I was taken aback last month when a reader wrote to ask me if bacon-flavored vodka is as popular in Russia as it is in her part of the world: the Southern United States.
Bacon vodka? Really?
I’ve never been a big vodka fan, which is probably the reason I am still alive after twenty years in Russia, where vodka is a way of life. I’m more of a gin or chardonnay gal, but the idea of bacon-flavored vodka, and what a basic Internet research revealed to be its unquestioned popularity, forced me to take another look at vodka and experiment with its seemingly endless possibilities. Flavor infusion has helped vodka and me hit the reset button!
Since the Poles first brought vodka to Russia in the 8th Century, the clear, strong, largely flavorless beverage has been the liquor of choice to accompany both the lavish banquets of the Tsars as well as the simple fare of Russian peasants. In the 18th Century, Catherine the Great granted distillery rights to select members of the aristocracy, who vied with one another to produce the purest and most sophisticated brands of vodka, as well as flavored versions which, as Moscow’s Vodka Museum points out used, “all the letters of the alphabet…cherry and pear, blackberry and acorn, caraway seed and dill, bird cherry and sage!”
Vodka, then, is a blank culinary canvas on which the creative cook can paint almost any flavor by infusing fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices and yes, even bacon. Infusion is a simple process which combines a flavor component with any liquid at a specific temperature for anywhere from four hours to four weeks (depending on the properties of the component.) Vodka is particularly suited to infusion because of its odorless clarity and high alcohol percentage.
Summer is the perfect time to start experimenting with flavored vodka, particularly in Russia where vodka is always cheap, and the bounty of summer floods the market with fresh berries and pungent fresh herbs. Flavored vodka is not only delicious on its own: chilled in a simple shot glass, or as the basis of imaginative mixed drinks; but it also adds wonderful flavor to soups, risotto, stews, and makes a marvelous marinade to meats, poultry, and fish, and are a great accompaniment to traditional Russian summer staple of shashlik.
Here are some of my favorite infused vodkas, and the foods they match to perfection!
Ginger-Infused Vodka:
This is ideal for mixed drinks, a marinade for fish and chicken, or on its own to accompany Asian food. I serve this with sushi and spring roles for an innovative, light appetizer.
Ingredients:
One large knob of fresh ginger (10-12 centimeters long) peeled and sliced very thin.
750 ml of plain, unflavored vodka
Instructions:
1.Wash and sterilize a one liter bottle or jar with a non-metal lid.
2.Using the back of a spoon or the smooth end of a meat tenderizer, gently crush the ginger slices to release their essential oils.
3.Combine the ginger slices and vodka in the jar or bottle, shaking lightly to combine.
4.Place the mixture in the freezer for 5 days.
5.Remove the mixture from the freezer and allow the mixture to come to room temperature.
6.Sieve the mixture through a coffee filter or fine mesh colander.
Thyme-Infused Vodka:
This vodka infusion pairs wonderfully with lamb chops, poultry, and grilled vegetables. Combined with extra virgin olive oil, the vodka does well as both as a dipping sauce or marinade, or drizzle it over goat cheese, to add a wonderfully fresh flavor component.
This recipe works well for almost any fresh herb. Try tarragon, dill or basil!
Ingredients:
One bunch of fresh thyme
750 ml of plain, unflavored vodka.
Instructions:
1.Carefully remove the thyme buds from the stems. Wash in a salad spinner and pat dry on paper towels.
2.Wash and sterilize a glass jar with a tight, non-metal lid.
3.Gently crush the dry thyme buds in a clean mortar and pestle and place in the bottom of the jar.
4.Pour vodka over the thyme buds and gently shake to combine.
5.Cover with lid and place in a dark location at room temperature (no warmer than 20°C). Allow to steep for up to three days; periodically shaking to ensure the vodka absorbs the thyme flavor.
6.Strain vodka through a coffee filter or fine wire mesh with cheesecloth.
Lime and Coriander Infused Vodka:
I combined these two flavors, which go wonderfully together, for a delicious pairing for Middle Eastern meze: hummus, baba ganouch, and tabouli!
Ingredients:
Zest of one lime (be careful to remove only the green rind and not the inner white part of the rind.
5-Tbl of lightly toasted coriander seeds, crushed in a mortar and pestle
750 ml of plain, unflavored vodka
Instructions:
1.Combine lime zest and coriander in the bottom of a sterilized glass jar or bottle with a non-metal top.
2.Add vodka and shake gently to combine.
3.Let the mixture steep for four days in a dark area at room temperature (not warmer than 20°C). Do not steep for more or the lime rind will make the vodka bitter.
4.Shake lightly periodically.
5.Strain the mixture through a coffee filter or a fine wire mesh with a piece of cheesecloth.
6.Return the mixture to the dark location to age for approximately 30 days.
7.Serve chilled.
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This article was first published in French under the title "La vodka se reinvente pour les gourmets," in La Russie d'Aujourd'hui on June 15, 2011. A link to that original article may be found here.
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Privyet Readers!
Want to know the secret to bacon vodka? You know you do! Leave a comment below and I’ll send it right along, along with some creative ideas on how to use it (and not abuse it!) Don’t knock it ‘til you try it – it makes a mean Bloody Mary, and has a truly phenomenal flavor!
As excitement over this month’s Royal Wedding reaches fever pitch, it seems appropriate for Russia to seriously consider a strategic return to monarchy. There are those who will feel that this is an incredibly complicated and possibly prohibitively expensive move, but it is clear to me that monarchy is not only readily affordable for Russia but, properly constituted, could go a long way to mitigating a number of Russia’s current issues. Sure, it’s expensive, but surely not as expensive as the Sochi Olympics and in every way imaginable a far superior long-term investment. I won’t reveal which of the candidates I think should wear the Cap of Monomakh (not in this month’s column anyway), but I will pose this question: what is a Stabilization Fund for if not to create stability, and the best way to do that is to get a crowd I’m calling “The Imperials” back to work as Heads of State in Russia.
Here’s why:
1. Russia Already Functions Like a Monarchy: It’s hard to impose hereditary monarchy on countries that are used to hundreds of years of representational government, but, happily, Russia doesn’t have that problem. The mindset is in place and dare one say it, primed, for a seamless return to Tsar Alexander III’s trifecta of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism.” The Church, traditionally a stalwart prop of monarchy, would be the first to sign up and lend the new monarch their not inconsiderable influence and support to get the populace on board. It’s a no brainer.
2. Russia Has the Equipment: Russia has all it needs in terms of regalia: crowns, orbs, scepters, thrones, carriages, palaces, crown jewels, and a coat of arms. No additional expense necessary. None of what the “prschiki” in Russia call, “rebrendinguh.” Everything is sitting tucked up in the Diamond Fund, no doubt more than ready for an airing. The existing real estate just needs minor renovations such as indoor plumbing and it will be all set for the Imperials to move right in.
3. Monarchy Is Great Public Relations: It goes without saying that the Imperials would do wonders for Russia’s PR, both at home and abroad. At home, they could handle things like charitable causes: visit factories, schools, and open sports events. This would free up the people who run the government to run it, and not phaff about on Channel 1. Abroad, the Imperials could spearhead things like bids for (more) major global sporting events. Or, better still, they could just have the occasional wedding at home, which would mean Russia wouldn’t need any major sporting events in the first place. Monarchy, of course, is to tourism what honey is to flies, so more money from that. And let’s face it while the KGB/FSB is an admirable school of management for many aspects of government, PR isn’t one of them. Finally, I for one feel that Russia deserves something a little bit more up market in terms of a cultural ambassador than Roman Abramovich or Xenia Sobchak.
4. More Home Games: The Court/The Season: An acute problem with Russian society today is that everyone wants to go and have his or her fun elsewhere. Monarchy could change all that. The Imperials would foster and encourage fun at home, by creating a social calendar of events in Russia and thereby an axis around which the socially ambitious would revolve. They could make unlikely backwaters fashionable, just as Prince Albert did for Scotland. Imagine boating week in Volgograd, winter sports in Krasnodar, and the elk-shooting season in Omsk. The Imperials would make it chic to stay home, just as HM The Queen does. All those billions of rubles that normally go to Courchevel and St. Tropez flowing into the domestic coffers to say nothing of the more middle class Middletonski wannabes trawling for Russian Grand Dukes.
5. Raising the Taste and Quality Bar: Royalty has an excellent track record at fusing class and brass and the Imperials could be put to very good use disseminating this new mindset in Russia, which today is rather more inclined towards the unfortunate twinning of brash and cash. The Imperials would lower the heels and get the jewelry off the men: two consummations devoutly to be wished. Imperial Warrants could motivate production of high quality goods such as Faberge Eggs, which are so much prettier than cloud computing.
6. A Shot in the Arm To the Military: Monarchy is always a boon for the military, the only profession considered suitable for the male members of any Imperial dynasty. Once the Imperials take over, the army will become a competitive profession as smart regiments such as the Semenyovsky and Preobrazhensky are reconstituted. Families will stop paying money to keep their sons out, and start paying money to get their sons in. Total rehabilitation.
7. Solves the Nagging Belarus Problem: Belarus would be immediately incorporated into the newly constituted Russian Empire and the Heir to the Russian throne would be titled the Tsarevich and Grand Duke of Minsk.
If they hurry, the Imperials could get some seats in the Abbey this month. What better time to say, as the Chuds, the Krivichians, and Slavs did to the people of Varangian Rus in 860 A.D.: “Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.”
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A version of this article first appeared in "Russia Beyond the Headlines" on April 20, 2011 and an online version of this can be found here.
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Hey there readers! What's your take on monarchy in Russia? Good idea? Terrible idea? What are your plans for Friday's nuptials? Are you a "stay up all night and have Coronation Chicken for breakfast" type or "what wedding?" grinch? I bet you can guess which your intrepid blogger is! Enjoy the day!
Orthodox Easter cuisine in Russia keeps pace with the liturgy’s potent symbols of resurrection, the triumph of light over darkness, and the return of spring. During Holy Week, Russians bake a light, dry traditional Easter bread, called kulich, and color and decorate hard-boiled eggs, which sadly fewer people these days seem to do in the traditional manner with the skin of yellow onions boiled in water. Orthodox Christians bring their eggs and kulich to their parish church for a Pascal blessing. Together with a sweet, rich, creamy curd cheese mold, spiked with spices, candied fruit, and citrus zest called paskha, these are the fundamentals of the Easter meal, right after the lengthy service, which culminates in the joyful Easter greeting “Xhristos Voskres!” or “The Lord Hath Risen!” to which the faithful respond, “He is Risen Indeed!” In Church Slavonic, this phrase is rendered by the Cyrillic letters “XB,” a motif which appears on eggs, kulich, and the paskha.
I remember my first Russian Easter as a frantic hunt, not for eggs and chocolate, but for bake ware. Although I have a sizable arsenal of pots, pans, pie and tart dishes, and other baking paraphernalia, none of them is suitable for the Easter confections. I wanted to do the thing properly: kulich is tall and cylindrical with a slightly puffy mushroom-like cap on top. Paskha is traditionally prepared in a special trapezoidal mold called a pasochnitsa decorated with elaborate “XBs” and Orthodox Crosses on each panel so that the chilled mold retains the imprint of these seasonal decorations.
In Russia, sourcing things never comes quite as easily as it does in the rest of the world. Figuring the pasochnitsa would be the harder of the two to run to ground, I started my search there. I prowled supermarkets and specialty kitchen stores to no avail. I checked the farmer’s markets and found nothing but got lucky with some local knowledge. Since the primary ingredients of paskha are cream, curd cheese, or “tvorog,” eggs, and butter, I threw myself on the mercy of the rosy-cheeked ladies who peddle these items at the market.
“Try the Churches,” they advised, leaving me wondering why I hadn’t thought of that simple solution. I’d got the scent, and after a slight detour to the three churches in my neighborhood and the Danilovsky Monastery gift shop, I headed strait towards the source: the Sofrino Ecclesiastical Store in Central Moscow where you can buy anything and everything having to do with the Russian Orthodox Church from a slim 2 ruble candle to a 13 million ruble marble baptismal font. There was one pasochnitsa there and I held my breath as four priests cut in line in front of me (apparently they can) to stock up on holy water and wedding crowns, but I was in luck, and, precious pasochnitsa in hand, I literally skipped down the stairs and out into the.
The kulich tin proved even more elusive. The church store didn’t have them. I trawled up and down the aisles of department stores and supermarkets. I found tube pans and charlotte moulds, both of which were too short, and baba cups, which were the right shape, but too small. Back at home, I burst into tears of frustration.
“What’s wrong?” asked my Russian husband. Hiccupping slightly, I explained that, thanks to my lack of a kulich tin Easter would be ruined – completely ruined. To my surprise, he burst out laughing. He disappeared into the pantry, still chuckling, then emerged with four metal tins of various sizes, which held tomatoes, coffee, beans, and pickled mushrooms.
“Kulich tins,” he said. I dried my eyes and let out a chuckle of my own.
“Kulich tins, indeed.”
Paskha:
Paskha is the tangible proof that Lent has ended, combining, as it does, all the forbidden foods in one delicious confection. The smooth and rich creaminess of paskha is a perfect foil to the drier kulich, and one without the other doesn’t seem to make any sense.
Don’t let the lack of a traditional pasochnitsa deter you from trying this recipe. An agnostic but serviceable mold of any kind will do the job.
Ingredients:
750 grams of full fat tvorog (curd cheese)
500 gms of caster sugar
5 egg yolks
450 ml of heavy whipping cream
500 grms of sweet butter
2 cups of chopped candied fruit and peel
2 Tbl of vanilla extract
3 Tbls of a sweet liqueur such as Cointreau or Grand Marnier
Directions:
1.Whip the egg yolks together until slightly thickened. Add the sugar and beat until smooth.
2.Cream the butter in a separate container and then add to the egg yolks and sugar.
3.Drain the curd cheese through a fine sieve, and then mix it well into the butter, sugar and egg yolk mixture until smooth.
4.Add the cream, vanilla and liqueur and mix until smooth.
5.Fold in one cup of the candied fruit and peel,
6.Line a mold with plastic wrap or cheesecloth. Pour the mixture into the mold, and then weight the top with a pot lid or flat plate and a heavy weight such.
7.Chill at least 12 hours in the refrigerator.
8.Unmold the paskha and decorate with the remainder of the candied fruit and peel. Keep cool until serving.
Kulich
Ingredients
2 packages of active dry yeast
1,5 liters dry flour + 1 tablespoon
¾ teaspoon of salt
350 ml of caster sugar + 1 tablespoon
5 large egg yolks at room temperature
300 ml of whole milk, scalded and cooled to 50°C
225 grams of butter, melted and cooled to 45°C
2 large egg whites at room temperature, whipped to stiff peaks
6 strands of saffron dissolved in 2 tablespoons of rum
2 cup of candied fruit (I use a mix of raisins, candied ginger, dried cherries, candied orange peel)
1/3 cup of slivered blanched almonds
Extra butter
Glaze made of egg yolk, vegetable oil, and water
2 cups of icing (I used a confectioner sugar glaze)
Directions
1.Butter aluminum tins, then line the bottom and sides with buttered parchment paper.
2.Combine yeast, 6 Table of water, 1 tsp of sugar and flour in a bowl. Cover and set to rise in a warm place with no breeze.
3.Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until combined, then vigorously for approximately 5 minutes. When the mixture is thoroughly combined, add the milk, then flour and the salt. Knead or mix for 2 minutes.
4.Add the proofed yeast, beating for 2 minutes to combine.
5.Add the melted butter gradually, beating a moderate speed. Let the dough rest for two minutes, and then test for elasticity. If needed, add more flour.
6.Add the egg whites and saffron and rum mixture. Once the dough is thoroughly combined, add one cup of the candied fruit.
7.Cover the dough to rise in a buttered bowl placed in a warm place until it has doubled in size (2-3 hours)
8.Knead the dough lightly a few times, then return it to the bowl and cover for another 2 hours.
9.Divide the dough between the aluminum tins so that the dough covers slightly more than ½ of the tin. Retain 1 cup of the dough. Cover and let rise another hour.
10.Preheat the oven to 180°C.
11.Take the retained dough and form it into strips. Place two strips across the top of the dough in each tin in the form of a cross. This will enhance the top of the kulich.
12.Glaze the tops of each tin and place in the preheated oven. Cook for 15-20 minutes. Then raise the temperature to 200°C. Smaller tins will cook faster than larger ones. Kulich is finished when a skewer inserted into it comes out clean.
13.The final step is a little local peasant wisdom that seems to work an extra bit of magic: cover a soft bed pillow with a towel and gently place the kulich tin onto its side on the pillow. Gently roll the tin back and forth over the pillow to ease the kulich out of the buttered tin. Cool the kulich on its side on the pillow for at 40 minutes. Then place it upright and frost with the glaze of your choice. Use the remaining candied fruit and almonds to decorate the kulich in any way you wish!
Priyatnogo Appetita!
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A version of this article first appeared in Le Figaro in French under the title, "La Chasse au Moule" on April 19, 2011. An online link to that publication may be found here.
Today is Bribery Day! Since pagan times, Russians and their ancient Slavic forbears have set aside the Spring new moon to celebrate the strength of the grey economy. As ancient and venerable as Ivan Kupala and Maslentisa, Bribery Day has its roots in the agricultural pagan worship of the trickster god Otka. Otka was a Slavic version of the Greek God Hermes, guardian of thieves, messengers, traveling salesmen and merchants, and from his name, the modern word for “kick back” in Russian, “otkat’” is derived. On this day, as the winter slush finally left the soggy fields, as the Primary Chronicle of Russia recounts, the peasant elders of each village brought the last of their winter stores as offerings to their landowner, who dressed up as Otka. In an elaborate ceremony, each elder made lengthy speeches praising the god and the landowner, while their sons and grandsons placed their baskets at the feet of the landowner’s family. The speeches over, the landowner then announced the allocation of the narrow strips of soil called the “barshina” to the various peasants. Over time, whoever brought the largest donation would receive the most advantageous strips of land, which were adjacent to one another. This meant that the peasants could work the land without the hassle of traveling long distances between their different strips.
After the Baptism of Russia in 988, the Russian Orthodox Church gradually incorporated worship of Otka into worship of St. Nicholas The Miracle Worker. The Tsar held a grand levee on the first Sunday of April to receive the homage and elaborate ceremonial gifts from each head of the regional “gubanatoriya,” a tradition, echoed today in the annual Russian banking conferences in St. Petersburg, Sochi and London.
Revolution, famine, and the repression of the peasant kulacks during the forced Collectivization of the 1920s and 1930s severely curtailed celebrations of Bribery Day in Central European Russia, although stealth observations were recorded in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Far East. After the Great Patriotic War, Stalin’s death, and Kruschev’s “Secret Speech” however, authorities gradually relaxed their more stringent regulations and by 1960, Bribery Day was reinstated and today is as much a part of the rhythms of the Russian year as New Year’s, Maslenitsa, and the November holidays.
Here is a confession: I personally suck at bribery. Even after two decades, I never quite get the nuances, the timing, and I can never gage the right amount of money to proffer. Since free-lance writers are almost never on the receiving end of bribes, that has rarely been an issue for me. Back in the day, I did get what was an unmistakable approach in late 1994: I was offered the sum of $17,000 if I awarded a contract for services to a certain company. None of it was feasible: the company was laughably incompetent, and they had foolishly underestimated my influence in the decision making process. $17,000 was intriguing, though. To this day, I’m still wondering whether that was minus an $3,000, $7,000, or $8,000 kick back for the person who offered it to me. So I’m not a big time disciple of Otka, although I once confused the word for kick back (otkat) with the word for sunset (zakat), which HRH found hilarious. To this day, during the summer, we mix up some nice gin & tonics and head out to watch the “sun’s kick back.”
And that’s how I like to worship pagan “Otka.” So, mix yourself up your tipple of choice, and join Slavs across the globe in raising your glass to the ancient worship of the grey economy!!
Do you have a bribery story? My story about the 17K is true and I love it. Let us know about yours, won’t you by clicking on the comment button below. You don’t need to use your real name, but it would be great to hear from you!
When the men are silent, it is our duty to raise our voices in behalf of our ideals. ~Clara Zetkin
This week was of course the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day – or 8th of March, as it is better known in Russia, one of the most important dates in a calendar chocker block with important holidays.
8th of March was originally conceived as a day dedicated lobbying for equal rights for women, universal suffrage, and the abilities and achievements of women throughout the world. It was first celebrated in Russia in 1913, and, after the revolution of 1917, quickly became a fixture on the calendar for the new Bolshevik government. On the 8th of March, men are supposed to take on all the tasks traditionally assigned to women. They clean the house, make a meal, or possibly look after the children. Today, however, in this more mercantile post-perestroika era, celebrations have strayed a little bit far off the mark. 8th of March has become an obligatory gift giving extravaganza. The gross national product of Holland shoots up a number of points due to all the flowers sold on 8th of March, and restaurants do a brisk business for those International men who can’t quite face the kitchen.
This year, Russia held its national beauty pageant and crowned a “Miss Russia,” and this alone would have the socialist pioneers Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxumburg turning in their graves. In what are politely called penal facilitates, Russian women prisoners also held beauty contests to crown a “Miss Prison Russia.” Russia’s favorite redhead spy, Anna Chapman, who for some reason is still making headlines, launched a very silly website, and Russia’s infamously unpleasant traffic cops declared a one day cease fire on pulling women over for minor traffic offences. This pulled the GDP of Russia down a few points.
Celebrating 8th of March this year was a three-day event thanks to the way the holiday fell in the middle of the week. For the uninitiated used to bank holidays and first Mondays, this may seem a trifle confusing, but follow me if you can:
Saturday, March 5th was a working day, meaning that Russians worked a six-day week. We had to work on Saturday so that Monday, March 7th could be a day off even though Tuesday, March 8th was the actual holiday. Does that make sense? Vintage Russian public holiday stuff. If the holiday is on a Tuesday, you have to have the Monday off as well so you can get a three-day weekend. Even though you have to work on the previous Saturday. Where that gets us, I don’t know, but I’m not sure anyone comes out ahead. Joe Biden is town this week and he’s talking about Russia’s accession to the WTO but if you ask me (and no one ever ever does) if they let that warped individual who sits in his windowless room in the Kremlin massaging the calendar keep on with this stuff, Russia doesn’t deserve to join the WTO.
On Saturday, I actually came in from London – a flight time of just over three hours. It took me about that amount of time to get from Domodedevo Airport to my flat in Moscow. HRH, my “horrible Russian Husband” was unable to meet me since he was at work, so Tolya my driver and I sat in a traffic jam that was more than usually insane.
“Yep,” said Tolya, “Everyone’s out congratulating the ladies.”
Saturday may be a working day, but most of it is given over to kicking off 8th of March in fine style, with lots of champagne, chocolates and flowers. Legions of delivery trucks leaned on their horns and tried to cut off their competitors through the gridlock.
Tolya told me he’d heard on the radio that you could hire an official emergency service ambulance as a taxi service for 6000 rubles and hour, which comes to about 200 USD per hour.
“I don’t approve of it,” he said. Neither did I, but we both agreed that it require a leap of the imagination to understand that it was actually happening.
My HRH hates to shop for anything – he becomes grumpy and impatient buying a newspaper at a kiosk, or a loaf of bread at the nice French bakery across the street from us. But, each 8th of March, he girds his loins and plunges into the maelstrom of baffled men trying to club together ingredients for a home cooked meal.
“Keep it simple,” I advised as we parked the car at a new place I’d heard about, called The Farmer’s Bazaar. I had high hopes of it turning out to be the Whole Foods of Moscow, which of course was delusional of me. It turned out to be a token supermarket on the 5th floor of what used to be a perfectly respectable food market on a central Russian street. Closed for a number of years, it had recently re-opened as a glitzy shopping mall. Because that’s just what Moscow needs – another glitzy shopping mall. And who in their right mind puts a supermarket on the 5th floor of a glitzy shopping mall?
Farmer’s Bazaar was definitely not Whole Foods. Far from it. It was like any overpriced Moscow supermarket: you needed to take a second mortgage to afford some of the items. I clocked a small package of white beans, which are admittedly hard to find here, retailing for just over $12. A packet of Earl Grey Tea would run you $20. HRH had that “I knew this would be a nightmare” look on his face as I steered him over to the fish counter. He was mildly mollified by some fresh fin de Claire oysters, reasonably priced at about 3 bucks a pop, and ordered a few dozen. These were carefully packaged in plastic takeaway containers with a bed of ice, but the problems was that they only fit 3 oysters to the container, so we ended up with ten takeaway containers. I then queered the deal by asking if I could buy the heads and spines of some beautiful fish one of the charmingly nautically clad fishmongers was gutting. This appeared to be the first time anyone behind the fish counter had ever received a request remotely like this, and it was met with a lot of suspicion.
Today is the beginning of Maslenitsa, Russia's version of Mardi Gras!
I wrote this piece for one of papers I write for, but they went with something about bears in Trafalgar Square which I didn't feel was nearly as informative, nor indeed entertaining. Looks like Olga Quelque Chose strikes again...So, here it is for fans of The Stunt:
There are a number of non-negotiables about life in Russia. You can’t have the window open—ever. You have to take your shoes off when you enter any residential dwelling—always. And, if you plan to earn the respect of your family, you need to learn how to make bliniy or pancakes---well. Particularly this time of the year. It has eluded me, in the past but this year, I promised myself I would master the art of the elusive Russian pancake in time for Maslenitsa. I rolled up my sleeves. I delved into 19the Century cookbooks. I cornered old women at the farmers’ market. I contemplated calling my mother-in-law.
“I have to work today, “ said my workaholic Russian husband last Saturday.
“Perfect,” I muttered, “I need you out from under my feet. I have to crack this bliniy recipe, and it is going to take me all day.”
“Don’t overdo it,” he cautioned hastening out the door.
“Don’t you dare have anything to eat,” I yelled after him, “because we’ll be having sixty pancakes for dinner!”
The pressure is on. Maslenitsa is upon us! Russia’s riotous Mardi Gras: a week of partying, pancakes and punch-ups which celebrates the end of winter, the beginning of Lent, and the promise of spring. Half-heartedly absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Calendar, Maslenitsa is really a tenacious rite of spring belonging to a much older, more pagan culture of nature worship, agrarian traditions, and a heightened awareness of the change of seasons.
Maslenitsa was originally pegged to the vernal equinox, that moment in early spring when the sun passes directly over the equator, making day and night equal length. Of the four points of the calendar (the solstices and the equinoxes), the vernal equinox was most revered by ancient societies, because it heralded the return of the sun and life after the darkness and death of winter. Many ancient monuments such as the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem were oriented such that the rays of the vernal equinox sunrise would fall directly above the High Alter.
Pagan Slavs interpreted natural phenomena in their religious worship with stories of human love and betrayal, sex and separation, and life and death. In a popular myth reminiscent of Egyptian Isis and Osiris, Russia’s Yarilo and Morana are brother and sister lovers who represent life and death, fire and ice, and spring and winter. Their courtship reaches a fever pitch during the summer solstice, only to spiral into betrayal in autumn, and separation and death in the winter. Spurred Morana turns into a fearsome hag, spreading death and frost in her wake. Crops wither to dried straw as Yarilo retreats to the underworld. As spring returns, the faithful burned a straw effigy of Morana on top of the snow to call forth Yarilo back from the Underworld. As the flames of the straw Morana crackled, pagan Slavs celebrated the return of spring by dancing, wrestling, and feasting on life-affirming pancakes, symbolic of the sun and eternal life.
Christians, ever-efficient recyclers of other people’s holidays, have nevertheless found Maslenitsa an awkward fit in the liturgical lead in to Easter. In agrarian Russia, Lent served as a handy spiritual excuse for a Spartan diet as it excludes meat, cheese, oil, eggs, alcohol, and butter, all of which do a lot to spice up plain buckwheat kasha. The forty days of Lent coincide with the period when the staples of winter stores had dwindled down to a bare minimum in Russia. Nowadays, of course, you can get mangos and quail in aspic at any supermarket year round, but many Russians proudly go through “The Great Fast,” as a way of clawing onto some moral high ground and dropping twenty pounds in less than two months: both goals easy to achieve if you are subsisting on buckwheat porridge and cabbage soup. Maslenitsa contains the word “maslo” meaning butter, although some scholars argue that it is a more ancient version of “mysia pust’” meaning “empty of meat.” Whatever the explanation, it is a time to gorge on butter, cheese, and cream, and is to Russia what Shrovetide is to the Anglo-Saxons and Carnival and Mardi Gras are to the Spanish and French: a public celebration of the return of light and warmth and the last gasp of fun and fat – and pancakes of course-- to be had before the onset of Lent.
This piece first appeared in La Russie D'Aujourd'hui and Le Figaro on February 16, 2011 in French under the title: "Les blinis sans états d’âme"
Photos (and pancakes) by the author. All Rights Reserved.
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Hello Readers!
Have you had a pancake today? Want to know the very best pancake recipe ever (much better than any of the ones posted that I've seen?) Hit the comment button below and I'll let you in on it. Not for the faint hearted!!!
To revisit a Maslenitsa that went horribly wrong, try this post.
As you spend February 23rd (Men's Day), so shall you spend 8th of March (Women's Day).
~HRH (and a lot of other Russian men I know.)
A friend, who is perhaps not the brightest bulb on the tanning bed, has just figured out the double entendre humor I use in referring to my “Handsome Russian Husband” as “HRH.”
“You know,” she said, “That can also stand for ‘His Royal Highness’. Like Prince William.”
Really?
The moniker HRH is eminently applicable to Russian men, who are all brought up by their mothers believing that they are, indeed, royal scions and therefore above such plebian and unmanly concerns like housework. In Russia, they are still teaching Home Ec to the girls and Shop to the boys, with no reform in sight – and certainly not regarding the impending gender-specific public holidays. In place of one messy, gender-neutral love fest on February 14th, Russians are suiting up for the very separate Men’s Day (February 23rd) and its companion piece, International Women’s Day (March 8th.)
I’m a Russian historian, so I like to delve into the origin of national holidays. Men’s Day is very interesting. Its full, and characteristically overblown, name is “The Day of the Defenders of the Motherland,” and it celebrates the 1918 rout of Kaiser Wilhelm’s forces by the just-that-day-drafted Red Army. The name eventually morphed from “Red Army Day,” to “Day of the Soviet Army and Navy,” and in 1995, as part of a re-branding campaign to drop “Red” from everything, ended up as “Day of the Defenders of the Motherland.” In HRH’s family, we take the 23rd of February very seriously indeed, since we are a military family: HRH and Dedushka both served as officers in the Red Army – as did Great Uncle Boris, and several others, dating right back to that Red Letter Day in 1918. Interestingly, this list also includes several gutsy great aunts and great-great grandmothers, who served, with distinction, in the Red Army as border patrol guards, field medical officers, and behind-the-lines guerilla fighters in Occupied Ukraine. Nevertheless, February 23rd remains devoted exclusively to the men of Russia, who, ipso facto, are all obliged to defend the Motherland as part of their mandatory military service.
On its current web site, the Russian Consulate in Houston, TX offers helpful guidance on the celebration of Men’s Day: “On this day,” it says, “the entire masculine population - from boys to old men - receive special greetings and presents. Women have a wonderful opportunity to convey their warmest and kindest feelings to the loved ones and to indulge them with sings (sic) of attention and affection.”
HRH, in mufti, is not a force to be reckoned with on the domestic front, although he does open wine bottles, which, along with driving a car, is what well-brought up Russian men consider “man’s work.” I once begged him to empty the dishwasher. He sighed deeply, went to the sink, and stood, his back to me.
“Darling,” I said quietly.
“What – “ he barked, turning around to glare at me.
“Just that, the dishwasher, you know, is the appliance on your left.”
HRH and Dedushka won’t be emptying anything except a bottle of premium whiskey this week – as we women convey our warmest and kindest feelings. I’ve bought HRH a new super sonic corkscrew, Babushka has the sweet Sovietskoye Champanskoye warming up in the vegetable steamer, and Velvet is on dishwasher duty, so we are all set to indulge our Defenders with the royal attention and affection they deserve.
This post first appeared as an article in Russia Beyond The Headlines on February 10, 2010.
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Hey there readers!
This may well have been the post that started me down the rocky road of profprazniks. Did you have a nice men's day? I decided to put all my chips on one number and spent a large part of Tuesday night making bliniy and all kinds of good stuff. Then everyone got sick. So now the house is full of food. Any Defenders out there still looking for a good meal?
Vodka is tasteless going down, but it is memorable coming up.
~Garrison Keillor
Happy Birthday Russian vodka! On this day, in 1865, renowned chemist Dmitry Mendeleev (last seen writing the lyrics to a Tom Leher ditty), defended his doctoral dissertation, “On Combining Water and Alcohol,” in which he began the exploration of the ratios, concentration and weights of various concentrations, which would lead to the publication, in 1894, of Mendeleev’s state standards for vodka production. Mendeleev’s 40% has remained the standard by which Russian vodka is produced to this day.
It may come as a surprise to readers to learn that vodka is not Russia at all. Unless those readers are Polish or Lithuanian (and in the era we are looking at this was more or less the same thing) in which case they will nod their heads vigorously and agree that, indeed, vodka is just another one of those things, like onion domes, snow, oil, and fur that the copy cat nation has stolen from other cultures and made their own.
Vodka can be traced as far back as 8th Century Poland, where it was more commonly used as medicine. Multiple sources credit ambassadors from Genoa for bringing the first hard spirits to Russia the 14th Century to the court of Prince Dmitry Donskoi. They called it aquae vitae, or “water of life” and although it was considerably lower in alcholic content than 40%, it was much stronger than mead or beer, which made up the liquor cabinets of the 14th Century boyars. Having just seen off the Tartar Mongols, the Russians were ready for a stiff drink, and took to aquae vitae like ducks to water.
Russia’s rulers kept close control over the distillation and distribution of vodka, which remained a state monopoly until the 18th Century, when Catherine The Great granted distillery rights to select members of the aristocracy, who vied with one another to produce the purest and most sophisticated brands of vodka, producing flavored versions which, as Moscow’s Vodka Museum points out used, “all the letters of the alphabet…cherry and pear, blackberry and acorn, caraway seed and dill, bird cherry and sage!”
Prohibition has reared its ugly head more than once in Russia, though in each case, legislation designed to curb alcoholism only fanned the flames, since addicts turned to illegal hooch to satisfy their cravings. Prohibition issued as a patriotic measure in 1914 by the Imperial Duma was only repealed in 1925 by the Soviet Government; and the roller coaster years of perestroika and the Wild 90s were made even more miserable by Gorbachev’s unpopular move to limit the production of liquor.
I am not, myself, a big vodka fan, and this is probably the reason I am still alive and well on this earth since it costs less than Windex here in Russia and is often used for much the same purpose. In fact, vodka is used in all kinds of original ways in Russia, and here are just a few:
Medicinal:
Vodka has always been considered a cure-all for anything that might be wrong with you. When vodka was first introduced to Russia, it was largely used for this purpose, which may be why Russians all drink “To your health!” when they start to knock it back.
Got the runs? Or the opposite? The cure is the same: Take a shot of vodka with a heaping teaspoon of salt and, strange as this may seem, it acts like a kind of intestinal cement. I was forced to try it on (I kid you not) The Road To Samarkand and it gets the plumbing sorted out in record time. Throw away your Imodium.
Vodka, rubbed on the chest and back of an infant is the quickest way to bring down a fever, if you don’t mind your two year old smelling like the inside of Kazan railway station, that is.
Vodka, mixed with pickle juice or a delicate mixture of tomato juice, horseradish, Tabasco, celery salt, and Worcestershire sauce (depending on your ethnic origin) is a good way to vanquish the excesses of the previous evening!
Housekeeping:
My cleaning lady looks askance every time I wave the vinegar bottle at her as eco-friendly, cost effective cleaning agent. She prefers Mr. Proper (a Slavic cousin of Mr. Clean) but if that’s not available, she’s got the vodka bottle out quicker than you can say “Stolichnaya” to get rid of mold on chrome, smears on glass, or any stubborn residue or stickiness. It’s cheaper than Mr. Proper and smells much much much better.
In a recent post, I advocated taking all the dubious cheesily branded vodka bottles you received for New Year’s, and pouring them into the hole where the windshield wiper goes: lots more effective on those -30 degree mornings (the kind where your contact lenses begin to stiffen) and, as any Russian will tell you, it’s a lot more “ekologitcheskiy chisto,” (ecologically clean). Like that’s ever bothered them.
Finally, I have seen with my own eyes just how effective Russian vodka can be as a de-icing agent.
If, however, you are not that creative, then you can always fall back on vodka’s culinary charms. If you are a man, that is. Vodka is not really a tipple for girls in Russia since it is taken straight, no chaser, out of a shot glass. You order vodka by the grams here: 50 grams is a small shot, 100 is a double, and the barman measures it out from the bottle into your shot glass. Ideally vodka is somewhat chilled, but that’s by no means a deal breaker. Like tequila, there is a ritual to taking a vodka shot: get your vodka poured and hoisted, take a massive sniff of some black bread, exhale vigorously, knock back the vodka, then grab a pickle, a piece of dried fish, or, if there is nothing salty to hand, the bread you just stuck up your left nostril and bite into it. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
Vodka today is still a thriving business in Russia and a favorite take-home souvenir of foreign tourists, many of whom seem baffled that, once opened, the half-liter bottles cannot then be re-capped. If asked, a Russian looks bemused and wonders why on earth you would need to re-cap a bottle of vodka?
Do you have a favorite vodka story? How do you take your vodka? With tonic and a twist, or a black bread chaser? Ever try the dried fish? Let us know by uncapping your bottle and clicking the comment button below!
If you enjoyed this post, stick around and enjoy more like it:
“This year they drank out everything but the Moscow River, and only because it was frozen over!”
~Anton Chekhov (writing about Tatiana’s Day in the 19th Century.
Today is Tatiana’s Day! January 25th (January 12th Old Style) is commemorates the death of the 3rd Century Christian martyr, St. Tatiana of Rome. St. Tatiana was a pious young woman, who was brought up by her father as a Christian and became a deaconess of the fledgling sect in Rome, when it was still in hiding from the authorities. She was captured and ordered to make a public renunciation of Christianity by making a sacrifice to the Roman deity, Apollo. Legend says that Tatiana prayed for deliverance, and an earthquake shook the ground, toppling and smashing the marble statue of Apollo. The Romans then gouged Tatiana’s eyes out with a hook and threw her into a pit with a hungry lion. The lion curled up at her feet and purred peacefully. Ignoring all these really quite obvious signs that she knew what she was about, the Romans then beheaded her.
Tatiana and the day commemorating her death might have slipped unnoticed into the Church calendar as yet another saint’s day, but historical events took over.
On January 25 (January 12 Old Style), in 1755, Empress Elizabeth founded Russia’s first University: Moscow University, noting that: “Any good comes from an enlightened mind, and evil is eradicated thereby.” Credit for founding the University goes to Mikhail Lomonosov, a prominent Academician and Professor of Chemistry, and the well-connected courtier I.I. Shuvalov, who served as the university’s first Curator. Prominent alumni include writers Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev, Nobel Laureate and Politian Mikhail Gorbachev, and the artist Vassily Kandinsky.
In the early years, the University offered a general course in Philosophy and liberal arts from which students went on to a concentrated course in one of three branches of study: law, medicine, or philosophy. The University was housed for most of its history directly opposite Red Square, in the yellow and white classical buildings on Mokhovaya Street which today house the faculties of Journalism, Asian and African Studies and Law. In 1949, construction began on the monumental new building of the University Complex in the Sparrow (Lenin) Hills, the largest of the “seven sisters” or “Stalin Wedding Cakes” high rises which are an integral part of the Moscow skyline. Until 1990, this was the tallest building in Europe, and until 2005, the tallest in Moscow. In 1953, the doors opened for the first academic year.
Today, Moscow State University, or “MGU” is the largest University in Russia with over 40,000 students who study in 39 departments, under the tutalege of more than 10,000 professors. Fees begin at € 5 900 per year which has to be the educational deal of the century.
The association with Saint Tatiana and students endures to this day, and all over Russia, January 25th or “Tatianin Deyn’” is considered “students’ day,” and marks the end of exams and beginning of the winter break. Divine service is held in the Chapel of St. Tatiana, followed by speeches, prize giving, and then unfettered partying in the city streets, beginning with a traditional honey-based mead, and moving on to anything the students can get their hands on!
Note that traditional celebrations for Tatiana's Day have been cancelled on Janaury 25, 2011 out of respect for the victims of the bomb blast at Domodedovo Airport which took place on Janaury 24, 2011.
As you can see above, the traditional merriment that accompanies Tatiana Day have been cancelled out of respect for the victims of the bomb blast which took place last night at Domodedovo Airport. Very fitting. Thanks to all who e mailed and sent messages of concern. Our friends and family are all fine, but our hearts go out to all those injured or killed in yesterday's tragic attack.
"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."
~Opening of Law & Order
Today celebrates the men and women who protect and defend the laws of Russia from those who might seek to break, or indeed bend them: the employees of Russia’s General Prosecutor, led by Yuri Chaika (like the Chekhov play and the car) in over 2,800 regional offices all over Russia.
On January 12, 1722, Peter The Great established the post of General Prosecutor of the Russia Senate. Before Peter, as with so many things, justice was rather more loosely organized...a bit rougher if you will. I won’t bore you with the lengthy and somewhat plodding history of the Russian Prosecutors – if you are fascinated with it that much, you can read the entire thing on their helpful website. I would just highlight two interesting moments – one is that in 1917, the Bolsheviks abolished all court systems and handed the administration of justice over to The People, which was obviously far more efficient as the next two decades would prove.
This kind of populist utopia can’t last forever, of course, and in 1992, soon after the Fall of the Wall and all that unpleasantness, the system was revamped once again. In the words of the General Prosecutor themselves:
As early as the first Russian Law on Public Prosecution Service (1992) abolished the total supervision over implementation of laws by citizens; the Prosecution Service was prohibited from interference in economic activities. The essence of prosecutorial supervision, which is nowadays carried out over execution of essentially new legislation regulating drastically changed social relations, became absolutely different.
There are those – and HRH is in the vanguard -- who scoff at my notion that Russian history is cyclical rather than linear, but I think the history of the General Prosecutor’s Office is a great example of why I’m right. What goes around comes around.
One thing that has remained constant, however, is that the Prosecutors in Russia are all uniformed – a tradition dating back from Peter I and carried on to this day. Today, the uniforms are a cheerful sort of Prussian blue, which if you ask me (and no one ever ever does), are ever so slightly effeminate. But there you are: they Army has manly olive green, the Navy took black and the Air Force got the funky blue/green and the Police the blue/grey. So the legal beagles are stuck with the girly blue which may account for their zeal in coming down hard on the crowd that wants to hang out by the statue of Mayakovsky or buy Parliaments (Lite or otherwise): a need to show their manliness. I base this on the following scholarly observation: when the Prosecutors do deign to make public statements, they tend to put forward some young woman in a shortened skirt as spokesperson. While the peroxide blond reads out a statement at lightening speed in “officialspeak,” the beefier senior men stand around silently and clutch their crotches and sway, as Russian officials are wont to do. As recent events have shown, no one can get through a statement faster than the General Prosecutors, because what's important is the letter - not the rule - of the law.
It’s all a far far cry from Sam Waterston and Alana de la Garza (who would look great in epaulettes and Prosecutor blue). There was a knock off “Law & Order” series on Russian TV for a while called “Zakon & Poryadok” (Russian for "LAW and ORDER") which lasted one season. I don’t know…it lacked a certain ya ni znaio shto (Russian for "je ne sais quoi") which I put down as Chris Noth, though it could have been that the misalignment of the fact that the Prosecutors aren’t “separate but equally important” from the police who investigate the crime. Certainly they don't stride down a hall carrying coffee cups together. Maybe it’s that they don’t represent the people. Or that it's not NYC.
In any case, if you want to check them out – they are on Bolshaya Dmitrovka – right near US Dental Care. You can’t miss it.
Have you been following Russia’s courtroom dramas these past few weeks? What’s your take on them? Weigh in, won’t you, by clicking the comment button below. If you liked this post, do “like” it on Facebook so your friends can enjoy it to. Or try some more stories about the world’s largest country like the ones listed below. Thanks for visiting Dividing My Time!
No prizes for guessing what today is...apart from being 1/1/11 which is pretty cool: It's New Year's! Hands down the brightest star in the Russian holiday firmament! It's been going on very steadily since about 1918 and it is for everyone!
Foreigners get confused about Russian New Year, Russian Christmas and all the things that go with it. I wrote a piece about it for Russia Beyond The Headlines and it seems appropriate to reprint it here:
So, Is This Christmas?
“Is this a Christmas Tree, or a New Year’s Tree?” asked my five-year old daughter Velvet, as I struggled with a tangle of fairy lights.
“It’s both,” said HRH, my “Handsome Russian Husband,” who was lying contorted on the floor, trying to get the tree to stand up strait in its holder.
“Nastia says,” Velvet informed us, referencing her infallible best friend “that Santa Claus isn’t Santa Claus at all – he’s called Ded Moroz and he comes on New Year’s.”
“Tell Nastia,” I responded through gritted teeth, “that in our very fortunate family, Santa comes on December 24th, and then his cousin, Ded Moroz comes on New Year’s Eve.”
“Nastia says Christmas is on January 7th,” said Velvet, still confused.
“That’s true too,” said HRH, brushing pine needles off his hands.
“Why?” asked Velvet, and they both looked at me expectantly.
Christmas in our American-Russian family is a marathon, not a sprint. Since Velvet was born, HRH and I have worked hard – he writing checks, me sifting the dry ingredients -- to fuse the varying traditions of Russia and the West into our family celebrations. The result is a month-long slog, from December 15th, when my friend Gail guilts us all into buying tickets to the Moscow Oratorio’s rendition of Handel’s “Messiah,” through January 13th, or “Old New Year” in Russia, at which point, I am ready to lock Prince Albert, Charles Dickens, and Pyotor Ilyich Tchaikovsky into a small, windowless room and throw away the key.
Russian Christians adhere to the Eastern Orthodox calendar (see sidebar), which lags 13 days behind the modern day calendar. This discrepancy was corrected in 1918, by the fledgling Bolshevik regime, but Christmas never reverted to December 25th in Russia, because the Bolsheviks began a systematic campaign to phase out traditional religious holidays and replace them with Soviet ones. Christmas was shifted to New Year’s Eve. At the beginning, stringent measures were put in place to see off any holdover of the old days: Christmas trees, introduced to Russia by Tsar Peter The Great in the 17th Century, were banned in 1916 by the Holy Synod as too German. The Bolsheviks kept the tree ban in place. Stalin declared Ded Moroz “an ally of the priest and kulak,” and outlawed him from Russia.
“Like the Burgermeister Meisterburger outlawed Kris Kringle in ‘Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town?’” asked Velvet breathlessly, referring to the seminal 1970 animated American Christmas classic.
I cast a careful look at HRH who was now struggling with the star on the top of the tree, “Exactly like that,” I whispered.
But you can’t keep the likes of Ded Moroz down for long. In 1935 Pavel Postyshev, Stalin’s architect of the collectivization program, possibly concerned about his lasting legacy, published a letter in Pravda asking that “New Year’s Trees” be erected in Pioneer Palaces and that Ded Moroz and his granddaughter and helpmate Sneguritchka be allowed to return to the children of the Soviet Union on New Year’s Eve. Ded Moroz and the trees were rehabilitated in 1937. Although Christmas and other Orthodox holidays were reinstated on the Russian calendar in 1992, New Year’s Eve remains firmly entrenched as the primary holiday.
Although Christmas itself was banned, Russians recycled traditional pagan and Christmas traditions as a template for the New Year’s Customs. In Old Russia, when the first star appeared in the sky, symbolic of the Star of Bethlehem, families gathered to break their 40-day fast with a twelve course “Holy Supper,” featuring “kutya” or grain porridge sweetened with honey and dried fruit. From pagan times, this dish symbolized life, hope, sweetness, and blessings to the home. You can still find kutya on the tables of today’s Russian New Year’s celebrations, along with lavish zakuski (hors d’oeuvres.) In the Soviet Era, New Year’s always saw the arrival of rare tropical fruits such as tangerines, which for HRH is the smell of his childhood New Year’s. After the Holy Supper, the faithful in Old Russia returned to church for an All-Night Vigil. Today, Russians gather around their tables in front of the TV to greet, not the Redeemer of Mankind, but President Dmitry Medvedev, who will hoist a glass of champagne and wish everyone health and happiness for the coming year. Then fireworks will explode all over Russia and all the bells will peel, as Russians exchange three kisses and good wishes: “New Year, New Happiness, New Luck!”
Sidebar:
Why is Russian Christmas on January 7th?
Dates and holidays are often confusing in Russia because of the historical split between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches over the reforms to the Julian Calendar by Pope Gregory XII in 1582. Most of the world rushed to adopt what became known as “The Gregorian Calendar,” which introduced more effective leap years and more precisely calculated the length of the year not as 365.25 days, but rather 365.2425 days, a difference of 11 minutes. The Eastern Orthodox countries, however felt that the Julian calendar more accurately plotted the spring equinox and Easter, and refused to buy into the Gregorian reforms. If you think 11 minutes doesn’t make a difference: think again: over three centuries, as the Orthodox Christians doggedly stuck to the older, less accurate calendar introduced by Julius Caesar, a time lag developed. By 1918, when Lenin decreed that Russia should join the rest of the world, the lag was 13 days long: the most severe jet lag in the history of mankind. Today, the Eastern Orthodox Church still adheres to the Julian calendar, though it has indicated it is ready to make the shift in 2100. Orthodox Christmas is 13 days behind what Russians call “Catholic Christmas.” Russians, who believe that when it comes to holidays “more is more”, also celebrate “Old New Year” on January 13th as well as “New Year” and Orthodox Christmas on January 7th. To ensure the season is indeed jolly, Russians enjoy a ten-day national holiday from January 1 – 10th!
This piece first appeared in Russia Beyond The Headlines and The Washington Post on December 15, 2010 and a link to the original online version can be found here.
Hope you are having a good one! If you aren't, here is a nice tip: if you make Bloody Marys with Aquavit and Clamato instead of vodka and tomato juice, they are a.) much better and b.) cure the bite a lot better. Which is about all the wisdom I've gleaned over this holiday season.
What are your New Year's Resolutions? Be the first in 2011 to weigh in by hitting the comment button below.
I mentioned Bees Rees in my last post, that uncrowned queen of Moscow. She collected over 15,000 Russian Christmas/New Year's Tree ornaments which is outrageous. She used to send e mails out to get everyone to come and help her unpack them...and THEY DID. Oy-veh. I don't have as many as Bees, but I have some nice ones and here they are:
We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation, united by a common destiny on our land, asserting human rights and liberties, civil peace and accord, preserving the historic unity of the state, proceeding from the commonly recognized principles of equality and self-determination of the peoples honoring the memory of our ancestors, who have passed on to us love of and respect for our homeland and faith in good and justice, reviving the sovereign statehood of Russia and asserting its immutable democratic foundations, striving to secure the wellbeing and prosperity of Russia and proceeding from a sense of responsibility for our homeland before the present and future generations, and being aware of ourselves as part of the world community, hereby approve the Constitution of the Russian Federation.
~The Russian Constitution, The Preamble
Today is Constitution Day in Russia! On this day, December 12, 1993, the Constitution of the Russian Federation was adopted by a Referendum and has been the legal foundation for the country ever since.
It always makes me laugh when I listen to the Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin worshippers defend leaving Health Care the way it is by saying things like, “We don’t want no socialism like they have over in Russia.” They also say things like “Government, keep your hands off my Medicare,” but that is less germane to talking about Russia, which is, of course, a constitutional democracy, with elected officials who run the country. This always blows people away for some reason.
The current Russian Constitution is the second of the country’s turbulent history, and replaced the Soviet Constitution dating back to 1918. There was an attempt back in 1825 to get a Constitution, known as “The Decembrist Uprising,” in which a number of well-born nobles were upset when Alexander I died and named as his successor his younger brother Nicholas and not the elder, Constantine. Nicholas was known to be a conservative, while Constantine favored adopting measures to make Russia a less authoritarian country. Unbeknownst to the populace, Constantine had also renounced his claim to the throne when he made a morganatic marriage to a woman of common birth who did not meet the rigid criteria for Russian royal brides.
The nobles and officers leading the uprising rallied 3000 supporters near the building of the Russian Senate on December 14 (December 26 New Style) and called for “Constantine and a Constitution!” which in Russian sounds like “Constantin i Constitutsia,” and many of the regular soldiers thought that Constitutsia was Constantine’s morganatic wife. The rebellion was crushed and its leaders, many of whom were close personal friends of the poet Alexander Pushkin, were exiled to Siberia. Many of their wives bravely left St. Petersburg to accompany them into brutal years of depravity and primitive conditions. “The Decembrist Wives” as they were known, were much admired and set, if you don’t mind me mentioning it, the bar rather high for what is considered acceptable loyalty in a Russian wife.
To get back to Russia’s present day situation, however, the Constitution is doing very well. It consists of 9 Chapters, a preamble and concluding and transitional documents. All Russian presidents swear the oath of office by placing on hand on the Constitution and the original copy is kept in the Kremlin Library.
I thought it might be interesting for readers to skim a few highlights of the Russian Constitution. The good people at kremlin.ru and Bucknell University, who provide English translations of Russia’s Constitution, make this task easier.
For someone like me, Article 44 is the key to the whole document, and the one I have memorized by heart in Russian.
Article 44.
1.Everyone shall be guaranteed freedom of literary, artistic, scientific, intellectual and other types of creative activity and tuition. Intellectual property shall be protected by the law.
2.Everyone shall have the right to participation in cultural life, to the use of institutions of culture, and access to cultural values.
3.Everyone shall care for the preservation of the historic and cultural heritage and safeguard landmarks of history and culture.
What this means, Readers, is that I can take pictures wherever I like, and so can you. So the next time some lunatic security guard tries to stop you, just mention Article 44 of the Russian Constitution. You can also add that the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, a devoted shutterbug has said that people can take pictures wherever they like and, according to Article 80 he is the top dog:
Article 80.
4.The President of the Russian Federation shall be the head of state.
5.The President shall be the guarantor of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and of human and civil rights and freedoms. In accordance with the procedure established by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, he shall take measures to protect the sovereignty of the Russian Federation, its independence and state integrity, and ensure concerted functioning and interaction of all bodies of state power.
6.The President of the Russian Federation shall define the basic domestic and foreign policy guidelines of the state in accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation and federal laws.
7.The President of the Russian Federation as head of state shall represent the Russian Federation inside the country and in international relations.
Here is another one, I find interesting:
Article 38.
8.Motherhood and childhood, and the family shall be under state protection.
9.Care for children and their upbringing shall be the equal right and duty of the parents.
10.Employable children who have reached 18 years old shall care for their non-employable parents.
According to # 10, all children over the age of 18 are obliged to care for non-employable parents. I can’t think why this has not taken off in Russia, given its current demographic…I have to hope that, like the majority of Russian citizens, Babushka and Dedushka have not perused the Constitution to this level of detail. Yikes.
So, in closing, the next time you hear someone faff on about socialism and stuff in Russia, remind them that Russia is a constitutional democracy and has been for seventeen years.
Can I implore you once again to take a moment and vote for us? Dividing My Time has been nominated in two categories (Best Travel Blog and Best Humor Blog) in the 2010 Blogger's Choice Awards! If you enjoy Dividing My Time, please consider voting by clicking on the icons to the right of this column, or by following this easy link and this one too. It’s quick, easy, doesn’t cost anything, you don't have to use your own name and its really all I want for Christmas! Thank you!
What do you make of Russia’s Constitution? Did you know about it? Did you know about Constitution Day? Want to read more about recent Russian history? Try some posts like these:
I know…I know, trust the Russians to have their own Santa Claus. But since they have their own calendar, alphabet, and Olympics – why should Santa be any different.
Dyed Moroz lives further south than Santa – in Velikii Ustyug, the heart of Russia’s dairy belt along the Volga River. In medieval times, Velikii – or Great -- Ustyug was a principality of great importance, and a major trade hub. Today, it’s on the map as Dyed Moroz’s hometown, which was made official in 1999. I would love to see the legislation, wouldn’t you? Presumably, as a Russian citizen, Dyed Moroz votes for United Russia and, like all other Russians, is currently trying to come up with a name for Vladimir Putin’s new dog.
In appearance, Dyed Moroz is longer and leaner than Santa, more Slavic and more stern, no doubt because he is the elder of the two: Dyed Moroz is more than 2000 years old, while Santa Claus, who was born the Greek Nikolaos of Myra is only 1740 years old, or, as my friend Judy pointed out, perhaps much much younger – only 187, if you, like Judy, attribute Santa’s emergence as a brand from the publication of “The Night Before Christmas” in 1823. Not being the patron saint of sailors, thieves, merchants, archers and children, Dyed Moroz lacks the kind of infrastructure Santa has built up: he has no elves, no workshop, and no Mrs. Claus to help him out. He does have one helpmate – his granddaughter, Sneguritchka, or Snowflake, a classic Russian beauty, who is traditionally dressed in an ornate blue Russian sarafan. Together, they make personal appearances in the run up to New Year’s Eve to hand out presents, which means that children all over Russia actually get to meet the great man. I don’t know why they feel they can drop the veil like this, but it may have something to do with the fact that Dyed Moroz doesn’t have the kind of transport, which Santa does. There is no sleigh, no reindeer, and certainly no Rudolf to help guide the sleigh when the weather gets bad, as it so often does in Russia. “America,” Dyed Moroz must sigh, as all Russians do when contemplating the ease and comfort of our life compared to the hardships of life in Russia.
The lack of transport also accounts for the fact that Dyed Moroz runs 6 days behind Santa, coming, as he does, on December 31st rather than December 24th. This is a holdover from the Soviet period, when the Russians replaced the Christian Christmas with secular New Year’s. For a while, Stalin tried to even outlaw Dyed Moroz, declaring him in 1928 “an ally of the priest and kulak.” Certainly, there have been moments in Russia’s history (and there may well be more ahead) when the concept of “he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good,” might be less than a desirable state of affairs. But, even Stalin (the Burgermeister and Heatmiser of his day) can’t keep the likes of Dyed Moroz down for long. Dyed Moroz was rehabilitated in 1937 – though with one important wardrobe change: during the Soviet period, he and Sneguritchka wore blue fur trimmed outfits, as opposed to red so that Russian children would not confuse them with Santa Claus.
On November 18th, each town in Russia opens a ceremonial mailbox for Dyed Moroz, and he receives official (really – official) delegations from all over Russia. Instead of writing letters explaining that they’ve been nice, not naughty, and a lengthy list of Christmas wishes, Russian children wish Dyed Moroz a Happy Birthday, and then move on to the lengthy list of New Year’s Wishes!
So, if you are in Russia today, be sure to drop Dyed Moroz a line to wish him a very Happy Birthday!
The holiday season is upon us! Have you ever met Dyed Moroz and Sneguritchka? More importantly, how are you going to do your Thanksgiving turkey? Have you ever brined? Is Dr. Pepper a good brining agent? More importantly, do you have a gravy story? Do you have big fights about the gravy…I’d love to know about those for an upcoming column.
Let me know, won’t you, by hitting the comment button below and leaving me some ideas.
And when you’ve done that, stick around and enjoy a few more forays into Russian history and culture:
Today is Sberbank Workers Day! For the benefit of my readers who have not had the unforgettable experience of trying to pay your phone or utilities bill during a compressed lunch hour, Sberbank is the National Savings Bank of Russia. Next to the sweet spot between mattress and the box spring (which enjoys the only AAA rating in Russia) Sberbank is right up there in terms of reliability. The Sberbank we love to hate today has roots that go back to the founding of Gosbank, or The State Bank, on this day in 1841. Gosbank was established, as the Imperial Order written by Tsar Nicholas I stated, “for the purpose of providing a means for people of every rank to save in a reliable and profitable manner." The call for personal savings accounts was limited in the 1840s since the vast majority of Russian citizens were agricultural laborers, tied economically to the land through the system of serfdom. When the serfs were liberated in 1861, however, savings banks came into their own, as peasants flocked to the cities to seek more profitable employment in the growing number of factories and mills. By the 1880s, industrialization had reached a zenith, and Savings Banks had spread their network across Russia, opening up rural branches and offering telegraph services for remittance payments.
The Bolshevik Revolution, of course, changed forever the way Russians banked. All commercial banks were seized, and centralized. As the Soviet Union limped into the first decades of the 20th Century, famine was widespread and few citizens had money to bank. Barter was the most popular means of exchange, until the outbreak of World War II, when the savings banks came back into their own.
In the Cold War era, Soviet citizens banked with Gosbank, which was the only option available to them for making payments and keeping savings secure. In the mid 1980s and perestroika, the government, under Mikhail Gorbachev, launched a separate institution to deal with savings and loans for citizens, Sberbank.
In the rollercoaster ride of the wild ‘90s, Sberbank survived by conservative management, and the trust in its “Soviet” brand citizens retained in it. Sberbank offered lower interest rates than the less stable commercial banks popping up like mushrooms all over Russia, but it was considered safe, as well as enjoying the advantage of a strong regional network, and a virtual monopoly on servicing utilities (telephone, electricity, heat etc.) payments.
Which is where I come in.
I have shed a lot of tears in the Sberbank branches, and I personally would rather scrub toilets – lots and lots of not terribly clean toilets -- than ever have to fill in a Sberbank IZVISHENIYA again – just the word Izvisheniya makes me feel very tired and slightly sick to my stomach. This is the motherlode of unpleasant service in Russia. I daresay that one of Sberbank’s 251,208 employees in one of its 20,000 regional offices is capable of being nice, but I haven’t found them yet. The typical Sberbank employee one encounters is the kind of large Russian woman with purple hair called Olga something-or-other, who yells at you when you timidly approach the cage in which she works with your phone bill and cash.
The dreaded IZVISHENIYA: How you pay your utilities bills in Russia
I should not complain about this, since, of course, paying the utilities bills was long ago gently, but firmly, taken out of my hands and put in to the far more capable hands of HRH’s mother, Babushka. She very kindly does the leg work, which is great, but it is one of those things -- what do they call it – a double-edged sword. She sees how much electricity we use (and you will readily believe me when I say it is all the sauna), which is not like going through the underwear drawer or anything, but the problem is that, no sooner do I head over to Northampton, but she gets her legs under the kitchen table and starts to screw up all my domestic arrangements. She moans to Raisa, our cleaning lady heaping that special kind of Soviet guilt and class system stuff I can't begin to understand well, conveying the idea that Raisa shouldn’t use the dishwasher because it eats up so much energy (which costs pennies in the great scheme of things). So poor Raisa hand washes the Tupperware after its had frozen spaghetti sauce on it, which makes me say to her the next time I go to Moscow that of course all the Tup has to go through the dishwasher for hygenic reasons and then Raisa bursts into tears and we have to have a cup or six of tea and sort it out, and absolutely no fiction gets written that afternoon.
So maybe I should go back to paying the utility bills.
Perhaps I’ll go over the Sberbank and wish them a happy profpraznik and case the joint. Maybe they have streamlined the operations. I doubt it, but tell you what, you do the same, and let me know how that goes, by leaving a comment below.
How do you pay your phone bill? Is the procedure painful? Have you ever had to fill in a Sberbank izvicheniya? Do you agree with me, it’s the IPECAC of To-do list items?
Thank you for visiting today, which is also “Day of the Security Specialists” and you don’t want to miss that one.
After you’ve enjoyed that, come back and enjoy some more posts like this one:
Dividing My Time turns one today! I launched this blog one year ago with an inaugural post about envying all the smooth-haired authors on the book jackets who divided their time. In their case, of course, it’s like Oxford and London, or New York and Paris, or Cape Cod and something else. I think I must have the (very dubious) distinction of being the only aspiring writer to divide my time between Northampton and Moscow, but there it is, when life hands you beets, make some borscht.
And what could be a better way to celebrate this milestone than by celebrating it in tandem with Russia’s Policemen! Today marks the 40th anniversary since the creation of "Day of the Russian Militia" back in 1980, though of course, Russia’s police go back almost 300 years, to their founding by – you guessed it – Peter The Great in 1715. There have always been policemen in Russia, but, as with so many organizations, they were slightly re-organized in 1917 on November 10th, like three days after the Russian Revolution (which might have been a hint, although perhaps that is unfair: hindsight is of course always 20/20 vision.)
HRH was curiously absent all day yesterday. No calls, no SKYPE, and a few texts went unanswered. This always makes me slightly nervous, but when I went into my Top Secret File on Russian Holidays and looked ahead to see what The Stunt had in store for me, I knew immediately where he was, and drew a long and heartfelt breath of relief. No Oooh-Lah-Lah Strip Club last night for HRH. Clearly, he was out with his policemen friends, helping them get well fortified and lubricated with 18-year old Scotch in preparation for the rigors of the day ahead. HRH is a big fan of Policemen’s Day, and they like to start their holiday the night before. So, it is just as well I am in Northampton at the moment, where I recently had my own little encounter with the local constabulary.
I was on my way to my Writing Group, and, as usual, I had left early to get the plum parking spot at the top of the road, which runs perpendicular to our host’s road. I like to have the top spot since I’m still enough of an urban beast to feel slightly terrified walking down a dark street on my own, but truthfully, I can’t parallel park for love or money, so getting there early means I have time to wiggle the Subaru around before the other Subarus get there. I don’t like to be observed when trying to park, which is a phobia I developed when I lived on Leningradsky Pr-t and shared a courtyard parking space with the Metro Police. They used to love watching me try to back out of my woefully too small parking space in my very large Land Rover. They would stand around, spit, scratch their crotches and laugh at me. Sometimes, I would just put my head down on the steering wheel and howl until they went away, or HRH or Tolya-The-Driver came to rescue me.
So there I was, in Northampton, all snug up against the curb, rooting around in my bottomless tote bag for my flash drive on which I keep all my writing work, when a bright light flooded the window. I looked up into a 4-gazillion watt searchlight, aimed right at me from a Northampton Police cruiser.
“Oh #$%^&,” I thought, “I don’t have any cash.”
The officer got out of the car and crossed the street.
“Calm down,” I said to myself, “I'm probably just blocking a fire hydrant or something.”
“Yes,” said my Slavic alter-ego, “but you still don’t have any cash on you…you're gonna be in troooooooooble.”
I rolled down the window.
“Hi,” I said, “is there a problem?”
“Ma’am, are you okay?” asked the dead good-looking police officer in a concerned manner.
I was blind-sided. Policemen aren't supposed to be concerned, not in a sincere sort of way.
“I am…I’m fine,” I said, wondering if I should make a full disclosure about not really being able to parallel park. I wondered if he might share my concern about the social faux pas inherent in arriving too early for Writing Group. Russian police, I knew, didn't give a damn about that kind of thing, but Officer McDreamy looked like he might just be in a writing group of his own.
“Don’t be ludicrous,” said my alter ego, “like he cares.”
“Just wanted to be sure, you have a good evening now,” he said and got back into his cruiser.
I wanted to give him a bottle of like 80-year old scotch right there and then but, of course, they frown on that kind of thing in Northampton. So, I went home and wrote a check to the Policemen’s Fund. A large one.
Happy Policemen's Day to any of you still standing today! And to all of Noho's Finest for that matter!
First of all, heartfelt thanks for your loyal support which has got me through one year of blogging! As a readership, you number more than 35,000, which means a lot of you are keeping very quiet! I'd love to hear from you going into year 2, so take this opportunity to weigh in with a comment! If you were an early commenter on this blog and stopped, I wish you'd weigh in again!
I’ll bet you have a good policeman story – Russian or Northamptonite or wherever you do hail from! My good friend Mouse told me a funny one about Stockbridge, MA’s legendary Officer Oppenheimer, better known to his fans as “Officer Opie.” Opie, as the cognoscenti refer to him, is the anti-hero of Arlo Guthrie’s ballad “Alice’s Restaurant,” he who has “the twenty-seven 8” by 10” colored glossy photos with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.” After the film of “Alice’s Restaurant” came out with Opie in a cameo role as himself, he stopped calling Mouse’s mother, “Mrs. Miles” and would say, “Hey Flo!”
Got a story like that one? Let us know by hitting the comment button below and weighing in.
Or, stick around and read some other posts about law enforcement or me being reduced to tears in Russia, like these:
Today is Ground Forces day in Russia! Since 2006, the guys in the trenches are front and center each October 1st.
Not being hugely up on military tactics, I thought I would instead devote today’s post to the issue of mandatory military service in Russia, which is something I know a bit more about, primarily because most of my Russian friends are beginning to grapple with this issue as their children approach the age of 18. I say children – but of course I mean, their male children, since mandatory military service is only for men, not women. All Russian male citizens must serve in the army for 12 months sometime betwen the ages of 18 and 27, unless they have a legitimate reason not to. While changing one's gender might be seen as going to extremes to avoid conscription, this is Russia, and there are many things to keep the bands of military recruiters out on the streets, trying to round up all the available candidates.
Military service in Russia was recently reduced from two years to 12 months, but that hasn’t done much to swell the ranks. It remains, for many, a brutal first step in to the world of adulthood, with notoriously violent bullying and hazing, called dedovshchina (from the Russian word for Grandfather) of new conscripts by more seasoned soldiers. I can’t think the food is up to much either, so all in all, it isn’t an ideal “Be All That You Can Be,” situation. Russia is also actively engaged in military conflict down in the south of the country, so, for those who are not bullied to death, there is a very real concern that they might have to deploy to an active combat zone.
If you ask a 40-something woman what her 18-year old son is up to, she might well respond, “Oh, he’s hiding from the army.” This might well be accompanied by either a welling up of tears in her eyes (in which case, get ready to be asked for a loan) or a disgusted “tsk-tsk” noise and a Slavic shrug. Both mean that the golden boy in question has failed to line of any of the acceptable legal exemptions from mandatory military service. These are, in order of social acceptability: university or graduate education, which entitles you to either postpone your tour of duty, or take the option of becoming an officer for two years, which used to be a fast-track method to securing the lowest rung on the property ladder, but is less so today. If you have two or more children (and don’t laugh this off: the winters are very long, and cold and dark in a lot of Russia) this constitutes a permanent exemption. The most popular excuse, however, and the one which is easiest to arrange if the recruit in question is not the brightest bulb on the sun tanning bed, is to obtain a medical exemption. This is where the loan your 40-something friend will be asking for comes in. If there is actually nothing wrong with you, then you have to purchase an ailment. Doctor’s certificates testifying to a medical condition making it impossible to serve can be obtained for roughly $5,000.
A fourth option exists for those who cannot scrape together the money for a fake student ID or a medical certificate, and that is to join the murky ranks of the semi-legal strata of Russian society. In the early days of perestroika, many parents sequestered their military-aged sons at remote dachas, or sent them in to the interior regions of Russia to hide out on farms or with distant cousins. This is a dismal existence: always looking over your shoulder on public transportation to avoid detection, never being able to stay at your home address, many legitimate forms of work unavailable to you because you haven't completed your military service.
Russia’s elite make sure their children are either full time students, or that they reside abroad at the family’s house in Kensington. And, I can’t say I blame them. I think if I had a son, I would do everything I could to keep him out of mandatory military service.
HRH, however, disagrees with me – violently. He says the whole system means D students and petty criminals staff the Army at the lowest levels. He thinks everyone should serve (which he did, from the ages of 17 - 24 first as a military cadet, and later as a serving officer). So, it is a good thing we only have a daughter (though Velvet would love to be an Hussar). HRH disapproves of hiding from the Army. He thinks it is a sissy sort of a thing to do, and he gets very exasperated when he hears about people who are actively engaged in it. Tolya, our driver, who did his 2 years, agrees: “Everyone should serve,” he says simply, “well, unless they are unable, in which case, they shouldn't. But if you can...you should. It makes a man out of you.”
Happy Ground Forces Day to all of Russia’s boys currently in the process of becoming men.
I do not want to finish this post without mentioning the excellent organizations of soldiers' mothers who are lobbying to improve conditions for military conscripts in Russia. The Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia does excellent work, and you can read more about another group in an excellent article by Tatianna Shabaeva here.
What is your take on Russia’s mandatory military service? Are you a veteran of military service, or are you perhaps serving at the moment? What’s it like? Leave me a comment and let me know. Thank you very much for stopping by and reading this post. I have some other posts about other branches of Russia’s military you might enjoy:
The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.
~Dave Barry
Today is Internet Day in Russia! Great timing for Russia’s # 1 fan of Cyberspace, Blogger-in-chief (as he is known) President Dmitry Medvedev (http://twitter.com/KremlinRussia_E) who must feel like kicking back after a week spent kicking some (albeit long distance) ass, firing Moscow’s pint sized mayor, Yuri “The Long Armed” Luzhkov. And not before time either. Go Dmitry, Go!
I’m currently doing some half-hearted research on the concept of The Great Russian Soul at the moment for my too much-neglected book, and one of the things that keeps cropping up is Russia’s sense of a special mission to promote its Russianness within the global community. This means they always have to be just that little bit different about every single little thing. Like Christmas. And Internet Day: although the rest of the world celebrates the Vatican-sanctioned World Day for the Internet (pronounced in Russian “Interrrrrrrrr-nyet”) on April 4th, the day of the ascension of St. Isidore of Seville (560-636 CE), (who is the current patron saint of the Internet), in Russia, we celebrate it today because some IT guys (called “Eye-tea-shniki”) decided we should. Instead of Facebook (pronounced in Russia “feyssss-buk”) Russians have a total prototype called “V Kontakte,” which means “In contact.” There are also lots of copycat retail sites such as ozon.ru, which sells books and if you squint looks just like amazon.com. Last Spring, there was a huge hue and cry about the introduction of a Russian language domain, so that the endings read “.rf” rather than the more Latinized “.ru.” This was a pet Kremlin project and will, I feel sure, play a big part in ushering in total world domination. Any day now.
Living in Russia, I count my cyber blessings daily. I am old enough, and enough of a veteran of life in Russia to remember what life was like before the internet: endless tries to get a crackly international line on the telephone, no access to print media in English, no iTunes downloads of “Big Love” or “Mad Men,” and no Google or Wikipedia. Awful…
According to my uber-reliable cyber buddy, Russian Sphinx, only 32.2% of Russians use the Internet, which seems woefully little for a country that has an almost monopolistic lock up on the cyber bride/dating concession. This may be because the demographics of Russia lean heavily towards the over 70-s, who have not embraced the new technology with open arms. This generalization, however, does not include HRH’s father, Dedushka, who is very much on-line. All the time. Great SKYPEr, Dedushka, as I have mentioned before.
Still, there is no lack of interest in Russia out there in cyber space, and this is brought home to me each and every day as I spend way too much time trawling my Feedjit roll to see who is visiting my blog, how they came to it, and what they are looking for. The single biggest reason people come are searches (mostly from New Zealand or Australia) for recipes for Beef Stroganoff, but there are other reasons too. Some particularly intriguing ones follow:
Happy Internet day to all of Russia’s bloggers, programmers, web site builders, on-line retailers, and, of course, to cyber-stud, President Medvedev ! Who is STILL not following me on Twitter. Which, frankly speaking, hurts my feelings.
Are you old enough to remember the pre-Internet days? What are the things you love or hate about the Internet? What is your take on the sushi with Portia and Daniel…I fear it is perhaps not rated-PG. Thoughts?
Thanks for stopping by Dividing My Time. If you liked this post, try some more like it:
Today marks the sixth anniversary of what many people call Russia’s 9/11: the terrible three-day hostage crisis at School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetian. Armed militants from Ingushetia and Chechnya captured over 1,100 parents and children inside the school building, holding them for three days in unbearably hot conditions with little food or water until Russian special forces stormed the school. Over 300 people were killed. Hundreds more were wounded and a school, a town, and a country were traumatized.
Today is the Day of Russia’s Guards Regiments! Today’s holiday is another one brought to us by that triumvirate of Russian leaders: Peter The Great, Josef Stalin, and Vladimir Putin, and celebrates the elite, or “crack” regiments who have earned the title “Guards” through exceptional achievement, bravery, and military prowess. Today marks the 10th anniversary of the holiday’s celebration in today’s Russia, but the history of the Guards dates back to 1687.
Although crowned Tsar in 1672 as a child, together with his mentally deficient half-brother Ivan V, Peter The Great spent most of his childhood outside of Moscow and away from the intrigues of the Kremlin. In the peaceful riverside villages of Preobrazhenky and Semyonovsky, energetic Peter organized the local boys into playing soldiers: games which became more complicated as the years went by, until, by 1689 the toy regiments constituted sufficient military might to play a major part in Peter’s successful efforts to wrest power from his half sister, the Regent Sophia. Peter set about a complete transformation of Russia’s armed forces, and designated the loyal companions of his youth as the two elite “Guards,” regiments: The Preobrazhenky and Semenovsky. These regiments remained the pinnacle of aristocratic military service until 1917, personally attached to the Tsar, and often under his personal command. The Guards’ regiments represented a significant political force, and their backing of a young German princess married to the lackluster and insane Peter III would play a major role in the ultimate coronation of Catherine II, or Catherine The Great. Peter insisted in working his own way up from a lowly recruit to the Colonel of the Regiment: a burden all other Romanov men would be saddled with in the years to come.
The glory and panache of the Guards’ disappeared in the defeat of the White Army in the Civil War of 1918, and by 1920, most former Guardsmen were either teaching riding in Central Park or driving cabs in Paris. It would take World War II to revive the idea of designating a “Guards” regiment. Stalin designated Guards status for exceptional bravery and military success on a few rifle divisions, artillery divisions, aircraft, tank regiments, and navel warships, cruisers and destroyers. At the end of the war, however, these Guards divisions were dismissed and the privileges and patronage of the Head of State were not extended into peacetime.
Fast forward to the Putin era, and the Guards are brought out of retirement, dusted off, and put to work again for the greater glory of Russia’s new empire: along with double-headed eagles, the orthodox church, money, and good old Russian excess.
Today the Guards’ Regiments, under the direct command of the Head of State, Dmitry Medvedev include the Kantimirovsky Armored Division, the Tamanskaya Motorized Rifle Division, The Carpathian-Berlin Motorized Rifle Division, the Sevastopol Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, as well as Air Force Bases and Naval Ships.
Congratulations to all of Russia’s elite Guards Regiments!
I’m indebted to the very informative web portal www.arms.expo.ru for details on the modern Guards divisions.
About the photo: I took this photo a few years ago at the inaugural "Changing of the Guard" in Cathedral Square in the Moscow Kremlin. Although these soldiers do actually serve in Russia's military, I've not been able to confirm if they are actually "Guards" or if they are, like the soldiers who stand guard at the Eternal Flame, part of "The President's Regiment." If any readers know, please pop me a note in the form of a comment: it would be great to get some more information to make this post complete!
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Dear Readers:
Had you heard of the toy army of Peter The Great? Does it make you think you might want to pay more attention to what your children are actually up to in the sandbox? Thank you for stopping by on this very festive and colorful profpraznik! Stick around and enjoy some more posts like this one:
Today is another of Russia’s fifteen Days of Military Glory or День воинской славы России. These are key military victories from 1242 – 1945 which, according to the 1995 legislation of the Federal Duma of Russia “played a pivotal role in the history of Russia’s history, and in which Russia’s forces earned themselves the honor and respect of their contemporaries, and the grateful memory of those who came after them.” We have visited a few, such as Victory Day and the Battle of Poltava, and we’ll get to more as we slog through the Year of Living Russian Holidays.
The Battle of Hanko Peninsula is known in Russia as “Gangut” since there isn’t an “H” in Russian. It is helpful to know this, so as to not appear as if you’ve lived your life in a remote Sierra Leonese village if a Russian mentions someone uber famous such as Adolf Gitler, the head of the Nazi party, or Gamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who features in Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name, or, if you are under twenty-five, Gryffendor’s Quidditch Seeker, Garri Potter, and his good buddy Germione (pronounced Ger-mee-own-eh) Grandzher. You don’t want to be caught in that trap.
The Battle of Hanko Peninsula is Russia’s first major naval battle, fought during the Great Northern War in 1714 against the Swedes, with Peter The Great pitting his new navy against the much larger, and more experienced Swedish fleet of Emporer Charles XII, in an effort to secure sea access to the Russian forces in Finland. Admiral Apraksin made an initial attempt to open the lines, but was pushed to the other side of the peninsula by the strong Swedish fleet. Apraksin then sent an urgent message to Peter to come and command the troops himself, and it should come as no surprise that Peter did not have to be asked twice.
You have to hand it to the Russians, sometimes. Full marks for not giving up, where others might. In attempting to break through the Swedish lines, the Russians decided to drag their galleys across the peninsula on land, which can’t have been a walk in the park. When the Swedes found out, they deployed a detachment of eleven ships, including the aptly named flagship “Elefant.” The Russian ships were much smaller, and proved easier to handle in the calm weather which prevailed all day on August 8th and were all able to break through the Swedish lines by the early hours of August 9th, according to Apraksin’s orders. Once through the lines, the substantially larger Russian force was easily able to surround the cumbersome Swedish fleet and ultimately capture them.
Gangut was the first naval victory for Russia’s nascent naval forces, and the gains in Finland remained in Russian hands until the end of the war in 1721. In commemoration of this victory, the Russian Navy maintains, at all times, one active battleship or vessel, which is called “The Gangut.”
Congratulations to all Russia’s sailors and naval officers!
Do you know which are the other twelve Days of Military Glory? Can you guess? Here is a subtle hint for one of them: it’s a battle “on the rocks.” Stay tuned for that and other important professional holidays coming right up!
Hungry for more tales of Russia’s navy or Peter The Great? We have plenty! Like these:
Today is another day to lock up your daughters, and certainly to wear protective footgear around fountains to avoid a huge amount of broken glass! It’s Paratroopers' Day, and this year marks the 80th anniversary from the first jump of the first unit of twelve paratroopers in Voronezh. Like the Border Guards, the Paratroopers take their holiday very seriously, and hold informal reunions across Russia, generally centered at the city’s major fountain, and involving a certain amount of liquid spirits. This year, I decided to go along and join them.
HRH was a little hesitant, as he always is about me venturing into this kind of scenario, and told me to keep in touch on the phone. After four hours in Gorky Park, I dialed his number.
“This is the best holiday of them all!” I gushed, “I’ve had three marriage proposals, ten invitations to go for a beer, and two guys asked me to swim with them.”
“Great,” he said, “what time is dinner?”
Pictures are not always worth a thousand words, but I think, in this case, they might be!
Congratulations to all the paratroopers of Russia! You guys sure know how to put on a great party!
Last Word from a kiosk near Gorky Park: "Beer not sold from 9:00 am to 10:00 pm"
If you want to get there fast, take a plane. If you want to get there on time, take the train.
~ Popular saying in Russia
Today is the day of the Railway Workers in Russia! This is one of my favorite professions, and over 1 million employees of Russian Railways, Inc will be celebrating today, so if you happen to be on a train today, be sure to wish anyone working a very happy profpraznik.
Railway workers’ day is one of the oldest professional holidays celebrated in Russia, though it has taken some shifting to get into its current gauge of the first Sunday in August. The holiday was first inaugurated in 1896 by order of Tsar Nicholas II during the active construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the date chosen was June 25th, the birthday of Nicholas’s Great-Grandfather, Tsar Nicholas I (1825- 1855) who oversaw and encouraged the construction of Russia’s first railway in 1837. The holiday was celebrated until 1917, and then dropped until July 28, 1936 and later moved to the first Sunday in August.
Many of the enduring images of Russia which drew me to the country have to do with the railways: Yuri Zhivago’s epic trip across civil-war torn Russia, Anna Karenina (of course), John Reed, Lenin in the sealed train, the Finland Station, and Paul Theroux’s hysterical account of his Trans-Siberian trip with his grumpy Yugoslavian wife, Wanda. When I worked as a tour guide in Russia, leaving at midnight on the Red Arrow for weekly overnight trip between Moscow and St. Petersburg was always a highlight: the chaos of the station, the chimes announcing the departure, the sweet tea served in old-fashioned metal tea glass holders, called podstakanitchki, and the gentle sway of the rails rocking me to sleep. Sea travel is my favorite way to go anywhere, but the railways are right up there.
The Trans-Siberian From Moscow - Vladivostok 1990
Twice, I traveled to Siberia to ride on portions of the famous Trans-Siberian railway, and I hope to do the whole trip someday, though perhaps not with a group of tourists: I’m still getting over having to explain to a woman from New York that the train did not offer pedicures (although this is a fabulous idea…because the days are very very very long and ever so slightly monotonous.)
Nicholas I of Russia: The Railway Tsar
The introduction of railway travel and cargo had a lasting effect on Russia in the 19th Century, bolstering the rapid industrialization of the late 19th Century, and transporting peasants from the countryside to join the swelling ranks of the proletariat. It was Austrian Franz Anton von Gerstner who first lobbied Tsar Nicholas in 1836 with a comprehensive plan to introduce the railroad to Russia, arguing, correctly, that railway travel was far more efficient than the river systems, which froze for half of the year in Central and Northern Russia, or the roads, which were choppy at the best of times. With classic Teutonic persistence, von Gerstner waded patiently through the mire of the Tsar’s bureaucracy: sitting in endless committee meetings, re-submitting plans, debating with the strong canal faction, and lobbying for support and investment from Russia’s chrysalis merchant classes. Von Gerstner’s patience paid off, and on October 30, 1837, the Tsarskoye Selo – Saint Petersburg Railway line was officially opened, linking the Imperial Russian Capital, with the summer residences of the Tsar and nobility.
My favorite anecdote about the railway line between Moscow and Saint Petersburg (inaugurated in 1851), is that Nicholas I, exasperated by the haggling of the engineers as to where to lay the tracks, famously took a ruler, slapped it down on the map of Russia, and impatiently drew a straight line between the two capitals, saying “Put it there!” Some tour guides embellish this refreshing story with the notion that Tsar accidently drew around his own finger, causing a bend in the line around Novgorod, but the line was actually perfectly straight.
Today, Russia’s railway is the second largest network in the world (after the US), with over 85,000 kilometers of tack. The Railway accounts for 2.5% of GDP, moving 1.1 billion passengers per year and 1.1 billion tons of freight (43% of the country’s entire freight capacity). Russian Railways Inc. is the fourth largest company in Russia, employing over 1 million people. The Trans-Siberian railway remains the world’s longest single uninterrupted railway track.
In closing, let’s wish the Russian Railway workers prosperity and good luck in the coming years! Really.
I am indebted to Russian Railways Inc.s very helpful and informative website for current railway statistics.
I researched the history of the development of the railway in Russia with the invaluable help of two sources:
Kevin Fink. (1991) "The Beginnings of Railways in Russia"
Haywood, Richard Mowbray. (1969) The beginnings of railways development in russia in the reign of Nicholas I, 1835 - 1842.
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Ahoy there Readers!
Are you a railway fanatic? There usually is one in every family. Do you know a railway worker? If you do, be sure to give them a big hug today! Or, you can leave them a note on this blog, I’ll see that they get it. Hope you enjoyed today’s installment, and if you liked this post and would like to read more about some of Russia’s history and industry, try posts like these:
“For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men.”
~ Ambassadors of Grand Prince Vladimir to Greece as told in The Primary Chronicle,
Today, Russia inaugurated a new public holiday: commemorating the day in the 10th Century when Prince Vladimir of Kiev baptized the Russian people into the Greek Orthodox Church.
Vladimir’s decision to convert earned him the title “Apostolic” or “Equal to the Apostles,” but in truth, his motives in joining one of the major world religions seem to have been as much political and strategic as spiritual. In his choice of Eastern Orthodoxy, Vladimir set a cultural course for Russia, with profound political and geographic implications, which resonate today.
Vladimir was a pagan prince, the youngest – by some accounts the bastard -- son of the warrior Prince Sviatoslav: a ruler who spent his early reign consolidating Kiev as the center of power, by exploiting the petty feuds among the minor Varangian (Viking) princes. He spent the latter half sparring with the Byzantine Greeks in the Crimea, achieving an uneasy peace by his death in 972. Vladimir, for his part, recognized the need to create better ties with the powerful nations to the west and the south, and shrewdly saw the advantages a common religious culture offered. His choice was between the four majors: Judaism, Islam, Western Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Judaism seems to have been rejected immediately (plus ca change…) because it was the religion of the enemy Khazars, and so Vladimir dispatched ambassadors to the capitals of the three remaining religions to see for themselves and not rely on the foreign emissaries.
What happened next depends on who is telling the story. Anecdotal Russian history says Vladimir was leaning towards Islam, despite the reports that, “there is no happiness among them, but instead only sorrow and a dreadful stench;” but when the Ambassadors revealed the teetotaler clause in the fine print of the Koran, Vladimir gravely shook his head, proclaiming, “Drink is the great joy of the Russian people,” and rejected it outright.
The Ambassadors from the “Germans” (the Holy Roman Empire) reported that they saw “…them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we beheld no glory there.”
It was the Greeks, rolling out the smells and bells as only they could, who really blew the ambassadors away. They walked into the Cathedral of St. Sofia in Constantinople and were rendered speechless. “…We knew not,” they reported to Vladimir, “whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men…”
Vladimir, who was an excellent PR person (today, perhaps not un-coincidently, is also the Day of the PR Specialists) and asked his Ambassadors again and again what they thought he should choose, and they, being good Russian bureaucrats, responded again and again that, really, they couldn’t say, that it was up to him. Vladimir, already leaning in the direction of Byzantium, decided to shelve the decision, until he could seal the deal with some military action. He laid siege to the Byzantine stronghold of Kherson in the Crimea, and achieved eventual victory by cutting off their water supply.
In negotiating with Emperor Basil, Vladimir revealed his hand: like another Vladimir approximately 1,012 later, he wanted a seat at the A-list table of nations. For Prince Vladimir, this was represented, not by the G-8, but by marrying the Emperor’s sister, Princess Anna, who was “born in the purple.” In exchange for this, suggested Vladimir, he might – just might – be willing to consider becoming a Christian.
The Primary Chronicle suggests that Princess Anna thought this was just about the worst idea she’d ever heard, but she dutifully loaded up her bibles, rounded up her clergymen and set out – as a lamb to the slaughter – to baptize Vladimir, and then marry him. Upon reaching Vladimir, she found him suffering from a disease of the eyes, which had rendered him blind. She insisted on baptizing him immediately in the Church of St. Basil at Kherson, and immediately his sight was restored. Vladimir claimed, “I have now perceived the one true God.” And he adopted the name of Basil as a complement to both the church and the Emperor. He married the Princess, and, it is assumed, they lived pretty much happily ever after.
Vladimir set the tone for future rulers of Russia by forcing cultural change by means of threats of “risking your prince’s displeasure,” and just as beards came off for Peter The Great, mass baptisms took place at a steady clip back in Kiev.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Congratulations to all Russian Orthodox Christians on the Day of Baptism of Prince Vladimir!
Direct quotes from "Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales," edited by Serge A. Zenovsky
Icon: Baptism of Russ by Monk Zenon, 1988 reproduced in "Russian Orthdodox Church," edited by B. Karpov and I. Ulyanova, 1990.
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Dear Reader:
In honor of the new holiday, I visited Trinity St. Sergius Monastery, one of the most sacred religious complexes in Russia. Here are some pictures from that visit:
…there is no good emitting smoke till you have made it into fire.
~Thomas Carlyle
Today marks the founding of the State Fire Inspectorate, which could be confusing to regular readers of Dividing My Time, who will recall that we have already celebrated Day of the Firefighters on April 30th, the day upon which in 1649, Tsar Alexei (Peter The Great’s Dad) founded the first firefighting brigade. Today, on the other hand, marks the day in 1927 when the Council of People’s Commissars (I love being able to slot that in) signed new legislation overseeing fire control in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the precursor of the USSR.
And I might leave it there except for the fact that fire is on my mind this week: the peat bogs outside Moscow are burning, spreading their acrid, foul-smelling smoke into the city, visibility is severely impaired and the sticky soot is everywhere. People who live in affected areas complain of itchy eyes and trouble breathing. The peat bogs are literally burning under ground, and attempts to put out the fires by dousing them with water are made more difficult by the intense heat we’ve been experiencing for the last two weeks – daytime temperatures of over 95 degrees F.
You never think of peat and Russia in the same thought, until these fires get going. Those who remember the particularly bad smoke from 2002 recognized the smell instantaneously. The upside is, I now have an olfactory understanding of what J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor must smell like.
My heart goes out to the fire fighters, and all those trying to alleviate the discomfort the heat and the smoke is providing to people most affected by it. It’s no fun…
Have you experienced the peat smoke, or something similar to it? Let us know by leaving a comment below. Thanks so much for stopping by today. If you are looking for a post with a little more meat (literally) on it, try one – or all – of these:
Today is the birthday of the Naval Aviation of Russia’s Naval Fleet! On this day (also Velvet’s birthday) in 1916, four Imperial Russian M-9 fighter planes engaged in a dogfight with German aircraft over the Baltic Sea, and won!
In the years that followed the Russian Revolution and the massive push towards building a viable military industrial complex, the Soviet Union became a leader in building and piloting naval aircraft. During World War II, the Soviet Naval pilots went on more than 350 000 sorties, destroyed 835 enemy ships as well as 5 500 Nazi airplanes, and many other strategic land-based targets.
Which is where, actually, I will stop, because that’s not what I want to talk about today: I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, and what with the spy thing going on, one don’t want to delve too deeply into this kind of research, does one? Suffice it to say that there are all kinds of weighty tomes on this subject, as well as the fantastic Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow if you want to pursue it in more detail. You can also read about the history of Naval Aviation in Russia here.
What I thought I’d do today is tell the story of how I met HRH, since it actually does have something to do with Naval Aviation. Almost everyone I meet asks me how I met my Russian husband, so I can now hand them a card with the blog address and direct them here, which would be great for traffic, I suppose (though it won’t be able to compete with the Beef Stroganoff enthusiasts.) I have to make a brief note to say that I’m inspired by my fellow blogger Jocelyn’s (Speaking Of China) very readable installments about meeting and falling in love with her Chinese boyfriend, which I highly recommend.
In 1991 (before the first coup) HRH and I were not living lives that were destined or designed to intersect. I was traveling the world as a free-lance tour guide and he was settling down to life in a military dormitory as a young 2nd Lieutenant in the Red Army. But, we did meet, thanks to a series of random factors, and once we did, despite the difficulties – logistical and otherwise – we were pretty much stuck on one another, and still are. I needed a train ticket from Moscow to what was then called Leningrad and today is called Saint Petersburg: I was planning something very bold, slightly outrageous, and possibly ill-advised: after a two wink stint working on a trade show in Moscow, I was going to borrow a friend’s flat in Leningrad for a week, none of which was not allowed by the tourism regulations of the time, and is actually still sort of uphill work.
“I need a train ticket,” I said to my friend Anatoly, an Arabic-speaking guide with Syrian groups, who spent most of his days flat on his back on the couches of the National Tourist Company’s Office in our base hotel, sleeping off a long night.
“Ah,” he said, cottoning on immediately. “That’s not me…its Lyosha who has those contacts,” he gestured towards his fellow Arabic-speaking guide who was taking his turn on the sofa. “You ask Lyosha when he wakes up.”
Lyosha, once he’d procured a strong cup of coffee proved efficient. He told me to leave the ticket issue with him, and also invited me to his birthday party the following week at his flat, which he warned me was a little bit out of the way, but accessible by taxi.
When the night of the birthday party rolled around, I was all in. It was hot, and humid and the day had been a long one: managing, as my boss Jack would have said, the expectations of a very difficult executive. I was contemplating bribing the bartender for a bag of ice and repairing to my hotel room for an early night. But, the thought of letting Lyosha down, that stalwart comrade of the road, who had been so helpful about the train ticket prompted me to take a shower, stash the bottle of scotch I’d purchased at the dollar store into my innocuous back pack and sally forth to find a taxi to take me to the wrong end of the ominous sounding “Highway of the Enthusiasts.”
The taxi driver and I had a spirited haggle about the price, which I finally got down to a little more than what a Russian would have paid, thanks to an accent which was more Yugoslavian than Anglo-Saxon: a ruse I kept up throughout the whole journey through the city: past the monumental post-war Stalin buildings, which morphed into the monotonous and grimy pre-fab housing projects of the 70s.
Most everyone was drunk when I finally got to Lyosha’s apartment. Really, really, drunk, crowded around a small table laden with food and sticky bottles.
“I told the driver I was a Yugoslavian, and only paid 30 rubles,” I informed Anatoly proudly as I squeezed into a space between him and a girl called Lena.
“You are amazing,” slurred Anatoly, “A Yugoslavian…brilliant.” He made brief introductions of the other people around the table: Lyosha’s brothers, their girlfriends, some colleagues, and then the man sitting across the table, who appeared to be the only other person in the room except for myself capable of chewing gum and walking a strait line. Smashing looking, I thought, and regarding me with a certain amount of interest.
“And he is the guy who actually got you the ticket,” said Anatoly.
“Oh,” I said, “thanks so much. Do you work at the train station?”
“Sort of,” he said.
And here is where the naval aviation stuff comes in. There was a badly dubbed version of “Top Gun” on the TV – which is not the sort of thing you would see in this day and age of repackaged patriotic xenophobia, but back then they couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Everyone else went in different directions to either pass out or pair up, leaving the smashing looking guy and myself. He opened one of the remaining bottles of sweet Russian champagne and sat down next to me to watch it.
“Those aren’t our pilots,” he said presently as Tom Cruise was getting aerodynamically haggled by what the film called “The MIGs.” If you’ve seen the film (and HRH and do watch it every year on the anniversary of this particular evening) you’ll recall that the MIG pilots’ faces are fully covered with ever-so-slightly sinister headgear.
“Aren’t they?” I asked, not caring one way or another, just hoping he’d stay right where he was.
“Those are our planes, certainly,” he explained, “but not our pilots.”
“Oh.” I said, for someone who worked at a railway station, he seemed to know a lot about naval aviation, and I said as much.
“I’m a military officer,” he said, looking at the bottle of champagne to see if I’d had too much.
“I see.” I said as we watched Tom take out the MIG.
“Our planes,” he said again, “but not our pilots.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, wondering where military officers lived and worked.
“But, you know that,” he said, looking confused. “You’re from Yugoslavia…you have MIGs.”
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
~ Herodotus (I know… I was surprised too)
Today we celebrate Russia’s postal system…or shall we say the potential that it represents?
A lawyer-type classmate of my sister’s (who I suspect is firing on a few too many cylinders) was recently posted to Russia and sent in some impressions of the country to his friends and colleagues. Among these, he confessed to being really taken aback that a letter posted to him from Western Europe took almost 21 days to reach him in Moscow.
Myself, I was astonished that no one at his fancy-schmansy legal outfit had seen fit to warn him that, along with trolleybuses and the 10 pm evening news on TV, foreigners (and quite a few Russians) just ignore the postal system here. Not in any kind of morally outraged, angst-fueled boycott or anything, but rather as something we’ve given up long ago as antiquated, inefficient, and irrelevant. As a recent article in The Moscow Times pointed out, if you want something in Russia, you need to hand-carry it in. An example: I forgot my battery charger for my digital camera in the US when I came over a few weeks ago. The first thing I did was to send out a note on Facebook to figure out which of my friends was next coming over from the US to Russia, and then asked a neighbor to send her the battery. I’ll have it next week. It did not occur to me to ask my neighbor to post it to Russia, and, as I’m on an austerity budget, there is no way I could afford the cost (four figures) of having it shipped via DHL, FedEx or UPS.
“I can always tell when you are coming home,” says my mother, “when the UPS man comes three times a day.” And so he does, along with Chet the Mailman, and the tough cookie FedEx woman, bringing clothing, and books, and sheets, and towels and obscure pieces of kitchen equipment, and label maker tape and all kinds of things you can’t easily or cheaply access in Russia. Then, I pack them in my TUMI bags and head over to Russia.
Such as it is, then, Russia’s postal service was founded more than 300 years ago by…guess whom? Peter The Great, of course! In 1693, Peter ordered the first regular postal service to support (of course) the naval shipyard at Archangelsk, and the State Duma inaugurated the Day of the Postal Service in 1994.
About three years ago, I began to get a whiff of what seemed to me to be a concerted effort by the Russian Government to beef up the post office service. It was almost as if someone at the top had seen that cheesy film with Kevin Costner “The Postman” (because they don’t strike me as the types to curl up with Il Postino) and said “First tier nations have a decent postal service… do something about it!”
Here were the hints: Andrei Kazmin, (who looks more like a rodent than any of the other oligarchs) the former head of Sberbank (the National Savings Bank) was put in charge of the Post Office, suggesting that either he had really screwed up or reform might be in the wind. Next, you started to see commercials on television for the Russian Postal Service: wildly improbable, slightly unfocused scenes of sun-drenched (so likely) kitchens and fit and happy families overjoyed to be receiving newspapers, letters, cards, parcels from a jolly Slavic version of Chet The Mailman who they just let in their back door, which, needless to say, is the kind of thing that happens every day in Russia. It was clearly a PR campaign, because, of course, the Russian Postal Service doesn’t compete directly with anyone. About this time, I got into it, and wrote a column about how easy it was to walk in and buy post cards and stamps, encouraging a very skeptical HRH and his parents to send Velvet some mail at boarding school. I’m afraid that they’ve been proven right: Mr. Kazmin has stepped down and the Gorgans who run the post office have gone back to snapping your head off when you ask for international post card stamps.
If you ask me (and no one ever ever ever does) if Dmitry Medvedev is really serious about beefing up Russia’s economy, he ought to put Skolkovo on the back burner and beef up the catalog mail order business: I know for a fact that Russians are wild for LL Bean, Lands End, Eddie Bauer, Hannah Andersson, Eileen Fisher and that ilk. I know because I’ve spent the last 17 years lugging that kind of stuff over here, which I would love to stop doing someday.
Compare Russia and the US on post office statistics:
In 2009, the USPS handled 177 billion pieces of mail, compared to Russia’s 1.01 billion. The Russian Postal Service employs 390,000 people, and the USPS 596,000. Russia uses 450 postal vans, 17,000 vehicles and more than 360 flights, whereas the USPS deploys 218, 684 vehicles.
And, as Barack Obama will tell you, USPS is hurting.
What do you think about the postal service where you live? Is it efficient, or are you outraged by it? Have you had any experience with Russia’s postal system, or did you sensibly just give that one a miss? Thank you, as ever, for joining me on this romp through Russia’s professional holidays. If you found the state Russia’s postal system depressing, perhaps some more upbeat posts are in order. Try these:
“If I say, Battle of Poltava to you, what immediately springs to mind?” I asked HRH. It’s been very hot lately, and I don’t do well in that kind of weather. I need some inspiration.
“Peter The Great?” he asked, taking another hefty swig of cold beer.
“And?”
“The Swedes?” he ventured.
“Anything else?” I asked.
He scratched his head and thought a bit.
“We won?”
Russian History is neither HRH’s core interest, nor part of his skill set. He confuses the Nicholases, the Alexanders and the Catherines (though at least he does not make the common mistake that Catherine The Great was married to Peter The Great). But he got full marks on The Battle of Poltava, and bonus points for a succinct distillation of the salient points about today’s holiday: Peter’s victory over the Swedes at the Battle of Poltava on July 8, 1709, and their ultimate surrender on July 10th.
When last we encountered Peter The Great, he was also engaged in a contretemps with the Swedes, the naval victory in 1703 which secured him the strategic mouth of the Neva River on which he built his dream city, Saint Petersburg. If that was his first modest victory against his primary adversary, Charles XII of Sweden, Poltava was the zenith of Peter’s emergence as a military might, as he triumphantly hurled the might of his newly re-organized Western style army of 45,000 troops at Charles XII and the Ukrainian Cossack Hetman, Mazeppa. Ukraine gave up its dreams of independence (what else is new?) and Charles XII and Sweden had to cede their preeminence as the most significant player in the region: they limped away and spent three centuries crafting a new strategy to invade Russia, which would ultimately prove successful.
Today is one of fifteen “Days of Military Glory,” victories, which were recognized by the State Duma in 1995 in legislation entitled “About the Days of Military Glory of Russia” (so, now you know what the Duma does all day) as “playing a significant role in the history of Russia, and in which Russian troops have earned the honor and respect of contemporaries and grateful memory of posterity.”
I was interested to read, recently (in Bruce Lincoln’s The Romanovs) that Peter was not weaned until he was two years old, which, for me, explains volumes: not only his vigorous health, but also his addiction to instant gratification. “Boats,” you can see him thinking when, as a teenager, he and his Dutch tutor found the rotting remains of a keeled sea vessel in 1688, “Boats…hmmmm…I think I’d like a navy.” Never mind that Russia was completely landlocked. This could also explain his impatience with anything that stood in his way: a meddlesome older half sister as Regent during his minority? Overthrow her and stick her in a Convent. Boring conservative first wife? Rinse and repeat. Long traditional kaftans getting in the way? Adopt Western clothes. Money tight? Tax people for keeping their beards. Moscow seeming a little backward? Abandon and create a new capital on a mosquito-infested swamp. Church getting a little too powerful? Cut it down to size and make it into a government department, and, for good measure, mock it, holding a mock Synod entitled “The Vastly Extravagant, Supremely Absurd, Omni-Intoxicated Synod,” (and you have to wish they’d revive that particular Petrine tradition.)
Dictatorial? Da. Effective? Definitely Da. This is the kind of ruler the Russian people understand, expect, and ultimately admire. Larger-than-life, clear on what he wants, and slightly crazy. Certainly no one, except perhaps Stalin, has so thoroughly dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the direction of his choice by sheer force of his own personal will power
Peter The Great is the impossible standard against which all other Russian rulers must measure themselves, and I can’t think that, in their heart of hearts, they feel they are in danger of outstripping him in any way.
Peter, for example, would never have tweeted. Never.
Had you heard about The Battle of Poltava? Did you know that Sweden was such a military power in the 17th Century? What’s your take on Peter? Do you buy into the breast-feeding idea? Let me know, by leaving a comment below. If you enjoyed this post, linger a while and read some more just like it:
A family is not just husband and wife, but also Granddad and Grandma and, most importantly, kids.
~ President Dmitry Medvedev via his Twitter account, KremlinRussia_E on 3:36 AM Jul 2nd via web
Today is the All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity, and not before time, either, after the chaos and naughtiness of yesterday’s St. John’s Eve, or Ivan Kupala. Today’s holiday affords a timely reminder to any tempted to stray from the bosom of the family, what an awfully big mistake that would be. Take Anna Karenina, for example, who’s tale of descent into adultery begins with Tolstoy’s immortal observation that:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Staying faithful to your spouse (whether he or she has to be a member of the opposite sex is not mentioned, nor is any detail gone into as to the nature of the conception of the children) is the watchword of this holiday, which was introduced recently, in 2008, with the support and encouragement of Russia’s First Lady, Svetlana Medvedeva, (who I suspect wears the pants in that particular family.) Mrs. Medvedeva is known to be a big supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church (none of this childhood obesity nonsense for her) and the choice of date for The All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity was not random: today is a 780 year old Orthodox holiday celebrating Saints Peter and Fevronia, the Prince and Princess of the ancient city of Murom, near Vladimir, who were canonized in 1547. This makes it a nice Public Service Message brought to you by the State-Church joint venture.
The story of Peter and Fevronia is a perfect fusion of simple peasant girl marries handsome prince after over coming adversity in the shape of a dragon/ happily-ever-after / fairy-tales, pagan and chthonian (I know, I had to look it up too) symbolism, and good old- fashioned Russian family values. I first read the entire story as a university student in Serge A. Zenkovsky’s "Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales," which is about the first thing they thrust at you when you embark down the path of Russian Area Studies. It is now on-line, so, if you really want to, you can read the whole thing too, but should you prefer a pithier synopsis, here is one:
Prince Peter, the brave and righteous younger brother and heir of Prince Paul of Murom, does battle with the devil disguised as a serpent, to defend the honor of his sister-in-law. Smiting the serpent, Peter is splashed by its blood, which covers his body with sores and ulcers. He searches the land for many years in vain for a cure until he encounters the simple peasant girl, Fevronia, weaving at her loom. After a symbolically packed exchange of riddles, promises, and Peter’s eventual cure, they cut to the chase, marry, and settle down as the ruling couple. Happily ever after, however, eludes them, as the wicked boyars (nobles) are not content with Fevronia, a simple peasant girl, taking precedence over their own wives. So they begin to stir up trouble. One particularly wicked (and married) boyar tries to take advantage of Fevronia during a sea voyage. Fevronia reprimands him sharply, asking him to taste the water on either side of the ship, and note the difference. He does so, and claims that there is no difference at all.
“And so it the nature of all women.” (Replies Fevronia) Why then do you want to leave you wife and think about another woman?”
Having thoroughly squelched the boyars with this withering remark (?), things calmed down considerably for Fevronia and Peter, who went about the business of ruling in a pious, generous, and just manner. They loved each other so much that they prayed to die at the same hour, and prepared a joint tomb. To seal the deal, she became a nun, and he a monk, and they did die at the same moment, only the crowd in charge prepared to bury them in separate graves. On the next day, however, their bodies were gone, ultimately found in the double tomb, where they remain to this day in the Church of the Holy Virgin in Murom.
I wondered to myself if Mrs. Medvedeva wasn't pushing the envelope a little on this one. Russia already has a lot of holidays along these lines: Men’s Day (February 23rd) and International Women’s Day (March 8th) as well as Catholic St. Valentine’s Day (February 14th) which Russians have taken up with the same fervor they have sushi and mojitos. But, as the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church when he was Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad noted, “February 14th (Valentine’s Day) is the Day of Those in Love, and being in love does not necessarily guarantee love, nor family, nor, for that matter, faithfulness.”
With which sentiment, I am sure, both Fevronia and Mrs. Medvedeva would heartily agree. And, for that matter, Tolstoy too. Things like this don’t hurt. They might help. You never ever know, do you? Still wondering if this covers same sex families though...
Happy Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness to everyone who is in to that kind of thing.
Is there a holiday like this where you come from? Do you think it is over the top, or a good thing? Or does the idea of family values make you break out in hives. Let me know, won’t you, by leaving a comment below. Thank you for stopping by and for your patience as you can see we are playing catch-up again (pressures of family life have kept me occupied). Stick around, if you like, and enjoy a few more posts just like this one:
Today is St. John’s Eve, or, in Russian: “Ivan Kupala!” This is Russian Midsummer, with all the same accompanying mischief, magic, and misdemeanors, as anywhere else in the world, just thirteen days late, because of that Gregorian – Julian calendar thing we’ve discussed before. So, we’ll be expecting wild sexual midnight revels; naked bathing, bonfires, and all that will all make a refreshing change from Anna Chapman.
It is nice for me, as well, to take a tiny break from the more modern Russian institutions such as the traffic cops and the veterans of the custom's service, and harken back to ancient pre- and early Christian Russia: wallow a little in all the Dan Brown/Bloodline conspiracy/St. John Worship/Freemason stuff. If you are into that kind of thing (and I am) today’s holiday can be an endless font (pun intended) of fascinating information.
St. John’s Eve in the Christian calendar celebrates the night before the birth of Jesus’s cousin, St. John. Scripture tells us that John was about six months older than, and “prepared the way” for Jesus, so that fits nicely: if you buy in to the idea that Jesus was born on December 25th (or January 7th according to the Russians). St. John’s Eve, and its counterpart in the calendar, Christmas, are actually, as Alexander Hislop argues convincingly, replacements for much older pagan rituals surrounding the juxtaposition of light and dark. Jesus’s birth was set by the early Christians to replace the pagan Saturnalia or Winter Solstice, when the days begin to get lighter; John’s birthday replaced the Summer Solstice, when the days begin to grow darker. This neatly captures the "twinned" or juxtaposed relationship between John and Jesus. St. John, a wild and zealous desert preacher, rigid and ascetic in his beliefs, was an annoying thorn in the side of both the Romans and the Jewish King Herod. John publicly denounced Herod for his marriage to his brother’s widow, Herodias. John condemned this as adulterous and incestuous. King Herod, famously beheaded John at the request of his step-daughter (so also niece) Salome, after she did a very effective dance of the seven veils (making her the Anna Chapman of the piece) for his guests. The head, then, is served up on a platter.
St. John remains a shadowy and puzzling figure, associated historically with controversial and secretive organizations such as The Knights Templar and the Freemasons, at the heart of bloodline conspiracy theories, and mysterious symbols and hidden messages in art and literature. The fact that his birth, and not his death (August 19th in the Catholic calendar) is the key holiday is also significant, since most saints are celebrated on the day of their martyrdom or death, and not the birth. Jesus and John are not.
St. John’s Eve in Russia was, and still is in some parts of the country, celebrated with the traditional focus on fire and water: elements, like Jesus and John, who stand in direct opposition. At dusk (which comes very late this time of the year), huge bonfires are lit to guard against the evil spirits, witches, goblins, and other fey creatures who, as the world turns to darkness again, begin to gain in strength and power. Men compete against one another to see who can jump the highest over the bonfire, ensuring the winner happiness and luck throughout the year. Young women gather the traditional “Midsummer ferns,” which are woven into garlands and wreaths, worn throughout the evening and then dried, and kept to ward off evil spirits throughout the coming darkness. In another long-standing tradition, young women float their wreaths of Midsummer ferns with lit candles into the river, and the one, which floats the longest, ensures its maker happiness in love, long life, and good health.
"Night of Ivan Kupala" by Genrikh Semyradski
As the night lengthens, and a brief darkness hovers over the Northern sky, tradition says that the trees move about and speak to one another in the breeze, and the important water element is incorporated by naked bathing in ponds, rivers and streams to purify both the body and the soul.
Things can begin to get slightly out of hand, which is wonderfully captured in Nikolai Gogol’s breakthrough short story “St. John’s Eve,” which you can download here, and Mussorgsky’s “Night On Bald Mountain,” which might sound strangely familiar to any of you with small children:
In closing, here are a few other interesting facts associated with St. John’s Eve, which may dictate the way you plan your day today:
1. Traditionally, in Russia and other countries which celebrate St. John's Eve, there is a not-unsurprising spike in the birthrate during the month of March.
2. As I wrote in a recent article on Russian superstitions, witches will not come into your house if there is a needle or something sharp in the doorjamb or other portals to the house. This is particularly true on St. John’s Eve, so housewives scatter thistles or roses on their windowsills to keep the witches at bay.
3. It is very important (Velvet, are you listening?) to lock up your horses on St. John’s Eve, lest the witches or goblins spirit them away...to Bald Mountain!
4. If a girl collects seven different kinds of flowers and puts them under her pillow, she will dream of her future husband.
5. If you climb over twelve garden fences during St. John’s Eve, your wish will come true.
Can you find a garden fence you could actually climb over in Russia?
What have you got planned for tonight? Let me know, won’t you…you don’t have to identify yourself in the comments…really. Make up a name, go on! Be clever, reference Shakespeare: Hermia, Helena, Bottom, Titannia, Puck...or be current, and call yourself Anna Chapman. You get the idea.
I know this one was a little academic for some palates, so here are a few ones in a slightly lighter vein.
Волга Волга , мать родная (Volga, Volga dear mother)
~ Russian folksong
Today is Day of the Workers of the Ocean and River Fleets!
“Again?” I hear you query, “Haven’t we had a lot of aquatic holidays of late: four naval fleets and that fountain hopping holiday?”
“Oh yes,” I reassure you, “and more to come; lots more to come, so stay tuned.”
Since we’ve gone into a certain amount of detail about Russia’s four naval fleets: The Black Sea, The Northern, The Baltic, and the Pacific Fleets, I thought we’d focus a little bit on Russia’s lesser known, but equally important river fleets.
Any course, book, or podcast on Russian History will begin with the geography, with much stress on two things: the lack of a natural boundary from the Danube River to the Ural Mountains, which explains the shifting borders; and the importance in early Russian history of the North-South communication provided by the Dnieper (now no longer part of Russia) and the Volga Rivers. Other Russian rivers played their parts in Russia’s history: the settlements of Cossaks on the banks of the Don River, expansion and exploration in the east along the Amur, the Lena (from whence Lenin took his nom du guerre) theYenisei, the Angara and the Ob.
Landlocked Moscow is actually the port of five seas, thanks to one of those impressive building projects of the 1930s: the Moscow Canal. This impressive feat of engineering connects the Moskva River from Tushino in the north-west of Moscow up to the mighty Volga River some 128 kilometers, through a series of locks, and thus provides access the White, Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas, as well as The Sea of Azov.
I spent a lot of time on the Volga River, during my misspent youth as a tour guide, and later Head of Customer Service, and, although my memories of it are primarily dominated by the lack of air-conditioned buses, a really unpleasant and inept (never a great combination) Cruise Manager who was someone’s son, having to work for Serbs (which I never want to do again), really horrific food, and mosquitoes the size of pigeons, I would still tell you that, if you are a paying customer, a river cruise is the very best way to see Russia. Here is a link to a great company who can help you organize that.
I wrote in an earlier post about the bizarre three days I spent on a river cruise as a guest (and I use that term loosely, since we were largely ignored) by Russia’s National Tourist Organization (not it’s real name), and, perhaps as a result of that meeting, I got my name on some list, and soon after was summoned to a large dingy building on New Arbat Street, up twelve or thirteen floors in a very dodgy lift to meet with some Deputy Director of Moscow’s City Government Tourism Development Organ, who was called Maxim (they are always called Maxim) who said he would be very happy to listen to all of my ideas for making Moscow a better place for tourism. He got out his cheesy leatherette A5 Diary, which they all use to write down this kind of thing, and looked at me with anticipation.
“Move the Kremlin, Pushkin Museum, and Novodeyvichy Convent to Saint Petersburg and close up shop,” was honestly the first thing that came into my mind, but the Muscovites get tetchy about this kind of thing. I decided, instead, to plug for much needed improvements to the infrastructure of the River Cruise program, suggesting that the Moscow River Station, a marvelous and completely empty 1930s building with colonnaded terraces, marble floors, mosaic ceilings and marvelous views over the river, could be furnished with a few more amenities.
“Such as…?” prompted Maxim.
“Well,” I said, “Perhaps a bank of international phones, maybe a fax machine (this was 1999), or something…since you have almost 10,000 foreigners passing through there each month and no other way to be in touch along the 7 day cruise.”
He wrote that down.
“And maybe…” I continued, “a store with some souvenirs, books, maps, and snacks…like perhaps bottled water and soda,”
“Soda, good,” he nodded and wrote that down.
"An ATM?" I queried.
"Complicated," he responded.
“Handicapped access might be improved,” I proposed, “since most of the people on these cruises are over 70.”
He shook his head, “That is a Federal problem,” he said, “We are Municipal” (this was pre-Putin when people still said things like that).
“A coffee shop?” I ventured. He squinted at me in confusion. “Or a bar,” I amended he nodded and smiled.
“And possibly a water taxi to the center of town?”
We continued in this vein for some time, and then I got in the dodgy lift and rattled down to the ground floor. I never saw Maxim again. I’m happy to say that some of these measures were put in place, some are still being considered. I never got a thank you note or anything, but I feel I played my part.
And I didn’t have to go up that elevator ever again.
The beautiful picture of the Moscow River Station was taken by Sergei Burak in 2004, and more of his work can be found here.
The lovely image of the Moscow Canal Lock is by Shiko the First (2009)
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Greetings Readers!
Have you ever taken a river cruise? Where? Thank you as always for stopping by Dividing My Time. Do you like the new and improved streamlined look? If so, please let me know! If you would like to stay a little longer, please do, an enjoy some more posts like this one:
"This war is not an ordinary war. It is the war of the entire Russian people. Not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our heads, but to aid all people groaning under the yoke of Fascism"
Josef Stalin - about 22nd June 1941 (broadcast on July 3rd)
Today is the Day of Remembrance and Mourning, which marks the day in 1941 when Hitler launched his fatal "Operation Barbarossa" and opened up his war onto a second front by invading the Soviet Union. So for the Americans out there, you will readily understand when I tell you that this day is Russia’s Pearl Harbor Day.
When I first worked as a tour guide in the USSR and later Russia, I spent a lot of time collecting really badly written guidebooks from various places in an effort to beef up what in the tourism biz is called “the commentary.” This was pre-Internet, so I painstakingly copied all kinds of information into an exercise book and eventually developed a very rich repertoire of historical facts, figures, anecdotes and other things with which to entertain busloads during long haul trips to Sergeiv Posad’ or Tsarskoye Selo, or if I got stuck in a traffic jam. I could never bring myself, however, to work in the pat phrase which appeared in every single overview of USSR history published between 1945 and 1989: after a bulky and distinctively hyperbolic section on the Victorious October Socialist Revolution, way too much information on V.I. Lenin and his mates, and those brave sailors from the Battle Cruiser Avrora firing the first shot etc. things would come to an abrupt close. It would then Fast Forward right to June 22, 1941 (adroitly by-passing the murky 1920s Famine/NEP period and the somewhat depressing 1930s), when all of the sudden, as the guidebooks explained, “The peaceful life of the industrious Soviet people was brutally interrupted by a sudden and unexpected invasion of the Nazi armies.”
Amongst modern historians, there are two schools of thought on this “it was a complete surprise, we had absolutely no idea they were coming” theory.
1. Theory 1: It was a complete surprise, they had absolutely no idea they were coming. This is supported by the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, in which the USSR shut its eyes to the Nazi invasion of Poland, while it grabbed the Baltics, and parts of Finland and Romania. Stalin, who seems to have been paralyzed by fear, cowered in his bunker for more than a week, only making a public address on July 3rd. The brain drain of the 1930s had left the Red Army without an officer corps, and the troops were slow to react to the surprise attack. This school of thought makes the eventual sacrifice of more than 20 million people and the key role the USSR made in ending the war even more impressive.
2. Theory 2: While it was a surprise for the people of the USSR and the ordinary soldiers of the Red Army, it was no surprise to Stalin and his inner circle, or the Military High Command. The 1930s was all about getting ready to fight a large-scale global war with A-Listers over ideology, and the 1939 Pact was a strategic move to buy more time and continue the military-industrial build up.
In any case, Hitler was nuts, on that we can all agree. What on earth was he thinking? (Some historians have suggested that he expected the 12th Century Prussian King Frederick I known as "Barbarossa" to rise up from the dead like those guys Aragorn goes and gets in The Two Towers, and help Hitler put the cap on Total World Domination). This seems to have not worked out, and therein lies a lesson for us all: never count on slightly fictional/definitely dead heroes to show up to help out.
And, readers, I’ll leave you with this last thought: is this all a little too much? Do we need to celebrate the beginning, as well as the end of wars? I don’t think the British do: I’ve never seen a “Beginning of World War I Day” flower campaign, have you? The French (obviously) don’t, nor do the Italians…you don’t see them saying, “Happy Beginning of the Third Punic War Day,” do you? The Spanish don’t and, God knows, the Germans don’t. Only the USA and Russia.
Author's Note: If you want to learn more about Theory # 2, I encourage you to read this excellent review.
Hey There, Readers!
Do you think we should celebrate the beginning of wars? Do you, perhaps, know of some other nations that do? If so, leave me a comment and let me know. Thank you as always for stopping by “Dividing My Time.” If you enjoyed today’s post, perhaps you might also enjoy these:
Today is Light Industry Workers Day! And in Russia, that means one thing: a trip to the City of Brides: Ivanovo.
Ivanovo is the center of Russia’s textile industry, the brightest star in Russia’s shimmering light industry firmament, though to be honest, after the loss of the –stans in the 1990s, cheap cotton has been harder to come by, so the firmament is a tad dusty. Ivanovo, whose coat of arms features a woman sitting at a spinning wheel, is known as “The City of Brides,” because the textile mills attracted women workers in large numbers. Ivanovo’s women are also known to be slightly forward and aggressive, so it came as no surprise to me during one of those innocuous Internet searches to find, guess what? An on-line Russian bride site called City-Of-Brides.com, and frankly I was riveted by the site’s opening parlay, which I must just repeat here in its original:
Russian women it is unique essences. They put family above al. They are always ready to offer the outstanding career to be with the husband and children. If you will give her a little attention, love and care, if you will show her that you appreciate her as the wife and the mistress of the house, will admire with her beauty and wit, she will be true to you to the death.
As long as we are making fun of badly-translated Russian into English, I thought this classic press release on Russia’s textile industry should not be missed -- I’ve highlighted the most magnificent examples so you won’t. It just proves, once again, that Google Translate is not always a boon to mankind.
Russia Textile Industry Should Be Made Competitive - Medvedev
Itar-Tass
President-elect Dmitry Medvedev said Russia's textile industry should be brought to a new level and made competitive on the world market. He met in the Kremlin on the Ivanovo region's governor Mikhail Men on Thursday.
"Regrettably, we had a failure and collapse of the textile industry in the nineties, and we all but lost it. It is necessary to do all we can to bring the sector to a qualitatively new level in order it is competitive. This is an important state and regional task," Medvedev said. He said the nearest meeting of the State Council presidium would be dedicated to the innovation policy.
The Ivanovo region has its own investment potential, Medvedev said. "It may be not be seen so well, but something has been already done in this area." The governor said the Ivanovo region's investment project is its textile industry.
"The textile industry provides 25 percent of regional products and over 25 percent of the regional budget. About 50 factories at which about 50,000 people work operate in our region," Men said.
However, competition from China, Turkey, Pakistan and India is growing. "We are looking for ways out of this situation. Jointly with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade,we have selected on a competitive basis the best world specialists in the textile industry, who have proposed switching to artificial fiber and chemical thread. The main problem lies that at present we depend on imported raw materials, on cotton from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan," Men said.
He said the Ivanovo region's programmes developed together with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade would allow changing an assortment of products and manufacturing not only textiles, but also upholstery for car seats.
Medvedev asked what decisions are necessary for "this sector beginning to work". "In our view, the first and foremost thing is support from the Investment Fund for development of the infrastructure of the Ivanovo textile cluster. In the nearest time the Ministry of Economic Development and Trde shall report where federal money of the Investment Fun should be invested and how to attract Western investors in the light industry," Men answered. "That is, investments from the Investment Fund are necessary in order to 'draw' Russian and foreign investors?" Medvedev asked. "This can be called the establishment of business parks. I would ask for your support, because this is a most serious investment project that could give a start to new development of the Ivanovo region," Men said.
What really is sad, though is the knowledge that Russia could have been a contender in providing a world-wide brand, but the UGG people got there first. I did a quick trip through my apartment and the only thing I could say with any certainty that was made in Russia (apart from HRH’s sauna implements) was a pair of felt boots called valenki. These are traditional felted wool boots that Russians wear in extremely cold weather. In recent years, enterprising craftspeople have begun to tart them up, add rubber soles and decorative appliqué motifs, but I fear the train has left the station, since every Russian woman from Velvet to Babushka wants a pair of purple UGG boots.
We’ll just have to work on world domination in some other sector. Like fur hats.
Sigh.
Happy Day of the Workers of Light Industry to All!
Do you have a pair of UGG Boots? What color are they? Are you interested in a pair of Valenki? Do you think Valenki might be a fantastic give-away? I keep seeing all these give-away things on sites…are they the way to true world domination of the blogosphere? If you know, please leave a comment and let me know, or stick around and enjoy some other posts like this one:
Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia.
~ Boris Yeltsin
Today is Russia Day!
At a gathering at my home in Moscow on Friday, I was not surprised that a survey of Russians polled (HRH and Joe’s very clever girlfriend Tanya) had absolutely no idea what Russia Day is in aid of, even though today marks the 20th anniversary of the original Russia Day. Ask them about Border Guard Day, or Victory Day, and they are letter perfect, but Russia Day? But this is why nation building – to say nothing of being a groundbreaking chronicler of Russian holidays -- is such uphill work.
So, as a public service message, here is the skinny on Russia Day: Russia Day marks the moment on June 12, 1990 when (and pay attention, because this is slightly tricky) the Russian parliament declared Russian sovereignty over Russia. And if that sounds like a bunch of people who don’t have enough to do getting together to have a party, it actually was a significant moment for the newly-minted Russian Federation, which had been the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the 15 Republics that made up The Soviet Union. Declaring State Sovereignty over this body made the Russian Federation a new nation, independent of the other 14. While the name of the country would be ratified later in 1991 (we’ll come to this in December), Russia Day marked the true moment of the birth of a nation.
But you can see why people like HRH (44% of Russians actually, according to a recent poll) remain confused about the holiday and refer to June 12th as “Independence Day.” This is understandable if you are French or American and you look at the color scheme and the choice of a summer date, as well as the fireworks in the evening. Reminds you vaguely of some other holidays celebrating that kind of thing around this time…though sadly the menu isn’t as wonderful.
“But,” asks Dee Dee Jansson, who hasn’t been here that long, “independence from whom?”
“That’s easy,” I say, using my favorite joke that never gets old, “independence from Georgia, Armenia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the Stans.”
Being a fairly young holiday, Russia Day does not have a lot of engrained traditions, beyond the classic “Red Day on the Calendar” playbook: streets blocked off to cars, metal detectors in Red Square, cheesy bands playing in the squares to small exhausted looking children half-heartedly clutching Russian tricolors. As Russia Day falls this year on a Saturday, needless to say, we get Monday off, so most everyone I knew took advantage of this by either leaving Russia altogether (preferable) or going to the dacha, which I think they will regret as the forecast suggests violent thunderstorms that will very possibly be made worse by the cloud seeding that happens on days like this. A handful of journalists took the opportunity to craft some well-written opinion pieces like this one by Vladimir Milov, which I recommend, while the gang in power handed out some prizes for poetry, music, and science. Cheesy loud concert in Red Square followed by fireworks. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, if we could just introduce some fried chicken, cole slaw and potato salad into the mix somehow…
Happy Russia Day! What did you get up to? What would be your ideal Russia Day menu? Don’t you think it should feature red, white, and blue martinis of some kind? Any suggestions?
Thanks as always for stopping by, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the form of a comment, which you can leave by clicking the comment button below.
Or, stick around and enjoy a few more posts like this one:
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
~Frank Zappa
Today is the second Saturday in June and since 2003, that has meant one thing: Beer Brewer’s Day!
I’ve been writing, for my sins, a monthly cooking column about Russian food, which I don’t actually like to either make or consume, but I have found it interesting to learn that most dishes that we think of as “classic Russian,” are, in fact, not native to Russia at all. We don’t know that, because Russia has so claimed these meals as their own, that it doesn’t occur to us to question their origins. Take Beef Stroganoff, which seems to account for an astonishing number of hits to this blog, which is French; or shashlik, which comes from the Caucuses, or, indeed, Russian pelemeni, which were brought to Russia originally by the Finno-Ugric tribes of the North.
And so it is with beer. Russians certainly did not invent beer, in actual fact the Iraqis did (for all the good it did them), but today Russia is the third largest beer market in the world! Russians stumbled upon beer fairly early on in the form of kvass which beer expert Michael Jackson argued is an early form of beer. Kvass is a lightly fermented drink made from any old grain or stale dark bread, yeast, and flavored with berries and other fruits. It’s mostly consumed in the summer by the older generation, whereas everyone consumes beer in Russia, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Russians like their beer strong, and I was interested to learn that the strongest stout ever, was made for Catherine the Great, and called “Imperial Stout.” The theory was that the high alcohol content of the stout ensured that the sub zero temperatures in winter would not freeze the beer as it made its way from Great Britain to Russia.
Today, Russian beer is a dynamic sector of the economy. The national brands of Baltika, Siberian Crown, Stariy Melnik and others are never going to win any prizes for quality, but they remain viable because, in Russia, the main driver, as the economic geeks say, is quantity rather than quality.
I know this, because, like most women in Russia, I live with a beer expert.
HRH is very fond of beer, and, because he’s been exposed to beer in countries like Switzerland and Jamaica where they focus more on the quality, rather than the quantity of beer production, he’s discerning. He prefers European draft beer to American bottled beer, which he feels is on a par with Sprite or 7-UP in the beverage line up. The happiest I have ever seen him was in the Sultanate of Oman, where we spent one Christmas. Slightly concerned about our dwindling reserves of Duty Free gin and whiskey, we were invited to Christmas lunch by a charming couple, who ran the (tightly controlled) alcohol concession in the Sultanate. Tipped off by our friend Annie, Debbie and Samir unearthed a case of Heineken, which they wrapped in festive paper and presented to him as the, hands down, best Christmas present he ever received.
So, to an industry facing possible crippling tax hikes and the ever-menacing specter of another government-sponsored anti-alcohol campaign (because the last one went so well), let’s raise a glass of imported Newcastle Brown Ale and wish the Beer Brewers a very happy profpraznik!
The wonderful picture of Russian beer and dried fish (the peanut butter and jelly of Russian summers) was found on the Google by Mr. Kunglay.
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Hey Readers!
How are you enjoying Beer Brewers’ Day? Does your country have both beer and an airline? Mine does, but both are pretty lame. What’s your favorite tipple? Leave me a comment and let me know! Thanks for stopping by.
Did you enjoy this post? Here are some others you might also enjoy:
Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.
~ Benjamin Franklin
Today is Northern Fleet Day! Put on your party hats, let’s play pin the tail on the submarine, because the Northern Fleet is the baby of our bunch. Construction of a northern naval base was begun under Nicholas II in 1895, but like so many things started by Nicholas II, it was left to Josef Stalin to finish it off. The Northern Fleet considers its founding dates to a visit to the Zapolarniy (meaning just below the Pole), in 1933, which makes it 77 years old today.
Young they may be, but the Northern Fleet has distinguished itself as a formidable force, winning numerous battles in the Great Patriotic War and the recent unpleasantness with Chechnya. It is, however, their continued ability to literally make me wave a white flag of surrender each June that is the subject of today’s post.
HRH, who went to military school and served as an officer until 1991, has a bunch of friends who are still actively serving in braches of Russia’s military, all over the country. We see a lot of some of them, and less of others, but summer is always ushered in by the simultaneous arrival of Borya from Zapolyarniy and the pukh.
Pukh, (pronounced “pooo-kuh”) which fellow blogger Potty Mommy described very well in a recent post, is the fluff from a sexually frustrated female poplar tree. After World War II, Russian authorities hastened to make Moscow green again, by planting a large amount of poplar trees. It was one of those moments when the people who knew better were afraid to speak up, and so the authorities planted only female trees. Poplars, like holly, are both male and female, and you need a few of each to keep the others happy. Moscow has only female trees, which each June release their snowflake-like pods into the atmosphere where they swirl and whirl in a summer snowstorm, like a million Carrie Bradshaws looking for Mr. Big. Muscovites rush to close their windows, since the pukh gets into nooks and crannies, wily evades the vacuum cleaner, the broom and the duster. It creeps into your nostrils and down your throat. You find it lurking in corners, and if you are at all prone to allergies, you don’t even go outside until the week or so passes.
As soon as the first bit of pukh sails through the air, HRH announces that Borya is on his way down to from Zapolyarniy and will be staying a few days.
I have learned that, in the case of HRH’s friends, it is better not to lead with polite chitchat about their work, such as “So, Borya, how goes it with the Northern Fleet?” Though we’ve not discussed it, this is what I assume Borya does for a living, and one does not need to be the Head of the CIA to work that out. The clues are there: the naval tank top, the fact that he hails from Zapolyariny: apart from the Naval Base, there isn’t a lot else going on. There isn’t, for example, an IKEA at Zapolyarniy, despite its relative proximity to Sweden. Then there is the final and clinching evidence: Borya enjoys an annual summer vacation of forty days.
That’s right, forty days. People who work for the government in Russia, who live above a certain latitude (and Zapolyarniy is so far north that it tends to be obscured on any globe by the knob one uses to rotate the globe) get a government subsidized vacation of obscene length to the Black Sea resort areas of Russia: the theory being that they need to soak up the vital vitamins contained in the sun’s healing rays. So down they go, unencumbered by sun hats or sunscreen, to lie flat on their backs, turn beet red, and gorge themselves on fresh fruit and sweet Crimean champagne. Borya had stopped off in Moscow en route from Zapolyarniy to Sochi to change trains and catch up with some of his childhood friends.
That first year, I had just started working at The Bank and was putting in 15-hour days trying to figure out the difference between Fixed Income and Asset Management. Nevertheless, when HRH told me his friend would be arriving for dinner, I spent some time the night before to make what I thought was a good menu for a scorching June evening: gazpacho and raspberry chicken salad. I left two bottle of wine chilling in the fridge, emptied the ice trays into precious zip lock bags and refilled them. The next morning, I extracted a promise from HRH that he would shut all the windows against the pukh and buy whatever staggeringly large amount of beer he felt was appropriate, grabbed my coffee mug and headed into the pukh maelstrom.
Fast-forward fifteen hours. Tired and limp in my crinkled linen suit, I dug my car out of pukh spores, climbed in and cranked up the air-conditioning. Switching on a book on tape, I eased into the evening Moscow gridlock, looking forward to a cool shower and the nice dinner I’d prepared.
I opened the door of our flat and was flattened by a gust of hot air and a cloud of pukh that immediately settled in my inner ears and nostrils with the precision of a Murmansk nuclear submarine. But the overwhelming sensation was one of affixation by a lethal combination of dried fish, flat beer and human sweat.
“Darling,” I called out in English, “what’s up?”
HRH poked his head around the living room door.
“Hi Sweetie!” he said, “Come on in and meet Borya!” He enveloped me in a clammy, shirtless embrace.
The shirtless thing is one of the first hurdles you face making your marriage to an HRH work. You have To Be Very Firm about that not being acceptable outside the bedroom, or before you know it, there will be a coterie of nearly naked men in your living room. Like not in a good way.
Which is what I had that night. Resplendent in only a pair of Turkish track suit bottoms, hunched over a coffee table spread with newspaper and what looked like most of last month’s catch-of-the-day from Murmansk, sat Borya, his round face shining with sweat. With some difficulty, he focused his Windex-colored eyes on me disapprovingly, making a “tsk tsk tsk” noise with his tongue and shook his head.
“What time do you call this?” he shouted over the boom of the television, tuned to Russian MTV.
I didn’t know him from Adam.
I wondered if it was a trick question and consulted my watch as I picked up the remote control for the air-conditioner.
“Nine thirty?” I responded.
“Not any time for a woman to be getting home from work,” boomed Borya, “I don’t let my women come home at this time.”
“I see,” I said, moving towards the window to shut it. HRH bounded over the coffee table to stop me.
“Borya is concerned about getting sick from the air-conditioner…the breeze,” he explained.
“But it’s like 92 degrees and the pukh is everywhere,” I said in English.
HRH gave me one of those Slavic shrugs that speak volumes. Wordlessly, I retreated to the kitchen, opened the fridge and poured myself a hefty glass of the chilled wine, adding a few of the untouched ice cubes (also very bad for your health) for good measure. After a long cold shower and another glass of wine, I cranked up the a/c in my bedroom, pulled a Nancy Mitford book down and climbed into bed wearily.
I am no match for the Northern Fleet.
Congratulations to Vice-Admiral Nikolai Mikhailovich Maksimov and all those who serve under him!
Author's Note: I found that superb picture of the pukh on hub by Jim Sheg. It's actually China, where apparently they have the same problem, but it is a great visual!
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Dear Reader:
Be honest, men shouldn't go shirtless in the public areas of the domicile should they? Have you ever come home to find an impromtu male bonding thing going on? What did you do? Leave a comment and tell us about it!
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discovered.
~ Tom Lehrer
Today is the Day of the Chemists! Today we celebrate all the eggheads who mix things up in test tubes and make the world a better place to be! The most famous Russian chemist is Dmitry Mendeleev, whom we last saw trying to get Russia to adopt the metric system. Mendeleev came up with the Periodic Table of Elements, a systematic grouping of the elements by atomic weight. He claims to have seen it in a dream, and then wrote it down. He won the Nobel Prize and all kinds of other cool stuff, like having the Periodic Table etched into the wall of a house he used to live in. I wonder if, in his wildest dreams, Mendeleev could have imagined the popularity of the Periodic Table as a shower curtain. Seems unlikely.
Alexei Soloviev, the COO of The Bank I used to work for, and I spent one rather dull winter week, trying to come up with a list of ten things Russia had invented or given the world. It was the week we both discovered Wikipedia. We had incredibly high standards: for example, the Kalashnikov rifle didn’t qualify because you had to have invented the firearm, which Russia didn’t do. We looked at space exploration, but the French were responsible for coming up with the original technology for that, and if you don’t count that, then you have to give it to Italy since Leonardo da Vinci had some pretty definitive drawings. We looked at vodka, which was invented by the Swedes, although our buddy Mendeleev was responsible for answering his country’s call by coming up with the chemical “standard” for vodka. We had the radio screaming match. We looked at a number of things, which are useful to mankind, that were invented by Russians who emigrated to other countries, such as helicopters and television, which I ruled out as possible entrants. That’s like saying Maria Sharapova is a Russian tennis player, about which Alexei and I had a heated argument, which I eventually won. Of course Maria Sharapova isn’t a Russian tennis player…how silly is that?
This is the kind of argument one does best to avoid with Russians. They are the first to tell you just how truly useless their country is, but suggest that Maria Sharapova is not a Russian tennis player and they go ballistic. They moan and groan about how badly things are run, but throw a national conniption fit when their gold medalist figure skater doesn’t win another gold medal and behaves badly in public. A Russian can bore you to death over all the reasons why the government is going to hell in a handbag, but just you try to suggest that other countries took part in the Victory Over Fascism and you find yourself feeling like you’ve done 16 rounds with a heavyweight.
I did finally give Alexei these points: Russia did invent the musical synthesizer, chromatography, and synthetic rubber.
But the big contribution remains the shower curtain. Russia definitely gave the world The Periodic Table of Elements.
However, it took an American Harvard professor to really make it a hit:
Happy Chemists' Day to Russian Chemists everywhere!
If I were a rich man, dah-dah-deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle dum…
~ Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof
Today is the Day of the Russian Entrepreneur, which I guess is sort of like dressing for the job you want, rather than the job you have.
I fear I will disappoint my loyal readers today (both of you) since I am really hitting a wall on this one. I can’t think of anything to tell you about Russian Entrepreneurs…because I’m not sure there are any. There is an association of Russian Entrepreneurs, but it is staffed by government flunkies. I know several people who have started and (more to the point) sold successful businesses in Russia…but they are all foreigners. Nowadays, everyone wants to either work for the government or for a foreign company. No one seems to want to start a business, and, you can't because the paperwork is so complicated. Even HRH, who started off with a kiosk selling cigarettes and beer, has decamped to higher ground.
I was having a very interesting conversation on just this very topic with the father of one of Velvet's classmates last week. He noted that Poland seemed to have done very well after the Fall of the Wall.
"Well," I said, "that's the whole Roman Catholic thing."
He was riveted. We talked between Hayden concerti and acapella singing groups about how the countries with an Orthodox Christian heritage don't have any tradition or understanding of an individual's sense of his own place in the world, or an ingrained conviction that you can, and should better yourself. Think about it: Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, The Baltics and so on are all predominantly either Roman Catholic or Lutherans. They are doing well, whereas Russia, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine and Romania, the Orthodox counties, are still struggling to implement positive change 20 years after the Wall came down.
I wracked my brain while writing this post, and as I was on a train with no wifi, I couldn’t turn to my friends in cyber space for any inspiration. I wanted to come up with a shining example of 100% Russian entrepreneurial success that:
1. Wasn’t linked to either the wild 90s acquisition of former Soviet industries like Norilsk Nickel or Severstal.
2. Was not in someway connected with a foreign manager, foreign investment, or foreign know-how.
3. Is not a government or semi-government company
4. Is still a viable business…by which I mean the CEO is not in financial exile in London.
Not easy.
There is this Russian Silicon Valley getting up and running: the pet project of Blogger-In-chief Dmitry Medvedev and Ashton Kucher, but until that begins to bear fruit…we’ll just have to have a modest celebration today.
Thank you for stopping by Dividing My Time. I'm sorry today was not as sparkling as usual. It makes you think, though, doesn't it....why I couldn't come up with anything. Do you know some Russian entrepreneurs? Like real ones, not the ones who run your cab company.
“With over 340 different verbs of motion, those three sisters couldn’t get up and go to Moscow!”
~A.N. Wilson
Here is an opportunity to raise a glass if you ever stayed up all night to study for a genitive plural or perfective/imperfective test…if you ever had to forgo a frat party to make your plodding way through Lermontov’s "Hero Of Our Time," or Pushkin’s "Captain’s Daughter," today is your day! If you can speak Russian beyond (Dee Dee this means you!) “to the left,” or “to the right,” or “a diet coke with ice please,” then get yourself some flowers and a bottle of wine. You’ve earned it!
Today is Slavic Writing and Culture Day! This holiday was established in 1863 as an Orthodox Christian saint’s day, celebrating brothers Cyril and Methodius, 9th Century Christian missionaries from Greece, who were sent to convert the Slavs. As part of their efforts, they invented first the Glagolitic alphabet and later, the alphabet that bears Cyril’s name: Cyrillic. I think the naming thing was politeness on Methodius’s part, as Cyril died much earlier, but they may have flipped a coin. With these letters, they were able to translate the Greek New Testament into a vernacular the Slavs could understand. Then presumably, they taught the Slavs to read and write. And that worked out pretty well. This language can still be heard today by the clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church, and is known as Old Church Slavonic.
Learning Russian is not as hard as Mandarin Chinese or ancient Persian, but it has some challenges to it. The letters brought to you by Cyril and Methodius can be tricky. English “P” is a Russian “R” and, as fan’s of Murder on the Orient Express know, English “H” is a Russian “N.” Sometimes reading Russian makes one feel slightly dyslexic and mildly nauseous but you get used to it.
Russian verbs are complicated. They have two “aspects:” the imperfective, which refers to the action of doing something, such as “I am reading "War & Peace,” as opposed to the “perfective,” doing the action with the intention of getting it done. Very confusing, and something I still haven’t really mastered, although I find the distinction curiously germane to the national character somehow.
Verbs of motion, which take up most of the second year of any course in Russian, have the perfective/imperfective thing going on, as well as the distinct difference between moving on your own steam, or in a vehicle, which does cut down on the drunk driving, like a little bit.
Russian is full of diminutives, both for people and things. These are achieved in a staggeringly extensive range of endings, but some common ones are “-chick,” or “-sulia” and “-ichka.” My mother-in-law manages to combine all of these when referring to Velvet as her "vnutchichkuliaetchka," taking the simple word "vnutchka" meaning granddaughter and turning it into "darling little tiny granddaughter." In this case, a diminutive conveys affection. When a Russian is trying to get something out of you, they automatically make what ever they are asking for a diminutive and insert the adjective “nimnogo” or “not much” so you get a request for…”a teeny weeny advancechick on the salariula,” for example, or, “just pour me a miniscule not a lot amount more voditchka.” This gets old really fast, particularly up in St. Petersburg, where they have turned this into a fine art.
On the more formal end of the spectrum, you have the names. Names are confusing, and a lot of people just throw up their hands on the first page of War & Peace, since everyone has three names. Russians have first names and there are only roughly 10 of each sex: Alexander, Dmitry, Mikhail, Nikolai, Andrei, Vladimir, Ivan, Igor, Sergei, and Boris for boys. Anastasia, Svetlana, Olga, Tatianna, Ekaterina, Valentina, Elena, Irina, Natalia, and Nadezda for girls. These basic names have endless diminutives.
Tatianna, for example, can be Tata, Tanik, Tanya, Tanyuissia, Tanechka etc.
Alexander can be Sanya, Shura, Sasha, Sashenka, Sashulia, Sashka
You can tell this is a society that likes to remain largely anonymous.
Russians also carry an obligatory middle name, called a patronymic, which is the name of their father (of course) and an ending, which is –evna for a girl and –ich or -evich for a boy.
So, for example, the youngest and most famous daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II was called Anastasia Nikolaevna.
In my cross-culture marriage group you get a lot of funny combos of names and patronymics, mostly from the well-populated ranks of foreign men who married Russian women. I know a Cyril Brucevich, a Ashley Christopherevna, and a Tom Eduardovich.
[Here is your intrepid blogger, marching with the Williamstown Public Library on July 4, 1990. The assignment was to march as your favorite book, so I chose "War & Peace."]
Russians use the patronymic as formal address and very intimate address. To address a Russian formally, an equivalent to “Mrs. Smith,” you refer to them by their full first name and patronymic together: Alexander Dmitrievich or Olga Vladimirovna. For someone with whom you are very intimate, say a child, a spouse, or a childhood friend, you can address him or her with his or her patronymic only. I don’t have a patronymic, but my father’s name is Peter, and the patronymic for girls is “Petrovna,” which is how HRH addresses me. It’s important not to confuse these two very different forms of address, as I did, by referring to the 60-something veteran head of the National Tourism Committee’s English section as “Vassilievna,” which was incredibly rude. Everyone was so embarrassed that no one told me for about six months, at which point, thank goodness, she retired.
Finally, a Russian has a last name, which normally ends in –EV or OV like Medvedev, but sometimes doesn’t, such as Putin. Mrs. Medvedev is Svetlana Medvedeva and Mrs. Putin is Lydmilla Putina. This is a problem for us, as a family, since Velvet and I have an “A” on the end of our name, and HRH doesn’t, as we saw earlier this year with the TSA crowd. He always gets an “A” on his nametag at Velvet’s school, which I have to white out before we can throw ourselves into non-stop fun and games of parents’ weekend.
Learning Russian has gone somewhat out of fashion lately, which may be because we now need more Arabic and Chinese speakers to help run the windowless buildings just over the river from Our Nation’s Capitol, but that seems a shame. There is nothing like curling up with my favorite book, which is actually not "War & Peace," but “500 Russian Verbs” (they are ALL fully conjugated...perfective AND imperfective!!!) and a teeny weeny glassulia of chardonnaychick.
Happy Day of Slavic Writing And Culture to all Russian speakers, those with patronymics, and those who wish they had one!
Today is also Day of the Human Resources Managers and the excitement is almost uncontrollable – there’s Team Building, and Formula 1 Racing, and Leprosy, and…well don’t miss it!
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Dear Reader:
Cпасибо! Thanks for checking in with me here at Dividing My Time on Day of Slavic Writing and Culture. Did you learn something new? Does this make you want to race out and get a copy of "War & Peace?" Give it a try…you can skip the battle scenes: I always do. Let me know how you are getting on learning your foreign language by clicking the comment button below!
Sarah Palin may well regret until her dying day that she erroneously claimed that she could see Russia from her home in Wasilla, AK; but for the boys in Russia’s Pacific Fleet – it means job security for life, and I for one sleep easier knowing that they are keeping their collective eyes on her.
Today is Pacific Fleet Day! On this day, in 1731, Russia’s first permanent Naval Base was established at Okhotsk. Some of you may not think Russia has anything to do with the Pacific Ocean, but that’s just not true. Where else do you think the Trans-Siberian Railway goes…Siberia?
In addition to keeping their eyes on Sarah, the Pacific Fleet keeps Russia safe from Japan and their insane cars with the steering wheel on what my British friends call “the correct side.” Almost 50% of the cars in big Pacific Coast cities like Khabarovsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Vladivostok are beat-up but serviceable Subarus with the steering wheel on the correct side. Occasionally some lunatic transports these to Moscow to make an already intolerable traffic situation even more horrific, since the people who drive these all seem like they haven’t taken their Lithium that day.
The real reason, however, to keep the Pacific Fleet yar, as C.K. Dexter Haven would say, is China, and if you ask me (and no one ever ever does) it’s a bit like locking the barn after the horse has been stolen. When the world’s most spacious nation, chocker block with rich mineral resources that are hard to access, populated by people who only ever get galvanized by military engagement and don’t seem to want to do anything about their worrying declining birth rate, is bang up against the cramped and overcrowded worker ant nation: a crowd who brought you affordable Hot and Sour Soup, then osmosis is simply going to take over.
Osmosis is “the physical process in which a solvent moves, without input of energy, across a semi permeable membrane (permeable to the solvent, but not the solute) separating two solutions of different concentration,” and that seems to sum up the situation between Russia and China to a tea. The semi permanence of the membrane in this case is economic, and the physical process has already started in Russia’s Far East. This might not be the worst thing to ever happen to Russia…the last invasion and occupation of Russia by an Asian Power, the Tatar Mongul Yoke from 1237 – 1480 gave Russia all kinds of useful things like shashlik, primogeniture, bureaucracy, and, something they’ve put to very good use, taxes.
And the Chinese drive on the right side of the road.
To Admiral Viktor Dmitrievich Federov, and all those who serve with him: Congratulations on Pacific Fleet Day!
Today is also Day of the Military Translators, where you will find your intrepid blogger adrift, attractive and adroitly doing a little military translation on the Volga River! Don't miss it!
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Dear Reader:
First of all - to those very kind people who I haven't actually met in person who send me the lovely e mails about this blog...THANK YOU!!!!!! The last few days have been kind of stressful and those were lovely moments. I am so pleased you like this blog.
I've had some questions from readers about leaving comments. Here are the answers to some FAQ:
1. It is super kind to leave me a comment on Facebook, but then I suspect you haven't quite read the post, which is entirely up to you, of course, but, comments here on the blog are like potato chips without the calories.
2. You don't necessarily have to give your real name, which is what is keeping HRH from leaving anything, (althoughI know for a fact he isn't reading 1/8 of what he says he is, because I think he'd divorce me if he actually did.)
3. You don't need a URL to leave a comment - you can leave that blank.
4. Yes, Dad, you do have to put in the CATCHPA code in. It keeps the Spammer crowd at bay, and, for someone with a College degree, you shouldn't have to wait for your wife to do it for you.
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.
~William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)
He’s Russian: I’m American. He’s Male: I’m Female. He’s Metric: I’m Imperial. Marriage is uphill work at the best of times, but marriages like ours mean you have to try just that little bit harder to achieve total understanding. I imagine Velvet in therapy as a 42-year old saying, “No, my parents were happy enough, but they didn’t always speak the same language.”
And she will mean that literally. HRH and I decided early on to bring her up bi-lingual and all the baby books agreed that the best way to do this was to have each parent stick to their native tongue. After about a year, this became habit, and Velvet grew up listening to Mommy speaking English at Papa, and Papa responding automatically in Russian. She speaks both, choosing her language to match her interlocutor. This makes perfect sense to all of us, although we get some odd looks pretty much everywhere we go.
In bi-lingual marriages like ours, you sometimes have to push the PAUSE button, literally and figuratively to be sure you understand one another. HRH pauses the DVD of the 30 hour classic Soviet spy thriller “17 Seconds of Spring” every 18 minutes or so to explain a phrase containing World War II-era military slang; and I pause in the middle of the pre-Christmas chaos to explain in detail why I’m tipping the garbage collector $50. These cultural details are certainly very nice icing, but something as basic as weights and measurements – that’s the cake, and it is essential.
Clearly, the burden was on me to go metric, and quite right too: only the USA, Burma and Liberia aren’t members of the global metric club, and that’s not what I call an A-list group. But, it was like going green: such a good thing to do in theory: we should all have a Prius, but it’s easier to get to a horse show in a Land Rover.
My learning curve was steep. Math has never been part of my core skill set, and in the days before there was an app for that on metric/Imperial conversion, I made a lot of mistakes. A kilo turned out to be about 2 times what a pound is, so I was always buying much more food than we needed. This calculation allowed denial about my own personal weight to get wildly out of hand. I knew that a 10K run was equivalent to 6 miles, so I did every calculation based on this ratio. I never really understood meters versus feet, but, since real estate is a National Obsession in Russia, I have a highly accurate understanding of what a 90 square meter apartment is, versus a 220 square meter apartment, and when George, HRH’s godson reached the astonishing height of 2 meters, that made sense, but the rest was lost on me. I have no idea how many square feet the house in Northampton is. Like, a lot.
Weather also presented a challenge. It was many years before I automatically understood that the perfect temperature, for me, was 17 Degrees Celsius, and it took HRH a while to realize that 23 Degrees F was not shorts and T-shirt weather. I would have burnt the Thanksgiving turkey more than once, if not for a handy conversion table in the back of my grease-stained copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook!
Kilometers and miles still present problems for us. On his first trip to America, HRH was shocked to see the gas price, which in Russia is listed in litres, until we explained, by holiding up a plastic jug of apple cider what a gallon looked like. Years later, he puzzled over the dashboard of our new Subaru in Northampton for a while before he admitted he didn’t know what the “MPG” dial meant.
“Miles per gallon,” I explained.
“And, remind me, a gallon again is…” he asked, and I went to the store and bought another gallon of apple cider.
Of course, we should all go metric, just like we should all go green, if only so we never have to worry about MPG ever again. It would give Sarah Palin and the Tea Partyers something to really get ticked off about, though I think if you explained it to them carefully, even they would think twice about the cache of being lumped in with Burma and Liberia.
Today is World Metrology Day, celebrating the sense and sensibility of the metric system, marking the first Metrology Convention in Paris in 1875, when a lot of sensible people got together and decided upon a reasonable, universal method of measurement.
HRH would tell you that a Russian, Dmitry Mendeleev, about whom we will hear much more in the next few weeks invented the metric system, which is no doubt what he was taught in school, just like the one about Alexander Popov inventing radio. Alas, no, HRH, sorry to disappoint you but the metric system was first dreamed up by a Flemish scientist in the 16th Century, first proposed in England in 1668, and polished to a high gloss by the French in the 18th Century. Mendeleev certainly supported the move to a metric system, which Russia supported in a delusory fashion at the Paris Convention on May 20th, agreeing to “try” to adopt it, but, as anyone who has ever struggled through Turgenev and Tolstoy knows, Russia was still using its outdated units by the late 19th Century. And it is a shame they changed, really, because these have great names like piad (palm), verst’, krushka (cup), vedro (bucket), butilka (bottle) and butilka vinnaya (wine bottle) and others. Imperial Russia did finally adopt the metric system in 1889; fearful it would be thought backward (surely not!). The Soviet Union officially adopted the metric system in 1924. America, as you know, along with Burma and Liberia, still waits.
Happy World Wide Metrology Day to all those who think in terms of meters, grams, liters, and Celsius!
Are you metric or Imperial? Do you think in cups, buckets, and bottles? Do you know the point at which water freezes? Are you sure? More importantly, do you and your partner understand the fundamentals of your weights and measurements? I’d be interested to know: leave me a comment by clicking the button below!
(Your intrepid blogger's personal tribute to the Baltic Fleet in Leningrad circa 1990)
Today is Baltic Fleet Day! The oldest of Russia’s naval fleets was founded by Tsar Peter The Great, himself as part of his Herculean efforts to secure a “Window on the West” for Russia. On this day, in 1703, Peter led his troops in a naval victory against two Swedish battleships, and thereby secured the strategic mouth of the Neva River, where he went on to build the naval city of his dreams, St. Petersburg.
The Baltic Fleet, like the Black Sea Fleet, has a sticky wicket in terms of the territorial waters it defends, a historically complex relationship with its near-neighbors, and, of course, the base question. One Baltic Fleet base is in Kronstadt, and the other in the Russian enclave, Kalingrad. Kronstadt has the advantage of being cozily tucked deep into the Gulf of Finland, and Russia’s second city, St. Petersburg has its back. Kalingrad, formerly German Konigsberg, on the other hand, is handicapped by being the lone blueberry in a NATO muffin. As with the Black Sea post, it’s a visual so check out this helpful map:
The Kaliningrad question has been in the news a lot. Short history lesson may be in order: Soviet troops captured Konigsberg from the Germans in 1945 at the end of The Great Patriotic War and renamed it “Kaliningrad” after a prominent Bolshevik. In 1991, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia said “Thanks, but we’ll take it from here,” which meant that Kaliningrad was cut off from the rest of newly forming Russia. Then those crybaby Baltic States and that wimp Poland went to hide behind NATO’s skirts, which meant Kaliningrad was more than just mildly logistically difficult. Every time the US talks about putting missiles in places like Poland “to fight terrorism in the Middle East,” Russia drops a hint (thud) that Kaliningrad would also make a nice place to stick a few warheads. Kaliningrad is a special economic zone, but some of the Kaliningraders feel they might have more fun being part of the EU.
A few years ago, my friend Jack, who goes to Russia frequently for business, was being held hostage at a long liquid lunch in St. Petersburg with some tourism types. This happens to Jack a lot, and not having much of a head for liquor, he was tuning out, letting his local representative do the heavy conversational lifting, until he vaguely noticed that the conversation kept including a funny word he’d not heard before, which sounded like the syllable “nat-“ (as in “fat-“ “cat-“ or “rat-“) and then “oh.” Nat-OH. Jack first thought it might be a newly opened summer palace, which, as far as he was concerned, are all unpronounceable: “Gatchina,” and “Orianbaum,” Forchrissakes, or the ultimate tongue twister, “Tsarskoye Selo.” But that didn’t seem right, because the battleaxe he was lunching with kept saying things like,
“But you know that nat-oh has absolutely no right…”
or
“And you know, nat-oh never ratified..”
“Perhaps,” thought Jack, “it’s a new hotel and they haven’t got the price points we need.” That seemed plausible: God knows most St. Petersburg hotels were both overpriced and unpronounceable – after 25 years he still couldn’t say “Pribaltiyskaya,” “Pulkovskaya,” or “Oktyabrskaya,” and, really, he thought, why on earth should anyone want to try?
“Putin is having all kinds of trouble with nat-oh,” said the Battleaxe.
“A-ha,” thought Jack, relieved he’d at last got the right end of the stick, “it’s a tourism ministry thing.” He prepared to jump into the conversation, when his interlocutor said, bafflingly,
“And then there is the question of Kaliningrad.”
“Kaliningrad?” thought Jack, wildly, downing another shot of Stolichnaya in an ill-advised attempt to achieve some clarity, “Where the hell is that?” Then, because he’d been on 461 city tours of St. Petersburg, he recalled that St. Petersburg had been called Leningrad from 1924 - 1991, (well, that’s not what Jack thought…but I’m supplying the correct information) and as The Battleaxe paused to take in another lungful of air, he interjected what he hoped was an overdue intelligent observation.
“I find it interesting that some people still call it that,” he said affably,
The Battleaxe leaned over and slammed her fist down on the table, making the silverware dance, and the crockery rattle. Sour cream splashed onto the tablecloth. Jack sighed, thinking that much – perhaps too much -- of his professional life had been spent in a semi-alcoholic-induced stupor, sitting across the table from Slavic battleaxes from the tourism industry who rested their titanic bosoms on the shelf of a groaning lunch table, and banged on the grease-stained tablecloth to make some emphatic point the vodka kept him from fully understanding. Perhaps, thought Jack, it was time to begin to contemplate partial retirement.
“We are not giving it back!” she shouted, “No matter what nat-oh says!”
“Golly,” thought my friend, “this new tourism ministry is even more powerful than the old guys.”
“But who would you give it back to?” asked Jack, searching his memory for a sketchy understanding of 18th Century Russian history.
“The Swedes,” asserted Jack’s local St. Petersburg representative, who had much more of a head for lunchtime drinking and had been following along with a certain amount of wicked amusement.
“The Swedes!?!?!?!” howled The Battleaxe, bosom heaving, “What have they got to do with it.”
“NATO,” said the local rep, making it rhyme with ‘Plato,’ and kicking Jack under the table to silence him. “You have to keep your eyes on them at all times.”
To Vice Admiral Viktor Nikolaevich Mardusin, and all those who serve with him – many congratulations on the birthday of the Baltic Fleet!
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Today is also International Museum Day, and your opportunity to weigh in on your favorite museum bathroom, pick up value, desirability as a runaway venue and other categories! Be sure not to miss it!
Thank you so much for stopping by on Baltic Fleet Day! Is it part of your job description to have too many cocktails at lunchtime? What's your strategy? And, does anyone know why Finland hasn't joined NATO yet? That seems silly...
Today is The Day of the Black Sea Fleet, founded on this day in 1783 by Prince Potemkin – of the Villages fame. Traditionally, and it now seems that tradition will continue, the fleet has been headquartered at Sevastopol, located on the Crimean Peninsula. Sevastopol has the disadvantage of not actually being in Russia, not that Russia worries about this too much. This would be like Britain having its Naval Headquarters in Galway, Ireland. So likely. If you’ve been watching the news recently, you’ll recall that the subject of extending Russia’s lease of numerous naval bases in the Crimea resulted in this dignified moment in the Ukrainian parliament:
Russia’s navy has four fleets: The Baltic, The Pacific, The Black Sea, and the Northern, as well as one flotilla, The Caspian Sea Flotilla. While I am sure each of these has its own particular cross to bear, it has to be really uphill work to keep Russia’s interests safe in this particular part of the world. Ukraine, which Russia does treat as a mildly irksome younger sibling whose left shoe is untied and nose is running, is not the only problem. To make it clearer, I’ve made a helpful map:
The Black Sea fleet guys are known for their somewhat hotheaded approach to seamanship, the most famous example being the uprising in 1905 of the sailors of The Battleship Potemkin, (named after the guy with the Villages.) Sailors mutinied killing 18 officers. They then tried to shop the battleship round to minor countries like Bulgaria and Roumania, who knew enough to send it back to Russia, but the uprising was seen as one of the early victories of the Russian Revolution and later made into a famous film.
The other thing you think about when you think about the Black Sea, of course, is the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Sochi --
“Where?” asked my high school friend, Madeline, whom I met for a drink on a visit back to the US.
“Sochi – it is a resort town on the Black Sea Coast – backs up on the Caucasus mountain range? They’ve turned it into a winter recreation center and Putin and Medvedev are always there skiing and stuff.”
“Wasn’t the Olympics in Canada this year?” she asked, confused.
“Yes, but the next winter Olympics is in Sochi.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “I never heard about that place in my entire life.”
Madeline is clearly not Russian, because every Russian knows about Sochi – you can’t avoid the nightly updates on the Russian news about it. The Olympics in Sochi – or “Sochi 2014” as it is branded, is likely to be the biggest national embarrassment since the Russo-Japanese War, but to hear Russians talk about it, you’d think it was the Second Coming of Christ. Russia watchers have concerns that things may not be going according to schedule. Putin changes the person in charge every three months, and eventually, I suppose, he will simply have to go and run the damn thing himself.
Maybe he should get that Potemkin guy in. Him with the Villages.
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Happy Black Sea Fleet Day to Vice-Admiral Kletskov and all those who serve under him!
Can you believe Russia has four fleets in it’s Navy and that they ALL celebrate different holidays? I confess I was a little taken aback. Had you heard about the egg roll in the Ukrainian parliament? Had you heard of Sochi before this post? Could you have correctly identified it on a map before today? Did you realize it was so close to Georgia? Well, there’s no homework here at Dividing My Time, just a sincere thank you for stopping by and reading this post. I’d love a line from you, telling me more about you and what you think of this blog, or Russia in general. You can leave a comment by clicking the comment button below!
And I'll leave you with a charming montage of the Black Sea Fleet Musical Ensemble's performances:
Today is Victory Day!! I usually put the entire name of the holiday in the title of the post, but this one doesn't fit. Once again, post-perestroika political correctness at work: День воинской славы России — День Победы советского народа в Великой Отечественной войне 1941—1945 годов (1945) which translates as Day of Russia’s Military Glory – The Day of Victory of the Soviet People in The Great Patriotic War 1941 – 1945.
What can I say about Victory Day that hasn’t already been said? As you know, May 9th of course commemorates the glorious moment in 1945 (choreographed by Stalin with the tacit agreement of Roosevelt and Churchill, who no doubt just wanted the whole thing to end one way or the other) when the Soviet Army triumphantly marched into a vanquished Berlin.
World War II, or “The Great Patriotic War,” as any Russian schoolchild will tell you, was a conflict primarily fought in the Eastern European theater of war: starring the Russians as the Good Guys and featuring the Nazis as the Bad Guys. As guide books say : while many millions of brave and patriotic Russians perished, the Soviet Forces ultimately triumphed over the powers of Fascism, and peaceful productivity was restored to the peaceful-loving Soviet people. Footnote: there were, perhaps, other skirmishes taking place on the periphery of this major conflict such as a minor air battle over the English Channel, and some unpleasantness in the Pacific, but they do not cover this in national curriculum of Russia, even in elite officer-training military academies such as the one HRH attended. As I have written before, HRH was baffled and unable to identify D-Day as an historical event during a screening of “Saving Private Ryan.” I rashly suggested that D-Day had been the turning point in World War II, with dire consequences.
On May 9th, there is a huge parade through Red Square. Huge ostentatious military parades complete with goose-stepping have rather gone out of fashion, so Moscow's parade is one of just a handful of opportunities left on the planet to experience this live. I recommend it, if only to see the bizarre moment when Very Senior Military Guy tries to remain standing in the 1950's style convertible car at the beginning of the parade, as the car clatters over the uneven cobblestones of Red Square. Velvet feels, and I must say I agree with her, that there is really no excuse for this sort of thing: Very Senior Military Guys should be on horseback, like Field Marshall Zhukhov who led the first May 9th parade astride a pure white charger, and here is his statue just outside Red Square:
In case your local TV station didn't cover the parade in as much detail as you'd hoped, here is a link to the 2009 parade.
We always watch the parade at home with Bloody Mary's and smoked salmon, and avoid going out on the streets since you can hardly move thanks to crowd control brought to you by the Ivan The Terrible School of Civil Defense. After the parade, the veterans march down from the Belorussian Railway Station to the Bolshoi Theatre and have a big piss up. Rather nice fireworks later in the evening. Barack isn’t coming, which is a blow, although my Very Good Friend The Famous Newscaster interviewed him the other day and he wished all the Russians well. There is this issue of Moscow's pint-sized mayor seeding the clouds to ensure good weather which is true. No one believes it, but its true: helicopters fly up the sky and put something in the clouds and they go away for the day, ensuring bright, hot sunshine on the day, and cold, cloudy, clammy weather for the next week after. The estimated cost of this, according to Moscow News: 45 million rubles, and that never seems like a lot in Monopoly money does it: but is actually $1,474,208.58 USD or £996,858.62 Pounds Sterling. Seriously.
May 9th this year happens to coincide with Mother's Day in the USA, but I'm not expecting HRH to remember to send floral tributes my way (he recently learned how to purchase floral tributes on the Internet and send them places...was astonished by the technology) since he is hosting a small gathering in our apartment, so everyone can enjoy the five second moment when you see the fighter planes come from Tyushino Airport at the speed of sound right towards our large living room window. Then you see the same thing on the TV and then you see red, white and blue smoke from the opposite window as they make their way over Red Sq. Prime real estate.
Since all my clever readers know about World War II (if not, see Cliff Notes in Paragraph 2), in lieu of a history lesson, I'll tell you a very funny story about what happened to our family on May 9, 2005 in Malta:
Sometimes, if I want to make HRH rein it in, I need only cock my eyebrow and say, “Darling, let’s not forget Malta 2005 now, shall we?” He nods, shudders, puts down the shot glass and, tail between his legs, moves to fizzy water for an hour or so.
Malta was my choice for our annual May Holiday getaway. I had always had a hankering for Malta, which I vaguely wanted to test drive as a possible second home for when we struck it rich. On paper, it seemed to combine a number of things which are high up on my list: Italian culture, British history, a glamorous Order (with a capital “O”) of Knights, stone architecture, the San Antonio palace connected with Marie of Romania etc. It seemed like a win-win travel destination for the whole family, offering Velvet and HRH the opportunity to sun and swim while I poked around Valetta. The food, I felt sure, would be heavenly Mediterranean.
Disappointment ensued. Not the stabbing kind of disappointment that motivates you to pen an outraged letter to the New York Times; rather a dull sinking feeling that pervades you like soy sauce spilled on a white cotton T-shirt, that this travel destination is not the travel destination of your dreams. Yes, the ornate hotel was nice and comfortable, and sure, Valetta offered up some of its interesting history, but the sea was cold, the beach rocky, and the “charming” port town of St. Julian was full of brassy British expats, loud sunburnt German holiday makers, and shifty looking Eastern European youths from the myriad Maltese language schools. The blocks of flats looked depressing, the drink of choice was Belgian lager, and the plat du jour tended to be lasagna and chips. As I poked through Valetta’s streets with the growing awareness that even Dan Brown couldn’t conjure up an ancient Maltese secret, at the hotel, HRH and Velvet fell into a nodding acquaintance with a group of disgruntled Russian tourists from Perm, fellow refugees from the cold sea, they pulled deck chairs around the hotel pool and shared their general disappointment in the entire experience.
This cordial entente continued until the evening of May 9th, arguably the most important holiday in Russia. Returning to the hotel after yet another fruitless foray out into St. Julian to find something more appetizing than lasagna and chips, we found about sixteen of the Permites had taken the liberty of rearranging the hotel lobby’s furniture into a stereo-typical festive Russian living room configuration: couches pulled up around two coffee tables. They motioned to us to join them, and have a Victory toast.
It seemed vastly ill mannered on the 60th anniversary of Russia’s unqualified victory over Nazism to flee, although this was my immediate gut reaction. Since nothing as major as the 60th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War could possibly be put to bed in a mere half an hour – I braced myself for a lengthy session in the trenches. We squeezed onto one of the couches. An elegant Maltese waiter immediately approached to ask what I wanted to drink, and I mentioned a local wine I’d tried and liked. HRH ordered a cognac and we secured Velvet a Fanta.
“Lissssssssen,” Arkady, the ringleader, hissed at us knowledgably. “No need to pay those bar prices…just order juice, look see what we have!” He motioned us to look between his legs, which I felt might not be completely appropriate for 8-year Velvet, but I followed his eyes to the bottle of Duty Free Chivas under the table.
This under-the-table tactic was one I knew well: having successfully employed it frequently, off-duty, during my misspent youth as a tour guide in the late 1980s in Eastern Europe. It’s a good trick, if somewhat obvious, and yet somehow, as a full paying guest in the “oughts” it seemed somehow awkwardly out of place.
“Um…” I began, but HRH gave me a no nonsense warning look, and I just smiled. Arkady deftly topped up eleven orange juices with Chivas and we hoisted our collective glasses to victory: “Za Pobediy!”
This all-too-familiar ritual was repeated about six or seven more times. I was getting woozy, and I could see Velvet was on the verge of collapse from the gassy combination of stodgy lasagna and chips and three large Fantas. I cast a few pleading glances at HRH across the coffee table, but he ignored me, deep in a conversation about the 900 Day Siege of Leningrad with an older men who’s face was borscht red with sun and drink. We drank to the Soviet Army a number of times, and Arkady was kind enough to indicate, that, of course, America had had a role in World War II, so a toast was drunk to me, which I tried to acknowledge gracefully.
A discreet cough.
“Madame,” said the suave waiter in English. “Madame, may I speak with you?”
“Of course,” I said, welcoming the interference, but wary about the conversation I felt sure would ensue. I awkwardly extracted myself from between Sveta and Aniuta, who were on either side of me, and went to join the waiter a discreet distance from the group. My tour guide days had made me feel an intense solidarity with hotel staff, and I smiled encouragingly.
“Madame, I realize your friends are guests of our hotel, and as such are most welcome in the lobby bar. They are, we recognize, celebrating a national holiday, but we cannot allow them to continue to top up their drinks from under the table. There are a number of hotels and hostels where this kind of thing is permitted – even encouraged -- but this is not one of them. It is not our custom to allow such things.”
I sighed; feeling much as I imagined Roosevelt must have done at the Yalta Conference.
“I understand,” I said, “and I will try to get them to move the party elsewhere, but I fear these things are –“
“We know, Madame…we have many Russian guests. If you could explain that they are very welcome to order their drinks from the bar, I’d be most grateful.”
He had the impeccable manners to hand me a complimentary glass of wine and we exchanged watery smiles.
I returned to the couches and explained, as sweetly as I could, that the guerilla tactics with the Chivas under the table had been outed, and I thought it best that they repaired to someone’s room to continue the party.
Arkady shook his head and, thumbs tilted at right angles to his body, pounded his upturned wrists in the universal gesture of Russian emphasis.
“Urodiy!” he spat out, “Italian Axis Power BASTARDS! But what can you expect…all these other countries can’t stand it that we won the war…and look at it now…EU money while we…”
“Besieged,” I whispered, miserably, but with the confidence of one with a complete tour of the Valetta History Museum under her belt, which I (correctly) conjectured Arkady wasn’t, “Malta. Under siege by the Germans from 1940-1942. British Naval Base. Allied forces all the way.”
Abject silence ensued, as seventeen pairs of eyes squinted in suspicion and an effort to focus vision. The suave waiter gave me a big smile and a nod of acknowledgment.
“I think Velvet and I are going to say good-night now, she seems very tired. Once again, congratulations on victory in The Great Patriotic War.” I beat a hasty retreat, dragging Velvet, now on a sugar high, behind me.
HRH lurched in around 9:00 the next morning as I was trying to decide whether to go to breakfast or call the Maltese police first, while simultaneously trying to reassure Velvet that Papa had just stayed awake with the nice people we’d met the night before. HRH stood in the doorjamb, swaying back and forth. I felt a rush of relief that he was alive, which is all that matters in moments like this.
“Vraaaaaaagggg-eeeeee…” he drawled, in is his standard morning-after condemnation and accusation of the external forces – or “enemies”, which have forced him, unwillingly, into a drunken stupor the previous evening.
“Allies, surely.” I quipped as he fell senseless onto the bed.
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Happy Victory Day to everyone...where ever in the world you may be!
The phrase “In defeat unbeatable: in victory, unbearable,” is attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, who used it in reference to Lord Montgomery, not The Russian Federation.
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Dear Reader:
Happy Victory Day! Unless, of course, you don’t celebrate Victory Day, and there are those who don’t. There are those who already celebrated it yesterday, but anyway. What’s your take on seeding the clouds? Do you think I was right to get Velvet out of the Maltese lobby? Did you think the waiter was being churlish? Thanks for making it through a long story…but hopefully a funny one. You can tell me to “edit edit edit” which is what my Mom always says to my Dad, by clicking the comment button below and leaving me your thoughts! Stay with me as we set sail (hint hint) for next week’s exciting line up of Russian professional holidays!
~ Metronome played over the radio during the 900 Day Siege of Leningrad (1941 - 1945)
Today is Radio Day in Russia, and if you can have a fight via SKYPE, I’ve just had a particularly vicious one with HRH, over, what else, who actually invented the radio? Was it Italian Guglielmo Marconi who worked out how to transmit the human voice, took out a patent and formed the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, or was it Russian Alexander Popov who was the first to present a thunderstorm monitor on May 7, 1895? Russians seem to favor the Popov theory, which is why today we celebrate anything and everything to do with radio!
Whoever did invent radio, there is no question: it is a boon to mankind. When I first started coming to Russia in the 1980s, radio was piped into houses like electricity and water, and many of the older people I met could not believe we purchased separate units to listen to the radio. In flats, there was a button on the wall, and you dialed it up or down, and that was it. You have to wonder, given what we know about the political climate of Russia in the early and mid 1900s about the two-way street aspect of Soviet Radio, which got me thinking how amazing it would be if NPR’s Terry Gross or Michelle Norris could actually hear me during "Fresh Air" or "All Things Considered?" But then I thought, uh-oh, potentially very cringe making: Does Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! host Peter Sagal listen in on my SKYPE fights with HRH? What if “This American Life’s” Ira Glass has heard me curse when I cut my thumb chopping onions, or, God Forbid, BBC’s Melvyn Bragg knows that I sometimes take phone calls during “In Our Time.” Thank God for perestroika and podcasts!
The mere phrase “Radio Day” will make Russians with a sense of humor smile, because they are thinking of the play, and later movie of the same name by the amazing comedians from “Quartet I.” If Russia has a SNL, it’s these guys. "Radio Day" is set at a radio station trying to keep one step ahead of a made-up tragedy, which the DJs and writers are making up themselves as they go along. Their better-known movie, "Election Day" or “Deyn’ Vyborov” is a family favorite with HRH, Velvet and myself, with the same cast of characters, now sailing down the Volga with only 2 weeks to create a winning PR strategy for a dud gubernatorial candidate in a rigged regional election. I’ve been fortunate enough to see the group live and they are phenomenal. If you speak Russian, be sure to catch their movies or, if you have a husband as nice as HRH who buys tickets, their live shows. You will wet your pants, I promise.
I’ll finish on a touching note, by drawing your attention to today’s quote: which is merely the sound of a metronome. This sound was broadcast via radio throughout the 900 Day Siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1945, and to survivors of the Blockade, the sound is instantly associated with the cold, dark hungry days when the city was surrounded by German troops. But, as Harrison Salisbury noted in his definitive book on the subject: "900 Days" a besieged city is not an occupied one, and radio played its part in keeping citizens informed and alert. Actors read classic poetry, musicians played live music, and when there was no one to speak, the metronome was placed in front of the microphone, communicating the steadfast heartbeat of a city determined not to give up. The metronome was also used to warn citizens of impending air raids: if the tempo increased, Leningraders knew to seek shelter, and when the tempo decreased, this was the sound of the all-clear.
Happy Radio Day to radio broadcasters and listeners everywhere!
I won’t even ask if you are a radio listener, because, of course you are! What is your favorite program and when do you listen to the radio: in the car, as you try to wake up, making dinner, or all of the above? Have you listened to Russian radio? If so, you have my sympathy. Thank you very much for tuning in to Dividing My Time to find out more about the funnier side of life in Russia. That means a lot to me, as does your feed back, which you can leave by clicking on the comment button below.
We aren't going to give a lot of attention to this CYA post-perstroika footnote holiday. Not when today is also Radio Day, which is a lot more interesting.
Today marks the 18th anniversary of the Creation of the Military Forces of the Russian Federation, which happened on May 7, 1992. It's a post-perestroika, sign the decree thing.
Which is an excuse for a lot of 40, 50, and 60-something alpha males to kick off the REAL holiday on Saturday a few days early. I can see the logic -- make sure their hangovers are well and truly cured before the rigors of the big day. Stay tuned!
Wait a minute....18 years? That long? This is where I came in...
YIKES!
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Dear Reader:
Unless you are a military buff, I don't think you'll have much to say about this...neither do I, but thanks, as ever, for tuning in!
The only difference between a saint
and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
~ Oscar Wilde
Today’s is
St. George’s Day and before you Brits go ballistic, remember that, despite all
that “religion is the opium of the masses” stuff, Russia still goes by the
Orthodox calendar, and thus is always about 13 days behind the rest of the
world.We’ve talked about this
before.
Having
conceived this stunt, I was determined to steer clear of all but the most
important religious holidays…once you get into things like Day of Saint Simeon the Stylites, you kiss
any hope of seeing Grey’s Anatomy on a regular basis good-bye.But St. George is actively
celebrated in Russia, possibly due to its proximity The Major Event (stay
tuned) happening later this week, and therefore is something of a warm up.It’s also a very good example of how post-perestroika Russia
has returned to Tsarist traditions. Catherine The Great established the Military Order of St. George in 1769, and this was revived in 1994 by President
Boris Yeltsin, with an obvious hiatus from 1917 – 1994.The Order of St. George, said she in a
know-it-all voice, is the highest military order in Russia, and before you HRHs
out there start mouthing off about The Hero of The Russian Federation, which
used to be called The Hero of the Soviet Union, that is the highest military
honor associated with a medal.So
there.
When HRH
does something truly astonishing such as carrying his empty coffee cup upstairs
to the kitchen (our kitchen is upstairs) and is obviously looking for the gold
star, I will often say to him:
“What to do
you want, The Order of Lenin?” to which he will instantly and rather cheekily rejoin
“First
class.”
I think I
will start asking him if he wants the Order of St. George the Triumphant.If I can figure out how to say
“Triumphant” in Russian, which could be uphill work.
If you were
in Russia this week, you’ll have seen a lot of these ribbons, the “George
Ribbon” which is a fad that got going five years ago when Russia celebrated the
60th anniversary of World War II:motorists tie this on their antennae or on the dashboard to
show their patriotism.The
colors of the ribbon are said to represent fire and gunpowder and are possibly
derived from the original Tsarist Coat of Arms, which also features George and
the dragon.
St. George
appears on a lot of coats of arms in Russia, as well as on the Presidential
flag.You can see him in the
middle slaying the dragon, which interestingly in Russian/Orthodox tradition
never dies (classic) but is locked in eternal struggle with the noble George,
who embodies all the virtues of bravery, faith, Christian morals and
compassion.No wonder he’s the
patron saint of the Boy Scouts.
We don’t
know much about George himself, except that he was a noble Roman soldier who
was beheaded by Emperor Diocletian (who was often known as “the dragon” which
perhaps gave birth to the legend) for protesting the Roman persecution of the
early Christians.
Whoever he was, today, St. George
is a busy guy:he is the patron
saint of soldiers, cavalry, chivalry, farmers, field workers, Boy Scouts,
butchers, horses & riders, saddlers, archers (hence the Henry V speech),
and those who can’t get their visa to Russia because they have leprosy, plague
or syphilis.Saint George is supposedly buried
outside Tel Aviv, but that doesn’t stop Moscow from making him its patron
saint, along with many countries and cities.
Happy St.
George’s Day to all who claim him!And who is the patron saint of Pony Moms…huh? Huh?
Happy St. George's Day! Are you a Boy Scout or a Butcher? Did you have to get a leprosy test to get to Russia, or do you think that's just the straw that might break the camel's back? Thank you very much for stopping by Dividing My Time. That means a lot to me, as does your feedback. Tell me, how do you celebrate St. George's Day, if indeed you celebrate it at all? Does your husband think he deserves a medal of honor for picking up his dirty socks? Whatever you're thinking, leave me a comment by clicking on the comment button below and let me know about it!
"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key…”
Sir Winston Churchill
Where would we be without our code crackers? Dan Brown, for one, would just be a geek in a turtleneck. Cryptography is as old as time, in fact, it seems to me that it has to be about the 5th oldest profession (after the Oldest Profession**, hunter/gatherer, housewife, and marriage counselor) out there. I was interested to learn by literally stumbling on this tidbit of information on a Russian government web site (!) that the Kama Sutra lists cryptography as one of the 64 essential arts for a cultured person, along with carpentry, tattooing, and, of course, cooking.
**Before you ask, as my buddy Joe Kelly did, no there isn’t a Day of the Sex Worker. Sorry about that.
The history of Russia’s code crackers is interesting, if short. Peter The Great (1672 – 1725) who was into big ideas, like creating a crackerjack navy for a land-locked country, realized that a world class autocracy could not function without some secret code, and the Petrine (as we Russian history buffs smugly but correctly call this period) reforms and campaigns made extensive use of coded messages and ciphers.
Fast forward two hundred years and things are virtually unchanged from Peter’s time.
From about 1850, Russia’s rulers dealt with a sharp uptick in violent revolutionary activity at home. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated minutes from the Winter Palace by members of the revolutionary group “Narodnaya Volya” or Peoples’ Will, and after that the secret police, or Okhrana, the forerunner of the KGB, was beefed up and more attention paid to creating and cracking more complicated ciphers, such as the particularly successful Nihilst code. Go ahead, click it! It will show you how to say "Blow up the Winter Palace" in code!!!
The Revolution of 1917 split Russia in two: the “Reds” those loyal to the Revolution and “White” monarchists fought for control until 1921. The Whites got most of the cryptologists and cryptanalysts, making it necessary for the fledgling USSR to start all over again.
After this, the trail leads to the FSB (current incarnation of the KGB) website. The Cryptographic Service is part of that crowd. From there, the trail goes cold.
As well it should.
My theory about the relative late start and lax attention to cryptography during large swathes of Russian history, for what it’s worth, is this: I think Russians more often than not think they talk in code already…and of course they do. With an alphabet that makes a normal person feel they’ve developed instant dyslexia, Russians can, and do, use their truly foul curse words in the lobby of posh hotels in New York and Paris, confident that no one (except the bellboys) understands a word they are saying.
This, however, is erroneous, as I can attest from my days as a tour guide. Once, I was doing what is called a "Fam" or Familiarization Tour (you may know it better as "boondoggle") for travel agents in Eastern Europe. The National Guide was Serbian, the driver was Slovenian, the Czech guide we were dropping off at the border spoke Slovak and Czech, and I spoke Russian. We got to the Czech/Polish border and, I kid you not, this really happened, everyone spoke his or her language and we understood one another perfectly.
Velvet and I often lapse into Russian over here in the USA if we need to communicate sensitive info. For example, when my vegetarian nieces dig into the tofu, pea pod, and tempeh salad their mother has provided as the children’s’ meal, I cock an eyebrow and say to her in Russian:
“If you eat some of that, after dinner I will take you to that red restaurant with the golden arches for the largest item on the menu and their very good potatoes”
Which is code for: “Eat a little and then I’ll get you a Big Mac and fries.”
Congratulations to all the employees at the Cryptographic Service of The Russian Federation!
Thanks for sticking with me on this double-holiday day! I sincerely appreciate you visiting Dividing My Time, and I'd love to know how you and your family talk in code! Click on the comment button below and leave me a message (in code or not!) And if you haven't done it yet, be sure to visit the other people we are honoring today, the divers and wish my personal favorite PADI-certified diver, George a happy 15th birthday and Happy Divers Day (lucky him to be born on the day of his favorite holiday!!)
Today is May 1st, which is a big deal in a number of cultures and countries for various reasons.Foremost is the coming of Spring, as celebrated by the Romans at the Festival of Flora, the Celts at Beltane, and the good old Germans at Walpurgisnacht (I once went to a memorable Walpurgisnacht celebration in Bristol, England, and haven’t been able to face sweet dessert wine since).
In the “Former Socialist” or “New Capitalist” world, May Day is associated with solidarity of the working classes, and in the USSR, May 1st used to be known as "Day of Solidarity of the Workers." What the Russians won’t tell you, though Wikipedia and I will, is that this was actually dreamed up by…the Australians. Go and figure. Which is interesting, since May 1st for them doesn’t designate the coming of Spring at all, but nevertheless, in 1856, they came up with the idea of a universal holiday for the working classes.
On the other side of the world on May 1, 1886 in Chicago, at a three-day-strike at a factory got out of hand and police fired on the crowd of striking workers, resulting in twelve deaths and world-wide outrage and subsequent sympathy for the plight of the working people. May 1st became a day of solidarity with the cause of workers’ rights, and gained a solid foothold in Europe. Russian workers first held demonstrations in 1891 in St. Petersburg, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the holiday was firmly entrenched as the national day of celebration of the workers’ state, with massive parades through the streets of major cities.
Northampton celebrates the beginning of May too... in its own particular way, which also has to do with solidarity. This is known simply as "Pride" and it was getting going this evening on main street, under the benevolent protection of Noho's four cops. This is a regional celebration, it seems, which was brought home to me today when Velvet called from school to say she was sorry that she had not called me in the morning, but they were observing a morning of silence, "...you know in solidarity with people don't live in as understanding a community as ours."
I said I thought that was just great, and then suggested she might not want to go into a lot of detail about that to HRH.
Sadly, I will miss my opportunity to show solidarity with people who live in the most understanding of communities, in downtown Northampton, because, needless to say, I am going to a horse show.
In Russia, May 1st kicks off a series of holidays bundled up together as “The May Holidays,” which actually just include May 1st and May 9th (Victory Day), but the Russian Government in its infinite wisdom massages the calendar so that these two holidays run into one another and Russians end up with most of May off, although they usually have to work an eight day work week to compensate for it. You can read about it in my inaugural humor column. The one that got me in to so much trouble with Olga Quelque Chose
All this free time, combined with fairly reliably good weather, mean one thing for any Russian worth his salt pork: it’s time to head to the dacha! I hate dachas. I'll explain why tomorrow.
So off you go, Russia, to your shashlik and your dachas, Noho - enjoy Pride. I'm going to be in solidarity with the other Pony Moms.
Thank you for stopping by and reading this post. Although I know my Russian audience will be firing up the kostor and too busy, I'd love it if everyone else could let me know what you thought about this post by clicking on the comment button below. Tell me, how are you going to spend May 1st?
If you watch Russian TV, you know: these are the guys with the best parkas hands down, no contest. According to EMERCOM’s very user friendly web site (except the HTML code they provided to put their logo into my blog doesn’t work, but I am sure they have more important things to worry about, so we will just leave that aside…) there are 220,000 firefighters who will be celebrating today, so my advice is to check that you’ve unplugged the toaster and dumped all those cigarette ashes down the loo since these guys will be celebrating all day long. Joining them will be the 210,000 volunteer firefighters, so it is set to be a big party.
I wondered if there would be many women at the party, and extensive Internet searches for “Female Firefighters in Russia” did not reveal much that I could publish on this blog without having to add an “Adult Only” rider, though I did find a PG-Rated online dating service for single firefighters and, as a public service message, I link it here. If any readers know the answer, I hope you will get back to us with some statistics!!
This year will be the 361st anniversary of the founding of Russia’s Firefighting force on April 17, 1649 by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, whom you won’t have heard of, the father of Peter The Great, whom you will have.
“Wait a minute,” I hear you cry. “Today is the 30th of April.”
Exactly right. Because Russia was 13 days behind the rest of the world, languishing in the calendar system created by Julius Caesar in 45 BC or BCE until 1917 when Vladimir Lenin pulled the world’s largest country onto the slick, new and improved Gregorian Calendar of 1582 . I wrote about this in a column on Russian Public Holidays, which a lot of people, most of them called Olga, didn’t think was funny. They were wrong.
But, to get back to the Russian Firefighters: who doesn’t love a fireman? What’s not to adore? As regular readers know, I’m not the President of the Russian Uniformed Militia/Civil Servant Fan Club, but I do have a great fireman story (are there any bad fireman stories?) and it is this:
Back in my miss-spent youth, or, as my daughter Velvet says, “before there was e- mail," I worked as a tour guide in post-perestroika Russia which, in those days, was uphill – talking steep incline -- work. Not only was there no e-mail, there were practically no phones, no yellow pages, and lots of stuff that was off limits. American tourists, however, didn’t think the “off limits” part applied to them, and they were always after me to find impossible-to-find things like dog shelters (this was also before Barbara Spier got busy creating these), their long-lost third cousin Masha, last heard from in Karaganda in 1941 (as I touched on a recent post on the Stalin Era Terror, cousins called Masha who lived in places like Karaganda from 1936-1953 are very hard to find indeed), pedicures on the Trans-Siberian railway (seriously), condoms, The Seventh Day Adventist Church, and lots of other Holy Grail-type things. I’d stand there at JFK at Gate # 10 waiting to meet them and wonder what the next 7 days would have in store for me.
One March, a group of three men arrived to check in with me – all tall, moderately good-looking, fit, and very wholesome looking. I can’t recall where they were from, but it was considerably west of JFK. They announced to me before we boarded the plane that they were firemen and said they really really really wanted to visit a fire station in Russia.
“Absolutely,” I said, which was what I always said standing at Gate # 10, and then promptly forgot about it. It was a long and complicated itinerary and our days were packed. They reminded me a few times during the first day, and so I asked our Intourist guide, Tanya, if she thought we could make time for a stop at a firehouse.
Tanya assumed the maddeningly non-committal air Intourist guides were trained assume even before they were taught to use a microphone, and said we’d have to see. I knew what that translated into: I would have to sort out this problem myself.
I asked the firemen exactly why they wanted to see a firestation, and they said it wasn’t so much that they wanted to see the firestation, but they wanted to meet their Russian counterparts. It turns out that firemen are an international brotherhood, and the great thing to do is to take a little banner from your firestation and trade it with some other guys little banner from his firestation, and the firestation with the most little banners is the coolest. It is also quite the fashion to be photographed on the other guys’ truck. And the firestation who has the most exotic collection of photos is the coolest. Like, for example, if you had a banner from North Korea, you would be the coolest firestation of all. Nowadays, they have online forums, but then it was just this thing they did – no one organized it – it just happened. Like, as my mother is always pointing out, Halloween.
In 1989, I wasn’t entirely sure that the Russian firemen, closed off from all but Warsaw Pact firemen for 3 generations were going to be at all excited about Americans walking in and claiming international brotherly rights. I had reservations about there being an adequate stock of little banners, if indeed there were little banners at all.
“I’m not sure we have time for it,” said Tanya in Vladimir and Suzdal.
As we reached the end of our journey, in Kiev, my least favorite city of them all, the firemen were giving me petulant looks, and I finally decided to take my chances with the bus driver, Volodiya. I handed him four packs of Marlboro cigarettes (a veritable fortune in those days) and explained the problem. He swept the packs into some concealed part of the driver’s seat, flashed me a tobacco-stained smile and told me to leave it to him. Later that afternoon, Volodiya took me and the firemen to a leafy suburb and pulled up in front of a real Russian firestation.
“Did you tell them we were coming?” I asked Volodiya.
He looked dumbstruck, and began to protest violently that this had not been part of the agreement. I sighed deeply. It's moments like this that keep Russia out of the WTO. I pointed out that merely locating the firehouse was a one pack deal, taking us there and back was also a one pack deal, but that for an entire FOUR I had hoped he’d lay some groundwork. He shook his head.
There was nothing for it. We hopped off the bus and strode purposely towards the firestation. Inside, there were five sleepy men seated around table playing cards.
“We are American firemen,” I said tentatively. They gave me a curious look, then clocked the three men flanking me, relaxed, nodded, and then stood up and, in what was clearly a well-rehersed production taught to them in Firefighter school, shook hands and began to give a completely unedited tour of the facilities including the pole, the sleeping quarters, the uniforms, the helmets…the whole enchilada. My guys climbed up on the stations sole fire engine made the same year as the Sputnik, and I snapped pictures of them grinning from ear to ear, arms around their Russian counterparts.
I was holding my breath, but, sure enough, little banners were produced, and exchanged. More photos. Then, the inevitable: numerous bottles of vodka and some salami.
“This is very cool,” I commented to my American fireman.
“Oh yeah,” he said calmly, “We always do this.”
Toasts were proposed to American Firemen and Russian Firemen and firemen in general, international friendship, and I raised a silent toast to myself…another Holy Grail run to ground.
We’d have been there all night, were it not for Volodiya, who pointed out that staying past 9 pm was going to cost another half a carton. So we took three incredibly drunk firemen back to the fleabag hotel, clutching their little banners, 100% satisfied.
Which is why Russian firefighters have remained very dear to my heart! Happy Firefighters Day!
All men are created equal, then a few become firemen. ~Author Unknown
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Dear Reader:
Thank you very much for stopping by and reading today's Stunt. It means a lot to me, as does your feedback, which I'd love for you to leave by locating the "COMMENT" button below and telling me what you think about Firefighters' Day. Do you know if there are women firefighters in Russia? Are you a firefighter yourself, and if so, have you got a lot of little banners?
This post is a part of The Stunt. For more information, click here.
Today I’m the featured blogger on Blogtrotting! This is very exciting and it is my pleasure to welcome you to my blog and the country where I spend a lot of my time: The Russian Federation. This post will give you a little bit of the skinny on me and Russia, as well as Me & Russia: a long-term, somewhat choppy relationship, which for better or worse, and richer or poorer, is set to last a lifetime. I've left a few breadcrumbs to follow to some classic posts via links, and I hope you'll stay a while and browse.
I’m an American who fell in love with Russian language, history, and culture when I was a bored 13 year-old and read Robert Massie's “Nicholas and Alexandra.” After The Wall came down, I majored in 19th Century Russian Studies, graduated, and set sail for Russia just in time for the main act of perestroika. To my extreme shock and horror, Russia in 1989 looked nothing like “Nicholas and Alexandra." You could have knocked me over with a feather. I almost left, but it was all too compelling to give up. So, here I am, 17 years later.
In 1992, I settled down in Moscow with the man who would become HRH (which, in addition to meaning “His Royal Highness” can also mean, depending on my mood, “Horrible” or “Handsome” Russian Husband.”) After a suitable interval, we were joined by our daughter, Velvet, who, at the age of six months made it abundantly clear to us that her life would be dedicated spending as much time with horses as possible. To better facilitate this, we’ve sent her to school in rural Massachusetts and we now divide our time between Northampton, MA and Moscow, and when people ask me what I do, I tell them, I'm a Pony Mom. We have many frequent flyer miles, but not enough to fly through volcanic ash.
“How do you like living here?” Russians ask me all the time. “It’s never dull,” I tell them, and it isn’t. Everything you try to do takes strategic planning, on-the-ground know-how, and sheer guts. What for example, would you do if confronted with this situation?
Or this one?
Or indeed, this one?
Though I am pretty sure you would know what to do in this situation...
“What has been the best thing about living in Russia for seventeen years?” asked an American lawyer.
“Smoked salmon,” I replied promptly.
“What can’t you get in Russia?” people often ask. The answer used to be everything from A-Z, so much so that I would play that game “I packed my grandmother’s trunk…” when I couldn’t fall asleep. Today, it’s just zip lock bags and Eileen Fisher. Yes, I’ve seen a lot of changes.
My blog is about finding the funnier side of life in Russia, which isn’t always easy, but incredibly satisfying when you do. Even the Russian TV Guide is funny. I found a guy so desperate to find a girlfriend that he dressed up in absurd clothing and was photographed in a truly tacky 18th century palace. You don’t see that every day, but you can see him here.
I have a thing about the Uniformed in Russia. I also am on a mission to chart all of Russia’s professional holidays, which include everything from the Day of the Cosmonauts to Customs’ Workers Day (and how I am going to find anything nice to say about them, I don’t know...stay tuned!).
Moscow is a huge sprawling city that has very beautiful parts of it, like the Moscow Kremlin, and some really awful parts of it, like the raw open wounds of chaotic construction all over the city. It’s a brusque, businesslike place, where traffic is often gridlocked and the weather is often grey. Moscow doesn’t welcome you with open arms, but you can find a lot of interesting things if you are willing to look. I take a lot of pictures in Moscow of the things I see – mainly the things that stand out at me as very ironic, very funny, very sad, or very typical of the Russian approach to life, which is often a combination of all of the above. I hope you enjoy having a look around.
I love to cook, and living in Russia, oddly enough made me a good one. I prefer to shop at the Farmers' Markets, which isn't for the faint of heart, but the best place to get fresh produce, meat and fish.
It is hard being a photographer in Russia, because very few people want to have their pictures taken, especially people in uniform, which is why I really treasure these shots:
Moscow cityscapes:
The women who made Hitler cry...
A man who helped...
And the most enduring image of them all...with the ubiquitous crane...
Author's Notes:
Photos by Jennifer Eremeeva, with sincere thanks to the administration of Dorogomilovskaya Market for allowing me to take pictures of the farmer's market.
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Dear Reader: I close my posts by thanking readers for stopping by, and telling them how much I value their feedback about Dividing My Time. If you would like to leave a comment, please feel free to click the comment button below. This is especially true today, when I look forward to welcoming new readers! I would also like to thank Blogtrotting for their interest in featuring this post: Большое вам спасибо: Russian for Thank you very much!
Veteran American expatriate, calling Moscow home for the last 17 years, I’m also a photographer, historian, cook, and humor columnist: always trying to find the funnier side of life in Russia as I manage a family consisting of HRH, my “Horrible Russian Husband,” and Velvet, my 12 year old, who thinks she’s a horse. I’m finishing up my first book, and divide my time between Moscow, Russia and Northampton MA: and the only thing they have in common is a complete lack of parking spaces.
Contact Me: herringunderfurcoat@gmail.com
"Jennifer Eremeeva’s blog Dividing My Time is certainly not another English Russia. Instead Jennifer – who has been living in Moscow for 17 years – posts wry observations about day to day life in Moscow."
Daily Hampshire Gazette
"wry and funny observations on life in Russia...Eremeeva also shares her tongue-in cheek take on what she encounters stateside."
Cool Cucumbers in a Pretty Pickle The sizzling hot spy scandal makes me wonder if I could pull of being a Russian...if only in the kitchen, where I attempt pickles!
Cool Cucumbers in a Pretty Pickle The sizzling hot spy scandal makes me wonder if I could pull of being a Russian...if only in the kitchen, where I attempt pickles!
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