My favorite Russian blogger (the one who is 89 years old) wrote that Putin is a second-hand Stalin from a flea market.

My own Russian husband has realized that, these days, the phrase to start and end the day is, “Putin is an asshole.” And also, “Crimea is Ukraine.”

Tanya Golash Boza posted the following on Facebook:

According to Robert Boice’s study of faculty, those who were successful engaged in these behaviors:

*spent three hours or more per week on scholarly writing.

This is obviously true.

*integrated their research into their undergraduate classes.

Yeah, I can just imagine that. “Ser” versus “estar” and the memory wars in Spain. Does this guy knowing anything about actual undergrads? The idea that they have the preparation that enables them to understand my research is really bizarre. And it was the same at every school I worked. The worst course of my life was the course I taught at Cornell on the subject of my research. Since then, I swore never to inflict this suffering on myself and keep my research away from students for good.

Our real estate agent is a great guy. Helpful, competent, hard-working. But he spent his life in the deep Midwest and it shows.

In our initial meeting, he creeped out N. by trying to enter into a male bonding process with him. His attempts at male camaraderie through a series of winks and “Well you know how ladies are, we guys can never understand them” comments did not produce the desired effect. N. gets alarmed and starts looking longingly at the door when these things happen.

Yesterday, the agent tried pulling this Midwestern macho trick again. As I was talking about things I needed to appear in the offer, he interrupted me and addressed N. with, “Well, you are the boss here, N. You get to decide.”

“No, I’m the boss,” I said. “And as I was saying. . .”

After a while, the agent understood that he was doing something wrong and started looking at me when I spoke. He also had to stop trying to recruit N over to his side.

“Oh,” he said to me. “When I prepared the offer, I put his name first and your second. I will redo it immediately. I also have to ask, are you two legally married?”

An older gentleman in line at the convenience store asked me, “So do you know how the opener went yesterday?”

“We won,” I said.

Of course, I didn’t watch the game and am still not completely sure what sport was played but I know it’s crucial to be aware of who won.

It’s been many years since I checked my emails every two minutes, wondering, “Will he write? When will he write? What will he say?”

This time, the “he” is my real estate agent but the feeling is very recognizable.

The population of Quebec turned out en masse to vote for the discredited and corrupt Liberal Party. 80% of people are said to have come to the polls.

This was, of course, not a vote for the Liberals, whom everybody despises, but a big, huge, pulsating NO to the idea of having a new referendum on Quebec’s independence.

A Spanish-speaking Montrealer wrote on Facebook:

Chau Pauline Marois!!!!!!! Que te vaya bien!!!! Y que te vayas bien lejos!!!!

It seems like the leader of Parti Québécois Pauline Maurois has managed to antagonize many people in Quebec in quite a short period of time.

I want to extend my condolences to those in Quebec who are sad and congratulate those who aren’t (my loyalties are severely strained here, people. Whatever I say, somebody will hate me.)

Vive le Québec libre!

 

As usual, my great readers have come to my rescue in a difficult moment. Blogger Z proposed the following self-care challenge that I support and will adopt:

Racewalking and Bubbles.

Z says:

It is April and now it is at least warm enough. Everyone is to racewalk as many as 9 miles each day, or at least 1 km. This is for stress and is much better than, say, pacing around the house smoking, which is what watching developments like this Ukraine thing would have me wanting to do were it my country. After racewalking, bubble baths with some kind of fancy, skin smoothing bubbles.

Brilliant challenge! Thank you, Z, you are amazing. I think I can definitely do this.

Reader el asks an important question:

If most of Russian people want USSR back than why don’t most Ukrainians want it back? It seems strange since Ukrainians also experience “uncertainty attendant on living in a democratic capitalist society.” Seems like some Russians and some Ukrainians would be for USSR, while f.e. business owners in both countries – against it.

First of all, of course, there are people in Ukraine who long for the return of the USSR. I have the great misfortune of knowing people like that. The difference with Russia, though, is that the nostalgic feelings concerning the Soviet Union are not nearly as strong or wide-spread in Ukraine as in Russia for the following reasons:

1. People in Ukraine and the rest of the FSU countries that were not Russia always were second-class citizens in the USSR and were very aware of that. They had to live the situation where their cultures were suppressed, their languages persecuted, and they were constantly lectured on how Russia was their big brother and far superior to them in every way. The standard of living in Russia was kept artificially higher by robbing the rest of the republics. My husband comes from a tiny town in the Greater Moscow area, and when we talk about our childhoods (we were born three weeks apart in the same year), I always find it curious that a much wider variety of food items and consumer goods was available to them. Basically, everything was taken away from us to feed them. This is a very common colonial situation, and as a result, the memories of the USSR that people have in countries other than Russia are more bleak.

2. When Obama says that US’s current confrontation with Russia is not ideological, he is wrong. As Masha Gessen points out in her recent article,

Finally, said Putin, it was time to resist this scourge of tolerance and diversity creeping in from the West. “We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values,” he asserted. Russia’s role is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.” In short, Putin intends to save the world from the West.

As it has been doing pretty much forever, Russia is rejecting what it sees as Western values. Russia and Ukraine are countries with very different histories. Unlike Russia, Ukraine never practiced the viciously anti-woman Domostroy, never forced women to cover their heads, never forced women to live in a separate part of the house, never introduced the practice of arranged sight-unseen marriages. The sexual revolution that started in Russia in the 1990s and that people still can’t fully process began in Ukraine about 100 years earlier. This is why there are so many famous female writers in the XIXth-century Ukraine and not a single female writer of note in Russia until after the 1917 revolution.

3. In what concerns democracy, Ukraine had a well-functioning democracy back in the XVIIth century while Russia is yet to have its first successful experiment with the democratic system of government. The mentality of the Russian people is, and always was, deeply monarchical. They worship and hate (simultaneously) any leader they get and see him as a good / bad tsar. They develop extremely emotional attachments (be they negative or positive) to that supreme ruler and can’t imagine not having one. This worldview ties in neatly with their profoundly patriarchal mindset.

4. And the final reason is that the people of Russia chose the USSR while we didn’t. They fought a Civil War over it and the pro-Soviet side won. Ukraine, in the meanwhile, had its own independent republic and was trying to go its own way. That way was strictly and obsessively democratic and extremely progressive.

The Russians are the ones who wanted the USSR, they organized it to work for their benefit, and now they want it back. I’d say they should have at it and knock themselves out if only they weren’t trying to bring anybody else into their madness by force.

Horrible news from Kharkiv that are heartbreaking to me.

There was a concert in my native city yesterday (the second biggest city in Ukraine whose greatest misfortune is being located right on the border with the worst country in history). The concert was in support of Ukraine’s unity, and was attended by many people, some of whom were holding Ukrainian flags.

When the concert ended, people started walking home down the Sumskaya street. They were detained by a very aggressive crowd of people holding Russian flags. This angry mob separated a group of concert-goers and attacked them, forcing them to get on their knees and crawl. Those who refused were viciously beaten. Those who didn’t refuse were also viciously beaten.

What is curious is that the angry mob exhibited no familiarity with the city’s geography. For instance, the pro-Russian attackers mistook the Schevchenko Theater for the Mayor’s office. I’m from Kharkiv and I can assure you that it is not possible to be from Kharkiv and not know the Schevchenko Theater. It takes about 30 minutes to reach Kharkiv from Russia by bus. These pro-Russian bullies did, in fact, come in buses.

The goal of the attackers is obviously to provoke Kharkivites into striking back. The moment a single provocateur gets a scratch or a bruise, the Russian troops stationed at the border will cross into Ukraine.

People are asking why Ukraine is not considering a military response to Russia’s aggression. They seem to forget that just a few years ago the people of Georgia did fight back, after which their country was carpet-bombed and devastated by the Russians.

It’s frustrating when people’s only reaction to bullying is to tell the victims to be more aggressive and strike back. Bullying doesn’t happen because the bullied people are doing something wrong. It happens because bullies are nasty, vicious aggressors.

There is no self-care challenge this week, people, because I’m definitely not in a self-caring mood and I don’t want to be a hypocrite and tell people to do what I feel incapable of doing myself.

The news from Ukraine are too painful and present an unrelenting source of stress. Yesterday, a couple hundred provocateurs occupied the municipal administration building in Donetsk. They destroyed Ukrainian flags, substituted them with Soviet flags, and walked around, yelling, “Putin, come save us!” and singing the anthem of the USSR and The International.

My mother is from that region and she says, “I can’t believe my parents will now lie buried in the ground held by occupation forces.”

I watched a live streaming video from Kharkiv, the city where I grew up, yesterday. A big group of very angry people hovered around Sumskaya Street, looking for “Ukrainian nationalists.” Finally, they found somebody who they decided had to be a Ukrainian nationalist and started beating him. Sumskaya is the central street in the city, and this poor fellow was just walking there peacefully when people, drunk on propaganda and in a state of uncontrollable hysteria, attacked him.

I turned the live stream off because this is more than I can bear.

Later, we decided to watch a musical TV show from Russia. “It’s just people singing, how bad can it be?” we thought.

And of course it ended up being really bad. The participants declared that the USSR had been “a grrrrreat country!” and proceeded to offer an endless stream of sexist, racist, and xenophobic jokes and comments. The most offensive statements were directed at Indian people.

If I could only say, “This is all Putin, the Russian people are not to blame, it’s all their horrible government’s fault.” But that isn’t true. The people want their USSR back. They are very open and direct about it. They tried the alternative, didn’t like it, and now want the Soviet Union back.