Culturally Embedded Understandings - 8/29/06 - 9/4/06

On our last night in Moscow we had a "closing reception" for our "orientation," which consisted of snackfood and wine at the American Center in the main library in Moscow. There were only about ten people there that were not directly linked to our program (including the American Center staff). After a speech or two, we were instructed to mingle with the non-Fulbright guests. Two other Fulbrighters and I ended up in a conversation with an American diplomat who had been in Moscow for only seven weeks and, as far as we could tell, had no specialty either in Russian language or culture. He proceeded to impress upon us how different a Russia we were going to be in than the Russia of cold war days. I briefly said something inane about the difficulty of understanding the cold war as seen through its impact on the daily lives of Americans, given that as a youngin' I only read about big events like McCarthyism, Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, etc. His response was to go into a bit of a tirade against "intellectuals" who compare events in the West like McCarthyism to the atrocities of Stalinism. I could not help myself, and had to point out that a better comparison would be with the number of civilians killed by right wing dictatorships propped up by the U.S. via the CIA over the last century. Given, such a tally is not easily available, and would probably be still quite a bit smaller than the number of people killed by Stalin's purges. However, it does complicate the post hoc analysis of the cold war.

In any case, the diplomat kept repeating his central point, that "those were ideological times," when it meant "if you don't agree with my ideology, I'll kill you." Indeed, the cold war and World War II were about ideology. But what is the Iraq war about? I asked him. He said, "that is really more of a traditional war to protect our country's interests." I'm not sure what that means. The sense I get is that, despite this man's extensive travel, he still uses the word "ideology" the way the words "terrorist" and "nationalism" are used; i.e. to signify the wrong-headedness of members of an 'other' culture. We are not "Ideological," we are "protecting our own interests" which are of course well grounded in "Reality." We are simply involved in a "conflict" to protect homeland, as any "patriot" would do. They are "idealogical," "nationalist" "terrorists." It is a linguistic trick that delegitimizes the recipient of the adjective without need for any complicated argument or reasoning.

This, of course, is not new. But, it was especially disturbing coming from a diplomat, someone who obviously has seen much of the world. It bothered me, in particular, because it indicated to me the extent to which I must be seeing everything here through biased eyes, despite my best efforts to identify those biases.

In an earlier post, I wrote that Russia's is a history of "what if's?" What country does not have so many turning points in its history, which one may wish had been a turn to a different direction? What if JFK had not been shot? What if Nixon had been put on trial? What if the Supreme Court had not stopped the recount in 00? And so on and so forth.

So much is different here, it is easy to forget how much is the same. I look at the crazy lay-out of Samara, which I recently described in an email to a friend:

"It's old and tiny decrepit buildings, its mess of small dusty streets. The green that seems to grow in the small spaces which the central planners forgot to include in their machinations. It could be any city in Russia, I think. A thin clutter of advertisements spewing into the streets, collecting into small shopping centers that look new and western, here and there. The rest of the city is old. It's been this way probably for a hundred years. There are the big Soviet, apartment buildings (my dorm is one of them), but mostly the central part of the city is composed of these old one- and two-floor wooden buildings, with the decorative, carved window dressings."

It could be any city in Russia. But, it could also be Oxford Mississippi. The disjointed mixture of old and new is not unique to Russia. The large Soviet apartment block buildings look not unlike the projects of every American city built in the sixties and seventies. The green growing in seemingly random, chaotic sprawls. Does that not happen in every city to some extent?

Indeed, Russians are poorer than Americans, this is true. And the state has certainly had a different role in society in the last century. However, many things, I'm sure, must be the same. This is perhaps why I'm here. To see what sticks when I turn everything around, and look at it from a different angle.

I simply hope that I succeed in doing just that, and not seeing simply a different, 'other' world, the kind that might require its own separate lexical categories.

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.

The Humanities -- 8/23/06

I have been in Moscow for three days now. It’s been more of a shock than I expected. I expected to feel overjoyed at the wonder of constantly seeing new things. I have a bit of that wonder, but mostly I just keep feeling slightly surprised and out of place. Some part of me, I think, feels that this is some big mistake, that this is not the adventure I bargained for, but instead a rehashing of past adventures. The monstrous, dilapidated apartment buildings, the enormous public spaces, the ever-present fragrance of gasoline (which seems to have a unique quality in Russia as though it were mixed with a dash of rose water) and that fragrance’s counterpart, the stench of cigarettes seem all too familiar.

I am also overwhelmed by the difficulty of immersion in a foreign language. I’m staying in a dorm with five other Community Service grantees, with whom I spend 24 hours a day, and seven English Teaching Assistants, of whom I also see plenty. All of these kids speak better Russian than I do. Almost all of them majored in Russian in college, so I am at a significant disadvantage. Fortunately, there will be no big competition to win. But, because they all speak Russian so well, the (well-meaning) ‘orientation’ coordinator decided that no translator was needed for our two site-visits to Russian NGOs yesterday. After five straight hours of being talked at by Russian professionals excited to have an audience, and having to laugh along with jokes that I alone did not understand, I felt completely drained. It occurred to me that I had failed to include in my list of fears, compiled while preparing for this trip, the fear that I might have a lot of difficulty with the language.

Today, we had an amusing lesson in ‘cross-cultural’ education. It was by a pair of professors at Moscovskiy Gumanitarniy Universitet (Moscow University of the Humanities). It was intended to be a workshop, but instead was a three-hour lecture (in English) on multiculturalism that was really appropriate for a middle school audience. It was truly absurd. Probably unlike any experience I have had before. It consisted of all varieties of cliché and irrelevant anecdote. I believe the central point was that people from different countries have different points of view and different ways of looking at things, and hence one must avoid stereotyping when one visits another country so as not to degrade into chauvinism. Basically, it was a sort of meandering ramble on the foundations of a multicultural society, obvious to anyone who grew up in one. However, the professor who kept hammering in the point about not being chauvinistic revealed his own chauvinism by continually interrupting his female co-instructor to a degree that would be humorous were it not sad and frustrating. The irony of this lecture was that it was, indeed, a lesson in cross-cultural education, in the sense that we were all clearly witnessing an educational experience from another culture. I was impressed by the ability of my cohort to play along. All giggles and looks of horrified boredom were saved for after the lecture was over.

I would ordinarily pass this off as merely a couple of bad lecturers, but this was something different. This was not a situation, it became clear, in which they had been trying to keep the material simple enough for our level but merely missed the mark. Nor was it a lack of preparation. The presentation was rife with bizarre overheads about the need for a holistic approach to global education that focused on systems instead of disconnected facts. Though they both had doctorates, the professors’ thinking was simply not well developed. As condescending as it sounds to come to such a conclusion from one encounter, this is consistent with a comment made by one of my fellow Community Service Grantees who grew up in Belarus: that while Soviet science and engineering was excellent, the Humanities and the Social Sciences had been stilted by Soviet censorship.

Furthermore, it seems to me that even in the private sector, Russian society is still in the process of developing mechanisms for incorporate feedback on the quality of work. Indeed, one of the major difficulties the Soviet Union had during its decline was the enormous cadre of Soviet managers needed to monitor quality, given the lack of price signals and the guarantee of employment. Feedback on quality is a difficult thing to build into the softer disciplines of academia even in the West, where universities benefit from low systemic corruption and, for better or worse, a highly competitive private sector surrounding it. I imagine it is even more difficult to incorporate feedback into contemporary Russian academia, still reeling from the transition.

Of course, this is a cursory observation and even more cursory of an analysis. I worry that I am being overly critical of everything I see and do, because I am in another country. I am often amazed by how dirty all the buildings are in Russia (outside the center of Moscow, of course), however, it is hard to say if they are any dirtier than the projects of Brooklyn or the south Bronx. A better comparison, perhaps, in terms of its relevance to quality of life is that of the subway system in Moscow to the subway system of any city in the U.S. I am always amazed by the Moscow Metro. The stations are clean and well lit. They often have high marble ceilings and beautifully decorated walls. The trains run every 90 seconds (and always on time!!!!) and go almost everywhere in the city. You practically never have to transfer more than once (I’ve found only one instance). I read in Lonely Planet’s once that more people use the Moscow subway every day than use the subways of New York and London combined. And I would believe it. The trains, which, as I’ve said, run every minute and a half, are always as full as any train in New York, and more full during rush hour. It is a truly humbling experience to be a part of the masses of human flesh that pour into the stations’ escalators at every moment of the day, pushing and shoving. It is like being a grain of sand in a tired, sweaty hourglass.

With regards to being overcritical, I fear I may get myself into some trouble. During our briefings at the Embassy, we were told that one grantee got into trouble last year, because people in her small town read a blog in which she made critical statements about her environs (likely no more critical than this posting). Another Fulbrighter (a scholar) was actually deported for speaking in favor of a particular ethnic autonomy movement and wearing an orange pin (playing into Putin’s paranoia that Fulbrighters are here to incite some sort of Russian version of Eukraine’s Orange Revolution). It seems reasonable to assume that this blog may one day be closely examined with oversensitive eyes. If any Russian is reading this and wondering, let me assure you that I love Russia. That is why I am here. I love Russia and want to learn about its language, culture and customs as well as the problems it faces going into the uncertain future. Just as I am critical about the way Americans face their historical legacy, I may, at times, be critical about what I see here. Do not let that fool you into thinking that I have anything but love for the Russians and their nation.

Indeed, as uncomfortable as it is to have to adjust to being so far away from all the people I love, I am incredibly excited to get this year of work and study rolling and to settle into Samara in one week. I will simply need to work on being patient with myself and take everything one step at a time.