John Bninski

(Moscow, High School of Economics, 2007)

WARNING: THIS LETTER CONTAINS LONG DESCRIPTIONS OF RUSSIA THAT SOME MAY FIND QUITE BORING. DO NOT CONSIDER YOURSELF UNDER ANY OBLIGATION TO READ IT FULLY [OR AT ALL]. THE AUTHOR ADVISES NOT READING THIS LETTER ALL AT ONCE BUT RATHER PRINTING IT ON THE BACK OF OLD LECTURE NOTES/HANDOUTS AND LEAVING IT IN THE BATHROOM FOR THOSE INTERVALS WHEN ONE IS BORED ENOUGH TO READ ANYTHING.

Dear Friends,

By this time, I have been in Russia about two weeks, or 1/8 of my total stay in the program. It was on August 27 that I woke up early in Rodin (thanks for letting me crash at your place Matt), packed away the last of my things into my three bags (sorry Matt if I forgot my pyjama pants at your place) and took a taxi to 30th street, SEPTA to Trenton, NJ Transit to Penn Station, Long Island RR to Jamaica, the airport train to JFK, FinnAir to Helsinki, and FinnAir again to Moscow. There was, as had been arranged, a chap named Oleg waiting for me with a car sent by the School of Russian Studies at the Higher School of Economics (where I’m studying), and he took one of my bags and we started off.

The first thing I smelled when I stepped outside the terminal doors at Sheremetyevo Airport was cigarette smoke. I have smelled lots of different smokes in Russia – wick smoke in the Orthodox churches, where round candelabras stand in front of each ikon and believers can light thin beeswax candles that cost 10r (about 40 cents) at the booth in the back of the church; grease smoke when the kind babushka I live with fries up some dumplings with cheese or sour cream; black building smoke when the amusement park across the Moscow River caught fire and the fire-fighting boat Nadezhda (Hope) was summoned to fight the blaze; meat smoke as Oleg and I drove through what I guess was the food-processing district on our way into Moscow; insecticide smoke from the nifty little plastic gadget that plugs into a wall socket and into which one inserts a fibrous blue patch that, when heated, disperses some kind of repellent to keep away the Moscow mosquitoes that have been feasting on my A- while I sleep (I count fifteen bites on my left hand alone). But I think tobacco smoke leads the pack in terms of frequency of encounter. Cigarettes cost about a dollar a pack here (while mouthwash is almost $20 a pint), and Moscow’s streets, restaurants, and offices show few signs of the health-conscious primness that in the West has lead to smoking bans from Philadelphia to Dublin. Disposable plastic lighters can be had for a mere 5r (20 cents). The basics of life in Moscow are generally not expensive (although the housing market is tight), despite the statistics you see in newspapers about Moscow being the most expensive city on earth. The high costs are just for certain items: coffee, orange juice, Western goods that are considered a symbol of status. Smokes are cheap, and the metro stop you enter in the morning will have a crowd of Muscovites outside taking advantage of this. Beer is relatively cheap too – Russian beer is not bad, at least so far it hasn’t been – and the crowd of Muscovites outside the metro stop will be taking full advantage of this also. You see chaps holding bottles of beer at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. As for vodka – I’ve only tried one kind so far, but any little store will have quite a variety to choose from, at prices lower than in the States and with none of that “are you 21?” business.

Food here is fine, although generally plain, and a bit lacking in vegetables/rough on the digestion – one has to make sure to supplement food from restaurants or from babushka with ogurtzy, the smallish cucumbers sold by streetside vendors (thanks for the advice, Drew). There are a number of dairy products unfamiliar to American consumers: kefir (eaten at breakfast, this roughly approximates drinking yogurt), tvorog (halfway between cottage cheese and yogurt, this is usually fed to children; it’s delicious when mixed with jam)…Oh and Smetana (sour cream) on practically everything. (Queer isn’t it how MS Word capitalizes Smetana, thinking I am referring to the composer…) Smetana on dumplings, Smetana in borscht, Smetana on bread for breakfast (I’m serious). Ice cream is sold on virtually every street and nearly as common a sight in the hands of passersby as cigarettes. Oh and one other comestible that has to make this letter is the iced tea I saw in a grocery store that contains marijuana extract “for a great natural feeling.” Hmm.

I’d been told that people will try to make you eat a lot in Russia, and this is certainly true of the kind babushka I live with. I wake up in the morning and have some cereal for breakfast, then at 10:30 she offers me a cup of tea that, it turns out, comes with a huge plate of fried bread. Then at 1:30 it’s time for lunch, a heaping portion of potatoes, onions, and sausage, with tomatoes and cucumbers on the side, and a jar of sugared apples that I have to turn down because, well, you can only eat so much without bursting. One has to learn how to say “no” to food, which is hard, for me…

Another thing that is cheap in Moscow is the subway. Basically, the metro makes SEPTA look like a crushed bottle-cap on a highway. Rides on the Moscow metro can be purchased 20 at a time for $10. If you buy 60 the price falls to 36 cents a ride. The metro trains come every minute; the stations are clean and ok-smelling and, as an added bonus, 200ish feet under ground so they can be used as bomb shelters. The kind babushka’s daughter told me about a relative from the previous generation who was studying music in Moscow when the Great Patriotic War started. Forced underground into the darkness of the subway, she painted piano keys on a wooden board and practiced in the tunnels until the war ended, at which time she took the conservatory test and passed. This is the kind of Totally Nuts Shit that happens in Russia. They actually have a government department called Ministerstvo Chrezvichainykh Situatziy which, roughly translated, means in English the “Ministry of Totally Nuts Shit” (a more orthodox translation would be the Ministry of Extraordinary Situations).

Speaking of government…I haven’t yet been stopped by the militzia who stand on every street, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time. They don’t need a reason to stop you; they can just do it as they please, which is why I have to keep my passport and police registration on me at all times. In this respect, I really miss the States. I trust the police force a lot more there and I don’t worry that I may have to bribe them.

My only encounter with the government, apart from the sketchy people at the consulate back in DC who gave me my visa and the woman at the airport who stamped my passport, is looking at state buildings from the street. They are quite something. Many are in what one commonly thinks of as the Soviet style: stern, sometimes forbidding grey and brown stone buildings that convey, as their designers surely intended, an impression of serious power. On the other hand, there are places like that formerly known as the Vystafka Dostizheniy Narodnovo Khozyaystva (Exhibit of the Achievements of People’s Husbandry), where each republic of the former USSR has dedicated to it one of a series of buildings that were apparently designed by architects who grew to adolescence on a diet of old Imperial Russian buildings, with their gold-slathered attempts to outdo western Europe in baroque splendor; and then in their late teens started smoking a really outlandish assortment of drugs, among which was one with “neo-classical” written on it somewhere in fine print. There are no buildings like this in the States – or if there are, I sure haven’t seen them. Maybe there are a few in Vegas.

As for Russian political views, I haven’t talked about politics extensively, because I don’t want to make myself unpopular, and there are some pretty off-colour ideas floating around here. I’ve heard the Caucasians, especially Georgians and Chechens, described as “people who are only good at managing oil and fighting or cutting off heads…they are very rich, and all the Russians work for them in the [open-air] markets…the Armenians are more cultured,” but still damnably Caucasian (in the geographical rather than the Blumenbach sense). “We are slaves” of the wealthy novie russkie, who, one hears it told, all hail from the Caucasus. One encounters real nostalgia for the Soviet era, when, if there was less freedom, there was more order. Sometimes it’s hard to keep my mouth shut when I hear things like “it’s terrible how many people died after perestroika, from desperation/poverty/drunkenness,” when I feel like pointing out that a hell of a lot more people died after the Russian Revolution—but then, the older generation here have lived most of their lives under Communist rule and I figure it’ll be tough for me to say anything that’ll change their minds now. I’ve also been told that Orthodox Russians frown upon the Catholic Church’s presence in Moscow, although I haven’t encountered any negative behavior from the locals in my visits to St. Louis of France Church (where, in what I am guessing might have been an arrangement calculated to speak against the racism that is so widespread in Russia, one of the four altar servers was black and one South Asian). I’ve only been to one service in English—I’m hoping to chiefly attend the services in Russian (the other options are Latin, Polish, French, and Vietnamese) to improve my language skills, but I’ve met a group of people that might be described as the Moscow Catholic English-speaking Sunday Breakfast Club (thanks Alex for mentioning them to me); they’re quite an interesting bunch as their professions include inter alia linguistics, geology, biological weapons inspection, and reconciling the respective schedules of the Russian and American crews on the International Space Station. Today I learned from the geologist fellow that the biggest oil field in Russia has 17,500 wells, whereas 600 is considered a large field in America. I’m lucky to have found a community like this. There are only two or three Catholic churches here, in a metropolitan area of roughly twelve million people – not a very large presence. St. Louis’ is several hundred years old, having been built back in the day when the imperial aristocracy was importing French people to teach them French.

The capitalist spirit, alive and well in post-communist Moscow, sometimes manifests itself in unexpected forms, such as the fellow walking through the commuter train trying to sell fishing rods, and the folding tables at street corners where one can buy pirated DVDs of movies that are still in theaters (I’m a little tempted to spring for that new Jet Li / Jason Statham flick). Russian marketers, conscious of the irony or not, have turned symbols of the old capitalism-hating regime into brand names and labels: “Red October” is a well-known candy company, and there’s a common ice cream bar named “USSR.” For sheer entertainment value, though, neither of these matches the product I just bought from the little grocery store on Tolstoy Street, viz. “Grigory Rasputin”- brand mustard.

So much for my first two weeks in Russia. As excited as I am to have the opportunity to study here, I think about the US, that is, apart from peanut butter and reasonably priced coffee and fast Internet and free public bathrooms and rational traffic patterns and mouthwash and clothes dryers and freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, I think about the people both at home and at school that I won’t see for 4 months. I miss you guys…and I use the term “guys” to include people of both sexes and all ages, which might be stretching its definition a little, but whatever; I’m looking forward to seeing you all in December/January. If you need to get hold of me, you can email me or call 7 916 779 7168, and my address is 6, Nesvizhskiy pereulok, apartment 27, Moscow, Russia. I don’t have reliable Internet access here every day, and I still haven’t mastered the system according to which my cell phone is set up, so I may not respond promptly to missives sent my way. Apologies.

Well, that about wraps things up. If something terribly awfully Great-Caesar’s-Ghost exciting happens in Moscow, I will try to send out a blurb about it. Warm regards from 8 hours ahead of you, which means you may read this before I send it and cause some kind of calamitous snarl in the time-space continuum.