IZO

218 mph Ferrari Mansory Stalone crashed in Kiev (TopSpeed). Where else, these days?

The Trans-Carpathian Rusins (ethnic Russians) have asked Russia to recognise their independence (Kursor, in Russian). If Russia tries to seize Crimea, it will face a guerilla war (Kursor, in Russian).

The prostitution business in Crimea has been hit by the Crisis: prices are down 20-40% and the number of clients has dropped off dramatically (UAR, in Russian).

In the Kyrgyz national art gallery valuable works of art are falling into decay: the equipment controlling the micro-climate and temperature in the stores is broken, and no paintings have been restored for the last 13 years - because there are no restorers (centrasia.ru, in Russian).

A band of art-thieves has been caught in Zaporozhe, Ukraine (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Savik Shuster's live show on Ukrainian TV: a discussion of the Golodomor and Russian-Ukrainian relations with the participation of a wide range of commentators (kanalukraina.tv, in Russian).

The separation of Russia and Ukraine puts a cat among the cultural pigeons. Who's whose? Is Mikhail Bulgakov a Russian or Ukrainian genius (Guardian). The same sort of question could be asked, I suppose, about Malevich, Kulik, or even Ilya Kabakov (born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) – or indeed about a host of other artists born in, and trained in, the regions of the former Russian Empire. But, wherever an artist came from, usually we find that a particular city has a formative professional effect. Bulgakov became a major writer while living in Moscow, where he moved in 1921. If he's a Ukrainian writer, then maybe Picasso is a Spanish painter.

All currency exchange points in Ukraine will be closed from 1 January. Within the banking system, currency exchange rates will be controlled. But analysts believe that black-market exchange points will continue to function (MK, in Russian).

Mining near Kiev threatens the Dnieper river: if the bank is breached, the whole river could disappear underground, apparently (MIGnews, in Russian).

To live and die in Moscow: what is the fate of economic migrants from Tadzhikistan, many of whom work in the building trade? According to one statistic, at least 1000 die in Moscow each year. The morgues demand sums of up to 15,000 roubles ($500+) for their embalmed bodies, which otherwise may be disfigured or  left open. 88% of those who die are aged 17-28. The causes of death are as follows (Centrasia, in Russian):
10%: killed by their fellow-countrymen for domestic reasons
5%: killed by skinheads
7%: killed in road and rail accidents
6%: killed in fires
72%: die from heart attacks, illnesses, suicide

Presumably because gallerists are on holiday or in Miami, Vinzavod is almost empty of shows apart from the Pirosmani exhibition at Proun Gallery. The paintings have been assembled from private collections by Marina Loshchak. Three, I noticed, including one particularly fine work, are the property of Zurab Tsereteli's Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, so his money hasn't been completely wasted. Two, including what I reckoned to be the top work of the show, a large scene of Georgian businessmen at table, belong to Shalva Breus, owner of Art Chronicle magazine. Many of them are painted in oil on oilcloth, not a great medium for the longterm because it cracks up. I also heard that many of the Pirosmani works in museums in Georgia are kept in appalling conditions and are in a bad state of repair.

Moldova promotes itself as "island of safety" for foreign capital in Crisis (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

The Ukrainian team has been stripped of the Gaprindashvili Cup, won in the recent World Chess Olympiad in Dresden on the basis of the combined performance of the men's and women's teams. The reason is that team-leader Vasili Ivanchuk refused to undergo a drug test (Lenta.ru, in Russian). They will presumably give the cup back minus a precious stone, reportedly a diamond, which was stolen from it at Borispol airport (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Sex trafficking in Moldova, a five-part series. A man gets a phone-call from Turkey. It's from a friend of his. "I've sold your wife," says the friend. Apparently the friend got a thousand dollars for her (via Scraps of Moscow):

One of the claimed leaders of the Somalian pirate business, Abdullah Yusuf Ahmed, studied at a military institute in Kharkov (Kursor, in Russian).

Most expensive UK court case ever (IZO, earlier) comes to an end (John Helmer):

In a stunning repudiation of Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon, lawyers for the Tajikistan Aluminium Plant (Talco) agreed overnight to halt their High Court case in London. They have settled with Avaz Nazarov, the Ansol company, a former manager and traders of the aluminium plant, whom Rahmon and his cronies ousted in December 2004, in a scheme that has diverted more than half a billion dollars in aluminium export profits to safe haven in the British Virgin Islands.

Details of the settlement have not been made public; Nazarov and the others decline to comment. But the ramifications of their victory have only started to be counted — in Dushanbe, at Rahmon’s presidential palace, and in the board rooms of several international organizations, whose executives have been implicated in the frauds alleged in the court testimony, and documented in the evidence presented so far. The overnight agreement by the lawyers puts a stop to further disclosures in London, but the evidence remains for possible prosecution in Oslo, and internal investigations at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who have been backing Rahmon in the litigation that has now failed.

It is now almost impossible to buy dollars or euros at the exchange points in Kiev and other big Ukrainian cities; they've all been bought up by people worried about the fall of the country's currency (Dni.ru, in Russian).

A decision has been taken to latinize the Uzbek alphabet. Arab script is considered not particularly suited to Uzbek phonetics and grammar.  The cyrillic alphabet was introduced in Uzbekistan by Stalin in the 1940s (Centrasia.ru).

A free-speech crackdown in Latvia (freespeechlatvia)? (IZO, earlier).

Another building-block of the New Ukrainian History (National Post):

Mysteries of Ancient Ukraine: the Remarkable Trypilian Culture (5400 - 2700 B.C.) opens tomorrow [at the Royal Ontario Museum], filling a large part of the third floor of the Toronto museum with a collection largely consisting of earthenware containers and trinkets. ... For some, the Trypilans’ humble possessions will lack the pizazz of the golden wares of the Scythians, another Ukrainian culture that starred in a hit exhibition in 2001. Still, Kateryna Yushchenko showed keen interest in them as [the show's curator Krzysztof] Ciuk showed the Ukrainian First Lady around the exhibition yesterday. “What is it?” she asked, pointing to a bisected, bear-shaped earthenware object.  “I don’t know,” Ciuk replied, underlining the mystery that surrounds the Trypilians, who were only discovered in 1896 by Vikenty Khvoika.

Save Armenian churches in Georgia (drugoi). The Georgian church has always been within Orthodoxy, I believe, but the Armenian Christian church separated off onto its own path a long long time ago.

In December the Ukrainian government will launch a contest for a monument to the Golodomor (the forced starvation in Ukraine in circa 1932-33). The budget is 750,000 hryvnias (about $120,000) (intv-inter.net, in Russian). It's part-and-parcel of the creation of a fresh Ukrainian history designed to bolster the country's independence. Much of the new history is anti-Russian. Whether one can legitimately describe the murderous policies presided over by Stalin and other leaders of various nationalities as purely Russian crimes is I think a moot point; the Ukrainian government would like the Golodomor to be recognised as genocide. UPDATE: Russian political technologist a Sergei Markov's speech to the Golodomor conference in Kharkov: he considers the Ukrainian position to be not only anti-Russian but also anti-semitic; and he thinks that Ukraine historians are under greater pressure to falsify history than their Russian counterparts (Unian, in Russian). There have been several sceptical responses to Markov: Ezhednevny Zhurnal for example calls his speech the "export version of Putin's ideology" (Ezhednevny Zhurnal, in Russian).

Latvian pop-singer Valter Fridenberg has been arrested by the country's security services for making a joke about the state of the Latvian economy. At a performance in Elgava he said (Kursor, in Russian):

If anyone wants to run and get their money out of the bank, please at least wait until the end of the performance.

Apparently this was enough to have him brought in for questioning.

Three-quarters of foreign investors in Georgia are Israeli (Izrus, in Russian).

Vasili Volga, leader of the Union of Left Forces political party, says that Russiawards-leaning politicians could instigate a referendum on the status of Crimea in the near future (Komsomolskaya Pravda Ukraine, in Russian).

Reproductions of Nazi posters on sale in Estonia in the form of calendars etc (leh_ich/tonismagi, in Russian).

A review of Ken Silverlight's Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship (Washington Post) (thanks, MK): 

The real astonishment is how much the lobbyists expect to be paid. APCO quoted him roughly $600,000 a year. Cassidy & Associates estimated its services would run $4.5 million over three years, which it said was in line with what other regimes have paid: Equatorial Guinea, for example, was shelling out $2.4 million a year for Cassidy's services.

Top footballers questioned in Yushchenko poisoning case: Andrei Gusin; former Chelsea star and favourite of Roman Abramovich Andrei Shevchenko; and Kakha Kakhadze have been interrogated by the Ukrainian General Prosecutor (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Some random "Russian plot" links:

- Putin Plot To Return As President (Yahoo).

- Details of Russian plot to annex Crimea (Video Novosti, video, in Russian).

- Yushchenko's pock-marked face not result of a Russian plot (RIA Novosti).

- At 6:23 p.m., flight logs at O'Hare International Airport confirmed that two passengers, a male carrying two silver briefcases and dressed in a perfectly tailored Brioni tuxedo, and an African-American female wearing a fur coat and speaking in a thick Russian accent, were seen boarding a private plane. (The Onion).

Borat has had the effect of increasing tourism to Kazakhstan, says Kazakh tourism minister (MIGnews, in Russian).

The Ukrainian security services have banned the showing of a Russian film, The War 08.08.08: the Art of Treachery, about the recent war in South Ossetia. The Ukrainians claim the film relies on materials fabricated by the Russian security services which falsely implicate Ukraine in the conflict (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Fight in Ukrainian Supreme Rada between members of Yuliya Timoshenko's bloc and the Russia-oriented Regional Party.

 

John Varoli has sent a precis of his Russian-related articles in the November Art Newspaper; not all available online; see below the cut. I was interested in this about the Melnikov Garage:

"The relationship is very straightforward,'' said Erica Bolton, GCCC spokesperson. "The Museum of Tolerance will be housed on the 1st floor and GCCC will be on the ground floor. So they will not interfere with each other.''

Illegal two-inch-diameter petrol pipeline discovered under Russian-Ukrainian border (Regnum, in Russian). Apparently this is an established kind of private enterprise.

The Ukraine's Television and Radio Council has back-tracked and will now allow the Russian First Channel to broadcast in Ukraine (Kommersant, in Russian).

Devastating put down by Anatoli Ulyanov of Art Kiev with plenty of pictures (it seems to bear out a comment on IZO, yesterday) (Proza, in Russian):

May be leading collectors, critics and journalists visit it? Maybe you can smell lucre? Not at all. Does participation in Art-Kiev influence an artist's career in any way? Another no. So what's it all for? In aid of what?

The PinchukArtCentre [sic] has announced a prize for Ukrainian artists up to 35 years of age. There is an open submission via a website. First prize is 100,000 grivnas (Proza, in Russian).

I just emailed some artists in London about a hold-up to their show in Kiev, the Crisis being to blame of course. One writes back:

Thanks... sorry to hear their bad news - maybe Obama will fix it?

According to new legislation, some 14,500 historic buildings in Ukraine may now be privatised (UAR, in Russian).

A gallerist friend tells me that in fact Art Kiev (IZO, earlier) is a laughable institution, full of Bayswater Road-style paintings. If so, there's an opening for someone who wants to create a serious art fair in Kiev.

Kyrgyzstan anticipates crisis hit in 2009 (Regnum, in Russian).

TB raging in Ukraine due to HIV infection (Japan Times).

A suggestion that Russia's biggest internet portal, mail.ru, may be in the grip of Armenian sympathisers: it tends to treat the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh as a separate state rather than as a part of Azerbaijan (Today.az).

Art-Kiev 2008 has opened on five floors of the Ukrainian House (Komsomolskaya Pravda, in Russian; stb.ua, video, in Ukrainian).

The Sebastopol Town Council has decided to ignore the Ukrainian government ruling (IZO, earlier) and permit the broadcast of Russian-language television (Kommersant, in Russian).

Singer Muslim Magomaev has died, aged 67 (Kommersant, in Russian). I linked to him on IZO before re his performance of My Way (IZO). Below: he performs the song Thank You (Благодарю тебя):

Is Georgia becoming a "second Israel"? There's a lot of investment from the direction of Israel; and military assistance (at least until recently). And a friend of mine in Batumi to judge a film festival writes that the first TV channel in the hotel is in Hebrew.

Turkmenistan is revealed to have huge oil reserves (Asia Times).

Fashion retailing in Kiev (FWD).

Russian cable-TV channels in Ukraine to be cut off after 1 November (Kommersant, in Russian).