I taped a New Yorker cartoon to my Handsome Russian Husband’s (HRH) side of the mirror the other day. The cartoon depicted a classic sophisticated couple seated in a well-appointed living room. The caption read “You’d know that about me if you followed me on Twitter.” This was my somewhat desperate attempt to send to two subtle messages his way: 1.) I’d like him to once and a while read my blog (which I know he never ever does because I’ve deliberately planted stuff in there, which would outrage him if he did) and 2.) I’d actually like to see more of him in general since he works from 7 a.m. to 11 pm at his Big Important Job at the Difficult Start-Up in An Important Industry.
Twitter has been on HRH’s mind lately. He doesn’t follow anyone on Twitter, he has no friends on Facebook, and he deeply regrets his one foray on to the Russian version of “Classmates.com” odnoklassniki.ru (which is responsible for one in four marriages breaking up in Russia) since it clogs up his e mail and he gets inundated with requests for jobs at The Difficult Start-Up from people he hasn’t seen since 5th Grade. He thinks Tumblrs are for beer at the end of a long hard day, and Hoot Suite is something owls do. In the Social Networking terms, he’s North Korea.
Twitter, though, is something he thinks may be in his future.
“You have to teach me to Tveeter,” he remarked one evening.
“Tweet,” I corrected.
“What?” he asked.
“I Tweet, you tweet, he/she tweets,” I conjugated.
“I don’t Tveeter,” he said, ignoring me. “You have to teach me.”
“Why do you want to tweet?” I asked. HRH’s Difficult Start Up at the Important Industry doesn’t seem to lend itself to being buzzed. Quite the opposite.
“I’m getting an iPad,” HRH explained, “So I have to Tveeter, right?”
“That is the outside of enough!” I fumed. I yearn for an iPad, and I resist purchasing one with ever fiber of my being. Tool, not toy, I told Velvet, our 13 year old who feels her life will be ruined until we let her upgrade her current iPhone3 to an iPhone 4. “What will you do with an iPad?” I yelled. “You don’t even know how to Google!”
The fog cleared. For the last six months or so, President Medvedev has been pictured at Cabinet Minister pow wows tenderly caressing his tablet and gently scrolling through his power point presentations on his iPad, while all the Soviet era Ministers scribble in their cheesy leatherette A5 notebooks with things like Gazprom embossed on them. You could follow one role model (young, hip, liberal) or the other (old school, conservative, safe.) Putin, it occurred to me, never writes anything down, and certainly didn’t toggle or scroll any device when he spoke publically.
“Yes,” I said, “Medvedev does, though he still refuses to follow me, even though I follow him. But an iPad is one thing, and Twitter is a completely different thing. The two things are mutually exclusive.”
“Are you sure?” asked HRH. “What is Tveeter anyway?”
“It’s like this,” I explained, “You condense something you want to say into 140 characters and you send it out to your followers.”
“What’s a character?” asked HRH.
“And then,” I said, “you can build your follower group by adding hashtags to key words, and everyone who is following that hashtag will see your tweet.
“I still don’t get it,” said HRH “Can’t I just send an e mail?”
We continued in this vein for some time, covering trending, re-tweets, following Friday and other salient aspects of Twitter. HRH said the whole thing sounded like a huge waste of time.
“Darling,” I finally said, exasperated, “I don’t think you are a natural born Tweeter. Your primary method of communication is to yell at people on your mobile phone. With Twitter, you need to have followers. Where are you going to get followers, anyway? From that Red Director crowd you hang out with?”
HRH considered this.
“I have subordinates,” he argued.
“Would they follow you?” I asked.
“They’d better!” he said.
“So you don’t need to Tweet,” I finished with a flourish, “but if you got me an iPad as well, we could Face Time while you are at work.”
“I told you,” HRH said angrily, “I’m not going on that site again. It’s responsible for one in four break up of marriages in Russia.”
This piece first appeared in The Washington Post on June 29, 2011. Once an online version of that story (chance will be a fine thing) appears on the web site, I will post a link.
The cartoon pictured above was pulled down off the bathroom wall after I ripped it out of The New Yorker where it first appeared. Obviously a little water logged.
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.
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.
I spend half my time in the messy and energetic Russian capital and the other half in Northampton: the politically correct epicenter of the galaxy, nestled in the heart of the bucolic Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. I designed this division of time to become a saner human being, but it has completely backfired.
“Have an olive,” I urge Vladimir over drinks in Moscow, “they’re from Spain.”
“Have some hummus,” I invite Caitlin at a poetry reading in Northampton, “the chickpeas were grown three miles from here in a humane solar-powered greenhouse co-operative.”
In Northampton, any invitation involving food necessitates sending out the following code, “Do you or your partner have any food allergies?” This reveals the extensive list of banned substances. Your guest responds: “We eat everything, except of course red meat, caffeine, chickens and eggs from non-local humane farms outside a six mile radius. No alcohol, of course…no sugar, obviously, and oh, no farmed fish, or processed dairy.” Which leaves a gourmand like me almost nothing to work with.
Contrast this with a recent exchange in Moscow:
“Come for Sunday lunch,” I email Posey St. Edmonds, mother of three, “I’m making Bouef Bourguignon.”
“Awesome,” she answers, “what can I bring?”
“Childcare,” I respond.
In Northampton, everyone is a passionately committed locavore, consuming only that food which is humanely grown within biking distance of her own front door. Even the garbage collectors in Northampton go around on bikes. Imagine chickens being tucked in at night, and you aren’t far wrong. Ground Zero for Northampton locavores is the Tuesday farmers’ market known simply as “Market.” When I first moved to town, I was totally fired up for “Market.” I bought the tote bag and hid my car in the adjacent multi-story car park, doing what I hoped was a credible imitation of someone who biked everywhere. I felt sure the sisterhood of writers, poets, yogis, and fascinating friends I planned to make would all be there. Two hours (and a desperate trip around the corner for some locally-made rum raisin ice cream) I reluctantly concluded that “Market” was great if you wanted to live on kale salad. I didn’t.
I feel curiously off the hook somehow when I return to Moscow, where even the most committed Northamptonite would be forced to agree: you can’t subsist on a diet of local beets, sour cream, and cabbage, and you’d lose face if you tried. It’s all about imports here in the Big Potato—a sushi bar on every street, a German beer in each refrigerator.
Nothing in Moscow is easy, though, and shopping for imported food at a decent price is an all-day contact sport necessitating stamina, my wingman Tolya-The-Driver, the gas-guzzling Land Rover, and a full water bottle. Our objective: a large, wholesale cash-and-carry warehouse, catering mainly to restaurants, called METRO, where $100 gets you more than three items. Cash is king here, so I secure a wad of 1000 RUR notes from HRH, tuck them carefully into a money belt, don my most comfortable shoes and dress in layers that can be removed as needed.
Oh, the thrill of METRO! Much harder work than “Market,” but infinitely more satisfying. I feel like a mighty Neanderthal hunter-gatherer, forging through the jungle of Leningradski Prospekt, stealthily sneaking the re-usable shopping bags (no five cent discount for using these at METRO) past the watchful eye of the armed security guard, and stalking my prey.
List poised, I push the oversized, lopsided trolley around, parking it strategically at the end of an aisle blocked by surly staff re-stocking with their forklifts. On goes my coat for a plunge into the chilly meat room: Lamb chops from Wellington, chicken breasts from Lille! Forward to the Dairy Annexe for Finnish milk and Swiss cheese. Spanish anchovies in olive oil, and real cornishons from France not Bulgaria! Momentary confusion in the spice aisle: why so very much allspice and no cumin? Alas, this day is not a complete retail slam-dunk: no Australian wine, but compensation looms in the form of Greek melting cheese and Israeli limes.
Once the bounty is safely stowed in the back of the Land Rover, Tolya and I celebrate with some local fare: Quarter Pounders with cheese, from the Avto-Mac, made from beef raised just outside of Moscow. We don’t want to be accused of not supporting local food producers or anything.
Do you get embroiled in the "it has to be grown within a bike ride away from you" stuff? Did you read "The Poser" where the narrator comes across a woman sobbing in a Seattle grocery store because she can't find artisan cheese to take to her Nursery School's snack thing...only something from Madison, WI? Hilarious. Alternatively, do you live in a place where everything is imported?
Hit the comment button and let us know how your shopping plays out each week! And if you would like some more humor from the disconnect between Moscow and Northampton, try some posts like these:
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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?
Is there anyone in the galaxy who hasn't yet weighed in on The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Very Scary Amy "Well, it's a memoir, Stephen" Chua thing? Ever slightly behind the curve, here's my semi tongue-in-cheek take:
My 13-year old daughter Velvet is a most accomplished rider…or jumper, or is it hunter? Maybe it’s eventer? Or eventress? I’m not sure, but she is exceptionally good at riding a horse. She can jump something like three feet. Or is it four? She’s always coming home with blue ribbons, or long “Reserve Champion” rosettes, and all manner of glassware, tea towels, trophies, and medals. Velvet is already on the fast track to something that I’m told happens in Madison Square Garden, and the Olympics have been mentioned as a realistic goal.
Everyone wants to know how I, who seldom take on anything that I can’t do in my pajamas, managed to produce such an athletic prodigy who excels at one of the world’s most elite sports. No one believes me when I just shrug my shoulders and say, “Honestly: I did nothing.” I can tell they don’t believe me. If these other pony moms had any imagination, they might wonder if Velvet is the natural daughter of a Cossak Hetman or The Duke of Right. The truth, of course is far more complicated: I really did do nothing. Velvet is a typical product of successful “indifferent parenting.”
This is the way I was raised, by two WASPs, who came of age about six months too early to be full-blown hippies. They took great care never to expose my sister and me to anything in which we could win a medal – of any kind. “Field Hockey,” said my mother pursing her lips, “Why don’t you go out for Big Chorus?” Their primary concern throughout our childhood was that we never got invited to enough sleepovers. After dinner each evening, everyone dispersed to his or her own part of the house without a lot of detailed chitchat as to what would happen there. I assume we did our homework at some point because, before you knew it, despite my mother’s tears and protests, we were both packing our trunks for really good prep schools, from which we both matriculated to the Ivy League.
“Darling,” said one of my mother’s friends (Concerto of the Upper East Side Piranha) through gritted teeth, “You never seem to push your children, and yet…somehow they end up doing, so well…”
It worked for me. Primed by constant parental assurance that the fusion of Glee Club, AP Latin, “Most improved JV Soccer player, and a backstage solo in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was exactly the skill set that prepared one for The Real World, I was ready to be a model of indifferent parenting myself when Velvet started to display a single-minded determination to excel.
“Leave this to me,” I said to my Russian husband. We had a deal: I called the shots on education, food, clothing, travel, and thank you letters and, in return, Velvet was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church.
“Hey, sweetie, why don’t we have six or seven of your friends over for a sleepover?” I said when she was eight, “They can all come home on the bus with you. We’ll get some videos, maybe do some ice-cream sundaes.”
“Mommy,” Velvet reproached me, “I’d have to miss riding.”
“It’s one day…” I coaxed, “what difference can it make?”
When she wanted Breyer horses, I gave her an American Girl Doll. In a counter offer to her plans to spend twelve to fourteen hours bailing hay as unpaid slave labor at the barn, I suggested a two-week Shakespeare camp or an experimental Quaker farming co-op. I forced her to go to Cape Cod for the last two weeks in summer, and St. Croix over Christmas, during which time I refused to even discuss the idea of riding. When she wanted to up her lessons from three to six days a week, I sat her down for a serious discussion.
“Velvet,” I said sternly, “There is such as thing as overkill. Get too good at this, and you’ll end up fox hunting or steeple chasing, and that will be no fun at all, trust me. Just try to relax and enjoy it.”
Velvet spent most of her leisure time working on a tricky thing called a “lead change.” She set up a jumping course in the living room out of upturned coffee tables and couch pillows, and then taped the complex pattern onto the flat screen. Hour after hour, she galloped around the course on a hobbyhorse. “Velvet,” I said one afternoon, peeling off the pattern from the TV, “you’ve been at that for forty-five entire minutes…enough already. Put the couch back together, and we’ll download ‘30Rock.’”
“Mommy,” she rejoined, “I have to do this for at least three hours, or I will never get it right.”
During the long, hot summer months, Velvet went on the show circuit, garnering blue ribbons by the bucketful. While the die-hard pony moms crowded each other at the rail yelling, “Get your heels down/pull your shoulders back/pull him up/push him over,” I hid behind “The New York Review Of Books” and sloped off in search of “ice for the cooler,” hitting all the antique stores in town on my way back. Rather than insisting we stay an additional three hours so she could get in another go at “Maiden English Pleasure” (which to me sounded like a Victorian soft porn film), I took to establishing firm escape clauses such as “Aunt Nancy is coming for dinner,” or “I’m on deadline.”
“You didn’t really mean to tell Velvet that horses don’t feel human emotions,” placated one of the more sympathetic moms after I’d had a mini meltdown swinging in-to the tenth hour of a hot and humid horse show in nowhere Vermont.
“Oh yes I did!” I told her, as all the moms picked up their hoof picks and edged away from my little island of sanity made up of cooler, folding chair, and a stack of magazines. “And I’ll tell you something else: that trainer needs her head examined if she thinks making “good luck” cards for those animals is time well spent.”
Resolute, I refused to buy a horse, standing my ground when my husband waivered. I made Velvet learn to read and use EXCEL to create and balance a budget from the scarily expensive “Dover Saddlery” catalog before I sanctioned the purchase of $200 dollar jodhpurs and something called “half chaps.” I insisted that she OXYCLEAN her own breeches and iron her show shirts. I made it clear that I was never, ever going to haul anything behind my Subaru and certainly not a horse trailer. I categorically forbade my mother from learning to braid a mane or tail. I developed an extreme allergy to horsehair and hay, producing notes from doctors to prove it.
It’s been a winning strategy for Velvet, who is, as I mentioned, on track to the Olympics. Kudos to me! Thanks to the hours that I have spent trying to distract her from the relentless pursuit of excellence, she’s achieving it. The hours I’ve clocked, wedged between the Scylla and Charybdis of pony moms, unapologetically resisting their patient attempts to teach me the difference between “over saddle under fences” and “hunter jumper” have paid off: Velvet is a self-made athlete, and her success can be attributed completely to her. What parent doesn’t want that sense of achievement for her child? After all, it’s nothing I did. Parental indifference – the Western child’s ticket to greatness!
Jennifer Eremeeva is a free-lance writer, blogger, cooking and humor columnist, and passionate horse show dodger based in Moscow. She blogs at http://dividingmytime.typepad.com.
Today is Naval Navigator Day in Russia! On this day, in 1701 Peter The Great founded the School of Mathematical and Navigational Studies in Moscow to educate a new breed of naval navigators to support his growing navy. The naval navigators used to celebrate on both the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, which, in addition to allowing twice the amount of fun, makes sense since those are the days when navigation is a relative doddle because the sun rises and sets due east and west. In 1997, however, the Russian government (having as usual, nothing better to do) decreed that we should fete the navigators on January 25th. It has occurred to me that this may be an attempt to counter-balance the complete disorientation of all of Russia’s students by noon, since today is also their day.
It’s good to know that there are some men out there who do take the time to think about directions, because most of the ones I know think it is a big waste of time and a somewhat unmanly pursuit, the exception that proves this rule being my father, a.k.a “Lightfoot the Pathfinder” who still believes he’s more accurate and accomplished a navigator than Serena the GPS system.
Men and directions always remind me of that very funny (and clean) joke about the three wise men and Christmas. What if they had been three wise women?
1.They would have stopped to ask for directions.
2.They would have been on time.
3.They would have prepared the stable.
4.They would have helped deliver the baby.
5.They would have made a casserole.
6.And they would have brought useful gifts.
HRH certainly never wastes any time Map Questing anything, despite the fact that his work takes him to all kinds of horrifically complicated places like Profsoyuznaya or that place where the Sberbank complex looks like the Death Star—you know the one. At this point in his career, HRH is very much a back seat passenger, content to let his fleet of drivers figure it out while he barks monosyllabic grunts into his mobile like good minigarchs should. On the very rare occasions that we set sail for some event or other without a driver, the following conversation ensues:
Me: Where are we going?
HRH: To Sergei Bychiuk’s new country house.
Me: And where is that?
HRH: outside Moscow…out Volokalamskoye way.
Me: is that all you know?
HRH (exasperated) Petrovna!
Me: Okay..okay. Whatever.
At the end of Volokalamskoye Shosse, after the scarred earth confusion of the border between Moscow and the Moscow Region where the asphalt turns into dirt/slush, HRH pulls over and extracts his mobile phone.
HRH: Seriozh….privet…okay, I’ve crossed the bridge at the 8 kilometer sign….now what? (Indistinguishable grunts from the other end)…korochiye…straight to the 4-kilometer sign….then left, then right…what? A water tower? On the left or the right? On the right, then what? Okay, I’ll call you from the water tower.
Me: Could you not get your friends to send you a Google Map link or something?
HRH: Petrovna, Sergei’s country house is not going to be on a Google Map link.
Me: Sweetheart, Kim Il Jong’s house is on a Google Map.
HRH: Sergei wouldn’t understand that kind of request.
Me: What you mean is that he doesn’t know how to turn on the computer.
HRH: There’s the water tower.
The water tower, miraculously, turns up, but just as it appears, the bars on HRH’s mobile phone disappear completely, to be replaced by “No Service.” HRH lets off a stream of obscenities under his breath. I refrain from saying “I told you so.” We sit in silence for a moment surveying the landscape.
Me: Do you know the name of the cottage settlement where Sergei’s house is?
HRH: It’s something out of a book.
Me: A book?
HRH: Forest something…about stealing from the rich.
Me: Are you telling me Sergei Biychuik lives in a forest settlement devoted to stealing from the rich?
HRH: Robin Good!
Me: It’s called Robin Good?
HRH: No, no, the forest in Robin Good…what’s it called?
Me: You can't mean “Sherwood Forest.” There is a cottage settlement called that on the wrong end of Volokalamskoye Shosse?
HRH: (slaps the steering wheel) That’s what I said, Sherwood Forest…that’s what it’s called!
Me: (consulting the Road Atlas I’ve smuggled into the car) There is no Sherwood Forest in the index.
HRH: Of course there isn’t! It’s…like private.
Me: Don’t you yell at me. My friends all live at normal places like Pokrovsky Hills or Romanov Pereulok…or Arbat Street or something that is on the map.
(Tense silence)
Me: What you have to do is go up and ask at that kiosk (indicating the only structure visible in the lunar landscape: a rickety construction with a faded banner proclaiming “SAUSAGES”) where Sherwood Forest is. They are sure to know something.
HRH: (mutters Russian curse words.)
Me: (fumbling with the door handle) Look – I ‘ll go and ask, I don’t mind.
HRH: (bellowing) STAY IN THE CAR!!!
Generally, of course, what happens at this juncture is that some retainer or other is dispatched in a Toyota Land Cruiser from Sergei Biychiuk’s house to lead us deep into Sherwood Forest.
Are you or someone you live with directionally challenged? What’s your favorite story about getting lost? Do you think every male child should be issued with a GPS system?
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:
Velvet is itching to go to the stables and I sense a narrow window of opportunity.
“I’ll drive you over,” I bargain, “if you write your Christmas thank you letters.”
“Mooooohhhhhhmmm…” she wails, “I’ll do them after.”
“Do them now,” I say, “Non-negotiatiable.”
“Can I e-mail them?” she pleads.
“Certainly not.”
Velvet grimaces, but silently takes the list, box of writing paper and roll of stamps I have ready for her. She slumps at the kitchen table and scratches away diligently, but unenthusiastically for forty minutes, occasionally asking how to spell “quilted” or “polartech.”
In the car, Velvet comments that she never has to write thank you notes in Russia.
“That’s true,” I say, “but only Babushka and Dedushka give you things in Russia, and you are always there with them, so you don’t have to write them a note…and anyway, if you did, it would probably never reach its destination anyway…what with the postal service being the way it is.”
Velvet skipped off to go for a ride and I swung the car back towards home, contemplating the thank you note zeitgeist. What makes me hold a gun to my daughter’s head and deprive her of leisure and enjoyment until she puts pen to paper to thank someone for a gift or a visit, a favor, or simply going out of their way? I suppose it is because my mother held a gun to mine, and her mother held one to her head…all the way back to the Flood.
You never ever get a thank-you note in Russia. Not even via e-mail or text, so you can’t blame it on the They have no place in the strictly mercantile favor exchange in Russia. A credit history is built up with favors rendered. Direct debit involves sourcing someone who knows someone, who can get to someone who has what you need. It never occurs to Petrov to thank Ivanov.
Russians have learned, however, that many foreigners release favors for free: like the Dior scent sample sandwiched between the pages of Vogue, or the basket of hard candies at the doctor’s office. So they help themselves.
In college, my Russian teacher, a recent arrival to New York from Odessa, got me to hire her absolutely clueless sister, who spoke no English at all, as an office assistant at the law firm where I did night typing. A National Guide from the State Tourism Committee I’d worked with landed at JFK to find that her (male) sponsor hadn’t turned up (Mrs. Male Sponsor had found out), and she ended up living with me for six months. One of HRH’s military school buddies had a sister on an exchange program at Syracuse. We invited her for Christmas break, a three week period, during which she spent the entire time lying on the sofa, eating Cheerios, watching videos, never once offering to help with any domestic chores. No thank you notes from any of them.
Bees Rees, the uncrowned Queen of Expat Moscow sent me a breezy e-mail requesting a command performance to meet with “a really gifted Russian colleague,” who wanted to explore opportunities in PR.
“No,” I wrote back, “And that does mean no – this is not be a diplomatic fob off. The answer next week will be the same. I don’t do that anymore.”
Bees, who normally has the final word on everything was flummoxed.
“Why?” she asked finally.
“You know, I am just fed up with doing things for a crowd who can’t put “thank” together with “you” when I do it. A Russian wants something -- or decides that he or she can get something from you, so they beg, plead, wheedle, and cajole you in that slightly breathless voice. They flatter you; say you are the only person who can help them. You provide the necessary, and then, once they’ve got the contact, the quote, the copy or the e-mail of someone who can do even more for them, you never hear from them again. I feel like used Kleenex. I don’t expect them to put a stamp on good stock writing paper, but an e mail or a phone call wouldn’t kill them.”
“Wow,” said Bees. “Wow.”
I just say no. I don’t help Tom’s 18-year old Russian girlfriend du jour re-do her resume. I say “no” to Russians in the USA who expect me to take stuff to their relations in Russia. “That’s why God invented DHL,” I tell them. I’m done spending hours copyediting emails for HRH’s turbo-charged female relations to their boss’s boss.
Thank you notes are never going to take off in Russia. I once asked this Gorgon at a Russian company I worked for to send a personal thank-you note to a very senior executive from a Fortune 100 company for a face-to-face meeting. Olga Vladimirovna clearly felt it was a big waste of time but handed me this:
[Company Letterhead]
Letter # 49/2001
LETTER OF THANK YOU TO ABC COMPANY
Respected Mr. O:
The General Director of XYZ company, Ivanova, Olga Vladimirovna, conveys her respect to you and your organization and extends her gratitude for the, carried out by you, meeting on 19.08.01 in the city of Moscow to discuss company ABC’s mutually profitable business negotiations with XYZ.
We assume that continued mutually convenient business partnerships will be in the future.
How did your Christmas go? What is your take on thank you notes? Outdated, old-fashioned and obsolete or never more charming and prevalent than in this edgy digital universe we inhabit? Have you ever been on the receiving end of a Russian thank you note like Olga Vladimirovna's? Weigh in by hitting the comment button below!
“Meet me at the Diner for lunch,” said Joe Kelly over the phone “I need to ask you something.”
I was happy to take a break from writing and oblige: lunch with Joe is always a treat. A former linebacker from Ohio, he fills the strategically positioned hexagonal booth at the Starlight Diner with his effusive bonhomie most afternoons, massaging his iPhone and running his business between a cheeseburger and jovial encounters with his many friends.
“So,” he said after I slid into the booth next to him, “here is what I want to know – what is it like to spend New Year’s in Russia?”
“Armageddon,” I responded automatically. “You aren’t really considering staying here, are you?”
“I might be,” said Joe, talking a restorative sip of his Diet Pepsi. “Tanya would like to go to her mother’s dacha, and she’s made it clear she’d like me to stay.”
Tanya, Joe’s longtime girlfriend is the original tough cookie -- like a titanium chip cookie. If Tanya wanted a Russian New Year’s, she was likely to get it.
“Spending New Year’s in Russia,” I said, shaking the ketchup bottle vigorously, “is very much like working for a Russian company: most expats try it once, and then give it up because it's way too dysfunctional and the food is terrible.”
“Tell me what you really think,” said Joe mournfully, dropping his head in his hands.
“I spent New Year’s in Russia once,” I said, “and almost got divorced as a result.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Seriously,” I said snitching one of his French fries and pointing it at him for emphasis, “It’s like Narnia – ‘always winter and never Christmas.’ No stockings, no carols, no wassail, no eight tiny reindeer – none of that. Christmas, when it happens is in January and it is no big deal. Do you really want to sit here on December 25th while the civilized world sips Bloody Mary’s and egg nog and opens presents, and you are at work where some beefy accountant called Olga makes you do your expense report --?”
“Jen,” said Joe carefully as I was in mid-harangue, “I am self-employed, that wouldn’t be my experience.”
“-- And then when you finally get to December 31st, you have to spend the entire day with your mother-in-law cleaning the entire apartment while she makes herring under a fur coat.”
“Is that the one with potatoes and carrots?”
“No, Joe,” I responded sternly, “herring under a fur coat is the one made from layers of beets, chopped hardboiled eggs, pickled herring, potatoes, glued together with polyester mayonnaise, all topped with grated cheese.”
“Yuck,” said Joe.
“Yuck doesn’t even crack the surface, my friend. And then, when your husband finally – finally -- comes home after an afternoon of racketing around Moscow congratulating government ministers and police chiefs – he falls senseless onto the couch for about four hours until its time to get up and turn on the TV. And what’s on TV? Russian variety musical shows, that’s what – hours and hours of cheesy Russian rock stars singing horrible music.”
“Well, Tanya doesn’t know any police chiefs,” said Joe grasping at straws.
“Not that you know of,” I cautioned, “but come New Year’s Eve, she’ll unearth some. And then, just when you’ve had about enough, the horrible sister will arrive: the most self-centered narcissist in the galaxy, not lift a finger to help, and proceed take a four-hour nap. And then you will begin to get why everyone is taking all these four hour naps around 9:30 pm, because you aren’t going to eat anything until 11 pm, and when you do eat, it will be herring under a fur coat and sweet champagne, and trust me – those two aren’t a culinary match made in heaven.”
“What happens at midnight?” asked Joe.
“Ah well,” I said, “the big dénouement is that President of Russia comes on and makes a five minute toast.”
“That’s it?”
I racked my brain. “I think so,” I said, “Yes, that’s all, but you know I’m not sure. I was so knackered from it all that I fell fast asleep at 12:01.”
Hey Readers, a gentle reminder in this season of giving: 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, and its really all I want for Christmas! Thank you!
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:
Don't Take Your Own Charter to Someone Else's Monastery.
~Russian saying.
The piece below appeared today on the BBC's World Service website, under the "Strana Russia" section. I've been writing for them since last summer, and it has been my first foray into publishing in Russian. I've written about clutter busting in Russia, observations on carrying on a balanced conversation with Russian men, and the differences between Back To School in Russia and the US. I was very taken aback by the number of readers who voiced their outrage that a foreign writer should choose to take on the subject of Russia. Many called me uninformed, others called me rude, still more think me rude, disrespectful, and downright crazy. I wasn't sure how to respond: it seemed unproductive (and incredibly time consuming) to post a response to each one, but some response seemed called for, and the BBC kindly agreed to post this piece. What do you think? Are foreigners equally entitled to publish their thoughts on an adopted country? Is expat humor an insult to the host country? Please join the debate in Russian on the BBC's Russia Service site, or below, in English.
My Charter: Relevant for Your Monastery?
Recently, a reader of this blog warned me to lay off the satire about Russia, using a Russian proverb: “don’t take your own charter to another’s monastery.” ["Со своим уставом в чужой монастырь не ходят.”] What the reader was trying to convey was that no foreigner should never ever presume to write about Russia, and certainly never in a humorous or negative vein, even those who, like me, have racked up the numbers: 18 years living in the country, three heads of state, two coups, three financial crises, one Russian husband, four years working for Russian companies, and more than five thousand hours clocked behind the wheel of a car stuck in rush hour Moscow traffic.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve had my literary hand slapped for daring to attempt humor in Russia:
“Of course it wasn’t,” I thought to myself. “What is there to respect about a mobile phone case made out of zhel’, a Bohemian crystal vodka decanter in the shape of the Imperial crown, or an unfortunate plastic garden sculpture of ‘Happy’ from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?”
“This is a humor column,” I argued, “you asked for funny things that happen to me in Russia.”
“Make fun of your own kind,” she advised.
I can’t accept this, since it represents a serious threat to my livelihood: I’m a humor writer and I live in Russia, so I write about the side of Russia I think my readers, will find entertaining: surly shop-girls, the curiously Byzantine hierarchy of Russian society, and the disconnect between Cyber-age 20-somethings and the older generation’s Soviet values. Matters culinary: salad Olivier and salo, because, to the uninitiated anyway, these are intriguing, as is the quirky system of public holidays, and the unique Russian approach to health care.
Once I dared to take on that national Russian obsession: the dacha. I did not, in the accepted foreign tradition, couple the dacha with the concept of the Great Russian Soul. I didn’t talk about capturing the elusive unique Russian soul in a spoonful of homemade jam, or on a whiff of smoke from the kostor, because, honestly, I failed to find any of that. What I did find was mold, discomfort, and nuclear powered mosquitoes, so I wrote about those. In response, I received a harangue from a vitriolic septuagenarian Russian journalist, writing from his own dacha, who called me “crazy,” which seemed needlessly histrionic. Where is it etched in stone that foreigners have to be over-the-moon about every aspect of Russia and Russian culture? Do I not have the right to express of Russian culture what Joseph Brodsky did of American: “some of it I find revolting, some awe-inspiring?” The airport, spitting on the street, and prime time television I find revolting in Russia. And awe-inspiring? A much longer list, which includes all the Silver Age writers, the Mighty Handful of musicians, September 1st, World War II veterans, the mysteries of the Russian Orthodox Church, KVN, Kvartet I, the incandescent brilliance of Russia’s scientists, academics, and artists, as well as the pompous gallantry of Russia’s male chauvinists, and the Wagnerian tenacity of a breed of women who force the likes of Hitler, Napoleon, and Genghis Khan to their knees.
What I’m hearing from my Russian readers, though, is this: when it comes to crafting humor about Russia, foreigners -- it seems – need not apply. Elsewhere in the world, Englishman Peter Mayle is revered in France for his humorous tales of eccentric locals in the Luberon Valley. In the West, we double over at Yakov Smirnoff’s hilarious take on life in America in his popular magazine articles, and embrace émigré writers such as Lara Vypnar when she produces a pitch-perfect grilling of self-absorbed American male wannabe novelists in New York City.
So is this a double standard? Am I not as fully entitled to my take on my Russia as the “Beet Generation” writers are to their America? I’m creating humor, not “contempt…and disrespect for another country, its people and customs.” [“Презрение, цинизм, неуважение к другой стране, её народу и обычаям”] Having spent most of my adult life in Russia, it doesn’t seem like the best use of my time to, as another reader suggests, suddenly shift my focus to “hot dogs, Pepsi, and baseball,” [о хот-догах, пепси и бейсболе!!!] or the ranks of what another like-minded reader calls the “obese-minded Americans, their unkempt American women, a boring game of game of baseball or that stupid holiday, Halloween.” [“учных недалёких американцев, растрёпанных американских женщин, не следящих за своим внешним видом, скучную игру бейсбол и тупой праздник Halloween.”]
“Russians in their soul cannot tolerate foreigners,” [русские на дух не переносят иностранцев] yet another Russian reader tells me. But how, I wonder, does that reader square this intolerance, with the current sense of Russia’s national entitlement to many things, which by their very nature, necessitate foreign involvement such as hosting the Olympics in Sochi? Do the trappings of global citizenship ask of Russians a new kind of tolerance to foreign commentators?
Here we have all we need for a meaningful debate: an interesting issue, passionate readers, committed writers, and a well-established forum. I invite you to join me for just such a thoughtful and considered debate. What do you think? Do you agree, as one reader observed that, “the Cold War is long over…relax. [Холодная война закончилась уже давно, расслабьтесь...].
Can the Russian soul learn to tolerate foreigners?
Does my charter have any relevance in your monastery?
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This piece originally appeared on the BBC's World Service website in Russian under the title "Об иностранцах в России и "чужом монастыре" on October 13, 2010. A link to the original piece in Russian can be found here.
~Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde
This day celebrates the good people who bring us that essential thing we cannot do without: Insurance!
Russians have a deep mistrust of insurance, and I wrote an article about just this little character foible, which just appeared in Russia Beyond the Headlines so here it is:
The Pre-Existing Birkin
It’s that horrible time of year again: the insurance premiums are due. Once again, I will have to go cap in hand to my “Handsome Russian Husband,” or HRH for a five-figure sum to insure our life, our health, our home, and our car. Because he’s into downhill skiing, and Velvet is about to crack the 3-foot show jumping milestone, I feel the health insurance, anyway, should be comprehensive, and include catastrophic care. Call me cautious.
HRH is generous to a fault about a lot of things that matter. He is indulgent with the bills from Eileen Fisher, encourages me to splash out on Australian lamb (which costs as much per ounce as titanium in Moscow), good wine, and the kind of face cream you can justify only at Duty Free outlets. Being Russian, however, where medical care is (in theory) free, HRH thinks health insurance of any kind is Ponzi scheme of such epic proportions that it drives him to drink to even talk about it. And that, of course, just drives those premiums up further, not to mention acerbating certain pre-existing conditions. The pre-existing condition thing truly enrages him, and he went ballistic when he found out that I had done a rather full disclosure of his pre-existing conditions when I applied for the five-figure policy.
To get him to fork out for the policy, I resorted to a tactic known in the parenting biz as “re-direction.” It went something like this:
“What would you like for Christmas,” he asked me.
“A 35-inch Hermes Birkin bag,” I responded promptly.”
“Fine,” he said smoothly, “Whatever you want, darling. Where do I go?”
“Oh you don’t just go,” I said, “you have to get in touch with some guy in London, and he puts you on a waiting list, and then you have to give him a $5,000 USD deposit, if you want it by Christmas.”
“Okay,” he said, successfully concealing his sticker shock, “you get in touch with the guy, and I’ll wire the money.”
“Then,” I continued, “you have to pay the balance, which should be somewhere between seven and eight thousand dollars.”
“For a HANDBAG?” he roared.
“That’s right, Lady Bracknell,” allowing myself the rare pleasure of casting a verbal pearl before HRH, which I avoid doing since it just pisses him off to not get the joke.
He swallowed hard, and then summoned up what the Russians call ”koo-razh:” a unique Slavic fusion of flair, stupidity, and moxy. It’s what makes a Russian man light up a $500 Romeo y Julieta with a $100 bill, or buy a football club.
“Okay,” he said, “If that’s what you want for Christmas, then that is what we will do…”
“Or,” I said, moving in for the kill, “You could spend half of that, and get all three of us comprehensive international health insurance/medical evacuation with the dangerous sports rider, bodily remains clause, and optional US/Canada coverage, which covers us pretty much everywhere in world except North Korea.”
“No, no” he said, “No insurance. I’ll do the bag.”
“Are you on crack cocaine?” I exploded. “You are really prepared to buy an absurdly overpriced handbag before you would buy medical insurance for your family?”
“Insurance never works for me!” he exploded. “And anyway, you blew any chances of it ever working with your stupid ‘pre-extinction close.’ Are you going to tell me where hell they sell these insane bags or not?”
“Here is the thing,” I said, drawing on HRH’s secret phobia of speaking English on the telephone to anyone, “the insurance policy is all ready to go, it just needs your Visa card to seal the deal.”
“Incredible,” he said. “How do you come up with these kind of things?”
He then launched into his favorite argument that life is short. I presented what I felt was a winning counter-argument that comprehensive international health insurance/medical evacuation with the dangerous sports rider, bodily remains clause and optional US/Canada coverage can prolong life, whereas an Hermes Birkin bag certainly won’t.
“Get this through your head,” I screamed, “ I want the insurance – not the stupid bag!”
“You can have the bag – not the stupid insurance,” he said loftily.
“That’s just great,” I said, throwing up my hands in disgust. “Because it will be the perfect accessory when I come to visit you in the ICU after you break every single rib downhill skiing.”
This article first appeared in print in The Washington Post and Russia Beyond The Headlines on October 19, 2010. A link to the original version online can be found here.
Hope this finds you all very hale and hearty and minus any of what HRH calls the "Pre-extinction conditions!" What's your take on insurance and overpriced handbags anyway? By all means, weigh in and let us know by clicking the comment button below and letting it rip!
Stay healthy, and while you're around, enjoy some other posts about money, honey, and the weird and wonderful world of Russian medicine. Thanks for sticking around!
Give me a child until the age of seven, and I will show you the man.
~Attributed to Francis Xaviar, co-founder of the Jesuit Movement
September 27th celebrates the teachers and employees of Russia’s nursery schools. This is a fairly recent addition to the profpraznik line up, but I think certainly deserves to be as important as The Day of Knowledge and Teachers’ Day, since it takes a special kind of talent and patience to work with very little children, especially from September to June, when Russian children have to be wrapped up in four to six layers of undershirts, sweaters, tights, trousers, snow pants, parkas, hats, neck warmers, boots, mittens and so on. Just try to take your kid to the bus stop on a mild April morning with one button undone, or hat askew -- you will be instantly attacked by a cadre of old ladies, all of them of total strangers, who will rake you over the coals in the vilest terms for exposing your unhappy offspring to imminent death.
Russia is a great place to bring up the under fives. If you are working in the formal economy, you can employ a Nanny, who could be anything from a trained nurse, to a nuclear scientist, without taking out a second mortgage on your home. She will consider it an inherent part of her job to potty train your child at 16 months, teach them the poetry of Alexander Pushkin at 2, and some interesting table manners which will later prove difficult to retrain. In most Russian families, the primary caregiver is a grandparent, who wheels the pram out for the two mandatory walks in the -30° degree temperatures, produces borscht 24/7, and has the advantage of being free. Grandparents, however, feel very free to tell the parents, nanny, and anyone else who listen, exactly what is wrong with their parenting or nannying styles. That’s why it may come as something of a relief for parents to wrench their 3-year old from the grandparental stranglehold, and deposit them with the nursery school crowd, for the next stage of early childhood development. This, according to some Russian officialspeak includes “learning the secrets of the world around them, and to love and protect their Motherland.”
This is how Russian children get brought up, and if I’m honest, they are, on the whole, very well brought up indeed. When it is “Parents’ Hour” Russian kids know how to, as my late Uncle Stephen used to say, “bust off.” You don't get those epic melt downs every five minutes, which force all of the adults to down martinis and enter into complex multi-lateral negotiations on “time outs.” There is not, according to my friend Tatianna (who admittedly may not be working with all the data available for the Russian Federation), “any of that American Asperger Syndrome thing,” which means there are no four year olds off their meds.
The contrast between Russian parenting and parenting in the US was brought home to me recently at a party I attended in Northampton. I was over the moon to be invited – it was by way of being the Pioneer Valley version of lunch at Windsor Castle with HM during Ascot Week. I thought it would be a great way to meet people, which it was.
The Pioneer Valley is, of course, a parenting Shangri-La. This is where you come if you want to be a hardcore breast-feeder until your child is old enough to go to the Middle School (which in Northampton is the weak link in the public school chain, so many parents just keep on nursing right through 8th grade). This is where you will feel comfortable if your family consists of two dads, two moms, a single mom, single dad, and all imaginable combinations of children who are biological, adopted, or products of maxing the genetic technology. No one looks at you askance if you are one nationality, and your spouse is another, and if you choose to speak different languages at one another. It is a great place, I thought wistfully, to bring up a bi-cultural toddler. There might not be instruction on loving and protecting the Motherland (although almost all the kids had faded Obama ’08 T-shirts), but you can bike to school, learn Chinese, take a baby yoga class, and march in the Annual “Pride” parade. I felt I’d sort of missed the boat as a Pioneer Mom.
And then I caught a whiff of Pioneer Parenting: a woman I knew vaguely was trying to have a conversation with a friend over the quinoa salad. She was dressed exactly as if she was on a Central Casting open audition for liberal Pioneer Valley 40-somethings: pre-Raphaelite hair with a touch of grey, no make-up, wire rimmed specs, dressed in clothes, which suggested she had either just come from, or was on her way to, a yoga class. A six year-old boy tugged fiercely at the end of her asymmetrical JJill tunic,
“Mom,” he whined, pawing her leg, “I want something to eat…”
“Hey buddy,” said his mother, immediately interrupting her conversation with her fellow grown up, "what can I get for you? How would you like…some of this kale salad?”
“A hot dog,” screamed the kid.
“Ethan,” (not his real name) said his mother, adroitly sidestepping what would have become a direct kick to her shins. She bravely maintained her mellow singsong lilt, “I’d prefer you not have another hot dog, you’ve had three already…how about this lentil casserole?”
“I WANNA HOT DOG!” screamed the unhappy Ethan, kicked his mother squre in the shins, then opened his mouth and sunk his teeth into the soft skin between her thumb and index finger. I looked around the party, thinking surely someone would intervene. No one batted an eyelid. I looked back to the mother, who was gently removing her hand from the kid’s mouth.
“Ethan,” she said calmly, still in that unbelievable calm, dulcet lilt, “now we’ve talked about this before. I'm asking you to listen. Please, stop biting me.”
On second thought, Moscow wasn’t the worst place to parent. Not bad at all…
Happy Day of the Nursery School Teachers and Employees!
What is your take on parenting these days where you are? Do you think kids should learn the word “no” before they go off to college, or is that just last century fascism parenting? Does your kid wear scarves in July? Hit the comment button and let me know!
Here are few more posts related to the “parenting” gig:
Today is Recruiter’s Day! Since 2001, Russia and a few of the other CIS countries celebrate all things Headhunting on September 20th.
Headhunting, executive recruitment, or whatever you call it was virtually unknown in Russia until 1991, when an article in the national broadsheet, Izvestia wrote about how Western Head hunting firms worked. For much of the population of Russia, the idea that you go to a neutral (and in many cases unknown) third party to find a job or employees still seems highly suspect. Goes against the grain somehow. It took HRH, my "horrible Russian husband" a long long time before he felt comfortable about a perfect stranger calling him up to tell him he was a leader in his field (which HRH. being a Russian guy, already knew) and to gauge his interest in looking at a possible new job in a different company.
Here is a distillation of a common exchange circa 1996:
“Ohhhh…that sounds exciting,” I said. “Be sure to wear your red tie.”
He looked at me, surprised.
“And a white shirt,” I continued, “always better to wear a white shirt.”
“Do you think I should go?” he asked astonished.
“You should always take the meeting,” I said firmly, quoting my friend and leading headhunter Teri Lindebeg, who founded a ridiculously successful agency in Russia. “Always, always, always take the meeting.”
HRH didn’t seem convinced. “But if I go,” he hypothesized, “my current employer will find out.”
HRH was brought up in that fine Soviet tradition captured best in a pithy bon mot from Josef Stalin: “In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance.”
“So much the better!” I enthused, “that way, they get scared you might leave, and then you can have the ‘how much will you pay me to stay’” conversation."
That was appealing; HRH decided to probe a little bit deeper.
“And if they find me a job?” He would hone in, “What will I have to pay them?”
“But that’s the beauty of the whole thing,” I said triumphantly, “You don’t pay them anything. Your new employer does.”
HRH raised a quizzical eyebrow at me.
“I don’t have to pay anything?”
“No nothing – you are the commodity for the headhunting firm, and the new employer pays them to find you.”
“I think you must have something backwards,” said HRH. “That’s not how it works.”
Here's how it works in the world HRH grew up in: if you wanted a job, you made some phone calls to someone who knew someone, who might put in a good word for you. Executive jobs with great income streams might require a “business sauna” where all the parties met up at a sauna, got naked and beat one another with branches to seal the deal. You know the kind of thing. Once the “Prikaz” or order had been signed sealed and the new job secured, discreet reimbursement would take place up and down the food chain. The prime motivator was always the employee, or the parent of an employee. Not the employer.
It took some time and some input from some of my (male) friends, before HRH felt comfortable putting on his red tie, tucking two copies of his (brilliantly written if I do say so myself) CV in his briefcase and sally forth to conquer new worlds. But once he got into it, he was hooked. It was like sponge painting. He always, always, always took the meeting. It became a sort of security blanket he carried with him at all times: like having a casserole in the freezer, or a Swiss bank account. As long as HRH had some headhunters who took an interest, he could put up with the bi-polar egomaniacal lunatic who owned one of the companies he worked for. He could smile beatifically at the Red Directors and the minor officials at another. He could tolerate one really very mediocre financial hack from New Zealand who was the boss of him in an industry the hack knew less than nothing about.
So today, I for one will raise a glass of better-than-average chardonnay today to thank all of Russia's (and London too for that matter) headhunters for making my life just a teeny bit nicer…
Author’s Note: Teri Lindeberg’s blog Work360.ru about Russian staffing, workplace issues, and cross-cultural companies is highly recommended! Here is a link to a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) piece I wrote for her about what not to eat at a business lunch, lest you make an idiot of yourself!
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Hey there readers!
What is your experience with Headhunting? Have you been a hunt-ee? Are you a hunter? What’s it like? Let me know by leaving a comment below. And, if you liked this post, stick around and enjoy some others like it:
Today is the 1st of September so it’s back to school day all over Russia! And I’m back from a blogging hiatus – and relieved to be so after lots of end of summer housework, admin and general revving up for the school year. I’m reminded of a recent quote from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat Pray Love” in a piece on Slate.com's XX Factor (Eat, Pray Love and Never Get Any Work Done) by Hanna Rosin on women and writing and the frustrations we often feel sticking to the task. “Do you think Philip Roth ever set aside his novel so he could change the sheets in the guest bedroom for the third time that week?” she asked. I love it: so true.
In honor of The Day of Knowledge, I wrote a piece for the BBC’s Russian Service blog “Strana Russia” about the differences of back to school in Russia versus back to school in the USA, which was published today in Russian. As usual, it garnered some heated comments. Here it is in English:
Back To School
My 13-year old daughter Velvet starts her second year at boarding school in the United States this autumn, so she and I have spent the past few weeks in the US getting her ready. My Russian husband has remained in Moscow at work. He is very sanguine about the entire process, which makes a marked contrast to his mood this time last year:
“Did you get everything Velvet needs for school?” he would bark at me on an almost hourly basis, “have you managed it all?”
I would repeatedly pull out a thick file folder with all the separate, color-coded forms from the school, my crowded “To-Do” lists and print outs from the Internet. Everything was there, all in order: she saw the doctor for her shots, had her eyes checked, she was up to date with the orthodontist, and, for good measure, I’d made an appointment for her to have her hair cut the week before school started. I told my husband all of this in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.
“But did you manage to buy everything she needs?” he would press impatiently.
“Like what?” I would query, mentally reviewing the past week, when it seemed Velvet and I had done nothing but fill up shopping carts (real and Internet cached) and “proceed to checkout.”
“Like her notebooks,” he exploded over the SKYPE line which crackled briefly, “AND PENCILS!” he screamed, “and erasers, and exercise books, and…that kind of thing.
Pencils? My husband never micro-manages on this level. It never occurs to him if we have sufficient reserves of fabric softener, cottage cheese, or cat food: he just assumes we will. And we do. So, I had, indeed, taken care of everything for Velvet in what is as American a tradition as hot dogs at a baseball game: the annual “Back to School” trip to STAPLES, the largest national purveyor of office and school supplies. We had, of course, had a blast: Velvet had everything from a set of highlighter pens all the colors of the rainbow, to a professional engineering calculator.
“Of course,” I told my husband reassuringly, “We did that last week.” I launched into a detailed list of our purchases.
“But did you manage to get everything?” he pressed.
“Well, what else do you think she needs?” I exploded, “a wand from Ollivanders…or maybe Quidditch pads?”
Which made him laugh, and he relaxed and crossed Velvet’s school supplies off his worry list forever.
I had actually understood his concern, which dated back to his Soviet childhood when ballpoint pens were non-existent, and exercise books only po blatu. Some of that underlying fear seems to linger in Russia today, despite the booming free market economy PR. The last week in August in Moscow is sheer hell as children from ages 7 – 22 get ready to return to their institutions of learning on September 1st. The traffic, always hectic, snarls into total gridlock for hours as harried parents crisscross the city in search of elusive school uniforms and French dictionaries. Bronzed from the dacha, frantic mothers race from one book store to the next, stand in lines, and elbow their fellow countrymen aside with more than the usual level of rudeness to stockpile paper products and state-issued text books which, as far as I can see, are manufactured with no thought to population statistics. This is why shifty looking types in dirty rain coats stand outside book stores and murmur sotto voce, “Woman…do you need an algebra textbook?” They hold up battered cardboard index cards with a list of all the books you won’t find in the store, but which they, presumably, can provide if you are brave enough to accompany them down the street to a dark alley where they operate out of the boot of a beat up Lada.
There is no joy in the process, the way there is for parents in the US, who fling themselves wildly into wild orgies of spending -- spiral notebooks, post-its, and # 2 pencils, knowing, as they do so, that relative freedom lies just around the corner. The thrill in America is the (admittedly mercantile) run up to the day, while the day itself is something of a let down. In Russia, however, it’s the actual “Back to School” that is the emotional zenith. After the frenetic, last minute search for supplies, suddenly September 1st dawns and, magically, the angst melts away in the face of the moving “First Bell” ritual that is as much a part of Russian life as military parades and blini and caviar. Russia’s children set forth on “the Day of Knowledge” bright as new pennies: boys with shiny shoes and scrubbed faces, girls adorned with stiff bows aloft in their hair. They grasp stiff bouquets of flowers to present to their teachers: held carefully -- slightly away from their bodies so as not to crush them on the journey to school. Through the streets, they make their way: little ones clutching parent’s hand; the older ones faking disinterest in meeting their friends after the summer vacation. Music fills the crisp September air, and Moscow, for one bright autumn morning anyway, becomes a big party. It never fails to reduce me to tears.
This article originally appeared on September 1, 2010 in Russian on the BBC’s Russian Service under the title: 1-я сентября - ежегодная паника. A link to the original online version can be found here.
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Hey there Readers!
How is your Back To School process going? Who changes the sheets in your family?
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:
I can’t say that retail sector is one that just blows you away with its efficiency here in Russia. For example, at the moment, we are experiencing an unprecedented heat wave, swinging into its third week with no signs of abating. And, do you think you can purchase a fan or an air-conditioning unit anywhere in Moscow? Ha ha ha ha. No way. HRH said last night that the thing to do it is to start buying space heaters to stay ahead of the curve.
positively the last fan left in Moscow...any offers?
Shopping in Russia is not fun, nor can one be efficient about it, as we have seen during our examination of the postal system in Russia. Looking for reasonably priced, tolerably drinkable, New World Chardonnay that doesn’t taste like paint thinner is an experience akin to panning for gold in California in the 19th Century. Many people pay other people just to do their shopping for them so they can avoid dealing with the surly, snarly sales people, who just don't have the serve gene. It’s also never simple, though I will admit that shopping for life’s essentials like food has gotten marginally (marginally) simpler since the bad old days of one line to choose your item, one line to pay and another to collect your item. These days, you can wheel a trolly cart around a supermarket. Everywhere else, however, is still an exercise in extreme patience.
The concept that time is money hasn’t impacted mainstream life here. Take buying an electronic appliance at a modern shopping mall, which is a multi-stage Chinese water torture, taking on average, three hours and thirty-six minutes
• Enter store. Commence extensive, and ultimately futile search for the exact brand and make you want (20 minutes).
• Identify pimpled youth called “Vladik” as someone who might help. Inquire about the item you want. He slopes away. He returns and confirms that, not only is the item you want not in stock, it never was in stock, and is unlikely to ever be in stock. It’s not that popular in Russia, you know (30 minutes).
• Deliberate over the next best choice, which turns out to be more expensive, with fewer functions. (10 minutes)
• “Vladik” returns to the secret room to check if this item is available (10 minutes).
• Waiting for “Vladik,” you check your phone for messages.
• “Vladik” returns to announce that the display item is the last item available. There is nothing wrong with it, you understand, but it was, in the end of the day, he wants you to understand, the display item. Do you want it? “Vladik’s” expression suggests that you are insane if you agree. Agree. (5 minutes).
• “Vladik” directs you to Kassa # 34, the only one open. Get in the line. Check for more messages Wish you’d brought a bottle of water. Wait. (30 minutes).
• Hand bovine “Olya” at Kassa # 34 your credit card, which she swipes three times unsuccessfully, and then gives you a look as if you’ve outlawed nail polish. Insist that there is nothing wrong with your credit card. Gather your strength and insist that she call the bank. “Olya” picks up the phone, rolls her eyes, dials Master Card and proceeds to shout all sixteen digits of your credit card, your expiration date, the three digit security code and your full name, so that each of the seventeen people standing behind you at Kassa # 34 can hear perfectly. (25 minutes).
• Collect raft of paper hurled down by “Olya.” Cross the store to the collection point. (7 minutes).
• Get in line to collect your item. Call your nanny and explain you’re going to be later than you’d planned. Unbutton your top button. Roll up your sleeves. Fan yourself with the sheaf of paper from “Olya.” Wonder if you should place your own call to Master Card to cancel your card. (20 minutes).
• “Vladik’s” equally pimpled colleague “Shurik” presents you with your item, which you attempt to grab, and run, but “Shurik” slides the box back to his side of the counter. With the agonizing precision of an archeologist excavating a Mayan burial site, he slits the box open, removes each part, one-by-one, including the batteries, accompanying CD ROMs, and adaptor to make your appliance work in the car. Thoughtfully, he assembles the item. He plugs it in and runs it for three seconds. Silently, he meets your eyes, raises his eyebrows. Wearily nod. (15 minutes).
• “Shurik” extracts the individual instruction manuals (Czech, Bulgarian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Polish, Serbian and Hebrew) out of their plastic cases, revealing the absolutely useless warrantee ticket. He bends down and fills it in carefully, stamps it, replaces it between the Bulgarian and Albanian instruction manuals, which you are sure to throw away as soon as you get home. (10 minutes).
• Moving as if through quicksand, “Shurik” disassembles the item entirely, re-wrapping each part carefully in slippery clear plastic, slotting it between Styrofoam protectors. He replaces the eight completely incomprehensible instruction manuals on top of the box, carefully re-seals it, and hands it to you triumphantly. (20 minutes).
By which point, you’ve completely forgotten what it was and why you wanted it.
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.”
Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.
~Dave Barry
Last summer I was stuck in a bizarre time warp. American friends of a cousin were over in Moscow for a large medical conference. They roped me in to a dinner at some out-of-the-way restaurant, called, ominously (and I suspect not ironically) "The Collective Farm" organized by some of their fellow delegates: a 50-something surgeon called Rostislav Dmitrievich, and his wife Tatiana Ivanovna, who were stiff, formal and old-fashioned. I was late, having coming on from a meeting with my editor, and a good thing too, since I missed the first course: a lavish spread of traditional Russian zakuska: pickled mushrooms, pickled fish, pickled cucumbers, pickled garlic, and pickled diners, if their flushed cheeks and the half empty vodka bottle were anything to go by. The zakuska also featured the mandatory stale slices of brown bread, curling slightly at the ends, and a warm viscous homemade cranberry juice, which tastes like cough syrup, called “kliukva” and sulphorous mineral water from the Caucuses which tastes like rotten eggs.
It was like an express train back to the late 1980s: during my misspent youth as a tour guide, I’d had that same meal from Tallinn to Tomsk a thousand times. It came as no surprise to me that the next course was mushroom julienne: a glutinous concoction of sour cream, mushrooms, salt, and cheese, which I had no doubt was more cholesterol than my cousin’s friends had consumed in the last month. Then we moved on to blini and (red) caviar, which everyone pretended was a massive treat. Then, tough, inedible beef (possibly the only red meat the doctors had consumed in this century) finishing up with melting ice cream.
“What has been the most…just amazing thing about living in Russia for 17 years,” asked the lady doctor in a desperate attempt to force conversation during one of the numerous deeply awkward lulls.
“Affordable smoked salmon.” I answered promptly, which made everyone laugh for some reason.
Today is Fishermen’s Day in Russia! Today we are feting not just those who go out to their local watering hole with a rod or a reel for a quiet afternoon’s nap, but all those who trawl Russia’s 12 seas, 2 million rivers and 3 oceans to haul in catches of over 3 million tons of fish annually, making Russia one of the world’s top ten producers of fish.
I wasn’t completely kidding when I said that affordable smoked salmon is one of the highlights of living in Moscow…it is fantastic, although you buy it in chunks, rather than fillets, unless you go to the market yourself and are firm with the salespeople about how you would like it sliced (which if you are like me is thinly). They don’t tend to want to hear it from a girl, since fish is another one of those things, like shashlik, that is a predominately guy thing. Like the dried fish Borya from Zapolyarniy was kind enough to bring with him. Guys, for example, have a charming tradition of buying live crawfish (pictured below) boiling up a large pot of water and…well…I’m sure you can imagine the rest. Another fishy male bonding ritual is simply called “shrimp.” For “shrimp,” conditions are ideal if there is a major sporting event on television and all the women in the house have been banished elsewhere. Donning blue and white striped naval undershirts, the men spread newspaper over a coffee table in front of the television, boil shrimp in their shells, then spend the evening peeling, eating, and spitting out the hulls with copious amounts of beer. No cocktail sauce or anything. My freezer in Moscow is full of bags of these unshelled shrimp.
Then, there is caviar (which they prefer you don't photograph:) HRH claims he was force fed black caviar as a child on the basis of its high protein count. When I first lived in Russia, we used to get a lot of from HRH’s colleagues in Astrakhan (and the less said about HRH’s colleagues from Astrakhan the better): like a whole kilo, which we would open and spoon straight from the tin, although I occasionally made an effort to do the thing properly: toast, some chopped hard-boiled egg, a little onion to bring out the flavor, and a dash of lemon juice, which is not the way the Russians do it. They serve caviar with sour cream and blini, which if you ask me (and no one ever ever ever does) is like taking a perfect vine ripened tomato and dumping half a bottle of Stop & Shop French Dressing on it.
A metaphor that works for many things here come to think of it…
Author's Note: Kudos to Velvet (who turned 13 this week!!) for not only arranging the smoked salmon so cleverly, but having the foresight to snap it on her iPhone!!!
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Hail Readers!
Do you fish? For complements…or perhaps comments? I do…so please leave me a few, or like me on Facebook. Or something. It's been a long hot weekend, and the peat fires are starting to stink up the place. If you liked this post, stick around for a few more like it:
Today is the day of the light operators! This includes people who design lighting for fireworks, rock concerts, shopping malls, and your bedroom. On this day July 11th in 1874, Russian electrician Alexander Lodygin took out a patent for an incandescent lamp. You can see the original at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow.
Lighting is another one of those issues that makes me gnash my teeth here, particularly in my own living room, where we have gut-wrenchingly expensive recessed lighting which is about 4 zillion watts and, as the slimy contractor assured us, a dimmer was not possible (liar, liar pants on fire). We also have a bookshelf enclosed in glass (HRH insisted because he planned – and I guess still plans – to purchase a library of Russian classics and he feared the dust) with florescent tube lighting on either side. I don’t use either of these lighting fixtures, preferring instead the subtle play of shadow produced by the two interesting and tasteful metal light fixtures I chose, as well as lots of candles.
My father-in-law, however, just loves those bright lights. About the first thing he does when he comes in to the house is turn them all on. I go around and turn them off, and then he turns them back on.
This is how we keep the Cold War alive and kicking.
Do you have any specialized skills, training or experience related to firearms and explosives, or to nuclear, biological or chemical activities? If <Yes>, please explain.
~ Question # 32 on the visa application for US Citizens to the Russian Federation.
Here is another holiday, Like Day of the HR Managers, where I do not see us breaking out the Veuve Cliquot and the cobalt blue champagne flutes with the Imperial Seal. Today is Workers of the Federal Migration Service Day. See, I can’t even work up enthusiasm for my customary exclamation mark.
This is the crowd, as I have written before, who are making us run around Moscow trying to find a certified Latin- Russian translator, so we can have our college diplomas translated and apostiled, and have us combing the post-Armageddon landscape of southern Moscow to find the one rump-sprung clinic that is still testing for leprosy. These are the clowns who change the rules about where and how to register your visa (once you actually get one and successfully enter the country) every single solitary time. And, I have to assume that these are the Sadists who came up with that PDF version of the visa application, which is quite simply impossible to fill out on the computer. Go ahead, try to do it…click here and try and fill in one line without having to move your mouse and click on every single box. See?
These people drive me to drink...and I can crawl there on my own, thank you very much.
People are always offering me back doors to Russian citizenship, and I just decline politely on behalf of myself and Velvet. For one thing, Russia doesn’t have a dual citizenship agreement with America, or a number of other desirable first world locales like the EU...and all those Russians who think they are so clever (a number of HRH’s female relatives fall in to this category) in keeping their red passports once they get the new blue or burgundy ones should, I believe, be made to choose one and not the other, in tense circumstances by someone as unpleasant as Officer Noble, after a 26-hour flight. Citizenship, Comrades, is not a travel document. You can’t have a propiska (a residency permit) in a Moscow apartment, and vote for Barack Obama. One or the other. Not both. Apart from anything else, you are depriving the poor Workers of the Federal Migration Service income, and driving the price of a one-year, multi-entry visa (for which you could get an entire new outfit at Eileen Fisher) for the rest of us!
The Federal Migration Workers are in charge of surveillance of labor migration, which is everyone from the Head of Proctor & Gamble in Russia to the Tadzhik street sweepers, and I always smile at the Tadzhiks and say “Good Day” politely since I feel we are essentially in the same boat. It seems the Russians also think so, because the Moscow Times had a hysterical report on Friday about a little volume being created by Moscow City Hall. This quite over-shadowed the other news of the day which I must just mention: about the65 meter penispainted on the underside of one of Saint Petersburg’s drawbridges on the eve of the Petersburg Economic Forum. When raised, the drawbridge faced the Saint Petersburg HQ of the FSB, and that, to me, is genius on a scale you rarely see these days.
But to get back to the other story: it seems the authorities at City Hall are coming up with an etiquette book for foreign workers visiting the capital. This is A Bit Much, if you ask me, from a crowd who clear their nostrils of phlegm by pinching one side and blowing out the contents of the other. Like on the main street, in broad daylight.
Is this woman getting ready to slaughter a lamb?
Is this man wearing his national costume on Tverskaya Street?
The latter-day Emily Posts at City Hall, if you ask me (and no one ever ever does) could spend a little more time on re-working traffic patterns to ease the gridlock than telling me how to behave, but there they are, putting out this silly thing and issuing press releases about it all over the place. The volume gets specific about some taboo behavior including wearing one’s national costume in public, which rules out jeans I guess, and LL Bean boots, as well as my North Face parka. We are also supposed to refrain from slaughtering sheep in the courtyard, which wasn’t high up on my to-do list, but then my blood ran cold when I saw that we were also forbidden to barbecue on our balconies.
Oh Dear…
Congratulations to all of the Workers of the Federal Migration Service.
Have you ever applied for a visa to Russia? Did you have to be medicated after you completed the application? Did you try that PDF, and if so, do you agree it was created by a modern day Torquemada? Do you know why I am so concerned about the barbecue rule??? (HINT: you’ll find the answer in one of the posts listed below!) Leave me a message of support below, or stick around and enjoy a few more posts like this one.
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
~ William Morris
Today is Furniture Makers’ Day! Although this isn’t an official holiday on the calendar, it has been celebrated for the last ten years by the members of the Association of Furniture Companies and Woodworking Industries of Russia, formed in 1997.
Most of the furniture in Russia, of course, is not Russian at all, but Swedish. As we say in Russia: “If there’s an idea, there’s IKEA,” and there is nothing quite like a day out at that island of Nordic calm to make you feel like the world makes sense again. For 5,000 RUR ($158.92) you can perk up your house something fierce, with vases, candles, wicker footstools or stacking plastic boxes. I love IKEA, in fact, my heart went thumpty thump when my cleaning lady told me we needed some new towels! I’m planning a trip out there next week and I can hardly wait!!
I love IKEA so much, I agreed to accompany Babushka (HRH's mother) there to plan her “shkaff” that all-important floor-to-ceiling wall unit for the bedroom in her new apartment, a task neither of her (amazingly self-centered) children seemed willing or able to do. Patiently, I followed her around the showrooms, marking down the items in the free catalog (“More Copies Read than the Bible”) for further consideration, had her choose the color and make, and then, at home, we logged on to ikea.ru, pulled up their “Build Your Own Wall Unit” program, which is the most fun you can have with your clothes on…well with Babushka anyway. And for the next four hours the conversation went like this:
“Would you like drawers, here, or wire baskets?” I asked.
She looked baffled; choice never having been high up on the list of luxuries she’d enjoyed.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
“How about a few of each?” I said encouragingly, and add them with a click of the mouse.
She got into it. The magic is universal. We debated whether she needed one long closet or could go double-tier for shirts and pants. We had cups of tea while we decided whether the entire façade should be of opaque glass panels or solid white. She deliberated over the wire basket/drawer debate a little longer, added some shoe racks, and moved the full-length mirror panel, but eventually we were done, and I hit the “CALCULATE and PRINT” button. The printer spewed out a hard copy of the plan from the screen, a list of items with their warehouse identification number, as well as an invoice.
“Now, you just go into the store, and straight to the cashier,” I instructed, “and you pay them. Then, and this is the most important part, you go to the ‘Home Delivery’ section and you ask for Delivery AND Assembly.”
“Oh,” she protested in that demurring Soviet “Assembly is not for the likes of me” tone, “I think Dedushka (HRH's father) can – “
“No no!” I said emphatically. “Dedushka and your son and a case of beer is not the way to go.”
Dedushka and HRH had often attempted to assemble IKEA furniture and the procedure was always the same: I bugged HRH about it three or four times, which he ignored. When I started to become more shrill, he’d pull out the well-worn excuse that he’d lent the drill to his extremely slimy friend Ilya. Changing tactic, I’d attack his weak flank, threatening to call in “Husband By The Hour,” a small service company that sends you a handyman to do all the things your lazy husband refuses to do: hang pictures, paint a wall, remove an old sofa (for which you need two Husbands By The Hour) and that kind of thing. HRH maintains that they are useless, which he pronounces “You-zzz-e-less,” and blames them for the fact that Velvet’s closet door had unmatched handles. He cannot stick the Husbands By The Hour, so he gets in the most “You-zzz-e-less” person in the solar system – Dedushka – to come and help him assemble the furniture.
Dedushka tends to arrive in a suit and tie, which is how he was dressed during our entire move to a new apartment. I think he thinks this is a clear indication to anyone who is interested that he is not accustomed to manual labor. He and HRH change into the Russian guys–doing-chores uniform: shiny tracksuit bottoms and striped navel shirts. They have three or four beers while they unpack the boxes and lay out the parts.
“There aren’t enough of the XYZ,” HRH informs me 37 minutes into the exercise. Without even looking up from what I am doing, I say:
“Check again.”
Signs that they have found the missing parts and are getting on with it emerge from whatever room they are in: heated arguments, the intermittent sound of a drill, and Velvet who trots into to the kitchen to ask for more beer. It took all day. But that is now a thing of the past.
Are you an IKEA fan? How could you not be? Have you ever unpacked a box from them and found bits missing? No, I didn’t think so. But, if you have an IKEA story, and everyone does, click on the comment button below and let us know about it!
Or stick around and enjoy more posts like this one:
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!
My buddy Joe Kelly is what Yiddish speakers call a mensch – a great guy who seems to have an innate sense when to turn up.. In May of 2005, I was single-handedly unpacking and shelving my book collection in our new flat in Moscow. I had been itching to get this done, and so had spent much of the day, unpacking and stacking boxes with careful labels announcing, “Fiction Buchan – Dickens,” or “Dan Brown Studies,” and “Queen Marie of Rumania bios.” When Joe showed up, looking for a clean bathroom, a cold drink, and a nap on my new couch, he found me more than ready to take a break.We sipped our ginger lemonades, feet up on piles of books, as we surveyed the stacks on the floor and partially filled shelves, which stretched across the length of two rooms.
“Want me to help you throw these up onto the shelves?” asked Joe.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “Thanks…but I have to figure out where to start each section…that will take me a while.”
“Dude,” said Joe laughing, “what do you mean…section?”
“You know,” I explained, “like biography, early church history, interior design, fiction, foreign fiction –“
“Jenny B!” exclaimed Joe, laughing his head off, “you really catalog your books…like according to what, the Dewey Decimal system?”
I was confused.
“Don’t you?” I asked.
Joe is still dining out on this…he calls me the Call Number Girl, and because he’s Joe, it’s funny.
Today is All Russian Library Day! From Kaliningrad to Nakhodka, we are celebrating Russian libraries and librarians! Be sure to take a moment and stop off at your neighborhood public library and thank the librarians for all they do to make our lives richer, fuller, and happier.
That, of course, could be a problem if you live anywhere between Kaliningrad and Nakhodka, because you might not be able to get into the library. Not unless you have a special access pass (which is very different from a card) like the one Lyudmila, the gutsy husband-hunting heroine of “Moscow Doesn’t Believe In Tears,” finagles in order to spend a Sunday afternoon in in search of a likely-looking graduate student in Moscow’s Lenin Library.
“What are you going for?” asks her more practical and studious friend, Katya, “surely not the books?”
“Well,” says Lyudmila, “you see…there is a cigarette break room.”
It goes without saying that there isn’t the Library culture in Russia that exists in the West. There are libraries, to be sure, but you don’t get taken to them in a stroller for Story Hour as a toddler, or exhaust the Young Adult section by the time you are 13. You don’t inhale Victoria Holt or become riveted by Nicholas & Alexandra. They don’t offer free Internet access, and aren’t staffed by nice people who talk to you as they check out your books about the latest Rachel Cusk. They certainly don’t hunt down an out of print copy of “My Ordeal” by Queen Marie of Rumania for you. You can’t check out a DVD of “My Man Godfrey” when you are feeling blue or a 30 hour engrossing Book On Tape for a long car drive…in fact you don’t check out anything, you stay in and read stuff there. You don’t volunteer to go to an endless series of what are known in my family as “regularly scheduled emergency meetings of the Library Board,” on cold January nights.
There are no real libraries in Russia. Not that I could find. Not that satisfied my insatiable desire for books. There is the Library of Foreign Literature which doesn’t smell super, but is a place where you can go and sit and read Jane Eyre or a three-month old Time Magazine if you are that desperate, but you have to bring six copies of your passport and leave your first born as hostage.
I took three books with me to Russia in 1992, and I read them until the spines cracked and the pages were waterlogged. When Saint Steve came out with the iPod and I could download audio books, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. English books were like gold in Moscow: every trip to London included a long session at Hatchard’s or a slow trawl up Charring Cross Road. You had to know someone really really well to lend them a book, and Russian drivers criss-crossed Moscow to deliver and return the precious commodities to book club members. Today, my own library in Moscow to me seems nothing short of miraculous: Over 2000 volumes: impressive lit in the public areas of the flat, comfort lit downstairs in the privacy of the bedroom. Each one, a triumph over logistics. Each one, a friend. Each one painstakingly trawled for in used book shops or online to satisfy the completist in me: my childhood favorites added to Velvet’s shelves: Laura and Mary, Heidi, and Frodo joined the five sisters from All-Of-A-Kind-Family, and made room for newcomers Princess Mia, Harry, Ron and Hermione.
As Velvet got older, she would ask for new stories and I’d pull Lizzie Bennett, Linda Radlett and Fanny Logan, Patrick Dennis or Scout down from the shelf.
My books keep me company and make me feel safe. It isn’t too much of a stretch to say they keep me sane.
After we closed on the new house in Northampton, title documents in hand, HRH suggested we head off for a long celebratory lunch at our favorite French restaurant, Bistro Le Gras.
“One stop to make first,” I said, climbing into the car.
Let's shout it out for the Librarians!!!!! Leave a tribute by clicking on the comment button below, and don't forget to say "Thank You" to the people who make your library possible! Consider becoming a member of your own local public library, volunteer for story hour, or just browse the shelves. Or, if you're in Moscow, come and see my Library....if you are very good, I'll lend you a book!
Another article in Figaro this week, courtesy of Russia Beyond The Headlines French edition! Originally appeared in French, but here is the English version:
People who read my columns are very special, so when reader Laura, wrote to ask if I would do something on beet salad, I was more than ready to accommodate.
But the lilacs distracted me. Spring comes quickly to Russia: one moment the world is a jar of dirty water full of muddy paint brushes, and then, overnight, it blossoms into the vibrant pastel colors of spring. Up from Central Asia and the Crimea come the first of the fresh strawberries and ripe tomatoes, sold by peroxide blonds in pinafores and dirty fingernails.
Beets: at this time of the year? No, beets in Russia are part of the musky bounty of autumn, not the budding promise of spring.
Spring in Russia comes with the first whiff of the pungent smoke of the “kostor” the barbacue grill. As the lilac blooms, the “snowdrops,” those rickety, rusty, banjaxed cars used only to get to country houses, or “dachas,” from May to August bounce out to the dachas, where, even if the dacha has electricity, and many do not, the menu is traditional and unchanging: shashlik: skewers of marinated pork or lamb grilled over an open wood fire.
Like so many of its cultural fulcrums, shashlik is not native to Russia, but Russians have made it their own. That is to say, Russian men have made it their own. Russian men are not natural cooks: cooking is a bit effeminate, is not associated with world domination, and involves cleaning, multi-tasking and long-range strategic planning. Not madly them. The big exception is shashlik, which, Russian men assert “cannot tolerate woman’s touch.” I’ve noticed shashlik seems able to tolerate a woman’s touch during preparation and clean up, but Russian men do throw themselves into their sole culinary endeavor with gusto: spirited debates over the exact chemistry of the secret ancestral marinade (consisting of vinegar, oil, salt and pepper), and the proper arrangement of kindling in the “kostor” last as long as it takes to consume a bottle of vodka. Tenderly and lovingly, they spear the clammy chunks onto lethal meter -long shashlik imaplers, and carefully lower them onto the flames. I sometimes think that if Russian men lavished this kind of attention on their wives, the burning issue of Russia’s declining birthrate could be solved.
What to serve with shashlik? Very simple: tomatoes, cucumbers, dill and lavash, the chewy bread of the Caucuses. No dressing, save salt, and when the produce is fresh, and the sun is in the sky until after 9 pm, what else, really, does one need?
Shashlik:
Ingredients:
1 kilo of pork or lamb, cubed
2 yellow onions cut into 1/8 half moons
1 cup of red wine vinegar
cold water
The juice of one lemon and/or 12 cup of fresh pomegranate juice
Chopped fresh parsley
5 sprigs of dill
4 Tbls of peppercorns, coarsely crushed in a mortar and pestle
4 Tbls of coarse sea salt
4 scallions, diced
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1/8 cup of fresh coriander
½ a cup of olive oil
Trim the meat of all fat, and cut into 5 cm cubes. Place the meat in an airtight wide dish with a lid. Combine the remainder of the ingredients except for the onion, olive oil, coriander and the water together in a jar and combine by shaking vigorously. Pour the marinade on top of the meat, using water to top up so that the meat is covered. Refrigerate, covered overnight, or, if you are in a hurry, let stand at room temperature. Toss the meat at intervals, making sure that all the pieces are well marinated.
Using long skewers, spear the meat cubes and onions in a pattern of your choosing. Grill the skewers until the meat is browned and the juices run pink. Turn frequently, and baste with the olive oil. Serve immediately garnished with the chopped fresh coriander.
A Note on Sauces: For the many kinds of shashlik, there exist an equal number of traditional garnishes. The sauces of the Caucuses combine the tartness of citrus, musky flesh fruits and salt with fresh herbs to make Tkemali (sour plum sauce) or the pungency of walnuts, pounded with garlic and the tang of coriander to make Satsivi (walnut sauce). Other sauces take their cue from the Balkans: garlic yoghurt sauce and a diced tomato salsa. Be creative!
Shashlik Sides
Traditionally, shashlik stands alone – not accompanied by any fancy salads or complicated garnish. Russians serve fresh vegetables of the season such as tomatoes, peppers or cucumbers with only salt for seasoning. The reasons for this are primarily practical: shashlik is prepared and eaten in the outdoors, or in the back garden of a dacha which may well lack refrigeration, sharp knives, or electricity to facilitate preparation and storage. Russians are wise to avoid heavy, starchy accompaniments such as potatoes or the mayonnaise-based salads that grace a Russian indoor zakuska or hors d’oeuvre course. Complicated accompaniment can also take away from the pure flavor of the freshly grilled meat, tinged with the smoke of the kostor, freshly mown grass and hint of pine. In our Russian/American family, we’ve experimented with different culinary traditions to find side dishes that compliment shashlik. Lighter, citrus-based salads with tangy herbal dressings seem to be the perfect match for enhancing shashlik without stealing its thunder. Note: these are not traditional Russian salads, but they made from ingredients readily available in Russia and make frequent appearances at our table in Moscow.
Gingered Lentils:
I brought this recipe with me to Russia from my childhood in New England, where it was always referred to as “Lentil Sludge,” and I don’t think there has been a piece of lamb on my table without these for the last twenty years. When I first came to Russia in the early 1990s, puy lentils were almost impossible to find, so I made do with the abundant green lentils. The tang of ginger and the red wine vinegar are a perfect foil to lamb, while the fresh scallions and peppers provide the essential “crunch” to the meal’s ensemble.
2 cups of puy or black “beluga” lentils
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons of grated fresh ginger
4 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup and 1/8 cup of olive oil
¾ cup and ¼ cup of red wine vinegar
Malden salt and pepper to taste
½ cup of chopped dill
5 scallions chopped
Diced orange, red, or yellow peppers
Preparation:
Place the lentils and bay leaves in a large pot of cold, salted water and bring to the boil. Reduce heat, and simmer until lentils are tender.
Drain the lentils and return to pot. Add the 1/3 cup of olive oil, and ¾ cup of vinegar, ginger, garlic and Malden salt and pepper. Set aside, uncovered, and allow lentils to come to room temperature. This can be made ahead of time 1-2 days before serving and stored, covered, in the refrigerator.
To finish the lentils, add the remaining olive oil and vinegar. Toss dill, scallions, and peppers and correct seasoning to taste.
Lemon, Tomato and Basil Salad:
In Moscow, we are lucky enough to have a roof garden with a grill, where we eat some form of shashlik or grilled meat most evenings from May to September. This salad appears with every dinner during the summer, and when it doesn’t appear on the table, family and friends protest violently! They all ask for the recipe, which makes me laugh, since it is so easy!
Ingredients:
1 kilo of small fresh tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, or sliced beef tomatoes
A drizzle of good quality olive oil
Juice of one fresh lemon
2 Tbls of sugar
Generous handful of basil leaves, coarsely chopped
One loaf of French bread
Preparation:
Slice the tomatoes into quarters or halves, depending on their size and your taste. Lay them on a large, flat platter. Scatter basil leaves generously around the tomatoes. Drizzle with olive oil, squeeze the lemon juice on, and just before serving, and add sugar and sea salt and cracked pepper to taste.
Why the bread? To soak up the delicious juices from this salad, mingled with the drippings from the meat. Delicious!
“Granny Pasta”
My nieces are vegetarians, so when we are together, we often to serve some form of this light, but nourishing pasta dish for them, and this is my daughter, Velvet’s favorite picnic dish for her horse shows. As the name suggests, my mother – their grandmother – invented this and it’s great as a side dish to shashlik, as well as on its own. I made it for a group of guests recently and a very polite, but I think sincere 14 year old looked down at his plate of Granny Pasta and barbecue, sighed deeply, and said, “This is the perfect meal.” And so it is!
500 grams of penne pasta
½ cup of olive oil
1 cup of fresh green basil leaves
Malden salt
Pepper
1 cup of grated cheese: we use Asiago or Parmesan Reggiano, but I’ve also used goat cheese, sheep’s cheese, or just the ends of the cheeses left in my fridge!
Preparation:
Place the olive oil and basil leaves in a food processor or blender and pulse 6-7 times, so that the basil is finely chopped but not fully combined as in a pesto.
Bring a large pot of cold, salted water to the boil. Skim surface with a teaspoon of olive oil and add the penne. Cook according to package instructions until al dente. Drain the pasta and quickly return to the pot. Place the pot over low heat and add the grated cheese and combined olive oil and basil mixture. Toss vigorously until the cheese begins to melt. Remove from the flame. Can be served immediately or at room temperature.
Make this your own family recipe by adding your favorite ingredients some ideas include: cherry tomatoes, black olives, fresh asparagus, peas,
Priyatnogo Appetitita!
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Dear Reader:
Do you know a man who thinks only he knows how to grill? If so, leave me a comment about it by clicking the button below! Tell me what you'd like to learn how to make next. I'm being encouraged to try okroshka which is a cold, kvas and cucumber soup. I'm panting for an alternative...so weigh in!!
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!
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.
----------------
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.
-------------------
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.
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!
About the Author
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: [email protected]
"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."
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"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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