Stop the presses! Free Варя!

One of my university classes here in Russia is called СМИ (pronounced "Smee," which I think is funny, but which everyone else seems to think is Russian and not funny at all). СМИ stands for something long a difficult to type in Cyrillics (much like most of the Russian language), but in English means "language of the mass media." Basically, in a typical СМИ class, one of two things happen:

1) We watch an incomprehensible Russian movie in which the characters either converse solely in street slang or without moving their lips. The case of the former, I do not understand because I do not know how to ask my casual acquaintance, in Russian, if he's got any heroin and if he'll share. In the case of the latter, I do not understand because what thus issues from their mouths is not so much language as, to my ears, the mystical mumblings of a drunken prophet who has just polished off his daily lunch of unshriven sheep.

2) We discuss events in Russia, and by discuss, I mean she asks us a question that we don't understand, she rephrases it twice, I say something, and then she tells me that I am wrong. Case in point, we've spent most of the past several weeks discussing the G8 conference, which was something of a big deal here. (It's a big deal in Russia when the police have been specially told to smile at people on the streets, which is not just weird, but downright frightening. Small children are still having nightmares.) We were "talking" (not really, but trying) about energy security, and I mentioned how much Europe was pissed off when Russia cut off the gas to Ukraine in the dead of winter. We had the following exchange, and my language ability has not at all been exaggerated in this translation:

Abby: Cutting off the energy to Ukraine created a scarcity and jacked up the gas prices in Europe. Also, it was winter. People were cold. Generally, that makes them unhappy.
Professor: There were no problems in Europe. Russia didn't cut off the gas to Europe. Ukraine just wasn't paying a fair price.
Abby: Europe gets its gas through Ukraine. There were problems.
Professor: There were no problems. All the gas lines to Europe worked fine.
Abby: There were problems.
Professor: No, there weren't.
Abby: I have not the language, nor the hard statistical evidence to argue with you, so I'm going to shut up now.
Professor: You have grown wise in the ways of СМИ, young padawan.

The reason this is interesting (addendum: to me, anyway) is that my professor is an educated woman who is not unhip to the fact that most of the news in Russia is produced by or at least controlled by the government. I've read innumerable stories from western and Russian English-language news about the Ukrainian gas crises in January, but the version I'm getting flat out contradicts the version the Russians are getting, which is that Ukraine wasn't paying a fair price (true), and that Western Europe is just whinging the way Western Europe does sometimes (false). My professor's viewpoint reflects the way a lot of Russians I've talked to look at the news here: We know it's wrong, but we'll believe it anyway.

The wasteland of СМИ aside, one of the more entertaining ways to while away the time here is to compare stories from Russian-language papers and English-language papers on the same topic. Possibly the fact that I refer to this as entertainments says that a) Russia is short on Law and Order marathons, my preferred summer time-waster, and/or b) I am a tremendous dork. Anyway, the G8 was great for this exercise. My favorite example was in reading stories about the futile attemtps of anti-globalist activists to not be oppressed in Russia. "The St. Petersburg Times" has run a front page story nearly every edition since I've arrived on problems the activists are having with a government that refuses to grant them permits to hold events and with a police force that persistantly invites itself over to dinner at the apartments of leading activists, and, aside from eating all of the borsch, generally makes it known that it would be a bad decision for the future health of that activist to be seen on the streets of St. Petersburg between July 15 and 17. These stories emphasize both the government's heavy-handedness and the views of the opposition, stated frequently and in their own words.

Мэтро ("Metro"), the free newspaper that you receive, not coincidentally, I believe, on the metro, tells a different story. Not outright. But there are clues that tell me that Мэтро is not entirely in step with the hippies, here. It's not that they don't cover the anti-globalists. The Thursday before the summit began, there was a page two story. It was entitled: "Антиглобалисты должны быть голодными." To translate: Anti-globalists Must Be Hungry. The lead of the story described in detail the activist's camp in Kirov Stadium, making sure to mention exactly how many security checks the activists have to go through, exactly how much they are being harassed, and most importantly, the fact that dinner isn't served until an unreasonably late hour. (For the record, Kirov Stadium is both far away from the city center and condemned. Well, condemned is too strong a word. But St. Petersburg is knocking it down soon in order to build a stadium that hasn't stood there since approximately the Paleolithic era, when man first decided that kicking round rocks into baskets was fun and a good excuse to paint their faces blue and insult each other.) For anyone who hasn't been through the journalism boot camp that was my high-school newspaper, news stories are written using the concept of the inverted pyramid: the most important information goes first, the least important information goes last. If I was a busy Russian who only had time to read the lead of this story, what I would know about activisits in St. Petersburg during the G8 summit is that they slept in tents, got poked at by the police, and ate gruel. I would probably think that activism wasn't for me. If I read a little furher, I would come upon the sordid tale of 14-year-old Варя (Varya), the youngest activist in the camp. Варя came to St. Petersburg from Moscow with her uncle. She just wants to see the city, but her mean uncle is making her protest the G8. Now all I know about activists is that they sleep in tents, get poked by the police, eat gruel, and hate children. Not only do I now think that activism is not for me, but I am developing an active hatred towards activists, and, when in the next paragraph, I read that some have been arrested and detained in Russian jails, which are scary beyond all reason, I probably think that they deserve it. Only if I read down to the very, very last paragraph, will I know what the goals of the activists are: to discuss their private and political rights, monetary problems, minorities, and the war in Chechnya. Now I think activists are dirty, hungry, cruel, and boring. I step out into the sunlight, proud to be a Putin-supporting Russian who only has to worry about that policeman on the corner who won't stop smiling. A good day begins.

(Note: If you can read Russian and want to read the article, you can here.)

Fun Familial Note: Actually, you think this entry has been about how much fun the Russian news is (and it is lots of fun), but really, this entire entry has been an excuse for me to get this one thing out there: My father was mentioned in the Russian newspaper! Well, it was the "St. Petersburg Times," which is in English, and they spelled his name wrong, but it was definitely my father! The "Times" has this unbelievably vitriolic editorialist named Chris Floyd who writes a column misleadingly titled "The Global Eye." I say misleading because here, "Global" is meant to mean "about the horrific, power-mad, possibly cannibalistic monstrosity that is the Bush administration." Chris Floyd earns his pay insulting George Bush in 700 words or less once a week. Normally, I'm all for this, but I prefer it when writers on my side of the political divide do things like research. You can't really read Floyd for information, but you can for humor! Bush is described as speaking in a "cretinous playground patois." David Addington, the architect of Bush's policy on military tribunals, is "the ruthless vizier to Vice President Dick Cheney." The American media plays the "simpering handmaiden to the ruling thugs." My favorite: Tony Blair and Bush together are eloquently immortalized as "two murderous mountebanks dripping with self-anointed piety." I don't know what a mountebank is (or what "patois" is, for that matter), but I appreciate good alliteration when I see it. Anyways, my father's name was mentioned in these illustrious contexts (well, it would have been mentioned if Chris Floyd had checked his spelling, but close enough) when Floyd did a column on the Supreme Court's decision to strike down military tribunals. I quote the paragraph: "As legal scholar Mark Garber notes, this will likely satisfy at least one of the court’s wavering moderates when the next test of Bush’s tyranny comes around, sinking the razor-thin majority for liberty — which will soon disappear in any case when the ancient Stevens shuffles off this mortal coil. His bold stroke for freedom was magic indeed, but it may prove, in the corrupted currents of this world, to be such stuff as dreams are made on." I'm not sure if my father ever mentioned the words "Stevens" and "a bold stroke for freedom" together in the same sentence, or believes in the "corrupted currents of this world" (the man is an alliterative genius!) but if "The St. Petersburg Times" says it, it must be true!

You can read and chuckle fondly at the full article here.

If it's sunny and July, then why is it cold and snowing?

First of all, no, no, it's not true. A frigid wasteland Russia may be, but not between the months of June and August. Temperatures here are hitting record highs (80-90 degrees, I think, although the Russians are ridiculous and metric, and heck if I know what 31 degrees Celcius means), and, for a city that sits-slash-sinks proudly into a marsh, we've been remarkably precipitation free. The storm of good weather has, however, created a flurry of questions for me, and chief among them are 1) What is this white, fluffy stuff that falls from the sky and collects in drifts on the gound, and 2) Why am I freezing at night?

You see, Lucy had it right all along when she told Charlie Brown, "The snow comes up! Just like the flowers!" St. Petersburg loves snow so much that it just can't let it go, even for a measly two months of the year. Unfortunately, St. Petersburg can't have snow when the weather is otherwise focused on sucking every drop of moisture out of the city and it's inhabitants. So, we get the next best thing: пух (prounounced "poox," translates to "fluff").

At first charming and quaint, пух rapidly became deeply annoying when I realized that it wasn't going to go away after I was done finding it charming and quaint. Пух is white fluff that falls from some sort of tree that, judging from the shear volume of пух in the air, apparently covers every surface in and around the city not otherewise physically occupied by some sort of monument to Peter the Great. At times, walking around in St. Petersburg is literally like walking around in a heavy flurry of snow that doesn't diffidently melt away when it touches your skin. There are people in St. Petersburg who cannot leave their apartments during the day, they are too allergic to пух. There are people who use пух as an excuse not to leave their apartments during the day and thus have the energy to party all white-night long. Пух is in the air. Пух is in the trees. Пух is on the ground. Most importantly, пух is on my clothes, in my eyes, in my hair, and up my nose, and I want to it go away now.

But St. Petersburg, land of the 6-to-8-month winter, doesn't end it's quest for winter year-round with new-fallen, allergenic snow. We here in the city (and I use the word "we" here to mean everyone who isn't me) miss our sub-zero temperatures outdoors in February, and since no airconditioner in Russia is powerful enough to cool the whole city (let's face it: no airconditioner in Russia is powerful enough to cool my university classrooms--airconditioning is really not a Russian speciality), we try to re-create the feeling with sub-zero showers.

I don't know why it happens, and I don't know who to blame, but when I find out the answer to these questions, there will be bloodshed, and this is Russia, so I don't have to make it look like an accident. On a staggered schedule, every neighborhood in Petersburg loses hot water for a 2-3 week period over the summer. Ours got shut off yesterday and apparently won't get turned back on until July 24, five days before I leave for Moscow. I received no warning from my host family, who I think assumed that I would expect to have to plunge myself in a shower of ice daily for a small eternity. When I asked why this happened, all the host mother could tell me was, "Eh. That's Russia," which is the answer to far too many questions about things that go wrong around here. She seemed to take some solace in the fact that the entire neighborhood was suffering with us, which I thought was actually very German of her. The point is that it's hotter than toast outside and sunnier than...than...a really, really sunny day (take Abby's Petersburg Blog Challenge! Come up with a better metaphor than that!), and yet I come home covered in white fluffy stuff and go to bed with blue lips and frozen extremities. In conclusion, only in Russia.

Fun international moment: The internet cafe that I used is often populated almost exclusively with loud English foreigners who don't know a word of Russian and who are forced to interact with a staff that knows just enough English to take your money and not enough to give it back to you if there's a problem with your computer. I make a point of ordering my time in Russian, and it's always fun to see the look of relief on the cashiers face when she hears someone speaking a language that she speaks better. The way it works is you tell them how much time you want and they assign you a computer. The other day, telling me my computer (which I had ordered in Russian), the clerk (who I think was new), went, "Number sixt...uuuhhhh...извините, номер шестнадцать (sorry, number 16)." For a brief, shining moment, I convinced a Russian that I was one of them. Score.

Addendum to the fun international moment: Of course, today I ordered in Russian and a different cashier answered me in English, so the war is not yet won.

Back in the USSR

Back in tenth grade, the sister of my government professor, who formerly worked in the Soviet Union and in the satellite nations, came into our class and talked about what it was like to live daily life under communism. The one thing that has stuck in my mind the most is her descriptions of restaurants in the Soviet Union. She described how one would walk into such an establishment, hoping, like the ridiculously over-pampered capitalistic westerner one was, to be served food. The waiters, however, had pretty much gotten the hang of this communism thing by that point, specifically the classic description of communism as "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The restaurant staff took the "wait" out of "waiter" and ran away with it into the night, cackling madly. You would enter the restaurant. They would look over in your direction, and, if in a generous mood, grant you a sneer. You would sit down. Maybe they would take your order, although your order would in no way correspond to the food that they would bring you, which was really okay, because the food would in no way correspond with the dictionary definition of "edible." Eventually you would leave, probably without giving them the tip that they weren't allowed to accept anyway. In conclusion, it was a highly successful experience for all involved, with the exclusion of the underfed customer, the underpaid staff, and the underworked Soviet economy.

I try your time and mine with anecdotes of times gone by because I'm beginning to suspect that communism just gave restaurant workers an excuse to be just as surly as they would have been anyways without the benefit of a fixed income no matter their job performance. Trying to eat in Russia is a frightening prospect, and I'm not only talking about the food. (This, at times, transcends frightening into another whole dimension of badness yet to be covered by the English language but for which Russian probably has five or six words. Like the Inuits and their forty-some words for "snow," the Russian lexicon is rife with very specific ways to describe your terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.) Russians have a saying which, roughly (re: poorly) translated means, "He who smiles for no reason is an idiot." What this means for you trying to live your daily life in Russia is that customer service is nonexistent. If at a cafe, you will place your order for food with a cashier who will not promptly acknowledge your presence, will not greet you once she deigns to notice you standing there, will certainly not smile warmly at you, will resent the fact that you have troubled her and be down right angry that you do not have exact change, will almost certainly not hand the right change back to you, will mumble and slur in order to as much as possible hinder your understanding of the transaction, and in the end, will bring you the wrong food. I'm pretty sure that all of the build-up leads to that moment when you receive the wrong dish (a healthy amount of time later, I might add) and are by that point to afraid to change it for the right one.

I experienced pretty much every single one of the above-described steps today when I went to a sushi bar in downtown St. Petersburg.(Fun sidenote: Russians are crazy about sushi. I don't know why, but I approve.) My experience was not helped by the fact that I was the lone American with two Russians, who, obviously, being Russian, spoke fluent Russian instead of annoying, halting foreigner pidgin Russian. We had to hail a waitress three or four times; we ordered the simplest items on the menu; our food came 40 minutes later, and when it did, it was minus half the order (this is where the two Russians came in handy, as they were brave enough to demand the rest of the food). On the plus side, this particular cafe has частливые часы, which makes no sense in Russian but directly translated means "happy hours." Supposedly this means that two eat for the price of one, but what it really means is that if you order something relatively cheap, they make you pay the full amount and the bring you twice as much food (which is an important distinction, as you end up paying the same amount of money and end up eating more than you wanted to or wasting half the order and getting no discount, unless you have someone to split with). On the even pluser side, I am now full of sushi.

In conclusion, I'm at the point where I sort of find the attitude towards customer service in Russia kind of funny as opposed to deeply aggravating. It helps that I've now realized that wait-staff are rude to everyone, and that it's not the fact that I'm mildly incompetent at speaking Russian that's getting me the communist treatment. Furthermore, I'm willing to brave pretty much all but the most dire of circumstances (or high of prices) to get my hands on food that isn't some re-combination of meat, potatoes, and salt.

Fun economic note: Most facilities in Russia are chronically short on change, which explains some of the widespread resentment of foreigners, who walk around trying to use 1000 or 500 ruble bills for 50 ruble purchases. If you have correct change, it's worth it to take a few extra minutes digging around in your purse to get it before you walk up to the cash register. However, complicating this problem is the issue of Russian pride. I tried to hand the cashier at the local food supermarket 52 rubles for a 42 ruble purchase, only to have her throw the 2 rubles back at me and say loudly, "Here we have change." In conclusion, shopping in Russia is never just shopping, but a cultural exchange in which the opportunities for behaving like a stupid American are not only multifarious, but in fact impossible to avoid.