Thanks for starting this thread.
When I look at Russia on the map, I’m struck by how freaking huge it is and I imagine that a lot if it is rural. Did you get the impression that the politics of the communists really play a big role the lives of the people that live in the eastern 2/3 of the country? Or did they consider themselves somewhat isolated from the officialdom?
I read a “beautiful Russian women want YOU!”-type dating site for a time. It said that Russian women (at least the ones looking for a husband overseas) viewed Russian men as excessively-prone to drinking alcohol, were fed up with the situation, and were looking elsewhere.
How true is this? Do Russian men, on average, drink a lot, or is a population of moderate drinkers skewed drinkward by a few absolute sots? What about Russian women? What is the attitude towards drinking–do non-drinkers, especially men, have a hard time?
Do or did Russians travel within their country a lot? Is the east coast isolated from the rest of the country?
Is the population of Russia decreasing? What is it like environmentally–are there vast zones of pollution and ruined landscapes?
Eva Luna, please tell me to butt out of your thread if I’m hijacking it, but it’s killing me not sharing my own personal anecdotes.
I don’t know if it’s the drinking that Russian women are trying to escape. It’s just poverty, and a somewhat misogynist culture. A women can and will get a great education, but despite the fact she’s smarter than the men around her, and every bit as well educated, she may still end up being the good looking coffee-serving secretary who actually runs the place, while the guys are out having a cig. I’ve seen it. You enter an office and there’s this secretary/assistant serving coffee, the guys go outside to have a smoke, then you start talking to the secretary and very quickly find out if she were in the US, she’d have a Master’s in business. Appalling! As a gay guy, I wanted to marry one of these women, take them back to the States, let them carve out a business empire and I’ll stay home with the kids!
It’s so strange though. Next thing you know, you meet the head of the local area’s medical department and it’s a woman. Huh? Is this a chauvinist culture or not? It’s kinda like the US. Women can advance into the higher levels of power, but not the really, really high levels of power.
A custom that was strange to me, was if you were a single man, or a man out to dinner with another man, you get seated with women. There were women who would hang out, waiting to be paired up with any eligible seeming man who showed up at the restaurant for dinner. They weren’t prostitutes exactly. It’s just you couldn’t be a man having dinner in a restaurant without female companions. During the Cold War, they were likely also working for the KGB. During the breakup of the USSR, they may or may not have been KGB informants. There was still the custom of hooking up unaccompanied men with young, attractive, intelligent conversationally pleasant women and you’re expected to pay for dinner. At least. If things went well, you just might have found yourself a wife. This was always a bit awkard for me, but I played along. I was actually more interested in that buff waiter. 
I hear the next PIXAR movie is Lightning McQueen Does Moscow.
Sorry, darn job…now where were we?
I imagine things were (and are) different in the countryside; the only pagan leftover I witnessed was Ivan Kupalo. Russian superstitions could be a whole thread in themselves, though - the draft will kill you if you sit on the floor, single women should never sit on the corner of a table or they will never get married, and so on.
I’ve noticed that too, and not just with Russians; the Polish groceries around here carry an astounding variety of honey. I’m not sure why that is - culturally specific food preferences could also be a whole thread in themselves, or someone’s dissertation in cultural anthropology, for that matter.
That is a huge question which would take volumes to answer properly. Who? Where? When? Why? Most people acknowledged that the USSR had some major political issues; some thought the answer was democratization, but many also thought the answer was strong central government that didn’t tolerate dissent. Stalin still has his fans. It’s hard to give a good answer to this one - even now, Russian sociology is highly underdeveloped, and that’s even more so in the rest of the FSU. Many people are still going to be quite reluctant to share political opinions with strangers, especially older people.
Where have you read that? As far as I’ve ever seen, it’s the default drink of choice, for men at least. However, another Russian superstition is that once you open a bottle of vodka, it’s bad luck not to finish it during that bout of drinking, so either you need a bunch of people to help, or a few really heavy drinkers. (I don’t know about now, but when I was last there many brands of vodka didn’t even come in resealable bottles.)
Depends where - in the banya (sauna), nudity was the norm, even in mixed-gender groups. In general, it’s probably closer to the Euro view on nudity than the American one, with (of course) variations depending on where you are.
Absolutely. Much less automation of basic everyday tasks; needing to search around and wait in long lines for basic necessities, possibly acquiring them on the black market; horrible dietary and other public health issues; you get the picture.
However, my opinion is that one very positive aspect of Soviet society was a result of this phenomenon: people placed a much higher value on friendships, even relatively casual ones, than is often the case in the U.S. The reason: your friends were your lifeline, your survival mechanism, to a far greater extent than in a society where people can be self-sufficient with mere cash. Ther is a Russian proverb which can sound either super-sentimental or super-cynical, depending on how you look at it: “*luchshe ne sto rubley, a sto druzey,” *(better to have not a hundred rubles, but a hundred friends), which means that many things were simply unattainable without inside connections of some kind.
Currants (red as well as black): well, you might as well ask why we almost never see them in the U.S., except in the form of imported jam. I mean you can grow just about anything in some part of the U.S. or another, so why don’t we see currants in the stores? But they are everywhere in central and eastern Europe. I wish we had them here - I love them!
Grapes: well, much of Russia is not the right climate for growing grapes, though there are some imported from warmer FSU climes (chiefly the Caucasus, including lots of Georgian wine). Why no grape jelly? Maybe it’s leftover cultural heritage on my part, but I’ve had zero interest in grape jelly since I was about 7 years old. Give me some nice red currant jam anytime instead!
Conversely, I’ve often wondered why many other foods common in Russia are hardly seen here - for example, why do so many Americans hate beets?
Nope, sorry - never read it.
I haven’t known many Georgians well - the exception was my grad school lit professor, a, how shall we say this? quite colorful Georgian poet. She didn’t talk much about Stalin, except in the context of giving biographic details on the poets we read in class (she was madly in love with Aleksandr Blok, and a big fan of Anna Akhmatova as well, whose family suffered terribly under Stalin). But she thought people in the West had swallowed Eduard Shevardnadze’s image as a democratic reformer hook, line, and sinker. She considered him, and I quote, a “vicious KGB general.” Sadly, details were not forthcoming - probably not enough Georgian wine consumed on that occasion.
If you haven’t already, check out this absolutely classic thread. If you really want some insight into the social context of Soviet women, check out Francine du Plessix Gray’s Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope. To be frank, many Soviet (and post-Soviet) women consider marrying a near-stranger met online to be a preferable alternative to more familiar surroundings and options. And they aren’t supid; there are very real societal reasons for this, including sexism, severe discrimination and pervasive alcoholism.
Your average Russian man does a lot more binge drinking, IME, than your average American man. It’s much easier to get trashed quickly if you’re pounding vodka shots. There is immense peer pressure to drink heavily in Russia, much mroe so than here.
Luckily the pressure isn’t nearly as severe for women, or I would have had major problems. A woman could just have a glass of wine and not be looked down upon; if a man didn’t want to drink heavily, he pretty much had to come up with some kind of serious excuse. Our orientation materials recommended lying and saying you had an ulcer or were on medication; the Soviets must have thought we were a sickly bunch. Also luckily for me, I hung out with a lot of North Caucasian Muslims; not that they didn’t drink, but there was zero pressure for women to drink most of the time. A Soviet was considered a bad host if your plate or glass were ever empty, so I found the best technique was to eat or drink very, very slowly.
Well, the east coast is several hours’ flying time from anywhere even semi-populated in Russia; from Moscow even to Novosibirsk, which is central SIberia, it was a 4-hour flight. Those in European Russia who could afford it liked to vacation on the Black Sea - Crimea and Sochi were popular vacation destinations. Or people would go visit other Union Republics; the Caucasus, in more peaceful times, was a popular change of scenery. But most of my friends were not ethnic Russians, so on vacations they would go to wherever their extended families were.
Yep, as is the average life expectancy.
There are some beautiful pristine birch forests, vast tundra, gorgeous mountains (it’s really too bad I don’t have a scanner, or I’d post some pictures of Altai). At the same time, Russia has some really serious environmental issues. We were told to both filter and boil tap water in Novosibirsk, not to prevent giardia (which had been the issue in Leningrad), but to filter out mercury and other heavy metals and fertilizer chemicals.
Not at all! Please go ahead and contribute to your heart’s content; like I mentioned upfront, this should be a communal effort.
Agreed 100%. A grad school classmate (actually, she was a Ph.D. political science student a few years ahead of me) wrote her dissertation on women in the post-Soviet workforce; she gave a fascinating lecture for the department on the subject. Soviet law enshrined a high level of legal and social benefits for women: multi-year paid maternity leaves and such. The result was that after the breakup of the USSR, when companies actually had to figure out how to mkae money, but the legal system essentially wasn’t functioning anymore, people realized these benefits were expensive, so women were the last hired and first fired. Plus then there were the lovely job ads specifying the desired candidate’s height, hair color, and measurements, plus the phrase "bez kompleksov, (no hangups), which basically means “will sleep with the boss.”
The most hilarious bit of the lecture was when she explained that to support herself while doing dissertation research in Moscow, she had worked as a legal secretary for an American law firm (she’s been a legal secretary between college and grad school). The office manager, who was gay, used to dread hiring admin staff, because they all thought they had to proposition him to get the job - they would come into his office and gradually hike up their skirts, until he literally thought he was going to be sick.
I don’t think most Russians actually want Stalin back, per se. It’s just that Stalinism was a time of relative material plenty when compared with late perestroika, and also compared with the standard of living that many people have if they are forced to rely on government pensions for their primary support; government pensions are infinitesmally small. Those whose entire formative adult years were spent under socialism have often had a hard time adjusting.
Also, there was much less common crime under Stalin, and fewer ethnic conflicts (and those that did occur were frequently hushed up, so people didn’t hear about them). Those who pine for a strong Stalinesque central authority figure probably see the current sociololitical/economic situation as highly dislocated. And it was a time when the USSR was viewed as a great world power, worthy of fear and respect.
I’d agree with that, with the exception of the extremely drunk woman in my favorite thread linked in the OP who mistook me for a hard-currency prostitute. That was hilarious.
All sorts of things - a far smaller proportion of the population gets a university education than in the U.S. (there is a distinction between 5-year universities and 4-year technical schools/institutes/pedagogical institutes, not to mention numerous shorter higher education and technical training programs of various sorts). So the people I knew, who were studying at one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Russia, were more likely to have an intellectual bent. Wikipedia has a decent explanation of the Soviet educational system, which has remained essentially the same from a structural viewpoint (though there have been experiments with making some formerly 5-year university degrees into 4-year ones, to correspond more closely with the Western model).
My aforementioned roomie studying Arabic poetry, last I checked, was running the Soros Foundation office in Almaty; the nice Ukrainian roomie who taught me to make borsch was teaching Ukrainian history in a technical college in her hometown, last I heard. Another friend went on to graduate school in Middle East Studies, and I have a sneaking (but unconfirmed) suspicion that my boyfriend from 1989 ended up in military intelligence. (Some of my American classmates also suspected as much.) Another of the North Caucasian guys started an import/export business, and last I heard was living in London.
The same that college students do many other places, just differently - stay up all night talking with friends, trying to get into each other’s pants, drinking, dancing (someone turned a barren meeting room in the dorm into a makeshift dance club, which was very successful until some idiot started a fight and the dorm administration closed it down, much to everyone’s chagrin), reading books, the occasional commuter train trip out of the city into one of the gorgeous Tsarist palaces that could be reached by commuter rail, going concerts practically for free and to some of the most mind-boggling museums in the world…but hardly ever to anything resembling a sit-down restaurant. There wasn’t much of anywhere to go grab a burger with friends and hang out; Soviet restaurants were mostly special-occasion places, complete with tables full of zakuski, a live band, and a disco ball, and were budgetarily out of reach most of the time. It was far more common for Soviets to entertain at home, and Soviet hospitality was amazing. People would really go all-out to impress their guests and make them feel welcome. You’d be amazed at the spreads I saw college students put together with nothing more than a hot plate and some ingenuity!