Category: Access

I overdid it at Christmas, which for the Russians was this past Sunday, remaining incapacitated – catatonic is the usual term – and incapable of writing anything new this week.  So here are some old jottings.  Through the fog of champagne and grappa there dimly glimmers in them, I trust, a truth that bears repeating in the New Year. Reading all the various, though scarcely varied, opinions on the “crises” that Moscow throws the West’s way – after 100 years of Russian misrule one might think the word would be safely devalued, but no, they use it like St. James’s...

Like many great men, Signor Baldo, whose skills with the ancient San Marco espresso machine recall the illustrious surgeons or perhaps even the famous generals of history, is used to adulation.  The morning bar crowd here is what in marketing is called a quality-conscious clientele, and these people are cognizant and appreciative of the fact that the machine is entirely manual, with nobody but its operator to be either blamed or applauded for the result.  None of that press-the-button stuff for Signor Baldo’s customers. Once in a while a tourist wanders in, and though I can see that the coffee...

I fear the gentle reader may have concluded from my last post, where I confessed to having watched fifty hours of old Russian television in a single week, that my idleness has finally got the better of me. Yet Zone, as I sought to explain, is no ordinary television, but a pivotal historic event, and one, moreover, that presages the latest political developments in Moscow. On the day my post appeared, December 20, a remarkable anniversary was being celebrated by the millions of Russians in the covert or overt employ of the police state.  It was the centenary of the...

I just finished watching the last episode of a fifty-episode Russian television series entitled Zone.  This epic series was made ten years ago, and represents a kind of symbolic watershed in Russia’s political progress from the authoritarian horizontal of the 1990’s to the totalitarian vertical of today.  To make such a production in the country’s present climate would be just about unthinkable, as witness the scandal around Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan, acclaimed in Cannes yet politically a much weaker statement than Zone. It occurs to me that, having sunk 50 hours of my time into this situation tragedy, I may...