Call in the spetsnaz...

The morning's news says the situation in Moscow has been resolved. The theater where 700 hostages had been kept for two days by about 40 Chechen terrorists was stormed by Russian special forces (spetsnaz).

News reports indicate that the official version of the storm involved the use of stun grenades, though several reports say that troops entered the building wearing gas masks and that, afterward, a number of hostages were sent to hospitals suffering from some form of chemical poisoning. One report suggested that psychoactive gas was used in the assault. Somewhere between 35 and 42 terrorists are reported as having been killed in the action, and 67 of more than 700 hostages died.

grani.ru reports the following:

Депутат Госдумы Сергей Ковалев считает, что "поспешность операции (по освобождению заложников в Москве. - Ред.) определялась тем, что слишком сильны стали требования о мире в Чечне", сообщает "МК-Новости".

Ковалев подчеркнул, что достаточно многих сведений о происшедшем не хватает, а в том, что сообщают, возможно, довольно много лжи. "Единственное, что я могу сказать, - власти, принявшие решение, имели другую таблицу приоритетов, чем можно было ожидать. Главным приоритетом не была жизнь заложников", - сообщил он.

* * *Duma member Sergei Kovalev thinks that the "haste of the operation [to free the hostages in Moscow - Ed.] was driven by the fact that calls for peace in Chechnya had become too strong," reports MK-Novosti.

Kovalev stressed that a rather large amount of information about what happened is lacking, and that is is possible there are quite a few lies in what is being reported. "The only thing I can say is that the authorities who made this decision had a different set of priorities than one might have expected them to have. The main priority was not the lives of the hostages," he said.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what role - other than member of the Duma - Mr. Kovalev plays, so I am at a loss to assess his statements. That the lives of the hostages may not have been the main priority in the storm is something I don't find inconceivable. As far as the crack about lies being reported, well... based on my experience reading the Russian media on the internet, it's not as if this kind of thing is something new. I pity anyone who takes what the Russian media dishes out at face value, because such persons are among the most misinformed people in the world (if you don't count CNN viewers, but I digress...).

The hostages aren't clear yet, either. They are being systematically screened - including the ones in serious and critical condition in the hospital, if I understood the report correctly - to make sure there are no disguised terrorists among them. I suspect life will also get a lot harder for people of Chechen-like appearance who show their faces in Moscow.

Cheers...

Whassamatta?

I can't seem to settle down and get right with this miserable translation. Part of it has to do with the fact that the end client wants it in Excel (actually, he wanted it in MS Project, but my copy is so old...), and another part has to do with the numerous typos in the text (entries in a table, so there's no hope of doping out the meaning from sentence structure).

I'm 3 pages into that 5-page job, and not 3 complete pages, either (I'm leaving the numbers for later). I'm also having difficulty printing out the JPEG files I downloaded yesterday, so I may take advantage of LJ friend tamaraland's suggestion and shove the graphics into a PDF file, and then print that file.

* * *I called my folks and told them about the Kazakhstan job. Predictably, my mom's a little bent out of shape about it (airplanes have never been her preferred mode of transport, and the news of the day does little to reassure her). Her comment to me was that I was "crazy"; my dad heard me out and, from what I can gather, thinks it's probably no more or less harebrained than some of the other stunts I've pulled in my life.

I am well and truly wanting to go upstairs and watch a little TV... maybe rub Galina's feet. Tomorrow morning, I plan to get up and do some cooking (chicken/leek/mushroom soup, eggplant "caviar"), and then finish the remaining two pages of the translation for S and settle down to a nice late afternoon dinner with the kids and their company.

Cheers...

On toasts, and things...

One of the highlights (for me) of the annual ATA Conference is the dinner for members of the association's Slavic Language Division. Some of these events have been memorably, um, mediocre, while others (last year's dinner in L.A., for example) have been excellent get-togethers.

It occurred to me, at the SLD dinner last year, that nobody was proposing toasts along the lines of the toasts one might hear at a gathering of Russian trainers, specialists and cosmonauts in Houston. Try as I might, I could not remember any... at least not well enough to be sure of myself on my feet in front of forty or so of my colleagues.

Happily, I recently ran across a couple of books of toasts and anecdotes that I acquired during one of my trips to Moscow. They may give me some ideas.

In fact, on the first page of one of the books is an apparent translation of the "Selkirk grace," which is a short piece often attributed to Robert Burns (though almost certainly not composed by him). In English, it goes as follows:

Some have meat and cannot eat
Some cannot eat that want it
But we have meat and we can eat
Sae let the Lord be thankit

Here's what's in the book:

У которых есть, что есть, -- те подчас не могут есть,
А другие могут есть, да сидят без хлеба.
А у нас есть, что есть, да при этом есть, чем есть, --
Значит, нам благодарить остается небо!

Personally, I think the Russian translation tries too hard to be cute, with its repetitive use of the verb "есть," which means both "to eat" and is a form of the verb "to be" (as in there is, there are).

Cheers...