Dividing My Time

Introducing The Expat Lexicon! The "S" Words

As my friends, fans,  and family know, I like jobs I can do in my pajamas and one thing I do for the occasional crust is brief expats who are setting off to Moscow for work.  I have a very serious and thorough outline and I do a nice job if I do say so myself.   There are, however, a few points I tend to leave out of a general briefing.  In this series of posts, I’ll be grouping these important concepts about expat life into alphabetical clusters with some helpful links to other resources.  I encourage you to submit your own questions about expat life in Moscow!

Salary:  

It’s all about the money.  That’s why you are here after all, and don’t let on that this isn’t a hardship post.  Of course it is:  peanut butter costs 9 bucks a jar and there is a 5-month lag to watch Celebrity Apprentice.   But the “The Package” as expats refer to it includes all kinds of perks:  an all expense-paid look-see visit before you move, and all-expense paid move when you do featuring a sea container big enough to fit a year’s worth of Sam’s Club Mac&Cheese boxes, housing, insurance, insurance that ensures your insurance, pet relocation, assimilation training for you and your pet, schooling, trips home (to stock up on more Sam’s Club Mac &Cheese), a guaranteed bonus.  

Shelter:  

Location, location, location.  Are you poshly situated on the banks of Patriarch Ponds (soon to be renamed Cadaver Pond) or have you chosen the more hygienic confines of Rosinka or Pokrovsky Hills, where your neighbors are People Like You and not slightly crazy octogenarians in worn out tapki who hurl insults at you, or a scary beezinessmeyn from Moldova and his 17-year twin girlfriends.   Are you horrified by the cost of your rental?  Do you know the layout of IKEA by heart? You are outraged when the rent goes up, and you know you are really entrenched when you stop thinking you can get one up on the landlord.  You can’t.

Servants:  

Suddenly, you are the hero of your own Masterpiece Theatre special.  There are servants everywhere!  Someone drives you around, someone else drives your spouse around, and a third guy may even drive your kids around.   A colorful but increasingly tedious woman cleans your home, sighing heavily about the good old days when she worked for a Soviet Research Institute and had a three-week voucher to a sanatorium each summer.  She often suffers from a curious thing called “pressure” from the “magnetic field.”  You are working up the courage to fire her and get a string of Filipinos in to replace her.

Schooling:  

Keeping your children busy, productive, occupied, and off the streets is a full time job for an expat.    If you have school aged children, you’ve probably gone for the “All Inclusive” option of an international school with bonus points if you’ve chosen to live adjacent to it.  Good choice:  everything including your own social life is under one roof.  You will never be lonely again.  Unless of course, your child is unhappy at the international school, in which case, you are out of luck.  If you have teenagers, I strongly advocate a lengthy and serious consideration of "American Boarding Schools" or a similar publication from your home country.

Security:  

If this is your first posting abroad, you may be disconcerted by the amount of security measures in place:  metal detectors to enter shopping malls, armed guards at your local supermarket, and the bewildering rigmarole of getting a “propusk” or pass to any building in the city.   Relax.  Remember Russia is a human resources rich country and the entire male population serves in the army, making them fit for only one thing when they get out:  security services.

Spirits:  

Moscow expats like their tipple.   Whether it’s cocktails on the patio at Scandinavia or vodka at the banya, gird your liver for the onslaught of alcohol to come.   Quantity, not quality, is what counts in Moscow, where a mediocre bottle Cru d’Ordinary Cheap and Cheerful Australian Chardonnay retailing in your home country for $7.99 and available at every newsagent, needs to be specially ordered and costs up to $60.00.   None of this deters Moscow expats, some of whom even take a liking to the aluminum tins of pre-mixed Gin Tonic sold at kiosks throughout the city.  Don’t knock them ‘til you’ve tried them, and try them as the locals do:  while riding public transportation.

Sirens:  

Relax.  All those ambulances are just moonlighting as traffic jam plows, and all those blue lights are just show-off minigarchs.  No emergency.  

Sourcing:  

Where oh where do you buy peanut butter?  (Azbukha Vkusa) Or toilet bowl cleaner? (Metro)  Can you get Vanilla Extract in Moscow? (No) Is there any store that sells three holes US Letter Sized paper?(huh?) Where do you buy a bathing suit or clothes that are in the size 12 and up range (www.landsend.com of course…what did you think?) Finding things in Moscow is a full-time job for a trailing spouse, or what a recent Expat Forum more charmingly renamed the “lovepats.”   Keep your ear to the ground; post your questions on Facebook.  Be ready to improvise.   Take many many many empty suitcases home on holiday.

Social Life:  

A big part of being an expat is the social life.  This is primarily carried out with other expats at large events held to raise money for various good causes.  This is when “The Package” begins to make sense.  You are charged an arm and a leg to attend, then shell out the other arm and your other leg to purchase way too many raffle tickets for chance to win something you neither want, nor need (such as a weekend at the Marriott Grand Hotel on Tverskaya Street).  Hours of fun.  You may choose to join a book club, or go native and visit a dacha.  Whatever you do, get out there and meet people.  Even if you have to help unpack 14,000 Russian Christmas tree ornaments, or go to divine service. Otherwise, the cleaning lady will drive you nuts.

Sojurns:  

Ah…vacations!  Before you even unpack one suitcase, check with the HR people who are in charge of you about all the public holidays in Russia.  You don’t want to be caught wondering where everyone is during the first week in May, November, or January.  Nor do you want to miss the Saturday that turns out to be a working day.    Once you’ve got that clear, you have a wonderful opportunity to discover the joys of package holidaying a la Russe in Turkey, Egypt, and the UAE for the low, low price of less than $500 p/p and the high, high cost of mental anguish when you take your first (and last) charter flight to the sunny destination.  Live and learn, friends, live and learn.

Sex:  

No "Life in Moscow" piece could be complete without this "S" word.  Suffice it to say that attitudes about sex are different abroad, particularly those held by the typing pool at the better firms.   And then there are the rumors of trampoline sex in the gated communities...true or false?  Hmmm...

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Hi There Readers!

Can you think of other "S" words that are important to life in the expat lane?  Questions about life in Russia? Curious or outraged by what you read here?  Hit the comment button and weigh in, won't you?

Secretary's Day/ День секретаря: A Hazardous Job!

 

“What distinguishes a businesswoman from a Woman? A gait! Just look how you walk! ...”

~ Verochka in “Office Romance”

Good luck getting a bouquet of flowers, a hair appointment, or a bottle of sweet Russian champagne in Moscow today – its Secretary's Day!   From Planernaya to Vykhino, from Krylatoskoye to Shchelkovskaya, wives are in for the evening, slipping pirated copies of “Sex In the City” into the DVD player, cracking open bottles of Misty and trying hard not to keep an eye on the clock.  Since 2005, when an enterprising group of Russian secretaries got together an inaugurated an annual profpraznik for themselves, this holiday has struck fear in the hearts of wives, as their husbands sally forth to fete the other woman in their lives.  I don’t mind telling you that my nails are bitten down to the quick…HRH has been curiously unavailable for the past few hours…hmm…

Unless, of course, as so often happens, the wife WAS the secretary.  In that case,  the former secretary/now wife quickly and efficiently organizes a weekend in Paris for her and her husband, and the secretary is left with a stiff bouquet of Dutch roses to take home with her.

Secretaries are in the headlines over in the US with the emergence of Miss Blankenship "Yes, my first name is Ida, but you can cuall me Miss Blankenship" as the character to watch on an otherwise (to me anyway) somewhat puzzling and lackluster new season of AMC’s Mad Men.  You know you are hotter than hot when you are a.) Fictional and b.) Profiled on The Daily Beast.  We can only aspire. Miss Blankenship, who is about four hundred years old, recently replaced the weepy Allison, Don Draper’s pretty but pretty naïve secretary who was stupid enough to sleep with a very drunk Don after the Clios.  Miss Blankenship, on the surface of it, seems to be ideal to keep Don’s mind on his work, much like Betty Suarez was hired to keep Daniel Meade in check on Ugly Betty…but we all know how THAT turned out, right Velvet?   However, it turns out Miss Blankenship has some skeletons in her closet – information which Don stumbled upon while snooping around Roger Sterling’s memoires…and all I can say is that I’ll be tuning in with a dry martini on Sunday to find out just why Roger calls her “The Queen of Perversions.”  

I never really had a secretary in Russia because I was way too competent.   I speak Russian fluently, I can use public transportation, I had HRH to negotiate with any landlords who needed negotiating with, and, in the end of the day, I was able to fly solo on the relatively simple procedure of ordering pizza from Jacks.ru (in English) over the telephone.  Many, if not all, of the expat men I know are not able to do any of these things, and that suits them just fine.   That is, after all, why God invented secretaries.  

Russian secretaries are part pit bull terrier, part Nanny, and part GPS system: ready at a moment’s notice to coolly take the phone and settle a dispute between the boss’s wife and the new nanny, filling out your boss’s expense report, keeping the transactions on his Platinum American Express card separate from the family’s Raiffeisen Visa.   Making sure his two mobile phones don’t get mixed up.    At the more ostentatious Investment Banks and domestic oil companies and natural gas monopolies in Moscow, you have to look like Heidi Klum if you want to be promoted to the marketing or mistress departments.  

At my happy time with Russia’s national carrier, I got a lot of first hand experience with Soviet style office etiquette.   Although we were working at a start up with a skeleton staff (here is some free advice:  never, never, never agree to work at a start up with a skeleton staff for a State-controlled Russian company), the secretaries immediately set up the “Priyomnaya” which the Oxford Russian/English dictionary tells me is translated “waiting room.”  This does not begin to define the hollowness and hush of the “priyomnaya,” meant to make you think you are in the Curia, or St. James Palace waiting to see a semi-divine individual.  In our case, the top dog had two fierce secretaries; both called (of course) Olga, each of whom would answer the phone, “Priyomnaya of Ivanov, Sergei Viktorvich, General Director of the Universe of The National Carrier.”  When someone important came, they would stand up and introduce themselves just that way.   If someone unimportant came in, they would clip briefly “sit down,” and proceed to make the person wait for much longer than they’d intended.  And, trust me, there are no back copies of The New Yorker in those kinds of offices. 

Lest you think that all Russian secretaries are either Barbie Dolls or Pit Bull terriers, I should in all fairness add that there is, of course, a famous secretary in Russia’s film history: the effervescent, cool, and savvy Verochka from “Sluzhebny Roman” or “Office Romance.”  Played by the darling of Soviet Cinema, Liya Akhenzhakova, Verochka holds court in her frumpy female boss’s “Priyomnaya,” deftly accepting tributes of cigarettes and scent from employees, anxious to curry favor and access.  She mentors the frump’s makeover, by teaching her how to dress and how to walk, orchestrating an ultimate happy ending to her romance with a co-worker.  Verochka has all the best lines, including today’s quote.

“I won’t live that long,” she says, “I have a hazardous job.”

Congratulations to all of Russia’s secretaries!  

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Dear Readers:

So, do you have a secretary?  What is he or she like?  Ugly Betty, Verochka, or Miss Blankenship? Are you going to tune in to Mad Men this weekend?   What is the most amazing thing your secretary has ever done for you?  Share with us, won’t you, by adding a comment below?   And stick around, if you like to enjoy other posts like this one:

Day of the Legal Profession /День российской адвокатуры: Russia’s Pornographic Portia

Human Resource Department Day/День кадровика: 69 Pieces of Paper And Your Blood

Metallurgy Day/День металлурга: No Oligarch Is That Good Looking

 

 

 

The All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity/Всероссийский день семьи, любви и верности: Happy Families

A family is not just husband and wife, but also Granddad and Grandma and, most importantly, kids.

~ President Dmitry Medvedev via his Twitter account, KremlinRussia_E on 3:36 AM Jul 2nd via web

Today is the All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity, and not before time, either, after the chaos and naughtiness of yesterday’s St. John’s Eve, or Ivan Kupala.  Today’s holiday affords a timely reminder to any tempted to stray from the bosom of the family, what an awfully big mistake that would be.  Take Anna Karenina, for example, who’s tale of descent into adultery begins with Tolstoy’s immortal observation that:

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Staying faithful to your spouse (whether he or she has to be a member of the opposite sex is not mentioned, nor is any detail gone into as to the nature of the conception of the children) is the watchword of this holiday, which was introduced recently, in 2008, with the support and encouragement of Russia’s First Lady, Svetlana Medvedeva, (who I suspect wears the pants in that particular family.)  Mrs. Medvedeva is known to be a big supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church (none of this childhood obesity nonsense for her) and the choice of date for The All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity was not random: today is a 780 year old Orthodox holiday celebrating Saints Peter and Fevronia, the Prince and Princess of the ancient city of Murom, near Vladimir, who were canonized in 1547.  This makes it a nice Public Service Message brought to you by the State-Church joint venture.

The story of Peter and Fevronia is a perfect fusion of simple peasant girl marries handsome prince after over coming adversity in the shape of a dragon/ happily-ever-after / fairy-tales, pagan and chthonian (I know, I had to look it up too) symbolism, and good old- fashioned Russian family values.   I first read the entire story as a university student in Serge A. Zenkovsky’s "Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales," which is about the first thing they thrust at you when you embark down the path of Russian Area Studies. It is now on-line, so, if you really want to, you can read the whole thing too, but should you prefer a pithier synopsis, here is one:

Prince Peter, the brave and righteous younger brother and heir of Prince Paul of Murom, does battle with the devil disguised as a serpent, to defend the honor of his sister-in-law.  Smiting the serpent, Peter is splashed by its blood, which covers his body with sores and ulcers.   He searches the land for many years in vain for a cure until he encounters the simple peasant girl, Fevronia, weaving at her loom.  After a symbolically packed exchange of riddles, promises, and Peter’s eventual cure, they cut to the chase, marry, and settle down as the ruling couple.  Happily ever after, however, eludes them, as the wicked boyars (nobles) are not content with Fevronia, a simple peasant girl, taking precedence over their own wives.  So they begin to stir up trouble.  One particularly wicked (and married) boyar tries to take advantage of Fevronia during a sea voyage.   Fevronia reprimands him sharply, asking him to taste the water on either side of the ship, and note the difference.  He does so, and claims that there is no difference at all.

“And so it the nature of all women.”  (Replies Fevronia) Why then do you want to leave you wife and think about another woman?”

Having thoroughly squelched the boyars with this withering remark (?), things calmed down considerably for Fevronia and Peter, who went about the business of ruling in a pious, generous, and just manner.  They loved each other so much that they prayed to die at the same hour, and prepared a joint tomb.  To seal the deal, she became a nun, and he a monk, and they did die at the same moment, only the crowd in charge prepared to bury them in separate graves.  On the next day, however, their bodies were gone, ultimately found in the double tomb, where they remain to this day in the Church of the Holy Virgin in Murom.

I wondered to myself if Mrs. Medvedeva wasn't pushing the envelope a little on this one.   Russia already has a lot of holidays along these lines:  Men’s Day (February 23rd) and International Women’s Day (March 8th) as well as Catholic St. Valentine’s Day (February 14th) which Russians have taken up with the same fervor they have sushi and mojitos.  But, as the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church when he was Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad noted, “February 14th (Valentine’s Day) is the Day of Those in Love, and being in love does not necessarily guarantee love, nor family, nor, for that matter, faithfulness.”

With which sentiment, I am sure, both Fevronia and Mrs. Medvedeva would heartily agree. And, for that matter, Tolstoy too.  Things like this don’t hurt.  They might help.  You never ever know, do you?  Still wondering if this covers same sex families though...

Happy Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness to everyone who is in to that kind of thing. 

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This Post is part of The Stunt

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Hi There Readers:

Is there a holiday like this where you come from?   Do you think it is over the top, or a good thing?   Or does the idea of family values make you break out in hives.  Let me know, won’t you, by leaving a comment below.  Thank you for stopping by and for your patience as you can see we are playing catch-up again (pressures of family life have kept me occupied).  Stick around, if you like, and enjoy a few more posts just like this one:

Hide and Seek

World Wide Metrology Day/Всемирный день метролога: He’s Metric: I’m Imperial: How Can Love Survive?

Day of the Philologists /День филолога: Language Learners, Lovers, and Luddites

St. John’s Eve/Иван Купала: Ferns, and Fires, and Flesh: Oh My!

Get your kit off!

~ Prefers to remain anonymous

Today is St. John’s Eve, or, in Russian: “Ivan Kupala!”   This is Russian Midsummer, with all the same accompanying mischief, magic, and misdemeanors, as anywhere else in the world, just thirteen days late, because of that Gregorian – Julian calendar thing we’ve discussed before.  So, we’ll be expecting wild sexual midnight revels; naked bathing, bonfires, and all that will all make a refreshing change from Anna Chapman.

It is nice for me, as well, to take a tiny break from the more modern Russian institutions such as the traffic cops and the veterans of the custom's service, and harken back to ancient pre- and early Christian Russia: wallow a little in all the Dan Brown/Bloodline conspiracy/St. John Worship/Freemason stuff.  If you are into that kind of thing (and I am) today’s holiday can be an endless font (pun intended) of fascinating information.

St. John’s Eve in the Christian calendar celebrates the night before the birth of Jesus’s cousin, St. John.  Scripture tells us that John was about six months older than, and “prepared the way” for Jesus, so that fits nicely: if you buy in to the idea that Jesus was born on December 25th (or January 7th according to the Russians).   St. John’s Eve, and its counterpart in the calendar, Christmas, are actually, as Alexander Hislop argues convincingly, replacements for much older pagan rituals surrounding the juxtaposition of light and dark. Jesus’s birth was set by the early Christians to replace the pagan Saturnalia or Winter Solstice, when the days begin to get lighter; John’s birthday replaced the Summer Solstice, when the days begin to grow darker. This neatly captures the "twinned" or juxtaposed relationship between John and Jesus. St. John, a wild and zealous desert preacher, rigid and ascetic in his beliefs, was an annoying thorn in the side of both the Romans and the Jewish King Herod.  John publicly denounced Herod for his marriage to his brother’s widow, Herodias. John condemned this as adulterous and incestuous.  King Herod, famously beheaded John at the request of his step-daughter (so also niece) Salome, after she did a very effective dance of the seven veils (making her the Anna Chapman of the piece) for his guests.  The head, then, is served up on a platter.

St. John remains a shadowy and puzzling figure, associated historically with controversial and secretive organizations such as The Knights Templar and the Freemasons, at the heart of bloodline conspiracy theories, and mysterious symbols and hidden messages in art and literature.  The fact that his birth, and not his death (August 19th in the Catholic calendar) is the key holiday is also significant, since most saints are celebrated on the day of their martyrdom or death, and not the birth. Jesus and John are not.

St. John’s Eve in Russia was, and still is in some parts of the country, celebrated with the traditional focus on fire and water:  elements, like Jesus and John, who stand in direct opposition.  At dusk (which comes very late this time of the year), huge bonfires are lit to guard against the evil spirits, witches, goblins, and other fey creatures who, as the world turns to darkness again, begin to gain in strength and power.   Men compete against one another to see who can jump the highest over the bonfire, ensuring the winner happiness and luck throughout the year.  Young women gather the traditional “Midsummer ferns,” which are woven into garlands and wreaths, worn throughout the evening and then dried, and kept to ward off evil spirits throughout the coming darkness.  In another long-standing tradition, young women float their wreaths of Midsummer ferns with lit candles into the river, and the one, which floats the longest, ensures its maker happiness in love, long life, and good health.

"Night of Ivan Kupala" by Genrikh Semyradski 

As the night lengthens, and a brief darkness hovers over the Northern sky, tradition says that the trees move about and speak to one another in the breeze, and the important water element is incorporated by naked bathing in ponds, rivers and streams to purify both the body and the soul. 

Things can begin to get slightly out of hand, which is wonderfully captured in Nikolai Gogol’s breakthrough short story “St. John’s Eve,” which you can download here, and Mussorgsky’s “Night On Bald Mountain,” which might sound strangely familiar to any of you with small children:

In closing, here are a few other interesting facts associated with St. John’s Eve, which may dictate the way you plan your day today:

1.    Traditionally, in Russia and other countries which celebrate St. John's Eve, there is a not-unsurprising spike in the birthrate during the month of March.

2.    As I wrote in a recent article on Russian superstitions, witches will not come into your house if there is a needle or something sharp in the doorjamb or other portals to the house. This is particularly true on St. John’s Eve, so housewives scatter thistles or roses on their windowsills to keep the witches at bay.

3.    It is very important (Velvet, are you listening?) to lock up your horses on St. John’s Eve, lest the witches or goblins spirit them away...to Bald Mountain!

4.    If a girl collects seven different kinds of flowers and puts them under her pillow, she will dream of her future husband.

5.    If you climb over twelve garden fences during St. John’s Eve, your wish will come true.

Can you find a garden fence you could actually climb over in Russia?

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Author’s Note:

Lots of research went into this one, and I am grateful to:

Astrology On The Web

“ And dedicated to the Holy Saints John: An inquiry into the designation of the Saints John as Patron Saints of Freemasonry”, by W. Bro Harry L. Ward Jr. PM on Pietre-Stones: Review of Freemasonry

Secret Societies, by David V. Barrett

Cracking The Symbol Code: the Hidden Message Within Church and Renaissance Art, by Tim Wallace-Murphy

The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop

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Well then, Readers,

What have you got planned for tonight?  Let me know, won’t you…you don’t have to identify yourself in the comments…really.  Make up a name, go on!  Be clever, reference Shakespeare:  Hermia, Helena, Bottom, Titannia, Puck...or be current, and call yourself Anna Chapman.  You get the idea.

I know this one was a little academic for some palates, so here are a few ones in a slightly lighter vein.

Day of the Legal Profession /День российской адвокатуры: Russia’s Pornographic Portia

Day of the Chemists / День химика: Russia’s Unquestioned Contribution to Civilization

International Museum Day/Международный день музеев: Which Museum Would You Run Away To?

Vanilla Love vs. Alfred A. Knopf: A Blogger's Dilemma

 A guy at a thing asks me what I do.

“I write,” I say, punching the “T” for emphasis.

“Oh really?” he says, mildly interested, “Publish anything?”

“Oh yes,” I say, “I write a monthly humor column, and I’m working on a book about Russia, and,” I pause for effect, “I have a blog, which is about the funny side of life in Russia.” 

“Do you like, make any money from the blog thing?” he asks.

God, how mercantile, I think.

“Do I monetize, you mean?” I query, tilting my head to one side and using the singsong, quizzical, and annoyingly gravelly voice well-educated women five to seven years younger than myself seem to these days.  “Put ads on it you mean?”   I note with satisfaction: my jargon has momentarily trumped his condescension.  He nods.  “Oh no,” I say, shaking my head gravely, as if he has offered me something toxic like cigarettes or a ride on a Harley without a helmet, “No, I don’t do that.”

“What’s the point, then?” he asks genuinely perplexed.

I dial up the gravel several notches, and babble about keeping the space pure, creating trust with my readership (all six of them including Aunt Debbie), and drop in some other sound bytes I read in “Typepad for Dummies” about monetizing.  His eyes begin to wander about the room, and pretty soon, he knocks back the rest of his glass in a gulp and mutters something about getting more to drink and beats a hasty retreat.

Cards on the table:  I can’t monetize, because, if I did, my blog would be immediately and irrevocably overrun with semi-pornographic ads for Russian and Ukrainian women looking for Western husbands. Sites called creepily racist things like “Vanilla Love,” would establish permanent resident alien status on the extreme right hand side of my blog, flashing garish neon blue messages:  “Hot Ukrainian girls are waiting for you!” or “Russian babes want you!”  

This isn’t the message I’m trying to convey.  I spend a lot of time researching various things for a part of the blog which covers all of Russia’s professional and public holidays, and doesn’t matter what I Google or Bing:  “Siberian dumplings,” or “Baltic Fleet,” or “Peter the Great,” there, alongside the search results is a column of scantily-clad live blond Barbie dolls called things like “Snezhena,” which I’m pretty sure isn’t even a name.   Surely, I won’t be taken seriously as a blogger or a writer if I allow this kind of cyber hoi polloi onto my “platform.”  

And yet…  If I were, hypothetically, willing to go down the monetization route, it occurs to me that I could make a fortune, although I cannot believe this Russian bride industry is still going strong twenty-five years after perestroika.  Are there still Western men of sub-human intelligence who are stupid enough to be taken in by: “Hello, my name is Masha and I have not found my soul mate yet,” or “I’m Nadia, I’m 19 and I’m a student.”   I thought they all cycled through the system a decade ago: 60-something expat men making asses of themselves by marrying the first 20-something guided missile they meet at work; or oil rig employees too cheap or lazy to get on a plane themselves, sending off for 19-year old Nadia, and then astonished when 37-year old Lena plods down the jet way, with her 72 year-old mother, Svetlana and 11-year old son Ruslan in tow; and, on a somewhat later flight, 51 year-old Vlad. 

Googling “Russian meteorologists” today, there was so much resulting “Vanilla Love” that I started to seriously re-examine my whole approach.  Should I face facts, give up the high road, and turn the blog into a “portal” rather than a “platform?” If I’m honest, most of the traffic I get is from people looking to save a failed Beef Stroganoff, which would be great if I were a food blogger. But I’m not. Could I offer advice to these silly men?  Could I sell them my unique, patented insight into the personality of a Russian woman based on her first name?  “Olga,” for example: very scary.  Could I blow the lid off the “Snezhena hoax?  Should I de-gravel my voice and start making some real cash?  $14.99 a month, I could charge, or 12 months for only $99.99.  I could get a PayPal button!  

Or would I just get people looking for cheap vanilla extract?

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Author's Note:  This article first appeared on "Powder Room Graffiti"

Day of the Legal Profession /День российской адвокатуры: Russia’s Pornographic Portia

The one great principle of the…law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

~Charles Dickens (Bleak House)

Today is Legal Profession Day!   This holiday was introduced to Russia by the once and future President Vladimir Putin relatively late in the game in 2002.  It marks no special legal occasion or milestone that I could discern, but rather reflected the rise in importance and prominence of the profession, keeping pace with the hyper-development of Russia’s economy in the early oughts.

Russia has very few famous lawyers.  The equivalent of our Attorney General, the General Procurator, is a uniformed position, usually occupied by some portly guy who speaks that horrific officalspeakski the Russians developed somewhere in the 1950s and 1960s, after all the people who knew how to deliver lofty rhetoric had been killed in the war (or other places), died of natural causes, or fled the country.  My friend Tess made the excellent point that it was probably what a lot of badly educated peasants thought intelligent people should sound like.

Sentences are delivered primarily in statacco phrases, which intone up and down for emphasis.  The speaker generally employs a condescending tone, as if it is a total waste of his very valuable time to read off his prepared statement.  The language he employs makes as full a use of the past tense as possible, as well as the full names of companies or government organs, and the speaker, characteristically avoids eye contact with the camera or audience, and waggles his hand up and down in a chopping motion to underscore his words. So, for example, an official, keeping his eyes firmly to the left of camera might say something like this:

“I, Ivanov, Yuri Borisovich, Deputy Head of the National Carrier of the Russian Federation can confirm that, in compliance with Law # 648 of the Federal Aviation Services of the Russian Federation, by the National Carrier of the Russian Federation, all scheduled flights for today, May 31, 2010, were carried out and executed by the National Carrier of the Russian Federation on time and on schedule.  And what is more, I can add that by me, Ivanov, Yuri Borisovich, Deputy Head of the National Carrier was received a personal congratulations from the Stepanov, Vassily Dmitrievich, the Head of the National Carrier of the Russian Federation.”

Rhetoric in Russia is sick puppy, so it’s no wonder there aren’t any famous Russian lawyers, apart, that is, from the two who currently run the country.   You don’t have any real live Clarence Darrows or Alan Dershowitzes.  There isn’t a golden thread of Russian legal fiction to give us Rumpole, Atticus Finch or Jarndyce and Jarndyce.   There aren’t even any lawyer jokes.  Because the law in Russia isn’t funny.  It’s tedious and plodding and Byzantine and changing.  Russian lawyers enrage me.  They charge a gazillion dollars a minute and used to muck up my beautifully written press releases with their legalese just to get their fingerprints on to some document.  

What Russia can boast, however, is a Pornographic Portia.  She wasn’t made in Russia, but she’s certainly made it in Russia, many many times. 

Deidre Dare is an American who worked for Alan & Overy in Moscow, which has to have been very dull work indeed.  To spice things up, Ms. Dare went out a lot, got up to all kinds of things, and wrote about it in an erotic novel (not the very best of that genre, but still).  She published the novel in her own name in weekly installments on her web page, each chapter charting her escapades with men of varying nationalities. In 2009, her bosses at the law firm asked her to take down the web site; she refused, and was sacked.  For about thirteen and a half minutes, this was Headline News. It looked like book deals and film rights would rain down on Ms. Dare, who made some outraged statements, which were much better crafted than her erotica or, of course, Russian officialspeakski, about suing the firm for slander or liable or something.  

The book deal may be in place, but the lawsuit seems to have fizzled out.  I have to admire Ms. Dare, though, for staying in Moscow and parlaying her exploits into a weekly column in The Moscow News called Sexpat (not the very best of that genre, but still), which you can find here.  People keep threatening to bring her to my dinner parties, and I may just pluck up the courage to say yes.  She’s obviously not stupid, has no reservations, and is enjoying being a writer much more than being a lawyer. 

Rumpole would have adored her…

Congratulations to all of the lawyers in Russia!  If you want some unsolicited advice, try some Cicero or John Mortimer...read To Kill a Mockingbird, or watch Inherit The Wind.  Rhetoric, people...rhetoric!!

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Dear Reader:

What do you think of Deidre's work?  Come on!  I know you looked!  Leave me a comment and tell me...