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.