Ah, the sanctity of Sunday nights…
Sunday nights in Northampton usually involve loading the car up with clean laundry and a trip with Velvet to Stop & Shop to stock up on Raman noodles and Hershey bars, which for her form the two basic food groups. I then return her to school, and then head back down I-91 to Northampton. Once back, it is my custom to mix up a martini, or pour out a glass of cheap and cheerful New World chardonnay, and settle in to watch the endlessly fascinating, albeit fictional, world of Juniper Creek and Sandy Utah on HBO’s Big Love, the Mormon drama, which follows the roller coaster world of modern-day polygamist Bill Hendrickson, who juggles three wives, countless children, a scary set of in-laws from “The Compound,” his DIY business, and a run for public office. The perfect way to unwind after a busy week.
In Moscow, Sunday nights mean swanky leftovers, a similar bottle of the New World wine, which costs 8 times as much, and a slog into the weekly analytical news programs. Normally, during the Russian Sunday night line-up, I doze, peruse cookbooks, escape to my bedroom to watch a DVD, or trawl Facebook, but not this week. This week was a doozy, leaving even Juniper Creek and Bill’s sinister brother-in-law Alby and Nikki’s truly slimy ex-husband JJ in the dust.
News, of course, unlike Big Love, is meant to be non-fiction, but sometimes, and this week in particular, those lines get blurred.
The news channels all kicked off with the same lead story: Russia is dominating the medal count in the Paraolympics. After a frankly lackluster performance and a shocking display of bad sportsmanship at the Other Olympics this is Really Good News. The kind of news you can build on. If I were the President of Russia (and I often think it is a shame I’m not), I’d get right on top of this, ride the curve, and announce a sweeping program of universal handicapped access to things that aren’t now accessible to anyone mildly physically challenged. Sidewalks spring to mind, as do airports, museums, theatres, and residential housing. Clearly, Russia needs to support and encourage its physically challenged, who are so obviously the future of the Russian sporting world.
Lofty as this idea is, however, it seems unfeasible, since according to the blogosphere and some pretty pissed-off, and deliciously grammatically challenged construction workers down in Sochi, no one is paying anyone to build anything in Sochi for the 2014 Olympics. Construction workers, hired from all over Russia by dodgy-sounding agencies, agreed to pay their own travel expenses to Sochi (and what were they thinking?) have not been paid in several months by numerous organizations ending in –STROI (which means construction), including, ominously, Olympstroi. The unpaid workers are being fed by kind residents of Sochi, who have set up soup kitchens for them, though why the Sochi-ites should do that is beyond me, since the STROI crowd are going to force all of the citizens of Sochi from their existing homes into yet-to-be-constructed slums, which seem unlikely to be built any time soon, let alone a Luge course.
As reported in The Moscow Times the construction workers themselves live in truly appalling conditions, which they filmed on the few mobile phone which had not been hocked for cigarettes and kefir. This wasn’t covered in any of the Sunday night line-up, but it is all over the Russian blogosphere. Their plight is not remotely funny, and I’m not suggesting it is, but the growing awareness that Sochi 2014 might just be a Potemkin Village was captured brilliantly in a truly funny ad by Smith’s Crisps, which is enjoying a certain amount of popularity on, as Rachel Maddow would say “the YouTube machine. Well worth a visit!
No Russian newscast is ever complete without a bad road story, but this week, the infamous traffic cops had a head on collision with vox populi, and vox populi emerged the winner! The traffic police are not having a good month. Heads continue to roll in response to a public outcry at the suspicious lack of closed circuit film to document who was responsible for a hideous head on collision between a brand new black Mercedes, registered in the name of the Head of Security of a leading Russian oil company, and a beat up Citroen, driven by one of Russia’s leading OBGYNs (aged 72) and her daughter-in-law, also an OBGYN, who were heading to a delivery. One of the cars had moved into the opposite traffic lane to avoid a jam. You do the math. But, just as authorities were getting to grips with that PR nightmare, traffic police on the Moscow Ring Road asked Russian citizen-just-minding-his-own-business Stanislav Sutyagin to park his vehicle in the middle of the gazillion lane highway, at a diagonal to act as a “human shield” to apprehend a potentially armed criminal, traffic police were attempting to apprehend. The other car covering the opposite flank was – and you really can’t make this stuff up – a Volga containing a 9-month pregnant woman heading the hospital to give birth. Both drivers, who agree they were not given much choice in the matter, positioned their cars, and several minutes later, an Audi going three thousand kilometers a second smashed through their volunteer cordon, severely denting the sides of both vehicles and sped away.
This is the kind of thing you rarely see on I-91. Not between exits 17B and 27 anyway.
Sutyagin, peeved, took his upset to the Internet, where it immediately went viral. Authorities were forced to make a public apology: in a ceremony that made even me cringe, portly senior traffic cops in full uniforms called Sutyagin in to collect a verbal, as well as a written and nicely framed apology, that he seemed reluctant to accept. Senior officials in the Interior Ministry called on the carpet by President Medvedev who wondered why ordinary citizens had been asked to act as human shields on a deathly highway in the pursuit of an armed felon seemed unsure of their response. On the roads, traffic cops seem mildly, and no doubt very temporarily, chastened – our driver Tolya has been able to talk himself out of three fines in as many days. It can't last.
Neither of these
stories, though, however juicy, could touch the Georgian (as in Former Soviet
Republic, not the home of Scarlett O’Hara) TV channel IMEDIA’s Saturday night lark:
This privately-owned TV channel launched a 30 minute faux broadcast, reporting
in tones of alarm that Russian forces had invaded Georgia, bombs were raining
down on the capital Tbilisi, and that President Mikheil Saakashvili had been
assassinated. No mention was made
that the broadcast was fictional, and a disclaimer crawl appeared only after
total and utter panic had ensued.
Georgians, as anyone who has ever been to a Georgian restaurant knows, are an excitable people. Unlike their colder, more staid Slav neighbors (grammatically challenged unpaid construction workers in Sochi aside), Georgians react in a volatile and wholly Mediterranean manner, and, on Saturday during the broadcast they reacted in character: everyone rushed to the ATM and the gas station. Russian TV, predictably did not seem to be familiar with, nor made any mention of Orsen Wells’s 1938 caper “War of the Worlds,” which to me is yet another example of how, in this part of the world, all the really good ideas like iPhones, vertical filing systems, and the concept that you can sell food and drink at gas stations, are imported.
The most balanced reporting on the whole thing I found was Andrew Kramer’s in The New York Times this morning. Russian TV focused much of its attention on running the mock broadcast, which had been spliced together from real footage from August 2008, when Russian and Georgia clashed over North Ossetia, and a voice-over commentary on pictures of Barack Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy, who, the TV station claimed, were responding “strongly.” To me, and I have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, there were a few obvious tip-offs which might have suggested that the footage wasn’t real: the fact that everyone was dressed in sleeveless sun dresses and short sleeved shirts and trees were in full bloom stand out as memorable, but the panic was real, and only subsided after the conclusion of the broadcast, when IMEDIA ran a crawl to explain that the broadcast was a simulation. Russian TV had no trouble finding a number of terrified underage children to whine into the camera obligingly.
Saakashvili is, of course, a nut case of the highest order, and I can’t think that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that crowd aren’t going to give him what for – which is exactly what he deserves. His only comment about the broadcast was that, yes, it had indeed been scary, because it portrayed a realistic future for Georgia if Russia had its way.
It seems to me that if Russia has its way, a realistic future for Georgia would look something like a cross between Juniper Creek, the Moscow Ring Road, and the Paraolympics, run of course, by JJ.
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Photos by Jennifer Eremeeva, all rights reserved