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.
Dividing my time is more complicated than it sounds.
I’m back in Moscow, and I’ve spent the last few days doing what I always do after a lengthy absence: removing every single garment and (carefully labeled) plastic container from my closet, which for some reason is covered in about an inch of dust. If you ever wondered why luxury handbags come with those soft bags, now you know: to keep the dust off. Then I had to empty the fridge and do whatever it is I do do to rid it of the sour smell that comes from what I call “HRH food.” I put all the half-wrapped salami slices into sealed containers, I throw away the rotting radishes, and I banish all the food my mother-in-law imports as soon as I leave: jam, German pickles (yuck!) and synthetic faux creamer.
Having replaced batteries in absolutely everything from my computer mouse to my Sonic-care toothbrush, downloaded software updates for my sluggish MacBook, completely reconfigured my To-doist.com (never underestimate the empowerment of a good to-do list), I read Raisa the cleaning lady the riot act about not throwing out any ice while I’m here, and finally feel ready to get back to writing.
I’ve been on an enforced writing sabbatical since HRH came to Northampton for a week’s holiday from the Difficult Start Up at the Important Industry right before my departure to Moscow (a schedule line up I won’t be repeating any time soon) during which, he declared, he wanted to do absolutely nothing. Except buy some new suits. And watch Velvet in a Very Serious Horse Show she attended in utter upstate New York. HRH forgot his driver’s license, which meant I did all of the driving involved. And this pleased neither one of us. HRH loves to drive in the United States, which he likens to playing a not-too-demanding video game. Since we acquired Serena, our dulcet-toned GPS, we never worry about getting lost, and since my Dad (the car Tsar) generously arranged for and continues to underwrite an E-Z Pass, we are almost never stuck in traffic.
The E-Z Pass reigns as one of HRH’s top favorite things about America (along with Cape Cod Potato chips and the Hampshire Regional YMCA). Being Russian, he likens waiting in line for anything as a sign of weakness, and waiting in line to pay for using a road completely unacceptable. Each time we shoot through the E-Z Pass lane, leaving the other drivers to creep and crawl through the “CASH” Lane, HRH gives a grunt of approval. I certainly found it handy as I pushed pedal to metal on the New York Thruway in order to make it to one of Velvet’s early morning jump offs.
Perhaps it was the E-Z Pass, or maybe it was the smooth execution of the Valet Parking I surprised him with at the Natick Mall, but HRH got it into his head that he needed to order a VIP Meet & Great at Domodedevo Airport for his return journey back to Moscow. He also very generously determined that I should have the same treatment for my return three days later. I did not demur. When you’ve checked in three large duffle bags full of harmless kitchen essentials such as a vertical chicken roaster, and innocuous white substances such as 500 packets of Splenda and baking powder, the thought is always there that some Customs’ Official recovering from a long night, might just take it into his head to decide that the former is a sex toy and the latter a controlled substance.
I was thrilled, therefore, to casually stroll off the aircraft as my fellow passengers pushed and shoved, and did that thing that is not quite a run, but is a lot more than a walk, in a desperate effort to get to the front of the endless passport control queue (which is now even longer as we wait for the printer to print out the registration card). Savoring the moment, I approached the bored-looking female with pockmarked skin and an inexpertly hemmed uniform skirt, holding up the “VIP-ЗАЛ” sign.
“Hello there,” I said brightly, “I’m your client!”
She regarded me with a massive amount of disinterest.
“Identify yourself,” she grunted.
She seemed surprised, but resigned when I produced the right documentation and she motioned me to follow her.
Does anything say “You’re back in Russia” like the echoing “clack clack clack” of a female airport employee’s rickety heels on the tile floor? We forged our way through the steamy departure lounge, full of Russians in tracksuit bottoms and tank tops heading off for package holidays in Turkey and Egypt. Through a door, down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor and up an additional flight of stairs I lugged my rollaboard full of cameras, computers, my Duty free swag (three bottles of PIMMS) and enough cooking magazines to last me two months. We finally pushed through the final set of doors to the VIP Lounge.
I won’t belabor the point describing it, except to say I think that rattan, as a decorative motif in a climate such as Russia's is a mistake, and that, at the prices they charge for the service, a cash bar seems tacky, but as the Russians say, “It’s a sin to complain.”
Well, maybe just one complaint then…
It is nice to sit in a rattan chair and wait for someone to collect your three large duffle bags full of Splenda and vertical chicken roasters for you, but having to lug them up those two flights of stairs then through the entire arrivals hall, down the one tiny working elevator to get to the car which is parked in the dedicated VIP Parking space…that makes me long for my E-Z Pass.
------------------------------
Priveyt Readers!
Have you experienced a VIP service in Russia? VIP Sushi perhaps? Or VIP Banya? What's your experience been? Hit the comment button below and tell us about it!
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!
----------------------------------------------
A version of this article first appeared in Le Figaro in French under the title, "La Chasse au Moule" on April 19, 2011. An online link to that publication may be found here.
Today is Bribery Day! Since pagan times, Russians and their ancient Slavic forbears have set aside the Spring new moon to celebrate the strength of the grey economy. As ancient and venerable as Ivan Kupala and Maslentisa, Bribery Day has its roots in the agricultural pagan worship of the trickster god Otka. Otka was a Slavic version of the Greek God Hermes, guardian of thieves, messengers, traveling salesmen and merchants, and from his name, the modern word for “kick back” in Russian, “otkat’” is derived. On this day, as the winter slush finally left the soggy fields, as the Primary Chronicle of Russia recounts, the peasant elders of each village brought the last of their winter stores as offerings to their landowner, who dressed up as Otka. In an elaborate ceremony, each elder made lengthy speeches praising the god and the landowner, while their sons and grandsons placed their baskets at the feet of the landowner’s family. The speeches over, the landowner then announced the allocation of the narrow strips of soil called the “barshina” to the various peasants. Over time, whoever brought the largest donation would receive the most advantageous strips of land, which were adjacent to one another. This meant that the peasants could work the land without the hassle of traveling long distances between their different strips.
After the Baptism of Russia in 988, the Russian Orthodox Church gradually incorporated worship of Otka into worship of St. Nicholas The Miracle Worker. The Tsar held a grand levee on the first Sunday of April to receive the homage and elaborate ceremonial gifts from each head of the regional “gubanatoriya,” a tradition, echoed today in the annual Russian banking conferences in St. Petersburg, Sochi and London.
Revolution, famine, and the repression of the peasant kulacks during the forced Collectivization of the 1920s and 1930s severely curtailed celebrations of Bribery Day in Central European Russia, although stealth observations were recorded in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Far East. After the Great Patriotic War, Stalin’s death, and Kruschev’s “Secret Speech” however, authorities gradually relaxed their more stringent regulations and by 1960, Bribery Day was reinstated and today is as much a part of the rhythms of the Russian year as New Year’s, Maslenitsa, and the November holidays.
Here is a confession: I personally suck at bribery. Even after two decades, I never quite get the nuances, the timing, and I can never gage the right amount of money to proffer. Since free-lance writers are almost never on the receiving end of bribes, that has rarely been an issue for me. Back in the day, I did get what was an unmistakable approach in late 1994: I was offered the sum of $17,000 if I awarded a contract for services to a certain company. None of it was feasible: the company was laughably incompetent, and they had foolishly underestimated my influence in the decision making process. $17,000 was intriguing, though. To this day, I’m still wondering whether that was minus an $3,000, $7,000, or $8,000 kick back for the person who offered it to me. So I’m not a big time disciple of Otka, although I once confused the word for kick back (otkat) with the word for sunset (zakat), which HRH found hilarious. To this day, during the summer, we mix up some nice gin & tonics and head out to watch the “sun’s kick back.”
And that’s how I like to worship pagan “Otka.” So, mix yourself up your tipple of choice, and join Slavs across the globe in raising your glass to the ancient worship of the grey economy!!
Do you have a bribery story? My story about the 17K is true and I love it. Let us know about yours, won’t you by clicking on the comment button below. You don’t need to use your real name, but it would be great to hear from you!
When the men are silent, it is our duty to raise our voices in behalf of our ideals. ~Clara Zetkin
This week was of course the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day – or 8th of March, as it is better known in Russia, one of the most important dates in a calendar chocker block with important holidays.
8th of March was originally conceived as a day dedicated lobbying for equal rights for women, universal suffrage, and the abilities and achievements of women throughout the world. It was first celebrated in Russia in 1913, and, after the revolution of 1917, quickly became a fixture on the calendar for the new Bolshevik government. On the 8th of March, men are supposed to take on all the tasks traditionally assigned to women. They clean the house, make a meal, or possibly look after the children. Today, however, in this more mercantile post-perestroika era, celebrations have strayed a little bit far off the mark. 8th of March has become an obligatory gift giving extravaganza. The gross national product of Holland shoots up a number of points due to all the flowers sold on 8th of March, and restaurants do a brisk business for those International men who can’t quite face the kitchen.
This year, Russia held its national beauty pageant and crowned a “Miss Russia,” and this alone would have the socialist pioneers Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxumburg turning in their graves. In what are politely called penal facilitates, Russian women prisoners also held beauty contests to crown a “Miss Prison Russia.” Russia’s favorite redhead spy, Anna Chapman, who for some reason is still making headlines, launched a very silly website, and Russia’s infamously unpleasant traffic cops declared a one day cease fire on pulling women over for minor traffic offences. This pulled the GDP of Russia down a few points.
Celebrating 8th of March this year was a three-day event thanks to the way the holiday fell in the middle of the week. For the uninitiated used to bank holidays and first Mondays, this may seem a trifle confusing, but follow me if you can:
Saturday, March 5th was a working day, meaning that Russians worked a six-day week. We had to work on Saturday so that Monday, March 7th could be a day off even though Tuesday, March 8th was the actual holiday. Does that make sense? Vintage Russian public holiday stuff. If the holiday is on a Tuesday, you have to have the Monday off as well so you can get a three-day weekend. Even though you have to work on the previous Saturday. Where that gets us, I don’t know, but I’m not sure anyone comes out ahead. Joe Biden is town this week and he’s talking about Russia’s accession to the WTO but if you ask me (and no one ever ever does) if they let that warped individual who sits in his windowless room in the Kremlin massaging the calendar keep on with this stuff, Russia doesn’t deserve to join the WTO.
On Saturday, I actually came in from London – a flight time of just over three hours. It took me about that amount of time to get from Domodedevo Airport to my flat in Moscow. HRH, my “horrible Russian Husband” was unable to meet me since he was at work, so Tolya my driver and I sat in a traffic jam that was more than usually insane.
“Yep,” said Tolya, “Everyone’s out congratulating the ladies.”
Saturday may be a working day, but most of it is given over to kicking off 8th of March in fine style, with lots of champagne, chocolates and flowers. Legions of delivery trucks leaned on their horns and tried to cut off their competitors through the gridlock.
Tolya told me he’d heard on the radio that you could hire an official emergency service ambulance as a taxi service for 6000 rubles and hour, which comes to about 200 USD per hour.
“I don’t approve of it,” he said. Neither did I, but we both agreed that it require a leap of the imagination to understand that it was actually happening.
My HRH hates to shop for anything – he becomes grumpy and impatient buying a newspaper at a kiosk, or a loaf of bread at the nice French bakery across the street from us. But, each 8th of March, he girds his loins and plunges into the maelstrom of baffled men trying to club together ingredients for a home cooked meal.
“Keep it simple,” I advised as we parked the car at a new place I’d heard about, called The Farmer’s Bazaar. I had high hopes of it turning out to be the Whole Foods of Moscow, which of course was delusional of me. It turned out to be a token supermarket on the 5th floor of what used to be a perfectly respectable food market on a central Russian street. Closed for a number of years, it had recently re-opened as a glitzy shopping mall. Because that’s just what Moscow needs – another glitzy shopping mall. And who in their right mind puts a supermarket on the 5th floor of a glitzy shopping mall?
Farmer’s Bazaar was definitely not Whole Foods. Far from it. It was like any overpriced Moscow supermarket: you needed to take a second mortgage to afford some of the items. I clocked a small package of white beans, which are admittedly hard to find here, retailing for just over $12. A packet of Earl Grey Tea would run you $20. HRH had that “I knew this would be a nightmare” look on his face as I steered him over to the fish counter. He was mildly mollified by some fresh fin de Claire oysters, reasonably priced at about 3 bucks a pop, and ordered a few dozen. These were carefully packaged in plastic takeaway containers with a bed of ice, but the problems was that they only fit 3 oysters to the container, so we ended up with ten takeaway containers. I then queered the deal by asking if I could buy the heads and spines of some beautiful fish one of the charmingly nautically clad fishmongers was gutting. This appeared to be the first time anyone behind the fish counter had ever received a request remotely like this, and it was met with a lot of suspicion.
Today is the beginning of Maslenitsa, Russia's version of Mardi Gras!
I wrote this piece for one of papers I write for, but they went with something about bears in Trafalgar Square which I didn't feel was nearly as informative, nor indeed entertaining. Looks like Olga Quelque Chose strikes again...So, here it is for fans of The Stunt:
There are a number of non-negotiables about life in Russia. You can’t have the window open—ever. You have to take your shoes off when you enter any residential dwelling—always. And, if you plan to earn the respect of your family, you need to learn how to make bliniy or pancakes---well. Particularly this time of the year. It has eluded me, in the past but this year, I promised myself I would master the art of the elusive Russian pancake in time for Maslenitsa. I rolled up my sleeves. I delved into 19the Century cookbooks. I cornered old women at the farmers’ market. I contemplated calling my mother-in-law.
“I have to work today, “ said my workaholic Russian husband last Saturday.
“Perfect,” I muttered, “I need you out from under my feet. I have to crack this bliniy recipe, and it is going to take me all day.”
“Don’t overdo it,” he cautioned hastening out the door.
“Don’t you dare have anything to eat,” I yelled after him, “because we’ll be having sixty pancakes for dinner!”
The pressure is on. Maslenitsa is upon us! Russia’s riotous Mardi Gras: a week of partying, pancakes and punch-ups which celebrates the end of winter, the beginning of Lent, and the promise of spring. Half-heartedly absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Calendar, Maslenitsa is really a tenacious rite of spring belonging to a much older, more pagan culture of nature worship, agrarian traditions, and a heightened awareness of the change of seasons.
Maslenitsa was originally pegged to the vernal equinox, that moment in early spring when the sun passes directly over the equator, making day and night equal length. Of the four points of the calendar (the solstices and the equinoxes), the vernal equinox was most revered by ancient societies, because it heralded the return of the sun and life after the darkness and death of winter. Many ancient monuments such as the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem were oriented such that the rays of the vernal equinox sunrise would fall directly above the High Alter.
Pagan Slavs interpreted natural phenomena in their religious worship with stories of human love and betrayal, sex and separation, and life and death. In a popular myth reminiscent of Egyptian Isis and Osiris, Russia’s Yarilo and Morana are brother and sister lovers who represent life and death, fire and ice, and spring and winter. Their courtship reaches a fever pitch during the summer solstice, only to spiral into betrayal in autumn, and separation and death in the winter. Spurred Morana turns into a fearsome hag, spreading death and frost in her wake. Crops wither to dried straw as Yarilo retreats to the underworld. As spring returns, the faithful burned a straw effigy of Morana on top of the snow to call forth Yarilo back from the Underworld. As the flames of the straw Morana crackled, pagan Slavs celebrated the return of spring by dancing, wrestling, and feasting on life-affirming pancakes, symbolic of the sun and eternal life.
Christians, ever-efficient recyclers of other people’s holidays, have nevertheless found Maslenitsa an awkward fit in the liturgical lead in to Easter. In agrarian Russia, Lent served as a handy spiritual excuse for a Spartan diet as it excludes meat, cheese, oil, eggs, alcohol, and butter, all of which do a lot to spice up plain buckwheat kasha. The forty days of Lent coincide with the period when the staples of winter stores had dwindled down to a bare minimum in Russia. Nowadays, of course, you can get mangos and quail in aspic at any supermarket year round, but many Russians proudly go through “The Great Fast,” as a way of clawing onto some moral high ground and dropping twenty pounds in less than two months: both goals easy to achieve if you are subsisting on buckwheat porridge and cabbage soup. Maslenitsa contains the word “maslo” meaning butter, although some scholars argue that it is a more ancient version of “mysia pust’” meaning “empty of meat.” Whatever the explanation, it is a time to gorge on butter, cheese, and cream, and is to Russia what Shrovetide is to the Anglo-Saxons and Carnival and Mardi Gras are to the Spanish and French: a public celebration of the return of light and warmth and the last gasp of fun and fat – and pancakes of course-- to be had before the onset of Lent.
This piece first appeared in La Russie D'Aujourd'hui and Le Figaro on February 16, 2011 in French under the title: "Les blinis sans états d’âme"
Photos (and pancakes) by the author. All Rights Reserved.
--------------------------------------------
Hello Readers!
Have you had a pancake today? Want to know the very best pancake recipe ever (much better than any of the ones posted that I've seen?) Hit the comment button below and I'll let you in on it. Not for the faint hearted!!!
To revisit a Maslenitsa that went horribly wrong, try this post.
As you spend February 23rd (Men's Day), so shall you spend 8th of March (Women's Day).
~HRH (and a lot of other Russian men I know.)
A friend, who is perhaps not the brightest bulb on the tanning bed, has just figured out the double entendre humor I use in referring to my “Handsome Russian Husband” as “HRH.”
“You know,” she said, “That can also stand for ‘His Royal Highness’. Like Prince William.”
Really?
The moniker HRH is eminently applicable to Russian men, who are all brought up by their mothers believing that they are, indeed, royal scions and therefore above such plebian and unmanly concerns like housework. In Russia, they are still teaching Home Ec to the girls and Shop to the boys, with no reform in sight – and certainly not regarding the impending gender-specific public holidays. In place of one messy, gender-neutral love fest on February 14th, Russians are suiting up for the very separate Men’s Day (February 23rd) and its companion piece, International Women’s Day (March 8th.)
I’m a Russian historian, so I like to delve into the origin of national holidays. Men’s Day is very interesting. Its full, and characteristically overblown, name is “The Day of the Defenders of the Motherland,” and it celebrates the 1918 rout of Kaiser Wilhelm’s forces by the just-that-day-drafted Red Army. The name eventually morphed from “Red Army Day,” to “Day of the Soviet Army and Navy,” and in 1995, as part of a re-branding campaign to drop “Red” from everything, ended up as “Day of the Defenders of the Motherland.” In HRH’s family, we take the 23rd of February very seriously indeed, since we are a military family: HRH and Dedushka both served as officers in the Red Army – as did Great Uncle Boris, and several others, dating right back to that Red Letter Day in 1918. Interestingly, this list also includes several gutsy great aunts and great-great grandmothers, who served, with distinction, in the Red Army as border patrol guards, field medical officers, and behind-the-lines guerilla fighters in Occupied Ukraine. Nevertheless, February 23rd remains devoted exclusively to the men of Russia, who, ipso facto, are all obliged to defend the Motherland as part of their mandatory military service.
On its current web site, the Russian Consulate in Houston, TX offers helpful guidance on the celebration of Men’s Day: “On this day,” it says, “the entire masculine population - from boys to old men - receive special greetings and presents. Women have a wonderful opportunity to convey their warmest and kindest feelings to the loved ones and to indulge them with sings (sic) of attention and affection.”
HRH, in mufti, is not a force to be reckoned with on the domestic front, although he does open wine bottles, which, along with driving a car, is what well-brought up Russian men consider “man’s work.” I once begged him to empty the dishwasher. He sighed deeply, went to the sink, and stood, his back to me.
“Darling,” I said quietly.
“What – “ he barked, turning around to glare at me.
“Just that, the dishwasher, you know, is the appliance on your left.”
HRH and Dedushka won’t be emptying anything except a bottle of premium whiskey this week – as we women convey our warmest and kindest feelings. I’ve bought HRH a new super sonic corkscrew, Babushka has the sweet Sovietskoye Champanskoye warming up in the vegetable steamer, and Velvet is on dishwasher duty, so we are all set to indulge our Defenders with the royal attention and affection they deserve.
This post first appeared as an article in Russia Beyond The Headlines on February 10, 2010.
--------------------------------------------
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?
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?
Today is Old New Year. That’s right – Old New Year. Old in the sense of “what used to be.” As the leading (read only) chronicler of Russian public and professional holidays, I’ve explained the 13-day discrepancy between some Russian holidays, but for those of you just joining Dividing My Time, here is my authorized version of just how this discrepancy came about.
Old New Year is the final push to the finishing line of my Christmas marathon, which begins around December 10th, around about the time my friend Gail guilts me into buying a gazillion tickets to the Moscow Oratorio’s annual performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” and ends – deo gratis – tomorrow. And not before time!
While the Valentine’s Day décor goes up in the West at approximately 2 pm on Christmas Day, the Russians drag it out until the last gasp. Today, at Goodman’s Steak House where Tancy and Tanya and I got together for a girly lunch, they still had Ella Fitzgerald singing “Sleigh Bells Ringing” full blast, which made me want to throw my 9 oz New York steak across a room filled with plump businessmen having catch up lunches with their secretaries. Readers, it’s time to pack up Christmas and be done with it. Lent is just around the corner.
In this spirit of de-cluttering and de-Christmasing, I attacked HRH’s staggering range of Corporate Gifts with all the relentless zeal of my new heroine, Clutter Buster to the Elites, Barbara Reich.
Corporate gifts, like birthday gifts, in Russia have a culture uniquely their own, which has a lot more to do with the giver, rather than the giftee. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I run through some of the more outrageous ones I’ve encountered in my day. The list was long as it was, but this year, it got a stunning new addition that no one could see coming down the shosse.
I’ve written before about clutter busting in Russia (and gotten my hand nicely slapped for it) but at this rolling time of the year, as Dickens would say, there is a very real danger that one could end up buried under all this…seasonal bounty. So, with that in mind, I offer, below, a practical guide for wives, trailing spouses and secretaries as to what you can expect to receive, and more importantly, what you should do with it.
1.Shiny carrier bags with the logo of the giver emblazoned on the front:
Disposition: empty these of their contents, being sure to remove the business cards stapled to them so you can remember to thank the giver. Write the contents of the carrier bag on the back of the business card. Collate with rubber band to give to your minigarch. HRH tends to not take this any further, but I figure this is his business.
When the carrier bags are emptied, flatten them out and give them to your cleaning lady. She will be over the moon and use them as you or I would use a tote bag for the remainder of the calendar year. On no account should you use them to “re-gift” an item, because you won’t get any of the credit. Duh…
2. Booze:
Booze at New Year’s is a wonderful barometer of how well you are doing professionally: the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the better the quality of the booze swag. Russians, despite all the patriotic rhetoric you hear these days, are serious snobs about their alcohol, preferring the imported to the domestic. So, if you got a wooden case of three bottles of really nice French red wine, you are doing well. If you got one bottle of Super Sladkoye (sweet) Shampanskoye, not so much.
Disposition: Consume (in the case of the good wine, cognac, and scotch) or (in the case of the Super Sladkoye Shampanskoye or the Cough Syrup Cranberry Liqueur) re-gift down the social scale to those who will appreciate it. The exception to this rule is vodka, which often comes in a witty custom-branded bottle with the firm’s logo on it. Keep this and pour it into the hole in your car where the windshield wiper fluid goes and you’ll be all set.
3.Banya accessories:
Newcomers to Russia are often surprised to find they’ve been given dried branches, felt caps, wooden buckets, a small wall thermometer, or a long-handled ladle as presents, but in no way should this be perceived as an insult or a slur. Quite the opposite, these gifts indicate that the giver perceives you or your minigarch as a bit of a lad, one of the boys, and an all around good egg.
Disposition: If you have a sauna, then stick them in and put them to work. If you don’t, hand them over to your driver, who will think that you think he is a bit of a lad. No bad thing.
4-7: The paper products/A5 junky diaries:
No Russian company worth its salt will go one year without producing an A5 diary, calendar, or outdated business card holder of some kind. During my time at the The Firm, I tried to get rid of them, but no dice. These can range from tasteful real leather blank books (and as you can see from the photo, some companies are wising up and producing A4 or letter-sized diaries) to the really heinous faux-suede stuff. As for the business card holders – another reason why, if you ask me (and no one ever ever does) Russia will never join the WTO – everyone knows you need a Rolodex to keep those in any kind of order.
Disposition: Cull vigorously, keeping the A4 ones for yourself. Gift the A5 ones to the Accounting and Security Departments, who can’t seem to live without this kind of thing, and the faux suede ones to your driver.
8. PR-shicki get creative:
Sometimes the PR-schiki get creative and you end of with some one-off items. These can be clever (a boxed set of really good Soviet classic movies) or tasteful (a silver-plated USB charger – my own idea one year), or downright silly like Christmas tree ornaments. Who the hell wants a Christmas Tree ornament from ROSGOS something or other?
Disposition: Think carefully about how you might use this on a day-to-day basis and act accordingly. Re-gift if you possibly can, though you will have to do it down the social scale, since all of these items will be aggressively branded.
9. The inexplicable:
Sometimes you just can’t fathom the mindset of the person in charge of this kind of thing. I mean, who in their right mind gives a grown man and potential minigarch what can only be described as a doll? A shiny, expensive doll, to be sure, but a doll nonetheless. I can only think that in this case, the empty-headed, long-legged secretary of the Top Guy was allowed a free hand.
Disposition: I give this kind of thing to my mother-in-law.
"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."
~Opening of Law & Order
Today celebrates the men and women who protect and defend the laws of Russia from those who might seek to break, or indeed bend them: the employees of Russia’s General Prosecutor, led by Yuri Chaika (like the Chekhov play and the car) in over 2,800 regional offices all over Russia.
On January 12, 1722, Peter The Great established the post of General Prosecutor of the Russia Senate. Before Peter, as with so many things, justice was rather more loosely organized...a bit rougher if you will. I won’t bore you with the lengthy and somewhat plodding history of the Russian Prosecutors – if you are fascinated with it that much, you can read the entire thing on their helpful website. I would just highlight two interesting moments – one is that in 1917, the Bolsheviks abolished all court systems and handed the administration of justice over to The People, which was obviously far more efficient as the next two decades would prove.
This kind of populist utopia can’t last forever, of course, and in 1992, soon after the Fall of the Wall and all that unpleasantness, the system was revamped once again. In the words of the General Prosecutor themselves:
As early as the first Russian Law on Public Prosecution Service (1992) abolished the total supervision over implementation of laws by citizens; the Prosecution Service was prohibited from interference in economic activities. The essence of prosecutorial supervision, which is nowadays carried out over execution of essentially new legislation regulating drastically changed social relations, became absolutely different.
There are those – and HRH is in the vanguard -- who scoff at my notion that Russian history is cyclical rather than linear, but I think the history of the General Prosecutor’s Office is a great example of why I’m right. What goes around comes around.
One thing that has remained constant, however, is that the Prosecutors in Russia are all uniformed – a tradition dating back from Peter I and carried on to this day. Today, the uniforms are a cheerful sort of Prussian blue, which if you ask me (and no one ever ever does), are ever so slightly effeminate. But there you are: they Army has manly olive green, the Navy took black and the Air Force got the funky blue/green and the Police the blue/grey. So the legal beagles are stuck with the girly blue which may account for their zeal in coming down hard on the crowd that wants to hang out by the statue of Mayakovsky or buy Parliaments (Lite or otherwise): a need to show their manliness. I base this on the following scholarly observation: when the Prosecutors do deign to make public statements, they tend to put forward some young woman in a shortened skirt as spokesperson. While the peroxide blond reads out a statement at lightening speed in “officialspeak,” the beefier senior men stand around silently and clutch their crotches and sway, as Russian officials are wont to do. As recent events have shown, no one can get through a statement faster than the General Prosecutors, because what's important is the letter - not the rule - of the law.
It’s all a far far cry from Sam Waterston and Alana de la Garza (who would look great in epaulettes and Prosecutor blue). There was a knock off “Law & Order” series on Russian TV for a while called “Zakon & Poryadok” (Russian for "LAW and ORDER") which lasted one season. I don’t know…it lacked a certain ya ni znaio shto (Russian for "je ne sais quoi") which I put down as Chris Noth, though it could have been that the misalignment of the fact that the Prosecutors aren’t “separate but equally important” from the police who investigate the crime. Certainly they don't stride down a hall carrying coffee cups together. Maybe it’s that they don’t represent the people. Or that it's not NYC.
In any case, if you want to check them out – they are on Bolshaya Dmitrovka – right near US Dental Care. You can’t miss it.
Have you been following Russia’s courtroom dramas these past few weeks? What’s your take on them? Weigh in, won’t you, by clicking the comment button below. If you liked this post, do “like” it on Facebook so your friends can enjoy it to. Or try some more stories about the world’s largest country like the ones listed below. Thanks for visiting Dividing My Time!
No prizes for guessing what today is...apart from being 1/1/11 which is pretty cool: It's New Year's! Hands down the brightest star in the Russian holiday firmament! It's been going on very steadily since about 1918 and it is for everyone!
Foreigners get confused about Russian New Year, Russian Christmas and all the things that go with it. I wrote a piece about it for Russia Beyond The Headlines and it seems appropriate to reprint it here:
So, Is This Christmas?
“Is this a Christmas Tree, or a New Year’s Tree?” asked my five-year old daughter Velvet, as I struggled with a tangle of fairy lights.
“It’s both,” said HRH, my “Handsome Russian Husband,” who was lying contorted on the floor, trying to get the tree to stand up strait in its holder.
“Nastia says,” Velvet informed us, referencing her infallible best friend “that Santa Claus isn’t Santa Claus at all – he’s called Ded Moroz and he comes on New Year’s.”
“Tell Nastia,” I responded through gritted teeth, “that in our very fortunate family, Santa comes on December 24th, and then his cousin, Ded Moroz comes on New Year’s Eve.”
“Nastia says Christmas is on January 7th,” said Velvet, still confused.
“That’s true too,” said HRH, brushing pine needles off his hands.
“Why?” asked Velvet, and they both looked at me expectantly.
Christmas in our American-Russian family is a marathon, not a sprint. Since Velvet was born, HRH and I have worked hard – he writing checks, me sifting the dry ingredients -- to fuse the varying traditions of Russia and the West into our family celebrations. The result is a month-long slog, from December 15th, when my friend Gail guilts us all into buying tickets to the Moscow Oratorio’s rendition of Handel’s “Messiah,” through January 13th, or “Old New Year” in Russia, at which point, I am ready to lock Prince Albert, Charles Dickens, and Pyotor Ilyich Tchaikovsky into a small, windowless room and throw away the key.
Russian Christians adhere to the Eastern Orthodox calendar (see sidebar), which lags 13 days behind the modern day calendar. This discrepancy was corrected in 1918, by the fledgling Bolshevik regime, but Christmas never reverted to December 25th in Russia, because the Bolsheviks began a systematic campaign to phase out traditional religious holidays and replace them with Soviet ones. Christmas was shifted to New Year’s Eve. At the beginning, stringent measures were put in place to see off any holdover of the old days: Christmas trees, introduced to Russia by Tsar Peter The Great in the 17th Century, were banned in 1916 by the Holy Synod as too German. The Bolsheviks kept the tree ban in place. Stalin declared Ded Moroz “an ally of the priest and kulak,” and outlawed him from Russia.
“Like the Burgermeister Meisterburger outlawed Kris Kringle in ‘Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town?’” asked Velvet breathlessly, referring to the seminal 1970 animated American Christmas classic.
I cast a careful look at HRH who was now struggling with the star on the top of the tree, “Exactly like that,” I whispered.
But you can’t keep the likes of Ded Moroz down for long. In 1935 Pavel Postyshev, Stalin’s architect of the collectivization program, possibly concerned about his lasting legacy, published a letter in Pravda asking that “New Year’s Trees” be erected in Pioneer Palaces and that Ded Moroz and his granddaughter and helpmate Sneguritchka be allowed to return to the children of the Soviet Union on New Year’s Eve. Ded Moroz and the trees were rehabilitated in 1937. Although Christmas and other Orthodox holidays were reinstated on the Russian calendar in 1992, New Year’s Eve remains firmly entrenched as the primary holiday.
Although Christmas itself was banned, Russians recycled traditional pagan and Christmas traditions as a template for the New Year’s Customs. In Old Russia, when the first star appeared in the sky, symbolic of the Star of Bethlehem, families gathered to break their 40-day fast with a twelve course “Holy Supper,” featuring “kutya” or grain porridge sweetened with honey and dried fruit. From pagan times, this dish symbolized life, hope, sweetness, and blessings to the home. You can still find kutya on the tables of today’s Russian New Year’s celebrations, along with lavish zakuski (hors d’oeuvres.) In the Soviet Era, New Year’s always saw the arrival of rare tropical fruits such as tangerines, which for HRH is the smell of his childhood New Year’s. After the Holy Supper, the faithful in Old Russia returned to church for an All-Night Vigil. Today, Russians gather around their tables in front of the TV to greet, not the Redeemer of Mankind, but President Dmitry Medvedev, who will hoist a glass of champagne and wish everyone health and happiness for the coming year. Then fireworks will explode all over Russia and all the bells will peel, as Russians exchange three kisses and good wishes: “New Year, New Happiness, New Luck!”
Sidebar:
Why is Russian Christmas on January 7th?
Dates and holidays are often confusing in Russia because of the historical split between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches over the reforms to the Julian Calendar by Pope Gregory XII in 1582. Most of the world rushed to adopt what became known as “The Gregorian Calendar,” which introduced more effective leap years and more precisely calculated the length of the year not as 365.25 days, but rather 365.2425 days, a difference of 11 minutes. The Eastern Orthodox countries, however felt that the Julian calendar more accurately plotted the spring equinox and Easter, and refused to buy into the Gregorian reforms. If you think 11 minutes doesn’t make a difference: think again: over three centuries, as the Orthodox Christians doggedly stuck to the older, less accurate calendar introduced by Julius Caesar, a time lag developed. By 1918, when Lenin decreed that Russia should join the rest of the world, the lag was 13 days long: the most severe jet lag in the history of mankind. Today, the Eastern Orthodox Church still adheres to the Julian calendar, though it has indicated it is ready to make the shift in 2100. Orthodox Christmas is 13 days behind what Russians call “Catholic Christmas.” Russians, who believe that when it comes to holidays “more is more”, also celebrate “Old New Year” on January 13th as well as “New Year” and Orthodox Christmas on January 7th. To ensure the season is indeed jolly, Russians enjoy a ten-day national holiday from January 1 – 10th!
This piece first appeared in Russia Beyond The Headlines and The Washington Post on December 15, 2010 and a link to the original online version can be found here.
Hope you are having a good one! If you aren't, here is a nice tip: if you make Bloody Marys with Aquavit and Clamato instead of vodka and tomato juice, they are a.) much better and b.) cure the bite a lot better. Which is about all the wisdom I've gleaned over this holiday season.
What are your New Year's Resolutions? Be the first in 2011 to weigh in by hitting the comment button below.
I mentioned Bees Rees in my last post, that uncrowned queen of Moscow. She collected over 15,000 Russian Christmas/New Year's Tree ornaments which is outrageous. She used to send e mails out to get everyone to come and help her unpack them...and THEY DID. Oy-veh. I don't have as many as Bees, but I have some nice ones and here they are:
“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!
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:
~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!
Today is Ground Forces day in Russia! Since 2006, the guys in the trenches are front and center each October 1st.
Not being hugely up on military tactics, I thought I would instead devote today’s post to the issue of mandatory military service in Russia, which is something I know a bit more about, primarily because most of my Russian friends are beginning to grapple with this issue as their children approach the age of 18. I say children – but of course I mean, their male children, since mandatory military service is only for men, not women. All Russian male citizens must serve in the army for 12 months sometime betwen the ages of 18 and 27, unless they have a legitimate reason not to. While changing one's gender might be seen as going to extremes to avoid conscription, this is Russia, and there are many things to keep the bands of military recruiters out on the streets, trying to round up all the available candidates.
Military service in Russia was recently reduced from two years to 12 months, but that hasn’t done much to swell the ranks. It remains, for many, a brutal first step in to the world of adulthood, with notoriously violent bullying and hazing, called dedovshchina (from the Russian word for Grandfather) of new conscripts by more seasoned soldiers. I can’t think the food is up to much either, so all in all, it isn’t an ideal “Be All That You Can Be,” situation. Russia is also actively engaged in military conflict down in the south of the country, so, for those who are not bullied to death, there is a very real concern that they might have to deploy to an active combat zone.
If you ask a 40-something woman what her 18-year old son is up to, she might well respond, “Oh, he’s hiding from the army.” This might well be accompanied by either a welling up of tears in her eyes (in which case, get ready to be asked for a loan) or a disgusted “tsk-tsk” noise and a Slavic shrug. Both mean that the golden boy in question has failed to line of any of the acceptable legal exemptions from mandatory military service. These are, in order of social acceptability: university or graduate education, which entitles you to either postpone your tour of duty, or take the option of becoming an officer for two years, which used to be a fast-track method to securing the lowest rung on the property ladder, but is less so today. If you have two or more children (and don’t laugh this off: the winters are very long, and cold and dark in a lot of Russia) this constitutes a permanent exemption. The most popular excuse, however, and the one which is easiest to arrange if the recruit in question is not the brightest bulb on the sun tanning bed, is to obtain a medical exemption. This is where the loan your 40-something friend will be asking for comes in. If there is actually nothing wrong with you, then you have to purchase an ailment. Doctor’s certificates testifying to a medical condition making it impossible to serve can be obtained for roughly $5,000.
A fourth option exists for those who cannot scrape together the money for a fake student ID or a medical certificate, and that is to join the murky ranks of the semi-legal strata of Russian society. In the early days of perestroika, many parents sequestered their military-aged sons at remote dachas, or sent them in to the interior regions of Russia to hide out on farms or with distant cousins. This is a dismal existence: always looking over your shoulder on public transportation to avoid detection, never being able to stay at your home address, many legitimate forms of work unavailable to you because you haven't completed your military service.
Russia’s elite make sure their children are either full time students, or that they reside abroad at the family’s house in Kensington. And, I can’t say I blame them. I think if I had a son, I would do everything I could to keep him out of mandatory military service.
HRH, however, disagrees with me – violently. He says the whole system means D students and petty criminals staff the Army at the lowest levels. He thinks everyone should serve (which he did, from the ages of 17 - 24 first as a military cadet, and later as a serving officer). So, it is a good thing we only have a daughter (though Velvet would love to be an Hussar). HRH disapproves of hiding from the Army. He thinks it is a sissy sort of a thing to do, and he gets very exasperated when he hears about people who are actively engaged in it. Tolya, our driver, who did his 2 years, agrees: “Everyone should serve,” he says simply, “well, unless they are unable, in which case, they shouldn't. But if you can...you should. It makes a man out of you.”
Happy Ground Forces Day to all of Russia’s boys currently in the process of becoming men.
I do not want to finish this post without mentioning the excellent organizations of soldiers' mothers who are lobbying to improve conditions for military conscripts in Russia. The Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia does excellent work, and you can read more about another group in an excellent article by Tatianna Shabaeva here.
What is your take on Russia’s mandatory military service? Are you a veteran of military service, or are you perhaps serving at the moment? What’s it like? Leave me a comment and let me know. Thank you very much for stopping by and reading this post. I have some other posts about other branches of Russia’s military you might enjoy:
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!
----------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------
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"
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!!!
------------------------------------
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:
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
~ Herodotus (I know… I was surprised too)
Today we celebrate Russia’s postal system…or shall we say the potential that it represents?
A lawyer-type classmate of my sister’s (who I suspect is firing on a few too many cylinders) was recently posted to Russia and sent in some impressions of the country to his friends and colleagues. Among these, he confessed to being really taken aback that a letter posted to him from Western Europe took almost 21 days to reach him in Moscow.
Myself, I was astonished that no one at his fancy-schmansy legal outfit had seen fit to warn him that, along with trolleybuses and the 10 pm evening news on TV, foreigners (and quite a few Russians) just ignore the postal system here. Not in any kind of morally outraged, angst-fueled boycott or anything, but rather as something we’ve given up long ago as antiquated, inefficient, and irrelevant. As a recent article in The Moscow Times pointed out, if you want something in Russia, you need to hand-carry it in. An example: I forgot my battery charger for my digital camera in the US when I came over a few weeks ago. The first thing I did was to send out a note on Facebook to figure out which of my friends was next coming over from the US to Russia, and then asked a neighbor to send her the battery. I’ll have it next week. It did not occur to me to ask my neighbor to post it to Russia, and, as I’m on an austerity budget, there is no way I could afford the cost (four figures) of having it shipped via DHL, FedEx or UPS.
“I can always tell when you are coming home,” says my mother, “when the UPS man comes three times a day.” And so he does, along with Chet the Mailman, and the tough cookie FedEx woman, bringing clothing, and books, and sheets, and towels and obscure pieces of kitchen equipment, and label maker tape and all kinds of things you can’t easily or cheaply access in Russia. Then, I pack them in my TUMI bags and head over to Russia.
Such as it is, then, Russia’s postal service was founded more than 300 years ago by…guess whom? Peter The Great, of course! In 1693, Peter ordered the first regular postal service to support (of course) the naval shipyard at Archangelsk, and the State Duma inaugurated the Day of the Postal Service in 1994.
About three years ago, I began to get a whiff of what seemed to me to be a concerted effort by the Russian Government to beef up the post office service. It was almost as if someone at the top had seen that cheesy film with Kevin Costner “The Postman” (because they don’t strike me as the types to curl up with Il Postino) and said “First tier nations have a decent postal service… do something about it!”
Here were the hints: Andrei Kazmin, (who looks more like a rodent than any of the other oligarchs) the former head of Sberbank (the National Savings Bank) was put in charge of the Post Office, suggesting that either he had really screwed up or reform might be in the wind. Next, you started to see commercials on television for the Russian Postal Service: wildly improbable, slightly unfocused scenes of sun-drenched (so likely) kitchens and fit and happy families overjoyed to be receiving newspapers, letters, cards, parcels from a jolly Slavic version of Chet The Mailman who they just let in their back door, which, needless to say, is the kind of thing that happens every day in Russia. It was clearly a PR campaign, because, of course, the Russian Postal Service doesn’t compete directly with anyone. About this time, I got into it, and wrote a column about how easy it was to walk in and buy post cards and stamps, encouraging a very skeptical HRH and his parents to send Velvet some mail at boarding school. I’m afraid that they’ve been proven right: Mr. Kazmin has stepped down and the Gorgans who run the post office have gone back to snapping your head off when you ask for international post card stamps.
If you ask me (and no one ever ever ever does) if Dmitry Medvedev is really serious about beefing up Russia’s economy, he ought to put Skolkovo on the back burner and beef up the catalog mail order business: I know for a fact that Russians are wild for LL Bean, Lands End, Eddie Bauer, Hannah Andersson, Eileen Fisher and that ilk. I know because I’ve spent the last 17 years lugging that kind of stuff over here, which I would love to stop doing someday.
Compare Russia and the US on post office statistics:
In 2009, the USPS handled 177 billion pieces of mail, compared to Russia’s 1.01 billion. The Russian Postal Service employs 390,000 people, and the USPS 596,000. Russia uses 450 postal vans, 17,000 vehicles and more than 360 flights, whereas the USPS deploys 218, 684 vehicles.
And, as Barack Obama will tell you, USPS is hurting.
What do you think about the postal service where you live? Is it efficient, or are you outraged by it? Have you had any experience with Russia’s postal system, or did you sensibly just give that one a miss? Thank you, as ever, for joining me on this romp through Russia’s professional holidays. If you found the state Russia’s postal system depressing, perhaps some more upbeat posts are in order. Try these:
“If I say, Battle of Poltava to you, what immediately springs to mind?” I asked HRH. It’s been very hot lately, and I don’t do well in that kind of weather. I need some inspiration.
“Peter The Great?” he asked, taking another hefty swig of cold beer.
“And?”
“The Swedes?” he ventured.
“Anything else?” I asked.
He scratched his head and thought a bit.
“We won?”
Russian History is neither HRH’s core interest, nor part of his skill set. He confuses the Nicholases, the Alexanders and the Catherines (though at least he does not make the common mistake that Catherine The Great was married to Peter The Great). But he got full marks on The Battle of Poltava, and bonus points for a succinct distillation of the salient points about today’s holiday: Peter’s victory over the Swedes at the Battle of Poltava on July 8, 1709, and their ultimate surrender on July 10th.
When last we encountered Peter The Great, he was also engaged in a contretemps with the Swedes, the naval victory in 1703 which secured him the strategic mouth of the Neva River on which he built his dream city, Saint Petersburg. If that was his first modest victory against his primary adversary, Charles XII of Sweden, Poltava was the zenith of Peter’s emergence as a military might, as he triumphantly hurled the might of his newly re-organized Western style army of 45,000 troops at Charles XII and the Ukrainian Cossack Hetman, Mazeppa. Ukraine gave up its dreams of independence (what else is new?) and Charles XII and Sweden had to cede their preeminence as the most significant player in the region: they limped away and spent three centuries crafting a new strategy to invade Russia, which would ultimately prove successful.
Today is one of fifteen “Days of Military Glory,” victories, which were recognized by the State Duma in 1995 in legislation entitled “About the Days of Military Glory of Russia” (so, now you know what the Duma does all day) as “playing a significant role in the history of Russia, and in which Russian troops have earned the honor and respect of contemporaries and grateful memory of posterity.”
I was interested to read, recently (in Bruce Lincoln’s The Romanovs) that Peter was not weaned until he was two years old, which, for me, explains volumes: not only his vigorous health, but also his addiction to instant gratification. “Boats,” you can see him thinking when, as a teenager, he and his Dutch tutor found the rotting remains of a keeled sea vessel in 1688, “Boats…hmmmm…I think I’d like a navy.” Never mind that Russia was completely landlocked. This could also explain his impatience with anything that stood in his way: a meddlesome older half sister as Regent during his minority? Overthrow her and stick her in a Convent. Boring conservative first wife? Rinse and repeat. Long traditional kaftans getting in the way? Adopt Western clothes. Money tight? Tax people for keeping their beards. Moscow seeming a little backward? Abandon and create a new capital on a mosquito-infested swamp. Church getting a little too powerful? Cut it down to size and make it into a government department, and, for good measure, mock it, holding a mock Synod entitled “The Vastly Extravagant, Supremely Absurd, Omni-Intoxicated Synod,” (and you have to wish they’d revive that particular Petrine tradition.)
Dictatorial? Da. Effective? Definitely Da. This is the kind of ruler the Russian people understand, expect, and ultimately admire. Larger-than-life, clear on what he wants, and slightly crazy. Certainly no one, except perhaps Stalin, has so thoroughly dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the direction of his choice by sheer force of his own personal will power
Peter The Great is the impossible standard against which all other Russian rulers must measure themselves, and I can’t think that, in their heart of hearts, they feel they are in danger of outstripping him in any way.
Peter, for example, would never have tweeted. Never.
Had you heard about The Battle of Poltava? Did you know that Sweden was such a military power in the 17th Century? What’s your take on Peter? Do you buy into the breast-feeding idea? Let me know, by leaving a comment below. If you enjoyed this post, linger a while and read some more just like it:
“They have a Day? Isn’t every day, like, their day?
~ My Very Funny Friend Ian
Get out your walletchampagne! Today is Traffic Cop Day! Which is why the traffic cops, known by their old name “Gaishniki” are all dressed up in their special white shirts. These are the fine men (mostly men) of Russia’s Department for The Provision of Road Safety. If you get pulled over, be sure to offer them up hearty congratulations on their “profpraznik.” It can’t hurt. Unlikely to help.
So very much has been written about Russia’s nefarious traffic cops, and since I was slammed this week in a five page harangue by a lunatic septuagenarian Russian writer who took such violent exception to my views on Russian dachas, I hesitate to offer my own thoughts on the subject, but what the hell…
There he is, our hero of the day, the Gaishnik standing at an intersection, arms casually folded, propped up against a telephone pole, watching the traffic snarl up with a profoundly detached expression, as he enjoys a smoke, hawks and spits, or indulges in an unhurried chat on the phone. “Christ,” you think “my tax rubles at work.” HRH tells me to drop it, because, in his experience, when they try and get involved, like if a traffic light has been broken for four days in a row, things go rapidly downhill. A Gaishnik will leap to action quickly enough, however, if the call comes through that “Someone Important is on the Move.” He straightens his spine, hurls his half-smoked cigarette into the nearest on-coming windshield, pockets his mobile, and wades bravely into the tangle of cars, blocking off all access at the intersection by bravely taking up a defensive stance in the middle of the five lanes, legs spread, hands on hips, the brave defenders of Stalingrad and Borodino come to life again, ready to salute smartly as the motorcade whizzes by.
Gaishniki are the scourge of Russian drivers, who, like over-disciplined children, have developed a reckless disregard for speed limits and traffic regulations that makes Ben Hur’s chariot race look like a tricycle race for the five-and-under set. These two disparate elements co-exist, co-depend and enable one another until the road situation in Russia is beyond rehab or any one of the twelve steps.
If corrupt minor officialdom has a face, it is a Gaishnik: ruddy complexion, squinty-eyed, stocky build, and medium height. You can tell they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. They exude a bizarre combination of smug self-satisfaction and a menacing demeanor, which makes you think that asking them if you can turn left on Alabianaya Street is possibly not the best idea. They wear slate grey uniforms: in the winter padded snow pants and heavy parkas, with matching fur hats, thick gloves and Storm Trooper boots. In the summer, they look slightly less menacing, in military tunics and peaked police caps. They are instantly recognizable by their emblematic pozhaluysta (please) sticks. As in “please” pull over. Pozhaluysta sticks are roughly 20 inches long, painted in white and black stripes, and hang from a well-worn leather strap. At Gaishnik Prep School, it seems to me, the mandatory curriculum includes complicated majorette-type twirling routines with the sticks. They really are very accomplished at these intricate swings, twirls and twists. I think this is a key skill set for climbing up the Gaishnik Greasy Pole: if you are any good at it, you get posted to some plumb intersection where the traffic rules change hourly. You enjoy rapid promotion. Mind you, they don’t lack for practice, and keeping fit for the All-Gaishnik Semi-Annual Pozhaluysta Stick Twirling Jamboree must help to kill time between motorists nabs. Pozhaluysta sticks are meant to direct traffic, but the true purpose is to act like one massive middle or, if you like, index finger. A Gaishnik seeks out his victim – a hapless transgressor of some obscure traffic rule, or, if you are a foreigner, some completely made up traffic rule – swings his pozhaluysta stick up, executes a quick flip, and then plunges it down like a dagger right in the direction of your windshield. As you acknowledge, he swings it around 180-degrees, then snaps his wrist adroitly to point to the side of the road, motioning you to pull out of traffic, and prepare for battle.
I’m not saying this ever happens to me, but if it did, my heart would plummet to my accelerator foot. I am not great at these encounters: this is not my core skill set. I might roll down the window of my slick imported planet-punishing SUV, with the Obama ’08 sticker, a set up that could earn me an immediate 15% increase in whatever fine is coming down the pipeline, in addition, that is, to the pre-existing 5% surcharge for being a female of the species behind the wheel. It would not occur to me that I might get off without a fine, which is why a lot of people (not necessarily me) keep a stash of crisp 1000-ruble notes hidden between the pages of their copy of “Rules of Automotive Conduct of the Russian Federation” in the glove compartment. Not that I do that kind of thing.
Should, hypothetically, this kind of thing happen, the Gaishnik would whip through his compulsory polite routine: a curt salute, his name and rank rattled off at lightening speed, in a tone that doesn’t fill one with confidence that he feels himself to be a servant of the public. Having established his unquestioned supremacy, he asks to see one’s documents. Then, not that this has ever happened to me, one might hand over the car’s registration card, Certificate of Roadworthiness, HRH’s power of attorney giving one permission to drive the car, one’s license and, what will earn one a further increase in whatever fee is surely heading one’s way: one’s blue American passport. Not having the documents is not an option – it’s not like trying to get out of gym by forgetting your shorts. Not having the full set of documents means that they will confiscate the car instantly. The Gaishnik would then make a thorough investigation of the documents, checking them once, checking them twice, because there might well be a juicy little bonus stream if any of them is outdated, incorrectly stamped, or in any way defective. He would take even more time with the American passport, because, let’s be honest, he can’t read anything but Certificates of Roadworthiness in Cyrillic Sovietese. He flips through the pages to find something written in Cyrillic he can understand. Finally, he looks up and greets one, using the charmingly outdated “Citizen” as a salutation. Responding With Charm is Plan A. Tears are Plan B, and calling HRH is the strategy of last resort, one hopes never to have to fall back on.
“Citizen,” might the Gaishnik say, in a manner suggesting he is personally deeply offended, “you have broken law number blitherblather of the Rules of Automotive Conduct of the Russian Federation.” (said at lightening speed, making one unlikely to refer to one’s really-not-all-that-well-thumbed copy of “Rules of Automotive Conduct of the Russian Federation”).
At this point in the proceedings, my audacious buddy Joe Kelly would launch into a complicated and eloquent argument in his best pidgeon Russian. He’d actually exit the vehicle (enough to scare anyone who doesn’t know him well) and start to re-enact the scenario, trying (and failing) to prove that he’s in the right. I’ve noticed that men like HRH and Joe often exit the vehicle to discuss their transgressions with the Gaishniki, but girls tend to stay in the car. This would suit me fine. I enjoy being a girl.
“Oh dear,” I would say. “How shall we proceed?”
For all my time in this emerging market, I am neither an accomplished, nor a thrifty briber. Joe might argue, haggle or negotiate at this point, but I would not. Why? It costs more, but it saves time. Should the Gaishnik write me up a summons, I would pretend to be very frightened, and ponder, out loud, what my husband might say when he finds out, or bite my lip and say I’m running late for picking my three children up at kindergarten, and might there possibly be a way to settle this thing quickly and simply? I think psychologists call this mirroring: sensing what the Gaishnik wants, and becoming it. Should this happens (and I’m not saying it does) I would become the helpless female. He, in turn, would make a production of sighing deeply, glancing surreptitiously to the left and to the right, as if checking to see if a non-existent senior officer is looking on, then tell me it is a massive exception, because he is an incredibly nice guy, but he’d let me streamline my penalty, by paying him directly. He might quote an (outrageous) figure, which I might (I’m not saying this has ever happened) pay promptly, in the crisp notes, already prepared, out of the “Rules of Automotive Conduct of the Russian Federation” and gratefully hightail it of there as soon as possible.
Let’s hear your GAI stories: come on: I know you have them! And, if you hate dachas, this would be an excellent time for you to chime in on your support, as I really was quite brutally lambasted. So, please, comment! And, if you want to stick around, enjoy a few more posts like this one:
Nowhere are the cultural gaps between Russians and Westerners wider than the attitudes towards sickness and health. Like so many things, the Russian health care system can be characterized by the “Feast or Famine” theme. This is a country that pioneered laser eye surgery, but still uses jam where you and I would use penicillin. You can get a first-rate boob job in Moscow, but low blood pressure medication is usually sold out. The signature Na Zdaroviya every foreigner knows means “To your health!” “Health is the most important,” runs the template toast, again and again and again. The surfeit of good wishes is not idly issued. You need it in Russia.
Ill health lurks around every corner in Russia, and the causes are many and manifest. These days, I just tune out and start to make a mental grocery list when Russians start in about being sick; if the conversation isn’t totally baffling, then it is impossible to keep a straight face:
“My heart hurts,” states Tatiana. (That’s right: “heart” not “head.”)
“It’s the weather,” responds Svetlana.
“The pressure…” asserts Olga.I’ve been in Russia 18 years and I still don’t understand the pressure thing: it is always referenced; sometimes I’m sure it is air pressure, but other times I think it must be blood pressure. Then there are times when I am assured it is neither. Blood pressure could be responsible for your heart hurting, but then how could the weather be connected? And then, it has yet to be clear to me whether the pressure should be high or low. For example:
“My head hurts so much!” cries Katya
“The pressure is very low,” explains Anya.
“It’s the magnetic field,” nods Galina sympathetically.
At the magnetic field, I draw a veil. It must exist on some level, because the weather people always chart it on all the TV channels. No one can pinpoint exactly what it is. I’ve tried telling Russians, “We don’t have this in America,” but they just laugh as if I’ve floated a hypothesis that we don’t have Coco-Cola.
Right up there with pressure, are “drafts” or “breezes,” which actually do exist. These are caused by opening a window of a house or car and allowing a cleansing and refreshing breeze to flow into the invariably stuffy hot-house fug that is the interior climate in Russia: the gift that just keeps on giving of double-glazed windows and indoor heat, regulated by a somewhat uncharacteristically generous government from September to May. As soon as you create a draft, any Russian in the vicinity will yelp and dive out of the path of terminal illness. No one in the back seat will let you open the passenger or driver seat’s window, even if it is over 90 degrees out and your A/C is on the fritz.
Once illness sets in – whether from pressure, draft, an escalating scale of options exists for your “treatment.”
A Russian’s first line of defense against illness is to stay at home and employ the folk remedies handed down to them by their peasant grandmothers. The peasant grandmothers, operating in conditions of war, famine and revolution, understandably used what they had at hand, and with certain success. Many of these remedies do work. Mustard plasters are effective, and, although I personally don’t care to have my three year-old to smell like the inside of Kazan Railway Station, vodka does bring a fever down if rubbed on the stomach and limbs. Vodka, taken with a heaping tablespoon of sea salt, is the cure for both diarrhea and constipation. Vodka, needless to say, is usually at hand.
Also pretty often on hand is jam. If you are sick, the great thing to do is to have a lot of tea and a huge bowl of strawberry jam, preferably homemade by someone over the age of 45 at a dacha. You spoon the jam directly into your mouth without anything like a scone to cut it. This was obviously the only source of Vitamin C to which the 19th century Russians had access during the ten-month winters. Today the older generation still regards jam as far more reliable than the soluble tablets available in just about every pharmacy.
Chicken soup, oddly enough, is not in the vanguard of the remedy line-up. I think it is considered a Jewish dish, and therefore suspect. I always suggest this when HRH has flu and he always looks at me with blank incomprehension. The companion to chicken soup in my childhood was iced Ginger ale, which I’ve stopped even mentioning as an option for fear my mother-in-law will have me arrested for attempted murder. Russians consider ice on a par with arsenic in the bad for you category: odd from a crowd who consumes ice cream on the street in February.
Seeking professional medical advice – such as that dispensed by someone who has had medical training -- is not immediately considered. Why? The jam-tea-vodka trinity, preferably administered by your mother or grandmother, can usually be relied upon to solve the problem.
Although today you can go to any clinic you like, all you need is money, and Russians like HRH regard this with the utmost cynicism and mistrust. Everyone knows that finding the right doctor to deal with your particular complaint should be much harder than merely one phone call. Doctors need to be sourced through many degrees of separation from your good friends, then heavily bribed to give you the right diagnosis, and then very heavily bribed for the appropriate treatment, which may or may not include producing some “almost impossible to obtain” medicine“
Before any kind of traditional medicine is tried however, the next level of treatment is a therapeutic stay in a medical facility, preferably a sanatorium, for “observation.” This lasts a minimum of three weeks and, as far as I can see, nothing very much medical happens, except that you eat really crap food, drink incredibly stinky water, and maybe take a sauna or six a day.
Russians adore this stuff. When they puff up like pigeons and announce that they are headed for a sanatorium that their cousin’s boss’s sister runs on the outskirts of Tula, the correct reaction is to widen your eyes in appreciative disbelief, tilt your head to one side and waggle your chin in admiration. Imagine they told you they’d just been invited by HM herself to dine at Windsor Castle, and you would have it just right.
HRH went off to some place I immediately christened “Kidneykavkaz,” who a friend of a friend who had an uncle on the General Staff etc., instead having laser surgery on his kidney stones. He went for two weeks and came back starving and covered in turquoise colored iodine from an infection he’d got from a massage. I kept very quiet.
As much as stays at sanatoria are notches in the belt, stints in hospitals are vaguely humiliating experiences to which Russians succumb reluctantly. It’s as if you couldn’t assemble the resources necessary to dodge this particular bullet. No one likes to stay in a hospital anywhere in the world, but I’m willing to bet that there are more cases of Munchausen Syndrome reported per year in just one of the Federated States of Micronesia, than in all of Russia. Apart from the need to bribe the medical staff to do things like run labs, change an IV drip and all that stuff the Grey’s Anatomy crowd are always doing, friends and relatives have to parcel out the responsibility for providing essentials like fresh sheets, food, toothpaste, clean syringes and new bandages. Nothing is included, and you pay through the nose for luxuries such as private rooms, flushing toilets, and a sober surgical team.
The only time a Russian might willingly sign on for a stay in a hospital is for what I call “the strategically timed illness.” I worked for a blue-chip Russian company you’ve heard of for fifteen months, eight of which where a downward spiral of unpaid salaries, general unpleasantness, and passive aggressive behavior designed to make me give up the struggle for the unpaid salary. The General Counsel took a week’s holiday to Spain in August. When she did not appear in September, October, November or December, we were told simply: “she’s ill.” Because she was officially signed into a hospital, they couldn’t fire her, downsize her, or reduce her salary. In reality, she was watching the Mexican soaps at home, and signing in with a doctor she paid off each week. In February, she finally returned and no one but me batted an eyelid.
“Well,” said one of a diminishing number of people still willing to talk to me, “She is a lawyer, after all. She knows how long she can be sick.”
Congratulations to all those fighting against breezes and the magnetic field, with strawberry jam and vodka as a first line of defense.
How is your health? Are you keeping the windows closed and the air conditioning off? How's the magnetic field? Do you believe in it? Let me know by leaving a comment below, and then enjoy some 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:
Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia.
~ Boris Yeltsin
Today is Russia Day!
At a gathering at my home in Moscow on Friday, I was not surprised that a survey of Russians polled (HRH and Joe’s very clever girlfriend Tanya) had absolutely no idea what Russia Day is in aid of, even though today marks the 20th anniversary of the original Russia Day. Ask them about Border Guard Day, or Victory Day, and they are letter perfect, but Russia Day? But this is why nation building – to say nothing of being a groundbreaking chronicler of Russian holidays -- is such uphill work.
So, as a public service message, here is the skinny on Russia Day: Russia Day marks the moment on June 12, 1990 when (and pay attention, because this is slightly tricky) the Russian parliament declared Russian sovereignty over Russia. And if that sounds like a bunch of people who don’t have enough to do getting together to have a party, it actually was a significant moment for the newly-minted Russian Federation, which had been the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the 15 Republics that made up The Soviet Union. Declaring State Sovereignty over this body made the Russian Federation a new nation, independent of the other 14. While the name of the country would be ratified later in 1991 (we’ll come to this in December), Russia Day marked the true moment of the birth of a nation.
But you can see why people like HRH (44% of Russians actually, according to a recent poll) remain confused about the holiday and refer to June 12th as “Independence Day.” This is understandable if you are French or American and you look at the color scheme and the choice of a summer date, as well as the fireworks in the evening. Reminds you vaguely of some other holidays celebrating that kind of thing around this time…though sadly the menu isn’t as wonderful.
“But,” asks Dee Dee Jansson, who hasn’t been here that long, “independence from whom?”
“That’s easy,” I say, using my favorite joke that never gets old, “independence from Georgia, Armenia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the Stans.”
Being a fairly young holiday, Russia Day does not have a lot of engrained traditions, beyond the classic “Red Day on the Calendar” playbook: streets blocked off to cars, metal detectors in Red Square, cheesy bands playing in the squares to small exhausted looking children half-heartedly clutching Russian tricolors. As Russia Day falls this year on a Saturday, needless to say, we get Monday off, so most everyone I knew took advantage of this by either leaving Russia altogether (preferable) or going to the dacha, which I think they will regret as the forecast suggests violent thunderstorms that will very possibly be made worse by the cloud seeding that happens on days like this. A handful of journalists took the opportunity to craft some well-written opinion pieces like this one by Vladimir Milov, which I recommend, while the gang in power handed out some prizes for poetry, music, and science. Cheesy loud concert in Red Square followed by fireworks. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, if we could just introduce some fried chicken, cole slaw and potato salad into the mix somehow…
Happy Russia Day! What did you get up to? What would be your ideal Russia Day menu? Don’t you think it should feature red, white, and blue martinis of some kind? Any suggestions?
Thanks as always for stopping by, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the form of a comment, which you can leave by clicking the comment button below.
Or, stick around and enjoy a few more posts like this one:
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
~Frank Zappa
Today is the second Saturday in June and since 2003, that has meant one thing: Beer Brewer’s Day!
I’ve been writing, for my sins, a monthly cooking column about Russian food, which I don’t actually like to either make or consume, but I have found it interesting to learn that most dishes that we think of as “classic Russian,” are, in fact, not native to Russia at all. We don’t know that, because Russia has so claimed these meals as their own, that it doesn’t occur to us to question their origins. Take Beef Stroganoff, which seems to account for an astonishing number of hits to this blog, which is French; or shashlik, which comes from the Caucuses, or, indeed, Russian pelemeni, which were brought to Russia originally by the Finno-Ugric tribes of the North.
And so it is with beer. Russians certainly did not invent beer, in actual fact the Iraqis did (for all the good it did them), but today Russia is the third largest beer market in the world! Russians stumbled upon beer fairly early on in the form of kvass which beer expert Michael Jackson argued is an early form of beer. Kvass is a lightly fermented drink made from any old grain or stale dark bread, yeast, and flavored with berries and other fruits. It’s mostly consumed in the summer by the older generation, whereas everyone consumes beer in Russia, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Russians like their beer strong, and I was interested to learn that the strongest stout ever, was made for Catherine the Great, and called “Imperial Stout.” The theory was that the high alcohol content of the stout ensured that the sub zero temperatures in winter would not freeze the beer as it made its way from Great Britain to Russia.
Today, Russian beer is a dynamic sector of the economy. The national brands of Baltika, Siberian Crown, Stariy Melnik and others are never going to win any prizes for quality, but they remain viable because, in Russia, the main driver, as the economic geeks say, is quantity rather than quality.
I know this, because, like most women in Russia, I live with a beer expert.
HRH is very fond of beer, and, because he’s been exposed to beer in countries like Switzerland and Jamaica where they focus more on the quality, rather than the quantity of beer production, he’s discerning. He prefers European draft beer to American bottled beer, which he feels is on a par with Sprite or 7-UP in the beverage line up. The happiest I have ever seen him was in the Sultanate of Oman, where we spent one Christmas. Slightly concerned about our dwindling reserves of Duty Free gin and whiskey, we were invited to Christmas lunch by a charming couple, who ran the (tightly controlled) alcohol concession in the Sultanate. Tipped off by our friend Annie, Debbie and Samir unearthed a case of Heineken, which they wrapped in festive paper and presented to him as the, hands down, best Christmas present he ever received.
So, to an industry facing possible crippling tax hikes and the ever-menacing specter of another government-sponsored anti-alcohol campaign (because the last one went so well), let’s raise a glass of imported Newcastle Brown Ale and wish the Beer Brewers a very happy profpraznik!
The wonderful picture of Russian beer and dried fish (the peanut butter and jelly of Russian summers) was found on the Google by Mr. Kunglay.
---------------------------------------
Hey Readers!
How are you enjoying Beer Brewers’ Day? Does your country have both beer and an airline? Mine does, but both are pretty lame. What’s your favorite tipple? Leave me a comment and let me know! Thanks for stopping by.
Did you enjoy this post? Here are some others you might also enjoy:
“…Global warming might even benefit countries like Russia as people would spend less money on fur coats and other warm things.”
~ Paraphrase of comment made by President Vladimir Putin at a climate change conference.
Today is Ecologist’s Day in Russia! It's also my Dad's birthday, and since he's a very dedicated recycler, we'll wish him a very happy day today! Happy Birthday Dad!!! Today we take our SPF 50 sun hats off (briefly) to all of the professional ecologists, activists and all those who spend their professional lives worrying about Russia’s ecology and the effects of climate change on the world’s largest country.
“There’s your global warming,” says HRH in a snarky tone during every major snowstorm. He, like many Russians believes that global warming is a figment of the Western imagination.
“Climate change,” I correct him sternly, “and it doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t snow.”
“Humph…” says HRH non-committed.
HRH is not really interested in going green. He’s not up at night fretting about his carbon footprint. He refused to let me consider getting a hybrid car, which he feels are for sissies. I’ve explained the recycle concept to him until I’m blue in the face, but he still throws beer bottles in with the regular trash in Northampton, and in Northampton that is worse than larceny. There is no recycle program in Russia, and this was brought home to me rather vividly when Tolya the driver watched open-mouthed as my mother washed out a cottage cheese container with soap and water and left it on the draining board during her last visit to Moscow.
“Why did your mother do that?” he asked when we were alone in the car.
I explained that she’d spent more than half her life separating paper from plastic, and keeping boxes in the basement where glass was categorized by color, and tin cans, their paper labels removed and added to the paper pile, scrubbed and flattened.
“Why?” asked Tolya.
“It’s better for the environment,” I said rather smugly.
“Oh,” said Tolya.
Driving around Moscow, you often wonder if “better for the environment” is a phrase that ever crops up at government meetings…and I don’t mean the ones where they are trying to slap a huge environmental tax fine on Shell for supposed environmental damages (and I suppose this is not really the week, month, or year for me to discuss other people’s oil spills is it?). But it is true that there are lots of noxious fumes belching out of smokestacks and car engines, and those are the ones we can actually see. The air quality in Moscow is not super: I have to neti pot twice a day and I only wear my contact lenses if I am taking pictures, and by the end of a morning, my eyes feel like sandpaper.
The bad air quality is what sends everyone racing off to the dacha, crying “Ekologiteshki chisto!!” (“Ecologically clean!!) Velvet’s horrible school in Moscow was in the middle of nowhere because it was a neighborhood that had the cleanest air quality, but everyone used up way too much petrol to get there. But no one seems to worry about that, or global warming, or climate change.
I believe in climate change, and I think anyone who lives in the Northern hemisphere who doesn’t is either on some very potent prescription drug or needs to be. Summers in New England, which used to be so pleasant: warm clear days and chilly nights, have become unbearable: hot and humid and buggy, and miserable. The winters have got much milder, and good luck to anyone trying to get over the river and through the woods on in a sleigh on Thanksgiving, even if the horse does know his way.
There is a theory out there that Russia could do very well out of climate change: the frozen steppes could become dense Northern forests and the dense Northern forests could become tropical paradises. All the goodies like coal, steel, gold, and oil lying under the permafrost could start bobbing up to the surface, which would make them much easier to pluck out of the ground, so the Chinese might not have to invade after all. Moscow’s climate would shift such that it could become, along with Warsaw and Stockholm, the world’s premier wine-growing regions. Before it turned into swampland and then one large ocean after the polar ice caps melted down.
Imagine: Chateau le Kremlin 2108: a very good year.
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!
----------------------------------------
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!
“With over 340 different verbs of motion, those three sisters couldn’t get up and go to Moscow!”
~A.N. Wilson
Here is an opportunity to raise a glass if you ever stayed up all night to study for a genitive plural or perfective/imperfective test…if you ever had to forgo a frat party to make your plodding way through Lermontov’s "Hero Of Our Time," or Pushkin’s "Captain’s Daughter," today is your day! If you can speak Russian beyond (Dee Dee this means you!) “to the left,” or “to the right,” or “a diet coke with ice please,” then get yourself some flowers and a bottle of wine. You’ve earned it!
Today is Slavic Writing and Culture Day! This holiday was established in 1863 as an Orthodox Christian saint’s day, celebrating brothers Cyril and Methodius, 9th Century Christian missionaries from Greece, who were sent to convert the Slavs. As part of their efforts, they invented first the Glagolitic alphabet and later, the alphabet that bears Cyril’s name: Cyrillic. I think the naming thing was politeness on Methodius’s part, as Cyril died much earlier, but they may have flipped a coin. With these letters, they were able to translate the Greek New Testament into a vernacular the Slavs could understand. Then presumably, they taught the Slavs to read and write. And that worked out pretty well. This language can still be heard today by the clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church, and is known as Old Church Slavonic.
Learning Russian is not as hard as Mandarin Chinese or ancient Persian, but it has some challenges to it. The letters brought to you by Cyril and Methodius can be tricky. English “P” is a Russian “R” and, as fan’s of Murder on the Orient Express know, English “H” is a Russian “N.” Sometimes reading Russian makes one feel slightly dyslexic and mildly nauseous but you get used to it.
Russian verbs are complicated. They have two “aspects:” the imperfective, which refers to the action of doing something, such as “I am reading "War & Peace,” as opposed to the “perfective,” doing the action with the intention of getting it done. Very confusing, and something I still haven’t really mastered, although I find the distinction curiously germane to the national character somehow.
Verbs of motion, which take up most of the second year of any course in Russian, have the perfective/imperfective thing going on, as well as the distinct difference between moving on your own steam, or in a vehicle, which does cut down on the drunk driving, like a little bit.
Russian is full of diminutives, both for people and things. These are achieved in a staggeringly extensive range of endings, but some common ones are “-chick,” or “-sulia” and “-ichka.” My mother-in-law manages to combine all of these when referring to Velvet as her "vnutchichkuliaetchka," taking the simple word "vnutchka" meaning granddaughter and turning it into "darling little tiny granddaughter." In this case, a diminutive conveys affection. When a Russian is trying to get something out of you, they automatically make what ever they are asking for a diminutive and insert the adjective “nimnogo” or “not much” so you get a request for…”a teeny weeny advancechick on the salariula,” for example, or, “just pour me a miniscule not a lot amount more voditchka.” This gets old really fast, particularly up in St. Petersburg, where they have turned this into a fine art.
On the more formal end of the spectrum, you have the names. Names are confusing, and a lot of people just throw up their hands on the first page of War & Peace, since everyone has three names. Russians have first names and there are only roughly 10 of each sex: Alexander, Dmitry, Mikhail, Nikolai, Andrei, Vladimir, Ivan, Igor, Sergei, and Boris for boys. Anastasia, Svetlana, Olga, Tatianna, Ekaterina, Valentina, Elena, Irina, Natalia, and Nadezda for girls. These basic names have endless diminutives.
Tatianna, for example, can be Tata, Tanik, Tanya, Tanyuissia, Tanechka etc.
Alexander can be Sanya, Shura, Sasha, Sashenka, Sashulia, Sashka
You can tell this is a society that likes to remain largely anonymous.
Russians also carry an obligatory middle name, called a patronymic, which is the name of their father (of course) and an ending, which is –evna for a girl and –ich or -evich for a boy.
So, for example, the youngest and most famous daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II was called Anastasia Nikolaevna.
In my cross-culture marriage group you get a lot of funny combos of names and patronymics, mostly from the well-populated ranks of foreign men who married Russian women. I know a Cyril Brucevich, a Ashley Christopherevna, and a Tom Eduardovich.
[Here is your intrepid blogger, marching with the Williamstown Public Library on July 4, 1990. The assignment was to march as your favorite book, so I chose "War & Peace."]
Russians use the patronymic as formal address and very intimate address. To address a Russian formally, an equivalent to “Mrs. Smith,” you refer to them by their full first name and patronymic together: Alexander Dmitrievich or Olga Vladimirovna. For someone with whom you are very intimate, say a child, a spouse, or a childhood friend, you can address him or her with his or her patronymic only. I don’t have a patronymic, but my father’s name is Peter, and the patronymic for girls is “Petrovna,” which is how HRH addresses me. It’s important not to confuse these two very different forms of address, as I did, by referring to the 60-something veteran head of the National Tourism Committee’s English section as “Vassilievna,” which was incredibly rude. Everyone was so embarrassed that no one told me for about six months, at which point, thank goodness, she retired.
Finally, a Russian has a last name, which normally ends in –EV or OV like Medvedev, but sometimes doesn’t, such as Putin. Mrs. Medvedev is Svetlana Medvedeva and Mrs. Putin is Lydmilla Putina. This is a problem for us, as a family, since Velvet and I have an “A” on the end of our name, and HRH doesn’t, as we saw earlier this year with the TSA crowd. He always gets an “A” on his nametag at Velvet’s school, which I have to white out before we can throw ourselves into non-stop fun and games of parents’ weekend.
Learning Russian has gone somewhat out of fashion lately, which may be because we now need more Arabic and Chinese speakers to help run the windowless buildings just over the river from Our Nation’s Capitol, but that seems a shame. There is nothing like curling up with my favorite book, which is actually not "War & Peace," but “500 Russian Verbs” (they are ALL fully conjugated...perfective AND imperfective!!!) and a teeny weeny glassulia of chardonnaychick.
Happy Day of Slavic Writing And Culture to all Russian speakers, those with patronymics, and those who wish they had one!
Today is also Day of the Human Resources Managers and the excitement is almost uncontrollable – there’s Team Building, and Formula 1 Racing, and Leprosy, and…well don’t miss it!
------------------------------------
Dear Reader:
Cпасибо! Thanks for checking in with me here at Dividing My Time on Day of Slavic Writing and Culture. Did you learn something new? Does this make you want to race out and get a copy of "War & Peace?" Give it a try…you can skip the battle scenes: I always do. Let me know how you are getting on learning your foreign language by clicking the comment button below!
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!
"I am going to start a book club,” said HRH, the other night, as we watched the evening news.
You could have knocked me down with a feather.
“But darling,” I said, “you don’t read.”
“I read the news,” he rejoined.
I thought about pointing out the difference between contemporary fiction and the news -- glanced at the TV -- and said instead:
“Book clubs, or good ones anyway, tend to focus on things like contemporary fiction, or non-fiction by knowledgeable pundits on the burning issues of our time.”
“Huh,” grunted HRH dismissively, “all of yours seem of focus on having way too much wine with your friends on Thursday nights.”
“Well,” I said defensively, “I have to have a book club. I’m an expat.”
Living in a foreign country creates an immediate and insatiable urge to stay on top of cultural developments at home. To do this, you seek out others from your native shores, meeting all kinds of people you never knew at home: people with goatee beards, Republican people, and people who use “scrapbook” as a verb. You agree to be a Girl Scout Leader, which turns out to be much better than you thought; then agree to help some twisted individual unpack a collection of 15,000 Russian matrioshka dolls, a Kafkaesque experience that time and alcohol turns into one of your favorite expat anecdotes. In desperation, you seriously contemplate attending some form of divine service, but reject it in favor of a lengthy lie in on the weekend.
Eventually, the universe cuts you some slack and you get invited to join an English-language book club, and this seems like the third stage to Nirvana.
Expats bring book clubs into the world with lofty aspirations: a carefully considered, handpicked list of participants, a firm commitment fixture on the calendar, and rarified guidelines: “focusing on native English-language fiction, currently enjoying critical acclaim.” With time, however, the lack of a reliable source of books, and the general ebb and flow of expat life, the rules soften, and then rot. Blink, and your book club is poised on the brink of chaos: Stephanie and Verity move back home, so you let Stacy, who isn’t, let’s face it, the sharpest tack in the box, join. It proves impossible to find a date that works for anyone, so you skip March, and since no one’s husband went to London on business, there aren’t any copies of April’s book, but when you do get around to reading it the following September, the only “critical” material is something Amy copied and pasted from amazon.com. And then comes the real death rattle: Becca, who hasn’t been in Moscow long enough to know better, invites her new Russian friend Olga to join, and unless some decisive action is taken, you’ll all be stuck reading Master & Margarita. Again.
Cordelia and I were in charge of just this kind of book club, and last Wednesday we met at Remy’s for garlic soup and literary euthanasia. As usual, we had the place to ourselves, and Cordelia suggested we get the discussion over with so we could give ourselves wholly over to the soup.
“Kill it off,” she stated, drawing heavily on a Silk Cut Ultra Light, “shut it down.”
‘Did He Who Make The Lamb Make Thee?’ I thought to myself.
“Not remission, try a little chemo?” I ventured, “Dismantle until everyone gets back from Christmas? Transfuse some new blood?”
“Nope,” said Cordelia in her definitive ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ manner, “If they want to continue, then fine, but I am not going to read one more of those sticky toffee pudding books ‘Ya Ya something-or-other.’”
“’The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood,’” I corrected, as two bowls of fragrant creamy soup were placed in front of us. We inhaled silently. Remy’s may well be a front, but the chef makes a mean bowl of garlic soup.
“Tell you something else,” confided Cordelia, after several minutes of silent and reverent spoonfuls, “If I have to read one more single thing by some woman from the Subcontinent who went to Oxford and writes about being a woman from the Subcontinent who went to Oxford, I will self-combust.”
There had been a longish run of that particular genre.
“And,” Cordelia, added, shaking a well-licked spoon at me, “Let me say this right now, I refuse to read anything about Aspergers’ Syndrome, bees, mermaids, or quilts.”
Cordelia had a point: it had been a precipitous slide from Ian McEwan to Jodi Picoult.
“Look,” said Cordelia, more softly, “It’s served its purpose: you and I have become friends. That’s what an expat book club is for. Don’t worry, I’ll send out the e-mail. Now, I propose we just have another bowl of this soup for our second course, and I tell you what, how about, just this once, we split a bottle of wine?”
---------------------------------------
Author's Note: This post first appeared as a column entitled "Kill The Book Club" (I know...can you STAND it????? Olga Quelque chose strikes again!) inRussia Beyond The Headlineson April 28, 2010 and a link to that version can be found here.
---------------------------------------
Dear Reader:
Everyone has a book club story...what's yours? Did you have to kill it off because someone wanted to read Jonathan Franzen? Is your book club still intact, and if so, what's your secret? What are you reading now? What's your take on Oprah? Do you sometimes feel you can just, like, read on your own? Log in by hitting the Comment button below (it's there...really, it's just very small and it is stuck amongst all of those other tags... andas soon as one of you does, it is so much easier for the others.
And just as a reminder to those very deeply embedded readers in the Pioneer Valley, I'm still up for joining your bookclub...even if you are reading Jodi Picoult. That's OK.
Today I’m the featured blogger on Blogtrotting! This is very exciting and it is my pleasure to welcome you to my blog and the country where I spend a lot of my time: The Russian Federation. This post will give you a little bit of the skinny on me and Russia, as well as Me & Russia: a long-term, somewhat choppy relationship, which for better or worse, and richer or poorer, is set to last a lifetime. I've left a few breadcrumbs to follow to some classic posts via links, and I hope you'll stay a while and browse.
I’m an American who fell in love with Russian language, history, and culture when I was a bored 13 year-old and read Robert Massie's “Nicholas and Alexandra.” After The Wall came down, I majored in 19th Century Russian Studies, graduated, and set sail for Russia just in time for the main act of perestroika. To my extreme shock and horror, Russia in 1989 looked nothing like “Nicholas and Alexandra." You could have knocked me over with a feather. I almost left, but it was all too compelling to give up. So, here I am, 17 years later.
In 1992, I settled down in Moscow with the man who would become HRH (which, in addition to meaning “His Royal Highness” can also mean, depending on my mood, “Horrible” or “Handsome” Russian Husband.”) After a suitable interval, we were joined by our daughter, Velvet, who, at the age of six months made it abundantly clear to us that her life would be dedicated spending as much time with horses as possible. To better facilitate this, we’ve sent her to school in rural Massachusetts and we now divide our time between Northampton, MA and Moscow, and when people ask me what I do, I tell them, I'm a Pony Mom. We have many frequent flyer miles, but not enough to fly through volcanic ash.
“How do you like living here?” Russians ask me all the time. “It’s never dull,” I tell them, and it isn’t. Everything you try to do takes strategic planning, on-the-ground know-how, and sheer guts. What for example, would you do if confronted with this situation?
Or this one?
Or indeed, this one?
Though I am pretty sure you would know what to do in this situation...
“What has been the best thing about living in Russia for seventeen years?” asked an American lawyer.
“Smoked salmon,” I replied promptly.
“What can’t you get in Russia?” people often ask. The answer used to be everything from A-Z, so much so that I would play that game “I packed my grandmother’s trunk…” when I couldn’t fall asleep. Today, it’s just zip lock bags and Eileen Fisher. Yes, I’ve seen a lot of changes.
My blog is about finding the funnier side of life in Russia, which isn’t always easy, but incredibly satisfying when you do. Even the Russian TV Guide is funny. I found a guy so desperate to find a girlfriend that he dressed up in absurd clothing and was photographed in a truly tacky 18th century palace. You don’t see that every day, but you can see him here.
I have a thing about the Uniformed in Russia. I also am on a mission to chart all of Russia’s professional holidays, which include everything from the Day of the Cosmonauts to Customs’ Workers Day (and how I am going to find anything nice to say about them, I don’t know...stay tuned!).
Moscow is a huge sprawling city that has very beautiful parts of it, like the Moscow Kremlin, and some really awful parts of it, like the raw open wounds of chaotic construction all over the city. It’s a brusque, businesslike place, where traffic is often gridlocked and the weather is often grey. Moscow doesn’t welcome you with open arms, but you can find a lot of interesting things if you are willing to look. I take a lot of pictures in Moscow of the things I see – mainly the things that stand out at me as very ironic, very funny, very sad, or very typical of the Russian approach to life, which is often a combination of all of the above. I hope you enjoy having a look around.
I love to cook, and living in Russia, oddly enough made me a good one. I prefer to shop at the Farmers' Markets, which isn't for the faint of heart, but the best place to get fresh produce, meat and fish.
It is hard being a photographer in Russia, because very few people want to have their pictures taken, especially people in uniform, which is why I really treasure these shots:
Moscow cityscapes:
The women who made Hitler cry...
A man who helped...
And the most enduring image of them all...with the ubiquitous crane...
Author's Notes:
Photos by Jennifer Eremeeva, with sincere thanks to the administration of Dorogomilovskaya Market for allowing me to take pictures of the farmer's market.
_________________________________________
Dear Reader: I close my posts by thanking readers for stopping by, and telling them how much I value their feedback about Dividing My Time. If you would like to leave a comment, please feel free to click the comment button below. This is especially true today, when I look forward to welcoming new readers! I would also like to thank Blogtrotting for their interest in featuring this post: Большое вам спасибо: Russian for Thank you very much!
HRH cannot get through the week without purchasing “7 Days,” Russia’s equivalent of “TV Guide,” but not to find out when “Dancing On Ice,” will be, but rather to read his horoscope – or “goroscope” as the Russians pronounce it. This is one of those little character hiccups that forever endears him to me, along with the fact that he can never admit that he’s done something wrong. Since we had three weddings, HRH is much overburdened with remembering three different anniversaries. A week ago, I was so busy with Velvet and various service providers, that I only recalled the third when I was lying in bed sipping a well-deserved glass of wine, watching “Inspector Lynley.”
“Darling,” I texted him over in Moscow, “Did we both forget that today was our anniversary?”
In the morning, much refreshed, I rolled over to find this message on my iPhone:
“I love you!! Call me!”
HRH, if pressed, will tell you he doesn’t believe in God, the goodness of his fellow men, health insurance, and certainly not that Barack Obama is going to change the world for better. But he does believe with all the fervor of an original disciple what “7 Days” tells him is going to happen the upcoming week. For the week of the 8th of March, “International Women’s’ Day,” that one day of the year when Russian men give themselves over to housework and fawning over the females in their lives, “7 Days” predicted:
You have a calm week ahead of you. Now you are more inclined to compromise than to assert your independence. These thoughts will allow you to focus on your personal life. In additon, a new diet, exercise and spiritual practice will bring you happiness and have a good affect.
I was hardly impressed. You don’t have to be Deepak Chopra to come to those conclusions.
Interspersed with television timetables are articles about cheesy Russian celebrities and their wildly decorated homes, which is why I would never go a week without “7 Days.” I want to get them all bound in leather covers, so we can preserve this delicious slice of Russian culture. I want to say “7 Days” is a cross between…but then, I can’t really think of two things that could ever define the perimeters of “7 Days.” It is inspired by “OK” magazine, that smutty and pimply younger sibling of “Hello!” but “7 Days” goes much further in its sheer awfulness. You have to wonder what ordinary people in Russia think when they see “7 Days.”
Here, for example, are the hardworking Russian Olympians, making sure they get enough protein before the big day:
Does everyone see the high-heeled sneakers in this one?????
One of Russia's leading singers, Larisa Dolina claims to have gone hoarse during the Vancover Games, supporting the Russian team but it must have been worth it to have had this snazzy poster made out of one of the most enduring images of the Second World War...it is the kind of thing that would be considered in poor taste if we did it to the famous "Rodina Mat'" but seemingly okay if a celebrity does it!
In this photo, we have that ultimate paragon of good sportsmanship, Evgeny Pluschenko, playing fuze hockey...clearly the sport of "real men."
Bonus snap: clock the rock star making a gesture of international sporting solidarity!
"7 Days" as a rule sticks closer to home, showcasing tender love stories between people I have never heard of, but who's interior design I would not want to miss. Case in point, cover girl Olga Fillipova and her boyfriend Vladimir Vdovinchenkov: he's been married three times officially and their marriage plans are not firmed up yet, but they have been living together for seven years in their very interesting interior:
"7 Days" is also up to speed on the fashion end of things, like the extensive photo shoot of Dana Borisova, of whom the magazine gushed: "...one of the most noticeable blonds of our TV....many people thinks such graces never have any problems: any dress on a lovely figure looks great! But Dana thinks this is a false belief. She's convinced by her own example, that to dress with taste, you need to spend a lot of time and energy.
Here is Dana, surrounded by some of her favorite accessories. The caption tells us that Dana "first seriously thought about her own style when she came to NTV..."
"Own style" is putting it on a bit thick: Dana's accessories are the Alpha to Omega of any Russian devushka: Burberry, Hermes Birkin in electric blue, Vuitton in a pattern that isn't going to last, and no, I don't know what the purple crocodile thing is...do you?
No edition of "7 Days" is ever complete without a dacha spread. Here aging rock star Vladimir Politov kicks back with a few friends and enjoys the outdoor life, hunting bears, wolves, and something green and furry with which those chairs are covered!
"Be vewy vewy quiet...they're hunting rabbits..."
"The most difficult thing about hunting, is the sitting around and waiting. For hours you can't smoke, you can't move, you can't even cough, in case you scare the animals."
"We just hurled money to the right and to the left: on clothes, on girls, on gifts. We thought it would always be like that..."
A friend has just figured out the double entendre humor in referring to my Handsome Russian Husband as HRH.
“You know,” she said, “that can also stand for His Royal Highness. Like Prince William.”
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 plebeian 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 Feb. 14, Russians are suiting up for the very separate Men’s Day (Feb. 23) and its companion, International Women’s Day (March 8).
I’m a Russian historian, so I like to delve into the origin of national holidays. Men’s Day has a full and characteristically overblown name—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 (my daughter Velvet’s grandpa) 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, Feb. 23 remains devoted exclusively to the men of Russia, who are all obliged to defend the Motherland as part of their mandatory military service.
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 (Velvet's grandma, of course) 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.
Dear Reader: Thanks so much for reading this post -- it means a lot to me, as does your feedback. If you would like to leave a comment, just click on the teeny tiny "comment" word below, and an easy-to-use pop up comment window will appear. Thanks again!
Winter in Russia is a marathon, not a sprint, and it is vital to have intermittent water stations along the way, particularly coming into the home stretch. At this point, in marathon terms, we are roughly at mile 18, and the end is nowhere in sight. But there are a few bright spots on the horizon, and we do best to train our focus on them: Men’s Day (February 23rd), about which more next week in my column in Russia Now! Men’s Day, a sort of one-way Valentine’s Day, is just a warm up for the main event coming later in the Spring: International Women’s’ Day on March 8th, and I’ll be writing about that too.
These are secular and Soviet holidays, which, when I look at them from the point of view of a historian, I see were invented to wean Russians off the massive rush served up by Orthodox Christian Lent, which began last week. Lent, of course, is no one’s idea of fun, but in agrarian pre-revolutionary Russia served as a handy spiritual excuse for a Spartan diet, excluding meat, dairy, oil, eggs, fish, meat, or anything else that might make life slightly more bearable, like alcohol, which taste great accompanied by only turnips and oatmeal. The forty days that Lent covers is just that time when the staple of Russian winter stores dwindled down to the bare minimum. Nowadays, 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.
Russian culture is all about extremes, so the feast/famine cycle is inbred into the rolling cycle of the year. Fun-filled Maslenitsa otherwise known as “National Cholesterol Week,” precedes Lent. Maslenitsa – or “butter week” is the same thing as Mardis Gras, Shrovetide or Carnivale: a traditional gorge before the austerity of Lent begins. Maslenitsa, which lasts a week, is a time for feasting and drinking, eating traditional pancakes or bliniy, which not only use up all of the forbidden foods, but also represent the spherical sun, central to Maslenitsa’s ancient forerunner: an early spring pagan festival heralding the end of winter and the return of the sun.
The anti-religious campaign that characterized much of the previous century did not seem to make much of a dent in Maslenitsa – though the celebrations were less public, confined to mothers making pancakes for their children, as their mothers had made for them. Now that religion is the new red in Russia, Maslenitsa has been reinstated with terrifying enthusiasm by the authorities, in large-scale public celebrations: open-air festivals, concerts, pancake stands on every corner – you get the idea. My friend and colleague Evy Hua wrote a great piece on it – it was her first Maslenitsa and she got into it.
I’m not a fan. I’m not pining Lent or anything (I’m not a masochist), but Maslenitsa is associated in my memory with a truly scary afternoon, getting separated from HRH and Velvet as we strolled through Moscow to try and get down to Red Square to see the public Maslenitsa celebrations, and what on earth were we thinking? I had my large camera and telephoto lens with which I hoped to catch some of the national merriment, and I foolishly did not transfer my wallet, keys, or mobile phone into the large camera bag – not a mistake I will ever make again. As we got down towards Red Square, we encountered the usual public holiday scene: a plethora of policemen,
backed up by raw army recruits looking baffled and angry,
and glowering hostile senior citizens with retro-Soviet red armbands proclaiming them “Friendly volunteer.”
The temperature was hovering around freezing, it was sleeting steadily, and, as we progressed, we joined swelling crowds who were pushing, shoving, and breathing stale beer fumes on one another. The police had blocked off the usual traffic and pedestrian routes, sending the crush of people about one and a half miles out of their way.
“Comrades!” One woman shouted above the din, “Turn back! There are no bliniy on Red Square…we’ve been hoodwinked!”
With no money, and no phone, I tried to find police station where I could borrow a phone. There was no meeting point, no first aid station…nothing except thousands of policemen brusquely directing human traffic through metal detectors, flanking Red Square, where cheerful sponsorship banners from the Campbell Soup company fluttering in the breeze.
I approached a policeman.
I had always told Velvet to do this if, God Forbid, she’d ever got lost in Moscow. HRH had agreed, but qualified the advice by saying it was much much much better never to get lost. This turned out to be excellent advice.
“Can you help me?” I asked the policeman.
He looked at me, confused, as if he’d not heard that request before.
“Help you?” he grunted.
“Yes, I need some help.”
He furrowed his eyebrows, lifted a cigarette in gloved hands, dragged deeply, blew smoke at me, and then gestured with the cigarette to another, slightly older man.
“You must address the ‘starshiy’ (meaning literally – the elder, which also indicates a higher military rank). I shuffled over.
“Can you help me?” I asked him.
“Help you?” he barked, “what do you think I can do?” asked the starshiy defensively.
“I’m lost – separated from my family. I don’t have a phone, and I don’t have any money. Can I go to your precinct and phone my husband so he can come and find me.”
“Nyet…nyet…” he said, making a shooing gesture with his sawn off Kalashnikov rifle.
There was nothing for it. I wasn’t, of course, lost at all, just slightly overwhelmed by the situation. So, I walked back home, all the way around the inconveniently re-routed pedestrian traffic, trudging up Tverskaya Street, slipping and sliding on the ice, swerving to avoid groups of drunken Tadzhik migrant workers in bright orange coats,
lugging my heavy camera case. I kept my eyes down, as I walked the three miles to my apartment building. The 300-year-old lady concierge, who provides the critical line of defense against criminal elements at our building, informed me that HRH and Velvet had not yet returned. The phone rang, and she disappeared into her glass hut, picked up the receiver, turned her back to me and began to exchange lengthy holiday greetings with a relative. I crossed one leg over the other, suddenly aware in the relative warmth of the entresol, that I needed the bathroom rather urgently. She finished her conversation and turned to me in an annoyed manner. I explained my predicament, and asked her if she could phone the Commandant (which is how you refer to the Super in Russia, can you imagine) to let me inside the apartment, she looked horrified, threw her arms out wide, wailed that the Commandant wasn’t at work
“Eto zhe praznik!” she stated. “It’s a public holiday, you know!”
And then she told me the thing that really, in the end of the day, sums up the attitude that keeps Russia out of the WTO – that it was way outside the ‘framework of her competency’ to do a single, solitary, thing.
This story has a happy ending. Velvet wasn’t lost, and I turned my back on Ninel (Lenin spelt backwards – truly) Alexandrovna, and sought help from a more trusted source. I trudged back down the stairs. I left our courtyard and shuffled my way down a well-worn path. I pushed open the door of our neighboring Starbucks. Katya, the barista gave me a big smile.
“Katya,” I gasped, crossing my legs in desperation to hold in my bladder,
“Could I please use your phone – I got separated from the family and I don’t have any money or my keys.”
“Of course!” she said, proffering the store’s landline and pouring me a cup of coffee. “On the house,” she said with her charming smile. “For the holiday!”
Later, I learned that the last day of Maslenitsa is called “Forgiveness Sunday,” during which everyone bows down low in front of one another and asks forgiveness of one another, so as to start Great Lent out with a clean heart and in the spirit of reconciliation and Christian love.
So, forgive me, reader. Next week we'll find a much funnier side...
------------------------------------------
Dear Reader: Thanks so much for reading this post -- it means a lot to me, as does your feedback. If you would like to leave a comment, just click on the teeny tiny "comment" word below, and an easy-to-use pop up comment window will appear. Thanks again!
In these troubled times, having a TSA horror story is like having an iPhone. Have awful TSA story – have traveled.
Nothing in this world is as boring as other people’s travel horror stories. You get a lot of travel horror stories in expat circles: tales of planes grounded for six hours in Frankfurt, horror stories of flights missed by a mere and really so unfair thirty seconds, and let’s not even scratch the surface of the Russian aviation mother lode.
The only travel story worth telling is the one where my friend Sarah meets her fabulous boyfriend Estaban on a BA flight that had landed, and there was a strike, and they had to sit on the tarmac for 5 hours and lived happily ever after. But, that incident of the Direct Intervention of God aside, I really dislike travel stories. No sooner does someone launch into “and then I called the airline’s 800 number and you won’t believe it –“ but I mentally edge to the outer perimeter of the conversation, and start to make the grocery list in my head. If they go on about a forced layover, I reach surreptitiously into my bag and make my iPhone ring (there’s an app for that) pull it out, grimace and say, “Oh goodness me, I must take this,” and flee.
My latest TSA story, however, really is funny.
HRH and I were coming back from our classic “don’t worry be happy” Caribbean idyll, where we had not left the resort for one blessed minute of the ten days. We were tanned, rested, well fed, well read, very well watered, and generally in the sweet spot of married life.
And then we hit the airport.
The Christiansted airport is not a state-of-the-art facility, and the people who staff it don’t strike one as coming off anyone’s “A List” of on-the-ball staffers. Not a crack regiment. Since St. Croix is officially US territory, this is all grist to HRH’s mill, and fair enough, since I spend a lot of my waking hours making fun of Russian institutions such as the Russian National Air Carrier or State Duma Committee on Public Holidays, and it gets printed under our own surname. When he hits inefficiency even in this remote outpost of the USA, he feels its payback time.
First up: a false start with a thirteen year old American Airlines trainee, who took nine minutes to work out that HRH’s last name ends in “EV” and mine is the same last name, only ending in “EVA” because, as I explained to him helpfully, “He’s a man, and I’m a woman.”
“And,” added HRH a little more menacingly in his practiced ‘Bad Cop’ manner, “I am also GOLD CARD Executive Club member,” which he set about proving by flinging the plastic on the counter.
“Oh Darling,” I said effortlessly adopting my own ‘Good Cop’ parlance, “I am sure Mr. Lefebvre here knows that. It must be in the system.” I turned a sparkling smile onto Mr. Lefebvre, who was desperately punching keys.
“If he can read,” muttered HRH in Russian.
Eventually, two boarding passes spat out and --- is this boring? – onto the Border control
We got up to the TSA desk and presented our documents to the Officer. He looked the way they all do: too swarthy, greasy looking skin, unfortunate pinky ring, white teeth, and spearmint chewing gum. To me, they all look like extras on the Sopranos, but you can just tell they all see themselves as Kevin Costner or Harrison Ford. Our guy had a nameplate on that said, “Noble,” which I had to assume was his surname and not his provenance. I also had to think that he could not have been that high up the TSA food chain. St. Croix, after all, is not an international “hot spot” -- Anderson Cooper isn’t going to be live there just after these messages. What self-respecting jihadist would try to launch a suicide bomb attack in St. Croix of all places? But, it was right after the guy who tried to detonate his underwear, so they were taking no chances. They were obviously on some heightened security brief, so HRH and I got the full treatment.
Officer Noble scrutinized HRH’s red Russian passport, and my blue American passport for what he clearly felt was long enough to start making us nervous, which it didn’t, because Russian border control people are so much better at making you nervous.
“Right, said Officer Noble, finally, hauling himself up from his hunched over position, and transferring his gum from one side of his mouth to the other, squinted at us and asked, “What is your relationship to this gentleman, ma’am?”
“He’s my husband,” I responded promptly.
“Oh, he is?
“That’s right,” I said, turning to HRH for confirmation of the fifteen years of bed-making, 8 hours of labor with Velvet, the fact that I go to ALL the Parent Teacher Conferences, to say nothing of the last ten nights, and was annoyed to see him assume his, “I’m dealing with a congenital idiot in uniform” stance: one hand on the handle of his roll-a-board, the other splayed on his hip, his head cocked and his mouth pursed in a simper. He loves this kind of moment.
Officer Noble proceeded to have another flip through my passport, in that way they teach them at TSA school: thumbing through it as if it were a stack of 50-dollar bills. He would occasionally glance up, and it occurred to me to suggest asking him if he’d tried matching up the “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY” section of my passport with the information section of HRH’s passport, but I thought better of it. Officer Noble might well think that was an obvious decoy, which would not have held much water once he failed to find the reciprocal page in HRH’s passport. Russian authorities figure they have enough to do without screwing around with someone’s idea of their own emergency contacts. The Authorities know whom to call.
Officer Noble stroked my Kingdom of Bhutan entry stamps suspiciously.
Then asked: “Ma’am where do you ree-side?”
“Part of the year in Massachusetts and part of the year in Russia,” I said. He furrowed his eyebrows: the Kingdom of Bhutan would have clearly been a more plausible response. Officer Noble put down my passport and picked up HRH’s. He flipped through it, rutching up the pages as he searched for something that didn’t make him think he had severe dyslexia.
He finally heaved a frustrated sigh, closed the passport, then assumed a ‘Now I’ve gotcha,” expression and pulled out the trick question they teach you at TSA school.
“So, where’s his home town?” he asked me.
His hometown? What did HRH’s hometown have to do with it? Then it dawned on me: Officer Noble thought I was Andie McDowell and HRH was Gerard Depardieu? Was this a Green Card thing? This was too good to be true. Especially since I knew the answer, and the answer was a tricky one.
“Berlin,” I said.
Officer Noble pursed his oversized lips and snuck a surreptitious look down at the red passport’s info page.
“Huh?” he finally said.
“Berrrrrr-leeen,” I enunciated carefully, because the TSA crowd doesn’t get out much. “In Germany.”
Officer Noble seemed gob smacked. He flipped the passport over, and checked the gold letters, which spelled out “The Russian Federation.” He looked back up at HRH, who smiled and nodded, “Berlin…Berlin.”
“As in “the Berlin Wall” I added helpfully, which I later thought wasn’t the smoothest conversational move, since people like Officer Noble are often of the opinion that the Berlin Wall, if anything, should have been reinforced and made higher. But, while we certainly didn’t need to get specific on which side of The Wall HRH hailed from, I wanted to stay on the Berlin subject, since I had a growing concern that should HRH’s be asked to correctly identify my hometown, his pronunciation of “Oklahoma City” might be a bit dicey. There was an added concern that, despite the four zillion forms HRH has had to fill out in Russia to facilitate our fifteen years of wedded bliss, he knew that this was indeed where I came from. I certainly never encouraged anyone to put out press releases on that topic.
“Where did you stay while you were here?” he asked HRH.
HRH took off his “Sugar Mill” baseball hat, pointed to it and said, “The Sugar Mill.”
Officer Noble took one more look at HRH’s passport, and then his eyes strayed to the area behind us where all kinds of straightforward TSA victims slouched in line: rum runners, Cubans with funky Green Cards, or, if Officer Noble got lucky, possibly even a loser jihadist who was going to try and pull a third rate terrorist attack on the puddle jumper to San Juan. Cases that were covered in the TSA Handbook, not like some wackado Russian, claiming to be married more than a decade to an American, but who hadn’t ever applied for US citizenship. He licked his lips, and transferred the gum from one side of the mouth to the other.
“Anything to declare?” he asked, finally.
“Wet bathing suits,” I said.
Officer Noble shook his head wearily, as if he’d heard that one too many times, then stamped our passports and wished us a pleasant flight, conveying his conviction that this was a distinctly remote possibility. We moved into the security line, and began to slip off our shoes and expose our laptops.
There hasn’t been much news since I delivered Babushka and Dedushka into the dubious hands of Delta Air Lines at 4 am en route to their Caribbean cruise, Babushka complete with a three new Eileen Fisher ensembles (which I suspect she has secretly relegated to the “HRH takes back to Moscow pile,” and Dedushka clearly not using his Christmas presents I thought would be so useful: a TUMI document organizer and travel case, each with flaps, and separate zippered compartments and straps, and Velcro and convenient passport-sized slots and the whole nine yards. I know this had been relegated to the “HRH takes back to Moscow pile,” as he was at a loss to locate one single thing during check-in. This was stressful, as I had the car parked in the HANDICAPPED ONLY section of the POSITIVELY NO PARKING AREA of the curbside check-in. A large TSA/Harrison Ford wannabe told me, “Ma’am, you are going to have to move your vehicle,” and I told him I was very sorry, but there was no way I could leave my elderly, non-English speaking, generally clueless, Russian in-laws en route to Miami on their own at curbside. I pleaded with him to make the not-so-difficult leap of imagination that they were handicapped. “Five minutes.” He said and lumbered off.
“Where is your goddamn document holder?” I screamed, stamping my foot. I sensed Babushka was up for a little female solidarity, but as usual, she was the one methodically going through the enormous, cumbrous, completely inappropriate faux Dolce and Gabana overnight bag they think is the ultimate in hand luggage. She found the document in question and took charge, clasping it to her bosom, pushing Dedushka aside and stepping up to the check-in counter with the DNA that made Hitler and Napoleon gnash their teeth. I stood in awe, and mused, on my way back to Northampton, that if people like Babushka weren’t forced all the time to pretend that people like Dedushka are really in charge, the world would be a much more efficient place.
In any case, the sheet rock guy was right, and all the starm and drang of Christmas and New Year’s seems like a long time ago, now that HRH and I are ensconced in the lovely Sugar Mill (not it’s real name) in beautiful St. Croix. And no news from the Royal Caribbean crowd, as I assured HRH, probably means good news. I mean, if Haitian pirates had captured them, we’d hear from the pirates, right?
On the way down, as I dozed in the plane, I was mildly musing about Russians abroad, which is the theme of the chapter I’m currently working on. Since HRH first went on our honeymoon on a similar Royal Caribbean cruise we’ve been running into his compatriots in every corner of the globe. I should pause here to note that Dedushka is a great one for brand loyalty: he once booked his daughter into the same hotel, in the same resort town, on the same island as HRH and me: where we were attempting to have that “first vacation after small baby,” thing. Not that his daughter thought anything of it, since the world really does revolve around her. So Dedushka opted for a preference for Royal Caribbean.
The Sugar Mill (which is delightfully free of any global hotel chain association) is a lovely old Sugar Plantation that has been turned into a golf and hotel resort. HRH and I discovered four years ago, and liked it so much that we folded it into our solidifying annual schedule. I ask HRH every now and then if he wants to try another place, but he doggedly insists that he likes The Sugar Mill, and I agree. It is incredibly laid back – no boom boxes or naval peircings, no discos or Jell-O shots, just a quiet, laid back crowd, sleeping on the beach, reading Wolf Hall or Vanity Fair, coming back from a satisfyingly energetic round of golf, or splashing about in the Grotto pool with their small children. We usually hit it after American schools resume, so the property is half empty, and even quieter than usual, which makes the minor logistical responsibilities such as booking a table for dinner overlooking the ocean and the twinkling lights of Christiansted a synch.
Or so we thought.
I had booked the table overlooking the ocean and the twinkling lights from Northampton the previous weekend. But when we got to the restaurant and announced our last names, there was massive confusion. Were we are party of 3? No, we assured them, party of 2. It seemed we’d already been seated. We assured them we had not been. After a certain amount of fluster, the maitre d’ took control and led us to a just-vacated and hastily tidied table overlooking the ocean. As he pulled out my chair, and wafts of the conversation from the next table drifted over me, I solved the mystery of the snatched table: raspy immigrant Russian, tones born in the South of Russia and honed in the outskirts of Chicago and Brooklyn. I exchanged amused glances with HRH, who raised his eyebrows and confined his speech to English for the remainder of the evening. Was he recalling the 9th of May, 2005 in Malta, when he got sucked into a group of Russian tourists from Voronezh with 3 bottles of Chivas under the table and a continuous order for orange juice on top, who insisted he stay with them to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, prompting a two day hangover and a vow never to drink Chivas ever again?
Perhaps it was a reluctance to agree to, or even engage in the stream of abuse about The Sugar Mill’s food, and service, and general shabbiness that was Topic A at the table that should have been ours.
Here I am, once again, playing a reluctant game of hide-and-seek-in-my-own-home. HRH’s parents have come from Russia to stay in Northampton for a week. Funny thing about time. HRH’s and my tantalizingly just-around-the-corner week on the beach in St. Croix will be woefully short. This post-Christmas week with HRH’s parents is flowing like cement. I’m exhausted from single-handedly pulling off Christmas, and I am having trouble womaning up to single-handedly pull off New Year’s Eve. But I have to, because New Year’s Eve is the main event for Russians: as I pointed out in one of my columns, the Orthodox Christmas is on January 7th, and was not widely celebrated in The Soviet Union. All of the Christmas trees, gifts and their emaciated version of Santa Claus, Dedushka (Grandfather) Frost have shifted to New Year’s Eve.
I cannot look to our own “Dedushka,” HRH’s father, for much practical help, although his entire time and energy is devoted to seeming busy, looking important, and asking us if he can help. He can’t. I feel he is a prime candidate for the chill-pill line of pharmaceuticals – like a quadruple hit of Zanax or Valium, which I yearn to slip into his morning muesli. These might perhaps cut down on his constant fidgeting, the restless pursuit of a purpose or occupation, or his insistence on mixing the thirty-some English words he knows in with the forty German ones, no one else understands, with Russian, which is so clearly the lingua franca of this particular group. I’m not sure about drugs though, since he is my prime suspect in the case of the rapidly disappearing cooking brandy, and alcohol it seems to have only further hyped him up: He’s underfoot everywhere, offering suggestions or authoritative supervision on the execution of things he can’t do, like drive. Or cook. He drove me straight to the cocktail shaker this afternoon as he tried to direct me backing the grocery-laden Subaru into our garage. Backing automobiles into narrow confined spaces is not my primary skill set, but I don’t need a hyperactive non-driver getting in on the act.
If Dedushka could use a chill pill, his wife, Babushka, (Granny) might find life a brighter proposition with the pharma forklift provided by Prozac or Lexipro. Unfortunately, neither would even consider ever discussing mood enhancers with their primary care physicians, because that generation just didn’t do that kind of thing in Russia. You didn’t talk to anyone working for the State and keeping records about feeling a little down. Pity. Babushka seems to bear the weight of the world’s sorrows on her back, and qualifies every noun with the adjective “poor.” “Poor trees that were cut down and turned into firewood!” “Poor oysters we are about to eat,” or “Lovely snow, but the poor stuff will melt later today.” She is savvier than Dedushka, though very self-effacing, and she has wisely retreated into the abject misery of a stuffy nose. I may teach her to Neti Pot just as a diversion. Still, she seems very appreciative of what she’s found here in Northampton. Like Eileen Fisher and some really nice fish pate. We had a longish time at my beauty salon where a very patient and nice stylist worked for about three hours to turn her Russian-salon florescent henna with green highlights into a lovely auburn with caramel lowlights. This was ultimately successful, but she whispered to me somewhere into the second hour, “Is this going to be way too dark?”
Babushka is more helpful because she can, and, unlike the men in her family, is prepared, to make a bed or wash a dish. True, my new kitchen clearly intimidates her. The pots are heavy, the knives are sharp, the gas stove is menacing, and most of the food she finds in the fridge is unfamiliar. Still, she’s determined to be helpful, so I’ve ceded her the kitchen. This, as any woman who has ever married a man with a mother still living knows, is the right and proper thing to do. This is the right and proper thing to do even if you are way better at cutting up the baffling items in the fridge with the scary sharp knives, then cooking them in the heavy pots on the intimidating stove. Even Nigella Lawson should do this. I’m gritting my teeth as she drapes dirty napkins and soiled dishcloths across clean surfaces for reasons I can’t fathom, and I sneak in at night to put all of the inadequately-washed wine glasses through the dishwasher, but in general, I just give it all a wide berth.
So, I’m playing reluctant-hide-and-seek. In my own home.
My friend Victoria, who also has an HRH, and three children under the age of seven, in Moscow knows all about hide-and-seek-in-her-own-home. She is usually hiding from her own children or their many and varied nannies, trying to finish an article or get over a bad case of the ‘flu. She barricades herself in the Master Bedroom.
“En-suite bathrooms,” she says, nodding, “are the key. If you can access a toilet and manage to stockpile food and drink, you need never see anyone.”
I haven’t played hide-and-seek-in-my-own-home yet in Northampton, but I play a great deal of it in Moscow. Russia is a human resources rich country, and so I have a lot of “Help” in Moscow. And I have to hide from them, due to an architectural flaw in my apartment. With 20/20 hindsight, I see now that I should have been firmer about the – admittedly stunning – but completely transparent glass walls of the little study, where I am supposed to write The World’s First Funny Book on Russia. These glass panels are a green light to anyone to rap softly, gesture wildly, and come in saying, “I’m not disturbing you, am I?” And this happens all day long. Even when there is a sign, in Russian, taped to the outside of the glass wall, with only two or three spelling errors, but nothing that would confuse the reader as to the general thrust of the message, which is to PLEASE let me get on with writing the World’s First Funny Book on Russia undisturbed.
Tolya-the-driver bustles in and out on HRH’s errands, which mainly consist of escorting electricians into my en suite bathroom (removing that iron-clad hiding place). They all stop to have a cup of tea with the long-suffering Raisa, our cleaning lady. Raisa, like any Russian cleaning lady worth her salt, is always up for a lengthy one way chat about her current automotive disasters, the deplorable state of her dacha, how expensive everything is, or the details of the latest in a series of endless acquaintances who are diagnosed with really gruesome fatal illnesses. I never know what to say in these situations, except to repeat every synonym I can think of for “how awful!” Russian, as the Russians say, is a rich language, so there are a lot of synonyms. None of them ever seems quite up to the magnitude of Raisa’s tragedies, so I’ve got in the habit of dodging the bullet, by being up and dressed and out the door before she arrives. Where to go was sometimes a challenge until the next-door Starbucks opened, and then where to write the World’s First Funny Book on Russia was painlessly and somewhat stereo-typically solved.
“Just ignore them!” HRH says. “Write your book in the study, for Chrissakes!” He, child of the “classless” proletarian revolution, has no qualms about behaving like Ivan the Terrible to The Help. If he and a cadre of rust belt factory directors have had a long hard night with a case of vodka, he simply stays in bed until noon. Rising, he dons his dressing gown and parades around the apartment, like a medieval boyar, smelling like a distillery, yelling at people on the phone, sending Raisa and Tolya scurrying away to avoid bothering him. It’s dead impressive, and I’m deeply jealous. Raisa will make him a three-course meal from scratch if he only hints that he’s hungry, whereas I’m next door paying 660 rubles for a “Venti skinny latte c dvumiaya dop shotiy.” (Venti skinny latte with two extra shots). But you know, at Starbucks worldwide, after they give you that latte, they leave you alone to get on with it. They don’t start vacuuming the parquet floor just outside the glass panels of your stupidly designed study.
This doesn’t seem to be an issue with the people who work here on the renovations to the house in Northampton, which is traditionally a place to which hedge fund managers flee to become contented stonemasons. So, the electrician here is a really cool lady from Noho with a killer tool bag, the husband and wife team who have painted the entire house are really musicians, and my contractor (a sculptor) and the cabinet maker (also a sculptor) spend the day comparing Italian trattoria they know and love. I’m very fond of the sheet rock guy, who shares his thoughts on how sex when you are with your partner in the Caribbean is outstanding (a correct assumption I’m clinging to). He really does need his own reality TV show. I’ve got no problem wandering around the house if they are there, making them coffee, writing up in my loft as they work away, and I’d be delighted if they stayed all day. “How wonderful,” I say, as they enthuse about the latest gig or exhibit, and then go and look up synonyms for wonderful.
I’ve ceded the new kitchen to Babushka, but I still can’t work out what Dedushka should do. Neither has he. I feel its somehow not quite right to ask him to bring in some wood, although this is what I expect of any male guest over the age of 12. I fear Dedushka will take offense: think I’m confusing him with the Help. He clearly wants to have a long one-way chat and tell me all about New York, or San Francisco or some other place I know a lot better than he does. So, I’m hiding. I don’t think HRH’s parents have worked out where our bedroom is, and they can’t be sure if I’m up in the loft where HRH and I have our desks, which is where I’m hiding. But Dedushka has wandered up, so I may need to go to Northampton’s wonderful public library to look something up. Like the length of every single river on the planet. And hit a Starbucks. Hard.
Here’s the good news: President and ardent blogger, Dmitry Medevdev, in his State of the Union last Thursday categorically announced that he wants to make my life easier: “We should simplify the rules for recognizing degrees and diplomas awarded by the world’s leading universities,” he said, “and also the rules for hiring the foreign specialists we need. Such people should receive their visas swiftly and for a long period. It is we who have an interest in bringing them to Russia rather than the other way round.”
This is epic. I hardly even know what to do with all the free time that I will have on my hands, once these new fast track visa regulations take effect. Maybe I should write a book.
HRH, of course, doesn’t have a lot of confidence that these measures will be in place next week. And he’s probably right. So, very soon, we will have to put aside all other cares and woes, and focus our combined organizational and administrative abilities, and all of Tolya-The-Driver’s time on assembling the necessary paperwork. We will cancel Christmas so we can afford two multi-entry visas, and I will attempt to work up the courage to visit a Russian Consular section, fail, and ultimately erroneously put my faith in God (who has no say in any of this), FedEx, and some cheesy visa agency to exercise the expensive cowardly mail-it-in option.
Once upon a time, I worked at The Bank, and they took care of all this for me. The Bank, in those heady pre-crisis heady days, maintained an entire department devoted to visas, a group of industrious and, one assumes, well-connected individuals whose sole task it was to keep abreast of the constantly-mutating, esoteric rules and requirements for getting a visa. They stayed precariously atop of the mountain of documentation, and up-to-speed on the correct dimensions of the 3”x 4” matte color photos. You had to feel sorry for this crowd, even though they provided much of what little amusement can be had at an Investment Bank; but I never envied them the moment when they had to communicate new and more idiotic additions to the Byzantine regulations as issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bankers don’t relish having their time wasted.
“You want me to have a…what?????” exploded Piers Folkerstone-Smythe, an Old Wykehamist who had made a fortune in Russian telecoms.
“Test against leprosy,” responded sullen and spotty-faced Sveta, a hapless junior sent out by her scardy-pants bosses to announce the latest addition to the medical tests needed.
“And just who administers them?” quipped Jessica Underwood, the perennially sarcastic General Counsel, “Ben-Hur?”
“Well,” said the anal-retentive, paranoid, schizophrenic, Chief Economist, who, for someone who was supposed to work in Russia, spent far more time on Threadneedle Street than he ever did on Romanov Pereulok, “I’m certainly not going to have my insurance profile ruined by taking a test for another fatal disease…in fact I have refused to get a multi-entry visa this year: they simply do not understand why I need an HIV test.”
I never had a leprosy test, and I often think that it is shame, as it would have stopped conversation dead in Northampton. But Velvet, who developed a pathological fear of needles, and I continued to go for the annual AIDS tests. And take it from me, if you march into LabPro in the US, with your 9 year-old and cheerfully ask them to screen you both for HIV, you get some raised eyebrows, and earnest follow-up mail. Each year, the Russian government came out with a new doozy, which they claimed was nothing that the American INS wasn’t asking for. This packed the additional diplomatic punch of being America’s fault, and that is always the object of the exercise.
Now that I’ve left The Bank, HRH handles my visa support work, and I swear he’d rather iron and starch my entire collection of antique damask dinner napkins. It drives both of us to drink, and we can easily walk there. When they introduced the really idiotic rule that anyone applying for a work permit would need to submit a Russian translation of the original of their educational diplomas, apostiled (which is a notary on steroids which you get from your State Capitol after a 6 week wait), I could tell we were well and truly up the creek without a paddle.
I hated to burst HRH’s sense that all would be smooth sailing, but I pointed this out to him as a problem area.
“What on earth is the problem?” he thundered. “You graduated didn’t you?”
“Certainly, I did,” I said haughtily. “But my diploma is written in Latin.”
A deathly silence fell, as HRH shook his head, and I could tell what he was thinking – the Freemasons at work again. He thinks the Freemasons get up every morning to ruin his life.
“You are kidding me,” he said at last.
“I’m not,” I said, “and it’s not a Freemason thing, either.”
“Why are American diplomas written in Latin?” he asked quietly.
“Not all,” I said. “Just some.”
HRH heaved a huge sigh.
“You are going to have to figure this one out,” he said. “I’ll fake the HIV and the TB thing, and Tolya will go and get the fake clean driving record certificate, but you will have to deal with the diploma.”
I chewed my fingernails for a moment, idly humming a few bars of “Gaudeamus Igitur” and wondered what to do. Calling Columbia was out of the question for the next four hours. So, I did what I always do in moments of panic, I shot off a text message to Lucy Milne, Princeton Class of ‘89, travel agent to the oligarchs, owner of an enviable rolodex full of mid-level apparatchiks, who all want to go to bed with her. Faithful Lucy got right back to me.
“Lucy,” I opened with no fanfare, “tell me this, is your diploma in Latin?”
“Right,” she countered, getting the gist immediately. “Here is what you have to do: call the Representative of the Papal Nuncio,” in the same way she would casually suggest you give Sasha a call to make your recently-shot rhinoceros hide into a briefcase, “Monsignieur Bonaventura…but, listen, get right on top of it…the entire Ivy League is jamming his switchboard, and its Good Friday next week.
I was so busy getting ready to come to Moscow, that I did not even think about being here for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the fact that this event, more than any other, has influenced the way I live now. We were not, however, flooded with invitations to Black Tie celebrations here in Moscow, where it was very much business as usual. The celebrations in our household were also muted and modest, partly defined by my jetlag, but also by HRH’s very mixed feelings about the events of 1989 and Berlin itself.
HRH, though Russian, was born and spent his childhood in Berlin, on what most of my readership would consider “the other side of The Wall.” This is an era he remembers not with barbed wire and check-point Charlie, but as the halcyon days of his childhood. He grew up in a tightly knit, privileged, expatriate community of Soviet diplomatic, military and other official families. My mental image of him as a teenager is always superimposed against The Wall: HRH and his trusty sidekick, Boris Stepanov – the enfant terrible of the Soviet Mission, who, at the age of 11, had already cornered Black Market in West German Comic Books, thereby laying the foundations of his current construction fortune. I see them both dressed in unfortunately cut leather jackets, grimy Eastern European jeans, with unfortunate ABBA haircuts, furtively smoking purloined Marlboros before they race off to hockey practice.
I was moved by the celebrations, as, indeed, I always am by any well-executed world scale event management, which features Barack Obama merely hinting at the Declaration of Independence; but I kept my emotions in check, casting furtive glances at HRH on the other end of the squishy sofa, as we consumed the remains of some really amazing Bouef Bourguignon I’d made, and channel surfed in a delusory fashion. We flitted between BBC World, who was covering the event in its entirety, to Euronews (Russian Language), who covered the event in chunks, interspersed with features of “where are they today,” nostalgia pieces about East Germans, and the Russian News Networks, who stuck to their regularly scheduled programming throughout the evening, and led the news headlines with the death of Nobel Prize Physicist, Evgenii Ginzburg. This Russian restraint did not come as a huge shock to me. This summer, I toured the Newseum in Washington DC with our 14-year old Russian godson, who spent the summer in America with us. I directed his attention to the eight panels of the Berlin Wall on prominent display near the entrance of the museum, flanked by flat screen monitors rolling continuous vintage grainy CNN footage of the Fall of the Wall. He had absolutely no idea what he was looking at – none at all. Hadn’t heard about it in school, hadn’t been told about it by his parents, hadn’t even seen any reference to it on TV.
No, it was very much business as usual in Russia – a nation, as I have written elsewhere, very into anniversaries and round numbers. Third story on the headlines, despite the fact that there was President Dmitry Medvedev sitting on the podium – next to Hillary, chatting in the vastly more relaxed manner he always adopts at an away game. I certainly hadn’t expected Berlin’s VIP Guest, Mikhail Gorbachev, would create any spike the Russian TV ratings, as he is on an exclusive away games only circuit – being perceived very much as the unfortunate relation who sold off the family silver. Gorbachev has to go abroad for speaking engagements, to be fêted, and invited to feature in glossy Louis Vuitton commercials, showing him riding alongside the Berlin wall. I love that image – to me it sums up brilliantly the last twenty years of my life: a conjunction of where I came in, and a generation’s lofty political hopes purloined into rank materialism. I keep trying to add it to my collection of ironic things on our Moscow fridge, but HRH refuses to sanction it. Russians as a rule don’t put anything on their fridges except faux wood paneling, and HRH doesn’t think we need to give the man who broke up The Soviet Union any space on our German double-door deluxe Liebherr.
And, since he is the Berliner in this family… it’s his call.
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."
Daily Hampshire Gazette
"wry and funny observations on life in Russia...Eremeeva also shares her tongue-in cheek take on what she encounters stateside."
Cool Cucumbers in a Pretty Pickle The sizzling hot spy scandal makes me wonder if I could pull of being a Russian...if only in the kitchen, where I attempt pickles!
Cool Cucumbers in a Pretty Pickle The sizzling hot spy scandal makes me wonder if I could pull of being a Russian...if only in the kitchen, where I attempt pickles!
Recent Comments