we practically had a race riot at work yesterday.
one of my collegues is ukrainian, from some village i have never heard of. naturally, i talk to her alot, since we both speak russian. she has been here for 7 years already, but her english is pretty poor, which i suppose is not surprising: she spoke none at all when she arrived, and spent most of her first few years here cleaning dishes, most likelywith other ukrainians and poles. anyway, my point isthat her brain stayed in ukraine, and she hasnt really blended in much with english society, or it would seem, english values.
i am used to such people, so i didnt really think anything of it that she called our afro-british collegues "ni***rs" when we were speaking together in russian. i could never use that word myself, but russians do all the time and it is not considered in the same way there as it is here. but when you are in england, you have to follow english rules whether you like it or not, and that was the problem yesterday.
a woman came into the shop wearing a full burqua. she bought her books and left. then one of my other collegues commented that the burqua had been really beautiful. it had been: it was obviously made of really expensive material, and the cloth looked great. but oli (the ukrainian, the english call her that since her full name is too hard for them to pronounce) said that "those people" should go back where they came from if they dont want to dress "normally."
it was at that moment that all hell broke loose. one of the other collegues standing up front near me happens to be a british-born muslim and literally went berserk. he told oli she was a racist bitch, and that he, and most british muslims, had more right to be there than she, since he was born there, and speaks correct english, and that maybe she was the one who should go back where she came from, seeing as she obviously failed to understand english values. an incredible fight ensued. apparently it never occurred to oli that most english people consider english born muslims to be as english as anyother english person, she seemed to think that because her skin is white she has something in common with the english. but, of course, english people judge her by her poor english and think that she is stupid.....and foreign. i have to admit there was something ridiculous about hearing someone in a thick ukrainian accent saying london born people should "go back where they came from." at a certain point i fled to another section just to avoid getting dragged into the whole scene. but later MD (the british born muslim, whose parents are sudanese) told me how much he hates oli since she is always making racist and nationalistic remarks. he kept asking me why i was so different, when oli and i both come from the same place (we dont, but he doesnt understand that, since he just hears us talking to each other in the same language and assumes we are from the same place, and anyway oli claims to be russian, since she doesnt speak ukrainian and doesnt want to), and then oli came by to complain to me in russian that MD was a stupid ni***r and should go back to africa. apparently she had failed to grasp MD's point that he has never BEEN to africa and has lived in london his whole life.
later the boss came by to ask ME to explain the situation, since i seem to have become the specialist in explaining east euro behaviour. these moments make me cringe. i dont think such discussions should take place at work, in front of customers, many of whom might well be offended by such things, and i certainly cant understand why you would seeming delibrarely go out of your way to offend someone's faith.....i like to be on good terms with all my collegues, so i am nervous how this will play out, and how i will avoid taking sides.
29.12.06
27.12.06
back to work
it has been a quiet two days off (i havent had that many days off in a row since early november!) and i have used my time to do nothing. i mainly stayed in bed and read. i read one biography on allende, and then one on putin. reading about the sobchak years in piter brought back all kinds of memories, i remember those times well. the biographers accuses sochak of all kinds of corruption, the lady my father and i lived with back in those days would have had none of that: she was a massive sobchak supporter and cried buckets when he lost to yakovlev. it seems at that time putin and i were neighbours, both living on vasilievskii ostrov, and judging from the locations only about 3-4 streets apart. but then nobody knew who putin was at that time, and i was certainly unaware of living near a future president!
on the 25th i ventured out for a small walk, only to find myself in what looked like a colder version of the subcontinent. all the indian and pakistani run shops were open and all the wives were out taking walks with their kids, wearing saris covered by coats to make up for the differences in climate.
then yesterday, with the tube back in service, i decided to venture out a bit more, i walked around, but on the biggest shopping day of the year, it was a zoo everywhere. on regent street people were fighting just to get into zara, controlled by security guards, and one woman even had a heart attack or something and an ambulance had to come to take her off. at the zara by oxford circus, they had cops to brreak up the fights that erupted between angry customers, and the queue to pay was estimated to be an hour long. although there were certainly things i would have liked to have bought, and although i had money to spend, the whole thing was just so appauling that i bolted from the place empty handed, taking side streets back to a metro station that was not so overcrowded. from there i retreated to the calm of my flat and continued reading about the life and times of vladimir vladimirovich.
today it is back to work. on that note i should head for the shower and get ready for a day of reshelving.
on the 25th i ventured out for a small walk, only to find myself in what looked like a colder version of the subcontinent. all the indian and pakistani run shops were open and all the wives were out taking walks with their kids, wearing saris covered by coats to make up for the differences in climate.
then yesterday, with the tube back in service, i decided to venture out a bit more, i walked around, but on the biggest shopping day of the year, it was a zoo everywhere. on regent street people were fighting just to get into zara, controlled by security guards, and one woman even had a heart attack or something and an ambulance had to come to take her off. at the zara by oxford circus, they had cops to brreak up the fights that erupted between angry customers, and the queue to pay was estimated to be an hour long. although there were certainly things i would have liked to have bought, and although i had money to spend, the whole thing was just so appauling that i bolted from the place empty handed, taking side streets back to a metro station that was not so overcrowded. from there i retreated to the calm of my flat and continued reading about the life and times of vladimir vladimirovich.
today it is back to work. on that note i should head for the shower and get ready for a day of reshelving.
25.12.06
....and rest
today is my first day off after 16 days of non-stop shifts. i did it for the money, it will be welcome at the end of january when the pay check arrives. yesterday i stayed late at work to help the boss redo things for the boxing day sales. it made me appreciate the hard work that goes into making a shop ready for such an event: the books needed to be restickered, new banners needed to be hung. different titles will now be going on the 3 for 2 offer (yeah! including several that i want to buy!!!) it all took several hours. and now i have two whole days of rest. i plan to sit around doing absolutely nothing other than sleeping and reading. i have a stack of books from work and from the library calling out to be read. i might watch a dvd as well, i have a bunch copied onto my computer. but mainly i want to curl up with a not-too-academic book and enjoy the break.....wednesday it is back to work.
22.12.06
and now turkmenbashi is dead too
this has really been the year of the dying tyrants. first milosevic died (ok, some of you might not like me grouping him with "tyrants," but, well, all these guys had their supporters, didnt they?) then pinochet died, and now turkmenbashi.
of them all turkmenbashi was certainly the wierdest. he constructed gold statues of himself all over the country and renamed the months of the year after himself and his family. worse, he destroyed the country's education system by making his book the only curiculum. i feel sorry for all those people stuck in his country.
turkmenistan has always been a abit wierd. my father was there in the 60s and his great memory of the place was having his flight out to baku delayed for several hours while they tried to get camels off the runway. i remember also the year when turkmenbashi expelled most of the ethnic russians left in his country. they were only given a few days notice to pack their bags and leave. they arrived like refugees, which is i suppose what they iin fact were, at sheremetevo. i was flying somewhere myself at the time, and i remember seeing plane loads of them arriving with those cheap checkered plasic bags, looking utterly lost. many of them had no relatives of acquaintances in russia, and many had never even been there before.
in hungry, i knew a guy from asgabat. he had left at 17 to go to uni in bishkek (since turkmenbashi essentially shut all the universities in turkmenistan) and he hadnt been home since. he was afraid if he went back he would never be allowed to leave again. so he hadnt been home in something like 5 years, and was determined not to until he had another citizenship of turkmenbashi was dead. but no one thought he would die so soon. i hope mersat can go back now.
of them all turkmenbashi was certainly the wierdest. he constructed gold statues of himself all over the country and renamed the months of the year after himself and his family. worse, he destroyed the country's education system by making his book the only curiculum. i feel sorry for all those people stuck in his country.
turkmenistan has always been a abit wierd. my father was there in the 60s and his great memory of the place was having his flight out to baku delayed for several hours while they tried to get camels off the runway. i remember also the year when turkmenbashi expelled most of the ethnic russians left in his country. they were only given a few days notice to pack their bags and leave. they arrived like refugees, which is i suppose what they iin fact were, at sheremetevo. i was flying somewhere myself at the time, and i remember seeing plane loads of them arriving with those cheap checkered plasic bags, looking utterly lost. many of them had no relatives of acquaintances in russia, and many had never even been there before.
in hungry, i knew a guy from asgabat. he had left at 17 to go to uni in bishkek (since turkmenbashi essentially shut all the universities in turkmenistan) and he hadnt been home since. he was afraid if he went back he would never be allowed to leave again. so he hadnt been home in something like 5 years, and was determined not to until he had another citizenship of turkmenbashi was dead. but no one thought he would die so soon. i hope mersat can go back now.
20.12.06
sometimes the economist is right
i come from a family of economist readers. my father always had the logic that is was necessary to know the enemies arguements in order to effectively combat him/her. i have inherited this notion, except i have to admit that some times their writers are right on the target, in particular with regard to some of the recent articles that have been published on Russia. so i am attaching a piece from the latest edition on russian airports. appropriately it is entitled "kama sutra and feral cats."
WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.
But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.
Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.
Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.
The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).
As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.
Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.
Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.
Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.
Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.
It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.
Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven.
It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing Baltic fleet.
The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.
Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.
You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering.
A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?
Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.
The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.
For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.
Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.
The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.
Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.
Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.
The staff speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence
The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.
Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”
It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.
In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport.
Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).
There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.
WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.
But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.
Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.
Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.
The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).
As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.
Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.
Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.
Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.
Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.
It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.
Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven.
It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing Baltic fleet.
The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.
Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.
You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering.
A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?
Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.
The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.
For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.
Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.
The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.
Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.
Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.
The staff speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence
The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.
Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”
It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.
In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport.
Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).
There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.
17.12.06
oi
it has been a long week. in my efforts to get some cash together, i volunteered to do massive amounts of overtime, and i am tired. the worst is i wont get the money until the end of january, due to byzantine english banking rules i cant understand. oh well.
today i was in charge of the travel section. i was flipping through all the nice glossy books with various 1000 things you need to see/do/ visit before you die. so here is another on of my lists: best and worst train rides within europe....i didnt get tothinking about the rest of the world, so pleasures like the dakar-bamako will have to wait for another shift.
Worst:
1. skoplje-belgrade. i especially like the part where the train stops in an empty field for a few hours
2. the RERs that run from gare du nord out to departement 93. they are gross. the people on them smell. and the cops come buy all the time to make things worse for everyone. and they are strike prone (like every other RATP/SNCF production)
3.budapest- lvov. the problem occurs inevitable at 3am at chop, the border crossing. they have to change all the wheels on the train since the soviet union operated on a different track system. it takes several hours and is a very loud process.
4.St petersburg-tallinn. russian trains are normally good, but thank god this one isnt running anymore. it was awful. it should have been 6 hours but the newly erected border suddenly made it 8 or more. it was also a major route for drug smugglers, most of whom were ethnic russian babushki. there is something sad about seeing a 70 year old woman hauled off in chains. there is also something ridiculous about the way the estonian guards would greet non russians with phrases like "welcome to europe."
5.istanbul-ankara. apparently it was faster in ottoman times. take the bus.
6.athens-thessaloniki. they over sold my ticket and didnt offer compensation. i spent the trip in the restaurant.AND it was expensive. i dont think trains are a balkan speciality.
7. scotland-london. they all suck. the last time i was delayed by 3 hours. sometimes it is 5. and the worst is you pay over 50 pound for this torture. and they bombard you with psuedo polite explanations like "due to signalling problems at newcastle, this train will be delayed...." blaim thatcher.
best.
1. eurostar. i spent my childhood on the bloody ferry. couldnt pay me to take it now. the only pity is that it is so pricy, sometimes i still fly because it is often half the price. if the train were cheaper, i would take it all the time.
2. lisbon-porto. i am not kidding, this thing is beautiful and it goes incredibly fast. and it wasnt even that expensive (comparitively)
3.stockholm to copenhagen. the bridge is incredible. and it is fast and reliable.
4. oslo-bergen. the scenery is breaktaking. i have never seen water so blue anywhere else.
5. rome-munich. same explanation as above: the scenery is phenomenal, and the sevice, while not so good as in scandanavia, is still quite good.
conclusions:
1. it is better to be on a train in scandanavia than in the former ottoman empire.
2. thatcher was evil.
3.russia is still the best place for trail journeys: the trains are bearable (ok except the toilets) and cheap. and they are safer than internal russian flights.
today i was in charge of the travel section. i was flipping through all the nice glossy books with various 1000 things you need to see/do/ visit before you die. so here is another on of my lists: best and worst train rides within europe....i didnt get tothinking about the rest of the world, so pleasures like the dakar-bamako will have to wait for another shift.
Worst:
1. skoplje-belgrade. i especially like the part where the train stops in an empty field for a few hours
2. the RERs that run from gare du nord out to departement 93. they are gross. the people on them smell. and the cops come buy all the time to make things worse for everyone. and they are strike prone (like every other RATP/SNCF production)
3.budapest- lvov. the problem occurs inevitable at 3am at chop, the border crossing. they have to change all the wheels on the train since the soviet union operated on a different track system. it takes several hours and is a very loud process.
4.St petersburg-tallinn. russian trains are normally good, but thank god this one isnt running anymore. it was awful. it should have been 6 hours but the newly erected border suddenly made it 8 or more. it was also a major route for drug smugglers, most of whom were ethnic russian babushki. there is something sad about seeing a 70 year old woman hauled off in chains. there is also something ridiculous about the way the estonian guards would greet non russians with phrases like "welcome to europe."
5.istanbul-ankara. apparently it was faster in ottoman times. take the bus.
6.athens-thessaloniki. they over sold my ticket and didnt offer compensation. i spent the trip in the restaurant.AND it was expensive. i dont think trains are a balkan speciality.
7. scotland-london. they all suck. the last time i was delayed by 3 hours. sometimes it is 5. and the worst is you pay over 50 pound for this torture. and they bombard you with psuedo polite explanations like "due to signalling problems at newcastle, this train will be delayed...." blaim thatcher.
best.
1. eurostar. i spent my childhood on the bloody ferry. couldnt pay me to take it now. the only pity is that it is so pricy, sometimes i still fly because it is often half the price. if the train were cheaper, i would take it all the time.
2. lisbon-porto. i am not kidding, this thing is beautiful and it goes incredibly fast. and it wasnt even that expensive (comparitively)
3.stockholm to copenhagen. the bridge is incredible. and it is fast and reliable.
4. oslo-bergen. the scenery is breaktaking. i have never seen water so blue anywhere else.
5. rome-munich. same explanation as above: the scenery is phenomenal, and the sevice, while not so good as in scandanavia, is still quite good.
conclusions:
1. it is better to be on a train in scandanavia than in the former ottoman empire.
2. thatcher was evil.
3.russia is still the best place for trail journeys: the trains are bearable (ok except the toilets) and cheap. and they are safer than internal russian flights.
14.12.06
films
since sort of passing my exam; i have decided to vegetate for a few days and do nothing other than lie in bed and watch films. ok, obviously i have had to get out to go to work and so on, but the rest of the time has been as described, and in this i have been greatly aided by max who lent me 16 odd DVDs for the occasion (brought over here, naturally, from mother russia....)
so far, i have seen Casino royal for the second time (the actor is SOOOO cute) then breaking and entering (bosnians in london! although i have to admit that juiliette binoche was alot more convincing as a bosnian than i had anticpated), then borat, which is just as dumb as everyone claimed. then, really frying my brains, i saw some film about dancing and singing pengiuns. this would probably have been a dumb film under any circumstance, but i had the priveledge of seeing it dubbed in russian, which made it that much more surreal.
moving along to the russian stuff: i went on an feast of russian war films (there are so many of them, i get a bit confused as to which is which) 9 rota was better than proriv.....but not as goos as my all time favourite-voina.
oh, and Stranger than fiction......i laughed, but i didnt really like it....hmmm....
so far, i have seen Casino royal for the second time (the actor is SOOOO cute) then breaking and entering (bosnians in london! although i have to admit that juiliette binoche was alot more convincing as a bosnian than i had anticpated), then borat, which is just as dumb as everyone claimed. then, really frying my brains, i saw some film about dancing and singing pengiuns. this would probably have been a dumb film under any circumstance, but i had the priveledge of seeing it dubbed in russian, which made it that much more surreal.
moving along to the russian stuff: i went on an feast of russian war films (there are so many of them, i get a bit confused as to which is which) 9 rota was better than proriv.....but not as goos as my all time favourite-voina.
oh, and Stranger than fiction......i laughed, but i didnt really like it....hmmm....
12.12.06
fones
my phone got stolen. again.
i sent out emails to as many peoples as i could with my new number. if i didnt send one to you, write me.
so here is my latest list:
phone stealing experiences:
1. august 2000, st petersburg, russia. i was with joao and lemurana in a perehod under nevski prospect, looking at cds and not paying attention. when we got out of the perehod, the phone was gone.
2. august 2003, srpsko sarajevo, bosnia. caitlin sent me a text with the exciting news that a 30+ canadian of our acquaintance was marrying the teenage belorussian daughter of his firms cleaning lady. i tried to verify this wild story, and didnt see the blow coming to my face or the knife being held to my neck until it was too late. the funny thing was i was waiting for my bus back to serbia. i got on the bus with blood all over my face. for once, i got two whole seats to myself!
3. june 2005, paris, france. i lived in the ghetto of departement 93, but it wasnt there that my fone was taken, but rather in the building where i worked. the boss didnt allow us to keep our phones on us, so we had to leave them in the staff room. unfortunately, not all the staff were too honest, and several of us lost our phones in the space of about a week.
4.december 2006, east london. the buggers must have got it on the tube. i didnt feel a thing and it was in a zipped up part of my bag. i have to hand it to them, they were good.
i sent out emails to as many peoples as i could with my new number. if i didnt send one to you, write me.
so here is my latest list:
phone stealing experiences:
1. august 2000, st petersburg, russia. i was with joao and lemurana in a perehod under nevski prospect, looking at cds and not paying attention. when we got out of the perehod, the phone was gone.
2. august 2003, srpsko sarajevo, bosnia. caitlin sent me a text with the exciting news that a 30+ canadian of our acquaintance was marrying the teenage belorussian daughter of his firms cleaning lady. i tried to verify this wild story, and didnt see the blow coming to my face or the knife being held to my neck until it was too late. the funny thing was i was waiting for my bus back to serbia. i got on the bus with blood all over my face. for once, i got two whole seats to myself!
3. june 2005, paris, france. i lived in the ghetto of departement 93, but it wasnt there that my fone was taken, but rather in the building where i worked. the boss didnt allow us to keep our phones on us, so we had to leave them in the staff room. unfortunately, not all the staff were too honest, and several of us lost our phones in the space of about a week.
4.december 2006, east london. the buggers must have got it on the tube. i didnt feel a thing and it was in a zipped up part of my bag. i have to hand it to them, they were good.
11.12.06
pinochet, asesino
Y se murió de viejito nomás. En una cama, del corazón (un corazón al que sólo acudió para morir tranquilo), rodeado de fascistas y dolorosamente impune. Cuesta encontrar las palabras para expresar la monstruosidad de este hombre. Cuesta expresar la tragedia que implicó en nuestras vidas. Inauguró el golpe sangriento, con torturas sin límite, con desaparecidos. Todo golpe cruento, asesino, tomó su nombre: pinochetazo. Aquí, a mediados del ’75, todos lo decían: “Lo que se viene es el pinochetazo”. Debimos saberlo desde el ’73. Debimos saber que el adversario no sólo era poderoso, sino que era criminal. Debimos haber puesto cautela en nuestra mano; no frenarla, no pararla, pero reflexionar que lo de Chile nos dejaba muy solos, era muy desmedido y reclamaba eso: cautela. Pero estábamos embalados. En septiembre de 1973 la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras dictaba muchas de sus materias en la calle Córdoba. Un lindo lugar con una capilla en el medio. Ivannisevich se sacó una foto pegándole con un pico a una pared, destruyendo el edificio. Prolijos, dejaron la capilla. Todavía está. Un pibe de la JUP me dijo del golpe y se me ofreció para levantar mi clase. Yo, uno se creía, aún, inmortal, le dije que la levantaba yo y llevaba a mis alumnos a la marcha. Salimos de las aulas en busca de las marchas. Sentíamos más la presencia de la JP en las calles, vivando a Allende, que la relación profunda, íntima, que la tragedia de Chile tenía con nosotros. En esa época las fronteras parecían más lejanas. Si algo pasaba en Chile, no tenía por qué pasar aquí.
En seguida llegó la foto del carnicero. Es la perfecta caricatura del general golpista sudamericano. La jeta erguida, bigote, anteojos negros. Después, la noticia de la muerte de Allende. Decían: se suicidó. Un periodista le pregunta a Ricardo Balbín qué haría él en una situación así. El compadrito de comité se mandó una histórica: “¡Ah, no! A mí no me hacen eso”. No recuerdo qué dijo Perón. Nada memorable, sin duda. Poco tiempo después cruzaba la cordillera y se entrevistaba con el carnicero. ¡Qué vivos están estos recuerdos! Los dos bien trajeados de milicos. Con capas y todo. Le gustaban las capas a Pinochet. Al día siguiente o a los dos días empezaron a llegar los exiliados, los que apenas habían salvado el pellejo o los que habían sido escupidos del Estado Nacional. Estaban desechos. En Ezeiza, el gobierno argentino les tomó huellas digitales hasta de los dedos del pie. Les tomaron todos los datos, los ficharon bien fichados, les hicieron saber que si algo raro hacían duraban media hora sin ser arrestados. El Descamisado publicó las fotos y tituló: “Esta vergüenza se hace en nombre del peronismo”. Claro que sí: eso hizo el peronismo. Lo habría hecho cualquier gobierno argentino. Pero el peronismo de esos días era pinochetista. Cosa que, en algún oscuro rincón de su alma, siempre puede volver a ser si es necesario.
López Rega habrá brindado con champán. El carnicero de Chile estaba enseñando cómo se arreglan las cosas con el marxismo internacional, con la sinarquía apátrida. Nosotros empezamos a enterarnos de las peores cosas. Las versiones que llegaban sobre las torturas y las violaciones del Estado Nacional estremecían. ¿Era posible tanta crueldad? Se sabía que estaba lleno de tipos de la CIA el Estadio. Que los de la CIA eran especialmente activos en torturar y hasta enseñaban a los empeñosos chilenos cómo hacerlo. Las mujeres que maltrataron a Allende con los cacerolazos salieron a festejar. Otros agarraban lo que tenían a mano y huían. “Yo –me contó años después un escritor– llegué a Perú, me metí en una pensión, abrí mi valija y puse en un estante los libros que me había llevado. Ahí estaba mi nueva biblioteca: un libro de Cortázar, otro de Lezama Lima y uno de Tolstoi. Era todo lo que tenía.”
Un día lo fue a ver Borges. El carnicero estaba orgulloso: el gran escritor había cruzado la cordillera y estaba feliz de verlo. Le puso una condecoración bien llamativa. El gran escritor –el que decía un mar de concheterías bobas cada vez que “comía”, porque un concheto no “almuerza” ni “cena”, “come”, en lo de Bioy Casares– le dijo al carnicero: “Me honra esta condecoración porque Chile tiene la forma de una espada”. También la Thatcher lo recibió y le habló con un inglés lento y vocalizado como para que el carnicero entendiera: “Le agradezco su ayuda en la guerra de las Falklands. Sin sus informaciones nuestros pilotos no podrían haber hecho los blancos que hicieron”. El carnicero sonrió, satisfecho, goloso.
Cierta vez estaba en una clínica en Londres. Golpean a su habitación. Entra una mujer joven y resuelta, treinta años, por ahí. El carnicero, siempre seductor, sonríe y dice: “Pasa, niña. Dime, ¿a qué vienes?” “A arrestarlo, general. Por violaciones a los derechos humanos.” Se enfurece y llama a sus matones: “¡Saquen de aquí a esta comunista!” Días después regresa a su país. Llega en silla de ruedas. No bien baja del avión se pone de pie y saluda a los suyos. ¡Pícaro el carnicero! Otra vez había engañado a todos.
No sirve para nada que se muera. Que estos tipos se mueran cuando ya mataron a todos los que querían matar es un pobre consuelo. Ni un cáncer vale desearle. Nadie va a revivir por eso. Nadie va a sufrir menos de lo que sufrió. Deja, para colmo, problemas. Los militares de su país (al que le aseguró la economía y todos sabemos cuánto aprecian esto los pueblos) lo honrarán desde las armas. Michelle Bachelet no lo honrará desde el Estado. Pero habrá que organizar actos en toda América latina. El New York Times ha anunciado su muerte como la de un cruzado contra el marxismo. Puño de hierro, dictador, pero un hombre que no dudó. Fue la suma de las peores cosas que un ser humano puede ofrecer: lo de asesino lo sabemos, pero fue, además, ladrón, mentiroso, cínico, se rió de sus adversarios y de sus muertos. Descansará en paz porque morirse es eso. Pero que no tenga paz su memoria. Que nadie olvide sus crímenes. La era de horror que inauguró. Que en las escuelas argentinas se sepa que Pinochet es parte de nuestra historia, porque prefiguró nuestra pesadilla, porque inspiró a nuestros verdugos. Que gane la verdad por sobre la mentira con que sus adeptos buscan protegerlo. Que su nombre infunda pavor y que ese pavor se transforme en coraje: nunca más un Pinochet. Que haya un busto suyo con una placa en todos los países del mundo. Que esa placa diga: “Augusto Pinochet, asesino”. Porque olvidarlo sería como olvidar Auschwitz, el Estadio Nacional, la ESMA.
pagina/12
En seguida llegó la foto del carnicero. Es la perfecta caricatura del general golpista sudamericano. La jeta erguida, bigote, anteojos negros. Después, la noticia de la muerte de Allende. Decían: se suicidó. Un periodista le pregunta a Ricardo Balbín qué haría él en una situación así. El compadrito de comité se mandó una histórica: “¡Ah, no! A mí no me hacen eso”. No recuerdo qué dijo Perón. Nada memorable, sin duda. Poco tiempo después cruzaba la cordillera y se entrevistaba con el carnicero. ¡Qué vivos están estos recuerdos! Los dos bien trajeados de milicos. Con capas y todo. Le gustaban las capas a Pinochet. Al día siguiente o a los dos días empezaron a llegar los exiliados, los que apenas habían salvado el pellejo o los que habían sido escupidos del Estado Nacional. Estaban desechos. En Ezeiza, el gobierno argentino les tomó huellas digitales hasta de los dedos del pie. Les tomaron todos los datos, los ficharon bien fichados, les hicieron saber que si algo raro hacían duraban media hora sin ser arrestados. El Descamisado publicó las fotos y tituló: “Esta vergüenza se hace en nombre del peronismo”. Claro que sí: eso hizo el peronismo. Lo habría hecho cualquier gobierno argentino. Pero el peronismo de esos días era pinochetista. Cosa que, en algún oscuro rincón de su alma, siempre puede volver a ser si es necesario.
López Rega habrá brindado con champán. El carnicero de Chile estaba enseñando cómo se arreglan las cosas con el marxismo internacional, con la sinarquía apátrida. Nosotros empezamos a enterarnos de las peores cosas. Las versiones que llegaban sobre las torturas y las violaciones del Estado Nacional estremecían. ¿Era posible tanta crueldad? Se sabía que estaba lleno de tipos de la CIA el Estadio. Que los de la CIA eran especialmente activos en torturar y hasta enseñaban a los empeñosos chilenos cómo hacerlo. Las mujeres que maltrataron a Allende con los cacerolazos salieron a festejar. Otros agarraban lo que tenían a mano y huían. “Yo –me contó años después un escritor– llegué a Perú, me metí en una pensión, abrí mi valija y puse en un estante los libros que me había llevado. Ahí estaba mi nueva biblioteca: un libro de Cortázar, otro de Lezama Lima y uno de Tolstoi. Era todo lo que tenía.”
Un día lo fue a ver Borges. El carnicero estaba orgulloso: el gran escritor había cruzado la cordillera y estaba feliz de verlo. Le puso una condecoración bien llamativa. El gran escritor –el que decía un mar de concheterías bobas cada vez que “comía”, porque un concheto no “almuerza” ni “cena”, “come”, en lo de Bioy Casares– le dijo al carnicero: “Me honra esta condecoración porque Chile tiene la forma de una espada”. También la Thatcher lo recibió y le habló con un inglés lento y vocalizado como para que el carnicero entendiera: “Le agradezco su ayuda en la guerra de las Falklands. Sin sus informaciones nuestros pilotos no podrían haber hecho los blancos que hicieron”. El carnicero sonrió, satisfecho, goloso.
Cierta vez estaba en una clínica en Londres. Golpean a su habitación. Entra una mujer joven y resuelta, treinta años, por ahí. El carnicero, siempre seductor, sonríe y dice: “Pasa, niña. Dime, ¿a qué vienes?” “A arrestarlo, general. Por violaciones a los derechos humanos.” Se enfurece y llama a sus matones: “¡Saquen de aquí a esta comunista!” Días después regresa a su país. Llega en silla de ruedas. No bien baja del avión se pone de pie y saluda a los suyos. ¡Pícaro el carnicero! Otra vez había engañado a todos.
No sirve para nada que se muera. Que estos tipos se mueran cuando ya mataron a todos los que querían matar es un pobre consuelo. Ni un cáncer vale desearle. Nadie va a revivir por eso. Nadie va a sufrir menos de lo que sufrió. Deja, para colmo, problemas. Los militares de su país (al que le aseguró la economía y todos sabemos cuánto aprecian esto los pueblos) lo honrarán desde las armas. Michelle Bachelet no lo honrará desde el Estado. Pero habrá que organizar actos en toda América latina. El New York Times ha anunciado su muerte como la de un cruzado contra el marxismo. Puño de hierro, dictador, pero un hombre que no dudó. Fue la suma de las peores cosas que un ser humano puede ofrecer: lo de asesino lo sabemos, pero fue, además, ladrón, mentiroso, cínico, se rió de sus adversarios y de sus muertos. Descansará en paz porque morirse es eso. Pero que no tenga paz su memoria. Que nadie olvide sus crímenes. La era de horror que inauguró. Que en las escuelas argentinas se sepa que Pinochet es parte de nuestra historia, porque prefiguró nuestra pesadilla, porque inspiró a nuestros verdugos. Que gane la verdad por sobre la mentira con que sus adeptos buscan protegerlo. Que su nombre infunda pavor y que ese pavor se transforme en coraje: nunca más un Pinochet. Que haya un busto suyo con una placa en todos los países del mundo. Que esa placa diga: “Augusto Pinochet, asesino”. Porque olvidarlo sería como olvidar Auschwitz, el Estadio Nacional, la ESMA.
pagina/12
9.12.06
work
yesterday was my last day off work before christmas day. i wanted things to be like that: i need the extra money! for the next two weeks i will be working straight, so i can hopefully go off somewhere in the spring.
my last day off started slowly with me in bed watching stupid films. then i went into uni. i had great plans to go to the library, but i ran into zbek at the enterence and we ended up going for coffee. i told him the story about my supervisors and he said that, actually, he wasnt too surprised, he said he could completely imagine them doing something like that. we had a chat for an hour or so, then i resolved to really go to the library....but just as i got down the steps leading into it, i ran into uilliem....which led to another long conversation, and by the time that finished it was already after 5 and i had to leave to meet paul who was in london for an exciting day at the public record office. he was frustrated: he had spent several hours going through the documents of a double agent, and everything seemed to be backing up his beliefs....until he got to the very last paragraph, where the spies british handlers note that everything in the previous few hundred pages was rubbish, and largely fabricated. the guy was a fake. so paul was annoyed that he had wasted so much time on. we headed for a chinese restaurant to moan about our dissertations and two bottles of wine later we moved on to a bar in convent garden with a completely cool interior, but too many people. paul insisted on buying vodka cocktails.....oi my poor liver.....but it is always good to be with friends, regardless of the damage to your internal organs!
my last day off started slowly with me in bed watching stupid films. then i went into uni. i had great plans to go to the library, but i ran into zbek at the enterence and we ended up going for coffee. i told him the story about my supervisors and he said that, actually, he wasnt too surprised, he said he could completely imagine them doing something like that. we had a chat for an hour or so, then i resolved to really go to the library....but just as i got down the steps leading into it, i ran into uilliem....which led to another long conversation, and by the time that finished it was already after 5 and i had to leave to meet paul who was in london for an exciting day at the public record office. he was frustrated: he had spent several hours going through the documents of a double agent, and everything seemed to be backing up his beliefs....until he got to the very last paragraph, where the spies british handlers note that everything in the previous few hundred pages was rubbish, and largely fabricated. the guy was a fake. so paul was annoyed that he had wasted so much time on. we headed for a chinese restaurant to moan about our dissertations and two bottles of wine later we moved on to a bar in convent garden with a completely cool interior, but too many people. paul insisted on buying vodka cocktails.....oi my poor liver.....but it is always good to be with friends, regardless of the damage to your internal organs!
6.12.06
more lists
worst places to use the toilet:
1.my secondary school in russia: now only was there never toilet paper: there werent even doors to the stalls. this meant we had to go to the toilets in groups so that one girl could hold the outer door closed (to prevent boys from running in) while the other girls used the toilets, with all other girls watching. yuck.
2. algonquin park, canada. i always went to "hit the bush" as it seemed the only civilised thing to do. the toilets installed by the authorities were scary. truely scary.
3. moscow state university. at one point someone drew a smile face on the wall with their own shit. it stayed there for months, flaking off from time to time onto the floor.
4. the hospital i was in in serbia. i dont think these things had been cleaned since tito walked this earth. there was no running water in the hospital, and naturally no toilet paper. my ukrainian flatmate smuggled some rolls of it to me, and i walked around with it non stop for the whole duration of my stay, as i was terrified someone would steal it from me. i slept with it under the pillow.
5. the exit festival, serbia. thousands of people, too few portopotties. the queues were huge and i dont think the things got cleaned once during the 9 day festival. i once woke up in the morning to see shit all around the bottom of my trousers. yuck.
6. a glaswegian pub. i dont remember the name, but it was something like out of trainspotting: the worst in scotland.
7.laurents flat in paris. strictly speaking, there was no toilet here, there was a paying one down on the street, and a sink. the choice was left to me.
8. darkos flat in belgrade. harry claimed i was the first woman ever to step into this guys flat, which i can well believe from the looks of things. it was too grimy to even put in words, best to draw a veil over this one.
9.the hungry duck in the late 1990s, moscow. the vomit was everywhere, your shoes stuck to the floor. supposedly some people died in here.....
10 the public toilet accross from the job centre plus in cambridge. there were junkies shooting up at the sink. the place stank of homelessness. no wonder you are not allowed to use the ones inside the job centre plus, such is their clientelle....
and all of this doesnt take into account the emergencies that could not be solved by an actual toilet. such as the time i had to go in a serbian sunflower feild with a whole bus watching me, or the time i had to do the same thing in the loire valley, or the time i sent in the yard of bratislava university, or the time on a greek autoroute.....or....
hmmm, reading this list i am starting to wonder: could there be a connection between orthodoxy and uncomfortable toilet experiences? serbia and russia seem overly well represented on this list, while i cannnot think of a single comprable experience in a muslim country, for example.
1.my secondary school in russia: now only was there never toilet paper: there werent even doors to the stalls. this meant we had to go to the toilets in groups so that one girl could hold the outer door closed (to prevent boys from running in) while the other girls used the toilets, with all other girls watching. yuck.
2. algonquin park, canada. i always went to "hit the bush" as it seemed the only civilised thing to do. the toilets installed by the authorities were scary. truely scary.
3. moscow state university. at one point someone drew a smile face on the wall with their own shit. it stayed there for months, flaking off from time to time onto the floor.
4. the hospital i was in in serbia. i dont think these things had been cleaned since tito walked this earth. there was no running water in the hospital, and naturally no toilet paper. my ukrainian flatmate smuggled some rolls of it to me, and i walked around with it non stop for the whole duration of my stay, as i was terrified someone would steal it from me. i slept with it under the pillow.
5. the exit festival, serbia. thousands of people, too few portopotties. the queues were huge and i dont think the things got cleaned once during the 9 day festival. i once woke up in the morning to see shit all around the bottom of my trousers. yuck.
6. a glaswegian pub. i dont remember the name, but it was something like out of trainspotting: the worst in scotland.
7.laurents flat in paris. strictly speaking, there was no toilet here, there was a paying one down on the street, and a sink. the choice was left to me.
8. darkos flat in belgrade. harry claimed i was the first woman ever to step into this guys flat, which i can well believe from the looks of things. it was too grimy to even put in words, best to draw a veil over this one.
9.the hungry duck in the late 1990s, moscow. the vomit was everywhere, your shoes stuck to the floor. supposedly some people died in here.....
10 the public toilet accross from the job centre plus in cambridge. there were junkies shooting up at the sink. the place stank of homelessness. no wonder you are not allowed to use the ones inside the job centre plus, such is their clientelle....
and all of this doesnt take into account the emergencies that could not be solved by an actual toilet. such as the time i had to go in a serbian sunflower feild with a whole bus watching me, or the time i had to do the same thing in the loire valley, or the time i sent in the yard of bratislava university, or the time on a greek autoroute.....or....
hmmm, reading this list i am starting to wonder: could there be a connection between orthodoxy and uncomfortable toilet experiences? serbia and russia seem overly well represented on this list, while i cannnot think of a single comprable experience in a muslim country, for example.
the latest
oi oi oi
i am exhausted. i was supposed to have my massive comprehensive exam this morning. but the yesterday i ran into my second supervisor, who told me that my exam had been cancelled as she felt i was not ready for it. instead, she told me to come in to meet with her and my first superisor to discuss where i had gone wrong. i was totally upset and paranoid, wondering what exactly i had done wrong. i mean, i had had doubts about some things, i was aware that my first chapter was a bit un methodological, and i started to think that i was totally off.....but then this morning i came into the university and both my supervisors started apologising: my first supervisor had sent my second supervisor THE WRONG PAPER!!!! this only occured to them last night at 11pm when they finnally got around to discussing what was actually wrong with my paper, and realised they were talking about 2 different papers actually.
so in the end we had half the exam (the historiography section, since everyone had read my literature review) but we will have the other half now in january, after my correct paper has been circulated and read but the various people. so ridiculous. and here all night i had been really worried about where i had gone wrong and what i had done...and it seems in the end it was all about nothing! how ridiculous! but as my dad said when i told him the latest news: vsyo horosho shto horosho konchaetsia!
i am exhausted. i was supposed to have my massive comprehensive exam this morning. but the yesterday i ran into my second supervisor, who told me that my exam had been cancelled as she felt i was not ready for it. instead, she told me to come in to meet with her and my first superisor to discuss where i had gone wrong. i was totally upset and paranoid, wondering what exactly i had done wrong. i mean, i had had doubts about some things, i was aware that my first chapter was a bit un methodological, and i started to think that i was totally off.....but then this morning i came into the university and both my supervisors started apologising: my first supervisor had sent my second supervisor THE WRONG PAPER!!!! this only occured to them last night at 11pm when they finnally got around to discussing what was actually wrong with my paper, and realised they were talking about 2 different papers actually.
so in the end we had half the exam (the historiography section, since everyone had read my literature review) but we will have the other half now in january, after my correct paper has been circulated and read but the various people. so ridiculous. and here all night i had been really worried about where i had gone wrong and what i had done...and it seems in the end it was all about nothing! how ridiculous! but as my dad said when i told him the latest news: vsyo horosho shto horosho konchaetsia!
1.12.06
food
went out again last night with jovana and olena. olena brought along some siberian friend of hers named yelena who was (like olena) from a town i had never even heard of, and i think i have pretty good sense of geography, so it must be small. we headed for a pub near where oli (as olena is called here in england) and i work. we talked in a strange slavoenglish that got more odd as the hours and wine passed. jovana got married three days ago, so that was the major news.
funny people i hang out with.
one of the topics of conversation was the odd food people eat in this country. (marmite! what need more be said?)so i decided to compile a list of food i wish i could have access to here all the time but dont. by this i dont mean any gourmet or complicated things, just food that is normal everyday food elsewhere, but not here.
1Grechka. i have only seen this in russia, where a big bag costs about 20 rubles (less than 50p). you can buy it at the russian immigrant shop here near hyde park, but the same bag costs close to 5 pounds, and that is just absurd.
2.my breakfast shakes, caracas. i never really figured out what was in these: obviously various tropical fruits, ice and maybe some kind of milk. they are both incredibly good and very filling. i used to have them every single morning....mmm/
3.all russian milk products: in particular tvorog, kefir, and smetana. why dont they export these things?
4 mrs cho's cooking, moscow and elsewhere. ok, i have not yet been to korean, so maybe there everyone cooks like this, but i kind of doubt it. her food is incredible, i could live the rest of my live on pipinpop.
5 al- diwan, paris. amazing. from hommous starters to dessert. great location as well.
6. burek od sira. as we were drinking and becoming desperate for some kind of fatty zakuski, jovana and i decided that what english pubs need to be selling is burek. it is fatty, tasty, and absorbs all alcohol like a sponge. i have several regular places to buy it, favourites being belgrade train station, the underground shopping mall near zagreb train station, and any place in bosnia.
7.baked potatoes on the street, istambul. it is filling, cheap, and has yet to poison me. (the same cannot be said for russian street food, for example)
8. salted corn in cups, mexico city. so cheap and simple, why dont other people think of this? it is like pop corn, but fresh....
9.breakfast in thailand. i prefer salty to sweet food. so i was exstatic when i discovered that in thailand, and it would seem in asia in general, the breakfast looks almost the same as dinner. i could have a huge stir fry in the morning and not feel like a freak, excellent!
10.greek frappés, athens. so simple and so logical. caffeine doses for summer.
11. roated chestnuts. they sell these in a lot of places, but they are not always good, as in london where they are grotesquely overpriced and not well toasted. great ones are in budapest and zagreb.
12. mini fank, budapest. small and fatty, and 40 forints.
13 empanadas, chile. anything can be stuffed into these things, even tofu. i dont know why they have not caught on elsewhere.
14 any meal in bulgaria. i love the food in this country. and the prices.
funny people i hang out with.
one of the topics of conversation was the odd food people eat in this country. (marmite! what need more be said?)so i decided to compile a list of food i wish i could have access to here all the time but dont. by this i dont mean any gourmet or complicated things, just food that is normal everyday food elsewhere, but not here.
1Grechka. i have only seen this in russia, where a big bag costs about 20 rubles (less than 50p). you can buy it at the russian immigrant shop here near hyde park, but the same bag costs close to 5 pounds, and that is just absurd.
2.my breakfast shakes, caracas. i never really figured out what was in these: obviously various tropical fruits, ice and maybe some kind of milk. they are both incredibly good and very filling. i used to have them every single morning....mmm/
3.all russian milk products: in particular tvorog, kefir, and smetana. why dont they export these things?
4 mrs cho's cooking, moscow and elsewhere. ok, i have not yet been to korean, so maybe there everyone cooks like this, but i kind of doubt it. her food is incredible, i could live the rest of my live on pipinpop.
5 al- diwan, paris. amazing. from hommous starters to dessert. great location as well.
6. burek od sira. as we were drinking and becoming desperate for some kind of fatty zakuski, jovana and i decided that what english pubs need to be selling is burek. it is fatty, tasty, and absorbs all alcohol like a sponge. i have several regular places to buy it, favourites being belgrade train station, the underground shopping mall near zagreb train station, and any place in bosnia.
7.baked potatoes on the street, istambul. it is filling, cheap, and has yet to poison me. (the same cannot be said for russian street food, for example)
8. salted corn in cups, mexico city. so cheap and simple, why dont other people think of this? it is like pop corn, but fresh....
9.breakfast in thailand. i prefer salty to sweet food. so i was exstatic when i discovered that in thailand, and it would seem in asia in general, the breakfast looks almost the same as dinner. i could have a huge stir fry in the morning and not feel like a freak, excellent!
10.greek frappés, athens. so simple and so logical. caffeine doses for summer.
11. roated chestnuts. they sell these in a lot of places, but they are not always good, as in london where they are grotesquely overpriced and not well toasted. great ones are in budapest and zagreb.
12. mini fank, budapest. small and fatty, and 40 forints.
13 empanadas, chile. anything can be stuffed into these things, even tofu. i dont know why they have not caught on elsewhere.
14 any meal in bulgaria. i love the food in this country. and the prices.
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)