Issue #06/61, March 25 - April 7, 1999  

by John Dolan

The Irish consulate in Moscow has decided to cancel the Moscow St. Patrick's Day Parade, a tradition since 1993 (making it one of the most venerable of Moscow-expat festivals.) The cancellation notice was completely in line with the true Irish spirit: sanctimonious, paranoid, and steeped in the hatred of life, the body, and all happiness. An official from the consulate announced with the sort of crawthumping moral posturing one expects from the 26-county statelet that it would be wrong to parade when there was so much poverty; and besides, the Irish community in Moscow has dwindled so much of late.

The first reason is downright comical: cancelling a St. Patrick's Day parade on account of poverty? That's like cancelling Cinco de Mayo on account of a refried-beans surplus. Poverty is the basic material of St Patrick's Day parades! They began as a defiant celebration of Irishness in New York City, where "Irish" and "poor" were synonymous. At that time, "Irish" was also synonymous with "Papist," "criminal" and "riotous," proud titles the latter-day Irish are anxious to live down. But of course the poverty to which the Consulate was alluding wasn't the poverty of the Irish in Moscow but of the Russians. And that might be a problem. Irish people of the docile, eager-to-please variety now common are very happy being stepped on, but being the winner makes them very nervous. With this in mind, maybe they should've hired poor Russians, dotted their faces with fake freckles, painted their faces and hair orange, and sent them out into the street with green balloons. Keep everybody happy.

The second reason the consulate offered--the alleged dimunition in the Irish community in Moscow--is more interesting. When I came here in 1993 it looked like the Irish were the new managerial class in the expat Biospheres of Moscow. There was the huge Irish supermarket on Novy Arbat, and others like it on Mayakovskii Square and Dom na Naberezhnii. Rosie O'Grady's was the place all the expats hung out, and everybody had to pretend to like Guinness, the most disgusting plant extract since Ipecac. The Irish were running this place. They were waterskiing out here.

When I came back in '97, they were gone. Just plain gone. Rosie O'Grady's was still opened, but nobody went there any more. They said the Chechens had grabbed it from the Irish. There were many melodramatic variations on this story. In one, the Irish, under threat from the Chechens, brought out somebody from the IRA as a sort of counter-intimidation. I don't know whether anybody actually tried this on the Chechens, but if they fell for it they're not nearly as smart as I think they are. The fact is, the IRA is one of the most tightly-disciplined guerrilla armies in history. They don't moonlight as rent-a-thugs and they don't do private favors. What does happen is that every wannabe bad guy in Dublin or Belfast finds out, just about the first time he goes to a pub outside his home ground, that he can get laid instantly by naive American or British girls if he hints darkly that he's connected to the IRA. If he said this back home in Andersontown or Newry, where they know him, he'd be laughed out of the pub and then whacked around with baseball bats for telling silly lies; but the further he gets from home, the stronger his story gets. Without exception, the sort of guys who say this would never, ever, be recruited by the IRA; but if you count up all their boasting, the IRA comes out to be the second-largest army in the world, losing narrowly to the Chinese.

If the Irish managers of the late great Rosie O'Grady's really did hire some ham actor to put on a cloth cap and look menacing, for the benefit of their Chechen goodfellas, then I hope the Chechen had a good sense of humor, took it easy on the fool and let him off with a good beating. Otherwise, some kid walking his dog this spring is going to find, exposed by the melting snow, one cloth cap covering one Celtic skull with a 9mm round through it. It's amusing to imagine the last moments of this pseudo-Provo, as his Chechen hosts lead him on a Miller's Crossing walking tour of the suburban Moscow woods: "Listen me fine boyos--oh OK, lemme cut the Irish-accent crap and talk normal, OK? I'm just an actor, damn it! I played an IRA guy in this play in London so they hired me to come here and scare you guys! Please! Look into your hearts, look into your hearts!" As the Chechens push their blubbering victim further into the woods, one of them translates for the rest this repeated phrase. The Chechens are so convulsed with laughter they can scarcely see to aim, and all the way back in the their luxury sedan they mimic the fake IRA man screeching "Look into your hearts!"

There were a variety of stories about where the Irish went, and why they left Moscow. Some said that there were suddenly so many jobs back in Ireland that the Irish expats just went home; others said that they were pushed out of their middle-management jobs by Russians willing to work for lower wages; others that they were casualties of the crash, gone home to fiddle a double dole for themselves in the grim bedsits of North Dublin. Having spent six months in Dublin last year, I'm inclined to believe that last story, because I can't imagine anyone choosing Dublin over Moscow if they had a choice. I spent six months in that sad museum-city looking for some spark that made them so magnificent--for God sake, Sinn Fein taught the whole world how to take on the Empire and beat the bastards! Six months...and found nothing but Brit-sucking politicians getting in line to distance themselves from their suffering kin in the ghettoes of the north. I found no one there, no one alive but the noble survivors of Falls Road and Crossmaglen. The rest of the Island was nothing but a confederacy of dunces, of cowards whose main interest was in renting summer cottages and living down any hint at all of their rebel past. In the end I had to concede the sad truth of what a friend of mine said when the Ceasefire took hold the second time: "Ireland without the IRA is just Belgium with worse food." And you don't see Belgians parading much, do you?