But, given that she is a star of the show, how would she interact with any of the other stars if she could never leave the Eastern Bloc? I think she has to return to America. What could be the story line otherwise?
Nina is a beautiful nubile young lady and her attractiveness is a major component of her appeal. I think she will have to be in the direct presence of some man - like Beeman or Oleg Burov.
Russia, and the rest of what used to be the Soviet Union, has changed drastically in the last quarter century.
Yes, there are still people who are dirt poor, and things are still much better in the large cities than in the countryside. Yes, there is still a powerful oligarchy that is very skilled at siphoning off a lot of the country’s wealth. However, there is also a burgeoning middle class and no shortage of affordable consumer goods.
When I studied in Moscow in 1989–90, you could shop all day not find such simple things as yeast on the shelves. Nowadays, there is abundant food just about everywhere you go, and places like McDonalds and KFC are doing a booming business.
Many goods are imported from China and are of dubious quality, but supermarkets and department stores stock plenty of good items from the EU and US as well. Most of the food on sale seems to be locally produced, though you can also find imported stuff (Marmite, however, will never catch on in Russia 
).
By Western standards, salaries are not all that high, but most people seem to be doing quite well with what they get. The most blatant example of this is the great volume of automobiles that are now clogging the cities. The area where I live in southwest Moscow used to be a very clean, prestigious part of town. Now, in addition to being overbuilt and overpopulated, the streets are clogged with traffic and there’s no place you can park a car except on the sidewalks (some people drive on them to get around traffic jams). The air downtown is filthy and you can no longer hold a conversation on the street with the noise the traffic makes. In the summertime, the city center can be unbearable.
I could go on for another twenty pages and still not convey how much things have changed. Compared to the end of the *perestroika *era, I might just as well be living on another planet. (And I won’t even begin to describe what things were like the first time I visited Russia in 1975.)
Please excuse this very long post. It is directed primarily towards Terentii. But I did not send it as a Private Message because it’s about Russia and so I thought it would be relevant to the show “The Americans”. As a result, some other people may also be interested and that is why I posted it in this thread. However, if you object to very long posts or you are not interested in general questions about Russia, please feel free to bypass the spoiler button and also feel free to skip the info contained therein.
For Terentii,
Thanks very much for that great info. I had no idea about all that info. Most all my knowledge about Russia and the USSR was based on the WW2 era and your info makes watching The Americans much easier because it provides a lot more info. Actually, most of our info was about the USSR more so than Russia - especially about the USSR hockey team.
I still think of Elizabeth and her mother in terms of the enormous suffering the mother faced in WW2. I’m certain that left a huge impact on her mother’s psyche and also on Elizabeth although it must be to a lesser extent then her mother. I can still see in my mind’s eye the Russians that were hanged by the Nazis and left hanging for a week or two. That must have resulted in a huge degree of hatred by Russians towards the Nazis and Germany. Is that still prevalent to this day? Do most Russians feel very hostile towards Germany? Of course, we realize there is a very profound difference between Germans and Nazis. Some people can’t tell the difference between them and that is a terrible shame. It results in a great deal of misdirected hatred.
But, I still can’t get over the way that Russian soldiers and the Russian people suffered during WW2. I often enjoy watching documentaries and serials like “The World At War”. There are at least half a dozen excellent documentary serials that are similar. I have at least four of them. The ones I have are titled “WW2 in Colour”, “WW2 in High Def” and “WW2 in HD Color”. Believe it or not, they all have at least 13 episodes and they all provide a great deal of video as well as info about Russia’s involvement in WW2. It was an extremely heroic struggle - especially what happened at Stalingrad and St. Petersburg (or more properly called Leningrad I suppose). How in the world could an entire city last for so long with no food or water?
The way the Nazis launched their attack on Russia in June 1941 and the way the Russians moved so much of their industrial production thousands of miles East and ultimately defeated the Nazis is one of the greatest stories of the 20th century. I never grow tired of watching those serials.
I’m afraid that almost all the knowledge I have about Russia comes from documentaries like the serials I mentioned above as well as “The Russian Revolution”, “The Russian Revolution in Color” and “The Battle of Russia” and also movies like “Enemy at the Gates”.
There is something that I have often wondered about Russia and I hope you won’t mind if I ask you about it. I debated whether to send you this question as a PM. But since the show is largely about Russia, I figured it would be OK to post it here.
In 1961, I was eleven years old and one day our 6th grade elementary school teacher told us we were going to be assigned a year long class project. She gave us the address of the Russian embassy in our capital city (Ottawa) and instructed all of us to write to the Russian embassy and she gave us the exact words to use. They were something like, “Dear Sir or Madam, Our sixth grade class has been assigned a class project this year to study the history and geography of Russia. Can you please send me any available information about Russia so that I may complete this assignment?” She was not willing to take any questions as to why we were to write the Russian embassy to get this info instead of obtaining it from other sources. But, three weeks later, I received several booklets and pamphlets showing us pictures of Russia. I recall many large pictures of huge farm machines harvesting grain and discussing “The Five Year Plan” and the “Seven Year Plan” but there was little description as to just what these plans entailed.
It has always puzzled me why our teachers (this happened to all the 6th grade classes in our city and I’m not sure just how far it extended beyond that) told us to write to the Russian embassy when she could have just as easily told us to go to public libraries or to get some books from some other source. That was a real puzzle.
Would you have any idea why hundreds (possibly thousands) of children across Canada (and possibly other countries) were instructed to write to the Russian embassies to request this info. Is it possible the Russian embassies wrote to school boards in various countries and told them they had prepared these pamphlets and booklets and other information and invited them to have students write to the embassies and request this info.
I often wondered if this was some kind of ploy by the Russian government to give this info to the children of other countries in order to interest them in Russia - possibly with the goal in mind to have these children emigrate to Russia when they became older or whether it was a ploy by Canada to make demands on the Russian embassies and their resources.
I’m just about to go to bed, and I have a lot of work to do over the next three days, so any long answer will have to wait. But in brief, yeah, the USSR was heavily into PR and self-promotion (if they had shown what most collective farms were really like, e.g., it would have seriously tarnished their image).
I don’t think this is anything uniquely Soviet; pretty much every other country in the world does it. But at no time was reality in the USSR ever as great as they would have liked outsiders to think.
OK. Feel free to take your time. This question has waited for 54 years and so it can surely wait for a few more days. Laff.
Huh, by the time I was there in '90 there seemed to be plenty of food, and in fact there were little stands everywhere that sold the most amazing ice cream I have ever tasted (though admittedly, I told this to a Russian emigre I became friends with here in the U.S., and he said he liked American ice cream better because of all the different flavors, so go figure).
Where did you shop? The one and only Stockman’s at Paveletskaya, or the Sadko on Kutuzovskii? (I forget the name of the supermarket at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel.)
In January 1990, I spent an entire afternoon scouring Moscow in a snowstorm trying to find yeast so I could make pizza for my friends. The only place that had it was the berezka (hard currency store) near Belorusskaya, and they refused to take my American dollars because everything there was sold for diplomatic scrip only.
At the big grocery store by my institute (which is now stocked with all kinds of food), you could almost count on the fingers of one hand the number of items for sale: bread, macaroni, rice, baloney, stale margarine, and milk that went sour overnight. While you were standing in line for whatever you wanted, you could watch the sparrows fly down from the rafters and eat the grain that had spilled on the floor. (No, I am not making any of this up!)
The late perestroika era (late '80s, very early '90s) was probably the time of the worst shortages in the major cities during the last few decades of Soviet rule. Things were really falling apart by that point. In the early 1980s, there were certainly shortages of particular items and it was hardly an era of great luxury but it wasn’t a time of tremendous deprivation either. The defector character in “The Americans” probably would have had access to a greater variety of products than the ordinary citizen since she worked in a (presumably) prestigious institute, and she could have ordered groceries through her workplace. She was probably a Party member as well, which would have also allowed her various privileges.
Charlie Wayne, I hope you don’t mind if I answer your post above. You are absolutely right about the long-lasting impact of WWII on the Soviet (and post-Soviet) psyche. However, I don’t see much in the way of hostility toward Germans among Russians these days. Just as one bit of anecdotal evidence, my elderly father-in-law served in the Soviet army, fighting all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin. He doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Germans as people, and he has very fond memories of his visits to East Germany in the 1980s. People of younger generations don’t seem to have any kind of negative feelings toward contemporary Germans, as far as I can see.
What a fascinating story about your elementary school project. I have no idea why Canadian teachers would have their students write to the Soviet embassy, but I assume it was an attempt to receive the most up-to-date materials possible. Information in encyclopedias and the like was probably dated. Of course, the Soviet government was generally very eager to promote its achievements. There was even a magazine called Soviet Life that was produced specifically for the English-speaking world. The U.S. government created its own magazine called America which was sold throughout the Soviet Union. The two governments had some sort of reciprocal agreement about these publications.
Chaika,
Mind? Of course not. I enjoy your posts very much and I’m delighted that you would answer my question. I find it very interesting that your elderly father-in-law does not feel any resentment towards German people. I think that is a very enlightened attitude and I’d really love to know just how many Russians who were alive during WW2 and were old enough to understand what the Nazis were doing, actually do bear some hatred towards the German people because of all the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Russian people.
I still don’t understand why the Canadian elementary school teachers directed their students to write to the USSR government in 1961 and I’d really love to know why. My best guess is that they were directed to do this by the provincial (that’s like an American State government) governments but as to why? I have no idea and it would have to be some kind of political directive.
Thanks very much Chaika for taking the time to answer me. I certainly do appreciate your doing that.
You’re more than welcome. 
I should clarify that in Russia there was (and is) a tremendous amount of enmity directed at the Nazis. It just doesn’t extend to ordinary Germans nowadays, at least in my observation. The historical memory about the war is very strong and the scars run very deep, even though the war generation is all but gone now. You can see how much these memories still resonate in the rhetoric the current Russian government has directed at the Maidan protesters in Ukraine, for example.
By the way, February 23rd is a holiday in Russia: Defenders of the Fatherland Day (formerly Soviet Army Day).
It’s still around under the name Russian Life, though it’s now owned by a private company.
Is anyone else here experiencing delays or maybe it would be better called “jags” when trying to get to the bottom of the page of messages?
I’m not describing that vary well. Sorry. But I notice that when a thread gets kind of long - like there are now 294 posts in this thread - and each page contains a max of 100 posts. Oh dear. Is it possible that I set the number of posts per page myself? Am I causing this problem for myself?
Anyway, it now takes me close to 30 seconds to get to the bottom of a page and read the latest posts in this thread. I always thought that was due to Internet “lag” but, it may just be due to the number of posts per page. In fact, it may be caused by the large number of posts per page. I will be embarrassed if it is caused by the large number of posts per page which is a variable set by each user.
Oh dear. I just hope I’m not complaining about something that I have, in fact, caused for myself.
It defaults to 50.
I don’t remember any names of stores (except that some of them were just called generic things like the Russian words for “bread”, “ice cream”, etc., which I thought was cool–talk about cutting out all the money wasted on advertising and branding). But this was in Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk (where, we were told, we were the first Westerners allowed to visit in decades), Odessa, and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). I was in Moscow briefly but did not go to any stores there.
I did think it was strange and annoying how you had to buy things. My memory is a little hazy, but it was something like you had to get a ticket at one counter, then bring that to a different one to pay. And the staff seemed surly.
OTOH there were a lot of cafeterias here and there where you could load up and get a bunch of food, even caviar, for a very small amount of money (like five or ten cents in American money IIRC). And the street food (or maybe “subway food” is more accurate) was very good too: I don’t know what they were called, but sort of like eggrolls with ground beef and onions and spices inside (kind of reminiscent of a street item commonly sold in Kenya as well).
SlackerInc - Have to say I was in Moscow in 91/92 and I don’t recognise your descriptions eitherr.
Again, they are descriptions of cities in Ukraine and Leningrad in 1990, not of Moscow in '91 or '92.
I’ll add some more and see if any of this rings a bell with anyone. Alongside the Dniepr river, you could buy large glasses of beer that was very strong. A girl I met took me to meet her parents, who lived a long bus ride away (similar to some European cities, no one actually collected fares or tokens to get on, but if you got caught without the little ticket, which seemed to be made out of something like newsprint, you were in trouble). They lived in a giant high-rise, like a projects building, which was just plunked very oddly in the middle of a forest. The hallways and elevator looked like projects too, dirty, with graffiti; but the inside was homey and nicely decorated.
In Dnepopetrovsk, our hosts plied us with large amounts of vodka, which was chased with a thick slurry of fruit (strawberry, I think, somewhere between jam and juice).
In Kiev, the first, or at least “an early”, volley in the ongoing fight between Kiev and Moscow, happened to take place right when we were there. There was a general strike (this girl’s father was a striker, and was trying to convey impassioned thoughts to me, but my Russian was too poor to understand and my Ukrainian nonexistent) and the Ukrainian national flag had been raised in the central square for the first time in modern times, replacing the Soviet republic version. Masses of flowers were laid around the flagpole.
In Leningrad, I had a debate with a young man who complained bitterly about Gorbachev and various conditions of Soviet life, something like the disagreement we are having now. We were talking though mainly about clothing rather than food. He was forced to admit that there was plenty of perfectly serviceable clothing in the stores, but his complaint was that one must have Levis jeans and other Western logo’d apparel, because if you just wore the Soviet stuff “no one will like you”. That sounded stupid to me, and I told him so.
In anticipation of tonight’s episode, I am posting a link to some biographical information about Annet Mahendru (the actress who plays the part of Nina who was a Russian KGB agent who got fairly involved in spying - perhaps much too quickly and much more than she could handle). This information is contained in the IMDB data base and the list of her accomplishments read something like a list than any six other people might have done. However she did it all and she is only one person. I’m posting this because I fully expect she will be given a breakout performance soon - in an upcoming episode this season - possibly even tonight - because she is listed as a star of the show, but she currently just spends her time curled up in bed and feeling sorry for herself.
It is such a shame and such a waste of a fine performer. It is enough to make any one of her fans just break down and cry.
You know, I must admit that I can talk all this high faluting stuff about Anna. It’s not difficult. After all, she got a brown belt in Karate (not sure but it looks like she did that before reaching her 11th birthday) and at the same time, she studied and acquired some advanced techniques in Russian dance - all the while reading a book on some language. She learned six different languages before becoming twelve - at least that is the way it looks on paper. In addition, she has several other achievements. But that is all just a bogus cover story. I like Anna because she is incredibly beautiful and sexy and there is just no sense in denying that. After all, I’m sure that I’m not fooling anybody. Surely, you all must know why I like her. I’m just your typical horny old man in his 60s looking for a beautiful young maiden to worship.
Oh, yikes! I best go away now before I fully embarrass myself past the point of no return. Anyway, I promised you a link and here it is:
If anyone else is interested in discussing Annet, it will be very easy to get me into more of this discussion. I think the analogy would be very close to, “shooting fish in a barrel” and, I mean horny old man type fish, btw.
Oops. I called her “Anna” in my post above. Of course, her name is “Annet”.
Yeah, that first bedroom scene with Stan made me take notice.