Something Old, Something New

Something old ... a Russian samovar

Something new...

I'm home from Russia, and a news story from there depressed me greatly. New York Times reporter Clifford Levy reported Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent.

In one sense the story wasn't new to me. Levy's piece wasn't the first detailing the cynical way that Russian authorities have used anti-piracy laws as a pretext for confiscating computers of troublesome non-governmental organizations. Although software piracy is rampant in Russia, and Microsoft estimates that it loses $1 billion a year because of piracy, authorities have not gone after the manufacturers or distributors of pirated goods. Dozens of raids have instead been made on advocacy groups and opposition newspapers, totally disrupting their operations.

Clifford Levy didn't report on the reaction of ordinary Russians to the police raid of the environmental group Baikal Wave. Here's what I think Ivan Ivanovich (that's "Joe Blow," in Russian) might say.

"Let's be realistic here," says Ivan Ivanovich. "The law is nothing more than a tool for authorities to use as they wish. If you irritate the people in power, or you have something they want, well, expect them to use the law against you. They certainly won't use the law against their friends!"

To Ivan Ivanovich there's nothing surprising about the authorities using anti-piracy law to go after Baikal Wave. The organization opposed the re-opening of a paper mill on the shore of beautiful Lake Baikal, the world's oldest and deepest lake, home to hundreds of species found nowhere else. But Vladimir Putin had taken a stance in favor of reopening the dirty factory. (Putin had publicly made his endorsement after taking a submarine ride in the lake. The pure waters could handle pollution from the plant, he concluded.)

What made this story different from dozens of others about anti-piracy raids on advocacy groups is that the New York Times reporter focused on the role of an American entity. "Microsoft, like many American technology giants doing business in authoritarian countries is often faced with ethical choices over government directives to help suppress dissent."

Microsoft had tried to steer a middle way. It would cooperate with the Russian government on anti-piracy crack-downs, but it would try to help non-governmental organizations by making licensed software free or very low cost. All an NGO had to do was ask for the free licensed software.

Indeed, Baikal Wave had licensed software. But where standards of probable cause are weak, and judges are complicit, the little guy has little protection. Baikal Wave had its computers confiscated "for investigation."

Clifford Levy's story upset me so much I tried to think about something I could do. I thought about contacting a friend in the U.S. Department of State... would the U.S. government have any influence? Erratic enforcement of anti-piracy laws are one of the things holding up Russia's accession to WTO, the World Trade Organization. But I happen to believe that Russian leaders aren't all that enthusiastic about WTO because of the disruptions it would bring to protectionist policies... Diplomatic pressure would probably not work.

Is there a higher power than the U.S. government? Yes. The power of the U.S. press.

There was some squirming on office chairs in Redmond, Washington, after the story in the New York Times on Monday. Microsoft had known for months of accusations that "Russia uses Microsoft to suppress dissent." But in just one day, on Tuesday, Microsoft came up with what appears to me to be a brilliant remedy. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith announced Microsoft Changes Policy Over Russian Crackdown. The company will immediately provide a blanket software license good until 2012 to cover even pirated software installed by advocacy groups and media outlets. NGOs will be automatically covered by it, without having to apply. Furthermore, Microsoft will institute the same policy in any other country where advocacy groups are threatened with shutdown by the same tactic as has been used in Russia.

See, some stories have happy endings!

Highest Mountain in Europe

Who knew? Not I!

The highest mountain in Europe is not Mont Blanc in the Alps, but Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus. Mont Blanc is 15,782 ft tall. Mount Elbrus is 18,510 ft tall. It's in the southern mountain range that helps mark the border between Europe and Asia (readers of this blog know that the Ural Mountains mark the northern border of the continents).

When Slava and I were a mere 40 miles from Mount Elbrus in the town of Kislovodsk, I very much wanted to take a day trip to this site. Its permanent ice cap feeds 22 glaciers. It is said to be where Zeus chained Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. Zeus knew what he was doing. Mount Elbrus is intimidating.

I haven't been as scared in a long time as I was on Mount Elbrus. Now I happen to be a 'fraidy cat and scare easily (never taking roller coaster rides). For those who really like a thrill ride, I recommend the cable cars and chair lift on Mount Elbrus.

There is a sleek, French-built cable car system on Mount Elbrus that looks quite safe. Unfortunately it's not working. Some Russian bureaucrat decided to save money (or pocket some money) instead of providing lightning protection for the new equipment. The predictable happened and the electronics of the cable car system got fried.

Slava and I rode up the mountain on the old Soviet-era cable car system. It was built in segments between 1959 and 1976, so it's at least 34 years old. The creaking journey high above the rocky mountainside took 40 minutes, and I spent much of that time worrying that the bureaucrat who decided not to install lightning protectors on the new system was the same bureaucrat in charge of maintenance on the old system.

Riding in the enclosed cable car cabin was bad enough. The chair lift beyond that was postively petrifying. Periodically we'd pass signs that said, "In the chair, don't...." I didn't know what it was that I wasn't supposed to do (which itself was a little worrying), but it turns out that the warning in Russian was not to jump out of the chair -- a caveat of the type you see on U.S. warning labels.

Jumping or falling from the chair would mean instant death. Below us -- way, way below us -- was a field of flint sharp boulders. Mount Elbrus is an ancient volcano, covered in chunks of basalt. It looks as inhospitable to life as the moon (although I can't say for sure, not having been to the moon).

Once out of the chair lift we had to climb a bit to the snow fields. Slava bounded forth ahead of me, assuming incorrectly that I was right behind him. Eventually he came back and patiently helped me along. We were at around 14,00 ft and able to enjoy the snowfield in shirt-sleeve weather.

I was glad that I had the opportunity to see the geography of the Caucasus, in order to appreciate better the continual troubles of the area. Tribes of people are quite isolated from each other, and fertile land is preciously scarce.

Roads through the Caucasus are not good. We had a four-hour drive to get to Mount Erbrus, going through several towns and driving along winding roads. We were in a 10-passenger Toyota, sitting in the very back. The driver sped along heedlessly, and we were bouncing up and down so much I felt like I was on a galloping horse for four hours. I felt saddle sore afterwards.

For anyone who likes adventure travel, I recommend taking a trip with Slava.

Diet No. 5

At the health hotel we had Diet No. 5. Pictured here is a typical breakfast.

A Russian breakfast may be similar to supper. You'll notice a cup of tea, a tomato and cucumber salad, an omelet and mashed potatoes. (A Russian omelet is made with lots of milk and is therefore almost a custard.)

Side dishes include tvoroznik (a baked pudding with farmer's cheese), a small plate of oatmeal, a pastry, and red caviar for buttered bread. We could have had boiled chicken or a meat cutlet instead of the omelet. In any case, you can see that there was plenty of food to last us until dinner -- which is in the middle of the day.

A Russian dinner starts with zakuski, or appetizers, which often include vegetable or meat salads. There's also kielbasa, cheese, bread, and a soup course. The main course here will be boiled meat or chicken or baked fish, served on a small plate with mashed potatoes.

The dinner drink at the health hotel is always either kompote, a sweetened beverage made with a few berries or softened dried fruit, or kisel, which tastes somewhat like liquid Jello.

Supper is similar to breakfast. At the health hotel we usually get something to take back to our rooms for a late night snack. Fresh fruit, perhaps. Or kefir to drink (look for kefir in the dairy section of your grocery store; it's similar to buttermilk or drinkable yogurt.)

Diet No. 5 is a generic one here, probably what most people get. There are to be no fried foods. Meat is boiled, braised, or baked. Soups are made with vegetarian broth. Nobody gets seconds, although each portion is small.

One day a tablemate of ours ate our servings of the first course before we arrived. The waitress was indignant, for she had to replace our setting. The guy never tried that trick again!

Slava is a big eater, although a careful one. He needs to have a large stash of fruit around for snacking. So some afternoons we went foraging. From an Armenian couple on the street we bought some grapes and a watermelon. At the central market Slava got plums and peaches. He got pears from a wild orchard we found on a hike.

There's one important food group virtually missing from Diet No. 5. That is coffee. On our first day I asked about coffee at breakfast, and was told that I could have it the next day, which was Tuesday. The next morning I got one packet of instant cafe-au-lait with sugar. I got another one the following Tuesday. I learned that coffee was served only on Tuesdays.

Fortunately I had come prepared for such a situation. I had packed a bag of ground coffee with single cup filters. In a land of tea drinkers, I knew that I might have to be responsible for my own welfare.

Do clients lose weight on Diet No. 5? Not likely. I'll have some remedial work to do in the United States.

A Russian Recipe

Photo of our kitchen in E-burg

After "Food Safety Alerts," published below, I'd like to talk about cooking at home.  In the heat of summer, it’s nice to have a cold soup for lunch.

A Russian favorite is called Okroshka, and it is with pleasure that I share this recipe with you. Note that the quantity of each ingredient is left to your discretion.

OKROSHKA SOUP
Boiled potatoes, diced
Boiled egg, diced
Cucumber, peeled and diced
Green onion, chopped
Fresh dill, chopped
Sausage or other meat, chopped
Horseradish
Mustard
Sour cream – as a topping
Kvas

Oh-oh. The last ingredient is a bit of a problem in the U.S. Kvas is a beverage made from fermented black bread. Although it’s possible to make it at home, no one does that any more. A fair substitute, I think, would be near beer, or nonalcoholic beer.

An alternative is to use the milk product called "kefir."  It's available in most American supermarkets, and it's something like a light yogurt.  It can be used as the broth of this cold soup in place of kvas, thinned out a bit with water.

If you try this in the U.S. and mix near beer or kvas with the chopped vegetables and meat, I think that to get the full Russian experience of summer you should also turn off your air conditioner.

Food Safety Alerts

In an earlier posting, “Secrets of A Russian Housewife,” I stated that the women I know here like to make pelmeni by hand, rather than buy it at a store, like I do. Or rather, like I used to do – until I read the following article in the Moscow Times. The first shocker was learning that at least some commercial pelmeni (Russian ravioli) contains horse meat rather than beef. Then I noted that Darina pelmeni has been recalled in Sverdlovsk (the area surrounding Ekaterinburg). Tons of meat had come from animals infected with anthrax.  

By the way, for the past six months Russian authorities have halted the shipment of chicken from the United States ostensibly because chlorine has been used as a disinfectant. This vigilance in protecting Russian consumers also keeps them from getting frozen chicken that is bigger and cheaper than what is produced in Russia.

I’ll be looking for follow-up stories to the one reprinted below. I’d expect that a few people might get into trouble with these revelations. If that ever happens, I’ll share that news on this blog.


Anthrax Death Linked to Pelmeni 
03 August 2010
The Moscow Times

One man died and five others were hospitalized after contracting anthrax at a farm in the Omsk region that supplied horse meat for pelmeni sold in Moscow and other regions, Interfax reported Monday. 

All six victims fell ill after being hired to cut meat from diseased animals, said Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service. Horses started dying at the farm in June, but the farm's owners hid the deaths, he said. 

Lifenews.ru said about 2 1/2 tons of horse meat with anthrax was supplied to Darina, a prominent pelmeni producer. The meat was confiscated, as were shipments of the company's pelmeni in the Moscow, Omsk, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Tver regions, the Novy Region news agency reported.

The Health Hotel

I'm starting to write this while in the salt room of the  Health Hotel, undergoing speleology treatment.  I'm to be here for 45 minutes -- sitting, breathing, and listening to New Age music.  That's 30 minutes longer than yesterday, and 30 minutes longer than I can sit without a great deal of figetting.  

When Slava and I arrived at the Health Hotel in Kislovodsk, the doctor who checked us in over-ruled the doctor in Ekaterinburg, who said I have feeble limbs (see August 7 posting on "Health Problems").  The treatment for me here would be for "chronic bronchitis in remission."

Breathing ions in a room walled with bricks of salt is one prescribed treatment.  Five minutes daily of inhalation therapy is another, using a face mask to breathe in air moistened with narsan mineral water.  Every other day I bathe in narsan water; on alternating days I have a "circular shower" for blood flow stimulation.  On alternate days I also get a ten-minute spinal massage.  And every day I get a mug of phytochai, a herbal tea concocted for better breathing.

Slava is getting several different treatments.  He gets a strong underwater massage, magnetic treatments for his knees, and a herbal tea appropriate for his Type A personality.

Actually I don't think that I've ever seen Slava as relaxed as he is here.  He knows the routines of a Russian health spa, and like most clients here he readily accepts the prescription of resting between treatments.

All treatments are scheduled for morning hours.  The afternoons are hot, and without air conditioning or electric fans.  Our sluggish bodies frequently end up napping.  We do, however, often take walks in the afternoon or evening.  We've climbed the hill to Red Rocks, walked to the Valley of Roses, gone off trail to pick pears at an abandoned orchard, and (my favorite) walked 15 minutes downtown to use the public access computers at the main post office.

Good health...good access to the Internet... I appreciate both more than ever!

Learning Russian -- Part II

The first hurdle to learning Russian is the Cyrillic alphabet. Five letters are easy, just like ours: A,K,M,O, T. Eleven others are mostly Greek, and then there are four that make a sibilant sound. The tricky letters are Latin in style, but different in pronunciation: B is ”veh,” H is “en,” P is “er,” C is “ess,” E is “yeh,” X is “khah,” and Y is “oooh.”  The Cyrillic letter for I is sometimes written like U, and the letter T can look like a lower case m.  So...

 The storefront sign says “Coffee House.” The sign on the kiosk transliterates to "Pit Stop."

Learning Russian Part I

 Sign for a "Dino-Park"

The good news is that I seem to remember most of the Russian I learned while living here.

The bad news is that it never was very much.

My first week back I was labeling some containers in the kitchen, and I remembered that the word for flour is “myka” (pronounced “moo-KA”). Slava asked me if I knew the meaning of “myka,”pronounced “MOO-ka.” No, I didn’t. It turns out that myka can mean either flour or “anguish.” With just this one example you can imagine badly I can garble the Russian language.

Ah, let me give you another example. The other day I was in the kitchen with our Russian daughter-in-law, and as she was cutting up vegetables I asked her if she wanted an onion. Only, what I offered her was a manhole cover, Slava said.

Russian grammar is complicated. In addition to suffixes and prefixes, some words have infixes – take a word apart, stuff something in the middle, and put the word back together. Nouns have three declensions and six cases. Verbs have two conjunctions and lots of irregular forms. So many opportunities to make mistakes!

To improve my Russian I like watching three things on television: sports, weather reports, and advertising. These three are presented with limited vocabulary. Win-lose, wet-dry, buy now…

My greatest skill is in listening. My good friend Galina knows English well, but prefers to speak in Russian. So when we get together, she speaks Russian and I speak English. We get along just fine.

Fire, Fire!

The most severe heat wave here in recorded history (temperatures up to 40 Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit), combined with an unusual drought, has led to a conflagration that has surrounded Moscow with smoldering peat bogs and out-of-control forest fires. The resulting smog may itself be setting a record.  Slava and I are safely away from the fires in European Russia; right now we're in the northern Caucuses Mountains, but on August 18 we'll be going to Moscow.  We trust that conditions in Moscow will be better then than they are today. 

The country's chief lung doctor, Alexander Chuchalin, has said the air pollution is equal to about two packs of cigarettes smoked within three or four hours. The pollution-monitoring agency said that pollution has reached a level 10 times higher than acceptable, and has urged Moscow residents to wear thick, eight-layer face masks outdoors.

But what about the air indoors? Very few Moscovites have air conditioning. The air inside apartments is the same as air outside. Moscovites have nowhere to go to get away from the smog. That part of the story hasn’t generally been reported.

I won’t get into the various examples of incompetence and lack of planning for dealing with today’s problems. Let me just say that summertime fires in the highly combustible peat bogs are a regular occurrence, albeit not usually so dramatic as this year.  

It is said that a question Russians frequently ask is “Who’s to blame?” The fall guy is not usually a high level person, although this time Putin himself has been criticized. Frequent Kremlin critic Yulia Latynina says, “In reality, there is really only one bureaucrat who is responsible for this tragedy — Putin himself.”

When Putin signed the Forest Code of 2007, written to please paper mill owners and real estate developers, forests were to be “protected” by those using them, entities with rights to cut them down. The number of forest monitors was cut by 75 percent.

Latynina says, "Although Russia has been burning for a month, the army was ordered to join the firefighting battle only several days ago. Why was the army not called up three weeks ago? Because there is no fundamental system of controlling and managing the country. Putin decides everything in Russia, and he was too busy with other things during the first three weeks of the fires — for example, doing photo ops with bikers in Crimea or singing songs with the 10 spies who recently returned from captivity in U.S. detention centers." 

Not everyone blames Putin. An Interfax news story reports, “Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said Russians should seek to stop sinning in order to end a record drought that has stoked the fires.” 

"One shouldn't think that the drought will pass if we just pray to God and then forget and fall into sin," Kirill said during a visit to the town of Lukoyanov. He cited an Old Testament story about a drought sent on the Jews for worshipping a pagan god and said Russians should turn into "a different people" by abandoning their sins.

You’ll note that the patriarch has opinions not unlike those of some American religious leaders who have commented on the cause of hurricanes.

 I’m going to finger someone who has escaped harsh questioning until now, and that is the king of Moscow – excuse me, the mayor of Moscow for the last 18 years, Yury Luzhkov.

The mayor isn’t around right now. He’s on vacation. Where? His aides won’t say. When will he be back? His aides won’t say. The fires are not his problem, they’re outside the city. Oh.

In my opinion,  the city of Moscow could and should have lots of air conditioned shelters set up for the most vulnerable, if only for a few hours of respite during the day. At minimum, more hospitals could and should be air conditioned.

How many deaths will occur because of the current harsh conditions? The answer to that is political, because of course the question really is, how many deaths will be reported as having been caused by these harsh conditions. Count on lowball figures.

The Moscow Times reported on August 5, “The scorching heat and thick smog in Moscow have not reached levels that could be considered critical, the Russian capital's chief pulmonary specialist said on Thursday.” The report noted however that on Wednesday the overnight invasion of acrid smog had shrouded the city's streets and landmarks in a choking haze that was so dense that airplane pilots diverted to other airports.

Pulmonary specialist Andrei Belevsky said, "The peat bogs [around Moscow] are on fire not for the first time. This concentration [of toxic substances] doesn't harm the health of Muscovites." Ah, what has he been smoking? 

Dateline: Kislovodsk

We arrived in Kislovodsk on Sunday, and one of the first things I learned about the hotel where we are staying for 10 days, is that it has no Internet available for guests.  We will have to make occasional trips into town to use computers at the main post office.  Blogging from Kislovodsk will not be easy!

A Hijack Scare

There are times that I tend to be a little melodramatic. This is one of those times.

About a week ago, the flight that Slava and I will be taking on August 18 had a hijacking scare. The flight is to Moscow from Mineralniye Vody in the North Caucasus. On July 29 a passenger on this flight refused to let the other 104 passengers and crew leave the plane, demanding direct talks with Putin about terrorist activity. There was a 2 ½ hour standoff until police disguised as medics boarded the aircraft, ostensibly to help a passenger who was ill. The would-be hijacker was unarmed and made no direct threats, according to first-hand reports. He simply made demands to meet with authorities and mass media representatives. That was enough, apparently, to scare people.

Although hijacking an airplane is punishable here by up to eight years in prison, the man is more likely to face up to five years on charges of “illegally depriving people of freedom.” Hmm… I can think of other people here in Russia who might be vulnerable to such charges…

August is a month to dread for Russian leaders. Remarkably bad events have happened year after year… In 1991 there was the attempted coup of Soviet leadership (I was here then; my write up of that experience is on an old floppy disk somewhere). In 1998 Russian financial institutions imploded with government debt default (I was here for that one, too). In 2000 there was the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine (Americans were indirectly blamed until evidence indicated otherwise). In 2004 there were bombings of two passenger jets, and on “August 32” (the 1st of September), terrorists in North Ossetia took 1,100 children and adults hostage in the town of Beslan; 300 people died. In 2009 an accident at Sayano-Shushenska hydropower station in Siberia killed 75 people. I think that 2010 will go down as the year of the terrible heat wave and drought, when fires consumed acreages of peat bogs, wheat fields, and even whole villages.

It’s 4:00 am local time, and normally I’m not up quite so early. Slava and I have a flight from Ekaterinburg to Mineralniye Vody (“Mineral Waters”) leaving at 6:10 am. I have little idea what life will be like for the next 10 days. I do expect to be able to blog occasionally, although perhaps not quite as often as while in E-burg. In the meantime, pay attention to any breaking news coming from the Caucasus. If possible, I’ll later give you a first-hand report.

Health Problems

I’ve been diagnosed by a Russian doctor as having feeble limbs. There are two explanations for this diagnosis. The first is that when interviewed in Russian, I might have answered “da” to a question when I should have said “nyet.” The second explanation is a little more complicated.

Slava wanted a traditional Russian vacation this year. In Soviet times people didn’t do frivolous things like go off to have fun; they got authorization for health treatment at a sanitarium. The experience, I’ve been told, is quite relaxing.

I was quite willing to go to the Health Hotel for ten days. Slava made reservations and booked our flight, then he asked me what kind of health treatment I wanted. I said that I feel perfectly fine. It was the wrong answer. “What?!! You’d take the place of someone who really needs it?!!” We set off to find something wrong with me.

It turns out it’s best if there’s just a little bit wrong with you. Having tuberculosis or HIV or a sexually transmittable disease is not good. So I got a lung x-ray, an EKG, went to a gynecologist, and left blood and urine samples at the Russian Academy of Sciences polyclinic. Everything was normal. It was up to one last doctor to determine a reason for me to go to the Health Hotel for ten days.  

I helpfully suggested that my cardiovascular system might benefit from attention. (It doesn’t get enough attention from me, in the form of regular exercise.) As an essentially lazy person I was thinking that Russian medicine might have a machine that would do the work for me while I lie around for ten days... I think this is how I got the diagnosis of having feeble limbs.  

Tea for Two

Entertaining someone at home in Russia almost always means inviting them for tea.

Depending on the time of day and other circumstances, “having tea” can be a lavish spread or something simple. I go for simple.

When my friend Irina Medvedeva came to visit, I served good Chinese tea, some sweet cakes, and fruit. Fresh fruit and something sweet are requirements. I should have had some home-made varenniye jam, but I didn’t. And I didn’t bother making any open-faced sandwiches or other substantive fare.  

Years ago, when I first came to Russia, I was mystified by the social practice of having tea. It seemed that it could mean anything. In the evening it would take the place of supper, and there could be many side dishes. Tea in the morning or afternoon could involve home-made pastries or store-bought pizza. Then I learned the one rule about having tea: Never serve a soup.

Russians like to have soup every day if they can. The meal that has soup, usually in the middle of the day, is called dinner.  

I have learned to appreciate good loose tea. It can be steeped more than once, and when it is made strong, it can be served in a small pot and then diluted with hot water at serving time.

I’ve left out one important aspect of a Russian tea, and that is conversation. It's the real reason we get together. Comments that my friends have made about Russia today will be the subject of a later message.

Ekaterinburg, Yekaterinburg

Peter the Great was tsar when E-burg was founded in 1723. The tsarina was Catherine I, but the city wasn’t named after her – it was named in honor of her patron, St. Catherine. So why wasn’t the city called St. Ekaterinburg, similar to St. Petersburg? Don’t know.

There’s more to say about this place name. E-k-a-t-e-r-i-n-b-u-r-g is close to the Russian spelling, which has a few Cyrillic characters thrown in that I can’t produce in this blog. The pronunciation is Ye-ka-TER-in-burg, hence the spelling in English usually begins with a Y, and that’s likely the way you’ll see the city on a map (Yeltsin’s name, by the way, transliterated from Russian, is Eltsin.)

The Governor’s Palace, pictured here, is from tsarist times. Like other buildings of this era, it has a stucco façade and lots of ornamentation. Buildings from pre-revolutionary times are often brightly restored with the pastel colors used in Europe during earlier epochs. But such restoration is expensive, and not all old buildings get this loving treatment.

 
There’s another name for the city that is of historic importance. During the Soviet period the city was called Sverdlovsk, named after the Bolshevik hero Yakov Sverdlovsk. Who was this guy? Well, the usually reliable Wikipedia says that he was a close ally of Vladimir Lenin, and that he played an important role in planning the October Revolution. He is said to be the person who ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, which took place here in the city of Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. Later Sverdlov was the chief architect of the Red Terror. “It was claimed that Lenin provided the theories and Sverdlov made sure they worked.” That is what Wikipedia says. Russians say differently.  

My friend Galina believes that in ordering the execution of the tsar, Sverdlov was merely carrying out Lenin’s diktat. Slava says that within the last week he read a historian’s report saying that local Bolsheviks were entirely responsible for the murder of the tsar, and that no one in Moscow was informed of it for four days. Sverdlov was in any case guilty of many other murders, which were called justified by the still-influential Communist Party. The statue of Sverdlov remains on the main street of Ekaterinburg

 
The statue of Vladimir Lenin has never been brought down in this city, and it remains a prominent part of 1905 Square. There’s no statue that I know of for the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, whose political career began in this city. Yeltsin is remembered with distaste for the tumultuous chaos that occurred with the break up of the Soviet Union. 

The local duma or parliamentary body meets here. It’s not exactly a vibrant example of democracy. Russia has a “power vertical” system, which means that the locals are to follow the diktats of their superiors. In the 1990s local elections resulted in governors and mayors who were not always compliant with the wishes of the Kremlin. Putin appointed presidential representatives to deal with these local bosses, but he’s found it much more efficient to have governors be appointed rather than elected, and within the last few months Ekaterinburg has lost the opportunity to elect the city mayor. The duma exists to ratify whatever it’s supposed to ratify. An efficient system, yes?

During the Soviet era this city was closed to foreigners, hence it was not known in the west. But it’s the fourth largest city in Russia and growing year by year. The third largest city, Novosibirsk, is dropping in population. Both E-burg and Novosibirsk experience more deaths than births (in E-burg there were 54,500 births and 65,000 deaths in 2008). Growth in E-burg comes from in-migration because of job opportunities. Right now E-burg has about 1.3 million people, with 4.5 million in the general area. The population is 90 percent ethnic Russian with splinter representation from 21 different ethnic groups.

 
A large cathedral was recently built on the site of the Ipatiev House, where the family of Tsar Nicholas II was bloodily assassinated on July 17, 1918.

 

The Iset River flows placidly through the city, and a few tall buildings can be seen in the background.

The wrought iron gazebo is an example of the ironwork frequently found around this town, which is the economic center of minerals processing. The region is rich in natural resources, particularly in metals (iron, copper, gold, platinum), minerals (asbestos, gemstones, talcum), marble and coal. Logging and wood-processing are important, too. It all contributes to air and water pollution, but for right now the emphasis is on economic growth.

 
Ekaterinburg is a military headquarters as well as an industrial center. It was here that American U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. Although bits of his aircraft were meticulously collected and sent to Moscow for study, Slava says that local boys boasted for years that they found metallic scraps they were sure had come from the American U-2 spy plane.

A few street scenes...

                   … a summer outdoor café…

 
…a woman crossing the street… Japanese model cars seen in abundance…

 
…a walkway down the main boulevard of town, Lenina Prospekt. Ekaterinburg is more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow. It’s not likely to be on a tourist itinerary any time soon and so it’s going to remain an unknown place for most Americans – except for those who read my blog!

Russian Dachas

 The dacha is a country house, yet it is much more than that. The dacha pictured here belongs to my friend Galina. Although it looks like a nice cottage, it’s not what Russians call a “cottage.” Russians use the word “cottage” (with lots of Cyrillic letters) to describe a brick mansion or a very modern structure that is a display of social status, wealth and power. Only the very rich have cottages.  

The root word of dacha is “given.” During tsarist times aristocrats were given large country dachas by the tsar himself. During the Soviet era small dachas were given to ordinary people by the enterprise they worked for. Communist leaders got bigger dachas, but all the land belonged to the state, and the rights to a particular dacha could be taken away. Today, with private land ownership, dachas can be bought and sold.

Dachas are weekend homes on small plots of land that are usually heavily planted with fruits and vegetables. These garden plots provide a huge amount of basic foodstuffs for the Russian people. They take work, lots of work. For the older generation, a bounteous harvest from the dacha provides a sense of security that no matter how tough life is in general, at least they will have food to eat.

Younger Russians with discretionary income may regard a dacha as a place for weekend relaxation. They also like to escape from the city to the clean air of the countryside.

Every Russian I know has a dacha. Actually, it’s estimated that about 25 percent of city dwellers have dachas, and the rest probably know people who’ll invite them to visit.  

A big holiday in Russia is May Day, the first of May – it’s the start of the planting season. Although there are summer harvests of fruit and some vegetables, potatoes and carrots are harvested in the fall.

It’s common to have apple trees, and bushes for black currants, gooseberries, and raspberries. Strawberries and rhubarb are other popular fruits. Vegetables that are commonly grown include potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, radishes, onion, garlic, dill, parsley.

 
Zucchini grows and grows during 18-hour days. One zucchini can feed a family of four.

 
This photo is of the garden at the dacha next to ours. There is a huge field of potatoes to feed the family through the winter.  

 
Like many families we have a greenhouse. Ours is larger than most and has two rooms. Many of the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and herbs grown here by a gardener may end up in a local market.

 
Here is our dacha. Although most are just one story, this one has bedrooms upstairs. It is made of logs and was built in the 1980s, when private persons weren’t supposed to be able to build such things. How Slava managed to buck the system is a story for his autobiography, which I hope he writes one day.

Careful What You Wish For

Not long ago I expressed a yearning for hot water. We had it for a while last weekend, but we had to leave town to get it.

We spent the weekend at our country dacha, which is a rustic home about 50 kilometers from here. Although we didn’t have the luxury of flush toilets, we did have filtered well water and an instant hot water heater in the kitchen.

Having hot water in the kitchen was great, but how about in the bath? Well, at a Russian dacha there is often a separate “banya.” Ours is shown in the accompanying photo. The banya is something like a Scandinavian sauna. 

Picture a winter scene where hardy people are super-heated in a sauna or a banya, and then run out into the snow. Now picture a sweltering summer day with the temperature hovering over 90 degrees. There’s no place to get cool. Would you like to get even hotter?

It was with misgivings that I agreed to use the banya. The outer room, the one for relaxing, was perhaps 95 degrees from the heat seeping in from the other rooms. We could sit in the first room for a while and listen to music CD’s while having a drink of one kind or another, which we might have done in cooler weather. This time we went straight on into the bathing room. Vats of water were there for us, some hot and some cold. We mixed according to our own preferences and soaped up thoroughly. We were busy enough that we didn’t mind that the heat had crept up to more than 110 Fahrenheit. Once we were clean we stepped into the last room. The heat hit me like a wall. I asked Slava what the temperature was, and he replied that it was over 95. “It feels hotter than that!” I corrected him. “Shirl, that’s 95 degrees Celsius,” he said. And in his usual quick way he calculated Tf = 9/5Tc +32 and told me that the temperature was 203 degrees Fahrenheit.  

Let me tell you what happened next. My own internal circuitry for temperature sensitivity got fried. When we stepped out of the banya, the 90 degree air felt positively cool. And for the next 24 hours my body sensors continued to compare ambient temperature to the banya experience.

So, when you’re feeling hot and sweaty, try getting hotter and sweatier. It feels so good when you return to just hot and sweaty!

Where Asia Meets Europe

In my last post I gave you some latitude, starting with 54-40. Today I’ll go into what’s interesting about the longtitude here.

As shown in the photo of 7-year-old Sofia Timasheva, there is a line nearby showing where Asia meets Europe. It’s possible to stand with one foot in Asia, and another in Europe (Note the names written in Russian Cyrillic. They’re pronounced “A-zi-ya” and “Yev-ro-pa.”)

So, where’s the line? It goes down the Ural Mountains, which stretch from the Arctic Ocean to the steppes of Kazakhstan. Geologists say that the Ural Mountains formed when two tectonic plates crashed into each other. Wow! The event happened 250 – 300 million years ago, and I guess it took place over a few million years…I’ll have to give up the image I had of one loud crash when the continents collided…

The city of Ekaterinburg is located in the middle of the Ural Mountains. You may imagine it to be like Denver, Colorado, but please remember that the Rockies are young, less than 76 million years old. As a matter of fact, the Urals are the oldest mountain range in existence, and they’re quite worn down. In the middle, latitude-wise, there’s a wide saddle of low land, and that’s where E-burg is located. The altitude “here in the middle of the Urals,” is a mere 780 feet.

Ekaterinburg is on the Asiatic side of the Urals, on the edge of Siberia. On another day I’ll provide some pictures and describe the city. 

54 40 or Fight

Before I get into the topic of the day, I’m going to make a digression. In high school I had a teacherless course in American history, and I loved it. I took American history in a summer school correspondence course in order to make room in my junior year schedule for something-or-other.  If I had had the usual history course it would have been taught, most likely, by an athletic coach who was put in social studies classes during the day. I saved myself from a dull experience and found out that history is what we choose to make of it.

I was surprised that summer to learn of the passions that have inflamed political leaders throughout American history. The Good Guys, it seems, are dedicated, persistent, eloquent, and altruistic. The Bad Guys are monomaniacs, obsessive, raucous, and self-centered. Ah, but the separation of Good Guys and Bad Guys is in the eyes of the beholder.  

     “Hang together or hang separately”…”Remember the Maine”…   ”54 40 or Fight…”

It’s that last slogan that came to mind to me recently. As the political slogan of presidential candidate and eventual winner James Polk in 1844, it threatened a third war with Great Britain. The Good Guys (or were they the Bad Guys?) said that the proper boundary of the United States in the Oregon Territory was at the edge of Russia-America, at the 54-40 parallel. Great Britain had a puny hold on the land north of the 49th parallel, which was the border for the rest of Canadian Territory. As this dispute continued, President Polk led us into war with Mexico. It really wasn’t a propitious time for another war with Great Britain, and so negotiation settled the U.S. – Canadian border at the 49th parallel. The disputed land became British Columbia and part of Canada.

You may know that the major population centers of British Columbia and other Canadian provinces are generally near their southern borders. There’s not much up at 54-40. I say that to put in perspective the fact that the Russian metropolis of Ekaterinburg is even farther north, at 56 52.  Moscow is just a smidge to the south, at 55 45 (and more than 1,000 miles to the east).

The weather in Ekaterinburg is continental, which means that like the Plains states in the U.S., it has temperature extremes. It’s cold in the winter, and it can be hot in the summer. Russians know how to deal with cold weather. Hot weather can be a problem. Since uncomfortable summer weather lasts only a few weeks, it is just something to be tolerated. I’m relearning how to live without air conditioning.

Being far north in the summer means that days are long and nights are short. It might still be light when we go to sleep. The sun is definitely up before we are.

Location, location, location. It does matter.

Dealing with Jet Lag

We’ve been here a week, and I’m fairly well adjusted to the 10-hour time zone difference. I no longer sleep late in the morning, take four-hour naps in the afternoon, and stay up all night reading. I only take short naps and read just a little in the middle of the night.

I’ve gotten used to reading the Washington Post online in the evening (8:00 am EDT is 6:00 pm here). More importantly my stomach and kidneys and liver don’t signal that they’d rather sleep when I have breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

An understanding of jet lag explains some recent public behavior of President Obama. You may recall that he hosted Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on one occasion, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on another. They were return visits made after Obama had been to their countries.

I’m very sure that Obama was feted with an elaborate state dinner in the Kremlin, and was served rich French food when he was in Paris. He vowed to get revenge, and the only thing he could think of that would be worse than all that rich food on a jet-lagged stomach was to take his guests to a greasy spoon restaurant. So he took Sarkozy to Ben’s Chili Bowl, and Medvedev to Ray’s HellBurgers.

A really nice thing to do for a jet-lagged head of state would be to have a picnic in a park. Lafayette Park is convenient to the White House, but it lacks seclusion. I recommend that Obama take guests to Rock Creek Park and let them relax. Grateful guests would think of Obama as a true friend.

I’m glad that my foggy brain is finally working well enough to solve problems in international relations.

Yearnings

I miss having hot water…

There’s one time a year when the city-supplied hot water is turned off in Ekaterinburg, and pipes are cleaned of corrosion, or some such thing. That happens for a week or so, and usually there are posters announcing it in advance. Not this time. Nobody knows why. And nobody we’ve talked to knows when the hot water will come back on. 

Although we didn’t have hot water our first day here, we did the next day. I thought we had had a temporary problem, and didn’t know that we’d lose warm water again. Fortunately I did some laundry and washed my hair that day.

There’s an obvious solution to the lack of hot water: make it yourself on the stove. It’s the way I do dishes. But a second problem arises, because the flow of cold water here is never very strong. It’s better in the kitchen than in the bathroom, however. The flow from the bath faucet is more like a leak. Today it took me 30 minutes to get water ankle deep in the tub – and that was with adding pots and pots of water that I had heated on the stove.

For the time being I’m having trouble going with the flow…

Secrets of a Russian Housewife

In my earlier life I didn’t need to know how to deal with dozens and dozens of long-stemmed roses at a time. Russian women confront this problem from time to time, such as on birthdays and on the 8th of March, which is Women’s Day.  

Roses last longer if they’re allowed to rest at night in a water-filled bathtub. Not only does the bath keep them from wilting, it refreshes them if they have started to wilt. This amazing factoid is one for which I have little use in the U.S.

Every self-respecting Russian housewife makes her own jams from fresh berries. The grocery store where we shop doesn’t even carry factory-produced jams and preserves. Fortunately Slava likes honey.

It is a proud local tradition in the Urals for women to make Russian-style ravioli, known here as pelmeni. No, pelmeni and ravioli aren’t the same, and Slava has a hard time ever eating ravioli because for him it’s a poor substitute for pelmeni. To be really good the pelmeni meat filling must be ground by hand, and the yeast dough wrappings made from scratch. Every Russian husband in this region, except mine, says that his wife’s pelmeni is the best. Making pelmeni is a labor of love, but I figure that love can be a side dish to store-bought pelmeni.

Kitchen Mishaps

This morning I ruined the French toast. Here’s what happened:

I started out with some good demidovsky, a dark bread with raisins. In a bowl I mixed together an egg, some nutmeg, several glurps of milk, and a tablespoon of salt. It would have been much better if I had used sugar instead of salt, but I can tell you that Slava made the problem worse…

In the U.S. Slava will put maple syrup on French toast. He decided to top his French toast here in Russia with a spoonful of sour cream, to which he added a tablespoon of salt from the sugar bowl. I’ll pause for a moment for you to imagine his reaction when he tasted this mess…

How did this happen? Well, yesterday I took on the task of reorganizing the kitchen. One part of that job was to take many small plastic bags with white ingredients, and label them. A carry-over from Soviet days is that there are many foodstuffs that are still sold in bulk, scooped into plain plastic bags. You can buy flour that way, and cream of wheat, too. Plus sugar…salt... Slava says that this is not a problem – if you’re not sure what’s in a bag at home, all you have to do is look at the grains very carefully, or scoop up some to taste. Wanting to put the Soviet system behind us I gathered a collection of glass jars, and labeled them with the intended contents. In various places around the kitchen I found several bags to combine of “mannaya kasha” (cream of wheat), “caxap” (that’s the Russian spelling for sugar, pronounced “sakhar”), “myka” (flour), and col (“sol” or salt). One bag that had just a small amount of sugar I simply dumped into the sugar bowl. That was yesterday’s mistake, which Slava discovered when he went to put sugar into his tea and discovered instead what salty tea tastes like.

This morning I picked up the jar labeled “caxap” and put a spoonful into the French toast batter. I then discovered my second mistake in the kitchen.

Tomorrow morning I think we’ll have “mannaya kasha” for breakfast.

Slava's Jubilee

Let me invite you to Slava’s jubilee birthday, held in the large conference room of his offices. There are about 25 people sitting at a large T-shaped table, with family at the end. You find a place, and within easy reach are platters of open-faced sandwiches, several types of pirogi, bowls of olives and pickles, and three-tiered trays of fruit. Also within easy reach are bottles of French Bordeaux, Russian vodka, Armenian cognac, various fruit juices, and water. Please help yourself.

Do remember that it is not Russian tradition to sit and sip. There will be plenty of time to drink your drink in response to toasts made throughout the evening.

At a birthday party, what do you give to The Man Who Has Everything? In Russia the answer to that is easy -- flowers. Sviatoslav Anatolyevich (a.k.a. Slava) got bouquet after bouquet of roses, lilies, mums, and more. There were other very Russian gifts: a beautiful sterling silver bowl made specifically for serving caviar, an elaborate tea set, and Russian Orthodox icons. One thoughtful gift was a book about the city of Harbin, the Russian enclave in China where Slava was born. Slava also got a couple of unusual cases for business cards, a keepsake Australian coin of pure silver, a pair of silver champagne flutes, a fancy new cell phone, and several years’ supply of cognac, his favorite drink (one bottle lasts him a year).

Gifts are presented with poetic tribute and song. Since Slava has clever people at his Center for Science and Engineering, I presume that the tributes were done with wit and style. Fortunately they were also done with broad humor, which I could appreciate, even if I couldn’t get the nuances of language.

One tribute started off with a poem by the beloved Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and then had verses added for today. Another person mimicked the stiff Soviet leader Brezhnev, and gave Slava a hero’s medal. A group of people announced that they were part of Chinese Children’s Radio (recalling Slava’s childhood in China), and to get high sing-song voices they inhaled balloons of helium.

A good time was had by all.


 

The Director's Wife

The party for Slava was not the first time I’ve seen how much Slava is appreciated by his staff. They know that he has given them opportunities they would not have had working in a regular bureaucratic institute in the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is therefore an honor for me to be the director’s wife, and I’m reminded of an old Russian joke that goes like this:

A military officer is selected to become a general. The day he achieves this rank is a day of great pomp and celebration. The new general and his wife return home, exhausted. The general goes to sleep right away, but his wife is too excited to sleep. She punches her husband awake and exclaims, “Genya, can you believe it? You are now married to a general’s wife!”

Arrival in Moscow

Jet-lagged after a long flight, there’s no better treatment than to be coddled and pampered until you recover. The best place for such treatment in Moscow is at the bed and breakfast run by Ludmila Rodina.

Ludmila is a long-time friend as well as a generous hostess. Slava and I were bad guests. I hope we didn’t strain Ludmila’s friendship.

I had told Ludmila that our flight arrived at 10:10 am, and we expected to be at her place around noon. At 12:00 we called to say that we’d not be there until 1:00 or 2:00. Our behavior so far was not unreasonable, and as I expected, she had lunch waiting for us. But we were not hungry. Our stomachs were still operating on Eastern Daylight Time. Ludmila delayed her own lunch until we were ready to eat at about 4:00 pm. Naturally, we weren’t ready for supper at 6:00 or 7:00. It was well after 9:00 pm that Ludmila had her evening meal with us.

Ludmila is rightly proud of being a gourmet cook, featuring many recipes from the Caucasus, and using ingredients from the gardens at her dacha. We had a cold beet soup, zucchini fritters, a Caucasian variant of ratatouille, turkey cutlets (rare in Russia), a platter of cold meats (Ludmila is largely vegetarian), traditional Russian brown bread, and caviar. This was served with champagne and cognac. With tea we had rhubarb-apple pie with a choice of homemade strawberry, raspberry, or blackberry fruit preserves.

Ludmila was gracious hostess to a pair of zombies. Slava functions better than I when jet lagged, but both of us needed naps. When we can stay for a few days Ludmila usually arranges for us to go to a concert somewhere, and we have plenty of time to talk. This visit was short, however, because we had to fly the next day to Ekaterinburg.

While hosting us Ludmila also had two Spanish women as guests. Ludmila operates her business largely by word of mouth, and so she’s not as busy as she could be. She likes to have guests she can enjoy. I recommend her services to any traveler who fits that description.

Transatlantic Travel

It’s been three years since I last flew to Russia. Delta Airlines has made the trip daily, with incremental changes along the way. I found that passenger electronics are better than three years ago. Food is not.

Instead of having a featured movie that starts after dinner, all passengers have touchscreens that can order up a menu of movies for their viewing pleasure. I found time for two – the pleasant comedy “Date Night,” with Tina Fey and Steve Carell, and the inspirational “Invictus” starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.

We used to have a number of music channels, like radio stations. Now we can put together our own playlists. It’s much more fun.

But, ah, the food. I looked for the printed menu of our dinner choices; the write ups always sounded good, even if the plates didn’t live up to their promise. Today there’s no need for a printed menu. Our choice, we were told, was “with chicken or without chicken.” I chose “with chicken,” and got a small plate with a calorie content suitable to the dwarf for which the seating was designed. For most of the men on the flight, I can’t imagine this being a happy experience.

After 8 hours of flying – just shortly before landing -- we got breakfast. It was shaped like a hockey puck and thrown by the flight attendant going down the aisle. Luckily the thing was wrapped in plastic, so it was okay if it dropped to the floor. After unwrapping and eating it I guessed that it was something like an English muffin with a scrambled egg white. The flight attendant made a second toss going down the aisle, and that time we got bananas.

What will transatlantic travel be like in another five years? I have no idea. I am grateful that the airline industry continues to have a good safety record, and in spite of my complaining, I’m glad that airlines try to keep costs down.

Chautauqua, NY

Imagine a quaint village built in the late 1870’s, with small wooden cottages decorated with Victorian trim… Now populate that village with people from the 21st Century… Question: Would the people transform the village, or would the village transform the people?

Based on what I’ve seen at Chautauqua, New York, the transformation works both ways.  

Chautauqua was founded in 1874 as a lake-side summer place where hard-working Sunday school teachers could go for rest, relaxation, and of course, religion. Few had a college education, which was rare in those days, yet many yearned for intellectual stimulation. Chautauqua Institution set up a challenging reading group, and invited speakers on lively topics. Chautauqua was broadly ecumenical from the start, and developed a flourishing arts program in music, dance, and visual arts.

Chautauqua is still a small village, with a summer population of about 7,500 that changes week to week. It attracts a variety of people, most of whom stay in guest houses that eschew air conditioning, but there are other facilities available. Some people cook their meals in community kitchens or private apartments, others eat out. Automobiles are rarely seen on the grounds and in fact are forbidden in many areas. The daily newspaper carries news of arts programming, nature walks, announcements of special studies, and synopses of remarks by featured speakers. No mention is made of anything happening outside Chautauqua. 

Welcome back to the late 1800’s. A week at Chautauqua is addictive, with first-time visitors invariably vowing to return year after year. Slava and I just completed our seventh visit.

Aiding the transition from the 21st Century to the 19th Century are some modern features that various people can’t live without. Starbucks coffee, for one. Internet connection, for another. We found several Wi-Fi networks we could use, one of which required a password. The password was “whatever.” A nice choice for the laid-back atmosphere of the place!

No two people experience Chautauqua the same way. The planned program, with simultaneous events throughout the day, is augmented by special interest groups that pop up on their own. If there are three people out of 7,500 who share a particular passion, they’re likely to find each other at a “brown bag lunch” or some other event.  

The theme for the main lectures of the week we visited Chautauqua was “From Asia to the Middle East: Energy, Capital, and Conflict.” Here’s what we have to choose from in 2011:
| 
“Global Health as Foreign Policy”-- June 26 - July 2

“Applied Ethics: Government & the Search for the Common Good” – July 3 - 9

 “American Intelligence: Technology, Espionage, and Alliances” – July 10 - 16

 “A Case for the Arts” – July 17 - 23

 “Women in Crisis: The Road to Social and Economic Growth” – July 24 - 30

 “Iran: From Ancient Persia to Middle East Powder Keg” – July 31 – August 6

 “The U.S. Economy: Beyond a Quick Fix” – August 7 - 13

 “Sparking a Culture of Creativity and Innovation” – August 14 - 20

 “The Path to the Civil War” – August 21 – 27

For more information about this wonderful puzzle of a place, go to www.ciweb.org