As astute readers will have noticed, I am no longer updating this website. Don’t worry, I have not been expelled, or worse, from Russia for anything I may or may not have written, said or thought about the Russian government.
On Saturday I leave Russia–God and the winds permitting–to start a new life in the West. If you’re interested in peering through some of my photos, they’re here and likely to grow in number.
But if it’s more delicious recipes you’re after, I recommend Epicurious.com.
The 200 climate experts in St Petersburg for a climate-change conference were surprised when the conference began with a speech from the only government representative present which expressed doubts about global warming. Citing the warm colours of the Dutch masters as evidence, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, a former paratrooper, informed the scientists “In reality, the scientific basis for the protocol is fairly weak.”
In the restrained words of the St Petersburg Times, “On this point, Mironov stands on the fringes of global scientific opinion.”
Also in the news, the temperature in Moscow went over 30 degrees for the first time in May since records began, hitting almost 33 yesterday. Here in Petersburg we’re in the high twenties, and very humid, and it’s not even summer yet. I hope Mr Mironov remembered to pack a light suit for the conference.
A few readers have privately taken exception to my blanket dismissal of Soviet cinema as “extraordinarily boring.” I was referring (in my own head at least) specifically to the Stalinist-era tripe which, in my experience, involves a lot of cheesy propaganda and tedious celebrations of the glory of Communism and Stalin but not a lot of anything you’d watch if something was on the other channel.
BUT I’d like to offer a forum for constructive feed forward. So, for the betterment of the Apricot Flan community and my own cultural advancement, I invite you to submit the names of good films from the Soviet era, in the comments of this thread. Or forever hold your peace.
Why did the chicken cross the road in St Petersburg?
To get a better look at the more than 18,000 buildings which date from before 1917 and form the best preserved central city in the whole world.
Why was the maharajah disappointed with his trip to St Petersburg?
Because the St Petersburg zoo is the only major European zoo not to contain elephants.
An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman were travelling on the St Petersburg metro.
“This metro network seems unusually deep,” said the Englishman.
“Yes, at 80-100 metres it’s the deepest in the world,” added the Scotsman.
“It would be quite immune from attack with conventional munitions,” replied the Irishman.
Why did the insomniac leave St Petersburg?
Because between the 26th May and the 16th June the sun never sinks lower than seven degrees below the horizon, resulting in the famous “White Nights.”
What do you call the biggest “second” city in Europe?
St Petersburg. It’s bigger than all other European countries’ second biggest cities, and the fourth largest European city overall.
How many bridges does it take to make a St Petersburg?
800.
There’s not a massive overlap between people interested in Russia and people interested in triathlon, but I thought I’d post this here anyway. I’m working on a new website called: triathlontube.com. Basically it’s a whole bunch of video clips relating to triathlon (Ironman especially) and related sports. Just launched, but I’ve got lots to add already. I’m going to run a Tour de France special in July too.
So if you’re interested, check it out, or please do forward on to friends who might be interested. Thanks!
The biggest problem with watching Soviet films is they tend to be extraordinarily boring. However, this clip from The Fall of Berlin (by Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949) is quite interesting. You don’t need to speak Russian to get the gist of what’s happening.
Note especially the presence of British and American flags, the healthy looking concentration camp survivors (who must have simply raced from Poland to be in Berlin in time for the arrival of Stalin) and a soundtrack by no less a composer than Shostakovich.
As a side note, Shostakovich had spent many years treading very close to the precipe of the Gulag for his “formalist” music (a euphemism for too difficult, not rousing enough), but there’s no doubt he was an enthusiastic patriot. During the Nazi seige of Leningrad he wanted to stay in Leningrad as a firefighter–his eyesight precluding frontline service–but was flown to safety to keep writing rousing tunes. Whether he wrote music for propaganda pieces like this, well after the war, out of patriotism or for self preservation remains a subject of debate.
As this blog is very rapidly turning into broad, shallow generalisations about one complex and diverse civilisation, I thought I may as well bring America into the mix. I enjoyed this exchange between two Americans sitting opposite me in the internet cafe just now, it strikes me as kind of typical of the loud, pointless, friendly conversations middle aged Americans are required to master before travelling overseas:
- You should get a mask for the air pollution.
- Really?
- You should.
- I should?
- Yes. My doctor told me to get one. So I did.
- You did?
- Yes I did. And you should. It filters the air.
- The air is filtered?
- That’s right. Filtered. It’s good for allergies. And it’s good for pollution.
- All right!
- So get one.
- I will.
- My allergies have gone away. And the pollution, it doesn’t matter.
I’m reading a book at the moment called Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917. The central thesis is intriguing: Russia never developed as a nation because of the demands of maintaining an empire. Consequently, it was forced to follow a different path of development from the more homogeneous and increasingly self-aware nation states of Europe.
Anyway, I was struck while reading one passage by how little some things have changed over the last two hundred years (yeah, I know this isn’t very academic, but it’s interesting all the same):
The operation of monopolies offered the best prospects of making a fortune in Russia, as one can see from the career of Vasilii Zlobin, a state peasant from Saratov guberniia, who in Catherine II’s reign won the favour of Procurator-General Viazemskii and was entrusted with the running first of a distillery, then of a whole tax-farming operation.
He used his wealth to acquire licences for the sale of salt in several provinces and of playing cards for the entire empire. Soon he was making half a million rubles a year and riding around in ‘a magnificent coach, in fine clothes, with a diamond medallion at his throat, the title of an honourary citizen, and millions in his purse’. True, his fortunes proved as vulnerable as his acquisition of it had been sensational: when he suddenly lost imperial favour, he was accused of irregularities, had to mortgage his possessions, and died in 1814 a bankrupt. (p. 250).
I enjoyed this from a 1950s who-am-I television show in which Salvador Dali admits to being a television leading man, a comic book artist, a writer and a sportsman.
Check out this screenshot from the website of Stuff (NZ news) this morning - see anything which makes you gloomy about the future of our once great nation? And in a World Cup year too.
A friend recently needed to travel from Sochi, a town in southern Russia, to a port farther up the coast from where he could take a ferry to Ukraine. He thought he’d be smart and take the coach directly along the coastal road, and avoid a big loop the train takes.
The cost of the coach ticket itself was 150 roubles, around US$6, for the twelve hour journey, but that would turn out to be only the tip of iceberg.
Over the course of the journey the coach was stopped five times by local police with the sole purpose of extracting bribes. Five times he was threatened with imprisonment, deportation or heavy fines for some unspecified visa infringement.
At four in the morning in a remote spot he was removed alone from the coach, menaced with AK47s, handcuffed and made to wait in the police car–all part of the intimidation readily used to extract bribes. By this stage he had run out of cash for bribes, the one offense which is truly not taken lightly.
All in all, the bribes cost an additional 2000 roubles, around US$50, not to mention a fair degree of psychological distress. So if you’re weighing up your travel options in Russia, err on the side of train travel. It’s difficult for a rickety old police Lada to stop a moving train, and on-board extortion is rare.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think the Putin’s clique’s grip on power or popularity is anywhere near as strong as the Western media insists. Without fleshing out that point anymore because I’m in a bit of a rush, here’s some interesting news which points in roughly the same direction (with a few important caveats):
Almost half of Russia’s voters expect that the parliamentary election this year will be falsified by the ruling elite and defy the will of the people, a new poll indicates.
In a sign of discontent with the Kremlin’s manipulation of party politics, the Levada Centre discovered that 65% of 1,600 respondents were in favour of returning the chance to mark a ballot “against all candidates”, a right removed in order to cut down on protest votes.
Only 8% of those surveyed predicted that the election in December would be fair, and a third said they would consider the new parliament illegitimate.
I’ve been holding off writing about last Wednesday’s V-E day commemorations in Petersburg until I could put my finger on the source of a strange feeling I took away from the main parade down Nevksy Prospekt. It hit me suddenly as I swerved around a lamp post, while running over the weekend.
And here it is: under all the standard military parade carry-on, the re-enacted euphoria, the genuine gratitude, the pride, I’m sure there ran an undercurrent of nostalgia. It’s peculiar to imagine, given the awfulness of Russia’s war, sandwiched between two awful periods of domestic bloodletting, but in the beaming old ladies waving posters of Stalin and the vintage jeeps (complete with costumed soldiers) and the trucks blaring ballads and dances from the 1940s it was unmistakable. Even if it happened to take me a few days to unmistake it.
For the most part the parade consisted of lines of veterans–still so many–variously marching, goose-stepping, hobbling and rolling their way up Nevsky Prospekt between companies of serving soldiers, bands and display pieces, like the painted trucks playing old music. Most waved enthusiastically back to the crowd which was cheering, clapping, waving ribbons and calling “oorah!”, which roughly translates as “hoorah!”.
Once again, the city pulled out the stops for the celebration. Nevsky was bedecked with Russian flags and banners, and the immediate surroundings groaned with posters wishing a happy victory day, and banners in orange, red and black. Never mind political hijacking: the massive billboards on Palace Square devoted to Victory Day were proudly and prominently brought to you by United Russia, the party of power and probably the patrioticist of the lot.
The atmosphere in the evening, after the fireworks in Palace Square, was altogether different. The crowd thronging away from Palace Square reminded me more than anything of a football crowd. Chants of “Russia! Russia!” broke out periodically. To me it felt unpleasant: intense and angry.
Just the medicine the doctor ordered. In the midst of the Estonia statue nonsense (more about that later) and preparations for Victory Day celebrations (yesterday) it was interesting to read a new nationalist party in Russia has formed from leftovers of an old pro-Putin party and an anti-immigrant agitation organisation.
At the launch, the leaders of Great Russia promised a nationalist platform without oppositional politics. It sounds therefore like another of that special Russian breed: the political party which competes with rivals to agree the most vehemently with Mr Putin.
My initial reaction was that it looked like another Kremlin pet project, designed to corral popular sentiments into manageable, pro-Putin pens. Fair Russia, hastily created to present a semblance of a multi-party system before recent elections, is one of these.
But looking closer I’m not so sure. Some of the leaders seem to have genuine grievances with other parties and it looks like they’re preparing for a fight to gain official registration–something a pro-Kremlin party need never contemplate. Further, pro-government parliamentarians are already demanding an investigation into whether the party is funded by forces overseas; a well-trodden route for discrediting a rival. It will be interesting to follow the clues as they emerge.
A little about the leaders.
The party’s founder, Dmitry Rogozin, isn’t officially a party member, due to concerns this might hamper the party’s registration efforts. He used to head Rodina, which held 9% of the seats in the Duma before being folded into Fair Russia. Shortly before that happened he was pressured to step down from the leadership, apparently due to his increasing popularity.
Rogozin at the launch (seated at left)
He has three degrees, in journalism, economics and philosophy, and is an established anti-liberal nationalist. By way of proving his credentials his book promotes itself by way of critical quotes from now-reviled liberals of the 1990s, such as this from one of Yeltsin’s team, Anatoly Chubais:
All that is behind Rogozin is Nazism, which destroys the country and should be destroyed.
The two co-founders are Andrey Savelyev and Alexander Belov.
Andrey Savelyev was elected to the Duma for Rodina but refused to move with the party to Fair Russia. He is a tae kwon do expert who brawled with Zhirinovsky in the Duma, as captured by the following clip. Savelyev is the one who starts off seated. Observe his tidy deflection of the Zhirinovsky jab, and his straight, trained counter punches. A pro:
Alexander Belov heads the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, which agitates against immigrants in Russia and raises funds to support natives who stand accused of violence against dark skinned foreigners.
All in all they sound like a lovely bunch of chaps with whom to while away an wintry afternoon playing Monopoly by the fireplace.
Thank you for the barrage of anxious emails. I am still alive, with fingers, but will be away from Apricot Flan for a couple of days.
Normal posting will resume shortly, possibly with some ill-informed musing on international relations and some out-of-date, knee-jerk reactions to the disappearance of Boris Yeltsin.
The new experiences just keep on coming. The wonder of travel and so forth. Today was the first time I’ve seen a girl with her hair dyed in the pattern of jaguar skin*. The craftsmanship was impressive, but still I ended up feeling somewhat disappointed. In her defence, it did distract me–until the last moment–from her upsetting sequined lycra trousers.
As I write that I suddenly realise: I haven’t been east of Tallinn for six months. Maybe this is the trend now. Maybe the streets of London and Madrid and Paris are awash with big cat hair-dos, and this woman is but Russia’s swallow to a jaguar-patterned spring. Please tell me it isn’t so.
* Jaguar pelt is characterised by large irregular blotches of colour, each with a thick black border. It’s easily discernible at a glance from the tight bunches of five black dots of leopard skin and the single spaced-out black dots of a cheetah.
This might strike those of you who know me as a bit of surprise. Today, I’ll be starting a job. It’s my first proper job since December 2001, if we take “proper job” to mean the sort of arrangement where you have an employer who gives you money in exchange for turning up during certain hours and undertaking certain tasks which you might otherwise not have done.
I’ve got a bit tired of working alone, in a foreign city, so I’m going to be teaching business English to Russian businessmen and businesswomen, part-time, from 6.15pm this evening. I’ll still be doing some of my own work in the until-now unexplained remainder of that “part-time”, but I think teaching will keep my human-contact batteries charged and pretty much cover all but my most extravagant indulgences. I think I might even enjoy it too.
My last proper job (during university, before starting my own business) was hauling large plates of bacon–whole pigs sometimes, it seemed–to breakfasting tourists in one of Christchurch’s big hotels. The Americans were always the first to breakfast, narrowly beating the furious Germans into the lift, across the mezzanine and down the escalator. Maybe the time difference helped them. It must have felt like rising at six in the evening to the Germans, while the West Coast American could breeze across the finish line, after getting what felt like a sleep in.
As those two parties departed from sight the few Australians and Kiwis would appear, surveying the empty dining room with satisfaction: first again. The other Europeans would follow. The Japanese were unpredictable. Operating on an eighteen hour “tourist day” to maximise efficiency they could be eating breakfast at four in the afternoon, or forcing down pre-dinner gin-and-tonics as the sun came up, it simply depended on where in their cycle you caught them.
I didn’t really like that job, and finishing my seven-hour shift at 11am meant I spent most of the day confused and disorientated. Well I seem to have wandered a little from the point.
About James Westlake. Born in Paraparaumu, New Zealand and subsequently raised, educated, entertained and employed in Melbourne, Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington with mixed results. I left in 2006 and now live in St Petersburg, Russia.
