Our new novel, Fish: A History of One Migration, written by Peter Aleshkovsky and translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray, has just arrived from the printer. They did a wonderful job and Fish will start shipping tomorrow morning.

Fish is a mesmerizing novel about the life journey of a selfless Russian everywoman. Shortlisted for the prestigious Russian Booker Prize, Fish is an expansive, gripping, often controversial story of the intimate fallout of imperial collapse, from one of modern Russia’s most important writers.

If you didn’t pre-order a copy, no worries. You can easily zip on over to our webstore and get yourself a copy right now. Plenty of Fish in our freezer! And, if you would like to find out more about the book, and about Peter’s work in general, be sure to pop over to his website. A highlight there is an interview between author and translator of Fish.

In the past decade, Putin’s Russia has forsaken Western values and returned to its authoritarian past. Ordinary Russians, bribed by the Kremlim’s oil largesse and misled by its controlled media, expressed only apathy at this development. Granted, the regime may enjoy superficial support (given Putin’s strangely stratospheric approval ratings), but the accelerating population decline proves that Russians are discounting the nation’s future with their loins. And so should we, for what’s the point of taking a “Potemkin country” ruled by a “kleptocratic thugocracy” seriously?

There’s only one problem – many of the underlying assumptions of this Catechism are unsupported by any facts, figures or statistics.

A major cornerstone of the Catechism is that electoral manipulation under Putin has become so egregious that the regime has lost the political legitimacy that many Westerners believe only stems from democracy. But opinion polls from the Levada Center strongly belie these concerns. In the 2008 Presidential elections, Medvedev’s 71% mandate was exactly the same as the percentage of voters who later recalled casting a ballot for him (and significantly lower than the 80% who intended to vote for him three weeks prior). [see poll 1 & 2] Obviously, this is not the Soviet-scale fraud of Kremlinologist fantasy.

There are two main rejoinders to this argument. First, doesn’t the Kremlin make ample use of its “administrative resources” – unfair media access, illicit campaign financing, etc. – to skew election results to its liking? True. As a “plebiscitary regime,” it not only relies on but revels in popular approval. But it’s genuine approval for all that – because if it weren’t, one would expect most Putinistas to be old, sour-mouthed “sovoks” who are fed news from state TV, right? But that’s not the case. Though pro-Kremlin, West-skeptical views are prevalent across all major social groups, they run highest among young, university-educated Muscovites – the very Russians most exposed to the West through the internet and foreign travel.

But that’s heresy! Don’t these inconvenient results imply that the Kremlin has coopted the polling agencies? Sorry, false cause fallacy. Furthermore, Lev Gudkov, the current director of the Levada Center, writes stuff like this: “Putinism is a system of decentralized use of the institutional instruments of coercion… hijacked by the powers that be for the fulfillment of their private, clan-group interests.” Doesn’t exactly sound like a raging, pro-Kremlin fanatic, does he?!

A second major theme of the Catechism is that Russia’s plethora of economic and social ills – best manifested in its demographic “free-fall,” “death spiral” (insert your own appropriately apocalyptic term here), etc. – doom it to decline and eventual irrelevance. Yet according to the state statistics service, Rosstat, the population stopped falling in 2009, as part of an ongoing recovery from the “lowest-low” fertility and “hyper” mortality rates of the post-Soviet transition period. True, its long-term sustainability is uncertain, and Russia’s demography is still nothing to write home about; for instance, death rates for today’s middle-aged men are unchanged from those of late tsarism (also according to Rosstat). That said, considering today’s Russia has an above-European average fertility rate and a stabilized population, there is no point in flogging this “death of a nation” meme any further.

Locked within their larger Meta-Catechism of Western universalism, the Commissars of Kremlinology are oceans separated from the lives of ordinary Russians, who by and large like their country, consider Putinism a fair balance between order and freedom, and are relatively optimistic about Russia’s future. One does not have to be a useful idiot, Kremlin stooge or “whataboutist” apologist for “Chekist dictatorship” to point this out – all it takes is a few minutes and a few mouse-clicks online.

So, until the Western commentariat can provide evidence that the claws of the Kremlin extend to Rosstat and Levada – as opposed to relying on generalized claims, hearsay and tea leaves – its Catechism of a secret police dictatorship leading brainwashed Russians to a national pyre is best appreciated as dystopian fantasy.

So what am I talking about? Well, this for instance, among more recent and semi-recent news items:

• Daniel Radcliffe, the guy who plays Harry Potter, just celebrated his 21st birthday… at a bar in St. Petersburg
• I just finished Stieg Larsson’s NY Times Bestseller The Girl Who Played With Fire (second in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first one) and have started The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest. Spoiler alert: The books (which are great) may have been written by a Swede, but the main baddy is of course a Russian.
• Speaking of baddies: no surprise that it was Russians behind the worst of everything in the final season of 24.
• Ok, I guess I have to mention the Spy Scandal here. Which is kind of hard to call a scandal, since the spies were caught before they did any damage (so we are told) and ended up being swapped for more non-spies.
• Chelsea Clinton just got married. She is now Chelsea Mezvinsky. Her new hubby, Marc, is son of convicted felon and former congressmen Edward Mezvinsky (aka “Fast Talking Eddy”). It is not clear that the family is of Russian extraction, but they are Jewish and that means they likely trace their lineage back to the Pale of Settlement, which was in the Russian empire. And there is this from one online source: “He [Marc] threw Chelsea a 30th birthday party for 70 friends and family at Russian eatery Mari Vanna, one of their favorite restaurants.  Guests dined on caviar, pierogies and vodka-infused cocktails.”
• Tony Hayward, the Golden Parachute clad, embattled ex-CEO of BP Oil has been exiled to Russia.
• Daniel Pirog (his last name means “pie”) of Russia just won the world middleweight boxing title.

I find the most interesting aspect of this that it the first time we have swapped Russians for Russians. Swapping 10 spies who did Russia no good for 4 Russians who did Russia no harm.

Andreï Filipov was a prodigy—the celebrated conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, the greatest orchestra in Russia. Today, aged 50, he still works at the Bolshoi, but as a cleaner.

During the communist era, he was fired at the height of his fame for refusing to get rid of all his Jewish players—Zionists and enemies of the People—including his best friend Sacha Grossman. Andreï sank into booze and depression.

The Director of the Bolshoi, an old apparatchik, has been promising forever to return Andreï’s orchestra to him “soon”, but he’s mocking him, humiliating him sadistically. For him, Andreï’s a has-been, and he’s doing him a big favor by keeping him on as a cleaner.

Then Andreï finds a fax inviting the orchestra to play at Pleyel, in Paris, in two weeks’ time, as a last minute replacement for the indisposed Los Angeles Philharmonic. Andreï conceives of a crazy notion: he’ll round up his old musician buddies, a motley bunch now scraping a living in Moscow as cab drivers, removal men, flea market traders, suppliers of porno film sound effects…

They’ll go to Paris as the Bolshoi.  They’ll defy destiny and take their revenge!  Will they make it?

The facts don’t lie, right?

Meanwhile, a film festival in San Francisco in August has a couple of nice documentaries on offer, one on growing up in Russia, another on the amazing cartoonist Boris Yefimov, who lived to be 109 and who was probably first featured in the west in the pages of Russian Life. For more info, visit the festival’s website.

“Excuse me, but haven’t we met in California last summer?”

“No, I think it was the Hamptons.”

Life is always stranger than fiction, or, in this case, it may have been imitating [bad] fiction. Th above was a coded exchange which one Anna Chapman, an alleged Russian sleeper agent (“illegal”) was to use to verify the identity of a person to whom she was to give off a fake passport.

Chapman (not her real name, we assume) is one of nearly a dozen Russian sleeper agents rounded up by the FBI today in a multi-state arrest of illegal agents.

The criminal complaints read not so much like a Le Carre spy novel as something Dave Barry might have written. There are meetings in CVS pharmacies and Russian restaurants, malfunctioning private wireless networks, messages encrypted in photographs [aka steganography], invisible writing, brush switches of bags, trips to South America, envelopes of cash hidden at dead drops, and, yes, an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. It has to be read to be believed.

Another identity verification with one Mikhail Semenko:

“Could we have met in Beijing in 2004?” 

“Yes, we might have, but I believe it was in Harbin.” 

Apparently, these spies were not trained to introduce variety to their spycraft.

Today’s arrests are apparently the culmination of a years-long investigation into the SVR’s (Russian foreign intelligence) illegals program, which the FBI asserts was set up to train deep cover agents that would blend in in the US, either individiually or as a married couple, have children, buy a house, have cover jobs, etc., all with the express purpose of “becoming sufficiently Americanized” so as to infiltrate, gathering intelligence on and recruiting other agents in policy making bodies. The main NYT article offers some of the more hilarious exchanges between Moscow Center and the agents, the choicest being two agents arguing with Center about who would own a new house they would be purchasing in New Jersey.

Based on the criminal complaints, it is clear that these characters are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier (someone wrote down a 27-character password for accessing encrypted data on a sheet of paper and left it lying around), and they are going to race to be the first to cut a deal. So I would expect we will soon learn all of the juicy details of this spy ring, perhaps soon to be known as The Gang Which Couldn’t Spy Straight.

I am guessing some people on Lubyanka Square are not going to get a lot of sleep the next few days.

p.s. Meanwhile, in a curious twist of fate, our current issue of Russian Life, which mailed last Friday, has a long story on the little-known private life and history of Russia’s most famous illegal in the U.S., William Fisher, aka Rudolph Abel.

just recently he made a request for buying about 50 books authored by contemporary Russian writers over the past 5-7 years.

“I have read some of them and I cannot say I have been excited,” he said to share his impressions.

“By and large I have to read all sorts of dull papers the presidents normally read. Draft documents, draft decrees, draft instructions, laws, reports by ministries and departments and memos from secret services,” Medvedev said. “All this is interesting only to a certain degree. Sometimes you feel you want to read something more humane.” (Itar-Tass)

Perhaps the training rule applies here: if you plan to run a marathon, don’t train for a 5k. Actually, it would be most interesting to learn what exactly among modern authors the prez is reading. I don’t suppose he’s reading Peter Aleshkovsky?

Wait a minute, why don’t we ask him. We’ll just drop a note on his blog and see what he says…

But, more interestingly, a spin-off photo morfing site (which seemed to be connected to McDonald’s Finland) allowed visitors to turn pictures of famous people into the blue Na’Vi. A Russian newspaper tried it with Medvedev and Putin.

Here are the tinted results.

First Putin: