What happened in Moscow on Monday is so horrible.

I was still asleep when my cell phone rang at 9:02 AM - the crazy alarm ringtone that keeps scaring the shit out of me and everyone around me every time I get a call: I imagine a sound like this is used on submarines in times of emergency - and I remember what a powerful effect it had on fellow passengers on the Moscow subway a couple times in the past - I even used to joke about it.

It was my friend calling - the mother of Marta's best friend here. She happened to approach Frunzenskaya subway station entrance around the time the second suicide bomber must have been passing right underneath, on the way to Park Kultury, the next station, where she blew herself up. My friend was running late - her daughter had been cranky that morning, and this had delayed her, and, possibly, saved her life.

There seem to be many stories like this one in this neighborhood now. Someone at the playground told my friend she was on that train, in that car, with her daughter - and the daughter, for some reason, decided she wanted to ride in a different car, so they switched - and the car they got out of was the one that blew up later. I've no idea if this is true or if it's an urban legend in the making. What matters is that wherever you go here now, you always run into someone who was close enough that morning.

Having Marta in this epicenter with me is unspeakably heartbreaking. I don't want her to know anything about it all just yet - but I had to explain that something truly awful had happened, and she kept asking me to be more specific, while I was doing my best to be as vague as possible. I told her there'd been an explosion, a big boom.

The risk has always been there - they keep saying now that it's been six years without major attacks in Moscow, but with the crazy mess that's been going on in Dagestan and Ingushetia all these years, it would've been strange to feel fully safe, plus everyone here seems to remember quite vividly the 1999 explosions, and Nord-Ost in 2002, and the 2004 subway bombings - it's just that most people try not to dwell on it too much, in order to keep going. And there is risk everywhere, not just in Moscow.

Beslan took place over five years ago, and I was only now beginning to recover from the shock and the pain and the horror of it. Marta's arrival 15 months after Beslan turned me into a different person. Also thanks to her, I was able to pull through my father's disappearance and death in relatively one piece in 2007. And now, too, her presence doesn't allow me to focus too much on the horror of what happened here on Monday - I can't afford to be depressed when she's around, and she wouldn't let me switch channels to watch the news, and we always have to run somewhere, or I have to force meals into her - so yes, she is the greatest distraction that can be. I'm very grateful - but I also hate myself for being forced to use her as a shield.

So I ended up escaping from Kyiv - to Istanbul, on Friday. Evacuated myself. My short-term emigration. Here are some pictures.

I've had this Nick Cave's (oops, sorry!) Tom Waits' song playing in my head for about a week now:



One of my most favorite songs of his, but I don't listen to music much now.

All started with this line this time: "If I stay here I'll rust." Again and again.

Used to be such an Iowa song for me - "The sky is red, and the world is on fire, and the corn is taller than me."

Now it's a Kyiv song, too... "And the places that I'm dreaming of, do they dream only of me?"

***

WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND

I've grown up here now
All of my life
But I dreamed
Someday I'd go

Where blue eyed girls
And red guitars and
Naked rivers flow

I'm not all I thought I'd be
I always stayed around
I've been as far as Mercy and Grand
Frozen to the ground

I can't stay here and I'm scared to leave
(Just kiss me once and then)
I'll go to hell
I might as well
Be whistlin' down the wind

The bus is at the corner
The clock's on the wall
Broken-down windmill
Ain't no wind at all

I yelled and I cursed
If I stay here I'll rust
I'm stuck like a shipwreck
Out here in the dust

The Sky is red
And the world is on fire
And the corn is taller than me

The dog is tied
To a wagon of rain
And the road is as wet as the sea

And sometimes the music from a dance
Will carry across the plains
And the places that I'm dreaming of
Do they dream only of me?

There are places where they never sleep
And the circus never ends
So I will take the Marley Bone Coach
And whistle down the wind

To recover from the election, I spent part of Tuesday night looking at other people's photos, hopping from one relatively random photo site to another, really loving it.

And then I went and made myself yet another pseudo-blog - Neeka Smetana - photography blog - to make it easier for myself and others to admire my own photos.

I can't figure out where to fit the links and other functional info, but otherwise it's all done and you're welcome to have a look.

(Another election post may or may not appear at some point later this week.)

No more surprises in the second round, I suppose.

98.70% of the vote counted.

Yanukovych - 48.64% (12,229,505 votes)
Yulia - 45.77% (11,509,152 votes)

Yanukovych's margin of victory so far: 2.87%

Against all: 4.38%

Voter turnout: 69.15%

Those "against all" votes and the no-shows look really tasty, and it's tempting to focus on imagining how they could've been Yulia's votes, etc., but that sort of thinking is such a waste of time. Yulia should've tried harder in the past five years - tried harder in many different ways - and then she would've beaten Yanukovych easily. She would've been running against a completely different candidate even, and Yanukovych would've been history - if only she had tried harder and had been more consistent.

I re-read my last night's post and felt sick because of all the silly figures of speech we are all so fond of using. An abyss, typhus, whatever. Tiger Yulia, damn it.

But, here's one more: we live in a ghetto, and if Yanukovych becomes president, the ghetto will grow a bit more overpopulated than it is now. Our everyday lives will resemble the Feb. 5 Yanukovych concert a bit more. Many things will not change at all: it will remain as scary as it is now, for example, to find oneself sick and in a hospital.

It could've been different.

According to the Central Election Committee, Yulia is 3.5% behind Yanukovych so far (74.43% of the vote counted).

***

The map of the vote looks the way it always does - one half red and one half blue, as if we indeed need to split Ukraine into two and each have the president we prefer. But it's not that simple, of course.

***

The only surprise of the first round for me was that Yulia got only 6.5% in Luhansk region - despite having Natalya Korolevskaya run things over there.

***

The only surprise of the second round so far has been that two people I have huge respect for decided not to abstain from voting for Yulia after they spent some time at the Feb. 5 Yanukovych concert on Myhailivska Sq. As I wrote earlier, you had "to get real close & hear it to really understand" why it was such a shockingly awful experience - and I shouldn't be really surprised that it had the same effect on these reasonable and determined people as it had on me - and actually I'm not. It's just that I had thought that nothing could force them to change their minds and end up "choosing typhus over cholera" or "eating the less smelly chunk of shit" - but the abyss between Yulia's event on Sofiyivska and Yanukovych's bacchanalia on Mykhailivska turned out to be too blazing to ignore.

***

Here's a video of Yanukovych supporters marching past me while Volodymyr Hryshko, an opera star, is singing a 1964 song (Beauty Queen/"Королева красоты") for them, in Russian:



***

While I was writing this and editing the video, they've counted some more votes (83.95%), and the distance between Yulia and Yanukovych has shrunk to 2.59%.

Also, Zakarpattya has become the first region with all the votes counted: Yulia won with 51.66% (279,631 votes) there, while Yanukovych got 41.55% (224,917 votes).

In the city of Sevastopol, the second location with all the votes already counted, Yanukovych has 84,35% (178,201 votes), while Yulia's are 10.38% (21,940 votes).

February 5, 2010

Sofiyivska Sq - Yulia Tymoshenko's "Prayer for Ukraine" rally:




Mykhailivska Sq - Victor Yanukovych's pop music concert:











***

A few more quick notes and pics - on Twitter. (I feel as if I'm cheating on this blog over there - feel guilty about it...)

Too tired - and too depressed - to write more about it. (Yanukovych concert was such a nightmare.)

Under a spell:

Went over to the Left Bank to visit our extended family, took these two quick photos with my iPhone (and the lovely Hipstamatic app):





We take it for granted, but the contrast between the gloomy bellies of our apartment blocks - podyezdy/paradnyye - and the cozy apartments that you escape to is just crazy...

I cursed a lot when I saw that picture of a Moscow cop detaining Lyudmila Alexeyeva (82 and dressed as Snegurochka), following the New Year's Eve opposition rally.

This profile of Alexeyeva in the New York Times is a much more adequate response to what happened than cursing - a cool way of sending something of a "fuck you" postcard to the regime. (Thanks for the link to Matthew Bown of IZO.)

Below are some of my favorite passages:

You almost feel sorry for the police officer tasked with detaining Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva as she led an unsanctioned protest on New Year’s Eve. It is not just that at 82 years of age she appears as fragile as a porcelain teacup, or that she was dressed as a Snow Maiden, complete with sparkly hat and adorable fur muff.

That is part of it. The other part is that as a young woman, Ms. Alexeyeva sat through so many K.G.B. interrogations that she rolls her eyes rather than count them. She was developing a variety of strategies to distract, deflect and otherwise irritate the authorities before the police officer’s parents were out of grade school.

Upon hearing the details of Ms. Alexeyeva’s arrest, Paul Goldberg — who wrote with her “The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era,” her memoir of life as a dissident — started to laugh. “They should actually print out pictures of Lyudmila Alexeyeva and hand them out to all the law enforcement authorities with a note saying ‘Do not arrest this person,’ ” said Mr. Goldberg, now an editor in Washington. “It is not fun to tangle with this person. She will make you feel like dirt, and she will not do it gratuitously. She will do it because you are dirt.”

[...]

Everyone knew the sentence for crimes against the state: seven years in a penal camp and five years in exile. On her way into K.G.B. headquarters, Ms. Alexeyeva would stop to buy a ham sandwich, an éclair and an orange. These were delicacies in the 1970s, even for the investigator, who was headed for a lunch of gray cutlets. Halfway through, Ms. Alexeyeva would unwrap her lunch and lay it out on the table.

“They reacted very nervously when they started to smell ham,” she said with a sweet smile. “Then I would start eating the orange, and the aroma would start dissipating through the room.” The effect was reliably hypnotic.

“That’s how I amused myself,” she said. “It was a way to play on his nerves.”

[...]

Kariye:

Eyüp Sultan:

Gülhane:

Yulia is closer than ever to becoming president - and our sissy boys are getting out of control. Or has it always been like this?

Here's what Yanukovych said (UKR) about Tymoshenko a few days ago in Kharkiv, as he refused to confront her in live TV debates:

They tell me it's pointless to argue with a woman - it's wrong, I don't agree with it. More than anything else, I regard her as prime minister, and she should take responsibility for her every word. And if she's a woman, then she must go to the kitchen and show off her whims there.

And here's what writer Oles Buzyna wrote about Tymoshenko in Rinat Akhmetov's Segodnya newspaper:

The way Yulia Vladimirovna aspires to become president is similar to how a woman twice divorced aspires to re-marry.

At our polling station, the turnout was 67.63% yesterday - about 1% higher than nationwide.

533 votes were cast, and 255 ballots (32.37%) were left untouched.

Of these 533 ballots, three (0.56%) were deemed invalid.

149 (27.95%) of my neighbors have voted for Tymoshenko;

106 (19.88%) - for Tihipko;

105 (19.69%) - for Yanukovych;

40 (7.50%) - for Yatsenyuk;

36 (6.75%) - for Yushchenko;

35 (6.56%) - for Hrytsenko;

24 (4.50%) - for Symonenko;

11 (2.06%) - for Lytvyn;

9 (1.68%) - against them all;

7 (1.31%) - for Tyahnybok;

2 (0.37%) - for Kostenko and Ratushnyak;

1 (0.18%) - for Bogoslovka, Brodsky, Moroz, Protyvsikh;

0 - for Pabat, Ryabokon, Suprun.