Call to American Medical Center, June 12 eXile: Yes, hello? AMC: Yes, hello. You wanted to speak to a doctor? eXile: Yes, I have this strange problem...May I speak English? AMC: Yes, well, my name is Dr. Dmitry Khukhrev. How can I help you? eXile: Well, okay. My name is Stanley Greenberg. I work for International Paper, you know-the big paper company? Anyway, the strangest thing happened. I was wondering if I should come in. I was walking down the street today and... you know how there’s pukh everywhere? AMC: Yes? eXile: You know-’Stalin’s revenge’? AMC: Yes. eXile: Anyway, I was walking down the street today, and I got hit by this piece of pukh. It must have been a big piece, I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve got blood pouring out of my ear now... AMC: From pukh? eXile: Yeah. It must have been a big piece. AMC: How could this be? eXile: I don’t know. It’s very strange. Anyway, I’ve got this bruise there now, it’s the size of a grapefruit. You should see this thing. AMC: From pukh? Amazing. eXile: It didn’t hurt that much, but seriously, I’ve got blood pouring out of my ear. Literally pouring. AMC: I think you should come in! eXile: Have you ever heard of anything like this before? AMC: I think you should come in. So I can express my surprise. eXile: It’s just this blood in my ear. So you think I should come in? You’re on Grakholsky pereulok? AMC: Number one. eXile: I’ll be in as soon as I can. AMC: See you.

A lot of responsibility goes with being the Worst Journalist in Moscow. It’s like being heavyweight champion—you’ve got to take on all comers, or else you lose your belt. The best of the best don’t mind the burden, though. Remember the young Mike Tyson? They asked him once if he was ready to fight Michael Spinks. His answer: “Bring him on. I’ll fight that nigger in a phone booth.”

The New York Times’s Michael Wines, this year’s Worst Moscow Journalist, is a hack in the Tyson mold. He showed it last week, when he filed a lengthy piece with the penultimate Bad Journalist theme—pukh. Come early June, the season in Moscow when the mildly irritating white shit descends upon the city, other bad journalists might perhaps have backed off from the challenge implied by this wildly irrelevant news phenomenon.

Not Wines. Scared of pukh? He fought that nigger in a phone booth. And the fight was a wipeout—decisive and violent. Even better, he did it in a style that thoroughly validated his champion status. Like Tyson, he didn’t just defeat his opponent; he destroyed him, reducing a grown man to a battered, bleeding child with no doubt that he has just tangled with The Man.

The pukh story has long been the great cliche of Moscow journalism. In a country where women with doctorates are reduced to hooking for pennies and serial killers own the keys to half the country’s cities, Western journalists year after year somehow never fail to deem to deem newsworthy the botanical accident which leaves cottony pollen floating in their latte. Lengthy space-filling features about pukh appear year after year in the front pages of newspapers from London to Canberra. And yet....

And yet Michael Wines, the man who once told the world that Vladimir Putin has a “firm intellectual grasp of democracy,” has upped the hack ante. Last week, he came out as the first journalist to assert that pukh, more than just a temporary irritant, is no less than a grave threat to American national security.

A centerpiece of his June 7 piece, “Take Cover, Spring Is in The Air,” was a story about a former American ambassador who had to be airlifted out of the country after having an allergic reaction to pukh. Writing in the chilling prose of a gothic horror novelist, he tiptoes up to the terrifying plot development in the piece’s second paragraph. Note the language in the first sentence—he appears to be describing levitating ghosts (“shrouded”, “nearly weightless”) whose unconscious otherworldly malevolence guides them straight into the nostrils of the unsuspecting ambassador:

“Upon maturity in early June, the catkins split into two parts and the ripened seeds, shrouded in white, nearly weightless tufts, are released into the air. Freed, they drift by the millions before accumulating in rain puddles, sticking to screens and, in one extraordinary case, so relentlessly tormenting a United States ambassador to the Soviet Union that he was forced to leave the country for medical help.”

As if this extraordinary paragraph (complete with the amusing redundancy of a “rain puddle”) were not enough, Wines actually goes through the trouble to track down this aggrieved ex-U.S. official to relive the pukh horror. Clearly, Wines was so struck by the story that he needed to investigate the story completely, to make sure there is no stone left unturned—a la Oliver Stone after he hearing for the first time about the “winos” on the grassy knoll:

“Reached today in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he is accompanying his wife on a business trip, Mr. Hartman had no problem recalling his brush with what he calls ‘Stalin’s revenge’.

“‘It was coming down like snow,’ he said. ‘There are some pretty lethal trees at the residence.’ He then added with evident satsfaction, ‘I think they’ve cut one of them down.’”

Even more delicious is Wines’s description of the actual incident involving the ambassador. Remember, this is a reporter who brushed off the violent history of the KGB to praise Vladimir Putin for his early career choices—describing the car-battery-to-genital-applying Soviet spy organization as a logical home for upwardly mobile young Russians who wanted to see the world. Able to dismiss the KGB with a wave of the hand, he nonetheless feels compelled to use the full force of his descriptive powers, such as they are, to render the awful drama of the dread pukh bud invading the civilized haven of the ambassador’s nose:

“In 1986, the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, Arthur A. Hartman, was strolling outside his historic Moscow residence, Spaso house, when he accidentally inhaled an airborne cloud of pukh. Lodged deep inside, the pukh caused such a serious allergic reaction that Mr. Hartman was evacuated to Germany, gasping for breath, to receive medical treatment.”

The Wines pukh piece is a lesson to those of us—and I have to admit, I’m one of them—who claim that all mainstream journalists are alike. Most of the time, this is true. By reading the text of your average pukh article, in most cases it is impossible to tell whether it was written by a bitchy menopausal Moscow Times columnist (Jean MacKenzie, 1998), a faceless Knight-Ridder automaton (Inga Saffron, the same year) or a Pulitzer-Prize-nominated Los Angeles Times matron (Maura Reynolds, again 1998).

Wines is different. Had I not seen the byline of this piece of his, I feel fairly confident that I would have known that this was our resident equine sperm-slurper Michael Wines, and not some other bored hack, who was writing. Whenever Wines ventures way from straight news, and even sometimes when he doesn’t, he manages to color his articles with the nauseating pretensions of the Bobo in Paradise class. Writing about the homeless, he recalls the squeegee men who wash the windshield of his Audi in New York. Writing about the KGB, he aims to put things in context for his readers by inventing a Soviet version of the yuppie generation. His pukh piece, too, falls squarely into this tradition. Aside from the mere fact of its publication—pukh is only a significant and newsworthy phenomenon to the kind of people Wines identifies with (i.e., people who have screens on their windows)—the details Wines chooses to include in the article give him away.

For instance, Wines’s admiration for the office of U.S. ambassador shines through the piece. The line about Hartman “strolling outside his historic Moscow residence, Spaso house” might seem like an extraneous detail, but Wines its inclusion is a necessary means of contrasting the horror of pukh with The Good Life. Even the line about Hartman “accompanying his wife on a business trip” jumps out at the reader; it would have been enough to say that Hartman is on a business trip, but Wines has to stick the wife in there, his heart I think genuinely warmed by the image of the happy Commissar couple on a trip abroad. In another section of the piece, he complains about pukh sticking on “hair and sweaters” and notes that the stuff “torments contact lens wearers.” I know I may be reading a lot into these details, but I feel certain that Wines is the kind of person who not only has something like an emotional attachment to his Land’s End sweaters and his lenses, but feels confident that his readers in America would have the same kinds of concerns he does when considering an ecological phenomenon which disturbs these important consumer relationships.

As always, Wines in this piece also does not fail to capitalize on his journo-cliche opportunities. A few years ago I wrote in a press review about a thing I call the “fear bond.” Basically this is a kind of article where the reporter writes about some negative phenomenon (the drug trade in Central Asia, tuberculosis in Siberia, the appearance of some new crypto-fascist political party) and asks his reader to care about the story in return for a promise that the situation will soon get worse and actually affect his life personally. In other words, heroin traffickers in Kirgyzstan have not yet reduced the Connecticut suburbs to shooting-gallery ghettoes, but, the reporter asserts, they might.

Wines in this piece does not actually threaten American audiences with pukh, but he makes sure to close his article with a promise that the worst that pukh can offer is still yet to be seen:

“There are hopes that this season’s infestation will not be so bad... An early heat wave followed by a rainy, cool spring has hamstrung the poplar’s catkins and sent many of the first tufts crash landing in puddles and wet grass, never to rise again...

“Forget it, Mr. Mashinsky says; the season has just begun. ‘Wait a little bit,’ he said. ‘When the poplar trees are in full blossom, you won’t be able to complain about any defecit of pukh.”

I have a beef with Michael Wines. It was his intervention in the wake of the sperm-pie incident that was a key factor in David Johnson’s decision to ban the eXile from the influential Johnson’s Russia List. I would have understood if Wines had simply complained that we had hit him with a horse-sperm pie, but from what I understand, he also complained to Johnson that I had made threatening phone calls to his wife. Johnson, a seriously religious person, was apparently deeply moved by this story, which happens to be totally untrue. When I protested that the charges were totally absurd—I didn’t even know Wines had a wife, and besides, why would I hassle his wife in private when I’d already thrown horse sperm in his face in public—Johnson, his heart heavy with various past eXile crimes, was not able to rid himself of all doubts. I consider this dirty pool; the whole incident, quite frankly, offends my sense of fair play; and as a result I’ve resolved to get Wines, and get him good, before I’m through with him.

In the meantime, we are all left to appreciate Michael Wines for the champion that he is. He did the falling icicle piece; he did pukh. December is coming, along with the inevitable controversy over whether or not Westernizing Russia will finally replace Ded Moroz with Santa Claus. Will the champ rise to the occasion? Will this latest Great White Hope finally erase the memory of Marciano? Time will tell, sports fans. Time will tell.