Winter Glory

Moscow's weather has been a puzzle as of late.  By "as of late," I mean for the past few years.

My wife was born and grown in Moscow.  Her years of local weather experience always translates to the following advice to tourists who are eager to experience the Russian winter:  "Come in December, January, or February.  Avoid November and March because those months are not cold enough, meaning that there will be lots of slush and mud on the roads."  My friends who were also born and grown in Moscow agree with my wife's advice.  Years of predictable winter experience by Muscovites has made this advice into a sort of a latent wisdom.

 Word from the Wise:  Avoid This

But that advice would not have worked for the past few years.  Until today, 21 December, which is just one day short of the Winter Solstice and hence the beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere, Moscow was too warm to be covered in a snow blanket.  Pedestrians, like me, slogged through soggy and wet streets for some of October, all of November, and most of December.  Today we are treated with a wonderfully beautiful snowstorm.  White is everywhere, and the quality of openair sound has changed as it always does when abundant snow muffles the background hum.

A More Beautiful, Quieter Day

A note for American friends:  Despite the fantastic snowstorm, Moscow is humming along just fine.  Schools are open, work places are running, and traffic is flowing just as erratically as ever.  In similar conditions, any major US metropolitan area would have been crippled.  Indeed, Russians are a rugged and hearty bunch.

How Do You Say "Light Snow" in Russian?

At last, winter glory is in Moscow.  The only question is why it took so long to get here this year.  A good friend, and a Moscow native, said in passing two nights ago that "every winter seems to be getting warmer here."  I hope not.

Off Topic: Dear Leader's Death

Kim Jong-il passed away.  Like any good dictator, such as the ones I spent part of my childhood under, "Dear Leader" did an excellent job of creating a paternalistic society build around a personality cult - his personality to be specific.

View the video clip below.  From an outsider's point of view, these organized grief-letting meetings may seem ridiculous and, perhaps, even funny.  However, and sadly, most of this grief is likely to be real.  After all, their Dear Leader, their father figure, passed away.  When all hope is invested in one figure, as a child invests so heavily in his mother, the passing of that figure is extremely terrifying and depressing.

Regardless, part of the adult in me says:  "Get a life people.  Make your own future."  But, when years of censorship and brainwashing have made an otherwise capable people into a hapless adolescent bunch, my opinion is about as valuable as the copious teardrops shed for a useless, dangerous, and dead despot.

In case you are doubtful of the cult that existed around this man, here is a sampling of his great feats per Korean Central News Agency, North Korea's official mouthpiece:

• His 1941 birth in a humble cabin in the slopes of Mount Baekdu was foretold by an unseasonal swallow and heralded by a double rainbow. Simultaneously, a bright star lit up the sky.
• He learned to walk at 3 weeks old.
• He learned to talk at 8 weeks old.
• He penned 1,500 books in his spare time during this 3 years at Kim Il-sung University.
• He first picked up a golf club in 1994, at North Korea's only golf course, and shot a 38-under par round that included no fewer than 11 holes in one. Satisfied with his performance, he immediately declared his retirement from the sport.
  

Rip.

America's Religious Right's Wrong Track

In the American political spectrum, evangelical religiosity is closely linked to right-winged political views.  This is not to say that those in the middle or left are less spiritual or religious than those on the right; it is to say that those who are on the right and religious tend to be vocal about their beliefs in the political arena.

A thought vector in America's religious right that explains this behavior is along these lines: "The Christian God made America great.  To continue keeping America great, it is the duty of Christians to ensure that the core of the nation remains strongly Christian.  As such, evangelism, constant religious dialog, and conversion of nonbelievers is a duty and a path to salvation."

During the Soviet years, when we had a bipolar world of the two superpowers, US and USSR, the US was the most religious industrial nation in the world.  Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire." The fall of the Iron Curtain was a signal - at least to some folks on the religious right - that God was on America's side and the atheistic Soviet Union had erred on the wrong side by disavowing the supernatural.

It is now a bit more than two decades after the dissolution of USSR.  Americans on the religious right should take note that their country no longer has the "most religious" status amongst the industrialized nations.  As it turns out, that spot has been relinquished to Russia, the heart, mind, and muscle of the erstwhile "Evil Empire."

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is currently displaying a relic believed to be Virgin Mary's belt.  Russians from around the country are making a pilgrimage to this magnificent church to queue up in the cold weather for up to 24 hours to get a first-hand glimpse of this artifact, and to kiss the glass encasement in which it sits. 

This phenomenon has created some angst among the less-religious Russians.  There is a genuine surprise at the degree of latent religiosity that has become visible suddenly and many attempts to interpret what it really means.  A popular interpretation is that because Russia is on the wrong track and Russians have lost faith in their institutions, they are looking elsewhere for hope, inspiration, and perhaps a miracle.

It is curious that religiosity is seen as a sign of "losing faith" in national institutions in Russia while it is deemed as a necessary element of "keeping faith" in national institutions in America by the religious right.  Both views cannot be simultaneously right.  In any case, it can be concluded that America's religious right is on the wrong track either because it has lost it leadership or it has always been making the wrong assumptions about what made America strong.

VOA's Jim Brooke on Caucasian Male Behavior in Moscow

The article is posted under Moscow News; for convenience, I have added the text below.  The text explains, at a very high-level the confluence of multiple factors that lead to bad behavior by multiple parties:

• Repressive religious laws in the Muslim (Caucasian) portion of Russia;
• Young men that "break free" of this repression and head to non-Muslim Russian locations, behaving badly with (at least) women in the new locations;
• The bad behavior of the Caucasian men leading to understandable bad feelings of local Russians, but eventually leading to generalizations and hence bad behavior expressed in nationalistic, xenophobic, and racist tones.

I have witnessed similar dynamics around the world where suppressed - or simply different -  human behavior of some sort, due to religious, cultural, or legal codes, leads to apparently aberrant behavior amongst the diaspora in new lands, thereby, at a minimum, making the diaspora the butt of jokes or, in some instances, subject to violence.

This, is the unfortunate result of human psychology and social behavior patterns.  It is explainable and understandable but results are most often inexcusable.

Moscow is not a sexual Disneyland

by James Brooke at 10/11/2011 20:59

Nicole, a Moscow State Linguistics University journalism student, showed up for dinner Sunday night, a bundle of energy, ready to interview me for her thesis. I was more interested in what she had to say, so I asked if anyone had approached her on the 10 minute walk from Kievskaya metro station to the Georgian restaurant.

Although bundled up like a winter fur ball — coat, hat, scarf, mittens, boots — Nicole said she walked the usual gauntlet of leers and sexual invitations from young men from the Caucasus who hang around the metro exits. In fact, she said, it has become so common that she had not even thought about it, until I asked her specifically.

I had been pondering something very strange that I noticed Friday at the rally in Moscow of 7,000 Russian nationalists. There was a total absence of signs denouncing the United States or NATO.

Instead, the nationalists were entirely focused inward, largely on the Caucasus.
“Stop feeding the Caucasus,” seemed to be the most a popular slogan, objecting to the billions of dollars funneled south to pacify Russia’s heavily Muslim southern border region. Another was: “Stop stealing from Russian regions.” If you want to draw a nationalist crowd in Moscow this season, don’t waste your energy hyperventilating about Kosovo, missile defense, or even Georgia. Instead, appeal to the sexual politics of the city’s streets.

Margarita Simonyan, a Russian journalist of Armenian descent, is editor-in-chief of RT, the Kremlinsupported television channel formerly known as Russia Today. Shielded by these impeccable establishment credentials, she broke a mainstream media taboo last week, by writing an essay that was first aired on Dozhd TV. Under the headline, “Why We Hate Each Other,” she wrote: “Last weekend, I happened to be at the Kazansky Station where I witnessed a disgusting scene: Three young men from the Caucasus were taunting female train conductors standing on the platform. ‘Hey babes, are all women in Moscow as beautiful as you are?’ they jeered. Then they joined hands and began yelling, ‘We are from the Caucasus!’”

Russians love the phrase double standard – “dvoinoi standart.” For decades, it has been directed outward, to the West.

But now, more and more Russians are directing the double standard critique inward, to their heavily Muslim South.

They object to the fact that some young men come from the Caucasus to Moscow under the impression that they have just won a ticket to a sexual Disneyland. If you just proposition 10, 20 or 50 girls on the street, the thinking goes, eventually, you will get lucky.

Earlier this year, I was down in Chechnya and its sister republic Ingushetia on reporting trips. Chechnya now lives under virtual Sharia law. Last week, a Reuters friend reported from Chechnya that security men are invading beauty salons and tearing down pictures of women modeling hairstyles. Apparently hair dressers can no longer display photos of hair styles. It sounds like Monty Python, but that is Grozny today.

Ms. Simonyan is a well-traveled, multi-lingual, 31-year-old executive, whose family roots go back to the southern Caucasus. She blames the problem on parents sending the wrong signals to their sons: “Why do some from the Caucasus behave this way in Moscow? Do they behave in the same way in their native regions? Of course not. They respect their countrymen. But they have no respect for Muscovites — or Russians in general. If those young men at the Moscow train station had dared to taunt “their own” in such a crude manner in the Caucasus, somebody certainly would have broken their jaws.”

Next month, my three sons, all American university students, will visit Moscow for the holidays with two college buddies. I will explain to all five, very clearly, in plain English, that their health insurance policies do not, in any way, cover the consequences of harassing girls on the streets of Moscow.

You Like Potato and I Like Potahto

For the longest time, I could not figure out why, in Russian, the word for "foul speech" was the same as the word "mother." I posed this question to several Russian friends and I got what seemed to be head nods of agreement. 

In fact, the words are orthographically different while being phonetically identical (at least to me). Mother is "мать" while cursing is "мат." In retrospect, those head nods may have been of sympathy, as in "poor guy just doesn't get it."

This reminded me of a strange dialog that I once had while teaching mathematics in inner-city Dallas area. The school principal (P) introduced me (A) to Ms. Lohan (L) in a dialog similar to this:

P:  Mr. Sharif, this is Ms. Lohan, the liberian.
A:  Nice to meet you; I have always been curious about Liberia and have never met anyone from there.
L:  I am the liberian at this school.
A:  I should expect so; Liberia is not a large country and has a small diaspora.
L:  No, I run the libary at this school.
A:  Oh, I see.  It is nice to meet you in any case.

Lohan the Liberian

Gauging by the looks that I got from them, the principal and Ms. Lohan considered me a moron for my apparent inability to distinguish a liberian from a Liberian.  In standard English, there is no "liberian," but in some American dialects, liberians (librarians) run libaries (libraries).

Potato, potahto, Tomato, tomahto, Let's call the whole thing off

American Zoo vs. Russian Theater

Having written a bit on animalistic themes, it is now appropriate to dive a bit deeper into the domain and talk about politics.  In particular, it is worth comparing two types of productions:  The American zoological type versus the Russian theatrical one.

The next American presidential election will be held in a bit over a year from now, but the presidential campaign is in full swing.  The White House is now a cage of some sorts for a wounded animal.  Barrack Obama came into the White House roaring like a lion and memorizing with a lofty rhetoric, but he had little experience.  Now he has more experiences, but seems to be out of lofty words, uplifting speeches, or even kitty-cat meows.  His presidency, sans a few exceptions, has been disappointing.  If we add economic stewardship and his ample wasted political opportunities to this consideration, we can qualify Mr. Obama's performance as nearly disastrous.

American Politics

This should give a wide opening to Republicans coming at him from the right, but this is where the zoo analogy really takes hold.  The Republican field appears to be replete with entertaining gorillas that are busily hurling feces at each other.  At the current pace, he who dishes out the most poop but gets served the least has a good chance for the party's nomination.  But, the stench that the current Republican primary is creating makes it improbable for this candidate to beat Mr. Obama in the general election.  Welcome to the American political zoo.

In contrast to the American zoo, Russian politics is a nearly perfect theatrical production worthy of no less than the Bolshoi Theater (situated just across the road from the Kremlin).  After keeping the country - and the world - in suspense for four years, the president and prime minister announced that they are to switch jobs in next year's "elections" per an agreement that was decided years ago.  The show was nearly perfect.  The slight imperfection stain came when one competent and professional government official, Mr. Alexey Kudrin, went off script and began to heckle one of the lead actors, the president himself.

A World Best:  Russia's Bolshoi Theatre

Magnificent, and Only for Masterful Performances

The theater responded appropriately:  It ejected the heckler.  The focus was kept on center stage.  The show goes on.  And it will continue to do so while enough oil revenue is coming in.

Cougar Alert

Cougars are fast, in this case fast enough to elude captured by a 1/500 of a second flicker of a camera aperture.

This was a city-dwelling cougar. She was in her middle ages, but revived by the high-revving, sleek, but purring animal she was driving: a Mercedes Benz coupe. And to ensure that the world did not misunderstand her place in the food chain, this predator had airbrushed actual cougars all over her car.

All Are Cougars, Some Are Wilder

Alas, this fast and cunning cougar gave me the slip; If only I had been a bit quicker with my camera ... I mean, that stylin' cougar's car paint job was worth a thousand words just by itself.

Something Like This, but on a Benz

The Dog Was Spared

I took an illegal taxi last night, chauffeured by an Azerbaijani, and presumably a Muslim.  At some point, a bus driver dangerously cut off my taxi, sending my driver into a rage.  The taxi driver accelerated, made eye contact with the bus driver, and unloaded a creative but crass tirade involving his genitals and a dizzying combination of the bus driver's mother, wife, daughter, and their orifices.

To His Credit, He Spared the Family Dog

Somewhat shocked, I looked at the driver and said "это не по-мусульмански," roughly translating to "this is not Islamic behavior."  The driver paused to think for a moment and then looked at me with shame and embarrassment and said, "you are right, I shouldn't say anything about putting it in their mouths."

The rest is okay, I guess.

Animal Trap

Alexey Navalny, a Russian public activist, once compared certain Moscow street intersections to animal traps.  Mr. Navalny complained that the signage on these traps was designed to be deliberately confusing.  This confusion invariably leads most drivers to commit "errors," thereby giving hungry policemen waiting nearby a chance to trap the driver and shake him down.

Whether the animal trap analogy is appropriate is a separate question; the fact is that street signage in Russia is, indeed, rather confusing.

I took this picture at the intersection of two major streets in downtown Moscow. When turning right from the feeder road of the Garden Ring to Tsvetnoy Bul'var, one is confronted with this extremely cluttered signage scene.  It is as if it was designed to deliberately confuse drivers.

• The street name sign is quite small; it must be that Russians have better eyesight than other mere mortals on the planet.
• Signs overlap each other; good luck trying to get a clear picture with a simple glance.
• And if it is not bad enough, some random pole blocks the traffic signal. 
• The traffic light is small, posted low, and as poor visibility unless you get very close to it; then it is blocked by a random pole (see above)
• You have to pay very specific attention to the shape of the traffic light (I versus L) to know whether right-hand turns are allowed with a general green sign (I) or whether they require a special green light (L). There is no other way to know other than looking at the shape of the traffic light. And the special green light on the L-shaped signal is not complemented by special red light informing the driver not to turn left. In other words, you either get a green light or nothing.
• There is a slight degree of additional confusion with the blue direction sign; that sign says that “one can go straight or right;” however, the traffic light says “unless I explicitly allow it – and you have to pay close attention to my shape."
• And what is it with the advertisement posted right next to official, information signs? This should be a crime – or at least a misdemeanor.

With all this confusion, no wonder hungry policemen are waiting right around the corner to flag driver who will, invariably, make mistakes with this signage arrangement.  Bad information presentation, it seems, is a blessing for bribe collectors

Marvels of Moscow Metro, Part V

Post rush hour, some Moscow metro trains are taken out of service as the extra capacity is not needed.  Obviously, these retiring trains need to be evacuated of passengers; and sometimes passengers do not evacuate willingly.  

A case in point was a drunkard on my train who refused to (or could not) wake up and leave the train.  He was removed by a very lightly-armed the metro police - probably as gently as possible.  

In my experience of witnessing American police, had this passenger been riding the BART in the San Francisco Bay Area or the New York Metro, he would have likely been handcuffed and arrested for a similar infraction.  In the case of this drunkard, the indignity of being dragged of the metro car and onto the metro station floor is probably punishment enough.  

As a final note, the drunkard blew a kiss to the lady who first attempted to wake him up.  Call it a happy ending.