Yuri the Hacker has two posters on his wall, one a poster
for Oliver Stone’s forthcoming movie about Edward Snowden and another of Julian
Assange. But let’s say Gogol were still alive, what kind of a short story would
Yuri merit? What would be Yuri’s “Overcoat?” One thing that Yuri and Gogol’s
famous character Akaky Akakievich have in common is that they are both
bureaucrats. Yuri is just a cog in the wheel of Russian hacking, monitoring the
private e mails of DNC members to see who has or doesn’t have accounts with
Ashley Madison ("Hack of Democrats' Accounts Was Wider Than Believed, Officials Say," NYT, 8/10/16)? The more important jobs like describing the moment when Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama created ISIS are left to higher ups ("Donald Trump Calls Obama 'Founder of ISIS' and Says It Honors Him," NYT, 8/10/16). Gogol’s character
loses his overcoat, but Yuri loses his shirt when he falls for a bum tip on the
black market. Yuri has visions of glory in chasing his Holy Grail, which is proof that Hillary Clinton has demanded a pound of flesh when one of the
organizations she had given a speech to, couldn’t pony up with the $450,000
fee. Yuri, like Hillary’s adversary in the hotly contested presidential election, doesn't understand metaphor until it's too
late and he has already flushed his hard earned rubles down the drain. Russia
has many great poets like Pushkin, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and Pasternak, but
under the Putin regime figures of speech have been banned and Yuri doesn't even
enjoy the pleasures of hyperbole. After his failed attempt, Yuri starts to go
mad, as anyone would who sought to learn about the private lives of politicians
whose reputations are already besmirched. Reality starts to blur and he begins to haunt laundromats to find those
American politicians (naturally Democrats) who are willing to air their dirty
laundry. Yuri grows ill and becomes delirious and in a final scene finally
succumbs. But his confused ghost is reported to haunt the servers, the waiters
and waitresses who wait on the apparatchiks in the Kremlin’s executive dining room.
