Now that everyone seems to be talking (RUS) about an impending war over Abkhazia, in spite of Germany's best efforts (see the latest news here or here), I decided to finally translate this post from a few months ago (RUS) by LiveJournal blogger cyxymu (the blog's name uses letters of the Latin alphabet to spell out the name of Sukhumi, Abkhazia's capital, as it looks in Cyrillic), a Georgian who spent his childhood in Abkhazia but now lives in Tbilisi, having become an “internally displaced person” (IDP) during the hostilities in the early 1990s.

Here is cyxymu's post, titled “Home“:

Last night I dreamed about my grandfather's house. I hadn't dreamed about it in a long time, and it was amazing to find myself back in my childhood.

Most of the time I spent in Sukhumi I lived in that house, I knew all of its nooks and crannies, had secret hiding places and places to be alone and dream…

I dreamed that I was climbing the stairs to the attic, and it was so nice to listen to the rain fall up there. My brother and I went up there a lot and listened to thunderstorms, you could hear the branches banging against the corrugated roof, the rain pounding the tile and flowing down the gutter.

I also liked to hide in the garage, my brother and I had our headquarters there, the garage had a metal roof and the rain would pound on it really hard…

Sometimes when the Besletka [river] would rise during a rainstorm, it would start to flood. The water would pour into the cellar, and then we had to save our supplies ) heroism was rewarded with the jam that grandmother made.

In the cellar we had hiding places where we hid all sorts of things, even just before we left, we hid an optical sight that I had found that very day. In the back of the house was a chicken coop, and a rooster woke us up every morning as he summoned the sun to rise. Sometimes rats would get into the chicken coop, and I would hunt them with a small-caliber Geco. That's what I wanted the sight for.

In the garden grew everything necessary for human life: two types of pears, apples (champagne and winter), persimmons, green springtime plums [tkemali], plums, [feijoa], [medlar], figs and two kinds of cherries. I planted the peaches with my own hands. And tomatoes, cucumbers, raspberries, strawberries (though the strawberries often went bad, since we had very damp earth). The cucumbers liked to climb up on the raspberries, and we sometimes missed a cucumber, since we couldn't always see them in the greenery, and it would grow into a big, yellow cucumber. Then grandpa would say, “Well, it's OK, we'll use it for seeds next year.”

Every spring he would start the seeds first in cans, then he would replant them into wooden crates, and only then into glass hot-houses. And when the tomatoes grew tall, grandpa and I strung nets over them, so that the pears wouldn't fall on the tomatoes when they ripened.

During [the war], when an Abkhazian shell hit next door, a bit of shrapnel took down a branch of the champagne apple tree as wide as your arm, some of the other trees lost limbs also, and I kept saying that it was the trees that protected us…

Shrapnel chopped up the whole house then, pieces flew in the window of the room where grandpa and grandma slept, miraculously not touching them, lots of bits penetrated the walls, tore the roof apart, knocked out all the windows in the house… But we didn't go move into an Abkhazian's house, instead we put in new glass and fixed the roof (patched the holes). Thinking ahead, we stuck crosses of white paper tape on the windows…

My heart aches for that house more than any other, in spite of the fact that we had nicer houses and apartments in Sukhumi. My heart stayed behind in that house.

And more than anything I can't forgive myself for leaving behind my grandpa and grandma - when I took my parents out of Sukhumi, I was hoping to return in a couple of days.

And no one from my family was able to make it to Sukhumi for my grandpa and grandma's funerals. We simply weren't allowed to return.

Journalist Ilya Barabanov, who writes for the New Times and blogs engagingly as LJ user barabanch, wrote a laconic post a couple weeks ago that drew some interesting comments (RUS):

A young lady came to interview for a job with a friend of mine.
She's a [Young Russia] activist.

Under “Professional Accomplishments” [on her resume] the first and only line read “Participated in the inauguration of [the Russian president] Dmitry Anatol'evich Medvedev.”

A couple of comments on the post:

avdeev [punctuation and capitalization as in original]:

it's funny, but things like that have been happening for awhile
for example at RGGU [Russian State University for the Humanities] they accept [United Russia] party members into the graduate programs, and it's harder for people who haven't been vetted by the office to get in […] a couple of my friends were advised by the academic department that before turning in their grad school applications they should pay a visit to the local United Russia office, that it would be more correct and predictable to do so

at the office it was suggested that they write an essay about how much I love the motherland, i.e. [United Russia], and how much I want to join the party, well they told [United Russia] to go you-know-where and they submitted their applications anyway, we'll see what happens in September

***

el_cambio:

You don't understand.

[quoting from Viktor Shenderovich's website (here), who also seems to have been quoting from a transcript of some kind]:

Speaking at [a panel discussion on “the new Russian elite” at the “Strategy-2020 Forum”],[Vladislav Surkov] called on the participants in the discussion to “determine what the Russian elite is.” In response to this, producer Andrei Fomin suggested compiling a “list of the elite,” and Andrei [Korkunov], general director of the Odintsovo candy factory, noted that such a list already exists, and pointed out the list of participants in the presidential inauguration in the Kremlin.

In recent years, it seems like a solution to Moldova's long-unresolved secessionist conflict is always being forecast but never quite materializes. Meanwhile, the people who live in the unrecognized Transnistrian Moldovan Republic (a.k.a. the PMR, Transnistria, Transdniester, Pridnestrovie, etc.), a little strip of land that's been trying to secede from Moldova since the breakup of the USSR, just try to get by.

It seems that at least a couple of the territory's netizens are unhappy with some of the initiatives of their de facto government. Here are my translations of a couple of recent posts to ocity, a Russian-language LiveJournal community set up by residents of Tiraspol, Transdniester's capital (which also exists outside of LJ):

Demand and complaint addressed to Evgeny Shevchuk, Chairman of the “Renewal” (Obnovlenie) party (posted by LJ user 06_07_1970)

Dear Evgeny Vasil'evich!

We woke up this morning and left our apartments intending to head to the cemetery and honor our dearly departed.

In the entryway of the building where we live, we found a huge quantity of “Renewal” party newspapers - they are strewn on the landing on every floor, in the stairwells, in people's mailboxes (several copies of this spam in each mailbox), and in the elevator. Part of the area in front of the building is already besmirched with your party's newspapers - some of the building's residents have tossed them out of the stairwell.

It should be noted that this is not the first time when the entryway of our residential building has been littered with such trash.

Based on these facts, I request that you organize the cleanup of the stairwells of the building at Zapadnyi Per. 19/1 in Tiraspol as soon as possible.

Otherwise, we will have to go to court with a complaint against the Renewal party and against you personally as the director of that organization.

With respect,

Residents of the besmirched [засранного] building

This complaint was also posted on a more traditional online forum, where it has generated some 25 comments. On LiveJournal, it generated the following comment by LJ user verba77:

They say our government is impoverished, but think how much money was spent on this garbage. Our authorities don't do anything useful for the people, instead they rub in the people's faces what good rulers we have.

I should note, in fairness to Obnovlenie and Shevchuk, that it's not unheard of for political parties in the post-Soviet space (and probably elsewhere) to engage in the “dirty trick” of placing their opponents' materials in locations designed to annoy voters. I seem to recall that one example of such “black PR” involved party A sticking party B's stickers on cars parked on the street. In this case, though, if I had to guess, I'd say the offending newspapers were probably left by overzealous “Obnovlentsy.”

Here's another assessment of the local government by a regular commenter at the ocity forum:

Defense of human rights, Transnistrian-style (posted by LJ user verba77, whose blog is subtitled “life with a 'special' child in a 'special' country”)

Two years ago, on June 7, 2006, Pridnestrovie first appointed a representative on human rights issues. A 10-room office was set up and luxuriously renovated to European standards. Dozens of new computers and other office equipment was purchased, excellent furniture, air conditioners, etc. There are plans to open branch offices of the human rights representative in other cities in Transdniester.

Interruptions in - and later complete denial of - the government's supply of essential medication to disabled children began around the same time.

Is it possible that the funds which had previously been devoted to saving the lives of disabled children are now going toward the human rights representative's office?

From my conversation with Transnistria's human rights representative V. Kol'ko last week:

- Does the non-issue of medications which are legally provided for to disabled children constitute a violation of human rights?
- Yes, of course, but what can I do about it?
- What do you mean, what, you are the human rights representative. Can you defend the rights of a sick child?
- There isn't any money in the budget for those medications, our government is very poor.
- Then why does the government have money for such luxurious facilities for a human rights office which is unable to protect human rights?
- What, it's my fault that the Supreme Soviet decided to create this office?

I might also suggest that our rulers do away with pensions and use the money saved to create an office of the representative of pensioners' rights. Or they could close the hospitals and open an office of the representative for the rights of sick people.

In the comments, verba77 explains that his family pays for a couple of more expensive medications, but is trying to get the government to pay for one cheaper item prescribed for their child, which is included in the official list of medications the government is supposed to provide:

This has become a matter of principle, because those animals are buying themselves expensive official cars, building lordly estates, and renovating their offices to European standards, using the money of the Transnistrians who break their backs working for them, but they refuse to comply with the law guaranteeing medication to sick children. But they spit on my requests and on all of us put together. The animals have made it to the trough.

***

And on a more humorous note, here's a comment from the same forum titled “[Customer] Service” (posted by LJ user sasha_ethna):

Tiraspol'. The train station. We get on the number 3 minibus, hoping to get to Balka.

…I was already handing the driver my fare when a one-lady orchestra came up to the minibus. She had a guitar on her shoulder, fancy luggage and several musical instruments. She tossed her first bag into the minibus and was getting ready to toss in the second, when the driver spat out “I'M NOT GOING TO BALKA!”

All of the passengers were baffled, the one-lady orchestra quickly retrieved her bags, and many people prepared to get off the minibus.

“But we all want to go to Balka!” said a few people.

“Everything's OK - that's where we're going. I just wanted to avoid all of that baggage,” said the driver, revealing the logic behind his trick.

Shortly after the Duma elections last December, I saw this article and wanted to translate it. I didn't have time then, and in truth it's a fairly challenging text to translate, since it is all about mood and atmosphere. The furor around Putin's Luzhniki speech has faded, but Nizhny Novgorod, where part of the article is set, is still in the news as the location of Medvedev's one official day speaking as a candidate and (perhaps less significantly) as the region singled out by the New York Times in a controversial article about the Kremlin's (ab)use of “administrative resources,” so this seems like a suitable item to post as we await the inevitable result on March 2.

By way of background, this piece was supposed to appear in the Moscow weekly Bolshoi Gorod, but the head of the publishing house that prints BG decided not to print it as written, and BG's editor chose to publish it on his ZheZhe rather than edit it. The comments on the blog where it was posted suggest a range of assessments of that decision - mostly praise for the article, but also some averring that it was proper not to publish it, because it's not “journalism” and is more suitable for a ZheZhe post, or that it's an “empty” tale describing a political reality that has existed for years but is just now being noticed by the creative intelligentsia (it is indeed something one could see hints of a few years ago).

Comments elsewhere (and there were many, at the time) speculated about censorship or self-censorship and led in some cases to soul-searching online discussions among old friends divided by their opinions of Russia's path… but I should let the piece speak for itself.

An Echo of Moscow
by Roman Gruzov
c. December 3, 2007

The city before the elections

In late November it was cold in [Nizhny Novgorod], and the people handing out United Russia fliers on the streets were bundled up in scarves against the chill. Nizhny covered in snow feels oppressive to a person unused to the Russian provinces. The industrial areas which die out towards the evening and the touching wooden downtown, restored in some places and lop-sided and half-abandoned in others, seemed like some sort of different, unknown, incomprehensible and thus not entirely safe country. There were campaign banners on every corner, so the word “Putin” was always visible from several angles at once.

I stopped a car on the banks of the Oka and thought about those banners and about why they seemed different in Nizhny than at home. To be honest, I always paid attention only to the most odious images. For instance, on the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky, on the building where the editorial offices of Afisha used to be, there's a gigantic group photo that covers up the entire facade, with the caption “Putin's Petersburg.” The second lady from the left has such a ghoulish smirk that it looks like she's promoting the next of the “Dozor” vampire movies and not the Presidential line. Not far away, a poster on a pillar reads, “You are in Putin's plan,” and my gaze has been stopping on that pillar for a month, too, but only because it's odd - he's not in my plans, but I am in his. In Nizhny the quantity of these pictures is something qualitatively different, perhaps because based on the way the locals look, it's hard to understand what they have to do with these banners.

I was picked up by a green Moskvich with a driver of indeterminate age wearing yellow wraparound shades and a shabby sheepskin coat. The radio was bellowing frightfully, and I thought the speaker's voice sounded familiar. But as we drove alongside the still unfrozen river, I had a moment of doubt - the rhetoric of the person shouting from the ragged car speakers about jackals and foreign embassies was just too coarse. I thought, “Could it be Zhirik?”

The driver turned the volume up louder - louder than was proper, so much louder that it became unpleasant to be in the car. After a couple of minutes I was sure that it really was the President speaking - the radio was picking up the TV broadcast from Channel One. I felt uneasy - at any other time I would have asked the driver to turn it down, but I kept quiet. The voice coming from the radio was too insistent, the city too incomprehensible, and the driver's murky gaze from behind his yellow glasses too unpredictable. I had absolutely no desire to argue with him about politics - practically for the first time in the last seventeen years I decided that it would be better to hold my tongue. It was unpleasant, strange and somehow radically new, all at the same time - to be driven around a dark, cold city, listening to the stadium responding to the speechmaker, and to feel that you are living an a new, different time, a time when if you don't know your interlocutor's mindset it's better to stay silent. And we did stay silent - we drove along and listened as various not-so-picky people made speeches at the stadium. Then the driver drew his hand out of his tattered cuff and sharply turned off the radio. It got quiet. Then he said:

“Those assholes!”

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, opened the window and spat angrily into the frosty evening.

In Moscow the next day I learned that many of my friends had been through something similar during the past few days, and that for almost all of them the feeling of a qualitative shift was surprisingly connected with something trivial - not with the Luzhniki rally, but with some silly story. One friend's kid got sick from paint fumes, because they were painting the school starting first thing in the morning, rushing to beautify it in time for the elections. Another got into a fight with drunken teenagers on the street, and at the police station noticed they had “I'm for Putin” scarves around their necks. And in response I told everyone how to my own surprise I had been afraid to ask the driver to turn down the radio.

When I returned to St. Petersburg a day later, there were heavy trucks with barred windows parked by the train station. There were more police on Nevsky than there were pedestrians, and the farther I went the more men in uniform surrounded me. Closer to Palace Square, when the police turned into riot troops, I realized that it was because of the dissenters. There was no march whatsoever - a dozen or so pensioners stood by watching the hundreds of soldiers who had secured the square. Then they came up to me, looked at my press card, and put me in a police bus.

“You have a laptop in your bag,” said a calm, mustachioed officer, “and today only journalists accredited by the Main Internal Affairs Directorate [ГУВД] are allowed to be here. Let's take a ride to the precinct, and we'll take a look at what you've got in your computer.”

In the new era this was normal, and I climbed into the dark freight box of the truck without a fight. Inside were about six dejected Tajiks, a gray-haired old man with a hearing aid and teary eyes, and a radical who looked like a sad demon with horns of hairsprayed dreads. They drove us around the city for a long time, and tears flowed down the old man's cheeks from the wind blowing through the cracks in the truck. It was unpleasant to see, so we looked out through the cracks - at the police, roaming about on Nevsky among billboards showing “Putin's Petersburg,” and at the people avoiding the billboards and the policemen. Everyone was silent, but this time I knew for sure what everyone else was thinking. And after three more hours or so they photographed us and let us go - all but the radical, who didn't want to hold a number up to his chest for the camera. My number was 809.

“Assholes,” said the Tajiks, stepping out into the fresh air.
“Assholes,” I agreed.
The old man said nothing.

That was the winter; let's hope the spring will be different. Some observers seem hopeful.

By the way, the imprecation that is repeated in the middle and at the end of the article is “суки” in the original (literally, “bitches”), so I took a bit of license with it - though not much license, actually. According to my trusty Русско-английский словарь ненормативной лексики (М: Астрель, 2002):

Сука ж. […] 3. груб.-прост. Употр. как бранное слово Cf. bastard, shit, asshole (used as a term of abuse).

He has also posted recollections from a number of his readers about their experiences during their last days in Sukhumi. I was going to translate a couple of them, but some of the best ones are quite long…

The recollections culminated on September 27th with cyxymu's own thoughts about the significance of that date:

Today marks 14 years since the day when I stepped on the earth of my homeland for the last time. On September 27, 1993, I left my hometown and have not been back since. That was the last day when Sukhumi existed. On that day, as the Abkhaz say, “they shot the ‘i' off Sukhumi,” and along with it they killed the city's soul. And if on other questions I can find points of agreement with my Abkhaz friends, that day remains for us a chasm which we can never cross. For us [Georgians], that day is a day of mourning, a day when hundreds and thousands of civilians died by the hands of the Abkhaz units who entered the city; tens of thousands of Georgians, saving themselves and their children, fled into the mountains; a day when children lost their parents and parents lost their children. But for the Abkhaz side it is a day of victory, the day when they took Sukhumi. And we'll never be able to arrive at a common denominator regarding that day.

I don't lose hope, and I believe that we will return to Sukhumi, that Abkhaz and Georgians will be able to live together, but in order for that to happen it's essential to punish the war criminals whose arms are covered up to their elbows in the blood of civilians.

I should probably temper the translated text by noting that most observers of the conflict believe that atrocities rising to the level of war crimes were committed on both sides (see, e.g., this Human Rights Watch report). For what it's worth, my opinion is that too much time has passed and attitudes have become too entrenched for a tribunal or other attempt at post-conflict justice to be effective. On the other hand, I can't think of anything better, so maybe a low-impact “truth and reconciliation” process that doesn't necessarily hand down harsh sentences would be one way to go about starting to rebuild the bridges burnt back in 1993.

Somewhat less emotionally, cyxymu also posted in late September about the Abkhazian special forces troops captured after a skirmish with the Georgians, and how they were led by an officer who had served in the Russian peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia before joining the Abkhazian armed forces. The post is titled “вот такие у нас миротWARцы” - an impossible-to-translate pun meaning “these are the kind of peacekeepers we have,” but substituting “WAR” for a phonetically similar syllable in the Russian word for “peacekeepers.” A few days later, he wrote about a firefight and increased tensions in South Ossetia.

And on October 1st, cyxymu marked the 15th anniversary of an earlier battle in the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, the battle for Gagra, by posting a slew of photos from the war. He introduced the photos with this text:

These pictures, taken during the days of the final storm of Sukhumi, show war as it is, not as something heroic and splendid, but as something which brings death, not only to those who go to war, but to those who simply lived in the city and didn't touch anyone. The photos show the Georgian side and the Abkhazian side.

I'd like for those who want to spill new blood to look at these pictures and reconsider. It's not too late.

In the past few days, cyxymu has written about his memories of Sukhumi taxis (the post ends on a rather sad note - “The Sukhumi taxi park ceased to exist on August 14-15, 1992, when most of the taxis were stolen by the Abkhazian forces, and the rest were stolen by the Georgian forces.”) and briefly about the furor surrounding former Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili - cyxymu suggests that everyone watching this “concert” stock up on popcorn and take their seats to watch further developments.

On many of these posts there are numerous comments expressing diverse points of view by well-informed (if sometimes impassioned) people, some of them eyewitnesses to the hostilities 15 years ago and others knowledgeable about the conflict.

I have blogged a fair amount at Scraps of Moscow about the PMR, the secessionist entity (or de facto state, depending on your preferred terminology) located along Moldova's eastern border on a patch of land called Transnistria, Transdniestria, Transdniester, Transdnestr, or Pridnestrovie (again, depending on your preference and politics). A Fistful of Euros has recently blogged about this troubled territory - not once, but twice - and a couple of Austrian journalists have just published a book on the region that looks like it will be interesting; but it can be difficult to find voices from the region unfiltered by spinmasters working for or against the PMR's secession.

With that in mind, I decided to poke around in the universe of Russian-language LiveJournals and found a couple of interesting communities. Foto_pmr - the source of the photo above - is an interesting if not very often updated site with a diverse array of photos from the region. The Tiraspol city community ocity also has a wide array of postings - everything from the city's new anthem (picked up from Russian news agency Novyi Region 2) to photos of “the PMR's Paris Hiltons” and a post about “Electronic music in Pridnestrovie.” I decided to translate a couple of posts from the ocity community (RUS):

A rhetorical question when the barrel is pointed at your nose

When you go into the recently built IDK [InterDnestrKom] service center, you feel like you're in a European country - everything is so awesome and captivating, and also unusual for this area (mirrored ceilings… I've been waiting to see them for a while, and the wall in the Quake room is cool). Then you go to the passport department at the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] and understand that you're in far-off 1993, and it's the same old sovok, and nothing has changed in all this time - you show up with your own forms/sheets of paper from a notebook and fill them out. Watching this contrast for an hour, you involuntarily start to think, “What sort of a state do we have? A wealthy one or a poor one? And that right there, bro', is a dilemma. Practically a rhetorical question.

And a second post, in response to the first one:

To the post about the poverty and wealth of our republic

Whenever I turn on the TV (although that's only rarely), on the TV PMR “news” I often see clips about the expenditure of budgetary funds on such things, that you can't help but think, “How much money must we have, if we can afford that?”

Today I saw a story about the restoration of the “Druzhba” hotel. Was this the government's idea?! The report talked about how they're going to make this so-called hotel into something beautiful. But literally the day before yesterday I was in the hospital. Probably 70% of the equipment there is older than I am [the poster's profile says he was born in 1987 - trans.]. And this equipment is going to check my health, make me well and keep me alive if something happens! Many operations could be done much more safely and with less pain, if the doctors had decent equipment. They showed my friend that if he got operated on here, they would have to make a hole in him the size of a fist, and if he got it done in Chisinau, then they would make a small incision a centimeter long. Because there they have more modern equipment. There must be thousands of such examples in EVERY ONE of our hospitals.

That's why I want to know, is the hotel's reconstruction really worth the danger posed to the health of the citizens of this republic if they should happen to come down with anything more serious than the flu[?]

I want to see a business plan showing the projected profitability of this hotel and in general all of the expenditures from the government's budget. For example, on the website of the Supreme Soviet.

Comments to the post are interesting and state that the hotel is actually being renovated by its owner, a private investor (but question the demand for a luxury hotel in the city), and that the PMR's budgets are published periodically and available by subscription.

The Hotel Druzhba received a mention in one of Edward Lucas's reports from the PMR earlier this year:

The misnamed Hotel Druzhba (Friendship) used to be the only place to spend the night in Tiraspol. For connoisseurs of truly dismal Soviet-style rudeness, apathy, squalor and clashing shades of muddy pastel, it is still unmissable. As a place to stay, its noisy, draughty rooms, with their nylon sheets, uneven tiles, flimsy locks and eccentric plumbing, leave a lot to be desired.

For other discussions by Tiraspolians and other Transnistrians, you can also check out this online forum.

…when I write about Moldova I get very emotional, because I don't understand why life is so difficult. On every corner in Italy there are Moldovans looking for work which they hope will make them some money and allow them to pay off their debts and send some money home to their children. Just today I was standing by a bank, and a strange woman walked up and greeted me. She asked me just one thing: “Do you know of any job at all, no matter what it pays, I'm sick of walking around outside and searching from morning until night,” and she got teary-eyed, then she got embarrassed and left.

It's difficult when there's nothing I can do to help, it's difficult when I hear hurtful words about us, but those at home should know that there are lots of us here who work very hard and aren't ashamed to say we're from Moldova, and to tell people about our holy places; we cook our national dishes, and we pray all the time for our motherland.

I know lots of people who say that they are sick of being someone's slave and have gone home to their villages, because it is psychologically very difficult to always be a foreigner.

My friend is an Italian, and he always wants to learn something about my country, I'm happy that at least Europe is interested in us because of our girls. Because before, 10 years ago, no one even knew what side of the world we were from, but now, like they say, “whether they talk good or bad about you, at least they talk about you.” […she describes differences between Moldovans and Italians…]

I'm still quite young, and I have time to choose my way in life, but now I want to tell the people who want to come here that the land where you were born will always be in your soul. Best to you all, Ciao vi voglio sempre bene.

Another comment from Snejana, in which she summarizes an Italian's opinion and posts it in full (in Italian, which I can't translate and have omitted here):

Here are a few words from Italians who have visited Moldova. I don't know if you'll understand Italian, but I'll translate the most important part, which is that those who have been there a few times say that the situation is getting better; I want to believe this, too.

So do I, although I'm not sure it's true.

Old and New on Str. Cosmonautilor - Chisinau, Moldova, August 2006 - photo by Lyndon Allin

Only a naive person could believe that the Russian authorities decided to loosen the visa blockade of Georgia just out of kindness. No, with this action they wanted to sweeten the arrival of the delegation from Russia to negotiate Russia's WTO accession. The blockade is the stick, and the issuance of visas to certain groups of Georgian citizens is a small carrot.

However, Georgia, I think, will continue to insist on the legalization of all border checkpoints on the Russo-Georgian border. Recently Russia has illegally opened checkpoints on the [River] Psou and at the Roksk tunnel, which Georgia has declared closed some time ago. And Georgia demands that Georgian customs officers occupy these checkpoints.

One other disagreement is the Russian ban on the import of Georgian Borzhomi [mineral water] and Georgian wines, based on trumped-up reasons. How can Georgia agree to Russia's WTO accession without the resolution of these problems? I don't think Georgia will agree.

I of course do not intend to suggest that WTO membership is so necessary to the Russian people, but it is necessary for the oligarchs, and therefore for Putin, and he pressures Georgia to admit Russia to the WTO because his oligarchs are losing nearly a billion dollars a year.

Cyxymu is the most widely read and commented on blog about Abkhazia that I've seen. It's written, I believe, by a refugee (or, rather, internally displaced person) from the conflict. The blog's full title is “Memories of Sukhumi, the war, and pain,” which gives you some idea of its focus, although recently the author has written a bit about the conflict in South Ossetia as well. It often has photos of Sukhumi and other places in Abkhazia, along with reminiscences from the blog's author or others in the comments section, and it has a consistent community of readers/commenters who guarantee a lively dialogue and often add their own very interesting information about goings-on in Abkhazia.

Tbilisi, Georgia, August 13, 2006 - photo by Lyndon Allin

For whatever reason, the discussion in the comment section of that post was re-started about a week ago, and I posted a couple of comments there, mainly 1) trying to stick up for an outstanding PCV blogger named Peter Myers - not that he needs me to stick up for him - who some of the Moldovans felt was being too critical of the rural school he teaches in, and 2) disagreeing with the broader notion that all PCVs are “losers” or people who haven't found themselves in American life.

My comments there are not that interesting, frankly, because they go down a well-trodden path about how criticism can be a good thing if it's constructive and digress into discussions of the American educational system and other less-than-relevant topics (though the discussion was refreshingly friendly compared to others I've been involved in recently). They are not, for example, as interesting as one of Peter's recent posts:

After class today, I noticed nearly a dozen men, of whom I know several and who are major figures in the village, standing around on the first floor of the school. I said hello and then continued upstairs. On the way to the computer lab, I saw Raisa, one of the cleaning ladies. I struck up a conversation:

“Why are practically all the men in Mereseni at the school right now?” I said, exaggerating.

“It's a Communist party meeting,” Raisa said. “They want the Communists in power.”

This was the first time I had heard of a local Communist party in the village, but it didn't surprise me. Before I could respond, Raisa summed up the political thinking of many Moldovan villagers, rooted in nostalgia for the times when food was cheap salaries came on time:

“I would be in favor of the Communists,” she said, “if I thought that they could make things the way they were back then.”

But I've already digressed from my intended point, which was to translate one of the more recent comments to the post mentioned above on Culiuc.com, written by a Moldovan living in Italy [I've translated it from Romanian, and I hope anyone who can will correct any mistakes - although I don't think there are any serious ones, my Romanian is not as good as my Russian]:

snejana 28 March 2007 17:08

Hello to everyone from Moldova, I'm in Verona, Italy now, it's a beautiful and rich country, but you just can't imagine how much you miss those green pastures of home. Here as everyone knows there are lots of foreigners who work at very difficult jobs, there are lots of Albanians, Moroccans, Blacks, and of course Moldovans, Ukrainians and Russians.

When I get on a bus or go into a supermarket, I feel at home because if you want you can ask something in your own language. Ours is a small country and I don't understand who has stayed home if there are so many of us here. I hear a lot of compliments from the Italians about us: we learn foreign languages very easily compared to them, we are good-looking, clever, and very emotionally strong. When they have a little problem, they have to go to a psychologist, since they are very melancholic and, as they say, “Non voglio fare niente” - man, what about all the problems we have, I guess we should just die, but no, we struggle and get through it all.

My friends ask me what Moldova is like, and I don't know what to say, it's a lovely country but of course there's nothing to see there, because it's nothing compared to other places, so I tell them that all you see there is bars, good times, and drinking.

Everyone who's here wants to go home but then they come back and say that it's even worse, they shouldn't have gone because it was just a waste of money and it's sad there, but I still hope that someday we too will speak with pride about our country and lots of foreigners will come so we can show them how brave [bravii] we are.

Now I ask myself, what am I doing in a strange land with a strange language, living in a strange house, if I have a big house and an apartment at home, and all my folks are there? I don't have an answer, for some reason my plans seem to keep me here, but Moldova is still in my heart always.

Maybe it was the style of the original - stream-of-consciousness, with minimal punctuation and capitalization; I've added paragraph breaks and more sentence breaks in translating it - or me being too sentimental in the spring air, or who knows what else, but I found this to be one of the most moving things I have read in I don't know how long.

Moldova's capital, Chisinau - by Lyndon Allin