When Appearances are Better Than the Real Thing

During August and September, when I had my language training, I was at the office only in the afternoons. In part of October, I was completely absent during the fellowship program orientation. As a result, not a lot of people outside of the investment staff were able to figure out who I was or what I did.

On my first day back in the office, I discovered that I had been displaced. The company hired a new portfolio manager and all the investment staff shifted one seat down on the trading desk. Which bumped my part-time spot off the desk completely. So, I had to find a place until my afternoon meeting with the CEO.

The company has been growing like a weed this year so its pretty hard to find open space. I went into a conference room and found that it had been converted into workspace for 2 people. But I was stuck at this point – so I asked if I could sit on their couch. They were a bit surprised at the request at first, but assented. It was a comfortable spot for me, but I could sense that my colleagues weren’t really sure what to make of my presence there.

Then the boss came by – all 6’6” of him – loudly shouting my name in his quest to find me. I nearly jolted my neighbors out of their seats when I shouted back through the closed door. The CEO came in and invited me to have a meeting. I briefly thanked my new friends, who were staring at me agape, and met him in the hall.

He had his overcoat on. “When I say ‘let’s have a meeting’ on a Friday,” he said, “I mean at the bar across the street.”

All meetings with the boss should come with half a liter of beer. He had an additional much smaller beer after the first one. I changed to mineral water – I know my limit. Of course, I can easily drink more than one beer. When I say “limit”, I’m referring to my ability to first, make sense, and second, not talk a bunch of nonsense. Everyone tells me one is my limit for that.

Back at the office, the boss took me to the previous CIO’s office opposite the trading desk and presented it to me. Of course, it comes with the stipulation that he reserves the right to stuff more people in or move me completely. That’s fine with me - I’m pretty happy with it in the meantime. A big flat screen monitor on one side of the desk, a two-screen Bloomberg on the other. An Aeron chair. A big leather armchair and a wardrobe for my coat. And a frosted glass door for privacy. Sweet.

I went back into the office where I camped out part of the day to collect my papers. I thanked my colleagues again – but they just couldn’t take it anymore. Who am I? What do I do? Where did I learn Russian? How did I know the boss? They made me tea and got all the answers out of me.

Reactions the next week were hilarious. People had become accustomed to the door being shut, or at least the lights off, for several weeks since the CIO departed. Everyone did a double take as they walked by and saw that it was occupied. And that turned into a triple-take when they caught sight of me.

Folks were already quite nice to me. But after drinking beer with the boss and getting a private office that far exceeds my actual position, people are even nicer. I think I could get quite used to a life of unearned status.

Uhhh...I Don't Get It.

I’ve spent the past few months in Moscow exploring areas of culture, history, and literature. It’s been educational, enlightening, and well, fun. This weekend I experienced something that I liked very much, but that was so beyond my poor ability to understand, that it knocked all my intellectual pretensions out of me.

I trundled off to the the Mayakovsky museum, an exhibit about the revolutionary poet and writer. It has a reputation for being inspired by the author’s own works – that is, as a futurist. In the words of the website:

“This new Museum creates a model of age and world of Mayakovsky, transforms the poetical metaphor into poetical compositions, realizes intellect and fantasy of the author, transforms a visitor from an obedient super into a co-author and participant.”

Hmmmm.

The building has been scooped out below Mayakovsky’s original 4th floor apartment. One starts near the top (a la Guggenheim) and winds down through the vast open space. The impression is almost of a warehouse, with large artistic installations of sculpture. Attached to all these things, in little frames, or under glass panels, or hanging in the background, are the articles and documents that made up this extraordinary writer’s life and times.

It was fascinating. It is, by far, the most modern and radical museum I’ve been in - a true tour de force of artistic interpretation, impression, and expression. Each sight line provided another glimpse of other levels, each a striking new area to explore.

Except that I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was all about. Unlike a traditional museum, there was no written placard explaining certain areas. One had to somehow glean this from the original material. The Russian, for me, was impenetrable.

A group of military officer cadets was getting a guided tour, so I tried to tag along and eavesdrop. The director of the museum was explaining what one installation symbolized (sort of a dining table lined with personages being consumed by a huge machine topped with a picture of Stalin) but I decided to break off on my own when the description dragged on and the cadets started looking over their shoulders at me. I don’t think they were grasping it, either.

Mayakovsky, of course, was one in a long line of Russian poets who went well before his time. In this case, suicide at age 38 over disappointment at the early development of the Soviet State he supported so strongly. Fittingly, all the photos in the museum are of a dour, frowning, gloomy man with a furrowed, heavy brow.

Perhaps I’ve been to too many other museums that show you someone’s desk and chair and a few yellow copies of early work – but the Mayakovsky museum will probably always stick in my mind as a unique and original place.

It’s just that now, days later, I still can’t really figure out what it was all about.

I tried to assuage my intellectual shortfall with dinner at a Georgian restaurant, and ended up getting seated next to a birthday party. 8 men in suits. They began requesting a song from the singer, and he dutifully sang all about the FSB and Lyubyanka (the post-Soviet KGB and its headquarters building). The birthday party rose and sang along with it; did a shot of vodka, and demanded that the singer do the song one more time. He happily did, and the birthday boy came to my table and encouraged me to stand and sing with him.

I didn’t really know the words except for the chorus – pretty easy to pick up the second time around – and by this point in the evening the birthday boy didn’t seem too sure of the lyrics either. He gave me a big hug in response to my best wishes.  

It’s probably best to humor the federal agents on their birthdays.

It's Quiet ... Too Quiet.

I’ve often stated my belief that Moscow is a lot like New York. And I’ve had to defend that position on multiple occasions. No one really believes it. They begin to understand, however, when I couch my argument in terms of the abstract concepts of life in these two dynamic cities. But I’m more than willing to admit that sometimes Moscow city life is just too radically different to fit into my philosophy.

In the metro the other day, I stood near two drunk guys on the train. Not especially unusual. But as they sat on their large bags from the market, I noticed that they were communicating through sign language. And I wondered to myself – do deaf people slur their words when they’re drunk? Does loss of motor control extend all the way down to the finger tips and affect clarity of communication? I’m quite sure that they talk nonsense just like the rest of us, but I have to admit that the sign-language thing has me stumped.

Regardless, it was an opportunity to reflect on the things that I’ve seen in the metro. Like mass transit anywhere, you come across the occasional person toting something unexpected. A guy with skis, for example, or some sort of machine part. It’s more pronounced a phenomenon in NYC, I think, where it’s common to see people with bikes and street vendors carrying their wares. Here in Moscow, that behavior is a bit dissuaded by a tariff on articles over a certain volume. It seems that it would be difficult to fake your way through in the well-staffed and well-policed metro system here.

But something else stands out compared to New York – if only by its absence. Crazy people. I haven’t seen a single crazy person in the metro since my arrival. I don’t mean the mildly weird person with suspect reading materials. I mean the hysterical, shouting loonies. Is this a medical-social phenomenon that isn’t present in Russia? That seems unlikely given human nature and the appearance of hysterical, shouting loonies in Russian history – sometimes as national leaders.

A local colleague suggested that there genuinely isn’t quite such a problem here – he’s lived in New York before and agrees with me about the different characteristics of the respective riderships. His alternative theory is that craziness is evenly spread across the population of Russia – everyone here is just a little bit nuts and that, he maintains, accounts for a lot of things.

Maybe he’s right. In a place where everyone is a little bit crazy, no one person would stand out. In fact, the word crazy might even cease to exist or have never been invented. But the language puts the lie to that theory – Russian has many eloquent ways to express your doubts about someone else’s mental health.

So, I’m not sure I buy his hypothesis. I just wonder why the truly insane don’t feel compelled to ride the metro as they somehow do in New York.

Anyway, there’s a certain beauty and hopeful nature to the belief that everyone here is a little bit crazy. It makes me believe that I can fit after all.

Everything Old is New Again - for Me

I’m having a really good time in Russia. It’s still a sufficiently alien environment for me that places I’ve gone multiple times can come across as a completely new experience on a subsequent visit.

Last weekend, I went back out to Izmailovsky Market, the sprawling open-air bazaar. Jim (my fellow, well, fellow) and I were nominally charged with securing yams for thanksgiving dinner and we decided to make a day of it out there.

We started at the tourist entrance, the pristine area where foreigners flock for their souvenirs. Everything in this part of the market takes place in English. We weren’t distracted by the boring souvenirs, like refrigerator magnets, or even the cool ones, like central asian daggers. We made our way purposefully to a little corner where Alexei sells all your favorite CD’s and DVD’s. The movies are completely authentic – well, that is, fully featured. Each has the graphics and additional features one expects on a DVD release. They’re not the absolute newest movies (those come out at the same time as the theater release in the US and are for sale around the corner), but they’re the highest quality you can get on the market here.

Now, I’m not sure if they’re fully licensed and all that. Actually, I’m quite sure that they aren’t. Mainly because each CD or DVD is 100 rubles ($3.60). And Alexei throws in generous discounts for multiple purchases. Anyway, I screwed a few of my favorite artists and we were on our way.

We exited through the side of the tourist market and entered the general bazaar. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark – huge crowds were jamming roughly into narrow corridors, 2 security guards were violently ejecting a struggling woman, vendors with huge carts were shouting for people to make way, and suddenly, in the midst of it all, a black Mercedes appeared – patiently making its way through the throng.

We walked a short distance and turned a hard right. But we may as well have taken a long flight. Suddenly, all the trading rows were labeled in Asian languages, the colors changed, the people looked and sounded different, the goods for sale were practically unrecognizable. Butchers were using axes to chop huge pieces of meat on wooden stumps, then displaying the goods in their open-air stalls.

Jim led me to the second tier of stalls – up a rickety staircase and catwalk – to a Vietnamese restaurant. We walked in and were warmly greeted in, well, Vietnamese. No one spoke even halfway decent Russian – including us – so ordering was a little difficult. But Jim had one recommendation and we communicated it as best we could.

While our lunch was being prepared, I noticed the other patrons at the communal tables. Whole families crowded into some booths. In others, business was being conducted over huge stacks of rubles. The wall was lined with jars of pickled plants and snakes in exotic colors, all helpfully labeled (in Russian) “Display Only. Not for Sale.” Strange-looking Vietnamese farm implements were hung as decoration. On the whole, quite charming.

But not especially clean. Anyway, our lunch consisted of a big bowl of pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup. It was fantastic and ridiculously cheap – and fit our criterion that whatever we eat should be thoroughly boiled.

We went back downstairs into the market frenzy to find yams. Outside one of the shops we found a box labeled in Czech or something that looked like it might have said “sweet potatoes”. The shopkeeper wasn’t a lot of help, since we couldn’t really find a common language as he busily and messily bagged livers. No erring on the side of caution for us, we bought them all.

Regardless of what exactly we had purchased, we declared victory and decided to leave the field. The market was closing at that point. Open air markets tend to close as daylight wanes – and in Moscow right now that means about 3:30pm. Security guards began closing gates at points throughout the market, so it was difficult to find our way out. At one point, the path snaked through the first floor of what appeared to be an elementary school.

In all, it was yet another fascinating experience at Izmailovsky. The beauty of this trip is that the surprise may last right up until Thanksgiving dinner. After all, that’ll be the moment of truth for our Russian-English-Vietnamese shopping skills.

Whoa … Take it Easy, Buddy.

This weekend, I had a little lesson in culture, commerce and race relations in Moscow. Like a lot of these lessons, I stumbled into it. This time, perhaps a little more literally than usual.

On Saturday, I went to a party that had a "zombie" theme. The inspiration was not the shuffling, moaning undead but the cocktail version of the same. Of course, by the end of the evening it was anybody's guess as to whether the guests were actually getting into character or falling prey to the brain-eating nature of the refreshments. As you may guess, it plays a large role in the second half of the story.

I was a late responder to the email chain setting up the zombie evening and as such I was assigned the task of purchasing apricot brandy. I spent the better part of the day searching liquor and grocery stores in Moscow, and I feel quite confident in saying that Russia is definitely not a cocktail culture. Wine - which region of which country? Whiskey - what style? Vodka - you're kidding, right?

But mixers - forget it. I only saw triple sec once and vermouth only twice. No doubt my difficulty in finding apricot brandy was compounded by my awkward questions -"Do you have brandy with the flavor of apricots?" And a cultural bias not to look in the right places. That is, I never expected to find fruit-flavored drinks on the highest shelf behind the cash register. Nor did I expect it to cost so much - around $30. Back home, the off-brand (DeKuypers, Arrow) strange-flavored booze is on the bottom shelf near the door to the stock room and goes for not more than $12 a bottle.

When I got to the zombie lab, I heard the tail-end of a discussion on how to synthesize 151 Rum. That is, using so many milliliters of grain spirit and so many milliliters of rum should approximate the proof of 151. The math was sound even if the other elements of rationale simply didn't compute. The idea was abandoned, however, to everyone's relief. Just because we have the technology to do something doesn't always mean that we should.

The zombies were potent. Not exactly delicious. Decidedly lukewarm. But potent.

On my way home, I realized that I may not survive the night without a bottle of water. And potato chips. So I stopped by a new kiosk on my corner. As the vendor finished what he was doing and came over to the window, I eyed the rotisserie chickens slowly revolving in an oven behind him. Despite the zombies, I thought better of getting a street chicken at 3am and decided not to order the desiccated, but wonderfully fragrant, little bird.

I did order 2 bottles of water and a bag of chips. I placed 200 rubles through the window of the kiosk, then took 100 of it back. To be honest, that's the real moment that the rotisserie chicken idea died. The merchant took the remaining 100 rubles and started to struggle with how much change to give me. I asked for 25 rubles back. He looked at me and objected.
"No," he said, in a thick Caucasus accent. "How much money did you give me?"
"200, but I took back 100. So give me 25 rubles change."
"Ahhh, listen," he said hesitatingly. "You don't understand Russian very well, do you?"

I may well be loaded on zombies at 3am, and I may well be considering eating that last unsold chicken in your oven, but that's no reason to make fun of my language skills.

"No, I don't understand Russian well - but I understand math very well." This was not exactly the right thing to say.

"What are you trying to say? Why would I want to cheat you?" he exploded.

Whoa. Whoa. No one said cheat or deceive (obmanoot') to the guy from the Caucasus, the region where men wear long daggers as a part of their national dress. Things needed to calm down, and quickly, before I ended up on the spit with the lonely chicken.

"Listen," I said politely, but zombie-fortified firmly. "2 bottles of water is 40 rubles, and chips are 35 rubles. That's seventy five and I gave you 100. Give me back 25 rubles."

The vendor looked at me, looked at the goods in question still on the counter, looked back at me and calmly said, "You're right."

He handed over the 25 rubles ($0.89 US) and wished me a good evening.

So what lessons to take away from this whole thing?

In Moscow, it's easy to find alcohol that you can drink straight. Finding ingredients for mixed drinks is a lot more challenging.

The horrible reputation that the Caucausus peoples have here in Russia rises to the level of unpleasant racial stereotype. Frankly, I've never personally experienced deceptive treatment from a "black", as they are called. Maybe that's because I look more like a "black" than a Russian. But I do know that with all these folks put up with in terms of prejudice and discrimination, their reputation is no joking matter.

Oh, and if someone invites you over for zombies - tell them you can't make it. Trust me on that one.

The Truth is Out There

Ahhh, the stock market. Wherever you go in the world, its always the same. There’s something comforting in the groupthink of many different players all focusing on one thing. It’s even more enjoyable when everyone firmly believes in the conclusions. But the truth is often a lot more complicated than what market players tell you.

Take, for example, the Russian market for fruit juices. 2 major domestic players are battling for market share dominance. Each is a good company, but with different characteristics. WBD is a highly decentralized manufacturer whose stock is traded on the US exchanges. As such, it has a very diverse shareholder structure. The other, L, is predominantly owned by management – to the tune of about 80% of the outstanding shares. In all respects, it’s a much more centralized model.

Conventional wisdom tells us that L is the better company. Its taking share from others, especially WBD, thanks to aggressive marketing. Its also more attractive because of its highly concentrated ownership – strong management means owner/managers are focused on success, have the power to push through their agendas, and generally are better at getting results. Margins are better at L, too, but that aggressive advertising is constraining margin growth while top line is booming.

Sorting through the numbers, however, provides a very different insight into what’s going on at the company. Advertising expense is increasing at L but at a slower pace than revenue. That is, as a percentage of total cost advertising is actually decreasing. So, that’s not the cause of margins getting pinched.

The financial statements show that the most significant growth in expense is actually found in labor costs. Annual labor costs have averaged a 69% increase from 2002 to 2004 while revenue only went up 46% at the same time.

So, it’s a growth story and subject to high expenses, right? Well, look at headcount over that same time. Just dividing labor expense by headcount implies a 35% increase in annual wage per employee over the 2002 to 2004 period. By the way, accounting bodies stopped considering Russia a hyperinflationary economy on January 1, 2001.

In my view, the truth is sort of an amalgam of several elements of the conventional wisdom. Sure, L is a great company that’s taking market share. And yes, concentrated owner/manager stakes seem to be an advantage in this case. But its pretty clear to me that those owner/managers are bringing home the money in buckets.

One more line item: “other expenses”. It only accounts for 4% of total expenses, but that catchall line item has increased at an 82% compound rate from 2002 to 2004. Wonder how many Mercedes’ that much will buy?

So, for now I’ll go along with the wisdom that L is definitely a good investment and a great operator in its local markets. Let’s just not kid ourselves too much – its fat city at L headquarters and management is taking home what it considers its fair share.

Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

I’m realizing that not a lot goes on during the course of a week outside of work – the office accounts for a majority of the day. In that respect, life here is much like working life in any big city. But the whole point of this experience for me is that getting into a “rut” in Moscow has intellectual stimulations in its own right. Just getting to work in the morning, for example, can be a real eye-opener.

The street I live on, Merzlyakovsky Pereulok, leads down to Novy Arbat and the metro station. By the time I leave in the morning, it’s already clogged with cars; both the street and the sidewalks. In Moscow there’s no controlling legal or moral authority that dictates how to park. If a driver sees enough room, he simply pulls into the spot – in any direction. If it’s not enough room to parallel park, it’s perfectly acceptable to pull in head first onto the sidewalk. The result is that the car blocks both automobile and pedestrian traffic.

It gets a lot worse the closer to the metro, too. On the main streets, there’s no real on-street parking; the only alternative is to pull up on the sidewalk – which is exactly what happens. So drivers pull up on the sidewalk and then drive down the pedestrian path looking for a place to park the car. In short, there’s nowhere that you won’t encounter a car either driving or parking.

And I haven’t even crossed the street yet.

Pedestrians are highly disadvantaged when it comes to crossing the street. Most intersections have an underground walkway to avoid surface traffic. But sometimes it’s just not the most direct path. Pedestrians clump together at intersections until, emboldened by their numbers and as if signaled by a ringleader, they all dart out into traffic together. Moscow drivers, usually totally oblivious to the presence of others, are intimidated by the numerical advantage, and slow down. Slow down, but don’t stop – they continue edging their way through the crowd.

So it’s been a bit of a gauntlet already, and now I’ve only just reached the metro.

The Moscow metro is a well known miracle of city planning and engineering. Every accolade is well deserved. It’s vast, it’s beautiful, it’s clean, it’s efficient – and it handles more people than the metro systems in NYC and London combined on any given day.

You’d probably guess that. There are constant streams of people, all somehow ending up on trains. Cars are large and long, but whole trains are packed within an inch of their capacity. The entire system seems to run close to the intensity level of the downtown 6 train on the Lexington Avenue line.

It is close contact, and it is urban combat. One doesn’t get on or off the train – one jockeys for position and then is swept into the appropriate direction when the doors open.

It takes some getting used to, this anonymous yet highly personal one-on-one violence. One morning, for example, I felt what I thought was a blunt object striking me in the back. I looked over my shoulder at the young woman behind me – pretty and well-dressed on her way to work. A second jolt; I turned around in time to see the third one coming. She was repeatedly using her forearm to bash me in the small of the back – a forearm “shiver” in pro-wrestling terms.

“What’s with you?” I said in my best Kaliningrad sailor-speak.

What came out of this lovely woman’s mouth was a torrent of abuse and invective so violent that I immediately considered myself fortunate to only be getting a few forearm “shivers” from someone so angry. The long and short of it? Her definition of personal space did not match mine – I was not following the people ahead of me closely enough for her taste.

So in a sea of literally hundreds of people queuing for the escalator, I was the proximate cause of her being late for work. And she gave me hell for it.

It was a valuable lesson, though. Now I don’t look over my shoulder at the person pushing me; I’m way too busy shoving the person in front.

Back, then, to my premise that living in Moscow is a lot like life in any big city. Thank God - I find it hard to get homesick for New York in a place as chaotic and confrontational as this!

Paranoia May Not Destroy Ya After All

If you ever spend any time here, it’s hard not to think that the Russians are the inheritors of an astoundingly rich culture and heritage that is built solely on the foundation of paranoia. More often than not, innocent conversations eventually turn to hints of dark conspiracies, offered with a knowing glance and a nod. But every once in while, Americans do something to restore my faith in our ability to compete on the lunatic fringe.

I went out for a drink this weekend to a local bar. It’s a soviet-style cafeteria, actually, with a huge picture of Brezhnev and his inner circle enjoying a post hunt picnic. It’s a great sight – the dour soviet leaders we knew all gathered around a picnic table covered in food and drink, pointing at one another and obviously sharing a genuine laugh. Thick sweaters, those winter time hats that businessmen used to wear - the ones with the little feather cockade on the side – and side arms strapped to their waists.

The rest of the restaurant is sleek stainless steel and concrete. Not much to claim the moniker soviet; unless, that is, you count the attitude of the ridiculously surly staff.

The tables are all communal, so you end up meeting some interesting folks. Mainly, the kind of folks who can pay 60 rubles for a beer that costs 20 rubles at the kiosk outside – no riff-raff, that is.

We were all watching a soccer match on the television when we gradually began talking to the young couple next to our group. It started off as a typical conversation between curious foreigners. Frankly, I just can’t answer the most common question – why isn’t soccer popular in the US when people around the world go crazy for it?

Well, this weekend was the celebration of the 1612 expulsion of the Polish occupiers of Moscow, so I should have expected a little patriotism. And the soccer game on TV was against Poland. But somehow the conversation began to veer around to the things that Russia is great at and that the US can’t get right; everything from technology to foreign policy.

And then it got downright weird. There were some oblique references to the power of Jewish businesses. Then, my new acquaintance leaned forward over his beer, wagged his finger in my face and said in a combination of matter-of-fact and try-this-one-on-for-size tones: “George Bush is a Mason.” He arched his eyebrows and sat back as satisfied as if he had just put Gary Kasparov in checkmate.

Now, I don’t know why, but the Russians have a deeply irrational fear of Masons. They are inherently distrustful of anything that is private, secretive, and not an organ of the church or state. I tried to counter this with a description of what the Masons do in the US; that is, they hold barbecues and donate money to hospitals for children.

A friend helped me translate the concept of holding a barbecue for profit. Our new acquaintance stood up and excused himself for a trip to the rest room. But as he did so, he looked at my friend, gestured at me, and said gravely “Tell him that’s very bad.”

That was our cue – we escaped before he got back to the table. I never did find out who won that game.

A day or two later I was searching the internet for a reference to the Alfa Fellowship when I came across a site that saw broad connections between international organizations as unmistakable signs of conspiracy. Specifically, it accused Alfa of drug trafficking, arms trafficking, unspecified Russian criminality, participation in the "underground Reich", links to "prominent Germans", links to Halliburton, Saddam Hussein, Mohammed Atta, and 9/11. Sponsorship of the Fellowship program, of which I am a proud member, was provided as further proof of Alfa’s connections to all of the above.

Huge leaps in logic were required to follow the article. But it had the veneer of academia since all of it was footnoted. Of course, the citation following the main incendiary charge was simply a link to the fellowship application on a web page. Nonetheless, it definitely gave the impression of high-quality insane ranting.

Which reminded me of a lesson a colleague once taught me; you can read something or see something and be unsure of it, but in the end there’s one way to tell for sure. You can, he assured me, smell that which is crazy.

And this article stank to high heaven.

Well, anyway, next time I get involved in this type of conversation with a Russian who is terrified of Masons, I’ll go to my happy place – a place where Americans can theorize about black UN helicopters in whisper mode without having to worry about the insane ramblings of half-in-the-bag soccer hooligans.

Museum of Time and Space

I went to the Museum of the City of Moscow today. The museum screams “Moscow” from its layout, to its friendly old ladies in the ticket office. But I find that museums can be unsettling places sometimes. Sometimes when you look at something really old you realize how little some things have actually changed.

The museum is housed in a former church, a circular pink building located in the heart of the city. The interior is a jigsaw puzzle of exhibition halls that have been shoehorned into the space. The ticket booth is on the mezzanine; the coat-check room is in the basement. The displays start on the second floor and then continue disjointedly across the first and third floors. No traces of the former interior remain at all. That’s a pretty good analogy for modern Russia sometimes – a completely different interior crammed into a shell with an older, different appearance.

One hall of the museum chronicles the dozen or so terrorist acts perpetrated in Moscow since 1996. Photos of the victims, biographies, small details of the events. It’s all well put together and touching, without any prurient glimpse at what’s now a long list of gory attacks on civilians.

The main display is an impressive collection of materials from the Stone Age up through modern times. The walls between cases are covered with beautiful oil paintings of various periods in the history of Moscow. Some are even painted by rather famous Russian artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. In fact, the artwork near the exhibits was often times superior to the display itself. After all, there are only so many stone-age arrowheads one can look at in any one dose.

But I did find one really interesting article in a case full of finds from the 9th century. Hanging in a case with impossibly old household items, above an axe-head - once obviously sturdy but now rusted into a delicate lacelike trellis – there was a belt buckle. It looked awfully familiar. Then I looked at my belt buckle and realized it was exactly the same. Exactly the same size, style – everything was precisely the same except for the quality of the finish.

And the fact that mine came from the LL Bean catalog, not an archeological dig in Moscow.

I wasn’t really prepared for the crashing confrontation with mortality that the belt buckle provoked. Standing in the museum, looking at that display, I started doing the comparison. How would my life in Moscow resemble the life of someone resident here in the 9th century? I feel confident in saying that it wouldn’t resemble it at all – maybe not even in the abstract. Yet that guy and I had the exact same belt buckle. And it was very clear that our belt buckles were going to outlast us both.

Anyway, it’s hard to believe that pant-holding-up technology hasn’t changed in more than a millennium. It’s somehow a comforting notion that, in the age of rapid technological change, maybe some things have already been perfected.

Happy Something Day!

The orientation phase of the fellowship program ended, and I’ve entered the professional placement phase. As such, I’ve returned to work full time. Well, almost full time.

Stocks sold off for about 10 days while I was away. Since the Russian market has only gone up in the past 2 years, everyone here is calling it a “correction”. Certainly the return of some volatility, that’s for sure; but I beg your pardon – it’s not really a correction if it only lasts a week. NASDAQ 2000 to 2003 – now that’s a correction.

My first week on the job was interesting outside of the normal movements of a capital market, too. I showed up for work at 8:15 on Monday. Getting to work at that time would be perfect; I wouldn’t be late by very much, nor would I be early for that matter. My boss was in his office listening to music very loudly from his computer. He waved and said hello. That’s when I noticed that we were the only 2 people in the office. And we were until just before 9:30 when the rest of the company reports for work.

The investment staff gathers for the morning meeting at 10:30 and discusses the outlook for the day. Work goes until about 6:30, when most people begin to leave. Some operational people stay much later to process daily trades and reports, etc. By 7pm, the office is as empty and as dark as it is at 8:15.

I timed my return to work perfectly. I discovered that Friday is a holiday, and the office would be closed. So far, so good. But figuring out which holiday we’d be celebrating proved to be a little more difficult.

The Soviets celebrated the October (Bolshevik) Revolution on November 7th and 8th every year, giving everyone a 4-day weekend. In post-soviet Russia, however, the glorification of the establishment of Soviet rule became a much touchier subject. So one day was lopped off the holiday, and the other day moved to the previous Friday. Easy enough.

But figuring out what the holiday actually was supposed to be about was another thing, and something that has changed a few times since then. The first idea was to call it the National Day of Accord and Reconciliation. And in the immediate post-soviet environment of a still-strong Communist Party, the country was definitely in need of both accord and reconciliation.

That idea didn’t last too long, though, and neither did the communist threat in ensuing elections. Last year, the holiday was changed to People’s Unity Day. Ostensibly, the holiday celebrates the expulsion of the Polish forces that occupied Moscow in 1612 during what Russians call “the Time of Troubles.”

Frankly, in my view, the holiday is just the most recent incarnation of traditional Russian paranoia and nationalism. The church has glommed onto (and some say sponsored) this holiday as a victory of Orthodoxy over Catholicism. The right-wing makes loud noises about Russian greatness and how other countries need to be more respectful. The government observes all this happily, as it seems intent on developing a “surrounded-by-wolves” siege mentality.

Oh well. I had the day off all the same. It may be a new celebration of a victory 393 years ago that will hopefully obscure a victory 88 years ago, but it seems that in, Russia too, long weekends are universally popular regardless of the political ideas behind them.