the eXile - Press Review

Issue #23/104, Nov 23 - Dec 7, 2000

Peter Ekman Groped Me

By Matt Taibbi

If the reports we hear are true, then the Moscow Times is on the verge of total collapse, apparently ready to cede the entirety of the local insanely-dull straight-news newspaper market to its even dumber competitor, the “Ignorance is Bliss” weekly Russia Journal.

But even in its death throes, the Times is staying true to itself. Like a drunk who dies of cirrhosis while reaching for one last bottle, the paper is apparently willing to go down in flames still clinging to its habit of giving its most valuable air-time to improbably moronic reactionary columnists.

The original incarnation, Jean MacKenzie, was a total abomination according to most indicators, but at least had an entertainingly vile confessional style—she developed a sort of cult of anti-personality in her time here— and could write a little.

The second incarnation, Suzanne Thompson, was simply a nutra-sweet version of Jean: while every bit as sexually frustrated, fat, and Russophobic as the original, she was an improvement in the sense that nothing she wrote could ever be remembered successfully, even if you were taking notes. In the modern newspaper business, this is a real virtue, and in this sense Thompson’s sudden and inexplicable decision to flee Moscow a few months ago (we had nothing to do with it) came as a great loss to our esteemed competitors over there on Pravda street.

Now the Times is hanging its hopes on a new rising star, a self-described Moscow-based “financial educator” named Peter Ekman. Publishing his work alongside a striking photograph that reveals him to be a man with tinted glasses, a head seemingly worn bald from improper use, a taciturn expression (of the “I know the truth, and it pains me” genus), and the giant, flowing mustaches of a snuff-taking 19th-century loyalist field marshal, Ekman is a sort of Kaiser Wilhelm of reactionary writers—plodding, lacking either the spiffy aesthetics of the Nazi era, or the space-age defenses of modern armies.

Ekman has only one idea (“Russia has a lot to learn from America”), which he tries endlessly to sell and resell as a varied package of ribald wit and insight. When audiences don’t react in the right way— in other words, when they just stare in empathetic silence at him— he plunges into deep depressions which apparently leave him torn between the conflicting urges of attack and apology.

Ekman almost always gives in to the wrong urge. There was, for example, the recent bizarre instance in which he wrote a letter to his own editor at the Moscow Times attacking fellow staffer Michael Slackman, calling the latter’s recent front-page piece on organ-dealing “the worst article I’ve seen in six years of reading the Moscow Times.” This is a letter, incidentally, whose publication could only have been made possible by the rare meeting of two different debilitating professional pathologies— the abovementioned one peculiar to Ekman, and another peculiar to whichever MT editor thought that “fairness” required voluntarily submitting to this silly mutiny in his own pages.

I’m not sure what it means in general when a columnist writes a letter to his own editor, but in this case two things seem clear: a) Ekman was so steaming mad about Slackman that he couldn’t wait to address the issue in his own column, and b) the MT was wary enough of Ekman’s legendary personal instability that they preferred to print the letter rather than confront him. A possible “c”, of course, is that the MT simply didn’t have enough letters to fill its reader response page, but that’s another matter.

Another example of the “attacking” Ekman came just two weeks ago, on November 10, in his hurrumphing “Two Kopek’s Worth” column. Headlined “Some Lessons in Messy Democracy”, Ekman’s column was an outraged response to the widespread Russian bemusement over the American electoral mess. ЙУТФУ‰ЛМЫ щНП‡МЫ, ‚Л‰ЛПУ, ·ЮОУ У·Л‰МУ Б‡ ‰ВРК‡‚Ы. His piece starts off as follows:

“The most important effect of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election for this country may be the amount of attention it’s gotten. NTV started its television coverage Tuesday even before most of the U.S. polls opened and gave special reports almost hourly Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning from its correspondents in Austin, Nashville and New York. State television RTR had only slightly less thorough coverage.

“Elections with competing candidates have been held here for only about a decade and have been marred by biased news coverage and other tactics that favor incumbents. These devices are euphemistically referred to as ‘administrative resources.’ Strong evidence of vote-counting irregularities in President Vladimir Putin’s election victory in March has been thoroughly documented by this newspaper. For all of its progress toward democracy, Russia still hasn’t had a peaceful transfer of power.”

Note the lead of this piece. The patriotic Ekman was so pained by criticism of the American system that he couldn’t even bring himself to write the actual word “criticism” in his own text. While chiding Russians for using the euphemism “administrative resources”, Ekman himself chooses to euphemistically refer to Russian gloating over the elections by speaking vaguely about the “amount of coverage” the story has received here.

Ekman literally cannot bring himself to air out Russian criticisms of the American elections in even the most shortened of forms, even to refute them. Instead, he plows right past the “thorough” coverage that has him so upset and moves straight into attack mode, reminding Russians in just the second paragraph that they’re a backward people who’ve been corrupt and backward for their entire history—unlike us.

Now, what Russians have been saying, in response to our elections, are things like “It seems you don’t have any more democracy than we do,” and “Maybe you could use Veshnyakov’s help in determining the winner.” Basically, Russians have heard so much bad news about their own country that when they finally had the opportunity to laugh at us for a change, they understandably jumped at the chance. To Ekman, this was unacceptable. He would refuse the Russians even this one tiny intellectual consolation amid the drear embarrassment of their usual existence. Not only does he deny that there was anything wrong with our elections, but he insists on publicly castigating the Russians for failing to see the valuable lessons these elections held for them. He goes on to actually list those “lessons”, which include:

‘Lesson 2: The system works, not because of complicated laws, but because people are determined to make it work. No matter who is declared the winner, the other candidate will accept the result. There will be no rioting, rumors of coups, nor even a constitutional crisis.

‘Lesson 3: A free press can fairly inform the voters. No single source provided perfectly fair coverage, but with many sources available every voter had the information needed to decide between the candidates. Mudslinging was notable for its absence.

‘Lesson 4: ‘Administrative resources’ did not determine the outcome. Two weeks ago, Alexander Rutskoi was thrown off the ballot for Kursk region governor by an 11th-hour court decision, citing Rutskoi’s abuse of his administrative resources, including concerts and other election activities staged at government expense. Many people in turn saw the court decision as an abuse of Putin’s “administrative resources.”’

Translation of “Lesson #2”: At least we don’t have coup rumors, like you animals. Uh-huh. This is political commentary on the level of “My Dad can beat up your Dad.” It just seems different from a sandbox because the Times uses blue print, instead of red like ours.

Lesson number 3 I’ll leave without commentary. If Ekman sincerely believes that a free and fair press did its job during this campaign, I don’t want to spoil his illusions. Probably he thought those debate questions were really tough after all. As for lesson number 4... Does Ekman really believe that the two ruling parties in American didn’t rely almost entirely on “administrative resources” to run their campaigns? Does Ekman think that just anyone can raise $50 million to run for president? For God’s sake, they didn’t even let Ralph Nader in the building for the first debate, much less let him participate.

The election column by Ekman was by no means exceptional. He has a habit of blasting Russians at length for their failure to be as civilized as we are. On the surface, this would seem easy enough to do, but Ekman can’t manage even this simple job. He has to screw up his facts every time he tries it. A notable example is his November 3 column, “Passports are the root of all evil.”

In this one, Ekman picks a worthy target, the Russian propiska system. But Ekman’s problem is that he can’t criticize Russians without blowing Americans at the same time. If he’d just stuck to the propiska system, he’d have been fine, but he had to go and rub it in by comparing it to the American system, which is where he goes wrong:

“Passports represent the main difference between the Russian and American forms of government. Most Americans don’t have a passport. All Russians aged 16 or over must have one and many people have two f the second being for foreign travel...The Russian government wouldn’t know how to govern without internal passports. Government here is about filling out multitudinous documents, which are all based on other documents, which are all, sooner or later, based on a person’s passport.”

All of this is more or less fine so far, with the exception of a few minor issues. For one thing, the reason most Americans don’t have a passport is that they’re not aware that there are other countries on the planet. Not exactly something to be proud of. And of course all governments base their documentation on their citizens on some form of ID or another, whether it’s a passport or, as is the case in America, a social security number.

But these are secondary issues. The real crime comes later, when Ekman attempts to prove that the reason Russians are burdened with this system is that they deserve it, being as they are intrinsically unwilling to stand up for their own rights. Unlike Americans, that is:

“Americans would never put up with internal passports. If one of the major presidential candidates were to suggest that internal passports were needed, there would be a record voter turnout with 100 percent of the votes being cast for the other candidate.”

A few notes on this passage:

a) Sens. John Ashcroft of Missouri, Rod Grams of Minnesota, and Spencer Abraham of Michigan were thrown out of office this year after voting against the introduction of a National Identification Card, which would force every American to have a photo ID with a social security number on it. 54 Senators voted for the card.

b) Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996 after proposing the creation of the so-called “Unique health identifier”, which would give everyone a country a number, without which they could not receive health care.

c) Christine Todd Whitman in 1998 proposed the creation of an “Access New Jersey Card”, which would have a computer chip in it, and (to quote committee hearings) “would be used to access numerous government programs and services, as well as for private enterprise, such as a credit card, debit card, health care ID card, and insurance card.” Whitman was not hounded out of office by outraged Americans.

I used to work as an assistant to a private detective years ago. From that experience I can testify with absolute sincerity that when it comes to personal privacy, Russia is a virtual Jeffersonian paradise compared to the United States. In the United States, you simply cannot move without leaving a trace of yourself somewhere for the authorities—or, in our case, unscrupulous private detectives—to find you. You need a social security number to get a credit card, apply for a job, use public health care, get a loan. Any time you do any one of these things, some minimum-wage bozo calls up your entire history, examines it, and adds his own contribution to it. Not only the government, but anybody can find out just about anything about anybody else in the United States.

This phenomenon is worsening now, with the internet; the porno-surfing, e-purchasing, and plain old reading habits of almost any individual can be bought at the right price through the right company. And all of this is because more and more things are now being bought with credit cards in America, and credit cards, again, are attached to searchable social security numbers.

All of this points to a movement in favor at personal surveillance on a scale that the Russians, with their silly little pieces of paper, are decades away from even imagining. Imagine if Russians had to show a passport and have their names entered in a book every time they bought a liter of milk! Americans are already there.

In a relatively civil way, I recently asked Ekman about these issues, as well as about some others (for instance, what exactly is a “financial educator”?). Among other things, I tried to get him to take a bet for ten thousand dollars that Christine Whitman wouldn’t lose all 100% of the vote the next time she ran for office. His response was basically to tell me to fuck off. “Don’t bother writing to me again,” he growled. His tone was distinctly menacing and hinted at possible violence.

I am going to digress here because I gave Ekman a chance to be nice, and he copped an attitude with me, and I’m pissed off. I was going to leave the next part out of this article, but here it is.

In any case, I was surprised when Ekman got nasty with me, because his attitude toward the eXile wasn’t always so hostile. There was a time, for instance, this summer, when he offered to spend a lot of quality time with us. Well, not with all of us, exactly, but with one of our female Russian employees, who made the mistake of running into him at the nightclub “Garazh” at about three in the morning after he’d been drinking all night. Apparently, Ekman’s mother-in-law was in town (he has a Russian wife, whose family lives in the provinces, apparently engaged actively in the avoidance of protest over the local propiska system) and he was desperate to get away. Within minutes, he had his hands all over our employee, a leggy blonde of about twenty-eight.

“He asked me to spend a weekend with him in St. Petersburg,” she told us later. “He said his in-laws were in town, and he wanted to get away. He was really drunk.”

To Ekman’s credit, he was, our girl reports, “very nice that night.” Then again, think of what she’s used to. These Russians are savages—just imagine what she has to endure on a daily basis. Nonetheless, despite his niceness, she had to decline his invitation.

“I mean, he’s really too old,” she said. “They say bald men get that way from having too many hormones, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t say he was radiating all that much sexual energy.”

This would never have happened in America, of course. In America, she would have said yes. Nonetheless, there are lessons for Russians to learn from this incident:

1) The system works. It may not be perfect in every case, but eventually, the will of the people will be heard, and somebody will go away for a secret weekend with Peter Ekman;

2) A free press can fairly inform the public. Thanks to the eXile, the entire expatriate community in Moscow, including Ekman’s wife, now knows that Ekman was at Garazh at four in the morning a few months ago, drunkenly groping a 28-year old Russian girl and begging her to steal away with him;

3) “Administrative resources” did not determine the outcome. Despite Ekman’s superior finances, the girl eventually made a free and informed choice, and left to go home and sleep alone. This is evidence of a functioning democracy.

Matt Taibbi is a journalistic educator based in Moscow. He welcomes letters at taibbi@exile.ru. Peter Ekman’s wife is welcome to visit his office in person. Afternoons are slow.

Links