When a good thing goes bad it’s not the end of the world
It’s just the end of a world, that you had with one girl
And she’s the reason it happened, but she’s overreacting
And it’s all because she don’t want things to change
We live in a generation of, not being in love, and not being together
But we sure make it feel like we’re together
Because we’re scared to see each other with somebody else
As I finally sat on the bus to the hotel after a four-hour flight to St. Petersburg, I couldn’t successfully formulate my emotions into words, until I overheard one student say to another, “I can’t believe I’m here. I never thought of Russia as a real place, it was more like an idea”. Ideas are fragile tenants of the mind that, when experienced in reality, can alter the decisions we make and how we perceive our past. The idea of spending a week in Russia with my study abroad class was more than I could fathom, knowing that my preconceptions will collide with reality as I enter a country that has been under 75 years of communist regime. After 6 days in this foreign country, my impressions of the people evolved, expectations were contradicted, and my opinion of Vladimir Putin diminished.
From initially observing the Russian people to getting to know them personally, my impression of them evolved from attitude stemming from destitution to a mindset growing from values. After the dissolution of the Soviet Era in 1991, a “shock therapy” economy was put into place by Boris Yeltsin that liberalized foreign trade, prices, and currency, resulting in almost half of the population living in poverty by the mid 1990s. As I walked around the outskirts of St. Petersburg near our hotel, I first started to notice the ubiquitous decay of the 1930s constructivist architecture, the uninhabited streets and courtyards, and the cold expressionless faces of the people walking past me- I felt a sense of poverty. Though I understood the effect of shock therapy on Russia, I didn’t understand how this powerful country could seem so poor, which left me questioning where government spending was being focused and how the Russians felt about the current conditions. During our stay in St. Petersburg, we visited a commune that was still in use since the Soviet Era in which each person received ten square meters to sleep and eat. As my friends and I got a tour through the flat, we had to view each room in pairs otherwise there would be no space to walk. While I observed the cots divided by cabinets on which they slept, the tiny table on which they ate their meals, and the 6” by 6” television on which they watched their shows, I felt sadness for him and disgust with my materialistic way of life in Los Angeles. Though his flat isn’t filled with expensive objects and seemingly useful luxuries of today, I saw content on his face and a proud sense of ownership. In the book Contemporary Russia by Edward Bacon, Russians are described to be “less materialistic, less individualistic, and less shallow than their Western counterparts, and instead have a greater commitment to spiritual values, egalitarianism, community, and the deeper mysteries of faith and eschatology.” Later in the week, I experienced these community values first hand when our class was divided into groups and arranged to cook dinner with local students. A girl named Anastasia took my friends and I into her home where we cooked a traditional Russian meal and met her friends and family. Leading up to this point, I felt that Russians were expressionless and didn’t smile; yet behind the walls of Anastasia’s home, we were laughing, drinking, and sharing our different cultures. At first glance, Russians may seem unwelcoming and uneager to speak, but it is their strong tie to their family and community that makes them appear indifferent to strangers. At the dinner table, our conversation ranged from all sorts of topics, from favorite foods to pop culture to Vladimir Putin, but the topic of Communism was overlooked or avoided if we ever brought it up.
Before coming to Russia, I expected a fading presence of Communism within the culture and surroundings, but my expectations were contradicted as I witnessed a display of the Soviet past. In history, an ending of an unpopular social system, dictatorship, or political system was made significant by an action that conveyed a disapproval of the past with hopes towards a new future, such as the falling of the Berlin Wall or the dismantling of Adolf Hitler’s statue. Yet as I explored the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow, I saw countless statues of Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, and Karl Marx, and buildings with the hammer and sickle symbol of the Soviet Union. Growing up, I learned about these politicians and philosophers in my history classes as men of backwards values or unjust morals, and because there was such a demand for the conclusion of communism in Russia, I assumed that the icons of this period would also cease to be prevalent. A strange and surreal sensation came over me as I viewed these monuments; it was like I stepped into a time machine and was sent back to the 1950s. In our class discussions, we talked about how Russia viewed the Soviet Era as part of their culture, but is it then justified for a country like Germany to accept Nazism as an embedded aspect of theirs? Thousands were killed in the effort to preserve the Soviet Union and to punish the tarnishing of its name, and including these murders as a part of a nation’s culture lacks justification. One of the experiences that I will remember for the rest of my life was seeing the well-preserved body of Vladimir Lenin. After descending down the dimly lit staircase of Lenin’s mausoleum, I entered a dark room in which the body of Lenin was illuminated at the center in a glass case. Roses surrounded his body, while guards surrounded the glass box. The man that introduced communism to a country, resulting in the killing of thousands, was laying in a peaceful slumber right before my eyes; I was not only seeing the preservation of a historical leader, I was seeing the preservation of the communist culture. After viewing the body, I walked up the stairs and exited to the path that contained the graves of Josef Stalin and other important figures in Russian history. On their tombs lay quantities of fresh, single roses to commemorate their death. I couldn’t help but wonder who was placing these flowers of respect on their graves. Was it the people of Russia or the people of the government? Personally, I would have rather picked up these flowers and placed them on the graves of the innocent that died because of communism; my respect is for the forgotten, not the remembered. The display of the Soviet past reflects the attitude of the current government, and though the conservation of these monuments acknowledges the past, it still embodies ideals that accompanied the era.
During the Russia trip, I was part of the Politics focus group, which met with different journalists and political advocates from both sides of the spectrum, and after the week of getting a glimpse of Russian policies and ideals concerning Putin, my opinion of him diminished to that of a present day dictator. Before Putin became president, he was preceded by Boris Yeltsin, who eventually resigned in response to his unfavorable decisions as president, and at the beginning of Putin’s term; he was mostly “popular because he was not Yeltsin” (Bacon, Contemporary Russia, p.6). Yeltsin brought Russia into very unstable conditions and also nearly destroyed the economy with the shock therapy policies, eventually resigning in December of 1991 to hand the presidency off to Putin. Instances such as this, where there is great social and economic turmoil, force the people to look for someone new for solutions and to take control of the controversial issues, yet this can lead to the people giving away too much control to a new politician and losing their own sense of stability. Putin has already served his two years as president, but he is currently running unopposed for his third nonconsecutive term this coming year. Instead of looking for another candidate that can lead the country in a new or better direction, Putin feels that he can and should continue to run the country for the years to come- these are the early signs of a dictatorship. In an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled “For the Sake of One Man”, Bret Stephens writes, “Russia has become, in the precise sense of the word, a fascist state. It does not matter here, as the Kremlin’s apologists are so fond of pointing out, that Mr. Putin is wildly popular in Russia: Popularity is what competent despots get when they destroy independent media, stoke nationalistic fervor with military buildups and the cunning exploitation of the Church, and ride a wave of petrodollars to pay off the civil service and balance their budgets. Nor does it matter that Mr. Putin hasn’t re-nationalized the “means of production” outright; corporatism was at the heart of Hitler’s economic policy, too”. Near the end of our week, we met with the United Russians Youth group in their building headquarters in Moscow, which greatly differed from the café we went to visit the Anti-Putin Youth group. We asked them question about corruption, the presidential candidacy, and Chechnya, and out of all the controversial and fake statements said, the statement that I remember the most was, “We don’t censor our media; we aren’t China”. From 1997 to 2007, Russia ranked second in the world for number of journalist killed on duty (Bacon, Contemporary Russia, p.159), and according to Roman Dobrokhotov, a blacklisted journalist and philosopher, criticism of the government results in personal termination, media termination, or death. When there is such control over what is said about Putin in the media to a point where life is threatened, there is no doubt why Vladimir has such an apparent approval in the opinion polls, and this state of fear and forceful censorship does not fall far from the communist’s paranoia. After the week in Russia, I got a glimpse of what it felt like to life under a state of fear from the government, ruled by a dictator posing in a form of democracy- a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
A week prior to this trip, Russia was only a fragile idea that was built up by textbooks, movies, and media, but after a short experience of the reality, that idea surpassed the initial facts I read in books, and transformed into emotion that I can connect to the people and the culture. I have a strong respect for the profound community values of the people, a disagreement with the preservation of the Soviet Union monuments, and a concern for the possibility of Putin becoming a dictator. Russia, like every country in the world, has ideas on how to deal with problems to better life for its people, and when ideas transform into emotion through experience, that emotion sparks action and change.
Today, I had my orientation meetings for my Czech Republic trip and my Russia trip. In Czech Republic, our group will be staying in a castle/hotel in the middle of a forest where we will be signing up for activities such as archery, rock climbing, kayaking, and hiking. Before I end that trip, we will be spending a day in Prague. Sunday morning I leave for Russia where we will be staying in hotels in Moscow and St. Petersburg, finishing the trip off with onion domes and the biggest monastery in Russia =] SO EXCITE hfewgdalsh;f
VERY NICE. Or should I say, VERY приятный
Boy’s Schwarma, Red Label and coke, Electro club hopping, underground club invite, 50% off sale at H&M, Sasha’s apartment, Kulørbar, free pizza from a stranger =] Time to study for this Danish Design Midterm. Eff. But Sensation at the end of the week!!!!
