Some Random Observations Cobbled Together from E-mails-- 8/28/06


Moscow is a crazy place. It's like transposing Las Vegas onto the typical American image of Old Soviet Russia. Huge, austere Soviet government buildings that are now hotels with shiney new signs. Old, dirty, decrepit Soviet-style apartment buildings everywhere, but interspersed with enormous neon malls. There are rich men, richer than the rich in America, with gorgeous dolled up young women (with a style referred to by an American gender-studies student as "hyper-femininity" [see right]). The rich men for some reason carry little leather purses that look like miniaturized brief cases. The ex-pats call them "murses." And there are enumerable poor old ladies, who have to sell flowers or cucumbers at every train stop, because their pensions disappeared during the transition. Scabbed up drunken brutes swerve through the streets. Well-off teenagers, out on the town and dressed to the nines, fill the shopping centers.


It is a place that impresses upon you the importance of history. And the Russians' is a history of "what if's?" What if Stalin hadn't taken power? What if Krushchev hadn't been deposed and his reforms had been successfully carried out? What if Gorbachev had tried perestroika before glasnost instead of them both at the same time? What if the transition planners working with Yeltsin' had focused more on gradualism? What if Khadorkovsky hadn't been jailed and his attempts to build civil society had been successful? What if HIV prevention works?

This weekend we went on a big excursion away from Moscow, though, which was pretty nice. Fulbright rented us a big bus and took us around three golden ring towns (Yaroslavl', Kostroma [pictured at left], Plyos), which were all nice. The tours were grueling and always incorrectly timed with eating so that we were all hungry and grumpy half-way through them, but I was still able to appreciate the enourmous Volga, the ancient churches, the quiet struggle of the Russians. We even went into this ancient cathedral on Sunday and got to see a small service. I felt horribly invasive, but it was beautiful to see. Made me want to be an anthropologist. It was so amazing to see the richness of the church's rituals, the chanting, the paritioners lined up for prayers to be whispered in theeir sake, each one bowing to touch the ground before crossing herself and kissing one of the icons, the long robes and arcane gestures. I imagine the same things being done centuries ago when the church was the center of peasant life and this beautifully architectured building, its intricate designs, painstakingly wrought by hundreds of believers, and these rituals were each peasant's only portal to a different world, one without hard labor, dirty food, disease and death. It all makes perfect sense. I can also understand why the revolutionaries of the enlightenment must have been so angered by this arrangement: that hundreds of paupers should scrape and save to donate to the church, sacrificing so the priests (and nobles) could live richly.

The town Plyos [below] is tiny, quiet and beautiful. Hadn't really been changed much in decades. We saw a museum of Russian folk life that was impressive not because of the excellent exhibit, but because of the heart-felt interest you could see in the two guides' eyes as they explained how derevnie (meaning village but also with connotations of ancient) Russians used to live. One woman was showing the house that her grandfather had built. She had three or four golden teeth and made us some wonderful traditional Kasha. Then we walked around and saw the beautiful Volga, the biggest river in Europe. I wanted to build a raft and just float all the way down it to Samara. Instead I'll be taking a 14 hour train on Wednesday. I can't wait to get there and get my life there started.