Alcohol ad exaggeration

Vodka is, of course, a cornerstone of Russian culture. How else would you make such lovely statements as, “Let’s drink to kind ladies and other mythological heroes!” and mark the coming together of friends, etc.?

But Russia is a land of extremes, and Russians show a strong tendency to overindulge, on average.  They consume approximately 4.75 gallons of pure alcohol per person each year, over twice what the WHO considers a health danger.

The Russian government is showing signs of an impending crackdown that would ban beer sales at kiosks.  Besides ruining the beautiful culture of strolling along river banks and boulevards with a cold beer (rather than sinking ever lower under the eardrum-splitting pressure of blasting Europop at a bar filled with lipsticked, pig-faced women and bald, head-butting men), this would fail to address an alcohol problem based on vodka.

In a related example of stupidity, Russian TV is running exaggerated scare-tactic ads such as the following:

Text:  “When alcohol enters the blood, red blood cells clot.  Clots appear in the bloodstream that lethally block capillaries.  Capillaries expand and burst.  With the use of 100 grams of vodka up to 8,000 brain cells die.  For every drinking session, 10,000 brain cells flow out in your urine the next day.  Protect yourself!”

Reducing the alcohol-induced problems of premature death, reduced productivity and population decline is a matter of regulating distillers who make unregulated brand-name knock-offs and taxing vodka more heavily.  Fear-mongering TV ads are about as effective as oars on a motorcycle.

Come learn how he ate the dog

I’m back to deliver on my promise to start posting translations of Russian authors who are hard to find in English, and our first likely lad is Yevgenii Grishkovets (also transliterated “Yevgeni Grishkovetz”). This contemporary writer has basically made a career of selling memoirs, in many of his works drawing extensively on his experiences growing up in the heart of Siberia, serving in the navy and returning to Russia after traveling the world.

I first read his memoir “Reki” because it’s relatively doable Russian for a non-native, and I’ve just finished reading the equally autobiographical “How I Ate the Dog,” a monologue performed by Grishkovets himself that enjoyed a near-perpetual tour of Russian theatres in the early aughts. It’s been said that this work divided Russian theatre into two eras: before Grishkovets and after Grishkovets. While I wouldn’t go that far, it certainly is unique, a kind of novel-meets-theatre bit that features extensive improvisation and add-ins by the author during live performance. Here we get Grishkovets at his finest; the experiences of his navy service and childhood recounted in the monologue are not unusual or even eventful, but the way Grishkovets tells them, they take on the thoughtful yet folksy tone of an armchair philosopher’s musings, only the result is  spellbinding rather than pretentious.

The next couple of posts will feature a translation of this seminal work, which remains relatively unknown in the non-Russian speaking West, as far as I can tell. Conveying the author’s idiosyncratic humor and semantic wit will be difficult; even the title can be contentious and has been translated alternately as “How I Ate A Dog” (there are no articles in Russian). I have chosen to translate it “How I Ate the Dog” because the title references a Russian expression meaning to acquire or demonstrate mastery of a skill, which becomes  a play on words at one point in the monologue.

Depicting Grishkovets’s talent as a performer will of course be impossible. For those interested in also seeing the onstage dynamic, plenty of clips can be found online.

Into Georgia (and Back Out Again)

Apologies for the absence; I’ve been traveling in Georgia, that mysterious little post-Soviet Eden on the Black Sea. And as post-Soviet things tend to do, the republic is slowly crumbling, from pockmarked, torn-up stretches of sidewalk on Rustaveli Avenue, the main street of Tbilisi and the most important street in the country, to the Tbilisi metro, which in form looks like a rundown mimicry of the St. Petersburg metro and in size resembles a model train set. But the food is delicious, even the alcohol, which ranges from red wine to the stiff Georgian white wine, a de facto hard liquor, to the grape-based vodka “cha cha.”

And the people are the friendliest I’ve met so far in the former Soviet Union, priding themselves on their maxim, “Guests are a gift from God,” and inviting this traveler into their homes on more than one occasion.

In short, a charming place, which is why it’s hard to watch as its already scarce territory is sliced away by Russia, which has played on Abkhazia’s half-baked dreams of independence and poured its settlers and then its troops into South Ossetia in August 2008. These troops have yet to withdraw from the new swaths of territory they conquered.

The August war is never far from mind. On Rustaveli, there’s still folks living in tent-like “cells” to protest the rule of Misha Saakashvili, who is either loved or hated by each citizen of Georgia in his turn. An American government employee I met in Tbilisi blamed Saakashvili for the August 2008 war, saying he had misinterpreted signals from Washington and gotten overexcited to win back his country’s territory, but also noted that the Georgians don’t have anyone better to lead them at the moment.

When I went to Georgia in the second week of July, word was that a new war was soon to break out …

Russian Radiohead tribute: Damn that dental fricative “th”

Saw a tribute concert to Radiohead last night at The Point, a “club” that’s actually just a small bar with a soundboard housed in half a VW van that reads, “Where were you in ’62?” on the front.

As a result of this half-ecstatic, half-traumatic experience, I will never be able to listen to any Radiohead song involving the phoneme “th” without thinking of Russian youth whipping themselves into a blind frenzy to melodic keyboard tones: “Every-sss-i-i-i-ng … in it’s right place …”

There are a few topics that almost any person will pretend he’s an expert on regardless of his actual experience; the music of Radiohead is the third most popular of these, following sex and Barack Obama’s health care plan.

And so I was a bit surprised to find myself the resident Radiohead expert in the room following the show.

“How was the singing?  I mean, the English pronunciation?” an eager dredded Russian would-be tormented-but-rich-and-famous pop artist asked me.

“It was great, Sid, just watch that ‘th’ sound.  It’s a doozy.”

Volga Boatman Episode 5: Saratov

The infamous "serp and molot" of the USSR, with the wrench-and-hammer symbol of the Soviet Ministry of Railways underneath.

Somewhere deep in the Russian psyche lies a desperate need to commune with past glory.   As we saw with Samara’s Stalin bunker, this does not mean a close analysis of what actually happened: The Soviet era lingers like the memory of a crusty grandfather, fondly reminisced over whenever his mug shows up in the family photo album, but never condemned for beating up grandma (Let a dead dog lie, to used a mixed metaphor).

Communist Party is still alive and actually growing in Russia, as this rally shows. Probably the most serious competitor to Putin and Medvedev's United Russia.

In Saratov, this deliberately simplified relationship with the past comes to life at Park Pobedi (Park of Victory, only the millionth such-named park in Russia), where you can clamber around on Soviet tanks and pose for funny pictures under Communist-sloganed rail cars, all while paying your respects to the victorious soldiers of the Great War of the Fatherland.

Little engine that could: The "Death to Fascists" locomotive.

On the flag: "For the homeland, for honor, for freedom!" Below: "All as one for the defense of the Fatherland."

And since every Russian city has a fetish with some historical figure (possibly an outgrowth of the Russian inferiority complex based in its mixed history), you can also get yer yuks from the many memorials to first man in space Yuri Gagarin, who learned to fly here, and ironically landed (crashed?) nearby after his historic space flight.

The cultural side of the city — a stroll through the market and the pedestrian street — was better than nearly cutting my feet on the broken bottles lying around the famed beaches of Samara, but it also served as a reminder of the current collision between the brashness of consumer culture and the stoicism of tradition.

East meets West: A Baskin Robbins stands next to a Russian Orthodox church.

A meat seller displays the front of a cow's face at the rinok.

In Saratov, cops only have to go to the other side of the police station to get a donut.

Who cares who started it?

On the debate sparked by Georgian recordings purporting to show that Russian troops invaded first:

Start by realizing it was disadvantageous for the Georgians to storm South Ossetia regardless of whether there was already a Russian invasion underway. Because of Russia’s clear military presence (and therefore dominance) in the region — Russian planes had been overflying Georgia for months — the Georgians really should have realized what a colossal blunder they were making.  Maybe they did and felt they had no choice, moving in a last-attempt bid to win quickly and seal off South Ossetia from Russia via the Roki Tunnel.

In the end, who really cares who started it? Both sides have been aching to throw down for South Ossetia since long before shells started falling. Since at least January, Medvedev/Putin and Saakashvili have been shuffling their military forces around the region like impetuous Battleship players impatient to start calling out shots, with ominous but under-reported trash talk to match their posturing.

The only real mystery is why.  Because of this conflict, Tbilisi has lost any chance at control of South Ossetia, and Moscow now has to commit even more money and resources to the war-torn region.  Saakashvili looks like too much of a hothead for the prim-and-proper NATO kids, and Medvedev/Putin are still the rabid dog scaring the citizens of the international community.  Talk about senseless loss of life.

Why is it that the biggest political stage so often resembles the smallest, i.e. the playground?

“C-1!”  “Hit!”

Was Russia in the right?

From “Georgia Offers Fresh Evidence on War’s Start” at NYTimes.com:

“But at a minimum, the intercepted calls, which senior American officials have reviewed and described as credible if not conclusive, suggest there were Russian military movements earlier than had previously been acknowledged, whether routine or hostile, into Georgian territory as tensions accelerated toward war.”

Uhh-ohhh…  I was just talking to my Russian friend who strongly believes, like most Russians, that the Kremlin intervened only after the fact to protect the South Ossetians from Georgian aggression.  She condemned the loss of life on all sides, but still felt Russia was justified in invading, since “Georgia started it.”  We’ll have to see if the grayscale picture emerging here shakes up such black-and-white views…

Georgia debate continued …

So it turns out that Kirill, the juggling bartender pictured below, is from North Ossetia, the Russian counterpart to the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia. For him, the conflict has struck close to home, with bombs at one point falling a mere 15 kilometers from his parents’ house.

Nevertheless, his view on the situation was pragmatic: Let South Ossetia stay in Georgia, or at least not be absorbed into Russia, which South Ossetian officials have stated will be the province’s eventual fate (incidentally, this article’s headline, “Kremlin announces that South Ossetia will join ‘one united Russian state’”, is false and misleading; a South Ossetian official made this statement.  Let no one doubt that the American media can be quick to condemn Russia).

Kirill feels that with the Russian government already forced to shuffle large amounts of money and resources from rich urban areas to the poorer and sometimes conflict-ridden parts of the country (like the Caucuses), South Ossetia would only be a greater burden for Russia.

At a time of such fervent nationalism at home (in Russia, Georgia, America, South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and political brinksmanship on the international stage, a clearheaded analysis like this is refreshing. See fellow Russia blogger Siberian Light’s recent post for similarly practical observations.