Dividing My Time

The Bodies Politic

With the news about Vladimir Putin running for president (ending, as the international press called it, "months of uncertainty" -- poppycock!  I was always certain!) Russia now officially joins the US in gearing up for a presidential election in 2012.  The difference between the two political processes brings out the contrast between my native country and my sometimes-if-they-give-me-a-180-day-visa adopted country.    And while I love getting caught up in the hoop-la and intricate minute-by-minute politico.com approach of the American model, the minimalist/clutter-buster in me finds much to admire in the streamlined approach of the 35-minute Russian electoral cycle, where they waste no time on extraneous stuff like:

        1. Candidate-branded bumper stickers, lawn signs, baseball hats etc.   Branded items are for winners only, and since the electoral cycle is so very short, and, of course, no one in Russia actually has a lawn (that the public can see anyway), what’s the point?  

         2. Philadelphia Cheese Steaks: Ever since Boris Yeltsin’s ill-advised boozy boogie on the tarmac became the primary perestroika image, Russia’s leaders have avoided anything overtly physically sloppy or messy.   Food consumed on national television is limited to the traditional bread dipped in salt, which is much easier on the tie and shirt collection. 

        3. A hit television series, lasting the through two presidential terms, which details the inner workings of a fictitious Presidential Administration, in which the actor playing the fictitious president enjoys an actual political approval rating significantly higher than that of the real sitting president.  Puh-leeze.  There is enough confusion over who is really running the country, without putting Martin Sheen into the mix.

        4. C-SPAN:  “God is too high, and the Tsar too far away,” runs an old peasant saying, and that’s the way the current Kremlin crowd intends to keep it.  No need for raw uncut sausage factory detail, the sitting Russian government is hard at work, a message that is reinforced each night on the news.  The scene: ornate inner Kremlin office.   Minister X perches uncomfortably across from glossy reproduction Baroque desk from either the Prime Minister or the President (because, as we know, they are interchangeable,) torso bent over arms stacked one on top of each other, hands touching opposite elbows, listing slightly from side to side in the classic “Russian bureaucrat slump.”   He mumbles his set piece, which includes at least one set of statistics, peeking out from under his bushy eyebrows nervously at the boss, who learns back in the contemplative, but slightly condescending manner of a headmaster who has had to call this particularly errant 7th grader in just once too often, finally nodding and saying “Yes, that’s right.”  Flashbulbs pop.    “Dancing on Ice” follows after the break.

        5. Jon Stewart and Tina Fey.

        6. Debates.

        7. The long-drawn out Primary process.  Are we on ludes, or is the football season just too short?

        8. The wife of a national candidate showing off her bare upper arms.  Russian political wives and children keep subterranean profiles, in a tradition going back to the Tsarevich Alexei and hemophilia thing.  Russia’s first ladies only ever really come out in public during State Visits to meet The Queen  (and can you blame them?)  However, whoever is advising them on what they should wear to that particular social event needs to be shot.   J. Crew catalog – over here, please!  

        9. The clergy having an opinion.   And expressing it.  Uphill work for Russia, since the clergy only speak Old Church Slavonic, a 13th Century dialect which no one but them understands.  Picture Jeremiah Wright and Billy Graham communicating in Demotic Greek.  (So likely.)

        10. Sexual scandals.  Russians are genuinely baffled by the Anglo-American prevalence to sexual scandals like the Monica Lewinsky “episode” toppling the political careers of powerful men.   What is wrong with us?  HRH (my “handsome Russian husband”) could not make head or tail of the Senator Larry Craig foot tapping scandal, no matter how many times Velvet and I explained it to him.  The data went in, but his brain refused to fuse it together.   He couldn’t link “gay” with “senator;” or “senator” and “at” with “public airport bathroom.” “Public airport bathroom” and “gay overtures” didn’t make sense as a pair, and he kept going back to “senator” and “public airport” as a dubious match, and was finally defeated by “gay senator” and “reinstatement.”  Total data scramble.  Tech support please.

-------------------------------------------------

A much edited version of this piece appeared this month in Russia Beyond The Headlines.  

-------------------------------------------------

Hey there readers!  Can you think of any other differences between Russian and American political campaigns?  What's political campaigning like where you live?

Un-friending Dmitry Medvedev

If you are a Russia watcher  (and if you aren’t, why on earth are you reading this blog?) you will be up to speed about the big announcement over the weekend that Putin will be running for president of Russia in 2012.   I don’t know about you, but I personally did not need to hold on to anything solid.  As my friend Beth Knobel put it succinctly in the Huff Post in the one “must read” article on the topic:

    “The news that Vladimir Putin will seek a new term as Russian     president is about as surprising as Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi announcing     that she's going for another round of spray tanning.”

This made me wonder if the Brighton Beach sylphs from Russian Dolls were at all surprised/shocked/disappointed/jaded, or, indeed, even aware of the news that Putin will most likely be in power until 2024, until I told myself to stop being so silly. They can’t even spell “Putin,” let alone form an opinion about him, and quite right too.  Not knowing nor indeed caring about who is running Russia is why their melancholy parents have been scrubbing floors for the past 25 years, so their progeny can focus all their attention on lip liner, Botox and getting a reservation at Rasputin for New Year’s.

I spent about 30 seconds feeling a little bit sorry for Dmitry “Lamest Duck Ever” Medvedev, if only because I think his tough cookie wife Mrs. Medvedeva is probably giving him a helluva time, but then I dismissed that as overly sentimental. HRH is always accusing me of being naïve about politics, and I daresay he’s right.   It’s a shame, though, because I thought Medvedev was cute.  I met him once for about 32 seconds during his halcyon days as First Deputy Prime Minister, when all he did was drive around and give money away.  He seemed a nice guy, and he was very complimentary about some logistical duck tape I'd used strategically (sorry, I really can't say more) so I was pleased when he got his promotion.   I liked his iPad-toting style, even though it sometimes seemed like he had neglected to download the latest update of the app-for-that on what was actually going on in Russia, like that time Moscow was literally burning up and he announced he was rebranding the militia to be the politisia (which has not made one iota of difference.)  I thought the Twitter thing was engaging, though he continuously refused to follow me. Let’s face it, though, nice though he was (note that we are all already using the past tense about him) he looked way too much like another nobbled-at-the-post loser Russian leader, Nicholas II (complete with strident, excessively religious wife and a son always kept in the shadows) to be in any way reassuring... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See what I mean?

I wasn’t going to stop following Medvedev on Twitter, though, because that seemed excessively harsh, but then I took a break from writing to check out the latest news and was really horrified to learn about the rank silliness with Alexei Kudrin, the I-guess-Former-but-probably-not-for-long-Finance Minister.  Kudrin, who is a real geek, but knows how much oil there is in a barrel, had publically announced he would not serve under Medvedev as Prime Minister.  Medvedev publically encouraged Kudrin to resign now, and Kudrin (nah-nah-nah nah-nah) said he’d have to consult with Vladimir Putin (the current-but-not-for-long) prime minister.  What is this, people, the 8th grade?  Even the Russian Dolls crowd are not this petty. 

So, I am, like, totally un-following Medvedev.  And I’m not alone.

------------------------------------------

Priveyt Readers!

Have you stopped following Medvedev?  Have you unfriended him?  Do you think Alexei Kudrin makes Amanda Seyfried in "Mean Girls" look nice?  Do you think the Russian election will be interesting?  Or does Rick Perry seem appealing in contrast?  Let's find out ! Hit the comment below and let rip!  And stay tuned for more exciting Russian Dolls news, coming right up!

Curb Your Enthusiasm!

HRH, (my “Horrible Russian Husband”) has some friends who are high up in government circles, and then he has an even larger number who would like you to think they are.  Gena Varyenkov falls into the latter group.  He spends a lot of time trying to convince everyone that he is privy to all kinds of explosive insider information when, in actual fact, he works for the State Lottery.  Conversation with Gena is always uphill work, since he is allergic to opposing views.  The last time I tried was in 1999 when he flatly refused to even discuss the notion that an anchovy is a fish.   After that, I gave up.

Gena’s latest conspiracy theory is that the mind-bogglingly inconvenient sidewalk renovation currently going on in Moscow is actually a clever anti-revolutionary measure by that cagy crowd in the Kremlin.  “Last year they engineered the heat wave and the smoke,” Gena revealed, “so everyone left the city.  This year, it’s the sidewalks being torn up.  No one can move around the city, so no protests are possible. By the time they finish, it will be too cold for protest marches.  No one revolts during cold weather.”

“With the possible exception of the Bolsheviks in February and October of 1917,” I quipped.  

HRH and Gena ignored me.

“What worries me,” said HRH, “is that those bricks they are using for the new sidewalks are the perfect weapon for the proletariat, should they ever decide to rise up.”

If, or indeed, when Russia’s next revolution comes, it will most likely be nicknamed “The Curb Revolution,” because the origins of discontent might well be traced back to the sidewalk debacle that has Muscovites well and truly pissed off.

One upside of the renovation is that this has been a great summer to start the Dukan Diet – the new no-carbs miracle diet that helped Kate Middleton slim down before her April nuptials.  Why?  Because for most of the summer, it has been physically impossible to get to my favorite bread shop, thanks to the simultaneous carving up of over 4 million cubic meters of Moscow sidewalks ordered by the capital’s new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin.  Overnight, the existing asphalt sidewalks were hacked to pieces, and Moscow suddenly looked even more like Poland in the early hours of September 1, 1939 than it already had.  Swarms of dusky guest workers up from the south started to lay the (really ugly) brick tiles slated to replace the hacked-to-pieces asphalt, getting into heated arguments with beefy security guards over access to the entrances they guard.  It’s never been easy to be a pedestrian in Moscow, but this summer, it’s been impossible.   To score a simple baguette or pastry, I’ve had to pick my way through a narrow path perilously close to the traffic whizzing by on the Garden Ring, and then negotiate a rickety wooden plank, placed precariously over two hunks of old asphalt to reach the bakery door. 

Like the Dukan Diet, the sidewalk controversy has a lot of meat on it.  Sobyanin, a rank outsider, hails from Khanti Mansi, and spent most of his career on the wrong side of the Urals, so when he became Mayor of Moscow it was like appointing Clint Bundtson from Lake Woebegone, MI to be the mayor of New Orleans.  Since the mayor of Moscow is Presidential appointment rather than elected position, Sobyanin has no legal or political responsibility to seek the opinion of Moscow’s 15 million citizens as to how they feel $145.4 million dollars from the city’s coffers should be spent.  Sobyanin, who until the sidewalk thing got going, was best known for cancelling gay pride events and registering his shock and the amount of “Non Parisian skin colors” on a visit to France, clearly did not waste any valuable time or energy finding out.   

When Muscovites learned that Sobyanin’s wife Irina, known as “Ira Bardura” or “Ira the Curber” owns a successful sidewalk tile/brick and curbing company, and that during Sobyanin’s tenure as governor of Tyumen Region, all of the sidewalks in Tyumen got a tiled facelift, you could almost hear the collective groans as heads were shaken from Khimki to Southern Butova.  Though there was no direct evidence to link the Moscow tiles with Mrs. Sobyanin’s company, the memory of former mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s construction mogul wife, Elena Baturina was on the mind of everyone.  Nikolai Klimeniuk, writing in “Snob” put it succinctly:  “I don’t want to hear that those tiles are all because of the mayor’s wife.  We’ve already had one married mayor.”   Tales of Ira Bardura began to fly around Moscow, including the wild rumor that the curbs of Tyumen were all lined in solid marble.

Three days later, Gena had a new different explanation, which I wasn’t sure he understood was actually a popular joke around town (which Tolya our driver had recounted to me that afternoon):  “Luzhkov told Sobyanin that the streets of Moscow are paved with gold,” Gena confided conspiratorially.  “So Sobyanin is looking for it.”

Proletarians of the world…over to you!

---------------------------------------------------------------

A version of this post first appeared in Russia Beyond The Headlines. 

----------------------------------------------------------------

Photo by the author.  All rights reserved.

Hello There Readers!

How's your summer been?  Have you found it difficult to get from A to B in Moscow? Do you think Mrs. Sobyanin's company is behind Curbgate, or do you think that we're all just been so so so unfair!  Weigh in by hitting the comment button below!