This holiday we've got covered

I promise not every post is going to be about holidays, but Russia's pretty big on them, so here we go again: This past Friday, June 23, Saint Petersburg celebrated Алые Паруса (pronounced Alia Parusa. A sidenote: I can switch my keyboard to Cyrillic! An addendum to the sidenote: Typing is Cyrillic is really hard. Like really hard. Like it took me several minutes to type Алые Паруса, but only two seconds to accidentally delete when I tried to copy and paste it onto this line. Anyway.) Алые Паруса happens every year on the day all of the high school seniors in Russia finish their last exam. Recall, in the good ol' days of Soviet Russia, that Stalin claimed to be able to tell you exactly what page in the textbook all the kids were studying on any given day? Many things have grown less extreme is Russia since the collapse of the USSR (the national dress code, for instance. But that is an opinion for another post), but the educational system isn't really one of them. Every high school student still does the same program, and thus all of the high school students in Saint Petersburg graduate on the same day. Hence Алые Раруса--I'm not sure if it's nationwide, but the entire city of Petersburg celebrated the high school graduates.

Now, recall once more way back to my previous post when I quizzically discussed the Russian apathy towards День России. (Сyrillics! Good lord, I'm cool.) I've developed a new theory on the reason why nobody does much about that one: they're all saving themselves for Алые Паруса. The best way that I can describe Алые Паруса is as an holiday with the sentiment of prom, the hoopla of the 4th of July, and the generalized blood-alcohol level of Woodstock. If you're under the age of 30 and you aren't out of the street drinking and partying until 7 am the next morning, you a) have two broken legs and no one who likes you enough to push your wheelchair around all night or b) are legally dead. There are concerts in several different corners of the city (note: only bad music, which is good, because good music would be expensive to book, and most Russians seek to be too drunk to care by about 10 pm anyways), fireworks over the Neva (although they were the most polite, elegant, and restrained fireworks I have ever witnessed), and throngs and throngs and throngs of people.

The Алые Паруса itself is the name of a ship with red sails that sets forth on the Neva at around 1:30 am. I say around, because everything in Russia happens in RST (Russian Standard Time), which is approximately equivalent to JST (Jewish Standard Time) and almost as bad as CST (College Standard Time). So, the fireworks started around 1:50, with an amazing fountainy watery showy thing, and the ship came out at about 2:10 or so. Again, I think the Russians were too drunk to notice. Did I mention the drinking? There was a lot of drinking. As in, most of the local stores ran out of alcohol (common policy was clearly to stock up early--most people walked around carrying 4 or 5 beers by 9:30 pm or so). The fact that this is the height of the white nights made the evening-night-morning especially wonderful. It never really got totally dark, except for about the 45 minutes of fireworks, when it was maybe 8 pm-U.S. quality darkness (i.e., dark enough). It was also much easier to stay out all night when my body thought that it was only early evening most of the time.

As for the legend behind the Алые Паруса, the way my friend told it to me was that way back when, a young girl fell in love with an average sailor. She then went to a fortune teller, who told her that she would marry a man who sailed a ship with red sails. Then she was sad, for her sailor sailed a ship with boringly beige sails. However, he decided one day that it would be really impressive to equip his ship with red sails. I'm not sure why, but maybe it was all the rage with the ladies. Anywho, he did so, and she was suitably impressed, and then they got married. To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what this has to do with high school graduation, except that most of the girls would probably be considered eligible for marriage at this point, so this holiday may have sinister undertones that I missed because people were shouting a lot and it was generally a pretty loud, raucous, crazy time in St. Petersburg that night.

Fun linguistical note: My new favorite word is Russian is брак (brak), which has two meanings: 1) Marriage. 2) Spoiled goods. Russia, I salute you.

Holiday? What holiday?

Upon our arrival, we ignorant Americans blithely assumed that our first Monday in Russia, June 12, would herald the beginning of our university term. We were, however, sorely mistaken, for on June 12th Russia "celebrated" a most sacred though unhelpfully generically named holiday, "Russia Day" (D'en' Ross'ii: No cyrillic characters because Russian computers are crafty and I haven't quite figured that part out yet). I've put the word "celebrated" in quotation marks because as far as I could tell, most Russians knew about as much or less about the holiday than we did. A conversation between myself and my host mother (my Russian edited to make me look better):

Me: "What kind of holiday is this?"
Host Mother: "Russia Day, like that sign says."
Me: "No, I mean, what is the holiday about?"
Host Mother: "It's Russia Day. That's all I know."

This is not an uncommon view in St. Petersburg. According to the "St. Petersburg Times," an English-language newspaper based in Petersburg, a few copies of which I absconded off with several days ago and am now hoarding in my room, 15 percent of respondents to a poll about Russia Day said they had no idea what the holiday is all about, and most people called it “Independence Day.” (Interestingly, on June 12 we took a boat tour of St. Petersburg with our Russian tutors, and when the tour guide announced the holiday as "Independence Day," most of the tutors shook their heads and rolled their eyes. I think this reflects less on their fondness for the "other" independence day, which celebrates the October Revolution, than on their general disdain for "Russia Day.")

To make a long story longer and clarify a post that has already wandered wildly out of my feeble control, the official name of the holiday is Day of the Passage of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia, a name that I think says something, mainly, "We haven't invented "pithy," yet," or perhaps, "No, this is my dictionary and you can't take it away from me!" Day of the Passage of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia, or, I as prefer to call it, DOTPOTDOSSOR, technically celebrates the separation of Russia from the Soviet Union in 1990. However, much like Memorial Day or Labor Day in the states, most people here simply celebrate their day off of work.

I found this attitude towards what I think would be, were I a Russian, an important historical event, a little strange at first. Russians, from what I understand, generally greet their holidays with great gusto--I think the 4th of July-type parade atmosphere is fairly common several times during the year here, and any excuse to eat more than the medically-recommended amount of food is a good excuse in Russia. Russians also seem to have a very close, personal connection to their history in the kind of way that Americans don't. Any Russian who has graduated high school could probably hold a decent discussion with you about Russian history, and Russians feel very connected to their great leaders and historical figures. For example, I took a tour of Pushkin's old apartment, and at a certain room, the tour guide's voice got very soft, he cast his eyes dramatically downward, and said, with great gravitas and sorrow, "And here, in this room, Pushkin...died." I almost expected tears. I've never seen a tour guide at the old presidential houses appear to care much when talking about the deaths of Washington or Jefferson. History is much more distant on our side of the Atlantic, and we perceive it much more as something that already happened as opposed to something currently being made, which I think is closer to the Russian idea.

All this brings me back (at last, at last) to the original question: Why don't Russians know anything about Russia day when they know everything about everything else (okay, not everything else, since I haven't found a Russian yet who understands peanut butter, but almost everything else)? I think the answer is that people are supremely ambivalent about the success of capitalism and democracy in the post-Soviet era. Only 12 percent of the Russians who responded to the poll mentioned above felt that independence has helped positive developments in the country’s economy, while only 22 percent were proud to hold a Russian passport and live in the country (and that's twice as many who said as much in 2003). I think myself, like many Americans, expected Russians to have the same visible level of patriotism as the does U.S., or maybe as did the U.S.S.R. But I think the fact of the matter is that many Russians feel stagnated and pulled one way or another by various influences, both intra and international, and are experiancing a loss of definable Russian culture. Thus, they romanticize history (see the incredible national adoration of Putin and the relative passivity towards modern writers) distrust the present, therefore greeting historical holidays with hoopla and modern ones with ambivalence.

If you want to read the full "St. Petersburg Times" article, here's the link.

Fun historical note: We took a tour of the Political History Museum today. According to the tour guide, Lenin very specifically wanted what became the October Revolution to take place on July 4th. Thus, Russia would have an even better holiday on July 4th than the Americans, clearly winning the playground battle for "Best Day to Eat Hotdogs, Wave Flags Around, and Shout a Lot."

Addendum to the fun historical note: Of course, the tour guide was speaking Russian, so I could be totally wrong, and he might have been talking about fish.