Natalia A.

In which I spend entirely too much time responding to the same damn argument creepy Ukraine crisis trolls ALWAYS make around here

Recent articles on paid troll organizations in Russia haven’t surprised me – ’cause they’re not that recent a phenomenon (though lately, it seems, they are going after Western publications with a vengeance). The thing about a paid troll is that you can rationalize their actions. When I get messages that are apparently sincere in their utter hatred – I don’t know what to do. Well, aside from responding with gifs, I guess. The guy below is one of the “regulars” here. My latest appearance on a HuffPost Live panel has upset him.

For a Russian state media hack, you are remarkably good at crying crocodile tears about what’s happening in Ukraine, the homeland you have egregiously betrayed.

Russian trolls are also fond of blathering about “traitors” among us. At least they usually do it in a more entertaining way.

Lest your readers forget, you worked at RIA Novosti before moving on to Russia Beyond The Headlines. YOU’RE A HACK.

A grateful hack, too. Grateful to have worked at The Moscow News/RIA Novosti, grateful to have stayed there all the way until the bitter end, grateful to have excellent Russian colleagues at Russia Beyond and in general.

And the fact that you appear to be taken seriously at decent media just makes this reader want to dig around and see who it is you’re doing favors for and the nature of these favors. The public at large knows that Russia is very good at using supple young women to promote its agenda abroad.

See this accusation keeps coming up AGAIN and AGAIN, and it’s really interesting, because what it basically comes down to is that, “All Russians are barbaric neanderthals. All of the editors at the Western media outlets you work with are also barbaric neanderthals. Sexism is not cool when the Russians engage in it, but it’s perfectly OK for me to be a sexist dick, ’cause my name is not Vladimir. I’d never accuse a man of what I’m accusing you of, but I’m still an enlightened member of a clearly superior society.”

Right.

It is not a fucking compliment, Natty. Whores engage in more honest business.

ACCUSING A WOMAN OF SLEEPING WITH HER EDITORS IN ORDER TO GET PUBLISHED IS NOT A FUCKING COMPLIMENT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Your Twitter attacks on Timothy Snyder have been duly noted. Who’s paying you for that huh? And is the money really that good?

EGAD. Someone has discovered my secret gig! I get paid to disagree with historians on social media! Now this has totally RUINED things for me, of course, because now everyone is going to want to sign up.

Honestly what makes you think as if you are even worthy to speak on the subject of Snyder’s work? You are barely educated.

It’s true. As we all know, people who disagree with Timothy Snyder on the internet have all graduated from the Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too.

In conclusion, go ahead and be a ‘comfort woman’ for the Russians if they pay you so well. Just don’t imagine it will save you from the Gulagg. Whores are especially expendable at time of war.

Because I was somewhat trained in literary criticism (my professors will probably disagree on how well I responded to the training), I am actually amazed that it takes this guy so long to just come out and call me a whore. You can kind of see him building up to it, then abandoning that track, then coming back to it, for reasons that would probably be fascinating if I was into serious criticism of batshit comments on the Internet.

Also, “the Gulagg.”

And quit your crying about how “bad” you feel about what is happening to Ukraine. Collaborationist pigs don’t get to have have a voice. In any just society they’d cute off the pretty hair of yours and march you through the streets. Bitch.

You know, I’m not going to pretend that crap like this doesn’t get to me. It’s really low, obviously deranged, and it comes from what appears to be a very tiny group of people on the Internet, but it still gets to me sometimes. Especially now, when things are so hard, on various fronts. When they are too hard to even talk about.

PS you looked like a whore at HUFFPOLIVE today. But this is what you people do isn’t it – show skin when you have nothing interesting to say except for the usual “rah rah Russia” dung.

Good to know that me wearing a damn sundress in the middle of a heatwave in Moscow can now also be used against me.

Just in case anyone is wondering, this is what I looked like on HuffPost Live today:

I know I shouldn’t be responding to any of this. I know I shouldn’t be justifying anything – or, for that matter, producing actual screenshots of what I looked like on a political panel in order to counter a stupid troll – but it’s the kind of week when merely ignoring it, deleting, and forgetting doesn’t help.

It especially doesn’t help that one of the people who writes me these things is very much a “real” person, someone whom I have a friend in common with back in the States, someone who has been to Russia – so not the kind of person you can stick into the “anonymous crazies” folder you will then demonstrably burn.

And it’s especially hard, because things in Ukraine are not getting better. The east of the country is descending into full-blown civil war. These aren’t just headlines from far away – this is personal, and it is terrifying, and dealing with trolls in the midst of it is profoundly ugly, and I can only cope with it by ridiculing it publicly, I guess.

And breaking out the ice cream after that. And the mint juleps, which go well with this heat, and make everything that much more tolerable.

Kiev’s brittle spring

I’m one of those people who can’t sing by herself. Someone else has to hit the first note for me. Two of my aunts are music instructors – one disabled, the other partially disabled these days – and they both say that it’s an issue of confidence, of being sure. As if that hidden first note is trying to tell me something.

In another lifetime altogether, when neither one of my aunts was particularly sick, I would take long trolleybus journeys downhill to the best theater in Kiev. That winter, the air was so cold that it literally glittered. I couldn’t afford to be ethically fashionable and bundled myself into an enormous fur coat I had discovered in the back of the closet.

It was only a matter of time before I would return to the States. That was pretty obvious. The States was where the life was. Mine – and everyone else’s. The States had a credit ratings system, good roads, and HBO. I would rent a room in Brooklyn and write a blog complaining about not being able to get laid as often as I liked. Assuming I partied with the right people, it would inspire a television pilot eventually. Or some dorky, deceptively undersexed-looking man/bird-thin woman in a vegan sweater would offer me a book deal. It was how I pictured it, anyway.

The future had been clearly penciled in, but before it came, there was plenty of time to write, party, and stumble out of taxis into blustering sunrises with curly-headed clouds tossed aside by a strong wind that seemed to blow into Kiev both from the East and the West simultaneously.

I started writing plays largely as a means of amusement for myself and the actor friends who rode in taxies with me. “I would SO love to, like, be in a one-act that you wrote, you know? Don’t tell me you can’t write in Russian! You totally can!” they would tell me, never underestimating the power of cheap flattery. But we all loved each other too – in was that were obvious and not obvious.

Then bearded men from Moscow started showing up and giving their pronouncements on these plays. When they poured me vodka, it always overflowed.

I sat next to one of these men at a party in what passed for the theater’s foyer, where chairs were glued to the ceiling and a large tank overflowed with lethargic turtles. My friends sang. My throat opened up on the second note and I joined them – and the man snapped his head in my direction with a surprised look. He told me later that he had never heard women sing like that. They were old, calcified songs, the notes etched on mineral deposits below the dark basements of the city.

After I sung myself out, I kissed him goodbye on the cheek. I was leaving for a road-trip to Poland in the morning. He went back to Moscow in a couple of days and I didn’t think of him, I didn’t think of him at all (maybe once or twice did I think of him. Maybe a little bit more).

I realized recently that I hadn’t seen April in Kiev in years. The April rain here must contain some kind of chemical in it that strip layers off of everything – including people. April is a month of dangerous clarity and what’s increasingly clear right now is that we are all dangling off a precipice and below us are the hard, shining peaks of war.

Continue reading “Kiev’s brittle spring”

Goodbye to The Moscow News: on riding off into the sunset yet again

“Again the well-worn saddle creaks,
And the wind chills an old wound;
Monsieur, where in the name of hell have you wound up?
Can it be you can’t afford a bit of calm?”

After nearly four years, I am leaving The Moscow News. Now that our owner, the RIA Novosti agency, has been liquidated, the paper has been put on hiatus, all of our social media channels are frozen, and the audience we have worked very hard to build has been left wondering what’s going to happen next. I will not be with TMN in the next chapter, so I will not be the one answering that question.

I do sincerely hope that the paper will be reopened – and that it will thrive.

I also have words of advice for everyone interested both in the media and in Russia.

To say that the future is uncertain is to say that the celestial void is somewhat daunting to behold. What’s especially hard to accept is that with regard to Ukraine, nothing may ever be the same again. It’s a scary, painful time. And it’s almost bizarre to observe how the stuff of headlines and news reports also has to do with your family and fate.

Personally speaking, I have been asking myself whether or not I would change anything if given the chance to go back. The answer is “no.”

I’ve also been asking myself how I really feel about everything – and in the end, all I can think about is how grateful I am for every single day I spent in the company of amazing people, doing something I loved.

So here’s to love. And to the past. And to the future.

No, idiots, Belle Knox is not an “embarrassment” to Duke

Ever since the so-called “Duke porn star scandal” hit the headlines, random people have repeatedly asked me if I am “embarrassed” by it as a Duke alumna.

The short answer is: “No.”

The somewhat-longer answer is: “No, are you freaking kidding me/what the hell is wrong with you/are you for real?”

Here are some things, meanwhile, that I AM embarrassed by: Continue reading “No, idiots, Belle Knox is not an “embarrassment” to Duke”

In a Kiev that might as well have existed one thousand years ago

I realized that outside of time, the Kiev that exists today and the Kiev that existed a thousand years ago is the same.

I also realized the other day that you need a glimmer of happiness inside you to be able to tell sad stories – so that you have perspective.

The act of telling itself is dependent on timing. It’s the wrong time to tell the story I am about to tell you.

Of course, it helps that it isn’t really a story. It’s just another pattern stitched somewhere on the sleeve of the universe.

In this pattern, I am younger and I am a blonde instead of a redhead. There is a hand holding my blond ponytail. That hand is twisted away by another hand.

It’s summer in Kiev, it’s a national holiday (or there was just a concert downtown, or football – right away, there are parts I am no longer sure of), there is a fair amount of revelers downtown, some of them drunk, and these two security guards are particularly drunk and belligerent, and they’ve just graduated from verbal abuse to touching, and between encountering them and what is happening now no more than a minute has (probably) passed, and I am too stunned to do anything about it in that very moment, so in that very moment, a Berkut officer gets them off of me with such frightening efficiency that I am too scared to thank him at first, lest he is about to go after me next. Continue reading “In a Kiev that might as well have existed one thousand years ago”