Six Demons and Seven Hats

By Waldo Mistral

current politics, Russian imperialism against Western expansionism, UKraine war, Russian literature as a way of life there

• Language: English
• Publisher: Waldo Mistral
• Release date: Jun 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227608185

Book preview

to Sinclair Lewis,Scott Fitzgerald, O’ Henry, old Uncle Rudyard (they taught me to write) and to Him who taught me to live    

Waldo Mistral

Foreword

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT some figurative Demons and Hats. About Cabbages and Kings—an age after Syd Porter, known as O’Henry, whote his. The kings (of Russia, Ukraine, and others) are loony and donkyish obstinate (as usual), the cabbages—dollars—are burned & boiled in a ‘pressure cooker’ of war. There’s even a cabbage soup war in the background.

Nice? (so to say)

Sure not. But the sense of this writing is to inform the reader, to reinforce him or her for the times to come – rough, tough, strange, or unimaginable. A how-to book. How-to live. 

It contains a lot of humour. At the end of each chapter there’re jokes, suitable by the subject. Really new. Translated from sixteen languages.  Have fun! (joy is strength) ☺

Some bold, or risky, moments to bump against: Scotland is compared to Ukraine (or, the Confederacy) while England, or Yankeeland to Russia). Anything in common? Have a look.

Readers hungry for a short, pithy Russian literature reference, will find enough food: Barkov, Radishchev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Korolenko, Saltykov, Chernyshevsky, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Chekhov, Bunin, Rozanov, Blok, Solzhenitsyn and V. Yerofeyev are named, referred to or quoted. Also, all four founding fathers (three men and one woman – Lesya Ukrainka) of Ukrainian literature are mentioned. Bon appétit!

The book is a bird’s-eye view of terrific (in all senses of this word) Russia’s soul and an attempt to define Ukrainian soul, surely more freedom-loving but perennially scared and mauled by envious ‘Bear’ half-drowsing, half-raving just a couple of miles north. The very soul who’s trying to stand up from her knees – for the third time.

This book doesn’t point fingers, call names or endorse witch hunts. It's about being alert. It’s about deeds, too—because, as the real philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, if wishes alone were enough, everyone would be a good person. Let’s remain normal, calm and strong.

For the freedom of the whole normal world (Ukraine including).

༼ ºل͟º ༽ ̿ ̿ ̿ ̿’̿’̵з=༼ ▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿ ༽

I The Underworld: Six Spirits

We’re living in a peculiar world of coloured facades, hat-tricks and mediacracy (the might of the media, not the ‘power of the mediocre’). Under the veneer, there’s more to detect: deep state, secret clubs, plutocracy and old demons. Let’s take a look at one active, stubborn gang.

Once upon a time, there was, amidst snowy, swampy plains, a necropolis sorry a town resting on 13 foundations: seven hills and six demons. Its hushed, hurried, cowed dwellers were, from days bygone, a bit batty and, off and on, as daft as a brush. They habitually, 24/7, served idols—from Dazhbog and Stribog to the red deities of proletarian revolution and worldwide onanism (sorry communism—more in chapter 10) Today, they brandish and worship the giant, snaky letter ‘Z’ and cherish their brand spanking new ghosts. They erect more facades and shiver in dense mental fog of their own handcraft. The hills: Borovitsky, Tverskoy, Sretensky, Trigorny, Tagansky, Lefortovsky and Vorobyovy. The demons are much higher than those molehills.

Demon  No. 1 :  Greasy Hand

A mighty critter with many—sticky—paws  and a black, seared heart. On the outside he’s smily, grey and rules over a huge   ¹ grey economy, worth billions of $$    

No one ever challenged him. Smearing palm is the basis of life in Muscovy, whether under the princes, the Mongols, the tsars, the reds, or now in the new Russia (what a moronic oxymoron). Is blessed (tacitly) by all Patriarchs and avidly used from the top to the bottom (inmates, homo’s, hobo’s).

Some basic tariffs:

Better position ‘right off the bat’ (civil company): 20-30 thousand roubles

Getting a ‘spravka' (certificate) of incapacity for military service—60,000 r. Bribing a judge to lock a crook for a shop window smashing instead of armed robbery—up to 1 million roubles;  Monthly contribution for the police from a drug dealer: around 5,000 So low?

But don’t delude yourself, it depends on turnover. Police & spooks know everything about you anyway

A must-do payoff during a roadside check—40 USD.  Also  recently increased. Why not in roubles? Because top officers take their share in serious currency alone.

The demon of corruption consumes your heart and kills your conscience—if anyone still has it in Russ—but it can be trusted as one of a very few stable pillars of that flimsy society. This ‘chyort’ is reliable—as reliable as a ... chyort. He helps while everyone and everything put you down. He could be reached, if not by phone then one-on-one and has lots of worshippers in every age group and social stratum. Still, since the ordinary 'naked Vanya' has little apart from worn-out pants and, at times, debts, the top demon is more useful for profi crooks—white collar or not, from the capital and the backwater. The result is a grey state, with transparency rank 137 from 180.          ²

Why do petty Ivans keep greasing the palm of another, mightier Ivan and making things up? On every level, from a hobo to the  Tsar’s  press secretary. Why? It  just happens, in more or less the same way as sun just climbs up and slides down. It’s always been this way. It ... simply cannot be otherwise. Not in this world, anyway.

The author had an occasion to overhear, by a taxi stand, a hushed conversation of two young wolfcubs (in human form) who were sharing a Polichinelle secret about a gift trip to the Capital. They also knew who to begin with, who should be given just a flask of wine (minimum a good French, boys), and who had to get the lian’s share. It was just a routine chat of two young guys from the province simply willing to sky-rocket their careers. Why not, ugh?

Those lads weren’t any badmen. A bit more ambitious, more connected than rank-and-file. They haven’t been crime bosses’ kids (those also had their own patrons in Moscow, at a higher level) – they just learned by rote a local, very Russian savoir-vivre: Grease the proper palm and live a brighter life!

This unsavoury savoir can be their feature (one can think), but it’s far from us, It’s somewhere on another planet, where bears, thugs, and drunken policemen skip and spin a macabre ballet on thin ice.

Wrong, gentlemen. It’s already on our planet: the Moscow moguls, names don’t matter, are vying to infect us with their graftism, buying up our politicians (those who’re not yet bought by our own rich men’s clubs), celebrities, banks, media etc.)

(the above malaise is completely absent in the UK. Only aliens take bribes. Only dummies pay bribes. We ... juss ... haven’t a clue how to graft a cop ... we  ... in fact, we shall read a manual ‘Bribery for Dummies’. XVII edition, Moonshine Pub-lishing House, Pimperdunny Lane 109, XH21 6JJ, Grafty Hill, Dummyshire, UK)

(some bribery jokes)  ²a

In Russia its called corruption, in USA we don't talk about it.

A little girl asks her father: Daddy, what is corruption?

—GO BRING ME A BEER and I'll tell you.

—But mom said you should stop drinking!

—Get yourself an ice-cream too while you bring me that beer.

—Oh, okay!

Teacher: One day our country will be corruption free, which tense is it?

STUDENT: FUTURE IMPOSSIBLE tense.

A customs officer gets a call at work and is told his wife is with another guy. The tax collector jumps into his BMW and speeds home. When he arrives, he asks his wife: Where's that sucker?  Who?  The tax collector starts the search. First, he looks under the bed. Then searches the kitchen. The bathroom. Nobody.

Then he looks in the closet. There, sits a half-naked guy with 100 euros in his hand.  The tax collector takes the money and says: Nobody, my dear... (from RO)

Devil  Two:  BM = BIG MOUTH

Two-headed like the flightless monster over the Romanov throne.

A properly prepared infrmtin—the word is written correctly!—or another sort hanging noodles on your ears [a day without one is  lost] is ever-present betwixt Petersburg and Vladivostok. Could be compared with French ‘petit mensonge’ but lacks the Paris elegance or British assertiveness. Pulling the wool over your eyes, ‘prefab’  facts, hot air and  half-truths—all this comes from the demon’s No. 2 bakery.  

A hazy tale (fib, fiction, obliquity) is the daily bread of a normal Ivan, from his cradle to coffin 

You never know how much your boss's words are worth—you'll learn more from gossip. Whether the road repair will be completed on time (it won't, 99,9 %); you can't trust your car to an unknown auto mechanic because he can cheat on kinky parts and... you don’t know if you come home alive. In Muscovy, apart from the closest family and a few chums ‘round a bottle’ (only a boozy will tell you ‘the’ truth), you cannot trust anyone. Never. Faith in man is a grave sin there, apart from co-habitation, apostasy, abortion, beating up an orthodox priest and any criticism of the state, army, and his Majesty the tsar.

The Orthodox Church is silent and servile, sprinkling  weapons  with ‘holy’ water  and parroting state lies, more holy still. Why?  It was, is, and will be in 101% dependent on the state. Everything in Russ is depen-dent on it: favour and disgrace, riches and penury, freedom and jail, life and death.   

A feral cat has in Muscovy more freedom than a ‘domestic’ man.

There’re countless lies (more than crows, sparrows, owls and flies taken together) from virtually every source – TV, press, toady literature, media, your work, your neighbourhood, your family and inlaws (yep, this too!)—that an average Ivan or Marya wade in a thick information fog. And it gets thicker every year. English or California (physical) fogs are just feathery morning mists that, luckily enough, don’t pollute or sear your mind.

As nasty as it sounds, lies (and so-called ’deza’ – look at ‘the dictionary of mat’ at p. ) are now the main export goods of Muscovy. So was it from the time of chieftains and princes, who must lie to Tatar lords and one another to survive, so was it later and so is it now, with one, not very long, break. The ‘new Russian’ clique, which staunchly stages itself to the media-opiated narod as true patriots, is whining about the western debasing of the largest country on earth and squeezing it into a straightjacket of ‘raw minerals supplier’. But, folks, Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries didn’t whine at all! Banks and investments were open, railways and cities were built, industries grew like mushrooms after autumn rain (Hugdesovka was just one of many examples). Russia wasn’t then a loony, complex-ridden and kitchen ‘Messianism’-moonstruck outcast (or outlaw) but a country with a parliament, a prime minister and some law and order. It exported a thing or two (not just raw materials) and it grew. Why accuse the whole world of your own folly? If you’ve turned into a nettle, everyone will keep their hands off you.

The Soviets were known as the ‘Evil Empire.’ a pariah state, and eked out their life exporting oil, uranium, diamonds, gold (with which it’s now paying ayatollahs for the Shakhed drones) and gas—and importing most of its food (I remember two sorts of corned ‘pork’, both made from US soy beans, both plainly tasteless, the costlier one called ‘doctor’s sausage’ for the reason still unknown to anyone). As a thank-you note for the goofy capitalists, the Red Empire paddled crass lies and half truths on an epic scale. With some maniacally childish faith that it’ll ‘just be well’ one wonder day—or, once in a blue moon. Instead, the red fancy conked out. Yeltsin, a former First Secretary of a big city, threw the Marx-Lenin octopus into the animal carcass waste and halted its crazy dogma of ‘painting the whole globe red’. The fresh and open Gorbi- and then Yeltsinoreigns dawned on poor and dark minds, the latter lasted but eight short, stormy and haphazard years.

In fact, the only, very brief, break in the conveyor belt of lies was Boris Godunov Yeltsin's reign. I mean, abroad-directed 'deza'-flood. But tsar Boris had enough to delude, to bluff (maybe sincerely and jovially-yet the common folk weren't at all amused) and to scuffle with at home. Dire finances, two dramatic rouble defaults, a parliament coup, the loss of 1/6 of the Soviet landmass (Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics and Central Asia), let alone the hapless first Russo-Chechen war—a big scar on the national pride. All that must be juggled and tricked away, with jovial lies and with spirited, groggy dances.       ³

Tsar Boris, chaotic yet quite steady in enriching his own clan, has finally had enough of Russian politics. The broadest land on earth got lashed by a different whip and lurched, eyerolling and teeth-gnashing, back to its narrow-minded, entrenched, prewired path of xenophobia, renegade nationalism and, surely, the mass-production and peddling of lies.

The mental poison of lies and propaganda was avidly used to lure some British (Kim Philby and Robert Blake) into becoming double agents. The duet mentioned above believed the grand lies and machinations of Marx and Lenin, naively or blindely. But what deception will Muscovy use now? What attractive alternative will it offer to our trias politica and civil society? Communism has rotted away or mutated into Mandarinism/ pragmatism (in China), a holy-cow clan cult (North Korea) or a shoddy Big Brother-style farce (Cuba), still quite nasty but no longer cheap.

What we see now is a rapidly cobbled together new figurehead, a fresh fairy tale: Orthodox ‘messianism’. The very nation set to ‘uproot all religions and establish scientific atheism’ ninety years ago has changed colours, like a veiled chameleon, from fiery red to gilded—within just one generation. And ardently began to sell lies, to sow discord and conflicts far and near. In the same maniacal, insane faith ‘it will all succeed one day.’

It won’t.

And let’s not forget a very old truth: who-ever sows the wind will reap the storm.   ⁴

(of course, only aliens and politicians can lie in Britain. We don’t. In fact, we cannot. Or, is it the first lie in this book?)

(a couple of jokes about lying)

The biggest liar

TWO BOYS WERE ARGUING when the teacher entered the room.

The teacher says, Why are you arguing?

One boy answers, We found a ten pound bill and decided to give it to whoever tells the biggest lie.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, said the teacher, When I was your age I didn't even know what a lie was.

The boys gave the money to the teacher.

The only time a politician tells the truth...

WHEN HE CALLS ANOTHER politician a liar

(only) small kids and drunken men speak truth; unfortunately, one don’t understand the former and don’t trust the latter (translated)

Statistics is a younger sister of lie

Lie has beautiful legs (L. Andreyev)

Liar’s house stood on fire, but no-one believed (a Turkish proverb)

"Why are you lying again, Pepi? asks the primary school teacher,you know what happens to liars, don’t you?    Yes, I do—they become politicians or bankers"   (translated from Ĉeský)

When is Peskov (the Kremlin speaker) lying? Whenever his lips move

Judge to defendant: "Sir, please stop to lie so primitively!   (transl. from Hungarian)

Ghost. 3: oUTER sPACE’S TOO SMALL (don’t mistake it with our ‘Pride and Prejudice’).

Below: an invisible but true symbol of a Great-Muskovite ego. Pride is an utterly weighty element of an alien’s’s life (sorry I meant Ivan’s life). He may  be  physically  and  mentally down, tipsy, penniless, and  without  prospects, but he’ll still feel, as long as he wobbles somewhere along Tverskoy Boulevard—someone great. Pridely peering down at dirty Africa, rotten West, and slave Asia from a plinth of nukes and a hundredfold higher pep talk about them. Exactly—abroad, this naked Vasya sees slaves. His own self doesn't notice any chains, and if, by chance, he does hear them clink, he drowns it out with booze.

Pride, much more than a smelly bonfire of raw pine branches, warmed Yermak, Yakunin  (butcher of  the  Chukchi)  and other colonizers and ‘russificators’. They didn’t have to build a fleet and learn the arduous art of navigation—an 'empty' land covered with pine trees and the bodies of locals slaughtered by the way was always further east. Every piece of land you took was never yours—private property was a sin, (a state or church property wasn’t) —but bloated the Tsardom instead. And the invader's co(s)mic vanity. 

Pride and the desire to mend his misery drove the tsarist soldier to Samarkand, Almaty—or, currently, Donbas. But in Rus’, any personal wasn’t and isn’t worth a plugged nickel. Personal is a toothbrush, a soap bar, plus two pairs of socks and one change of underwear: this is what you can take to the jail there.

The rest, including your poor ass, belong to the juggernaut of the Pridestate. It brutally cements over any trait of selfhood with the sticky concrete of bluster. With grey rain pouring on your sad brain from lead clouds, you’ve no choice but to turn into a cast concrete mummy (photo) or run for your life.

Back in 1914, the ´goddy´ Lenin wrote his essay ´On the National Pride of the ⁴a Great Russians’. The article (or a speech abstract?) isn’t long, yet the word ´slave´ is to find there eight times, while ´pride´ just five. Conspicuous? Bizarre? Are the ‘Great Slavs’ both ashamed and proud of being slaves’ offspring? Reading the essay, one gets the strange feeling that Lenin is rather setting scores with monarchy and some discordant socialists (Plekhanov), too ‘civvy’ for him than taking Russian pride seriously.

If any genuine, normal, so to say, pride is there at all, it is so deeply buried under a smelly heap of political hassle, inferiority complexes and scars of agelong shackles that one sees, instead of a mighty eagle or a giant swallowtail, a crippled Kafkaesque insect. Half butterfly, half wolf, a dreamt-up harmony mixed up with pandemonium. To be in one’s right mind and proud of this? Hard but possible—if you swap ‘right mind’ for ‘Russian mind’. The world’s fog factory is not ‘incomprehensive to the mind’ as poet Tyutchev wrote. Want to understand it and its stuffy pride? Read Kafka (or Yerofeyev, his Soviet double). Begin with ‘The Verdict’, or ‘The metamorphosis’ and when you wade through ‘The Trial’ (or ‘Moscow to the end of the line’) you’ll grasp, at least in part, Stalinism and Russian ‘regime’ism’, its spirit of relentless oppression and the rabbit-in-front-of-a-boa-constrictor fatalism of most Ivans. (or course you never read all that, but now you know what Russia is)

The ‘Great Slavs’ are so touchy over their bloated pride, their assumedly debased dignity and any attempt to pierce their often bleak (yet, it’s so) ego that they, personally and on any other level– business, politics etc., expect or even demand a compliment. One little warm word. And a kind of .. servility. That’s why they (many of narod, not just elites) are so mad at poor Ukrainians who, as they feel, plotted to ditch the sky-high Russopride.

The above combination is hard to find among freeborn people. Maybe Greek waiters, soft-spoken, a bit sheepish and hearty, look like that. That’s their job, to  mention just one thing, to be cordial, even somehow servile, when serving their (well-off) customers. An outward Orthodox tinge such as crosses on bullish necks adds to the lord-and-slave puppet theatre that Ivan loves to stage on the first occasion.

But, if unchecked, the Muscovite starts with servility wishes and ends with slavery conditions – that’s the abyss between us and them that will never, ever be levelled.  

(we, honest folks, who never give a tinker’s cuss when an i...t cuts us short or cuts us off with his i...t jalopy, are not arrogant. We’re proud of not being sniffy, and feel chesty of not being bossy. We don’t know what P-word or F-word means, especially now, when First Minister is a ...)

Jokes about pride/ overconfidence:

I talk to myself readily because I enjoy company of bright, outstanding people. (translated from Srpski)

A Russian nouveau-riche broke his arm and was brought to a hospital.       We’ll apply a plaster cast, says the doc  "Why plaster, man? Make a marble one!"

It’s not enough to be modest. Important is, that everyone around knows about it

"Doctor, are you certain this medicine will cure me?      Of course it will. No one who ever used it came back"  (from German)

"Doctor, what are you doing when you have no patients?      I’m killing time ..."  (translated from Ĉeský)

Monster 4: Funk²  & ferosity: two-faced Janus (this chapter isn’t about music, sorry)

In Moscow, you must be afraid, it’s a sort of good manners there.

And if by chance you can't—learn it asap! Ivan's water is fear, as lying is bread. Who should you be afraid of? Oh, gentlemen, the list is longer  than the menu in the ⁵ Kremlin’s stolovka! Police, FSB, cameras   on every street corner, work colleagues because they’ll happily report you, a yob from the next flat ‘cause he can mug you at a whim. Be afraid on the street, in a trolleybus kuz they can rob you anywhere and anytime, (and share the booty with the police, this same night). Do not  take much cash from the ATM and never late in the evening. You mustn't ask questions when state nabobs pay a visit to your droopy ‘biznis’ and babble s.o.s (silly official stuff), completing it with bland 'any questions'? God forbid, don’t ask any! You'll get fired, hush.