I
t’s 5AM but I can’t sleep. I’ve just returned from the southern border of Chechnya. I’m in Kyiv now. Before that I was in Odessa. After that I was in Stavropol. It’s been a long eight week foray into Russia and Ukraine.
Most of my ex-Soviet colleagues and acquaintances thought I was crazy mad
to visit the Stavropol region. Well, actually they used a more emphatic Russian idiom. But it’s too difficult for me to transliterate and it’s the kind of word that gets bleeped on television.
Now I am in my flat in the Shevchenkivskyi Raion (district). If I walk across Artema and go west, I’m only a half-kilometer to the American Embassy. If I stroll east, I’m five minutes to the Lukyanivskaya metro station. The trolleys are only 200 meters distant, and run every two minutes to the Center (downtown). Public transportation is outstanding – and any ride of any distance will cost a whopping ten cents.
The police officers hang out and socialize in front of the local precinct, which is directly across from my 8th floor two-room apartment. Unlike in America, here “two-rooms” indicates a bedroom, living room, kitchen and bath. It’s clean and comfortable by any standards.
The “rental agent” is Vitaly Smirnoff. No, he’s not the heir to a vodka cartel, just an enterprising and prematurely balding Russian in his late 30’s. He speaks a decent English and tells me that (he) “doesn’t notice the bad smell around the elevator.” He says, “I’ve had visitors from other big American cities and they say it reminds them of home.” I wonder in what kind of “home” those people live.
There is some charm to his maneuverability with language. But as many others here, he doesn’t understand the Western business value of “customer relations,” of creating product image, of investing today for tomorrow. He’d rather weasel another ten dollars from you today, and risk your disapproval, than gain a grateful customer for tomorrow and, perhaps, a good word-of-mouth recommendation.
“So, what about the title to this piece and what about Chechnya?” you’re asking.
I confess: it’s almost a ruse. This essay is a little about a lot. It’s a skewed view that sometimes drinks from both sides of the cup. Most of the political java we Americans dilute with cream and sugar gets splashed on pages printed with a great deal of hype about Victims and Perpetrators, the Evil Axis of Power, exaggerated claims about Russian prostitution rings, and the so-called bad life behind the ex-Iron Curtain. And maybe it’s because I’ve been sucking down cartloads of caffeine, but somehow I haven’t felt too much different about being in Odessa and Kyiv than I have in Paris, Helsinki, Berlin or Tel Aviv. These are all very much cosmopolitan and European cities by intent and action, feel and attitude, if not strictly geography. And they are all rather agreeable cities to be in, if not even live in for some time. All the amenities you’d need for comfort are easily found.
You could live a nice life here in this countries capital for about $1,000.00 a month, and maybe for less but even more comfortably in the warmer Black Sea resort city of Odessa. Yes, Odessa, a city of culture and antiquity, the city where the central promenade overflows in the evenings with smartly dressed handsome men and beautiful women who appear to have just walked from a page of Vogue Magazine. Yes, Odessa, the city where my maternal granny was born.
* * * * * * * * * *
So, if one must know, I had an alternate agenda for this visit. It feeds directly to and from my “roots.” Woody Allen once quipped that “Jews look like whoever was raping their grandmother.” But with less wry cynicism and more clarification about assimilation, one easily observes that my facial features in no way resemble a Persian Jew, or a Yemenite, or an Ethiopian. But they do look a lot similar to some Cossacks. I know of no such recent intermarriage in my family, so maybe Woody Allen has a point.
Three of my four grandparents are Russian. And a grandfather is of speculative derivation. He had many stories but no dokumenti. But we know he could speak equally comfortably with Russians, Romanians and Gypsies. The Odesskaya granny influenced me most. She had translucent blue eyes and a great sense of humor. She once joked to me that I “performed well in school because our family came from Russian Intelligentsia.”
I’ll come back to Kyiv in a moment. But first a sidebar about Odessa and how we take our cultures for granted. When I was fourteen, my family lived near a recreational area in Hollywood, California that is officially named “Plummer Park.” For whatever reason, Russian immigrants focused on that area, beginning in the 1970’s. Now the area is almost entirely Russian – or gay (what an admixture). And that park is now filled with babushkas and their grandchildren. English is no longer spoken there – and it has earned itself a nickname: “Little Odessa.” From Heaven, I think my granny must be smiling about this.
Yes, Heaven. Why? If nothing else, for her sense of humor. Until the moment of her passing – which was exactly the day of her 100th birthday? She had her hair, her hearing, and perfect eyesight. And even on that day she smiled to my then fiancée and said, “Oh Alixander is so handsome; if I were only 60 years (!) younger I would give you competition.”
But granny was tired from watching another friend die every week. She wanted to leave. She waited until after the birthday party I gave her. She smiled and ate cake. And she even waited until the shift changed at 8PM, so her favorite nurse would go home. She left us at 8:35PM. If she hadn’t been a Russian Jew, maybe a Hindu instead, they would believe she “took a conscious exit from her body.”
Another sidebar: I now live in the foothills of Encino. My house is on a quiet street; the back garden has a multitude of flowers. But every possible ethnic restaurant is a short walk away. And for whatever the reason, it seems that when most of the Russian immigrants get a good job, they vacate Hollywood and move (where else?) to Encino! And Encino also has a nickname, “home of the Russian mafia.” I’m not so sure about any criminal underbelly. My streets are among the cleanest and safest anywhere. But for certain, the medical offices nearby have many doctors and clientele who now have names which end with
“-evich” and “-skaya.” I think my granny is smiling about this, too.
Last sidebar: Before my eventual many visits to ex-CIS countries, I could only speak the few endearing Russian words that my granny taught me. Well, those and also how to command my dog (сидите. Лежите…). Of course these commands later became convenient, if not silly, when applied to meetings with the female gender, while matriculating a year of my kandidat nauk in Moscow. But because of my granny, I also indeed assumed that the “official” word, in English, for cereal was “kashi.” Babushka molodyet!
* * * * * * * * * *
Okay, back to my story: Strongly in its favor, Kyiv has one of the finest public transportation systems anywhere. Yes, I am repeating myself – but it’s within the context of literary hyperbole and because I’m from the non-commutable and mostly grid-locked city of Los Angeles. But transportation in Kyiv rivals Frankfurt, Montreal and Moscow, if not in beauty but efficiency. You can get anywhere fast. And cheap. A single “anywhere” fare on any conveyance is 50 Kopeks (about nine cents). And like the very wintry city of Montreal, you can virtually live underground here, if you so chose, all winter.
All major intersections have pedestrian undercrossings (Los Angeles, are you listening?) which are connected to underground department stores, groceries, cinemas, cafes and pretty much whatever you need. And the city feels safe. Few might believe this, but I have less hesitation to walk around more places here in Kyiv (and throughout Ukraine) than I would in LA.
And I’m even surprised about the climate. At least in Odessa, the winters are mild if compared to cities in the Northeast and Midwestern United States. That’s important to me. I suffered through a “visiting professorship” in Tallinn, Estonia where a cold and bitter wind would whip the rain horizontally. It was like Sankt Petersburg. In absolute temperature, Moscow is colder but Petersburg and Tallinn are much less hospitable. I was wet and cold all winter. I developed permanent bronchitis for three winter months. After all, I grew up in Southern California where my warmest article of clothing was a leather sport jacket.
Certainly, if you choose to do business Ukraine or Russia, you won’t become profitable without learning to deal with some degree of open corruption. Taxes are avoided. Favors are bought. It’s really the same in the United States; it’s just not in the “open.” But more importantly, many of the Russian “working class” are refreshingly honest. Every city has its thieves. One learns to avoid them. But throughout Ukraine, I’ve many times bought something and simply let the clerk pick the correct change from my hand. And not once have they miscounted in their own favor.
I don’t want to be naïve or misleading. There is a dominant problem for Westerner in Ukraine: they too often are viewed as potential “gold mines.” The media has convinced most Ukrainians that Americans have inexhaustible sources of cash – and that this should be unreasonably shared with those who suffered from years of Communist oppression.
And there are the Russian girls who have married American men, often to find lives of bitter disappointment. They watched every episode of “Melrose Place” and believed it was a factual documentary! They expected that anyone who earned thirty thousand dollars a year must surely be able to afford “the good life.” And certainly “anyone who worked hard could earn ninety thousand a year!” Reality is often a bitter pill. Some of those women were experienced physicians in Russia and came to America, only to discover that their credentials were considered almost worthless. Some of them now work as medical assistants for $11 an hour. And there is no place in Los Angeles where one can survive on $11/hour. Our television told them and sold them that all Americans live like actors on soap operas. For the non-Americans reading this, trust me, we don’t.
Of course there is elitism everywhere in the world. One of my colleagues, Irina Ivanova, from Shevchenko University in Kyiv, says I’m “responded to in this way because (I’m) lodging in a workers neighborhood.” She says this with a slight but unhesitant air of disdain. I understand she implies that the intelligentsia are not only more aware and honest, but also better in class and quality. She lives here; I only visit. Only a fool would argue.
The University assigned me an assistant from day one. Sure I once had to translate a page from Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” for my professors before they’d sign off on my Ph.D. in “useless Liberal Arts” (as my astrophysicist friend Marina calls it). But it’s easy to “explain” what I’ve read in Russian on “page 151” when I can look at that same page in English! So with my miserable ability with the Russian language, my assistant, Natasha Yaroshenko, became my most valuable asset. And just so my readers can sound like they know something about that culture, if ever in this part of the world, her surname is Ukrainian, not Russian. People tend to get edgy if you mutate their genealogy.
Natasha and I get along, “if for no other reason,” as she says, “because we share the same birthday” – even if divided by 20 years. At least astrologically we “speak the same language” and, according to her, that’s what the art of translation is all about. Natasha told me that she “often translates from Russian to Russian for some of her clients.” She says, “speaking the same language is not the same as understanding one another.” Again, only a fool would argue with this.
Okay, Chechnya. Against all advice I tried first to hire a car to drive to the southern border of Russia and Chechyna. If you open an English language newspaper here, like the Kyiv Post, there are numerous classified ads offering cars with drivers. I called the first one. Sergei said, “sure, (he) has a late-model Peugeot 405 and 15 years experience that was available for only $35 for an eight hour day.” He also warned, “that doesn’t include parking in the Center.”
I’ve found most Ukrainian men to be candid if not somewhat lacking in financial finesse when discussing money. After all, parking is rarely more than a few Grivney, the local paper currency now valued at around 20 cents. In the West,
a proprietor would most likely include that within the 35-dollar purchase, as a token gift, a thank you perk to a paying customer.
Coyly, I asked Sergei if he would drive me south to another city on the Dnipro River named Dnepropetrovsk. He said, “sure but that’s a 24-hour day and you’d have to pay me $100 per day plus expenses. I won’t sleep in my car like other drivers,” he added. “My wife doesn’t like if I do that.”
Having set what I thought was a sly trap, I then said, “Well, that’s not a problem. I will set aside your expenses (this is their phrase) for an overnight in a reasonably priced hotel.”
Sergei said, “No problem then, when do you want to leave?
I thought I had him. I paused, then almost yawningly said, “Well, before we go to Dnepropetrovsk, I need to first go for a few days to Stavropol.”
I barely put a period on my sentence before Sergei nervously interjected. “You said Stavropol, that’s in the south of Russia…”
By now I’d heard it before so I tried to salvage the shot with a distraction, “Sergei, it’s even closer than Dnepropetrovsk. You do have your Dokumenti, don’t you?”
“Of course I have a Passport – that’s not it. But I’m not sumashehtshyj. Are you? There are bandits on those roads. They’ll take you, me, the car, chop it all up and sell everything back in Chechnya.” I could tell he was nervous; car parts I could understand – but human body parts don’t even make good dog food. I don’t know. Maybe the bandits would come with little Igloo ice chests and preserve our barely cold internal organs long enough to sell them to some desperate rich guy. But how many rich guys are there in Chechnya?
Sergei was out. I tried five others. They had a variety of opening prices that were related to the quality of the car I’d wanted, but the same response once I mentioned going anywhere near the tranquil green mountains on the Russian border of Chechnya. If a car is difficult, why not fly? Arriving by plane is awkward. There is no direct flight from here to there. First you must fly east and north to Moscow from Kyiv. Then you must change planes AND airports, before flying “backward” and south to Stavropol.
Changing airports is the worst part. In Moscow, most airport taxi drivers pay a vyigrysh to the local Mafia. If you are an obvious Muscovite, you’ll pay about $35 to shuttle between disembarkation and re-embarkation. But even if you speak Russian and are obviously a yokel, you could spend a whole lot more. If you’re a naïve, non-Russian speaking tourist, I’d advise that you ask your travel agent to handle this transfer, and simply have a hired car waiting for you. It’s been known that many tourists in this situation have been ransomed, only after handing over in excess of a hundred dollars – for a cab ride!
So, I went to the central train station in Kyiv, with Natasha as my guide. We passed another McDonald’s, which is indeed the king of quickie burgers in all of Eastern Europe. But I opted for a Ukrainian version of this fast food chain. At Shvalko, I decided on the most expensive combo plate on the menu. For about $3.00, I ate a tasty schnitzel, a side of nicely prepared mixed sautéed vegetables (it would make Mom happy), some au gratin potatoes, an ice cream and an apple drink. I decided we could use the respite and also added two “pints” (500 deciliters) of palatable beer in a plastic disposable cup. Both beers cost about $1.50, USA. Oh, and some chewing gum. Maybe it’s a fetish with oral hygiene, but they always ask if you want gum.
My multilingual aide had the Chicken Kiev combo meal, which was priced on the menu at a mere $1.63. (I grew up eating “Chicken Kiev” but never imagined that this dish actually originated in a place by the same name!) This included a side of vinaigrette cabbage salad, fries, an ice cream, and a lemon drink to wash it down. The total bill for me and my translator was almost eight dollars, but the calculator in my head had estimated just bit over $6.00. I asked Tasha to explain why it was almost higher than I’d expected. She explained it was because she didn’t like the salad that came on the Combo plate meal. Instead, she ordered a different one. Because of this, the counter girl had charged us for everything as if each dish had been ordered separately. I asked Tasha if she would be blasé about a 35% “surcharge,” if it were a pair of $100.00 shoes.
That lunch debacle cost Natasha a one-hour lecture on Western Economic Theory and the essential purpose for ordering “combo plates.” Unfortunately, I lost my audience somewhere between the topics of a “diving Dow Jones average and Alan Greenspan.” And I believe that everything she heard was only a little bird crying, “cheap, cheap, cheap.” This again is a cultural difference. In Russia and Ukraine, it is often thought that if someone has $500 in their pocket, then they have $500 to spend – and spend now.
As if in retaliation for my harangue, Natasha, almost in tears said, “Well, if you want to write journalistics, you should at least remember that it’s Kyiv, not Key’Ev. The sound is almost monosyllabic. It is not the heavily enunciated polysyllable sound of Key’Ev – which is what your Americans call our native chicken dish. If you are going to write correctly, then start speaking correctly.”
I should note here that many foreigners will be corrected (justifiably) about inappropriately referring to the country in two words as “the Ukraine,” instead of the single nominative of “Ukraine.” The first term implies a “region” whereas the second is a “country.” If you want to sound erudite, don’t make this mistake.
The train station was sprawling, nicely appointed, and mostly new. There was even a section where you could rent sleeping cabins while waiting between train transfers. The main hall graced us with the latest in computer generated billboards announcing the departure and arrival times and track locations of the trains for all major cities. For those who have succeeded in a program of speed reading, it even flashes these statistics in English for about three seconds. And there it was, Kislovodsk, a 31-hour train ride and the endpoint of my destination, plus another thirty kilometers and a three-hour bus ride south to Stavropol.
But even Natasha refused the invitation. Her best friend had been gang raped by drunken Muslims. But aren’t we told that “Muslim” and “drunk” is an oxymoron? She was fourteen at the time and spent the next two years in a mental hospital. At 29, she still eats the occasional antidepressant medication like candy.
So, I found someone younger and more naïve. Yana, at 22 and married, was working for the tourist rental agency from which the University had rented my flat. Upon our first meeting, Yana had proudly announced that she was my “colleague,” having also received her “higher education” (that’s what they call any degree garnered from five or more years of university) in English Philology. It seems that if you want to earn a better than average wage anywhere in the world now, you’d better be polishing your English skills. In my first three weeks here in the ex-Soviet republics, I received two nice offers to teach and one to assist a wealthy businessman who makes both chocolates and Jeeps.
Yana told me that she “asked her husband and even he thought my offer was generous.” I’d give her a month’s salary ($200.00) to accompany me on the train and to the southern Russian border for four days. No feminist would consider me a chauvinist, but I don’t think I’d want my attractive young wife locked in a private sleeping car with another guy for a few nights – but then who am I to argue sociology?
For me it was a great value. Yana would not only translate but watch my bags – which were worth over $2,000.00 just in clothes, camera, and Palm Pilot. When I needed to stretch my legs or attend to life’s necessities, these possessions would be at risk, if I were alone. Also, it’s not a grand idea to be speaking English on a train where impoverished people are crossing borders. One thing in my favor is one can not even buy a train ticket without first showing a passport. So, as a form of “insurance,” I’d also pay for her round trip train fare ($148.00) plus food and incidentals. This was a win-win situation. And the otherwise toilet-paperless and exhausting trip was made better by Yana’s keen acumen and witty repartee. As a self-confessed codger, the fact that an attractive young woman was my next-over bunkmate also didn’t diminish the experience.
I checked into the 3-star Intourist. It was clean, crisp and $35 a night. And that included the mineral baths they are famed for. Anzhela Beletseva was the manager and my next interview. I’d previously emailed her. And I’d expected a woman around forty years in age with forty pounds of stout around her middle.
The men and women from this geography are actually renowned for their lithesome figures and striking good looks, especially from the ages of 13 to 33.
Turkish and Persian princes of yore would send raiding parties to Cossack and Tatar villages to steal young girls for their hareem. But after 35, particularly the feminine gender gains about 5% in girth yearly, until they double in weight by age fifty. On all accounts, I’d guessed wrongly about Anzhela. In Los Angeles, it is uncommon to find a woman with sterling acumen, poise, and top-model looks working at a budget-class hotel.
The Governor General of the Stavropol region had been trying to keep “the border open” between Russia and the Georgian Republic. Until recent history, Georgia had been part of the USSR. Free flow of commerce and people was the norm. Then the so-called rebel extremists in Chechnya (situated between northern Georgia and southern Russia) began hijacking everything in sight. The hijackings turned to murder. Five local policemen (boys of 17 and 18 and barely out of the Academy) were found dead, decapitated and gutted like cattle.
Then came the apartment bombings in Moscow where people died just like those in the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The Russian people were outraged. Muslim extremists in Chechnya were getting bolder. The Georgian government, at risk of a coup, asked the Russian government to send more troops. They did.
Here’s a literary sidebar: Lermontov, the 19th century acclaimed Russian poet and contemporary of Pushkin, once commented in "Prisoner of the Caucasus" that “they were singularly useless bandits who for a thousand years never grew a crop or created anything of value.” Writing in a literary style similar to the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lermontov was opinionated but not racist. He died a stone’s throw from the Chechnya of today in the city of Pyatigorsk.
I asked Anzhela if she could tell me why the Russian consensus of those people seemed contradictory to that expounded by most Western media.
She said, “Sure. It’s always different. Everyone has an agenda. When my father’s brother died in Afghanistan, the Russians were the bad guys. But when the Americans invade the same place, suddenly it’s about freedom for Afghan women and because of 911. I feel terrible about what these Muslim terrorists have done to America. Everyone here feels terrible. We don’t dislike America. We never have. Such things are only propaganda. And sure I also feel terrible about what’s being done to the Muslims. No one deserves it. But please, maybe some sympathy. Russians didn’t start it. But why no one will finish it; this I don’t know about. And these bandits have been here, selling heroin and guns and stealing women to sell as prostitutes for much longer than the world knows about Chechnya. Tell me please, can your colleagues find this place on a map? “
For me her last question was rhetorical. A few years before and when I’d left for a visiting professorship to Estonia, most of my college educated peers thought that maybe it was, not on the Baltic Sea next to Finland, but somewhere in South America. And I did already know about the heroin trade. But this hers was a new angle on the prostitution business. I told her that I’d heard it was Russian mafiosi who operated an exclusive franchise on this ugly business.
Her mouth trembled as she spoke. “Sure, there are Russian mafiosi. Sure, sure. But where did they learn this? My best friend from school, stupid girl, got involved with a boyfriend who is drug addict. She begins heroin. She becomes addict. Boyfriend has heroin very cheap. He was in army in Afghanistan. He gets it from source – Muslim drug lords. My girlfriend is very beautiful. But she and he owe lots of money. One night she does not come home. Everyone knows where she is but can do nothing. She is in big house in small town, after the border of Moldova. She can not leave. Her boyfriend sold her for drugs. The trafficker took her by truck, through Ukraine to Moldova or Romania. Sure it’s true. Everyone knows it. Go to Prague. In Czech they pay most money for pretty Russian girls. But their mothers can only cry. And if she cries to many people, the traffickers will threaten her.”
“Why do you stay?” I asked.
“Not stay,” she said tersely. I will go to Moscow. I will be safer there. Western men have come here for beauty tours,” she said. They would come to meet our beautiful Russian women. Western men come here for brides. They have told me they don’t like their own girls with bad attitudes. But now these men go to Ukraine or Sankt Petersburg where it is safer. Tourism has dropped by a third. If I stay, where is my future?” She paused then said again, “I will go to Moscow. All the money is in Moscow. And I will be safer.”
Anzhela introduced me to the local police chief. Vladimir spoke barely more English than I speak Russian. Both Anzhela and Yana sat in for the interview.
I don’t need to repeat his story because it’s already been said. The only thing he added were the horrific details of how he had to examine the bodies of those boys whose parents he knew well.
I told him I wanted to see the border. To see the “crash sites.” Dima (his “short name” as they call “nickname”) shook his head. “Why do you want to see death,” he asked. “It comes to all of us even when we are not looking for it.”
After some insistence and for my own safety, he arranged an “escort” for us. Anzhela didn’t want to but came anyway and Yana, still naïve, insisted that she come – or else how could she “earn the money I was paying to her.”
The mountains there are green and serene, even mystical. You can feel the ghosts of our original ancestors. The anthropologists tell us that our prehistoric parents spread from these and similar mountains and germinated our first civilizations. Those were the first “Caucasians.”
They were the founders of the first cities in Mesopotamia and maybe the sailors on Noah’s Ark. Some believe that Adam and Eve were their children. The Armenians, also from these highlands, believe that they were the first civilization. And so this name refers not so much to ethnicity or the color of skin, but to the Caucasus Mountains that generated those beings.
It didn’t make the journey any more comfortable feeling those ghosts. I don’t like it when I can’t solve a problem. Even as a boy I would take my toys apart and then try to reassemble them, just to see how they worked. But the problem of lighter and darker complected Caucasians, at odds for centuries and with no end in sight, remains unsolvable for me.
Before taking the bus back to Nezinomysk (“Mineral Water”) where I would catch a flight for Moscow, for helping me I bought two dozen roses and gave twelve to Anzhela and twelve to Yana. They both became angry. Stupidly I had forgotten another of many cultural differences: you don’t shake hands or kiss in a doorway – and you only give even numbers of flowers at funerals!
I went other places. I talked to other people. As with anybody anywhere there is a difference of opinion. But there really is some sense of consensus here. And that’s especially difficult to find when it’s a cultural given that “women don’t like to talk about politics; it’s boring, it’s what men talk about.”
“So what do Russian women like to talk about,” I asked Yana.
“I’m Ukrainian,” she said. But mostly we talk about the normal things that women talk about. Clothes, food, our children, our men. And about love. We like very much to talk about love.”
I’m back in Kyiv. I won’t spell that name K-I-E-V ever again. I’m writing this draft on a computer with less than a gig of hard drive and Cyrillic letters on the keyboard. My back is hurting like the dickens because I’ve no where to stretch my feet as the computer is perched atop the kitchen counter.
One piece of luck, when I was twelve years young, I learned “touch typing” on the old manual Smith-Corona typewriter in my father’s office. Sometimes old skills come in handy. But it seems that Negotiation is one of the oldest skills known to human kind. And that’s a skill that doesn’t seem to be working right now. People who speak essentially the same language and come from the same ethnic stock will inevitably insist they are either Ukrainian or Russian. People whose ancestors came from the same mountains ten thousand years ago are still killing each other.
Natasha is looking over my shoulder now and reading this. She has said before that one thing that gets us both in trouble is our habit of being “too direct.” And Russian ethnic types prefer more room to maneuver in verbal communication. But with that, she has just asked me, “Why are you writing this?”
I say somewhat darkly, “Because some people are convinced, however foolishly, that I have some expertise and skills which they are willing to pay for. It’s my free working vacation.”
“No,” she says. “I don’t mean why are you getting paid. I mean why are you bothering to write this? Will anyone read it? Will anything change?”
Maybe she is partly referring to the anti-Kuchma demonstrations of the past day. The President of Ukraine is not a popular political figure and is a significant reason for the lack of influx of Western capital investment. Although Kuchma has beautified Kyiv, he’s also seen as a risk, as a future minor despot. I saw a portion of the ten thousand police, garrisoned across from my flat that he’d called up to quell the political demonstrations. I also came inches from crossing paths with a police truncheon and my Internet server was down for 36 hours while Kuchma vainly tried to suppress the westward egress of information about his efforts.
“Well, in that way,” I answer Natasha, “not enough will read this to ever matter. And those with the power are rarely concerned with the best interests of the public. Enron exists everywhere. So, I guess I’m writing this just because I need to. In the end, only the names change and most people will continue to believe whatever their hegemonic system markets. So, Tasha, I’m guessing that what I write probably will not matter.”
Natasha has never heard of Enron. The metaphor escapes her. Despite this, she responds with an “Aha,” said with that typically throaty inflection on the letter H. “Now,” she says, “you are starting to think like a Russian.
Endnotes: After the events at the Moscow Theatre, I received an email from the hotel manager in Stavropol. She said she will not now relocate to Moscow and that, “No longer is anyone anywhere safe from terrorists and gangsters.” She added, “I am sorry to tell you that Dima, the police captain, tells that more of his young boys have been murdered.” She then concluded, “I don’t know why there is everywhere such evil and violence. But I believe there is good in love and nature. I really believe this.” – I hope hers is not just youthful naiveté. I hope she is right. ◊◊
Impressum
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.11.2009
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