Alien Antfarm

I was wrong. There is waterfront infrastructure, and the shoreline DOES attract people on warm, sunny weekend afternoons––they just don’t go to the dirty part I visited Thursday. I’m still struck by the sight of people having picnics on rocky coasts strewn with garbage, of children playing in the turning leaves with smokestacks, cranes, and other monuments to heavy industry looming in the background. In Connecticut it causes an uproar if somebody’s house is too close to the street, or if a cell tower goes up where it “doesn’t belong”. In western Massachusetts, it takes years of public relations work to get a single wind turbine built. Not in Soviet Union (it seems less true today, although we'll see if the Gasprom building goes up). Here people always seem like an affront to the architecture. The Winter Palace (and Pavlovsk, which I visited today), strikes me as too beautiful, too grand for whatever people could think of doing there. Where I live, the Soviet-era apartments buildings are like huge machines, which ask not for fickle people, but for perfect interlocking parts––precise, sturdy, reliable. In a city where the buildings resent people, in a sense that their design does not eminate from the people or respond well to their needs, where the roads and cars and buses do not seem to express the people's will––or expresses the collective so well that the result is a boring compromise, like when you get white from combining all the colors––then art is only the things that happen to be neglected or the things that don’t fit, or the deliberate choices that carry a human face, rather than the stamp "made in the USSR"--and each thing is then automatically opposed to the straight lines, the Soviet expectation of what kind of person should fill the spaces it invented. (I also think that's why people get so depressed by Russia--because Soviet buildings demand to be perfect and obviously cannot be kept in perfect shape). Public expression, banned from the buildings, cars, and parks, defaults to the dead dog on the sidewalk, the Caucasians (people from the Caucuses) who sell fruit on the sidewalk and get harassed by the police; the beer bottle that guy's trying to hide; graffiti, cigarette butts, and all the things that got knocked off their pedestals during the night.

PS: My host brother took the picture. I think its amazing, way better than any I took that day. I'm hoping he gets into photography.

Down by the Seaside, Baby

Tom Sawyer, in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, insists on applying the laws of adventure writing to real-life problems, such that when it comes time to rescue the runaway slave from “prison,” he invents an absurdly elaborate scheme––the Rube Goldberg machine of schemes––which takes weeks to put into action and puts everyone else’s safety in jeopardy. Form over function; ego over all. The same can be said for Peter the Great, who was so enamored with sea travel, so committed to transforming his country into a nation of seafarers (like Holland, in his eyes), that he excluded bridges from the city plan. He also dug many more canals than exist today. Thankfully, his successors filled in the more excessive ones and built scores of bridges (if I’m not mistaken, there are around 300 today). Neither did they take to seafaring as he hoped.

It seems as though the people are completely indifferent to the seaside where I live. There are no parks or walkways, nowhere at all for girls to go wild, should they do wish to do so. It could easily be one of the most depressing places in the city, but living in Russia, you form a zen-like peace with decay in all its forms––garbage, crumbling concrete, dead animals and people (a dead dog by my apartment, a dead man in a smashed up Volga automobile), horrible smells (a student on the program said that his house smelled as though a hundred babies were trucked in daily to deliver their aromatic cargos). I really enjoyed looking at the garbage––speculating as to what kinds of crimes and misdemeanors take place in this, the seediest of places. A used condom, some broken glass, a tube sock, a McDonalds bag (“I’m lovin’ it,” doesn’t translate, so they use, roughly “here’s what I love”). I saw a police car and a civilian car side-by-side in a grove of trees, almost hidden from view doing something illegal, I imagined. Some guy was trying to impress his girlfriend by doing high-speed 180s in the parking lot in his early 90s Lada. On the indelicate concrete slabs that form the actual water-land interface, three young anglers in black turtlenecks chugged Balticas, the local beer, and took turns casting.

But I didn’t find any syringes, which is what I was really looking for. I wanted to see syringes everywhere; I wanted them to be sticking out of the ground, clogging drainage pipes, tossing about in the surf, being swallowed by seagulls adapted to their consumption. I know I’m being flippant; heroin use, and AIDs transmitted via infected needles is a serious problem here and I don’t mean to make light of it. I’m even embarrassed by my enthusiasm. Where did it come from? The idealistic take (from the standpoint of my moral maturity), is that the syringes are not signs of another’s misery or but of a version of reality, which, as a product of a nice place in Connecticut, I’ve never seen before and so I was simply curious. But this feels incomplete and quixotic. The other possibility is that they ARE signs of another’s misery and failing, of a major pitfall that I have avoided thus far, are therefore I wanted to find them to inflate my own balloon somehow. Or perhaps I was searching for corroborating evidence––of the drug problem of course, but also of the tenacious big, bad, scary Russia myth I’ve heard for so long in so many forms.

Back in touch

Sorry about that weeklong haitus. Rules changed and I got cut off from the internet. Back now. Here's the deal, I'm going to post twice a week. I'll post when I can for now, and then I'll try to work into a schedule--Sundays and Wednesdays perhaps. There's a lot to catch up on.

The Kunstkamera

According to the Lonely Planet guide, there are four places a visitor must see Petersburg: the Hermitage, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, the Church of the Spilled Blood, and the Peter and Paul Fortress. Until yesterday I had seen all but the Anthropology museum, better known as the 'Kunstkamera' (German for ‘art chamber’). It's famous for two things: 1) being Russia’s first museum (Peter founded it in 1714) and 2) permanantly displaying (Gaga and anybody else who is squimish, skip this and the next paragraph) Peter's collection of deformed, hundred-plus-year-old fetuses, hearts, legs, and heads, which can be found floating in jars on the third floor. Peter thought up the exhibition as a way to educate his ‘unenlightened’ subjects, to convince them that birth deformities were not caused by spells, the devil, etc, but by “internal damage as well as fear and the beliefs of the mother during pregnancy.” A step in the right direction.

There they are––skins white, rubbery and loose in suspended decay. Their tiny eyelids opened just a crack so you can see the lifeless, unblinking eyes inside. Two headed fetuses, cyclopses, fetuses with ‘Janus-syndrome’ (two faces), brain hemorrhages bulging here and there, and one whose entire face just fans out around a square inch where the eyes, nose and mouth are horribly condensed.

I thought it would be cool. I’m gross, they’re gross––bingo, perfect, where do I sign. But it bothered me that they were infants, and even more that they were just floating there, completely intact. A dissected body is just a body, an incredible machine that's been opened for investigation. But when you simply undress the thing and leave it completely intact, its a freakshow, a grave insult. Even if all none were killed for the exhibition (I’ll take their word), they still lived momentary, tragic lives and deserve to be buried, not floating naked in jars for eternity. Call me old fashioned.

The New?

It couldn't have been scripted better. Having just passed the creaky communists, I resumed my awkward vigil by the entrance to the Gostiniy Dvor metro station. My friends were supposed to meet me here half an hour ago and I had run out of minutes on my phone so calling them was impossible.

It started when a few boys, ten-fifteen yrs old, emerged from the metro station and gathered in the center of the plaza. They were joined by a few more, and then half a minute later a few more, and they just kept coming. The invasion was underway. Within five minutes there were well over two hundred 5'5", baby-faced, fatigued boys massed in the center of the plaza. They pushed and jostled into two colomns. Five to ten older boys (no more than twenty), confidently herded the mass. I actually saw one of them practice his goose-step. If the communists symbolized the old Russia, do these kids symbolize the new? And if so, how many goose-stepping pre-pubescents are required before we can call on the Hitler Youth analogy? More broadly, what's going on with militarism in this country?

It alayed my fears a bit to learn that the little soldiers were students at a local military academy. I was always used to associating military school with deliquents and military families, but in Russia it's much more mainstream. Parents send their children to the military academy to get them a spot in the officer corps come draft time; better than with the grunts, where reports of abuse and suicide is chillingly common. So, in short, this is not the Hitler Youth (a nationlistic youth movement called "Nashi" ("Ours") exists, but I don't know much about them.)

Still, this legion of little soldiers sent chills down my spine. What if the little soldiers grow up to be big ones? What if the ones who look like children dressed up for holloween grow into their baggy uniforms? What if goose-stepping, for them, begins to feel like walking?

The Old

United States : Democracy :: Russia : ___________

Don't say communism; don't do it! Fight it, fight it!
Here's why:

I ran into some communists on saturday outside the Gostinii Dvor metro stop on Nevskii Prospekt (the street Dostoevsky made famous). They stood out rather sharply: a row of fifteen white heads, wrinkly hands and faces popping out of knitted sweaters on the banks of a roaring river of pedestrians, surrounded by posh jewelry shops and gigantic advertisements for the latest BMW. Every week the communists (all pensioners) bring their flags here, to one of the busiest metro stops in the city, on Petersburg's Fifth Avenue, to proclaim loudly that they're not buying it, this new Russia I mean. I stood there for a few minutes reading one of the signs, which argued, point-by-point, why life was better under Stalin (by the way can you imagine seeing "life was better under Ike" signs at Grand Central? Stalin died in 1953!) Reason number 1: "Under Stalin, bread prices fell. Under Putin, they have been rising." As I was reading this, three boys about twelve years old started arguing with one of the women, who happened to have two very prominant gold teeth. "But what about all the people he killed?" they asked. She replied gruffly "Stalin made this country great!" The boys walked away giggling.

Lenin must be spinning in his grave: The politics of "Workers of the World Unite" is now the politics of "when I was your age..."; the army of the proletariat, now fifteen grouchy pensioners, standing off to the side as the rest of the city passes them by.

Only the Good Die Young

They sell greeting cards at the bookstore I pass by everyday on my way home from school. The selection isn't as good as your neighborhood CVS--only two display racks by the checkout counter as opposed to a whole aisle. Most of them are blank inside and I only found one or two that told jokes. They also have those generic birthday cards for every five year increment (5s and 0s I mean) just like we do. I always love looking through those to see how the wording and presentation changes with the audience. "Happy 10th" is bright orange splattered with skateboards and basketballs and pencils and the Cheetos cat wearing those sunglasses that Slater wears in Saved By the Bell. Happy 80th is a deep-green-colored card tastefully (well, that was the idea) adorned with silver linings and carnations and candles and a glass of champagne, half full. The reason I'm tell you all this is because I noticed that they didn't have one for 80. They don't even have 70. Anyone want to take a guess at where they stopped?

60. That's right, 60.

Maybe its cultural--there are plenty of older folks here; maybe the Russians just think its rude to remind people over sixty of their age. But I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the puzzlingly low average life expectancy in Russia, currently 59 for men and 63 for women. I was shocked when I heard this. Apparently it was't much higher in Soviet times either. In case Vladimir Putin (President Bush's reported nickname for him, "Pooty Poot", caused a furor here) is reading, I'm not writing this to humiliate Russia (a ubiquitous accusation against foreigners these days). I've been interested in this question ever since I saw my Economics professor at Williams give a presentation on the puzzling decline in life-expectancy which took place during the 1990s (she confessed that she hadn't solved it yet).

How do you explain these two little numbers? What do they say about Russian culture (in the West they say that the individual doesn't matter in Russia), the bureaucracy, the transition from the USSR (the health system famously fared poorly), and the inner health of Russia as it makes it makes it boisterous return to the world stage?

Observations from my psychoanalysis class

-Russian professors answer their phone during class not because they don't know its rude, but because there's no voicemail in Russia.
-Psychoanlysis attracts students with lip rings and unconventional hair-on-head configurations at a higher rate than other classes.
-The girl with long, braided, orange hair to my right is sketching nude, anime women right beside our professor--the director of the largest and most prestigious psychiatric hospital in Petersburg--and neither of them think anything of it.
-I am going to have to get used to being the authority on all things American.
-I can't understand what's being said. This will be my audit class.

Last night my host mother got me out of bed at 12:30 in order to serve me a comically large piece of watermelon. Both my parents absolutely insisted that I eat the whole thing so I did. Almost everybody on the program experiences this overhospitality. I'm told it came about as a reaction to psychological trauma of the Nazi blockade. I'll say more about it later.

The News and The Weather

I haven't had access to the internet in a few days. I'll make more of an effort to post M-F.

The weather verges on apocalypic. The wind and rain come off the Gulf of Finland in massive thunder clouds. Where I live, by the water, the rain falls horizontally and twice a day. I wonder if Dostoevsky would have been himself without the Petersburg weather––which includes the famous whitenights, when you'll go outside in broad daylight and the streets will be completely empty as though the city were deserted.

I have my first actual Smolny class today, in about an hour. The class is psychoanalysis. I've heard great things about the professor, but I'm a bit worried I won't understand her. In addition to that, I'm signed up to take a RSL class (Russian as a second language), and courses on Shastakovich, the theory of fascism, late Soviet un-official culture, and weekly piano lessons. All but the Soviet culture class are in Russian. Yes, I'm scared.

This past weekend we met some Smolny students, and I stayed up all night Friday in Oksana's apartment somewhere in the Petrogradskaya region (north Petersburg) listening and occasionally talking to two Siberians (two people from Siberia, two students, two peers, two kids...is there any really good way to say this). Before that we all played charades and I had to act out "imagination." I thought I did it rather well.

The girls who hang out with Oksana are energetic and cheerful (some Russians actually are, hilariously so. My grammar professor spends the whole class giggling to herself and asking us and God for forgiveness). They run and dance and laugh like crazy. Yesterday they came with us to Peterhoff (which reminds me I have to tell about the Hermitage another time)––Peter the Great's answer to Versaille, a 30 minute hydrofoil ride from the city (see picture). The girls piruetted, mimicing the actors in period clothing who waltz by the fountains everyday at noon and then retreat like the figurines in a coocoo clock. The palace itself is magnificent blah blah blah. Didn't anybody realize how lame they were being when they built ANOTHER huge, Italian-renaissance palace. Still everybody seems to think its a smash hit––tons of tourists. Everybody loves a good palace––the Czars, the Soviets, the Nazis (the Soviets destroyed Peterhoff in part because Hitler was planning a celebration "horaay we beat Russia-themed" party there. I'm sure he had a "Mission Accomplished" banner made up), and of course the tourists.