Roulettian Intermezzo - Last Photo of April

Canal Griboedova is Ice Free!

A pair of beer cans float by as the finally ice-free waters of the Canal Griboedova erratically reflect the nearby buildings.  Spring is in the air, the trees are almost starting to bud, the grass is almost starting to grow, the sun is shining, and tomorrow is a holiday:  1 May, International Workers Day.  What could be better? Sometimes you get a winning hand after all.

Roulettian Intermezzo - Photo of the Week

The Ice is Melting, Signs of Spring

Temperatures still aren't tropical but Spring is slightly in the air as ice in the Canal Griboedova melts away.

Cabaret and Pocket Change

Start by admitting 
from cradle to tomb

It isn’t that long a stay.

Life is a cabaret, old chum,

It’s only a cabaret, old chum, and I love a cabaret!

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, Cabaret

The original inspiration for Cabaret was Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. This wrenching book (#58 on TIME's 100 Best English Language Novels since 1923) was a result of Isherwood's stay in Berlin between 1929 and 1933 when the sophisticated city danced on the perilous edge of upcoming destruction. 


A British native, Isherwood eked out a living as an English tutor and reveled in Berlin’s glamorous, scandalous night life, cultural creativity and sexual freedom, while mingling with firebrand Communists, wealthy Jews, homosexuals, and general bohemians before the catastrophic Nazi dictatorship swept over Germany and most of these colorful characters either fled or met their doom. Isherwood himself understood the signs of the encroaching times and headed off to sunny California not long after the Nazis acquired power and the concentration camp replaced the cabaret as a German national symbol.

Meanwhile, as Liza also notes in Cabaret „Money makes the world go around, that clinking clanking sound!“ and indeed, a little extra pocket change is generally a desirable thing. So from Cabarettian Berlin to Roulettian Petersburg, I decide to follow in Isherwood's employment footsteps and earn some extra roubles providing English lessons. My first student is a ten-year-old girl called Dearlise. Most Russians have predictable names: for women, it’s Olga, Masha, Natasha, Tanya, Sveta, or Ira.  My friends roll their eyes when I mention my student's name – it’s so incredibly pretentious.

Dearlise is sweet and slender, greeting me in a finely decorated apartment that lives up to the pretentiousness of her name. Vast and stylish, it exudes a faint whiff of nouveau riche kitsch, and my amazement increases when two finely groomed pedigreed Abyssinian cats are trotted out to meet me.

These are not the average Russian circumstances that I have come to accept as standard. I think of Uralian Natasha, who shares one narrow, cramped room in a communal apartment with her seventeen-year-old daughter. In the other rooms that seem not to have been renovated since WWII live two decrepit grandmothers that spend all day watching tv, and Azerbaijanean Nariman who hawks vegetables at a local market and cohabits with the blowzy Ukrainian waitress, Tanya. There is one kitchen and one bathroom between the six of them. It's considered a blessing that no one smokes or drinks much  and there are no feisty alcoholic scenes at three in the morning as is often the case in those crowded communal flats.

Well, Dearlise is a charming child and between reading Where the Wild Things Are and The Cat in the Hat in her spacious, lacy bedroom with puffy kingsize bed, upright piano, and florid rose wallpaper, I learn a little more about her circumstances. She lives in this luxurious apartment with her nanny, her grandmother and her grandfather, who she says has lots of secretaries and a big, black, expensive American Range Rover. Her real Mama and Papa reside with her six-year-old brother in Germany, where Dearlise was born. Mama is Ukranian and Papa italiano. Papa, it seems, was one of nine happy Italian children, and as the oldest thereof, he inherited the family’s apparently wildly profitable factory complex in Germany that produces rubber tires and the like. With all of this international confusion, I can't keep track of who owns what houses and where, but it's clear – while these folks may not be in the ranks of Prokhorov or Abramovitch, they're certainly financially far better off than anyone else I know, here of course, but even for the most part in New York! This also is Putin’s Russia. And personally, I'm thinking I should have requested a higher hourly rate.

So why is a girl possessing German and Ukrainian passports that was born in Germany to an Ukranian mother and an Italian father with houses and factories near Stuttgart, sitting here with me in a luxurious St. Petersburg apartment reading The Cat in the Hat?  I’m sure there’s an explanation somewhere, though it may not be a good one.

PS:  The new law has recently gone into effect in Petersburg that makes the distribution of gay propaganda illegal and so far four people have been arrested thereunder. There were hearings for two of the four on Monday. One was postponed because the arresting officer did not show up. The other person was found guilty of disobeying police orders to disband (the same charge that got Red Kirill into trouble back in March at  that unauthorized anti-Putin demonstration) while the charge of "homosexual propaganda" was left unaddressed. We'll see what happens to Madonna when she comes to Petersburg in August during a world concert tour: she plans to protest against this law.

Roulettian Intermezzo - Photo of the Week

                         

Pulling the sled in snow-covered Yussupov Gardens

Putin's Roulettian Ancestry and How Now?

In fact, it turns out that the former and future President of the Russian Federation is himself a rather roulettian character. There were so many chances for Vladimir Putin to end up never existing.


Putin's paternal grandfather was an excellent cook trusted in high circles: he prepared savory meals for Lenin and his clan and later also for Stalin, whereby he somehow managed to survive Stalin's sweeping random purges unscathed. Putin's maternal grandmother was killed by a stray bullet during World War II, her older brothers disappeared at the front without a trace. 


Putin's own two older brothers died as infants: Oleg passed away before his first birthday, Viktor succumbed to diphtheria during the first year of the Leningrad blockade and was buried in a common grave. Maria, Putin's mother, had the chance to evacuate out of encircled, starving Leningrad, but refused to leave her husband, Vladimir, who was wounded by a grenade in 1942. By the end of the blockade, she was so weak from starvation that she could barely move, and only her husband's additional soldier rations prevented her demise. 


Over a million people died before the blockade was finally lifted in January 1944, but two of those who survived the entire siege were, amazingly, Vladimir and Maria. In 1952, late in life and after so much suffering, they had a third child, the only one to survive: Vladimir Jr.

Vladimir Jr with his mother, Maria

Meanwhile, sixty years later, Putin has again been elected president.  A few weeks after the elections, the protests seem to be fading, the Snow Revolution is melting away.  Putin is at the helm and will be for awhile. Better? Worse?


Red Kirill says, "Of course worse. Everything is completely clear. The situation will deteriorate, you're going to have to be on the look-out at all times, if there's any way they can break you, they will. I am now facing existential decisions. Criminals are in power -- how am I supposed to live with this? Maybe I should sell my apartment and buy a cottage in the country so I can be left alone and pursue my art in peace?  You know the only thing that keeps me sane is that I have so much to do. I'm running from one event to the next, one project to the next. There's absolutely no time to think about what a disaster the whole country is in, how am I living, why am I living, what for? That's what's saving me."


Music Manaager Mischa retorts: "You're living on nothing, you're living for nothing, what can you do, let's have a drink!"


On the other hand, Russophile Nikita states, "Everything is in the best of order! Thank God Putin will be president again. And for six years. And hopefully another six years after that. In fact, I hope that when I die, a long time from now, Putin will still be president. And after I die, I hope he lives for another two hundred, three hundred years -- as President!"


When I point out the biological obstacles to that wish, he sighs and says, "Maybe doctors can do something in this special, important case?"

Roulettian Intermezzo - Photo of the Week

Footprints, Pigeon Prints -- Where is Everyone Going?

Imprisoned Billionaire and Released Red Kirill

I can recall October 2003. My last day as a free man. Several weeks after my arrest, I was informed that President Putin had decided I was going to have to "slurp gruel" for eight years. It was hard to believe back then. Seven years have already gone by since that day. Seven years -- quite a long stretch of time, and all the more so, when you've spent them in jail.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky during his final address to the court in 2010

One of the most roulettian characters in modern Russian times is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He grew up in humble circumstances in Moscow, but displayed a knack for seizing profitable opportunities. He started a computer-import business in perestroika times, went on to found one of Russia's first privately owned banks, and became unfathomably wealthy in the chaotic 90s when ruthless oligarchs made untold fortunes while the general population became ever more impoverished -- in his case, he amassed vast sums in the Siberian oil fields as head of Yukos Oil. In fact, he was the wealthiest man in Russia with almost uncountable BILLLIONS of dollars and was the wealthiest man in the world under forty. 


It seems that around the turn of the millennium, Khodorkovsky underwent an ideological conversion. Unlike other oligarchs who squandered their money on extravagant parties, yachts and villas and purchased foreign soccer and basketball teams, Khodorkovsky founded a charitable organization supporting Russian non-profits and human rights groups and completely revamped Yukos, making it one of the most profitable and transparent companies in the country. And he funded the political opposition, something that in Putinian Russia could clearly not be done without repercussions. A strong warning came when his partner was arrested in July 2003. At this point, Khodorkovksy could have meekly backed down or escaped to join his billions abroad, but instead, realizing that imprisonment was virtually guaranteed, he went on a speaking tour, insisting that Russia must join the modern world. While underway, he was arrested in October 2003, charged with fraud and tax evasion, subsequently also with theft and money laundering, and as a result of two frequently described as "Kafkaesque" trials, the once wealthiest Russian has been slurping gruel in various jails and prison colonies around the country ever since, while showing a sense of decency and dignity that perhaps few expected. At this point, he is scheduled for release in 2015.

Meanwhile, there is news from Red Kirill. He’s out of the slammer after being detained for over 24 hours, ostensibly for participating in an unauthorized anti-Putin demonstration and not following police orders. So as originally planned, on Wednesday evening we all – Lawyer Misha, Spanish Teacher Tanya, Golden Retriever Konchik, Red Kirill, and I – go to Lawyer Misha’s dacha about fifty miles from Petersburg’s center. It’s holiday time again in Russia: this time they’re celebrating International Women’s Day and we have a four-day weekend ahead of us, which gives us plenty of opportunity to hear Kirill’s political adventures a number of different times. 

Misha's dacha (lacking running water but sporting a well and a bucket) with Konchik enjoying the snow

The short version of Kirill's travails is thus:

With his red clothing and dreadlocks highlighting him as a beacon of dissent, he was almost immediately pulled out of the crowd by two OMON guys at 7:15 on Monday evening and brought to a bus that was filling up with other detained protestors and bystanders. Documents were checked, a few people were released, but most of them – thirty or so in number -- were transported to a police station on the outskirts of town – "the other precincts had already reached capacity.“ 

As we walk along the frozen, snow-covered river, Kirill regales us with his adventures.

The detainees were brought into a large room, there was more waiting while documents were checked and protocols completed. Water and some food from police cupboards were provided, but there were no blankets or pillows, people built their nests for the night as best they could. Kirill slept on a raised, stage-like platform that was covered with utilitarian carpet. "I can sleep anywhere,“ he said, "For me this was not problem. I have such a sleep deficit! There’s always so much going on! No time to sleep. So if I’m not doing something I immediately crash.“

"The cops were okay. They said, 'we’re not the ones who arrested you, OMON made us take you, we’re just doing our job.' And the other people with me, they were super, no criminals, all upstanding activists, I could sit in jail with people like that for a month. Tea, food, good company, what more do you need?“

The other face of OMON

"Alexander Ivanovich Vorontsov, Cavalier of Three Orders of Courage.

Our Work is to Protect Citizens"

This poster at a bus stop has been partially pasted over with ads for a one-room $300 apartment; apartment renovation; an office dispatcher -- girl between the ages of 18 and 28; and Oksana: "waiting to meet you!"

The next morning it was back in the bus and off to the center of town for an appearance at the courthouse on Sadovya Street.

"But the courthouse was so jammed with detainees that we had to wait in the bus. It was amazing, all sorts of people came to support us, asked what we wanted, brought us coffee, tea, food from McDonalds. The police took us to the pizza joint in front of the bus when we needed to use the restroom. No problem. Just that it was so cold in the bus and we had to wait so long.“

All those detained (the police say close to 300, the protest groups claim almost 500) were charged with participating in an unauthorized demonstration and failing to follow police instructions. Perhaps some folks didn’t follow police instructions to disband but at certain places on the square it was hard to hear anything the police were saying, and it was clear, OMON was looking to grab people. One recalls Stalin’s famous thesis: "Get me the person, and we’ll find the article to charge him with.“

Speaking of Stalin, not far from Misha's dacha, on private property, stands a benevolent Stalin statue, graced with fake flowers.

"So after hours of waiting, I finally had my, ahem, night in court. We had the choice to either sign and go home, or not sign and who knows what would happen? I thought about refusing, but there was no guarantee that I’d be brought back to that same precinct, you can’t tell the police where to take you. I might have landed in a real jail with criminals and alkies, hell on earth. Plus I was in custody for over 26 hours – exhausting! So almost everyone signed, we were fined 500 rubles per charge, altogether 1000 rubles [about $30].“ 

Kirill slowly started winding down, "I told them all, I’m going to these demonstrations because Putin says we’re living in a democracy. So I’m exercising my democratic rights. If it’s a totalitarian state, tell me and I’ll act differently. Yeah, well, they basically shrugged their shoulders at that. No, I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like a real human being. Putin just got elected for another six years and I was sitting in jail.  That was the right place to be.“

Finally, a joke from jail:  "If you don’t want your vote to be stolen, vote for Putin.“