Yevgeniya Albats vs Anna Arutunyan - this seems to be the Russian LJ's new war.

Albats (LJ user ymalbats) has received 153 comments on this post so far.

Arutunyan (LJ user arutunyan) has received 512 comments on this post.

Most of it is in Russian, including Masha Gessen's reaction - here.

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More on the conflict - in my previous post.

Random links, in Russian and in English, in no particular order, and a few brief notes - I hoped to write more about much of this, but with Marta teething and other stuff, I have no time whatsoever. I tried to post this last night, but Blogger was down.

- Hilarious and absolutely pointless: Oleg Kuvaev's video-blogging experiments (RUS) - here (2 videos) and here. Kuvaev is the creator of Masyanya.

- My last night's GV translation of Kuvaev's intro to the first two videos and some other LJ-related stuff - here.

- In my Saturday GV translation - on the blog war that's going on Russia now - I mentioned Anna Arutunyan's 2005 piece on Russian bloggers - and then on Sunday, she gets grilled (RUS) by Yevgenia Albats on Radio Echo Moskvy for an opinion piece she wrote on Anna Politkovskaya for the Moscow News.

Arutunyan's piece is rubbish - I know I have to be more specific when I write something like this, but I really don't have time for this now. Okay, just one tiny thing, a quote:

When terrorists held an auditorium hostage during the Nov. 2002 production of Nord-Ost, she spoke to the hostage takers and made their demands public.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the end of the siege - and it's October, not November.

Still, the reaction of Albats has been inappropriate, misplaced, hysterical. It's bad for the general cause or whatever, to act like this: with friends like this, there's no need for enemies. Putin had referred to a newspaper article when he said those unfair things about Politkovskaya - and it would've been so much more useful if Albats had found the authors supplying Putin with this info and grilled them instead. Also - a few xenophobic callers drawn to the show by Arutunyan's Armenian last name have added to the terribly bitter aftertaste.

- In her LJ - which lay dormant for a year - Arutunyan writes (RUS) about the humiliating Albats experience and gets plenty of comments: here and here.

- Arutunyan's really long text on the media (RUS), published in Novyi Mir last year - here.

I'm posting the link not because I hope to read the text later, no, but because there've been many discussions about Russian journalism lately - how ironic that it's Politkovskaya's death that has inspired these discussions, not one of those silly Izvestia pieces on Ukrainian language (RUS)... It would've been more natural to start hearing more about kadyrovtsy using their cell phones to film torture, but no, instead there are all those pseudo-academic attempts to determine whether Politkovskaya was a journalist or an activist.

- A response to Arutunyan from the eXile, on what I assume is the Moscow News, the paper that published that pathetic Politkovskaya piece - here's the link, but I want to quote it here, because if it's indeed the Moscow News, then it's sort of-kind of relevant - and funny - even though it's from a year ago as well:

Dear Ms. Arutunyan,

If just one single article in your newspaper was as clearly written and
grammar-mistake-free as this sic letter to Rudnitsky, you guys might actually land your first paid advertiser, rather than having to continually suck at the teat of a disgraced oligarch. [...]

- Wanted to post a few links to Bolshoi Gorod - but their site seems to be down now. Who knows, maybe they got hacked for running too much of pro-Georgian content.

- Almost forgot: an opinion piece by Evgeny Morozov on the blog war, in the International Herald Tribune - here.

Several people forwarded the piece to me yesterday and here's part of my response:

sounds a bit too alarmist - and irrational... like, nossik is the virtual putin or something...

and the controversial figure in charge (Sup's chief blogging officer is Anton Nossik, the father of the Russian Internet and, among other things, a former associate of Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin's spindoctor).

[...]

Who would be to blame for destroying a viable and vibrant public forum and turning it into another Kremlin- medicated sanatorium? Nossik, Sup's blog boss, who increasingly resembles Ivan the Terrible killing his son in that famous Repin painting, should top anyone's list of suspects.

take marina litvinovich, who seems to be an archfoe of putin's regime now, creator of PravdaBeslana.ru, whose presence in the blogosphere is quite noticeable (lj user abstract2001) - she used to work for gleb pavlovsky at the time putin became president, too - she was one of those who helped him get to power...

if you think about her, then it's really hard to understand why nossik is so evil. i'm not saying he is an angel, i don't know that much about him, but i would've preferred to read a more convincing argument against him...

also, marat guelman (lj user galerist) - he used to be involved in exactly the same things as pavlovsky, manipulating politics, not just in russia, but also in ukraine, too, very notorious, and now he seems to be so innocent, he gets beaten up in his gallery, putin-bush-osama cartoons from his gallery get detained by the russian customs, it all does seem to be connected with the georgia scandal, with the rotten regime and all that - and he's anti-sup, too - despite his "kremlin spindoctor" past...

i mean, go figure...

Marta's still very feverish, especially at night... I haven't called the doctor - because she's not coughing, acts the same way as she always does, just takes naps more often and isn't all over the place all the time. I admit that I'm scared that the doctor would just prescribe antibiotics - I don't trust them. I think I can see where the new teeth might break through - I do hope they are the reason for her fever... But if she remains feverish tomorrow, I'll call the doctor.

So good yesterday, but in the morning, Marta woke up with a fever...

Something always gets in the way.

Must be her teeth - because there are no signs of a cold, just some low-grade fever and a really bad, cranky mood.

And I thought of taking her to Lavra for a walk...

Such a good day today/yesterday (Sunday) - must be because of the weather, Indian Summer. One of those days when I feel so happy to live in Kyiv.

Must be also because there are very few cars here on weekends, unlike the rest of the week.

Kyiv has grown so big; night traffic at the Besarabka/Khreshchatyk corner that I see from our window is mesmerizing - all the glowing, non-stop, like an electronic music video.

I've noticed today that during the day, when the crowd on Khreshchatyk isn't too drunk yet, there's a lot of beautiful Ukrainian language out there: normally, I pay more attention to what people look like, not how they speak, but today I kept eavesdropping on the bits of relaxed weekend conversations in Ukrainian - and loved it.

Loved it so much that, on the way to the tiny and cozy courtyard of St. Sophia's, I suddenly had a craving for something Ukrainian to read. I stopped at a tiny Ukrainian-language bookstore that exhibits a selection of its books outdoors when the weather's nice (located on that tiny street that starts near Zoloti Vorota and goes parallel to Volodymyrska towards St. Sophia's). I bought Lesya Ukrainka's biography (13 hryvnias/$2.60, published in 1971, signed by the author, Anatol Kostenko, for poet Oleksa Novytsky) and a work on Petro Mohyla - read from both of them while Marta was taking her afternoon nap. Loved it, of course.

On the way back home, I passed a group of krishna/hippie/dervish kind of people who do the Whirling Dervish kind of dance on Khreshchatyk every weekend. Two girls were circling around in a trance, in those amazingly beautiful skirts of theirs, a beautifully happy-looking bearded man was beating the beat for them on a drum, and another guy was playing some repetetive tune on a flute. A dozen or so people stood nearby, watching. Among them was an old woman - a village woman, most likely, though she wasn't wearing a headscarf - and she was singing, she was sharing the beat with the whirling girls and singing in Ukrainian, the song that I think I recognized because Mishah used it to calm Marta down in the first months - but he had been performing it in that exaggerated, funny "goat" voice, while the old woman on Khreshchatyk was singing it beautifully - "Oy, u vyshnevomu sadku, tam soloveiko shchebetav, dodomu ya prosylasya, a ty mene vse ne puskav..." (Update: mp3 is here - thank you, R. Smith!!!)

A lovely day.

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Two pictures from St. Sophia's:

Among other things, Natalya Gevorkyan writes (RUS) about Putin's/Russia's image in the West, the damage done to it in the past two months. Her feeling seems to be that Putin is not the puppet master anymore - which doesn't make him less responsible for the situation, especially considering that all this could possibly be the beginning of an emergency that would keep him in his chair for the third term.

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Valeriy Panyushkin has decided to quit political writing and is moving to Gala, a glossy magazine, of all things. He feels both good and bad about it; his last column in Gazeta.ru is here (RUS).

Rumor has it, Masha Gessen is moving to Gala together with Panyushkin. Her last Moscow Times column is here.

On the one hand, it's such a pity - first, Politkovskaya, and now these two. But on the other hand, at least they are alive, and, honestly, I'd rather read Masha's wonderful vignettes about her kids (RUS) than be fed the same old political crap, no matter how finely written, over and over again.

I asked my father today: he has worked as a tennis coach since 1958 - that is, he began earning money as a tennis coach that year, but worked for free before that, since around 1951.

Marta is crying a lot less when she sees him at home now - but she sobbed when he came up to us in the park this afternoon.

Looking for stuff to translate for Global Voices is getting more and more difficult: too often, I start feeling dirty after just a few minutes of browsing through Russian LJs.

One guy is shutting down his journal because the Russian segment of LJ is now owned by the "kikes." Another is asking on whose side you'd be fighting if you lived during WWII - and gets 1,192 responses. And one of the most popular searches now is on the upcoming Russian March.

I'm so tired of reading through other people's hatred.

And Putin, he seems to be courting this militant segment of the electorate, tries to be more like them and, possibly, lure them away from their leaders, the competitors. And it shouldn't bother him that what he's doing doesn't look nice to most people outside Russia: they aren't his target audience.

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I've translated a selection from Natasha Raslambekova's war diaries for Global Voices - here.

Sorry for the silence: I'm re-adjusting to the city life.

Back home, I keep having flashbacks to when Marta was a newborn - pretty amazing... I can't believe it ever happened.

I can't believe we've ever lived in Pushcha Vodytsya, either...

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Today, I decided to walk up the stairs from Franka Sq. to the presidential administration, with Marta in the stroller - and, after the first set of stairs, a cop came up to me and helped me carry the stroller all the way to the top. Extremely nice, even though I could easily do it myself - have had a lot of practice in Pushcha.

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In the park today, the color of the benches shocked me: gray. Not yellow, not blue - just gray.



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Marta is still scared of my father, but I can feel she's slowly getting used to him. Too slowly - she doesn't have much time before we move back to Moscow.

My father has raised hundreds of kids in his 50 years or so as a tennis coach - and now his own granddaughter starts sobbing whenever he comes close. How sad. He doesn't look or sound his best, though, and, most likely, never will. Even sadder.

Moving back to Besarabka was stressful: we haven't got much stuff, but for some reason it occupied way too much space - you should've seen the van we were riding in, how packed it was, and me in the midst of it all, with Marta asleep on my tit, all stuck in an unexpected traffic jam. You wouldn't have seen any of it, though, because of the van's fancy window tint. A family straight out of a Kusturica film.

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My computer's charging cable broke Saturday night - and I nearly went crazy, positive that I'll be arriving to the wonderful adsl connection at Besarabka without a computer. But thankfully, there is an Apple store in Kyiv (across the street from the stadium on Velyka Vasylkivska), so Mishah went there and bought a new cable today.

(Velyka Vasylkivska seems to be the only new, post-Soviet street name that no one in Kyiv feels comfortable using - most people still call it the old way, either Krasnoarmeyskaya or Chervonoarmiyska: Red Army Street.)

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The speed of my internet connection back home is amazing: so fast, it scared me at first! I can't imagine having spent four months on that terrible dialup, managing to accomplish anything at all!

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Khreshchatyk is so noisy, but it's nice for a change, civilization.

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The weather is horrible, no one's prepared for the cold, there're still plenty of people wearing summer shoes, etc, even though it's colder now than it was on December 31 last year.

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Marta is so not used to my father, she starts sobbing every time she sees him. We don't know what to do about it - any advice? Is she always gonna be this timid or is this the age thing? Poor papa... (She's not scared of the cat at all, however. Quite the opposite...)

We didn't have hot water again, for about 24 hours, not too long, but I panicked still, because it's already cold outside, and it's very cold inside the apartment (central heating doesn't get turned on until, I guess, Oct. 15, the day we're moving out of here), and no one I asked knew when it'd be restored.

So yeah, we are moving back to Besarabka on Sunday, after four months spent here. I'm happy and I'm not at the same time. Having to fight my way past all those cars with Marta not sleeping in her stroller anymore but STANDING in it - that's gonna be an adventure... But she'll have fun - so much new stuff for her to discover, including our two black cats...

She met her first horse two days ago, by the way - and got really scared. Cried non-stop until mama carried her away. Me, I've realized that I tend to fall in love with horses - I talk to them as if they know what I'm saying, and I have a hard time walking away, and I keep thinking about these encounters. Crazy. I rode a horse only once - for, like, 30 seconds...

The horse Marta and I met on Tuesday is one of the two that were brought to the sanatorium about half a month ago. I think they are planning to use them to entertain the visitors and their kids, at least this is what the guy taking care of them told us. A few years ago, in Kuchma's time, a notorious Russian TV guy, Kiselyov (don't remember his first name, and he's not the same person as NTV's Kiselyov), kept his horses at the sanatorium's stables - everyone here informs you of this at some point - but after the Orange Revolution, they stood empty and neglected. Now, there's Viking, the beauty we've met, and another one. I fed Viking some grass and am totally charmed.



Basically, he's another reason I don't feel like leaving...

One of the most depressing GV translations I've ever done - here... More depressing than maddening, though the latter emotion was there, too.

Was looking through the Russian papers to see what's being written about Politkovskaya - ran into an Izvestia piece on the "language issue" in Ivano-Frankivsk, titled quite radically: Diktatura Movy ("The Dictatorship of the [Ukrainian] Language").

It begins with a quote from Russia's foreign ministry:

"Elimination of the Russian language in Ukraine can no longer be ignored, [tough measures] now spread not just into the sphere of official communication, but to [everyday use] as well. The Ivano-Frankivsk officials have succeeded in this. In the city, it is prohibited to speak Russian on the premises of educational institutions, it is not allowed to hold mass Russian-language events and to paste notes in Russian. The Committee of Public Control, acting as the "language inquisition," watches over the observance of these rules. The Russian community's complaints aren't being accepted."

Then, this:

[...] Ivano-Frankivsk, named after a writer known for these words - "Study and leave politics alone" - has become the most Russophobic city of Ukraine. It is a miniature copy of Ukraine, which openly suffers from three problems: financial, gas and language. All of them are connected with Russia.

To read the rest of the piece, my dear readers, you'll have to learn Russian, and me, I'm going to bed. Na dobranich, spokoinoy nochi.

:)

President Putin said this about Politkovskaya in an interview with Suddeutsche Zeitung today (in Russian, here):

I have to say that her political influence (and I think that the experts will agree with me) was insignificant inside the country, and, most likely, she was more noticeable in the human rights and mass media circles in the West. Hence, I think - and one of our newspapers has stated this correctly today - that to the current government in general and to the Chechen authorities in particular, Politkovskaya's murder has done much more harm than her publications.

He also called Politkovskaya's views "too radical" - and "perhaps, due to this radicalism, she didn't have such a strong influence on the political life in the country and even less so in Chechnya."

The way he sat quietly throughout the whole Beslan horror must be a beautiful norm, then. Would've been too radical to make a statement on something as radically horrible right away.

And the way he lashed out at the non-murderous Georgians is also a norm, I guess, not something radically silly.

I was browsing pretty aimlessly, then decided to check the Photo of Grozny on Request page - it's not there anymore, I wonder why and where those wonderful guys are now - and then somehow I found myself at the Virtual Grozny forum, a very friendly place, it seems, and there, I downloaded 28 pages of Natasha Raslambekova's 1994 war diary - and I've just started reading it, and it's so heartbreaking, so horrible, and written in such an intimate way... It's in Russian, unfortunately, but those of you who do know the language, take a look at it...

Update: I've read half of the text, an overwhelming account. I hope someone will translate it one day. It's like reading a blog - one of those Haifa blogs, for example... It's raw, full of typos, lots of incredible, vivid details... Hard not to cry reading it. I wish I could translate it, but no, I can't.

Update 2: When I write that it's full of typos, I don't mean it's bad - it's making it real, too real. And "full of typos" is an exaggeration - there are some, that's it.

Natasha is 38 and lives in France with her family now. Her daughter was a little girl then and remembers only some of it.

What hell...

Update 3: She deliberately kept politics and the goriest moments out of her narrative.

I'm tremendously happy about this find - though 'happy' is probably not the most appropriate word...