A Second Recovered Email from the First Semester

Dear readers,

Again, some of the following subject matter is grating, as it reflects a tendency to lump all of the emotions from one or two jarring interactions together and project them onto an entire culture. I will account for the changes in my views on Russia in an epilogue to these travel notes. In the meantime, I will keep posting old letters to friends or family, as you can use them to chart the progress in my thinking, and they always contain at least one or two interesting anecdotes.

Since I have so little time--I started the four paragraphs before this one with the word "I"--I will have to record my impressions of Russia as a largely disjointed list with woefully little commentary. Many of the people whom I have met here are wildly religious. Someone whom I met through my studies claims that she has prophetic dreams and can talk to her dead relatives in them. She claims to know that she will have a son and to know exactly what he will look like--she says that women always know what their children will look like. When she was a child, she was once drowning but saw a beam of light and was saved by the hand of God (I am not making this up.). When you visit certain churches in Moscow, miracles can happen to you, and if you pray for certain things (in those churches, I think), your wishes will come true. God gives this acquaintance the strength to handle each day (she has a very busy schedule), as He does a friend of hers who is an otherwise perfectly sane person but believes that there is one God and one truth, as most people here seem to. When my acquaintance bumped into a friend on a day on which they had had to cancel prior plans, she called it proof of God’s will, and she says that she can find subway stops by intuition.

I met someone through this acquaintance who had tried astral projections when he was younger (this makes his wife, an especially devout Christian, tense up) but quit when he could feel himself dissociating from his soul, and, when he was in a coma following a stroke (he is quite old), he saw the light of God. A friend of a friend told me that my interest in church music was proof that God was hovering over my shoulder and waiting for me to come to Him. People here say grace, not under their breath, as in Arkansas (at least, when in mixed company), but at a conversational volume. They stack their shelves with icons and even collect holy oil from different parts of Russia, and they cross themselves constantly (when leaving the house, when entering a church's grounds, in front of the door of the church (before entering), inside the church, during sermons, when exiting the church, and when exiting the church grounds (twice)). They claim that God decides their fates for them and gives them just as heavy a cross as they can bear. When my acquaintance brought up Islam in a conversation, the aforementioned old guy’s wife crossed herself and said, “God save me.” What kind of faith is that when God has a harem and makes women cover their faces? Buddhism does not count as a religion, as Buddhists do not believe in any God, and the Muslim God is false for reasons that I could not quite follow. My acquaintance’s priest once chewed her out for having entered a synagogue and went ballistic when she checked out a mosque while travelling (I forgot to mention that the Catholic faith is all wrong, because they do not follow God's word.), as they were a threat to her true faith. I cannot remember every crazy thing that I have heard from people here, but it has reached the point where I feel a wave of relief, as I did in Arkansas, when I meet an atheist--one of the Irish girls whom I have met here has convinced me that we do not have to be racist, sexist, spiteful, and backward-thinking in order to fit in here, but I am trying to convince her to eschew her liberal worldview and become more of a nut so as to immerse herself fully in Russian culture.

I suppose that you can guess that the reason for people's inordinate religiousness now is that religion was so strictly repressed (one can see why) during the Soviet Union. I have found people uninterested in discussing the framework of ideas underlying their beliefs from an abstract point of view and unaware that such discussion could have any value. Their dogmatic way of viewing the world, which was, as it turns out, instilled in them for centuries and centuries (I will try to return to this later.), transfers to their daily lives. My religious acquaintance has claimed to have cured a friend's asthma with a special medicine that she made at home. She filters her water with rocks from a holy site in the south of Russia and claims that the water is tasty and "so soft that a child could drink it." If you leave your room in bare feet, she claims, you will catch an infection; if you walk around your room in bare feet, you will catch a cold. She claims that someone whom she knew got cancer because he held in his emotions, which led to his being stressed and compromised his immune system. Diabetes, as it turns out, is a crippling and life-threatening illness. I wish, for the sake of the rhythms of this paragraph, that I could continue listing idiocies, but I have run out, except that an acquaintance of mine--again, an otherwise sane person--gasped and said that I had blasphemed when I joked that it was "God's will" that we get to a lecture a few minutes late. I have learned, from various sources, that black people suck (thank God there are not any here), gays are undermining the fabric of our society and should be ejected from it (they are just putting on an act anyway), that Jews started the Russian Revolution and control much of the press, and that Donald Trump would make a good president, because he has a lot of reasonable things to say (people do not like him because he tells it like it is).

I am afraid that I am running out of nuttiness. Someone almost ran me over while I was walking to the subway because he decided to drive down the sidewalk for a few hundred metres to avoid traffic. I have seen someone stumbling drunk down the road at midday on a Saturday, and I saw some guy hop the fence of a freeway overpass, as though he were expecting there to be more sidewalk on the other side of it, and stumble away, hopefully not on a broken ankle, ten or so metres below. I have learned women do not open doors, open cans (not jars--cans!), drive cars, pay for their own meals, or set up computers on their own and that they are gossipy, unreliable, and beholden to always look their best--God made men and women different for a reason. (Edit: I found more nuttiness!) Drinking water while exercising is bad for you, as it impedes your muscle movement. Eating leftover pasta is bad for you, as it turns to mush. A woman cannot give birth without some fat on her belly. Spicy food is good for your immune system. Lust never brings people together. Even the few things that these people say that make sense are based on hearsay; I do not know how to approach them except to nod and smile.

I suppose that I could talk a great deal about the layout of the city, what it feels like to live here, and what people are like beyond their religious beliefs and associated superstitions. (I have emailed one friend at length about the city itself.) The buildings in which I live and study are so dirty and run-down that they would be torn down immediately in any developed country. (I will describe this more if I get my blog running.) There is lots of in-fighting in the university itself, but the level of teaching is pretty good. The head of international relations makes 12,000 roubles per month, if my memory holds, while the teachers make something like 2,000 roubles per two-hour lecture, I think. (This is better than the $67/month that the dancer from Ukraine whom I met two years ago made.) People here hate Ukrainians and are not surprised to learn that the West blames the conflict on Russian foreign policy. They do not get mad when one expresses Western ideas, as one can always call oneself a mouthpiece for the West and not claim to have any opinions of one's own (they are not going to get mad at an entire other culture). What I wanted to say about icons is that everyone in every village, town, or city in medieval Russia had a bunch of them, prayed to them for, say, a safe birth, someone's recovery from an illness, a good harvest, a good sale, &c., &c., and they tacked gold and silver ornaments onto them when one of their prayers was answered. (People still do this. I saw signs, in Kazan, enjoining that one pray for people with, of all things, oncological illnesses. When people enter a church to pray, they often walk up to their favourite icon, pray to it, and kiss it, pressing their forehead to it and, sometimes, to the ground.) One of the outstanding features of the city, beside the fact that one can buy food and all sorts of prescription drugs (and just about anything, really) at any hour of the day or night, is that everything in the city seems fenced off. If you want to get to the nearest park, for example, you have to cross a couple of highways, which involves going through underground passageways, like the ones that lead to the subway, and, when you exit the subway, you will almost always find yourself facing a massive, fenced-off construction, which you can only circumvent by--you guessed it--going back underground and taking further underground passageways. It is a city of gargantuan obstacles, huge housing projects, and streets that turn into back alleys within a block or two, so that the only way to get where you are going is by dead reckoning. As you could have predicted would be the case, people here smoke constantly, litter everywhere, and scowl at one another. Dogs here, too, are unfriendly, barking at anyone who happens to run past them in the park.

You would be interested in the system of trade here, especially since you have been to Thailand. Around every subway stop (above ground), there are dozens of little shops with produce, clothing, cell phones, electronics, household goods, and God knows what else. All of them have signs in bright red or yellow lettering proclaiming that they are the best deal in town. The passageways leading to the subway itself (underground) are lined with little shops selling much of the same stuff, in addition to pharmaceuticals and, often, passport photos. Most shop owners sit indifferently, watching people pass by (There are also old ladies selling turnips and flowers by the entrances to the underground passages.), but in larger markets they harangue every passerby. Billboards here, I have noticed, are modelled almost entirely on Western ones, with clever slogans like, "Pay less, buy more" and "As easy as 1-2-3," while advertisements on Youtube largely feature people knowingly making fools of themselves, just like in the advertisements back home. (It is a sort of comedy of the intentionally absurd.) You can get serviceable black bread here for 12 roubles a loaf, or 20 cents (US), while gas costs 35 roubles (or 55 cents) per litre. A single ticket on the subway or most public buses costs 30 roubles, while milk, a frustratingly expensive item, clocks in at roughly 60 roubles per litre.

The subway itself is quieter and more efficient than I had remembered. Its carriages and stations are, oddly, excellently marked, and some stations even have statues or artwork in them (or even music!). There are several tastefully reserved memorials to the 2004 terrorist attack in which one of the trains was blown up, and there is free Wi-Fi on the trains now. Probably the most interesting note about the city's architecture is that there are memorials to World War II on seemingly ever city block. (I have not gone a single day without seeing one; they are in literally every park that I have visited; they are in, say, the kremlin in Nizhny Novgorod, a nearby city, and in front of university buildings.) Everywhere you look, the fallen heroes of World War II are celebrated, sometimes in fighting stance, sometimes in the form of actual replicas of tanks or fighter planes. People here are nuts about World War II (and also Lenin, of whom there is at least one monumental statue in every major city that I know of.) and get mad when they hear that American children are taught that the Americans won the war. They deny that Stalin was a mass murderer, though they admit that he overdid things at times, and they seem committed to the idea of Russia's being a strong, fighting nation beset on all sides by vicious enemies. They seem aware that their government is corrupt, but they also think that Putin is making the country stronger and that the West is largely to blame for their socioeconomic problems. They do not realize that the images of fighting soldiers and men bravely defending a flag are propaganda; I suppose that it gets hammered into them from the time at which they can walk.

A final cultural note is that I have gotten to meet a couple of people who were already adults when communism ended and who have the foresight to see some of its failings. The grandfather of one of these people was a so-called "kulak" whose land was dispossessed, and he refers to communism as one great act of idiocy that undermined the country. Another of my teachers, whose views are less clear, claimed, when I called the early communists "hooligans" for having destroyed so many religious edifices, that "they were more than that." Not everyone here wants a return to communism, as much as it is preached in the popular press, and not everyone is so caught up in his individual prejudices as to be unable to rationally discuss the pros and cons of different political systems. On the whole, I have found people far more backward and benighted than I had ever expected given my earlier exposure, through friends of mine who are physicists, to its more atheistic and forward-thinking social classes... and I do not know how else to end this email. My wing of the dormitory is much different from the other wings, as all of the foreign students from countries that were formerly part of the USSR are housed together--we are given larger rooms, have better heating, have our own shower, and even have a washing machine. The dormitory has no internet provider as such; if you want internet access, you arrange it through Katya from room 421, whom you pay every month, without a receipt. Students on the other floors have to go down to the basement to take a shower, and, until recently, there were no working washing machines here, as a result of which two groups of students from separate floors, each of about 20, pooled their money and bought two washing machines, which they kept under lock and key. It has been explained to me that Russian students break communal appliances because the appliances do not technically belong to anyone, so one is not breaking anyone's personal property. (Of the level of theft here I could write whole pages. There is nothing communal in the kitchen or the halls here--nothing.) Only half of the burners on our two stoves work, and, unlike some of the other floors, we do not have an oven. Still, I like our floor, as the people on it are friendly and intelligent, and we have our own key to our wing of the dormitory, for which my gratitude is boundless, as I want to be sure to keep the bastards on the other floors out of here at all costs. I have met some interesting people here and had plenty of opportunities to discuss literature, which I have enjoyed. I just wish that I had a little more time for essentially everything else in life.

Postscript: one or two crazy people do not define an entire society. It would have been better to cast the crazy people in my posts as such without projecting their craziness onto Russians in general. I will write more of this soon. The generalisations in some of these emails are ridiculous.

Sincerely,

Max

P.S. One of the most interesting parts of rereading these emails (or, in my case, skimming over them) is their reflecting my real-time reactions to my surroundings. I was hugely taken aback by much of what I encountered in Russia, and it took me a full eight months or so to be able to step back from my emotions and process everything a little more rationally. Perhaps the kind of remove that I learned to apply to Russian culture will come in handy to me in the future. My period of study did, indeed, force me to cardinally change how I engaged with my surroundings.

An ordinary autumn day. (On my way, I think, to the grocery store.)

As above. Definitely on my way to get groceries.

Spray paint advertisements remind me strangely of my childhood.