes it's really breaking my heart to think that she hasn't had the time to meet Marta.

Rest in peace, prababushka.

And here's an unusually short Zerkalo Nedeli piece (RUS):

At the end of the nine-hour session of the Cabinet of Ministers, prime minister [Yanukovych] remembered to mention that he was getting requests from numerous PMs to initiate amnesty for those citizens of Ukraine who were sentenced for their participation in falsifying the 2004 election (their sentences were suspended). We all understand what the matter is, said Victor Fyodorovych, and explained right away that teachers and mailmen were [...] "not the ones who ordered or organized [falsifications], they [merely carried them out. Right, Andrey Petrovich?" said the former presidential candidate, addressing vice premier Andrey Klyuyev... He said it and laughed loudly. And the audience [started laughing, too], for some reason.

I'm reading about the utilities and tariffs disasters - a typically endless piece in Zerkalo Nedeli (in Russian, though they'll probably translate it sometime next week). The piece covers Donetsk, Odesa and Zaporizhzhya regions (dry stats for the last two).

Here're two passages on hot water in Donetsk region:

Donetsk region's housing and communal services system is extremely diverse and carries the traits of the reformative labors of all the previous Ukrainian governments. Most towns and villages are served old-fashionedly, by the companies working at the regional level - the water is supplied by DonetskOblVodoKanal, and DonetskTeploKommunEnergo is providing the heat in winter. There is no hot water in small towns. Only relatively big ones with the actively working industry have it - Donetsk, Mariupol, Kramatorsk and a few others. But the communal services there have been the property of local councils for a long time; in their own lingo, communal service employees call such water and heat suppliers "independent."

[...]

In cities with "independent" water and heat suppliers, the local governments were the first to raise the issue of the new tariffs. Officials read the Law on the Housing and Communal Services and realized that after gas and electricity prices go up, they'll either have to compensate for the losses of the communal services from local budgets, or raise prices to the "economically justified level." According to the mayors, there's no money for compensation - and there won't be any in the future. This is why local authorities were very determined in demanding understanding and approval of such an unpopular step by the population - and they even came close to using direct blackmail. For example, after gas prices went up July 1, they immediately turned off hot water in the seaside city of Mariupol. City officials announced that they'll return [it] only after the new tariffs have been adopted. Exactly one month later, on August 1, Mariupol began to live [with new tariffs]. Communal prices went up nearly twice, within the limits of the "region's average."

We are still in Pushcha Vodytsya; the view from one of our windows, the one facing the children's playground, is still ugly - mountains of sand and clay, kids playing war on top of them, and a few guys still working down in the pits, fixing something, speaking in Ukrainian, cursing in Russian (cursing more than speaking). But we do have hot water now, and life is beautiful.

Marta's best friend - Artyom, a 10-year-old boy from the apartment next door - told me that their makeshift football field down in the forest by the lake would soon have the real gates - made from those old pipes they are extracting and replacing right now. Artyom's really happy - and I'm very happy for him and the rest of the boys, too: all they do here is play football and talk about it. Just like the boys in Turkey.

***

Soon, there'll be lots of bitching and complaining about Kyiv on this blog: we are moving back to Bessarabka in two weeks (or even earlier, depending on the weather and the landlady's plans). And then there'll be even more bitching and complaining about Moscow, as we are moving there sometime this fall, too.

If it were completely up to me, I'd choose to stay here.

I think I saw it on the news yesterday and today - there are rallies against rises in utility rates, in Kryvyi Rih, in Kharkiv. But I was running back and forth between the kitchen and the TV room, so I might have missed something. Maybe they were showing archive footage. There's a piece in the Kyiv Post on the relevant legislation, but I'm too sleepy to understand anything in it... I need a clone badly.

I was in Babiy Yar yesterday, briefly. A few photos, nothing special, are here, a Global Voices translation here. Eavesdropped on an elderly Odesa man telling some woman why Jews lay stones, not flowers, on their graves. The menorah monument is well-hidden - I remember we couldn't find it in 1995, and it took me a while to find it this time. I haven't been to Babiy Yar since then. There're fights going on about building a decent memorial there, I heard - I don't understand why a makeshift football field and a huge unfinished construction are better... It's horrible to walk through the park, past all the young mamas with strollers, after re-reading about the massacre. And to see kids playing near the monument to the children who died there...