Oh, what a month.

The Ukrainian rallies seem to be so far away now. I stopped following the events there even before Piskun became our prosecutor general yet again. The most important thing is that there's been no bloodshed.

And what a week.

First, Yeltsin. Now Rostropovich and Lavrov...

Lavrov the actor, not the foreign minister; the latter is quite alive, commenting on the situation in Tallinn left and right.

Yes, and now the situation in Tallinn: I've just posted a GV translation on that.

And the week's not over yet.

***

Chernobyl's 21st anniversary went pretty much unnoticed - by me, at least, because both Marta and I felt pretty ill on that day. Marta is teething; me, I don't know what it was.

***

An interesting point someone made on Radio Echo of Moscow today: in 1999, there were no Russian billionaires on the Forbes list; in 2007, there are 53.

Just another way of looking at the years of Yeltsin's rule vs. the years of Putin's rule.

April 25, 2007
Near Novodevichye Cemetery, shortly after Yeltsin's funeral.

More photos - here.

The whole Communist faction at the Russian Duma refused to stand up to honor Yeltsin today.

This says a lot more about him and his legacy than all the obits in the world would.

Marta had her first radio appearance yesterday - on BBC Radio Five Live, Pods and Blogs show!!!

I'm kidding, of course: it was me who was being phone-interviewed in our TV room, while Marta was desperately trying to get past the locked door, screaming her lungs out... And I'm exaggerating, too - you can barely hear her, just a couple of times, a sound that resembles a cat's meow (myaaooo).

:)

My segment begins somewhere at 2:45 minutes into the show and lasts till about 8:15.

The audio is here, show notes are here.

UPDATE: The audio content for this episode seems no longer available at the Pods and Blogs site, so here's a clip with my segment (thanks so much, Georgia, for capturing it!) -

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First, Chris Vallance quotes from my last night's Global Voices translation, and then I say stuff about Yeltsin and about the Russian blogosphere.

I'm not saying anything special, but I'm still extremely happy. It was damn scary to be interviewed - I haven't spoken English in months, have only been reading and writing - but I think I sound okay. Yes, I do like the way I sound - it's a really nice surprise. :)

***

Thousands of people have come to the Christ the Savior Church in Moscow to say good-bye to Yeltsin - it takes at least an hour of standing in line to get inside and view the body.

Looks like Putin's got himself yet another peaceful rally - which he can't disperse, mainly because of all the Bushes-Clintons-John Majors coming over for the funeral.

The funeral is a good reason to do some repairs, too. Here's what LJ user grinka reports (RUS, my sleepy translation):

All the janitors that could be found in [Moscow's Central Administrative District] seemed to swarm on Prechistenka at 10 pm. They were washing the facades, painting lamp posts, washing shop windows. Evacuators were [towing cars away], road workers were shutting down [sewage holes] [...]. Someone standing in line [to view Yeltsin's body] said that by the Novodevichye [Cemetery] they had even promptly put fresh asphalt everywhere.

The timing of Yeltsin's death is outstanding: he died amid all the rallies, and the parading of riot police, and the endless talk of Putin's possible successor.

After reading Sergei Ivanov's interview in the FT just a few days ago, I caught myself thinking that I might even miss Putin a little bit if Ivanov became the next president. For a number of reasons.

And now everyone's talking about Yeltsin, and so many people speak of "the end of an epoch" - and so many admit that they miss the 1990s, Yeltsin's time.

***

A quick GV translation of the Russian bloggers' reactions is here.

***

A sort of a tribute to Yeltsin, from the piece I wrote for Euro-Correspondent.com in 2003 (no longer in their archives, though):

[...] Two years later, in October 2002, I was in a cab in Moscow, on my way to the Kremlin Cup finals. The driver was Georgian, and since he seemed interested, I decided to share some of the tournament's highlights with him. One was Russia's ex-president Boris Yeltsin, of course, who had spent over six hours cheering for a succession of this country's players on a previous day. No matter what one's political views might be, Yeltsin the Tennis Fan could be very amusing, even cute. The Georgian cab driver had a slightly different take on it. He shook his head in disbelief and fired out a curse in Russian so powerful and wordy that I think I blushed. Then he elaborated: "And look at our old fart, Shevardnadze! That's what he should be doing - retire and spend the rest of his life watching tennis! And instead, he is stealing and stealing and stealing, till nothing remains of the country!" [...]

Yeltsin has died, and somehow it's really hard to believe, and it's sad, too. Hard to believe they are mortals, you know. I felt the same kind of shock when Milosevic died, though there was no sadness at all then.

Yeltsin sat at a tennis game in Luzhniki just a few days ago, I've read. He was really good at it. (CORRECTION: Actually, he wasn't there, and it got people - Russian fans - worried. Sorry for confusion.)

Besides seeing him a few times at Kremlin Cup, I also bumped into him in spring 1987, when he was still a minor politician - but already considered progressive. He was visiting Ramenki then, a neighborhood in the south-west of Moscow - a really tall guy, sticking out of the crowd that gathered around him. Twenty years ago. We really liked him then.

RIP.

It is getting more and more surreal here.

On Sunday, a bunch of Russian human rights people decided to have a walking tour of last weekend's "battlefields" - the sites where OMON attacked, beat up and detained participants of the April 14 Dissenters' March, random passerby and journalists.

OMON fighters were awaiting them: seven people got detained right away, before they had time to gather in a group, and then the police followed the rest around - fewer than 20 people total, about half of them journalists, according to Marina Litvinovich (RUS), who was there with her son (a 5-year-old, I guess).

Here's a quote:

We walked, smiling, talking to journalists, and a walkie-talkie in the hands of an OMON guy nearby was saying: "They are just walking. What shall we do with them?"

OMON was definitely confused.

Photos from this walk are here.

And another quote from Litvinovich:

It may seem funny, but it's absolutely not funny. It's paranoia and fear. The regime is completely inadequate if it fears people who are just strolling peacefully.

Anyway, let's walk around our city! We are the free people and we aren't scared.

***

Litvinovich wrote that the majority of OMON guys had been deployed to Trubnaya (Pipe) Square - and, believe it or not, soon after they were gone, some 200 square meters of the pavement sank in somewhere nearby. (Most likely, it happened because of subway construction there, but still.)

Here're a few comments, again from Litvinovich's LJ (RUS):

el_cambio: The earth can't hold them anymore.

[...]

rgkot: What would happen if OMON guys jumped all at once?

abstract2001 [Litvinovich]: The Earth would come off its orbit and the global freezing would begin.

ilarion: Here you go: the gravitational weapon :)

***

Later that day, around 9:30 pm, some 30 activists of Rossiya Molodaya (The Young Russia, an anti-opposition movement) gathered by the Ukrainian embassy to protest Victor Yushchenko's pro-West policies: according to Gazeta.ru (RUS), they drove out a cart with "the U.S. president" sitting in it and "Yushchenko" acting as a horse; they also lit up firecrackers and dropped anti-Yushchenko leaflets over the embassy's fence. Gazeta.ru reports that

As a result of the rally, one activist, one journalist and a passerby were detained.

***

And here's what Sergei Ivanov, the man who may or may not become Russia's next president, thinks of all these marches and Russia's "civil society" in general:

[...] Russia is a huge country and mentally, unfortunately, the majority of the population, as before, relies on the tsar. Our civil society is still weak. It can’t be strong because only 15 years have passed since it began to be created.

[...] the majority of the people are apolitical, and I don’t see anything terrible about this.

[...] Monopolism of state power is harmful and we don’t even need to discuss this. But in conditions of weak political culture, when demonstrations easily turn into fights, when they close down roads, this just arouses aversion among the apolitical population, for whom it’s not important what slogans people are going around with, it’s important for them to be able drive along the road, and the rest they couldn’t care less about. There is a thin line between political freedoms and extremism.

[...]

FT: What do you think about the marches that are due to happen this weekend?

MR IVANOV: I don’t even know about them, I don’t really follow them. I know they happen from time to time, where about 100 people take part in the march and 2,000 police guard them. I think too much attention is paid. The only aim of the organisers of the marches is to attract the attention of the media. Why do municipal authorities ban marches, but allow meetings? Say whatever you want. We have freedom of speech. This is a free country. Read our newspapers. They write such things, sometimes you could say it’s total garbage. But print what you want, say what you want. But as for the marches, which you asked about. Here you are, here’s a place. Stand there. For a week if you want. Shout there, like in Hyde Park - Speakers Corner. Go ahead. But if you insist that you want to close down all the traffic in the centre of Moscow, if the interests of 10m people don’t concern you at all, if you couldn’t care less about them…any authority would say no because the majority of people are against this. And this really is the case, and there is no politics in this. If you want to demonstrate your opinion of the authorities, to criticise them and complain, stand here and shout. But don’t block the traffic. This is the principal contradiction.

I've read the interview with Sergei Ivanov in Financial Times and wanted to write down a few things, but I'm really tired right now, so I'll do it later, and for now, here's a picture from Kyiv - a crazy license plate on a Lexus parked near Mandarin/Arena City (taken with my cell phone)...

Someone's left this comment today/yesterday - thank you, dear Anonymous:

Ok. Sorry I am being out of every topic but somoone had to say it on this blog. It's been 2 days since we know: ... UKRAINE and POLAND will host EURO 2012!!! the 3rd largest sport event in the world. (..) I'm very, very happy.

I should've mentioned how happy and excited we are - but then there are so many things I fail to mention here...

And so much stuff going on in Kyiv that I'm missing, too...

But yes, Euro 2012 is such a great news - but there were no celebrations in Kyiv, nothing like what I saw on TV from Warsaw, right? We're too preoccupied with politics right now...

Yulia Tymoshenko's piece in Foreign Affairs: I've read it but don't really know what to make of it.

It's ghost-written, right?

Because, somehow, it reads like that huge text about Russia in LRB, and like a thousand other pieces of that kind.

And it is about Russia, not Ukraine. Which I, of course, find a bit annoying. Yulia Tymoshenko advising the West on what to do about Russia - instead of speaking out as an "expert" on Ukraine - an expert that she, hopefully, is.

***

An absolute trifle: "[...] the collapse of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991 [...]" - could it really be Tymoshenko who wrote this?

They celebrate Christmas about two weeks later here - Orthodox Christmas - and, moreover, very few people celebrated it back in 1991.

Sounds too foreign to me.

***

But overall, it's a very smoothly-written piece, and as tactful towards Russia as the context allows.

"Russia is not a police state," according to Tymoshenko. And it "is usually judged on the basis of speculation about its intentions rather than on the basis of its actions." And its "leaders deserve understanding for their anguished struggle to overcome generations of Soviet misrule."

***

Oh, and this reminded me of the conspiracy theory thingy that I quoted from a week or so ago:

Indeed, Russia may actually be putting itself out of the gas business, because high engineering costs for new projects in Russia are signaling to the market that Russia and Gazprom lack the capacity to develop these fields. Western companies could come in and do the job, but given the Kremlin's recent usurpation of Shell's investments on Sakhalin Island, these companies would be remiss in their fiduciary duties if they undertook such investments.

How strange that I read this on the day Shell had finalized its deal with Gazprom - and was forced to sound happy about it:

Shell’s Executive Director, Exploration and Production, Malcolm Brinded said: “Gazprom’s entry into the Sakhalin Project is warmly welcomed. Combined with the government acceptance of the Environmental Action Plan, this is another important step for Sakhalin II. The AMI should create additional growth opportunities for the partners in the future.”

***

Tymoshenko also mentions Microsoft at one point: they should bring Gazprom "into line" - the way they did with Microsoft.

And in the adapted version of this piece, published in the International Herald Tribune, she's so hip, she even writes about iPod:

One must ask how it is that Apple's iPod and iTunes are challenged by EU regulators yet Gazprom is not?

***

One last thing - a terrible sentence, whoever wrote it:

And dangerous new forms of tuberculosis - as well as of Islamist extremism among the 17 percent of the Russian population that is Muslim - are being incubated through neglect.

Another little GV translation, this time on the March in St. Pete, among other things.

I'm getting really sick of this subject...

Kasparov's aide and PravdaBeslana.ru founder Marina Litvinovich has posted recordings of the walkie-talkie conversations between OMON fighters - on April 14 in Moscow and on April 15 in St. Pete.

On Radio Echo of Moscow, they've been playing one of these clips all day long today, the edited copy, with beeps instead of the curses.

There's also this thread on RadioScanner.ru forum, where the folks were listening in on the police during the rally in Moscow:

Ivanov, April 14, 2007, 13:02:27 -

A quote: "There's no one on Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard! Not a single person, only OMON. Who are we supposed to detain, damn it?!"

Ivanov, April 14, 2007, 13:03:21 -

And in reply - "Detain everyone - with or without the attributes - detain them all!"

They'll have to detain the OMON guys :)))

(All links are in Russian, of course.)

Another Global Voices translation on April 14:

Russia: Dissenters' March in Moscow (2)

On the one hand, president Vladimir Putin's spokesman admitted Tuesday that there had been instances of "overreaction" by riot police during the opposition's weekend rallies.

But on the other hand, also on Tuesday, opposition leader and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov was summoned for questioning to the Federal Security Service (FSB), on suspicion that he had been propagating extremism.

There is a lot of media coverage of these two and other post-rally developments (here's what comes up when you google "kasparov kasyanov limonov" - this AP piece, for example) - but below is a bit more of what Russian bloggers have written about the Dissenters' March in Moscow itself, as well as links to their photos.

(Warning: as in the previous installment, some links here lead to blogs with bandwidth-intensive content.)

- LJ user drugoi (photos and video);

- LJ user jetturtle (photos);

- LJ user zhenshen (photos);

- LJ user sholademi (photos featuring riot police in the context of the city and its various ads and signs):

On April 14, OMON fighters in Moscow took part in the casting for commercials of world-famous brands.

- LJ user khit (text):

April 12, 2007 -

I'm a dissenter, too [I disagree, too], but I'm not going to the March. Because what I disagree with isn't what the Communists, nationalists, and Limonov people [limonovtsy, members of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party] disagree with. And don't try to explain to me that Communists and limonovtsy are absolutely not what they used to be, and that the nationalists who are going to be there are all good - derivative from the word "nationa" and not "ethnicity." This [mixed up mass] smells of unscrupulousness. Not political unscrupulousness (you can't surprise anyone with that now), but human unscrupulousness. Disgusting.

April 15, 2007 -

Yes! Yes! Yes! I went there, even though only a day before, I was explaining in detail why I wouldn't go. But I wasn't lying. [...] I don't regret having gone there. It was something to be seen with my own eyes. In order to once again realize that this regime is mean. And also to understand that, alas, we are not ready for resistance. Alas!

- LJ user orthannaer (photo, text - here, here, here, and here):

[...] An OMON sergeant. A normal guy. Some female journalist was trying to get him talk on the subject of whether he "enjoyed defending the regime" - so I also spent some time talking to him. I'll skip the conversation's beginning, here's from the middle:

He asks me: "Have you come here to cause something bad to happen?"

- No, I wouldn't want anything bad to happen. But if the fighting occured here, it would be my duty to tell how it all went, who started it first.
- Ah, come on, as always, you'll write that it was OMON that beat the crap out of everyone.
- If you start it, I'll write this. But if the NBP people set upon you, I'll write that they are the idiots.
- Oh yeah?

Then [an officer of superior rank] approached and we pretended that we were just standing next to each other. Then the guy said that they couldn't be photographed, and couldn't talk to journalists, and couldn't do anything at all - because they wouldn't get their bonus money if they did. I [ignored] this ban on photographs and took a picture, shooting upward, from the hip, and the guy didn't see it.

Anyway, what am I trying to say? If you approach them with hatred, you'll get hatred in return. Folks come out of the subway and look at the cops as they would look at animals, or mud beneath their feet (and I've seen many people like this today), and then they are for some reason surprised that they're being grabbed by their hands and taken to jail [obezyannik, "monkey cage"]. Cops are people, too. And they differ from one another. Just like anywhere else, some are bastards, and some are normal guys. [...]

- LJ user bee-n-noa (photos, text):

[...] When we started photographing the police, an OMON fighter came up to us and asked if we had any posters with us. When we asked him what he'd do to us if we did have posters, he said mysteriously: "Well, it depends on what the posters say." And after another question - "And what if it said, 'Putin, give us back the election'?" - he lost patience and said that he wasn't allowed to talk with us. [...]

- LJ user krocodl (text):

[...]

* There are many young people in the audience. I spoke with a friend a while ago, and he complained that he didn't like today's kids too much, because they seemed somewhat zombified to him. But there [at the March], there were many good faces, with thoughts and feelings in their eyes. This, of course, is a plus, but the minus is that OMON is aiming exactly at these very people. I heard it myself - when the Marsians [OMON fighters] were jumping out of the bus, their commander was yelling, "Grab the young ones first." With such an approach, they'll become even more interesting and more adult in a while, of course, but I'm afraid it'll get pretty hard to explain to them about law and non-violent resistance. [...]

* The second-largest group is, of course, people aged 50 and more. Something worth noting is that there are a lot more "middle-class" representatives now [...]. Pensioners and the very elderly people are the second most intense group, too, whose drive can only be compared to that of the National Bolshevik Party guys. An idiotic country, where only the youngest and the oldest can afford being active - because both don't really have anything to lose. [...]

Here's my Global Voices translation about April 14 - I hope to do a few more this week.

Russia: Dissenters' March in Moscow (1)

The volume of blog coverage of the weekend's rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg is truly overwhelming - as overwhelming, perhaps, as the number of riot police (OMON) deployed from all over Russia to disperse the opposition's Dissenters' March. But nowhere near as shocking.

Below is the first installment of links, accompanied with snippets of text translated from Russian. (Please note that many entries - arranged in no particular order - link to bandwidth-intensive content.)

- LJ user mnog (photos):

Don't feel like writing.

Photos (more than 50 (about 6 MB) )

- LJ user insie (other bloggers' photos, text):

[...] In the backyards near Tverskaya, I was surprised to discover little streams of people, who chose this path as the best, just like I did. In the backyards closer to Pushkinskaya, I saw trucks with OMON, police officers giving threatening orders via walkie-talkies, fire trucks and an ambulance. People walking nearby were on their cell phones, saying something like this: "See you later, unless I get detained." Made me feel uncomfortable. [...]

- LJ user serni (photos, video, text):

Disclaimer: I was present at the Dissenters' March out of curiousity only.

[...] When people moved forward, trying to break through, yelling, "There are more of us," the regime's forces produced sticks right away and started beating everyone who was in their way. It was the first time that I saw the enraged OMON fighters, walking towards me with sticks in front of them, beating everyone left and right. By miracle, I avoided the blows. It felt like a parachute dive. [...]

- LJ user dolboeb (photos, text):

Some OMON fighters, in the Ninja Turtles' outfits, looked appropriately intimidating and photogenic, but the pointlessness of their being there, their walking back and forth, seemed to tire both them and the audience. [...] As background for portrait shooting, the police looked great, I think.

- LJ user plushev (photos, text):

[...] We only got there at the very end of the rally, when they were no longer detaining or beating anyone - all were polite and respectful. The main and, basically, the only impression that I had the time to get was that they send A LOT OF young [police] women to work at rallies. Students of the police school, that is. Many were very beautiful, even in their ugly uniforms. Didn't manage to get a close shot of anyone - [my camera is too slow], and the girls were shy, they were turning away and asking not to photograph them.

- LJ user m_gaidar (text):

When they were taking me away, I called 02 [an equivalent of 911] and told them that I and a group of 20 people have been unlawfully kidnapped by people in uniform. The girl [operator] got very frightened and asked: "Where are you?" In a bus near Pushkinskaya, I replied, and the girl just hung up on me. I called again and asked her to introduce herself and register my call, because people in camouflage were taking us all in an unknown direction. She asked again where we were detained. I said, on Pushkinskaya, and she sign with evident relief and said: "Well... you know... here... We are just having a special operation there! Nothing to be scared of." A special operation against whom - against me?!!!!!! And what do you mean it's nothing to be scared of - for whom nothing scary? For you or for whom?!!! The girl was definitely feeling uncomfortable... said, please call the boss [starshiy]. "What boss?" I asked. "The one in camouflage," she replied. Okay, I see, you are all together in it, I said and hung up on her myself this time.

Anyway, I've now got a phone call from the prosecutor's office and they invited me to come tomorrow at noon to 19 Petrovka, to Boluchevskiy Sergei Anatolyevich and answer questions about my phone call. I said I'd come with journalists and a lawyer. They replied: "Yes, sure! Come with whoever you want..." Anyway, if anyone want to come along - write me. [...]

[A RIA-Novosti photo of m_gaidar's detention is here.]

- LJ user okalman (text):

I'm going to the March tomorrow... For many reasons. I disagree with the Other Russia, too, among other things, but I'm still going. [...] I don't like Kasyanov, nor do I like Kasparov, and even less so do I like Limonov. But if in the 1990s everyone wisely concluded that Yeltsin was a [Communist] party official and why would I go to the White House "for Yeltsin"? - then we'd still be living under Communists. [...]

I've finished posting April 14 photos.



It's depressing to be looking at so many cops (for the second day in a row), while also watching Kill Bill on Channel 1.

***

Below are some of my favorites:



George Michael is coming to Moscow.

***


Kto kuda, a my zhenitsa.

Someone's wedding, interrupted by a traffic jam near Pushkinskaya. Terrible timing.

I also saw a young woman in a maroon Mercedes with the wheel on the right side - she was trying to drive out to Tverskaya from one of the little streets, but the cop told her she had to back up and take a detour, and she replied, in a slightly hysterical but totally serious way, "But I don't know how to drive backwards!!!" - and the cop looked absolutely bewildered, and even asked her, earnestly, "But what can I do about it?"

***


"A million dollars into one pair of hands."

That's a casino sign, on Pushkinskaya.

***


"V mire zhivotnyh" - "In the Animal World"

An ad for a popular TV nature show with Nikolai Drozdov. (I mentioned him a while ago, in this post.)

***



This is Aleksandr Potkin, aka Aleksandr Belov, leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

I wrote a little about the movement here; and about Potkin-Belov and the Russian March here.

(Also, remember I was trying to locate the link to a Russian blogger's post about that wonderful old lady who went to every rally there was? - I've found it, thanks to Potkin-Belov!)

At the rally, he told the crowd about his car: an old Mercedes with the driver's door broken - so he has to get in through the passenger's door.

He also said he was sure the police would join him and his supporters when they march onto Kremlin - but not this time, later. Judging by his "bodyguards," it must've been a joke - though it's interesting that they arrested Kasparov for much less, yet didn't touch this idiot.

He was also screaming something like "Churki, out!" - churki is one of those offensive terms for the non-Slavic population.

He and Rogozin also believe that 70 percent of Russia's voters would vote for their new party ("Great Russia" or something) in the upcoming election. If they are one of Putin's "projects," the goal must be to get as many people as possible thinking, "If this is what the alternative to Putin looks and sounds like, well, maybe it's better to have Putin stay where he is."

Or maybe not, because why would Garry Kasparov want to invite Limonov and Anpilov to his bloc? And why should everyone anti-Putin worry about the fate of the leader of something called the Vanguard of the Red Youth? (Another ally of Kasparov, he was detained yesterday, too.)

Zyuganov's Communists have been doing pretty well in the regional elections lately - and perhaps freaks are what people here really want, and all the riot police gathered in Moscow for no reason are not making Putin himself look too adequate, so here you go.

Seriously, though, Russian politics is incomprehensible and too crazy, even crazier than what we have in Ukraine.