How Many Bottles are in the Wine Cellar of a Grand Duke?

In December 1917, some six weeks after the start of the chaotic Bolshevik Revolution, Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich Romanov received a horde of uninvited guests. Revolutionary soldiers arrived at his palace with orders to destroy his vast collection of wine.  For hours, bottles were smashed (and stolen), Madeira, Burgundy and Bordeaux flowed in rivers, glass shards glittered, Red soldiers lay drunk in the snow. 

This was the first destruction of property endured by the Grand Duke, but certainly not the last. Eventually, some months after his magnificent palace was seized, Pavel was arrested, imprisoned, and then shot along with three other Grand Dukes in Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress in December 1918.  


Interestingly, the Grand Duke himself had been banished by the Tsar in 1902 on account of his second marriage to a divorced woman who was not a princess of royal blood.  The couple spent twelve years in exile -- although in Paris, not Siberia -- and returned to Petersburg amidst the patriotic fervor accompanying the outbreak of World War I. Had they but stayed in la belle France what horrors they would have escaped!


In another roulettian twist, Pavel's son Dmitri by his first marriage had also been exiled  by the Tsar -- to Persia as punishment for his part in the murder of Rasputin in 1916. When the Grand Duke attempted to intervene on behalf of his son, the Tsar coolly responded, "I do not give pardons to assassins." Ironically, this banishment, a disaster at the time, meant that Dmitri, unlike his father, survived the revolutionary terror.


Meanwhile, Tour Guide Natasha takes me and an acquaintance from Moscow to visit two of her friends who live in an artistically atmospheric basement apartment with curved arches and rounded ceilings.  We have four bottles of Merlot between the five of us, which seems like a reasonable ratio. It's chilly, so we make mulled wine, complete with fruit and spices, in a pot on their handy hot plate.  


As we sip the results of our labor, Tour Guide Inna and Roommate Masha discuss how best to obtain future security.


"Marry well, my dears," advises Natasha.


"Marry well?"  they answer in chorus with eyebrows raised.


"Of course. What's the use of marrying poorly?" responds Natasha.


"Ach, Natasha, marry well?  Who can know?  No, no, it's less risky to rely on the miserable government pension than on marrying well."


It turns out that Masha and Inna are both in their thirties, and Natasha laughs, saying "Girls, girls, who knows if pensions will even exist by the time you retire! And anyway, the world is supposed to end this year, right?"  


This is a convincing argument, and Inna says, "So what are we worrying about?  If we survive, we'll figure out what to do next year. More wine for everyone!"


So how many bottles are in a Grand Duke's wine cellar?  Grand Duke Pavel estimated six thousand.  Actual count:  TEN THOUSAND BOTTLES.

Roulettian Intermezzo - Photo of the Week

Snow comes to Petersburg and the walkways must be cleared

Elections Then and Now

Not everything is left to chance or fate. For instance, elections in the USSR of old didn't include many surprises.  Voters then had the right to vote either for or against the unopposed candidate that had been pre-selected by the Communist party.  Predictably, under such beneficial conditions candidates usually received about 99 percent of the vote.

Stalin casting his vote.

The caption reads "For the people's happiness!"

Meanwhile, I asked Spanish Teacher Tanya about her voting experiences back in USSR times.   "What?' she said, "There weren't any elections then. Are you kidding?"

Her husband Lawyer Misha quickly contradicted her: "Of course there were! Don't you remember how as an incentive for voting you could buy food and other stuff at the polling center when there was nothing anywhere else?"

"Oh!" Tanya exclaimed, "Yes! That's right. You could! No, it wasn't cheaper, it was just that you could get it at all!  I still have a towel that I bought there years ago. It must be 25 years old! I forgot completely. I guess that's because they weren't REAL elections... Hmm, kind of like now!"

About those elections now, that is to say, the last parliamentary election that was held back in December, well, some things just don't add up.  Like the percentages in the Rostov region, where votes allocated per party totaled 146%.

The newscaster eyes the voting results for the Rostov region where the percentage cast for each party is listed.  When added up, the total is an impossible 146%.

This  mathematical impossibility has been interpreted as proof that the election was rigged in favor of Putin's United Russia, which is shown here as receiving 58.99% of the vote.  Next comes the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with 32.96%.  For some folks, the old days were no doubt better.

Later that evening, Student Igor tells me a joke that's making the rounds:

Barack Obama is concerned about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, so he calls the Russian Vote Counting Manager and asks for assistance.

"No worries," says the manager, "we'll hop right on it."

A few weeks later, Obama calls back for an update.

Says the Vote Counting Manager, "We have everything under control.  Putin is winning in all fifty states."

[originally published 19 January 2011]

Lenin and Red Kirill

St Petersburg was called Leningrad from 1924 upon the death of Lenin until 1991 upon the death of the Soviet Union. The man in question, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, was an almost unbelievably roulettian character. It's hard to imagine what Russia would have been like today had this radical revolutionary been content to relax in his rural hometown on the Volga in the soft comfort of bourgeois family life.

Instead, he moved to Petersburg, studied law, and took part in conspiratorial organizations against the monarchy for which he was exiled to Siberia. Thereafter, he went abroad, residing among other places in Zurich, where he heard the news of the February 1917 revolution that deposed Tsar Nicholas II. This was the moment! But how to get back to Russia?  War was raging and crossing international borders was fraught with difficulty and danger. A million things could have gone wrong, but with the help of the Germans, who hoped to foment internal problems in the land of their WWI enemy, he was transported back to Petersburg in a sealed train like (so Churchill) a "plague bacillus."  The plague spread, and Lenin stirred up a fervor that culminated in the Great October Socialist Revolution and the founding of the USSR.  


Meanwhile, Red Kirill sends me a text message:  there's going to be some sort of event tonight in an underground pub. I'm supposed to meet him at the Obvodny Canal metro station in one hour. Kirill is an artist, a continual dissident, an optimist with negative forecasts. His hair is tied up in dreadlocks and he only wears red, not due to any communist convictions, but because "Red is the color of hope!  And it makes it easy to buy clothes. I only look at red."


As we race along to the pub, Kirill talks and walks non-stop, ignoring red lights. "I only know one direction! That's forward. If I stop, I sleep. Ach no, nothing will come of the protests. This is a land of slaves! No one knows any better. My problem is Griboedovian: 'Woe from Wit.' I understand too much. If I didn't know everything, I too could be a consumer like the rest! But no, I understand it all. Putin says the Americans are stirring up the protestors. Ridiculous! It's the KGB! They know how to manipulate. They're causing dissension between the various groups. Then they'll strike. At first we were all working together, now everything is squabbling among themselves. Ach, things will never change, oh, here we are."


The pub is located in an anarchistically renovated cellar with low ceilings and red walls. A band plays loud music and the smoke hangs heavy. Kirill introduces me to Byelorussian Ilona, striking in dyed blonde hair, black-rimmed glasses, space-consuming earrings, white fur, and red plaid skirt.  


Ilona says that contrary to rumor, there really isn't a dictatorship in Byelorusssia. The pensioners love President Lukaschenko, it's the youth who are discontented as usual. They call it a dictatorship just to get attention. Of course the situation is bad, but...what can you do?


Suddenly, the door swings open and who strides in but Lenin himself! The crowd cheers. Following him are Father Christmas (the Russians use the Orthodox Church calendar which is fourteen days behind the western one, plus they celebrate for as long as possible: in short, it's still Christmas here), and somewhat unrecognizably, Putin as an extraterrestrial robot. Everybody wishes everybody else a happy 2012 as the band plays on.

Red Kirill, Lenin, Putin, and Father Christmas

The lyrics stick in my mind:
A happy new year to you and me
Now that we're free
Anything might be.


In Russian, this doesn't sound optimistic, but rather like a warning of impending chaos. As long experience has taught, that "anything" will most likely be bad. 


[originally published 11 January 2011]

Roulettian Intermezzo -- Photo of the Week

Moon over Fontanka

The first full moon of the year reflects in the still waters of the Fontanka Canal.

[originally published 9 January 2012]

Hippolyte and Cat Roulette

"If I had the power to prevent my own birth, I should certainly have never consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions. However, I have the power to end my existence."


Shortly after this dismal pronouncement, Hippolyte, distraught and delirious, takes a pistol out of his pocket, and in a roulettian scene similar to our previous excerpt from Lermontov's A Hero for Our Time, holds it to his head and pulls the trigger. There is a metallic click, but no shot fires. Hippolyte collapses in a faint and his astonished companions inspect the gun: it was loaded, but the overexcited Hippolyte had forgotten to correctly cap it.


Hippolyte is one of Dostoevsky's many intriguing minor characters. Just eighteen years old, he is consumptive and was recently informed that he has only weeks to live. Indeed, even though he survives this attempted suicide, he dies of the disease not long after in great agitation.


Meanwhile, consumption -- or as it is termed today tuberculosis -- has never been fully eradicated, and Petersburg still shows a fairly high incidence of the disease, especially in especially in prisons. It's also one of the most common causes of death in people with AIDS/HIV -- another group with a high Petersburgian percentage rate.  


Awareness of the problem is increasing, and a friend who works for a charitable organization took me along on an expedition outside the city to deliver powdered milk to new mothers with HIV.  This activity is part of a multi-faceted program aimed at hindering further transmission of the disease. 

Conditions disintegrate pretty rapidly in this suburban outback an hour or so drive from Petersburg’s architecturally magnificent center. 

After crossing the dreary parking area and heading up a desolate, decaying staircase we reached the apartment of one of the program’s recipients. She was out at a temporary job (my friend deemed this a big improvement in the situation) and so we were greeted at the door by Babushka. The cramped apartment housed not only her, Working Mama, and several children -- as usual, the guy, an alcholic and the one originally infected, lived elsewhere and had nothing further to do with the family -- but also eight cats and two dogs.  In the midst of the furried frenzy my friend caustically remarked "It’s rather like a zoo in here.“ 


Babushka, nearing fifty, bedraggled and missing teeth, replied sheepishly, "Yes, but the animals, you can’t let them stay on the street. I have to take them in or they’ll die  We try to give them to other people. I’ve already gotten rid of a few, but these...“


Her voice trailed off, while the winners of the cat roulette variously lounged on the bed or skittered off the walls and one of the canine winners peed on the wooden floor.

A Winner in Cat Roulette

As we headed back to the car, a pack of unkempt dogs loped by (I couldn’t help recalling a brutal film I caught last October at the NYC Russian Film Festival in which marauding hounds devoured jovial Uncle Yuri) and a few unhappy losers of the cat roulette skulked around the battered garbage can.

A Loser in Cat Roulette

Pack of Roving Dogs in Lightly Falling Snow

Shortly thereafter, on the way back to Petersburg we passed another roulette loser.  Evidently a pedestrian (perhaps drunk?) underestimated the amount of time needed to cross the road and was felled by an oncoming car.  His body parts lay strewn on the road, his head smashed red on the wet, black pavement.

[originally published 4 January 2012]

Happy New Year!

As the roulette wheel of life spins into 2012, here's wishing us all a valuable, rewarding, meaningful New Year.

[Originally published 1 January 2012]

Griboedov and Protestors

Back to Alexander Sergeyevich Griboedov -- the statesman-author slaughter in Persia for providing refuge to three harm escapees. What roulettian circumstances occurred in his life! Griboedov was one of those superbly educated, reform-minded, liberal members of the wealthy aristocracy who had been influenced by European ideas of freedom and democracy. Like Pushkin and Lermontov (and indeed also Alexander Hamilton) he was involved in illegal dueling escapades, but unlike them, he managed to emerge from these adventures alive. He joined the diplomatic service and spent years (some of the a type of mild exile as punishment for one of those dueling affairs) in the Caucasus and Persia, occasionally returning to Russia, where on the estate of a friend he finished his brilliant verse play Woe from Wit. This Russian classic mercilessly satirized anti-refom elements in society and was immediately banned by Tsarist censors as subversive. Like Pushkin, Griboedov associated with the Decembrists, a group of reformers that unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the conservative, autocratic Tsar in December 1825. He was arrested in January 1826 as the police tried to sort out what his contribution to that plot might have been. Warned in time, he managed to destroy piles of incriminating documents and was exonerated several months later. Then the roulette wheel spun again, and Griboedov was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to Persia. Stopping off in Georgia, he married a sixteen-year-old princess and brought her with him to Tehran. There he met his untimely brutal death at the hands of the mob outraged over his protection of those harem escapees. His body was so badly mistreated that it was only later identified by a dueling scar on his left hand. 


Meanwhile, since Putin & Co didn't rescind the election results or arrange for new elections, the protestors gathered again, on 18 December, in Pioneer Square around Griboedov's imposing statue.  Last week there were about 7,000 people, this week it was closer to 4,000.  The mood was relatively festive and towards the end of the demo, an accordion player started tickling the keys with Russian folk songs, gathering around him a small crowd who sang and danced to the tunes.

 Special Forces stand on the edge of Pioneer Square while the protestors gather around Griboedov's statue

"My vote was stolen"

"The power of the empire will be overthrown"

A member of the crowd yells, "Hey guys, what's wrong with empire? Empire is great.  It's just that we've got the wrong emperor!"

Munch's Scream: "Give back my vote" 

(or as a play on words, "Give back my voice")

"We don't need a revolution! We need fair elections!!!"

"It's simple. 4 + 9 = 49" 

(referring to the 49% of the vote that Putin's party, United Russia supposedly received in the recent parliamentary elections). Virtually all of the signs and banners are directed against Putin. Medvedev isn't mentioned much at all. 

"It's not important how they vote, it's important how the votes are counted"

A relevant quote from Stalin is tacked on the festive barricade around an artificial Christmas tree  

Some folks don't seem to mind the chilly temperatures

Police hang out near the Golden Arches

No New York City Dept of Sanitation trucks here! 

After police and protestors dissipate once the demonstration comes to a close, one lone man with a broom of twigs cleans up Pioneer Square. 

A few police officers linger on. The billboard behind them reads:  "New Year's with Ferrero Rocher" 

Indeed, 2012 is only two weeks a way and who can guess what it will bring? You already know, it's roulette!

[originally published 18 December 2011]

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to All from Petersburg's Palace Square

which has seen a number of its own roulettian revolutions.

More on that later. For now, be of good cheer. Here's wishing the best of luck, chance, fate to everyone for the upcoming holidays.
[originally published 24 December 2011]

Sakharov and Protestors

Andrei Sakharov was another person for whom the roulette wheel spun in amazing, unpredictable directions. As he himself said, "I am a man with an unusual fate."  A nuclear physicist who was partially responsible for the development of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union, he later became a renowned dissident and defender of human rights and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.  He was convinced that human rights should form the basis of politics and due to his activist stance endured internal exile, police surveillance, and when he went on a hunger strike, forced feeding.


Meanwhile, it was on Sakharov Square, near his impressive statue that protestors gathered today, 24 December, in the continuing demonstrations against Putin & Co.  Under falling snow -- the first since my arrival here -- a crowd shouted the usual anti-Putin slogans and listened to a variety of speakers interspersed with rock bands.

 Statue of Sakharov, his hands are bound behind his back as a prisoner, in the background are the stage and a demonstrators.  

When asked who who would help ensure the upcoming March elections were conducted fairly and properly, the whole crowd raised hands.

From left to right: "Santa Claus, for Christmas give us a new president."  "Putin is a good reason to live abroad" and "Send Putin to North Korea!"

"Freedom to Political Prisoners" 

With special forces and their vehicles in the background:  it seems even Santa is now against Putin.

The first snow of the season settles across the city and gives the chance for snow graffiti: "Russia without Putin."

As before, life beyond the police barricades proceeds fairly oblivious to the chants of the demonstrators.  

Once again, some people try to earn a living.  On Haymarket Squre, this man is promoting money within five minutes and with no deposit.

Other people get married.

And some people just don't seem to mind the cold. Or perhaps they prefer style to comfort.

After the demonstration I went to a Christmas Eve party at Tour Guide Natasha's.  Intellectual Sascha said "Don't worry if you don't understand the political situation. None of us do."  As the vodka flowed, Natasha proposed a Holiday Toast to all our friends, near and far.  Cheers!

PS: Actress Larissa sent a short text message. She says the Twelve Chairs event with Nigerian Prince went even worse than expected. Details will follow when we see each other.

[originally published 24 December 2011]