Lord of the Swine

(Рецензия в Exile на недавнюю книжку Трегубовой)"…she continues babbling this crap right on through to the next page, piling post-Soviet elitny cliche upon elitny cliche… The cliche of the elitnaya dyevushka who hates getting up in the morning is one of the longest running jokes among my friends in Moscow — but Tregubova apparently thinks itm"s profound enough to warrant telling her readers."""In the end, so as not to fall into depression, I started taking with me from Moscow such soul-savers as tea with bergamot [an elitny chai – Ed.]. And I would buy two kilograms of oranges from the hotel snack bar in the evenings so that in the morning, in order not to frighten the aborigines by my gluttony, Im"d lock myself in my hotel room and eat them with my breakfast, thus simulating my daily need for fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is necessary for my emergency resuscitation."Did you get that? "Aborigines." Itm"s one thing for her to whine like a cliched Tseppelin dyevushka over fresh juice, elitny chai, and dreadful mornings…but calling provincial Russians "aborigines" because they donm"t know what her beloved fresh-squeezed orange juice is?! ABORIGINES?! Because theym"re too poor and destitute thanks to the policies of oligarchs who funded Tregubovam"s entire career?! And people wonder why most Russians loathe the Yeltsin-era "free" press!As this passage illustrates, the overwhelming majority of Russians are for censorship not so much because they are "aborigines" too primitive to appreciate the value of a Tregubova-led free press, but rather, because the journalist class which made up the so-called "free press" of the 1990s treated that same 80% of Russians like, to use Tregubovam"s word, "aborigines." That call for censorship is merely a peasant revolt against a monstrous elite!"