When we got on the Metro I noticed that the woman sat down across from the man and the young child sat down next to her father. This appeared quite strange to me until I realized, when the women started signing, that that both husband and wife were deaf; they were sitting across from one another so that they could carry on a civilized conversation. When the woman had signed her piece, the husband started to respond but realized that he was handicapped by his beer. Feeling the urgent need to talk, he handed the beer to his daughter, who, with two hands, obligingly held the half-liter of lager for the duration the journey while mom and dad had a lively conversation across the wagon.
With young mothers smoking walking their babies and men drinking beer at all hours of the day and night, Russian’s health is deteriorating at a precipitous rate. While the health indicators of many former communist countries in Central Europe are improving rapidly, according to many, Russia is on the verge of a health catastrophe, much of it do to heavy smoking and drinking. This trend, among other things, causes my neighbor upstairs, presumably after heavy drinking, to throw all his vodka, beer, gin, and tonic bottles out his window, where they land and remain right outside mine.
In an article in the Moscow Times (originally published in The Washingto Post), journalist Jackson Diehl linked that health of former Communist countries to their chosen political path. While in Poland, a country that has embraced democracy, the average life expectancy has climbed 4 years, in Russia and other CIS countries, that have embraced “managed democracy” or dictatorship average life expectancy has plummeted. Interestingly, the Baltic States’ health indicators dropped right after the collapse of the U.S.S.R, but started to rise again when the started implementing democratic reforms and moving towards joining the E.U.
The snow having melted and the weather having climbed below freezing, I see many mothers strolling with a friend and pushing along their infants’ in a stroller, sometimes letting a bundled-up three or four year old run on ahead. Inevitably, these women are pushing the stroller with one hand and smoking a cigarette in another—albeit often those slim cigarettes that are quite popular with women here. These women don’t even seem to bother to blow the cigarette smoke away from their children. I wonder if they stop when they’re pregnant.
Since I made my comment on draft evasion, I have found out in more detail about the system operates (please also see my previous comment on bribery for details on how that works). Russia has a system whereby university students are required to take military classes that apply to their course of study. So, if you are studying to be a geologist, for example, you will have to take the relevant military classes. The same holds true for students of business, finance, and the hard sciences, though I am unsure about those in the humanities. These military classes give the university students the rank of officer and exempt them from actually serving, except for perhaps a two to four-week boot camp, which, it seems, is also possible to finagle your way out of.
Nobody gives a damn about these academic military classes, however, and the professors who teach these subjects, perhaps because no is interested, are the most likely to accept bribes. This is very convenient for the students as they cannot study any of the military subjects and just give their professor a nice bottle of vodka and a thank you not with a $100 dollar bill. If you are poor, you just have t pass the class.
One of the most shocking instances of bribery I have found is the widespread phenomenon of professor bribing. Though this is not true of all professors, it is rampant, even in the more prestigious universities, and takes several different forms. In many universities, Upperclassmen pass down knowledge about which professors accept bribes to underclassmen; however, this information is not always necessary because usually the professor will make clear through her actions if she will accept a bribe.
The most common bribery scenario occurs when a student fails an exam, either on purpose or by accident—though it is more likely, of course, that a student will fail on purpose if she knows that she can bribe the professor. The professor will then summon the student to his office and will begin to speak in roundabout way: “So, I see here that you failed the exam…This is a problem. …What should we do about this?” When the professor begins in this roundabout way and asks open-ended questions, this signals the student that the professor is open to some kind of bribe. If the professor is known to accept bribes, the process will usually be shorter.
There are many tried and true methods of giving a bribe. Many students will put some money on the desk while the professor isn’t looking and then say something like “look there is $100 dollars professor. Where did it come from?” Other students will hand the professor an envelope, or will just straightforwardly give the bribe. As Russians note, professors are smart people, and one doesn’t need to pussyfoot around the issue. Alcohol, especially for male professors can be substituted instead of money. However, one must be quality alcohol—that means no Armenian Cognac—one must give Hennessy or another name brand. Flowers, perfume, and chocolate or a combination thereof is the tried and true method of success for women. Some professors are less forthright. They simply make their students by a copy of their publication.
Other professors are even more straightforward than the average bribe accepter. One of my student’s professors simply wrote the price of different grades on the board. Like many professors he did retain some sort of honor, which despite all the bribery maintains some, however minimal important. In the case of my student’s professor, he retained the top mark, a five, for those who actually earned it. This type of professorial behavior is demonstrated by a Russian joke in which a student hands a professor an envelope after the exam. In the envelope the note says:
Here is $500, $100 for every mark.
The next classes the professor hands the student back $300. The student, with a confused look on his face, asked, “Why?” The professor responded that they student had given him $100 dollars for every mark, and since the professor had given the student a two, the $300 was his change.
However, there was also no run up to the election. The only campaign signs I saw in the whole were some ads on bus stops for Moscow's erstwhile mayor Yury Luzhkov. It looked like the quaint kind of had one posts for school board of Moscow, Idaho not Moscow Russia and the ad said something to the effect like "we're a great team."
There were general election adverts of course. "Do a great service to your country. Vote!" or "Vote and win free stuff." These were the two themes posted all over the city. The comparison has been made to Communism when everyone vote, but there was only one candidate. Though, this was not the actual situation, it certainly appeared that way.
In fact, the non tv coverage, which at the moment is not controlled by the state couldn't even find anything to talk about.
They also see the difference between now and Soviet times as night and day-- and they really appreciate it. One of my students, who lives with his girlfriend, said that he really values his freedom because under Communism it would have been impossible for him to live with a woman he wasn't married to. In Soviet times, you had to have a special stamp in your passport that said you were married. Otherwise you could forget about living together. I think it is those little things about daily life in the former USSR that we in the West never really understood.
The biggest barrier to personal freedom still remaining, many felt, was obligatory military service. My students felt this even though the endemic corruption about who has to serve is way worse than it was during the Vietnam war when mainly poor undereducated minorities were sent to the front line.
Of course, none of my Muscovite students had served more than two weeks through either having powerful parents, paying bribes, or through educational deferral, which supposedly makes you an officer.
On the other hand, my students are upwardly mobile people who enjoy there freedom. Of course a large percentage or Russians, rural and often desperately poor, don't know how to respond to this freedom or don't have the resources to use it.
Anyhow, back to the story. It was snowing hard, and of course the first thing I saw was the ratty looking chained-up bears that everyone was gawking at along with the people dressed up as ethnic bare-tamers. As usual when I encounter these things in Eastern Europe, I was apalled. This didn’t stop me, however, from purchasing a fur hat. I was very proud of myself as I bargained the guy down fifty-dollars, and the man told me it was fox.
However, as I was eating my lunch another hat dealer came up to me and told me my hat was shit, and that I had to buy another one from him. He went through lengths to try to prove that the hat I had bought was cat. When I didn’t respond to him, he started shouting “Meow, MEow, MEOW” at me. This made my quite nice lunch very unpleasant and made me feel less good about my purchase. So, either way, it looks like real fur and maybe I can offer some kind of competition on the blog for someone to win this treasure.
Say hello to the new Russia.
The End.
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After the weekend, the hero attempted to ecxhange this defective phone for a new one, and, after a trip to the embassy to replace his passport, went to the phone store. However, as the hero was soon to find out, Russians don't understand customer service.
I arrived at the store, and was shuffled around among many people--each of whom at first didn't understand the problem and secondly, couldn't understand what to do. Finally, after much looking and hmm.... (or in russian gmmmmm..or гмммммм) they told me that I had to go to the service center.
The service center could be dubbed the anti-service center as service was very limited. First, our hero was made to wait in line like at a bread queue in order to speak with that Russian version of a "Customer Service." Many people appeared to have been there for several hours.
After some time, I was allowed in to see a "anti-Customer Service Agent." As I walked in the room, sercurity came in to forcefully expel a quite irate daperly dressed businessman. It did not bode well for our hero.
The man helping our hero went through the same routine as the routine at the store--lot's of looking and not very much action. After about twenty minutes a manager was called. Finally after much discussion in broken Russian and more broken English, they agreed not to give our hero a new phone, but to repair it. This, by Russian standards, was very kind of them, as I was the only one to enter the Customer Service room the whole time I was there that appeared to be successful in getting them to do anything.
As a bonus, I also managed to get them to give me a free loaner phone from about 1991 that weighs at least two pounds. Best of all the whole experience only took two and half hours!
The inside of the building was the spitting image of what you imagine a Russian Police HQ to look like. Imagine a project in the Bronx that hasn’t been repaired since the day it was built and you start to get the picture. The chief had a small office painted a dirty yellowish color, and his walls were dotted with scantily clad women on calendars. The room reeked of cigarette smoke. The police chief himself was dressed casually in a pair of blue jeans and a sweater.
After explaining the situation, the police chief gave our hero two options—one of which he strongly discouraged us from doing. Hence, he gave us one option. The non-option was to make a claim against the police. The other option was to say that our hero had lost his passport, get a spavka (a ubiquitous word in Russian for a piece of official paper—in this case a piece of paper that would say our hero lost his passport and give our hero permission to walk around, though our hero is not excited to use this piece of paper the next time someone asks for his passport), and come back on Saturday to talk to police and see if they might not give my passport back. So, we chose option one.
The rest of the story is boring and involves hours filling out paperwork. Interestingly, since our hero’s claim was a total fable, a police men dressed in the nastiest suit and one of the ugliest old white dress shirt—you know the ribbed see-through kind popular in the eighties—dictated what had happened. According the my aide the accommodation manner, the guy was a dunce and kept on using the wrong gender to talk about me even though I was sitting right in front of him. The story went something like:
“Our hero was waling down the street, when the passport fell out of his pocket”
However, this story took three handwritten pages to complete. Finally after many hours, and a headache from the chain-smoking police offices, our hero retired for the day and waited until Saturday to come back to the police station…