Courage and Affection in Moscow

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Four years ago, on February 20, 2005, Hunter Stockton Thompson passed away from a self-inflicted gunshot, just like he promised many a time during the course of his celebrated 47-year-long career.

Most people will probably remember him as the author of Fear and Loathing in Las-Vegas, which is of course a typical case of masses grasping the simplest and the hottest – in a tabloid sense – part of any culture, but Thompson was so much more.

This blog is titled Courage and Affection in Moscow for a reason, and this date is very special for me personally, as it indeed should be for anyone, who at a certain moment in time might be called a journalist. Luckily Thompson is immensely popular among the younger generation of Russian journos, which is a good sign.

Novellist, essayist, an adept of protest culture, a die-hard gun activist and a ‘fortified-compound-dweller’ HST was a beacon of common sense in a world, where “everyone is guilty, [and] the only crime is getting caught”. Probably, the last beacon intact.

Thompson had both the wit and the integrity to speak on the most complicated of issues, while keeping it simple, as if it was a minor baseball game. The vast majority of his pieces leave an aftertaste of a good talk over a bottle of whisky or whatever it is that you drink, eat or smoke.

His brilliant analogies contributed to this greatly, as well as the composition of his pieces, which is nothing short of exemplary. HST was one of the very few in the business, who always kept in mind that anyone who opens, turns on or even downloads any kind of media is essentially looking for a story. And a story he did deliver, with his ideas scattered around like sesame seeds on a Big Mac.

His vocabulary was that of power and energy, while his ideas were those of a pacifist and a liberal. Another peculiar combination in Thompson was his awareness of his social responsibility amid an array of acts of epic personal irresponsibility.

He never made a secret that politics disgusted him, with Richard Nixon his arch-nemesis, but he kept covering and covering those elections from 1972 to 2004 with his only purpose in mind to prevent America from making the wrong choices. This is the same Thompson who stole elk antlers hanging above the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s cabin and was, he claimed, a suspect for the first time at the delicate age of nine for abuse of state property following an incident with a mailbox.

But above all Hunter was the perfect cult figure: you could be a dedicated fan of his in your salad days, and then grow up and not be ashamed to admit it. He had that very rare thing indeed among writers: versatility, which made it impossible to ‘outgrow’ him in time.

At 17 you admired one thing about him, and at 21 a completely different thing, but it was still the good old Hunt doing the job. He was never a subject of “How on Earth could I have liked that mediocre idiot?!” after years, unlike the 90 per cent of other authors.

As far as favourite HST quotes go, mine are definitely mentioned here either in the main piece or in the commentaries.

Of those not mentioned I really liked the snake story, about how he left a snake in a box overnight in an editorial office – I think it was Rolling Stone’s, but it’s been awhile since I re-read that particular book, so I might be wrong – and the snake was accompanied by its supper, which happened to be a living mouse. The snake wasn’t hungry at the moment and the mouse took advantage of the situation to gnaw a hole in the box and flee. The snake followed suit and spent the night creeping on the various floors of the editorial office, until in the early hours of dawn it was encountered by an office guard, who virtually went insane, while clubbing the poor reptile to death. Hunter naturally was made responsible and for some time his relations with the magazine soured.

(NB. after finishing this passage I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to find that story, which I’m now hundred per cent sure was in The Great Shark Hunt; the following one was in the Kingdom of Fear, but the books don’t have any Ctrl+F, and I never bothered to make any bookmarks).

Another quote I remember is from his letter to Oscar Acosta (the prototype of Dr. Gonzo from Fear and Loathing in Las-Vegas, “As your attorney I advise you” etc.), who previously wrote to him about how he was going to have a ‘collumn’ in some newspaper and thus is no different from Thompson himself. In a response letter Thompson praised his friend, but also noted that ‘column’ is written with one ‘l’, and that noting it is just one of the dirty tricks that a professional journalist can perform on an amateur one.

Of course the famous ‘wave speech’ from Fear and Loathing in Las-Vegas deserves special mentioning. When I first read it back at school I hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about – mind you, San-Francisco of the 1960s is not something taught at history lessons – and my English was not that good (it still isn’t now) but I was still able to feel the ultimate nostalgia of those lines, which Hunter himself considered some of his best.

Still no quotes could match a fully-fledged Hunter Thompson experience.

As your attorney I advise you to run to the nearest bookshop and attain a copy of The Great Shark Hunt or The Kingdom of Fear.

Good luck, and Mahalo.

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Now that Arsenal have finally acquired the inconsistent genius that is Russia’s Andrey Arshavin, there is some advice due to the Gunners’ manager: be careful, Arsène, be very careful.

Real faces unveiled

Mid-season buys reveal the real face of a club. It’s a time when things like prestige, development strategy or perspective are put aside in favour of the club’s short-term future. When merry tales of flying to Mars for investors are abandoned and the club clings to one- goal victories seen as indispensable, both its real intentions and capabilities can be seen.

Manchester United, for instance, see themselves repeating the Ronaldo-Nani move – this time with two Serb players.

English FA Cup winners Portsmouth are already out of Europe and struggling on the home front, so Pompey are making their squad more modest.

Stoke have added to their of Championship stars by taking on the long-forgotten James Beattie in a bid to stay in the Premiership for another season.

Tottenham are set for some weird déjà vu getting back all of their big names, the question being whether they’ll bring back the lost chemistry.

Middlesbrough are in danger of relegation, and are evidently okay with it, so virtually no incoming player traffic; Everton are looking to capitalise on others’ mistakes, with ex-CSKA striker Jo signed on loan from Manchester City – a big relief to City manager Mark Hughes. City themselves are the early Chelsea of today – paying first-rate money for an array of second-rate talent, which gives its squad certain depth.

The kind of depth the squad actually doesn’t need, unless of course it intends to quit football activities and become a book by Slavoj Žižek.

But Chelsea’s example shows that this attitude works, it just takes a little time. Stars of Michael Ballack’s calibre would never have come to the Chelsea of 2003/04. First the club had to prove it could seriously fight for silverware with the likes of lesser names like Glen Johnson, Damien Duff, Scott Parker and high-profile big-club-rejects Gérémi, Juan Verón, Claude Makeléle, Hernán Crespo and former coke-addict Adrian Mutu.

Now it’s Man City’s time to do the same. The sci-fi Kaká move had it become reality, could have cut some corners for City, but ‘there are no sheikh’s roads in professional football’.

Still the money is there and City’s financial clout puts any club struggling to maintain its place in the Premiership’s big four in serious danger.

And the Gunners just happen to be the one struggling.

A move in times of crisis and stagnation

After making a massive breakthrough into the Champions League final in 2006, Arsène Wenger’s thirteenth year at Arsenal sees the club in a state of stagnation.

Out of the League Cup courtesy of Burnley, Arsenal have a replay of the FA Cup tie with Cardiff, victory in which will bring the Gunners to a quarter-final against… Burnley. Champions League prospects for Wenger’s side are as yet unclear.

In the Premiership, the Gunners are a safe six points above Everton, but five points below Aston Villa. With 13 weeks remaining this is a perfect position to miss the next Champions League.

So in the 2009 winter moves list Arsenal is the underachiever, who’ve turned to gambling. And this gambling may not end with only football betting, but possibly involve larger things.

Looking at Pavlyuchenko

Many will turn to Tottenham’s autumn signing Roman Pavluchenko to give them a clue how successive will Arshavin will be.

When Turkish football was on its first rise, with Galatasaray of Istanbul taking the UEFA Cup (ironically defeating none other then Arsenal in the final Inter Milan took its chances with signing Hakan Sükür for some €8.5 million. The move was such a failure in Milan that Inter let him go to Parma for free.

Pavyluchenko’s move looked similar at first beginning, but now it’s definitely better then Sükür’s. In fact many Russians are convinced that Pavlyuchenko rocks White Hart Lane. He has scored a massive nine goals in two cup tournaments.

However, in the Premiership his tally is more modest with the last of his three goals scored back in November. And the returns of Defoe and Keane are hardly an indication of the management’s confidence in Pavlyuchenko.

Anyway he’s still getting his playing time and still has chances to prove his worth in the eyes of Tottenham’s coach Harry Redknapp.

Another massive factor to be noted is the schedule. Pavlychenko debuted for Tottenham in September, basically without a vacation, Arshavin is presumably well-rested, despite his seemingly stressful transfer negotiations.

Other possible developments of the move

Officially in the fiscal year of 2007/08 Arsenal made some €46.2 million profit excluding player transfers, which add up to a further €18.2 milion, but only because they dared to sell the iconic Thierry Henry to Barcelona and, as one might say, are now facing the consequences.

But then, Barcelona have always had that little weakness for Arsenal men. While it might be too early to judge the success or otherwise of their purchase of Aleksandr Hleb, I can still recall Catalans splashing out most of their Luis Figo revenues (€60 mln) on the mediocre Marc Overmars (€40 million) and Emmanuelle Petit (€15 million).

Did it work out? At times the side was just epic, demolishing the opposition, but two fourth places in a row, then sixth, and then second in 2003/04, when Overmars was in the massive shadow of the rising Ronaldinho, with Petit long gone to Chelsea.

In times of a crisis profitable clubs like Arsenal are scarce, but investments are even scarcer.

The agreement between current members of Arsenal’s board of directors “not to dispose of any of their interests in the Club” – in plainer words not to sell it to Russian tycoon and 24% shareholder Alisher Usmanov – expires in April 2009.

If the Gunners lose their Champions League ticket and find themselves in need of serious investment they might remember Usmanov’s bid.

What may come in handy at this point is the fact that Usmanov is quite close to the United Russia party, a major member of which is… Andrey Arshavin.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of the RT channel.

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The best part of my job here at RT is dealing with Russian literature.

No second meanings in this one: we are going to have a massive literature section on our new website because, well… because we can, and Russia above all is a literaturic country, one you can’t fully understand without being familiar with the works of its writers.

Sounds a like banality, which can be claimed by any country, doesn’t it? But wait till I give a bright example of the above notion collected just last weekend.

As I was preparing Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s ‘The Storm’ for our website, the Russian blogosphere was all about Evgeny Chichvarkin – the latest embodiment of Russian officials ‘nightmarising the business’.

Nobody speaks of the nightmarising done by the rotten three ring circus sideshow of freaks a.k.a. Russian business where Chichvarkin claimed his place.

Oh, those Russian businessmen, the spineless bunch!

With no social consciousness whatsoever, and no sense of belonging to Russia, they themselves regard their fortunes as something not earned by hard work, but rather as something won in a game of roulette. In Russia there is no such roulette, other than the deadly Russian roulette.

It was not the Tsar or even the corrupt officials – the chinovniki – who let Russia down on the brink of 1917. It was the bourgeoisie, who mocked the working class, bullied the literate, and distanced itself from the army to go and live off their earnings in Paris, which is excellently shown in Ostrovsky’s late works like ‘The Fortuneless’. His dramas dealt with the first-generation nouveau riche merchants, whose trade was spawned by the 1861 abolishing of serfdom. Had he ever got to know the first-generation nouveau riche ‘entrepreneurs’ spawned by the 1991 abolishing of communism he would’ve been astonished by the striking similarities between the two groups.

The dramatic changes mentioned above left most of the country dumbfounded – like most ex-serfs in 1861, who basically didn’t know what to do with themselves now that they had their own lives. The Russians of 1990s had no idea how the market economy operated, what’s lawful and what’s not – especially regarding labour. So there was plenty of room for illicit activities, when, due to weak law regulations, the only boundary left between business and fraud was the morality of the entrepreneur (granted there was one).

Oh, there I go again, mentioning morality when talking about business. My late grandmother was probably right when labeling 13-year-old me ‘naïve’ in 1997.

Nobody would call Chichvarkin so back then. His newly-founded Euroset was breaking sales records with so-called ‘grey phones’ (not custom-cleared).

But then everyone sold them, so it didn’t prevent Chichvarkin from enjoying popularity comparable to that of Sergey Brin among Russia’s meager population of Gordon-Gecko-wannabe-finance-specialists and/or sales managers, i.e. those sweaty three-penny-suit wearers in hope of a better, brighter tomorrow, with no crisis and them in the place of George Soros. Ready to spend billions on useless books on effectiveness and about other peoples’ successes, they all admire his brief biography called rather modestly ‘Chichvarkin: the F***in’ Genius’.

God, some say he’s even more respected than Brin! Because, and I quote “Brin created Google in the almost greenhouse conditions of the U.S., while Chichvarkin had to work in this country (it’s always ‘this country’ for them, not ‘our country’ and certainly not ‘Motherland’), with all the chinovniki, the militia etc.”

I’ve always felt that all those MBA-wielding business executives are a bunch of incompetent lamers – after that statement I know it.

There are no significant growing markets without corruption issues, you idiots, live with it! It’s just something that comes with the ability to make a multi-billion company from a $US 2,000 business in less then ten years (what Chichvarkin has achieved), so stop complaining.

Brin all but invented a market on his own in a country where 99.99% of markets have been occupied since 1880s.

Chichvarkin, on the other hand, sold mobile phones. Surely this takes nothing less than a genius to do. And he did with such aplomb, as if he had invented not just the cellular connection, but the concept of talking itself. Even Artyom Lebedev, that pompous bigot of a web layout manager did some R&D of his own, while Chichvarkin didn’t even have a computer in his office – “I don’t master a computer. Why should I?” he said in an interview, with ignorance comparable to Ostrovsky’s iconic Madame Kabanova and Dikoy from ‘The Storm’.

With his Palace of Connection flagshop right across Moscow’s central Tverskaya street from Lebedev’s studio, Chichvarkin was little more than a low-end gadget pusher for low-end people.

I am aware that to millions of Euroset’s clients this probably sounds like a blunt insult (if you are reading this blog, please be prepared for lots of those as I’m aiming to overcome the ‘eternal’ record of insulting, set by George Byron, who managed to dishonour some 70 people on six pages of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers). But Euroset’s morbid ad/pr campaigns leave little doubt of being aimed at someone, whose last SMS was his/her biggest reading since the middle school and his/her new ring tone is his/her biggest musical experience since the last Pop Idol.

To name a few: issuing promo mugs with an obscene word used for describing the cheapness of Euroset’s prices, that is highlighted when hot liquid is in the mug; buying off a show at the Russian Fashion Week – which doesn’t come cheap – to display a bunch of yellow t-shirts and intentionally pour cheap beer on all the VIP-guests from the podium; sending dildos as holiday gifts for corporate partners with a note “Want a present, here’s a *** for you”; and on top of it all – giving away free phones for the clients, who would come into Euroset’s shop and get completely naked in front of cameras and other clients.

Social consciousness, anyone? Every single one of these ‘happenings’ is enough to make decent people unwilling to have anything to do with Euroset.

Yet another one of Chichvarkin’s similarities with Ostrovsky’s merchant folk was of course the XIX-century-style attitude to his employees.

When some tension between Euroset and Samsung erupted, Chichvarkin confiscated all of the Samsung products from about 35,000 employees, including their personal ones. To buy a custom-made Porsche Cayenne as a birthday present for Chichvarkin a sum of $US 2 was collected from every employee. Naturally, their consent was taken for granted, $US 2 is not a sum Russian employees would fuss about, they know their rights – they are after all the great grandchildren of those pre-1861 serfs! And in this case their main right was to get fired over some minor $US 2.

Russia is like a big (and presumably kind) whale, that eats hordes of small fish multiple times a day, Euroset’s employees wouldn’t want to be the small fish. Those slightly bigger animals, like Chichvarkin, may be lucky enough to take a ride on the whale’s back, but if they don’t cling to it with every muscle, it will eventually shake them off no matter how good they are. And Zhenya Chichvarkin wasn’t any good.

So farewell, Zhenya, and thank you, Britain, for accepting another disgusting idiot from Russia. Hopefully, there are not many left.

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